“Is he there?” she asked without turning around. The perception of schizophrenics was unnatural, Walker thought.
“He’s gone.”
“There’s always someone to be afraid of,” Lu Anne said.
“We don’t have to play their games, Lu.”
“But we do,” she said.
He stepped back, holding her.
“Come with me tonight.”
She shook her head.
“There’s tonight,” he said. “I don’t know what else there is. It’s touch and go.”
“Touch,” she repeated dully, “and go.” She shook her head. “I can’t,” she said. “I’m afraid. I don’t know why you want me.”
“I think we settled that,” he said, “a long time ago.”
“And you never learned better?”
“I never learn, Lu Anne.”
“The geisha and the samurai,” she said. “You’re the geisha,” she told him. She fingered his cheek with a long unpainted nail. “I’m the samurai.”
“That’s so,” Walker said.
People passed at the end of the corridor but he never turned to look. Lu Anne took his hands in hers and they stood with their fingers twined like old friends at some family ceremony.
“I’m so fucked up, Gordon. I mean, I think I love you — it’s been so long. It was always someone and I think it was always you. I’m sick and I’m scared. I have to hide.”
“Hide with me.”
When she eased away from him he followed and took her in his arms again.
“Don’t make me,” she told him. “Wait for me. Wait for tomorrow.”
We are not promised tomorrow, Walker thought. He would wait for her, for that unmerited, far-off day.
“Yes,” he said. “All right.”
Then she was off, barefoot, down the hall. She had left her going-to-church shoes where she stood. As he bent to pick them up he heard an insistent pounding from the wing of the hotel to which she had retreated. He walked to the end of the passage and saw her rapping against the door of an apartment on the court three stories below. The condominiums here faced the mountainside; they were less expensive and less elaborately appointed. Teamsters lived here and technical assistants and people who liked to be where the serious card games were.
Walker stepped to the metal rail and saw the apartment door open and Billy Bly appear in the lighted doorway. He watched as they spoke, saw Bly close the door to her. Waiting, she leaned her forehead against it until Bly came to open it again. This time she went inside and, though Walker waited for almost ten minutes on the upper landing, holding her shoes under his arm, she did not reappear.
Please, Pig,” Lu Anne pleaded. “Honestly, honey, I don’t want to be alone. I’m afraid I’ll die.”
Bly was looking down at her bare feet on his plastic doormat. He worked his jaws in embarrassment.
“I figured you were waiting for Gordon Walker.”
“I was,” she said. “I am.”
“Well,” Bly said, “he’s here.”
She shook her head.
“But I’m not, Pig. Just suddenly I can’t handle it. I told him — wait for tomorrow. He’s so nice, you know. He said he would.”
“You scared?”
“I am deathly afraid,” Lu Anne said. “I have to hide. I must.”
“Well,” Bly said, “this is the thing. I ain’t alone tonight.”
She stared at him and, without a sound, mouthed the words.
“Please. Pig.”
He watched her as though he were trying to gauge the measure of her fear. “You want to wait,” he said. She made a move to rush past him but he blocked her with half a step.
“Honey,” she whispered urgently, “I’ll talk to the boy. I’ll explain.”
“I told you to wait, Lu Anne. Now you wait.”
He closed the door and she leaned her head against it. When she heard the Mexican boy’s angry incredulous voice, she raised her hands to stop her ears.
After a minute or two, Bly opened the door and stepped aside. As she went into the large bedroom suite, she thought she caught a glimpse of a moving figure on the mountainside balcony. A pot broke on the tiles outside.
“Was he real mad?” Lu Anne asked.
“Yes, he was,” Bly said.
“He broke a pot, didn’t he?”
“Probably just knocked it over. Climbin’ down.”
“Honestly, Pig, I’d do it for you. I’ll make it up to you. You know there’s always a day and there’s always a way.”
“Just so you know, Lu Anne. It’s the same as if …”
“Pig,” she said earnestly, “I realize that, you know. I’m not so insensitive. Gosh, I hope you were … like … done.”
Bly shrugged. He was standing by the mirror taking his shirt off, checking his pecs.
“I never really feel done,” he said.
He was a serious man and not given to humor. It was Lu Anne’s delight to make him laugh. She rushed to him.
“I’m so happy now,” she said, “and I was so scared before.” On the counter she saw a cluster of amyl nitrate caps. She went over and stirred them affectionately with her forefinger as though they were a litter of pet mice.
“You want a Quaalude?” Bly asked.
“I can’t think of anything nicer,” she said brightly.
Bly’s tanned face reddened, he pursed his lips. It took Lu Anne a moment to realize that he was laughing. She hugged him.
“You smell so nice,” she said.
As he went into the bathroom for some Quaaludes, she realized that in the moment of their embrace she had felt him tense very slightly and that the moment of resistance to her body’s pressure constituted a discreet discouragement of any notions she might be cultivating of fun and games. It would not have been unconscious. Bly was as free of involuntary physical responses as a person could be.
They lay down on the unmade bed together and had their Quaaludes with ice water from a pitcher that sat on a silver salver on the floor.
“I could give that boy some money,” Lu Anne suggested. “I feel so bad about it.”
“He don’t want money. You know,” Bly added after a moment, “we get the wrong idea. Lots of these Mexican people — they don’t want money.”
“Forgive me,” she said.
“No problem. This time.”
The room was chill with air conditioning and the windows were closed. No breezes came from the mountainside. She snuggled next to Bly, put her hands on his muscular shoulders, then guiltily withdrew them.
“You know how it gets.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Now don’t think I have it mixed up, Pig. I mean, I always understood that you and me was a one-time thing. It wasn’t going to go on and all. Because of how we both were.”
“One of them bells,” Bill said, “that now and then rings.”
“How nice Quaaludes are,” she said. “The world is possible with art.”
He turned over, looked at her eyes and lay back on his pillow.
“What’d you tell Drogue about me?” she asked him. “You tell him I was O.K.?”
“You are as far as he’s concerned, Lu Anne. He doesn’t care how you really are. He’s just worried about his ass. Like Charlie’s worried about budget and insurance and all that.”
“How do you think I really am?”
“I don’t know. I can’t always tell because I ain’t as smart as you.”
“I was a quiz kid, Pig. Did you know that?”
Bly yawned.
“Lu Anne,” he said, “if you was half the things you claim you been you’d have to be seventy-five years old.”
“I’m older than people think,” she said sadly.
“I mean,” Bly told her, “I don’t know why you lie. I don’t understand it. You’re a great star, what more do you want? What are you trying to prove?”