CHAPTER SIX
EITEL WENT directly back to his fourteen-room house, and told the butler not to answer the door. His secretary was away on vacation, and so he called his answer service and told them he was going to be out of town for the next two days. Then he sat down in his study and began to drink. His telephone rang all afternoon and the only sign of how much liquor he had swallowed was that the sound of the phone became funny.
The fact was that he could not get drunk. Too sobering was the other fact that in forty-eight hours he would appear before the Committee. “I’m free now,” he would tell himself, “I can do what I want,” and yet he was able to think of nothing but the damage of quitting the set of Clouds Ahoy. His contract with Supreme was ruined, no doubt of that. Still, if he co-operated with the Committee, he would probably find work at another studio. What it amounted to was that a fit of temper was going to cost him a few hundred thousand dollars over the next five years. “It all goes in taxes anyway,” he caught himself thinking.
The night before the day he was due to testify, he still had not seen his lawyer, and spoke to him on the phone only long enough to say he would meet him at his office a half hour before the hearings started. Then Eitel rang his answer service and started to take the list of messages. In the thirty-six hours since he had left the studio, there had been more than a hundred calls, and after a while he became tired of it. “Just give me the names,” he said to the operator, and forgot them even as she mentioned them. When the girl came to Marion Faye, he stopped her. “What did Faye want?” Eitel asked.
“He didn’t leave any message. Just a phone number.”
“All right. Thank you. I’ll take that, and you give me the rest later, dear.”
Faye arrived an hour after Eitel phoned. “Trying to get used to living alone?” he greeted Eitel.
“Maybe that’s what it is.”
Marion sat down and tapped a cigarette carefully on his platinum case. “I saw Dorothea yesterday,” he said. “She’s betting that you’ll talk.”
“I didn’t know people were betting on me,” Eitel said.
Faye shrugged. “People bet on everything.”
“I wonder why?”
“It’s the only way to know.”
“Well,” Eitel said, “how are you betting, Marion?”
Faye looked at him. “I put down three hundred dollars that Dorothea is wrong.”
“Maybe you’d better hedge that bet.”
“I’d rather lose it.”
Eitel tried to sit back in his chair. “I’ve been hearing a great many stories about what you’re doing in Desert D’Or.”
“They’re true.”
“I don’t like it.”
“We’ll talk another time about that. I just wanted to tell you …”
“Yes, what did you want to tell me?”
Marion’s voice was not completely in control. “I wanted to say that if I lose my bet, that’s the end with you.” The finality of his sentence made him look young.
“Marion!” Eitel said for want of anything better.
“I mean what I say,” Faye repeated.
“I’ve seen you three times in the last three years. Not much of a friendship to be lost there.”
“Knock off,” said Faye. His voice was throbbing.
The answer irritated Eitel. Years ago, Marion would not have spoken to him in this way. “I’ve been wanting to talk about you,” Eitel said.
“Look,” Faye muttered, “I know you, Charley. You’re not going to name names.”
“Maybe I will.”
“For what? So they’ll let you make some more crud?”
“What else is there?” Eitel said.
“Why don’t you find out? That’s what you’ve been wondering for the last fifteen years.”
“Maybe I was fooling myself.”
“It’s a big future, isn’t it? You’ll just keep cooking slop till you die.”
Eitel never was certain what he would have done if Faye hadn’t visited him, but the next morning, after a very bad night, he walked into his lawyer’s office, gave his broad smile, and said easily, “I’m not going to give any names,” as if this had been understood from the beginning. “Just keep me out of jail, that’s all.”
“Sure you won’t change your mind on the way over?” the lawyer asked.
“Not this trip.”
In the weeks that followed, Eitel would try to think about his hour before the Committee for it stood well in his memory. He had acted as he might have hoped to act; he had been cool, his voice never lost control, and for two hours, carried by his excitement, he dodged questions, gave neat answers, and felt inspired to ruin every retreat. When it was over, he faced a crowd of photographers, sauntered to his car, and raced away. It was one o’clock in the afternoon, but he was hardly hungry. Feeding on his dialogue, he went for a drive through the mountains, his nerves enjoying every sound of the tires along the winding road.
That was finally spent. More numb than not, he crawled along a boulevard which went to the ocean, and cruised along the shore for miles. On a wide beach where the swell rolled in on long even waves, he stopped his car, sat on the edge of shore, and watched the surfboard riders. They were all young, somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two, and their bodies were burned to a golden bronze, their hair was bleached by the sun. They sprawled on the sand, wrestling with one another, sleeping, watching the water a half mile from shore where the riders would stand up and balance themselves on the first rise of the swell. Their feet on the board, they would race ahead of the surf, their arms stretched. When they had run into the shallow and could stand no longer, they would jump free, and propping the board into the sand at the water’s edge, would lie next to one another, the boys resting their heads on the hips of the girls. Eitel watched them, became absorbed in studying a tall girl with round limbs and round breasts. Not ten feet from him, she stood alone, brushing sand from her light hair, her back curled. She seemed so confident of her body and the sport of being alive. “I must make love to that girl,” Eitel thought, and was struck by how exceptional it was to feel such an easy desire.
“Is it hard to learn how to ride these boards?” he asked.
“Oh, depends.” She seemed concerned with the sand in her hair.
“Whom could I get to teach me?” he tried again.
“I don’t know. Why don’t you try it yourself?” He could sense that she was not reacting to him, and it brought an uncomfortable tingling to the skin of his face.
“If you didn’t help me, I’d probably drown,” he said with twinkling eyes and a voice to charm the dead.
The girl yawned. “Get a board and somebody’ll show you.”
A tow-head of nineteen with broad shoulders and powerful legs went racing past them and slapped her on the thigh. “Come on in,” he called in a booming voice, his short chopped features a cut of healthy meat to match the muscles of his limbs. “Oh, Chuck, wait till I get you!” the girl shouted, and ran down the beach after him. Chuck stopped, she caught him, and they struggled, Chuck throwing sand on her hair while she hooted with laughter. A minute later, running side by side, they dove into the shallow water, and came up splashing at each other.
“I was ready to do anything,” Eitel said to me, “to tell her my name, to tell her what I could do for her.” He stopped. “All of a sudden I realized that I was without a name, and I couldn’t do a thing for anybody. That was quite a sensation. All those years people wanted to meet Charles Francis Eitel, and to meet him, they had had to meet me too. Now, there was only me.” He gave a self-amused smile. “Those surf-board kids looked like you,” he said with his honesty, and I saw another reason why Eitel liked my company.
“Back I got into my guilt-chromed Cadillac, feeling like a little middle-aged man who decides to grow a mustache. When I reached home, there was a call from my Rumanian. She was still loyal.” Eitel shook his head at himself. “After that girl at the beach, I knew I couldn’t go on with the Ru
manian. Yet I never liked her so much as I did at that moment. So I had enough sense to know I was about to get into something really impossible. I talked to my business manager and told him to put the house up for sale and pay the servants off, and I got on a plane for Mexico.” That evening on the flight south, he had glanced at the newspapers long enough to see that he was on the front page. “How they must be hating me,” he had thought, and drifted into an exhausted sleep.
In Mexico, at a seashore resort which looked like nothing so much as Desert D’Or glued to the side of a cliff, the reaction followed him. There were hundreds of letters: a pamphlet from a vegetarian society, a Lulu Meyers Fan Club president who was happy Lulu had divorced him, anonymous letters, obscene notes, congratulations, even a personal letter from an anti-tobacco society which enclosed a news photo circled in red pencil of Eitel smoking a cigarette. “Eitel among the cranks,” he thought, and turned to open the letter from his business manager which gave the disaster of the back income taxes.
“It wasn’t too bad in Mexico,” Eitel said, “but on the other hand it was terrible. You may not believe it knowing me now, but I used to be capable of a lot of work, and all of a sudden I didn’t seem able to do anything.”
I nodded; besides everything else I had heard stories of Eitel working eighteen hours a day while making a picture.
“There was a week or two down there,” he went on, “when I began to think I was in poor shape. With all I’ve done in my life it may sound odd to you, but I started to think of how in college I used to dream of spending years wandering around, picking up little adventures here and there. It’s naïve of course but everybody has that ambition when he’s young. Anyway, I married much too soon, and when I thought about it in Mexico, it seemed to me that ever since, I had always been mixed up in something I didn’t exactly want. I began to think that the reason I acted the way I did with the Committee was to give myself another chance. And yet I didn’t know what to do with the chance. Yes,” he said reflectively, “that put me in bad shape.” Eitel smiled. “Anyway, win or lose, I managed to stop brooding. I tried to stay away from the places where I might meet people I knew, and I tried to think, and after a while I began to get interested in a little story I’d been saving for years.” He tapped the manuscript on the table beside him. “If I can bring this off, it’ll make a movie that can justify so much bad work.” He riffled the pages. “Pity I had to come back.”
“You don’t really seem to be doing much more here than you did in Mexico,” I said.
Eitel nodded. “It’s ridiculous, I know, but when you’re my age it’s not that simple to go looking for a new place. I wanted to be among people who knew me.” He smiled. “Sergius, I swear I’ll get down to work. This movie ought to be made.”
“Would anybody give you money?” I asked.
“That’s not the main problem,” Eitel said. “There’s a producer I know in London. I don’t like him much, but if I have to, I can work with him. We’ve corresponded. He’s wild about my idea, and in Europe I can direct the picture under a pseudonym. All that’s necessary is to write a good script.” He sighed. “Only, it’s not that simple. I feel as if I’ve been … amputated. You know, I haven’t had a woman in three months.”
I understood Eitel even less when he told me these stories. I had always thought that to know oneself was all that was necessary, probably because I didn’t know myself at all. I did not see how Eitel could talk about himself so clearly, and be able to do nothing with it. I even wondered why he didn’t mind that I told him nothing further about me, and I had the feeling that our friendship was of very small size. Often, after I left him and went back to the house I rented on the edge of the desert, I would leave off thinking about Eitel, and I would be stuck in my own past. I wanted to talk to him, to try to explain things I could not explain to myself, but I couldn’t do it. I can’t remember ever talking about the orphanage, at least not since I went into the Air Force. I had such a desire to be like everybody else, at least everybody who had made it, and to make it, I boxed my way into the middleweight semi-finals of an Air Force enlisted man’s tournament, and when that gave me the chance to go to flying school, I studied hours at night to pass the pre-flight examinations. Until I graduated, nothing seemed so important as to get my wings.
It is hard to say what being a flier meant. I had friends I thought would last forever, and in combat, routinely, in the way it happened, I saved other pilots two or three times just as they did the same for me. There was a feeling for each other. We knew there was nobody like us, and for once in my life I thought I had found a home.
That home fell apart. I can even pick the day I remember best, and it did not happen in combat. Fighting an enemy plane was impersonal and had the nice moves of all impersonal contests; I never felt I had done anything but win a game. I flew a plane the way I used to box; for people who know the language I can say that I was a counter-puncher. As flight-time built up, I went stale, we all did, but it was the only time in my life when I was happy and didn’t want to be somewhere else. Even the idea of being killed was not a problem for who wanted a life outside the Air Force? I never thought of what I would do afterward.
Sometimes on tactical missions we would lay fire bombs into Oriental villages. I did not like that particularly, but I would be busy with technique, and I would dive my plane and drop the jellied gasoline into my part of the pattern. I hardly thought of it any other way. From the air, a city in flames is not a bad sight.
One morning I came back from such a job and went into Officers’ Mess for lunch. We were stationed at an airfield near Tokyo, and one of our Japanese K.P.’s, a fifteen-year-old boy, had just burned his arm in a kettle of spilled soup. Like most Orientals he was durable, and so he served the dishes with one hand, his burned arm held behind him, while the sweat stood on his nose, and he bobbed his head in little shakes because he was disturbing our service. I could not take my eyes from the burn; it ran from the elbow to the shoulder, and the skin had turned to blisters. The K.P. began to get on my nerves. For the first time in years I started to think of my father and the hunchbacked boy and Sister Rose’s lessons on my duty.
After lunch I took the Jap aside, and asked the cooks for tannic-acid ointment. There wasn’t any in the kitchen, and so I told them to boil tea and put compresses to his arm. Suddenly, I realized that two hours ago I had been busy setting fire to a dozen people, or two dozen, or had it been a hundred?
No matter how I tried to chase the idea, I could never get rid of the Japanese boy with his arm and his smile. Nothing sudden happened to me, but over a time, the thing I felt about most of the fliers went false. I began to look at them in a new way, and I didn’t know if I liked them. They were one breed and I was another; they were there and I was a fake. I was close to things I had forgotten, and it left me sick; I had a choice to make. My missions were finished, my service was over, and I had to decide if I wanted to sign for a career in the Air Force. Trying to make up my mind I got worse, I had a small breakdown, and spent a season in the hospital. I was not very sick, but it was a breakdown, and for seven weeks I lay in bed and felt very little. When I got up, I learned that I was to be given a medical discharge. It no longer mattered. Flying had become too difficult and my reflexes were going. They told me I needed eyeglasses, which made me know how to feel old at twenty-two. But they were wrong, and I did without the eyeglasses, and my eyes got better, even if the rest of me didn’t. Resting in bed, I remembered the books I read when I could get away from the orphanage, and picturing what my life would be like outside the Air Force, I could feel an odd hope when I thought that maybe I would become a writer.
For such a purpose, Desert D’Or may have been a poor place to stay, and in truth, I hardly wrote a word while I was at the resort. But I was not ready to work; I needed time, and I needed the heat of the sun. I do not know if I can explain that I did not want to feel too much, and I did not want to think. I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a
real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children’s homes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans. It was better not even to think of this. I liked the other world in which almost everybody lived. The imaginary world.
But I write too much. In a few days the winter season began, and all of that routine I divided between Dorothea at The Hangover and Eitel at the Yacht Club was altered. Before the movie colony had been in Desert D’Or a week, what little story I have to tell was fairly begun.
Part Two
CHAPTER SEVEN
WITH THE BEGINNING of the season, there was some rain, not a great deal, but enough to put the desert flowers into bloom. Which brought the crowd from the capital. The movie people filled the hotels, and the season residents opened their homes. Movie stars were on the street, and gamblers, criminals with social cartel, models, entertainers, athletes, airplane manufacturers, even an artist or two. They came in all kinds of cars: in Cadillac limousines, in ruby convertibles and gold-yellow convertibles, in little foreign cars and big foreign cars. Then with the start of the season on me, I came to like the wall around my house which was always safe in the privacy it gave, and I would think at times how confusing the town must be to the day tourist who could drive through street after street and know no more of the resort than the corridors of an office building would tell about the rooms.