William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (83 page)

“Oh, Alonzo!” Rosemarie exclaimed. “You’re not going to bed so soon.”

“I’m going to try, darling,” he said.

“But there’s no need, you know, Alonzo dear. You said you won’t be shooting until tomorrow afternoon.”

“I won’t be doing even that if the weather stays like this.” He took a deep breath, as if to sniff the overcast.

“Everybody’s going swimming down at the pool. Please stay, Alonzo. You know, you’re just my favorite person alive. Come on over with Peter and me and let’s have a drink.”

“My dear,” he said in his soft pleasant voice, “for twenty years I’ve been fighting a war with insomnia. I tried alcohol, until it threatened to land me on Skid Row. I tried sleeping pills until they became such a burden that the cure was worse than the sickness. Now all I can do is go to bed and lie there staring at the ceiling until dawn, but there’s an outside chance, as always, that I’ll sink into slumber. You wouldn’t want to deny me that chance, would you, by luring me again into these nocturnal, meretricious ways?”

“Well—” she began. “Well of course not, Alonzo.” But the look on her face was one of such disappointment that, relenting, he sighed: “O.K., I’m weak, darling.” He took her by the arm. “Fetch me a plain glass of soda with ice. With a twist of lemon. But mind you, Rosemarie,” he added, with a smile at me, “if this night-owl business starts me off on what they call a depressive cycle, I’m going to lay the blame right on your doorstep.”

Drifting toward the bar, where a white-jacketed waiter from the Bella Vista held forth, Cripps inquired if I was the friend of Mason who had had the accident on the road. When I said that I was, he shook his head sympathetically. “Rosemarie told me about it. It’s a hellish thing to have happen. I’ve been lucky in Europe so far, but during the war, in Algeria, I was in a jeep that hit a child. It didn’t kill the boy but it broke him all up. I know how you must feel. It makes you sick to your soul. Are you insured, by the way?”

“Yes, I am,” I said.

“Then you’re fortunate. You can’t blame them for suing, of course, but the sad fact of the matter is—as you probably know —that an American is considered tender game in Italian courts, even if he’s in the right. I hope your boy gets well, poor bastard.” He sighed again as he took the drink Rosemarie held out to him. “I love Italy and Italians—most of them. My favorite wife was Italian, as a matter of fact. But the truth is, you know, contrary to popular belief, that they’re the sickest people on earth. Except maybe for Americans. Every one of them harbors a suicidal mania. A death-wish. That’s why they make such rip-roaring racing drivers and high-wire artists and trapeze stars. And end up like your boy. Well, cheers.”

“Cheers,” I responded, tipping my glass, thinking gloomily again of di Lieto. “Why do they make such rotten soldiers, then?”

“That’s a different matter,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “It involves a certain amount of pride. I mean—Put it this way. No Italian wants to kill himself unless it’s on his own terms.”

A few paces off to the side now I noticed that there was being enacted a strange, tense, and quiet scene. Here half a dozen people had gathered and were standing in a rough semicircle around a small low chess table and two opposing chairs. On one of the chairs was sitting a sweating, black-haired young Italian; on the other chair sat Carleton Burns: between them on the table they had propped their elbows and—perspiring, panting heavily, their faces crimson from the strain—were locked in a game of handwrestling, Indian-style. As Cripps and I both turned to watch them, I was able for the first time to observe the face of Carleton Burns straight-on, undistracted, and at close range. And what a face it was! Red from exertion (desperately and grimly he strove to press the Italian’s arm to the table), from booze, his face had the complexion now of a ripe tomato, and he snorted with the strain, and allowed a trickle of spit to ooze from a corner of his droopy mouth, so that as I watched his writhing, mobile expression and his inflamed, startlingly homely features—from his eyebrows that sprang up wildly like a satyr’s down to his chin which, as in the mug shots of certain criminal psychopaths I had seen, seemed to melt into his neck—I obtained a rapid series of impressions of the man that began with the sense of something diabolical then ranged to corrupt then to just perversely mean. And as I watched the struggle, as I looked at Burns, who despite all his marks of dissipation seemed to possess a wiry strength, and saw him gradually and with a trembling shudder of his muscles force his opponent’s arm toward the table, I wondered that such an ugly man should have been always cast as a hero and a lover, until I recalled the recent shift in cinematic fashion which had apotheosized the blackguard, the stupid, and the sidewise look of villainy. Suddenly with a thump, triumphant, Burns forced down the Italian’s hand, gasping, “That got you, spaghetti-head.”

There was a murmur of amusement and approval from the group around them; as the defeated sweating Italian forked over a fistful of lire, Burns gazed around the crowd with a jaunty smirk and with greenish, bloodshot eyes. “Anybody for a little handwrestling?” he said, and belched. “Anybody else want to take on Daddy-O?”

“You’re too good, Burnsey,” said the Italian as he replaced his wallet with a drained and sheepish look. “You should go into business for yourself. No kidding, Burnsey.”

“How ’bout getting me another drink, Freddie?” Burns mumbled to someone lingering at his shoulder, a skinny youth with long sideburns and a glassy, sycophantic expression. Turning back to the Italian, he said: “No, Lombardi, you goofed. You got to keep your wrist straight, like I told you. It’s all in the wrist. You can’t get by with any of that shoulder jazz. How about it, anyone? Anyone want to take on Daddy-O at fifty mille lire?”

A thin, pretty, bespectacled girl dressed in very skimpy shorts looked up from a sheaf of papers she had been studying. “Tell us the secret of your fabulous success, Burnsey, actually,” she said in a wry voice. She looked at him intently and rather sadly.

“It’s one-third muscle tone and one-third brains and one-third anchestry,” he replied thickly. His benumbed lips scarcely moved. “I’ve got Chippewa blood in me. That’s no jazz. Ask anybody that knows. Good old Chippewa blood, full of crazy red corpuscles. That’s what you skinny chicks need, Maggie. Good old hot … Chippewa … blood.” His chin sank down upon his chest. “Somebody might plug in on your socket every now and then.”

“Oh shut up,” said the girl, turning pink. She half-rose from the low stool upon which she was sitting, thought better of it, and sat down again with her back turned. “You filthy—”

“What you need, Maggie”—he belched again—“is a mercy hump.”

“Just shut up,” she said, with a catch in her voice. Her distress was as transparent as a glass: she was in love with the odious man.

Burns straightened himself enough to down in one swift gulp the drink that Freddie brought him; then, stretching back in his chair, he looked up at Cripps and grinned. His eyes were filmed and his face was more flushed than ever, and it was a mystery to me how in his soaked condition, Chippewa or not, he had managed to win at his strenuous game. “Hullo, Alonzo. How’s your hammer hanging? I thought you’d gone to bed.”

“I stayed up so I could watch you,” Cripps said in a level voice, without humor. “I always like to see you when you’re at your most suave.”

“Want to hand-wrestle for fifty mille lire?”

“No thanks.”

“What’s the matter with all you squares? Where the hell is Mason? I want to go swimming in that pool of his.”

“Why don’t you go to bed?” said Cripps. “You’ve been at it all day. I don’t want a repetition of what happened in Venice. I think it would be a whole lot better all around if you just went to bed. You’ll be dead tomorrow.”

“Will you for Christ sake please stay off my back, mother? Where the hell is Mason, baby?” he said, looking at Rosemarie. “Daddy-O wants a cool plunge.” Imperceptibly his voice had thickened and he had sunk by degrees down into his chair so that now, his hairy legs asprawl, neck and shoulders almost on the cushion, he was in a position not far from the horizontal. “Where the hell has Mason disappeared to, baby?”

We looked at Rosemarie. She flushed and stiffened. Her eyes grew wide with some undiscoverable but discomfiting emotion and, as her mouth parted round and hovered voicelessly and wretchedly agape, I realized for the first time that she not only
did
know where Mason was but had dark private reasons for being silent about it. “Oh, I—well I don’t know,” she stammered. “I mean, I think he went up to the Bella Vista.”

“Well, tell him to chop-chop down here and take a cool plunge with Daddy-O. He’s about the only one who wears pants around here that’s not a fag. Mason and me.
Only
ones around here not raving fags. And Freddie. Isn’t that right, Freddie?” he said, craning his neck upward.

“Well, gee-whiz, I don’t know, Burnsey,” said Freddie, looking warily and apologetically at Cripps.

“Now as for good old ’Lonzo,” said Burns, gazing up at him with a loose slack-lipped smile. “I’m beginning to think he’s the biggest fruitcake of all. That’s what I think about old ’Lonzo. Recite us some your poetry, ’Lonzo,” he simpered in a high lilting voice. “Play me a tune on the old skin flute. Say, Freddie, go up the hotel and get me my bongo drums. Me and ’Lonzo gonna jive with the old skin flute.”

I watched Cripps’ expression as Burns continued to bait him; his face wore a look now of faintly amused, faintly weary patience, as if he had been through this many times before, and he squinted at Burns through a blue haze of cigarette smoke with cool slit-eyed nonchalance. It was all in all an impressive portrait of equanimity.

“C’mon ’Lonzo,” Burns said. “Own up. Come clean. Ain’t you a big frooty-matoot? Gobble my—”

Without a word Cripps strode over to the place where Burns was sitting, or sprawling, and with one swift jerk of his hand at the folds of Burns’ sport shirt drew him to his feet. He plucked him, I should say, so casual was the motion and so seemingly effortless. Not for an instant did it appear to me that he lost his serene almost gelid composure, and as he spoke to Burns, with his eyes two inches away from those of the actor and blue and level upon him, I could have sworn that he was smiling—a thin smile, to be sure, but a smile. “Look here, Burnsey,” he said softly. “Do you want to know something? I care for you. You’re my pal. Am I penetrating? Am I reaching you? Do you read me?”

Dazed and confounded by the turn of events Burns tried groggily to reply, but he only managed to run his tongue nervously over his lips.

“Do you read me, Burnsey?” Cripps repeated.

“Roger, ’Lonzo,” Burns said finally, with one limp hand raised haphazardly, essaying a salute. “Wilco over and out.” Then swaying there he attempted to say something else, which ended up an incoherent gurgle. I thought for a moment he was going to fall flat on his face. “Read you loud and clear,” he croaked.

“Well then, fine. Listen to what I’m saying, Daddy-O. I like you. With you I feel a very close bond. I would lay down my life for you, which is more, I suppose, than I could expect in return. I really care for you, you see? But with all of this kinship I feel, there are times when you are disgusting. There are times in fact when you are so surpassingly repellent that it takes all my will power to keep from kicking you in the teeth. This is one of those times. Now you go to bed, hear?”

“I go to bed, hear,” Burns echoed mesmerically, in a faint voice.

“That’s right. You go to bed.” He gave Burns a feather-light tap on his chest so that the befogged actor, tottering backwards, half-stumbled, half-fell into the outstretched arms of Freddie. “Put him to bed, Freddie,” he said crisply. “Take his shoes off and put him to bed.”

Converted in the space of a wink, it seemed, from a tough swaggering hoodlum with a virulent sneer to a faltering and harmless drunk, Burns straightened himself partially, readjusting the drape of his sport shirt with fumbling hands, and once more morosely licked his lips. What looked like tears had welled up in his eyes, although this may have been only his habitual rheum. “OP buddy ’Lonzo,” he said. “Sonofabitch. OP mother. Love ya. Love ya, Daddy-O.”

“Go to bed,” said Cripps more gently. “Go to bed, pal.”

“Sorry, Daddy-O,” he mumbled. “Didn’t mean—” But then he stopped, utterly at sea. Freddie turned him slowly about. Contrite, vanquished, mumbling unintelligibly and swaying top-heavy on Freddie’s supporting arm, he lurched off across the room. Somewhere in the spacious distance I saw Dawn O’Donnell break loose from the wall and intercept them. “Burnsey darling!” I heard her exclaim as she took his arm. Then the three figures, weaving like skaters across the glassy floor, were lost to sight.

For me the whole tense little tableau had been rather hollow and disappointing. I don’t know just what else I expected but it did seem to me remarkable that Burns—so resourceful, so quickwitted in his professional roles—had been reduced to such shambling debris before my very eyes. In any case, I had little time to reflect on this matter, for a murmurous message had run through the gathering: everybody was going swimming. Turning round toward the window I saw the swimming pool, set like a huge and sparkling amethyst in the garden below, looking for all the world as if it graced some lawn in California and shining splendidly from a host of floodlights. Casually then, in twos and threes, still clutching their drinks, the guests drifted out from the room—fair Alice Adair escorted by the crew-cut young man, Baer and Rosemarie and all the rest, and Gloria Mangiamele, giggling, superbly undulant, her arm entwined about the waist of Burns’ demolished Italian. I had more than half a craving to see Gloria in a bathing suit but I was still a little tired, determinedly a non-swimmer; besides, I felt hardly close enough to these people to manage an awkward word or two, much less to splash about with them in the intimacy of a pool; and so I contented myself with another drink, which I poured into my glass at the empty bar, feeling lonesome and abandoned as I listened to the bright noise of hilarity floating up from the bathhouse down the slope. After a moment’s indecision I wandered out through a French door to the open balcony, where I thought I would watch the scene, and it was here beneath a dim orange lamp that I re-encountered Alonzo Cripps. He was standing alone at the railing.