Children of Light

Waking, he saw aqueous light on the blue-white ceiling — the morning sun reflected from the swimming pool just outside the window. The moment he raised his head the poison struck; thirst, nausea, a barbed pain behind the eyes. When he turned he felt the warm girl beside him, naked, belly down. He reached out, and with the lightest touch his sodden state could bring to bear, ran his fingers along the small of her back, over her buttocks and firm thigh. In his first moments of consciousness, he had not been able to remember who it was there. The touch of her cool young skin brought recollection quickly enough.

As gently and silently as he could, he climbed out of bed and padded across the tiles to the chair on which he had piled his clothes the night before. He did not want to wake her, wanted to be alone in spite of his loneliness.

Dressed, he went out through the bedroom door and found himself in her enormous kitchen. It was stark white, gleaming with steel and glass, resplendent with morning. At the tap, he drank long and breathlessly, resting his elbows on the cold edge of the sink. He wet his hand and rubbed his face. When he looked up he saw brown mountains through the kitchen window, a steep ridge crowned with mist commanding a neat green valley. It was a shimmering day, dappled with promise.

“Fucking California,” he said aloud. He was still half drunk.

Even after twenty years he was not immune to California mornings. He supposed they must represent the pursuit of happiness to him.

He closed his eyes and gripped the sink. His eyes were swollen. They want pennies, he thought. Pennies over them. He took a deep breath, swallowed and drew himself erect.

Now go, he told himself.

Adjoining the white kitchen was a small dining area. A little spiral sculpture of a stairway led down to the living room, where he had left his bags. He opened his suitcase across the sofa and rummaged through it for clean socks, underwear, a fresh shirt. Gathering up the clothes, he went to the spare bathroom and locked himself in against the fulsomeness of the morning. He turned on the shower, trying to calm himself with the familiar sound of the spray. His hands trembled. He was about to be afraid.

Instantly he was sick, vomiting into the fixture, sweating, dysenteric. Purged for the moment, he sat down on the covered toilet seat, holding his head in his hands. Desolation.

Of course he was poisoned. He had been poisoning himself for weeks.

As he stepped into the shower, he caught sight of himself in a mirror on the door of the medicine cabinet. The thing itself. Unaccommodated man. He did not let his gaze linger.

Standing under the veil of warm water, he began to recite. He made his voice large, comically orotund:

“Thou art the thing itself,” he declared to the tiny white room. “Unaccommodated man is no more than such a poor bare forked animal as thou art.”

He felt better then, but only for a while. A wave of regret had massed and was advancing on him; he had hardly time for breath before it ran him down. Bitterness — stifling, sour, the color of jaundice, gagging him.

“Pour on,” he declaimed, “I will endure. On such a night …” He stopped and fell silent.

At times like the one he was presently enduring, Walker, who was a screenwriter, would think of the days behind him as a litter of pictures. Light on the water, his wife at twenty, a sky, a city, his children at tender ages. One remembered image or another might move him almost to tears, then presently the emotion stirred would seem trivial and false, like some of the scenes he had written. His phantoms of conscience, his deepest regrets would appear petty, vulgar and ridiculous. These moods afforded Walker a vision of his life as trash — a soiled article, past repair. Observing things compose themselves into this bleak spectacle, Walker would wonder if he had ever had the slightest acquaintance with any kind of truth.

He held fast to the safety bar in the shower stall. What we need here is a dream, he told himself, a little something to get by on. For the past few weeks, he had been getting by on alcohol and a ten-gram stash of cocaine and he had begun to feel as though he might die quite soon.

Showered, he stepped out of the stall, dried himself on the guest towel and, avoiding the mirror, checked out the medicine cabinet. To his sharp delight, he found a little tube of Valium beside a bottle of vitamin B complex. The perfect hostess, he thought. A marvelous girl.

When he had helped himself to a five-milligram tablet of Valium and some B complex, he stepped on the bathroom scale, closed the cabinet and was confronted once more with his own image. Men Walker’s age were held to be responsible for their faces, a disquieting notion. But his was hardly a mask of depravity. He drew himself erect and stared it down. Just a face, quite an ordinary one. Caught, he squinted to examine the creature in the glass. It was his business to know how he looked; he worked as an actor from time to time. He looked, he decided, like a man in his forties who drank. For most of his life he had appeared younger than his age. Perhaps it was just the light, he thought. He looked away and stepped on the bathroom scale.

Walker found that he weighed just over one hundred and seventy pounds, which he thought not bad for one his height and build. He poked two fingers under his rib cage on the right side, checking for evidence of liver enlargement. Everything seemed as usual there.

Stepping off the scale, he blundered into his reflection yet again. This time he was paralyzed with the fear of death. He turned away and leaned against the wall, closing his eyes, taking deep deliberate breaths. It took him some moments to calm himself. His inner resources were in some disarray, he thought. Valium would have to serve in the present emergency. Another line from Lear came into his mind: “he hath ever but slenderly known himself.”

For the first time in his articulate, thoroughly examined life, Walker wondered if that might not be true of him. Not possible, he decided. He knew himself well enough. It was the rest of things that gave him trouble.

He dressed. Returning to the kitchen, he half filled a water glass with vodka, then poured clam and tomato juice mixture over it. Walking carefully down the stairway, he sprawled beside his suitcase on the light gray sofa and savored the cozy impeccability of Bronwen’s living room. When he had taken a few sips of his drink, he reached into the lining of the case and drew out the fold of pink notepaper that contained his ready-to-hand cocaine. He set the envelope on the coffee table in front of him but left it unopened.

How well she lives, he thought, for one so young. He himself was homeless and had been so for more than a month.

Walker worked in the film industry, having come into it seventeen years before as an actor. He had gone through the Hagen-Berghof studios with the thought of learning the theater and becoming a playwright. A few years later he had written the book and lyrics for a very serious and ambitious musical version of Jurgen and been astonished to see it fail utterly within a week. There had never been a play and he had come to realize that there would never be. Walker made his living — quite a good one — chiefly as author, adjuster or collaborator on film scripts. During the past summer, he had been acting again, on stage for the first time in years as Lear. Over the years he had advanced in station within the old black fairy tale. At different phases of his life he had played Cornwall’s servant, then Cornwall, then Kent, finally the King. He was still up on Lear-ness, chockablock with cheerless dark and deadly mutters, little incantations from the text. They were not inappropriate to his condition; during the run of the show his wife had left him.

Drink in hand, he went up the stairway again and stood just inside the bedroom door, looking in at the young woman. Such a nice house, he thought. His jaw was tight with anger. Such a pretty girl.

He leaned in the doorway and watched her. She lay facing him, her red-blond hair partly covering her eyes, her lips parted over long cowgirl’s teeth. She slept on, or pretended to. A deep blue silk sheet was gathered about her naked body; she was sheathed in it.

Bronwen was a writer, a midwestern girl honed smooth by early success and the best of California. Observing, or rather ogling, her at rest, Walker was stirred in equal measure by lust and resentment.

Basically, they disliked each other. They were both, in their diverse ways, performers, comics; much of their companionable humor turned on mutual scorn.

She had written three short novels, witty, original and immensely pleasurable to read. Bronwen was nothing if not funny. Each of her novels had been received with great enthusiam by reviewers and by the public; she had become famous enough for Walker, to his deep inward shame, to take a vulgar satisfaction in his liaison with her. She was intelligent and coldhearted, a spiky complex of defenses mined with vaults of childish venom and hastily buried fears. Kicked when she was a pup, Walker would say behind her back. The game they played, one of the games, was that she knew his number. That his stratagems to please, his manner of being amusing, the political sincerities that remained to him were petty complaints to which she was immune. Others might take him seriously — not she, the hard case, worldly-wise.

He ran his eyes over her long frame and wondered if she knew he knew about the pistol she kept in the wicker chest beneath her bed, wrapped in a scarf with her Ritalin tablets. Or whether she knew his number well enough to imagine the measure of his rage, or the murderous fantasies that assailed him — of destroying her, transforming her supple youth to offal, trashing it.

He was immediately stricken with remorse and horror. Because he liked her, really, after all. He must, he thought; there had to be more than perversity. She was funny; he enjoyed her wit and her high spirits. And she liked him — he was sure. She could speak with him as with no other friend; she respected his work, she had said so. It occurred to him suddenly how little any of this had to do with the terms of the heart as he had once understood them; love, caring, loyalty. It was just a random coupling, a highbrow jelly roll. Might she imagine that violent fantasies beset him with herself as their object? She might well. She was very experienced and knowing; she had his number. And the Lord knew what fantasies she spun round him.

Back in the living room, he found his wallet on the sofa where he had been sitting. It was thick with bills, jammed in haphazard. He remembered then, having almost forgotten it in his malaise, that he had won a great deal of money at Santa Anita the day before. He had gone with Bronwen; it was a glorious day and they had lunched at the clubhouse. Walker had scored on the double, a perfecta and an eight-to-one winner. His take was over a thousand dollars, the largest amount of money he had ever won at the track. It had paid for dinner at the San Gabriel Ranch and it would pay a week’s rent at the Chateau. He had been living at the Chateau Marmont since the closing of Lear, having rented his house in Santa Monica. He did not care to be alone there.

Walker caressed the disorderly wad between thumb and forefinger. The touch of the wrinkled bright new bills gave him a faint feeling of disgust. He took out a hundred, examining the lacy engraved illumination at its border. Then, on an impulse, he rolled the bill into a cylinder, laid out a line of his coke and blew it. Nice. He sniffed and rubbed his eyes. Confidence. A little surge for the road. Immediately it occurred to him that in the brief course of his waking day he had consumed Valium, alcohol and cocaine.

We need a plan, he thought. A plan and a dream, somewhere to go. Dreams were business to Walker, they were life. Like salt, like water. Lifeblood.

He touched the tip of his index finger to the surface of the coffee table, capturing the residue of cocaine that remained there, and rubbed it on his gum.

Go, he thought. It seemed to him that if he did not go at once death would find him there. He stood up and packed his suitcase, leaving the small fold of cocaine on the table as a house present. He had plenty more in the case.

Stacked on the mantel above the fireplace were Bronwen’s three novels; Walker found that each was engagingly inscribed to him. The drill was for him to take them and leave a note. He turned the topmost book to the back jacket and looked at Bronwen’s picture. Her eyes were fixed on the middle distance, her lips were slightly parted, her cheekbones high and handsome, her chin dimpled. She looked hip and sympathetic and fingerlickin’ good. He placed the book back on the mantelpiece and left it there. Then he put on his sunglasses, picked up his bags and went forth into the morning.

As he drove the freeway, KFAC played Couperin, the Leçons de Ténèbres.

Walker thought of himself as a survivor. He knew how to endure, and what it was that got you through. There was work. There were the people you loved and the people who loved you. There were, he had always believed, a variety of inner resources that the veteran survivor might fall back on; about these he was no longer so sure. The idea of inner resources seemed fatuous mysticism that morning. He had drugged and drunk too much, watched too many smoky reels of interior montage to command any inner resources. It was difficult enough to think straight.

As for work — after weeks of living on his nerves it would take nearly as much time of disciplined drying out before he could begin to face a job. And love — love was fled. Gone to London. The thought of her there and himself abandoned made his blood run cold. He put it out of his mind, as he had trained himself to do since Seattle. He would deal with it later, he would do something about it. When he was straightened out. A dream, he thought. That’s what we need.

He left the freeway at Sunset and parked in Marmont Lane behind the hotel. At the desk he bought the morning’s L.A. Times and Variety. He rode up to the sixth floor in the company of a famous German actor and two stoned young women.

The air in his apartment held a faint scent of stale alcohol and undone laundry. He opened the leaded bedroom windows to a tepid oily breeze. Below him were the swimming pool and the row of bungalows that flanked it. Dead leaves floated on the surface of the dark green water. The pool gardens smelled of car exhaust and eucalyptus.

This time it was not going to be easy to get straight. He would have to go about it very skillfully. Above all he would have to want to. There would have to be a reason, and Walker knew that inquiry into his reasons for surviving would bring him into dangerous territory. The world in general, he had conceded at last, required neither him nor his works. His wife was gone — for good as far as he knew; his children were grown. He was going to have to pull out for his own reasons, alone and unrequired, in a hotel in West Hollywood. The taste of death and ruin rose in his throat again.

He decided not to think about it. In order to postpone thinking about it he opened his suitcase, took out the tubular talcum container that held his cocaine and tapped out a small mound of the stuff onto the smooth dark marble of his bedside lamp table. He did it up with the hundred-dollar bill. Fine, he thought. For the moment he had obviated motivation; he was the thing itself again. The thing itself shortly came to self-awareness in the kitchen pouring out a shot of vodka. Perplexed, Walker looked at the drink he had prepared. He sniffed, drew himself erect and emptied the glass into the sink drain. He had made a luncheon engagement with his agent and keeping the appointment was all he owned of purpose. He must at least postpone the next drink until lunch. A small gesture toward renewal, nothing ambitious.

Drinkless, he went into his living room, turned the television set on, turned it off again and began to pace the length of the room.

This is where we begin, he told himself. We reinvent ourself. We put one foot in front of the other and we go on.

In a moment he went back to the bedroom and did another line. Then he leaned back on the bed and stared through the balcony windows at the still surface of the pool five stories below.

From somewhere amid the damp greenery of the garden, a mockingbird was trilling away, sounding a little fife march. For a fraction of a second Walker was beguiled by a shard of memory, the tiniest part of an old dream. It was gone too quickly to be pinned down.

He got to his feet and went to stand at the window. The bird song came again, under the rush of traffic, stirring recall.

He had gone away from the balcony and was sitting on the bed with the telephone in his hand when the memory surfaced. He put the receiver down and turned to the window. The bird trilled again.

He was remembering Lu Anne Bourgeois, whom the greater world called Lee Verger. She had been half on his mind all the previous spring, but Seattle, the show and the dreadful events of the summer had swept everything away.

Years before, when he and Lu Anne were young and fearless, in the days of mind drugs and transfiguration, they had invented a game together for bad nights. In fact, it was not so much a game as a state of mind to be indulged and they had called it Bats or Birdies.

Bats or Birdies was played in the worst hours before dawn. Winning entailed holding your own until morning, making it through the night with your head intact to the moment when bird song announced the imminence of first light and day. That was Birdies. Losing was not making it through, losing your shit. Bats. Mockingbirds, with their untimely warbles at ungodly hours, upset the game, making you think that it was morning and you had won through when in fact you were still fast in the heart of night.

He thought of Lu Anne and his heart rose. She was pale. She had dark blue saintly eyes and a smile that quivered between high drollery and madness. Nine years before, she had been nominated for an Academy Award in a supporting role; her subsequent career, like Walker’s, had been disappointing.

Long ago, during their time together, Lu Anne had given him Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening. Its setting was Louisiana in the late nineteenth century; Lu Anne was a Louisianan, Chopin’s book had been a favorite of hers. He had written a script, and every day of its writing she had been with him or in his expectation, so that when the principal character of Edna Pontellier was defined in scene and dialogue, Lu Anne inhabited it utterly. In those days they had dreamed of doing it together but it had not turned out that way.

Time passed. The book was discovered by academics and declared a feminist document. Lu Anne had acquired a new agent, who was vigorous, female and literate. About a year and a half before Walker committed for the Seattle Lear, ten years after his last revision of the script and six since his last conversation with Lu Anne, a package had been put together.

A young director named Walter Drogue had been engaged. The Awakening would be Drogue’s fourth picture; he was generally accounted intelligent, original and aggressive. His father, also named Walter Drogue, was one of the industry’s living Buddhas. A director himself for almost fifty years, Drogue senior had been publicly caned, fired upon by sexual rivals, blacklisted, subpoenaed and biographied in French. The father’s name, it was felt, added luster to his son’s project, and the son’s price, like Walker’s and Lu Anne’s, was not immoderate.

A producer of some probity took the picture over. One of the majors was induced to finance and distribute. It was all perceived as prestigious, timely and cheap. There was a real possibility that the interests involved might find themselves in control of a well-made picture that would generate good reviews, awards and, with the right handling, a favorable profit line. A vestigial social impulse was being discharged. Somewhere, deep within the Funhouse, they had opted for a calculated risk.

After shooting most of the summer in New Orleans, the production had moved, for convenience and economy, to the Drogues’ favorite Baja location at Bahía Honda. The elder Drogue had been filming there for many years and had bought hotel property through a nominal Mexican owner. Thus he was able to serve as factor to his own productions.

As far as Walker was concerned, it was a little late. He had been asked down and declined. Probably, he thought, to their relief. There was also the matter of Lu Anne, his dark angel. They had survived their last outing but it had been close. They had survived because they were both young then and married and motivated and skilled survivors. It would not be the same now.

But stoned, abandoned, desolate — Walker found himself listening to birdcalls and thinking of her. His heart beat faster. It had not been quite six years, he thought. She had kissed him casually. He imagined that he could recall her touch and when he did it was the woman he had known a decade before who presented herself to his recollection.

She was married again, to a doctor; she had children. His business now was to save himself and his own marriage, restore his equilibrium. What we need here is less craziness, he told himself, not more.

Then he thought: A dream is what I need. Fire, motion, risk. It was a delusion of the drug. The production’s location office number was in his black book. He found himself with his hand on the phone.

Yours in the ranks of death.

Trapped within some vertiginous silence, he dialed the far-off number. At the first ring he hung up in terror.

A few minutes later, it seemed to him that he was perfectly well again. When he picked up the telephone it was to confirm luncheon with his agent’s office.

At the agency, he got Shelley Pearce on the line. She was Al’s assistant, a Smithie who had gone through the Yale Rep some years after Lu Anne. She had been a student of Walker’s at an acting workshop; he had gotten her her first job, as a gofer on a production at U.A. He had introduced her to Al.

“Hello, Gordon,” Shelley said. She sounded glad to hear from him and he felt grateful.

“Where were you?” he said. “Every night I searched that sea of pale immobile faces. No Shelley.”

“You kidding, Gordon? King Lear? You think I got time for that shit?”

He laughed.

“Yes, Gordon,” Shelley said, “yes, I was there. I saw you. You were wonderful.”

“How’s that?”

“Wonderful, Gordon. Wonderful, O.K.?”

“I thought so too,” Walker said. “I felt underappreciated.”

“Didn’t you see the L.A. Times?”

“Acceptable,” Walker said. “But faint.”

“Don’t be greedy,” Shelley said. “Al will bring you some clippings to slaver over at lunch.”

“Why don’t you and I have dinner tonight?” he asked her suddenly. “Why don’t we go to the San Epo Hotel?”

She was silent for a moment.

“How are you, Gordon? I mean, how are you doing?”

“Not so good,” he said.

“Sure,” she said. “The San Epo, sure. Sunset. Know when sunset is? It’s in the paper.”

“I’ll call the Coast Guard.”

“You drinking?” she asked. “You better not stand me up.”

“I’ll be there,” he said.

Arriving at Musso and Frank’s, Walker settled in at a banquette table and ordered a martini. Keochakian came in fifteen minutes late to find him ordering a second.

“Bring me one too,” Al told the waiter.

Keochakian studied his client. He had hard, unconfiding eyes behind thick tinted glasses, the face and manner of a Marseilles numéro.

“How are you, Gordon?” He shook Walker’s hand and gripped his shoulder. “How are Connie and the kids?”

“They’re dead, Al.”

The agent looked at him without expression.

“Hey, that’s funny, Gordon.”

“You always ask. I wondered if you were listening.”

Keochakian bared his teeth.

“I always listen. I want to know. I’m a family man. I’m not like you, you fuck. They’re wasted on you.”

“Connie left me,” Walker said.

“I don’t believe that,” Al said. “It’s impossible and I reject it.”

“She left me a most eloquent letter. A bill of particulars. She seemed very determined. She’s in London.”

“Know what I think? I think she’ll come back. I’m sure of it. If you want her to.” Keochakian sipped his drink and grimaced. “I presume you want her to.”

Walker looked down at his folded hands and nodded slowly.

“Face it, man. Without her you’re fucked. You’ll go down the tubes. You have to get her back.”

“She has her pride.”

“Now you know,” Keochakian said.

“I can’t talk about it today,” Walker said. “I’m too scrambled.”

“That’s fine. But when you do want to talk about it let me know, because I have a few things to say on the subject and I have the right to an opinion.”

Walker chewed his lip and looked away.

“So what do you want to eat?” Al asked.

“Since we’re having martinis,” Walker said, “I’m thinking liver.”

“The liver is good,” Al said. He signaled for a waiter and was attended at once. They ordered. Under his agent’s disapproving eye, Walker called for a half bottle of cabernet.

“Tell me about Seattle.”

“I could spend the rest of my life doing Lear” Walker said. “I’d like to do it all. The Fool. Gloucester, Cordelia. The fucking thing is bottomless.”

“Shelley saw you.”

Walker smiled. “She said. She’s my turtledove.”

“Would you like to work?” Al asked. “I have something good.”

“When?”

“They’d want to test this week. But they asked for you specifically, so I think that’s just a formality.” He was frowning. “Are you tied up or something? Why is it important when?”

Walker made no answer.

“You into something? Will you have a script for me?”

“No,” Walker said. He cleared his throat. “I thought I’d go down to Bahía Honda and look in on The Awakening.”

Al squinted through his green-shaded glasses and shook his head.

“Why?”

Walker shrugged. “Because it’s my baby. I want to see how they’re treating it.”

“I thought we went through this,” Al said. The waiter brought the wine for Walker to taste. When it was poured out, Keochakian covered his own glass with his hand to decline it. “I thought a decision had been made and I thought it was the right one.”

“I’ve decided I want a look-in.”

“A look-in,” the agent said, a toneless echo.

“Make my presence felt.”

“They don’t want you down there,” Al said.

The main course arrived. Walker poured himself a second glass of wine.

“They asked for me once,” Walker said.

Keochakian took his glasses off and shrugged. “They didn’t care, Gordon. Walter thought he might pick your brain a little but he certainly doesn’t need you now. He’ll think you’re crowding his act.”

Walker picked up a fork and looked at his plate.

“I’d like to, you know.”

“They won’t pay. They don’t require you.”

“I’ll pay. I’ll go as a civilian. For the beach.”

Al addressed his liver and onions.

“I think this is unprofessional.”

“I don’t see why,” Walker said. When he began to eat he found that he was very hungry. “It’s not unheard-of.”

“You’re going to see Lee Verger,” Keochakian said. He was avoiding Walker’s eyes.

“It would be nice to see Lu Anne. Look, I’ve got some stake in the picture. Why shouldn’t I go down?”

“Because you work for a living,” Al said. He spoke very slowly and softly. “And I have work for you.”

“I’m not ready,” Walker said vaguely.

“It’s a fun part. It’s big. A faggoty intellectual villain. You’d have a blast.”

“I feel the need to go down to Mexico for a while. When I get back — I’ll be refreshed. I’ll be able to work.”

Keochakian leaned his knife and fork on his plate.

“Let me tell you something, Gordon. If you show up on that set you’ll be digging your own grave.”

Walker laughed bitterly.

“You think it’s funny, fucker?” Keochakian asked. “You know how you look? You’re sweating fucking alcohol. You think I can’t see your eyes? You think people in this business don’t know what drunks look like?”

“I’m quitting tomorrow, for Christ’s sake.”

“Oh,” Al said with a humorless smile, “quitting tomorrow. That’s nice. That’s good, Gordon. Well, I suggest you do that, pal. And I suggest you leave Lee the fuck alone.” He put his fork to the meat, then set it down again. “I mean, go retrieve Connie. Lee doesn’t need you. You’re the last thing she needs. Whereas Connie for her own sick reasons does.”

“I need a trip. Travel is therapy for me.”

Al looked at him and leaned forward across the table.

“If you’re ever unable to work, put yourself in a hospital.”

“Please, Al.”

“Gordon,” Keochakian said, “ten years ago this might have been a joke but it’s not a joke now. Take the cure, man. People do it all the time.”

Walker put a hand to his forehead.

“You have the money. Do yourself a favor. Get out of circulation and dry out. Go East. New England. It’s autumn, they have some good places there, you won’t see anyone you know.”

“I’d go bananas,” Walker said. “A place like that.”

“Maybe it has to be done, Gordon.”

“Well,” Walker said in a placatory manner, “we’ll see how it goes.”

A busboy came and removed their plates. Walker poured wine.

“Too bad you won’t do this thing I have for you. It might get you television.”

“Is that what I want?”

Keochakian’s eyes seemed to glaze. He stared into space and scratched his chin.

“I think I’ll grow a beard, Gordon. A goatee, what do you think?”

“Good, Al. That’d be good.”

“Don’t you dare go down there,” Al said. He shook his finger before Walker’s face. “Don’t you dare undo all the work I’ve done.”

“Sure, Al,” Walker said. “Hey, what work, man?”

“Fuck you, Gordon.”

Walker waited, half expecting him to stand up and leave. They both sat tight, facing one another.

“We made a very favorable deal, financially,” Al said calmly.

“My best fee,” Walker said. “A record.”

“Exactly. We also dealt with some typical Walter Drogue-like ploys.”

“Did we?”

“Yes, we did, Gordon. You may remember his concern over the feminist perspective.”

“I wasn’t aware of it.”

“Walter was worried about the absence of a feminist perspective. He gave us a lot of shit about this. Know what was on his mind?”

“I can guess.”

Keochakian smiled thinly.

“He wanted a writing credit. Not for some broad — for him. He saw the script was good. He thinks the thing might go. He wanted a writing credit for his vanity and to jack more points out of them.”

“Well,” Walker said. “Walter’s a great feminist.”

“Definitely,” Al said. “I hear his father was an even greater feminist. Anyway, that fucking ball would have rolled seven ways from sundown but it would have stopped on a writing credit for Walter Drogue. We were able to checkmate these numbers. We saved your points and credit.”

“He never heard of the novel before I did the script.”

“He thinks he did.”

“This time last year,” Walker said, “he thought The Awakening was a mummy movie. Now he thinks he wrote the book.”

“That’s how he is, Gordo. And if you go down there and act like a rummy and mess with his actress you’ll play right into his hands. He thinks he can swallow you with a glass of water.”

“Did he say that?” Walker asked, smiling.

“Words to that effect. And they’re all running scared because Dongan Lowndes is down there doing a big magazine piece on the filming. They’re afraid he’ll make assholes out of them and screw the project.”

“Well,” Walker said, “how about that?”

Dongan Lowndes was a novelist whose single book, published eight years before, Walker much admired. In the intervening years, Lowndes had turned to nonfiction writing for quality magazines. Most recently he had been writing on such subjects as Las Vegas crooners, self-publicizing tycoons, fatuous politicians and the film industry. He wrote well and bitterly and they feared him.

“Does he think he can swallow Lowndes too?”

“They’re hoping to charm him.”

“Maybe with Lee, huh?”

“This is a Charlie Freitag production, Gordon. You know Charlie. He figures …” Keochakian raised his eyes heavenward. “Christ, who knows what he figures? He’s a culture vulture. He thinks it’s a class picture and he thinks Lowndes is a classy guy. He thinks he’ll get a friendly piece and it’ll be good for the picture.”

“Whereas in fact Lowndes can’t get it on to write and he hates to see people work. He’ll nail them to a tree.”

“Tell Charlie,” Al said. He watched Walker sip his wine. “Hey, you’re a little bitter too, huh?”

“Lowndes is a fine writer,” Walker said. “I hope he never writes another novel in his fucking life.”

“Terrific, Gordo. You’re just what they need down there. You can hassle Lee and piss on the press. Get drunk, start fights. Just like old times, right?” He leaned across the table and fixed his Vieux Port stare on Walker. “You’ll hurt people. You’ll hurt yourself. I’m telling you to stay away.”

“I’ll think about it,” Walker said.

“Please,” Al said. “Please think.”

He took a file folder full of press clippings from his attaché case and handed them to Walker.

“Enjoy yourself. Sober up. Call me in a couple of days and we’ll talk about what you should do.” He called for the check and signed it as the waiter stood by. “I mean, what if Connie comes back or calls and you’re off fucking up somewhere? Don’t do anything. Don’t go anywhere until you’re sober.”

They went out. It had turned into a Santa Ana day with a dry comfortless breeze, a hot hazy sky. At the corner of Bronson, Keochakian took hold of Walker’s lapel.

“People are watching you,” he said. “Always. Evil people who wish you bad things are watching. You’re not among friends.” He turned away, walked a few steps and spun round. “Trust no one. Except me. I’m different. You can trust me. You believe that?”

“More or less,” Walker said.

On the way back to West Hollywood, he stopped at his health club, had a swim and read his reviews in the sauna. The reviews were, in the main, good. One of them was good enough to drive him out of the heat with angina pains. It called his performance a revelation. “Walker’s anguished king, descending from impotent frenzy to an almost fey, childlike madness, comes as a revelation to those familiar only with his street-smart movie turns.”

He thought it cheering, although the pains rather worried him.

Back at the Chateau, he packed up, left a wake-up call and took a short nap. His dreams were stormy. An hour later he was south of Long Beach in rush-hour traffic.

Deep into Orange County, he pulled off the San Diego Freeway and cut over toward the coast road. On his left, the future of southern California was unfolding; he passed mile upon mile of development divided into units by redwood fencing and bougainvillea, mock villages centered on a supermarket and a Bob’s Big Boy. Every half mile or so a patch of stripped, empty acreage awaited the builders and better times.

On his right, through some realtor’s stratagem, the land was unimproved. Herefords grazed in fields of yellow grass; wildflowers and manzanita flourished. From somewhere came the smell of orange trees, as though it were spring and twenty years before. The nearest groves were miles away now.

He drove into fog among the dry hills, the warm wind died away and on the coast it was gray and cool. He felt better suited.

On the coast road, he turned south. For a few miles it was all suburban maritime; there were condominiums with marinas, dive shops, seafood restaurants. Further down the Herefords wandered among undulating oil-well pumps, a landscape of tax deductions.

At seven-fifteen, half an hour before sunset, he was pulling into San Epifanio Beach, the last repair of untranslated seediness in the county. The beach had oil rigs offshore and an enormous German Expressionist power plant on the city line. There was a fishing pier borne seaward on spindly pilings in defiance of the Pacific rollers, the far end of which vanished into enshrouding fog. At right angles to the coast road, garnished with a rank of rat-infested royal palms, ran the lineup of tackle stores, taco stands and murky cocktail lounges that was the beach’s principal thoroughfare.

Walker braked at the intersection to let a party of surf punks cross. The slashes of green or orange in their close-cropped hair reminded him suddenly of the patch of white that had appeared in his brother’s hair following rheumatic fever. The four youths glared at him with impersonal menace as they went by.

Three blocks beyond the main drag rose the San Epifanio Beach Hotel, a nine-story riot of exoticism that dominated the downtown area. It was a shameless building from another age, silent-movie Spanish. With its peeling stucco walls, its rows of slimy windows and soiled shades, it was a structure so outsized and crummy that the sight of it could taint the nicest day. Walker was fond of it because he had been happy there. He had lived in the hotel years before in a room beside an atelier where a blind masseur cohabited with Ramon Novarro’s putative cousin. He had been married there, in the dingy ballroom, amid cannabis fumes.

Walker pulled over into the guest parking lot. A tough-looking little Chicana with a ponytail, a baseball cap and bib overalls handed him a claim ticket.

He went past the theater-style marquee over the main entrance and walked round to the beach side of the building. Several empty tables were arranged on a veranda overlooking a nearly deserted park. At the far end of the park four black teenagers, stripped to the waist, were playing basketball. Nearer the hotel, some Hare Krishnas from Laguna were chanting for the entertainment of two elderly couples in pastel clothes.

Walker ambled across the park to the beach. The wind was sharp, it had grown chilly with the approach of sunset. The declining sun itself was obscured in dark banks of cloud. Walker watched the waves break against the dark purple sand. Once he had seen porpoises there, seven together, playing just outside the break line of the surf. He had been standing in the same place, on the edge of the park around sunset. His wife had been beside him. His children were digging in the sand and she had called to them, pointing out to sea, to the porpoises. It had been a good omen in a good year.

He walked along the sand until he felt cold, then climbed back to the park up a dozen cement steps that were littered with plastic carriers and beer cans and smelled of urine.

The wall of the corridor between the main entrance and the inner lobby of the San Epifanio was covered in worn striped wallpaper against which were hung ghastly seascapes at close intervals. Once past them, he strolled into the candlelit gemütlichkeit of the Miramar Lounge, all nets and floats and steering wheels. There was not much sunset to be seen through the picture windows but the lights were low and the bar and adjoining tables fairly crowded. The customers were middle-aged, noisy and dressed for golf — a hard-liquor crowd. Walker took the only vacant stool at the bar and ordered a Bloody Mary. The drink when it came was bitter, hefty with cheap vodka. Strong drinks were a selling point of the place.

On the stool next to Walker sat a blond woman who was drinking rather hungrily of her gin-and-tonic and toying with a pack of Virginia Slims. She appeared to be in her early thirties and attractive, but Walker was not certain of either impression. He was not altogether sober and it was difficult to see people clearly in the lighting of the Miramar Lounge. That was the way they liked it there.

At the entrance to the bar, adjoining the corridor through which he had passed, was a phone booth, one from the old days decorated with sea horses and dolphins in blue and white tile. After a moment, Walker picked up his drink and went to the phone booth. He took out his black book with its listing of the Baja location numbers and his telephone credit card.

He took a long sip, held his breath and dialed. The resonance of submarine depths hummed in the wires as he waited for the ring. When it came, he closed his eyes.

When the telephone rang she was outside, in a lounge chair on the sand, looking into the afterglow of sunset. Her children were playing with their father at the water’s edge; she had watched the three forms darken to silhouettes in the dying light. The soft honey glow of the children’s bodies had faded in the quick dusk; now their scamperings and her husband’s thin-limbed gestures against the radiant foam and magenta sky suggested puppetry to her. It was an ugly thought and she forced it aside. She let the phone ring until she saw that her husband had heard it; knee deep in light surf, he had turned at the sound. She stood up and took her sunglasses off.

“I’ll get it,” she called to him.

She jogged up to the open door of their bungalow, wiped her sandy feet on the straw mat and rushed to the phone.

“Lu Anne,” said the voice on the far end when she answered. “Lu Anne, it’s Gordon. Gordon Walker.”

She had known, she thought, who it would be. Watching the sun go down she had been thinking of him and thinking that he would call that night.

“Hello? Lu Anne? Can you hear me?”

His voice sounded from the receiver in her hand as clearly as though he were there in Mexico, somewhere in the same hotel.

“Lu Anne?”

Slowly, guiltily, she replaced the receiver.

It had grown dark in the stone bungalow. The only light came from fading pastel sky framed in the doorway. She sat on a high-backed wicker chair looking out. In the darkness behind her she could feel a presence gathering. A confusion of sounds rang in her ears and among them she heard Walker’s voice saying her name. Watchful, perfectly still, she stayed where she was until she saw a figure in the doorway. At first she thought it had to do with the things that were manifesting themselves behind her back; she watched fascinated, virtually unafraid.

“Señora?”

She knew who it was then.

“Sí, sí,” she said, and she reached out for the light that was right over the phone. “Hello, Helga. Good evening.”

Helga Machado was the children’s nanny, supplied by the production unit through the hotel. A stout, pale, heavy-browed young woman, she watched Lee Verger with caution and a formal smile.

“Now,” Helga said, “I may take the children for their dinner. Or else I can come back a little later.”

Lu Anne was blinking in the sudden light. The wariness in Helga’s expression did not escape her.

“Well,” she said cheerfully, “let’s see. Why don’t we call them and they can go to dinner and I’ll say good night to them when we get back.”

“Very good, señora.”

Lu Anne went past Helga and through the doorway. At the water’s edge, Lionel and the children were still playing in the darkness. The shallows flashed phosphorescence where they ran.

“David and Laura,” Lu Anne called to her children. “Dinner time, you-all.”

She saw the dim figures fall still, listened to her little son’s protesting moan. They would be early to sleep. If she missed them that evening there would be only the shortest amount of time available for goodbyes in the morning. She and Lionel were to dine that evening at Walter Drogue’s casita. It was a courtesy — a farewell meal for Lionel — and there had been no chance of declining.

When the children came up from the beach, Lu Anne led them into the bungalow and bent to them, holding each by the hand. They were only a year and a half apart; David was five and Laura seven. They had their father’s red-blond hair a shade darker, and their mother’s blue eyes.

“You guys go with Helga and wash off all the sand and salt. Then you eat your dinners like good children and you can go see The Wizard of Oz in the suite.”

Thus bought off, the children murmured assent.

“Laura,” Lu Anne called after her daughter, “don’t forget your glasses, honey. Or you won’t be able to see the movie.”

“If I had contacts,” the little girl said, “then I’d never forget them.”

Going out, Helga and the children stopped to talk with Lionel, who had come up from the beach. She listened as he joked with them.

“Who was it?” Lionel asked her when he came inside. He was over six feet in height and dramatically thin, with a long face and a prominent nose. His hair was thinning, the sun-bleached strands pasted across his tanned scalp. Lee was facing the dressing-table mirror; Lionel watched her in the glass.

“Oh,” she said, “it just rang and stopped. It must have been the switchboard or something.”

Her husband took off his bathing suit and stood beside her at the mirror rubbing Noxzema on his face and chest. Their eyes met.

“Take your medicine, love?” he asked.

There was a look he had when he asked about the medicine. A stare. It made him seem cruel and unfeeling although she knew perfectly well that he was neither.

“Can’t you tell?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m like an old woman about it. I’ll stop.”

She had stopped taking the pills ten days before. Held her breath and stopped. Sometimes her old pal Billy Bly gave her something to get her through the night. She felt quite guilty about it but she was convinced it had to be done. They were ruining her concentration. They were ruining everything.

“You’ve seemed very well,” Lionel said. “I mean,” he hastened to add, “you’ve seemed happy. That’s what it comes to, I suppose.”

“I’ve been working,” she said. “Nothing like it.”

“It’s good, isn’t it? This.” He meant the film.

“Yes. I mean I think so. Edna — I love her.”

“Do you think she’s you?”

“Are you asking me that as a doctor?”

He had a way of seeming especially serious when he was joking. Sometimes it was hard to tell.

“As a fan.”

“Well, of course she isn’t me. I mean,” she said with a laugh, “things are tough enough as they are.”

She looked up at him in the mirror and saw him smile. He reached out and touched her shoulder and she put her hand over his. After a moment, he went into the bathroom and she heard the shower go on.

If he wanted to, she thought, he could count the pills. Then he would know. She looked at herself in the highlighted mirror, bent toward her own image.

A month before, she had done a face-cream ad that was running in the women’s magazines. They had asked her because she was visible again, working. It was an over-thirty-five-type ad and doing it had proved to be a good idea because in it she looked smooth and sleek and sexy. She had given the photographer a face she associated with Rosalind in As You Like It, whom she had played at twenty-three in New Haven.

Lu Anne looked into the mirror at her Rosalind face, stared into her own eyes. There were people, she thought, who must be studying the magazine ad, looking into the eyes.

There would be nothing compromising there. Rosalind was nothing if not sane. Lee Verger loved her above all women.

Rosalind in the looking glass smiled, a tiny curve of the lip on one side. I am Rosalind who can strike you lame with reasons and be mad without any.

Lee Verger smiled back into her mirror. A circus taste bubbled up in her mouth. She thought of a voice but never heard it, only imagined what the voice might say. She closed her eyes and made a fist and rested her forehead on it.

When Lionel came out of the bathroom she straightened up. He had dressed after his shower in white duck trousers and a Filipino wedding shirt; he glowed. He stood beside her again, just where he had stood before, combing his sparse red-blond hair, humming “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.”

“How are you?” he asked after a minute.

“I’m all right,” she said, smiling for him. “Mostly tired, I guess. Those period clothes, poof …” She shook her head. “It makes you feel for those women back then. The stays. The pins.”

“Have you stopped taking your medication?”

“Oh, honey,” she said, “please don’t.”

“I’m very sorry,” Lionel said. “Truly I’m sorry to press you. But I must know.”

“Did you count them?”

He hesitated. “I had a quick look.”

Aware of his displeasure and his eyes on her, she bent her head in shame. Presently, he reached out a hand and began to massage the back of her neck. She could not relax. His touch, the strong fingers kneading the base of her skull, seemed perfunctory and unloving, a fidget.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said.

“No. Look,” he said softly, “you were acting guilty.” He pursed his lips, embarrassed. “If you feel guilty it can mean something’s wrong.”

“You don’t know what it’s like to try and work behind the fucking things. Your eyes hurt, you can’t use them. Your head weighs a ton.”

Lionel took his hand away. “Really, I wish we’d had this out earlier.”

“Lionel,” Lu Anne said, “I want to try something. I’m finding the drug very hard to work behind and I want to try cutting it for a while.”

She looked up at him but his gaze was fixed on some place behind her. He was avoiding her pleas, her sickness. He wanted it simple, done with pills. She supposed she could hardly blame him.

“When did you stop?”

“A week ago,” she said. “More than a week.”

“And you feel all right?”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t been hallucinating?”

“Oh, Lionel,” she said. She affected a dismissive shudder and a condescending smile.

“Don’t bullshit me,” he said fiercely.

“I’m not. I’ve been fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she said.

“If you stop taking your medication,” Lionel told her, “I can’t go.”

Lu Anne took a deep breath, looked in the mirror and covered her eyes.

“Are you hallucinating now?”

“No,” she said.

“Look at me!”

She was staring at the tiled floor. Suddenly she raised her head and looked him in the eye.

“What do you expect to see?” she asked him coldly. “Do you expect to see it?”

Lionel removed his glasses and wiped them on a Sightsaver. He rubbed his eyes.

“As though,” she said, “it soiled my eyes. And I should avert them from the doctor’s godlike gaze.”

“I’m very sorry,” Lionel said. “Sometimes I get so frightened I can’t function.”

She watched him turn away confounded and her heart filled with pity for him and with love.

“It’s my enemy,” he said, and she thought she heard a throttled sob in his voice. He was looking at her. He was dry-eyed. “It frightens me. I hate it.”

She walked up to him and took his right hand and kissed the knuckle of his forefinger, which was callused where he chewed it in his terrors and rages. They were endured, she thought, for her.

“You are my hero beyond fear,” she told him. “My knight.”

“I’ve finally come to think of it as evil,” Lionel said. “That’s a term I’ve always resisted.”

“As unscientific,” Lu Anne suggested with faint malice.

“As meaningless. As a word belonging to false consciousness.”

“It doesn’t have a moral. This … condition. Not of the kind you’re comfortable with.”

“Evil,” Lionel agreed, “is not the sort of term I’m comfortable with.” He raised his spectacles toward the overhead light and inspected their surfaces. “How extraordinary that the thing should be metabolic. Like gout.”

“An undigested bit of beef,” Lu Anne said, “like Jacob Marley’s ghost. An underdone potato.”

Lionel slapped the back of his neck so savagely that Lu Anne started.

“Here I am, see, a specialist in medical practice. In my specialty there are two, maybe three basic pathological conditions. For Christ’s sake,” he cried, “maybe just one. I can’t heal it. I can barely treat it. I don’t even have a fucking insight into it.” He released his neck and stared wildly into the mirror. “I should go about with a bowl of leeches. I should have become a bloody palmist.”

She went to him and touched his cheek. “To each his doctor,” she declared. “This is mine.” She felt him fighting off tears; somehow he always succeeded. She herself had begun to cry.

Wise as he was, he could not cure her. A part of her rejoiced in that as freedom; the part, she had no doubt, that was mad, bad and dangerous to know. It rejoiced in refuge from his mastery, his shrewdness and compassion. There was a wood through which he could not pursue her with healing arrows and a dark tower of retreat.

“So,” he said after a moment, “I’m supposed to leave in the middle of a picture while you go off your medication. What happens then?”

“I’ll hassle it.”

“Will you indeed?”

“Lionel,” she told him, “it’s like trying to work behind any drug — grass, Valium, cocaine. You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what you’re like.” His heavy-browed stare did not seem unsympathetic. “I mean,” she went on, “I can’t use my eyes. I feel like a droid. It might be neat for having tea with Alan Cranston, but as for work — well, why hire me? They could have anyone. Plenty of people can give a lousy performance without the use of drugs.”

“I see your point,” he said impatiently.

“What about tardive dyskinesia? Have we talked about that?”

“Lu,” Lionel said, “don’t worry about tardive fucking dyskinesia.

Worry about flipping out. Worry about a second Vancouver.” He stood up and paced the bungalow. “I mean, actual straitjackets, right? Actual padded cells. Want to try it Mexican style?”

“I want to stop,” she said wearily. “I want to go to work like a normal human actress. I would like to try a little cautious experiment along the lines of … trying to do without it … for a little while.”

“I can’t let you do it while I’m away,” Lionel said. “The risks are too high. We’re away from home. You could have a very bad experience.”

He sat down on the bed beside her. She took his hand and looked into his eyes.

“We always agreed that a time would come when I would have to try it alone,” she told him. She swallowed and licked her lips, mannerisms she had drilled away, never to be used except intentionally, in character. Well, she thought, I am acting for him now. Perhaps she always was, day in, day out. Perhaps away from the shadows and the Long Friends it was all acting. There was no Lee Verger after all.

So dreadful and frightening was the thought that she doubled her grip on his strong lean hand.

“This is the time,” she said. “While the kids are with you. While I’m doing something that I feel so strong about. Man, I want to put my pills aside and be that woman and be me.”

Lionel said nothing. She gripped his hand but did not look at him.

“Trust me, love. Trust me and I’ll make you proud. It’ll be me and it’ll be beautiful.”

Something in his continuing silence troubled her.

“I mean,” she said, “if anything goes wrong because I’m off the pills, won’t there be warning signs?”

She heard his dry, bitter laughter. Gently he disengaged his hand from hers, stood up and went to sit in one of the wicker rocking chairs the kids had dragged in from the porch. The chairs were props, strictly speaking, but so comfortable that everyone who could misappropriated them.

“I’ve been seeing the warning signs all week,” Lionel said.

“You never told me.”

“I hoped …” he began. “I knew you’d stopped. I hoped.”

“And were you wrong?” she demanded of him. “Were you wrong to hope?”

He shrugged. “What do I know?” He leaned back in the rocker, his sandaled feet on the bed, his eyes closed. “I hoped.”

She went and knelt beside his outstretched knees. He had fallen silent again; it seemed the silence held a message for her but she could not make it out.

“It was a miracle we didn’t blow it all in Vancouver,” he said at last. “A miracle we kept it under control. They could have been reading about it in every supermarket line in America.”

“I was mostly drunk,” Lu Anne said contritely.

“I was there,” her husband told her. “You were drunk and off your medication.” He kept his eyes closed and wiped his brow. “That goes together with you.”

“You have to trust me,” she said. “This is the time.”

More silence. Then he took his legs down and stood, raising her gently beside him.

“Do you think that your performance has improved since you stopped taking those pills?”

She smiled. “I think that’s one of the signs you’ve seen. You’ve been going to dailies, Lionel. You know it has.”

“Christ,” he said.

“I don’t want to give it up,” she cried at him. “I’m on top of the world. I don’t want to take them anymore.” She turned away weeping. “And be a slave and lose my work and our sex life, a zombie. I don’t want to, Lionel.”

“It’s true,” he said. “Your performance has changed.” His voice was soft and remote as though he were speaking to an observer or to himself. “You look different in the rushes.”

She laughed and turned on her heel.

“I photograph alive now! I have feelings and I can get them out there. I mean, it’s so hard with just a camera, Lionel. But I’m doing it now. Acting, it’s called. Acting and sort of acting.” She exchanged another secret smile with Rosalind in the lighted mirror. “Sometime,” she said, “you should get Blakely to show you his collection of old-time rushes. He’s got a trunk full of tests and dailies from the old times — the golden age stuff, the old-time stars. Man, if you want to see people working ripped, tranqued and wasted, get him to show you them. Like Monty Clift. The junkies and alcoholics and the controlled crazies.” She touched her breast like a penitent. “It’s fascinating, Lionel, but it’s not pretty.” She had been speaking with her back to him; when she turned around he was gone. But he had only stepped out on the veranda. The dusk had given way to starry night. They had lighted the tiki torches along the perimeter of the beach.

Clenched-fisted, his jaw set, he stood with his back against the adobe wall.

“I have an odd superstition,” he told his wife. “I keep thinking that one day I’ll look over my shoulder — or turn a corner — and one of those things will be there, waiting for me. One of the things you see.”

“They have a name,” she said. “To neutralize them.”

“Don’t say it.” He cut her off quickly. “Never utter it.”

“All right,” she said. She looked at him and suddenly understood what the silences had meant, the quick slides from anger into resignation, from obsessive possessiveness to indifference. “Dr. Kurlander told me the same thing. To not say it out loud.”

He was going to walk. The surgical touch that passed for tenderness, the shifting moods — that was what they meant. He was tired and he was through with her. Eight years of patient martyrdom and at last he was saving himself, looking after number one. And why not? she thought. It was failure all around, his and hers.

A small electric lamp, styled like a gaslight, gave off a soft light beside their veranda door. The night sky was ablaze with stars. He never turned toward her as she watched him across the shadows.

“I want you to stay in close touch with Kurlander,” Lionel told his wife. “I’m going to telephone him and he’ll be checking in with you every day. If you’re in trouble call him. You can’t afford to stop the medication altogether, you’ll crack up. But if you take one fifty every morning and one fifty at night you might keep things the way you are at the moment. Remember, you may experience a bad attack as elation.”

“So,” she said, “if I start feeling too good I’m in trouble.”

“You won’t feel good long. But don’t panic and go back to your regular dose.” He turned to the cream-colored wall and struck it. “No booze, no grass, no dope — sorry. When shooting ends, go straight back to your regular dose. In the future,” he said, reaching toward her, “who knows? They may come up with something that works as well with fewer side effects. You may stop being crazy. One of us may die.”

“There would still be the other,” she said. “There would still be the kids.”

“The bomb might fall.”

“Oh, trust me, love,” she said. “Trust me and I’ll give you something beautiful.”

Lionel smiled. “A movie.”

“Don’t you like movies, Li?” she asked him wryly. “I tell you, babe — even if they have to take me off this set in a blanket I’m going to work.”

He stayed braced against the wall, immobile. She stared at him, knowing he would not turn, that he was afraid of her madness. Sweet Lionel, she told him silently, I’m gonna kiss the ground behind your fading shadow. Only let me keep my children.

“You mustn’t cry,” he said when he faced her at last.

She wiped her face with the back of her hand.

“Why do you stay with me?” she asked him after a while.

“Because,” he said, “to me you are life. And I will not give up on life. It’s as simple as that.”

For a moment she thought she must be wrong, that he would not go. Then he kissed her, lightly once and then hard on the lips, and then released her. After that she knew he was lost to her.

That’s the way you give up on life, she thought. But you go right on living.

“And you,” she asked him. “You’ll be all right?”

“Oh yes,” he said.

She nodded, knowing it was no less than the truth. He would suffer and then he would be all right. And I’ll sing your song alone, mon cher, she told him. If I can keep my children. One of the things gathered itself up in the dimness at the unlighted end of the veranda.

There were four children, counting the dead, and she did. The little golden ones, Lionel’s perfections. Charles, the dead one, in custody of the Long Friends. A girl who looked like her and whom she hardly knew, who lived in Baton Rouge with her ex-husband, Robitaille, because Momma was crazy in California. She slid her hand down the inside of Lionel’s arm, tracing the warm silk, and held his hand, the hand of the man who was getting his courage up to leave her. They stood together for a while and Lionel said with a theatrical flourish: “Well! We may live in hope of our fashionably late dinner, eh? If we don’t starve to death first.”

She was able to summon a polite smile.

Lionel sniffed the perfumed air. “Think I’ll have a walk,” he said. “Conceal myself and spy out the preparations for the feast. I can’t even remember the way, it’s so long since we were asked together.”

“It isn’t hard to find,” she told him. “It’s at the end of the left-hand path. At the top.”

“Where else?” Lionel said, and went out into the darkness. “I mean dinner with Walter Drogue — we’ve really arrived, wouldn’t you say?”

“Absolutely,” Lu Anne said. “Landmarks crumble, baby, but when you say dinner with Walter you’re saying all you can say. It should be on the Universal Tour.”

She watched him set out for the path; the taste of his betraying kiss was still warm on her lips. She was getting the universal tour. As he strode out of sight she considered herself as life, its deserving stooge and representative.

The Long Friends were gathering in the dark; she felt beyond fear or anger.

She had done her best — she felt sure she had. Lionel had done his, a tough, resolute, truly loving man. She thought she heard little Charles crying; she raised a hand to her mouth. Everyone had done their best.

She must not hate him; it was wrong and no good would come of it.

Then it occurred to her that Gordon Walker must be coming down.

Walker did not try to place the call again. He picked up his drink from beside the telephone and went back to his barstool.

She might have been on the line, he thought. Perhaps it was only a thrill of fear she felt at the sound of his voice. Perhaps calm resolution and refusal. Perhaps someone else had picked up the phone.

But it was Mexico, Mexican phones. As likely as not he had spoken into a dead line, into an unheeding, untroubled past. There was so much to be said, he thought, for leaving things alone.

Beside him, the blond woman on the neighboring stool had put a cigarette to her lips, supporting it with a bridge of fore and middle finger. It seemed somehow a quaint gesture, suggestive of film noir intrigue. Walker’s hand was on the lighter in his jacket pocket, but he checked the impulse. He did not want to pick her up. And although he was curious about her, he did not feel like forcing conversation.

He studied her in the candlelight. Not bad for the San Epo, he thought. She seemed free of the principal undesirable qualities common to pickups at the lounge, in that she was neither a prostitute nor a man in drag. She seemed, in fact, a fresh-faced, confused and vaguely unhappy young woman who had no business on a San Epifanio Beach barstool. He was about to give her a light out of common politeness when, from somewhere behind him, a flame was thrust forth and she inclined her cigarette to receive it. She smiled uncertainly over Walker’s shoulder and murmured her gratitude. Walker, who had not turned around, found himself listening to merry masculine laughter of an odd register. A voice boomed forth, subduing all other sounds in the place.

“I’ve recently had the opportunity to visit Mount Palomar,” the voice declared with a dreadful earnestness, “and was devastated by the sheer beauty I encountered there.”

Such a sound, Walker considered, could only be made by forcing the breath down against the diaphragm, swallowing one’s voice and then forcing the breath upward, as in song. He listened in wonder as the voice blared on.

“Everywhere I travel in California,” it intoned, “I’m — utterly dazzled — by the vistas.”

He’s raving mad, thought Walker.

“Don’t you find your own experiences to be similar?” the voice demanded of the young woman at the bar. It was a truly unsettling sound, its tone so false as to seem scarcely human.

To Walker’s astonishment, the woman smiled wider and began to stammer. “I certainly … yes … why, I do. The vistas are ravishing.”

“How pleasant an experience,” brayed the voice, “to encounter a fellow admirer of natural wonders.”

With as much discretion as possible, Walker turned toward the speaker. He saw a man of about fifty whose nose and cheekbone had been broken, wearing a hairpiece, a little theatrical base and light eyeliner. Returning to his drink, Walker cringed; he had feared to see a face to match the voice and that was what he had seen. It was a smiling face, its smile was a rictus of clenched teeth like a ventriloquist’s. The thought crossed his mind that he was hallucinating. He dismissed it.

“So few,” the man enunciated, “truly see the wonders nature arrays before them.”

How true, thought Walker.

The man eased himself between Walker’s stool and the lady’s, taking possession of her company and presenting a massive shoulder to Walker, his defeated rival. Walker moved his stool slightly so that he would still be able to see her.

“I know,” the woman said, with an uneasy laugh. “The average person can be blind to beauty. Even when it’s right in front of them.”

Walker sipped his drink. The neighboring dialogue was beginning to make him unhappy. Abandoning his observation of the two newly friends, he turned to see that Shelley had come in. She was standing in a doorway that opened to the windswept terrace; she was smiling, she had seen him. A tan polo coat was thrown over her shoulders, she was wearing pants to match it and tall boots. Under the coat she wore a navy work shirt and a white turtleneck jersey. Her dark hair was close-cropped.

She waved to him and he watched her make her way through the bar crowd. When she was by his side he stood up and kissed her.

“You look pretty tonight, Shell,” he said into her ear.

“You look pretty too, Gordo.” She cupped her hands around her mouth and croaked at him. “Why are we whispering?”

Walker put a finger across his lips and moved his eyes toward the couple on his right. Shelley peered at them, then looked at Walker with an expression of anticipatory glee. Her black eyes were so bright he wondered if she had been doing drugs.

“Do I discern a visitor to our shores?” the big man inquired in his awful voice. “Great Britain, perhaps?”

The young woman, who spoke with the accent of southern Indiana or Illinois, hesitantly explained that she was not a visitor from abroad.

“What a surprise,” the man had his voice declare, while his heavy face did surprise. “Your impeccable pronunciation convinced me you must be from across the water.”

Walker looked away. Shelley was hiding behind him on the stool, resting her chin on her hands, grinning madly at the bottles behind the bar.

“Let me see,” sounded the man through his morbid grin. “The eastern states, perhaps. I have it. I suspect Boston is the key to your refinement.”

“No,” said the woman. “Illinois is my native state.” She giggled. “I hail from the central region.”

Walker glanced at Shelley. She was batting her eyes, doing an impression of goofy cordiality.

“Ah,” honked the big man. “How charming. The land of Lincoln.”

They listened as he introduced himself as Ulrich or Dulwich or something close. “May I offer you a cocktail?” Ulrich or Dulwich asked gaily. “The night is young and we seem kindred spirits.”

Shelley put a hand on Walker’s arm. She had seen a free table. They got up and went over to it.

“How come you never say anything like that to me, Gordon? How about offering me a cocktail?”

He called a waitress and ordered Shelley a White Russian, which was what she claimed she wanted. Before the waitress could leave with the drink order Shelley called her back.

“Do you see that man at the bar,” she asked the girl, “the big one with the blond lady?” The waitress followed Shelley’s nod. “We’d like to buy him a drink.”

“Cut it out, Shelley,” Walker said.

“When you give him the drink,” Shelley said, “tell him we’re putting assholes to sleep tonight. And we got his number.”

“Shut up,” Walker said. “Forget it,” he told the waitress. The waitress was tall and dark, with a long melancholy face. One side of her mouth twitched in a weird affectless smile.

“You,” she said to Shelley, “you used to work here, right?”

Shelley wiggled her eyebrows, Groucho Marx-like.

“That’s right,” Walker said.

“So,” the girl asked, “you don’t want me to …?”

“Of course not,” Walker said.

“I myself hail from Tougaloo,” Shelley said to Walker. “May one inquire where you yourself hail from?”

“It’s so gruesome,” Walker said. “It’s like a wildlife short.”

“What animal is he, hey, Gord?”

“I don’t know why we come here anymore,” Walker said.

“I bring you here to listen to dialogue,” Shelley said. “ ’Cause I’m your agent’s gal Friday. It’s my job.”

“It’s so fucking depressing.”

“Slices of life, Gordo. That’s what we want from you. Verismo.”

“Do you see that guy? Does he really look like that? Is it something wrong with me?”

“No,” she said. She spoke slowly, judiciously. “It’s a wildlife short.”

“She doesn’t see him.”

“She doesn’t seem to, no.”

“It’s loneliness,” Walker said. He shook his head. “That’s how bad it gets.”

“Oh, yeah, Gordon? Tell me about it.”

“I hope,” he said, “you didn’t get me down here to pick on.”

“No, baby, no.” She patted his hand and smiled sadly. She shook her head vigorously and tossed her hair, and made mouths at him.

He watched her, wondering if she were not on speed. Of course, he thought, it was difficult to tell with Shelley. She was a clamorous presence, never at rest. Even quiet, her reverie cast a shadow and her silences had three kinds of irony. She was a workout.

“What are you doing with yourself, Shelley?”

“Well,” she said, “sometimes I have assignations in crummy ocean-front hotels. Sometimes I get high and go through the car wash.”

“Going to open your own shop soon?”

She was watching the man with the voice and his companion. She shrugged.

“I’m not sure I want to be an agent, Gordon.”

“Sure you do,” he said.

“Look,” Shelley said, raising her chin toward the man, “he’s gonna light a Virginia Slim. His balls will fall off.”

A squat man of sixty-odd passed by their table, carrying an acoustic guitar.

“Hiya, Tex,” he called to Shelley. “How you doin’, kid?”

“Hi,” Shelley replied brightly, parodying her own Texas accent. “Real good, hey.”

The older man had stopped to talk. Shelley turned her back on him and he walked away, climbed the Miramar’s tiny stage and began to set up his instrument.

“That fuck,” she told Walker. “He thinks he’s my buddy. When I worked here he practically called me a hooker to my face.”

“I can’t remember how long ago it was you worked here,” Walker said.

“Can’t you, Gordo? Bet that’s because you don’t wanna. Eight years ago. When I left Paramount.” She sipped from her drink and turned toward the picture window. The last light of the day had drained from the sky but no lights were lighted in the Miramar Lounge. “Yes, sir, boy. Eight years ago this very night, as they say.”

“Funny period that was.”

“Oh, golly,” Shelley said. “Did we have good times? We sure did. And was I fucked up? I sure was.”

“Remember gently.”

“Clear is how I remember. I had little cutie-pie tights. Remember my cutie-pie tights?”

“Do I ever,” Walker said.

“Yep,” she said. “Little cutie-pie tights and I wanted to be an actress and I wanted to be your girl. High old times, all right.”

The elderly man with the guitar began dancing about the little stage. He struck up his guitar and went into a vigorous rendering of “Mack the Knife” in the style of Frank Sinatra.

“That rat-hearted old fucker,” Shelley said. “I don’t know if I can take it.”

“How come he called you a hooker?”

“Well shit, I guess he thought I was one.” Her eyes were fixed on the singer. “So I called him on it. So he cussed me out and fired me. Now I’m his old friend.”

“And you a rabbi’s daughter.”

“Yeah, that’s right, Gordon. You remember, huh? It amuses you.”

“The rabbi’s raven-haired daughter. Makes a picture.”

She blew smoke at him. “My father was a social worker in a hospital. He was a clinical psychologist but he had been ordained. Or whatever it’s called.”

Walker nodded. “You told me that too, I guess.”

“I told you it all, Gordo. The story of my life. You’re forgetting me, see?”

He shook his head slowly. “No.” He was aware of her eyes on him.

“Hey, you don’t look too good, old buddy. You looked O.K. in Seattle.”

“I been on a drunk. This is what I look like now.”

“You’re nuts, Gordon. You live like you were twenty-five. I’m supposed to be a hard-drivin’ player and I’m not in it with you.”

“It’s a failure of inner resources. On my part, I mean.”

“You better be taking your vitamins.”

“Connie left me,” Walker said.

He watched her pall-black eyes fix on his. She was always looking for the inside story, Shelley. Maybe there was more to it, he thought. Maybe she cares.

She drew herself up and studied the smoke from her cigarette. Her mouth had a bitter curl to it; for a moment she was aged and somber.

“Well,” she said, “wouldn’t I have liked to hear that eight years ago.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t get to hear it eight years ago,” Walker said. “You get to hear it now.”

She smiled, a thin sad smile.

“Actually,” she said, “Al told me.”

“Ah. So you knew.”

“Yes,” she said. “I knew.”

“Hard-ass, aren’t you?”

“Come off it, Gordon. You can’t cry on my shoulder. It’s a fucking ritual. She’ll be back.”

He turned away from her. The candlelight and the red and green lanterns were reflected in the seaward picture window, together with the faces of the customers. In the glass, everything looked warm and glad, a snug harbor.

“I hope you’re right.”

She only nodded, holding her faint smile.

“Maybe I shouldn’t take it seriously,” Walker said. “But I think I do.”

A ripple of anger passed across Shelley’s face, shattering her comedy smile. Her brow furrowed.

“Do you, Gordon? Then why the hell are you …” Her voice was trembling. She stopped in the middle of a word.

“What, Shell?”

“Nothing. I’m not getting into it.” She was facing the bar and her gaze had fastened once more on the crooning seducer and his fair intended. Her eyes were troubled. “Look at him, Gordon. He eats shit, that guy. He’s a hyena. Let’s take him out.” She turned to Walker and seized his sleeve. “Come on, man. You can do it. You would have once. Punch the son of a bitch.”

“I’m on his side,” Walker said. “He’s a bon viveur. He’s a sport like me.” He picked up the drink beside his hand and finished it.

Shelley Pearce shook her head sadly and leaned her head against her palm.

“Oh wow,” she said.

“I suppose we could effect a rescue,” Walker said. “We could hide her out in our room.”

“Our room?” She might have been surprised. He thought her double take somewhat stylized. “We have a room?”

“Yes, we have a room. Should we require one.”

“How many beds it got?”

“How many beds? I don’t know. Two, I guess. What difference does it make?”

Shelley was on her feet.

“Let’s go look at it. I think I want to swim in the pool.”

“The pool,” Walker said, and laughed.

She laughed with him.

“That’s right. Remember the pool? Where employees weren’t allowed to swim eight years ago tonight? Got your bathing suit?” She worried him to his feet, clutching at his elbow. “Come on, come on. Last one in’s a chickenshit.”

He got up and followed her out, past the bar. As they went by, the crooning man gave them a languid eyes-right.

“Do you enjoy great music?” he was asking the blond woman. “Symphonies? Concertos? Divertimenti?”

They rode the automatic elevator to the top floor and followed the soiled carpet to their door. The room behind it was large and high-ceilinged with yellow flaking walls. The furniture was old and faintly Chinese in ambiance. The air conditioner was running at full power and it was very cold inside. Walker went to the window and turned it off. Two full-length glass doors led to a narrow terrace that overlooked the beach. He unlocked the bolt that held them in place and forced them open. A voluptuous ocean breeze dispelled the stale chill inside.

“This is neat,” Shelley said. She examined the beds, measuring her length on each. Walker went out to the hall to fetch ice. When he returned, she was on the terrace leaning over the balustrade.

“People used to throw ice,” she told Walker. “When I worked the front tables people would throw ice cubes at us from the rooms. It would make you crazy.”

She came inside, took the ice from Walker and drew a bottle of warm California champagne from her carry bag. As she unwired the wine, she looked about the room with brittle enthusiasm.

“Well,” she said, “they sell you the whole trip here, don’t they? Everything goes with everything.” Her eyes were bright.

“You on speed, Shell?”

She coaxed the cork out with a bathroom towel and poured the wine into two water glasses.

“I don’t use speed anymore, Gordon. I have very little to do with drugs. I brought a joint for us, though, and I smoked a little before I went out.”

“I wasn’t trying to catch you out,” Walker said. “I just asked out of … curiosity or something.”

“Sure,” she said, smiling sweetly. “You wondered if I was still pathological. But I’m not. I’m just fine.”

“Do you have to get stoned to see me?”

She inclined her head and looked at him nymph-wise from under gathered brows. She was lighting a joint. “It definitely helps, Gordo.”

Walker took the joint and smoked of it. He could watch himself exhale in a vanity-table mirror across the room. The light was soft, the face in the glass distant and indistinct.

Shelley’s cassette recorder was playing Miles Davis’ “In a Silent Way.” She took the joint back from Walker; they sat in silence, breathing in the sad stately music. The dope was rich and syrupy. After a while, Shelley undressed and struggled into a sleek one-piece bathing suit. He went to hold her but she put the flat of her hand against his chest, gently turning him away.

“I want to swim,” she said. “I want to while I still know about it.”

Walker changed into his own suit. They gathered up towels and their ice-filled champagne glasses and rode the elevator down to the pool.

The light around the San Epifanio Beach pool was everywhere besieged by darkness; black wells and shadows hid the rust, the mildew and the foraging resident rats. There were tables under the royal palms, pastel cabanas, an artificial waterfall.

Walker eased himself into a reclining chair; he was very high. He could feel his own limp smile in place as he watched Shelley walk to the board, spring and descend in a pleasing arc to the glowing motionless water. Across the pool from where he sat, the candles of the lounge flickered, the goose clamor of the patrons was remote, under glass. In a nearby chair, a red-faced man in a sky-blue windbreaker and lemon-colored slacks lay snoring, mouth agape.

Shelley surfaced and turned seal-like on her shoulder, giving Walker her best Esther Williams smile. He finished his champagne and closed his eyes. It seemed to him then that there was something mellow to contemplate, a happy anticipation to savor — if he could but remember what it was. Easeful, smiley, he let his besotted fancy roam a varicolored landscape. A California that had been, the pursuit of happiness past.

What came to him was fear. Like a blow, it snapped him upright. He sat rigid, clutching the armrest, fighting off tremors, the shakes. In the pool a few feet away, Shelley Pearce was swimming lengths in an easy backstroke.

Walker got to his feet, went to the edge of the pool and sat down on the tiles with his legs dangling to the water. Shelley had left her champagne glass there. He drank it down and shivered.

In a moment, Shelley swam over to him.

“Don’t you want to swim?”

He looked into the illuminated water. It seemed foul, slimy over his ankles. He thought it smelled of cat piss and ammonia. Shelley reached up and touched his knee. He shook his head.

“You O.K.?”

He tried to smile. “Sure.”

In the lounge, the musical proprietor was singing “Bad Bad Leroy Brown.” Light-headed and short of breath, Walker stood up.

“I think I’m feeling cold,” he called to Shelley.

She paddled to a ladder and climbed out of the pool.

“You don’t look good, Gordon. You’re not sick, are you?”

“No,” he said. “It’s just the grass. It’s all in my head.”

They went upstairs holding hands. Walker took another shower, wrapped a bathrobe around himself and lay down on the bed. Shelley Pearce stood naked before the terrace doors, facing the black mist-enshrouded plane of sky and ocean, smoking. A J. J. Johnson tape was running—“No Moon at All.”

When the piece ended she started the tape over again, scatting along with it under her breath. She went back and stood at the window like a dancer at rest. The back of one hand was cocked against her flexed hip, the other at a right angle from the wrist, holding her cigarette. Her head was thrown back slightly, her face, which Walker could not see, upturned toward the darkness outside.

He got off the bed and walked across the room and kissed her thighs, kneeling, fondling her, performing. His desire made him feel safe and whole. After a few minutes she touched his hair, then languidly, sadly, she went to the bed, put her cigarette out and lay down on her side facing him. He thought she wept as they made love. When she came she gave a soft mournful cry. Spent, he was jolly, he laughed, his fear was salved. But the look in her eyes troubled him; they were bright, fixed, expressionless.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello, Gordon.”

“Some fun, eh, kid?”

“Just like old times,” Shelley said.

“Why did you ask me about the beds?”

“ ’Cause I work for a living,” she told him. “I need a good night’s sleep. If there was only one bed I’d have to drive home.”

“You treat yourself better than you used to.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Everybody treats themselves better now. You’re supposed to.” After a moment she said, “Hey, Gordon, how come you’re sniffing after Lee Verger?”

“Come on,” Walker said. “Don’t.”

“I’d like to hear you tell me how that’s a good idea.”

“It’s my script,” Walker said. “I gave it my best. I want to see her do it. In fact, I want you and Al to set it up for me.”

“Al doesn’t want to do it, bubba.”

“Do it on your own. Play dumb. Tell him you thought it was O.K.”

“Why don’t you take a rest?”

“I don’t rest,” Walker said.

“I knew you’d pull this,” she said. “Al told me about your lunch. I wasn’t surprised.”

“Did you call them?”

“I called Charlie Freitag’s office and I spoke with Madge Clark,” Shelley said in a lifeless voice. “I guess they’ll put you up for a day or two. Charlie likes you. Charlie likes everybody. They have to work it out with the location people, so it’ll take a little time to fix.” She stared at him with a vexed child’s stare. He avoided her eyes.

“How about giving other people a rest? Like Connie, huh? Or Lee. Why don’t you give her a rest?”

He only shook his head.

“She’s a fucking psycho.”

“That’s your story, Shelley.”

“Oh yes she is, Gordon. She’s just as crazy as catshit and you better leave her alone.”

“I want to see her,” Walker said.

“You belong in a hospital,” Shelley Pearce told him.

He smiled. “Your boss told me the same thing.”

“Sure,” Shelley said. “We’re in league against you.” She got up and walked to the foot of the bed and leaned against the bedboard. “You know what crazy people like most, Gordon? They like to make other people crazy.”

“You have it wrong,” Walker said, “you and Al.”

“Her husband is with her. Her kids too. You want to walk into that?”

“I want to work,” Walker said slowly. “I want to get back into it. I need a project I care about. I need to work with people I care about.”

“You’re so full of shit, Gordon.”

“Don’t be vulgar,” Walker said.

“You’re an assassin, man. You don’t even care if you don’t get laid if you can make some woman unhappy.”

She stood beside the bed shielding her eyes from the harsh lamplight, then turned her back on him, folded her arms and walked toward the balcony with her head down.

“Every time I see you, we talk about your love life, don’t we? We never talk about mine.”

“How’s your love life, Shell?”

“Thanks for asking,” she said.

“Seriously.”

“Seriously?” she asked, rounding on him. “Well, it does just fine without you in it. I get along without you …”

“Very well.”

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s the line. I get along without you very well.” She turned toward him and on her face there was a pained half smile. “It’s absolutely true. No question about it.”

“Good,” Walker said.

She had turned away again, toward the blackness beyond the window; she was singing:

“I get along without you very well, Of course I do.”

She sang it twice over, snapping her fingers, straining for the key. He watched her come over to the bed.

“Wanna sing along with me, Gord?” She raised his chin with her palm. “Except when autumn rain …” she sang. “Da dum de da da dum. Remember, Gord?”

“No.”

“No,” Shelley said. “Naw. Well, that’s good, Gordon. ’Cause then I don’t have to worry about you. Or you about me.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Walker said with a shrug. “People should care.”

“Is that what you think, Gordon?” she asked. “You think people should care?”

“Perhaps,” Walker suggested, “you find the sentiment banal?”

“No, no,” Shelley said. “No, baby, I find it moving. I find all your sentiments moving.” She lay down beside him. “You want to fuck some more? Or you too drunk? Tell momma.”

Slowly Walker leaned forward, took the champagne bottle from beside the bed and drank. “Stop it,” he said quietly.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, all right.” She took the bottle from his hand. “Why her? Why Lee?”

Walker shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“You think you invented her,” Shelley said. “You’re going to be sorry.”

“No doubt,” Walker said, and shortly went to sleep.

A sweet expensive tropic darkness had enveloped the Villa Liberia; it was included in the budget and thought to enhance production values. Beyond the tiki torches stood illuminated fences and armed men. These, together with the jacaranda, reminded Lionel of South Africa, of Houghton and home.

To the sound of a gentle surf, Lionel climbed the hotel’s elegantly turned stone pathway until he stood upon a broad parapet that commanded the rows of bungalows and the main buildings with their interior gardens and swimming pools. In the lagoon, below and to his left, a few dories swung at anchor, lighted for night fishing. Southward along the coast, beyond the wire, were the lights of the village.

At the parapet, the path divided. A shallow ramp descended to the shadowy beach; a flight of coral-colored steps climbed toward the casitas on the higher slope. Lionel leaned against the stones of the rail and took out a cigarette.

In the morning he would be flying home — Los Angeles, then Rio, then Johannesburg. He had been eight years away. Neither of his children had seen their grandparents. Nor had they seen the beautiful scourged land, the winter roses, apartheid. Thinking about the trip, he was charged with excitement over the children’s impending discovery and his own return. They would lose their innocence there, pick up a small portion of the real world’s burden, learn fear. It was not all so sanitized there as at Bahía Honda.

He smoked and considered his fear and the fear his children would inherit. He and Lu Anne had talked about the danger. They had agreed it was remote, that the Night of the Long Knives was unlikely to come in that very month of that very season as if only to engulf their children. Luck rarely ran that hard. Yet, he thought, someone’s luck would run out there. Sometime, sooner or later, someone and their children, traveling in that country, would awaken in the night out of luck.

For the moment, it was a phantom terror. He was not afraid for himself or for the kids, not really. His long-term apprehensions were serious ones; for his parents too old to run away again, his married sister and her boys, old friends of all colors with complacent styles or dangerous politics. So many of the people who had shared his youth — in Houghton, Durban, the Cape — had become politically involved and he could only imagine the lives engagement imposed on them.

He was a rich doctor in Los Angeles, a world away; a Hollywood shrink, a cliché Married to an actress whose name would be vaguely familiar in Pietermaritzburg or Maclear or Aliwal North.

Then it struck him how happy, how joyful he was to be going away. He lit another cigarette and watched the twinkling dory lights.

He stood and smoked and considered the petty emotional squalor which was his present stock-in-trade. So aroused was he that it took him some little time to understand that the true source of his excitement — his happiness, in fact — was that he would be getting away from her. From her closely reasoned madness, her nightmare undersea beauty and deluded eyes.

He was startled from this insight by the sound of a woman’s laughter. The laughter was so loud and confident and heedless, so alien to his lonely despair that it surprised him to anger. Looking up the slope, he saw in the fairy glow of the patios a blond woman with her back toward him. She was seated on one of the low, tiled walls that surrounded the whirlpool baths and she appeared to be naked. So far as he could make out, she was wide-shouldered and slim-waisted, attractive in the latest of California styles, the style which was orthodoxy on that production. The girls all looked a bit alike to Lionel. Drawing nearer, he saw that there were two men sitting chest deep in the whirlpool on which the woman rested.

Inadvertently, Lionel had blundered into the director’s compound. He began to back away along the path he had followed but, uncannily, one of the men spotted him in the darkness. He heard his name called. He recognized the man as Walter Drogue. The woman was Drogue’s wife, Patty.

“Lionel,” Drogue called to him. “Bienvenidos! Come over and have a drink.”

Lionel trudged self-consciously toward the patio. At his approach, Patty rose from the edge of the Jacuzzi and hastily draped herself in a burgundy-colored beach robe. The second man in the tub got to his feet and climbed for dry land, making no attempt to cover his nakedness. He was an elderly man, grizzly of chest and scrotum, his frame slack and emaciated. He took a chair and observed Lionel’s approach with black gypsy eyes, watchful and expressionless.

The director stayed where he was in the tub, smiling contentedly. He was deeply tanned. His dark hair, moistly pasted to his forehead like Napoleon’s in a cognac ad, was worn short, shaven about his neck and ears in an almost military fashion.

“Lionel,” Drogue declared, “you and Patty know each other.”

“Of course,” Lionel said. “Good evening.”

“Hi,” Patty said, raising her amber eyes to him.

“This is my father, Walter senior,” Drogue told his guest, indicating the naked old man, who had taken a chair beside Patty Drogue. “He’ll be with us for the next ten days. Dad, this is Lionel Morgen, Lee Verger’s husband.”

Walter Drogue senior was a man from the mists of legend, a contemporary of Walsh and Sturges and Hawkes. The introduction of this celebrated figure did not put Lionel any more at ease. He felt offended by old Drogue’s nakedness. Drogue senior did not offer his hand but instead placed it, all venous and liver-spotted, on his daughter-in-law’s caramel shoulder.

“Well,” Lionel declared, with a fatuous enthusiasm that chafed in his own hearing. “I’m certainly privileged to meet you, Mr. Drogue.”

“Yeah?” old Drogue asked.

“I was just spying out the way, you see. We haven’t been up here in the dark.”

“I’m glad you came,” Walter Drogue the younger said. He had descended to chin level in the whirling green water. “Give us a chance to rap informally. Just ourselves. What would you like to drink?”

Desperate as he was for escape, Lionel decided a drink might be welcome. And indeed there were things for him and Drogue to talk about apart from the general company. The presence of Patty and the old man would have to be endured.

“Well, I won’t say no,” declared Lionel affably. “If I could have a whiskey? A scotch?”

He had hardly spoken when Patty Drogue disengaged herself from the old man’s pawings and hurried into the bungalow.

“So,” Drogue junior said from the depths of his whirlpool, “couldn’t take it, huh?”

Lionel looked down at the immersed director and chose to conclude that he was being good-naturedly teased, as an outsider.

“Actually,” he said, “I’ve been enjoying myself enormously.”

When Patty Drogue came out again, she was carrying a tray heaped with bottles and glasses and shakers filled with ice. Lionel, to demonstrate an easy manner, took up a bottle of unblended scotch and poured himself an undiluted measure.

“That’s good,” the younger Drogue said. “It’s a pretty crazy way to pass whole weeks. Especially if you’re not really playing. As a rule, locations and spouses don’t mix.”

“We’ve been all right,” Lionel said. “I don’t think we’ve been in each other’s way, Lu and I.” He glanced across the pool and saw that both Patty and old Drogue had settled into pool chairs. Apparently no conversations went unwitnessed in this family circle. “And I see you bring Mrs. Drogue.” The whiskey was as smooth as good brandy. Lionel drank rarely but this glass warmed his blood.

Patty Drogue laughed. Her laughter had an unsettling edge, as though he had said something ridiculous.

“That’s true,” Walter said. He too seemed to be suppressing a secret hilarity. “I always bring Mrs. Drogue.”

Lionel assumed an expression of self-assured amusement to show that he could join in the fun.

“South Africa,” young Walter Drogue said, “South Africa’s easier to handle?”

Lionel held his smile.

“You have to understand that my parents live there. My mother got there from Europe in the very nick of time.” He was silent for a moment. “And of course they’re quite anxious to see their grandchildren. At their age they can’t count on too many visits.”

“I didn’t mean to put South Africa down, Lionel,” Walter said. “I mean — why should you carry the weight? You left, didn’t you? To practice here.”

Lionel was growing tense. He finished his drink, and before he had a thing to say about it, Patty Drogue brought him another.

“I left,” he said. “I suppose I could have stayed and joined the Resistance. I mean … friends of mine did. But my parents wanted us all to go. Myself and my sisters.”

“Your parents loom large in the picture, huh?”

“You should talk,” Patty Drogue said casually to her husband.

Walter junior shrugged good-naturedly. The older Drogue watched her with his blank cautious eyes.

“Silence, exile, cunning,” old man Drogue said from the shadows. “And you get to hear the bellyaches of rich Americans. Your parents should be proud of you.”

“Wherefore do we lecture Lionel?” Walter Drogue asked charitably. “We’ve been showing our films to segregated houses out there. We used to do it in our own South. We have plenty to answer for.”

“I realize that Mr. Drogue spent time in prison,” Lionel said, belching on his drink. He was afraid he might appear obsequious. “Perhaps I’m not made of the same stuff.”

“Perhaps,” old Drogue said. “I was indicted. I never did time. Life is made of perhaps. Perhapses.”

“Lay off him,” the younger Drogue said. “He’s not getting paid to take this shit from you. Go pick on a qualified professional.” He turned sympathetically toward Lionel. It seemed to Morgen that a pattern was emerging in which each of the Drogues would seize an opportunity to protect him from the others. Perhaps even the old man would rally to his defense at the next attack. He glanced into the dark corner where old Drogue was lurking; it seemed, after all, unlikely.

“Don’t let him demean you, Lionel. He thinks he invented political commitment. He thinks he invented facing the slammer.”

“Well,” Lionel said, “it’s true enough about me. I’ve had friends go to the slammer for fighting apartheid but I’m quite untouched.”

“You know what the cons say?” old Drogue demanded of them. “They say never trust a man who hasn’t done time.”

“You don’t have to place your trust in me, Mr. Drogue,” Lionel said. “I’ll be on my way in the morning.”

“There were bets down on whether you’d finally leave or stay,” young Drogue told him. “Weren’t there, Pat?”

“Do I have to say how I was betting?” Patty Drogue asked plaintively.

“Bets?” Lionel asked. “I don’t see why anyone was betting. We knew from the start how long I’d be here. I mean, your girls bought my tickets.”

“Yeah, sure,” Drogue said. “But we thought under the gun you’d be more flexible about it.”

“My schedule is not flexible in the least, Walter. I’ve taken all the hospital leave I can manage. I was back and forth to New Orleans a dozen times. It’s taken me a year to organize my appointments in time for this trip.”

Young Drogue gave him a long cool look and shrugged amiably. Patty stared into the surgical green light of the whirlpool bath. The old man was invisible within the patio’s toy jungle.

“We haven’t changed our plans,” Lionel said. “I don’t see why that should surprise anyone.”

Walter emerged naked from the lighted pool and slipped into a boxer’s silk robe that had YOUNG DROGUE embroidered across the back. The Drogues’ collective nakedness had begun to repel and embarrass Lionel. In his experience, the clothed party held the advantage in mixed encounters. Within the Drogue compound, this principle seemed to have been reversed.

“O.K.,” Walter Drogue the younger said.

“So,” Lionel said, “as I am on my way out, I thought we might speak privately for a bit.”

Young Drogue sat down on a plastic chair and stretched, yawning luxuriantly. “What a good idea,” he told the psychiatrist. “Patty,” he told his wife, “bring me a drink, please. And bring the good doctor one. And the aged P.” Walter Drogue the elder swore audibly from his corner of darkness.

“We exploit Patty a little,” Walter explained to Lionel. “She wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“I’d like to speak privately,” Lionel said.

“This is privately, Lionel,” Walter Drogue said. “This is as private as we let it get.”

“It’s about Lu Anne,” Lionel said.

“No shit?”

“I think I just wanted to know … from a second source, as it were, how things were going.”

Walter gave him a soft smile. “Fine, Lionel. Things are going fine.”

“She’s quite good, isn’t she?”

“Oh, I think that would be an understatement, Doctor. She’s always good, your Lu Anne. But this is something else.”

“And the picture? Your feeling about the picture is good as well?”

“Lu Anne and I are the picture,” Walter Drogue said. “We two together. And we’re good enough to eat.”

“I’ve been seeing dailies as soon as they come in,” Lionel told Walter Drogue, “and I’m terribly impressed.”

“We’re sitting on a treasure, my friend. We’re going to astonish the world.”

Patty returned with another tray of drinks.

Lionel wiped his glasses. His head ached with the whiskey.

“I thought …” Lionel began. “I wanted to be sure everything was all right with her.”

The director was silent. Lionel drained his glass.

“Would you like another?” Patty Drogue asked.

“Oh no,” Lionel said. “Not now.”

“She likes bringing drinks,” Walter Drogue explained.

“It’s my way of atoning,” Patty said.

“Tell me what you think,” Walter Drogue said soberly. “You’re her husband, you’ve been living with her. You’re a … specialist in human behavior. How do you think she’s doing?”

“I don’t think that since she left the stage she’s been so involved in a show,” Lionel said.

“Surely,” Drogue said, looking about with his bright-eyed smile, “this is good news?”

“Well,” Lionel said, “yes.”

“But …?”

“Her eyes,” old man Drogue said from the shadows. “I remember her eyes from when she first came out here.” They all turned toward him. “It didn’t show up in her glossies,” old Drogue went on. “You could turn the page right past her. Up on the screen, her eyes, they’d fucking lay you out. I remember,” he said. “From when she first came out here.”

Lionel stared at his huddled figure in the darkness, trying to think of something to say.

“Before sound,” old Drogue said, “they would have loved her eyes.”

“Even you don’t go back that far,” Patty Drogue told the old man playfully. “Can you really say ‘before sound’?” She did a bass imitation of his rasp.

“He was here before sound,” her husband told her. “He worked on House of Sand.”

“You look at their eyes from those days, you’ll see eyes.” He grunted, a laugh or the clearing of his throat. “They came from tough lives.”

“House of Sand!” Patty Drogue declared. “I love it! I love it,” she told Lionel, “when they say ‘before sound.’ ”

“That was the last one Everett French did. He was a lush then. I cut it for title inserts.”

“That’s romantic,” Patty Drogue said. “Everett French losing his shit to gin. Fitzgerald-like.”

“So you tell me,” young Drogue said, addressing himself to Lionel. “How’s my actress and your lady wife?”

“Listen,” Lionel said. He was holding on to Walter Drogue’s silken sleeve, the sleeve of his boxer’s robe. When he saw the Drogues staring at his hand he took it away. “There is a certain kind of artist, don’t you think,” he asked them, “who might be described as a halluciné?”

“Dickens,” Patty Drogue said with enthusiasm. “Joan Miró. What do you think, Walter?”

Young Drogue’s faux naïf smile tightened.

“Sure,” he said, turning the very word to bitter mimicry. “Dickens and Joan Miró.”

“Wagner,” old man Drogue said from his unseen perch. “Mahler. Max Reinhardt.”

Lionel was impressed at their erudition. “Those are all,” he said, “wonderful examples.”

“How about another drink?” Patty asked.

“No, no,” Lionel said. “Your guests will be here. I’ve got to get back shortly to pick up Lu Anne.”

“Bela Lugosi played Hamlet for Reinhardt,” the elder Drogue informed them. “They called him the greatest Hamlet of the German-speaking theater.”

“But over here,” Patty Drogue pointed out, “Abbott and Costello were waiting for him.”

“Because he was a junkie,” Walter said, still smiling. “Because it was Hollywood.”

“Well,” Lionel said, “that’s how I see Lu Anne.”

“As a hallucinée, right, Lionel?” Patty asked. “Not as a junkie.”

“No, no,” Lionel reassured Mrs. Drogue. “As a hallucinée.”

“Like Dickens,” young Drogue suggested.

Lionel paused a moment, then laughed politely. “Well, I don’t have to tell you this, Walter, I’m sure. But some performers put a tremendous emotional investment into their roles. They can’t hold back. They pay a very high price for their work.”

“And that’s Lu Anne, isn’t it, Lionel?” young Drogue asked.

“Well,” Lionel said, “yes. I mean, I don’t know that much about acting — how it works from inside. It’s a mystery to me. Like all mysteries, I find it a bit frightening.”

“You’re a philosopher, Lionel. A student of the mind. And you think the price of this performance might be a mite high for your wife in her sensitive condition. The scenes we’re shooting from now on are some of the most intense in the script. It’s a shame you can’t stay for them.”

“I’m sorry,” Lionel said. “I thought I was performing yeoman’s service putting in so much time down here. I was led to understand location shooting would be over by now.”

“That was last year.”

“Yes. Well, last year is when I arranged for the journey. Originally we thought we’d go together. My parents have planned around it. The kids’ schoolwork has been arranged for. Why are you treating me like a deserter?”

“Come on, Lionel,” young Drogue said. “I’m not doing that. Do you know who Gordon Walker is?”

“He’s the scriptwriter.”

“Did you know he was coming down?”

“I heard something about it,” Lionel said. No one had breathed a word to him.

“Old pal of Lu Anne’s, right? Sort of a second Dickens?”

“I know who he is,” Lionel said. “I know he went out with Lu Anne. What are you suggesting?”

Young Drogue displayed opened palms. “Hey, Lionel, I never suggest. If I want to say something I just up and say it.”

“It sounded to me,” Lionel said, “as though you were implying something that’s none of your business.”

“Not at all, Lionel. Nothing of the kind. You have to leave, so you’ll leave.” He sighed. “I just thought everybody should understand everybody else’s feelings. See, we’re Californians. Compulsive communicators. We’re overconfiding and we’re nosy. Don’t mind us.”

“I wouldn’t worry about Gordon Walker, Lionel,” Patty Drogue said soothingly. “I mean, there’s much less sex on movie locations than a lot of people think.”

Lionel turned to her blankly. “I beg your pardon?”

“Ah, let him come,” young Drogue said. “Maybe tension will enrich her performance? Think so, Lionel? I think it’s possible. Anyway,” he told Lionel good-humoredly, “I can swallow that asshole with a glass of water.”

“She’ll be all right,” Lionel said. “We’ve agreed it’s time for her to handle it alone.”

“No second Vancouver?” Drogue asked delicately.

“She’ll be all right,” Lionel said.

“And you’ve got Kurlander covering in case of emergency, right? He’s agreed to come down if necessary?”

“That was privately arranged.”

“Should we put him on the payroll?” Drogue asked. “We might do that.”

“I’ve taken care of it. I don’t think you’ll need him.”

“I’m really glad we had this talk,” Drogue said. “So we could find out where we stood. By the way, have you read the script?”

“Of course,” Lionel Morgen said. But he had not. He had glanced at the Chopin book and leafed through a few of the scenes his wife was to appear in. That was all. He was instantly appalled at his own defensive lie.

“We thought you’d stay,” Patty Drogue intoned sweetly. “We thought you’d decide Lee needed you and stay.”

“I offered to stay,” Lionel said stolidly. “In spite of the difficulties. She agreed that I should go.”

“Well,” young Drogue said cheerfully, “you’re the doctor.”

There came the clatter and rustle of arriving guests ascending from the terraces below.

“Great eyes,” old Drogue said. Lionel’s own eyes had grown accustomed to the shadows and he saw that in the alcove where old Drogue was, a hammock had been strung between two date palms and the old man sat astride it. He looked, Lionel thought, like an old parrot on a stick swing. “But her pictures don’t make money.”

Lionel thought of his wife’s eyes and of his own image in them. “She said,” Lionel told them, “that if she couldn’t finish this one without me she was through.”

“That settles it, then,” young Walter Drogue said. He advanced and put his arm around Lionel’s shoulder. “You want to get our leading lady and bring her on up, right, Doc? Can’t have a party without her.”

Patty Drogue was wheeling an entire dollyful of canapés over the cobblestones of the patio.

“Make way,” she called. Her voice echoed over the hillside as she greeted the arriving guests across darkness. “Hello, you guys. Help yourselves to drinks while we get changed.”

Walter Drogue was walking Lionel to the path, holding him in an embrace. At the top of the pink steps, Lionel swept Drogue’s arm from his shoulder and started down, slowly and silently, ignoring the people going by. He came to the parapet at which he had stopped on the way up to watch the lights.

Drogue’s expensive liquor churned in his guts. For one self-loathing moment, he imagined he could smell his own cologne but it was only some overripe sweet odor of the place.

She had called him her knight and he was leaving her to them. He was numbed with his own betrayal. In their way, although they had it wrong, they were right to despise him. He loved her. But her madness was too much for him. It was stronger than he was, and evil.

Evil, a word attaching to false consciousness.

Now he would go, with his children, and in his faraway country he would think about it and he would see.

In the meantime, he recalled with a shudder, there was dinner to be endured. Dinner with the Drogues.

Dinner with the Drogues took place under the stars. Lionel was silent and vague. People who did not know him did not realize that he was drunk and thought he might be deaf or even a little slow, like someone recovering from a cerebral injury.

Lu Anne for her part had never seen her husband so utterly besotted. More like a drunken cricketer than a medical Svengali with his schizoid Trilby in tow. Those among the guests who had come to see him spoon-feed her got to watch her half carry him down the path to their casita.

In the bedroom, she had to undress him, practically put him in bed. He was not there at all, no more for her than for anyone else. She worked hard not to think about his leaving and she was tired and a little drunk and that helped.

Once, as they lay together, the full moon visible through the casita’s window, he reached out and took her hand. If she saw or heard anything, he told her — anything that might not really be there — she was to press his hand and wake him. Slim chance of that, she thought. They were already gathering. But that night at least she would sleep.

Well after she was certain he had passed into oblivion, he startled her by taking her hand again.

“I have discovered,” he announced, “the exact way in which America made sex obscene.”

“What?”

Intrigued, she struggled toward waking. But he had gone to sleep again, his hand still pressed to hers. So she was alone in the darkness. In solitude. What a beautiful word, she thought. And beautiful in Spanish, soledad. It was the name of a prison.

Still holding her husband’s hand, she began to pray.

In the dingy coffee shop, Walker took a breakfast of rye toast and tea. A hard steady rain drilled against the panes of the seaward windows. The ocean-borne wind rattled the ornate rusted fastenings that secured them and rainwater seeped through the rotten moldings to form small puddles on the checkerboard floor.

He smoked and watched the rain, ignoring the morning paper spread out on the unsteady table before him.

Shelley had gone while he was still asleep. She had left a note commanding him to stay in town until he heard from the agency and to call her that afternoon.

After a few minutes, he took his newspaper upstairs to pack and outwait the rain. As soon as he had closed the door behind him, he set about running more cocaine. He had no sure purpose for the day, only the dream of going south. The dream provided him a happiness against all reason, it was succor and escape. Coke turned it adamantine, to mythic longing. As he stood at the window over the rain-soiled sea, his blood quickened at the prospect. He felt then that it was all he had.

The rain increased. Walker paced the length of his room. He had begun to think about his script for The Awakening, sustaining a glow of proprietary satisfaction. He had not looked at it for many months. Suddenly now, a prisoner of the morning rain, he lusted after the thing and it occurred to him that in the addled state to which he had reduced himself he might have forgotten to bring it along. He brought his suitcase out of the closet and quickly found his two copies in their blue bindings. He picked one out and seated himself in one of the room’s musty elephant-colored armchairs to read it over. As soon as he turned the cardboard cover an airmail envelope slid from between the pages and landed in his lap.

The envelope contained a month-old letter from his younger son at prep school. He had received it just after the closing of Lear in Seattle, tucked it away with the scripts in token of a determination to respond, then forgotten it.

Walker sat looking at his son’s unanswered letter, smarting with guilt and shame. So stricken was he that he nearly put it aside. Ever since his sons had left home he had written them regularly, demanding replies. Even when his older boy, Tom Moore who was called Deak, had stopped writing or phoning back — had, in effect, stopped speaking — Walker had gone on writing, composing what he himself called sermonettes. That he had forgotten Stuart’s letter was a measure of the low place in which he found himself.

“Dear Parents,” Stuart Walker had written. “When I woke up this morning I asked myself where’s my change of season? Here it’s mid-September and the sugar maples are turning awesome colors. Everything’s the way it’s supposed to be except me because I’m just not feeling it …”

Walker folded the letter, put it aside and went to the suitcase for his book of telephone numbers. He looked at his watch: it was nearly twelve in Maine and he might catch his son in the dorm between his last morning class and lunch. When he had found the number he dialed it and asked the boy who answered for Stuart Walker. His son came on the line.

“Christ, kid,” Walker said, “I’m sorry I didn’t answer your letter. Things have been confused. I’ve been busy.”

“I guess that’s good, huh?”

“Yeah,” Walker said, trying to sound as though it was good. “Better busy than not.”

“Hey, Dad,” the boy said. “You know Mom was here. She was on her way to London.”

“That’s right. How was she?”

“She was really funny about it.”

“Was she indeed?”

“Really,” Stuart told his father. “She was a riot. Good old Mom.”

“Good,” Walker said cautiously. His son was opaque, a politician. “So it was all pleasant?”

“She was fine,” Stuart said. “You don’t have to worry about her.”

Walker felt a wave of simmering anger rise in his breast. He mastered it quite easily.

“When you wrote you said … you said … you weren’t feeling the change of seasons. I wondered … whether, you know … everything was all right with you. And if you were down … whether you still were. And if … I was hoping,” he stammered on, “that it was better.”

“Right,” the boy said. “Well, that was a couple of weeks ago.”

Yes indeed, Walker thought. How tidily this kid kept score. Deak never did, never in the same relentless fashion. Nor did Walker himself. His wife did but her way was gentler. She was forgiving. Her younger son was not.

“Sure,” Walker senior said. “Of course.”

“I think I was down because I’d just been hanging out with Deak. You know how he’s been.”

Walker knew something about the way his son Deak had been for the past year and his heart went cold with fear.

“He doesn’t write or call us,” Walker said to his younger son. The taste of a whine hung on his lips, a savor of special pleading. “We don’t know how it is with him.”

“Sometimes I get mad at him,” Stuart said. “Then I get brought down, you know, and I wish there was something I could, like, tell him. But what can I tell him? It was always Deak who told me what was what.”

“What I worry about,” Gordon Walker said, “is drugs.” It was painful for him to say it; his sons knew his ways well enough. Yet it was what he worried about.

“Yeah,” Stuart said, and no more.

Walker hesitated.

“Well,” he finally asked, “should I worry?”

“No,” the boy said without conviction. “I don’t think so.”

“Is he dealing?”

“You have to ask him, Dad.”

“I thought,” Walker said, “because we both loved him … we might … as it were … take counsel together.”

“Oh,” Stuart said. “Oh, for sure.”

Walker bit his lip.

“Did your mother see him?”

“Yeah. We went to dinner in Portland.”

“Good,” Walker said. “How was it?”

“He was a little wasted,” Stuart said. There was a suggestion of good-natured laughter in his voice.

“Oh God,” Walker said aloud.

“I think we ought to get together all of us. We might all go over to London. Deak would go for that.”

“I don’t know about that,” Walker said.

“I guess,” Stuart Walker said, “I’m being naive.”

Walker sighed. “I’m glad you enjoyed your summer of stock.”

“Oh yeah,” the boy said, “it was excellent. They asked me back, O.K.?” For the first time in their conversation Stuart seemed to speak without calculation. “Next year, wow, am I looking forward to that.”

“And you’ll be in the school play this year?”

“Hey, Dad,” Stuart said, “are you kidding? You know I’ll be in it. They don’t call it the school play,” he added. “They don’t like that. They call it Masquers. Because we’re all so preppie pre-professional here.”

“I suppose,” Gordon Walker said, “that’s what I’m paying for.” He heard his son laugh politely.

“Listen, kid,” he said. “Take care of yourself. I’ll see you at Christmastime.”

“How will we do that this year, Dad?”

“I don’t know. I’ll call you. And Stu—” he called before the boy could hang up. “If you hear from Deak — if you see him — tell him for Christ’s sake to call me.”

After a few minutes he took up Stuart’s letter and read it through again. Reading it oppressed him; when he had finished it he was left with a mixture of depression and anxiety that felt for all the world like grief.

The letter was a good one, observant, witty, boyishly rueful. There was a little about the opening of term and a few cautious lines about Deak that were at once concerned and humorous. Most of it recounted Stuart’s adventures with a summer theater company in Rhode Island. He wrote tellingly about the two plays that had been done — a ten-year-old Broadway comedy and Ah, Wilderness! He described his humiliation at being scorned for his youth by girls his own age who competed for the older actors. He described, without names, the artful, courteous and good-natured manner in which he had turned aside the advances of a homosexual actor who was an old friend of his father’s. He wrote about the audiences, the town, the adolescent social scene, about a drama student whose name was Blanche and who had called him an odious buffoon. It was a delightful letter. Any reader would conclude that its author was openhearted, generous and affectionate — all of which Walker knew well his younger son was not. Tom — Deak — the older boy, was all those things, or had been once.

Stuart Walker had talent and his parents’ good looks. He was unusually literate for a seventeen-year-old and successful at school. But it was as an actor that he truly dazzled. At fifteen he had performed on the Off-Broadway stage in the limited run of a surreal English drama. Since that debut he had been offered parts on the average of two a month. His summer theater experience had been intended by his parents as an exercise in humility and he had not objected. He was preternaturally wise, would wait, study longer, listen and learn. At times Walker and his wife would look on their younger son with superstitious dread, so bright did his possibilities appear.

In his oceanside hotel room, Gordon Walker examined the letter once more. He realized now one of the reasons that he had not answered it on receipt, unconfronted at the time but plain enough now. The letter had provided Stuart with an opportunity for one of his uncanny imitations of his older brother. “Uncanny” was one of the words critics had used in praising Stuart’s performance.

He was a shrewd, unconfiding boy, four years younger than Deak. Circumstances or a harder nature had driven him inward, toughened him and toughened him until his heart shriveled. The years of Stuart’s childhood had been a stormy time for Walker and his wife. They were both ambitious, jealous of each other, consumed with the Life. Connie had tried to keep working, rehearsing, studying. There had been the business with Lu Anne. Probably neither of them was there enough, in the right ways. They never spoke of it although they both knew; it was too hard.

Stuart had hidden and survived. Deak, who was loving and sensitive, had been caught in the coils; neither his humor nor his grace had served when the drugs came like a punishing wind to sweep away all the unprotected children. Abstemious Stuart did just fine.

So, to please, no doubt unconsciously, as a part of his uncanny repertoire, Stuart would perform his Deak impression and glow with a kindly fire not his own. That had been Deak’s when Deak was healthy and favored.

Walker crumpled up the letter and thought of Deak, his passionately loved, his angel.

Faint with anguish, he stood up and walked to the window. If — perhaps, only to speculate — he went through it and over the balcony, the pain would stop. He could do it any number of ways.

If he went out he would be killing Deak. Deak would eventually follow him, in that as in everything. Probably he would be killing Stuart as well. Stuart would prosper, have his fame and fortune, but time would bring him down. You could not make his kind of adjustment without paying in the end.

So there could be no question of leaps or lethal measures. The luxury of abandoning hope was not available to him. Hope might make a fool of him and compound his grief, but he was bound to it as much as the next man. For his sons, himself, even his marriage. He leaned against a cornice beside the balcony window and took deep hopeful breaths, his eyes closed. It was a matter of inner resources. It was a matter of getting through the day.

When he was ready for the road again, Walker checked himself out of the San Epifanio Beach and drove back to the San Diego Freeway. Within an hour he was at the boat basin north of Rosa Point.

He found a spot in the club parking lot and got out and walked along the dockside. The rain had stopped; pale sunshine was filtering through the low cloud. A party fishing boat rode at anchor off the point but the sea was still rough and there were few sailboats out. A stiff wind from the bay rattled the wire rigging of the boats at moor, banging stays against masts in a ceaseless tintinnabulation.

One of the dozens of powerboats tied up in the basin was a forty-foot Chris-Craft rigged with a pulpit; the legend SAM THE MAN was inscribed on her brightly finished after woodwork. Walker halted beside the boat, braced against a piling and called down into the cabin.

“Quinn?”

A portly sandy-haired man, deeply tanned, came up from the cabin and squinted up at Walker. He was bare-chested and powerfully built, although a slab of gut hung down over the waist of his dungarees. There was a red neckerchief at his throat.

“Hey, Gordo,” he said, and wiped his mouth as though he were hiding a smile.

“Hello, Sam.”

“You want a drink?”

“I want some cold water,” Walker said.

Quinn ducked back into the cabin and emerged with two bottles of clear liquid. One he handed up to Walker; the second he upended and drank from deeply.

“Want to give me a ride, Gordo? Figure you were on your way up to the ranch anyhow, right?”

“Sure,” Walker said.

They went back to Walker’s car and took off along the coast road. A few miles south of the point they passed a crescent beach tucked between cliffs; offshore twenty or so leonine surfers sat their boards in the chop, waiting for a wave. Walker pulled over and they got out, walking through ice plant that was littered with beer cans and cellophane bags.

“Little fuckers go on forever,” Quinn said.

Walker stopped near the edge of the cliff and lit a cigarette.

“I had a fantasy once,” Quinn said. “I’d get a net a quarter mile wide. I’d get a dragger, a galleon with black sails.” He turned to Walker, who had hunkered down in the brush. “Under cover of the fog I’d come in, see, and I’d play out my net and I’d catch the young turkeys and haul ’em in. Fill my hold with ’em. Boys. Girls. Don’t matter.” He reached into his pants pocket, took out a joint and lit it. “Work the coast clear from Mendocino to Imperial Beach. Then, when I had a load, I’d sail the whole mess to Jidda. Sell ’em as slaves to the Arabs.”

Walker declined the joint when it was offered, knowing how strong it would prove.

“You told Lu Anne about that plan,” Walker said. “She told me.”

“Sweet thing,” Quinn said. “She’s working down in B.H.”

“I know,” Walker said. “I’m going to see her.”

Quinn grinned at him with a sidewise glance. One of the caps on the man’s front teeth had a gold death’s-head design worked into it.

“Fine woman. You kiss her for me, man.”

They got back in the car and drove until the highway was intersected by a dirt road, running between rows of glass commercial greenhouses. They turned off there. After the last greenhouse there were rows of avocado trees and then the road began to climb, ascending one side of a canyon. Yellow tule grass grew on the crest of the hills. On the inland slopes there were live oak and cactus. Their road crossed and recrossed dry riverbeds and tributary canyons until it ended at a cattle grid. A wooden ranch fence held a sign that read: DANGER NERVOUS GUN FREAK. There was another sign that said: TRESPASSERS WILL BE VIOLATED. Beyond the fence was a grove of cotton-woods and beyond the trees an old white frame farmhouse with an attendant barn and duck pond.

Walker parked in front of the barn, alongside a dusty Bentley which was missing a wheel.

“Everything pretty much as usual?” he asked Quinn.

“Yes and no,” the big man said. “Little of this, little of that. What’s up with you?”

Walker told him that his wife had left for London, about the play in Seattle and his plan to visit Lu Anne. Quinn nodded curt approval.

“Connie was always bourgeoise.”

“Connie was a fucking hero,” Walker said.

The pain of loss he felt when he thought of her quite surprised him. He had only begun to realize that he had seen the last of her heroics and that she would not be coming back to him.

For years he had survived through her calm resolution and good sense; suddenly she had used them in her interest. He had not expected that. It seemed like betrayal to him.

For his part, he had never stopped loving her. Now he would have to force her out of his mind, confine her to the interior white space that held all those elements of his life too painful to consider. He could manage it, he thought; he was tough and selfish enough.

As he grew older, the number of things he sought to banish from his consciousness increased and so did his skill at keeping them in isolation.

“Whatever you think, Gordo.”

Behind the house was a small field with a dog pen, a fenced corral and an overgrown garden enclosed by strands of wire. Empty milk jugs were tied at intervals along the wire to stir on the breeze. It was close and warm in the hollow where the ranch was; hills shut out the ocean wind. The sky overhead was clear.

Walker and Quinn took chairs on the back porch.

“Lu Anne,” Quinn said reflectively. “She’s all right. I was glad to hear she’s working again.”

“She’s a lead,” Walker said. “My script.”

“Yeah, I heard all that.” He rocked slowly back and forth, watching his guest. “How’s her head?”

“I haven’t seen her much,” Walker said. “What else have you heard?”

Quinn shrugged. “Not a lot. That she married a doctor years back. A shrink. Probably handy for her to have one at home.”

“Yeah,” Walker said.

“Funny her getting an Oscar nomination for playing spacey,” Quinn said.

“Yes,” Walker agreed. “We all used to kid about that.”

“But she’s good,” Quinn said. “That’s the thing. There’s no one better than Lu Anne. Not out here. Not in New York.”

“What about you, Sam? Working any?”

Quinn smiled, flashing his Jolly Roger.

“Too old and fat,” he said. He was leaning back in the rocker looking at the sky. Walker turned to follow his gaze and saw two people hang-gliding high above the next ridge. They were beautiful to watch and, Walker thought, incredibly high. They seemed to command the wind that bore them.

“Shit,” Quinn said, “look at that.”

“Does it make you paranoid?” Walker asked.

“Nah,” Quinn said. “Makes me fucking cry, is what. Think that isn’t kicks, man? That’s the way to do your life, Gordo. Look the gray rat in the eye.”

“I think we all do that anyway.”

“We’re little worms,” Quinn said. “We piss and moan.”

“So,” Walker said, “I wonder if you can help me out.”

Quinn crooned in a black-toned bass. “Got yo’ weed, got yo’ speed, got yo’ everythin’.”

“I’m on this fucking thing,” Walker explained. “I’m doing a lot of blow and then I’m drinking. I have to dry out. I need downers.”

Quinn screwed up his face and sounded a high-pitched comic cry.

“Ai, Gordo. I don’t got them. I got blow. Speed. Sinsemilla. No downers. Except, you know, I could get horse but that’s not for you in your frame of mind.”

“Christ,” Walker said. “I was hoping to break the cycle.”

“Sorry, man.”

“I’ll have to wait until I get down there, then. I hope Siriwai’s the doctor on this picture.”

“Siriwai’s got a Laetrile clinic now. I doubt he even works flicks anymore.”

“Are you serious?”

“Absolutely. He’s got this enormous spread in San Carlos Borromeo. He cures cancer.”

Walker sat in silence, looking at the dun boards of the back porch.

“If you’re gonna drive,” Sam Quinn said, “it’s not that much out of your way. I’m sure old man Siriwai could fix you up if he felt like it.”

“I suppose,” Walker said.

“Hate to send you away disappointed, Gord. Can I offer a drink? A fine line?”

“Oh sure,” Walker said.

Quinn got up and went into the kitchen. Walker sat rocking, watching the hang gliders. When he looked down again, he saw a young red-haired woman coming from the barn, leading a little boy of about three by the hand. The young woman’s eyes were fixed on Walker as though in recognition. As far as he knew, he had never seen her before. He rocked and watched the two of them approach.

“Hello,” he said, when they had reached the porch, and directed a cordial smile at the child.

“You’re Gordon Walker,” the woman said.

Walker was not used to being recognized by name. The woman before him looked like a great many other women one saw in Los Angeles; she was attractive, youthful a bit beyond her years. She seemed like someone imperfectly recovered from a bad illness.

Her face broke into a sudden, quite marvelous smile.

“You don’t remember me,” she said. “I’m Lucy Brewer. I played the radical chick in Stover.” The child, who had Lucy’s auburn hair, shouted and pulled against her grip. “Woman, I should say. Of course, they cut a lot of me.”

“Sure,” Walker said. “Certainly I remember you.” He had absolutely no recollection of Lucy Brewer and very little of the character. Stover had been the next thing to a doctoring job, done years before. “I have trouble with names,” he assured her. “But I don’t forget people.”

“You had a cute little boy, I remember. You brought him out to the set.”

“I have two,” Walker said. “They aren’t little anymore.”

“Well, he was one cute little guy.”

“He’s an actor now,” Walker told her.

“Another one of us, huh?” She was good-humoredly restraining her own little boy with both hands. The child broke away finally and ran off toward the corral.

“Speaking of cute kids,” Walker said.

“We were having our nature walk. We saw the animals and the cemetery.”

Walker chuckled agreeably. Sam Quinn came out with two drinks on a tray. Beside them was a tiny glass bottle of cocaine with a miniature chain attached to its cap. Seeing Sam, the little boy turned around and came running back toward the porch.

“Sam Sam Sam,” the infant shouted.

“What cemetery?” Walker asked. Quinn handed him a drink.

“Ah,” Sam Quinn said, “we bury the animals. We have a ceremony.”

“And we buried Hexter,” the little boy cried.

Quinn sighed. “We gotta talk about this,” he said to Lucy. “I mean really.”

“We buried our dog,” Lucy said merrily. “Hexter.”

“Oh,” Walker said. A few years before he had known an aspiring screenwriter, a fellow Kentuckian, by the name of Hexter. Hexter had left for New Mexico some time before.

Lucy gathered the child to her loins. She seemed oppressed by Quinn’s even stare.

“Well,” she said to Walker, “best of luck.”

“The same to you, Lucy,” Walker said. He waggled his fingers at the little boy. Lucy took the boy by the hand and led him off.

Sam Quinn turned his back on an imaginary breeze, dipped the cap-spoon device into the vial of cocaine and had himself a snort. Done, he screwed the cap on and passed the works to Walker.

“I’m a murderer,” Quinn explained. “I murder my enemies. I bury them under my barn and then I drink champagne from their skulls.”

“We were talking about a dog,” Walker said.

“We were friends,” Quinn said. “We were close. He got into fucking nitrous oxide and he was not getting it from me. One time he comes up here from Taos and his pickup is loaded with tanks. We have parties, it’s great, except he won’t stop doing it.” Quinn sniffed and wiped his nose with his wrist. “So one morning I go into the john and Hexter’s in the tub. He’s underwater and he’s stone fucking dead and the tank’s on the floor next to him. So what am I supposed to do, send for Noguchi? I don’t want the damn cops up here. I loved that man, Gordon. He was like a brother.”

Walker took a hit off Quinn’s coke. It was very fine, better than his own. It dispelled his anxiety and his sorrow about his sons. He watched Quinn with a tolerant smile.

“I welded him into an oil drum and we brought out the Bible and we laid him to rest. He was divorced, didn’t have no kids. He’s home, man, he’s in Abraham’s bosom.” Quinn shrugged. “All right — it sounds kind of sordid.”

“I see,” Walker said, and did another tiny spoon.

They sipped their vodka-and-tonics. The hang gliders disappeared beyond the inland ridge.

“I have to get out of this business, Gordo. My nerves are shot. My life is in danger. Then I got Lucy and Eben to think of.”

“Funny,” Walker said. “I can’t remember meeting Lucy.”

“Stover,” Sam Quinn said. “I don’t think she’s worked since then. She had a speed problem and a couple of crazy boyfriends. I helped her out.”

“The kid yours?”

Quinn shook his head. “I can’t tell you whose kid that is, Gordo. Very big name. Since deceased.”

“You ought to get out,” Walker said. “I thought you’d be doing stunts forever.”

“Yeah, I was born to die in a burning stagecoach. But I’m too old for it, that’s the problem. I tell you, Gordon, this after-forty shit sucks.”

“You could coordinate. You been all over. You know a lot about filmmaking.”

“I’m associated in the industry with drugs. Once that didn’t matter. But these days it is not so good.” Quinn drained his glass and set it aside. “I ought to move. Maybe up to Newhall — I got a lot of old buddies up there might get me something. I should get Lucy out of here, get her straight. I should sell my boat, sell this place — I’d get ten times what I paid. There’s a couple of hundred goddamn things I should do. But I don’t know which, the way things are. I don’t want to be broke no more, Gordon, I ain’t used to it.”

“Well,” Walker said, “if you think of a way I can help you, let me know.” He set his own glass down. “You really think Doc Siriwai could fix me up if I stopped in Borromeo?”

“I’m sure of it,” Quinn said. “I see him once in a while.” They stood up; Quinn yawned and stretched. “Lee Verger,” he said. “Good old Lu Anne. You give her my special love, you hear.”

“I will.”

They shook hands and Walker got behind the wheel of his car. As he drove by the cottonwood trees, he passed Lucy and Eben. Lucy was smiling; she had bent over the child and was encouraging him to wave. Walker threw them a salute. As soon as he came in sight of the sea, the fog rose to meet him.

When they were gone she sat on the beach in front of her casita. She had not ridden to the airport, only stood in the driveway before the main building and waved them away. Lionel and the sun-ripe children, happy-eyed. Were they also pleased to be quit of her? They were sensitive children, they had seen a few things they should not have seen. Driving away, they had not turned to wave or to look back at her and it had made her feel hurt and afraid. Only their excitement, she had thought, walking back down the path. But it was as though their eyes were fixed upon some wholesome future in which she had no part.

At least there was work. But it was a few hours until her call, so she spent twenty minutes or so doing breathing exercises and then commenced swimming laps in the small patio pool. Lu Anne was a strong swimmer and the pool barely more than an ornament; she coursed the length in two strokes and flipped at ends in a racing turn. She kept at it until her breath came hard and her shoulders ached.

Overhead, the sky was leaden; distant heat lightning flashed. She could hear the men at work beside the lagoon where the Grand Isle set was. For weeks she had been listening to the trailer-truck engines and the roar of articulated loaders. Lines of peons, armed with machetes, had been chopping cactus, beating the brush for scorpions, laying track for the giant Chapman crane. Now it was ready, the ground cleared. A roadway of two-by-twelve boards, stacked three layers deep, stretched from the dunes to the mild surf. Only the odd shout or burst of laughter, the whine of a power drill or the beat of a hammer drifted across the tame surface of their civil bay. From the other direction, where the unchecked Pacific whirled in narrow canyons along the point or thrust itself against the black sand of Playa China, she could make out the crash of surf, muffled by the offshore wind and the guardian mountainside.

That would be the place to swim, she thought, to work the negativity from her frame, to contend. She sat quietly in the sun, eyes closed, imagining the half-heard surf, forcing, as well as she was able, all other thoughts aside.

A rapid knock sounded on the casita door. She rose, thoroughly annoyed, and opened it to find Jack Best, the unit publicist, and a writer named Dongan Lowndes, who was down to do a feature for a prestigious magazine and was not, one was forever being reminded, just another hack.

In Lowndes’s company, Jack Best, who was just another flack, assumed an elevated diction.

“Miss Verger,” he declared, “I’d like to introduce Mr. Dongan Lowndes. I’m sure you know each other’s work and I’m sure you’ll have a really interesting conversation.”

Lowndes did not seem embarrassed. He was a tall man with a long narrow face; its up-country Scotch-Irish frankness was spoiled slightly by the smallness of his close-set brown eyes.

Lu Anne and Dongan Lowndes shook hands; she gave him a sympathetic smile, which she noticed he did not return.

“Shall we go in?” Jack asked. “I’ve ordered lunch sent down.”

“Gosh, I’m sorry, Jack,” Lu Anne said. “I just spaced this interview. I was going to skip lunch and prep.” She turned to Lowndes, expecting that he would offer to go. He only stared at her, not unpleasantly, but quite fixedly. His stare might have been taken for one of polite interest had its object been other than human.

Jack Best looked unhappy. In his book Lee Verger was not big enough medicine to space lunch dates with the highbrow press. Mr. Lowndes declined his assistance.

“Well,” Jack said nervously to Lowndes, “we’ve got a bit of a condom here.”

“I suppose,” Lu Anne said after a moment, “it must have washed up on the beach from town.”

Lowndes kept his small eyes fixed on Lu Anne. “I bet you meant to say conundrum, didn’t you, Jack?”

“Yeah,” Jack said quietly. He looked awestruck. “How could I have said that?”

“There you are, Mr. Lowndes,” Lu Anne said. “Your first Hollywood malapropism.”

“I’ve lived among ignorant people most of my life,” Lowndes told Lu Anne, “and I’ve never heard better.”

“Well,” she said, “come in, guys.”

“I’m really sorry,” Jack Best said. “I mean, Jesus, it just popped out.”

“That’s O.K.,” Lowndes said. “Miss Verger and I know each other’s work and now we’re going to have a really interesting conversation.”

“Are you going to stay, Jack?” she asked.

The service wagon arrived, propelled by a waiter who wheeled it into the patio. Best stared at the floor, then stood up and helped himself to a glass of tequila. He looked at Lowndes, then at Lu Anne.

“Come here, kid,” he said to her. He motioned her toward the door with a toss of his head.

“Me too?” Lowndes asked.

Best ignored him. Lu Anne followed the publicist outside.

“So I look like a jerk,” Jack said. “Let him have me fired.”

“The hell with him,” Lu Anne said kindly. “I mean, where’s your sense of humor?”

“I’m supposed to stay with you. You want me to?”

“I believe by now I can hold my own with the Dongan Lowndeses of the world.”

“I humiliated myself in front of him,” Jack Best said through his teeth. “I’d like to punch his smart mouth.”

“For heaven’s sake, Jack,” Lu Anne said, laughing, “it’s just a giggle. Forget it.”

“He’s a rat, this guy,” Jack said. “You watch yourself. He’ll use everything you say against you. I know the kind of rat he is. The stupid thing I said — he’ll put that in.”

“You know they’re not going to print that.”

“You be careful. I mean, I oughta stay but I can’t stand him. I’ll kill the son of a bitch. Don’t tell him nothing, tell him your hobbies. See, Charlie doesn’t know — he’s out to screw us. Make us look funny.”

“Well,” she said, “I’ll proceed from there.”

Best gave her a dark look and went up the path.

In his patio chair, Lowndes smoked a cigarette, ignoring the food before him.

“You’re a wonderful actress,” he told Lu Anne.

“Thank you,” she said, wondering again what people thought they meant when they said that. “I work hard. I try to get it right.”

“And what is it?”

“To inhabit them,” Lu Anne heard herself say. “To be in the place you’re supposed to be.” She watched him stare at her. “Don’t you take notes?”

He shook his head. “Aren’t you going to tape us? So I don’t misquote you?”

“You’ll misquote me anyway. Then your magazine’s lawyers will read it and if they say it’s O.K. I’ll come out the way you like.”

“Do you always talk to interviewers like this?”

“Can I tell you something off the record?”

“I don’t know yet,” Lowndes said, “ask me later.”

“I haven’t given an interview in years. Not a real one.” She thought his eyes seemed somehow soiled. Mud-colored. Shit-colored. “You go to est training or something?”

He laughed but she thought she had embarrassed him.

“Do you go to est training?”

“I meditate,” Lu Anne said. Lowndes had an aura, she realized. His aura brought forth creatures, like the Long Friends. They were attracted to him. She could hear their prattling from inside the casita. Something about lost things, lost jewelry, old photographs, old-time things. He would not be aware of them, she reminded herself, because they were not there for him.

“You mean like Zen?” Lowndes asked, amused. “Alpha states?”

The Sorrowful Mysteries, she thought. In the casita she could hear the rattle of rosary beads. They were not hers, they belonged to Props but she had appropriated them.

“Everyone meditates,” she said. “It’s just clearing your mind for concentration.”

“What is acting?” Lowndes asked. “How is it like living?”

“Those aren’t possible questions,” she said. “They don’t make sense.”

“Yes, they do, Miss Verger. You can answer them.”

She laughed. “Mr. Lowndes, you don’t ask those questions of a person.” He had power over her. The aura that drew the Long Friends gave him great strength. And his contaminated eyes. “If you want to speculate on those things, if you want to hold forth on life and acting and whatnot for your readers, well, do it. But don’t ask me to give you the words.”

“Do you really know my work?”

“I read your novel, Mr. Lowndes. Some years ago. I admired it.”

“The novel? Not a studio synopsis?”

His eyes held her; she knew she must look troubled. His arrogance did not offend her but that he dared to speak so made her fear he knew his own power. Perhaps he was the same with everyone, she thought. He had humiliated poor foolish Jack Best. Considering his cruelty, she examined his stance, the lines of his body. When she felt the first faint thirst of desire, the Long Friends inside sounded a chorus of stern whispers.

“You-all hush,” she said softly.

“I’m sorry,” Lowndes said, surprised. “I was kidding.”

“Yes,” Lu Anne said. “Of course.”

“You’re from Louisiana?”

“Yes,” she said, “it’s in the handout. From Boulanger.”

“I’m from Georgia.”

“I know,” Lu Anne said. “I know from your name. Lowndes, that’s a Georgia name.” She was only flattering him now to keep him at bay, starting to tell lies. She saw that he was pleased.

“I love to swim,” she told Lowndes. “When I was sixteen I was an Olympic candidate. But I had a fall and broke my leg.”

“A fall from a horse?” Lowndes asked.

“Yes,” she said, “but I still swim regularly. And I ride occasionally.”

Lee had never been an Olympic candidate for anything. At four she had broken her leg being chased by a hog during a Christmas party. If her cousins hadn’t rescued her, her father said, she might have been eaten and gone into sausage.

“You went to Newcomb?”

“I went to Newcomb on a Madison Foundation scholarship. Then I went to Yale drama school.”

“And you were in that production of As You Like It where everybody in it became rich and famous.”

“People said it was like John Brown’s hanging. I was Rosalind.”

“Rosalind,” Lowndes mused. “Tell me about that.”

She shook her head with a secret smile. “No.” She has nothing to do with you, Lu Anne thought. With your bent back and your shitty eyes.

He was studying her refusal to answer when the telephone rang. It was transportation and her call.

“Time for me to go to work,” she told him pleasantly, and went into the bedroom to change. The Long Friends had left a smell, like sweet wine and lavender sachet, and Lu Anne was aware of it as she sat by the bedroom mirror.

She chewed a piece of sugarless gum and brushed out her hair, hoping to see Rosalind and not some ugly thing. When she had been married to Robitaille he had accused her of constantly looking in mirrors. Because, she had told him, my face is my fortune.

They had told her to stay out of the sun, to keep the character’s genteel pallor. In the end it could not be done without the most rigorous efforts and they had relented and let her tan. It had been a good idea; with the right makeup and in the right colors, she photographed young and golden.

It was Edna in the glass now, not Rosalind. Lu Anne studied herself. Gone, that young Queen of the New Haven night. Sometimes it seemed to Lu Anne that she missed Rosalind the way she missed her children. She turned to study herself in profile.

Years ago in Boulanger, a judge who was one of her ex-husband’s relatives had called her “a lousy mother,” right out in court, in front of her daughter and in front of her own mother and daddy. Now she was Edna Pontellier. Of Edna, Kate Chopin had written:

She was fond of her children in an uneven impulsive way. She would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart; she would sometimes forget them.

You lost it all anyway, Lu Anne thought. You lost the child inside yourself, then the person that grew there, then the children you never bore and the children you did. The boys, the men, the skin outside, the self inside. Feelings came and went like weather. You could not tell if they were real. You could not tell if they were your own. You could never even be sure that you were there. People pretended.

“She looks fine,” Lu Anne told herself in the glass. The unseen Friends buzzed. They were all guilty agitation, old-auntly admonitions.

Don’t say she look fine, she heard one whisper. Say she is fine.

Lu Anne smiled, lowered her head and put a finger across her lips.

“Lee?” It was the voice of the writer, Lowndes. “Your car is here.”

She stood up and went out; meeting his eyes, her own gaze faltered and he saw it.

At the door, Billy Bly, the stuntman, was waiting for her with the driver. Seeing each other, they both blushed.

“Hi,” he said, and glanced quickly at Lowndes behind her. “They told me to ride over with you. See if there was anything you wanted.”

“Just your good company, Brother Bly,” she said. She introduced him to Lowndes; they got in the hosed-down Lincoln that would carry them to the set.

Looking out the car window as they approached the sea, she was struck by the uncanny light. The sky seemed to threaten a storm out of season.

“You look fine, Lu Anne,” Bill Bly said. She laughed. They had sent him out as her protector, replacing Jack Best. A heavy-handed touch, she thought.

“I am fine, Billy,” she told him. She was aware of Lowndes, a watching darkness on the seat beside her. “I am.”

Around twelve, Walker pulled off the freeway in Del Mar and drove to a drugstore on the coast to telephone Shelley.

“Everybody’s thrilled,” she told him. “They think it would really be great. In other words, they’ll put up with you for a day or two but don’t push it.”

“I will be their guest, will I not?”

“Yes, Gordon. You will.”

“That’s what you said they’d do.”

“People don’t always do what I say they’ll do. Very often, though.”

“Doesn’t that make you feel good?”

“No, shitty. It’s depressing. How do you want to travel?”

“I’m driving.”

“Is that wise?”

“I’ll be all right.”

“Buen viaje, Gord. Don’t get sick.”

He was about to hang up when Al Keochakian came on.

“Smart guy,” Al said.

“Take it easy,” Walker said. He was afraid of Keochakian’s anger and afraid of his own.

“I’m taking it easy, Gordon. I want to tell you something Shelley said to me. She’s off the line.”

“Don’t get pissed at her. I asked her to set it up.”

“Of course you did. And she owes you her job here.”

“What are you going to do, fire her, for Christ’s sake? Why are you so hysterical about this?”

“I would never fire Shelley, Gordon. She’ll grow old in my service. I want to tell you something. I want to tell you what she said about you.”

“If it’s something I should hear I’ll hear it from her.”

“She said, ‘He’s dying, Al.’ That’s what she said to me this morning. ‘He’s really going to die.’ ”

Walker felt the sudden sweat under his arms and on his palm that held the telephone. A charge of fear exploded beneath his heart, like the fear that had seized him at the mirror the morning before.

“You malicious son of a bitch,” he said to Keochakian. “You’re cursing me.”

“You think so?”

“I understand you now. I don’t know why I didn’t before.”

“What I’m trying to make you understand,” Keochakian said, “is that you’re very sick. Your life is in danger.”

“I don’t believe that motivation,” Walker said. “I heard the satisfaction in your voice.”

For a few moments there was silence. When Keochakian spoke again his voice was tremulous.

“You are sick, man. Physically and mentally you’re sick. You have me on the phone here … in this unprofessional way … we are arguing like a couple of faggots here. I won’t stand for it.”

“Al,” Walker said, laughing, “go fuck yourself. You’re fired.”

He stayed on the line until he heard Keochakian hang up. Then, deliberately, he replaced his own receiver. His insides churning with fear and anger, he pulled recklessly out into the coast road traffic, forcing the southbound lanes to a squealing halt. Pursued by obscenities and shouts of outrage, he headed for I-5 and the border.

In their oversized custom-built trailer a short distance from the setup, the Drogues, father and son, watched a young woman in turn-of-the-century costume ride a horse-drawn trolley car on a video screen. The woman was Joy McIntyre, Lu Anne’s Australian stand-in. The vehicle was moving against a dimly perceived woodland background; Joy held tight to the standee pole, her hands clutching both the pole and her folded parasol.

“Pretty kid,” old Drogue said.

“Looka the way she holds the parasol,” Walter Drogue the younger said. “She thinks she’s on the bus to Kangaroo Springs.”

“A proletarian reflex,” the old man said. “And a cute ass. I think she’s endearing.”

“The more I look at her,” young Drogue said, “the more I realize we have a true original here. I mean, you get the McIntyre touch. You get McIntyrisms. Like there was Lubitsch, there was Von Sternberg, now there’s McIntyre.”

“Maybe there’s something there, eh? Maybe nature didn’t intend her for just an extra.”

Young Drogue blew his nose on a Kleenex.

“Nature intended her for a water spaniel. She can’t name the days of the week.”

They watched pretty Joy, her jaw set, grimly hang on.

“Kind of a phallic pole,” Drogue junior said.

“You know,” old man Drogue intoned, “we had an extra once — they called him Freddy the Fag. He was six-eight, three hundred pounds, and he had Gloria Swanson’s moves. One time we’re making a Western — big saloon fight scene, roulette wheels flying, guys crashing through balconies — and Freddy walks up a flight of stairs like he’s on his way to get a bouquet from Bert Parks. Next take, the A.D. says, ‘Freddy, for Christ’s sake, can’t you walk up those stairs like a man?’ Freddy turns around and says, ‘If you want me to play character parts you’ll have to pay me for it.’ ”

On the screen, Joy’s trolley swung past a line of wooden structures and rolled on through a grove of live oaks.

“She should sit,” the old man croaked. “The stance is passive.”

“It’s comical,” his son said. “It’s a comic composition. It won’t do.”

He kicked open the trailer door and stepped out into the strangely turned Mexican light, calling for his assistant.

“Eric!”

In a few moments Eric Hueffer, the A.D., rounded the edge of the trailer.

“Yeah, boss.”

“Let’s take her around again sitting down. I mean, Christ, she’s holding the parasol wrong. It doesn’t feel right.”

“Right,” Hueffer said. “Toby was wondering about the light on her face under that hat. She had her head down.”

They were walking toward the camera setup, Hueffer and young Drogue in step, the old man a few steps behind. As they approached, they heard Joy McIntyre begin to sing.

“And it was grand,” she sang in an antipodean quaver,

“Just to stand

With his hand holding mine

To the end of the li-i-i-ne.”

“How come you let her hold the parasol like that?” young Drogue asked Hueffer.

“I thought it was natural.”

“I want to watch her go around again on the tape. I want her sitting up straight, with her head up. I want the parasol in one hand, touching the floor. With her other hand she can hold the pole. Maybe. Well see.”

“Lee’s here,” Hueffer told his director.

“Well, I’ll talk to her now. We’ll watch the shot again while she gets into costume.” He watched his assistant walk back toward the setup. “Eric!”

The A.D. turned, squinting.

“Anybody heard anything about Walker?”

“He’s supposed to be coming down,” Hueffer said, “but he wasn’t on the plane with Charlie.”

“Good,” Walter said. “The guy’s bad luck,” he told his father.

“He’s a contentious drunk and that’s never good luck. Charlie — with his reporters and writers — he doesn’t know what’s good for his picture. In my day we’d have either kept a guy like Walker off the set or we’d have kept him busy with rewrites. Don’t you think he might upset Verger?”

“I think Lu Anne might extend with him around,” the younger Drogue said. “It’s a calculated risk. Anyway, I don’t want to fight with Charlie over it.”

“Give him to Lowndes,” old Drogue said. “Give them each other.”

Lu Anne sat in front with the driver, Lowndes and Bill Bly in the back seat. The big stuntman’s presence had a subduing effect on Lowndes. It was a presence that was straightforward and physical and created about itself an atmosphere unsympathetic to leading questions and intimidation. Lu Anne was glad to have him along. They drove in silence over a dusty road lined with giant eucalyptus. On the way they passed Jack Best trudging flat-footed through the dust. When the driver slowed for him, he waved them on. Best’s face was red and he appeared to be talking to himself.

“Is he all right?” Lowndes asked Lu Anne.

“He’s fine,” Bill Bly told him.

At the end of the road was the great laager of trailers and light trucks that marked the borders of the Grand Isle set.

In the center of an enormous clearing stood a grove of live oaks that had been trucked in from the Tamaulipas coast. They stood beside this alien shore looking as natural, as firmly rooted and grave in authority as the ancient trees of her home place, garlanded, like those, in beards of Spanish moss. The open ground between the grove and the beach was covered in anthemis vines that seemed to bear the same white and yellow flowers as Lu Anne’s native camomile but lacked the apple fragrance. This air was too thin, she thought, to bear the scents of home.

Getting out of the car, she stood and looked over the scene. In the strange light it had a sinister magic. Dongan Lowndes came and stood beside her. Bly stayed in the car with the door open.

“Thanks, Billy,” she said. He closed the door and was driven away.

“Weird, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Make you feel funny?”

“They always do,” she said, “these tricks. I think I like it. I think it puts me in the working vein.”

In the center of it all, beside the thickest oak, stood a small antique trolley, looking a bit like a San Francisco cable car. The trolley rested on a narrow-gauge track that ran a long parabolic route between the oak grove and a row of bathhouses at the edge of the dunes. Two handsome chestnut horses were harnessed to the car. An elderly, ebony-skinned man, wearing a period derby and a faded, collarless striped cotton shirt, sat on the driver’s platform. Joy McIntyre swung loosely from the trolley bar, grasping it one-handed. She was wearing an exact replica of the Gibson girl costume that Lu Anne herself would wear for the scene.

“Hi, Joy,” Lu Anne called. “Hi, Joe Gates.”

“I’m Judy Garland,” Joy said happily. She leaned forward from the bar, balancing on the edge of the trolley, waved and displayed the eagerest and most brightly toothed of Judy Garland smiles. “When you have a costume, you can be Judy Garland too.”

Joe Gates half turned in his buckboard and tugged on the bell cord beside him.

“Zing, zing, zing went my heartstrings,” he sang to them, in flatted hipster tones.

“Joe Gates was actually in Meet Me in St. Louis,” Joy said. “Right, Joe?”

“Naw,” Joe Gates said. “That was another man.”

Camera crew were struggling to mount the Panaflex aboard the trolley and keep it fixed in place. Joe Gates climbed down from his perch and one of the Mexican grips took up the team’s bridle. Lu Anne turned and saw young Walter Drogue approaching.

Lowndes, standing next to her, was holding her copy of the script. She took it from him quickly but not before Drogue saw.

“Don’t read the script, Lowndes,” Drogue said. “You’ll spoil the end for yourself. I mean, give us a chance, huh?”

“I want to see what one looks like,” Lowndes told the director. “I wanted to read what she wrote in it.”

“I understand,” Drogue said smoothly. “Now if you’d like to watch — and I’m sure you would — you could get a fine view from the back of that pickup behind the camera.”

He directed Lowndes’s attention to a red Ford truck near the clearing.

Lowndes ignored him.

“Work well,” he told Lu Anne. She smiled at him as he walked away, a smile she knew would encourage his quickening attentions. She had no particular idea why she had done it.

“Work well?” Drogue demanded. “Who the fuck does he think he is?”

Lu Anne helped herself to another stick of sugarless gum.

“I know his type, Walter. He’s what a former husband of mine would call a moldy fig.”

“And you have a weakness for that type?”

She shrugged. “I’m indifferent. I believe that type has a weakness for me.”

Drogue stared at her. “What former husband?”

“Oh,” Lu Anne said, “the clarinet player.”

He took her by the arm and they walked together toward the trolley.

“Look at this light,” he said. “What does it do for you?”

“It makes me sad,” she said.

“Come on,” he told her, affecting an excited tremolo, “this is El Greco light. It’s holy.”

She looked at the sky, hoping to catch his excitement. It looked to her like late-summer weather at home. Edna, she thought, would know the oppression of that yellow-gray dog end of summer light. But the air was different where they were. It was the West, and not old Pierre Pelican land. Even in famished Baja there was an edge of hope to the air.

“We’ve just done Joe Gates on his buckboard,” Drogue said. “Atmospheric, sinister as shit. I mean,” he said, “the dude’s been a millionaire half his life. Give him his cue and he’ll give you three hundred years of servitude and lonesome roads.”

Lu Anne smiled for him.

“Joe was in Salt of the Earth, you know that? Dad brought him in. He played the Black Worker, or as they used to say, the Negro Worker, and let me tell you, the Negro Worker was bad! This big young hulk of a guy — huge pecs, chest like a fucking draft horse. He didn’t give a shit about blacklists, he was rich in real estate.”

Toby Blakely, the cinematographer, walked up to join them.

“Turned out,” Drogue went on, “they never even noticed him in Salt. He worked through the whole decade. He played weepy singing convicts on death row, he played old wimpy butlers, the whole shtick. But you should have seen him as the Negro Worker.”

Blakely took off his baseball cap, a half-servile gesture.

“If we’re gonna use this light we’d best be doing it, boss. It’ll be hell to match and I’m afraid there’s a storm coming.”

“That’s not possible,” Drogue said. “I’m assured it’s not possible.”

“Well,” Blakely drawled cautiously, “they do have these out-of-season storms, Walter. They’re called chubascos.”

“Well, fuck that,” Drogue said. “ ’Cause I gotta match that light. And I’m gonna personally piss on the Virgin of Guadalupe if it rains on my picture.”

“That’s not helping, Walter,” Lu Anne said. Lowndes had put his glasses on; he was watching them from beside the truck.

“Now listen,” Walter said to her. He walked in step with her and they performed a wide paseo around the sweating figure of Toby Blakely. “We’re going to do great things with this trolley ride to the beach. We have a wonderful spooky light and we know how to use it. Then if the light holds — if we have any kind of sunset at all — she gets to walk on water.”

Lu Anne said nothing. She had been hoping to save Edna’s walk down the beach for a special day, even perhaps for the last day of location. But they were shooting out of sequence for reasons of economy. There were at least ten days of filming on the Grand Isle set.

“Do you mind doing both those scenes today?”

“I can do them both,” Lu Anne said. “They go together.”

Drogue stopped, facing the trolley, arresting Lu Anne in mid-stride, clutching her arm.

“Look at that light, kid.”

“Yeah,” Lu Anne said. The light frightened her.

“So tell me — if you were taking your last trolley ride, how would you do it? I mean, would you do it standing up holding the bar like Joy or would you sit?”

Lu Anne thought about it.

“Maybe I should try it both ways. I sort of think sitting. You know, a little stunned. Standing, it’s like Queen Christina.”

Drogue smiled. “What’s wrong with that?”

“I think what you want is an anti — Judy Garland, right, Walter? I’ll take care of that for you.”

“The question is sitting or standing and for me it’s a question of composition,” Drogue said. “I’ll get another tape of Joy on the trolley while you sit up here. I’ll watch the tapes, you think about it.”

“When the time comes,” Lu Anne said, “we’ll know.”

“Hey, I like the way you think, kid.”

Lu Anne watched him walk off in his crouched, bent-backed scurry. His movements were always startling. He was given to sudden violent gestures that continually caught her off guard and made her feel like cringing.

As she watched, he pivoted without warning, as though he were dodging the swoop of a predatory bird.

“Tell Frank you love it,” he said. With a limp outstretched arm he indicated the faked trees and the trolley, the whole artificial world they had made there. Frank Carnahan was the production designer. “Tell him you feel like you’re back in the bayou.” She nodded. On the way to her trailer she saw Carnahan headed toward the beach that would be their next location.

“Frank!” Going up to him, she tried a little variation on Walter’s walk. “Hey, I love it,” she told the designer. “I feel like I’m back in the bayou.”

Carnahan looked pleased. His breath smelled strongly of rum. All designers were alcoholic Irishmen; it seemed to be traditional. The smell of liquor made her want a drink. Or something. Carnahan smiled with pleasure.

“Don’t think there isn’t a story behind it, Lee.”

As Carnahan unfolded the story behind it Lu Anne’s eye roamed the location in search of people from whom she might score. She had already solicited Joy and Jack Glenn, the young actor who played Robert Lebrun; both had disclaimed possession. Bill Bly, who stood stroking one of the trolley horses, was always a prospect. But Bly and Lu Anne had a past which she did not care at that moment to reexamine; and she knew he had been appointed to oversee her secretly. George Buchanan, a middle-aged actor who played Alcée Robin, was not in sight. A few years earlier George had been able to produce anything conceivable at an hour’s notice but he had become a family man and joined A.A.

“So, Christ, I thought,” Carnahan was telling her in his broad Pawtucket accent, “jeez, Spanish moss, it’s a goddamn tree disease. They’ll never let me get away with it. I thought we’d have to fake it …”

Lowndes kept watching her. He had opened his shirt to the sun, thrust out his pale chest and assumed a somewhat fascistoid stance. This, Lu Anne thought, might be a modified variation of the Country Come-on, which she had seen performed quite often enough. Cocaine, est conditioning, childhood trauma — who could tell what such a posture reflected? In any case, there was no chance of asking him for drugs. He was the enemy.

“So I sez,” Carnahan said, “don’t shit me, I sez. I seen this shit growing on trees at Rosarita Beach. Of course,” he said with a burst of emphysemic laughter, “I ain’t never even been to Rosarita Beach.”

She came right in on the laugh. “That’s too much, Frank,” she giggled. “Hey, is it true that Gordon Walker is coming down?” She squared her shoulders, straightened up and leaned her fists on her hips, having a short shot at Lowndes’s stance to see what it would feel like on her.

“I dunno,” Carnahan said. “Who is he?”

“The writer.”

“Aw,” Carnahan said, “I dunno. He didn’t fly in with Charlie and the dailies.”

She felt relief. Ever since the call she had been waiting for him with combined joy and anxiety. Better that I rest, she thought. That evening, she decided, she would take a little of her medicine as prescribed and sleep. That was the purpose of the operation after all. That her scenes be played with clarity and the right moves and the right timing.

Things were under control. The landscape was a bit overbright, that was all. She was not saying inappropriate things, and the only voices she heard were concealed under the wind or in the sound of the sea and she knew them for illusion and paid them no mind.

Vera Ricutti, the wardrobe mistress, overtook her on the way to the trailer.

“I just been looking at these seals,” she said excitedly. “There must have been dozens. These darling little seals,” she exclaimed, “with their little faces sticking up out of the water.”

“Oh, I would love to see them,” Lu Anne enthused. “I hope they come back.”

“So cute!” Vera said as they went into Lu Anne’s trailer. “You gotta see them.”

The assistant director’s voice sounded across the laager. “Joy, please? Driver? Everybody ready? I want quiet, the director wants to hear the sound on this. Right,” Hueffer shouted. His voice was turning hoarse. “Quiet! Roll! Action!”

Vera closed the door of Lu Anne’s air-conditioned trailer. Lu Anne herself sat down before her mirror, wiping her brow with Kleenex. Everything in the mirror was shipshape. She felt ready to work.

As she undressed, Vera held up a light-colored corset for her inspection.

“See what we got for you? This goes on first.”

“My God,” Lu Anne said, lifting her arms for the fit, “is this thing wool?”

“It’s a synthetic. This is the same one you had on at the fittings except we made it out of lighter stuff and put a zipper on it. But the real ones, the ones they wore then — they were real wool. This one was for tennis and jumping around in.”

“I can’t believe they went around in wool corsets in Louisiana in summer.”

“So they shouldn’t see your bod sweat, that was why they had it. No underarm stain and your dress couldn’t stick. We tried this number out on Joy and it photographs O.K. Anyway, we got another dozen white dresses if you do sweat it up.”

“I’m a sweater,” Lu Anne said when she was zipped in. “But I mean, how could they play tennis in woolen corsets?”

“India,” Vera said. “Africa. The white ladies wore woolen corsets. The locals, I guess they got to let their jugs dangle.”

The door opened and Josette Darré, the hairdresser, came in. There was a thin film of frost between Lu Anne and Josette; they never spoke except about the business at hand. Josette was a sullen Parisian hippie. She had rebuffed Lu Anne’s French with a pout and an uncomprehending shrug and that, for Lu Anne, had been that.

Josette stood by while Lu Anne got into her dress and stood before the mirror, letting Vera tie her loops behind and straighten her hem. Then she sat down to let Josette work on her hair, making faces at herself in the glass.

“Lucky locals,” she said, wiping her forehead again.

There was a knock at the door and Joe Ricutti, who was the makeup man, came into the trailer. He was laughing.

“That McIntyre kid is a barrel of laughs,” he rasped. “She’s in her own musical.”

“I don’t know,” Vera said in a weary tone. Vera was Joe’s wife; they worked together most of the time. “Where do they find them?”

Josette stepped aside; Joe Ricutti stepped in behind Lu Anne’s chair. Lu Anne raised an upturned hand and the makeup man squeezed it. They made small talk and gossiped while Joe gently held her chin and turned her face from side to side, examining her profile in the mirror. His fingertips delicately probed beneath her bones; in his free hand he held a makeup brush. Lu Anne sat, a prisoner, listening to the trolley outside and watching as Joe found the soft spots around her jaw, the lines to be disguised. She examined the stringiness at the base of her throat and it made her think of a dry creek bottom — cracks, dry sticks, desiccation where it had been serene, smooth and cool and pleasing.

There was a Friend in the room. I don’t like her, it said, the way she look. Lu Anne hushed it silently.

“I think,” she told Ricutti, “I think the kid’s a little long in the tooth for this one.”

Joe sang a few bars of protest. “Whaddaya talkin’ about? You look good! Look at yourself!”

He turned her head to reflect her profile and ran his finger from her forehead to the tip of her chin. “I mean look at that! That’s terrific.”

Gazing sidewise, she saw in the mirror Josette’s expressionless eyes.

Made-up, she sat for Josette’s last applications. Vera Ricutti brought forth a straw boater from one of several identical boxes and ceremoniously placed it on Lu Anne’s head. The Ricuttis drew back in admiration. Josette stood to one side, arms folded. Lu Anne caught a scent of lavender sachet. She saw the inhabited mask of Edna Pontellier before her.

The Drogues were watching Joy McIntyre ride her trolley on their tape monitor. Now, instead of standing and clinging to the pole, she sat on the car’s wooden bench. Her back was ramrod straight, her chin raised so that the weird light, refracted through overhanging tree boughs, played dramatically on her face, which was partly shadowed by her straw hat.

“The speed is perfect,” old Drogue said. “Make sure they keep it.”

“That kid,” young Drogue said of Joy McIntyre, “everything you put her in looks overdone.”

“Use her,” the old man said.

“Use her for what? She can’t act. Her diction’s a joke. She’s so flamboyant you can’t tell what your scene is gonna look like if you use her to light.”

“If you throw away that face,” old Drogue said, “… a face like that, a body like that — you have no business in the industry.”

After a moment, the younger Drogue smiled. “You want to fuck her, Dad?”

“That’s my business.”

“Say the word.”

“I’ll manage my own sex life, thanks a whole lot.”

“Patty will flip. I can’t wait to tell her.”

“I told you,” the old man said, raising his voice, “mind your fucking business.”

In a humorous mood, young Drogue opened the trailer door to find Hueffer and Toby Blakely awaiting him.

“So,” he asked them, “is it gonna rain or what?”

“I honestly don’t think so,” Hueffer said.

Drogue studied his assistant for a long moment. “Hey,” he said to all present, “how about this guy?”

Hueffer blushed.

“Well,” Toby Blakely said, “obviously we can’t intercut with the trolley footage if it rains.”

“We’ll keep shooting if it rains,” young Drogue told them. “If it stops we’ll make rain to match.”

“Yessir,” Blakely said. “That’d be the thing to do. These chubascos can last an hour or they can last for three days.”

“The next scene is all that concerns me,” Drogue said. “I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to shoot the last scene of the picture in rain. If it rains for a week we’ll wait for a week.”

Hueffer and Blakely nodded soberly.

Young Drogue charged toward the setup in his loping stride. Hueffer and Blakely accompanied him. His father ambled along behind.

“So we’re home free, right? Rain or not.”

“Unless it rains tomorrow and not today,” Blakely said delicately. “And we still have the last scene to shoot.”

“Go away, Toby,” young Drogue said.

Hueffer and Blakely went back to the camera setup. Drogue had caught sight of the producer, Charlie Freitag, who was standing with his production manager in the eucalyptus grove beside the trolley tracks.

“He has to show up now,” young Drogue said bitterly. “Freak weather, there’s no cover set — Charlie arrives. You can show him four hours of magnificent dailies and he’ll give you five hours of handwringing because an extra stepped on a nail.”

“Well,” old Drogue said, “that’s his function.”

Lu Anne, sitting outside on her folding chair for Ricutti’s last ministrations, became aware of young Drogue’s spidery approach. She looked up at him and he offered his arm, parodying antique chivalry. When she rose to take it, she saw that the writer named Lowndes had not moved from the spot where they had left him. Charlie Freitag was speaking to him but he was watching her.

“Is that guy bothering you?” Walter Drogue asked. “That Lowndes?”

She told him that it was all right. But although it was her business to be watched, the concentrated scrutiny oppressed her. There were too many eyes.

“My ride?” she asked.

Drogue nodded. “I think you’re right about her sitting. It looks good. Would you like a rehearsal? I was thinking we might steal a jump on time if we shot it. If you were ready.”

“Yes,” she said, “let’s do it.”

Drogue looked her up and down. “Can you walk in the skirt? Are the shoes O.K. on this ground?”

“Costume’s fine. If you like the colors.”

Vera Ricutti hurried up and bent to Lu Anne’s hem, judging its evenness.

“The hatband to match the parasol,” she told Drogue. “That’s how they did it.”

“It’s pale green,” Drogue said. “Is pale green the color of death?”

“Bien sûr,” Lu Anne said.

“No rehearsal?”

“Just let me prep, Walter.”

“All right. Take care of it for me, kid.” As she was walking off, he called after her. “The old nothingness-and-grief routine.”

She gave him a smile. Under the huge gum trees she paced up and down. “If I must choose between nothingness and grief,” she recited, “I will choose grief.” The words were only sounds. Voices on the wind that stirred the trees took them up. Wild palms. Nothingness. Grief.

Joe Ricutti was weighting the elements of his portable makeup table against the breeze. Drogue stood beside him watching Lu Anne.

“How is she?” he asked the makeup man.

“Fine, Mr. Drogue. She talks normal. Pretty much.”

Drogue turned to Vera, who nodded silent assent.

Hueffer came up to them earnest and sweating.

“I had a thought, Walter.”

Drogue said nothing.

“What would happen if we used a sixteen-millimeter lens on her ride. Maybe even a fourteen?”

“Nothing would happen,” Drogue told him. “It would look like shit, that’s all.”

Hueffer pressed him. “Seriously?”

“If you like,” Drogue said pleasantly, “we’ll talk about it later. Let’s get everyone standing by.”

Hueffer went back to the setup.

“Standing by in two minutes,” he shouted. “Everybody out of the set.”

“He’s an asshole,” Drogue told the Ricuttis. “A gold-plated shit-head.”

The Ricuttis made no reply. Joe Ricutti shrugged.

“If I must choose between nothingness and grief,” Lu Anne recited as she paced the dry ground, “I’ll have the biscuits and gravy. I’ll have the jambalaya and the oyster stew.”

It was Edna choosing. Lu Anne’s path took her toward the trolley and she saw them all watching her. Lowndes. Bly. Walker was coming down. But Edna was the one in trouble here. The pretty woman in the mirror.

“Hush,” said Lu Anne. Edna would be at home among the Long Friends.

Edna was independent and courageous. Whereas, Lu Anne thought, I’m just chickenshit and crazy. Edna would die for her children but never let them possess her. Lu Anne was a lousy mother, certified and certifiable. Who the hell did she think she was, Edna? Too good for her own kids? But then she thought: It comes to the same thing, her way and mine. You want more, you want to be Queen, you want to be Rosalind.

Edna walking into death was conscious only of the sun’s warmth. So it was written. Walker’s notes had her dying for life more abundant. All suicides died for life more abundant, Walker’s notes said.

She walked on through the light and shadow of the huge trees. It was, she thought, such a disturbing light. She could see it when she closed her eyes.

The woods were filled with phantoms and she was looking for Edna. Only her children came to mind, as though they were lost and she was looking for them. As though she were lost.

In such a light, she had knocked on the door of their first house in town. It was the first time, so far as she could remember, that she had ever knocked on a door in the manner of grown-ups. For a long time — she remembered it as a long time — the door stood closed above and before her. Then, as she remembered, it had opened and her father loomed enormous in the doorway, his blank gaze fixed at the far and beyond.

So she had said: I’m down here, Daddy.

His swollen drunk face turned down to hers after a while. His eyes were red and lifeless.

I thought it was somebody real, he had said. Someone had laughed. Maybe he had laughed.

I’m real, Daddy.

Life more abundant, Lu Anne thought, that’s the ticket. That’s what we need.

Then they were ready and Ricutti was wiping her down.

“You been crying,” he said. He started to daub under her eyes. “Your eyes are all red.” When she stared at him he lowered the cloth.

I’m real, she thought.

“Let’s go with it.”

“I don’t know,” Joe Ricutti said. “Maybe he don’t want that, Lee.”