The End of the Night

Six

It was March in Laredo, and hot. John and Kathryn Pinelli were excessively polite to each other, and to me. As I said, we hung around there a day and a half. It didn’t have to be that long. But it was a stepping-off place. I got the black Chrysler completely serviced. I had to unload it and reload it so Kathy could get to her hot-weather wardrobe.

It was a strange thing about her — her taste in clothes. In New York it was rich and conservative and good. But as she got more informal, she seemed to lose her judgment. Maybe it was the Hollywood years coming out. Theatrical. Maybe, on the other hand, that outfit she wore in Laredo was a way of punishing John Pinelli in some way that I didn’t understand. Something had suddenly gone dead-wrong between them. So wrong that I could sense it wouldn’t ever be right again. It changed the reasons for the trip and everything else. It turned it into a different trip. It was as though we had all forgotten where we were going.

The outfit she put on to go shopping in, in the heart of Laredo that full day we were there, I felt funny letting her out of the car. She’d put on tight little pumpkin-colored short shorts, and a full-sleeved yellow silk blouse, with a Chinese type collar. She wore a white straw coolie hat and white gloves and high red heels, and sunglasses with red frames. I tell you, when she walked away from the car, she kept everything working for her. She handled it with a runway strut, and those heads snapped around and the jaws fell open when Kathy went by. I don’t know what she was proving, and I don’t think she did. Those little legs were wonderful, and no lady ever walked like that.

It got hot in the car. I got out and waited in the shade of a building. She was gone almost an hour, and I saw her coming in the distance, carrying a silver package. She came swinging toward me, a lovely little doll, and I had to grin at her, but her mouth did not move in response. She took off her glasses as I opened the car door for her. Her eyes were ten thousand years old.

“Buy something pretty?” I asked her.

“This is a stinking hot town. Get me home before I die, Stassen.”

So there wasn’t anything to say on the way back to the motel. We got a fairly decent start in the morning. I’d guess that by nine-thirty we’d had breakfast and we were across the river. At Customs I had to unload the car and carry everything inside, then carry all the sealed suitcases back out and load it again. Neither of them carried a damn thing.

And so I buttoned the big black car up, and turned the air conditioning on, and we went plunging down across the baked brown land into Mexico. The motor made a deep hum. The car rocked and swayed on the road. But we sat in the coolness and silence and it was like a kind of aimless drifting. The needle, at seventy, meant nothing. The world outside was a drab travelogue, without sound track, poorly edited. John Pinelli dozed in the back. She wore lime-green shorts and gold sandals and a green-and-white-striped blouse, and very dark sunglasses with green frames. The air conditioner was cold on her legs, I guess, so she pulled them up into the seat, and sat with her knees turned toward me.

Have I ever described Kathy’s hands? They were peasant hands, with short, wide, thick palms, stubby fingers. They were soft and beautifully kept, but the care she gave them could not disguise the basic earthy shape of them. The very long, curved nails helped a little, but if you noticed them particularly, you saw that they were not pretty hands. Her feet were short and wide, with rather puffy insteps.

I do not know what was going on in Kathy’s mind that morning. But there was hate in the car. You could feel the hate. And so there was sickness. So there was a sickness in her mind, and she infected me with it. She passed on to me a part of what the world had done to her.

I was driving. My hands were locked on the wheel at ten after ten. And suddenly that small, thick hand came crawling over my right thigh on its stubby fingers, a large soft pale insect...

I have stopped this account. I needed time to think about myself. It is a tired irony, I suppose, that I should be removed from this life before I have had any chance to understand it. Yes, I’ve been to college. In an objective way I’ve learned the various schools of thought — man’s efforts to understand himself. At one end of the scale are those who say we are a long-range result of a chemical accident, and what we call thought is an ultimate refinement of instinct. At the other end, man is in the image of God, and is divine. The individual is the result of heredity, environment — and something else. An X factor?

Yes, I had thought of such things — talked weightily in bull sessions. But until these past few weeks it has never been subjective. What is this thing I — in some process of simplification — call Me? It has a name. Kirby Palmer Stassen. (Say this enough times and it becomes meaningless — a mouthing of nonsense syllables.) The name is an inefficient tagging, a kind of identification. I have existed. I have moved through time and place, without thought. The world has happened to me, not me to it. My hungers and emotions have been primitive.

During this final year of my life I have done things society condemns. And even though they were acts committed by me, they are more like things that have happened to me. I see them on a small stage, brightly lighted — little painted figures moving on awkward strings, making empty sounds. The thing called Me is on that stage in every scene, in every act. I am the lead in a pointless drama.

While I thought, they brought the midday meal. They have just taken the tray away. I was hungry. I ate. In that sense Me is an organism, converting foodstuffs to energy through a process of gobbling, mastication, chemistry. Another Me has slept, renewing itself. Another Me has made love, and spoken with great confidence of eternity. A million million things have gone into my head, and memory is one of those toy cranes which can dig at random and never come up with as much as ten per cent of what must be there, buried under round candies.

Most men give up seeking an answer to the riddle of their own existence. It makes their heads hurt. They give up and go play manly games, dig hard for the buck, get slopped at the country club and chase all available tail, and if forced to think about themselves, they say introspection is unhealthy — a suitable diversion for eggheads.

They aren’t giving me enough time to wrestle with the big riddles, but I can amaze myself with the little ones. After my — excuse the expression — Wolf Pack career, it seems entirely strange that I should feel a revulsion about writing down what Kathy Keats did to me, a temptation to skip it. Since they are going to strap me down and put me to death by electricity, what difference would it make if I covered all this paper with obscenities?

But I cannot be explicit. I am in many ways a prude. Murderous, but a prude.

She trained me the way you train an animal, and with less respect than you show a decent animal. When I felt the touch of her hand I reached down automatically and clasped it. She snatched her hand away. Lesson one — the hand must not be touched. Lesson two — do not look at her, even for an instant. Her mouth was level, the Dietrich face expressionless, the eyes invisible behind the darkness of her sunglasses. Lesson three — do not permit the driving to become erratic.

I remember that I looked far ahead to where the road shimmered into mirage, and I tried to divorce my mind from my body. I knew the actions that would stop her, but I was powerless to use them, trapped by my own queasy fascination. I told myself it was a tawdry, silly, childish thing she did. But she was turned so as to stare directly back into the face of her sleeping husband. And I was frightened. I felt too young. I felt like a child being bathed by an evil nursemaid. I felt that some unspeakable thing was coiling and vomiting in her mind. I had fallen among strangers I could never understand, and when next we stopped I would leave them and they would never see me again. God knows I wish my resolve had not weakened.

At a dreamlike seventy the car fell forward into the endless, overexposed Kodachrome landscape. And far behind the car a ball of orchid facial tissue spun along the rocky shoulder amid the spin-devils of our swift passage and came to rest under the brass of an Aztec sun. Kathy curled away into the far corner of the front seat and went to sleep with her head on a small crimson cushion. John Pinelli awakened and coughed and asked where we were. Kathy’s trained animal answered him in servile tones.

The new motels of Mexico enable the U. S. tourist to leave his country with the assurance he will not have to adapt himself to alien ways. He can be comforted by the same bold and banal architecture, the same wide asphalt parking areas, the innersprings and mixer faucets and spring locks and wall-to-wall carpeting. If he can avoid staring at the world outside his motel he will not be upset by the look of burned mountains, overladen burros and the brown and barefoot gente.

Our up-to-date highway guide reported a new motel as being the last one for sixty miles. A desk clerk beamed and bowed at me and said he was full, he could not accommodate us. I went back to the car and told them. Kathy got out quickly, and I followed her into the office. She walked to the desk in her green shorts and her green-and-white blouse and her very dark glasses with the green frames and her golden sandals.

She took her bill clip from her purse, placed a twenty-dollar bill on the counter and said icily, “I have gone far enough today.” She placed a second twenty on top of it and said, “I am tired and we will stay here.” She added a third bill and said, “We will require a twin-bed double and a single, not connecting, and ice immediately.”

“Yes, señorita!” the man said, bowing, beaming. “Yes, of course.” He hissed like an adder and a small boy came and helped me with the bags.

As we walked to the car, I said, “If you want me to handle it that way...”

“You couldn’t possibly,” she said. “You wouldn’t know what to look for. You wouldn’t know how much. I watched his eyes.”

And that was the last I said to her on that first day in Mexico. After I was alone in my room I thought about her. I decided I hated her. Perhaps in the same way Pavlov’s dogs hated him. I felt dirtied, because she had known how to force my acceptance, how to deny me the male role, how to turn me into her creature. She had spoiled my own picture of myself — the clever, boyish, slightly sinister aggressor — a charming young man who had gone off on this mad adventure on the optimistic off-chance of putting horns on the husband-director, puffy, pink-and-white John Pinelli.

The motel had a bar. I got drunk. I told outrageous lies to two girls from the University of Texas on spring vacation. I managed to split them up and get the larger of the two, and a bottle, back to my room. Underneath all the alcohol I told myself she was the obvious cure for what had happened to me with Kathy. The girl was large, alert, muscular and elfin. She would permit only the most meager and innocent intimacies. And then she would begin writhing and laughing like a madwoman, all hard brown outdoor knees and elbows. After I gave up with her, I felt as though I had fallen down several flights of stairs.

We were on the road by ten-thirty. I had a dull headache. John Pinelli had a head cold. Kathy wore white shorts, a black blouse, red sandals, and sunglasses with white frames.

I had sworn I would not let her play her nasty game again. I would be a man, not a trained animal. In that way I rationalized my wish to stay with her. I waited in tension for the chance to repulse her, but nothing happened on that second day in Mexico. We stopped at four-thirty that afternoon, a half day short of Mexico City. The motel was very much like the first one. March flowers were growing, with a sweet spoiled scent, heavy in the air.

At dusk I met Kathy. I was going toward my room. She was headed for the bar. There was a narrow walk, roofed, with open arches on one side, a wall on the other. I saw her coming toward me in a cotton dress with a bold, broad stripe, her hair brushed out to long smooth silver, molten in that half light. I saw her and the sight of her hollowed my belly, hurried my pulse.

“Kathy,” I said, and she gave a mild half nod and attempted to walk by me, but I imprisoned her there, bracing my hands on the warm stone wall on either side of her. She put her shoulders against the wall, folded her arms close under her breasts and looked up at me, her head slightly tilted, her expression one of weary patience. She was a small-boned woman, quietly arrogant. I suddenly felt humble and awkward and unsure of myself. All resentment was gone.

“I suppose I gave you the right to make a nuisance of yourself, Kirby,” she said. “Could you possibly manage to forget it, dear?”

“Tell me why. I just want to know why.”

“There isn’t any ‘why.’ Even if I had all the words, there isn’t any why. Once I threw a painting into the fireplace. John had paid ten thousand dollars for it. He didn’t ask me why I did it. On impulse I’ve done things that would make your little-boy face turn green, darling. And I haven’t asked myself why. My God, we don’t go around checking motives. You brought up the idea of following me down here. You invited yourself. We both know you’re all steamed up for a nice romp. Who asks you why? Don’t ever bore me asking why.”

“What do you think that did to me, Kathy?”

“I couldn’t care less. I had no curiosity. Then, or now, dear.”

“John is probably taking a nap. Why don’t you come to my room right now, Kathy?”

She put her fist to her mouth. I could not guess whether the yawn was real or faked. It hurt as much either way.

“As if I owe it to you or something?” she demanded with a trace of anger. “One of those dull cause and effect things? Follow through? Little man, if you go through life looking for any kind of logic in sexual relationships, you’re going to raise lumps all over that boyish head, believe me. You don’t have any sort of claim on me, Stassen. I owe you nothing, college boy. Just drive the car. And if you must have a reason, just tell yourself the lady gets bored on trips. Stop collecting motivations, or buy a couch and go into the business.”

“I’m a person, Kathy. I’m not a object, or an experiment.”

She had looked withdrawn. She suddenly used her actress face, and it came alight with tender, theatrical concern. “Oh, have I hurt you, my darling? My God, how thoughtless of me! How cruel and selfish and heartless! I swear, my love, it will never, never happen again.”

She ducked under my arm quickly and was gone. I took a hesitant step after her. She looked back, and with a quick expression of malicious mockery, an extra switch of her hips, she disappeared around the corner of the wall.

It did not happen again. I knew it would not have happened at all had not the climate of their marriage changed so abruptly and finally in Laredo, that ugly, shabby, tawdry border city.

We drove to Mexico City. They took a suite in the Continental Hilton. I assumed that he wanted to put on a look of importance for the people he wanted to get in with. I didn’t meet any of them there. I met some of them later in Acapulco. I was provided a room in the Francis, across from the new Sanborn’s, near the Embassy. I didn’t get much time in Mexico City. They decided to stay a few days and then fly down to Acapulco. I would drive down alone. I had the Chrysler serviced again. I helped Kathy unload the basic clothes she would need in the city — about a hundred pounds of them.

I left early the second morning, knowing only that I had to locate the house of a man named Hillary Charis. There would be servants there. I had gathered that Hillary had made his money out of some kind of wide screen lens. He and his newest wife were away, wintering in Montevideo. On the afternoon before I left, Kathy, in her most to-the-manor-born manner and accent, had given me the word. “Here are two thousand pesos, Stassen. I shall expect you to keep an accounting of it. Drive on down and unpack the car and get settled in. I understand there are five bedrooms, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t move in for a little while. Please don’t select the most attractive guest room because we shall be doing some entertaining. Purchase any little things you think we’ll need to be comfortable there. You know our schedule, so you can get the household operating properly. Make sure the utilities are all in working order. When we’re ready to come down, we’ll phone you when to meet us at the airport. Is that all quite clear?”

“Yes, sir, Mrs. Pinelli, sir!”

“Really, Stassen, I did employ you to drive us down, did I not?”

“Yes.”

“It’s so much easier to be able to give orders than to have it all on... a loose sort of friendship basis, don’t you think?”

“If you say so, Kathy.”

“Have a pleasant trip, Kirby.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

So faithful, loyal, reliable Stassen went booming up the auto pisto into the high mountains on the day of April Fool, and over the highest pass, and then down and down, ridge by ridge, all day long, down through the tierra Colorado, down to the rich tropic beach.

I found the beach home of Hillary Charis. It was west of the city. It was a pale, faded blue with a red tile roof. It sat about fifty feet above the highway, on a ledge of solid rock. The big garage had been cut out of the solid rock. The garage door could have served a fortress. From the garage level you climbed one hundred wide, flat, curving, concrete stairs up to the house. My first view of the wide blue Pacific at sunset from one of the terraces was like being hit solidly behind the ear. My jaw sagged and I felt as if I would stagger. Fishing boats were headed in. You could see the exotic hotels of Acapulco to the east.

I came to know the house well, its moods and vistas. The biggest and most dramatic terrace was on the south side, overlooking the sea. There were tile floors thoughout the house, and plaster walls in cool shades of green and blue and lavender. Soil had been carried up to make small garden pockets around the house, tended by Armando who seemed to live on his knees. He was a knotted old man, rosewood brown, seamed and eroded, with bad teeth and one milky, sightless eye. His wife was Rosalinda, the cook. She was a timeless Indian woman, square as an up-ended box. Her face had the impassive features of an aging hero of many Westerns. It gave her an almost comic look, as though, through some convolution of the plot, Our Hero had dressed in pink cotton and a horsetail wig the better to make his escape. When she smiled, a slow blooming smile, it was a glorious thing to see.

I had a phrase book and two years of college Spanish. Rosalinda had perhaps fifty words of English, and a striking talent for pantomime. We could understand each other. Armando made no attempt at communication. They both came down when I arrived. By burdening ourselves like burros, we were able to unload the car with but two trips up the hundred stairs. Armando fell immediately in love with the black car. He circled it, hissing softly. He linked hoses together so the water would reach, and washed it lovingly with soft rags and polished it until it was dazzling.

Rosalinda assured me that the electricidad and the agua and the teléfono were all working and in readiness for Señor and Señora Pinelli. It was evident to me that they had been lonely and bored in the house, and welcomed the chance to be busy. She said that there was a girl in readiness, who would begin work as a maid as soon as the Pinellis arrived. The girl’s name was Nadina, and she was related to them in some way. I did not have the words to explain to her my relationship to the Pinellis. I said that I was a friend, but that I also worked for them. She smiled and nodded with total lack of comprehension.

The servant quarters were adjacent to the house, on the east side where the crest began to slope down, so that it was about six steps up from their doorway to the kitchen door. I selected the smallest bedroom for myself in the main house, on the northeast corner, with no view of the sea. The Pinelli luggage was placed in the master bedroom, a room about twenty by forty with huge glass doors that opened onto a private terrace overlooking the sea. There were two great double beds there, with massive posts carved of black wood.

After I had unpacked my own things, I went to the master bedroom. Rosalinda was unpacking Kathy’s things, hanging her clothing in a vast closet big enough to serve as a dressing room. She gave little cries of pleasure as she examined the dresses and suits, skirts and blouses. “¡Qué lindo! ¡Qué bonito!”

By then it was dark, and so I did not see the beach until the next day. It was the most private beach imaginable. Two hard ridges of rock reached from the height down to the level of the sea. They were about eighty feet apart. Only at the lowest tide was it possible to walk around them. They enclosed a crescent of coarse, clean, brown sand. Stone steps reached from the front terrace down to the beach. They were of reinforced concrete and projected out from the concave wall of the cliff, with a hemp railing on the sea side. They made one long sweep, descending, from east to west, to a balcony halfway down, then reversed and slanted down from west to east to a truly massive freeform sun platform six feet above the sand. The platform was about eight by ten, and of reinforced concrete at least ten inches thick. It was anchored in place by steel rods as big around as my wrist. At high tide the sea came up under it, covering all the sand, so that each time the tide ebbed, the beach was new again. When I wondered at the massiveness of the platform, Rosalinda told me, with elaborate use of pantomime that it was the third such platform. Storms had smashed the other two. She made a spinning motion of her hands to show that they had been hurled high in the air. She said this one would be taken by the sea one day. She seemed to think it incomprehensible to try to outwit the sea’s fury.

I cannot forget what it was like to awaken there that first morning and hear the sound of the sea, and see the sun against the mint-green wall of my room. I had that feeling of inexplicable and joyous anticipation which had been gone for a long, long time. I felt renewed. All things were possible.

I was served on the terrace, elegantly, with papaya, toasted muffins, strong, black coffee. I went down to the sea and swam out until the blue house was a sandbox toy. The sea sighed and heaved and glittered. I floated there, and yelled for no reason, and went all the way in, using a long racing crawl, spending myself. I baked in the sun. I showered. Rosalinda served lunch. I napped until three, then drove into Acapulco and bought myself an ornate silver lighter and a snake-skin billfold, sat and drank black beer at a sidewalk café and smiled at pretty girls who walked slowly, arm in arm, in the dusk, while the birds made a great clatter over settling down for the night in the big green trees.

Those four days before John and Kathy arrived were good days. They were the last good days of my life. Had I known they were, I could not have enjoyed them more. I did not think of the future in terms of purpose or direction. I just had the unreasonable confidence that everything was going to be fine and golden. It was euphoria. And it could not, of course, last. I sent a card to my folks. I bought a lottery ticket and won two hundred pesos. I worked diligently on my tan, and my Spanish. I waited for the phone call from my employers.

I picked John and Kathy up at the airport at noon on Friday. There were two men with them. August Sonninger and Frank Race. August was a squat, bald, imperious little weasel in a soiled scurfy beret, Bermudas, Indian sandals and a sports shirt emblazoned with pastel fish. He was obviously the dominant, completely in charge, full of power plays and rude contradictions, snapping his fingers for service. The others treated him as if he were king. Frank Race was a towering, languid, storklike man in a cotton cord suit and a tasteful tie. He drawled in an inconsistent Limey accent, and seemed to be trying to give the impression that all this was a sort of grotesque game, and he was playing along for kicks. He was almost amusing, in a withdrawn, ironic way. Kathy was being very windblown and girlish with them. It didn’t seem to suit her. The big surprise to me was John Pinelli. The great soft pink-and-white thing had come alive. He was full of snap, glitter and enthusiasm. For the first time I was aware of the quality of his mind — quick, perceptive, agile, imaginative.

They were hopped up, so busy with plans and schemes that they seemed only vaguely aware of being in Acapulco.

August Sonninger and Frank Race stayed through until the following Tuesday afternoon when I drove them and John Pinelli back to the airport. I guess it was not what Rosalinda had expected. She had a sense of order. They would not conform to any schedule. They seemed to take no pleasure in the house. They talked business endlessly. They fought over details. To the four of them I was a part of the background, like the house and the sea and the servants.

I learned that Kathy and John were still being remote and formal and polite with each other. From their arguments I gathered that John Pinelli had bought into the enterprise by signing over, in exchange for a stock interest, his piece of the successful television property.

They had brought a pile of scripts with them. They called on me for some special service on Saturday night, at about eleven o’clock. They were all in the big living room. Frank Race came and got me off the terrace. He had me sit down with a script in my hand. He and Kathy both had copies. Sonninger sat scowling at us.

“Read the Wilson lines, old boy, if you will,” he told me, pointing to a speech that started a scene.

“I don’t know anything about...”

“Just read the lines, old boy.”

I started to read the first speech, feeling like a damn fool, trying to sound the way I thought Wilson should sound from what little clue I had.

Sonninger broke in. “You!” he said.

“Yes?”

“This is not talent scouts,” he said in his slight Mittel European accent. “It is not Actors’ Studio. Just read, please. Nothing more.”

I shrugged and read my lines as if I were reading a market report. That’s what they wanted. That’s what they got. Kathy had the corner on emotion. Frank Race and I read our lines woodenly. She emoted. I thought she did fine. But I thought the script was horrible stuff, full of pretentiously poetic expression. It went on until three in the morning. They would quarrel viciously, yell at each other, and then mark up the copies of the script. Sonninger was boss. I couldn’t see how they were improving it in any way. If this was going to be the first release by Sierra Productions, it looked like a poor place to stick your money.

The only other time I wasn’t totally ignored was on Monday morning at about eleven. I had swum and I was baking on the platform above the beach. Frank Race came gingerly down the steps, his pallid, narrow body gleaming with oil. He carried a beach towel and a script.

After a casual greeting, he stretched out and worked on the script for about a half hour. When he put it aside, I said, “Is that thing really as bad as I think it is?”

He looked at me, slightly startled, and then smiled. “They can read bad, old boy, and play well. We’re all happy with it. And, forgive me, we have the benefit of professional judgment.The people who will release it are happy with it too. And they’re quite shrewd about these things.”

“There seems to be a hell of a lot of talk in it.”

“We’re taking a little out, here and there.”

“Kathy will play the lead?”

“That’s the idea. The old dear is a little long in the tooth for the part. But that’s a camera and lighting problem. It’s worth that gamble to have John.”

“John or his money?”

He looked at me intently. “You are a very brash young man. You seem to like to talk about things you know nothing about.”

“I’m just asking questions. People haven’t been falling over themselves to hire him. So all of a sudden he’s wonderful?”

“I’ll tell you a little more than you need to know, old boy. John Pinelli is a director of the first grade, sensitive, creative. A director must have one additional talent. He must be able to control his stars, keep them from acting like petulant children, keep them from blurring him. John used to have that. When he lost some of his confidence, he lost that first. The rest is intact. Sonninger will produce. I will be unit manager. We will work closely with John, and we’ll control the talent. He can do the rest. Once we wrap this one up, and it’s good, then all the confidence will be back. And he’ll be an enormous asset to us on the other pictures we’ve scheduled. I expect him to make me rich, old boy. The feds cleaned me last year. I miss the money.”

“So this first one has to be tops?”

“It will be.”

“I hope it is,” I said. I didn’t see how it could be. The story seemed silly to me. But maybe they knew what they were doing. Then I thought of all the brilliant, confident people who use up a whole year out of their lives to bring something to Broadway which lasts three performances. It seems like a mutual hypnosis deal. They all tell each other the material is great until they finally believe it.

Anyway, I took them to the airport on Tuesday, and Kathy and I were left alone in the house with the three servants. Nadina, the maid, was a round, brown girl with broad, bare feet. When you addressed her directly, she would put one of her black braids in her mouth, bite down upon it, try to turn her head all the way around on her shoulders, and giggle. When working, she sang softly to herself in a clear, true voice.

There was a sense of isolation about that house. It was as if the concrete steps were a rope ladder, and when you were up there, they were pulled up and you were alone.

I saw more of Kathy than I expected. We ate together. This seemed to please Rosalinda. There were always fresh flowers on the table. Kathy was casual and remote. She spent a lot of time on the beach and on the sun platform. And she spent a lot of time grooming herself, exercising. I did not mention my plans. At the time I made an accounting and gave her the balance from the two thousand pesos, she gave me the hundred dollars I had been promised. But she did not ask me what I would do. It seemed agreeable to her for me to stay on. She gave me errands to do. I drove her to and from town when she wanted to shop. It annoyed me that she preferred to sit in the back.

Things changed between us on the following weekend, late on Sunday afternoon. We were down on the sun platform. Rosalinda called her to the phone. She had been expecting John, and had been growing more irritated when there was no word from him. When she came back down, her face was pale under the new copper-gold of her tan, and she was so furious her hand shook visibly.

“Was that John?” I asked.

“Be still!” She stretched out with her back toward me. Her hip in gay nylon was mounded high. The nape of her neck looked tender and touching and defenseless, like the neck of a child. The strap of the halter top bit into the slender softness of her back.

She rolled up onto her knees abruptly, turning to face me. “Come on,” she said, a whisper almost lost in the sound of the ocean. It had come up under the platform. She looked at me over a gun sight. She got to her feet. “Come on,” she said. It was a command that needed no explanation. She went quickly and lightly up the steps without looking back. I followed her.

We went to the master bedroom. She adjusted the heavy wooden shutters so that narrow strands of the late sun lay against the far wall, filling the room with a luminous golden light. As she fixed the shutters I could hear the shallow quickness of her breathing and the whispery sound of her bare feet on the blue-green tiles. She turned, tiny and imperative, and held her arms out toward me, and it was as if reality had merged with my own erotic imaginings, making the present moment dreamlike.

I believe it would be ridiculous for me to waste any of this imprisoned tag end of my life in description of the mechanics of copulation, in the more intimate devices of this particular pair of adulterers. Go to any loan library. Select a novel with a reputation for naughtiness. Open it to the section where the pages are most smudged. Substitute Kathy and Kirby for the names in the text. Our novelists seem to write of physical love as though they were under some obligation either to acquaint a herd of Martians with the fleshy facts, or to compose a handbook for the inexperienced.

Now that I am so far away from it, I can coldly chart the short history of our physical affair. In the beginning, as is always the case, pleasure was handicapped by the awkwardnesses of new lovers. As we learned each other, on the physical level, in the way the tricks of performance of a new sailboat or sports car must be learned through use, pleasure was heightened. As with all lovers since the origins of mankind, as pleasure was heightened, we indulged ourselves more often. Such intensity invariably creates a hypnotic aura which dims all the other aspects of existence.

And now I must account for the change in Kathy, a change which astonished her. She tried to explain it to me many times. When John had phoned her from Mexico City he had taunted her with an account of Sonninger’s continual pressure to sign a younger actress for the lead in their first production, and he had tried to make her feel insecure by telling her he might back down and let Sonninger have his way. Kathy, furious at John, had sought the handiest weapon of revenge, to take a boy who meant nothing to her into the bed of her husband. It was to have been a meaningless and destructive act, a service she would require of me which would lead to no emotional involvement.

But to her surprise, and her mixed joy and consternation, she did become emotionally involved, and far more quickly than she would have believed possible. I now know that it was not some uniqueness in me — it was her vulnerable condition.

Her marriage had turned so bad she could not be sure John Pinelli cared whether she lived or died. She had fought the ravages of age to a precarious draw for several years, but now the other side was growing dangerously strong. She had let herself slip into an emotional pattern dangerous to any woman — telling herself she did not need anyone and did not want to be needed by anyone.

She had sought a quick, dirty little revenge, not sensing the depth of her own vulnerability, and suddenly found in the circle of her arms a young man who adored her. There had been too many men who had tried to use her to their own advantage. Here was one whose only humble desire was to be close to her, serve her, love her.

There was, in addition, a physical aspect to her vulnerability. She was a woman with a strong sexual drive, and except for those rare times in her past when she had not been working at her profession, she had sublimated that drive, used the force of it to refine her actress art. She was not working. John had not touched her — she said — since we had left New York. She was strongly ready to be used. And I had a youthful vigor she was soon able to surpass.

It was the small and dubious miracle of my life to watch such a woman slowly, and then more rapidly, turn all her clocks back to eighteen. It must be remembered, and understood, that in all my life I had never given of myself. I knew nothing of the pattern of giving. Those six weeks are as close as I ever came to love. I felt both humble and exultant. I believe that for those six weeks I was a good man. I struck no poses. I had no devious ideas of gain. I wanted only to love her and watch the continuous blossoming of her, a special gift that intrigued us both.

A warm spell in autumn will trick a flower into bloom. It was that way with my Kathy. Her harshness and her coldness went away. Her eyes were soft for me. The textures of her body changed with the flowering of her heart, silky, scented, poised always for acceptance.

We became fools, as do all true lovers. We had our own language, invented our own ceremonies, created our own jokes — and in this way made our own shining wall against the world. I had never heard her laugh aloud until those six weeks of our love. I learned the meanings of all her kinds of laughter, from paean of joy to bawdy guffaw, to velvety chuckle of pleasure. We bought absurd presents for each other down in the city. She was an actress, and a dozen women, and I knew that should I ever learn all aspects of that dozen, I would find a whole second series beyond that, like those clothing store mirrors, where images stretch off at an angle to infinity.

We swam, and we baked in the sun, and we went to the big hotels and sat at their bars and danced to their music, and we made five hundred plans to go away together, all of them necessary and impractical, and we knew we would not go away together, but it was a reality you could not mention.

She knew how much I enjoyed doing small things for her, and so she helped me think of things I could do. One special time was when I would brush that shining hair, a hundred strokes of the brush while she sat erect at the dressing table like an obedient child, her eyes watching me in the mirror. After the hundred strokes, I would wrap the brush in a nylon stocking and brush her hair thirty times more to bring out a special gloss, and then take the crackling electricity out of it with a tortoise shell comb. I was permitted to paint her toenails with the silver lacquer she used, while she looked down at me. She sent me to the city on personal errands. She was a small precious possession, and I cared for her, and her obvious sparkling happiness made me gloat.

We had one game we played often, and I imagine it is a game played by all lovers with but minor variations. She would announce primly, but with a glint of mischief, that on this day we were going to be “good.” And so we would tantalize ourselves with this false pose of noble self-denial as long as possible. But there would come a moment, inevitably, when our eyes would catch and lock, and I would see her mouth soften and see the pulse in her throat become more prominent, and see her head sag just a little as it would seem to become too heavy for her slender neck to support. And wherever we were then, on the beach, in town, at the table, we would pick the quickest route to the inevitable bed. “We’re horrible types,” she would whisper. “No character at all, my darling. No restraint at all, lover. Thank God.”

In the beginning we made a few weak efforts to hide our infatuation from the servants. But soon we ceased to give a damn what they thought. The institution of the lovely wife with a fat old husband and a muscular young lover is a cliché of the Latin world. John Pinelli had been brusque and rude to all three of them. Their approval of us was expressed in small ways that delighted us. Flowers from Armando on the table where we dined. Very special dishes prepared by Rosalinda. Giggles and blushings from Nadina. They all seemed part of a delicious conspiracy.

The intense affair suffered four interruptions during the six weeks. Perhaps the fourth one cannot legitimately be called an interruption. John flew down four times, once alone, once with Sonninger, twice with Sonninger and Race. On the second visit, he took Kathy back to Mexico City with him for two days. While she was gone I roamed my empty world like an abandoned dog. She flew back alone. When I picked her up at the airport, the expression on her face wiped away those two days as though I had never lived them.

It worried me that John Pinelli would see the change in her and guess the reason for it. I did not see how he could help it. I did not see how he could be in the same room with the two of us and not sense what we had become to each other. But she was indignant at my fears, saying they were a slur on her professional ability. And when John was there, she could turn off all that vibrant joy — almost all of it — and become, in some frightening way, a stranger. His fourth short visit cannot be counted as an interruption to our affair. He came with Sonninger and Race, and they stayed but one night, stayed up late, drank heavily. At dawn she awakened me by coming violently into my bed, chuckling, nestling into my chest and throat, her breath hot, her hair clean-scented, her small body sheathed in whispering silk.

Let me say that this adventure did not have a flavor of evil. It was more like a mischievous conspiracy — like children raiding an orchard. In some way we had cleansed ourselves with love. True evil was the incident in the car on the way down into Mexico. Once she spoke of that and said she was sorry in a voice that broke, and wept and was comforted. She wept easily in our days of love.

Sometimes, usually when she was asleep in my arms, I would remember that I had seen this woman on the big screens of movie houses and drive-ins, and on the flat small world of television, and had felt as had all other men watching her, that little twitch of speculation, that recurrent, unavoidable, egocentric daydream of coupling with that electronic projection of desirability. And when the absurdity of your wish becomes apparent to you, the ego protects itself by saying Aw, she’s scrawnier than she looks, and those show biz types are too stuck on themselves to be any damn good in bed, and she’s probably lez anyway.

Then it would seem incredible that I could be so lucky as to hold this almost mythical creature in my arms. I would study her sleeping face, the intricacies of her ear, and of her lips softly parted, study the delicate structuring of nose and brow, the incredibly perfect texture of her skin, the tiny perfect hairs of brow and lashes, like little gilded wires. I would wait in love and patience for her eyes to open, knowing they would be blank, unfocused, uncomprehending as she came out of the private jungles of her sleep, knowing that as they focused upon me a gladness would come into them and the corners of her mouth would lift, knowing she would stretch in supple ways within my arms, give a yawn that would expose the up-curling tongue, and then bring her mouth strongly and greedily against mine, and I would then begin to pleasure her in every way she especially liked.

There is always the perfect confidence of lovers that it will all go on forever. There is a timelessness about such things. The world stood still while I focused my life upon her, totally content. At high noon she loved to lie, Bikini-ed, upon a beach pad on the sun platform down above the beach and have me knead the sun oil into her body until her little moans and sighs of luxury were like the purrings of a cat. When the sting of the sun was too much to endure, we would cool ourselves in the sea, and then go up and have lunch in the shade of the patio. After lunch, before siesta, she relished having me cleanse the last of the sun oil from her body. There was a huge tiled shower stall, and a noisy turbulence of hot water. She would turban her hair in a big towel, and I would scrub her with a large soft brush and the mild musky soap she adored, and as she stood solemn and obedient as a child, I would towel her slenderness and ripeness until she glowed. It was traditional that during these chores I would digress from duty to caresses, and it was a part of our pattern that she would chide me and tell me to keep my mind on my work, please. It was love play, of course, and she enjoyed the pleasure I took in watching her, and it readied us to the point of torment for the love hour in the big bed after which, utterly spent, we would join the siesta sleep of all the rest of the world.

The unending, unendable world of love came to an end on the second day of July. I had fallen asleep facing her and the wall beyond her. She awakened me with a frenzied abruptness, making love to me with rapid little violences, biting at my mouth, making an odd little humming sound, digging me with her nails. Her eyes looked around, wild and mad. She laughed in a flat, strange way. Her intensity brought me quickly out of the blur of sleep into an almost immediate response to her. Of all the creatures she had been and had pretended to be, this one was quite new to me. But it was a part of our love, and if she felt like simulating a frenzy close to madness, I would play it her way. She was in such continual writhing motion that it took a surprising amount of strength to catch and cup the frantic chalice of her hips, and pin her long enough to permit a hasty joining.

But the moment I had accomplished that entrapment and that abrupt depth of conquest, I heard directly behind me sounds that seemed to stop my heart. I heard a low ferine grunting, a bestial gasping, a flat, splashing liquidity. I spun away from her to turn and stare at John Pinelli. He was not six feet from me. He held onto the footboard of the other bed. He was doubled over, vomiting on the tile floor. I knew instantly that she had been awake and had seen him come in, and had chosen to use me to hurt him in the most vicious way any man can be hurt. As she had aroused me to her purpose, she had been looking toward him, defying him, flinging him that ultimate challenge. Her frenzy had been built upon hate. It had not been love, but exhibition.

At the moment he was incapable of looking at me, and I knew I could not endure it if he were to look at me. I ran to the chair, took my damp swimming trunks that hung from the back of it, and yanked them on.

“Don’t leave me now, darling!” she called, projecting with full dramatic volume and timbre. “Don’t leave me like this, lover!” And, crouched there on the rumpled bed, her silvery hair in wild disarray, her face venomous, she began to scream with laughter.

As I tried to go by him he straightened up, eyes streaming, and reached a heavy arm toward me. I do not know what he was trying to do or express. In pure panic I swung and hit him, heavily, blindly, I know not where, and heard him fall behind me as I went through the door. Rosalinda was standing at the far end of the corridor, her eyes huge, brown fists pressed to her belly. As I raced by her I saw her cross herself.

There was no place in the world I could go. And I could never go fast enough to run away from memory. In my touching innocence I thought I was the owner of the world’s most vivid and most distressing memory. The world is seldom charitable to fools.

I hesitated, then went out through the front of the house, across the the terrace and down the steps to the beach. The tide was almost high, and there was a medium sea rolling in. I lay on the platform. The sea slid under me and smashed the rocks and threw spray high. I rolled over onto my back and the spray fell onto my face. On my lips it tasted as salty as tears. For a long time I thought I was going to be sick. But the feeling finally went away.

I was eye to eye with a contradiction, one many men have faced. If my love was capable of doing what she had done, then I had never known her at all. If I did not know her at all, then our love had been an indelicate farce. Are not all young men incurably romantic? The world cures the uncurable, however. And so in a lonely way, wrapped in the roar of the sea, I celebrated the death of love, or of illusion. Because I still loved the imaginary woman who could not have used me to strike such a deadly blow at the heart of her husband. But she had never existed.

This, I told myself, was no way for a sophisticate to behave. I ordered myself to put it all into proper perspective. A fading actress had dared play an ingénue role because her audience, her naïve intrigant, had been so very uncritical. I had been handy and healthy when she had desired fun and games. I counted her flaws: the almost invisible crescent scars at her temples from the cosmetic operation that had tautened the skin of her face into a semblance of youth; the beautiful teeth — expensively capped; the hair roots that were causing her much less trouble now that they were growing out gray; the crenelations of the flesh on the insides of her thighs; the deflated sag of her small breasts when she forgot to keep her shoulders well back; the ugly toes, crumpled by years of shoes too small; the peasant thickness and stubbiness of her hands and feet; the frank and blatant indelicacy with which she referred to all matters physiological.

But even her flaws were unbearably precious.

I knew exactly what a true sophisticate would do, and by God, I would do it. I would stay as inconspicuous as possible until they finished their battling and John Pinelli went back to the city. Their fights in the car had ended quickly. Her little hobbies couldn’t actually mean very much to him. So I would stick around and we’d continue the same pleasant routine.

Everything, I told myself, would be exactly as before. And I wondered why I started to feel sick again. She would sparkle for me, and we would divert each other with all our little games and devices and love words and private jokes. There would be but one small difference. This time I would know it didn’t really mean anything — to either of us. I hung my head over the edge of the sun platform and vomited into the sudsy green sea.

When it was over, I wondered how long I had been there. A long time. At least two hours. Possibly more. I squinted at the sun and estimated that it was six of its own diameters above the edge of the sea.

I heard a faint sound over the roaring of the waves. I looked up. A man stood on the cantilevered steps, fifteen feet above the plaform, calling my name. I stared up at him, raising my eyebrows, pointing at myself. He made that strange Mexican beckoning gesture which looks as if they are waving you away rather than summoning you. He stood just beyond the reach of the spray.

I went up the steps to him. He was a big man. He wore a pale silk jacket, sharply tailored, a grey bow tie, a cocoa straw hat with a feather. He looked like Don Ameche a little bit.

“Mr. Kirby Stassen?”

“Yes.”

“I am of the police. Come with me, please.” His English was very clear and deliberate. I followed him up the steps, thinking that John was giving me the roust the hard way. All he had to do was tell me to go.

There were five people in the living room. The three servants were lined up. A fat sleepy-looking policeman in uniform stood behind them. Another big Mexican in a white linen jacket stood facing them. He turned as we came in. He wore a blue shirt and a maroon bow tie, a straw hat just like the one who had come to get me. He looked a little bit like Richard Nixon, but bigger and jowlier. They were two smooth types. They had those police eyes, direct and skeptical.

White Jacket motioned toward me and projected a flood of fast Spanish at Rosalinda. Rosalinda answered. I could not follow the words. But I saw the pantomime that accompanied them. I saw John Pinelli stalking in. I saw the embrace that meant love. I saw myself running out, and going down to the beach. White Jacket tapped his watch and hammered her with short questions. She answered with explosive dignity.

Ameche said to me, choosing his words, “The woman says that you have been down at the beach while this thing has happened.”

“What has happened?”

“You heard no shots?”

“I didn’t hear anything! What happened?”

“Come with us, please,” Ameche said. He gave an order to the uniformed man. I went with White Jacket and Ameche to the master bedroom.

At the doorway, Ameche said, “Kindly do not step into the blood, Mr. Stassen.”

I had no intention of so doing. There was a Fourth of July smell of cordite in the room, and the bland sick smell of blood, and the sharpness of vomit. John Pinelli lay face down on the floor by the foot of the bed where his wife and I had made love. He lay in an ocean of blood. A partial dental bridge lay three feet from his head, a small ship making sail across the sea.

I gagged. I looked for Kathy. I did not see her.

Ameche showed me a gun. I had not seen him pick it up. He held it by a yellow pencil he had inserted in the barrel. It was a hell of a big gun, a Colt .45-caliber revolver with walnut grips. He held it so I could read the silver plates set into each grip, first on one side and then on the other.

One side said, “The John P., fastest gun on location.”

The other side said, “From Wade, Joan and Sonny — ‘Action at Box Canyon.’ ”

I remembered seeing the movie a few years ago, a pretty good Western. I had not known Pinelli was connected with it in any way.

“Are you familiar with this firearm?” Ameche asked me.

“I’ve never seen it before.”

He laid the gun on the bed, retrieved his pencil. “I shall make a reconstruction for you, Mr. Stassen.” He walked to the wall, skirting the blood. He pointed out four widely spaced scars in the plaster, each about four feet off the floor.

“He stood about where my associate is standing, and he fired these four shots at the woman. She was dodging back and forth, screaming. One of them caused the wound upon her arm, here.” He touched his left arm just below the shoulder. “This spray of blood is from that minor wound. It is believed that she then sought refuge under the bed, still screaming. He knelt and crawled after her and placed the muzzle of the gun against her body, here.” He pressed his finger down against the top of his shoulder, near his neck. “The large slug ranged downward through her body, killing her. The impact slid her halfway out from under the bed. He stood up, walked around the bed, and turned her over onto her back and fired once again into the center of the stomach. He pulled her out from under the bed all the way to look at her face and be sure she was dead. The gun was men empty. He walked to the bureau there and took one more shell. He walked back and stood where he could see her, and shot himself in the throat and fell where you now see him.”

Yes, I could see John Pinelli. But as he had explained how it happened, I had grown more and more conscious of what I couldn’t see, what I didn’t want to see. I knew where it was. I took four slow steps. And I could see her. There had been much blood in her too. She lay naked on the tile, tiny and gray and shrunken, her hair lifeless, her cheeks sucked in, her eyes turned up out of sight, her small teeth showing. Her breasts had sagged flat. She looked like an old, old woman.

I backed until I could no longer see her. I heard voices in the other part of the house. More officials had arrived. White Jacket hurried out.

“This disturbs you?” Ameche asked. “We will talk on the little terrace.”

I was glad to get out of that room, and away from the stink of death. I pulled the outdoor air deep into my lungs.

He perched one tailored hip on a metal table, pulled out a pack of Kents and gave me one. He looked at me shrewdly.

“They employed you?”

“Just to drive them down.”

“But that was some months ago. Have you been working for them?”

“Just... the odd errand. A little driving. They haven’t been paying me. I’ve been a house guest, you could say.”

“Yes, of course. A guest. And providing... a very personal service for your hostess, no?”

“Is that illegal here?”

“No, of course not. But stupid carelessness should be made illegal. You were caught with her.”

“Yes.”

“So we have a murder and a suicide. Now I shall tell you some facts of life, Mr. Stassen. This is a resort place. We like... rumors of intrigue, but not dirty violence and scandal. Mr. Pinelli was in poor health. He was despondent. You are not in any way in this picture.”

“I’m not?”

“Your things will be packed. You will be out of this house in ten minutes. You will be out of Acapulco by the first aircraft. I cannot insist, but I would say it would be wise for you to leave Mexico. Go now and dress and leave here.”

I looked at him. I shrugged and turned away. After I had gone a dozen feet he said, “Mr. Stassen!” I looked back at him. “She was much too old for you, chico.”

Kathy was under a great bed, screaming and screaming, holding her bleeding arm. John Pinelli, crawling, peered under at her, the big, ridiculous gun in his hand.

There was nothing in the world worth arguing about. I left. I had a thousand dollars when I arrived in Mexico City. I found a cheap hotel. I got blind, stupid drunk. Four days later I had eleven dollars left, and somebody had stolen my suitcase. I wired home for money. Ernie wired me a hundred dollars. I bought the clothes and toilet articles I needed. I fooled around the city for a while, living cheap, trying not to think about Kathy. I drank enough to keep the whole thing a little dulled, a little far back in my mind. When the money was dangerously low, I took a bus to Monterrey. There I ran into a family from Sonora, Texas. A man and wife and two small kids, traveling in a pickup truck.

He had a bad infection in his right hand, and his little Mexican wife couldn’t drive a car. So we made a deal.

I came back across the border at Del Rio on Sunday, the nineteenth day of July. He felt he could drive one-handed to Sonora. We parted company there, in Del Rio. I had a little over fifteen dollars left. I didn’t give a damn where I went or what I did. It was a blistering afternoon. I decided I might as well hitch-hike east. I walked a way east out of town on Route 90. I had no luck. I kept moving slowly as I tried. I came to a beer joint. I went in. After the glare outside I couldn’t see anything.

A high penetrating voice said, “And here is Joe College, seeing America first, having a great big fat adventure before he poops out and joins Rotary.”

That’s how I met Sander Golden, Nanette Koslov and Shack Hernandez.