CHAPTER NINE
SHE WAS A NEAR-BEAUTY. Elena’s hair was a rich red-brown and her skin was warm. She walked with a sense of her body, and I had always been drawn to that in a girl since my first year in the Air Force when like every other fly at an enlisted man’s dance, I would cock my hat and try to steal prizes like Elena with my speed. Although she wore a lot of lipstick, and her high heels would have satisfied a show-girl, there was something delicate about her and very proud. She carried herself as if she were tall, and her strapless evening gown showed round handsome shoulders. Her face was not exactly soft, but it was heart-shaped, and above a tender mouth and chin, the nares of her long narrow nose suggested ample aptitude to me. Munshin’s description seemed passing poor.
Except that she was obviously not at ease. As I watched Eitel lead her into the mouth of the party she reminded me of an animal, ready for flight. Their appearance at the party had set off a ripple of confusion, and very few of the people who saw him knew what to do. There were several who smiled and even said hello, there were some who nodded, and even more who turned away, but I had the feeling they were all frightened. Until they knew the reason why Eitel had been invited, they could only feel the panic that whatever they did could be a mistake. It was grim the way he and Elena were left to cross the floor of the party without catching anybody to accompany them, and I saw Eitel stop finally at an empty table near the pool, set out a chair for Elena, and then sit down himself. From a distance, I had to like the way he succeeded in looking bored.
I went up to their table. “Can I join you?” I said clumsily.
Eitel gave me a quick grateful smile. “Elena, you must meet Sergius, he’s the best person here.”
“Oh, shut up,” I told him, and turned to her. “I’m awfully sorry, I didn’t catch your last name,” I said.
“It’s Esposito,” Elena muttered, “an Italian name.” Her voice was just a little hoarse, and surprisingly deep, which made it considerably less useful to her than her face, but it was a voice which had muffled strength in it. I had heard accents like that since I was a kid.
“Doesn’t she look like a Modigliani?” Eitel said enthusiastically, and then added, “Elena, I know you’ve been told that more than once.”
“Yes,” Elena said, “that is, someone once told me. As a matter of fact it was your friend.”
Eitel passed over the reference to Munshin. “But where did you get those green eyes?” he teased her. From the angle where I sat, I could see his fingers tapping restlessly on his knee.
“Oh, that’s from my mother,” Elena said. “She’s half Polish. I guess I’m one-quarter Polish and three-quarters Italian. Oil and water.” We all worked a little to laugh, and Elena shifted uncomfortably. “What a funny subject,” she said.
Eitel made a play of studying the Laguna Room and said, “What do you think this party needs?”
“What?” I asked.
“A roller coaster.”
Elena burst into laughter. She had a nice laugh which showed her white teeth, but she laughed too loudly. “Oh, that’s so funny,” she said.
“I love roller coasters,” Eitel went on. “It’s that first drop. Like the black hole of death. There’s nothing to compare with it.” And for the next two minutes he talked about roller coasters, until I could see by the look in Elena’s eyes how alive he made the subject seem. He was in good form, and to draw him out, Elena was a good listener. I found myself thinking that she was not stupid, and yet she would only answer with a laugh or some little remark. It was the style of her attention. Her face gave back the shadow of everything he said, until Eitel was carried away. “It proves an old idea of mine,” he said. “One gets on a roller coaster in order to feel certain emotions, and I wonder if it’s not the same with an affair. When I was younger, I used to think it was ugly, even unclean I suppose, that a man who thought he was in love would find himself using the same words with one girl after another. Yet there’s nothing wrong about it really. The only true faithfulness people have is toward emotions they’re trying to recapture.”
“I don’t know,” Elena said. “I think a man like that wouldn’t be feeling anything for the woman.”
“On the contrary. At that moment, he adores her.”
This confused her. “I mean,” she interrupted, “you know, it’s … oh, I’m not sure.” But she could not let it pass. “A man like that isn’t relating to the woman. He’s detached.”
Eitel looked pleased. “You’re right,” he reversed himself. “I suppose it’s the proof of how detached I am.”
“Oh, you can’t be,” she said.
“I certainly am,” he smiled, as though to flag an advance warning.
It must have been hard to believe. His eyes were bright, his body leaned toward her, and his dark hair looked charged with energy. “Don’t judge by appearances,” Eitel began, “why I can tell you …”
He broke off. Munshin was coming toward us. Elena’s face lost all expression, and Eitel began to smile in an unnatural way.
“I don’t know what it is you got,” Collie boomed, “but H.T. told me to come over and say hello. He wants to talk to you later.”
When none of us answered, Munshin contented himself with staring at Elena.
“Collie, how are you?” Eitel said finally.
“I’ve been better.” He nodded his head. “I’ve been a lot better,” he said, continuing to look at Elena.
“Aren’t you having a good time?” she asked.
“No, I’m having a rotten time,” Munshin answered.
“I was looking for your wife,” Elena said, “but I don’t know who she is.”
“She’s around,” Munshin said.
“And your father-in-law? He’s here, I heard you say.”
“What difference does it make?” Munshin asked with a moist look as if he were really saying, “Someday you won’t hate me any more.”
“Oh, yes, no difference at all. I wouldn’t want to embarrass you,” Elena said, her voice all but out of control. It gave a hint of how badly she would act in a quarrel.
“I met Teddy Pope tonight,” I interrupted as best I could. “What is he like?”
“I can tell you,” Eitel said nimbly, “he’s been in several of my pictures. And do you know, I think he’s really sort of decent as an actor. Some day he may be very good.”
At that moment, a beautiful blond girl in a pale-blue evening gown came up behind Munshin and covered his eyes with her hands. “Guess who?” she said in a throaty voice. I had a glimpse of a little turned-up nose, a dimpled chin, and a pouting mouth I had seen before. At the sight of Eitel she made a face.
“Lulu,” Munshin said, half rising from his chair, and not knowing if her interruption had helped the situation or made it worse, he hugged Lulu with fatherly arms, smiling at Elena and Eitel, while with his free hand visible only to me, he patted the small of her back as though to tell her she might do worse than to hug him again.
“Miss Meyers, Miss Esposito,” Eitel said smoothly, and Lulu gave a passing nod to Elena. “Collie, we have to talk,” Lulu said, “I have something I definitely want to tell you about.” Then she gave a sweet smile to Eitel. “Charley, you’re getting fat,” she said.
“Sit down,” Eitel offered.
She took a chair next to him, and told Munshin to sit on the other side. “Isn’t anybody going to introduce the Air Force?” she asked directly of me, and when that was done, she made a game of studying my face. I forced myself to stare her down but it took something out of me. “What a pretty boy you are,” said Lulu Meyers. She could not have been much more than twenty herself.
“She’s great,” Munshin said. “What a tongue.”
“Would you like a drink?” I asked Elena. She hadn’t said a word since Lulu had come, and by comparison she did not seem as attractive as I thought her before. Maybe aware of this herself, she picked nervously and savagely at the cuticle on her nail. “Oh, yes, I’d like a drink,” Elena agreed, and as I started away, Lulu handed me her glass. “Get me a small Martin, will you?” she asked, turning violet-blue eyes on me. I realized she was as nervous as Elena, but in a different way; Lulu made herself sit easily in the chair—I had learned the same trick in flying school.
When I came back, she was talking to Eitel. “We miss you, old ham,” she was saying. “I don’t know anybody I’d rather get drunk with than Eitel.”
“I’m on the wagon,” Eitel said with a grin.
“You’re on the wagon as far as I’m concerned,” Lulu said with a glance at Elena.
“I hear you’re going to marry Teddy Pope,” Eitel answered.
Lulu turned on Munshin. “You tell H.T. to lay off the drums,” she said, and flipped her cigarette to the floor, grinding it out with a quick impatient motion. I had a peep at her legs and of little feet covered by silver slippers. Those legs were as familiar as the contour of her mouth, each drawn on one’s memory by a hundred photographs, or was it a thousand? “Collie, this propaganda has got to stop, I tell you.”
Munshin gave his sheepish smile. “Now, you relax, doll. Who’s forcing you into anything?”
“I approve of Lulu marrying Teddy,” Eitel drawled.
“Charley, you’re a troublemaker,” Munshin said quickly.
Elena and I looked at each other. She was trying very hard to be a part of this, her eyes following everyone who spoke, her smile forced as if she didn’t want to seem ignorant. Probably I was acting the same way. We sat at opposite flanks of the conversation, no more than social book-ends.
“I’m serious,” Lulu said. “You can tell Mr. T. I’ll marry this pretty boy first,” and she inclined a finger toward me.
“You haven’t proposed yet,” I said.
Elena laughed with enough pleasure to have said it herself. Again her laugh was too loud, and the others stared at her.
“Don’t panic, love-bucket,” Lulu said with an authority the redheaded girl, Candy Ballou, had not been able to muster. She held her empty glass up for us all to see, and poured its last drop on the floor. “I’m sad, Collie,” she announced and laid her head on Munshin’s shoulder.
“I saw your last picture,” Eitel said to her.
“Wasn’t I just awful in it?” Lulu made a face again. “They’re ruining me. What did you think, Eitel?”
He smiled noncommittally. “I’ll talk to you about it.”
“I know what you’ll say. I was performing too much, wasn’t I?” She raised her head and pinched Collie on the cheek. “I hate acting.” And with hardly a pause she leaned forward to ask a question. “What do you do, Miss Esposo?”
Elena was uncomfortable. “I’ve been … not exactly, a dancer, I guess.”
“Modeling now?” Lulu said.
“No … I mean, of course not.…” Elena was not altogether helpless before her. “Different things,” she finished at last. “Who wants to be a skinny model?”
“Oh, I’ll bet,” Lulu said, and spoke to me again. “You the latest tail on Eitel’s old tattered kite?”
I could feel myself turning red. Her attacks came so fast that it was a little like waiting for the sound to stop in musical chairs. “They say you’re through, Charley,” Lulu went on.
“They certainly do talk about me,” Eitel said.
“Not as much as you think. Time passes.”
“I’ll always be remembered as your second ex-husband,” Eitel drawled.
“It’s a fact,” she said. “When I think of Charley Eitel, I think of number two.”
Eitel smiled cheerfully. “If you want to put on the brass knuckles, Lulu, just give the word.”
There was a moment, and then Lulu smiled back. “I’m sorry, Charley, I apologize.” She turned to all of us, and in that husky voice which went along so nicely with her blond hair and blue eyes, she said, “I saw an awful picture of me today in the papers.”
“Lulu,” Munshin said quickly, “we can rectify that. The photographers will be working soon.”
“I won’t be mugged with Teddy Pope,” Lulu declared.
“Who’s forcing you?” Munshin said.
“No tricks, Collie.”
“No tricks,” Munshin promised, wiping his face.
“Why are you perspiring so?” Lulu asked, and then broke off to stand up. “Jay-Jay!” she cried aloud, and opened her arms. Jennings James, who had just walked toward us, wrapped her to his skinny body in a parody of Munshin’s bear-hug. “My favorite girl,” he said in his high Southern voice.
“That was a bitchy release you had on me day before yesterday,” Lulu said.
“Honey, you’re paranoidal,” Jennings James told her. “I wrote it as a work of love to you.” He nodded to all of us. “How are you, Mr. Munshin?” he said. The trip to the men’s room seemed to have revived him.
“Take a chair, Jay-Jay,” Munshin said, “this is Miss Esposito.”
Jennings James bowed formally to her. “I love the dignity of Italian women, Miss Esposito.” His freckled hand smoothed his red hair. “Are you going to stay with us long in Desert D’Or?”
“I’m going back tomorrow,” Elena said.
“Oh, you’re not,” Eitel said.
“Well, I’m not sure,” Elena corrected herself.
A waiter brought ice cream. It was melted on the plates, and only Elena took a dish. “This is soft ice cream, isn’t it?” she said. “That’s the expensive kind, I’ve heard.” When everybody looked puzzled by the remark, Elena became a little desperate in the attempt to prove it. “I don’t remember where I heard, but I did see it advertised, soft ice cream, I mean, or maybe I was eating it, I don’t know.”
Eitel came to her aid. “It’s true. Duvon’s in the city features a sort of melted ice cream. I’ve had it myself. But I don’t think this is Duvon’s, Elena.”
“Oh, no, I know it isn’t,” she said quickly.
Jay-Jay turned back to Lulu. “Honey, we’re ready for the pictures. Those photographers have finished grossifying themselves, and it all waits on you.”
“Well, let it wait,” said Lulu. “I want another drink.”
“Mr. T. asked me specially to get you.”
“Come on, let’s go,” said Munshin, “everybody.” I think he included Elena, Eitel, and myself to prevent Lulu from deciding she wanted to stay with us. Once on his feet, Munshin took her arm and started along the edge of the pool past the dance floor toward a group of photographers I could see gathered near the papier-mâché movie camera.
Jay-Jay brought up the rear with me. “That Esposito dame,” he said, “she’s Munshin’s little gal, I hear.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Oh man, she’s a dish. I never got my hooks into her, but I know some who have. When old Charley Eitel gets done with Esposito, you ought to spend a couple of delicious hours with her.” He then started to give me details of how good she was supposed to be. “And she looks like a sweet kid, too,” he added gallantly. “It’s hard for a girl living in the capital. I don’t hold it against any of them. Why, Teppis himself, that son of a bitch …” But Jay-Jay had no time to finish the sentence for we had come up to the photographers.
I could see Teddy Pope moving in from another direction. The tennis player still was with him, and they were laughing at some private joke. “Lulu, honey,” Pope said, and held out his hand to shake hers. They touched fingertips and stood side by side.
“Now, fellows,” said Jay-Jay springing forward and talking to the three photographers who stood phlegmatically in front of the camera boom, “we want some human-interest stills. Nothing elaborate. Just how cinema folks live and entertain each other. You got the idea.” People were coming over from various corners of the Laguna Room. “Honeybun, you look lovely,” Dorothea O’Faye called out, and Lulu smiled. “Thank you, sweetie,” she called back. “Hey, Teddy,” a man said, “have your autograph?” and Teddy laughed. Standing before an audience, his manner had changed. He seemed more boyish and more direct. “Why, here comes Mr. T. now,” he said aloud, and showing a crack disdain to those who could see it, he began to clap his hands, and at least a dozen of the people near him, trapped into obedience, applauded as well. Teppis held his arm aloft. “We’re taking some pictures tonight of Teddy and Lulu, not only for interest on their picture, or should I say our picture, An Inch From Heaven, but as a symbol, as I would call it, of tonight and the kind of good time we’ve had.” Teppis cleared his throat and smiled sweetly. His presence had succeeded in drawing even more people, and for a while the scene was busy with the flash-bulbs of the cameras, the shifting of positions, and the directions given by the photographers. I saw Teppis in place between Teddy and Lulu, Lulu between the two men, Teddy and Lulu together, Teddy and Lulu apart, Teppis holding Lulu’s hand in a fatherly way, Teppis photographed with his hand on Teddy’s elbow. I was struck by how well they did it, Teddy smiling, happy, healthy, and Lulu sweet, Lulu demure, Lulu ready, all with an ease which balanced the pride of Herman Teppis. It was just about perfect. Teddy Pope turned his face to every instruction of the photographers, his voice had sincerity, his smile seemed to enjoy his surroundings. He waved his hands in the air like a prizefighter, and gave a play of having wrenched his shoulder from the exercise; he put his arm around Lulu’s waist, he bussed her cheek. And Lulu with a cuddling curving motion slipped against his side. She seemed to bounce when she walked, her shoulders swayed in a little rhythm with her hips, her neck curved, her hair tumbled in gold ringlets over her head, and her husky voice laughed at everyone’s jokes. I thought she was about as beautiful as any girl I had ever seen.
When the photographers were done, Teppis made another speech. “You never know. We’re a big family at Supreme. I’ll tell you something. I don’t think these two kids were acting.” And with a hand against each of their backs, he pushed them together until they had to hug each other in order not to trip. “What’s this I hear, Lulu?” he said aloud to the laughter of the guests, “a little ladybug has told me you and Teddy are dear friends.”
“Oh, Mr. Teppis,” Lulu said in her sweetest voice, “you should have been a marriage broker.”
“It’s a compliment. I take it as a compliment,” Teppis said. “A producer is always making marriages. Art and finance. Talent and an audience. Are you all having a good time tonight?” he asked of the guests watching, and I listened to more than one answer that a good time was being had. “Treat the camera boys,” Teppis said to Jay-Jay, and walked off with Lulu on his arm. The crowd faded, the photographers were left to pack their equipment. Beside the pool, I saw Teppis stop to talk to Eitel, and while he spoke he looked at Elena.
I could see that Teppis recognized her name the moment Eitel introduced her, for Teppis’ reaction followed quickly. His back stiffened, his ruddy face seemed to swell, and he said something, something to the point, since Eitel and Elena turned away immediately.
Alone with Lulu, Teppis was mopping his forehead with a silk handkerchief. “Go dance with Teddy,” I heard him say hoarsely as I approached. “Do it as a favor for me.”
Because of the crowd I could no longer see what had happened to Eitel.
Lulu caught my eye. “Mr. T., I want to dance with Sergius first,” she said with a pout, and slipping away from Teppis she put her hand in my palm and drew me to the dance floor. I held her tightly. The liquor I had been drinking all evening was finally beginning to do its work.
“How long will it take,” I said in her ear, “before you start to look for Teddy?”
To my surprise she took this meekly. “You don’t know what I’m up against,” Lulu said.
“Why? Do you know?”
“Oh, don’t be like that, Sergius. I like you.” At the moment she seemed no more than eighteen. “It’s harder than you think,” she whispered, and by the softness with which she held herself, I found it hard to believe in the first impression she made on me. She seemed young; spoiled maybe, but very sweet.
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.
“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.