The Deer Park (31 page)

“You never know. You might just make it.”

“I got a scandal. There was this screwball I used to live with, and she was nuts about me. Only she was hopeless. I carried her as long as I could, and then I told her to hang up. You know what? She killed herself. Believe it or not, I wanted the best for that little chick. What a break. They say I drove her to it.”

The moment Tony Tanner was not alone with me, his style would change. Before an audience, he was always on the attack. He and Lulu would have fancy exchanges. “You’re a bland boy,” she tried once on him.

“Bland? Honey, I’m mellow.”

Lulu laughed. “I bet you faint on the doorstep.”

“Your sweet little doorstep?” Tony fingered his hair. “Let me in, and I’ll demolish the house.” He talked so loudly that people at the nearby tables turned around. Tony winked at them and their eyes went back to their plates. “You darlings,” he said to them.

“Oh, God,” Teddy Pope groaned. These days it was his habit to sit morosely.

“What’s the matter,” said Tony, “you bleeding?”

“I wish you were a Bimmler already,” Pope told him. “It would make things more relaxing.”

“I have news for you,” Tony said, “you know how much fan mail I got last week?”

Teddy yawned and turned away. “It’s such a pity you’re afraid of me,” he said in my ear. His manner went through several mutations. On the first evening he teased me. “You’re still a shy aviator, I see,” he said. Then he yawned again. “Forgive me. I forget you’re in love.”

Things improved a little. After a few nights he was even friendly. “When you’re over thirty, as I am,” he said once, “you’ll understand that you can’t have romance unless it’s against the conventions.”

In the meantime, somehow or other, Tony and Lulu were talking about Messalina. “Messalina had nothing on you, mouse,” Tony was saying.

“I like you, Tony,” said Lulu. “You’re so crude.”

“I’m tattooed. Try me.”

That was about the way it went. To help my mood I discovered after several days that Desert D’Or gossip was putting Tony in Lulu’s bed, and Teddy in mine. “Now that we’re lovers,” Teddy said with a grin one night, “let me warn you that I have a bad character.” He made a play of telling me the story of his life. “My mother’s a very sad person,” Teddy said. “Father died when I was a kid, and then she was always introducing me to a new uncle. I guess I panicked. Today, what I would like is for something to happen where I could be true to myself. A moment of dignity.”

“You don’t mean it,” I said to him.

Teddy looked at me. “Sergius, you don’t like me,” he said.

“I don’t feel anything one way or the other.”

“Yes, you do. I make you uncomfortable. I make a lot of people uncomfortable, but that’s no reason for them to feel superior.”

“You’re right,” I said to him. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you really sorry?”

“Yes,” I said. “Everybody has the right to love the way they can.” I meant it, I suppose I couldn’t have meant anything more, but it must have sounded superior. Teddy exhaled smoke in my face, and said, “I hate to camp. But for some reason you bring it out in me.”

“All right, kids, break it up,” Tony Tanner yelled. “Lulu can’t even hear me whisper in her ear.”

“Let’s go outside and have a little talk,” I said to Tony.

“Talk before an audience,” he answered. “It stimulates me.”

“You’re very stimulating. With a crowd around you,” I told him across the table. He was about twenty pounds heavier than me, and he was conceivably in good shape, and I was not,
but I had no worries about what was going to happen. All the pleasure of boxing was in my fingers. Like nearly everything else, good boxing is what is done with the rhythm and even more what is done just off the rhythm. I was so nicely ready that I was hoping Tony was good—I wanted it to go on for a while. “Tell you what, man,” I said, “you going outside or you going to sit here and let me give the talk?”

But Lulu put an end to that. “You stop it, Sergius,” she snapped at me. “You’re brutal. You’re practically a professional prizefighter.”

“Well,” said Tony, relaxing, “you didn’t mention that detail, did you?”

I didn’t know where I was and who seemed worse to me—Tony, Lulu, or myself. I couldn’t even think of anything to say. But I have to give credit to Tony—he knew what to say.

“Why not go outside?” Tony said. “Only when you take care of me, you better take good care, because if you don’t kill me, I’ve got a couple of friends who will be looking around for you.”

“Oh, let’s go,” I said, starting to get out of my chair.

And Lulu stopped us again. That was a night. I can’t know about the others, but I sat around drinking for hours and all the adrenalin I didn’t use was burning in me. “Look, like let’s forget it, man,” said Tony at the end of the evening, and I felt so stupid and so worn out that to tell the whole truth, I even shook hands with him.

For a week the four of us endured each other, and then it was time for Tony and Teddy to go back to the capital. Lulu was in a bad mood the night they left. I took her afterward to one of the clubs but she was restless. “I can’t stand Tony,” she said. “It’s the reaction setting in. I hate his vulgarity, don’t you, Sugar? He makes me vulgar too. That’s what’s so disgusting.”

In the following nights we returned to The Hangover. The
routine was picked up again. We played Ghost, and we heard the words of Martin Pelley telling us how perfect was Dorothea. There was a change in Lulu, however. Her rudeness to me had come back, and she was listless and mean in bed. A depression thick as a fog bank settled over her.

To change Lulu’s mood, Dorothea hired a projectionist one night, and we were shown two of Lulu’s movies. As films I thought they were bad, and Lulu’s acting was bewildering. There were a few scenes where she did the character called for by the plot, there were others where she was herself, and there were many scenes where she showed faces new to me. Yet she did something in and around the character, and what she did was a triumph for her; she was more beautiful than she ever seemed before. A girl somewhere between a child and a woman danced through the film. She had a naïve chastity which coaxed a man to find its opposite. Her husky little voice curled through a run of private humors. I sat beside her in the den while the film was projected, and felt she watched a vision. Little sounds came from her throat, her lips opened and closed, her body swayed slowly back and forth. She studied herself with an admiration, a pain, and a kind of awe.

She took a drink afterward, she listened with a half-smile to the praise of Dorothea’s friends, she remembered to thank them, she even managed to stay for another half hour. When we got home, she was hysterical.

“It’s awful, it’s awful,” she wept.

“What’s awful?” Before my eyes I could still see that silver image of Lulu, more troubling to her, more real, than anybody she had ever known.

“Oh, Sergius,” she cried, “for the rest of my life I have to go downhill.”

As in all such moments, everything seemed to happen at once. The phone was ringing. It was Tony calling from the capital. Lulu sobbed into the mouthpiece, she hung up, she
started to cry again. After half an hour of soothing her, she said in a broken voice, “Sergius, you have the right to know. I slept with Tony Tanner.”

“But where? When?” I cried aloud, as if to learn that was most important of all.

“In a telephone booth.”

Saying these words, she became helpless with grief. He had humiliated her, she managed to tell me. “I’ll never be anything good,” she wept into the darkness, for I had turned off the lights and sat beside her, smoking a cigarette by the edge of the bed.

Next day she left Desert D’Or and went to the capital. She had to be there for her picture, she told me. Her picture was not scheduled to start for another ten days, but it was urgent that she leave. For a week I tried to reach her by telephone, but she never answered the messages and she was always out.

O
NE NIGHT
while they were lying in bed, Eitel noticed that Elena’s thighs were beginning to show dimpled hollows. It was the only blemish on her skin, and yet it depressed him deeply. Afterward, he could not take his eyes away. He had to let her go, he would tell himself. There was no future with him, and she had left only a few years of youth.

How he hated himself. He would look for comfort in the thought that he was the only one who would feel such a sense of responsibility for her. But then Eitel was forced to remind himself that it was he who had begun the affair and made it what it had become and therefore he could not escape it. What would
become of her? When she loved she kept nothing with which to bargain and so she would always lose. There would be many men after him, many loves, each more impossible than the one before. If she never grew up, there would be drink or, in contrast, dope—no need to become melodramatic, he would tell himself—and yet what would become of her? Once again he was filled with compassion and writhed because the compassion was for the image in his mind. Toward the body sleeping beside him he felt nothing. That body only hindered his limbs, he could not really believe in the painful existence of that body.

Yet he felt her desperation. She slept restlessly; night after night she would wake in terror from a dream and shudder next to him in the darkness. A robber was trying the door, she would say, or she had heard someone in the kitchen. Every story she read in the newspapers of a rape or a murder was repeated in her fear.

“A man followed me today,” she would tell him.

“Of course he did. You’re an attractive woman,” Eitel would say irritably.

“You didn’t see the look on his face.”

“I’m sure he wanted to cut off your head and stuff you in a gunny sack.”

“That’s what you’d like to do to me.” She looked bitterly at him. “You’re a good-time Charley. You only like me when I’m in a good mood.”

The truth of this piqued him. “You’re the good-time Charley,” he told her. “When I say nice things, then you love me.”

“You’re so superior,” Elena said. “But you don’t know what goes on in my head.”

After half an hour, he uncovered her latest secret. She wished to become a nun.

“Are you crazy?” he asked her. “You’d make a honey of a nun.”

“A nun is never alone,” Elena said.

He was put in depression by her words. It was true, he thought,
he ruined everything he touched. If someone lived with him and loved him, he provided her with nothing but loneliness. “Nuns always have company,” Elena said in a stubborn voice.

A few days later she began wondering whether to cut her hair. She returned to the subject over and over. Would he like it? Did he think she would look good in short hair? What did he think? Should she do it? And Eitel, pretending to be interested, ended finally by beginning to think perhaps she should cut her hair. Her hair was one of her best features, but in the course of an evening it became disheveled. It was so difficult for her to be neat.

“Will you still love me if I cut my hair?” Elena would ask, and then decide, “No, you won’t.”

“If my love depends on a haircut, you might as well find out now,” he would say, and wonder if she was right.

“Yes, I ought to find out,” she would repeat.

Ever since the night he had come back from Bobby’s house, he had known that the effort to free himself of Elena had been premature. So, with a sadness that haunted him, for he had no idea if he was sad for Elena or sad for himself, he would say to her over and over, “I know that I offer you nothing,” as if by saying it often enough, he could beg from the demon he saw judging him, one whisper of grace. “You do try,” the demon might say, “you are not completely dishonest.” But if he was always telling Elena that he offered her nothing, he was attracted to another idea. On those long sleepless nights, he would think that to be fair he must marry her; somebody had to marry her. Otherwise, he could hear the complaint of all her future lovers: “Munshin didn’t want to, and Eitel didn’t want to, so why should I?” The only answer was for them to get married, and he would consider just how he would ask her, and how afterward he would arrange the divorce. He would make it clear to Elena; they would get married in order to get divorced. That way she could probably find somebody else. As the former Mrs. Eitel, the divorced wife of an ex-director, it was better than
Miss Esposito. So he would be married a fourth time—how much did that cost him?—and she … she would feel that a man had cared enough to give her his name. How idiotic. But it would have meaning for Elena. If she could play her cards right … only Elena would never be able to do that, she could not play her cards at all. In a fury at her, he would stare at the ceiling and wonder if he would ever be able to make Elena see it the way he saw it. So days passed, and Eitel worked on his script, and found no satisfaction at how well it went.

One afternoon while he was in the middle of work, there was a phone call from Lulu. Her picture had been postponed a week, and she had decided to visit Desert D’Or for a night. To celebrate, Dorothea was giving her a party. “Charles, you’re the one who’s got to be there,” Lulu said over the phone. “I think I came back just to talk to you.”

Eitel said, “I hear you’ve broken up with Sergius.”

“Yes, it was sort of hectic, but now I think the wounds are healed.”

“I’m sure yours are,” Eitel said.

“Stinker.”

“Did you say the party is being given by Dorothea?”

“Charley, it’s perfectly all right. Dorothea really wants you to come. I can’t say more, but believe me, there are reasons.”

The party was a party like many others. He was not surprised to find The Hangover decorated for the evening, nor to see fifty people jamming the den with the promise of another fifty to arrive. Lulu happened to be in the foyer and took them directly to Dorothea who was installed on a bar stool to greet her guests.

“Goddamnit,” said Dorothea, “every time I see poor Charley Eitel at a party, people introduce us.”

“Once the two of you get to know each other,” Lulu said, ignoring Elena, “it’ll be a romance.”