She was priceless, thought Eitel. “Couldn’t put it better myself,” he said lightly.
“I don’t really hate Collie,” she added, “I’m just ashamed.”
“Why?”
“Because …” Her nervous fingers tore cuticle from her nail. He would have to correct that habit, Eitel was thinking.
“Because you know you’re better than he is,” Eitel said with a smile.
“Well, I don’t know.” An impish look peeped out of her green eyes. “I guess it’s what I do mean,” she said, and laughed again.
“You’re wonderful,” Eitel said.
“I’m having such a terrible time today,” Elena smiled.
That night was like the night before, even better perhaps, for he had been wanting her all day, and besides he found her more likable. Once again he could marvel at Elena. She had the lusts of a bored countess, and what had he been looking for so long, if not for that? The doubt whether they could repeat themselves or had only enjoyed an accident, was now answered for him. “It’s never been like this,” she said to him, and when he nodded, she shook herself with wonder. “Something has happened to me.” Nestling closer she whispered, scratching a first pinprick of jealousy in him, “I was almost always acting with other men.”
It had happened before. He had had women who gave him their first honest pleasure, and he had taken all the bows for his vanity, but he had never met so royal a flow of taste. It was remarkable how they knew each other’s nicety between love-making and extravagance. It had always been his outstanding gift, or so he felt, to be able to know a woman, and he had the certainty at little instants that he could discover every sympathetic nerve. “The onanist at heart,” he had thought, and made love to a woman with care enough to have made love to himself. But Elena carried him to mark above mark. Her face was alive, she was alive, he had never been with anyone who understood him so well. The balance was perfect, without any bother that too little had been done or relatively too much.
Eitel fell into a deep sleep. Like most cynics he was profoundly sentimental about sex. It was his dream of bounty, and it nourished him enough to wake up with the hope that this affair could return his energy, flesh his courage, and make him the man he had once believed himself to be. With Elena beside him he thought for the first time in many years that the best thing in the world for him was to make a great movie.
Down one could go, very far down, but there was a bottom. Himself, wasted beyond wasting, and this girl he knew hardly at all. Together each of them would make something of the other. He felt full of tenderness for Elena. She was adorable. Her back was exquisite. “Wake up, little monkey,” he whispered to her ear.
Through the day he toyed with the thought that she should come to live with him. He was far too careful to give her such an idea before he was certain of it. But time passed well. They were now in the stage of talking about past affairs, a subject which always drew Eitel. He found that Elena not only loved to gossip, but was moved by the mention of complications.
“Do you know what I mean by a sandwich?” she asked.
He did. She insisted he give the details and listened like a child to a fairy tale, hugging herself while he told the story. “Maybe we can do something like that,” she offered.
“Maybe.”
“Oh, what a crazy conversation.” But she was a greedy rabbit for more carrots. Her heart-shaped face dimpled with interest, she wanted to know if he had ever been to a ball.
“I’ve more or less stayed away from that,” Eitel said. He went on, however, to tell her that he knew people in Desert D’Or with whom it was possible. Was she interested?
She was interested. They must do it sometime. “I’ve been, you know, sometimes with women,” Elena confided. “And once …” It seemed she also had stories. She was vague about it. “Collie wanted to kill me when I told him. He found that one hard to forgive.”
“You little demon. You did it just so you could tell him.”
“Well, he had to pry it out of me.” She giggled. “I’m awful.”
“I’m wondering how you would describe me,” Eitel said.
“I wouldn’t talk about you,” she said. “Never. I couldn’t.” He looked away, but the question came. “Why?” she asked, “would you talk about me?”
“No, of course not,” Eitel told her. “Absolutely fantastic,” he could hear himself saying, “the best woman I ever had.” He slapped her bottom. “You’re a funny monkey.” Before he realized it, his voice said, “And who do you love now?”
“You,” she said, and then looked away. “No, I don’t. I don’t love anybody at all.”
“You feel on your own?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a good way to feel.” With hardly a pause he went on to tell a new story. Cozily the day went by, and only at its end did they begin to talk about what she would do. Elena still insisted she would go back to the capital tomorrow, and Eitel said he would not let her. At the end of an hour of such argument, he said in full enthusiasm, “Let’s live together.”
To his surprise she seemed more troubled than pleased. “I don’t think so,” she said quietly.
“Why?”
She tried to give her arguments. “I’ve been with one man for so long …”
“Not really,” Eitel interrupted.
“Well, now I’m free of Collie, and I don’t want to start … that is, not yet. I want to see if I can live by myself.”
“You’re not giving the real reason.”
“Yes, I am,” she said, and looked at him. “Besides it wouldn’t work with you.”
“Why not try?”
Elena became agitated. “Sure, why not try? What can you lose?”
Annoyed, he was about to say “What can you lose?” but he kept silent.
They settled on a compromise. Elena would stay in Desert D’Or and they would see each other when they felt like it, even every day if so it worked out.
“You can do what you want,” Elena said, “and I’ll do what I want.”
“Perfect,” Eitel said. “If you need a loan of any money …”
“I’ve got enough to get on by myself for a while,” she said modestly.
It was really better than he could have expected. To have her, and to have his privacy too. She was wise, he thought, she knew how not to spoil things. Eitel insisted on paying a week in advance for her room, and that night he saw Elena to the hotel and slept alone. The moment she was gone he knew he had been looking forward to this. There came a time in every affair when he wished to be by himself; fortunate she had the sense to understand this.
Eitel fell asleep thinking how easily sleep came now. But in three hours he was awake, and could not close his eyes again. The long wait from early morning to the dawn brought all of his life back before him, until no one had ever seemed quite so useless to him as himself. The smell of Elena’s body clung to him still, somehow was penetrated into the cave of his throat. The tension of his nerves became acute; his limbs might have been on a rack. It was too late for a sleeping pill, and in this condition he would need several. Eitel got out of bed and began to drink. But it did little good, no more than to keep him from feeling worse.
He found that he was juggling with the idea of callings Elena to come to his house. The thought of having her with him was more than pleasant; it seemed a necessity; he did not want to wait by himself for the dawn. So he picked up the phone, dialed the number of her hotel, and asked the desk to ring her room. There was a long ten seconds in which she did not answer, time enough for him to learn by the pressure on his heart of what a crisis it would be if she were out at this hour. Then she answered. He could not be certain but he had the feeling Elena was pretending drowsiness.
“Oh, darling,” she said, “is something the matter?”
“Nothing.” He cleared his throat. “It’s just that I want to hear your voice.”
Her answer came softly back at him. “But, Charley, at this hour?”
&
nbsp; Eitel lit a cigarette, and made his voice casual. “Listen, you wouldn’t want to come over here now, would you?”
She did not answer right away. “Honey, I’m tired,” Elena finally murmured.
“Oh, well, forget it.”
“You’re not angry?”
“Of course not,” Eitel said.
“I’m so sleepy.”
“I shouldn’t have called. You go back to bed.”
“I missed you tonight,” Elena said. “But it’ll be nice tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” he repeated, “I missed you too,” and sat looking at the phone. Somehow, he could not rid himself of the idea there had been a man in her room.
To his amazement, Eitel discovered that he was jealous, he was jealous of Elena. It had been so many years since he felt jealousy that the emotion was interesting, indeed any kind of emotion was interesting. Nonetheless, he began to feel some fine tortures. The thought of Elena giving her sounds of pleasure to someone else crawled on his flesh.
Eitel fought one of those heroic battles of the night which leave not a single corpse in the morning; a dozen times he reached out his hand to the phone and then drew it back. By the insight of jealousy, the radical tool of the emotions, Eitel worked into the honest earth of all those giggling anecdotes she had told, so he had no more than to think of a man she had mentioned, and her chance comment, “Boy, was I drunk,” to dig into the center of how she had given herself, acting he knew, bleating, crying, purring, all of it alone and drink-inspired, his imaginative eye gouged by the chisel of jealousy—these orgiastic pictures were arousing him as well. The man she had been with, trust that man not to have known she was acting, and off on an exploration by herself, and so that man would boast afterward of just what she had said and what she had done. It was too much for Eitel. If he had listened in the past to confessions by other mistresses and seen it as a closed rehearsal of the comic and the entertaining, the scurry beneath the stone, he could by now have murdered every one of the men Elena had known. They did not appreciate her and that was their crime; they did not appreciate her any more than she could appreciate herself—like all jealous lovers Eitel thought Elena took scandalous care of his property. She was only what he could make of her, and if he were jealous of her past it was because what she had done before could be understood only as something she was doing now. Those words she might once have whispered to some other man lived now only to deny the fire of what she whispered to him. Like an ice pick to the breast, he heard his own words about her. “When Collie’s not around, his little kitten will go for a romp. A couple of actors who’ve worked for me have been with her. They tell me she’s extraordinary in bed.” He could have wrung her throat because she had not waited for him; why hadn’t she known she did not need to act for he would come to join her. Gone was the close reason which said that you got on a roller coaster in order to feel. He considered it a crime she had ever enjoyed even a moment with some other man.
The next few days were unbearable. He spent his time waiting for Elena to arrive, and when she came to his house, he would take her with a hurry he had believed gone forever. When she was absent he would drink, he would sit at the Yacht Club, he would go for a drive, he would pass her hotel, he would circle the town in order to pass her hotel again. When I visited him for the first time since the party, he was pent with energy. In an hour he told me one story after another, acting all the parts and creating person after person by no more than a move of his hands. I had put off seeing him, I had been slow after all to tell what happened with Lulu, afraid it might hurt our friendship, but he shook with laughter when I confessed the fact, congratulated me, gasped, “I knew it would happen. By God, I knew it would happen.”
“But how?”
“Oh, you know, I set something off in her. I had the idea, I just had it that now she was ready for a rough-and-ready with a gentleman sword.”
“A gentleman sword? Why I have a gutter psychology,” I said. But I was pleased. “Tell me,” I added casually, “what is Lulu like?”
Unable to sit still, he sprang to his feet and paced about. “Oh, no! Oh, no! You don’t think I’m a Collie Munshin, do you? Discover her for yourself.” And then he did the unexpected thing of slapping me powerfully on the back. “How we’re to be pitied,” he cried theatrically.
At the end of a week, just when he was thinking his jealousy was wrong, or to describe it right, just at that time when his jealousy had begun to ebb and he kept it alive for the pleasure of watching the pain, believing he could end it on notice, Eitel learned that Elena had been unfaithful to him.
She came into his bungalow quietly, she kissed him absent-mindedly, she was sweet and a little distant. “I met an old friend of mine today,” she said after a while, “somebody who knows you, too.” When he did not answer, his heart beginning to pound, Elena said, “It was Marion Faye.”
“Marion Faye. How do you know him?”
“Oh, I knew him years ago.”
“He’s an old friend of yours?” Until now, Eitel had managed to hide his jealousy, but the effort was going to be too much. “Tell me,” he said, “were you shopping for prices?”
Her eyes were wary. “What are you talking about?”
“Marion Faye is a pimp.”
“I didn’t know that. Honest I didn’t.” Elena’s face became expressionless. “Oh, my God. He’s just an old boy friend.”
“And now he’s a new boy friend?”
“No.”
“You just talked to him?”
“Well, a little more than that.”
“You mean a lot more than that?”
“Yes.”
Eitel felt gleeful. If his knees were numb, his tongue was sharp. “Obviously, I haven’t been enough for you.”
“How you talk.”
“Still, you had something left in reserve.”
“No. I wouldn’t say that.”
“Just threw a party for Auld Lang Syne?”
“You’re enjoying this,” Elena said, “you’re making fun of me.”
“Forgive me for hurting you.” He restrained a desire to clap his hand to his forehead. “Elena!” he exclaimed, “why did you do it?”
Her face took on defiance. “I felt like it. I was curious.”
“You’re always curious, aren’t you?”
“I wanted to see …” She stopped.
“I know. You don’t have to tell me. I’m an expert on female psychology.”
“You must be an expert on everything,” Elena said. She stopped and began again. “I didn’t know, and I wanted to find out if …”
“If this blossoming of the flesh was something you could cultivate only with me, or whether any old lad would do. Is that it?” From far away, Eitel was offended by the way he was speaking.
“Something like that.”
“Something like that! I’ll kill you,” he roared hopelessly.
“I had to find out,” Elena muttered.
“What did you find out?”
“That’s what I wanted to tell you. I felt like a statue with him.”
“Only you didn’t act like a statue with him.”
“Well … I thought of you all the time.”
“You’re a pig,” he said to her.
“I’ll go if you want me to go,” she said stiffly.
“Stay here!”
“I think we’d better quit now, you and me,” Elena said. “I’ll pay you for my hotel room … I’ll owe it to you.”
“And where will you get the money? From Faye?”
“Well, I didn’t think of asking him,” she said, “but now that you mention it …”
To his surprise, Eitel began to shake her. Elena started to cry, and he released her and walked away. His body ached.
“You don’t care about me,” she said. “You don’t really care. Just your pride is hurt.”
He tried to calm himself. “Elena, why did you do it?”
“You think I’m stupid. Well, maybe I a
m stupid. There’s nothing interesting I can tell you. I’m just a game for you.” Her weeping increased. “You’re too intelligent for me. All right.”
“What has this got to do with it? I think you’re smart. I’ve told you.”
Again she was defiant. Her little heart-shaped face tried to show indifference. “When a woman’s unfaithful, she’s more attractive to a man.”
“Stop reciting your lessons,” Eitel shouted. In a kind of frenzy, he caught her to him. “You idiot!”
“It’s true. It is true. It’s not lessons. I know.” The pain in her face was momentarily real to him. She was right. If her flesh were tainted, she had never seemed more pure to him, nor ever so attractive. “You idiot,” he repeated, “don’t you understand? I think I love you.” From the paralyzed center of his mind came the thought, “You’re in the soup now, friend.”
“You don’t love me,” she said.
“I love you,” he amended.
Elena began to weep again. “I worship you,” she sobbed. “Nobody ever treated me the way you do.” She was kissing his hands. “I love you more than I ever loved anyone,” she said with final abandon.
So their affair really began, and Elena consented to live with him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IN THE FIRST WEEKS of living together, Elena’s eyes never left Eitel’s face; her mood was the clue to his temper; if she was gay it meant he was happy; if Eitel was moody, it left her morose. No one else existed for her. I do not like to put things so strongly, but I believe it is the truth.
From what Eitel had been able to learn of Elena’s life—she was always vague about the details—he found out that her parents owned a candy store in the center of the capital, and their marriage had been miserable, her father an ex-jockey with a broken leg, a vain little man, a bully; the mother a petty shrew, a calculator, another bully. She had coddled Elena and scolded her, made much of her and ignored her, given her ambitions and chased them away. The father, cheated of his horses, ridden with five children, had disliked her—she was the youngest and she had come much too late. There were brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, cousins, grandparents, family parties where they all got together and fist fights started. The father was good-looking, he was a dandy, he could not be alone with a woman without trying to make love to her, but he was also moral, he told others how to live. Her mother was a flirt, she was greedy, she was jealous; she was sick that life had left her in a candy store.
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