Some intuition (or perhaps it is the noise) wakes Dong from his stupor and he staggers to his feet. He knows something is wrong, but is unable to perceive what it is. We notice the naked figures of Lola and Tex in reflection in the overhead mirror moments before Dong himself becomes aware of them.
Dong overhears the following conversation.
“You don’t love him, do you?”
“I pity him,” she says. “He had the world in his hand and threw it away. But I can’t leave him, Tex, not while he’s ill I can’t. I’ll nurse him back to health and then when he’s on his feet again tell him about us.”
We see the dawn of comprehension on the stricken gorilla’s face. He mouths Lola’s name — it is almost as if he could speak it — and stumbles wearily from the house onto the terraced beach that leads to the ocean.
In four steps he is at the water’s edge. And then, hesitating a moment — perhaps only to locate his destination — he enters the water.
Inside Dong’s palatial Hollywood estate: Lola has just discovered that the giant ape is missing. She goes from room to room looking for him, overrun by panic. Tex tries to calm her but she pushes him away and rushes from the house.
“Dong,” she calls, but he is already several miles out into the ocean, shrinking as he moves further and further from our view.
“Dong,” she calls, running to the water’s edge. “It’s Lola, honey.”
“He’s going home,” Tex says. “Let him go.”
A helicopter circles over Dong’s head and he swats at it as he would a large fly.
“Come back, Dong,” Lola calls. “Please come back.”
If he can hear her, he gives no indication of it, continuing determinedly on his way, a relentless figure.
A second helicopter joins the first and lets out a stream of machine-gun fire, kicking up the water around Dong.
Lola and Tex stand at the water’s edge, looking out at Dong, who is now almost imperceptible in the distance, a shadowy head above the waves.
A crowd has gathered. Concessionaires have sprung up like a plague of weeds.
A silver-gray limousine drives up. Commander Buck and the head of the studio that owns Dong’s contract get out of the car.
“Where the hell is he?” says the studio head.
A bystander, an Oriental boy about seven years old, points toward the ocean.
“He’s gone,” says Buck. “I can feel his loss as if some piece of me had gone with him. That ape brought the gift of love to this town.”
“I’m out a million bucks,” says the studio head. “That’s the last ape I ever put into pictures at your advice.”
The limousine drives off as precipitously as it had arrived.
The sun is setting. Onlookers leave in groups or one at a time, some lamenting the loss of Dong, others looking for a new thrill, anything to deflect the boredom and emptiness of their lives.
“Let’s go home,” says Tex.
Lola pushes his hand away when he tries to move her. There are tears in her eyes. “I’ll see you at the house,” she says.
It is almost completely dark now, the moon a knife slash in the gray flesh of the sky, Lola is alone on the beach. She reels with exhaustion, falls, staggers to her feet.
She is lying in the sand, weeping bitter tears.
She is sitting up, her hands covering her face, a reprise of voices in her memory. The chanting of pygmies. That ape brought the gift of love to this town.
The night is black like an ape. Lola perceives Dong coming to her in the night, her arms out, her legs apart. Whatever it is — the night, an imagined lover, a dream — it takes her by force, enters her. A groan of acceptance or pain. She takes him to her. “Dong,” she is heard to cry. The lovers thrash in the wet sand, barely illuminated by the slash of moonlight. Dong is with her; she is alone. It is being filmed by a giant camera.
The great ape has left his footprint on the imagination.
The Fields of Obscurity
His wife was the first up that morning. She looked at him asleep and said. “Oh Rocco, my sweet man, if you don’t go after what you want, you’re never going to get past first base.”
On the field, waking or sleepless, picking his nose under cover of glove, he would hear or remember it, the same touchingly useless advice.
“Okay,” he said or he said nothing.
“You don’t mean it,” she said. “If you wanted to be successful, you would be.”
“Yes,” he said. “Okay.”
He had married a thin pretty woman who kept the world from moving too quickly by having a theory for everything. “You get what you want,” she would say when he complained about not getting what he wanted, “and if you don’t get it then you don’t really want it.”
He had difficulty, which kept him from rising to the top of his profession, making contact with the low curve ball on the outside quarter of the plate.
She would not make love to him, she said, perhaps implied rather than said, unless he demonstrably wanted what he said he wanted. She had come from two generations of failed perfectionists and had no patience with anything more or less.
Her love denied him, the fast ball also tended to elude his stroke. That’s the way it was.
And when he didn’t get good wood on the fast ball, he either warmed the bench or was sent to the minor leagues for what the management called seasoning. He had had, to the point where this account begins, an up and down career. It was written about him in The Sporting News that Lawrence Rocco Kidd spent his early years toiling in the fields of obscurity.
Some days he thought, Is it that I’m not good enough? But when he was going good he was hard pressed to imagine anyone being better.
“You see,” she said, “you can hit the curve ball when you want to hit the curve ball.”
“They just didn’t get it on the outside corner today,” he said, too pleased with himself to admit his pleasure.
“You don’t want to succeed, do you? You just want to be right. That’s why you’ll never be first rate at what you do.”
He had wanted to marry a woman smarter than himself and he had, although not without occasional regret for having wanted what he had gotten.
Sometimes he thought (whenever he gave himself to thinking) that it wasn’t that she was really smarter but that her intelligence, unlike his, presented itself in words.
She occasionally went to see him play, liking the game in the abstract but considering it dull to watch. Whenever she went, she took a book with her to read or something else (like knitting if she knitted which she didn’t) so as not to be without occupation. It embarrassed her, she said, when he struck out and the fans booed and he lost his temper and flung his bat. She closed her eyes when that happened and pretended to be somewhere else.
One time, misconceiving the distance of a long fly ball, he made a leaping catch, somersaulting over backward with the ball sticking delicately like a pocket handkerchief out of the corner of his glove. The crowd stood up and screamed its admiration, almost everyone on his feet screaming and clapping and slapping each other. When he came home that night and asked her what she had thought of it she said she had been reading her book (something called The Golden Notebook) and hadn’t noticed until she heard the man in back of her mention his name. If she wasn’t going to watch, he said, he didn’t want her there not watching. It was to please her that he devised his heroics. If she wasn’t there, if he knew that she wasn’t, he would have just run back and caught the ball in its course.