“Do you always talk to interviewers like this?”
“Can I tell you something off the record?”
“I don’t know yet,” Lowndes said, “ask me later.”
“I haven’t given an interview in years. Not a real one.” She thought his eyes seemed somehow soiled. Mud-colored. Shit-colored. “You go to est training or something?”
He laughed but she thought she had embarrassed him.
“Do you go to est training?”
“I meditate,” Lu Anne said. Lowndes had an aura, she realized. His aura brought forth creatures, like the Long Friends. They were attracted to him. She could hear their prattling from inside the casita. Something about lost things, lost jewelry, old photographs, old-time things. He would not be aware of them, she reminded herself, because they were not there for him.
“You mean like Zen?” Lowndes asked, amused. “Alpha states?”
The Sorrowful Mysteries, she thought. In the casita she could hear the rattle of rosary beads. They were not hers, they belonged to Props but she had appropriated them.
“Everyone meditates,” she said. “It’s just clearing your mind for concentration.”
“What is acting?” Lowndes asked. “How is it like living?”
“Those aren’t possible questions,” she said. “They don’t make sense.”
“Yes, they do, Miss Verger. You can answer them.”
She laughed. “Mr. Lowndes, you don’t ask those questions of a person.” He had power over her. The aura that drew the Long Friends gave him great strength. And his contaminated eyes. “If you want to speculate on those things, if you want to hold forth on life and acting and whatnot for your readers, well, do it. But don’t ask me to give you the words.”
“Do you really know my work?”
“I read your novel, Mr. Lowndes. Some years ago. I admired it.”
“The novel? Not a studio synopsis?”
His eyes held her; she knew she must look troubled. His arrogance did not offend her but that he dared to speak so made her fear he knew his own power. Perhaps he was the same with everyone, she thought. He had humiliated poor foolish Jack Best. Considering his cruelty, she examined his stance, the lines of his body. When she felt the first faint thirst of desire, the Long Friends inside sounded a chorus of stern whispers.
“You-all hush,” she said softly.
“I’m sorry,” Lowndes said, surprised. “I was kidding.”
“Yes,” Lu Anne said. “Of course.”
“You’re from Louisiana?”
“Yes,” she said, “it’s in the handout. From Boulanger.”
“I’m from Georgia.”
“I know,” Lu Anne said. “I know from your name. Lowndes, that’s a Georgia name.” She was only flattering him now to keep him at bay, starting to tell lies. She saw that he was pleased.
“I love to swim,” she told Lowndes. “When I was sixteen I was an Olympic candidate. But I had a fall and broke my leg.”
“A fall from a horse?” Lowndes asked.
“Yes,” she said, “but I still swim regularly. And I ride occasionally.”
Lee had never been an Olympic candidate for anything. At four she had broken her leg being chased by a hog during a Christmas party. If her cousins hadn’t rescued her, her father said, she might have been eaten and gone into sausage.
“You went to Newcomb?”
“I went to Newcomb on a Madison Foundation scholarship. Then I went to Yale drama school.”
“And you were in that production of As You Like It where everybody in it became rich and famous.”
“People said it was like John Brown’s hanging. I was Rosalind.”
“Rosalind,” Lowndes mused. “Tell me about that.”
She shook her head with a secret smile. “No.” She has nothing to do with you, Lu Anne thought. With your bent back and your shitty eyes.
He was studying her refusal to answer when the telephone rang. It was transportation and her call.
“Time for me to go to work,” she told him pleasantly, and went into the bedroom to change. The Long Friends had left a smell, like sweet wine and lavender sachet, and Lu Anne was aware of it as she sat by the bedroom mirror.
She chewed a piece of sugarless gum and brushed out her hair, hoping to see Rosalind and not some ugly thing. When she had been married to Robitaille he had accused her of constantly looking in mirrors. Because, she had told him, my face is my fortune.
They had told her to stay out of the sun, to keep the character’s genteel pallor. In the end it could not be done without the most rigorous efforts and they had relented and let her tan. It had been a good idea; with the right makeup and in the right colors, she photographed young and golden.
It was Edna in the glass now, not Rosalind. Lu Anne studied herself. Gone, that young Queen of the New Haven night. Sometimes it seemed to Lu Anne that she missed Rosalind the way she missed her children. She turned to study herself in profile.
Years ago in Boulanger, a judge who was one of her ex-husband’s relatives had called her “a lousy mother,” right out in court, in front of her daughter and in front of her own mother and daddy. Now she was Edna Pontellier. Of Edna, Kate Chopin had written:
She was fond of her children in an uneven impulsive way. She would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart; she would sometimes forget them.
You lost it all anyway, Lu Anne thought. You lost the child inside yourself, then the person that grew there, then the children you never bore and the children you did. The boys, the men, the skin outside, the self inside. Feelings came and went like weather. You could not tell if they were real. You could not tell if they were your own. You could never even be sure that you were there. People pretended.
“She looks fine,” Lu Anne told herself in the glass. The unseen Friends buzzed. They were all guilty agitation, old-auntly admonitions.
Don’t say she look fine, she heard one whisper. Say she is fine.
Lu Anne smiled, lowered her head and put a finger across her lips.
“Lee?” It was the voice of the writer, Lowndes. “Your car is here.”
She stood up and went out; meeting his eyes, her own gaze faltered and he saw it.
At the door, Billy Bly, the stuntman, was waiting for her with the driver. Seeing each other, they both blushed.
“Hi,” he said, and glanced quickly at Lowndes behind her. “They told me to ride over with you. See if there was anything you wanted.”
“Just your good company, Brother Bly,” she said. She introduced him to Lowndes; they got in the hosed-down Lincoln that would carry them to the set.
Looking out the car window as they approached the sea, she was struck by the uncanny light. The sky seemed to threaten a storm out of season.
“You look fine, Lu Anne,” Bill Bly said. She laughed. They had sent him out as her protector, replacing Jack Best. A heavy-handed touch, she thought.
“I am fine, Billy,” she told him. She was aware of Lowndes, a watching darkness on the seat beside her. “I am.”
Around twelve, Walker pulled off the freeway in Del Mar and drove to a drugstore on the coast to telephone Shelley.
“Everybody’s thrilled,” she told him. “They think it would really be great. In other words, they’ll put up with you for a day or two but don’t push it.”
“I will be their guest, will I not?”
“Yes, Gordon. You will.”
“That’s what you said they’d do.”
“People don’t always do what I say they’ll do. Very often, though.”
“Doesn’t that make you feel good?”
“No, shitty. It’s depressing. How do you want to travel?”