Ideal (7 page)

“It is very nice here, thank you.”

“Just be careful of this chair, ma'am. It ain't very steady. . . . I bet it must make ye scared, don't it, when they work them cameras making pichurs?”

“I'll bring ye an extry blanket, ma'am. The nights are sorta chilly around here. . . . Oh my, what a pretty suit ye have, Miss Gonda! I reckon it cost all of twenty dollars, no less.”

“I'll get ye some water in that pitcher, ma'am. And some nice clean towels . . . Dear me, ye look just like in them movies! I knew ye right at once!”

“Did it hurt ye, Miss Gonda, when that feller stuck you with that big knife, in the movie, last year that was?”

They fluttered nervously, eagerly about the room, without tearing their eyes from the strange visitor. Her slender shadow rose up the whitewashed wall, and her hair looked like a huge black flower on the ceiling with tangled petals flung wide.

“Thank you,” she said, “I will be very comfortable here. . . . Please do not bother. I do not want to cause you so much trouble. Only, I will warn you, it's very dangerous, you know, keeping me here.”

Jeremiah Sliney straightened his stooped shoulders proudly.

“Don't you worry about that, Miss Gonda. There ain't no cops in the world what can get you out of Jeremiah Sliney's house. Not while he's alive, they won't!”

Kay Gonda smiled and looked at them. Her eyes were round and clear and innocent like a frail little girl's, a very young girl in a dress too severe for her fragile body. She leaned against the dresser, and her hand looked like a piece of clouded crystal chiseled into old planks with bald patches of faded varnish.

“It is very kind of you,” she said slowly. “But why do you want to take the chance? You do not know me.”

“Ye . . . ye don't know, Miss Gonda,” said Jeremiah Sliney, “what ye mean to us. We're old folks, Miss Gonda, poor old folks. We never had nothing like ye ever come to us. Cops, indeed! Ye don't think of cops in church, Miss Gonda, no more'n in this here room right now. And if . . .
oh gosh! Ye must forgive a driveling old fool like me! Just make yerself comfortable and don't ye worry about a thing. We'll be right here in the next room, if ye need anything. Good night, Miss Gonda.”

There was no sound in the house, no light. Beyond the window, crickets chirped in the tall grass, a shrill, unceasing whistle, like the whining of a steady saw. A bird screamed somewhere in short, choked gasps and stopped, and screamed again. A moth beat dry, rustling wings against the window screen.

Kay Gonda lay on the bed, dressed, her hands under her head, her thin black pumps crossed on the faded old blanket. She did not move.

In the silence, she heard the bed creaking as someone turned over in the next room. She heard a heavy sigh. Then there was silence again.

Then she heard a voice, a soft muffled voice whispering hoarsely:

“Pa . . . You asleep, Pa-a?”

“No.”

The woman sighed. Then she whispered:

“Pa, it's day after tomorrow . . . the mortgage is . . .”

“Yeah.”

“It's seven hundred dollars, it is.”

“Yeah.”

The bed creaked as someone turned over.

“Pa-a . . .”

“Yeah?”

“They'll take the house.”

“They sure will.”

The bird screamed far away, in the silence.

“Pa-a, think she's asleep?”

“Must be.”

“It's murder she's done, Pa. . . .”

“Yeah.”

They were silent again.

“It's a rich feller what she's killed, Pa.”

“The richest.”

“Reckon his family, they'd like to know where she's at.”

“What're ye talkin' about, woman?”

“Oh, I was just thinkin' . . .”

There was a silence.

“Pa, if they was told, his family, where she's at, it'ud be worth somethin' to them, wouldn't it?”

“Ye old . . . what're ye trying to—”

“Reckon they'd be glad to pay a reward. A thousand dollars, maybe.”

“Huh?”

“A thousand dollars, maybe . . .”

“Ye old hag! Ye shut yer mouth before I choke ye!”

There was a long silence.

“Ma . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Think they'd . . . they'd hand over a . . . a thousand?”

“Sure they would. Them's folks with plenty of money.”

“Aw, shut yer old face!”

A moth beat furiously against the window screen.

“It's the poorhouse for us, Pa. For the rest of our days.”

“Yeah . . .”

“They pay more'n that for bank robbers and such, they do.”

“Ye got no fear of God in ye, ye don't!”

“Fifty years, Pa. Fifty years in this house and now thrown out in the street in our old age. . . .”

“Yeah . . .”

“The children were born here, too . . . right in this room, Pa . . . all of them . . .”

“Yeah . . .”

“With a thousand, why, we'd have the house to the end of our days . . .”

He did not answer.

“And we could even build that new chicken coop we need so bad . . .”

There was a long silence.

“Ma . . .”

“Yeah?”

“How . . . how'd we go about it?”

“Why, easy. We just slip out while she's asleep. She won't hear a thing. We go to the sheriff's station. Come back with the cops. Easy.”

“What if she hears?”

“She won't. Only we gotta hurry.”

“The old truck rattles pretty bad starting.”

“That's so.”

“I'll tell ye what. We'll just push it out, the two of us, down to the road and down the road a ways, till we're far enough from the house. Ye just hold that board down that's loose in the back.”

They dressed hurriedly, without a sound. There was only a faint creaking as the door opened and closed again. There was only a soft rumble down the driveway, a faint grating like a sigh lost in the grass.

They came back in a glistening car that skidded up to the door and stopped short, brakes screaming. Two blinding white headlights stretched far ahead, slashing the darkness. Two men in dark uniforms, their buttons sparkling, jumped out, and Jeremiah Sliney scrambled out after them, his coat hanging open at his bare throat.

When they entered the spare room, they found it empty. Only a strange, faint perfume still lingered in the
air.

“Dear Miss Gonda,

You do not know me. Yet you are the only person whom I really know in the world. You have never heard my name. Yet all men will hear it, and they will hear it through you.

I am an unknown artist. But I know to what heights I shall rise, for I carry a banner that cannot fail—and that is you. I have painted nothing which was not you. I have never done a canvas on which you did not stand as a goddess.

I have never seen you in person. I do not need to. I can draw your face with my eyes closed. My spirit is but a mirror of yours. My art is but a radio set gathering the song which is you. I have no life but my art, and no art but you.

Some day, you shall hear of me again and not through a
letter of mine. Until then—this is only a first bow from your devoted priest—

Dwight Langley . . .

. . . Normandie Avenue

Los Angeles, California”

O
n the evening of May 5th, Dwight Langley received the first prize of the exposition for his last picture—
Pain
.

He stood leaning against the wall, shaking hands, nodding, smiling to an eager crowd that came streaming past him, pausing for a few minutes in a tight whirlpool around him; he stood like a rock in its path, a lonely, bewildered rock, cornered against the wall. Between handshakes, he brushed his forehead with the back of his hand, the cold back of his hand against his feverish eyelids. He smiled. He had no time to close his lips. His lips opened wide over even, white teeth in a tense sunburned face. His lids were half-closed over dark, haughty eyes.

There was a blue haze of fire around him. Beyond the tall windows, streetcars roared and a stream of white, round lights rolled, swirling, overflowing the street, rising in glittering sprays up the sides of the buildings; in twinkling signs, rising higher, to the roofs; still higher, to a few last specks of blue stars in the sky; and he thought that the huge white globes which seemed to float over him, under the ceiling, had been splattered into the room from the streets below, from the city aflame, closing in around him, greeting him.

A dull tide of feet rumbled against a marble floor. A huge fur of dark fox touched by a silver frost bobbed up and down through the tide. A long spray of bluish flowers bent from a black vase in a corner. A stifling mixture of delicate perfumes choked him, heavy as a fog over the lights.

On the walls, clear, resplendent, leaping out of the fog, the
paintings stood like a row of trim combatants after a battle, proud in their defeat. One of them had won, the one that was his.

Dwight Langley nodded, and smiled, and said words he could not hear, and heard stealthy whispers in the crowd: “Kay Gonda, of course . . . Kay Gonda . . . Look closely at that smile . . . that mouth . . . Kay Gonda . . . Why, he . . . and she . . . Do you think? . . . Oh, no! Why, man, he's never met her. . . . I'll bet you. . . . He's never seen her, I tell you. . . . It's really Kay Gonda. . . Kay Gonda . . . Kay Gonda . . .”

Dwight Langley smiled. He answered questions he could not remember while he was answering them. He remembered the perfumes that choked him. He remembered the lights; and the hands that wrenched his; and the words, words he had prayed for, for such a long time, from old wrinkled heads who held his fate, and the fate of hundreds of others like him, and a newspaper woman with spectacles who insisted on knowing where he had been born.

Then someone had thrown an arm around his shoulders, and someone had shaken him, and someone had roared close to his ear: “Why, to celebrate, of course, Lanny, old pal!” and he was stumbling down endless stairs, he was riding in someone's open car, a cold wind tearing the hair on his hatless head.

They sat in a restaurant where people's chests were wedged into table edges, and table edges wedged into people's backs, and waiters glided sidewise, holding trays high. Dwight Langley did not know how many tables were occupied by their party or whether all the tables were occupied by their party. But he knew that many eyes were looking at him, and he heard echoes of his name rustling through the crowd, and he looked bored even though he would not miss one syllable. Glasses were sparkling and yellow, then empty, then sparkling and red, then empty again, then milky white with whipped cream running over the table, and someone across from him was bellowing loudly for ginger ale.

Dwight Langley leaned far across the table; a lock of black hair hung over his forehead and his white teeth glittered in his tanned face. He was saying:

“No, Dorothy, I won't pose for you.”

A girl with straight, stubby hair that needed a cut was whining:

“Oh, hang it, Lanny, you're wasted as an artist, honest, you're wasted as just an artist, you ought to be a model, who ever heard of such a good-looking artist? You're ruining my career, if you don't pose for me, you are.”

Someone broke a glass. Someone yelled insistently:

“What, no music? What, no music at all? No music of any kind? This is a hell of a joint!”

“Lanny, my pal, the yellow . . . the yellow of that woman's hair in that picture of yours . . . it's a new color . . . call it yellow since there's no other name . . . only it's not yellow . . . a new color, that's what you've done. . . . You could skin me alive before I could ever get anything like it.”

“Don't try,” said Dwight Langley.

Someone with a huge, red face stuffed a crumpled bill into a waiter's hand, muttering:

“Jush a mem'ry . . . Jush for a li'l mem'ry . . . You better remember that you had th' honor t' wait on the greatesht artisht of the twentiesh shnt'ry . . . th' greatesh damn artisht ever lived! . . .”

Then they were riding again, and one of the cars was held behind, and, driving on, they heard someone's loud argument with a traffic cop.

Then they were in someone's apartment, and a girl without stockings, in a very short skirt, and with protruding teeth, was shaking cocktails in a milk bottle. Someone turned on the radio and someone played Schubert's
Marche Militaire
on an upright piano out of tune. Dwight Langley sat on a broad daybed covered with faded cretonne, and most
of the others sat on the floor. A couple tried to dance, stumbling over stretched legs.

Someone smelling of garlic was whispering confidentially:

“Well, Lanny, the troubles are over, eh? Pretty soon now it will be a Rolls-Royce at the door instead of the old wolf, eh?”

“Say, Lanny, do you know who that was who asked you to come have tea with him sometime? Do you? That was Mortimer Hendrickson himself!”

“No!”

“Yes. And if that guy says a fellow's made, he's made!”

“Did you ever,” muttered the girl who needed a haircut, “did you ever see such long lashes as Lanny's on a man?”

Someone broke a bottle. Someone banged furiously at the bathroom door where someone else had been locked for a suspiciously long time. A woman with a long, black cigarette holder insisted on listening to a woman evangelist on the radio.

A landlady in a Chinese bathrobe came knocking at the door, ordering the noise stopped.

Someone was crying over a tall glass.

“You're a genius, Lanny, thash what you are, a genius, thash what you are, Lanny, and the world doesn't appreciate geniushesh . . .”

A young man with rouged lips played the
Moonlight Sonata
on the piano.

Dwight Langley lay stretched across the low bed. A slim girl with a blond, boyish bob and heavy breasts put her head on his shoulder, running her fingers through his hair.

Someone brought another gallon jug.

“Here's to Lanny!”

“To Lanny's future!”

“To Dwight Langley of California!”

“To the greatesht artisht that ever . . .”

Dwight Langley made a speech:

“The bitterest moment of an artist's life is the moment of his triumph. Not until the crowd surrounds him does he know how much alone he is. The artist is but a bugle calling to a battle no one wants to fight. The artist is but a cup offered to men, a cup filled with his own blood, but he can find no one thirsty. The world does not see and does not want to see that which he sees. Well, I'm not afraid. I laugh at them. I despise them. My contempt is my pride. My loneliness is my strength. I'm calling them to throw the doors of their lives open to the most sacred of all that is sacred, but those doors will remain closed forever . . . forever . . . What was I saying . . . Oh yes . . . forever . . .”

It was long past midnight when a car deposited Dwight Langley at the door of his studio on a quiet, palm-shaded street.

“No,” he waved, staggering a little, at those who had brought him, “no, I don't want you to come up . . . I want t'be alone . . . alone . . .”

He walked swiftly across a neat lawn where a sign stood by the door: L
ADIES HATS MADE
TO ORDER.
H
OMESTITCH
ING 5 CENTS A YD.
A Spanish lantern hung over the open archway of the entrance. In a window at one side of the entrance two hats on wooden blocks stood dejectedly between voile curtains. In a window at the other side, a placard with a half-moon among stars announced: M
ADA
ME
Z
ANDA
P
SYCHOLOGIS
T AND
A
STROLOGIST.
W
H
Y
W
ORRY?
Y
OUR
F
UTURE
F
OR
O
NE
D
OLLAR.

He rose swiftly up the long, narrow, whitewashed Spanish stairway. A red carpet covered the stairs up to the second floor; the last flight, to the third, was bare, with the paint peeling off the creaking wooden steps, barely wide enough to let his slender body pass. He leaped two steps at once, light, exultant, his limbs swinging in the joy of movement, young, free, triumphant.

There was no light on his landing, but there was only one door—his—and he never locked it. He threw the door open.

Through tall windows, moonlight made broad blue bands across the room, across a jungle of paintings, and empty easels, and half-finished canvases leaning against chair legs. Through a broad skylight, a blue ray came to tear out of the darkness a charcoal sketch of Kay Gonda, a huge head thrown back, her neck curved, her breasts tense, naked.

Dwight Langley pressed the light button.

He stood still, frozen. A woman rose slowly and stood facing him at the other end of the room. Tall, erect, her shoulders thrown back, so slender that she seemed to sway in the draft from the door, and she stood, all black to the tips of her fingers, to the tips of her thin pumps, against a black velvet curtain, so that he saw only a face, at first, a luminous face of white light with shadows of blue light under its cheekbones.

He stood motionless, his eyebrows rising. She did not move; she did not say a word.

“Well?” he asked, at last, frowning.

She did not answer.

“What are you doing here?” he asked impatiently.

“May I stay here for the night?” she whispered.

“Here? What's the idea?”

“I'm in danger.”

He smiled contemptuously, slipping his hands into his trouser pockets.

“Just who are you?” asked Dwight Langley.

The woman answered:

“I am Kay Gonda.”

Dwight Langley crossed his arms and laughed.

“So? That's who you are? Not Helen of Troy? Not Madame Du Barry?”

Kay Gonda's eyes widened slowly, huge, unblinking; but she did not move.

“Come on,” said Dwight Langley, “out with it. What's the gag?”

“Don't you know me?” she whispered.

He looked her over, his hands in his pockets, grinning scornfully.

“Well, you do look like Kay Gonda,” he remarked. “So does her stand-in. So do dozens of extra girls in Hollywood. What is it you're after? I can't get you into pictures, my girl. I'm not even the kind to promise a screen test. Come on, who are you?”

“Kay Gonda.”

“Prowling through the streets, entering strange houses?” He laughed bitterly. “There's only one Kay Gonda. I know her. But no one else does. I have dedicated my life to tell men of her. To awaken in their souls a hunger for her who is the unattainable. She can never enter our lives, nor our houses. Our fate is but to sing of her, and to pour our souls into a sacred, hopeless hymn, and to glory in our suffering and our longing. Only you can't understand. No one can. And now, out with it: what do you want?”

She crossed her hands behind her back, her shoulders hunched forward, but head raised, looking straight at him, in her eyes a plea that looked like a strange, quiet menace. She said slowly:

“I don't know. That's why I'm here.”

“What's on your mind?”

“Nothing. Only that I'm so tired!”

“Of what?”

“Of searching. I've searched for such a long time!”

“For what?”

“I don't know. I thought maybe I could find it out—here.”

“Come on, cut the joking! Who are you?”

She walked toward him. She stood, looking at him, her eyes
pleading; she stood in the midst of paintings that were as dozens of mirrors tearing her body into dozens of splinters of reflections, throwing back at her her pale eyes, her white arms, her lips, her breasts, her bluish shoulders, mirrors playing with her body, coloring it in drapes of flaming scarlet, in tunics of luminous blue, while she stood, black and slender, only her hair alike all through the room, like dozens of pale golden stars scattered around them, filling the studio, rising from their feet to above their heads.

“Please let me stay here,” she whispered, her lips glistening.

Dwight Langley stood erect, and his dark eyes were blazing.

“Listen,” he said slowly, his voice tense as an electric current tearing through an overcharged wire, “I have but one life, like all people. Only their lives are broken into many words and values. Mine's all in one word, and that word is “Kay Gonda.” That is all I bring to the world, all I have to tell it, all I have to teach. That is all my blood, all my religion. And you come to tell me that you are Kay Gonda, me, who would know her if anyone is ever to know her! Get out of here!”