The Deer Park (30 page)

“Sergius, do shut up, and let me read your masterpiece.”

This was the poem:

When he finished it, he laughed. “It’s amusing, I guess. I didn’t realize how much you’re under the influence of Joyce.”

I knew I was going to make a fool of myself, but for once I didn’t care. “Who’s Joyce?” I asked.

“James Joyce. You’ve read him, of course?”

“No. I think I heard the name though.”

Eitel picked up my poem and read it through again. “Isn’t that odd?” he said.

There was one thing I wanted to take home with me. “You think I’m talented?” I asked.

“I’m beginning to have that suspicion about you, yes.”

“Okay,” I nodded, “I guess … well …” So much talk was coming up in me, so much enthusiasm. I felt as old as a ten-year-old boy, and it was a relief to feel that way with somebody I could trust. “Do you mind if I talk about why I never thought of being a professional fighter?” I asked him.

“I always thought it was because you didn’t want to get your brains scrambled.”

“Well, yes,” I said, “do you know that’s exactly it. I was afraid of that. How did you know?”

He only smiled.

“Charley, I was afraid all the time. There are fighters like that, you know, and some of them even get to be halfway competent, but that’s not the way to be. Not to go in scared every time.”

“Maybe the boys you fought felt the same way.”

“I suppose some of them did. But I didn’t know that then.” I shook my head. “Besides, there’s something worse. After a while I realized I had no punch. A counter-puncher who doesn’t have a punch fights all night and he takes too much punishment.” I whistled. “I can hardly tell you how I hated to admit to myself that I had no real punch. No
real
punch.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Once, I had a punch,” I said to him. “It was the Quarter-finals fight in the Air Force tournament. The word we had around the Base was that if a man reached the Semi-Finals, he had a good
chance for flying school. So I was pressing for that fight, and I almost got knocked out. I don’t remember a thing, but my second told me that I caught the other dupe with a beautiful combination when he was coming in to finish it off. And they counted him out, and I didn’t even know until it was all over. Then in the Semi-Finals I took a beating. I got stomped. But they say that sometimes a fighter is dangerous when all that’s left is his instinct sort of, because he can’t think his fight any more. It seems to come from way inside, like you’re a dying animal maybe.”

“And what is your instinct now?” Eitel asked.

“I can’t help it. I guess I want to be a writer. I don’t want somebody else to tell me how to express myself.”

“Trust your instinct,” Eitel said, and made a face. “How optimistic I am at bottom. Do what you think, Sergius.”

Somehow, I had known Eitel would help me to refuse the offer. On the way back, knowing my decision was made, I discovered I was feeling fairly well. I knew that my decision didn’t mean very much; if my movie was not made then others would be made, but at least my name would not be used. I suppose what I really was thinking is that I would always be a gambler, and if I passed this chance by, it was because I had the deeper idea that I was meant to gamble on better things than money or a quick career. I had a look then into the kind of vanity I shared with Eitel. Each of us judged himself hard, for strong in us was the idea that we must be perfect. We felt we were better than others and therefore we should act better. It is a very great vanity.

By evening my fear had come back, physical fear with a dry throat and a hot heart. I was scared and there was no check on it, because I knew my mind was made up and I would not change it now. I even forced myself to tell Lulu. I expected anything from her, tantrums, fights, maybe even the announcement that she wouldn’t see me any more. Instead she surprised me. She was silent for a long time, and then she said, “You didn’t want to do it, did you, Sergius? I knew, honey. I knew you were unhappy.”

At that moment I was full of pity for her. She looked so
small, so blonde, so disappointed and frightened, and yet she would not try to argue with me. Suddenly I felt that Lulu was really very frail and I loved her. My anger was gone. She had given me the best she could, and I could love her; how can there be love without some weakness? All I knew was that I wanted to give her all I had, and it hurt that I had so little.

“I love you, baby,” I said to her.

Tears came into Lulu’s eyes. “I love you, too,” she whispered. “I know that now.”

“Oh, listen,” I said, “listen, let’s get married.”

“How?” she said hopelessly.

“No, look, it’s not that hard. Let’s go away. Give it up. Give up the movies. Maybe you can act on the stage, and I’ll do something, I swear I will.”

Lulu began to cry. “It’s not possible, Sergius,” she said.

“It is. You hate the movies. You told me so.”

“I don’t really hate them,” she said in a little voice.

“Then we’ll live where you say. But marry me.”

She tried to nod. This was just what she had wanted a month ago, but once we want more, we can hardly want less. “It couldn’t work, Sergius.”

I didn’t know if it could. While we sat holding one another I tried to find a way, and in my enthusiasm it did seem possible. “Let’s try,” I said at last.

“Kiss me, darling,” she said.

We hugged each other very hard, and while she cried she kissed my eyes and nose with long wet kisses. “Oh, Sergius, let’s just go on like this for a while and not worry, and then we’ll see.”

What she said made me afraid again, and it was a tangible fear, as if the moment I left her room the burned corpses of half the world would be lying outside the door. We started to make love, and I couldn’t think of her or of myself or of anything but flesh, and flesh came into my mind, bursting flesh, rotting flesh, flesh hung on spikes in butcher stalls, flesh burning, flesh gone to blood.

All the while Lulu and I were caressing each other I could think of nothing else, and although I tried up to the end I knew it was no use. Her body was frightening to me. “No, I can’t, I just can’t tonight,” I said to her in panic, and she must have known it already for she did nothing except to touch my face, easily and gently.

“My poor baby,” Lulu said, and held me against her breast. “What’s the matter, my darling? I do love you.”

I had a horror I would start crying, and I couldn’t trust myself to speak. We weren’t inches apart and yet I had the feeling I had to reach out to her across a great distance. “Everything’s the matter,” I said, and perspiration covered my body.

“Tell me, tell me, I don’t care what it is.”

I did tell her, or at least I tried; for half an hour, maybe it was an hour, maybe more, I told her all the things I never told anybody else, the operations I had flown and their names, those box-office names military press agents would put on them until they sounded like night-club acts, “Operation Castanet,” and “Punchbowl,” and “Red Hot Mama,” and how red the fires had been which our planes sowed, and how cruel was jellied gasoline—a blob on a man and the man was the fire, fire hot enough to melt the skull. So I told her what I thought the corpses looked like, for we were never encouraged to get up to visit the front, but I could know how dead Oriental villages looked the following day, staring their blind eye into the air like the sour black ash of a garbage dump, and all the while we flew and we would drink and there were the geisha houses and the poker games and the taste on one’s tongue of being up at four in the morning ready for a flight, and the long conversations about parties and girls where nobody ever knew who knew the most, and the arguments about the technical performances of airplanes and which plane was better, and what was a career in the Air Force. I tried to tell it all to her, about the Japanese K.P. and how I came not to like the fliers I knew, until finally there had come the time when I could no longer go to the geisha
girls, so nice, so feminine, because flesh was raw, flesh was the thing one burned in the real world, and in a kind of sweat at myself, I would yell into the pressure of my brain, “I enjoy it. I enjoy the fire. I have the cruelty to be a man.” So I had been without a woman and without love until the night I met her, she had been the first in over a year, and that had meant more, it had meant so much more than anything which had happened to me … except that now my sickness seemed to have returned.

“Oh, my baby, oh my darling,” Lulu said, “if I could only chase it away.” And with a little air of tender child’s amazement, as if she had never considered this before, she said, “You’ve been hurt even more than me.” She was good that night, and as we lay together hour after hour my fear went back where it had come from, but it was weaker when it left. I could feel her body again, I could come to touch it and to sense it and to know it was beautiful until the moment when caught by the curve of her belly, loving the touch of her hips and so fond of the wink of her breast, I was able to take her again. It was the best night we ever had, for I loved her and I think she loved me. We passed into each other, and long afterward lay looking at one another and smiling. “I love you,” I kept whispering to her, and her eyes filled with tears. “I feel like a woman for the first time,” she said. Yet, before I left, our mood changed again. If I had loved her earlier in the evening, I loved her more now, I had never loved her more, and yet it was with bitter love, with a feeling of loss. For each of us knew that there was nowhere to go after this night.

My instinct was good. By the next day I had lost her sure enough. We had lost what we had had. We were close no longer and we could rarely lift above the sad depression which hangs upon people who still feel emotion and know the emotion has no future. We did what she said, we went on the way we had before, we even made believe there was nothing the matter. And all the while I was mourning our one fine hour.

We made the rounds, we had our little fights, we even made love, and all the while we were waiting. The date when she would have to begin work on her new picture came closer, and as if that were the first of a whole series of dates which meant ends to different things—the day she left for the capital, the day I drew my last money from the bank, the day I would have to leave Desert D’Or—we never talked about it. Once she told me that Teddy Pope and Tony Tanner would be down soon at the resort for publicity photos with her, and she even bothered to explain the movie. The new picture would be a triangle. Teddy Pope was to get her in the end, but through the middle of the film she was to think she was in love with Tony Tanner. “I don’t want you to be silly about it,” she said to me. “Naturally, I have to be seen all the time with Tony and Teddy. The studio wants a lot of advance publicity on this picture.”

“I guess I won’t be seeing much of you.”

“That’s so ridiculous. You can be with us all the time. It’s just that when they take pictures, it would be better if you sort of dropped into the background.”

“I’ll carry my trap door,” I said.

“You’re just a baby.”

When Teddy and Tony arrived, our life changed. Instead of going to Dorothea’s, we made a tour of the supper clubs and the night clubs, Teddy going as escort to Lulu while Tony Tanner and I would follow behind. A week went by of watered whisky, dim rooms, and the curving walls and scalloped arches of Desert D’Or architecture. We made quite a quartet. Publicly, the romance between Teddy and Lulu was sounded again, and there must have been a hundred pictures taken of them looking into each other’s eyes, holding hands, or dancing together. Yet when we were seated and no photographers were around, Teddy Pope gave his attention to me and Tony Tanner would go into long conversations with Lulu. At dawn when we separated, Lulu and I would be alone for an hour or two. I
had never seen her so happy. Lulu was enchanted to be divided into three.

“I wonder which girl you like,” I said to her after an evening, and she answered too quickly, “The one with you, of course. What a bore that Tony is.”

Tony was good-looking. Naturally. He was tall and big-muscled and he had dark hair which ran in rolling waves. He had a dimple in his chin. He was twenty-five but he still walked with a swagger, and he used the aggressive style of some comedians with little of the humor. I was prejudiced, that I knew, but he irritated me. “Hey, boychicks,” he would say, “let’s play the mouse into the next hole,” which was a way of saying that we should move on. Lulu laughed at almost everything he said. He had picked up several kinds of talk and he whipped them like a rug beater. “Sugar-boy,” he would say if I started to argue with him, “don’t swallow your words. Discussion is for squares.” To a woman’s nervous giggle, he would answer, “Lady, oil that libido.” Maybe it will help to understand him if I mention that he was friendly when I was alone with him. The only half hour we ever spent that way, he was full of admiration I was a flier. “You guys,” he said, nodding seriously, “I mean, you really had it rough. I was overseas on an entertainment junket, so in my own small way I know what it is.”

“Yes,” I said, “in your own small way.”

“It makes me feel ashamed and like a nothing when I talk to guys like you. Why …”

“I understand you know Marion Faye,” I interrupted.

“That bastard. A couple of bimbos I used to have around did a little work for him, so the word’s out I pimped. That’s the kind of thing that happens just when you’re starting to make it big in the industry.”

“You want to make it big, don’t you?” I asked.

He looked at me cautiously as though he didn’t know if it was important for me to like him. “What else?” he asked. “Don’t
you?” Then his mouth turned. “I never will, though. I’ll never make it, laddie.”