Rubicon Beach (23 page)

He pulled her through the room to the bar on the other side. Hello Lee, people said to him uneasily. He didn’t answer. Soon the room recovered its composure. Llewellyn was standing at the bar with his second drink, holding tight to Catherine, when Eileen flowed by in an airy blue dress. Eileen looked at Catherine’s light-brown dress and her bare feet. Hello, she said to Catherine. Catherine watched her mouth move. Hello Lee, Eileen said, turning to Llewellyn. She asked how he was. He said he was fine. She asked how Maddy was. This is Catherine, Llewellyn answered. I hear you’ve been working, Eileen said. Yeah, working, said Llewellyn. There was a pause between them and Eileen said, Lee, let’s talk later, all right?

Llewellyn had his third drink. He and Catherine stood at the bar with him holding onto her. When she tried to pull away, he held her tighter. He made no attempt to hide this behavior from anyone else; she kept looking around her. His face and eyes were still crazy, as they’d been for a while. People greeted him cautiously as they passed. They congratulated him on the
Nightshade
sequel; he didn’t hear them. He only wanted them to look at her face. They all looked at her face.

He heard someone speaking to him and glanced over at Larry Crow. The photographer looked past Llewellyn to Catherine. “How you doing Lee,” he said. “I hear you’re working hard.” Llewellyn ignored him. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you. Phone rings and rings or your wife answers. Your wife sounds like she’s not feeling well.” He looked at Catherine again and laughed like a machine gun.

“What do you want,” said Llewellyn.

Crow took a folded paper from his inside coat pocket, “I have good news, Lee.” He handed Llewellyn the form. It was a model’s release from a magazine. Llewellyn handed the form back. “They’re nuts about that last shot. Remember? In the kitchen, your lovely lady here in the bed sheet.”

“Forget it.”

“Sign the release,” Crow said merrily, swirling the ice in his drink, “and we all do well by it. I do well, your friend here does well. You especially do well. I mean, being the girl’s . . . executor, so to speak. Handling her finances, that sort of thing.”

“I’m not pimping her,” said Llewellyn.

Crow went from merriment to annoyance very quickly. “They’re giving it a hell of a spread, Lee. An art approach, basically.” He looked at Catherine and then back to Llewellyn. “You see the way everyone looked at her when you walked in here? Two dozen aspiring nubiles in this place and it all stops for an Indian girl with no shoes and a dress from Thriftimart.” He lowered his voice. “The Harris people will sign her tomorrow, no questions.”

“My name isn’t Lee.”

“What?”

“Come on,” Llewellyn said to Catherine, but not to her, past her. He began to pull her away.

“Listen you crazy bastard,” Crow said with anger, then gave a short laugh; he was trying not to get excited. “Lee or whatever your name is,” he laughed again. “I want this credit. I want this layout. I want to take a hundred pictures of this girl, a thousand. It can be very much worth your while. This isn’t another Hollywood airhead, you and I both know that,” he said, pointing at Catherine. “This is a look here.”

He pointed at her eyes, her mouth.

“Come on,” Llewellyn said to Catherine.

“Where’s Chiquita’s green card, Lee,” Crow said angrily. He looked around and lowered his voice again. “What do you think you’re doing.” He put his face right next to Llewellyn’s, practically snarling. “I don’t want to ice your groovy thang here, Lee. But this girl’s an ixnay immigration-wise, and I got a feeling otherwise too. You employing her in that house or what? And I don’t mind telling you I’m leaning toward ‘or what.’ Her running around in bed sheets and all.”

Llewellyn, in a series of very tidy movements, turned to Crow, opened Crow’s coat, and pulled the document out of Crow’s coat pocket. He set his drink down, took a pen from Crow’s other pocket, signed the model’s release on the top of the bar. He put the pen back in its pocket, opened Crow’s coat and put back the release; and then gazed into Crow’s face, sighing deeply. There was a dimple above the corner of Crow’s mouth, on his left side, Llewellyn’s right. Never taking his eyes from that spot above the corner of Crow’s mouth, Llewellyn stepped back and brought his fist rocketing into its target. There was a crack and Crow literally flew across the room into the volcanic candle, as though the candle had been wheeled onto the set for just such a scene.

Llewellyn also did one other thing during this series of very tidy movements. He let go of Catherine.

Momentarily the living room came to a standstill. Streaked in light and shadow, the antique music box wound to a low groan in the background, and a woman at the edge of the room lost her balance slightly and froze in a stumble. The expressions on all the faces were suspended, the air turned to a haze in the explosion. The candle rose balletically. Crystal and glass and wax flowed upward and then cascaded down, the table splintering in a thousand fragments. The wax cooled in midair and rained on the floor in flakes. Crow moved on the floor in a slow thrash, and an actress from Portland in a silk top giggled a moment and then stopped, the look on her face becoming very curious. She stared down at the front of her silk top to find it mottled with ellipses of red. Only after this did something burst loose, an ugly offended roar imploding on the core of the room. Five men grabbed Llewellyn by his head and every limb.

In the downpour of the glass and the wax and the roar Catherine walked across the room, up the steps and out the front door, as though through a blizzard of arrows and jungle and fever.

Because there always existed at the bottom of Maddy’s cynicism the cynic’s usual sense of failure, she was all the less prepared to accept the devastating failure of her  marriage: it seemed too sudden and battling, and she hadn’t seen the early signs—which perhaps justified her sense of failure after all. When Llewellyn took Catherine out the front door that night, once again Maddy sat on the edge of the bed upstairs with her hands in her lap, looking out the window and wondering what to do. Slowly she removed a suitcase from the closet and opened it on the bed; she began to fill it up. By the time she had carried the process as far as Jane’s room, however, where the scenario would have her gather the child in her arms along with a favored toy or two, she had balked, reminding herself, I’m not really going to do this. Not really.

She had a glimmer of an idea, which was to go to Llewellyn’s study and read the script in progress; and for the moment she balked at this transgression too. Instead she put lane back to bed and went to bed herself. She seemed to toss endlessly, and thought, I’m fooling myself if I think I’ll sleep tonight. So it was a shock for her to wake, sometime early in the morning around three, and End she must have slept after all, since her husband was passed out on the bed next to her and she had no idea how he’d gotten there. He smelled of liquor. He also looked bruised and cut, and what instantly and inevitably flashed through Maddy’s mind was a scene in which the bruises and cuts were received at Catherine’s hands, never mind everything leading up to it. Downstairs, in the part of the house with the housekeeper’s room, things were quiet.

Thus transgressions now seemed appropriate. Maddy got up from her bed, put on her robe and went to the study. She slid open the door and went to the desk with the typewriter and several yellow pads of paper. She turned on the small desk lamp; there wasn’t a sound in the house. She opened up the folder in which her husband kept his script, except that there was no script. Instead she found a thin collection of fifty or sixty poems, and by the time she had read a few, she understood they all had the same subject: she could recognize her immediately, the hair the color of night and the rage to match, and her mouth the color of blood. Her eyes, he wrote, had the opaque rushing depthlessness of the blind, like the color of white skies and seas meeting at some point in the distance. They were poems about a face that was ignorant of its own image, and a man whose cognizance of that image divided his life in two. She closed the folder and shut off the light on the desk and thought to herself, The surprise is that I’m surprised.

Several times the next morning, as she lay in bed in a stupor of despair, she heard the phone ring and go on ringing many times before it stopped. About nine-thirty she looked over and Llewellyn wasn’t there, and the phone was ringing again. When she got to the top of the stairs lane was playing with her toys; she looked up at her mother in confusion. At the bottom of the stairs she saw Lew, not in the study where she’d expected to find him, but sitting in the living room staring, as he had before, at the spots of blood on the carpet. The phone had not stopped, and Maddy picked it up. On the other end was Eileen Rader, who began speaking before Maddy had gotten out a word. “Listen to me, Maddy,” Eileen said. She sounded very cold. “Lee’s fortunate I’m not calling the police after last night. A couple of other guests still may, and why Larry Crow doesn’t I don’t know, unless Lee’s got something he wants. Whatever is going on in your house is none of my business, but how it affects Lee’s work is. When Lee’s ready to face things, I want to talk to him, and it had better be soon if he’s still interested in a career.”

“Police?” said Maddy. Eileen hung up.

Maddy walked into the living room and looked at her husband. “Lew,” she said quietly, “we have to talk now.”

“I have this poem in my head,” he whispered. “Not the last poem but the poem after the last poem: I keep trying to find it. I keep writing closer to it, because I know when I get there I’ll be at the point of no return. If it means losing the house, if it means losing my family, if it means losing everything, I’m going to find this poem.”

“Lew,” said Maddy, “we have only one more chance before it’s too late.”

He nodded. He got up from the chair, he walked toward her and then past her, out the front door. She went over to the chair where he’d been and sat down in it. While she contemplated the blood on the carpet her daughter called twice from the top of the stairs. When the phone began to ring Maddy looked up at the kitchen door, struck by the huge silence from the back of the house. Slowly, timidly, she finally entered the kitchen. Slowly, timidly, she finally entered the back of the house, where she came to the open door of Catherine’s room and saw no one was there.

Llewellyn drove past La Brea up into the Hollywood Hills, the way he had taken Catherine the previous night. Then he drove back along Franklin. He kept his eyes open for Catherine everywhere he went. After hours of searching for her futilely, up and down side streets and main boulevards, he went home. When he got there, something about the house seemed odd. He wasn’t certain exactly what it was, but there was no doubt the house was different somehow. Then, after he had gotten out of the car and started up the small walk to the door, he looked at the red brick front with the white edgings, looked at the door and the two upstairs windows, and saw, distinctly, that one of the two windows was not where it had originally been. It was at least several feet over from its usual spot. Extremely annoyed, he went into the house and slammed the door and marched up the stairs. He started to go into his bedroom and, sure enough, it was not where it had been before but rather a door down. There Maddy was sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap. She looked up at him expectantly. What’s going on here anyway? he said.

Over the next week Llewellyn left the house every morning to drive past La Brea up to the hills and back down Franklin, looking for Catherine. He continued to take every side street and boulevard in between. Every day that he returned to the house, something about it had changed. Inside Maddy and Jane were always in their places but the places were different. The telephone was always ringing. Shaking his head and muttering with irritation at this turn of events, Llewellyn walked into his study only to find it was now Catherine’s room, with the bed in the corner and the bare walls and pink bits of glass in the sink. He walked out into the entryway of the house and, just as the phone stopped, announced, This has gone on long enough. Madeline? Jane?  They didn’t answer, and after several minutes the phone began again.

He told himself he was inching closer to the poem of no return. If I can just find the study, he thought, I’m sure I can get it, it’s nearly in my grasp now. The telephone came to be an outright nuisance. Once he answered it and it was someone from the studio; he hung up. Once he answered it and it was Eileen; he hung up. Once he answered and it was Richard: Good news, old man, said Richard in that way of his. The hotel may not evict me after all. Guess assassination anniversaries don’t exactly pack them in; it appears, said Richard, that everything will go on being
exactly as it has been
. Beneath the affectation of triumph his voice rang with abject terror. Llewellyn hung up. Richard is mad, he said to himself.

The last straw came when Llewellyn returned home one afternoon to find the front door moved a good five or six feet from its proper place. The correct placement of the door, neatly centered between the two upstairs windows, was ingrained in a memory that rooted itself in childhood; now Llewellyn’s patience had run out. He came inside to find Maddy at the bottom of the stairs. She was shaking as she held the banister. She’s losing her grip, Llewellyn said to himself grimly. He was determined to put things right, to take command. You have to call Eileen, she said choking, it’s urgent, they want you to call tonight. Llewellyn looked high and low for the telephone, finally locating it in the fireplace. He dialed a local construction company.

Maddy went upstairs. She didn’t come down until several hours later, at which point she found part of the front wall of the house lying in a rubble on the lawn. Several carpenters were at work. What . . . is happening? she asked her husband, who stood supervising the carpenters with his arms folded. I am having the door, he coolly replied, restored to its proper place. She looked at him, at the huge hole in the house and the carpenters at work, and then went back upstairs. She re moved a suitcase from the closet and opened it on the bed and filled it up. She went into Jane’s room and gathered the child in her arms along with a favored toy or two. She carried the suitcase, the child and the toy down the stairs, past her husband and the carpenters. She put the suitcase, the child and the toy in the car and left.