“I’m coming with you,” she told Walker gaily. “I’m to show you around.”
“She’ll show you the location,” Axelrod told him. “You can go to the beach. Tonight Charlie’s giving a party for you.”
“Good,” Walker said. “Then you get to carry me home.”
“Writers sleep on the beach, Gordon.”
In the moment before they left the table, Walker noticed Helena try without success to catch Jack Glenn’s eye. She was out of luck, he thought with malicious satisfaction. Jack worked harder at sex than anyone Walker knew and did not miss his moments.
Walker went with Helena to the production offices, which were deep in early morning silence. One of Axelrod’s pistoleros was summoned to drive them to the setup. The drive was accomplished in silence. Helena’s good humor was turning steely. When they were at the setup, their driver got out and waited in the shade of a live oak tree. Walker and Helena sauntered along the trolley tracks toward the bay.
The trolley was parked at the end of the line. Walker climbed aboard, felt the brasswork and the varnished benches.
“Frank found that one in Texas,” Helena told Walker briskly. “He worked from the old Grand Isle photographs. Piece by piece, he found it all fairly close by.”
“How about Frank,” Walker said.
From the trolley, they walked across the waving fields of mock camomile to the dunes. Walker looked over the bathhouse and then walked along the beach to the camera track where Drogue’s Titan had rolled the night before. A couple of Mexican watchmen hunkered by the trolley, watching.
“It must be a kick,” Helena said, “seeing all this. I mean, all of it coming out of something you wrote.”
“Definitely,” Walker said. “A kick.” He was looking out over the bay toward a raft on pontoons that was anchored some forty feet offshore. It was secured by cables to pulleys on the shore to keep it steady in the chop. “Once they built a house I used to live in. Reproduced it in every detail inside and out. It probably cost them more to do it than it cost to build the actual house.”
“You must have been thrilled.”
“As I recall, I was thrilled. It was a long time ago and I’ve done a lot of shows since.”
“And now you take it all in stride? Or find it boring? Or what?”
“What’s that raft out there for?” he asked Helena.
“Walter thought he might want a reverse angle on Edna’s walk. There would have been a bloke on it with a Steadicam.”
“Dr. Zoom,” Walker said. The patches of troubling weather he had seen earlier were still hovering offshore.
“I mean,” Helena said, “I don’t see how you can be so superior about it.”
Walker looked at her. “You’re a film student?”
“No,” she said. “I … just like films. I respect them. I respect the people who make them.”
“Why are you trying to pick a fight with me?”
“I’m not,” she said, protesting. “Maybe I think more highly of cinema than you do. I’m sure I know less about it.”
“How do you come to be here?”
“Through friends.”
“Your friends?”
“Yes, why not? Is that your last question?”
“Let me guess,” Walker said. “You’re here through business connections of your father’s. Your father is something like a bookmaker-turned-mogul and he doesn’t sound like you at all. You’re doing the world, a little slumming, a little high life …”
“And you’re a fucking burned-out mediocre film writer with a whiskey face and no manners.”
“And here we are beside the Pacific. Just the two of us, more or less. As a film buff, do you think there’s a scenario here?”
“You’re not very highly regarded on this set. I was warned about you.”
“Well,” Walker said, “next time you’re warned pay attention. What were you supposed to do, keep me dangling with smiles and compliments?”
Helena turned away. “Keep you away from her. So you wouldn’t get her drinking or give her drugs.”
“When your old man turned you loose on the wide world, Helena, didn’t he warn you about pimps? Ponces? You let the people who sicked you on me — Drogue, Jon, whoever it was — turn you out. You pretended to like me. I could have gotten the wrong idea. I was supposed to.”
The young woman looked at him strangely for a moment.
“You’re a tenderhearted soul,” she said.
“Goddamn right,” Walker said.
“Flirtatiousness is fair, you know. It’s a legitimate device.”
“Of course it is.”
“I suppose you’ll go and see her.”
“I’ll go to her bungalow, yes. And you’ll report me.”
“Why shouldn’t I? I owe them hospitality. I don’t owe anything to you.”
“Helena,” Walker said. “If I find her — give us a while. You don’t have to go straight back to Axelrod.”
“It’s not right,” the woman said, “to give her drugs. You’ll harm her.”
“I’m not going there to give her drugs.”
“All right,” Helena said. “We’ll go back.”
They went back to the limousine; the driver left them near the beach at the base of the cliff.
“I’m sorry I was rude,” Walker said when they were out of the car. “I get angry all the time.”
“I really don’t mind exchanging insults,” Helena told him. “I was trained to it from an early age. Anyway, you’re the first person here who’s talked to me as though I were human.” She pointed down the beach toward a point beyond the curve of the cliff. “That’s where the bungalows are.”
“I know,” Walker said. “Give my best to the gang in Katmandu.”
She turned for the water’s edge. Walker trudged along the beach toward the row of bungalows.
A moment after his knock, through the closed door, he heard her startled motion; a shifting step on the tiles, the rustling of cloth. When she opened and saw it was he, she closed her eyes and opened them again.
“Thank God,” she said, and leaned her head against his breast.
“Amen,” Walker said.
She stepped aside to let him come in.
“Have you anything to drink, Gordon?”
“No,” he said. “And you shouldn’t.”
“Last night. I was so demented. I was out of my gourd. I couldn’t handle seeing you.”
“You went to Bly’s.”
She looked at him in alarm and shook her head.
“I went to Billy’s place to sleep because I didn’t want to sleep alone. I mean, he’s gay, Gordon. He’s my pal.”
“You had an affair with him once, Lu, I know you did. When I saw you creep off to him I was a little put out.”
“Gordon, you know I bend the truth from time to time.”
“We all forgive you, Lu. As best we can.”
“But I’m not lying now, Gordon. I went to Billy’s and he gave me a ’lude and we talked. I swear it. I’d just seen you — how could I make it with Billy? I may tell stories, Gordon, but I’m not capable of pushing that many buttons.”
“It’s funny,” Walker said. “I started out being jealous of that Lowndes guy.”
“He’s a piece of shit,” Lu Anne said. She stated it so positively and unemotionally that it sounded like a considered analysis.
“He wrote a good novel,” Walker said. “Of course,” he added with some slight satisfaction, “he only wrote one and that was a while ago.”
“I read his novel,” Lu Anne said. “I don’t care how many he wrote. He’s a piece of shit and he’s after me.”
“Why?”
“Because he knows I’m crazy and he wants to write about it in New York Arts. He’s always watching me.”
“Lu,” Walker said patiently, “he digs you.”
“Do you think,” Lu Anne asked brightly, “that if I called the room service people they’d send down a bottle of tequila?”