The Deer Park (41 page)

I’m so neurotic and maybe I ought to write letters more because
I never could talk to you and now I can, I suppose probably because we’re through, but there’re certain things you really ought to know cause you never could see them through my eyes like the sort of thing that happens with taxicab drivers. I don’t know why they always feel it about me but they know they don’t have to talk to me politely, and even the day I left your place and put in my suitcases and gave him Marion’s address, we hadn’t been driving two minutes and I was trying to think how I felt when the taxicab driver said to me, “Know this Faye character long, baby?” and he said it with a leer, just the same kind of tough guy leer my father always would have when he talked to a woman, and I got so angry I started screaming at him to keep his dirty mouth shut, right in the middle of the drive. And when I got to Marion’s and got inside the door I was ready for anything, I was hoping he would send me out as a call-girl right away. Did you ever have to put up with those kind of humiliations?

Anyway, Marion didn’t send me out. He just got me drunker and drunker, not that I needed much help, I don’t know if you know it or not, but I was drunk when I walked out the door on you, early that morning I’d called up Marion and told him I was coming over, and then I got so scared I filled a highball glass with whisky, and every time I went into the kitchen I would take a sip on it, and so I was looped when I got to his house, and he gave me more and then I don’t even remember the rest, all I can remember is that I kept thinking, “How Collie is going to suffer, good for him! !” And that makes me wonder Charley if maybe in a certain kind of way maybe I loved Collie more than you since I remember thinking about him and haven’t thought about you much, not until I started writing this letter. And maybe in a certain way I love Marion more than either of you, I don’t know, I don’t even care, but for example sometimes with him it’s very erratic but when it’s good it seems to me that it’s just as good as it ever was with you, I don’t know maybe I’m shallow, maybe I’m nothing, so-what?
I guess you were right when you used to tell me all I could think about was myself. But this I do know, at least there’s something doing with Marion, he’s not a coward and a snob like you, I don’t even know what he sees in me, but then that’s nothing new because I never could understand what anybody saw in me, but do you want to know the kind of stupid argument I have with Marion. I keep asking him to make me a call-girl and he says no, he says he wants to marry me and then I can become a call-girl. I suppose he wants to be a champion pimp. Like Don Beda or somebody. It’s impossible to marry him, he makes it a joke, and I don’t want to get married, I’m sick of the whole idea, and Marion does the sort of thing where he begs me to marry him, it’s the truth Charley, and when I ask him why, he says he likes the idea of me joining his mother’s coffee clotch (how do you spell that?) or some remark like that, and he insists we stay drunk all the time or on tea although frankly I don’t mind that part of it. Although sometimes on tea I get so scared I’m ready to climb a wall or maybe die of a heart attack. And Marion curses you. I think somewhere along the line you must have hurt him somehow. It’s all cockeyed. I don’t know where we’re going and it’s weird, I don’t want to hurt you if I say that he insisted on seeing Zenlia and Don Beda but you must have heard about that anyway, and I could tell you other things he does but it isn’t important, what I think is so rotten is that I’m writing about him as if he’s a stranger, and I’ve done something worse, I’ve talked to him about you the way I used to talk to you about Collie, very critically that is, and I feel ashamed every time, and the truth of the matter is that I’m a bitch and I never have grown up and you were right to call me a bitch, and I want you to believe that because Charley you’re such an unhappy and miserable man and it isn’t fair, I don’t know why I say it isn’t fair but I just wish you had some sort of break, some sort of luck, although what would be lucky for you would take a genius to say, but I suppose I have to confess that I’m as sick as you are to discover that I didn’t
love you the way I wanted to, and I apologize for the things I’ve said against you. How could I have done that? Charley, you deserve something good. It isn’t fair.

There was a blob of ink, the beginning of a new paragraph which she had scratched out, and then apparently having decided to end the letter she had signed her name. Looking at the scratched-out line, the blot, and the signature, I wondered how long she had sat there, thinking to add something else as if the reason for writing the letter had eluded her, and drunk, her mind must have wandered over the grab bag of her life until she had decided to grab no more, had put her name down, sealed the envelope, and sent it off.

A
FTER
I read the letter, I went out to see Elena and Marion, but she was shy with me and Marion was difficult so I gave it up. I had picked the wrong evening for I was in as bad a depression as I have ever been, and I remember as I was leaving them after a half-hour of stumbled attempts and expired conversations, Elena stood next to me for a moment in the hall. “You don’t like me any more,” she said.

“Maybe I don’t,” I muttered to her, and closed the door quietly in her face, my depression lifted because I had hurt her, and then it came back again doubly and I lay in my furnished room and I was nowhere. Reading her letter had laid a cloud on me; seeing her with Marion made it worse. I had thought that I knew everything there was to know about the bottom, but I was to learn all over again as one learns each time in his life
that there is no such thing as the old bottom, and no matter how bad one feels, one can always feel worse. So I went down and down until the memory of the past day’s depression was nostalgia in its contrast to what I felt today, and my energy began to leave me and I woke up in the morning more tired than I had gone to sleep. I whipped myself those days. I started to write, and I would cover pages with all the scrawls and fishhooks of the handwriting I learned in the orphanage, and in revenge on Lulu, for the worst to be said about a writer is that he can take a coward’s revenge, I wrote long incoherent pages where I tried to destroy her, and all the catechism which had been laid into my skull by good Sister Rose came back to scathe the people I had known at Desert D’Or so that I not only hated Lulu, and hated Eitel and Marion and Elena, but I loathed myself. I never knew such self-pity and I never disliked myself so much, and the worst of it was that I was certain I would never write a good word, and I didn’t have talent, and I didn’t have a girl, and I wondered if I could ever manage to have a girl again, and all in all I was about as brave as an eight-year-old boy at the bottom of an abandoned mine shaft. I thought it would go on forever, but something happened finally, and my sickness came to term, and I climbed from my hole. But I get ahead of myself, and besides I do not really know the reasons.

One night when I got back from my job, there were two men sitting in my room. They were wearing summer suits in some light-gray material, and each of them was holding his hat on his knees, a dark-brown summer straw with a tropical ribbon around the crown. Eitel had not described them too badly—they did look like All-American guard and tackle, but if we are to use the image, I ought to say that there is a difference between guard and tackle. The one who looked like a tackle was very big, he was rangy, he was mean for the pleasure of it: an archetype of the bastard in Dorothea’s book. I knew the moment I looked at him that if it ever got out of control, I could not hope for too much. He could use his hands at least as well as I could,
and that would be only the beginning. For he was obviously a man who did not like to lose, and he would know other ways to fight. Before we were through I would come to learn all about his elbows and his knees and how good he was at measuring the heel of his hand against my kidneys, and my neck, and of course the other places. He looked like he had changed more than one man’s features in his life. The guard was a little shorter and a little heavier and he had a friendly face. He was a wrestler. He was the kind of man who would give a pained and modest smile before he got into a bar brawl and then he would throw the nearest man across the room. With it all, they looked to have the intelligence of good athletes, practical intelligence.

“Hello,” I said, “how long have you been here?”

Then I knew it was going to be bad, because I was tired as always, and I had tried to make my voice flat, and it did not hold its pitch. I remember thinking what a serious difference it was going to make that they had come to talk to me in a cheap furnished room instead of the modern house I had had with its built-in bar and the long wall minor to show them their reflection.

The one who looked like a tackle was holding a newspaper clipping in his hand. “Your name O’Shaugnessy or McShonessy,” he said, looking at me. He had a peculiar stare. He did not look into my eyes, he looked at the bridge of my nose, and that was a trick to practice because it made me feel even worse.

“The first name is right.”

“Marine Corps or Air Force?”

“Air Force.”

The one who looked like a guard continued to smile at me.

“Why did you pass yourself off as a Marine Corps captain?” the tackle said.

“I never did.”

“Are you trying to tell me this newspaper item is a lie?”

“Oh look, Mac,” I said, “no newspaper ever makes a mistake.”

He grunted and passed the clipping over to the guard. When the guard spoke it was with a Southern accent. “Boy, why do you spell O’Shaughnessy without an ‘h’?” he asked.

“You’d have to ask my father.”

“He was a convict, wasn’t he?”

“My father was a lot of things,” I said.

“Yes,” the tackle said, “he was a convict.”

I sat down on the bed, for they were in the two chairs, and I went through a careful set of movements to open a package of cigarettes, and I believe I succeeded in doing it without letting my hands shake. But it would have been beyond me to manage to light a cigarette for them. I had no idea at all if they were just passing through Desert D’Or for the day and had dropped in on me to have an hour of entertainment, or if this were all part of some bigger mistake. “Before we go any further,” I said, “would you mind showing me your identification papers?”

We continued to sit there for a minute, and then the tackle took a wallet from his breast pocket and passed over an important-looking card with the stamp of the Subversive Committee on it, and
SPECIAL INVESTIGATOR
in raised letters under a passport photo. His name was Greene, Harvey Greene.

“Well, what do you want?” I asked.

“To find out a few things about a few people, including you.”

“What is there to find out?”

“We’ll ask the questions. In case you didn’t know, you might be in a little trouble.”

“I don’t see the trouble,” I said.

“Tell me, boy, is Lulu Meyers a Red?” the guard asked.

I made a point of laughing. “You know, I never knew anybody who was a Red. I just never traveled in those circles.”

“But you know Charley Eitel, don’t you, fellow?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Eitel was going around here with people who were politically questionable.”

I was beginning to feel a little better. “Well, he probably gave you their names.”

“He certainly did,” Greene said.

“Tell me about Lulu, fellow,” the guard said.

“We never had a single conversation about politics.”

“What
did
you talk about?” said Greene.

“Private things.”

“You had private and intimate relations with her?”

“Don’t you know the answer?”

“We’re waiting for you to provide it.”

“I was in love with Lulu,” I said.

Greene’s mouth showed a considerable distaste. “You mean you had depraved and illicit relations with her.”

“I don’t think like that,” I said.

“You don’t think,” Greene told me. “Because if you did, an Irish boy like you wouldn’t go around with these perverts.”

I was very scared then. The only thing about Harvey Greene which fit his name were his eyes—they were a boiled green in color. Into my mind passed the memory of a policeman with boiled green eyes who had come to the orphanage because a few of us had been making penny raids on candy stores. He had* questioned me for half an hour, and he had made me cry finally by forcing me to admit that I played with myself. So I had the anguish—it is truly the word—that the same thing was going to happen again.

But there are very few policemen who can work as a team all the time, and the guard saved me for a little while. I suspect that he and Greene were a little tired of each other. At any rate, the guard was interested in other things than the state of my soul. “You’re lucky, fellow, to hook up with a movie star,” he said with superior humor, but the hundred-twenty dollars a week he must have made, and the wife and children in the suburbs were also in his voice. “You must have thought it was soft picking up those big dollar bills for going down.”

Underneath everything else I felt, I could sense some opportunity
preparing itself. And to my surprise I smiled, and said, “You have a good instinct for personal details.”

“I know enough to know you think you’re pretty good,” said the guard.

“I’m not the one to brag.”

“Don’t brag. We all know movie stars are frigid,” the guard said. He was forward in his seat and he was getting angry. Greene sat by while this was going on, and shook his head sourly. “Wouldn’t you say they’re frigid?” the guard repeated.

“Depends on the man,” I said cautiously.

“Yes,” said the guard, “that would be your theory.” He was getting flushed. “So tell us, hot-rod, tell us about Lulu.” But before I had to worry about what I could possibly compromise to that, the guard was talking again. “I hear,” he started, “that Lulu …” and he continued for a full two minutes. He did not really have a great deal of imagination, but at least he had a divided mind on the subject, and so he went on and on. “Why, I bet no respectable call-girl would talk to her,” he said at last.