He hesitated and then, from the little lift and fall of his shoulders, I could see that he had given up. He said to us, “Lady Rebecca Divin-Harrison is one of our most attractive local institutions, and she has, as you may have detected, a whim of iron. Becky, may I present Mr. McGee. and Mr. Meyer. Gentlemen, please come back into my home as my invited guests.”
“Bravo!” said Becky. “That was really gracious, Bruce. Like a child taking medicine. Mr. McGee, I am Becky and you are…”
“Travis. And Meyer is Meyer.”
“And this is David Saunders, who is down here on a grant, grubbing about in the ruins. Bruce, dear, are you going to keep me out here on the street? I’m beginning to feel like Apple Mary.”
So we went back in, with Meyer giving me an amused little wink, a little nod of approval. We went out onto the twilight patio, sweet with the evening song of the birds, heavy with the scent of flowers that were just opening for the hours of the night, with fleshy pink petals, and a smell something like jasmine.
Each little group of strangers establishes its own set of balances and unspoken agreements. Tentative relationships are made and broken until the ones are found which are durable enough to last the evening, at least. From long habit, Meyer and I could talk on one level while maintaining an elliptical kind of communication on a level inaccessible to the other three. Bruce and Becky were doing the same thing, wherein innocent expressions had subterranean values.
Bruce bustled about, happily hostessing, making drinks, lighting the patio lanterns, summoning a solemn little Mexican woman to present the trays of hors d’oeuvres, with Bruce anxiously awaiting our verdicts on each delicacy.
Becky was all animation, in constant movement, making wry and bawdy judgments, with hoots of harsh laughter. In her evident maturity, she was still totally girl, that special kind of girl who does not have any self-conscious awareness of herself, but can fling herself about, leggy and lithe, laugh with an open throat, comb her casual hair back with splayed fingers, scratch herself, kick off her sandals, stand ugly, lick crumbs from her fingertips. She was teeming and burning with endless and remarkable energies, with taut slender vibrating health. One could not imagine her ever being bored. Her drink was a pale Spanish sherry, in an old-fashioned glass with a single cube of ice, and she seemed able to make one last indefinitely.
David Saunders was a familiar type, muscular, burly yet feline. He moved with languid grace. He sat immobile, thighs bulging the khaki slacks, apparently in total disinterest and indifference to anyone and anything about him. It was that special arrogance which relieves the possessor of any responsibility to communicate with anyone or please anyone. He could have been in a bus station, waiting for an overdue bus. But he did not become inconspicuous or invisible. There was a surly presence, an assurance, that made people try to please him, to bring him into the conversation. His drink, to Bundy’s apparent dismay, was bourbon and Coke, and he knocked them back with stolid, metronomic efficiency.
I decided that I could risk, for the sake of possible returns, casting a large doubt on our insurance story, and Bruce’s statement of having done stage design in New York and set design in California gave me the opening. So at a handy opening, using that-reminds-me, I brought up a Famous Female Name in the Industry.
“That wretched bitch!” Bruce said. “The most self-important little slut in the world, believe me. I did one totally commercial job for her. One of those period piece things, where they wrapped her little ass in crinoline, and had her bang her way through half the Confederate Army. I went a little camp with the decor, not to cut the picture, but to make a little gentle fun that only the cognoscenti would catch. So she raised stinking hell about my color patterns being wrong for her. She wants to act, direct, produce, write the script, and design the sets, and she doesn’t know one thing about her own trade. The only acting she does that seems authentic is when they have her horizontal. She is one of the reasons, dears, why I tucked away all their abundant bread into very good little securities, and when I had enough to live nicely on for the rest of my years, I told them all what they could kiss.” He paused and looked at me with a suspicious glint. “But don’t tell me she was buying her insurance in Florida.”
“It was something else, Bruce. She partied on a sun deck with a mixed bare-ass group, and somebody with a good telephoto lens tried to get rich quick.”
He nodded. “I remember a rumor that she was in that kind of trouble, but nothing happened.”
“I got lucky.”
“But why would you get involved in something like that, Travis?”
“Because she came around and asked me.”
“Why would she come to you?”
“Because I solved another kind of problem for someone she knew.”
“Then you aren’t really in the insurance business?”
I smiled upon him. “Hell, I don’t know. I guess that lady would be willing to say it was a kind of insurance.”
“But what are yod trying to do here? Who are you… trying to insure, Mr. McGee?”
“I think that if I had gone around telling people what I was trying to do for the actress, it wouldn’t have worked out as well as it did.”
Meyer broke in and said, “We just go around helping people, Bruce. I think it’s some kind of guilt syndrome. Trouble with those windmills, you stick a lance into one in a good wind, and it will purely toss the hell out of you.”
Bundy, after a few moments of narrow-eyed consideration, dropped it. And soon he began moving in on David Saunders’ blind side. But first there was a little exchange between Bruce and Becky that went over David’s sullen head.
Bruce said, “Becky, darling, Larry told me last week that you. practically gave him that marvelous ceremonial mask from Juchatengo.”
I saw her eyes go blank and her mouth purse, and though she recovered in a sparkling instant, I felt reasonably convinced that there was no mask, perhaps not even anyone named Larry.
“He seemed to want it.”
“It upset him a little. I mean he knew how terribly acquisitive you had felt about it when you first got it, and he didn’t want to take advantage of your friendship.”
“How silly!” she said. “I was cleaning out my little gallery and I remembered that he seemed to admire it, so I took it over and asked him if he’d like it. My word, had I wanted to keep it, would I have taken it to him?”
“I guess he wanted to be certain it was not just an impulse you’d regret later.”
“When you see him, tell him not to worry his little head. Actually, you know, I was very fair with him. I told him when I took it over there that it was really not as first class as I had thought at first. It’s very primitive, of course, and quite authentic, but it’s just one of those things you tire of seeing every day I suppose because it hasn’t much subtlety.”
“It’s probably more Larry’s sort of thing than yours.”
“Very probably. I sensed that, I suppose.” Transfer accomplished, in good faith. And so Bundy engaged Meyer in amateur archeological talk, saying, fmally, “I just cannot imagine how those priest types could bring the Indian peasants into this terribly inhospitable and certainly waterless countryside and establish a whole culture without losing untold thousands of them.”
And that hooked Saunders into his first conversation of the evening. “From what we know now, the system was to send out a large party of specialists, carrying water supplies, just before the rainy season. If they couldn’t find reliable wells or springs, they would dig giant cisterns deep in the earth, wide at the bottom and narrow at the top, like gigantic bottles made of stone and waterproofed with clay. Then around the top of the bottle, they’d make a hard surface, round, fifty or sixty feet across, and sloping toward the mouth of the bottle. The rains would fill the bottle and they’d put a big clay stopper in place to prevent evaporation. Next they would bring in the Indian families with grain and fowl and tools and tell them where to build the village and where to plant the grain.”