On a cool day in October Flora was, as usual, in her editing suite, when the first of the day’s unscheduled visitors appeared. Carol, Crow’s script girl and girlfriend, stood holding the screen door open with her body and asked for Flora’s help. ‘With Gil gone I don’t know who to turn to. This shouldn’t even be my business. I’ve already called Connie five times. I would have had Edna’s sister call, but I don’t want to risk him repeating to her any of the things he said to me.’
Carol told Flora that Crow’s wife was at Cedars of Lebanon, committed by her own doctor, and that the new baby, Francis, was at another hospital, Sisters of Mercy. Carol hadn’t been able to get a straight story from Edna’s sister. ‘She tracked me down, never mind that she clearly knows what I really am to Connie. She made me promise to get him back to town as soon as possible. But she wouldn’t let me have any details about what had happened. That family are unalterably Brahman, steeped in dignity.’
‘Do you have any guesses?’ Flora said. ‘Could Edna have harmed the baby?’
‘Possibly. Anyway, I called the Grand Hotel and spoke to Connie. But I was sent in unarmed, as it were.’
‘Wait,’ said Flora, ‘why aren’t you with Connie? He always takes you. You got to go to Mexico and Alaska.’
Carol said, ‘Well, this time I wasn’t admitted to the sacred circle of two.’ She pulled a face.
Everyone who knew Crow and Cole was very surprised when, on finally meeting, the two men not only hit it off but began taking Crow’s show-off Italian car out for long drives in the desert; long drives where they’d stop the car, and sit on the running board in the shade and desert silence, and talk, Crow unembarrassed by having to shout to make himself heard—for Cole was now partly deaf in his ‘good’ ear too—and Cole apparently happy to be the recipient of the older man’s advice and friendly patronage.
‘It’s not the old boys-club stuff,’ Carol said. ‘I was in on that. I was counted “a sport”. This time there’s just the three of them up at the spa, and Wylie for a week only. Connie said to me that they hoped to hack out a whole screenplay. He’s more excited about this film he’s doing with Cole than he has been about any other. He said to me that it’s “serious”. As if everything before wasn’t.’
‘They’ve given each other permission to think dark thoughts,’ Flora said. ‘And maybe the film will be all they hope, if Connie can temper Cole’s grandiosity, and Cole can soften Connie’s bravado.’
Carol said, ‘I told Connie that I wouldn’t have disturbed him unless it was a matter of vital importance. And he said that everything with Edna was always a matter of vital importance, and that Edna’s universe consisted of herself, her suffering, and a ticking clock. That’s what he said. I asked him why he’d imagine I was exaggerating—why the mistress would wring her hands over the wife’s troubles.’ Carol paused and her eyes swam.
Flora got up and gave Carol her handkerchief. Carol’s was sodden and balled in her fist.
‘Sorry,’ Carol said, and dabbed her eyes. ‘I don’t want to tell you what he said. But it appears he’s made up his mind to cut both of us loose—wife and mistress.’
Flora put her hand on Carol’s arm. The woman gave her a weak, brave little smile. She said, ‘I’d rather not think about it. When he gets like this, trying to work out what he’s doing is like sitting up in the road to try to work out the make and model of the car that’s just run you down.’
‘How can I help?’
‘You could call him. So that he knows it’s not just me. I would’ve got Edna’s sister on to it, but I don’t want to be responsible for his saying something irrevocable.’
‘What if he asks me for my source of information?’
‘Does it matter? Oh—Flora—you’ll think of something!’
There was no phone in Flora’s editing shack, so they locked up and went down to the nearest—a box by the commissary. They waited for a girl in black tights, a bow tie and tails, to finish her call. Eventually the girl retrieved her chewing gum from the booth’s doorjamb, popped it back into her mouth, smirked at them, and trotted off. They crammed into the booth together and once Flora had the operator, Carol recited the hotel’s number.
Crow wasn’t in his room. Flora asked the man at the hotel’s front desk to page him. She actually heard the bellhop recede into a certain kind of sound scheme—hollow marble, hushed emptiness, thin mountain air—calling ‘Phone call for Mr Crow!’ She wondered aloud, ‘Are there so many guests this late in the year that he has to call?’ She hadn’t thought the spa was a fashionable place. After many minutes she heard footfalls, and a murmured exchange, then the desk clerk came back on the line to say, apologetically, that Mr Crow wasn’t accepting calls.
‘Oh for God’s sake!’ Flora said in exasperation. She didn’t hear the desk clerk’s response because at that moment she was distracted by the sound of knuckles rapping on the glass by her head. She turned, irritated, ready to ask whoever it was ‘what’s your rush?’ And saw the white grin, bright skin and dark blue rain-washed evening gaze of Xas—the angel, of course, the angel, how had she not seen it before? She jostled Carol out of the way and burst from the phone booth. She threw her arms around Xas, who laughed. Flora pressed her face into his neck and opened her mouth to gulp his cold cloud odour.
‘You wanted me?’ he said, still laughing.
Of course Flora saw her chance—Xas was back, and if she kept him busy he’d stay involved, but she wouldn’t immediately have to face the difficult talk that was, no doubt, ahead of them.
Flora took Carol and Xas to the commissary, where they had coffee and she explained, with Carol’s help, how Crow must be persuaded to come back to town and to his wife, but was now avoiding their calls. Then Flora explained how Crow and Cole had become friends—that Cole had dropped his case against Crow, the one about who’d owned Ray Paige’s story—and, when they’d eventually chanced to be in the same place, Cole had admired Crow’s Isotta Fraschini and Crow had offered to let Cole drive it. ‘And now they’re planning a film, writing a screenplay with Wylie White—holed-up in a little spa town in the Sierras, near where you went that time you borrowed my car.’
Then Carol said to Xas, ‘If you know your way about up there, perhaps you’ll go with Flora? Can you do that, Flora?’ she added. ‘I know Crow thinks better of you than almost anyone. And, actually, so does Cole, so it’s unlikely he’ll be offended by you barging in on them. Or only a little offended. If you turn up they won’t automatically think “female interference”.’
‘Hmmm,’ said Flora, sensing an insult in Carol’s compliment. Then she said, all right, she’d go, and she put her hand on Xas’s. ‘And my friend can keep me company.’
They took Carol’s car, a new Chrysler Imperial. During the drive they talked about Millie. Xas said he’d read about the disastrous San Francisco to Hawaii race in a magazine, months afterward.
Flora told him how Millie had been afraid of getting lost. ‘Then so many of the planes did. She did say that if you were with her she’d be sure to find her way.’
Xas said, ‘I never imagined she was so desperate about the money.’
‘That flying school was her life’s dream.’
‘I should have been there. I had a plan to help her, but it was a stupid one.’
Flora watched him. She saw regret, and grief too, but grief perhaps without a clear object or occasion, as if he’d already put whatever he felt about Millie’s death where he put similar regrets and losses. She thought, ‘He has some place inside him that’s a memorial not to people he cared for who’ve gone, but to the inevitability of their being gone.’ Flora saw this, and it made her angry. He should be feeling guilty too. He had let Millie down.
She said, ‘When you say you should have been there, what do you mean?’
He glanced at her, then returned his eyes to the road. ‘I just drifted into our friendship,’ he said, ‘as if I’d only set down somewhere for a breather. I never got around to feeling properl
y responsible for her.’
‘So that’s what you feel,’ Flora said, flat. ‘Responsible.’ She wanted him to know that it wasn’t enough.
‘Ah—what I feel. I feel I should have been there. I should have known she was in trouble, should have reached her in time, caught her as she fell, plucked her up from the water, or kept her company till the searchers came. I should have been there like the sun and the stars. Like God.’
They were quiet for a time after that. Then Xas began to tell her a little about what had happened to him. He didn’t say why he’d disappeared, but told her where he’d been. He talked about Berlin and Kameradschaft. He told her how he’d got to the States, to New Jersey, aboard the airship Lake Werner. He took one hand off the wheel to fish in his jacket and pull out a passport. He handed it to Flora. The passport was issued that year to one Christoph Hintersee. The photo was of Xas. He said, ‘My captain had a young cousin who’d died. We used the cousin’s papers to get a passport. And here I am.’
‘For how long?’
He glanced at her, at the road, then back at her. ‘Fix a period,’ he said.
‘Watch where you’re going,’ she reminded him.
He returned his eyes to the road. He said, ‘Make a bargain. Extract a promise.’ The wind coming over the top of the roadster’s windshield was patting at the thick, long, oiled hair on his crown. He looked confident and careless. But it seemed to Flora that there was something cold at the bottom of this gallantry of his, and that all of it—his confidence, coldness, and carelessness—wasn’t directed at her, but at himself, his aimlessness. She thought: ‘This is what he does. He picks his moment, and offers up his life.’ If he’d thought to do this for Millie then things would have turned out differently.
Flora said, ‘I’m not playing any games.’
He looked disappointed.
After another few miles she said, ‘Cole will be surprised to see you.’
They slowed and turned on to Kaiser Pass Road.
‘Yes,’ Xas said.
Later, as they drove through a small grassy valley in a saddle between ranges and began to climb again, they passed another car. It was the first vehicle they’d seen for half an hour. It roared past them, engines throbbing, its chrome and paintwork bristling with light.
‘That’s Connie’s car,’ Flora said. The driver was wearing cheaters, a scarf and cap, and Flora wasn’t sure who it was. ‘Connie would recognise Carol’s car, surely.’
‘It was Cole,’ Xas said. He pulled over, left the engine idling and turned to her. ‘I’m getting out here.’
She seized his arm. ‘This is the middle of nowhere,’ she said.
‘Good,’ said Xas. He brushed her off and got out.
‘What are you going to do?’ Flora was afraid—for Cole.
‘You go on and talk to Crow,’ Xas said. ‘While Cole and I have a tender reunion. You don’t want to deprive us of our tender reunion, do you?’
‘He thinks you’re dead,’ Flora said.
Xas smiled, stepped away from the car, and waved her on.
It was November and the Grand Hotel was empty of guests and grandeur. The spa town had been fashionable before the War, and people did still come in summer to enjoy the swimming holes in the river. This last year there had been fewer family parties. Jobs were scarce, and ageing cars needed nursing on the climb up into the mountains. The rented cottages on the terrace across the river were all shut up early, and looked a little battered. Fallen leaves were piled in the avenues of the public gardens, the merry-goround was shuttered and padlocked, the kiosk’s louvres already sealed by thickening spider webs. Mornings, the spa town’s walls and trees were pink and gold, but both colours were greyed by dryness and a whole summer’s worth of dust not yet rinsed away by fall rain. It hadn’t rained, but the air was damp all morning and again when the sun went, which it did twice, declining in a shallow fall behind a near ridge, then behind another farther off. The sun was gone for forty minutes, only to reappear for a quarter-hour in the V between the peaks, its light pinched and concentrated so that, coming through the branches of the Californian hazels below the hotel terrace, it made shadows of leaves that were sharp-edged, but distilled in density, ghostly and dilute. This second sunset probed into the rooms of the west-facing Grand Hotel so that its handful of guests could see what the insufficient radiance of the smeared crystal chandeliers otherwise disguised: the fabric on armchairs polished by grime, dust softening the folds of once cheerful yellow curtains, and the white leather on the lobby’s loveseats burned brown by years of contact with acidic human skin.
For several weeks now only the hotel’s ground floor had been open. At times the few guests would feel like Beauty in the fairytale, waited on by invisible servants. In the dining room all the tables were draped, but only as many as necessary set for breakfast. There was never anyone in sight, but staff would appear, alerted to the guests’ movements by the talkative parquet floors. Over the years the piles of the hotel had sunk, and in the long perspective from the dining room, across a lobby and into the vast sitting room with its six fireplaces, the floor undulated in waves, and creaked and squawked when crossed. The hotel was quiet, but it was impossible for its guests to go about quietly.
Not that the guests did. The two movie people were often animated over their work. They worked all day, on the terrace, their white-painted wicker chairs pulled together so that their knees nearly touched. They were tall men, and one was hard of hearing. On the marble-topped table beside them were papers—the screenplay they were working on—a typewriter, an ashtray for the one who smoked, whisky in one jug and iced water in another for the one who always liked to fix his own drinks. They were often silent for hours, but then noisy in friendly dispute. One would jump up and act something out in an effort to persuade the other, while the other would just talk—the younger one, with the shy, hypnotic voice. One went to the grotto sometimes and took the waters, the other didn’t, and was very careful about his diet. They both vanished for long drives, the younger man driving although it was the older man’s car. They were Hollywood people, the younger more famous, the older easier to deal with, and more easily pleased. No one bothered to eavesdrop on them, for there was no news in their friendship or their mutual industry. But there was an air they had of being involved in something of momentous importance. As the weeks went by a kind of tenderness entered into their discussions—a tenderness directed not toward each other, but perhaps to the promise in the pages piled up between them.
For one week of the three they were joined by another man, a gnarled and waspish Southerner. When he was with them the whisky was put away and didn’t reappear till the final night of his stay, and, the following afternoon, they carried him out to a cab, handed over a hundred-dollar bill and sent him off straight to Sacramento, where he was to board the Twentieth Century. The older man was overheard saying, ‘He’ll be sober by Chicago.’ To which the younger replied, laughing, ‘Sober enough to order a drink.’
After the writer left, the hotel made enquiries about its guests’ intentions, for it was usually around this date that the maitre d’ took over the cook’s duties for the hotel’s handful of winter visitors. The staff were told that the two intended to be there for only another week, and that they didn’t expect anyone to join them.
*
A still afternoon. The sun was warm and low, the air hazy. The entire reduced population of the spa town heard the roadster before seeing it, climbing the slope on the far side of the river toward the viaduct. The road was illuminated in yellow light from the trees and the car’s white paint looked cream. The dead leaves on the road hopped along after the car’s back wheels, seeming to float on static over the road’s surface, galvanised, and living again. The car crossed the river. It drove slowly up the terraces between the guesthouses, passed the spa where a few old people—thin haired, swollen-legged—were walking arm in arm, limping between the grotto and park benches, carrying glasses of the spa’s piss-coloured w
ater. The car passed the other hotel guests—all four of them sitting on a horseshoe-shaped stone bench with their bellies in their laps. The roadster roared up the driveway, and parked below the hotel’s steps.
Crow was by himself on the terrace, with jugs and teacups, papers and typewriter before him.
Flora turned off the engine and stepped out onto the drive. Its white grit crunched under her feet. She went up the steps. The tiles on the terrace were uneven, some were loose. They made a musical tinkling under her shoes.
‘Flora,’ Crow said, pleased and exasperated. He was smiling and a little flushed, with drink and combativeness. ‘Carol sent you. Don’t deny it,’ he said. ‘Look—I’ll join my wife’s drama when I’m good and ready, and not before.’
Flora took a seat. She lifted the covers on the jugs. One held whisky, the other iced water. She poured herself a small neat whisky. ‘I don’t see how you can be angry at Carol. She’s not acting on her own behalf. What would she have to gain by encouraging you to rush to your wife’s side?’
‘I’d arrive in the middle of the mess, and have to confront how irrevocable Edna’s problems are. That’s what she’d gain.’
‘Oh,’ said Flora, and made a mental note not to try to argue motivation with Crow again.
‘What I’m doing here is important.’
‘That’s why Cole’s dashing about in your Isotta Fraschini. We passed him on the road.’
‘We? That’s Carol’s car—where is she? Did you drop her across the river? Nothing is open over there. Or only the gas station.’
Flora ignored this. ‘Did Carol tell you that the baby is at Sisters of Mercy?’
‘He’s unharmed. I called the hospital myself.’
‘Unharmed and unloved,’ Flora said. ‘Edna apparently refuses to see him.’