The Deer Park (6 page)

“How can passion be depressing?” I asked.

Eitel was kind about it. “You’re right, Sergius. It wasn’t really passion, and that’s why it left me low. She was hungry, that’s all.” He started to pour himself a drink, and instead rattled the ice cubes in his glass. “As I say, I believed I went to see her because I didn’t want to hurt her. But, looking back, I can say I was wrong. I needed to see her.”

“I don’t know if I follow you.”

He shook his head. “Maybe I was in bad shape after Lulu moved out.”

“Some of the people here think you’re still in love with her,” I said directly. I guess I believed this myself. I had seen Lulu Meyers not more than a year ago, but I had seen her when she passed for a minute through our officers’ mess escorted by generals and colonels, and I had seen her again with ten thousand soldiers between us while she told her jokes and prattled a little song on an improvised overseas stage like some fairy princess of sex who had flown across the Pacific to anoint us with tiny favors, a whiff of her perfume, a lift she lost from her heel, a sequin from her evening gown. I even remembered having heard the name of her husband, and having forgotten it, and
so the situation seemed impressive to be able to talk casually of her now.

“In love with Lulu?” Eitel asked. He began to laugh. “Why, Sergius, our marriage was the meeting of zero and zero.” He poured his drink and took a sip before putting it down. “When Lulu and I got married, I knew it could never last. That was what bothered me afterward. You begin to think you’re a sleepwalker when you can’t believe in your marriage on your wedding day. That’s why I needed the Rumanian. My work was going to hell.”

It had come on him, after fifteen years and twenty-eight pictures, that he would never be powerful enough to make only those pictures he wanted to do. Instead, he would always be making the studio’s pictures. He was not even surprised to decide that he had no real desire to make his own films. For better or worse, his true marriage was with the capital, and he knew nowhere else to go. Worse. The commercial reputation at which he had sneered was being lost. His last picture,
Love Is But a Moment
, had been an expensive failure, but the two which came before it had not been successful either. “And then,” Eitel said, “there was that Subversive Committee.” It had hung over him for months. There were so many petitions he had signed, so many causes to which he had given money, first from conviction, then from guilt, finally as a gesture. It was part of the past; he was indifferent to politics; yet he learned that in the next subversive hearings in the film industry he would be called, and if he were not ready to give the name of everybody he knew who had ever belonged to any of the parties and committees on the government’s proscribed list, he could never work again in the capital.

He felt nothing for all those people he once had known; some he liked in memory, some he disliked, but it seemed ridiculous to end his career by defending their names with his silence and so indirectly defending a political system which reminded him of nothing so much as the studio for which he
worked. Yet there remained his pride. One did not go crawling in public.

“It was horrible,” Eitel said. “I couldn’t make up my mind.” He smiled at the memory as if relieved it were gone. “You can have no idea of the work I put in. I had no time to
ponder
the moral questions, I was too busy having conferences with my lawyer, my agent was taking soundings at the studio, my business manager was lost in sessions with accountants to review my income-tax returns. They analyzed the situation, they refined it, they analyzed it again. My expenses were high, they told me, my salary was a necessity, my capital had been drained in divorce settlements, and Supreme Pictures was not going to protect me from the Committee. What with my big salary, my agent was even convinced they had encouraged the Committee to start on me. It seemed that when one got down to it, I had very little real money. So, they all advised the same thing. Co-operate with the Committee.” Eitel shrugged. “I said I would. I was sick about it, but there it was. My lawyer and I started to spend hours going over what I would say. In the middle of it all I started changing my mind again. When I got down to the details it was just too unpleasant. I got the lawyer to draw up a different plan in case I would not co-operate. And all the while friends kept seeing me and giving advice. Some said I should talk, others told me to be an unfriendly witness, others came just to admit that they didn’t know what they would do. I was finding it hard to sleep. What nobody took into account was the picture I was making. The studio had assigned me to film a musical,
Clouds Ahoy
. I couldn’t have asked for anything worse. I hate musical comedies.”

Everything about the picture was wrong. His producer interfered on the set, there were visits by high studio executives who did not say a word. Delays came up which could have been avoided and others which could not; the star got sick, the color film showed mistakes in lighting, Eitel had a fight with the cameraman, a grip was hurt, it was decided that changes
had to be made in the script, the schedule fell days behind, and an expensive scene with extras, calculated to take a morning, went into the morning of the next day; everything was lax, and Eitel knew he was to blame. Each night for salt to his sores, he had to sit in a projection room and watch the rushes from the last week. The more he worked, the worse it got. The pace was too slow or too rapid, the comedy was not funny, the sentiment was pious, and the production numbers with their troops of dancing girls and their kaleidoscope of scenery looked like a battlefield after the war between the dance director and Eitel. Lost in the middle was “the Eitel touch”; here and there a scene with studied composition, intricate shadows, and a patch of atmosphere. It went on like this for three weeks of shooting, until one morning, with the picture not half done, everything went wrong, and everybody, producer, director, actors, cameramen, and grips, dance director and chorus, milled over the sound stage. Eitel, his nerves out of control, walked off the set and left the studio. Immediately, his contract was revoked by Supreme Pictures, and the next morning another director was given the thankless mission of finishing
Clouds Ahoy
. Eitel wasn’t there to learn the news. When he quit the studio that morning, he was beginning to act a script of his own which, whether behind or ahead of schedule, took several days to unwind.

E
ITEL WENT
directly back to his fourteen-room house, and told the butler not to answer the door. His secretary was away on vacation, and so he called his answer service and told them he
was going to be out of town for the next two days. Then he sat down in his study and began to drink. His telephone rang all afternoon and the only sign of how much liquor he had swallowed was that the sound of the phone became funny.

The fact was that he could not get drunk. Too sobering was the other fact that in forty-eight hours he would appear before the Committee. “I’m free now,” he would tell himself, “I can do what I want,” and yet he was able to think of nothing but the damage of quitting the set of
Clouds Ahoy
. His contract with Supreme was ruined, no doubt of that. Still, if he co-operated with the Committee, he would probably find work at another studio. What it amounted to was that a fit of temper was going to cost him a few hundred thousand dollars over the next five years. “It all goes in taxes anyway,” he caught himself thinking.

The night before the day he was due to testify, he still had not seen his lawyer, and spoke to him on the phone only long enough to say he would meet him at his office a half hour before the hearings started. Then Eitel rang his answer service and started to take the list of messages. In the thirty-six hours since he had left the studio, there had been more than a hundred calls, and after a while he became tired of it. “Just give me the names,” he said to the operator, and forgot them even as she mentioned them. When the girl came to Marion Faye, he stopped her. “What did Faye want?” Eitel asked.

“He didn’t leave any message. Just a phone number.”

“All right. Thank you. I’ll take that, and you give me the rest later, dear.”

Faye arrived an hour after Eitel phoned. “Trying to get used to living alone?” he greeted Eitel.

“Maybe that’s what it is.”

Marion sat down and tapped a cigarette carefully on his platinum case. “I saw Dorothea yesterday,” he said. “She’s betting that you’ll talk.”

“I didn’t know people were betting on me,” Eitel said.

Faye shrugged. “People bet on everything.”

“I wonder why?”

“It’s the only way to know.”

“Well,” Eitel said, “how are you betting, Marion?”

Faye looked at him. “I put down three hundred dollars that Dorothea is wrong.”

“Maybe you’d better hedge that bet.”

“I’d rather lose it.”

Eitel tried to sit back in his chair. “I’ve been hearing a great many stories about what you’re doing in Desert D’Or.”

“They’re true.”

“I don’t like it.”

“We’ll talk another time about that. I just wanted to tell you …”

“Yes, what did you want to tell me?”

Marion’s voice was not completely in control. “I wanted to say that if I lose my bet, that’s the end with you.” The finality of his sentence made him look young.

“Marion!” Eitel said for want of anything better.

“I mean what I say,” Faye repeated.

“I’ve seen you three times in the last three years. Not much of a friendship to be lost there.”

“Knock off,” said Faye. His voice was throbbing.

The answer irritated Eitel. Years ago, Marion would not have spoken to him in this way. “I’ve been wanting to talk about you,” Eitel said.

“Look,” Faye muttered, “I know you, Charley. You’re not going to name names.”

“Maybe I will.”

“For what? So they’ll let you make some more crud?”

“What else is there?” Eitel said.

“Why don’t you find out? That’s what you’ve been wondering for the last fifteen years.”

“Maybe I was fooling myself.”

“It’s a big future, isn’t it? You’ll just keep cooking slop till you die.”

Eitel never was certain what he would have done if Faye hadn’t visited him, but the next morning, after a very bad night, he walked into his lawyer’s office, gave his broad smile, and said easily, “I’m not going to give any names,” as if this had been understood from the beginning. “Just keep me out of jail, that’s all.”

“Sure you won’t change your mind on the way over?” the lawyer asked.

“Not this trip.”

In the weeks that followed, Eitel would try to think about his hour before the Committee for it stood well in his memory. He had acted as he might have hoped to act; he had been cool, his voice never lost control, and for two hours, carried by his excitement, he dodged questions, gave neat answers, and felt inspired to ruin every retreat. When it was over, he faced a crowd of photographers, sauntered to his car, and raced away. It was one o’clock in the afternoon, but he was hardly hungry. Feeding on his dialogue, he went for a drive through the mountains, his nerves enjoying every sound of the tires along the winding road.

That was finally spent. More numb than not, he crawled along a boulevard which went to the ocean, and cruised along the shore for miles. On a wide beach where the swell rolled in on long even waves, he stopped his car, sat on the edge of shore, and watched the surfboard riders. They were all young, somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two, and their bodies were burned to a golden bronze, their hair was bleached by the sun. They sprawled on the sand, wrestling with one another, sleeping, watching the water a half mile from shore where the riders would stand up and balance themselves on the first rise of the swell. Their feet on the board, they would race ahead of the surf, their arms stretched. When they had run into the shallow
and could stand no longer, they would jump free, and propping the board into the sand at the water’s edge, would lie next to one another, the boys resting their heads on the hips of the girls. Eitel watched them, became absorbed in studying a tall girl with round limbs and round breasts. Not ten feet from him, she stood alone, brushing sand from her light hair, her back curled. She seemed so confident of her body and the sport of being alive. “I must make love to that girl,” Eitel thought, and was struck by how exceptional it was to feel such an easy desire.

“Is it hard to learn how to ride these boards?” he asked.

“Oh, depends.” She seemed concerned with the sand in her hair.

“Whom could I get to teach me?” he tried again.

“I don’t know. Why don’t you try it yourself?” He could sense that she was not reacting to him, and it brought an uncomfortable tingling to the skin of his face.

“If you didn’t help me, I’d probably drown,” he said with twinkling eyes and a voice to charm the dead.

The girl yawned. “Get a board and somebody’ll show you.”

A tow-head of nineteen with broad shoulders and powerful legs went racing past them and slapped her on the thigh. “Come on in,” he called in a booming voice, his short chopped features a cut of healthy meat to match the muscles of his limbs. “Oh, Chuck, wait till I get
you!
” the girl shouted, and ran down the beach after him. Chuck stopped, she caught him, and they struggled, Chuck throwing sand on her hair while she hooted with laughter. A minute later, running side by side, they dove into the shallow water, and came up splashing at each other.

“I was ready to do anything,” Eitel said to me, “to tell her my name, to tell her what I could do for her.” He stopped. “All of a sudden I realized that I was without a name, and I couldn’t do a thing for anybody. That was quite a sensation. All those years people wanted to meet Charles Francis Eitel, and to meet him, they had had to meet me too. Now, there was
only me.” He gave a self-amused smile. “Those surf-board kids looked like you,” he said with his honesty, and I saw another reason why Eitel liked my company.

“Back I got into my guilt-chromed Cadillac, feeling like a little middle-aged man who decides to grow a mustache. When I reached home, there was a call from my Rumanian. She was still loyal.” Eitel shook his head at himself. “After that girl at the beach, I knew I couldn’t go on with the Rumanian. Yet I never liked her so much as I did at that moment. So I had enough sense to know I was about to get into something really impossible. I talked to my business manager and told him to put the house up for sale and pay the servants off, and I got on a plane for Mexico.” That evening on the flight south, he had glanced at the newspapers long enough to see that he was on the front page. “How they must be hating me,” he had thought, and drifted into an exhausted sleep.