The Deer Park (26 page)

Eitel made himself sit back in his chair, and he extended his legs. “Well, Collie,” he said, “that I might buy.”

“Eitel, trust me for the premise of this hour. There are too many other characters in the world to fight. I don’t want to fight you.”

“Then let’s not talk about Sergius.”

“What if I say to you that I understand how you feel about the kid? Believe me I do understand it. I don’t care how much slop I’ve jammed up the hole of more than one cruddy and delirious piece of film product, I still am sentimental enough to think that everybody’s got to be an altruist about one person in the world. One person anyway. So you can be an altruist about Junior. I won’t fight you any more.”

Eitel took a long careful swallow of his drink. He was beginning to feel better. “I’ll tell you a secret,” he said. “We’ll get along if you cut down the length of your speeches.”

Munshin smiled tolerantly at the reprimand. “Then listen to this. I want you to tell me in all objective seasoned honesty, because that you owe me, Eitel; honesty you owe me: just tell me
how you think Sergius would develop if I can talk him into going in Uncle Herman’s direction.”

“Uncle Herman?” Eitel asked. “Uncle Herman
Teppis?
”

Collie grinned. “Please don’t say it so loudly.”

They laughed together as at an old family joke.

“Why, Collie,” Eitel said, “this is turning out to be a good drunk.”

“Tell me about Sergius, lover.”

“As a demonstration of my intelligence?”

“You know what I think of your intelligence. Do you want me to get down on my hands and knees?” Munshin said with a growl. “What do you think I’m here for?”

Eitel tasted his liquor carefully. It came over him that for the first time in some weeks he was conceivably out of his depression. “I have a little love for you, too, Collie,” he said slowly, “and you’re far from the dullest gentleman and wrestler I’ve ever had to deal with, but I think you’re underestimating Junior.”

“Are you sure you’re not being a proud father?” Munshin passed one of his heavy hands along his dark jowl. “Sergius is just a lucky opportunist to me.”

“After all these years, do you still believe in luck?”

“Luck, I believe in. To make a right connection at a good time? That’s luck I can believe in. And your friend is a very lucky operator.”

“No, it’s never so simple.” Eitel touched the bald spot on his head. “I don’t know if I really ought to talk about him, Collie, but—” Eitel sighed, as if to surrender to the attractions of conversation. “You’re right, I do like him. He was a friend during one of my plague months, and I wouldn’t want to see him develop into a bad piece of work.”

“Where is all this development?” Munshin asked. “The kid will have twenty thousand dollars as consolation when Lulu tells him how real it’s been, and good-bye.”

Eitel paused significantly. “You know, you’d do better to think of his possibilities as a movie actor.”

“A movie actor, you say?” And Munshin’s face became grave.

“Yes. He’s five years short of the theater, but there is something about his personality which is potential box office. I don’t say he’ll make a good screen actor, because for the life of me, I don’t know whether he has real talent. But, Collie, if my opinion is worth anything, that boy has a
wide
appeal.”

“Now that you mention it, there is a certain something about him,” Collie said in a speculative voice.

“Definitely. You don’t think Lulu would blow her time with a boy who had nothing?”

“What I don’t understand after all this,” Collie said, “is why you’re not in a hurry to encourage him to listen to me. I thought the guy was your friend.”

“I don’t know if he’s right for it. If he doesn’t have talent, or if he doesn’t care about such things, and he becomes too popular too quickly, he could turn out to be a pompous snot. I can see him growing into the kind of actor who’s read a hundred pages of Proust, and will take any celebrity aside at a party to tell him that he hates the acting profession because it kept him from being a great writer. And then of course every ambitious stock girl who’s ready to have lunch in his dressing room will get the lecture how the director on the picture is an idiot and doesn’t know the difference between The Method and Coquelin.”

“What projection you have,” Munshin said. “I didn’t even know the athlete could read.”

“Yes, indeed. He doesn’t know it, but he wants to be an intellectual. I’m seldom wrong on such predictions. Why, he hates intellectuals like a small-town slick writer.”

“Very interesting,” Collie said. “Do you want to know how I read him? Given a full expansion of his potential—if he has potential—I see him growing into a super-Western type. The whole bit. He’ll put hair tonic on his chest, and he’ll kick you in the crotch if it’s a fight to the death. I’ll say something worse. I sense ugliness in that kid. He could end up an amateur actor
and a professional vigilante who starts gossip-column posses to hunt down subversives like you.”

Eitel shrugged unhappily. “Well, I don’t know that I disagree with you. That’s possible, too. This particular light-heavyweight can go in any one of a hundred directions. It’s why I find him interesting.”

Collie nodded. “You may have a taste for hipsters, but they’re just psychopaths to me.”

“Don’t put labels on people,” Eitel snapped.

“This is getting us nowhere. I’m curious, Charley. Do you still think after all we’ve said about Sergius, that he won’t come to terms with me?” Collie smiled. “Not even a little chance?”

“I have to admit that I don’t know. If Sergius is bitched enough on my ex-Goddess to be ready for Uncle Herman, then you’re going to have an actor who’ll need a secretary for his fan mail.”

“Eitel, I have news for you,” Collie said abruptly. “H.T. thinks Sergius is fan mail too.”

Eitel smiled at the connection. “Well, Collie, when thieves agree …”

“You give me a pain in the ass. If you weren’t so pure, I could pull off a masterpiece. How I would love to ream H.T. with Sergius as the bait and you as the hook.” Munshin nodded at the decisive beauty of the project. “Charley, what would you think of signing a peace pact with me? Maybe it’s the good whisky, but I’m beginning to believe we could be friends.”

The intrusion of politics on friendship shivered Eitel’s mood again. “Don’t you think I’ve sold enough of myself for one night?” he said coldly.

“Sold what? Eitel, in my book you’re still an infant prodigy. You don’t begin to know what’s in my mind. I know I’m very drunk, but do think of this:
H.T. is not going to be in control of the studio forever
.” Collie gave the sentence in a whisper which vibrated through the room. “We could make an interesting
team, you and me. You’re one of the few directors who was never a cheap operator. And I
worship
real class, Charley. If I had top say in the studio, I can assure you that within reason I would let you make the kind of pictures you want to make.” His voice trailed off as if he regretted the timing of the proposition.

“Collie, we could have made a team.” Eitel admitted, and then shook his head in a small imperative motion as if to destroy the possibility forever. “But you did too many unpleasant things to too many pictures I cared about for me to forget so quickly.” A forgotten hatred came back to his voice. “And the worst of it was that you weren’t even right as a businessman so much of the time. They’re just beginning to find some of the nuances I wanted to do five years ago.”

“Stop living in the past!” Munshin looked at him levelly. “Brother, can’t you believe that maybe I want to change, too?”

Eitel gave the lonely smile of a man who has ceased to believe in the honesty of others. “You know,” he said, “it’s not the sentiments of men which make history, but their actions.”

Munshin looked at his watch, and got out of his chair. “All right,” he said, “since that’s the way you think, I’ll give you evidence of good faith. Forget the two thousand dollars I’m supposed to pay you on finishing the script. You can have it tomorrow. I’ll send it over by messenger.”

Eitel stared coldly at him as if he were a monster after all. “Still playing with pennies, aren’t you, Collie?”

The fatigue of a twenty-hour working day came into Munshin’s voice. “Eitel, you’re quite a man with the needle,” he said, swaying a little on his feet. “Because you’re right. I do think in pennies. But, you see, one thing Elena and I have in common is that my folks ran a candy store too. A crummy one with a numbers man to come around for the daily collections. It does things to the shape of your character that a café-society toff like Charles Francis Eitel could never begin to understand.”

“Sometime I’ll tell you about me,” Eitel said almost gently.

“Sometime. I hope so, Charley.” They shook hands formally. “Let me send that messenger in the morning. As a favor to me.” Munshin sighed with considerable force and liberty. “What a night this has been!”

Eitel was in a good mood when he went to sleep and he awakened in the same good mood. His sleep had left him in a state of well-being. His stomach, which was usually sensitive until late in the afternoon, accepted his breakfast and coffee with appetite. His satisfaction lasted until the moment he realized he would have to tell Elena that the script was no longer his own.

She was upset, and all the while he was explaining that working for Collie meant nothing, it was merely that he needed time and money was time, he knew that last night, far at the back of his thoughts, he had been dreading to tell her. “Nothing is changed really, darling,” he said. “I mean this script I do for Collie will be so different from my own that I’ll be able to do the other one later.”

She looked gloomy. “I didn’t know you were close to being broke.”

“Very close,” he said.

“Couldn’t you have sold your car?” she asked.

“Is that a solution?”

“I just hope you didn’t give up too soon.” Elena sighed. “I don’t know about these things. Maybe you’re right.” She was convincing herself even as she spoke, and all the time he knew that she did not believe him; at bottom nothing fooled her. “I’m sure the new one will be good,” she said, but she was silent all day.

The work on Munshin’s script went smoothly. Years ago, Eitel had defined a commercial writer as a man who could produce three pages in an hour on any subject assigned. That was the way it went with the new masterpiece. There were hitches, there were delays, there were mornings when he could not start, but over the whole, what amazed him, annoyed him,
and pleased him, was how easy the writing had become. Where he had written scenes many times only to decide that the latest version was worse than the previous failure, now ideas flowed, sections fit together, and walls of plot grew to support one another. Eitel knew nothing about the Church, and yet Freddie’s scenes in the seminary were good, they were commercially good, they boiled with movie ingredients. What did one have to know about the Church? There was a fine wit to the old priest, and Freddie was properly arrogant. One could rely on the stenographic code of the film which would say: Here is a heel, but it is a Teddy Pope heel, and regeneration is on the way.

Eitel began to enjoy himself by the time he started writing about Freddie’s success on the program. To the sugar of the seminary Eitel added the vinegar of television, and knew as he worked that the scenes which came later could not fail. A little syrup, a little acid, and lots of heart. These were the cupcakes which won Hercules awards, and it was fine to be working again with cynical speed.

Munshin would telephone almost daily from the capital. “How is Freddie coming?” he would ask.

“Freddie’s fine. He’s really alive,” Eitel would say, and think that no problems about character could exist any longer; Freddie was now an actor, any actor with a skier’s body, a sun-tanned face, and cartloads of heart.

“How’s Elena?” Munshin would ask, and answer himself by saying, “That’s great, that’s great,” even as Eitel was muttering, “She’s fine, thank you, she says to send a kiss.”

Only that was hardly true. If Eitel was in good spirits these days, Elena was not, and her depression wore against his optimism. For the first time since he had been living with Elena he found himself repeating the emotions of many old affairs. The time had come to decide how he would break up with her. This was always delicate, but with Elena he would have to be more than subtle. No matter how he might dislike her these
days for her sullenness, her vulgarity, her love itself, he was always aware that it was his fault. He had begun the affair, he had insisted on it, and so he ought to hurt her as little as possible. At the same time he did not want to end it immediately; that would be too disturbing to his work. The proper time was in a month, two months, whenever he was finished; and in the meantime, adroitly, like fighting big fish on slender tackle, he must slowly exhaust her love, depress her hope, and make the end as painless as the blow of the club on the fatigued fish-brain. “My one hundred and fourteen pound sailfish,” Eitel would think, and what a match she gave him. He was cool as any good fisherman, “I’m the coolest man I know,” he would think, and with confidence, aloofness, and professional disinterest he maneuvered Elena, he brought her closer to the boat. There was always the danger she would slip the hook before he pulled her in, and so the battle was wearying. He could not let her realize how his attitude had changed; she would force a fight which would go too far; that was her pride; she would not stay a moment once she knew he did not love her, and he had to struggle with temptation not to reel in line too fast, too soon.

He had wrapped his work about him and it gave the distance he needed, the coldness, the lack of shame. He would be far away from her, he would eat a meal without speaking, his eyes on a book, he would sense how despair swelled in her, fatiguing love, fatiguing spirit, and at the moment when he would feel that she could stand it no longer, “We can’t go on like this” about to burst from her mouth, he would confuse her completely.

“I love you, darling,” he would say out of a silence and kiss her, and know her bewilderment had seated the hook more firmly.