Children of Light

“Leave it,” she said. “Just get the damn sweat off me.”

When they were ready to roll she sat in her marks on the trolley bench. Drogue called for action, the trolley bore her along, and she saw that the field around her was filled with fake camomile. In that moment she found Edna. Edna knew what living was worth to her and the terms on which she would accept it. She knew the difference between living and not living and what happiness was.

It occurred to Lu Anne that she knew none of these things. Too bad, she thought, because I’m the one that’s real, not her. It’s me out here.

When they had pulled the trolley around for another take, she saw Walter looking at her through the viewfinder. Who does he think he’s looking at? she wondered. Or is he just seeing movies? Across the reflectors, she saw Bly and Lowndes and Charlie Freitag, all looking. She began to cry again.

“How about it, Edna?” Walter Drogue asked. He spoke without taking his eye from the viewfinder. “What’s it gonna be?” He was just chattering to keep their spirits up. “Nothingness or grief?”

“Beats me,” Lu Anne said.

A few hours south of the border, Walker sat in a vast cool room whose upper walls disappeared into darkness. Four columns of light descended from an unseen source in the ceiling to form rectangles of light beneath them like campfires on a plain. One column lit a reception station where a young oriental woman in nurse’s whites attended a bone-white desk. Another fell upon an altar-like two-tiered platform arranged with desert plants, Indian ceramics and feathered rattles. The contrast between the sun-drenched barrens outside and the deep, almost submarine gloom within was very striking.

The room’s combination of primitive sanctity and futurism was a bit stagey, Walker thought, which was hardly surprising in the establishment of Dr. Er Siriwai. There were no devices of therapy or prosthesis in sight; nothing visible in the great room was suggestive of sickness. Yet it seemed to Walker that something in the refrigerated air was subtly foul. This was almost certainly, he decided, imagination.

Presently his name was called by the young woman at the white desk. Smiling, she handed him a shiny brochure and directed him through a dark doorway that opened at his approach. He found himself following a barefoot Mayan servant along a corridor of cool brown tiles.

The Mayan led him to a garden with a fountain in the center, a pleasant and restrained reproduction of an old Spanish cloister garden. There were herbs of all kinds and orange and lemon trees. An entire section of the garden was given over to the cultivation of red and yellow poppies. The air was fragrant and pure as sound doctrine.

Taking a stone bench in the shade, Walker had a glance at the brochure the smiling young woman had given him. It told the story of Er Siriwai, M.D., Ph.D., who, born on the roof of the world and reading, Mulligan-like, at the Royal College of Surgeons, Dublin, arrived in America to discover his preternatural curative gifts and become Physician to the Stars. The brochure went on to describe the doctor’s renunciation of self-serving, his carefully documented researches, his traduction by medical pharisees and finally his withdrawal to the wilderness in which his healing visions had taken shape and blossomed forth like the fig, the date, the almond and other such evocative trees.

After a few minutes of reading, Walker looked up to see his old friend come into the garden.

“Hello, Doc,” Walker said. “I guess you’re doing well, huh?”

Dr. Siriwai, a tiny man, who in his medical whites complete with reflector and band resembled a child’s doctor doll, struck an attitude.

“Come,” quoth Dr. Siriwai, “let’s away to prison;

We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:

When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,

And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies …”

The doctor seemed so moved by his own recitation that he was unable to continue. Walker was impressed by the facility with which he was able to quote poetry about prison, since he had only escaped its humiliations by a matter of minutes. At one time, Dr. Siriwai had been the film colony’s most eminent writing doctor and on two or three occasions something very like a medical hit man.

“And take upon’s,” the little doctor said, recovering, “the mystery of things,

As if we were God’s spies.”

Dr. Siriwai spoke an English that combined traces of his cloud-capped homeland and sporting Dublin.

“I’d love to have seen you, Gordon,” he said. “Bigod, it’s many years since I’ve seen Lear. I think it was Donald Wolfit I saw. Sir Donald Wolfit.”

“Well,” Walker said, “too bad you couldn’t make it.”

“I saw it in Variety,” Dr. Siriwai said. He sat on the end of Walker’s stone bench with his legs folded beneath him. “My immediate thought was this: Is he old enough for Lear? Does he know enough — from chasing skirt and bending his elbow — to essay a tragedy of that dimension?”

“Yes,” Walker said.

“Can it be, Gordon?”

“Remember how it is up there, Doc. You hang around, people tell you you’re terrific. You make a few big mistakes. People aren’t as nice. You know enough before you know it.”

“Still hacking away at the lingo, are you? On your way to B.H., I suppose? The Awakening?”

“I guess that was in Variety too.”

“You’ll never learn, Gordon. No hope for you.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Downers, is it?”

“It is. If you’d be so kind, Doc.”

“Righto,” Dr. Siriwai said. He unwound from his posture, disappeared among the dwarf citrus and presently returned with three small cardboard boxes marked in Spanish.

“This is the only genuine Quaalude in the state,” he told Walker. “The rest of it’s counterfeit. Made from mannite, foot powder, God knows what.”

“I appreciate it, Doc,” Walker said, and reached for his wallet.

“Keep your money, man. A tiny favor. Pass it along. The favor, I mean, not the downers necessarily.”

“When I get down to B.H.,” Walker said, “down to the location, I’ll tell them hello. Lots of people down there remember you fondly.”

Dr. Siriwai settled Western-wise on the edge of the bench.

“No doubt,” he said, “they remember my little bag fondly. My uppers and my downers and my come-into-the-garden-Mauds.”

Walker saw that there was still dew on the trilliums in one shaded corner of the garden.

“You were much in demand at poker games, I recall.”

“Right,” the doctor said. “I was a wanton player, a desperate case. Lost. Always. Heavily.” He was watching Walker. “You’re not well,” he said after a moment. “You look very badly off indeed.”

“I thought I might put myself away for a while after B.H.,” Walker said. “Clean up my act.”

“If you want my advice,” Siriwai said, “you’ll do it now. Leave the coke and the ’ludes alone. You’re doing coke, I can tell you are. You’d better stop the lot, Gordon. You’re not a boy, you know.”

“My life’s a little out of hand,” Walker explained. “I’d like to make one stop before I rest.”

“In peace, Gordon. That’s how you’ll bloody rest. Christ’s sake, man, when I first saw you I thought you were one of the customers.”

“Well, I don’t feel that bad. I’m going down to B.H. to see them shoot my movie. By the way,” he asked Dr. Siriwai, “why do you call them customers? I mean instead of patients or something more … agreeable.”

“I call them as I feel them to be,” Dr. Siriwai explained. “I don’t call them squeals, or marks or tricks. I call them customers. I’m their dealer.”

“I see.”

“You’re going to see that schizophrenic poppet, eh? That little southern creature with the booby eyes? Lee Verger?”

“She always liked you, Doc. I think she’d hope you might always speak well of her.”

“Don’t give her cocaine, Gordon. No coke for her. You want to see fair Heebiejeebieville, my lad, give one of them cocaine. Mark my words. Hide it. Throw it away before you let her have any.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” Walker said.

“And for God’s sake take care of yourself. Alcohol especially — it’s such rubbish. And when your liver goes, well …” Dr. Siriwai shuddered with distaste. “It’s a jolly unpleasant way to die, Gordon. Almost as bad as … what we treat here.”

“I know what it’s like,” Walker said. “My father died of it.”

“Do you remember what W. C. Fields said about death?”

“He said he’d rather be in Philadelphia.”

“I don’t mean that. He called death the Man in the Bright Nightgown. Do you see? It has the originality of delirium. Fields was in total bibacious dementia. So when he went out, his death probably looked to him like a man in a bright nightgown.” Dr. Siriwai giggled.

“I like your poppies,” Walker said. “I always think of them as wildflowers. I don’t associate them with gardens.”

Dr. Siriwai smiled at the fine blue sky.

“Poppies, yes. Sweet forgetfulness.” He closed his eyes.

“If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.”

“This stuff you give your … customers, does it work?”

“Work? My dear man, assuredly it works. It cures cancer.”

“Really?”

“I wish I had a tanner for every abandoned life we’ve saved here, Gordon. I myself have been awestruck with some of our turnabouts. It gives you a mighty respect for nature’s capacity to heal, I’ll tell you.”

“Is it what you give them or is it attitude?”

Dr. Siriwai seemed to find the subject trying.

“There are no miracles, Gordon. I mean to say, old chap, I don’t believe in miracles, do you? There is attitude, yes. Also herbal therapy, diet, exercise, the lot. Holism. The holistic method.”

“Anyway,” Walker said. “It’s a pleasant place.”

Dr. Siriwai looked grim.

“You learn to conserve your spiritual energy here. There’s a lot of negativity about. I instruct my staff to keep a positive attitude. Hang on to the handrails, I tell my people, or they’ll drag you down with them.”

“So you do lose a few. Customers.”

“Some of them, Gordon. It’s their time and they’ve no right to be here. But one doesn’t turn down a contract. Hope is the anchor when all is said and done.”

“Too bad,” Walker said, “you can’t save them all.”

“Well,” Dr. Siriwai said, “it would be wonderful for business. I mean, are we talking philosophy or what?”

“I was just curious,” Walker said, “about whether you believed in it or not.”

“I believe in hope,” Dr. Siriwai said.

“The anchor.”

“Indeed,” said Dr. Siriwai. “Exactly so.”

“I should be on my way,” Walker said. “I have a few hours of driving.”

“Tell them at reception to give you one of our decals. It’ll ease your passage on our highways and byways. We’re not without influence in this part of the world.”

They shook hands and Walker offered his thanks for the Quaaludes.

“I remember you, Gordon. I remember some fine evenings of drink and jaw under the palm trees. I always thought you were a clever fellow and a great wit. But the thing is, I don’t remember your work at all. Nothing you ever did quite maintained itself in my memory.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Doc. I thought you liked the things I did.”

“Ah,” said the doctor, “no doubt I did, no doubt I did, Gordon. But your work — I’d have to say it — sat lightly on my recollection.”

“Work in movies can be ephemeral.”

Dr. Siriwai patted Gordon’s forearm.

“That’s it, you see. Ephemeral. Sure, it’s the nature of the medium.” Siriwai’s eyes came alight. He took Gordon by the arm and walked him around the garden. “I had a list once, Gordon — not a written list, of course, but a private mental list — of people I thought were supremely talented. Or good at certain things. Or clever but spurious. Or talented but lost or wasted it. I wasn’t just a sawbones, y’see, indifferent to the artistic aspects of the motion picture. I cared”—he touched his heart—“and I loved, I appreciated the work of the people I met in practice. But in your case, Gordon, though I love you dearly, old son, I can’t for the life of me remember the things you did. Or where on me little list you figured.”

“As one who loved his fellow man,” Walker said.

“Oh ho.” Siriwai gave a little clap with his soft hands. “Well said.”

“I was all right. I started as a kid. I had no training and I never took acting as seriously as I should. Never learned my craft until it was too late. As for writing — the kind I did was always the kind anyone can do. I never tried another kind. Except, of course, for that show. The opera.”

“Never got to direct?”

“No.”

“Pity,” Siriwai said. When they had completed their garden round, he released Walker’s arm.

“Perhaps you gave in too much. The immediate rewards were impressive to a young fellow — I remember well. And in my day there was the glamour of it all. One can’t give in too much to immediate reward, you know. You lose something, eh? Have to pay off on one end or the other.”

“That was it, I suppose.”

“Look at me,” Dr. Siriwai said. “You’d think I was well situated. I might envy myself from the outside looking in but little I’d know about it. I’m more than sixty-five, Gordon. According to the Vedas I should be free. I should return to the mountains, free as a mountain bird to meditate, and think about it all from morning till night. But I can’t, you see.”

“How’s that?”

Dr. Siriwai laughed merrily.

“Because I failed where you failed, Gordon. Failed to do the job. When I was studying in Great Denmark Street, now, I thought I’d go home to practice. Up the valleys. Into the starving villages. Over the rope bridges I’d go, risking fever and dacoits, only my books for company. In the end — not a bit of it.” He shook his head and uttered a series of reflective grunts. “I had an odd experience on my way from Dublin back up to London. Doubtless you know the Indian expression ‘karma’?”

“It’s widely used, Doc. You hear it all the time.”

“Well,” the doctor continued, “there I was, years ago and I’m just off the ferry from Dun Laoghaire on the Holyhead — Euston train. Somewhere — Bangor it must have been — the guard comes through first class, shouting his head off for a doctor. Well, I thought, who’s that excellent thing if not myself? So I went with the man and what do I find a few cars back but a lad in an empty compartment who’s stinking of Jameson’s and going cyanotic before our eyes. There’s an empty tube of Nembutal in his fist.

“ ‘Stop the train,’ I cried, and they did and off I went with this chap, my very first patient, to the nearest hospital and they pumped him out and he awoke to the light of day. Now, I later learned, Gordon, that the fellow recovered completely. In hospital he chanced to meet a beautiful young Welsh nurse with whom he fell madly in love — as she with him — and whom he subsequently strangled. Naturally they hanged him. I was a bit put off by it. First patient, value of life and all that. I daresay I’d have been sued today. In any case, finally, I went for the big bucks and the bright lights just as you did.”

“First you think it’s the money,” Walker said. “Then you’re not so sure.”

“Well, there’s no going back to the mountains for me now, Gordon. I have to stay here and die. With my customers.”

“I guess,” Walker said, “I’d better be rolling. To get down there before dark.”

“Do get yourself straight, old fellow. Hope the anchor, eh? Who knows but you may do something worthwhile one day. Only remember what the holy book says, Gordon: ‘We are not promised tomorrow.’ ”

“Thanks, Doc. I hope you continue to prosper.”

“Gordon, as long as there’s … well”—he smiled broadly and, as Gordon had remembered, some of his teeth were indeed of gold—“you know what I mean. I’ll be in business for a while.”

As Gordon went out the doctor’s hands were pressed together in benediction.

In the air-conditioned gloom of their trailer, the Drogues, father and son, watched a videotape of the last take. It was Lu Anne on the trolley, a continuous medium-close shot. Eric Hueffer and Lise Rennberg, Drogue’s Swedish cutter, watched with them. They sat in a semicircle on folding metal chairs.

“We have some very nice cutaways for this if you need them,” she told the director.

“Neat,” young Walter Drogue said, and switched on an indirect light over his desk.

“Walter,” Eric Hueffer said good-humoredly, “just so you don’t think I’m a complete nut, could I offer my arguments for a fourteen-millimeter lens in that scene? Or the next one?”

“Interesting idea, Eric.”

“Well, jeez,” Hueffer said, “you dismissed it out of hand an hour ago.”

“Did I?” Walter asked. “How rash of me. Of course we could use a fourteen there, Eric. But we’d need painted backdrops instead of the trees. Do you think we could work that out?”

“Come on, Walter,” Eric said.

Lise Rennberg smiled sedately.

“Maybe we could use footage from Caligari, huh, Eric? To show that the character’s at the end of her tether?”

“Obviously I was wrong,” Hueffer said, and got out of his chair. He was a tall young man, almost a head taller than Walter Drogue junior, and his height compelled him to stoop when he stood in the trailer.

“Don’t even think about it,” young Drogue said.

When they were alone the Drogues ran the videotape over again.

“Man,” young Drogue said, watching the screen, “that’s what I call inhabited space.”

Old Drogue reached out and stopped the tape, freezing the frame.

“You had her crying?”

“She cried. I thought I’d keep it.” He turned to his father. “You don’t like it?”

“I like it but something bothers me.”

He started the tape over again, stopping it about where he had before, on very nearly the same frame.

“Something,” old Drogue said softly, and shook his head.

“What’s the trouble?” young Walter asked. “You want it shot through a fourteen too?”

“You’re very hard on that young man,” Drogue senior told his son. “He’s efficient. He’s enthusiastic. I mean … a fourteen-millimeter — it’s off the wall but you can see how he’s thinking. He comes out of the schools.”

“So do I,” Drogue junior said.

“Maybe if your name was Hueffer you’d be his A.D., huh? Then he could be sarcastic to you.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” his son told him. “You don’t know what it was like. You can’t.”

“If your name was such a burden,” old Drogue said, “you should have changed it.”

“I was Walter Drogue the Less.”

“Tough shit,” the old man said.

“And I was never allowed to be as much of a fool as fucking Hueffer.”

“Stop picking on him,” old Drogue said. “You’re lucky to have him. He could go all the way, that kid.”

“His day will come,” young Drogue said.

“Will that be good news for him?”

“He’ll get his own picture. Little by little things will get out of hand. He’ll try weird shit — like spooky lenses. He’ll try to do everything himself. Presently they’ll smell his blood. They’ll sabotage him and laugh at him behind his back. His actors will panic. His big opportunity will turn to shit before his eyes. He’ll be afraid to show his nose on his own set.”

“Well,” the old man said, “that’s how movies get made. Myself, I’m too superstitious to wish disaster on my own assistants.”

“It’s not my wish. It’s inevitable. It’s the kind of guy he is.”

Drogue senior started the tape again. He and his son watched Lu Anne take her ride.

“I could watch that for twenty seconds, couldn’t you?” young Drogue asked. “Do most of the ride in one continuous medium-close, then maybe cut away to her point of view?”

“Why did you have her cry?”

“Hell, she was crying. Why not?”

“It looks out of character.”

“Only to us.”

“What do you mean?” old Drogue demanded. “It’s her cracking up.”

“For Christ’s sake, Dad, don’t you think I know that? It’ll play just fine.”

“Ever try to edit around somebody going bananas? You end up as crazy as them.”

“Well, I have two options, don’t I? I can make her not be crazy. Or I can get the picture completed with her as she is. Which do you recommend?”

“She has a way of being crazy,” old Drogue said, “that photographs pretty well.”

“Right,” his son said.

“Some do, some don’t.”

“She does. Ever since her old man started packing, her energy level out there has been a hundred and twenty percent.”

“She could do a complete flip. She has before.”

“Then I guess I fly in Kurlander or nourish her with my blood or something.”

“You don’t have too far to go.”

“I have some of Walker’s literary scenes to do up in L.A. Some important interiors. I need her coherent for that.” They watched the trolley tape run to its completion. “I’ll have Walker down here. I’ve got that peckerhead novelist to keep amused. If I can get her through this weekend, I can get her the rest of the way.”

“Good luck,” the old man said.

They went out into the afternoon; young Drogue looked at the sky. Overhead the sky had cleared and the wind had slackened. The storm hung on the horizon out to sea, a distant menace.

Hueffer and Toby Blakely had discovered a tarantula hiding in the shade of the trolley’s undercarriage and were tormenting it with a stick.

“They can jump really well,” Drogue told his men. Hueffer got to his feet.

“I was raised with tarantulas,” Blakely said. “Learned to love ’em.”

“I think maybe you’re right about the rain, Eric.”

“You thinking about shooting Lee’s walk tonight?” Blakely said.

“I’m thinking if it doesn’t rain we better do it. We’ll never get a better match and it could be pissing buckets tomorrow.”

“I’ll go on record,” Hueffer said. “Beautiful sunset tonight. Indicating chubasco in the morning. A day and a half of solid rain.”

“You predict weather on my set, you better be right,” Drogue said. “I have vast powers of evil. I don’t like bad predictions.”

“I think he’s right,” Blakely said. “If it was my money I’d pay the overtime and keep everybody out. Be better than looking at the rain tomorrow.”

“I’ll talk to Lu Anne,” Drogue said to Hueffer. “And since we have the producer here we can consult with him. Which is always fun.”

He looked down and discovered the tarantula approaching the tip of his Tony Lama boot. “You fuckers better be right,” he told them. He raised his foot, brought it down on the creature and mashed it into the sandy ground. “Or else.”

Blakely looked at him evenly. “That’ll just make it rain, boss.”

He and Drogue watched the young assistant director set out purposefully in search of Axelrod, the unit manager.

“You like that kid?” Drogue asked his photographer.

“Yeah,” Blakely said. “I kind of like him. Don’t you?”

Drogue had begun to scrape the hairy remnants of spider leg and thorax from the bottom of his boot and onto the edge of the trolley.

“Don’t you think he has a certain assholish quality?”

Blakely stood looking into the director’s eyes for several seconds.

“Maybe,” he said at length.

Drogue nodded affably. “I kind of like him too.”

Lu Anne was having her hair combed out as Vera Ricutti folded the last of Edna Pontellier’s cotton dresses, putting the pins in a cardboard box.

“God,” Lu Anne said, “they did you up like a celestial. Then they turned you loose with more spikes and prongs than a bass lure. There must have been young boys cut to ribbons.”

“That taught them respect,” Joe Ricutti said. “They should bring it back.”

Shortly afterward young Drogue appeared at the trailer; Josette and the Ricuttis took their equipment and left, unbidden.

“How are you?” young Drogue asked. She told him that she was fine. The pins on the dress made her think of defense and escape. Thorns. If I could, she thought, I would emit the darkness inside me like a squid and blind them all and run.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Drogue said.

They walked in a wide circle among the trees, hand in hand, Lu Anne wearing the thin white beach robe over her underwear.

“The most important question to me,” Drogue told her, “is whether you want to do it tonight. If you don’t, we’ll wrap.”

She said, after all, it was just walking in the water. She told him she would do it and that was what he wanted to hear.

Back at the trailer Vera Ricutti asked her if there was anything she wanted. Darkness was what she thought she wanted. Cool and darkness.

“Just to put my feet up awhile,” she told Vera.

When she was in the cool and dark the Long Friends emerged and began to whisper. She lay stiff, her eyes wide, listening.

Malheureuse, a Friend whispered to her. The creature was inside her dresser mirror. Its face was concealed beneath black cloth. Only the venous, blue-baby-colored forehead showed and part of the skull, shaven like a long-ago nun’s. Its frail dragonfly wings rested against its sides. They always had bags with them that they kept out of sight, tucked under their wings or beneath the nunnish homespun. The bags were like translucent sacs, filled with old things. Asked what the things were, their answer was always the same.

Les choses démodées.

She turned to see it, to see if it would raise its face for her. Their faces were childlike and absurd. Sometimes they liked to be caressed and they would chew the tips of her fingers with their soft infant’s teeth. The thing in the mirror hid its face. Lu Anne lay back down and crossed her forearms over her breasts.

Tu tombes malade, the creature whispered. They were motherly.

“No, I’m dead,” she told it. “Mourn me.”

In the next moment she found herself fighting for breath, as though an invisible bar were being pressed down against her. She turned on the light and the Long Friends vanished into shadows like insects into cracks in the walls; their whispers withdrew into the hum of the cooler. Delirium was a disease of darkness.

Her pills were on a shelf in the trailer lavatory. She went in and picked up the tube. Her body convulsed with loathing at the sight of the stuff.

Outside, the sun was declining, almost touching the uppermost layer of gray-blue storm cloud over the ocean. Wrapping the beach robe around her, she stood for a moment close to panic. She had no idea where to go, what to do. In the end she went to the nearest trailer, which was George Buchanan’s.

Buchanan rose in answer to her knock; he had set his John D. MacDonald mystery on the makeup counter.

“George,” she said breathlessly. “Hi.”

“Hi, Lu Anne.” He looked concerned and cross. He was a stern-faced man, a professional villain since his youth in the fifties. “I’m not here, you know. I’m hiding out.”

“Are you, George?”

“My son is with his girlfriend back at the bungalow. I came out here to give them a little … what shall we call it?”

“George,” she said in a girlish whine, “do you have a downer? Please? Do you?”

He looked stricken. He was so shocked by her request that he tried to make a joke of it.

“For you, Lu Anne, anything. But not that.”

“It was just a shot,” she said.

“Hey,” Buchanan said, “this is me, Buchanan. I’m into staying alive. I mean, Christ’s sake, Lu Anne, you know I don’t use that stuff. It tried to kill me.”

She shook her head in confusion.

“I mean, I can’t believe you asked me.”

She slammed his door shut, turned and saw Dongan Lowndes, the writer, apparently on the way to her trailer. He had seen her coming out of Buchanan’s quarters. He did a little double take to let her know that he had seen it.

“Mr. Lowndes,” she said. “I’m sorry but I can’t remember your first name.” She bit her lip; she could not seem to lose the whininess in her manner.

“Forget it,” Lowndes said. “Call me Skip.”

“Skip,” she said, “Skip, you wouldn’t have a downer on you? Or maybe back at your room?”

He stared at her. Had he taken the reference to his room for a proposition?

“No,” Lowndes said. “Or uppers or anything else.”

“Oh dear,” Lu Anne said. She smiled disarmingly for Lowndes. “I was hoping for a little something.”

“Sorry,” Lowndes said, looking as though he were. She saw that he was anxious to please her.

“Even liquor would do,” she said. “I don’t usually drink when I work, but now and then a small amount can prime a person.”

“Right,” Lowndes said, “well, I don’t drink anymore myself. I can’t. But can’t you send out to the hotel for it?”

She shifted her eyes from side to side broadly in a comic parody of guilt.

“I don’t want people to know.” She paused and sighed. “Dongan, could you?”

“Skip,” Lowndes said.

She looked at him impatiently.

“Skip,” he repeated. “Call me Skip.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” she said. “I can just see why your folks called you that. Could you get us a bottle, Skip, so we can sneak a slug down here?”

“I have trouble handling it,” Lowndes said. “I’m off the stuff.”

For a little while he looked at her, a faint fond smile playing about his thick lips.

“I guess I could, though.”

She opened her eyes wide and swallowed bravely. So go and do it, she was telling him, you shit-eating bird. The Long Friends cackled admonition.

“Scotch?” he asked. His gaze was sad. Whether he was begging for her favors or simply disillusioned, she could not tell and did not care.

“Yes,” she said, sounding absurdly eager, “that’d be nice.”

“I’ll go up and get a bottle,” he said. His voice wavered as he said it, like an adolescent’s.

Lu Anne did not feel particularly like drinking liquor but it seemed important that there be something to take.

“Oh great, Skip,” she said. “Now, you remember the car we came in, huh? Well, you just go back to that car and get him to take you up the hill and you can get us a jug. Only carry it in something, will you, because I don’t want people to think we’re a couple of old drunks.”

“Right,” Lowndes said. “I’ll brown-bag it.”

“And when you’re up there,” she said as he started for the car, “you ask them if a Mr. Walker has arrived, O.K.?”

“Mr. Walker,” Lowndes repeated. “And a plain brown wrapper.”

Across the clearing, Lu Anne saw Jack Glenn, the actor playing Robert Lebrun, in conversation with Joe Ricutti. She went over to them. A few years before, she had heard an agent describe Glenn — a natural who could fence, juggle, swing from vines and play comedy — as too small to be big. Whenever she repeated the story she got her laugh and people said it was a voice from Vanished Hollywood. But the agent had not vanished and Jack Glenn, at five feet nine inches, worked irregularly. Someone had told her it was because he was fair-skinned; a fair-skinned actor had to be taller. It was a matter of semiotics, the person had said.

He turned to her approach. “Ah,” he said with his hand over his heart, “Les Douleurs d’amour.” He kissed her hand, correctly, with the appearance of a kiss. Glenn was nice-looking and bisexual but for whatever reason she had never been attracted to him. Perhaps because he was fair and short.

“I don’t suppose,” Lu Anne said, “that since we talked you’ve come into any … you know, into possession of …”

“What a coincidence that you should ask.”

“You have!” she exclaimed joyfully.

“No,” Jack Glenn said. “But I was just thinking about it myself. I was thinking of asking that guy.”

He pointed to a middle-aged Mexican in a safari jacket who was holding one of the trolley horses with a twitch, examining its leg. As he worked, he was humming “The Trolley Song” from Meet Me in St. Louis.

“Who is he?” she asked.

“The vet,” Glenn said.

“What?” she said.

“The vet,” Joe Ricutti told her. “For the horses. So they shouldn’t get sick.”

Lu Anne turned to watch him work.

“I never thought of Mexican locations as having vets.”

“I always thought they shot the horses,” Jack Glenn said archly. “Don’t they?”

“This is No Help City,” Lu Anne said. “I mean, it’s a very bad situation.”

“This unit doctor,” Glenn said, “you tell him you can’t sleep, he tells you how many gringos are locked up in Baja Norte. ‘One hundred twenty U.S. citizens in jail.’ That’s the only English sentence he knows. So I was just thinking, like hmm — there’s the vet. Maybe he has something nice for us.”

“Oh God,” Lu Anne cried in exasperation, “like horse tranques? How about an STP trip? Or some angel dust?”

“Get him to give you a shot,” Joe Ricutti said. “You’ll go off on the rail at Caliente and finish first at Del Mar.”

“Well,” Lu Anne said, “we’ll have to tough it out, won’t we? Everything will have a clear black line around it, like a death notice.”

Jack Glenn laughed. “You’re so weird, Lu Anne.”

“That’s why we’re all here,” she told him. “You included.”

“I don’t know how people can joke about drugs,” Glenn said in mock sadness. In fact, as Lu Anne well knew, Glenn was mainly indifferent to drugs. He was only trying to amuse. “We should get someone to score for us in L.A.,” he said. “Bring shit down with the dailies.”

“Maybe Joy got hold of some,” Lu Anne suggested.

Glenn shook his head.

“Well,” she said, “I’m going to lie down and die again.”

She went back across the field to her trailer and there was Lowndes, sitting on the three little metal steps with a brown bag beside him. He stood up and presented the bag.

“Got any ice?”

But of course she did not want Lowndes, only the liquor. Or something. She opened the trailer door, trying to think how she might get rid of him. He followed her into the trailer and closed the door behind them.

She had some weeks-old ice in the trailer. She smashed the tray repeatedly against the miniature sink to get the cubes free, brushing aside Lowndes’s gestures of assistance. There were two plastic glasses on her makeup table; she filled them with ice and whiskey and passed one to Lowndes.

“We’ll have to make this a quick one, Skip, O.K.? Because I’m not really through working, you see.” She could not keep her words from running together, so intensely did she want the drink and Lowndes out. “I just wanted something … you know, when I get out of the water to dry me out. Well,” she said, “I guess dry’s the wrong word, isn’t it? I just wanted something to keep me wet between takes, aha.”

He was a magazine writer, she reminded herself, an important one, and he was there to write about the picture. With fascinated horror, she watched his upper lip draw back to expose a line of unhealthy red gum. “Not,” she laughed gaily, “that I’m planning to play the scene loaded, because that’s not how I work. Hell no, why …” She broke off. The man in front of her seemed to grow more and more grotesque and she was no longer confident about the reality of what she was seeing. There was something familiar about him, familiar in a most unpleasant way. It might be that he reminded her of someone. Or it might be worse.

“It’s been a very long time since I had a drink,” Lowndes told her.

“Is that right?” she asked. “Well, here’s how.”

When they drank, Lowndes’s features puckered with distaste. His eyes watered.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said to Dongan Lowndes, “when I’m through this evening we’ll have a proper drink. We’ll set around and drink and talk. How’s that?”

“I thought it would be all gnomes and agents and flacks,” Lowndes said. “I’d love to see you later.” He finished what was in his glass in a swallow and turned pale. “Shall we have dinner?”

“Yes, yes,” Lu Anne said, standing up. “Dinner it is.”

She gave him the one-hundred-and-eighty-degree smile. He was a starfucker, she thought, a cheap starfucker who wanted to get her in bed and then brag to all his colleagues about it and then, without fear or favor, humiliate her before all of with-it, literate America. Not, she thought, that it hadn’t been done before.

“Yeah, that’s great,” Lu Anne told him. “After work.” She put a hand on his arm to shove him toward the door. Then she realized that she must not shove, so the hand on his arm was transformed into something like an affectionate gesture. She plucked an imaginary thread from his shirt. After work — it was just like waiting tables again, only they knew where you lived.

“Are you working late?”

“Sundown. After six.”

“Well,” Lowndes said, “I’ll be in the bar around seven-thirty. I’ll see you there.”

“Is he here?”

“Who?”

“Gordon. Gordon Walker.”

“Gosh, I’m sorry. I forgot to ask. He’s the screenwriter, isn’t he? Is he a friend of yours?”

“Yes. Yes, an old friend. Hey, thanks for the scotch,” she called as he went out. “Skip.”

He had brought a full bottle of Dewar’s. The only problem was that it was whiskey and it would smell up her breath and the trailer, so she would have to rinse her mouth and spray evil-smelling deodorants around.

She sipped her first drink slowly. It changed things for her; changed the trailer from a ratty piece of aluminum machinery into a cool, well-appointed refuge. She turned the overhead lamps down a few degrees of intensity and found that she had created a happy kind of light. It was all so much nicer.

When she had finished her first drink, she poured a second into her plastic glass, half filling it. She wet her face with a cool towel, turned the air conditioning up and shivered comfortably.

Her copy of the script was on the makeup counter beside her chair, face down, open to the scene that was to follow. After a moment’s hesitation she picked it up, not at all sure if she was in the mood for work or Edna, Kate Chopin or Gordon Walker’s take on things in general. She had read it many times before.

The scene was the novel’s climax, her walk into the sea; if she opened her trailer door she would be able to hear the grips at work on the setup for it.

She moves life Cleopatra, Walker had written, as though impelled by immortal longings. The lines of direction were addressed only to her, a part of their game of relentless Shakespearianizing, half purely romantic, half higher bullshit. He meant he wanted Edna going out like the Queen in Antony and Cleo, Act V, scene 2.

She senses a freedom the scope of which she has never known. She has come beyond despair to a kind of exaltation.

Well, Lu Anne thought. Well, now. She had a little scotch and put the script face down in her lap.

“Really, now, Gordon,” she said.

Of course, that was the spirit of the book and its ending. But exaltation beyond despair? She had never found anything beyond despair except more despair.

There were some questions to take up, some questions for the writer here. Did Walker really believe in exaltation beyond despair? Did that mean she had to? Would she be able to play it? For that she had an answer which was: absolutely, you betcha. We play them whether they’re there or not. And once we’ve played them they’re there and there they stay, just like Marcel Herrand’s Larcenaire, Henry Fonda’s Wyatt Earp, Jimmy Dean’s Jimmy Dean. Exaltation beyond despair, she thought. Christ, I can stand that out in the middle of the floor and tap-dance on the son of a bitch.

It was wearying to have to think about despair, to have to think about Edna and Walker and what was there and what not. About the last especially, she wasn’t sure she had the right to an opinion. Who knew what was there and what wasn’t? The liquor made her head ache. Who could say what exaltations there were?

What if walking by the water one day you broke through it? You’re walking into the water like our Edna and bam! Life more abundant.

That’s a trick, she thought suddenly. That’s a mean trick, because Walker was right about the lure of life more abundant. To go for it was dying. That kind of abundance, going for that was dying.

That was what he had meant. That, and Antony and Cleopatra, Act V, scene 2.

Very clever, Walker, she thought, but a pretty tough one to lay on your old pal. He had rewritten the ending over the past year, not the action but the emotional tone in his descriptions. It occurred to her that he might think he was about to die. Or be wishing himself dead, or her.

There was, she decided, no point in getting upset about it. It was only the script, and the script an adaptation from what was only a book. Beyond despair to a kind of exaltation as far as she knew was nothing more than a theatrical convention, just as walking into the drink at sunset was only movies. Her trouble with Walker was that, down deep, she thought he knew everything. The past, the present and future, all the answers. But he was just a writer, as she was what she was.

She drank a little more; a confusion of emotions assailed her, her head ached. She took a couple of aspirin, turned out the lights and slumped into a chair with her legs up on the lounger, the glass in her hand.

What’s going on, Walker? she thought. What’s happening here? Who are we and what are we playing at? Where does one thing leave off and the other stuff commence?

“I’m real,” she said aloud. Having so declared, she had to have a drink and think about it. I know that I am. I know what’s me and what’s not me. That’s all I know. She finished what was in her plastic glass and threw it gently onto the makeup counter.

It was not quite dark inside the trailer. The late-afternoon sunlight hurled itself against every hatch, every weld and seam in the big metal compartment. The Long Friends came out to gossip and brush her with their wings. They were always there when it was dark and reality in question. Their lavender sachet breath was cloying, narcotic.

“Hush now,” she told them.

They prattled on about secrets. Much of their talk was about things that must never be known, ruinous scandals, undetected crimes.

The incessant undercurrent of noise drove her to rise and turn on the overhead lamps. Only one of the Long Friends remained with the light, curled up in the darkest corner, smiling vacantly.

The ones born aren’t enough for you, the Friend said. The ones unborn, they’re too many.

“Don’t unborn me,” Lee said. “Really,” she said, “really, you have a nerve giving that abortion crap to me. I gave life to four and you took one back.” She turned to the corpse-like creature in the corner. “Want me to lie awake nights? No, thanks.” She cursed it in Creole French until it raised chalk-white splayed fingers to stop its ears. Watching it do so, she raised her own hands to the side of her head.

“You’re a sickness,” she said without looking at it, “that I breathed in from a graveyard.”

She had an inward vision of a hot September day that sometimes came to her in dreams. She was small, always a child in her dreams, and walking a sandy road down home. On one side of the road, government pines were planted in rows and beyond them tupelos grew beside the motionless river. She crossed herself walking beside a cemetery wall; the oven graves on the far side were invisible to her. She held her breath as long as she could but she could hold it only so long. It was before the hurricane and the high water, just before they’d moved to town, the same summer she remembered her father huge and drunk in the doorway, looking past her for somebody real. Sometimes it pleased her to imagine she had breathed in the Long Friends that day, although it was years before she began to hear and finally to see them.

She turned and looked at the one in the corner. The rough cloth in which it had wrapped itself, the colorless god’s-eye pattern of its wing seemed as vividly present as anything in the trailer.

“Do you love me?” she asked. She began to laugh and cut herself off. Her prescription pills were in the pill case in her carry bag. She took them out, poured them into her hand and mentally counted them. There were enough to put her out forever. That was what she had wanted to see. All right, she thought. There were enough — there would be enough tomorrow. Next year and the year after that. It was always there. She put the pills back into their plastic capsule.

Resting her brow on her hand, she tried to think about the scene she was about to play. Cleopatra. Immortal longings and exaltation beyond despair. She clenched her teeth and shook her head violently, wrapping the beach robe closer about her shoulders. Then she began to sing.

Her song was a wordless prayerful hum. Years before, she had sung in convincing imitation of the saintly folk sopranos of her youth; she had no training but she liked to sing. As she sang, she relaxed, closed her eyes and let her arms go limp beside her. The song located her to that September day when walking beside the burial ovens she had breathed in some evil fateful thing.

Save me, she sang. That was what the song was about. Somebody, save me.

She leaned her head back, clasped her hands and let her voice rise in a strong tremolo. The song summoned up such a wave of sadness, of recollected hopes, old loves and losses that she thought she would die.

Where’s my exaltation beyond despair? she thought. There’s nothing here but this dreaming child, all unhappy.

She let her song rise again and spread out her arms. In Louisiana the old black people called that kind of singing a bajo or a banjo song, a homesick blues for where you’ve never been, which for them was Africa but for her was God only knows.

Be there, Lu Anne sang. Be there, Sweet Jesus. Be there.

She leaned back in the lounger, exhausted. When she turned to the mirror she saw her own secret eyes. No other person except her children and the Long Friends had ever seen them. She had used them for Rosalind, but so disguised that no one looking, however closely, could know what it was they were seeing in her face. None of her children had secret eyes.

She got to her feet, transfixed by what she saw in the mirror. The shock made her see stars as though she had been struck in the face. She watched the secret-eyed image in the glass open its mouth; she tried to look away.

Clusters of hallucination lilacs sprang up everywhere, making a second frame for the mirror, sprouting from between her legs. In her terror she called on God.

Suddenly the place was filled with ugly light, sunlight at once dingy and harsh. Trash light. Josette was standing in the open doorway, wide-eyed and pale. She took a step backward, her lip was trembling. It was the first time Lu Anne had ever seen the Frenchwoman show anything other than unsmiling composure.

Look, you little bitch! Lu Anne thought. Then she was not sure whether she had not said it aloud. Look at my secret eyes!

Vera Ricutti and her husband were behind Josette; Vera had a costume over her arm, a gray cotton garment and a blue bandana. The Ricuttis looked up at Lu Anne with something that might be reverence.

“What’s wrong, kid?” Vera Ricutti asked.

“I was prepping,” Lu Anne said. The accusatory malice and disgust she saw in Josette’s eyes made her feel sick.

“You were screaming!” the girl cried. She turned to the Ricuttis for confirmation. “She was screaming in there!”

“I was singing,” Lu Anne said quietly.

Josette looked up at her with a twisted triumphant smile; Vera Ricutti was holding her by the arm.

“Don’t tell me!” she shouted at Lu Anne. “You were screaming.”

“I was prepping.”

The woman shrugged and grunted.

Joe Ricutti came forward and spoke quietly to her and she walked away.

“We’ll take care of it,” Joe said in his gravelly voice. “We’ll talk to Eric. I mean, you don’t have to take that from her.”

Lu Anne stood in the trailer doorway, her beach robe undone, leaning one elbow on her wrist and chewing her little finger.

“Shit,” she said.

Vera stepped up and gently urged her back inside.

“So you were screaming. You got a right.”

“Absolutely,” Joe Ricutti said.

Walter Drogue and his father were walking from their trailer to the beach. The old man wore a blue bathing suit that scarcely concealed his privates and a gondolier’s striped shirt.

“You think you have to be smart to direct pictures?” the old man asked his son. “Bullshit. Some of the biggest assholes you ever met are immortal.”

“I never said you had to be smart,” his son replied. “I said it was useful. I was thinking of my own case.”

“Ford,” the old man said. “A born political director. An Irishman with the eye of a German Romantic. Peasant slyness. He never got in trouble here and he wouldn’t have got in trouble over there like Eisenstein.”

“You’re lucky it was here you got in trouble,” young Drogue told his father. “Over there they would have just shot your ass and no fancy speeches.”

At the beach Blakely and Hueffer were waiting for them. The Chapman Titan had been driven onto its track.

“Check out the sky,” Blakely said.

Old Drogue went off to settle himself in a folding chair beneath a beach umbrella. Drogue junior, Blakely and Eric Hueffer looked at the horizon.

The line of storm cloud seemed to have risen some thirty degrees, so that the horizon line was a convergence of two gold-flecked tones of blue. The sun’s intensity was just beginning to fade.

“If those clouds will stay where they are when the sun sets,” Blakely said, “we’re gonna have us one fuckin’ humdinger of a sunset.”

“I’m God,” Walter Drogue told his assistants. “I still the restless wave. I command the sun. Where’s Joy?”

“Joy,” Eric Hueffer called, and Joy McIntyre stepped out from inside the nearest bathhouse door. She wore a form-fitting gray cotton bathing suit. A blue bandana was tied around her head.

“Want to watch a tape?” Hueffer asked.

“No,” Drogue said. “I want to watch her walk.”

A pair of grips were summoned to lower the arm of the crane; Drogue climbed aboard the camera turret and was weighted in.

“Joy!” Hueffer shouted. “Got your marks?”

“Yeah,” Joy said.

They weighted Toby Blakely in beside his leader.

“Action!” Drogue shouted, and the mounted camera retreated before Joy’s advance down the beach, hauled along by the grips at their guide ropes. Young Drogue peered through the camera’s eye, his baseball cap reversed like a catcher’s.

“O.K.,” he said, when he was satisfied.

The grips swung the Chapman’s arm to its original position and brought Blakely and young Drogue to earth. Joy leaned on one extended arm against the side of the bathhouse. Drogue, Hueffer and Blakely hunkered down near the water’s edge.

“She’s so fucking beautiful it’s gross,” Drogue said. “She comes out of there and you just think: I want to fuck her. You lose your sense of proportion.” He glanced over toward where his father sat and saw the old man’s glance fixed on the comely stand-in.

“Lee has a lot more dignity,” Blakely said. “And a pretty sexy frame for a woman with two or three kids. Or even more.”

The three of them walked over to where Joy was standing and looked her up and down.

“I like this bathing suit,” Hueffer said.

Drogue patted Joy’s shoulder, and seized a piece of her bathing suit between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s cotton. To be accurate, it should be wool, but we figured fuck it. So,” he said, pointing to Joy, “as not to cause unnecessary discomfort to our personnel.”

Joy smiled gratefully.

“Actually,” Drogue told his associates, “we’re cheating a lot with this suit. This thing is circa 1912. If we gave ’em the real Gay Nineties article this scene would look like Mack Sennett.”

“I should think this ’un might be good for a few laughs,” Joy said. The three men looked at her sternly.

“When you take it off, doll,” Drogue told her, “no one will be laughing.”

“Crikey,” Joy said. “Take it off?”

“Don’t you look at the script?” Drogue asked her. “Of course you take it off.”

“Crikey,” Joy said.

“Miss Verger is taking her suit off. It’s in the script. If she can do it, you can do it.”

“I suppose,” Joy said doubtfully.

Drogue turned to Hueffer and drew him aside. Blakely went along with them.

“What I need to know here is how it’s going to look when she takes that suit off. It’s tight, she’ll have to wriggle — O.K., we don’t want a striptease. We’ll probably cut to the suit falling away but I’m not sure how far into the disrobing we want to go. So let’s roll tape on this shot — have her come down the beach to her marks, take the bandana off and toss it. Then let her get out of that suit as gracefully as she can and drop it aside. See if she can start by raising her right arm and baring her right breast.”

“Good,” Hueffer said. Drogue reacted to his approval with a slow double take. “Do you want her to go into the water?”

“No time for that. We’re shooting for sunset and that means three takes if we’re lucky. Otherwise we have to do it again tomorrow.”

“If it doesn’t rain,” Hueffer said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Drogue said. “Hurry up. Go tell her what she has to do.”

“I’m thinking eroticism,” Drogue said to Blakely. “I’m thinking sacrifice. Motherhood. Yes?”

“Right,” Blakely said.

“I’m thinking human sacrifice. Madonnahood.”

“Tithood?”

“Tithood too.”

They watched Eric discuss the situation with Joy McIntyre. Eric was speaking enthusiastically and at some length. Joy was pouting.

“Look at the ass on the little bitch,” Drogue said angrily. “Christ almighty.”

“Well,” Blakely said, “don’t get pissed, boss.”

Late in the afternoon, as the highway curved down from the Cerro Encantada, Walker found himself driving within sight of the sea. He pulled over at the next turnoff, got out of the car and walked to the end of a promontory from which he could see the ocean and the trail that lay ahead of him. The sun was low and losing its fire, the ocean a cool darkening blue that made him shiver in the desert heat. Between the ridge on which he stood and the sea lay the Honda Valley. It was every variety of green — delicate pastel in the circular irrigated cotton fields, silver-green in the stands of eucalyptus, a sinister reptilian emerald along the base of its canyon walls. Miles away, perhaps as much as an hour of cautious driving over the tortuous highway, a paved road descended in figure-of-eight switchbacks to the valley. He could make out the hotel buildings. From where he stood they seemed to rest precariously in the folds of a red table rock that commanded the coastal plain.

As his gaze swept the valley, he saw sharp glints of reflected sunlight from the seaside edge of one of the eucalyptus groves. Before a line of wooden structures, tiny human figures went to and fro along the shore. The sunlight was striking silver-paper reflectors, metal and glass. It took him a moment to understand that he was seeing The Awakening unit at work.

There was a copy of Peterson’s Western Birds and a pair of binoculars behind the rear seat of the Buick; Walker’s wife was a birdwatcher and he had driven her car to Seattle. He took the glasses, walked back to the edge of the ridge and picked out the unit. He saw a woman in an old-fashioned gray bathing suit walking toward the water. As he watched, the woman stopped short and sauntered back to the spot from which she had begun.

Walker watched her start again, noted the camera crane on its track and the figures on the turret. A sound man attended the woman like an acolyte, carrying his boom aloft. He saw the woman remove a bandana from around her head and toss it to the sand. He saw her walk on, remove her bathing suit and stand naked and golden in the sun. He was seeing, he supposed, what he had come to see.

It was very strange to see them as he did — tiny distant figures at the edge of an ocean, acting out a vision compounded of his obsessions and emotions. He had never been so in love, he thought, as he was with the woman who stood naked on the beach in front of that camera and several dozen cold-eyed souls. It was as though she were there for him, for something that was theirs. He felt at the point of understanding the process in which his life was bound, as though the height on which he stood was the perspective he had always lacked. Will I understand it all now, he wondered, understand it with the eye, like a painting?

The sense of discovery, of imminent insight excited him. He was dizzy; he checked his footing on the uneven ground, his closeness to the edge. Her down there, himself on a rock miles away — that’s poetry, he thought. The thing was to get it straight, to understand.

He saw them dress her again, saw her walk, lose the bandana, then the bathing suit in what, from where he stood, read as a series of effortless moves. Tears came to his eyes. But perhaps it was not poetry, he thought. Only movies.

The seed of meaning he had touched between his teeth began to slip away. He was struck by the silence between their place and his; he strained for the director’s voice, the sound of the sea. Gulls were what he heard, and wind in the mesquite.

What had it been? Almost joy, he thought, a long-lost thing, something pleasurable for its own sake. It had slipped away.

Fuck it, he thought. I got something almost as good.

He went back to his car, looked up and down the road to see that he would not be surprised and managed with some difficulty to do a few lines. Some of his cocaine blew onto the car seat and he had to brush it away and see it scatter on the wind.

It had been just like a dream, he thought, the same disappearing resolution, the same awakening to the same old shit. It wasn’t there. Or was hardly there — a moment’s poetry, a moment’s movies. Hardly enough there to count, not for the likes of him.

The coke was no help. It had been something like a daydream, provoked by the smell of the wind and the dizzying height and his impatience to see her; no drug would bring it back. Rather, the drugs gave him the jitters — made him feel exposed, out there in the open beside the road, pursued and out of breath. When he went out to the ridge again and fixed his binoculars on the naked figure he saw it was not Lu Anne but a younger woman who somewhat resembled her. There’s your poetry, he thought. Your movies.

The Drogues, Blakely and Hueffer crowded into the director’s trailer to watch tapes of Joy’s undressing.

When the screen showed her stripping, a reverent silence fell over the group.

“What was the big fuss?” old Drogue asked.

“She bitched. She didn’t want to show her ass.”

“Did you tell her that Lu Anne would?”

“I told her. She had the nerve to tell me her problem was the Mexicans. She said, ‘They take it wrong.’ ” He mimicked her accent and demeanor. “ ‘They take it wrong,’ she said.”

A murmur of disapproval arose in the dark trailer. They all sat quite still, watching Joy naked on the screen.

“A frame like that,” the old man said, “and she never took off her pants for a camera? Hard to believe.”

Young Drogue froze the frame.

“That’s going to be broken up,” he said. “It does turn out to be a striptease.”

“Remember,” Hueffer said, “with Lee it won’t be as flamboyant.”

Drogue was thoughtful for a moment.

“I think the opposite,” young Drogue said. “Joy’s so built and busty and dumb that you kind of … the thing gets this wild unpredictable quality. You don’t know what the hell’s happening but it’s weird and it turns you on. With Joy I might use it.”

“The kid does something for a camera,” Blakely said. “No question.”

“She’ll be my angel,” old Drogue said.

“With Lu Anne, you might have her bare her breast and it’s tragic. You don’t want to see her undress. She’ll look humiliated and anorexic and crazy. The whole ending goes limp and we’re dead.”

“He’s right for once,” old Drogue told Hueffer. “You’re wrong.”

“Let’s do this in one take, guys!” young Drogue shouted. He motioned Eric to his side. “When you get Lu Anne on her mark, Eric, clear the set.”

“Why?” Heuffer asked.

“The Mexicans,” young Drogue told him. “They take it wrong.”

Joe Ricutti had set up shop under a beach umbrella beside the bathhouse. He sponged and powdered Lu Anne’s face and gave her a neck rub. Josette worked on her hair, no more sulkily distant than was usual. The gaffer and best boy were winding cable for an arc. Lu Anne had a look at the sun and picked up her worn copy of Kate Chopin’s novel. The wording was a solo Liebestodt, death as liberation.

Edna had found her old bathing suit still hanging, faded upon its accustomed peg, Chopin had written.

When Josette finished with her hair, Lu Anne stood up.

“I’m going to walk it through,” she told Ricutti, and reading as she walked, set out for the bathhouse.

She put it on, leaving her clothing in the bathhouse. But when she was beside the sea, absolutely alone, she cast the unpleasant prickling garments from her, and for the first time in her life, she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited it.

“Clear the set, please,” Eric Hueffer intoned through his megaphone. “If you’re not working, we don’t want you on the set. Clear the set, everybody, please.” The Peruvian continuity girl made the announcement in Spanish, for the Mexicans.

Lu Anne leaned her head against the side of the bathhouse and thought of Edna naked in the open air for the first time. How sad it was, she thought. There was no way to film it. She had never thought of herself like Edna, but some things, she thought, they’re the same for everyone. A little Edna in all of us.

Naked for the first time, the open air. In the heat of the day it should be. A beach on the Gulf, midday, the water just cool, the sun hot on your body, the wind so still you can smell your own skin.

She finds out who she is and it’s too much and she dies. Yes, Lu Anne thought, I know about that. I can do that, me.

Too bad about the sunset, because it was clichéd and banal. Low-rent theatrics. Middle-income. Middlebrow theatrics.

She strolled at the water’s edge, reading. No one had called for quiet but the gaffer and the best boy spoke in low voices.

How strange and awful it seemed to stand under the sky! how delicious. She felt like some newborn creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that she had never known.

The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body, in its soft close embrace.

The cosmic fuck. Well, Lu Anne thought, who better than me? But the drowned people she had seen in the church hall after the hurricane down home had not looked particularly fulfilled.

She read the line again aloud: “The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body, in its soft close embrace.” She looked out to sea. That’s how it would seem to Edna. Something out there for me. Life more abundant. You let it go and you lie back and you let it happen. You don’t have to keep your clothes on or your mouth shut, your legs crossed or your hair up or your asshole tight. You don’t have to worry. You don’t have to do a goddamn thing but …

“Miss Verger, please,” Eric Hueffer called into his megaphone. Mechanically, she turned back toward her chair and the makeup table. Ricutti put a dry sponge to her temples. Josette ran a comb through her hair.

“Please, everyone,” Hueffer was telling the stragglers, “if we don’t need you, we don’t want you here.”

Lu Anne read on about Edna Pontellier’s last swim.

She thought of Leonce and the children. They were a part of her life. But they need not have thought that they could possess her body and soul.

Well, Lu Anne thought, nothing is free, Edna. Her life had not afforded her the opportunity to experience that sentiment. No doubt it was dreadful. A Doll’s House. Empty days. Childbirth. Massa having his nights out with the boys, his quadroon sweetie. The kids night and day. She decided it did not do for her to think about children.

They were waiting for her. She put the book down and stood up and Drogue came up to her, guiding her toward the bathhouse, telling her about the shot, how to come out, where to take the suit off, when to go into the water.

The mercy of the sun, Lu Anne thought. The informing words. Awful. Naked. Delicious. Sensuous. Soft close embrace. Dying was always fun. Immortal longings. Exaltation beyond despair. So much popcorn, she thought. To get the character you had to go down and inside to where your grief was. The place your truest self inhabited was the place you could not bear.

She stopped and leaned against Drogue. They were at the door of the bathhouse, and the camera was advancing on her. Two Mexican grips waited beside the Titan, privileged characters who were expected not to take it wrong when she undressed.

“O.K., partner?” Drogue asked.

“I’m fucked, honey,” she told him. “Life’s a condom.”

She looked into his panic-stricken face. He’s seeing it, she thought. Yes, she thought, behold the glory, Jim. Look at me shining, I’m the Queen of Lights.

“How about a half-moon on the bathhouse door, Walter? I could come out and do Judy Canova.” She bared her front teeth at him.

“Great,” Walter Drogue the younger said. “Only — some other time, maybe?”

“Have no fear,” she told the director. She stepped inside the bathhouse, closing the door behind her. There was only one of them inside.

How can you dare speak so to them? it asked gently in the old language. They don’t understand you. It’s we alone who do.

“Which one are you?” she asked it wearily. It was Marie Ange, she knew.

“Marie Ange,” she sighed. “Monkey-face. Go away, eh? Va-t’en.”

Eric was calling for quiet.

She raised her eyes into the darkness. “Oh, darkness above,” she prayed, “help your sister darkness below.”

She crossed herself quickly. She hadn’t meant such a terrible prayer. She thought that she might go to church in town that evening.

Drogue’s voice cut through the silence on the other side of the door.

“Action!”

She opened the door and walked out into the golden sunlight and caught a quick glimpse of Charlie Freitag, the producer. She fixed her gaze on a point above the reddening horizon where the sun’s fading glare might light her eyes yet not dazzle her. At the appointed mark, she stopped and lowered the shoulder straps of her one-piece gray bathing suit. It was not, she thought, of any thwarted love that Edna died. The suit peeled away easily as she eased her torso free. She kept her eyes on their quarter of the sky.

It was dangerous to probe one’s inward places. The chemistry was volatile, fires might start and burn out of control. What if I, Lu Anne thought, who cannot see past mirrors, should confront myself there? My self.

If I, who see everything in mirrors, who cannot approach the glass without some apprehension, were to see my inward self there, I would not die. But Edna might.

Medusa, she thought. That’s what that’s about. It’s your own face that turns you to stone, your own secret eyes.

Poor Edna. Poor Edna gets a sight of herself, she explodes, crashes, burns. Never knew she was there. Catches fire like the feckless child of family legend, little Great-Aunt Catastrophe in her going-to-mass dress on Christmas morning, alight from the Christmas candles, a torch-child spinning around the parlor.

Poor old Edna, little Dixie honey, sees her own self on the shield of hot blue sky and dies. Sees all that freedom, that great black immensity of righteous freedom and swoons, Oh My. And dies.

Stepping out of the suit, Lu Anne tossed it aside and walked on toward the water. All at once she was reminded of Walker, but whether it was of something he had told her or something in the script, she could not recall. Something of him had come to her mind for a moment and gone. She stepped into the warm water; two brawny men in swimming trunks stood waist deep just outside the shot, a third waited thirty or so feet out, resting on a float with a coiled length of line.

Shoulders back, head high, she walked along the inclining sandy bottom. The camera tracked with her, eye to eye, and when she lost her footing and pushed off, she was aware of it pulling back and hovering overhead as she swam out from shore.

When Drogue called cut, the man with the float advanced toward her but she turned back. Wading out of the water she heard a little clatter of applause.

“Where’s the crew?” Lu Anne asked, shaking her hair. Vera Ricutti brought her a beach robe.

“We cleared the set,” Drogue told her. “We thought it would be friendlier just us.”

“Well, Walter,” she said happily, “if you-all are going to applaud I would like a lot of applause rather than a little.”

“Shall we bring them back?” he asked. “Want a claque?” He strode away from her, calling for his soldiers.

“O.K., muchachos! Once more for protection.”

“Arcs ready if you want it,” Hueffer told him.

“I don’t want it. I want reflectors in place.”

Lu Anne went to the trailer to have her hair dried and combed.

Light was fading; the sun seemed to hang suspended above a thin curl of purple cirrus cloud. They were running out of clear sky. A gray wall of rain was approaching from the northwest; the wind carried a few fat drops to spatter on the beach and people looked at the sky in alarm. In the end, the rain held off and they had time for two more takes of Lu Anne going to the water.

“I’ll give it to you two ways, Walter,” Lu Anne said.

Drogue was on the crane with Blakely and the camera operator. Eric Hueffer stood beside the truck watching the sky.

“Anything you want, babe,” Drogue told her.

Action was called, Lu Anne flung her suit aside and went in.

Vera brought her the robe and they started back to her trailer.

“That was the James Mason ‘think I’ll do a few laps around Catalina between Old-Fashioneds’ one,” she called to Drogue as she went by.

As they set up for the sky and ocean shot, Drogue looked grim.

“Watch this,” he told his assistant. “We’re gonna have the Lu Anne Happy Hour.”

“Is that a bad sign?” Hueffer asked him.

“Fuckin’ right. But it’s the up side.”

She came out again for their last take of the day and repeated the scene. The bathing suit was tossed aside. Numb with self-recognition, Edna went to her death.

“Hey, Lee,” Hueffer asked her as she came out of the water, “what was that called?”

“That,” she told him, clutching the robe about her shoulders, “is called Lupe Velez Takes a Dunk.”

Hueffer broke up. Drogue, Blakely, even the operator chortled as they clung to their uneasy perches.

When Lu Anne had passed, the laughter froze on Drogue’s face. He looked at Blakely and shrugged.

“She’s funny,” he said.

It had been dark for over half an hour when Walker’s road began its snaking descent from high desert to the canyon floor. His headlights were focused on a wall of deepening green that seemed to spin before him; the indifferently banked road felt as though it were falling away beneath his tires, threatening to send him out of control. At last, to his relief, the road ran flat and straight. He kept to the center, wary of animals, riders, pedestrians — and in less than a mile he saw the hotel sign.

Its entrance was tree-lined; a fountain played in front of the foyer. Its buildings were of white stucco that glowed under decorative lamps. To Walker after his weary drive it seemed all compounded of inviting sounds, liquefactive shadow and soft light.

An attendant took his bags and at the desk he found himself expected. The room to which he was conducted was as tasteful as its elegant extravagance could bear, a showy red-and-black room that suggested Spanish melodrama, theatrical sex and violence. Carmen. He overtipped the bellman with a ten from his winning roll.

He felt anxious and weary. On a whim, he had come to a place where he was without friends to see a woman whom he had no business to see. There were no other motives of consequence behind his journey.

In the shower he hummed an old number:

You take Sally, I’ll take Sue.

Makes no difference what you do.

Cocaine.

The breeze that came through his open balcony window was fragrant with sage, jasmine, eucalyptus. At Santa Anita his winner had been called O.K. So Far.

Among his supplies he found a packet of cologne-soaked towels, part of a first-class flight kit issued him on a flight that someone else had paid for. Not the Shakespeare people; there was no first class with them. Television. He dressed and brought out his works. He was preparing a snort, thinking O.K. So Far, when there sounded a knock on his door. He put the drugs away and went and opened it.

His visitor was Jon Axelrod, the unit manager.

“Hey, Gordon. Our house is”—he gave his hand a flip—“you know?”

“Thank you, Jon. I’m glad to be here. May I offer you some blow?”

Axelrod took a chair.

“I have to tell you the unit has very strict rules regarding the use of drugs. We report narcotics to the police. Otherwise we can’t get insurance.”

Walker spread a few lines out on his mirror.

“Stop at Siriwai’s?” Axelrod asked.

“Mexico’s not Mexico without the doctor.”

“Did you tell him we all miss him?”

“He knows.”

Axelrod removed a crisp U.S. twenty from his wallet, rolled it and took a snort. He was a slightly built man with an ageless fey face. He regarded Walker from the corners of his eyes, which were blue and bright with fractured whimsy. Walker took a line for himself and they sat in reflective silence for a moment.

“Lu Anne is good,” Axelrod said. “What I seen. Not a whole lot. But good stuff.”

“How’s her head?”

“She seems cheerful.”

“I can’t imagine,” Walker said, “what you mean by that.”

“She’s working well. We’re watching her. See, her husband just took their kids off on a trip. We weren’t expecting that. We thought — the guy’s a shrink, he’s her shrink. We put them all up on the budget. Then he leaves.”

“Where is she now?”

Axelrod smiled.

“Take a guess.”

Lu Anne, Walker thought, would be either screwing in a Jacuzzi or in church.

“In church?”

“Pretty good, fella. She went to church in town. Billy Bly took her down.”

Walker was not too pleased to hear about Bly.

“Billy’s keeping an eye on her,” Axelrod told him. “We’re trying not to leave her alone too much.”

“How come he’s here? What do you call him on the budget?”

“Stunt coordinator. Hey, we made some changes in the shooting script, Gordon. We have a lot of falls.”

Walker was not amused.

“We got him down for special effects. He supervises the guys in the water, the guys with the horses. Lu Anne likes him.”

“They keeping company?”

Axelrod looked puzzled. “No,” he said. “I mean, her old man just left.”

“It’s a bad sign,” Walker said, “when she goes to church.”

They finished what was on the pocket mirror.

“How’s Walter?” Walker asked.

“Walter’s the same. What a talent, huh, Gordon?”

“Fuckin’ A. Will he be happy to see me?”

“Maybe he’s scared you might get to Lu Anne. Maybe not.”

Walker said nothing.

“You know Walter, Gordo. He doesn’t care if people like him. He thinks most people are wienies.”

“What does he think I came down here for?”

“He knows, Gordon. Everybody does.”

“Do they really?” Walker said. “Isn’t that something?”

“Wipe your nose good,” Axelrod said. “We should go see Charlie.”

The hotel restaurant had a terrace overlooking the bay. Adjoining it was a blue-tiled lounge with a service bar and a few candlelit tables. Two graying men sat at a table near the door. One was Charlie Freitag, esteemed gentleman producer. Charlie rose when Axelrod and Walker came in.

“Hello, Gordon,” Charlie called. He looked quite surprised. “How was your drive?” He turned to his companion. “This man drove down from L.A. He insisted!”

Walker was always happy to see Charlie Freitag, a pleasant, friendly man, possessed of a fatuous manner and many well-laid plans.

Charlie introduced the man he was drinking with as Howard Robinson. Robinson had the best suntan of anyone there; he wore checkered slacks and white loafers.

“Don’t care to fly?” he asked Walker.

“I like driving in Mexico,” Walker said.

“I could keep you in that for life,” Howard said, “if that’s what you like.”

Walker decided he represented Las Vegas investors, and it developed after a brief exchange that he did. He and Axelrod proved to be old acquaintances and Axelrod was the son of an IATSE enforcer from the days of the labor wars. There were always a lot of hoods around on Walter Drogue’s pictures and Walker had never determined the reason for it.

“Walter told me to greet you on his behalf,” Charlie said to Walker. “He bids you welcome.”

“Ah,” Walker said.

“You know who I think you should meet?” Charlie Freitag asked Walker. “You should meet Dongan Lowndes. Know his work?”

Walker knew it. It was a single novel of great force.

“I’m glad,” Freitag said. “He’s doing a piece on us for New York Arts. It can do us a lot of good where it counts.”

They went toward a dark corner where another party of two were sitting. Walker recognized one as Jack Best, the unit publicity man. Best hated him relentlessly over some drunken misadventure he could not recall.

“Mr. Lowndes,” Charlie said, with the air of a man opening first one expensive cigar and then another, “let me introduce Gordon Walker, who adapted The Awakening for the screen. You know Mr. Axelrod, I think.”

Lowndes when he leaned forward turned out to be a bulky man with a pitted face and aviator spectacles. The hand he offered Walker was big and thick-fingered like a countryman’s.

“How’re you?” Lowndes said. Walker saw that he was drunk and so was Best.

“This is Dongan Lowndes, Gordon,” Freitag said. “Our guest from New York.” He clapped Walker on the shoulder. “Listen,” he said, “we finished the late work today, so tomorrow we can drink and be merry. People are coming for a cookout at eight o’clock. Carne asada under the stars. We’ll talk.”

“Great,” Walker said.

“Claire would have loved to make it, but — you know, she’s busy with groups. She sends her best.”

“And mine to her,” Walker said.

Freitag took a quick rueful glance at his publicity man and went back to his table.

Walker smiled and murmured and made himself small. He was exhausted, propped upright by cocaine; he wanted people to be agreeable.

“We’ve been waiting for your girlfriend,” Jack Best said to Walker. “She just stood us up for dinner.”

“It was very informally arranged,” Lowndes said. He spoke in a quiet lowland southern accent. His diction was just ever so slightly blurred about the edges. “I probably misunderstood.”

“No,” Jack Best said. “She’s like that. A lot of them are. They don’t care about the public anymore.”

Studying Best across the table, Walker blundered into eye contact and suffered the full weight of his gratuitous hatred.

“I figured she was probably with him,” the publicist said, indicating Walker and staring him down.

“C’mon, Jack,” Axelrod said. “Be nice.” He put a friendly arm around Best’s shoulder and squeezed him.

“I liked your novel,” Walker told Lowndes, still wanting to please. “I mean your most recent one.”

Lowndes raised his glass. “My one and only,” he said.

Walker saw that he had said the wrong thing. He had intended to be polite and Lowndes was offended.

“Walker,” Jack Best intoned. “Gordon Walker.” He rose gravely and staggered off toward the toilets.

“I don’t know what he’s got against me,” Walker said to Axelrod when Best was gone. “What’s his problem?”

“His problem is you humiliated him in front of about a hundred people in Colorado two years ago. You don’t remember?”

Walker tried remembering. “No,” he said.

“Too bad,” Lowndes said. “It must make a funny story.”

“I think I’ll have a drink,” Walker said. He had decided that he was not among friends and that there would probably be some kind of trouble. He supposed that had been in the cards all along. “Have they closed the bar?”

The bar was still open; Axelrod found a waiter and they ordered another round. Lowndes ordered for Jack Best.

“He’s so amusing,” Lowndes said. “I thought we should keep him greased.”

When Best returned, he drank a full half of his drink and settled his gaze on Walker again.

“Jack’s been telling us the history of film,” Lowndes explained. “I’ve learned a lot too.”

Lowndes’s tone held a warning for the unwary but Walker decided the hell with it. He wondered if Charlie Freitag really thought that an article about a Mexican location in New York Arts would do any good where it counted. He concluded that the reference was to where it counted for Charlie Freitag.

“For instance,” he asked Lowndes.

“Jack believes,” Lowndes told them, “that Marty was the beginning of the end. It was all down thereafter.”

“Marty who?” Axelrod asked.

“The picture,” Lowndes explained. “The film of that name.”

Jack Best half rose to his feet.

“You,” he shouted at Walker. He turned to Lowndes and Jon Axelrod. “Him!”

“Yeah, Jack?” Axelrod asked softly. “That’s Gordon, Jack. What you wanna tell us?”

“I saw him years ago. I saw you years ago, Walker. I saw you and I was talking to King and I says”—he heaved a sigh and drew breath—“I says looka that guy. I says look. Because the guy — him. Walker. The guy has this stupid shirt on. A fuckin’ hippie shirt on. Hippie shirt. And his hair. And I says — King. King, I says. Is that a boy? Or a girl? And King says.” A mask of bewilderment closed over his features.

“We must infer what King says,” Lowndes declared.

Walker finished his own drink. “No,” he told them. “King says — fuck you, you disgusting little pissant of a flack. You’re not fit to lick the chickenshit off that talented young man’s shoes. You’re a drunken contemptible cipher, a dirty little hole in the world. A crepuscular fool, King says. A homunculus, King says. Go over to Oblath’s and cut your weaselly little rat throat, King says. Anyway,” Walker told them, “that’s the way I remember it.”

“Hey, Gordon,” Axelrod said, “you’re doing it again, man.”

“King?” Lowndes asked. “Vidor?”

“Kong,” Walker said. “Dennis King. Dolores King. Jack knew them all.”

Best appeared to have gone to sleep. Axelrod nudged him and he sat upright.

“The choreographer at the Sands is dead!” he told the people at the table. Everyone watched him. “That’s it,” he shouted. “The choreographer at the Sands is dead!” He choked and his head fell forward. Just before his nose hit the table he retrieved his posture and his face rose up at Walker like a creature from a black lagoon. He was shaken by spasms of what appeared to be laughter. He reached over and seized Walker’s arm and held it hard. “The choreographer at the Sands is dead!” he shrieked. Freitag and Robinson, the restaurant staff all turned to see him. His voice became a croak. “And the Sands … the Sands doesn’t …” He seemed too shaken by his fit of peculiar laughter to continue. “The Sands doesn’t even have a line!”

Having said so much, he uttered an explosive cry and fell face forward, still clutching Walker’s arm.

“What do you call that?” Axelrod asked.

Walker detached his arm from the old man’s grip.

“The riddle of the Sands,” he said.

The plaza of Bahía Honda town was not much to look at but it took on a little ragged charm at night. There was a raised pavement of whitewashed brick in the center, set around a single pink tile on which glitter-covered seashells had been pasted to form the numeral 1969. Under a row of naked bulbs at the edge of the sere football field, a few vendors were selling tortillas, ices, plastic sandals. The town’s few fishing boats were in port and there was laughter and music from one of the square’s two cafes. The other, opposite, stood empty, gloomy and ill lit. Before the town’s cinema, people of all ages and conditions stood in line for the evening showing of Dr. Zhivago. At the eastern end of the square, the town’s single church, an unimposing box of white masonry surmounted with a little bell tower, stood open for the Friday-night service of benediction.

As Bill Bly, with Lu Anne on his arm, walked past the queue, people fell silent to look after them. One or two of the free spirits in the crowd felt emboldened to whistle; it was Bly who provoked them. He was a man something less than six feet tall, he wore white slacks, a black tee shirt and a white baseball cap with the word SHAKESPEARE over the visor. His hair, spilling out from under his hat brim, was curly and seemed more golden blond than any number of tropical locations’ suns could bleach it. But Bly drew catcalls only from behind his back and only from innocents. The street-wise, the hustler or the desperado had only to check out the way in which he carried himself to know caution. He moved with the balance of a wire walker, as thoughtlessly well centered as an animal. The artisan class of the film industry cherished its Bill Bly stories: the amok knifer in the Philippines spun three hundred and sixty degrees on his own wrist; the bar louts laid out unconscious before they had stopped smiling. Bly worked as a bodyguard quite as often as he did as a stuntman and sometimes informally undertook both jobs at once. In his middle thirties now, he looked younger. He had been a stuntman since the age of fifteen.

Lu Anne walked, as it were, in the lee of him. She wore as her church clothes a beige skirt and blouse and a Spanish mantilla. As they walked up the church steps she clutched his elbow. At the door she smiled up at him. When she went in he lingered outside on the top step, watching the faithful as they passed, playing with a straw finger trap he had picked up in the market.

Benediction had not begun and there were only a few people inside the little church. Lu Anne walked across the stone floor to a crucifix that stood beyond two rows of votive candles to the right of the main altar. The crucifix was as old as anything in that empty quarter of the country, recovered from a fire on the mainland. Its crossbars were burned black, the seared Christus figure was tortured into a shape that made it look stylized and somehow modern. Its charred condition served to enhance the sense of martyrdom and elevated suffering it conveyed. Half a dozen worshippers stood or knelt rapt before it. Lu Anne took her place among them.

My God, she prayed, be there for me. So there is something there for me. So I am not just out in this shit lonely, deluded and lost.

The day’s work, the walk through the town among strangers had made her anxious, and the drink made her head ache. Strange sounds, echoes, toneless music rang in her inward ear. There was an incessant low chatter of inaudible, half-recognized voices. The voices bore some secret inference that made her afraid.

For a moment she thought she might be alarming the people around her. When she saw that they took no notice of her, she bowed her head.

Help me, Lu Anne prayed, You who are more real than I am. My only One, my Reality.

When she looked up at the crucifix she saw that the hanged Christ nailed to the beams had become a cat. It was burned black as the figure had been, its fur turned to ash, its face burned away to show the grinning fanged teeth. She looked away and with her face averted walked to the doorway of the church where Bly was waiting for her. When she was outside she leaned against the building wall, taking deep breaths, avoiding the gazes of the people who were coming in.

“Ain’t you gonna stay for the service?” Bly asked her.

She shook her head. As he stood watching her, she took hold of his arm about the biceps and with the nail of her right hand drew an invisible line around it. Bly stood by in confusion and embarrassment.

In the worst of times, Lu Anne thought, there’s meat.

On the terrace, Jack Best was coming to himself again. His eyes were filled with tears.

“The Sands,” he sputtered, “it doesn’t …”

Axelrod helpfully interrupted him. “It doesn’t have a line, am I right, Jack?” He turned to Lowndes. “I’m hoping this isn’t where you find your story.”

Lowndes stared at him for a moment without answering, then smiled.

“Certainly not,” he said.

In the garden outside, Walker suddenly saw the figure of a woman leaning against the terrace wall. The sight brought him to his feet. As he started toward her she moved away. He went faster, trying to get to her side before she was lost in the shadows. It was as though she were running away from him.

She was wearing her hair as she had worn it fifteen years before, he thought. He knew her silhouette, her moves, her aura.

“Lu Anne,” he called.

“I’m not her,” said a small antipodean voice.

Walker halted in confusion. When he came nearer he saw that it was Joy McIntyre, a stand-in and body double who had once spent time with Quinn. Her husband was a stills photographer, Walker’s acquaintance and sometime connection. The photographer had initiated Joy’s career by spreading her frame across two pages of a slick nudie book.

“That’s twice today you fooled me,” Walker said.

“Gordon, is it? They won’t be happy to see you about.”

“You mean Drogue won’t. Where’s Lu Anne?”

“She’s in church,” Joy sniffed. “That’s what I heard.”

“Are you crying?” Walker asked. “What’s the matter?”

“Hoi,” Joy snorted. “I mean wow!”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m all right.” Her eyes in the darkness appeared wide and wondering.

“How’s Lu Anne?” Walker asked.

“Just fine,” Joy said. “Outside of being in church. Know where I’ve been?”

Walker considered his answer. “With someone?”

“I shouldn’t say.”

“O.K.”

“I’ve been up with Mr. Drogue.”

“Ah,” Walker said.

“Balling, like.”

“Well,” Walker said, “whatever turns you on, we used to say.”

“Not the younger Mr. Drogue,” Joy said unsteadily. “His dad.”

“Ah,” Walker said. “Well …” He broke off. Troubles enough of his own.

“I mean, I had to tell someone, didn’t I?”

“Strictly speaking,” Walker said, “no.”

“I said to him—‘Mr. Drogue, I’m shocked. It’s my turn to be shocked now,’ I said.”

“It’s probably for the best. He can help you. I think you probably did the right thing. Careerwise.”

“I’m not talking about it,” Joy said. “I’m going to forget it ever happened.”

“I will too,” Walker said. “I mean, I’ll forget everything you told me.”

“What have I told you?” Joy demanded. “I haven’t told you anything.”

“Right.”

“Old Ryder,” she said, “he’s your pal, isn’t he?” Ryder was the photographer, Joy’s husband.

“I don’t see him much anymore.”

“We split up, you know. Love lost its luster for us.”

“I’m sorry,” Walker said.

“Boring, like.”

“That’s life, isn’t it?” Walker said. “I mean,” he said, “when it’s there it’s there. And when it’s not it’s not.”

“Oh yeah,” Joy said. “Well, we tried getting the old moonlight and roses back. No way.” She shook her head. “He used to get me into trouble like tonight,” she told Walker. “I mean, he put me forward like that. It must be second nature to me now.”

“Don’t blame yourself.”

“Well, I’m not,” she told Walker. “I’m blaming him. He’s the one had me out doing that sleazy phornpone,” she said.

“Right,” Walker said.

He recalled that Ryder had coerced Joy into accepting a position as a lewd telephonist for a pack of Melrose Avenue fatsos who rejoiced in her cultured British accent. She had stayed with the job until the owner of the shop was murdered.

“Waste of time, that was,” Joy said.

“A waste of something.”

“See, we took a holiday up in Mendocino, Ryder and me did. Bloody rained. He was piss paranoid. Didn’t bloody speak. The television set was screwed. I spent the whole bloody time walking in the bloody rain.”

“It can be so pretty up there,” Walker said. “Are you sure you’re O.K.?”

“Yeah.” Joy shook her head, took a deep breath and looked at Walker once more as though she had discovered him that moment before her. “One thing,” she told him, “I saw two animals there. Two animals fighting on the beach.”

Walker brightened. “That must have been exciting,” he said. “What sort of animals?”

Joy sighed deeply. “I think they were winkles.”

“The choreographer at the Sands is dead!” Jack Best shrieked. One of the cooks had come out of the kitchen and was crossing herself. Axelrod and a waiter were struggling to get Best out the inner door. At the table where he had been sitting, Walker saw Lu Anne seated next to Dongan Lowndes.

“Well,” Joy said. “Another bloody night, eh, sport?”

“Right,” Walker said.

He walked into the bar, his heart beating faster. Once she seemed to look his way but her eyes never settled on him. He took the chair that Best had been sitting in.

“Hello, Gordon,” she said calmly.

Her casual greeting stung him like a blow.

“Hello, Lu Anne.”

“We’re having a wonderful time filming your script.”

“That’s great,” he said.

“We have quite a famous author down here to write a piece on us, Gordon. Mr. Dongan Lowndes. From New York Arts. Have you all met?”

“Yes,” Walker said. “We’ve met.”

“You know, Mr. Lowndes,” Lu Anne said, “there are whole passages from Naming of Parts that I can remember just by heart.”

“Lu Anne used to be the president of the Good Old Girls’ Good Old Book Club,” Walker told Lowndes.

He watched Lowndes’s slack mouth tighten. Walker’s hands were trembling and he kept them out of sight.

“You know,” Lowndes said, “a lot of times when Hollywood people tell you they like a book it turns out they’re referring to the studio synopsis.” He laughed rather loudly at his own observation.

“That’s not true of Lu Anne,” Walker assured him. “She’s a great reader.”

“I wasn’t thinking of Miss Verger. It’s just something I began to run into.”

“Was your book ever optioned?” Walker asked.

“Yes,” Lowndes said. “There was something up. I don’t know what became of it.”

“It would have been difficult to film,” Walker said.

“In those days I suppose I would have been thrilled to have it made. Now I realize that the world can get on quite well without a film version of that book.”

From where he sat it seemed to Walker that Lowndes had moved his chair very close to Lu Anne’s, that their bodies must be touching at some point and Lu Anne had made no move to draw away. She seemed to hang on his words.

“If we get into what the world can do without,” Walker said to Lowndes, “God knows where we’ll end.”

Lowndes smiled. His left hand was below the table; Walker could not escape the thought that he was fondling Lu Anne. Yet, he thought, it might all be pure paranoia. As for her, he had imagined every reaction to his arrival except the smiley indifference he was experiencing. He ordered another round of drinks.

“So,” he asked Lowndes when the drinks arrived, “how long have you been down?”

“Just a day,” Lowndes said. “I think.”

Lu Anne nodded enthusiastically. “Yes. A day.”

“Let me tell you a little about what I want to accomplish down here,” Lowndes told Walker. “You may find it interesting.”

Walker saw Lu Anne and Lowndes join hands behind their chairs.

“Why not?” he said to Dongan Lowndes. “Why not do that?”

“I really don’t think anyone’s ever written a good piece on the making of a film until after the fact.” Lowndes disengaged his hand from Lu Anne’s and went into his pocket for cigarillos. Walker declined; Lowndes lighted one for himself. “My thinking is — if I hang around here, see a little of it all going on — I can get an insight into the process. So I did a little boning up on who everybody was. Now I can watch them do their thing. Then I can analyze the final product in terms of what I’ve seen.”

Walker looked at Lu Anne to see if what the man was saying made sense to her. So far as he could tell it did and she seemed profoundly interested.

“I don’t really understand,” he told Lowndes. “That sounds very complicated and ambitious.” He tried to imitate their smug amiable demeanor. “It’s a nice place to spend a couple of weeks. I’m sure it’ll turn out fine.”

“You decline to take me seriously, Mr. Walker,” Lowndes said.

“I don’t get it, that’s all. I don’t know what you’re trying to prove.”

“I have all your scripts,” Lowndes told him. “Every one you ever wrote.”

Jon Axelrod, red and sweating, returned to the table and sat down wearily. “Holy shit,” he said. “Sorry.”

Walker stared across the table at Lowndes. The idea of this soft-spoken, pockmarked man poring over the hundreds and hundreds of scenes that he had written made him feel violated and ashamed. All those scripts, he thought — the record of petty arguments lost or won, half-assed stratagems and desperate compromises. A graph of meaningless motion like the tube-worm trails in a prehistoric seabed. Here and there some shining secret as withered and barren as a stone pearl in a fossil oyster.

He thought of the things written that he ought not to have written. They were like the things done that should not have been done. The things not written were worse.

“How’d you like them?”

Lowndes smiled.

“They’re really very good.”

“Gordo’s very good,” Axelrod said. “Ask anybody.” Axelrod was in the process of discovering an unwholesome stain on his sleeve. He touched his finger to the stain, brought it away, looked at his finger and excused himself again.

“Some things about your writing make me wonder,” Lowndes said.

“Ah,” Walker said. “Wonder about what?”

Walker took a quick look at Lu Anne. There was a fond smile on her lips. In the shadowy light her face was porcelain, as pale and witchy as a Crivelli madonna’s.

“Well, I’m a Georgia boy,” Lowndes said with suitably bucolic languor, “and maybe I’m just simpleminded. But it seems to me — goddamn — you guys got a magic lantern out here. Being simple-minded makes me think of all the things I’d like to try doing if I had the chance.”

Walker stirred his drink.

“You aren’t simpleminded, Mr. Lowndes. You know the secrets of the heart. I know you do because I read your book. It’s a true article, your book. It made me cry, what do you think of that?”

“With envy?” Lu Anne asked.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Walker said, looking into her fixed smile. He saw that she was off her head and in some character of her own construction. He rejoiced; he had thought it was really she there — cold, mocking and lost to him. “I don’t think envy makes you cry. It was for the usual reasons. For love of it.”

“Shit,” Lowndes said. “Love my dog, love me.”

He extended his hand. Walker looked at it, paused and shook it briefly.

“I see what you mean,” Walker said. “My compliments. But even if you were country-simple, as you plainly aren’t, even if you were Pogo’s great-grandpuppy, I’d have trouble believing you were as naive as you claim to be. I think you’re trying to make me feel bad about what I do.”

“Say that again?” Lowndes asked.

“I said that even if your grandfather was a fucking alligator you ought to know more about the movie business than that. Do you really need it all explained to you, or are you just trying to give me a hard time?”

“You got me wrong, man. You’re touchy.”

“I’m sorry. I had a long drive.”

“Don’t be sorry. Bein’ touchy’s good. It indicates you have your pride. Where’d you say you were from?”

“Kentucky,” Walker told him. “Lexington.”

“I wouldn’t have thought that,” Lowndes said. “But you know, I have relatives in Kentucky named Walker. I wonder if you’re one of those Walkers?”

“No,” Walker said.

“Well, let’s pretend my granddaddy was an alligator. How would you explain to me the screenwriter’s role?”

“Oh Christ,” Walker said, “the screenwriter’s role?”

“Is that the wrong terminology?”

“You have to believe that it’s worthwhile,” Walker told him, “and you have to accept the rules. You can’t be a solitary or an obsessive. You can’t despise your audience. It requires humility and it requires strength of character.”

Lowndes turned to Lu Anne.

“Now that’s a very eloquent defense of an often derided trade, don’t you think?”

“Oh yes,” Lu Anne said brightly.

“Very eloquent, Mr. Walker, and I believe every word of it. Only tell me this: isn’t it true that on the screen what you and I might call a cheap shot works infinitely better than on the page?”

Walker thought about it.

“Yeah, O.K. That may be so.”

“Doesn’t it follow then that an instinct for the cheap shot is an advantage to a screenwriter?”

“There are rules, Lowndes, I told you that. You usually work within the terms of genre. Your flights of fancy are reduced to technical possibility because on one level you’re moving machinery. If you’re heavy-handed your characters will flatten out very badly. You have to be good at it.”

“Suppose I say,” Lowndes said, “that as a movie writer you’re restricted to a literal-minded so-called realism that changes its nature every five years or so. Would I be wrong?”

“I have a feeling we’re going to read that in New York Arts whether I think it’s true or not.”

Lowndes laughed.

“I don’t think it’s true,” Walker said. “Nor do I think I have an affinity for the cheap shot.”

“Well,” Lowndes told him, “maybe that’s why you haven’t been as successful as you should.”

“How successful should I be, Mr. Lowndes?”

“Secrets are forbidden,” Lu Anne said helpfully. “There’s a clause.”

“There’s also,” Walker observed, “a sanity clause.”

When Axelrod arrived back from the gents’ a wet spot had replaced the stain on his shirt.

“G’wan,” he said as he resumed his seat, “you no foola me. There ain’t no Sanity Claus.”

Walker and Lu Anne looked blankly into his fading smile. Lowndes kept his eyes on Walker.

“Nobody makes you do it,” Walker told Lowndes. “You’re usually well paid if you don’t get cheated, and you usually don’t. There are things you can do. You can have your moments.”

“I know that’s true,” Lowndes said. “I just wanted to make sure you felt as bad as you should.” He punched Walker on the arm. “Hey, I’m only foolin’ with you, man. I know you’re a serious guy.”

“How bad do you feel, Gordon?” Lu Anne asked.

“Medium,” Walker said.

Jack Glenn came in with some production people and the Peruvian script girl. They waved, hesitated for a moment and took a different table inside the bar. Charlie Freitag and his Las Vegas pal had gone off into the night.

“I’m going to turn in,” Walker said. “I enjoyed our talk. I hope it was helpful.”

“You bet,” Lowndes told him. As he got up he saw Lowndes put his hand over Lu Anne’s.

“Me too,” Axelrod said. He wandered over to the other table.

As he went down the corridor toward the opposite wing he heard running steps on the carpet behind him. For an instant he thought himself pursued by Dongan Lowndes but before he turned he knew it was Lu Anne. Her face was contorted with terror. As she crowded into his arms, she held her hands protectively over her temples as if to ward off a blow. He had to untangle her from her cringing stance to kiss her.

“Gordon,” she said, “you have to help me. That man’s been put over me.”

“Put over you? I thought you were going to let him climb on top of you. I’ve been high on you for five hundred miles and when I get here you’re playing footsie with that big swamp rat.”

“Gordon, you just don’t understand anything at all. I’m really scared, Gordon.”

“It’s all right, Lu. Everybody says you’re doing fine. You look very beautiful.”

“I went to church tonight,” Lu Anne said, “and there was a thing on the cross that wasn’t Jesus at all.”

He experienced a brief surge of panic. The panic was compounded of several fears — his fear of her madness and of his own folly, his fear of death and of life. It was too late for panic to do him any good. He did not propose to let her go.

“You’re alone, aren’t you, Lu Anne? Your husband’s gone and the kids?”

“I’m alone,” she said. “With that man over me. Don’t you think he looks like the winner of a flaming-cat race?”

“Absolutely,” Walker said. “Are the … are you seeing those people you see?”

She put a finger across his lips and nodded.

“What about your pills?”

“I tried,” she said. “I can’t work with them.”

He let her rest her head against his shoulder and stroked her hair. He had no idea what to do.

“That man,” Lu Anne said, “he saw me run out after you. I left him and he’ll take it out on us.”

“I thought you were making it with him.”

“I was fooling him,” she said. “They said I had to. They said he’d write about me.”

“Who said?”

“Well, Charlie. And Jack and Walter.”

“Forget about him. I don’t think it matters what he writes.”

Standing with Lu Anne in his arms, he saw Lowndes appear at the far end of the corridor. Lowndes stood watching them with an expression that appeared vaguely benign. He was uglier upright, slope-shouldered and paunchy, a poor soul. After a moment he went his way.

“Is he there?” she asked without turning around. The perception of schizophrenics was unnatural, Walker thought.

“He’s gone.”

“There’s always someone to be afraid of,” Lu Anne said.

“We don’t have to play their games, Lu.”

“But we do,” she said.

He stepped back, holding her.

“Come with me tonight.”

She shook her head.

“There’s tonight,” he said. “I don’t know what else there is. It’s touch and go.”

“Touch,” she repeated dully, “and go.” She shook her head. “I can’t,” she said. “I’m afraid. I don’t know why you want me.”

“I think we settled that,” he said, “a long time ago.”

“And you never learned better?”

“I never learn, Lu Anne.”

“The geisha and the samurai,” she said. “You’re the geisha,” she told him. She fingered his cheek with a long unpainted nail. “I’m the samurai.”

“That’s so,” Walker said.

People passed at the end of the corridor but he never turned to look. Lu Anne took his hands in hers and they stood with their fingers twined like old friends at some family ceremony.

“I’m so fucked up, Gordon. I mean, I think I love you — it’s been so long. It was always someone and I think it was always you. I’m sick and I’m scared. I have to hide.”

“Hide with me.”

When she eased away from him he followed and took her in his arms again.

“Don’t make me,” she told him. “Wait for me. Wait for tomorrow.”

We are not promised tomorrow, Walker thought. He would wait for her, for that unmerited, far-off day.

“Yes,” he said. “All right.”

Then she was off, barefoot, down the hall. She had left her going-to-church shoes where she stood. As he bent to pick them up he heard an insistent pounding from the wing of the hotel to which she had retreated. He walked to the end of the passage and saw her rapping against the door of an apartment on the court three stories below. The condominiums here faced the mountainside; they were less expensive and less elaborately appointed. Teamsters lived here and technical assistants and people who liked to be where the serious card games were.

Walker stepped to the metal rail and saw the apartment door open and Billy Bly appear in the lighted doorway. He watched as they spoke, saw Bly close the door to her. Waiting, she leaned her forehead against it until Bly came to open it again. This time she went inside and, though Walker waited for almost ten minutes on the upper landing, holding her shoes under his arm, she did not reappear.

Please, Pig,” Lu Anne pleaded. “Honestly, honey, I don’t want to be alone. I’m afraid I’ll die.”

Bly was looking down at her bare feet on his plastic doormat. He worked his jaws in embarrassment.

“I figured you were waiting for Gordon Walker.”

“I was,” she said. “I am.”

“Well,” Bly said, “he’s here.”

She shook her head.

“But I’m not, Pig. Just suddenly I can’t handle it. I told him — wait for tomorrow. He’s so nice, you know. He said he would.”

“You scared?”

“I am deathly afraid,” Lu Anne said. “I have to hide. I must.”

“Well,” Bly said, “this is the thing. I ain’t alone tonight.”

She stared at him and, without a sound, mouthed the words.

“Please. Pig.”

He watched her as though he were trying to gauge the measure of her fear. “You want to wait,” he said. She made a move to rush past him but he blocked her with half a step.

“Honey,” she whispered urgently, “I’ll talk to the boy. I’ll explain.”

“I told you to wait, Lu Anne. Now you wait.”

He closed the door and she leaned her head against it. When she heard the Mexican boy’s angry incredulous voice, she raised her hands to stop her ears.

After a minute or two, Bly opened the door and stepped aside. As she went into the large bedroom suite, she thought she caught a glimpse of a moving figure on the mountainside balcony. A pot broke on the tiles outside.

“Was he real mad?” Lu Anne asked.

“Yes, he was,” Bly said.

“He broke a pot, didn’t he?”

“Probably just knocked it over. Climbin’ down.”

“Honestly, Pig, I’d do it for you. I’ll make it up to you. You know there’s always a day and there’s always a way.”

“Just so you know, Lu Anne. It’s the same as if …”

“Pig,” she said earnestly, “I realize that, you know. I’m not so insensitive. Gosh, I hope you were … like … done.”

Bly shrugged. He was standing by the mirror taking his shirt off, checking his pecs.

“I never really feel done,” he said.

He was a serious man and not given to humor. It was Lu Anne’s delight to make him laugh. She rushed to him.

“I’m so happy now,” she said, “and I was so scared before.” On the counter she saw a cluster of amyl nitrate caps. She went over and stirred them affectionately with her forefinger as though they were a litter of pet mice.

“You want a Quaalude?” Bly asked.

“I can’t think of anything nicer,” she said brightly.

Bly’s tanned face reddened, he pursed his lips. It took Lu Anne a moment to realize that he was laughing. She hugged him.

“You smell so nice,” she said.

As he went into the bathroom for some Quaaludes, she realized that in the moment of their embrace she had felt him tense very slightly and that the moment of resistance to her body’s pressure constituted a discreet discouragement of any notions she might be cultivating of fun and games. It would not have been unconscious. Bly was as free of involuntary physical responses as a person could be.

They lay down on the unmade bed together and had their Quaaludes with ice water from a pitcher that sat on a silver salver on the floor.

“I could give that boy some money,” Lu Anne suggested. “I feel so bad about it.”

“He don’t want money. You know,” Bly added after a moment, “we get the wrong idea. Lots of these Mexican people — they don’t want money.”

“Forgive me,” she said.

“No problem. This time.”

The room was chill with air conditioning and the windows were closed. No breezes came from the mountainside. She snuggled next to Bly, put her hands on his muscular shoulders, then guiltily withdrew them.

“You know how it gets.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Now don’t think I have it mixed up, Pig. I mean, I always understood that you and me was a one-time thing. It wasn’t going to go on and all. Because of how we both were.”

“One of them bells,” Bill said, “that now and then rings.”

“How nice Quaaludes are,” she said. “The world is possible with art.”

He turned over, looked at her eyes and lay back on his pillow.

“What’d you tell Drogue about me?” she asked him. “You tell him I was O.K.?”

“You are as far as he’s concerned, Lu Anne. He doesn’t care how you really are. He’s just worried about his ass. Like Charlie’s worried about budget and insurance and all that.”

“How do you think I really am?”

“I don’t know. I can’t always tell because I ain’t as smart as you.”

“I was a quiz kid, Pig. Did you know that?”

Bly yawned.

“Lu Anne,” he said, “if you was half the things you claim you been you’d have to be seventy-five years old.”

“I’m older than people think,” she said sadly.

“I mean,” Bly told her, “I don’t know why you lie. I don’t understand it. You’re a great star, what more do you want? What are you trying to prove?”

She bit her finger and looked at him. Billy Bly believed in never borrowing money to gamble with, that it cost a fortune to erase tattoos, in reincarnation and in Great Stars. The Greater they were, he believed, the easier they were to get on with. Lu Anne was hot really a Great Star in Bly’s order of precedence but he afforded her an honorary inclusion.

“I want you to tell me location stories,” she said. “Then I’ll tell you some.”

Bill Bly loved location stories about high-rolling, monster fuck-ups and partying with Great Stars. He loved show business stories of all sorts. So did Lu Anne. Who didn’t?

“Hell,” Bly told her, “I told you all my good location stories a couple of times.”

It was a stylized demurrer. He told her about the Western director, mortally behind in a heavy poker game, who had heaved the once-in-a-lifetime pot into a bunkhouse fireplace. About the actor who had started shooting lights out from his Vegas hotel room. About misassignations, absurd love affairs, fights, comedians and local good-wives. Suits of armor pissed in, motel rooms filled with dirigible-sized polka-dotted water bags, child actors poisoned, chimpanzees released.

Lu Anne told Bill about Werner, the stunt bunny. The concept of Werner evoked his silent laughter.

“We had a stunt mule one time in Durango,” Bill said. “We had to pull his legs out from under him every time he got shot.”

“Werner was a European hare,” Lu Anne told Bill. “He was always wonderfully dressed and he had perfect manners. We met him at the airport and showed him his fall. It was down the south face of the Jungfrau. He looked that old mountain up and down. ‘Zo,’ he says. ‘Ach, zo.’ You’d a been scared, Pig. We said, ‘Can we get you anything, Werner?’ ‘Chust show me my marks,’ said Werner.”

Bly laughed again, his eyes closed. Lu Anne made a little man with her fingers and walked them along Bill’s chest.

“Werner had the nicest luggage you ever did see,” she told Bly. “He knew how to fold his napkin. You could take him anywhere. You could take him to Le Cirque.”

“Where the fuck’s that?”

She fingered a circle on his chest.

“Ever turn a trick, Pig?”

The sleepy smile on his face vanished. He opened his eyes but did not look at her.

“I guess you know the way I come up, Lu Anne. I guess you know the answer to that.”

“I’m sorry,” Lu Anne said, and shivered. “I was thinking about something. I was wondering about something. Hey, Pig, could I have another half a Quaalude?”

Bly stirred himself and put his feet on the floor.

“How come you asked me that?”

“I wanted to hear about it.”

“Well, it’s ugly as catshit,” he said. “It’s dirty and scary. It smells. Sometimes you dig it. You know yourself there’s plenty of people around here can tell you more about it than me.”

He staggered as he walked and turned on her.

“I mean,” he asked in a foggy voice, “you want to hear about the men’s room in the Albuquerque bus station? What you wanna hear?”

“I’m sorry, Pig.”

He brought her her half pill and she took it and he climbed into bed with her. They both got under a decorative Mexican quilt to shelter from the air conditioning.

“I did once,” Lu Anne said. “In New Haven. After the show. It was winter. We were doing As You Like It. I played Rosalind.”

“You told me a thousand times about that night, Lu Anne, and you never told me that. I think that’s foolishness.”

“No,” she said. “No, it’s true. A man offered me two thousand dollars. He was a depraved Shakespeare scholar. He would stop at nothing to have me and I suspect he was a Jesuit. ‘Top it off with harlotry,’ he said, ‘you’ll feel like a million and you’ll make an old man very happy.’ ”

“Bullshit, man,” Bly murmured. His eyes, half open, stared into his pillow.

“He took me down Stoddard Street,” Lu Anne told Bill. “The cast was holding one of those Communist-inspired parties we used to have in those days with drugs and promiscuity but I didn’t stay for it. I snuck right out of that green room. I was wearing my fake rat fur coat and he took me down Stoddard Street. I remember the Valle’s steak house with all the red snowflakes. He said, ‘It’s Ganymede I’m after’—I said no foolin’? Because they always are, I assure you. I mean, he wasn’t telling me a thing I didn’t know myself.”

“So,” Bly struggled to ask, “did he buy you a steak?”

“He took me to a house on a hill. Greek revival. It belonged to another century. The furnishings were exquisite and all the walls were glass. Old glass. From every room you could see all the others, you could see rainbows and tropical fish, everything crystal, Pig, and firelight in the mirrors and outside the glass walls the red snow was falling. In every room there were little glass bells, they shined and they tinkled. Of all the rooms, Pig, there was one into which a body could not see. And do you know why that was?”

“Well, sure,” Bly said. His eyes closed. “Why?” he asked.

“Because it was curtained off in furs. And that was where we went. And the man said, ‘You are the finest Rosalind that ever was, my dear child.’ He says, ‘I’ve traveled the world,’ he says, ‘I’ve seen them all, Stratford and the Aldwych, forget ’em all,’ he says. ‘Your voice is dulcet and you know your blocking and your moves are neat.’ ”

Bly roused himself slightly. “Hot shit for you, Lu Anne. Did he give you two thou?”

“Better,” Lu Anne said. Bly smiled and she stroked his neck.

“Better than two? Three?”

“Better,” she whispered. His eyes closed but the happy smile lit his lean face.

She leaned her head on his shoulder. Great silly Quaalude tears like Disney raindrops were rolling down her cheeks.

“If you can hustle, Billy,” she whispered to Bly, “you don’t have to go home. You need never. You can’t ever.

“Pig?” she asked. “You hear my little ’lude poem, home?”

His smile had drained away into sleep. It looked to her like dying. “You get to have a few laughs,” she told the aging boy asleep beside her, “but your head will fucking kill you.”

Early the next morning, Walker was treading water in the lukewarm Pacific. He felt less driven after his sedated sleep. His face was turned toward the beach and the dry mountains that rose above the coastal cliffs. The peaks outlined against the morning sky formed a contrast of surfaces so pure and unambiguous that it was literally joy to behold. As he basked in the day’s matutinal innocence, his hangover salved with cocaine, he became aware of a disharmony. On the beach itself, still half in shadow, he saw a small man in the resort’s livery struggling with a second man twice his size. Walker set out toward shore and as he swam he recalled Joy McIntyre’s story of rained-out romance. Two animals fighting on the beach.

He picked up his towel, threw it over his shoulders and walked toward the scene of conflict. Winkles.

One of the hotel’s bellmen was attempting to bring a drunken man to consciousness by standing him upright. Having attempted several mechanical strategies to accomplish this, he had fallen back on the old heave-ho and was pulling on the man’s arm.

“You’ll dislocate his shoulder,” Walker told the bellman. Together they took the drunken man by his underarms and balanced him on his heels. Walker saw that it was Dongan Lowndes.

“I never seen him,” the bellman said. “I don’t think he’s from the movies.”

Walker saw Jon Axelrod descending a coral stairway toward the beach. A black-haired girl of singular beauty whom Walker had never seen before stood watching from the lowest turreted landing, a princess in a tower.

“Lookit the fucking guy,” Axelrod said. “Mr. Class. His first drink in three years, he says. Then has about twenty of them.”

“In the sun,” the bellman told them, “he can die.”

“Listen,” Axelrod told the servant, “this isn’t your job. Go get Mr. Bly — you know who I mean?”

The youth nodded.

Axelrod, gripping Lowndes by the one arm, took a loose bill from his pocket.

“Go get him. Wake him up if you have to.”

The bellman pocketed his bill and ran off up the stairway. As he passed the girl on the landing he paused to bow and smile deferentially before bolting on up the higher stairways.

“In the sun,” Axelrod said in imitation of the bellman, “he can die. Because he already fuckin’ dead. And he no make it home to his coffin.”

“What are you looking for?” Walker asked. “A weapon?”

“I wanna see if he’s wired. Some of these fucks, you say something dumb and they write it down. You sue them and next thing you find out they were wired. I’m gonna get Billy to go through his room for a video camera.”

“You think he’d do that?” Walker asked. “He’s the correspondent of New York Arts, not Confidential.”

“Some of these writers are the lowest scum that ever walked the earth,” Axelrod explained. He looked thoughtfully at Walker. “Then there’s some that are O.K.”

The smell of Lowndes’s sweating body was making Walker sick. He turned his face to the wind.

“Who’s the lady?” he asked Axelrod.

“That’s Helena,” Axelrod told him. “She’s our valued assistant. She’s going to show you around. Come down, doll,” he called up to Helena. “Help us hold up this guy.”

Helena descended the last flight of steps. She was blue-eyed and lightly freckled. The expression of condescending concern with which she regarded Lowndes made Walker feel like a zookeeper displaying a sick seal.

“Is he drunk?” Helena asked in the British interrogative.

“He’s in deep alpha state,” Axelrod said, “from trying to meditate with his clothes on. Helena, this is Gordon Walker.”

“Ah,” Helena said brightly.

Walker braced his legs to adjust his leverage on Lowndes and reached out to take her hand.

“Helena will show you around,” Axelrod told Walker. “She’s been wanting to meet you.”

“Oh,” Walker said. “Well.” He looked at the young woman to see if such a thing might be true and saw quickly that it was not.

“Your script is wonderful,” Helena said. “It’s going to be a marvelous film.”

Lowndes pulled himself free of their hold and immediately lost consciousness again. Walker and Axelrod just managed to catch him.

“You know what I think?” Axelrod said after a moment. “I think fuck this.” He let go of Lowndes and Walker did the same. The author collapsed in a heap at their feet.

“We should bury him in sand up to his neck,” Axelrod said, “as a warning to assholes.”

Bly came jogging along the beach toward them. When he saw Walker he drew up short and approached at his stealthy, carefully centered amble. He looked down at the crumpled form of Dongan Lowndes, then at Walker.

“Come on, Bill,” Axelrod told Bly, “let’s get this turkey on ice.”

Bly with very little seeming effort drew Lowndes from the sand and shouldered him. Axelrod steadied the burden with his right hand.

Walker saw that Bly was smiling at him. The smile seemed friendly enough, not triumphant or malicious. In any case, Walker looked away. When Bly and Axelrod went off with the prostrate Lowndes, he found himself alone with Helena.

“Had breakfast?” she asked him. He had been on his way to Lu Anne’s cabana, hoping somehow that she had not spent the night with Bly after all. The notion to swim had seduced him en route.

“No. Have you?”

“I haven’t, actually. Shall we get some coffee?”

“Yes,” Walker said. “Yes, of course.” Helena’s beauty, her youth and her lightly pretended interest in him made Walker suddenly quite sad. The sadness and the thought of Lu Anne with Bly hit him with the force of his rallying hangover and fatigue. He required a line but the cocaine was hidden away in his suitcase in his room.

“We’ll walk up, shall we?” he proposed to Helena. “Then I’ll just have to get something from my room.”

Helena threw him a stagey smile and they walked up the coral steps together. He was tense, unhappy, out of breath. Helena seemed at the point of song.

Breakfast was being served on the terrace that adjoined the bar. Walker took a table with Helena, ordered them coffee with Mexican sweet rolls and excused himself.

He reached his room just ahead of the chambermaid, hung up his No Molestar sign and hurriedly prepared himself a measure. In his haste he had more than he intended; the effect was neither exhilaration nor the horrors but a confused enthusiasm without object. He felt for the moment as if he had replaced his true emotions, whatever they might have been, with artificial ones, artificially flavored. When he went out this time he brought a paper fold of cocaine in his beach bag, wrapped in foil to keep it from melting in the heat.

Jon Axelrod and Jack Glenn had joined Helena at the breakfast table.

Glenn and Walker, who had not seen each other for a year or so, shook hands.

“This is the only man I know who likes Mexican locations,” Jack Glenn told the people at the table. “I hope you didn’t come to make changes.”

“I am death,” Walker said, “destroyer of worlds. I’ve come to write people out of the script.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jack Glenn said.

Walker picked up his coffee and drained half of it at a swallow. It was really liquor he wanted, something to slow him down now that he was speeded up.

“To some people,” he declared, “Mexican locations are just dollar-ante poker and centipedes. I’m not like that.”

“Really?” Helena asked.

“I come,” Walker said, “to see the elephants.”

“Well,” Helena said. “This is all very tame stuff, if you ask me. Outside of the usual drunks. It’s so tranquil and businesslike it’s almost boring.”

Walker saw that she was pitching Jack Glenn. He found himself liking Helena a little less each moment.

“That could change overnight,” he told her.

“The last thing I did yesterday,” Axelrod said, “was put a drunk to bed. And what was the first thing I did this morning?”

“It’s psychodrama,” Glenn said. “All location shows are psychodrama.”

“Some of us get a little more psycho than others,” Axelrod said.

There was a brief tense silence.

“A friend of mine was down here making a movie a couple of years ago,” Glenn told them. “It was over by San Miguel. They were all staying at a hotel there and the restaurant cashier fell madly in love with him.”

“I do hope this has a happy ending,” Helena said.

“The thing was, he never even noticed her. So she went home to her village warlock and got a love potion. Like condor wattles and iguana testicles — she had the cook slip them into his huevos rancheros.”

“Did it work?” Axelrod asked.

“It worked fine. They had to fly him out in a helicopter. I mean, it was Mexico and everybody was sick, but this guy was ready for El Morgue-o. He sent for a priest.”

“What about the girl?” Helena asked.

Axelrod lit a cigar. “She married the cook.”

“Those were the days,” Glenn said, “when the movies spelled romance.”

Walker stood up and as he did so Helena and Axelrod exchanged quick glances.

“I’m coming with you,” she told Walker gaily. “I’m to show you around.”

“She’ll show you the location,” Axelrod told him. “You can go to the beach. Tonight Charlie’s giving a party for you.”

“Good,” Walker said. “Then you get to carry me home.”

“Writers sleep on the beach, Gordon.”

In the moment before they left the table, Walker noticed Helena try without success to catch Jack Glenn’s eye. She was out of luck, he thought with malicious satisfaction. Jack worked harder at sex than anyone Walker knew and did not miss his moments.

Walker went with Helena to the production offices, which were deep in early morning silence. One of Axelrod’s pistoleros was summoned to drive them to the setup. The drive was accomplished in silence. Helena’s good humor was turning steely. When they were at the setup, their driver got out and waited in the shade of a live oak tree. Walker and Helena sauntered along the trolley tracks toward the bay.

The trolley was parked at the end of the line. Walker climbed aboard, felt the brasswork and the varnished benches.

“Frank found that one in Texas,” Helena told Walker briskly. “He worked from the old Grand Isle photographs. Piece by piece, he found it all fairly close by.”

“How about Frank,” Walker said.

From the trolley, they walked across the waving fields of mock camomile to the dunes. Walker looked over the bathhouse and then walked along the beach to the camera track where Drogue’s Titan had rolled the night before. A couple of Mexican watchmen hunkered by the trolley, watching.

“It must be a kick,” Helena said, “seeing all this. I mean, all of it coming out of something you wrote.”

“Definitely,” Walker said. “A kick.” He was looking out over the bay toward a raft on pontoons that was anchored some forty feet offshore. It was secured by cables to pulleys on the shore to keep it steady in the chop. “Once they built a house I used to live in. Reproduced it in every detail inside and out. It probably cost them more to do it than it cost to build the actual house.”

“You must have been thrilled.”

“As I recall, I was thrilled. It was a long time ago and I’ve done a lot of shows since.”

“And now you take it all in stride? Or find it boring? Or what?”

“What’s that raft out there for?” he asked Helena.

“Walter thought he might want a reverse angle on Edna’s walk. There would have been a bloke on it with a Steadicam.”

“Dr. Zoom,” Walker said. The patches of troubling weather he had seen earlier were still hovering offshore.

“I mean,” Helena said, “I don’t see how you can be so superior about it.”

Walker looked at her. “You’re a film student?”

“No,” she said. “I … just like films. I respect them. I respect the people who make them.”

“Why are you trying to pick a fight with me?”

“I’m not,” she said, protesting. “Maybe I think more highly of cinema than you do. I’m sure I know less about it.”

“How do you come to be here?”

“Through friends.”

“Your friends?”

“Yes, why not? Is that your last question?”

“Let me guess,” Walker said. “You’re here through business connections of your father’s. Your father is something like a bookmaker-turned-mogul and he doesn’t sound like you at all. You’re doing the world, a little slumming, a little high life …”

“And you’re a fucking burned-out mediocre film writer with a whiskey face and no manners.”

“And here we are beside the Pacific. Just the two of us, more or less. As a film buff, do you think there’s a scenario here?”

“You’re not very highly regarded on this set. I was warned about you.”

“Well,” Walker said, “next time you’re warned pay attention. What were you supposed to do, keep me dangling with smiles and compliments?”

Helena turned away. “Keep you away from her. So you wouldn’t get her drinking or give her drugs.”

“When your old man turned you loose on the wide world, Helena, didn’t he warn you about pimps? Ponces? You let the people who sicked you on me — Drogue, Jon, whoever it was — turn you out. You pretended to like me. I could have gotten the wrong idea. I was supposed to.”

The young woman looked at him strangely for a moment.

“You’re a tenderhearted soul,” she said.

“Goddamn right,” Walker said.

“Flirtatiousness is fair, you know. It’s a legitimate device.”

“Of course it is.”

“I suppose you’ll go and see her.”

“I’ll go to her bungalow, yes. And you’ll report me.”

“Why shouldn’t I? I owe them hospitality. I don’t owe anything to you.”

“Helena,” Walker said. “If I find her — give us a while. You don’t have to go straight back to Axelrod.”

“It’s not right,” the woman said, “to give her drugs. You’ll harm her.”

“I’m not going there to give her drugs.”

“All right,” Helena said. “We’ll go back.”

They went back to the limousine; the driver left them near the beach at the base of the cliff.

“I’m sorry I was rude,” Walker said when they were out of the car. “I get angry all the time.”

“I really don’t mind exchanging insults,” Helena told him. “I was trained to it from an early age. Anyway, you’re the first person here who’s talked to me as though I were human.” She pointed down the beach toward a point beyond the curve of the cliff. “That’s where the bungalows are.”

“I know,” Walker said. “Give my best to the gang in Katmandu.”

She turned for the water’s edge. Walker trudged along the beach toward the row of bungalows.

A moment after his knock, through the closed door, he heard her startled motion; a shifting step on the tiles, the rustling of cloth. When she opened and saw it was he, she closed her eyes and opened them again.

“Thank God,” she said, and leaned her head against his breast.

“Amen,” Walker said.

She stepped aside to let him come in.

“Have you anything to drink, Gordon?”

“No,” he said. “And you shouldn’t.”

“Last night. I was so demented. I was out of my gourd. I couldn’t handle seeing you.”

“You went to Bly’s.”

She looked at him in alarm and shook her head.

“I went to Billy’s place to sleep because I didn’t want to sleep alone. I mean, he’s gay, Gordon. He’s my pal.”

“You had an affair with him once, Lu, I know you did. When I saw you creep off to him I was a little put out.”

“Gordon, you know I bend the truth from time to time.”

“We all forgive you, Lu. As best we can.”

“But I’m not lying now, Gordon. I went to Billy’s and he gave me a ’lude and we talked. I swear it. I’d just seen you — how could I make it with Billy? I may tell stories, Gordon, but I’m not capable of pushing that many buttons.”

“It’s funny,” Walker said. “I started out being jealous of that Lowndes guy.”

“He’s a piece of shit,” Lu Anne said. She stated it so positively and unemotionally that it sounded like a considered analysis.

“He wrote a good novel,” Walker said. “Of course,” he added with some slight satisfaction, “he only wrote one and that was a while ago.”

“I read his novel,” Lu Anne said. “I don’t care how many he wrote. He’s a piece of shit and he’s after me.”

“Why?”

“Because he knows I’m crazy and he wants to write about it in New York Arts. He’s always watching me.”

“Lu,” Walker said patiently, “he digs you.”

“Do you think,” Lu Anne asked brightly, “that if I called the room service people they’d send down a bottle of tequila?”

“Not if they’ve been told not to.” He paused a moment. “You can always try,” he heard himself say.

“Mezcal,” Lu Anne said wickedly, “that’s what we want.” She put her arm around Walker’s neck and buried her face in his shoulder. In an instant, as though she had been posing for a quick snapshot, she leaped to the telephone. “We’ll have ourselves an alcoholic picnic. As we were wont.”

“We were wont to lose the odd weekend with our alcoholic picnics.”

Lu Anne ordered her mezcal without objection from the house. The prospect seemed to cheer her; she sat on the edge of the sofa with her hands clasped between her thighs watching Walker.

“Funny about last night,” he said to her. “You’re with Lowndes, you go off with me. You’re with me, you go off with Bly. Lots of La Ronde, entrances and exits, bedrooms and closed doors and nobody really gets any. Very Hollywood.”

“We used to think we were too late,” Lu Anne said. “That we had missed out on Hollywood.”

“How wrong we were.”

Within a few minutes, two waiters wheeled in a rolling table with a liter bottle of mezcal con gusano attended by bottles of mineral water, glasses, lemon wedges and an ice bucket.

Walker poured them out two glasses of straight liquor.

“How about you, Lu Anne?”

She took the drink and drank it down unflinching with a childlike greediness and poured herself another.

“You want to know, Gordon? How it is with me? Is it really your business?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“That I bend my eye on vacancy and with the incorporeal air do hold discourse?”

“Sure. And why. And if you want to, you’ll get to hear how it is with me.”

“You played Lear,” she said.

“Yes.”

“How was it?”

“It was like life but easier to take. I could spend the rest of my time on earth playing Lear.”

“I wish I could play Lear,” Lu Anne said. “Maybe I can. Beard up and play Lear.”

“You could play the Fool.”

Their eyes met. Lu Anne poured them more mezcal.

“That’s good,” Lu Anne said. “Because I could. We could do it together.”

“When this is over,” Walker said. “Well talk it up. I’ll talk to Al.”

“The hell with agents. Well do it on campuses. We’ll do it in church halls for free.”

“Yes.”

She took the bottle of mezcal and examined the little embalmed creature at the bottom of the bottle.

“The worm’s an odd worm.”

“I wish you the joy of it,” Walker said.

“I want to be Cleo too, Gordon. I’m tired of Edna. I’m glad she’s dead.” She sipped her drink and laughed. “I mean, I just can’t die too many times. I can’t get enough of it.”

“You’re such a ham, Lu Anne. You’re lucky you can act.”

“And you’re such a ham,” she said to him, “it’s a crying shame you aren’t any better.”

“What’s happening with Lionel? Where’s he gone?”

“He’s gone visiting with the kids. But I don’t think he’s coming back.”

Walker poured himself some mezcal.

“He can’t just not come …”

“No,” she said, “he can’t just not come back. I mean he’s going to leave me. He was aching to get away from me. It was horrible.”

“He can’t take your kids from you.”

“Sweetie,” Lu Anne said, “with the right lawyer in the right state he could get me put to sleep.”

“Things have changed, you know. You don’t have to let him get away with it.”

“No,” she said. “I can kill him. But I don’t think I’d be able.”

They sat in silence drinking. Walker went to the window and saw the sky blighted with thick dark yellowing clouds, as though there were a dust storm over the ocean.

“Connie left me, you know.”

Lu Anne lay on the bed with her eyes closed.

“I never understood why she stayed,” Lu Anne said.

“I was very upset,” Walker said. “I think I still am.”

“Poor baby,” Lu Anne said. “Is that why you came down here?”

“No,” Walker said.

“Then,” Lu Anne asked him, “why did you?”

“I have a lot of excuses,” Walker said, “but I guess I came to see you.”

“Ah,” Lu Anne said briskly. “Yesterdays. Golden sweet sequestered days.”

“Of mad romance and love. Yes, I was moved by the prospect.”

“A reunion.”

“Just so.”

“Well, Gordon,” Lu Anne said, inventing a character for herself as she went along, “I too am moved …” She stopped and put her fist to her forehead, letting the character fall like a shed skin. “I too am moved.” She went to him and reached out, gently touched his cheek and leaned her head against his shoulder. Walker thought he felt an infinite weariness there. “I too.”

He held her and he was thinking that this was his golden girl and that she was in his arms and that they could never have peace or a quiet moment or a half hour’s happiness.

“It was so foolish of you to come, Gordon. Good heavens, man, no wonder Connie left you.”

He said nothing. She broke away from him.

“Connie and I, Gordon mine, we’re confronting hollow-eyed forty-odd. We’ve been screwed, blued and tattooed. We’ve been put with child and aborted, hosed down ripped open chewed and spat out seven ways from sundown! We’ve been burned by lovers, pissed on by our kids, shit on by mothers-in-law, punched out for laughing and punched out for crying and you expect us to sit still for your romantic peregrinations? Foolish man!”

“I don’t believe Connie had lovers,” Walker said.

She stuck out her lower lip and thrust a curved pinky toward him, the gesture of a child’s wager. He put his hand over his face; they both began to laugh.

“Foolish man!” she cried. “Stay home and fuck your fecund imagination!”

“I could do that in my garage,” he said. “When I had a garage.”

“I know all the things one can do in garages,” she said.

He kept smiling but her words gave him a vague chill. The picture they brought to his mind’s eye was not agreeable.

“The girls get all shriveled and the boys get soft and sentimental. That’s how the damn world goes.” She went back and put her arms around him again. “What do you want from me, fool? You want us to be kids again?”

“I wouldn’t have put it that way.”

“Indeed you wouldn’t, sweetheart, but that’s what you want.”

“Who knows?” Walker said.

“Jamais, mon amour. Jamais encore.”

They sat down together on the sofa and he kissed her. She pulled back to see his face.

“You closed your eyes,” she said, “you still do it.”

He shrugged.

“We’ll never be kids again, Gordon.” He felt her arms encircle him, he put his around her and kissed her.

“We’ll have to be spirits of another sort,” she said. After he had kissed her again, she whispered in his ear. “We’re not alone here.”

It brought him up short; then he realized she must be speaking of her Long Friends. They lay together for a moment, then she got to her feet. He stood up and took her in his arms again. The liquor, he supposed, had been a bad idea. It seemed not to matter any longer.

“No more romances for us, Gordon.”

When he started to answer, she covered his lips with her fingertips.

“There’s only work now. That’s all that’s left, it’s all that matters. That’s why I had to stop my pills.”

“If there’s only work,” Walker said, “where does that leave me?”

“You should have made provision,” she told him. “You should have lived like other people.”

“I always thought I could deliver. You know. Eventually.”

“When we do our Lear,” she told him, “and I’m your Fool, you’ll deliver.”

“I wasn’t bad, you know,” Walker said. “I was all right.”

She took his hands in hers. He gently disengaged and kissed her again.

“If I’m the Fool,” she told him when they caught their breath, “I’ve got to be Cordelia. They’re the same.”

“Yes,” Walker said.

“But I’m too old.”

“You aren’t,” Walker told her. “Anyway, I think it’s as much a question of weight.”

“That is what they say. Isn’t it, Gordon?”

“Yes, it is. Absolutely true.”

She let him pick her up, clasping her hands around his neck. She was not at all hard to lift, thinner than he had ever seen her and as quick.

“That’s the way they do it at the ice show,” she told him. “Did I tell you, Gordon, about when I was with the ice show?”

“Of course,” Walker said. “Of course you did.” He walked toward the bed carrying her.

“Howl!” she half cried. Clinging, she looked up at him. “Howl,” she whispered. “Howl.”

He swung her gently around once.

“See,” she said. “I can be a light Cordelia. And I can be a shy Cordelia. Warlike, on-the-march Cordelia.” She let go her grip on the back of his neck and sank down across his outstretched arms with a sigh. “And I can be a dead Cordelia.”

He placed her on the bed and sat down beside her. When they were both naked he rolled over to face her and found himself beside dead Cordelia.

“Hey,” he said. “Come back.”

They made love over a daylight hour or so. Once she told him that she had joy in his arrival; her words, while their spell lasted, swept away his weariness and fear and anger. Later they slept awhile.

When he awoke the sun was low in the sky. A blade of sunlight was edging across the bed where they had been, threatening the shadows in which Lu Anne lay sleeping.

That she had taken joy in his arrival, he thought, that she had spoken those words to him should be all that mattered. He wanted more than anything to stay in a time where her words and his love were all that mattered. When it began to slip away, he had a drink of mezcal and quietly went to his stash for more cocaine. He brought the drug and his works into the bathroom.

As he was chopping the crystalline powder, he happened to glance in the cabinet mirror. He saw the bathroom doorknob slowly turn. It was too late to hide anything; he steadied the stuff on the ledge in front of him so as not to spill it. In the next moment, as he expected, the door flew open and she was standing in the bathroom doorway, laughing.

“Aha,” she cried. “Gotcha.”

In a pink palazzo at the top of the hill, the Drogues and their womenfolk were whiling away the afternoon watching films in which people walked into the sea and disappeared forever. They had watched Bruce Dern in Coming Home, Joan Crawford in Humoresque, James Mason in the second A Star Is Born and Lee Verger in The Awakening. Now Fredric March and Janet Gaynor were on the out-sized screen before them. March stood clad in his bathrobe in the character of Norman Mayne.

“Hey,” he called to Janet Gaynor. “Mind if I take just one more look?”

Old Drogue picked up the remote-control panel and stopped the frame. His eyes were filled with tears.

“Listen to me,” he told the others, “this guy was the greatest screen actor of all time. That line — the emotion under it — controlled — played exactly to movie scale. There was never anyone greater.”

Joy McIntyre lay on some heaped cushions beside him, weeping unashamedly.

“Wellman was good,” the younger Drogue said.

“The vulnerability,” old Drogue said, “the gentleness, the class of the man. Never again a Fredric March. What a guy!” He let the film proceed and settled back with head on Joy’s bare belly. “You see what I mean, sweetheart?” the old man asked his young friend. But Joy was too overcome to reply.

“Look at the nostrils on Gaynor,” young Drogue said. “She acted with her nose.”

“Do I have to remind you that she started before sound?”

“I love it,” Patty Drogue said. “Before sound.”

“She was ultra-feminine,” old Drogue said.

The younger Drogue studied the images on the screen.

“Her face suggests a cunt,” he said.

The old man sighed.

“I don’t know why it does,” young Drogue said. “It just does.”

“You’re a guttersnipe,” Drogue senior said.

“Something about the woman’s face, Dad. It makes a crude but obvious reference to her genitals.”

“Some people are brought up in poverty,” the old man said, “and they become cultivated people. Others grow up spoiled rotten with luxury and become guttersnipes.”

“You look at her face,” young Drogue declared, “and you think of her pussy.” His brows were knotted in concentration. “Can that be the primal element in female sexual attraction? Can it explain Janet Gaynor?”

“People are surprised,” Drogue senior said quietly, “when they find out you can get sex education lectures at the morgue. They’re not in touch with the modern sensibility.”

Joy was glaring sullenly at young Drogue. The old man shifted his position, the better to fondle her.

“What does he mean,” Patty Drogue asked her husband, “sex education lectures at the morgue?”

“In San Francisco,” young Drogue said absently. “The coroner explains about bondage. Pops got fixated on this.”

On the screen, Fredric March’s body double was wading toward the setting sun. This time it was Drogue junior who stopped the frame.

“This one was the best,” his father said smugly. “Of all the walk-into-the-ocean movies this one was it.”

“In the Mason and Judy Garland,” his son told him, “the Cukor version, the scene’s exactly the same. Frame for frame.”

“The scene is conditioned by what’s around it. The other one is a Judy Garland film. Entirely different thing.”

Young Drogue went pensive.

“Well,” he said, “with Judy Garland now, see, she …”

“Stop,” his father said sternly. “I don’t want to hear it. Whatever idiotic obscenities you were about to utter — keep them to yourself. I don’t want to hear your sexual theories about Judy Garland. I want to go to my grave without hearing them.”

“Some of us want to remember Judy the way she was,” Joy McIntyre said primly.

“Who the fuck asked you?” young Drogue inquired.

Old Drogue kissed Joy on the thigh to soothe her.

“Ours is the best,” the young director declared. “We took a great risk to honor the author’s intentions. We had to reinvent a virtual chestnut because it was in the book.”

“You’re lucky you had a strong script,” his father told him.

They watched Norman Mayne’s funeral and the end of the film.

“There was another Cukor version, right?” young Drogue asked. “Before Wellman’s. It had a walk to the water, didn’t it?”

“There was What Price Hollywood? by Cukor. It’s a similar plot but it doesn’t have anyone in the water.”

“You sure?”

“Absolutely certain,” the old man said.

The chimes of the main door sounded. Patty rose to her feet and lifted the drawn shutters to peer out.

“Tell them to fuck off,” said Drogue minor.

“It’s Jack Best,” she said. “But he doesn’t look his jack best, ho ho.”

“I’ll bet he doesn’t,” young Drogue said.

“Please don’t be rude to Jack,” his father told him. “He’s got a job the same as you. And he’s been doing stills for us.”

“He’s been underfoot all morning with his stills,” the young director said, going to the door. “Helena saw him trailing after Walker by the beach — like we’re going to sell the movie with Walker’s picture.”

He opened the door to Jack Best, who did in fact appear ill and unhappy.

“Jack, baby,” he said cheerfully, “what’s this we hear about the choreographer at the Sands?”

“Ah,” Jack muttered biliously. “Dumb gag.”

“I didn’t even know the Sands had a line,” Patty Drogue said.

“It doesn’t,” her husband assured her. “Would you like a drink, Jack?”

Jack Best mastered a slight spasm of his jaw. Patty hastened to fix a whiskey and soda for him.

“Dumb gag,” he said. He took the drink from Mrs. Drogue and swallowed half of it. “One too many.”

“So what do you want here, Jack? Where’s your camera?”

Best finished his drink and looked lugubriously about the room. His eyes were bright with the squamous resentment of an old snapping turtle.

“We got trouble,” he said. He was holding a magazine in his hand. He opened it to reveal a photograph that had been inserted between its pages. He put the magazine aside and clutched the photograph to his breast. Everyone in the room looked at it.

“Run along, my dear,” old Drogue said kindly to Joy. “I’ll join you very shortly.” As Joy left pouting, the old man blew her a kiss.

“I can’t believe,” Patty Drogue said, “that you talk to her like that.”

“What’s the pic, Jack?” young Drogue asked.

Best looked from father to son in a state of agitation. He showed his teeth like a frightened pony.

“Miss Verger,” Jack said. “And that Walker. They been shacked up all day.”

The Drogues, father and son, exchanged glances.

“Yeah?” young Drogue asked. “So what?”

Best tried to hand his picture to the old man. His son intercepted it.

“Walker been mistreating you, Jack?” young Drogue asked, turning the picture face up. “He’s such a troublesome guy.”

He looked down at the picture for some time. His wife came to look at it over his shoulder.

“Golliwilkins,” she said. “Gag me with a spoon. And I was so reassuring to poor Lionel.”

The photographs were sunlit shots of Lu Anne and Walker naked in bed. Walker was holding a small shiny rectangle while Lu Anne sniffed at its surface through a drinking straw.

Young Drogue handed the picture to his father.

“So what’s this, Jack? A handout?”

“They got a whole bunch like this,” the aged publicist croaked urgently. “It’s a shakedown.” He turned rather desperately to old Drogue. “Right, Wally? Like when Eddie Ritz had those pictures of Mitch? That’s what it’s like.”

Drogue senior looked from the picture to his old friend. He shook his head sadly, put the print down and walked out of the bungalow.

Finding himself abandoned to the rising generation of Drogues, Jack Best began to shake. The ice in his glass tinkled audibly.

Young Drogue watched him with a bemused smile.

“This is odd,” he told his wife. “I think these were taken very recently. I think they were taken here. On our very own location.”

“It’s a shakedown,” Jack Best croaked.

“I see,” young Walter Drogue said. “What shall we do, Jack? I mean, I’ve heard of these things happening in the business. But I’ve never actually encountered it until now.”

Jack cleared his throat. He looked from side to side in a conspiratorial fashion.

Drogue put a cupped hand to the side of his mouth.

“You can talk here, Jack,” he whispered. “Right, Patty?”

“Righto,” Patty Drogue whispered back.

“It was Madriaga,” Jack told him. Madriaga was the jefe of the unit’s Mexican teamsters, a vicious clownish former policeman. “He come up to me. He was a cop, you see. They went to him. The ones that took the shots. He come to me. They want five big ones. Or they put it out. The reporter that’s here. They would give it to him. And around. Europe. England and France. Worldwide. It’s like before. You could ask your father. When Eddie Ritz had these pictures of Mitch.”

“Bless my soul, Jack,” Drogue said, “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.” He turned to his wife. “Can you, dear?”

Patty shook her head. “I liked it, though. I liked it when he said five Big Ones.”

“What are Big Ones, Jack?” Drogue asked.

“A grand,” Jack said urgently. “A thou.” His voice rose in panic. “A thousand dollars.”

Drogue took Jack’s empty glass from his unsteady hand.

“Jack,” Walter Drogue junior said, “that’s blackmail. Who would do such a thing? Not someone on our set? Not one of our own?”

Best began to titter and chatter in an almost simian fashion.

“Plenty of them. They ain’t got any — they don’t care anymore. They treat you like dirt. Just look around. They ain’t no good, Walter. They’ll make bad publicity. Shit where they eat.”

“I’m no good at this,” Drogue said dejectedly. “I can’t even follow you. What do we have to do, Jack? Will it involve telling Charlie? Will I have to give you money?”

“I could tell you,” Jack stammered, “if you ask your old man. I can handle them. Shakedown artists. I got ways. Like when they had Mitch’s picture.”

“Maybe we should call the police,” Patty Drogue suggested.

“The inside of a Mexican jail,” Drogue said with hearty indignation. “That’s the place for these dirty blackmailers. How about that, Jack?”

“No,” Jack said.

“No?” Young Drogue picked up the wireless house telephone on one of his bookshelves and began to dial. “You think not, Jack? Think we should pass on that one? A no-no?” When he had finished dialing, he picked up a pen and began doodling on a note pad.

“No cops,” Jack said. “I mean, Mexican cops? I mean, you’d gotta be crazy. You gotta leave it to me.” He stared at the futuristic telephone receiver in young Drogue’s hand. “I can handle it.”

“How would you do it, Jack?” He looked angrily at the wireless phone receiver. He had not obtained a connection. “Fucking thing,” he muttered. The sight of his unhappy public relations adviser seemed to soothe him. “Would you do it like they did it before Marty? Would you do it like they did it before sound?”

“Hey, Wally,” Jack said, “Walter — I never worked before sound, Walter. My first picture was with Dick Powell. That was sound.”

Drogue was dialing again.

“Axelrod?” he said into the phone. “Put him on.”

Jack turned to Patty Drogue. “Dick Powell,” he said.

Drogue sat waiting for Axelrod’s response, holding the miniature receiver in a clenched fist beneath his chin. Jack Best began to stare at the device with such intensity that the young director’s attention was diverted.

“Did you want to see this, Jack?” he asked kindly.

In his confusion and haste to be agreeable, Jack nodded eagerly. He reached out for the sleek receiver with such gleeful anticipation that it was possible to see why he had once been called Smilin’ Jack Best. At the last moment Drogue withdrew it from the old man’s soiled grasping reach.

“It’s a telephone, Jack,” he snarled. Jack cringed. “Axelrod!” he said into the receiver. “I got this grotesque situation to cope with. You want to give me a hand?” He looked at Best. “A man’s supposed to be an artist,” he said ill-temperedly. “Instead you end up as a carny boss.”

Jack Best could not reply. His face was trapped in the rigor of his own smile. No matter how hard he attempted to disengage his features from their merry aspect, he was unable to do so. He turned from the young director to the latter’s wife. Patty twinkled back at him. She was holding a Polaroid Instamatic. Rising, she stalked the publicist.

“Now, Jack,” she cooed, “we’ll see what you really truly look like.”

Jack wrenched his jaw into motion.

“Chrissakes,” he protested. “I seen it was a phone, Walter. I mean, chrissakes. I think my glasses … my specs … I seen it was a phone, Walter.”

Now the Drogues inclined together, watching for images of Jack Best to form on the blank print. They seemed rapt.

“When a thing fits in your hand,” Jack explained, “you gotta be sharp. Like the pics. You aren’t sharp, they’ll kick your teeth in. I know, Walter, because I been there. They say — he’s a nice fella and they eat you alive. Walter? Am I right or wrong?”

“Ooh,” Patty Drogue said, “there he is, the old scamp.” She tore free the Polaroid print of Jack’s photograph and handed it to him. Jack looked down into his own smiling face.

“Walter,” he said. “Honest to God, I dealt with the roughest and toughest, and the good of the organization was all that mattered to me. You could ask your father. It was dog cat dog. Murder. A jungle.” He set the ghastly picture of himself on the shelf beside the strange little telephone. Beside it was the pad on which young Drogue had been doodling. On the pad he read the words: “Five Beeg Wons.” He began to weep.

Patty Drogue leveled the Instamatic at him, giving no quarter.

“You shouldn’t,” Jack said. He raised his hands to cover his face but she made the shot. Jack fought for breath.

“It was …” he tried to say. “It was …”

Patty lowered her camera and ran at him. She thrust her face into his. Her voice, when she spoke, was a comic rasp.

“It was money talks — before Marty!” she growled. “It was bullshit walks — before sound!”

She stepped back and pulled out the print of her latest snapshot.

“Oh, see!” she cried as the print came into composition. She showed it to her husband triumphantly as though she were vindicating her position in some point under dispute. “See how he looks?”

Instead of looking at the picture, Drogue looked directly at the cringing man.

“He looks,” the young director said, “like Abbott and Costello are waiting for him.”

A brisk alarming triple knock sounded against the bungalow door. The sound was muted and urgent and had nothing of good news about it.

Walker had been reading New York Arts on the patio while Lu Anne slept. He put the magazine aside and opened the door to Axelrod.

“You’re a stupid fuck,” the unit manager told him.

Walker was taken aback. Openings like Axelrod’s usually presaged a narrative of nights forgotten, and he was quite certain that he could account for the entire period since his arrival.

“Look at this,” Axelrod said, and handed him an envelope of photographs. When he had looked at them, he went back to the patio table where he had been reading and sat back down. Axelrod followed him.

“Taken today, right, Gordon?”

“No question.”

“You never heard of shades?”

Walker looked out to sea. A darkening cloud bank hovered on the horizon, supporting a gorgeous half rainbow.

“Basic precautions, Gordon,” Axelrod said in an aggrieved tone. “A little discretion. You think you have nothing but friends around here?”

“I thought you got to do everything and they didn’t care anymore.”

“Did you, Gordon? I got news for you. Even today there are things you don’t do. You don’t snort in your front window with the shades up. If you do you can find yourself in a seven-million-dollar production without a dime’s worth of insurance. If our insurers, Gordon — you listening to me? If our insurers had these pictures they would cancel our insurance forthwith and this thing could close down today.”

“That’s a worst-case scenario. Is it not?”

“Gordon, Gordon,” Axelrod said with a mirthless smile, “this could have been a bad case. Remember Wright’s picture for Famous? Coke on the set? There was a corporate crisis in New York at Con Intel. The stockholders went apeshit. And it’s not only a matter of insurance. There’s a theory around that ripped people make lousy movies.”

“Lu Anne’s asleep,” Walker said. He rested his cheekbones on his fists and looked down at the uppermost print. “They’re in color,” he said. “That’s far out.”

“What did you think, asshole? That they’d have a black border? Look at yourself. You look like a vampire.”

Walker found the image troubling.

“The drinking straw came out nice. Like a little barber pole.” He looked up at Axelrod. “Who took them?”

“Jack Best.”

Walker nodded. “I thought it might have been Jack. Trying to relive his heroic past.”

“He used to get pictures back for us all the time. If you wanted pictures back you went to him. Half the time he probably set the people up.”

“I was teasing him a little.”

“You were stepping on his balls a little. He claimed his principals wanted five thousand dollars. Depression prices. So I went over and yelled at him and he folded up.”

“Didn’t Walter believe him?”

“Only an idiot would have believed him. You could see his mind work through the holes in his head.”

“It’s sad,” Walker said. “I mean, he taught me how to read a racing form. I’m really sorry.”

“He was some schemer,” Axelrod said dreamily. “He got back those famous pictures of Mitchell Drummond and the kid. What’s-his-name who was the child actor that O.D.’d last year. That was his greatest number. He knew all the mob guys and all the cops.”

“Really sad,” Walker said. “Poor Jack. Tell him he can take my picture any time he wants but I wish he’d leave my friends alone.”

“He’s finished, Gordon. He’s going where Winchell and Kilgallen went.”

“A tragedy,” Walker said. “Do we have all the pictures back?”

“He says he put one print under Dongan Lowndes’s door. Seemed kind of funny.”

“It’s a riot. Confidential closed, so he takes them to New York Arts. Van Epp can run them next to Nelson Eddy goosing chorines.”

“It makes no sense,” Axelrod said. “So I thought, well, he’s senile, he’s out of it …”

“Do we have to worry about what Lowndes thinks of us?” Walker asked. “He’s supposed to be a gentleman. He’ll give us the picture back.”

“Gordon,” Axelrod said, “let me tell you something that’s also funny. I just tossed the gentleman’s room again. I went through his gear as completely as I could without leaving traces. The print’s not there.”

“Maybe Jack was lying.”

“I don’t think so.” Axelrod took a chair in the shade. “I think Lowndes has it. If he was going to give it back he would have done it by now.”

“That’s not very nice of him,” Walker said. “But then he isn’t very nice, is he?”

“Not in my opinion. In my opinion he’s a smart prick.”

“He’s worse than that,” Walker said. “He’s an unhappy writer.”

Axelrod mixed himself a drink from the setup on the umbrella-shaded table beside him.

“It’s not good,” he said. “These shots kick around — sooner or later they end up in print.”

Walker watched the sea-borne rainbow fade into blue-gray cloud.

“It wouldn’t hurt this picture,” Axelrod went on. “It wouldn’t help you much. But I wouldn’t think it could hurt you much either.”

“People would get the impression I take drugs.” He turned toward the bungalow’s bedroom window. The blinds were closed. “But Lu Anne may be in a divorce court presently.”

“Careerwise also,” Axelrod said. “If it got around that in addition to her other problems she had this — you understand me.”

“We should really get the print back,” Walker said.

“Definitely. We should talk to Lowndes. We should get him to do the right thing. I mean,” Axelrod asked, “why should he want to keep it?”

“They’re such depressing pictures,” Walker said, raising one with his thumb and forefinger.

“Some things you do,” Axelrod observed, “you don’t want to see yourself doing them.”

Walker stared at the picture and shook his head in disgust.

“She caught me with it,” he explained. “It’s very hard to say no to Lu Anne.”

“I know that, Gordon. I understand.”

“You know what they say about her, Axelrod? They say her pictures don’t make money and she has no luck with men.”

“I’ve heard that said about her, Gordon.” He finished his drink and pushed the glass away. “She needed that doctor. He could say no to her.”

“It’s very irritating, Lowndes keeping that picture. What a cheap stunt!”

“No class,” Axelrod said. “No self-respect.”

Walker looked out to sea.

“Of course, it might make a good lead,” Walker said, “if he was writing a certain kind of story.”

“You think so?”

“I’m writing for New York Arts,” Walker said. “Here’s my lead: On the third day after my arrival at The Awakening’s Bahía Honda location, a package arrived at my feet having been slid under my bungalow door. Naturally I assumed it contained the daily trades … ha-ha, jape, flourish et cetera. Imagine my — and so forth — when upon opening it I find it to contain a photograph of two of the principal artists naked in bed, apparently in the act of scoffing I know not what, tooting up, coke and the movies, sordidness and blackmail, hurray for Hollywood, movies as metaphor, crazy California, decline of the West, ad astra ad nauseam! You like my lead?”

“It’s a colorful lead. Is there more?”

“Yes,” Walker said, “there’s more. There’s effect. Charlie Freitag — the movies’ answer to Bernard Berenson, the only man in California off the Redlands University campus who wears a bow tie — is deeply hurt. He subscribes to New York Arts. His wife subscribes, his gardener, the people next door across the canyon. His high-class flick is getting the mondo-bizarro treatment in his very favorite magazine. Sun Pix is pissed off at him. Amalgamated Can is pissed off at Sun Pix. It’s a litigious age. Van Epp is scared stiff. He calls in Lowndes … Did you make this up, Dongo? A literal Dutch uncle. The novelist’s — the former novelist’s — mouth is wreathed in a putrid smile. He reaches under his cape. Observe the snap, mynheer Van Epp.”

Axelrod thought about it.

“As a completely blind item,” he said, “it might not be so bad. It might even be a little … good.” He shrugged.

“Man, Lowndes is going to make this location look like Bosch’s Garden. If we were down here making kiddiebop with grown-ups talking dirty and popping bloodbags, they could run that print on the cover of Christianity Today and we could tell them to eat it. But what if the story just reads as production problems? And then your lofty scene dies the death? They’ll blame it on coke.”

“They’ll blame it on Lu,” Axelrod said.

“That’s right.”

“So,” Axelrod said testily, “why the fuck you give her cocaine, then?”

“Did you approve of my coming down here, Axelrod?”

“I thought it was a bad idea.” He sulked, eyeing the bank of storm cloud as though he wanted to tear it in half. “I might have been able to stop you. I might have hung up on Shelley.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Fuck you, Gordon.”

“You wanted me down here. Tell me why.”

“I thought we might have a few laughs.”

“You figured I’d bring down some blow. You were out.”

“I could’ve scored somewhere, Gordon. I thought maybe it would be … I don’t know what I thought.”

“You thought it would be like old times.”

“Yeah,” Axelrod said disgustedly, “that’s about it.”

“So did I,” Walker said. “Maybe they’ll bring them back. They bring everything back.”

“We gotta nudge Mr. Lowndes a little. So he gives us back our print. I mean,” Axelrod said, “it would be great not to have to tell Charlie about this.”

“What we have to do,” Walker said, “is make him understand he’s playing in the wrong league. Make him understand his position.”

“Right,” Axelrod said.

“We have to make him look down and see where he’s liable to fall. We’ll tell him how we see the big ones and the little ones fall every day. Like sparrows.”

“Yeah,” Axelrod said. He smiled. “Let’s tell him that, Gordon.”

Half an hour later Walker went into the bedroom. His first impulse was to draw open the blinds but he thought better of it. When he turned on the corner ceiling lights he discovered Lu Anne to be awake. Her hair was wet and she had changed into black lace.

“You do take a lot of showers, Lu Anne.”

“I take a lot of showers for a coon-ass. Is that what you meant?”

“Let’s not be crazy,” Walker said.

“Let’s not you be paranoid,” she told him. “Goodness,” she said. “I was drunk when I went to sleep and I’m still drunk.”

She rolled off the bed.

“Christ,” she said, from all fours, “there’s crawling.”

Walker put on a sweatshirt and went into the bathroom to shower.

“How long will you stay?” she asked him through the open door.

“I thought I’d go back on Monday. Leave you to work.”

“Stay longer.”

“Lu Anne,” he said, “I can’t afford this hotel. I’m here on Sun Pix and Amcan.”

“So short a time,” she said, “after so long.”

“It’s been hard for me to get away. The chance came. So I grabbed it.”

“No, no,” Lu Anne told him. “It was more elaborate than that. You connived. What were you thinking of?”

“Honest to God, I don’t know. Maybe of cheating time. Throwing a two-by-four in the treads.”

She sipped from a glass of mezcal, shivered and handed it half finished to Walker. He put it aside.

“Come back,” she said.

He took off the trunks and sweatshirt he was wearing and climbed into bed with her. In the vulgar half light she seemed to draw away as he approached. She did so without moving, with a silent, subtly visible retracting of herself. It was as though she drew in all softness, took up her own slack and curled the flesh around her long bones. Her eyes went dull, her lips were shadows. He could not tell whether it was something she was doing or some warp in his abused perception.

Gallic severity. A crucifix. Charlotte Corday.

“Come in, Gordon,” she said.

He found the game for him. The game for him was to ease through the ivory casing, to loose the bound flesh, draw out the woman and beyond the woman some creature of another sort.

The creature was inside, it fucked like pure madness. It was madness and it frightened him. Down the gullet of fear itself, he charged with a silent hurrah.

“How nice,” Lu Anne said.

When she turned her face to his, she looked flushed and dimpled and happy. The Lady of Mortifications was fled home to Port Royal, madness appeased. Lu Anne was at home.

She seems so young, he thought. Her face was smooth, the skin beneath her eyes was sound. It struck him then how good the doctor and the children must have been for her.

“Allons,” Walker declared. “Laissez le bon temps …”

She put her hand over his mouth.

“I forbid you to use that idiotic phrase,” she told him. “It’s for morons. Only cretins use it. And people from Shreveport.”

“I was feeling moronic. Happy in my sex life. A stud once more.”

“You were always a stud, Gordon.”

“Ofttimes,” he said, “of late not always.”

Suddenly she said, “How are your boys, Gordon?”

He fell silent inside. Her question fell upon his inward man like frost. He swallowed the pain.

“They’re fine.”

“In school?”

“Stuart’s in school. Deak’s on his own.”

“Deak is the funny one, right? The pretty one.”

“Stuart,” Walker said. “He’s the funny one now.”

“They’re the only ones you love,” she said. “You always fretted over them.”

“Hostages to fortune,” he said. He was thinking that if they began to talk about their children they would drown in a sea of regret. Walker had always pictured regret as something like vomit. The association was not gratuitous.

“I think I’ll do a little more coke,” he said brightly. “It might sober me up for dinner.” When he got up and looked in the mirror he thought of Lowndes and the pictures. He assembled his works, feeling more sober than he could possibly be.

“I shouldn’t have any more,” Lu Anne said uncertainly.

“Good thinking,” Walker said. He was trying frantically to get his hit and put the stuff away.

“Well,” she said finally, “if you’re having some I want some too.”

“You’re on half rations,” he told her. “Recuperating.”

“There are some would have me drink,” she said mysteriously, “there are those who would have me dry.”

He chopped two narrow lines for her and handed over the equipment, the mirror and the drinking straw whose festive colors had shown up so well on the color photographs.

For the drawn blinds and the dim light, it might have been any hour. How foolish of him, he thought, to have forgotten about the blinds. On locations people were always watching, peering in trailers, looking for lighted windows.

“Don’t think about your kids,” she told him earnestly. She leaned her head on one arm to lecture him. She was wearing a pair of silver-rimmed aviator glasses he had not seen before and he suspected she had appropriated them to use as a prop when she felt admonitory.

“Seriously,” she said, “your kids don’t care about you. Don’t care about them.”

Walker did not answer her. He reached down, took a pinch of coke under his fingernail and touched it to his gum.

“I saw you do that,” Lu Anne said. “Now listen to me — you don’t care a damn about your daddy, do you?”

“My father is dead,” Walker said. “And my mother is dead. And my brother is dead.”

He repeated this statement, this time as a little song, to the tune of an Irish jig.

“There was a time …” Walker began. He managed to stop, shut up before it was too late. He had been about to discourse on the subject of his father. Without trying to conceal it from her he put the mirror on his pillow and took some more. She took the straw from his hand and snorted until he thought she would pass out. He put it back down quickly before she could exhale on it.

“But honestly, Gordon! They won’t be worrying about you. You ought not to worry about them. I’ve got children myself, Gordon.”

“I know that, love.”

“Yessir. Four.” She held her hand, the long fingers splayed and trembling, before his face. “Four counting the dead and I insist on counting the dead, that’s the custom in Louisiana, Gordon, where the living and the dead are involved in mixed entertainments. And are not tucked away in the ground but dwell among us. Their hair grows and their fingernails and they go on getting smarter in those ovens under their angels. Which represent the angels that attended them in life. Or their crosses. Or their Médailles miraculeuses.”

“Stop,” he said.

“Life too much for you, brother? Huh? What says the gentleman?”

“The gentleman allows that things are tough all over.”

“Gordon,” she demanded, “are you listening to me?” She took her glasses off and gave him a look of pedagogic disapproval. “Show the courtesy to listen to the person in the same bed as yourself. I have four!” Her hand quavered before his eyes. “They don’t care about me. I’m a biological function of their lives. That’s it. Three lives, one death. That’s all, man. Would I let them destroy me? No, I would not, Lionel. Gordon, rather. You wrote the book, Gordon. She doesn’t let them dominate her life! She will die for them, sure, but she won’t live for them. Isn’t that the way it goes? They need not have thought that they could possess her. Isn’t that what you wrote, Lionel?”

“Lionel didn’t write it and neither did I. Madame Chopin wrote it.”

“A red-necked Irishwoman who would trade her kids for a pint of Jim Beam. That’s the big secret, you know. She didn’t care about her kids. What she really wanted to be was an actress. Isn’t that right, Gordon?”

“I don’t know what’s right, my love. I’m drunk and you’re bananas. That’s the score.”

“I want more now, please, Gordon.”

“Well, honeychile,” Walker said, “you ain’t getting no fuckin’ more. Because you have degenerated into a goddamn lunatic. What kind of party has a lunatic at it?”

“Plenty,” she insisted. “Plenty of parties do. And I want more. Damn it, Gordon!” she said. Then she cocked an ear as though she had heard something.

“Listen, Gordon. A recitation. Sir King, we deem that ’tis strange sport, to keep a madman as thy fool at court.”

“Rest easy, Lu Anne.”

“This is the forest primeval.” She paused thoughtfully and repeated the line. “Gordon, do you know how long it took me to understand that Evangeline was not a good poem?”

He put her arm under his head and wrapped his arms around her. His thought was to suffocate her fire, keep her from burning up.

“Longer than most, I bet.”

“That would be about right,” she said. “Late in life.

“Do you know why I take so many showers?”

“Yes,” he said, “sort of.”

“Say why.”

“Because you have hallucinations in which your friends advise you to take showers.”

“They hardly advise me, honey. French,” she breathed confidentially, “can be the vehicle for some very low observations. And Frenchman French, well!”

“They aren’t really there, Lu Anne. That’s all there is to it.”

“They aren’t there in your life. They’re in mine.”

“Lu Anne,” Walker said. “Do you understand that I love you?”

“Yes, yes.” She patted his arm. “Yes, I understand.”

“Does that penetrate the … whatever it is?”

“Whatever it is,” she said, “I guess love penetrates it.”

He took his arms from around her and kissed her hand.

“Gordon,” she whispered, “what I said about our children …”

A long time ago he had learned to watch for a catch in her voice, a look in her eyes. He had learned what it portended. He had called it shifting gears. Once he had told her that she had two speeds: Bad Lu Anne and Saint Lu Anne. There on the bed beside him he saw her slide into Bad Lu Anne. Bad Lu Anne was not in fact malign, but formidable and sometimes terrifying. As soon as he saw her eyes, he jumped.

He body-checked her as she rose, and like a coach miming a tackle, eased her in his grip across the foot of the bed and held her there. It took all his strength and weight to keep her down. Her face was pressed against his chest, her mouth was open in a scream of pain, but not a sound came out of her. Panting, he held on. If she chose to bite him he would have to give way. Sometimes she bit him, sometimes not. This time she only kept on screaming, and in the single moment that his grip relented she drove him off the bed and clear across the room and into the beige cloth-covered wall. He hung on to her all the way. His body absorbed her unvoiced scream until he felt he could hardly contain, without injury, the force of her grief and rage.

At last she stopped thrashing and he loosened his grip. He backed away, and they lay together on the floor. She cradled her hands prayerfully beneath her cheek; she was facing him. Her lips moved, she prayed, mouthed words, sobbed. He put his hand on her shoulder, an inquiring hand, to ask if she wanted him there or not. When he touched her, she drew closer to him.

“Hey, now,” he whispered absurdly. He put his arm around her, his every move seemed feeble and irrelevant to him. “Hey, now,” he kept repeating, like a man talking to a horse. “Hey, now.”

Around sundown, Axelrod walked into the Drogues’ bungalow with his envelope full of photographs. Young Drogue and his wife were watching a Spanish-language soap opera on their television set. Axelrod set the envelope before them.

“Should I be overjoyed?” Drogue asked. “Is this all of them?”

“All except one print. Dongan Lowndes has it.”

“Jack gave it to Lowndes? But that’s ridiculous.” He looked from Jon to his wife, with an expression of pained mirth. “Isn’t it?”

Axelrod presented Walker’s theory of the Picturesque Lead with Jack’s photograph to support it.

“Somehow,” Drogue said, “I find it hard to take this dopey snapshot seriously.”

“According to Walker, Lowndes is gonna really dish it to us. He says the NYA story will make this location look like Butch’s Garden.”