“Well you see, I was such a crazy kid. I mean … oh, I don’t know, I had all kinds of ideas. I thought if I could get my face in the camera, maybe somebody would recognize me.”
“You mean some studio executive would say, ‘Who is that girl? Send for her!’ ”
“That’s right.” Bobby sipped her drink reflectively. “What a nut I was,” she said in a tone which was both cheerful and valiant. “I remember at the end of the day, a woman who’d been an extra for years came up to me and told me not to get up front so much. They won’t hire you, honey, if your face gets too familiar to audiences,’ she said to me, and she was right.” Bobby laughed nervously. “So, you see, no stardom.”
“Unhappily, I’m afraid your friend was right about not working close to the camera if you’re an extra.” The conversation reminded him of things Elena had said the night he met her, and he felt low. How could he ever possibly make love to Bobby?
It was obvious Bobby expected him to make the first move. She was so green. He held out an arm to her, and she put her hand in his, and sat timidly on his lap. After he kissed her, he knew he had to get out of this room. Her lips were stiff and frightened, and her body had a rigidity he understood only too well.
“Look,” he said, “couldn’t we go someplace else? Hotel beds always look like cadavers to me.”
She laughed and seemed a little more relaxed. “I don’t know,” Bobby said doubtfully. “You see, we could go to my house, but it’s nothing much. I hate to show you what a mess it is.”
“I know it’s more pleasant than this place.”
“Oh, it’s comfy all right, but you see, Mr. Eitel …”
“Charley.”
“Well, Charley, my two little girls are there.”
“I didn’t know you had children.”
“Oh, yes. They’re wonderful kids.”
That was the answer, Eitel thought. He would go home with her, he would talk a while, he would pay her and excuse himself on the plea that the children made him uncomfortable. “Let’s go,” he said softly.
On the drive across town, she continued to chat. There were times, she told him, when she was sick of everything. She had had such a rotten time in the capital. If she ever got a little bit ahead, she thought she would go back to her home town. She knew a fellow there who still wanted to marry her, children and all; they had been sweethearts in high school. He knew her mother and father who were the sweetest people in the world. Only she had been so stupid, she had married a musician. “That’s advice I can give anybody,” Bobby said. “Never follow a man who blows a horn.”
In her tiny furnished four-room bungalow with its cheap wrought-iron furniture, one red sofa and two green armchairs, and the mounted photographs of her parents and children on the wall, he did not feel a great deal better. Bobby was making drinks, the baby sitter had left, and somewhere, probably in the kitchen, she had turned on the radio. Directly across from where he sat was a spindly lamp and next to it, a bird cage with a parakeet. If she ever prospered as a call girl, she would move to another house, the furniture would be changed, there might even be a maid, but the bird would remain with her. He felt unaccountably sad for Bobby, so sad that tears came to his eyes; only Marion could find joy in making Bobby one of the girls.
She had come back with a drink for him, and because she did not know what to do, she was talking to the bird. “Pretty Cappy, pretty Cappy,” she lisped, “do you love me, pretty Cappy?” The bird was silent and Bobby shrugged again. “I never can get Captain to make a sound when company’s around.”
“Let’s dance,” Eitel said.
She did not dance well, she was rigid. Nothing with her body would come easily. When the number ended, she sat down on the couch beside him and they began to neck. It was all wrong; she kissed with the tense activity of a fifteen-year-old, and it seemed as if their lips never quite met. He would have to get out of here, Eitel told himself again.
At that moment the baby began to cry. “It’s Veila,” Bobby whispered with relief and she sprang away and tiptoed into the bedroom. He hardly knew why, but he followed her and stood beside Bobby as she rocked a one-year-old child in her arms. “She’s wet her pants,” Bobby said.
“I’ll hold her while you change the diaper.”
He had always been indifferent to children, but his mood made him vulnerable to the baby he held in his arms. He passed through one of those drunken moments when years, decades, and lives seem to balance on the edge of alcoholic wisdom, and all is understood, forgiven, and put away. With whisky, the squire to love, he could love Veila for this instant, see her life as it must be, or see another life, or ten lives, or see himself at the age of one and Bobby as a child and Elena as a child, a little monkey-faced Italian child with surprising green eyes, so different, so similar, to the tiny blonde package in his arms. Would Elena be like Bobby in another few years?
Bobby had taken the child from him and was fixing the diaper. As she worked, she looked up at him, and to his horror he knew there were tears in his eyes again.
“Veila had pneumonia last month,” Bobby said, “so I have to take special care of her now. God, those doctor bills.”
Eitel was mourning the death of the unwritten hero; buried by Freddie; no, buried by himself. All the troubles of the world had been borne by a character in his mind, and now they were borne no longer. “Poor baby, she must have been very sick,” he said, and he turned away and went back to the living room. He had to control himself; these were whisky tears. And all the while, tearing as the rupture of flesh, tore the thought: when Elena becomes like Bobby, how will men treat Elena?
So from nowhere, or so it must have seemed, he heard himself calling to Bobby, “May I give you a loan?” Since the night he made the contract with Collie, he had been going around with a thousand dollars in his wallet. She had come back to the living room then and stared at him quizzically, almost warily. “No, look,” said Eitel, touching a hand to her cheek, “this is for nothing, this is a loan.” And pulling out the wallet, he drew three, then four, then five one-hundred-dollar bills and folded them into her fingers.
She squealed. “Why, I could never … Charley, I could never pay you back.”
“Sure you can. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. Someday you’ll hit it, and I’ll be happy to find the money drop in on me just when I need it.”
“But I don’t understand.”
He wondered if he had ever been as sentimental in his life. “No, look,” he said again, like an adolescent enraged at existence, “it all stinks, do you understand? Let this be a present. That’s how things should be. Some people have given me more,” he said finally, inarticulately.
He had been ready to go then. At that moment he wanted nothing more than to leave the house, leave the present, leave his minor miracle.
But Bobby was overcome. She would not let him go, and made him sit beside her on the couch.
Glowing from his generosity, he was still doubtful of his motive. “How much I paid to avoid a fiasco,” he thought, and then gave himself up to necking with Bobby again. It was better than before, she wanted to please him, and so, inevitably, they set about fufilling the purpose of the evening. But it did not go as smoothly as that, for with an air close to panic she begged him to allow her a few more minutes, and the sight of her thin boy’s body and her grateful inept kisses damped any promise he might have felt. Then it became necessary to choose one of the items from the schedule of crossed pleasures Jay-Jay had offered, and with the aid of that, and the aid of every relevant memory, they succeeded the two of them, he was able, and for five minutes, the sweat on his back, the sweat on his face, he pretended to be happy and finished with a smile.
Bobby was delirious, or at least she presented the face of delirium. Something had happened to her apparently, a tremor of sensation perhaps which had wormed free out of a frozen wilderness. “Oh, you’re wonderful,” she said, “it was marvelous.” And on she went, babbling a little, trying by language
to swell that tremor into a lion of passion. It was impossible, he thought, he could not have been wrong. Almost to the end she had borne him with a cramped smile and eyes which she turned away. He had never felt so lonely in his life as when he had made love to her, and now she was trying to believe they had had a triumph. “Darling Charley,” she was saying, kissing his eyelashes, fondling his hair.
She was close as sticky jelly, and it took him half an hour to leave her. At the end, just as they kissed good night, Bobby looked at him with shining eyes and said, “When will I see you again?”
“I don’t know. Soon,” he said, and disliked himself for a liar.
When he got back to his house, he scrubbed himself with a rough washcloth and took Elena in their bed, hugging her to his chest until she purred that he was breaking her, and he gave himself to her, crying, “I love you, I love you,” her body a cove where he could bury himself. Then he took a sleeping pill and drifted into unconsciousness until Faye’s call awakened him.
Now it was morning and everything in the last six weeks took its turn at tormenting him. He suffered these sleepless hours the way men with shattered bodies fight for the time which will be the end of their pain. So Eitel fought for the minute when Elena would wake up and he would no longer be alone. But while he waited, he could only think that if Elena had lied to him the way he had lied to her, had been with another man, washed, and come to his bed, he could have strangled her. It was ridiculous. One could not compare the pleasure he had found with Bobby to the pleasure Elena gave him. Still, someone watching Bobby and himself might have thought he found pleasure; considerately, he had uttered sounds of enjoyment. That was meaningless, it came from him, but the thought of Elena uttering such sounds with another man … that was odious. Abruptly, he recognized how completely he must own her.
“I’m willing to grant her no life at all,” Eitel said to himself, and with a sickly perspiration could only think, “How I’m deteriorating, oh how I’m deteriorating.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MUNSHIN was telling part of the truth. He had talked with me for a few hours in the roulette den where Lulu and I spent our time during our trip away from Desert D’Or. Maybe we came back the night Eitel was visiting Bobby; at any rate I missed nearly all of what was happening, and I knew nothing about Eitel’s new script or that Collie had seen him so often.
I was too busy. Lulu had suggested one afternoon that we get into her car, pack a picnic supper, and travel three hundred miles across the state line to her favorite gambling hole. Since Lulu did not know how to drive below ninety on the desert roads, and I liked a hundred, the picnic was not so impossible as it sounded. As, things turned out, however, we ate the sandwiches she brought at two in the morning, and we would have needed a fifty-gallon drum of coffee to supply us while we stayed.
I had gone ready to gamble. The fourteen thousand dollars with which I came to Desert D’Or was half gone already, and I had the idea it was time to make more. I was ready to win a lot or lose a lot, and I did both before we were through. We arrived with only a few hundred dollars between us, but Lulu had standing credit, and I borrowed from it until I knew we were going to stay and then cashed in my account from the bank in Desert D’Or.
For twelve days we gambled, and we might have gambled for thirty more if Collie had not come to bother us, betting through the long workingday of the gambler, from ten at night to nine in the morning, and for that stretch of time there could have been a heat wave for all we knew or an earthquake or even a war; we worked all night, we tried to sleep through the day, and at mealtime Lulu would be counting the serials on dollar bills to find her lucky number for the night while I would be busy covering page after page with astronomical computations so I could find a system for roulette. I came up with one just as I was beginning to lose interest, and it was exactly the system of a man who has given up; with thirty thousand dollars of capital, I could be sure of making a hundred dollars a night, or at least fairly sure; the odds were two hundred and fifty to one in my favor; but if I lost, I lost everything, all thirty thousand. I explained it to Lulu, and she made a face. “You have ice water for blood,” she snapped at me.
Lulu played like a one-man band on amateur hour. She would have her lucky number or two numbers or ten, and she would play her combination only long enough to desert it and pick another, any number, the count of people at the table, or the string of buttons on the croupier’s vest, and then she would swoop off into red and black or odd and even, make a stand on double-zero, and come flying back to two, three, seven, or eleven, as if a pair of dice were interchangeable with a roulette cloth, cleaving to two and three during what she called the “evil hours,” seven and eleven when things went well. If she won a bet she squealed with delight, if she lost she groaned, and sometimes she was so confused, for she could never remember the odds, nor even the idea of the game, that a winning bet on red would grow for several rounds until she finally noticed it with a gasp of surprise, or just as often never knew how much she finally lost because she forgot her chips too long. With it all, she tipped the croupiers, how she tipped them! and to everybody’s irritation would come out ahead more often than not. Watching her gamble made one believe in the lion and the lamb. Roulette was her passion Lulu would say to anyone who listened, but she gambled with the passion of a child for a dessert or a dixie cup.
She certainly irritated me. I was professional no more than Lulu, but I had talent—at least I thought so—and I was serious. Gambling was hard work to me, and I was always going with a dozen calculations at once, listing every number which came up on the wheel that night and marking it red or black, odd or even, adding a Roman numeral to denote its third of the cloth, trying all the while in the stew of five half-developed systems to know how the imbalance was moving; was it red now or was it black which must be ready to have its run or the law of averages would be sadly maimed?
Every once in a while I would start to see myself in that big room with its Louis the Fourteenth chandeliers hanging in no apology over the fluorescent lights of the game tables while the modern bar that went along one wall was deserted except for the tourists who came to get drunk, to drop their thirty dollars, and to sport the worried leer of the Anglo-Saxon in a tropical brothel. Then, looking at the hundreds of people in the room, listening to the hush, and the dry popping sounds of the ball going and goggling its route against the wheel, I would be startled to discover myself as if I were all of a sudden undressed, and for a moment I would seem weird, life would seem weird. For money was usually real to me, I had had so little of it, and even in Desert D’Or, like a rube who got rich, it was not an easy thing for me to buy an eighty-dollar jacket or order a five-dollar meal. Once, I have to admit, I swept that poker game in Tokyo, but I was low then, I was ignorant, I was lucky as Lulu, and now with a coldness that looked me in the eye when I would start to think of the size of the room rather than the spin of the wheel I would put up twenty dollars, forty dollars, eighty dollars, and double it a few times again, the amounts no more than figures on my pad, the sign of talent; there was the cold gambler in me.
Talk of my talent, I ended by losing a lot of money. There is no point in going into how I would feel afterward on winning nights and losing nights. The common denominator was the same; I wanted to go back for more, sure if I had won that my new system had shown itself, sure even more if I lost that the mistakes I made were now taken into account and the error would be fixed tomorrow. Win or lose, I controlled the situation with my mind, I was superior, I understood; that is the sweet of gambling; and so, long description is unnecessary—all real gambling is more or less the same. Why tell how my seven thousand dollars went to five, and the five, eight, and how eight thousand dropped to three, nor the interesting hours of that night when three thousand became ten thousand and went back to five again. What counts is that I came back to Desert D’Or with a third of the money I had when I left, the itch for gambling gone with the cash.
But while it la
sted, it was an itch. Lulu and I took adjoining rooms in an air-conditioned hotel, and there were heavy drapes on the window to give us night when it was day. Those rooms were made for sleeping, and sleep we did, swimming along in the light slumber of people suffering from fever. In all those days we did not make love once; Lulu could have been a goat or a wagon of hay for all I cared, and she cared less. We lived together, we ate together, we gambled together, and we slept next door to one another. We had never been so polite.
As I have said, it could have gone on for a month, but Collie came to bother us. It happened after we had been gambling only a few days, and nothing he said at the time seemed very pressing. A stranger might as well have come up from behind and said I had inherited a million dollars. “Fine,” I would have told him, “but have you noticed that seventeen has come up three times in the last twelve plays? There’s a mint to be made on that number.”
Collie put it on the table; he told me that once I gave the rights, a signature, no more, he would give me ten thousand dollars. When I showed no interest, saying to him, “Oh, man, just take my life and forget it. I’m looking for another,” it set off a kind of compound interest in Collie, until by degrees the ten thousand dollars was doubled. Lulu teased him, and I said that I never made up my mind in a hurry. He gave up without even my word to give an answer, and after he left we forgot about him for a day or two, but I heard him later on the phone to Lulu, and whatever they talked about, and I can guess that Herman Teppis was the subject, he made his impression. Lulu began to sweat free of the long fever; she was getting critical of me again. By the night we left, we were tired of gambling; something had filled its space.
On the drive home, there was a fight. “Naturally you don’t want to think about the future,” Lulu said.
There was nothing I wanted to think about less.
“You’re bland, do you know that, Sergius?”
“I don’t want a slob movie made out of my name.”