By an unmistakable cruel spill to his stomach, he knew then that he still lived in an exquisitely painful jail of jealousy. For that minute and for another minute he loved her as he had never loved anyone, loved her and knew that the life of such a love was but a minute, because all the while he loved her he knew that he dare not love her. Young as she was, he had heard experience in her voice which was beyond his own experience, and so if he stayed with her, he would be obliged to travel in her directions, and he had been fleeing that for all of his life.
So he cried again into the pressure of his mind, “Why is my brain always so alive when I’m too drunk ever to do anything about it?” and then the woe of his life washed up on him at all he had not done, and all that he would never do, and he wept, he wept the harsh tears of a full-grown man, for indeed it was the first time in twenty-five years that he had wept at all. Yet all the while he wept, part of his lament was for Elena because he knew that since she would not marry him, he must find another way to become free.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I ARRIVED at the party after Eitel had left, having spent most of the evening debating whether to go. My invitation had come from Dorothea, and I didn’t know if she was being kind, or whether Lulu wanted to see me. The more I debated, the more I knew I would go, and I found myself enjoying the fantasy that Lulu was racked because it was after one o’clock, now after two in the morning, and I still had not arrived. I even expected my phone to ring, and was bothered by the thought of Lulu calling everywhere in town, every bar, every club, never thinking to call my house because obviously I would not be there—since I had not appeared at the party, I must have something better to do. And so I paced around the house, close to desperate with my desire to see her again. It had not been easy since she left, but to talk about how I spent my time—the hours I drank, the hours I tried to write, the afternoons I spent with my bankbook as though by studying it long enough I could teach my savings to grow—would be endless for me. For two days I took up my camera and went scouting through the desert, taking infra-red pictures at odd angles of cactus against the sky. Yet that did not work either. I was frightened. For the first time since I had been in Desert D’Or, I had gotten into a fist fight at a bar, and I was beginning to wonder what there was in me. Sometimes I thought I was beginning to be the kind of man who would jump and dig my heels, and these days I had been looking for fights. So I tried with all my strength to keep from going to Dorothea’s party, and ended by getting into my car.
It was close to three in the morning when I drove up to The Hangover, and as I passed through the door, the excuses I had made all evening disappeared, and I was left with the hungry angry understanding that I had to see Lulu. But I had come very late and I thought she was gone already. The hour of the party had long been passed; scattered dishes of the buffet supper were hidden here and there, a cigarette stuck like a ski pole into a knoll of potato salad, a bite of ham swimming in a highball glass, an overturned plate underneath a coffee table. The people who were left had concentrated into some small activity whole caricatures of themselves, so that the drunk at the one-armed bandit who dropped quarter after quarter in a solemn, rhythmic way seemed to have become the gambler turned inside out, showing in contrast to his sober passion that he could dominate the machine, the knowledge that now he merely fed it in homage, and seemed never so surprised as when occasionally the box gave back some coins with a clatter. A young call-girl had fallen asleep on a couch, her mouth open, her arms trailing in dead weight to the floor, her deep sleep crying the end of that alertness, interest, and attention so necessary to the practice of her trade.
That way, too, did I find Martin Pelley. His chin on his chest, his breathing labored; he was not asleep but merely stunned. “I’ve had it,” he said to me, “Sergius, do you know what I am?”
“Yes, what are you?” I said.
“I’m a bellboy.” Pelley sighed. “I’d get a bigger kick out of spending the evening with the boys playing some cards.” Back went his chin on his chest. “Get it while you’re young,” he said drowsily and a first snore whistled from his nose.
In the den the party was still rowdy, in the kitchen people told jokes, in the bathroom private crises occurred, little moments from the hour of truth, forgotten even as they were washed away. I found Lulu in the pantry, her arms around the shoulders of two men, her voice quavering a burlesque of an old-time song. The three sang together, they searched for harmonies in their discord, and even as Lulu, seeing me, slipped apart from them and gave me her hand, the two men continued to sing, closing ranks on the absence like a prize platoon which stands at attention in the sun and ignores those weaklings who faint away.
“I want to talk to you,” I said to her.
“Oh, Sergius, I’m drunk. Do I show it?”
“Where can we talk?” I asked again.
She seemed not nearly so drunk as she claimed. “We can go upstairs,” she said.
If there was a chance I might have hope, she took care to set up our station in the master bedroom where the women’s coats were hung, and we talked through steady small interruptions, coming at last to pay no attention to whoever was fumbling for her wrap in the rosy lighting of the bedroom.
“Sergius, I’ve been very cruel to you,” Lulu began.
“How’s it going with Tony?” I interrupted.
“Sergius, I think you’re a darling. But I don’t think when people have been intimate, they ought to discuss what’s happening with them at the present. You see, I want us to be friends,” she said with just a little emphasis.
“You don’t have to worry,” I said, “I’m indifferent to you.” At the moment I was indifferent to her. If I had spent my days not knowing whether I loved her or was capable of killing her, I had arrived for the moment at that passing calm which teases us that we are cured. I was to feel her loss again; months from now I would catch a quick knife seeing her name on a cinema marquee, reading a word she was supposed to have said in a gossip column, or I would see a girl who by a gesture or a trick of speech would bring back Lulu for me. All this is pointless; what carried the moment was that I was indifferent to Lulu, I thought she could no longer hurt me. So I could be generous, I could say, “I’m indifferent,” and feel the confidence of a man who has lived through a landslide.
“You’d be a nice girl,” I tried, “if only you had a good opinion of yourself.”
She laughed. “You’re a boob when you try to be a psychologist. Sergius, be friendly. I think you’re honestly more attractive tonight than I’ve ever seen you.”
From the way she said it, I knew that I was now someone who had never been particularly attractive to her.
“Lulu,” I asked, startled to hear myself, “is it really all over?”
“Sergius, I think you’re sweet and good and I’ll never forget you,” she said with her desire to be kind, having forgotten me already.
I looked at her. “Come on, let’s go to bed.”
“No, I’m drunk, and … I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Try,” I said. But I wasn’t sure if I meant it, and who could fool Lulu that way?
“Sergius, sweetie, I don’t want to talk about it. You see with us, it wasn’t always very perfectly physical, I mean it wasn’t a physical-type affair. I think that’s due to chemistry, don’t you?”
“What about the time …?” I asked, and went on, telling her what she had worn, what we had done, hammering at her with every detail of what she had said and how she had said it, and Lulu listened with a cinema smile, the young girl eager and sympathetic, sorry for the nice-featured actor she does not love.
“Oh, Sergius, I’m terrible,” she said. “I must have been drunk.”
“You weren’t drunk.”
“Well, it was always very nice with you.”
That did it. By an effort, admitting I was done, I said, “Do you expect to see Tony a lot?”
“Maybe I will, Sergius. He’s full of laughs.”
A dr
unk blundered by, searching the upstairs hall for an empty bowl, and she drew against my arm. “I’m worried, dear,” she said in a voice which showed that we were finally old friends. “Herman Teppis is going to see me the day after tomorrow. I wanted to get advice from Eitel but he was too difficult.”
“Why are you worried?”
“Cause I know Teppis.” She shivered suddenly. “Don’t tell a soul about Tony,” she whispered. “Promise!”
Downstairs, guests were still leaving. “Sergius, drive me to the Yacht Club,” she asked. “I won’t be a minute, just wait for me to powder my nose.”
With her indifference to concealing herself, she did her make-up by the bedroom mirror, studying the shape, the spread, and the color of the powder and shadow she painted on herself. There was a moment when I thought she studied her features too long and the face in the glass became more alive than the girl who looked in, and I felt how she was bothered, almost as if I could hear a whisper of that wind which says, “That is you, that is really you. It is you whom you are looking at, and you can never quit your face,” for as we went down the stairs she was silent, she was worried, she was looking for the girl who lived in the mirror.
The party was breaking up as we went out. Dorothea kissed Lulu. “You be careful, honey-bun, you hear?” she said, and we pushed through the door. On the street beyond the gate of Dorothea’s there were adolescents waiting, a dozen of them, waiting in the false dawn of four o’clock in Desert D’Or.
“That’s her, that’s her,” several of them cried as we came out.
“My God, I recognize one of them,” Lulu said. “She’s from the city.”
“Miss Meyers, we’re on an autograph party,” the leader said formally. “Will you please sign our books?”
“Lulu, sign mine first,” another begged.
I stood beside Lulu while she decorated her name in album after album. “Thank you very much,” she wrote, “my very best … hello, again … best in the world … a million thanks …” So it went. When we were free at last and I was driving her on the road to the Yacht Club, driving the car myself for this last time, she lay back against the seat and fluffed her hair. I caught a glimpse of her face and the worry was gone. “Oh, Sergius,” she said with the glow of adulation still warm, “isn’t this a wonderful life?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
TWO DAYS LATER, a half hour before he was to see Lulu, Herman Teppis was waiting for Teddy Pope. From time to time it was Teppis’ habit, as Lulu had told me, to have a big chat, or so he called it, with some of his stars. The institution, known to the public through a run of magazine articles written by publicity men, had been advertised as the secret of good family relations at Supreme Pictures. Teppis was always giving little talks at his home, his country club, or the studio commissary, but the big chat took place in his office, the doors closed.
Teppis’ office was painted in one of those subsidiaries of a cream color—rose-cream, chartreuse-cream, or beige-cream—used for all the executive suites at Supreme Pictures. It was an enormous room with an enormous picture window, and the main piece of furniture was the desk, a big old Italian antique which had come down from the Middle Ages, and was said to have been bought from the Vatican. Yet, like an old house which is made over so completely that only the shell remains, the inside of Teppis’ desk was given to a noiseless tape recorder, a private file, a refrigerator, and a small revolving bar. The rest of the room had some deep leather chairs, a coffee-colored carpet, and three pictures: a famous painting of a mother and child was set in a heavy gold frame, and two hand worked silver cadres showed photos of Teppis’ wife and of his mother, the last hand-colored so that her silver hair was bright as a corona.
The afternoon Teddy Pope came to see Mr. Teppis, he was greeted warmly. Teppis shook his hand and clapped him on the back. “Teddy, it’s a pleasure you could manage to get here,” he said in his hoarse thin voice, and pressed a button under his desk to start the tape recorder.
“Always happy when you want to talk to me, Mr. T.,” Teddy said.
Teppis coughed. “You want a cigar?”
“No, sir, I don’t smoke them.”
“It’s a vice, cigars. My only vice, I say.” He cleared his throat with a short harsh sound as though he were ordering an animal to come up. “Now, I know what’s going on in your mind,” he said genially. “You want to know why I want to see you.”
“Well, Mr. T., I was wondering.”
“It’s simple. I’ll give you the answer in a phrase. The answer is I would like to spend the kind of time I ought to with all you young people, all you young stars I’ve seen growing up right on this studio lot. That’s a lack in my life, but it don’t mean my personal interest is at long distance. I think about you an awful lot, Teddy.”
“Hope you think nice things, Mr. T.,” Teddy said.
“Now, what are you nervous for? Have I ever hurt you?” Teddy shook his head. “Of course not, I got a real affection for you, you know that. I’m an old man now.”
“You don’t look old, H.T.”
“Don’t contradict me, it’s true. Sometimes I think of all the years I been sitting in this room, the stars that came, the stars that fell. You know I think of all the stars I made, and then all these up-and-coming starlets. They’re going to be heard from in a couple of years, but they’ll never push you out, you can depend on that, Teddy, you can say H.T. said to me, ‘You can depend on that almost as a promise,’ because what I want to say is that I feel the very real affection which all of my stars and starlets feel for me, I can tell when we have these chats, they think I got a large warm heart, I can never remember a single one leaving this office without their saying, ‘God bless you, H.T.’ I’m a warm individual. It’s why I’ve been a success in the industry. What do you need to be successful here?”
“Heart,” said Teddy.
“That’s right, a big red heart. The American public has a big heart and you got to meet it, you got to go halfway up to it. I’ll give you an example. I’m the father of a grown woman, you know my daughter Lottie, I love her, and I hear from her every single day. At ten o’clock in the morning the call comes through and my secretary, she clears the switchboard for me. If I can’t be punctual to my daughter, how can I expect her to be punctual to me? You see, Teddy,” he said, reaching forward to pat Pope’s knee, “it don’t matter the love I got for my daughter, there’s a lot left over for my other family, the big family right here at Supreme Pictures.”
“The family feels the same way about you, H.T.,” Teddy said.
“I hope so, sincerely I hope so. It would break my heart if all the young people here didn’t reciprocate. You don’t know how much I think about all of you, about your problems, your heartaches, and your successes. I follow your careers. You know, Teddy, you’d be surprised how much I know about the personal lives of all of you. I even follow to see how religious you are, because I believe in religion, Teddy. I’ve changed my religion and a man don’t change his religion like he takes a drink of water. I can tell you I’ve found great consolation in my new faith, there’s a great man in New York, a great religious man, I’m proud to call him one of my dearest friends, and he made things so you and me can go through the same church door.”
“I guess I haven’t been going to church enough lately,” Teddy said.
“I hate to hear that. I’d give you a lecture if there wasn’t something else I want to talk about.”
Teppis held up his arms. “Look, what am I showing you? Two hands. Two hands make a body. You see, I feel as if I come from two faiths, the one I was born with, and the one I changed to and elected. I think I’ve inherited the wealth of the tradition from two great faiths. Am I confusing you?”
“No, sir.”
“You take my first faith. One of the most heart-warming customs of the people I was born in, it was the concern the parents of the family took in all the doings of their children, the engagements, the weddings, the births of young people. I could tell you s
tories make you cry. You know the poorest house, dirt-poor people, they would take the same interest in arranging the marriage of their children as for a royal marriage. Now, this is a democratic country, we can thank God for that, we don’t approve of royal marriages, I don’t approve of it myself, I would never dream of doing such a thing, but there’s a lot to be said on both sides. I was talking to the Bey Omi Kin Bek on this very subject, and you know what he said to me, he said, ‘H.T., we don’t arrange marriages the way the American public tends to think, we just encourage them, and then it’s up to the kids.’ That’s a first-rate article, genuine royalty. I’ll say to any man I’m proud to have the Bey for a friend.”
“I think a lot of people like to look down on royalty,” Teddy said.
“Sure. You know why they do it? Envy.” Teppis took out his handkerchief and spit into it. “People are envious of the people at the top.”
“My idea,” said Teddy, “is that royalty is like everybody else. Only they express themselves more.”
“You’re wrong,” Teppis interrupted. “Royalty pays a terrible price. Let me tell you a story. What is it about public men that makes them different? It’s that they’re in the eye of the public. They got to lead a life as clean as a dog’s teeth, privately, not only public. You know what scandal is to a public figure? It’s a bomb ten times bigger than the atom. They got to do certain things, it breaks their heart to do them, and why? the public responsibility demands it. That’s true for royalty and it’s true for movie stars, and fellows like me, people like you and me, that’s who it applies for. Those are the laws, try and break them. We’re talking like equals now, aren’t we, Teddy?”
“Face to face,” Teddy said.
“You look at that picture I have,” said Teppis pointing to the painting. “I would hate to tell you how much I had to pay for it, but the moment I looked at that French picture with that beautiful mother and her beautiful child, I said to myself, ‘H.T., it don’t matter if you got to work ten years to pay for it, you got to buy that picture.’ You know why I said that to myself? Because that picture is life, it’s by a great painter. I look at it, and I think, ‘Motherhood, that’s what you’re looking at.’ When I think of you, Teddy, and I know what goes on in your heart, I think that you think about settling down with a beautiful bride and children that come out to greet you when you come home from work. I never had anything like that, Teddy, cause when I was your age, I worked long hours, very long hours, hours that would break your heart to tell you about them, and when I’m alone, I sometimes think to myself, and I say then, ‘You know, H.T., you missed the fruits of life.’ I would hate for a fellow like you, Teddy, to have to say the same thing. And you don’t have to. You know with all that’s due respect to my wife, may she rest in peace, she had to work very hard herself, only for those early years, but she never complained once, not a peep.” Tears filled Teppis’ eyes, and he wiped them away with a clean handkerchief he kept in his breast pocket, the aroma of his toilet water passing across the room. “Take any girl you would marry,” Teppis went on, “you wouldn’t have such problems, you could give her all the financial security, you know why, she’d make you settle down. I’d even sit down with you and your business agent and we’d have a talk how to straighten you out financially so you wouldn’t have to borrow from us ahead of your salary.” Teppis frowned at him. “It’s a shame, Teddy. People will think we don’t pay you nothing the way you got to borrow money.”