“I know who he is,” Lionel said. “I know he went out with Lu Anne. What are you suggesting?”
Young Drogue displayed opened palms. “Hey, Lionel, I never suggest. If I want to say something I just up and say it.”
“It sounded to me,” Lionel said, “as though you were implying something that’s none of your business.”
“Not at all, Lionel. Nothing of the kind. You have to leave, so you’ll leave.” He sighed. “I just thought everybody should understand everybody else’s feelings. See, we’re Californians. Compulsive communicators. We’re overconfiding and we’re nosy. Don’t mind us.”
“I wouldn’t worry about Gordon Walker, Lionel,” Patty Drogue said soothingly. “I mean, there’s much less sex on movie locations than a lot of people think.”
Lionel turned to her blankly. “I beg your pardon?”
“Ah, let him come,” young Drogue said. “Maybe tension will enrich her performance? Think so, Lionel? I think it’s possible. Anyway,” he told Lionel good-humoredly, “I can swallow that asshole with a glass of water.”
“She’ll be all right,” Lionel said. “We’ve agreed it’s time for her to handle it alone.”
“No second Vancouver?” Drogue asked delicately.
“She’ll be all right,” Lionel said.
“And you’ve got Kurlander covering in case of emergency, right? He’s agreed to come down if necessary?”
“That was privately arranged.”
“Should we put him on the payroll?” Drogue asked. “We might do that.”
“I’ve taken care of it. I don’t think you’ll need him.”
“I’m really glad we had this talk,” Drogue said. “So we could find out where we stood. By the way, have you read the script?”
“Of course,” Lionel Morgen said. But he had not. He had glanced at the Chopin book and leafed through a few of the scenes his wife was to appear in. That was all. He was instantly appalled at his own defensive lie.
“We thought you’d stay,” Patty Drogue intoned sweetly. “We thought you’d decide Lee needed you and stay.”
“I offered to stay,” Lionel said stolidly. “In spite of the difficulties. She agreed that I should go.”
“Well,” young Drogue said cheerfully, “you’re the doctor.”
There came the clatter and rustle of arriving guests ascending from the terraces below.
“Great eyes,” old Drogue said. Lionel’s own eyes had grown accustomed to the shadows and he saw that in the alcove where old Drogue was, a hammock had been strung between two date palms and the old man sat astride it. He looked, Lionel thought, like an old parrot on a stick swing. “But her pictures don’t make money.”
Lionel thought of his wife’s eyes and of his own image in them. “She said,” Lionel told them, “that if she couldn’t finish this one without me she was through.”
“That settles it, then,” young Walter Drogue said. He advanced and put his arm around Lionel’s shoulder. “You want to get our leading lady and bring her on up, right, Doc? Can’t have a party without her.”
Patty Drogue was wheeling an entire dollyful of canapés over the cobblestones of the patio.
“Make way,” she called. Her voice echoed over the hillside as she greeted the arriving guests across darkness. “Hello, you guys. Help yourselves to drinks while we get changed.”
Walter Drogue was walking Lionel to the path, holding him in an embrace. At the top of the pink steps, Lionel swept Drogue’s arm from his shoulder and started down, slowly and silently, ignoring the people going by. He came to the parapet at which he had stopped on the way up to watch the lights.
Drogue’s expensive liquor churned in his guts. For one self-loathing moment, he imagined he could smell his own cologne but it was only some overripe sweet odor of the place.
She had called him her knight and he was leaving her to them. He was numbed with his own betrayal. In their way, although they had it wrong, they were right to despise him. He loved her. But her madness was too much for him. It was stronger than he was, and evil.
Evil, a word attaching to false consciousness.
Now he would go, with his children, and in his faraway country he would think about it and he would see.
In the meantime, he recalled with a shudder, there was dinner to be endured. Dinner with the Drogues.
Dinner with the Drogues took place under the stars. Lionel was silent and vague. People who did not know him did not realize that he was drunk and thought he might be deaf or even a little slow, like someone recovering from a cerebral injury.
Lu Anne for her part had never seen her husband so utterly besotted. More like a drunken cricketer than a medical Svengali with his schizoid Trilby in tow. Those among the guests who had come to see him spoon-feed her got to watch her half carry him down the path to their casita.
In the bedroom, she had to undress him, practically put him in bed. He was not there at all, no more for her than for anyone else. She worked hard not to think about his leaving and she was tired and a little drunk and that helped.
Once, as they lay together, the full moon visible through the casita’s window, he reached out and took her hand. If she saw or heard anything, he told her — anything that might not really be there — she was to press his hand and wake him. Slim chance of that, she thought. They were already gathering. But that night at least she would sleep.
Well after she was certain he had passed into oblivion, he startled her by taking her hand again.
“I have discovered,” he announced, “the exact way in which America made sex obscene.”
“What?”
Intrigued, she struggled toward waking. But he had gone to sleep again, his hand still pressed to hers. So she was alone in the darkness. In solitude. What a beautiful word, she thought. And beautiful in Spanish, soledad. It was the name of a prison.
Still holding her husband’s hand, she began to pray.
In the dingy coffee shop, Walker took a breakfast of rye toast and tea. A hard steady rain drilled against the panes of the seaward windows. The ocean-borne wind rattled the ornate rusted fastenings that secured them and rainwater seeped through the rotten moldings to form small puddles on the checkerboard floor.
He smoked and watched the rain, ignoring the morning paper spread out on the unsteady table before him.
Shelley had gone while he was still asleep. She had left a note commanding him to stay in town until he heard from the agency and to call her that afternoon.
After a few minutes, he took his newspaper upstairs to pack and outwait the rain. As soon as he had closed the door behind him, he set about running more cocaine. He had no sure purpose for the day, only the dream of going south. The dream provided him a happiness against all reason, it was succor and escape. Coke turned it adamantine, to mythic longing. As he stood at the window over the rain-soiled sea, his blood quickened at the prospect. He felt then that it was all he had.
The rain increased. Walker paced the length of his room. He had begun to think about his script for The Awakening, sustaining a glow of proprietary satisfaction. He had not looked at it for many months. Suddenly now, a prisoner of the morning rain, he lusted after the thing and it occurred to him that in the addled state to which he had reduced himself he might have forgotten to bring it along. He brought his suitcase out of the closet and quickly found his two copies in their blue bindings. He picked one out and seated himself in one of the room’s musty elephant-colored armchairs to read it over. As soon as he turned the cardboard cover an airmail envelope slid from between the pages and landed in his lap.
The envelope contained a month-old letter from his younger son at prep school. He had received it just after the closing of Lear in Seattle, tucked it away with the scripts in token of a determination to respond, then forgotten it.