There were four children, counting the dead, and she did. The little golden ones, Lionel’s perfections. Charles, the dead one, in custody of the Long Friends. A girl who looked like her and whom she hardly knew, who lived in Baton Rouge with her ex-husband, Robitaille, because Momma was crazy in California. She slid her hand down the inside of Lionel’s arm, tracing the warm silk, and held his hand, the hand of the man who was getting his courage up to leave her. They stood together for a while and Lionel said with a theatrical flourish: “Well! We may live in hope of our fashionably late dinner, eh? If we don’t starve to death first.”
She was able to summon a polite smile.
Lionel sniffed the perfumed air. “Think I’ll have a walk,” he said. “Conceal myself and spy out the preparations for the feast. I can’t even remember the way, it’s so long since we were asked together.”
“It isn’t hard to find,” she told him. “It’s at the end of the left-hand path. At the top.”
“Where else?” Lionel said, and went out into the darkness. “I mean dinner with Walter Drogue — we’ve really arrived, wouldn’t you say?”
“Absolutely,” Lu Anne said. “Landmarks crumble, baby, but when you say dinner with Walter you’re saying all you can say. It should be on the Universal Tour.”
She watched him set out for the path; the taste of his betraying kiss was still warm on her lips. She was getting the universal tour. As he strode out of sight she considered herself as life, its deserving stooge and representative.
The Long Friends were gathering in the dark; she felt beyond fear or anger.
She had done her best — she felt sure she had. Lionel had done his, a tough, resolute, truly loving man. She thought she heard little Charles crying; she raised a hand to her mouth. Everyone had done their best.
She must not hate him; it was wrong and no good would come of it.
Then it occurred to her that Gordon Walker must be coming down.
Walker did not try to place the call again. He picked up his drink from beside the telephone and went back to his barstool.
She might have been on the line, he thought. Perhaps it was only a thrill of fear she felt at the sound of his voice. Perhaps calm resolution and refusal. Perhaps someone else had picked up the phone.
But it was Mexico, Mexican phones. As likely as not he had spoken into a dead line, into an unheeding, untroubled past. There was so much to be said, he thought, for leaving things alone.
Beside him, the blond woman on the neighboring stool had put a cigarette to her lips, supporting it with a bridge of fore and middle finger. It seemed somehow a quaint gesture, suggestive of film noir intrigue. Walker’s hand was on the lighter in his jacket pocket, but he checked the impulse. He did not want to pick her up. And although he was curious about her, he did not feel like forcing conversation.
He studied her in the candlelight. Not bad for the San Epo, he thought. She seemed free of the principal undesirable qualities common to pickups at the lounge, in that she was neither a prostitute nor a man in drag. She seemed, in fact, a fresh-faced, confused and vaguely unhappy young woman who had no business on a San Epifanio Beach barstool. He was about to give her a light out of common politeness when, from somewhere behind him, a flame was thrust forth and she inclined her cigarette to receive it. She smiled uncertainly over Walker’s shoulder and murmured her gratitude. Walker, who had not turned around, found himself listening to merry masculine laughter of an odd register. A voice boomed forth, subduing all other sounds in the place.
“I’ve recently had the opportunity to visit Mount Palomar,” the voice declared with a dreadful earnestness, “and was devastated by the sheer beauty I encountered there.”
Such a sound, Walker considered, could only be made by forcing the breath down against the diaphragm, swallowing one’s voice and then forcing the breath upward, as in song. He listened in wonder as the voice blared on.
“Everywhere I travel in California,” it intoned, “I’m — utterly dazzled — by the vistas.”
He’s raving mad, thought Walker.
“Don’t you find your own experiences to be similar?” the voice demanded of the young woman at the bar. It was a truly unsettling sound, its tone so false as to seem scarcely human.
To Walker’s astonishment, the woman smiled wider and began to stammer. “I certainly … yes … why, I do. The vistas are ravishing.”
“How pleasant an experience,” brayed the voice, “to encounter a fellow admirer of natural wonders.”
With as much discretion as possible, Walker turned toward the speaker. He saw a man of about fifty whose nose and cheekbone had been broken, wearing a hairpiece, a little theatrical base and light eyeliner. Returning to his drink, Walker cringed; he had feared to see a face to match the voice and that was what he had seen. It was a smiling face, its smile was a rictus of clenched teeth like a ventriloquist’s. The thought crossed his mind that he was hallucinating. He dismissed it.
“So few,” the man enunciated, “truly see the wonders nature arrays before them.”
How true, thought Walker.
The man eased himself between Walker’s stool and the lady’s, taking possession of her company and presenting a massive shoulder to Walker, his defeated rival. Walker moved his stool slightly so that he would still be able to see her.
“I know,” the woman said, with an uneasy laugh. “The average person can be blind to beauty. Even when it’s right in front of them.”
Walker sipped his drink. The neighboring dialogue was beginning to make him unhappy. Abandoning his observation of the two newly friends, he turned to see that Shelley had come in. She was standing in a doorway that opened to the windswept terrace; she was smiling, she had seen him. A tan polo coat was thrown over her shoulders, she was wearing pants to match it and tall boots. Under the coat she wore a navy work shirt and a white turtleneck jersey. Her dark hair was close-cropped.
She waved to him and he watched her make her way through the bar crowd. When she was by his side he stood up and kissed her.
“You look pretty tonight, Shell,” he said into her ear.
“You look pretty too, Gordo.” She cupped her hands around her mouth and croaked at him. “Why are we whispering?”
Walker put a finger across his lips and moved his eyes toward the couple on his right. Shelley peered at them, then looked at Walker with an expression of anticipatory glee. Her black eyes were so bright he wondered if she had been doing drugs.
“Do I discern a visitor to our shores?” the big man inquired in his awful voice. “Great Britain, perhaps?”
The young woman, who spoke with the accent of southern Indiana or Illinois, hesitantly explained that she was not a visitor from abroad.
“What a surprise,” the man had his voice declare, while his heavy face did surprise. “Your impeccable pronunciation convinced me you must be from across the water.”
Walker looked away. Shelley was hiding behind him on the stool, resting her chin on her hands, grinning madly at the bottles behind the bar.
“Let me see,” sounded the man through his morbid grin. “The eastern states, perhaps. I have it. I suspect Boston is the key to your refinement.”
“No,” said the woman. “Illinois is my native state.” She giggled. “I hail from the central region.”
Walker glanced at Shelley. She was batting her eyes, doing an impression of goofy cordiality.
“Ah,” honked the big man. “How charming. The land of Lincoln.”
They listened as he introduced himself as Ulrich or Dulwich or something close. “May I offer you a cocktail?” Ulrich or Dulwich asked gaily. “The night is young and we seem kindred spirits.”