“I’m on his side,” Walker said. “He’s a bon viveur. He’s a sport like me.” He picked up the drink beside his hand and finished it.
Shelley Pearce shook her head sadly and leaned her head against her palm.
“Oh wow,” she said.
“I suppose we could effect a rescue,” Walker said. “We could hide her out in our room.”
“Our room?” She might have been surprised. He thought her double take somewhat stylized. “We have a room?”
“Yes, we have a room. Should we require one.”
“How many beds it got?”
“How many beds? I don’t know. Two, I guess. What difference does it make?”
Shelley was on her feet.
“Let’s go look at it. I think I want to swim in the pool.”
“The pool,” Walker said, and laughed.
She laughed with him.
“That’s right. Remember the pool? Where employees weren’t allowed to swim eight years ago tonight? Got your bathing suit?” She worried him to his feet, clutching at his elbow. “Come on, come on. Last one in’s a chickenshit.”
He got up and followed her out, past the bar. As they went by, the crooning man gave them a languid eyes-right.
“Do you enjoy great music?” he was asking the blond woman. “Symphonies? Concertos? Divertimenti?”
They rode the automatic elevator to the top floor and followed the soiled carpet to their door. The room behind it was large and high-ceilinged with yellow flaking walls. The furniture was old and faintly Chinese in ambiance. The air conditioner was running at full power and it was very cold inside. Walker went to the window and turned it off. Two full-length glass doors led to a narrow terrace that overlooked the beach. He unlocked the bolt that held them in place and forced them open. A voluptuous ocean breeze dispelled the stale chill inside.
“This is neat,” Shelley said. She examined the beds, measuring her length on each. Walker went out to the hall to fetch ice. When he returned, she was on the terrace leaning over the balustrade.
“People used to throw ice,” she told Walker. “When I worked the front tables people would throw ice cubes at us from the rooms. It would make you crazy.”
She came inside, took the ice from Walker and drew a bottle of warm California champagne from her carry bag. As she unwired the wine, she looked about the room with brittle enthusiasm.
“Well,” she said, “they sell you the whole trip here, don’t they? Everything goes with everything.” Her eyes were bright.
“You on speed, Shell?”
She coaxed the cork out with a bathroom towel and poured the wine into two water glasses.
“I don’t use speed anymore, Gordon. I have very little to do with drugs. I brought a joint for us, though, and I smoked a little before I went out.”
“I wasn’t trying to catch you out,” Walker said. “I just asked out of … curiosity or something.”
“Sure,” she said, smiling sweetly. “You wondered if I was still pathological. But I’m not. I’m just fine.”
“Do you have to get stoned to see me?”
She inclined her head and looked at him nymph-wise from under gathered brows. She was lighting a joint. “It definitely helps, Gordo.”
Walker took the joint and smoked of it. He could watch himself exhale in a vanity-table mirror across the room. The light was soft, the face in the glass distant and indistinct.
Shelley’s cassette recorder was playing Miles Davis’ “In a Silent Way.” She took the joint back from Walker; they sat in silence, breathing in the sad stately music. The dope was rich and syrupy. After a while, Shelley undressed and struggled into a sleek one-piece bathing suit. He went to hold her but she put the flat of her hand against his chest, gently turning him away.
“I want to swim,” she said. “I want to while I still know about it.”
Walker changed into his own suit. They gathered up towels and their ice-filled champagne glasses and rode the elevator down to the pool.
The light around the San Epifanio Beach pool was everywhere besieged by darkness; black wells and shadows hid the rust, the mildew and the foraging resident rats. There were tables under the royal palms, pastel cabanas, an artificial waterfall.
Walker eased himself into a reclining chair; he was very high. He could feel his own limp smile in place as he watched Shelley walk to the board, spring and descend in a pleasing arc to the glowing motionless water. Across the pool from where he sat, the candles of the lounge flickered, the goose clamor of the patrons was remote, under glass. In a nearby chair, a red-faced man in a sky-blue windbreaker and lemon-colored slacks lay snoring, mouth agape.
Shelley surfaced and turned seal-like on her shoulder, giving Walker her best Esther Williams smile. He finished his champagne and closed his eyes. It seemed to him then that there was something mellow to contemplate, a happy anticipation to savor — if he could but remember what it was. Easeful, smiley, he let his besotted fancy roam a varicolored landscape. A California that had been, the pursuit of happiness past.
What came to him was fear. Like a blow, it snapped him upright. He sat rigid, clutching the armrest, fighting off tremors, the shakes. In the pool a few feet away, Shelley Pearce was swimming lengths in an easy backstroke.
Walker got to his feet, went to the edge of the pool and sat down on the tiles with his legs dangling to the water. Shelley had left her champagne glass there. He drank it down and shivered.
In a moment, Shelley swam over to him.
“Don’t you want to swim?”
He looked into the illuminated water. It seemed foul, slimy over his ankles. He thought it smelled of cat piss and ammonia. Shelley reached up and touched his knee. He shook his head.
“You O.K.?”
He tried to smile. “Sure.”
In the lounge, the musical proprietor was singing “Bad Bad Leroy Brown.” Light-headed and short of breath, Walker stood up.
“I think I’m feeling cold,” he called to Shelley.
She paddled to a ladder and climbed out of the pool.
“You don’t look good, Gordon. You’re not sick, are you?”
“No,” he said. “It’s just the grass. It’s all in my head.”
They went upstairs holding hands. Walker took another shower, wrapped a bathrobe around himself and lay down on the bed. Shelley Pearce stood naked before the terrace doors, facing the black mist-enshrouded plane of sky and ocean, smoking. A J. J. Johnson tape was running—“No Moon at All.”
When the piece ended she started the tape over again, scatting along with it under her breath. She went back and stood at the window like a dancer at rest. The back of one hand was cocked against her flexed hip, the other at a right angle from the wrist, holding her cigarette. Her head was thrown back slightly, her face, which Walker could not see, upturned toward the darkness outside.
He got off the bed and walked across the room and kissed her thighs, kneeling, fondling her, performing. His desire made him feel safe and whole. After a few minutes she touched his hair, then languidly, sadly, she went to the bed, put her cigarette out and lay down on her side facing him. He thought she wept as they made love. When she came she gave a soft mournful cry. Spent, he was jolly, he laughed, his fear was salved. But the look in her eyes troubled him; they were bright, fixed, expressionless.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello, Gordon.”
“Some fun, eh, kid?”
“Just like old times,” Shelley said.
“Why did you ask me about the beds?”
“ ’Cause I work for a living,” she told him. “I need a good night’s sleep. If there was only one bed I’d have to drive home.”
“You treat yourself better than you used to.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Everybody treats themselves better now. You’re supposed to.” After a moment she said, “Hey, Gordon, how come you’re sniffing after Lee Verger?”