She had a glimmer of an idea, which was to go to Llewellyn’s study and read the script in progress; and for the moment she balked at this transgression too. Instead she put lane back to bed and went to bed herself. She seemed to toss endlessly, and thought, I’m fooling myself if I think I’ll sleep tonight. So it was a shock for her to wake, sometime early in the morning around three, and End she must have slept after all, since her husband was passed out on the bed next to her and she had no idea how he’d gotten there. He smelled of liquor. He also looked bruised and cut, and what instantly and inevitably flashed through Maddy’s mind was a scene in which the bruises and cuts were received at Catherine’s hands, never mind everything leading up to it. Downstairs, in the part of the house with the housekeeper’s room, things were quiet.
Thus transgressions now seemed appropriate. Maddy got up from her bed, put on her robe and went to the study. She slid open the door and went to the desk with the typewriter and several yellow pads of paper. She turned on the small desk lamp; there wasn’t a sound in the house. She opened up the folder in which her husband kept his script, except that there was no script. Instead she found a thin collection of fifty or sixty poems, and by the time she had read a few, she understood they all had the same subject: she could recognize her immediately, the hair the color of night and the rage to match, and her mouth the color of blood. Her eyes, he wrote, had the opaque rushing depthlessness of the blind, like the color of white skies and seas meeting at some point in the distance. They were poems about a face that was ignorant of its own image, and a man whose cognizance of that image divided his life in two. She closed the folder and shut off the light on the desk and thought to herself, The surprise is that I’m surprised.
Several times the next morning, as she lay in bed in a stupor of despair, she heard the phone ring and go on ringing many times before it stopped. About nine-thirty she looked over and Llewellyn wasn’t there, and the phone was ringing again. When she got to the top of the stairs lane was playing with her toys; she looked up at her mother in confusion. At the bottom of the stairs she saw Lew, not in the study where she’d expected to find him, but sitting in the living room staring, as he had before, at the spots of blood on the carpet. The phone had not stopped, and Maddy picked it up. On the other end was Eileen Rader, who began speaking before Maddy had gotten out a word. “Listen to me, Maddy,” Eileen said. She sounded very cold. “Lee’s fortunate I’m not calling the police after last night. A couple of other guests still may, and why Larry Crow doesn’t I don’t know, unless Lee’s got something he wants. Whatever is going on in your house is none of my business, but how it affects Lee’s work is. When Lee’s ready to face things, I want to talk to him, and it had better be soon if he’s still interested in a career.”
“Police?” said Maddy. Eileen hung up.
Maddy walked into the living room and looked at her husband. “Lew,” she said quietly, “we have to talk now.”
“I have this poem in my head,” he whispered. “Not the last poem but the poem after the last poem: I keep trying to find it. I keep writing closer to it, because I know when I get there I’ll be at the point of no return. If it means losing the house, if it means losing my family, if it means losing everything, I’m going to find this poem.”
“Lew,” said Maddy, “we have only one more chance before it’s too late.”
He nodded. He got up from the chair, he walked toward her and then past her, out the front door. She went over to the chair where he’d been and sat down in it. While she contemplated the blood on the carpet her daughter called twice from the top of the stairs. When the phone began to ring Maddy looked up at the kitchen door, struck by the huge silence from the back of the house. Slowly, timidly, she finally entered the kitchen. Slowly, timidly, she finally entered the back of the house, where she came to the open door of Catherine’s room and saw no one was there.
Llewellyn drove past La Brea up into the Hollywood Hills, the way he had taken Catherine the previous night. Then he drove back along Franklin. He kept his eyes open for Catherine everywhere he went. After hours of searching for her futilely, up and down side streets and main boulevards, he went home. When he got there, something about the house seemed odd. He wasn’t certain exactly what it was, but there was no doubt the house was different somehow. Then, after he had gotten out of the car and started up the small walk to the door, he looked at the red brick front with the white edgings, looked at the door and the two upstairs windows, and saw, distinctly, that one of the two windows was not where it had originally been. It was at least several feet over from its usual spot. Extremely annoyed, he went into the house and slammed the door and marched up the stairs. He started to go into his bedroom and, sure enough, it was not where it had been before but rather a door down. There Maddy was sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap. She looked up at him expectantly. What’s going on here anyway? he said.
Over the next week Llewellyn left the house every morning to drive past La Brea up to the hills and back down Franklin, looking for Catherine. He continued to take every side street and boulevard in between. Every day that he returned to the house, something about it had changed. Inside Maddy and Jane were always in their places but the places were different. The telephone was always ringing. Shaking his head and muttering with irritation at this turn of events, Llewellyn walked into his study only to find it was now Catherine’s room, with the bed in the corner and the bare walls and pink bits of glass in the sink. He walked out into the entryway of the house and, just as the phone stopped, announced, This has gone on long enough. Madeline? Jane? They didn’t answer, and after several minutes the phone began again.
He told himself he was inching closer to the poem of no return. If I can just find the study, he thought, I’m sure I can get it, it’s nearly in my grasp now. The telephone came to be an outright nuisance. Once he answered it and it was someone from the studio; he hung up. Once he answered it and it was Eileen; he hung up. Once he answered and it was Richard: Good news, old man, said Richard in that way of his. The hotel may not evict me after all. Guess assassination anniversaries don’t exactly pack them in; it appears, said Richard, that everything will go on being exactly as it has been. Beneath the affectation of triumph his voice rang with abject terror. Llewellyn hung up. Richard is mad, he said to himself.
The last straw came when Llewellyn returned home one afternoon to find the front door moved a good five or six feet from its proper place. The correct placement of the door, neatly centered between the two upstairs windows, was ingrained in a memory that rooted itself in childhood; now Llewellyn’s patience had run out. He came inside to find Maddy at the bottom of the stairs. She was shaking as she held the banister. She’s losing her grip, Llewellyn said to himself grimly. He was determined to put things right, to take command. You have to call Eileen, she said choking, it’s urgent, they want you to call tonight. Llewellyn looked high and low for the telephone, finally locating it in the fireplace. He dialed a local construction company.