The Deer Park (13 page)

We danced in silence. “What did Teppis say to Eitel?” I asked finally.

Lulu shook her head and then giggled. “He told Charley to get the hell out.”

“Well, then I guess I have to go too,” I told her.

“You weren’t included.”

“Eitel is my friend,” I said.

She pinched my ear. “Wonderful. Charley will love that. I have to tell him when I see him.”

“Leave with me,” I said.

“Not yet.”

I stopped dancing. “If you want,” I said, “I’ll ask Mr. T. for permission.”

“You think I’m afraid of him.”

“You’re not afraid of him. You’ll just end up dancing with Teddy.”

Lulu began to laugh. “You’re different from what I thought at first.”

“That’s just liquor.”

“Oh, I hope not.”

Reluctantly, in a sort of muse, she allowed me to take her from the dance floor. “This is an awful mistake,” she whispered.

Yet Lulu was not exactly timorous when we passed Teppis. Like a promoter who counts the seats in the house, he stood near the entrance, his eyes adding up the scene. “Girlie,” he said, gripping her by the arm, “where are you going?”

“Oh, Mr. T.,” Lulu said like a bad child, “Sergius and I have so much to talk about.”

“We want to get some air,” I said, and I took the opportunity to give him back a finger in the ribs.

“Air?” He was indignant as we left. “Air?” I could see him
looking for the ceiling of the Laguna Room. Behind us, still in operation, the papier-mâché camera rotated on its wooden boom, the searchlights lifting columns to the sky. A pall lay over the party. The zenith had passed, and couples were closed into tête-à-têtes on the couches, for the drunken hour had come where everything is possible and everybody wants everybody; if desires were deeds, the history of the night would end in history.

“You say to Charley Eitel,” Teppis shouted after me, “that he’s through. I tell you he’s through. He’s lost his chance.”

Giggling at the sound of his rage, Lulu and I ran along the walks and over the little trellised bridges of the Yacht Club until we came to the parking circle. Once, underneath a Japanese lantern, I stopped to kiss her, but she was laughing too hard and our mouths didn’t meet. “I’ll have to teach you,” she said.

“Teach me nothing. I hate teachers,” I said, and holding her hand, pulled her behind me, her heels clicking, her skirt rustling in the promising tap-and-whisper of a girl trying to run in an evening gown.

We had an argument over whose car to take. Lulu insisted on using her convertible. “I’m cooped up, Sergius,” she said, “I want to drive.” “Then drive my car,” I compromised, but she would have no other way than her own. “I won’t leave,” she said, driven to a pitch of stubbornness, “I’ll go back to the party.”

“You’re frightened,” I taunted her.

“I’m not.”

She drove badly. She was reckless, which I expected, but what was worse, she could not hold her foot steady on the pedal. The automobile was always slowing or accelerating and drunk as I was she made me aware of danger. But that wasn’t the danger I was worrying about.

“I’m a nut,” she’d say.

“Let’s park, nut,” I would answer. “Let’s cut the knot.”

“Did you ever go to the crazy doctor?” Lulu asked.

“You don’t need him.”

“Oh, I need something,” she said, and with a wrench, gravel stinging our fenders, she brought the car off the shoulder and on the road again.

“Let’s park,” I said.

She parked when she would have it. I had given up hope, I was prepared to sit politely while she skidded us off the highway and we rolled and smacked at seventy miles an hour through the cactus and desert clay. But Lulu decided we might just as well live a little while longer. Picking a side road at random, she screamed around the turn, slowed down once it was past, drifted along, and finally pulled off in some deserted flat, the night horizon lying all around us in a giant circle.

“Lock the windows,” she said, engrossed in pressing the button which raised the canvas top.

“It’ll be too hot,” I argued.

“No, the windows have to be closed,” she insisted.

All preparations spent, she turned in her seat and took my kiss. She must have felt she had let loose a bull, and in fact she had; for the first time in almost a year I knew that I would be all right.

Yet it was not so easy as that. She would give herself to my mouth and my arms, she would be about to be caught, and then she would start away, looking fearfully through the car window. “There’s a man coming,” she would whisper, her nails digging my wrist, and I would be forced to lift my head and scan the horizon, forced to stop and say, “There’s no one around, can’t you see?”

“I’m scared,” she would say, and give her mouth to me again. How long it went on I do not know, but it was a classic. She coaxed me forward, she pushed me back, she allowed me a strip of her clothing only to huddle away like a bothered virgin. We could have been kids on a couch. My lips were bruised, my body suffered, my fingers were thick, and if I succeeded finally in capturing what clothing she wore beneath
her evening dress, pushing it behind me in the seat like a mad jay stuffing its nest, I still could not inspire Lulu to give up her gown. Though she allowed the most advanced forays and even let me for one, two, and then three beats of the heart, she sat up with a little motion that pushed me away, and looked through the windows. “There’s someone coming. There’s somebody on the road,” she said, and pinched me when I tried to come near her.

“This is it,” I told her, but for all I told her, high-water mark had been reached. For another hour, no matter what I did, how I forced, how I waited, and how I tried, I could not get so close again. The dawn must have been not too far away when exhausted, discouraged, and almost indifferent, I shut my eyes and murmured, “You win.” With a weary hand I passed over my cache of her door-prizes and lay back against the seat.

Tenderly, she kissed my lashes, her fingernails teased my cheek. “You’re sweet,” she whispered, “you’re really not so rough.” To revive me, she pulled my hair. “Kiss me, Sergius,” she said as if I had not yet done anything at all, and in the next minute while I lay back on the seat, not believing and almost dumb to her giving, I was led to discover the mysterious brain of a movie star. She gave herself gently to me, she was delicate, she was loving, loving even to the modesty with which she whispered that this was all very unplanned, and I must be considerate. So I was obliged to take the trip alone, and was repaid by having her cuddle in my arms.

“You’re wonderful,” she said.

“I’m just an amateur.”

“No, you’re wonderful. Oooh, I like you. You!”

On the way back I drove the car while she curled beside me, her head on my shoulder. The radio was on and we hummed to the music. “I was crazy tonight,” she said.

I adored her. The way she had treated everybody when I met her made this even better. For on that long drive she took me before we parked, I had told myself that absolutely I had
to succeed with her, and the memory of this feeling now that I had succeeded was fine. Maybe it was no more than that enough time had gone by, but I felt all right, I felt ready—for what, I hardly knew. But I had made it, and with what a girl.

Lulu was tense when we kissed good night outside her door. “Let me stay,” I said.

“No, not tonight.” She looked behind her to see if the walks were deserted.

“Then come to my house.”

She kissed me on the nose. “I’m just beaten, Sergius.” Her voice was the voice of a child.

“All right, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Call me.” She kissed me again, she blew a kiss as she disappeared through the door, and I was left alone in the labyrinth of the Yacht Club, the first sun of a desert morning not far away, the foliage a pale-blue like the pale-blue of her gown.

It may sound weird, but I was so excited with enthusiasm that I had to share it, and I could think of nobody but Eitel. It did not even occur to me that he might still be with Elena, or that as the ex-husband of little Lulu, he would not necessarily find my story a dream. I don’t know whether I even remembered that Lulu had been married to him. In a way, she had no existence for me before tonight, and if she seemed bigger than life, she was also without life. How I loved myself then. With the dawn spreading out from me until it seemed to touch the Yacht Club with its light, I began to think of those mornings when I was out on a flight which started in the darkness of the hangars, the syrup of coffee on my tongue, the blast of my plane flaring two long fires into the night. We would take off an hour before dawn, and when morning came to meet us five miles high in the air with the night clouds warmed by a gold and silver light, I used to believe I could control the changes of the sky by a sway of my body as it was swelled by the power of the plane, and I had played with magic. For it was magic to fly an airplane; it was a gimmick and a drug.
We knew that no matter what happened on ground, no matter how little or confusing we ourselves could be, there would always come those hours when we were alone in formation and on top of life, and so the magic was in the flight and the flight made us very cool, you know? and there was nothing which could happen once we were down which could not be fixed when the night went into the west and we ganged after it on our wings.

I had been careful to forget all of this, I had liked it too much, and it had not been easy to think that I probably would never have any magic again; but on this dawn with the taste of Lulu still teasing me, I knew that I could have something else, and I could be sad for those airplanes I deserted because there was something to take their place.

Thinking this, or thinking of such things, I started up the path to where I parked my car. Halfway, I sat on a bench underneath a bower of shrubbery, breathing the new air. Everything had come to rest around me. Then, in a cottage nearby I heard sudden brawling sounds, a mixed dialogue or two, and a door in the wall opened and Teddy Pope lurched out, wearing a sweater and dungarees, but his feet were bare. “You bitch,” he shouted at the door.

“Stay out,” came the voice of the tennis player. “I don’t want to tell you again.” Teddy cursed. He cursed at such length and in so loud a voice that I was sure everybody sleeping nearby must be reaching for their pills. The door to the bungalow opened again, and Marion Faye came outside. “Go beat your meat, Teddy,” he said in his quiet voice, and then he stepped back inside and shut the door. Teddy turned around once and looked past me with blank eyes which took me in, or maybe didn’t see anything at all.

I watched him stagger along the wall, and in spite of myself I followed at a distance. In one of the minor patios of the Yacht Club where a fountain, a few yucca trees, and a hedge of bougainvillea set up an artificial nook, Teddy Pope stopped
and made a phone call from an outdoor booth set under a trellis of rambler roses. “I can’t go to sleep like this,” he said into the receiver. “I’ve got to talk to Marion.” The voice at the other end made some answer.

“Don’t hang up,” Teddy Pope said loudly.

Like a night watchman making his rounds, Herman Teppis came into sight along one of the walks. He approached Teddy Pope, came up beside him, and slammed the receiver on its cradle.

“You’re a disgraceful human being,” Herman Teppis said, and kept on down the walk without saying another word.

Teddy Pope wobbled away and came to rest against a Joshua tree. He leaned on it as if it were his mother. Then he began to cry. I had never seen a man so drunk. Sobbing, hiccuping, he tried to chew on the bark of the tree. I backed away, I wanted nothing so much as to disappear. When I was out of sight, I heard Pope scream. “You bastard, Teppis,” he cried out into the empty dawn, “you know what you can do, you fat bastard, Teppis,” and I could picture his cheek on the joshua tree. I drove slowly home, making no attempt to find Eitel after all.

W
OMEN WHO HAVE COME
to know me well have always accused me sooner or later of being very cold at heart, and while that is a woman’s view of it, and a woman can rarely know the things that go on inside a man, I suppose there is a sort of truth to what they say. The first good English novelist I ever read was Somerset Maugham, and he wrote somewhere that “Nobody is any better than he ought to be.” Since it was exactly what I was thinking at the time, I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought because it seems to me that some people. are a little better, and some a little worse than they ought to be, or else the universe is just an elaborate clock. Nonetheless I can hardly claim that I am the most warmhearted man-and-jack to come sauntering down the pike.

Among the different people each of us has in himself is the gossip columnist I could have been. Maybe I would have been a bad columnist—I’m honest by inclination—but I would have
been the first who saw it as an art. Quite a few times I have thought that a newspaperman is obsessed with finding the facts in order to tell a lie, and a novelist is a galley-slave to his imagination so he can look for the truth. I know that for a lot of what follows I must use my imagination.

Particularly for Eitel’s affair with Elena Esposito. I have to wonder a little if I am the one to write about it. I have picked up something of an education since I was in Desert D’Or, but Eitel is very different from me, and I do not know if I can find his style. Yet, imagination becomes a vice if we do not exercise it. One of these days I am going to write a book about a town I visited for twenty minutes, and if I do it well enough, everybody will believe I lived there for twenty years. So there is no use in making apologies—I have the conceit that I
know
what happened, and at the least everybody in Desert D’Or knew that their affair began well.

When Teppis told him to leave the party, it put Eitel in a good mood, for to find his self-respect Eitel usually had to do something which was of no advantage for himself. On the walk to the car, with Elena on his arm, he was pleased enough to be giving imitations of the people they had talked to at the party. “I love the dignity of Italian women,” he said, mimicking Jennings James, and Elena breathless from laughter, could only plead, “Oh, stop!”