The Deer Park (47 page)

“Charley, you’re a great man,” Lulu said and hugged him again. “I’ll call Monroney right away.” The phone in her hand, however, she hesitated. “What about this Bonny-Kare thing?” she asked.

“I know Gustafson very well. It’s one of the charity drives he manages. Send him a check for five hundred, and you won’t have any trouble there. He’ll even release his own statement. ‘One of the most kindhearted actresses in this town.’ ” Eitel grinned. “Only have Monroney call him right away. While you’re at it, tell him to get the airplane reservation too.”

When the phone calls were finished, Lulu came and sat on his lap. “I don’t have to be at the airport for two hours,” she
said, “but I ought to call my maid to pack a bag and meet me there.”

“Let it wait.”

“Oh, Charley, you’re really a man,” Lulu said. “Monroney thinks it’s so good that he tried to tell me he was working on the same angle himself. He’s going to send a copy to Supreme as soon as the wire services release it.”

“If the newspapers take it on, and I’m sure they will,” Eitel said, “you’ll be publicity for a week at least.”

“I’ll never be able to thank you enough. Why did I know it was you who could do it?” she asked fondly.

“Because we’re just old thieves,” he smiled.

“Charley, let’s make love,” Lulu said. “Right now you look good enough to eat.”

They spent a pleasant quarter of an hour, and when they were done, Lulu gave him three quick kisses on his bald spot. “You’re the youngest man I know,” she said.

He felt comfortable. It was warm in the room and warm next to her body and the tension of the day’s work had passed from him. He held Lulu fondly and smiled when she began to meow like a kitten. Let her have this rest, he thought; she would be busy enough the next ten days.

Lulu stirred in his arms and he sighed for her. Now her mind was active again. “Charley,” she said slowly, “there’s one trouble.”

“Only one?” he asked gently.

“Well, you know I was planning to divorce Tony, and now I won’t be able to. Not for a year at least.”

“Would you really have divorced him so soon?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know really. Maybe I do love him.”

“Maybe you do.”

“It’s just I hate the idea how he used me. I never should have let you go.”

“We were meant to be friends,” Eitel said. “It’s better this way.”

“Sometimes I’m scared, Charley. I never used to be scared.”

“It comes and it goes.”

She propped herself up and lit a cigarette. “I saw Teddy Pope yesterday,” she said. “It’s funny. I never liked him but now I feel sorry for him.”

“What is he doing?” Eitel asked.

“He’s still looking for work. He told me he might have a job in an independent production. I told him to go East and he said he would, but he won’t. I think he’s afraid of the theater.”

“I wish I could do something for him,” Eitel said.

“Teddy’s really nice in his own way,” Lulu said, and blew cigarette smoke toward her belly. “Right in the middle of all his trouble with Teppis, it took courage to go see Marion in jail. Only he was a fool to give that crazy statement. He didn’t have to throw it in everybody’s face that Marion was his friend,” She touched Eitel’s arm. “I’m sorry, Charley.”

“Whatever for?” He resented this, however.

“Well, I’d forgotten about Marion and Elena.”

“It’s all light. Everybody has forgotten.” Eitel shrugged.

“Elena’s a good girl,” Lulu said.

“Yes.”

Lulu looked sad. “After I left Teddy, I kept thinking that H.T. was right. Maybe I should have married Teddy. We might have worked out, and we’d both be better off today.” Lulu began to cry. “Oh, Charley, I’m depressed. I wish I hadn’t seen Teddy.”

Eitel comforted her. For a while they chatted, and then he looked at his watch. “You better get dressed if you’re going to make that plane.”

“I almost forgot,” she said. “I wish I didn’t have to go.”

She talked to him while she was in the shower. “Good luck on your picture while I’m gone,” Lulu called out.

“Thank you.”

“When I’m in Pittsburgh can I phone your house if I need advice?”

“I guess so. Under the circumstances I can find some explanation for Elena.”

“She’s jealous, isn’t she?” Lulu asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Charley, I hope you have luck with this picture. Lord knows you’re due. I thought
Saints and Lovers
was one of the greatest pictures I ever saw, and so did everybody else in town. You should have gotten a Hercules for it.”

“Well, I didn’t.”

There was silence while she powdered her feet. “Charles, are you happy with Elena?” Lulu asked.

“I’m not unhappy,” he said.

“Elena’s improved a lot.”

“I suppose her analyst helped her.”

“Don’t believe it,” Lulu said. “I’ve been going to my head shrinker for five years and he’s never done a thing for me. It’s you. You’ve been good for Elena. You’re good for everybody.”

“That’s a novel role for me,” Eitel said.

“You’re always too hard on yourself.”

“Maybe I’m too easy now.”

Lulu opened the bathroom door and stuck her tongue out at him. “Nonsense. You just remember that.” She made a point of leaving the door open. “Charley, tell me about Victor. I was going to send him a present the other day but I forgot to.”

“Vickie,” Eitel said, “ah, I love Vickie.”

“I never could have thought of you as a father.”

“Neither could I, but I love that baby.”

Did he love him? he wondered, feeling a desire to hold the child in his arms. Victor resembled Elena; not Elena as she was now, he thought, but Elena as he had first known her. Yet, what was the truth? There were times when he did not think of Victor for a week at a time.

“How do you know you love him?” Lulu asked curiously.

Eitel was about to answer, “Because I want him to be better than me,” but instead he smiled.

“Maybe I ought to have children,” Lulu said. “I wonder if that’s the answer for me.”

“Better call your maid and tell her to meet you at the airport.”

When Lulu had finished dressing, he drove her car out of the garage and opened the door for her. “Just keep your head, and everything will be all right,” Eitel said.

“Want to follow me to the airport in your car?”

“Do you think we ought to be seen together?”

“I guess not.” Lulu reached out and hugged him again. “Oh, Charley, I love you an awful lot. Do you know you have real dignity now?”

It was a decent compliment, Eitel thought, for what was dignity, real dignity, but the knowledge written on one’s face of the cost of every human desire.

“It’s nice of you to say that, Lulu,” he said, and then he smiled. “You know, I wouldn’t want this to get around, and I don’t suppose I’ve told it to anyone in years, but my mother was a French maid before she married my father. Of course she worked only in the best homes.”

“Oh, Charley, Charley,” Lulu said, and they laughed then together. “Why didn’t you ever know,” she asked, “that you were my big love?”

He kissed her softly on the cheek and watched her drive away. In his ear he became aware of the sound of the surf, and he wandered down to the beach and watched the Pacific waters ride gently, steadily, onto the shore. It was early yet, he did not have to hurry home, and shivering a little, he sat down and stirred his fingers in the sand, remembering, from what seemed out of another life, the time he watched the girl with the surf board and tried to make her interested in what he said. It came over him with the force of forgotten pain how he had lusted for her that day, as if she were the entrance to a life he had never quite known.

Eitel was sad, but it was pleasant sadness. He was looking forward to going home; after days of indifference he felt tender
toward Elena now, as he invariably felt tender after he had been unfaithful. Before they went to sleep he would hold her and tell her that he loved her. She did not need these words as much as she had needed them once, but still she would be happy, and Eitel thinking back over the few years they had been married was thankful they were passed. The first year had been bad; there had been gossip and memories and for months it had not always been easy for them to approach each other. But that too had passed, and if with the loss of his jealousy he had also lost an emotion he once had felt, they still had a bedroom and it was better than most.

The last serious trouble had come when Elena discovered herself pregnant. She had been terrified of abortion and he had felt chained for life. But the child had come and now he loved it or at least he did his best to love it, and as Lulu said, Elena had improved. She could keep house, she could run the servants, she could even entertain. In those ways she had grown and there were many people who envied his marriage. Eitel sighed. Was it not possible after all that there was no such thing as Love, but only that everybody loved in their own way and did the best they could? “Life has made me a determinist,” he thought in passing.

He got into his car and drove home at a tired pace and climbed the drive which led up to the house they had bought in the hills of the capital, and then he parked in his garage, waited a minute to put himself together for Elena, and went to join her in the living room. She looked up from the book she was reading and he saw at a glance that she was moody. But then she often seemed moody on nights when he had been unfaithful, and he wondered if she knew or if it were merely his uneasiness, and he marveled at how little he understood of what went on in her mind.

“How is Victor?” he asked as he came in.

Elena smiled drowsily. “He was very cute today,” she said. “I have a story to tell you about what he did.”

“Fine,” Eitel said, “I want to hear it. But first I need a drink.” Alcohol would wash his mouth of Lulu and prepare him for Elena. As he kissed her on the cheek, he tried to be a touch remote so she would expect nothing of him when they went to sleep.

“Was the conference all right?” Elena asked.

“It was fair.”

“Why can’t Collie make up his mind?” she said crossly. “He’s so changeable.”

“He is,” Eitel agreed, and sat down beside her.

“I missed you tonight,” Elena said. “I was disappointed when you called at lunchtime.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Oh, baby, I’m tired,” he said softly. “Don’t scold me.”

“I wonder when we’ll have an evening together,” Elena said in a dispirited voice.

“Over the week end. I promise you. Maybe Friday night.”

“I have my dance group Friday afternoon.
I’ll
be tired then,” she said. In the last year she had begun to take dancing lessons again, probably more to keep her figure than from any deep ambition, but she was good, and once or twice when they had company, she consented to perform for them.

“No, we’ll make time over the week end, sweetheart,” Eitel said. He pushed himself farther back into the sofa, took a comfortable sip on his drink, and rubbed his eyes. “How did you spend today?” he asked.

“I played bridge this afternoon.”

“Fine.”

“I hate bridge,” Elena said.

She was clearly not in a good mood, and as fatigued as though he had actually undergone a conference with Collie, Eitel sat up and stroked her arm. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I saw my analyst this morning.”

“Well, you still see him twice a week,” Eitel said.

“Yes, I know, Charley, but I had a fight with him this morning.”

It was worth thirty-five dollars an hour that she should fight with someone else. “What caused it?” Eitel said tentatively.

“I don’t want to talk about my analysis.”

“All right.”

“It’s just that we always talk about the same things.”

He made a point of saying, “Do you mean your analyst or me?”

“Oh, darling, you know I mean the analyst. He’s very smart, but I don’t know if I need him any more.”

“Then quit.”

“I think I will … except …”

“Except what?”

“It was a stupid fight,” Elena said, not answering him directly. “I told him about the new house we were talking of buying if your picture is a success, and we discussed it, and it came out … well, Charley, what came out was that I don’t want to buy the new house.”

“You don’t?” She had seemed so excited the day they looked at it.

“Well, I do and I don’t. We uncovered some ambivalences I have.”

“Yes, yes.”

“Now, don’t get angry. I won’t use those words any more than I have to, but what we discovered is that I feel the house is too big and that we’ll just be too rich.”

“All right, I can understand feeling that way.” But he was annoyed at her. For in another few years, whenever she was ready, she would want a bigger house than the one he planned to buy now.

“The analyst didn’t like what I said. He told me I was regressing and being childish, and that it was my attitude toward money and toward you and a sign of weak ego.” As Elena spoke, he listened critically to her voice. She was more articulate these
days, and her voice had lost most of its coarseness, but there were ugly tones returning now.

She touched his hand. “I don’t know what happened, Charley, but I started screaming at him, and I told him he was a fine one to talk with his twenty-room house, and that he was a smug fat slob, and I couldn’t stand the way he was so satisfied with himself, and if he didn’t like the way I talked, well nobody was asking him to take my money and …” She lapsed into silence. “It was just awful.”

“That kind of thing has happened before.”

“Yes, but Charley, this time I meant it. That’s what I do think of him, and I don’t trust him any more, and next time I won’t make a scene when I tell him, I’ll just let him know how unattractive he is. Because you see I don’t want the same kind of life for me that he thinks I should have.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s true I owe him a lot, but he doesn’t understand me. He really doesn’t.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Charley, I know how you feel about that new house. You want it more than you think you do, and I suppose we’ll get it because we always end up doing what you want.”