He leaned in the doorway and watched her. She lay facing him, her red-blond hair partly covering her eyes, her lips parted over long cowgirl’s teeth. She slept on, or pretended to. A deep blue silk sheet was gathered about her naked body; she was sheathed in it.
Bronwen was a writer, a midwestern girl honed smooth by early success and the best of California. Observing, or rather ogling, her at rest, Walker was stirred in equal measure by lust and resentment.
Basically, they disliked each other. They were both, in their diverse ways, performers, comics; much of their companionable humor turned on mutual scorn.
She had written three short novels, witty, original and immensely pleasurable to read. Bronwen was nothing if not funny. Each of her novels had been received with great enthusiam by reviewers and by the public; she had become famous enough for Walker, to his deep inward shame, to take a vulgar satisfaction in his liaison with her. She was intelligent and coldhearted, a spiky complex of defenses mined with vaults of childish venom and hastily buried fears. Kicked when she was a pup, Walker would say behind her back. The game they played, one of the games, was that she knew his number. That his stratagems to please, his manner of being amusing, the political sincerities that remained to him were petty complaints to which she was immune. Others might take him seriously — not she, the hard case, worldly-wise.
He ran his eyes over her long frame and wondered if she knew he knew about the pistol she kept in the wicker chest beneath her bed, wrapped in a scarf with her Ritalin tablets. Or whether she knew his number well enough to imagine the measure of his rage, or the murderous fantasies that assailed him — of destroying her, transforming her supple youth to offal, trashing it.
He was immediately stricken with remorse and horror. Because he liked her, really, after all. He must, he thought; there had to be more than perversity. She was funny; he enjoyed her wit and her high spirits. And she liked him — he was sure. She could speak with him as with no other friend; she respected his work, she had said so. It occurred to him suddenly how little any of this had to do with the terms of the heart as he had once understood them; love, caring, loyalty. It was just a random coupling, a highbrow jelly roll. Might she imagine that violent fantasies beset him with herself as their object? She might well. She was very experienced and knowing; she had his number. And the Lord knew what fantasies she spun round him.
Back in the living room, he found his wallet on the sofa where he had been sitting. It was thick with bills, jammed in haphazard. He remembered then, having almost forgotten it in his malaise, that he had won a great deal of money at Santa Anita the day before. He had gone with Bronwen; it was a glorious day and they had lunched at the clubhouse. Walker had scored on the double, a perfecta and an eight-to-one winner. His take was over a thousand dollars, the largest amount of money he had ever won at the track. It had paid for dinner at the San Gabriel Ranch and it would pay a week’s rent at the Chateau. He had been living at the Chateau Marmont since the closing of Lear, having rented his house in Santa Monica. He did not care to be alone there.
Walker caressed the disorderly wad between thumb and forefinger. The touch of the wrinkled bright new bills gave him a faint feeling of disgust. He took out a hundred, examining the lacy engraved illumination at its border. Then, on an impulse, he rolled the bill into a cylinder, laid out a line of his coke and blew it. Nice. He sniffed and rubbed his eyes. Confidence. A little surge for the road. Immediately it occurred to him that in the brief course of his waking day he had consumed Valium, alcohol and cocaine.
We need a plan, he thought. A plan and a dream, somewhere to go. Dreams were business to Walker, they were life. Like salt, like water. Lifeblood.
He touched the tip of his index finger to the surface of the coffee table, capturing the residue of cocaine that remained there, and rubbed it on his gum.
Go, he thought. It seemed to him that if he did not go at once death would find him there. He stood up and packed his suitcase, leaving the small fold of cocaine on the table as a house present. He had plenty more in the case.
Stacked on the mantel above the fireplace were Bronwen’s three novels; Walker found that each was engagingly inscribed to him. The drill was for him to take them and leave a note. He turned the topmost book to the back jacket and looked at Bronwen’s picture. Her eyes were fixed on the middle distance, her lips were slightly parted, her cheekbones high and handsome, her chin dimpled. She looked hip and sympathetic and fingerlickin’ good. He placed the book back on the mantelpiece and left it there. Then he put on his sunglasses, picked up his bags and went forth into the morning.
As he drove the freeway, KFAC played Couperin, the Leçons de Ténèbres.
Walker thought of himself as a survivor. He knew how to endure, and what it was that got you through. There was work. There were the people you loved and the people who loved you. There were, he had always believed, a variety of inner resources that the veteran survivor might fall back on; about these he was no longer so sure. The idea of inner resources seemed fatuous mysticism that morning. He had drugged and drunk too much, watched too many smoky reels of interior montage to command any inner resources. It was difficult enough to think straight.
As for work — after weeks of living on his nerves it would take nearly as much time of disciplined drying out before he could begin to face a job. And love — love was fled. Gone to London. The thought of her there and himself abandoned made his blood run cold. He put it out of his mind, as he had trained himself to do since Seattle. He would deal with it later, he would do something about it. When he was straightened out. A dream, he thought. That’s what we need.
He left the freeway at Sunset and parked in Marmont Lane behind the hotel. At the desk he bought the morning’s L.A. Times and Variety. He rode up to the sixth floor in the company of a famous German actor and two stoned young women.
The air in his apartment held a faint scent of stale alcohol and undone laundry. He opened the leaded bedroom windows to a tepid oily breeze. Below him were the swimming pool and the row of bungalows that flanked it. Dead leaves floated on the surface of the dark green water. The pool gardens smelled of car exhaust and eucalyptus.
This time it was not going to be easy to get straight. He would have to go about it very skillfully. Above all he would have to want to. There would have to be a reason, and Walker knew that inquiry into his reasons for surviving would bring him into dangerous territory. The world in general, he had conceded at last, required neither him nor his works. His wife was gone — for good as far as he knew; his children were grown. He was going to have to pull out for his own reasons, alone and unrequired, in a hotel in West Hollywood. The taste of death and ruin rose in his throat again.
He decided not to think about it. In order to postpone thinking about it he opened his suitcase, took out the tubular talcum container that held his cocaine and tapped out a small mound of the stuff onto the smooth dark marble of his bedside lamp table. He did it up with the hundred-dollar bill. Fine, he thought. For the moment he had obviated motivation; he was the thing itself again. The thing itself shortly came to self-awareness in the kitchen pouring out a shot of vodka. Perplexed, Walker looked at the drink he had prepared. He sniffed, drew himself erect and emptied the glass into the sink drain. He had made a luncheon engagement with his agent and keeping the appointment was all he owned of purpose. He must at least postpone the next drink until lunch. A small gesture toward renewal, nothing ambitious.