Children of Light (11 page)

“Funny,” Walker said. “I can’t remember meeting Lucy.”

“
Stover
,” Sam Quinn said. “I don’t think she’s worked since then. She had a speed problem and a couple of crazy boyfriends. I helped her out.”

“The kid yours?”

Quinn shook his head. “I can’t tell you whose kid that is, Gordo. Very big name. Since deceased.”

“You ought to get out,” Walker said. “I thought you’d be doing stunts forever.”

“Yeah, I was born to die in a burning stagecoach. But I’m too old for it, that’s the problem. I tell you, Gordon, this after-forty shit sucks.”

“You could coordinate. You been all over. You know a lot about filmmaking.”

“I’m associated in the industry with drugs. Once that didn’t matter.
But these days it is not so good.” Quinn drained his glass and set it aside. “I ought to move. Maybe up to Newhall—I got a lot of old buddies up there might get me something. I should get Lucy out of here, get her straight. I should sell my boat, sell this place—I’d get ten times what I paid. There’s a couple of hundred goddamn things I should do. But I don’t know which, the way things are. I don’t want to be broke no more, Gordon, I ain’t used to it.”

“Well,” Walker said, “if you think of a way I can help you, let me know.” He set his own glass down. “You really think Doc Siriwai could fix me up if I stopped in Borromeo?”

“I’m sure of it,” Quinn said. “I see him once in a while.” They stood up; Quinn yawned and stretched. “Lee Verger,” he said. “Good old Lu Anne. You give her my special love, you hear.”

“I will.”

They shook hands and Walker got behind the wheel of his car. As he drove by the cottonwood trees, he passed Lucy and Eben. Lucy was smiling; she had bent over the child and was encouraging him to wave. Walker threw them a salute. As soon as he came in sight of the sea, the fog rose to meet him.

W
hen they were gone she sat on the beach in front of her casita. She had not ridden to the airport, only stood in the driveway before the main building and waved them away. Lionel and the sun-ripe children, happy-eyed. Were they also pleased to be quit of her? They were sensitive children, they had seen a few things they should not have seen. Driving away, they had not turned to wave or to look back at her and it had made her feel hurt and afraid. Only their excitement, she had thought, walking back down the path. But it was as though their eyes were fixed upon some wholesome future in which she had no part.

At least there was work. But it was a few hours until her call, so she spent twenty minutes or so doing breathing exercises and then commenced swimming laps in the small patio pool. Lu Anne was a strong swimmer and the pool barely more than an ornament; she coursed the length in two strokes and flipped at ends in a racing turn. She kept at it until her breath came hard and her shoulders ached.

Overhead, the sky was leaden; distant heat lightning flashed. She could hear the men at work beside the lagoon where the Grand Isle set was. For weeks she had been listening to the trailer-truck engines and the roar of articulated loaders. Lines of peons, armed with machetes, had been chopping cactus, beating the brush for scorpions, laying track for the giant Chapman crane. Now it was ready, the ground cleared. A roadway of two-by-twelve boards, stacked three layers deep, stretched from the dunes to the mild surf. Only the odd shout or burst of laughter, the whine of a power drill or the beat of a hammer drifted across the tame surface of their civil bay. From the other direction, where the unchecked Pacific whirled in narrow canyons along the point or thrust itself against the black sand of Playa China, she could make out the crash of surf, muffled by the offshore wind and the guardian mountainside.

That would be the place to swim, she thought, to work the negativity from her frame, to contend. She sat quietly in the sun, eyes closed, imagining the half-heard surf, forcing, as well as she was able, all other thoughts aside.

A rapid knock sounded on the casita door. She rose, thoroughly annoyed, and opened it to find Jack Best, the unit publicist, and a writer named Dongan Lowndes, who was down to do a feature for a prestigious magazine and was not, one was forever being reminded, just another hack.

In Lowndes’s company, Jack Best, who was just another flack, assumed an elevated diction.

“Miss Verger,” he declared, “I’d like to introduce Mr. Dongan Lowndes. I’m sure you know each other’s work and I’m sure you’ll have a really interesting conversation.”

Lowndes did not seem embarrassed. He was a tall man with a long narrow face; its up-country Scotch-Irish frankness was spoiled slightly by the smallness of his close-set brown eyes.

Lu Anne and Dongan Lowndes shook hands; she gave him a sympathetic smile, which she noticed he did not return.

“Shall we go in?” Jack asked. “I’ve ordered lunch sent down.”

“Gosh, I’m sorry, Jack,” Lu Anne said. “I just spaced this interview. I was going to skip lunch and prep.” She turned to Lowndes, expecting that he would offer to go. He only stared at her, not unpleasantly, but quite fixedly. His stare might have been taken for one of polite interest had its object been other than human.

Jack Best looked unhappy. In his book Lee Verger was not big enough medicine to space lunch dates with the highbrow press. Mr. Lowndes declined his assistance.

“Well,” Jack said nervously to Lowndes, “we’ve got a bit of a condom here.”

“I suppose,” Lu Anne said after a moment, “it must have washed up on the beach from town.”

Lowndes kept his small eyes fixed on Lu Anne. “I bet you meant to say conundrum, didn’t you, Jack?”

“Yeah,” Jack said quietly. He looked awestruck. “How could I have said that?”

“There you are, Mr. Lowndes,” Lu Anne said. “Your first Hollywood malapropism.”

“I’ve lived among ignorant people most of my life,” Lowndes told Lu Anne, “and I’ve never heard better.”

“Well,” she said, “come in, guys.”

“I’m really sorry,” Jack Best said. “I mean, Jesus, it just popped out.”

“That’s O.K.,” Lowndes said. “Miss Verger and I know each other’s work and now we’re going to have a really interesting conversation.”

“Are you going to stay, Jack?” she asked.

The service wagon arrived, propelled by a waiter who wheeled it into the patio. Best stared at the floor, then stood up and helped
himself to a glass of tequila. He looked at Lowndes, then at Lu Anne.

“Come here, kid,” he said to her. He motioned her toward the door with a toss of his head.

“Me too?” Lowndes asked.

Best ignored him. Lu Anne followed the publicist outside.

“So I look like a jerk,” Jack said. “Let him have me fired.”

“The hell with him,” Lu Anne said kindly. “I mean, where’s your sense of humor?”

“I’m supposed to stay with you. You want me to?”

“I believe by now I can hold my own with the Dongan Lowndeses of the world.”

“I humiliated myself in front of him,” Jack Best said through his teeth. “I’d like to punch his smart mouth.”

“For heaven’s sake, Jack,” Lu Anne said, laughing, “it’s just a giggle. Forget it.”

“He’s a rat, this guy,” Jack said. “You watch yourself. He’ll use everything you say against you. I know the kind of rat he is. The stupid thing I said—he’ll put that in.”

“You know they’re not going to print that.”

“You be careful. I mean, I oughta stay but I can’t stand him. I’ll kill the son of a bitch. Don’t tell him nothing, tell him your hobbies. See, Charlie doesn’t know—he’s out to screw us. Make us look funny.”

“Well,” she said, “I’ll proceed from there.”

Best gave her a dark look and went up the path.

In his patio chair, Lowndes smoked a cigarette, ignoring the food before him.

“You’re a wonderful actress,” he told Lu Anne.

“Thank you,” she said, wondering again what people thought they meant when they said that. “I work hard. I try to get it right.”

“And what is
it
?”

“To inhabit them,” Lu Anne heard herself say. “To be in the place you’re supposed to be.” She watched him stare at her. “Don’t you take notes?”

He shook his head. “Aren’t you going to tape us? So I don’t misquote you?”

“You’ll misquote me anyway. Then your magazine’s lawyers will read it and if they say it’s O.K. I’ll come out the way you like.”

“Do you always talk to interviewers like this?”

“Can I tell you something off the record?”

“I don’t know yet,” Lowndes said, “ask me later.”

“I haven’t given an interview in years. Not a real one.” She thought his eyes seemed somehow soiled. Mud-colored. Shit-colored. “You go to est training or something?”

He laughed but she thought she had embarrassed him.

“Do
you
go to est training?”

“I meditate,” Lu Anne said. Lowndes had an aura, she realized. His aura brought forth creatures, like the Long Friends. They were attracted to him. She could hear their prattling from inside the casita. Something about lost things, lost jewelry, old photographs, old-time things. He would not be aware of them, she reminded herself, because they were not there for him.

“You mean like Zen?” Lowndes asked, amused. “Alpha states?”

The Sorrowful Mysteries, she thought. In the casita she could hear the rattle of rosary beads. They were not hers, they belonged to Props but she had appropriated them.

“Everyone meditates,” she said. “It’s just clearing your mind for concentration.”

“What is acting?” Lowndes asked. “How is it like living?”

“Those aren’t possible questions,” she said. “They don’t make sense.”

“Yes, they do, Miss Verger. You can answer them.”

She laughed. “Mr. Lowndes, you don’t ask those questions of a person.” He had power over her. The aura that drew the Long Friends gave him great strength. And his contaminated eyes. “If you want to speculate on those things, if you want to hold forth on life and acting and whatnot for your readers, well, do it. But don’t ask me to give you the words.”

“Do you really know my work?”

“I read your novel, Mr. Lowndes. Some years ago. I admired it.”

“The novel? Not a studio synopsis?”

His eyes held her; she knew she must look troubled. His arrogance did not offend her but that he dared to speak so made her fear he knew his own power. Perhaps he was the same with everyone, she thought. He had humiliated poor foolish Jack Best. Considering his cruelty, she examined his stance, the lines of his body. When she felt the first faint thirst of desire, the Long Friends inside sounded a chorus of stern whispers.

“You-all hush,” she said softly.

“I’m sorry,” Lowndes said, surprised. “I was kidding.”

“Yes,” Lu Anne said. “Of course.”

“You’re from Louisiana?”

“Yes,” she said, “it’s in the handout. From Boulanger.”

“I’m from Georgia.”

“I know,” Lu Anne said. “I know from your name. Lowndes, that’s a Georgia name.” She was only flattering him now to keep him at bay, starting to tell lies. She saw that he was pleased.

“I love to swim,” she told Lowndes. “When I was sixteen I was an Olympic candidate. But I had a fall and broke my leg.”

“A fall from a horse?” Lowndes asked.

“Yes,” she said, “but I still swim regularly. And I ride occasionally.”

Lee had never been an Olympic candidate for anything. At four she had broken her leg being chased by a hog during a Christmas party. If her cousins hadn’t rescued her, her father said, she might have been eaten and gone into sausage.

“You went to Newcomb?”

“I went to Newcomb on a Madison Foundation scholarship. Then I went to Yale drama school.”

“And you were in that production of
As You Like It
where everybody in it became rich and famous.”

“People said it was like John Brown’s hanging. I was Rosalind.”

“Rosalind,” Lowndes mused. “Tell me about that.”

She shook her head with a secret smile. “No.” She has nothing to do with you, Lu Anne thought. With your bent back and your shitty eyes.

He was studying her refusal to answer when the telephone rang. It was transportation and her call.

“Time for me to go to work,” she told him pleasantly, and went into the bedroom to change. The Long Friends had left a smell, like sweet wine and lavender sachet, and Lu Anne was aware of it as she sat by the bedroom mirror.

She chewed a piece of sugarless gum and brushed out her hair, hoping to see Rosalind and not some ugly thing. When she had been married to Robitaille he had accused her of constantly looking in mirrors. Because, she had told him, my face is my fortune.

They had told her to stay out of the sun, to keep the character’s genteel pallor. In the end it could not be done without the most rigorous efforts and they had relented and let her tan. It had been a good idea; with the right makeup and in the right colors, she photographed young and golden.

It was Edna in the glass now, not Rosalind. Lu Anne studied herself. Gone, that young Queen of the New Haven night. Sometimes it seemed to Lu Anne that she missed Rosalind the way she missed her children. She turned to study herself in profile.

Years ago in Boulanger, a judge who was one of her ex-husband’s relatives had called her “a lousy mother,” right out in court, in front of her daughter and in front of her own mother and daddy. Now she was Edna Pontellier. Of Edna, Kate Chopin had written:

She was fond of her children in an uneven impulsive way. She would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart; she would sometimes forget them.

You lost it all anyway, Lu Anne thought. You lost the child inside yourself, then the person that grew there, then the children you never bore and the children you did. The boys, the men, the skin outside, the self inside. Feelings came and went like weather. You could not tell if they were real. You could not tell if they were your own. You could never even be sure that you were there. People pretended.

“She looks fine,” Lu Anne told herself in the glass. The unseen Friends buzzed. They were all guilty agitation, old-auntly admonitions.

Don’t say she
look
fine, she heard one whisper. Say she
is
fine.