The Deer Park (7 page)

In Mexico, at a seashore resort which looked like nothing so much as Desert D’Or glued to the side of a cliff, the reaction followed him. There were hundreds of letters: a pamphlet from a vegetarian society, a Lulu Meyers Fan Club president who was happy Lulu had divorced him, anonymous letters, obscene notes, congratulations, even a personal letter from an anti-tobacco society which enclosed a news photo circled in red pencil of Eitel smoking a cigarette. “Eitel among the cranks,” he thought, and turned to open the letter from his business manager which gave the disaster of the back income taxes.

“It wasn’t too bad in Mexico,” Eitel said, “but on the other hand it was terrible. You may not believe it knowing me now, but I used to be capable of a lot of work, and all of a sudden I didn’t seem able to do anything.”

I nodded; besides everything else I had heard stories of Eitel working eighteen hours a day while making a picture.

“There was a week or two down there,” he went on, “when I began to think I was in poor shape. With all I’ve done in my life it may sound odd to you, but I started to think of how in
college I used to dream of spending years wandering around, picking up little adventures here and there. It’s naïve of course but everybody has that ambition when he’s young. Anyway, I married much too soon, and when I thought about it in Mexico, it seemed to me that ever since, I had always been mixed up in something I didn’t exactly want. I began to think that the reason I acted the way I did with the Committee was to give myself another chance. And yet I didn’t know what to do with the chance. Yes,” he said reflectively, “that put me in bad shape.” Eitel smiled. “Anyway, win or lose, I managed to stop brooding. I tried to stay away from the places where I might meet people I knew, and I tried to think, and after a while I began to get interested in a little story I’d been saving for years.” He tapped the manuscript on the table beside him. “If I can bring this off, it’ll make a movie that can justify so much bad work.” He riffled the pages. “Pity I had to come back.”

“You don’t really seem to be doing much more here than you did in Mexico,” I said.

Eitel nodded. “It’s ridiculous, I know, but when you’re my age it’s not that simple to go looking for a new place. I wanted to be among people who knew me.” He smiled. “Sergius, I swear I’ll get down to work. This movie ought to be made.”

“Would anybody give you money?” I asked.

“That’s not the main problem,” Eitel said. “There’s a producer I know in London. I don’t like him much, but if I have to, I can work with him. We’ve corresponded. He’s wild about my idea, and in Europe I can direct the picture under a pseudonym. All that’s necessary is to write a good script.” He sighed. “Only, it’s not that simple. I feel as if I’ve been … amputated. You know, I haven’t had a woman in three months.”

I understood Eitel even less when he told me these stories. I had always thought that to know oneself was all that was necessary, probably because I didn’t know myself at all. I did not see how Eitel could talk about himself so clearly, and be
able to do nothing with it. I even wondered why he didn’t mind that I told him nothing further about me, and I had the feeling that our friendship was of very small size. Often, after I left him and went back to the house I rented on the edge of the desert, I would leave off thinking about Eitel, and I would be stuck in my own past. I wanted to talk to him, to try to explain things I could not explain to myself, but I couldn’t do it. I can’t remember ever talking about the orphanage, at least not since I went into the Air Force. I had such a desire to be like everybody else, at least everybody who had made it, and to make it, I boxed my way into the middleweight semi-finals of an Air Force enlisted man’s tournament, and when that gave me the chance to go to flying school, I studied hours at night to pass the pre-flight examinations. Until I graduated, nothing seemed so important as to get my wings.

It is hard to say what being a flier meant. I had friends I thought would last forever, and in combat, routinely, in the way it happened, I saved other pilots two or three times just as they did the same for me. There was a feeling for each other. We knew there was nobody like us, and for once in my life I thought I had found a home.

That home fell apart. I can even pick the day I remember best, and it did not happen in combat. Fighting an enemy plane was impersonal and had the nice moves of all impersonal contests; I never felt I had done anything but win a game. I flew a plane the way I used to box; for people who know the language I can say that I was a counter-puncher. As flight-time built up, I went stale, we all did, but it was the only time in my life when I was happy and didn’t want to be somewhere else. Even the idea of being killed was not a problem for who wanted a life outside the Air Force? I never thought of what I would do afterward.

Sometimes on tactical missions we would lay fire bombs into Oriental villages. I did not like that particularly, but I would be busy with technique, and I would dive my plane and drop the jellied gasoline into my part of the pattern. I hardly
thought of it any other way. From the air, a city in flames is not a bad sight.

One morning I came back from such a job and went into Officers’ Mess for lunch. We were stationed at an airfield near Tokyo, and one of our Japanese K.P.’s, a fifteen-year-old boy, had just burned his arm in a kettle of spilled soup. Like most Orientals he was durable, and so he served the dishes with one hand, his burned arm held behind him, while the sweat stood on his nose, and he bobbed his head in little shakes because he was disturbing our service. I could not take my eyes from the burn; it ran from the elbow to the shoulder, and the skin had turned to blisters. The K.P. began to get on my nerves. For the first time in years I started to think of my father and the hunchbacked boy and Sister Rose’s lessons on my duty.

After lunch I took the Jap aside, and asked the cooks for tannic-acid ointment. There wasn’t any in the kitchen, and so I told them to boil tea and put compresses to his arm. Suddenly, I realized that two hours ago I had been busy setting fire to a dozen people, or two dozen, or had it been a hundred?

No matter how I tried to chase the idea, I could never get rid of the Japanese boy with his arm and his smile. Nothing sudden happened to me, but over a time, the thing I felt about most of the fliers went false. I began to look at them in a new way, and I didn’t know if I liked them. They were one breed and I was another; they were there and I was a fake. I was close to things I had forgotten, and it left me sick; I had a choice to make. My missions were finished, my service was over, and I had to decide if I wanted to sign for a career in the Air Force. Trying to make up my mind I got worse, I had a small breakdown, and spent a season in the hospital. I was not very sick, but it was a breakdown, and for seven weeks I lay in bed and felt very little. When I got up, I learned that I was to be given a medical discharge. It no longer mattered. Flying had become too difficult and my reflexes were going. They told me
I needed eyeglasses, which made me know how to feel old at twenty-two. But they were wrong, and I did without the eyeglasses, and my eyes got better, even if the rest of me didn’t. Resting in bed, I remembered the books I read when I could get away from the orphanage, and picturing what my life would be like outside the Air Force, I could feel an odd hope when I thought that maybe I would become a writer.

For such a purpose, Desert D’Or may have been a poor place to stay, and in truth, I hardly wrote a word while I was at the resort. But I was not ready to work; I needed time, and I needed the heat of the sun. I do not know if I can explain that I did not want to feel too much, and I did not want to think. I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children’s homes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans. It was better not even to think of this. I liked the other world in which almost everybody lived. The imaginary world.

But I write too much. In a few days the winter season began, and all of that routine I divided between Dorothea at The Hangover and Eitel at the Yacht Club was altered. Before the movie colony had been in Desert D’Or a week, what little story I have to tell was fairly begun.

W
ITH THE BEGINNING
of the season, there was some rain, not a great deal, but enough to put the desert flowers into bloom. Which brought the crowd from the capital. The movie people filled the hotels, and the season residents opened their homes. Movie stars were on the street, and gamblers, criminals with social cartel, models, entertainers, athletes, airplane manufacturers, even an artist or two. They came in all kinds of cars: in Cadillac limousines, in ruby convertibles and gold-yellow convertibles, in little foreign cars and big foreign cars. Then with the start of the season on me, I came to like the wall around my house which was always safe in the privacy it gave, and I would think at times how confusing the town must be to the day tourist who could drive through street after street and know no more of the resort than the corridors of an office building would tell about the rooms.

Eitel did not take to this invasion. He had come to prefer being alone, and was rarely to be seen at the hotel. One day when I stopped by his house, the phone rang in Eitel’s bedroom.
From the den I could hear him talking. He was being invited to visit somebody who had just arrived at the Yacht Club, and after he hung up, I could feel his excitement. “How would you like to meet a pirate?” he said with a laugh.

“Who is it?”

“The producer, Collie Munshin.”

“Why do you call him a pirate?” I asked.

“Just wait until you meet him.”

But Eitel could not keep himself from saying more. I think he was irritated at how much pleasure the invitation gave him.

Munshin was the son-in-law of Herman Teppis, Eitel explained, and Teppis was the head of Supreme Pictures. Munshin had married Teppis’ daughter, and it had helped to make him one of the most important producers in the capital. “Not that he wouldn’t have made it anyway,” Eitel said. “Nothing could stop Collie.” He had been, I learned, a little bit of many things, a salesman, a newspaperman, a radio announcer for a small station, a press-relations consultant, an actor’s agent, an assistant producer, and finally a producer. “Once upon a time,” Eitel went on, “he was practically an office boy for me. I know the key to Collie. He’s shameless. You can’t stop a man who’s never been embarrassed by himself.”

Eitel began to change his shirt. By the way he picked his tie, I knew he did not feel nearly as casual as he was hoping to feel. “Wonder why he wants to see me?” he said aloud. “I suppose he wants to steal an idea.”

“Why bother?” I asked. “Nothing is cheaper than ideas.”

“It’s his technique. Collie gets a feeling about a story. Not anything you can really name. Some cloud of an idea. Then he invites a writer who’s out of work to come to lunch. He listens to the writer’s suggestions, and they talk the thing up. The next day he invites another man to lunch. By the time he’s talked to half a dozen writers he has a story and then he uses one of the peons he keeps locked in a hole to write the thing.
When Collie is done, he can sell the story to the studio as his own creation. Oh, he’s clever, he’s tenacious, he’s scheming …” Eitel ran out of words.

“What’s to keep him from running the studio?” I asked.

“Nothing,” said Eitel, putting on a jacket, “he’ll run the world someday.” Then Eitel smiled. “Only first he has to learn how to handle me. Sometimes I can set him back.”

As he closed the door behind us, Eitel added, “There’s another thing which might hold him up. He’s having woman trouble.”

“Does he run around with so many?”

Eitel looked at me as if I had a lot to learn about the psychology of prominent men in the capital. “Why, no,” he said, “Collie has too many decisions to juggle, and that slows a man up, don’t you know? Besides, it’s not so easy to keep a harem when your wife is Herman Teppis’ daughter. You don’t even keep a fancy girl. Just a child in a cubbyhole and she’s caused him trouble enough with H.T. It’s some poor dancer. She’s been his girl for several years. I’ve never met her, but Collie will be the first to tell you the trouble she gives him. It’s a conventional relationship. She wants him to divorce his wife and marry her, and Collie lets her believe that he will. Poor boy, he can’t bear to let go of anything.” Eitel chuckled. “Of course, the girl friend makes him pay. When Collie’s not around, his little kitten will go for a romp. A couple of actors who’ve worked for me have been with her. They tell me she’s extraordinary in bed.”

“Isn’t that rough on him?”

“I don’t know,” Eitel said, “there are parts and parts to Collie. He enjoys being a martyr.”

“Sounds like a sad character to me.”

“Oh, everybody’s sad if you want to look at them that way. Collie’s not so bad off. Just remember there’s nobody like him in the whole world.”

We came to Munshin’s bungalow, and Eitel tapped the
knocker on the pink-colored door. After a wait I could hear somebody running toward us, and then it flew open, and I had no more than the sight of the back of a fat man in a dressing gown who went bounding away to the phone, the gown flapping against his calves while he called over his shoulder, “Come in. Be with you in a minute, fellows.” He was talking in a high-pitched easy voice to somebody in New York, holding the receiver in his left hand while with his right he was neatly mixing drinks for us, not only carrying on his business conversation but opening a big smile across his face at the introduction to me. A little under medium height, with short turned-up features, he looked like a clown, for he had a large round head on a round body and almost no neck at all.

The drinks made, he passed them over with a wink, and his right hand free again, he began to tickle his thin hair, discovering a bald spot on his head and then patting it into hiding again, only to leave his head for his belly which he prodded gingerly as if to find out whether it concealed an ache. He certainly had a lot of energy; I had the idea it would be rare to see him doing one thing at a time.