Children of Light (18 page)

“Good,” Hueffer said. Drogue reacted to his approval with a slow double take. “Do you want her to go into the water?”

“No time for that. We’re shooting for sunset and that means three takes if we’re lucky. Otherwise we have to do it again tomorrow.”

“If it doesn’t rain,” Hueffer said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Drogue said. “Hurry up. Go tell her what she has to do.”

“I’m thinking eroticism,” Drogue said to Blakely. “I’m thinking sacrifice. Motherhood. Yes?”

“Right,” Blakely said.

“I’m thinking human sacrifice. Madonnahood.”

“Tithood?”

“Tithood too.”

They watched Eric discuss the situation with Joy McIntyre. Eric was speaking enthusiastically and at some length. Joy was pouting.

“Look at the ass on the little bitch,” Drogue said angrily. “Christ almighty.”

“Well,” Blakely said, “don’t get pissed, boss.”

L
ate in the afternoon, as the highway curved down from the Cerro Encantada, Walker found himself driving within sight of the sea. He pulled over at the next turnoff, got out of the car and walked to the end of a promontory from which he could see the ocean and the trail that lay ahead of him. The sun was low and losing its fire, the ocean a cool darkening blue that made him shiver in the desert heat. Between the ridge on which he stood and the sea lay the Honda Valley. It was every variety of green—delicate pastel in the circular irrigated cotton fields, silver-green in the stands of eucalyptus, a sinister reptilian emerald along the base of its canyon walls. Miles away, perhaps as much as an hour of cautious driving over the tortuous highway, a paved road descended in figure-of-eight switchbacks to the valley. He could make out the hotel buildings. From where he stood they seemed to rest precariously in the folds of a red table rock that commanded the coastal plain.

As his gaze swept the valley, he saw sharp glints of reflected sunlight from the seaside edge of one of the eucalyptus groves. Before a line of wooden structures, tiny human figures went to and fro along the shore. The sunlight was striking silver-paper reflectors, metal and
glass. It took him a moment to understand that he was seeing
The Awakening
unit at work.

There was a copy of Peterson’s
Western Birds
and a pair of binoculars behind the rear seat of the Buick; Walker’s wife was a birdwatcher and he had driven her car to Seattle. He took the glasses, walked back to the edge of the ridge and picked out the unit. He saw a woman in an old-fashioned gray bathing suit walking toward the water. As he watched, the woman stopped short and sauntered back to the spot from which she had begun.

Walker watched her start again, noted the camera crane on its track and the figures on the turret. A sound man attended the woman like an acolyte, carrying his boom aloft. He saw the woman remove a bandana from around her head and toss it to the sand. He saw her walk on, remove her bathing suit and stand naked and golden in the sun. He was seeing, he supposed, what he had come to see.

It was very strange to see them as he did—tiny distant figures at the edge of an ocean, acting out a vision compounded of his obsessions and emotions. He had never been so in love, he thought, as he was with the woman who stood naked on the beach in front of that camera and several dozen cold-eyed souls. It was as though she were there for him, for something that was theirs. He felt at the point of understanding the process in which his life was bound, as though the height on which he stood was the perspective he had always lacked. Will I understand it all now, he wondered, understand it with the eye, like a painting?

The sense of discovery, of imminent insight excited him. He was dizzy; he checked his footing on the uneven ground, his closeness to the edge. Her down there, himself on a rock miles away—that’s poetry, he thought. The thing was to get it straight, to understand.

He saw them dress her again, saw her walk, lose the bandana, then the bathing suit in what, from where he stood, read as a series of effortless moves. Tears came to his eyes. But perhaps it was not poetry, he thought. Only movies.

The seed of meaning he had touched between his teeth began to
slip away. He was struck by the silence between their place and his; he strained for the director’s voice, the sound of the sea. Gulls were what he heard, and wind in the mesquite.

What had it been? Almost joy, he thought, a long-lost thing, something pleasurable for its own sake. It had slipped away.

Fuck it, he thought. I got something almost as good.

He went back to his car, looked up and down the road to see that he would not be surprised and managed with some difficulty to do a few lines. Some of his cocaine blew onto the car seat and he had to brush it away and see it scatter on the wind.

It had been just like a dream, he thought, the same disappearing resolution, the same awakening to the same old shit. It wasn’t there. Or was hardly there—a moment’s poetry, a moment’s movies. Hardly enough there to count, not for the likes of him.

The coke was no help. It had been something like a daydream, provoked by the smell of the wind and the dizzying height and his impatience to see her; no drug would bring it back. Rather, the drugs gave him the jitters—made him feel exposed, out there in the open beside the road, pursued and out of breath. When he went out to the ridge again and fixed his binoculars on the naked figure he saw it was not Lu Anne but a younger woman who somewhat resembled her. There’s your poetry, he thought. Your movies.

T
he Drogues, Blakely and Hueffer crowded into the director’s trailer to watch tapes of Joy’s undressing.

When the screen showed her stripping, a reverent silence fell over the group.

“What was the big fuss?” old Drogue asked.

“She bitched. She didn’t want to show her ass.”

“Did you tell her that Lu Anne would?”

“I told her. She had the nerve to tell me her problem was the Mexicans. She said, ‘They take it wrong.’ ” He mimicked her accent and demeanor. “ ‘They take it wrong,’ she said.”

A murmur of disapproval arose in the dark trailer. They all sat quite still, watching Joy naked on the screen.

“A frame like that,” the old man said, “and she never took off her pants for a camera? Hard to believe.”

Young Drogue froze the frame.

“That’s going to be broken up,” he said. “It
does
turn out to be a striptease.”

“Remember,” Hueffer said, “with Lee it won’t be as flamboyant.”

Drogue was thoughtful for a moment.

“I think the opposite,” young Drogue said. “Joy’s so built and busty and dumb that you kind of … the thing gets this wild unpredictable quality. You don’t know what the hell’s happening but it’s weird and it turns you on. With Joy I might use it.”

“The kid does something for a camera,” Blakely said. “No question.”

“She’ll be my angel,” old Drogue said.

“With Lu Anne, you might have her bare her breast and it’s tragic. You don’t want to see her undress. She’ll look humiliated and anorexic and crazy. The whole ending goes limp and we’re dead.”

“He’s right for once,” old Drogue told Hueffer. “You’re wrong.”

“Let’s do this in one take, guys!” young Drogue shouted. He motioned Eric to his side. “When you get Lu Anne on her mark, Eric, clear the set.”

“Why?” Heuffer asked.

“The Mexicans,” young Drogue told him. “They take it wrong.”

J
oe Ricutti had set up shop under a beach umbrella beside the bathhouse. He sponged and powdered Lu Anne’s face and gave her a
neck rub. Josette worked on her hair, no more sulkily distant than was usual. The gaffer and best boy were winding cable for an arc. Lu Anne had a look at the sun and picked up her worn copy of Kate Chopin’s novel. The wording was a solo
Liebestodt
, death as liberation.

Edna had found her old bathing suit still hanging, faded upon its accustomed peg
, Chopin had written.

When Josette finished with her hair, Lu Anne stood up.

“I’m going to walk it through,” she told Ricutti, and reading as she walked, set out for the bathhouse.

She put it on, leaving her clothing in the bathhouse. But when she was beside the sea, absolutely alone, she cast the unpleasant prickling garments from her, and for the first time in her life, she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited it.

“Clear the set, please,” Eric Hueffer intoned through his megaphone. “If you’re not working, we don’t want you on the set. Clear the set, everybody, please.” The Peruvian continuity girl made the announcement in Spanish, for the Mexicans.

Lu Anne leaned her head against the side of the bathhouse and thought of Edna naked in the open air for the first time. How sad it was, she thought. There was no way to film it. She had never thought of herself like Edna, but some things, she thought, they’re the same for everyone. A little Edna in all of us.

Naked for the first time, the open air. In the heat of the day it should be. A beach on the Gulf, midday, the water just cool, the sun hot on your body, the wind so still you can smell your own skin.

She finds out who she is and it’s too much and she dies. Yes, Lu Anne thought, I know about that. I can do that, me.

Too bad about the sunset, because it was clichéd and banal. Low-rent theatrics. Middle-income. Middlebrow theatrics.

She strolled at the water’s edge, reading. No one had called for quiet but the gaffer and the best boy spoke in low voices.

How strange and awful it seemed to stand under the sky! how delicious.
She felt like some newborn creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that she had never known.

The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body, in its soft close embrace.

The cosmic fuck. Well, Lu Anne thought, who better than me? But the drowned people she had seen in the church hall after the hurricane down home had not looked particularly fulfilled.

She read the line again aloud: “
The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body, in its soft close embrace.
” She looked out to sea. That’s how it would seem to Edna. Something out there for me. Life more abundant. You let it go and you lie back and you let it happen. You don’t have to keep your clothes on or your mouth shut, your legs crossed or your hair up or your asshole tight. You don’t have to worry. You don’t have to do a goddamn thing but …

“Miss Verger, please,” Eric Hueffer called into his megaphone. Mechanically, she turned back toward her chair and the makeup table. Ricutti put a dry sponge to her temples. Josette ran a comb through her hair.

“Please, everyone,” Hueffer was telling the stragglers, “if we don’t need you, we don’t want you here.”

Lu Anne read on about Edna Pontellier’s last swim.

She thought of Leonce and the children. They were a part of her life. But they need not have thought that they could possess her body and soul.

Well, Lu Anne thought, nothing is free, Edna. Her life had not afforded her the opportunity to experience that sentiment. No doubt it was dreadful.
A Doll’s House.
Empty days. Childbirth. Massa having his nights out with the boys, his quadroon sweetie. The kids night and day. She decided it did not do for her to think about children.

They were waiting for her. She put the book down and stood up and Drogue came up to her, guiding her toward the bathhouse, telling her about the shot, how to come out, where to take the suit off, when to go into the water.

The mercy of the sun
, Lu Anne thought. The informing words.
Awful. Naked. Delicious. Sensuous. Soft close embrace.
Dying was
always fun.
Immortal longings. Exaltation beyond despair.
So much popcorn, she thought. To get the character you had to go down and inside to where your grief was. The place your truest self inhabited was the place you could not bear.

She stopped and leaned against Drogue. They were at the door of the bathhouse, and the camera was advancing on her. Two Mexican grips waited beside the Titan, privileged characters who were expected not to take it wrong when she undressed.

“O.K., partner?” Drogue asked.

“I’m fucked, honey,” she told him. “Life’s a condom.”

She looked into his panic-stricken face. He’s seeing it, she thought. Yes, she thought, behold the glory, Jim. Look at me shining, I’m the Queen of Lights.

“How about a half-moon on the bathhouse door, Walter? I could come out and do Judy Canova.” She bared her front teeth at him.

“Great,” Walter Drogue the younger said. “Only—some other time, maybe?”

“Have no fear,” she told the director. She stepped inside the bathhouse, closing the door behind her. There was only one of them inside.

How can you dare speak so to them? it asked gently in the old language. They don’t understand you. It’s we alone who do.

“Which one are you?” she asked it wearily. It was Marie Ange, she knew.

“Marie Ange,” she sighed. “Monkey-face. Go away, eh?
Va-t’en.
”

Eric was calling for quiet.

She raised her eyes into the darkness. “Oh, darkness above,” she prayed, “help your sister darkness below.”

She crossed herself quickly. She hadn’t meant such a terrible prayer. She thought that she might go to church in town that evening.

Drogue’s voice cut through the silence on the other side of the door.

“Action!”

She opened the door and walked out into the golden sunlight and caught a quick glimpse of Charlie Freitag, the producer. She fixed her gaze on a point above the reddening horizon where the sun’s
fading glare might light her eyes yet not dazzle her. At the appointed mark, she stopped and lowered the shoulder straps of her one-piece gray bathing suit. It was not, she thought, of any thwarted love that Edna died. The suit peeled away easily as she eased her torso free. She kept her eyes on their quarter of the sky.

It was dangerous to probe one’s inward places. The chemistry was volatile, fires might start and burn out of control. What if I, Lu Anne thought, who cannot see past mirrors, should confront myself there? My self.