“I’m gonna make sure there isn’t something in here I should know about. What’s this?”
“Herbal Essence Shampoo.”
“What about this crap?”
“It’s for dry-skin relief. It’s by Revlon.”
“This is the biggest bottle of Excedrin I’ve ever seen. What’s this?”
“Silverfrost. It’s an eye shadow. Also by Revlon. That little box? That’s Aziza two-tone luster shadow.”
“What about this?”
“Supernails.”
Chino pulls out an eyelash curler and tries it on himself. Donna is crying, but she thinks he’s cute. Then a green jar. His face is a question mark.
Donna says, “That’s analgesic balm, for small injuries.”
“Let me ask you something, Miss Whore. Why don’t you take your repair kit and get the fuck out of my life?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Then bring me Marianne’s boyfriend. Get him drunk first. Otherwise you’re too ugly to get the job done.”
The condo in the gloaming: long blades of bayside light penetrate the cloud-high dwelling. Marianne is in her room with her new friend, who, dressed for the street, turns shining African eyes on getting it while she can. Marianne is dressed in silk pajamas, part of the basic issue, suggesting a youthful housewife caught in an unsavory trap. Thanks to La Costa, she’s confident she can do a walk-through, keeping her mind’s eye on a better day. Meanwhile, she’s trying to explain Bobby. She says he must have caught her at the right time. She thinks maybe she fell in love with him or, as so many young women say, “I thought so at the time.” “Sometimes,” says Marianne, “you find yourself counting how long you’ve been away from home and sometimes you know you’ll never get there again.”
The door bangs open: Chino.
“You want to head out, La Costa? Marianne’s got a visitor.” La Costa makes a little comic rotary wave and leaves. Then Chino leaves, somewhat in La Costa’s wake, and the door is closed like the shutter of a stalled-out camera. When it blinks open again a huge wavering figure appears and closes the door. This is an enormous man. His tiny briefs are lost in the declivity of flesh that is the last fold of his belly. He’s about fifty and has the ponderous face of an oaf and the baleful gazing eyes we associate with martyrs whose stories have been lost.
“Do you like me?” he wants to know. His ring finger hooks the corner of his minute briefs. Desperately, Marianne recalls the buffalo paddock, the fog, the lost, adventurous dreaming of long ago. It was coming at her.
Chino and La Costa are watching a Western on TV.
Chino says, “Guy in there with Marianne?”
“Yeah?”
“He designs golf courses.”
“Is that so.”
“His wife’s a concert pianist, but he made her quit.”
“What’s he gonna make Marianne do?”
“No telling.”
La Costa is staring at the television. “Is that Montgomery Clift?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think he’s about to kick John Wayne’s butt. Don’t he just move his eyes cute, though?”
The golf-course designer appears in a blue suit.
“Highly overrated,” he says.
Chino stares, at a loss for words.
“And this pitch about resistance? I’m glad it’s on your phone bill. I’ll tell you what she is: she’s a whore. I saw through her in a minute. She’s simply a prostitute like Mandy there. Don’t call me again. I can do better at the Masters in Augusta.”
Chino is abashed. This topflight professional has made him feel like a crumbum. Then he’s mad. He’s infected with anger. It’s like some incoherent mind scabies crying for a final scratch. He makes no remark as the golf-course designer shoves open the door and leaves.
Dusty and battered after a long fight, Montgomery Clift and John Wayne are casting glances of new-won respect at each other. There’s a big free sky behind them as well as admiring townspeople to watch them become friends.
Chino stares at the screen, trying to get his bearings.
In the kitchen in Presidio Heights, Jane, pressing out little silhouette men on a buttered cookie sheet, has to dust her hands to answer the door. It is Donna, and she tells Jane how to find Marianne.
La Costa makes up Marianne’s eyes and powders her golden cheeks with a sable brush. Neither of them says a word.
Bobby comes in from the Palace of the Legion of Honor, where he saw a documentary about the end of the elephants. “They had these fabulous aerial photographs of elephants in their death throes. Then there was this terrific shot of an enormous bull who had died long ago, and all he was was like this terrible emblem on the desert floor.”
Jane replies, “You can find Marianne any night after nine in the Room of the Dons at the Mark Hopkins. She’s a whore.” Then Jane says to Bobby, “Stay with me.”
Bobby says, “Stay with you? Without your cross-referenced street guide, I wouldn’t have been with you in the first place.”
The Room of the Dons is a dark, paneled room. Marianne sits at the bar against the backdrop of paintings that depict the mythical Amazons of an imaginary California. Bobby sits next to her and rests his head on her shoulder. He holds her arm in both of his hands.
“Oh, my baby.”
“Hello, Bobby.”
“Has it been awful?”
“No.”
“Can we go?”
“We need a room.”
“Can we go home?” says Bobby.
“I’ve got a place.”
Once they’re inside Marianne’s room in the condominum, Bobby turns his eyes toward her in terrified suspension. He walks to the window and its pricey vista.
“Am I going to have to pay?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Then I think you’re trapped.”
“No, you are,” she says.
Bobby hands her his wallet. “I don’t want to hear the numbers. Take out how much it is.”
Marianne peels the bills into her purse and gives Bobby his wallet back.
“Shall I undress you?” she asks.
“Did you take out for that?”
“I took out for everything,” she says slowly. And for once in Bobby’s life pure desire pours through him like flame. For once.
Having quietly let himself in, Chino waits his turn in the front room. But, as with Bobby, nothing happens quite as he has foreseen it. Because Marianne’s door bursts open and Bobby flings himself into the hallway, a knife plunged in the base of his neck, jetting fatal quantities of blood on everything. Bobby clambers down the hallway toward Chino like a bride in a dream, smearing the walls as he goes, reaching, reaching toward the only man in the place.
The bloody bed is repeatedly ignited by flashbulbs. The officer turns to the press for a moment of candor. The people have to know. A stretcher passes covered with a sheet, the anonymous contents of which constitute a valediction to every long walk off every short pier in America.
The officer says, “We have no clues. Okay? You can see he was well off. He has no record of employment. Y’with me so far? Perhaps he was living on a trust fund. Since we don’t know what was here, we don’t know what was stolen. I think there’s a very real chance that, as a man of independent means, he kept too many valuables around. Okay? Such men are very relaxed about their possessions. You could pick the lock; you could buy the doorman. There’s more than one way to skin a cat. But this much is certain: I cannot offer any encouragement that your readers will ever hear the end of this story.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Thomas McGuane is the author of several highly acclaimed novels, including The Sporting Club; The Bushwhacked Piano, which won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters;