The intrusion of politics on friendship shivered Eitel’s mood again. “Don’t you think I’ve sold enough of myself for one night?” he said coldly.
“Sold what? Eitel, in my book you’re still an infant prodigy. You don’t begin to know what’s in my mind. I know I’m very drunk, but do think of this: H.T. is not going to be in control of the studio forever.” Collie gave the sentence in a whisper which vibrated through the room. “We could make an interesting team, you and me. You’re one of the few directors who was never a cheap operator. And I worship real class, Charley. If I had top say in the studio, I can assure you that within reason I would let you make the kind of pictures you want to make.” His voice trailed off as if he regretted the timing of the proposition.
“Collie, we could have made a team.” Eitel admitted, and then shook his head in a small imperative motion as if to destroy the possibility forever. “But you did too many unpleasant things to too many pictures I cared about for me to forget so quickly.” A forgotten hatred came back to his voice. “And the worst of it was that you weren’t even right as a businessman so much of the time. They’re just beginning to find some of the nuances I wanted to do five years ago.”
“Stop living in the past!” Munshin looked at him levelly. “Brother, can’t you believe that maybe I want to change, too?”
Eitel gave the lonely smile of a man who has ceased to believe in the honesty of others. “You know,” he said, “it’s not the sentiments of men which make history, but their actions.”
Munshin looked at his watch, and got out of his chair. “All right,” he said, “since that’s the way you think, I’ll give you evidence of good faith. Forget the two thousand dollars I’m supposed to pay you on finishing the script. You can have it tomorrow. I’ll send it over by messenger.”
Eitel stared coldly at him as if he were a monster after all. “Still playing with pennies, aren’t you, Collie?”
The fatigue of a twenty-hour working day came into Munshin’s voice. “Eitel, you’re quite a man with the needle,” he said, swaying a little on his feet. “Because you’re right. I do think in pennies. But, you see, one thing Elena and I have in common is that my folks ran a candy store too. A crummy one with a numbers man to come around for the daily collections. It does things to the shape of your character that a café-society toff like Charles Francis Eitel could never begin to understand.”
“Sometime I’ll tell you about me,” Eitel said almost gently.
“Sometime. I hope so, Charley.” They shook hands formally. “Let me send that messenger in the morning. As a favor to me.” Munshin sighed with considerable force and liberty. “What a night this has been!”
Eitel was in a good mood when he went to sleep and he awakened in the same good mood. His sleep had left him in a state of well-being. His stomach, which was usually sensitive until late in the afternoon, accepted his breakfast and coffee with appetite. His satisfaction lasted until the moment he realized he would have to tell Elena that the script was no longer his own.
She was upset, and all the while he was explaining that working for Collie meant nothing, it was merely that he needed time and money was time, he knew that last night, far at the back of his thoughts, he had been dreading to tell her. “Nothing is changed really, darling,” he said. “I mean this script I do for Collie will be so different from my own that I’ll be able to do the other one later.”
She looked gloomy. “I didn’t know you were close to being broke.”
“Very close,” he said.
“Couldn’t you have sold your car?” she asked.
“Is that a solution?”
“I just hope you didn’t give up too soon.” Elena sighed. “I don’t know about these things. Maybe you’re right.” She was convincing herself even as she spoke, and all the time he knew that she did not believe him; at bottom nothing fooled her. “I’m sure the new one will be good,” she said, but she was silent all day.
The work on Munshin’s script went smoothly. Years ago, Eitel had defined a commercial writer as a man who could produce three pages in an hour on any subject assigned. That was the way it went with the new masterpiece. There were hitches, there were delays, there were mornings when he could not start, but over the whole, what amazed him, annoyed him, and pleased him, was how easy the writing had become. Where he had written scenes many times only to decide that the latest version was worse than the previous failure, now ideas flowed, sections fit together, and walls of plot grew to support one another. Eitel knew nothing about the Church, and yet Freddie’s scenes in the seminary were good, they were commercially good, they boiled with movie ingredients. What did one have to know about the Church? There was a fine wit to the old priest, and Freddie was properly arrogant. One could rely on the stenographic code of the film which would say: Here is a heel, but it is a Teddy Pope heel, and regeneration is on the way.
Eitel began to enjoy himself by the time he started writing about Freddie’s success on the program. To the sugar of the seminary Eitel added the vinegar of television, and knew as he worked that the scenes which came later could not fail. A little syrup, a little acid, and lots of heart. These were the cupcakes which won Hercules awards, and it was fine to be working again with cynical speed.
Munshin would telephone almost daily from the capital. “How is Freddie coming?” he would ask.
“Freddie’s fine. He’s really alive,” Eitel would say, and think that no problems about character could exist any longer; Freddie was now an actor, any actor with a skier’s body, a sun-tanned face, and cartloads of heart.
“How’s Elena?” Munshin would ask, and answer himself by saying, “That’s great, that’s great,” even as Eitel was muttering, “She’s fine, thank you, she says to send a kiss.”
Only that was hardly true. If Eitel was in good spirits these days, Elena was not, and her depression wore against his optimism. For the first time since he had been living with Elena he found himself repeating the emotions of many old affairs. The time had come to decide how he would break up with her. This was always delicate, but with Elena he would have to be more than subtle. No matter how he might dislike her these days for her sullenness, her vulgarity, her love itself, he was always aware that it was his fault. He had begun the affair, he had insisted on it, and so he ought to hurt her as little as possible. At the same time he did not want to end it immediately; that would be too disturbing to his work. The proper time was in a month, two months, whenever he was finished; and in the meantime, adroitly, like fighting big fish on slender tackle, he must slowly exhaust her love, depress her hope, and make the end as painless as the blow of the club on the fatigued fish-brain. “My one hundred and fourteen pound sailfish,” Eitel would think, and what a match she gave him. He was cool as any good fisherman, “I’m the coolest man I know,” he would think, and with confidence, aloofness, and professional disinterest he maneuvered Elena, he brought her closer to the boat. There was always the danger she would slip the hook before he pulled her in, and so the battle was wearying. He could not let her realize how his attitude had changed; she would force a fight which would go too far; that was her pride; she would not stay a moment once she knew he did not love her, and he had to struggle with temptation not to reel in line too fast, too soon.
He had wrapped his work about him and it gave the distance he needed, the coldness, the lack of shame. He would be far away from her, he would eat a meal without speaking, his eyes on a book, he would sense how despair swelled in her, fatiguing love, fatiguing spirit, and at the moment when he would feel that she could stand it no longer, “We can’t go on like this” about to burst from her mouth, he would confuse her completely.
“I love you, darling,” he would say out of a silence and kiss her, and know her bewilderment had seated the hook more firmly.
“I was just thinking you were sick of me,” Elena would answer, uncertain tears in her eyes.
The hook had to be seated over and over; she had resources for such
a struggle; he would be amazed at times how she read his mind, the two of them sitting over a drink, chatting about nothing while his thoughts were working on the problem of being free. He might even be telling her how pretty she looked that evening, and the child’s eyes would stare back at him, the open green eyes, and she would say, “Charley, you want out, don’t you?”
“What gives you these ideas?” he would say, pretending to be angry, fighting the single word “Yes!” which twitched at his nerves, so much did he want to say it. But that would be fatal, for however it ended the damage would be too great. Either she would leave him and he would be unable to work just when he had found his rhythm; or what was worse, the calculating numbness he had been at such ends to cultivate in himself would disappear and he would be open to her pain, there would seem nothing more terrible in all the world than that she should suffer, and so the fish would be free, it would be no longer a fish, it would be Elena, and he would have to start all over again. So he must be patient, he must be cold, and all the while he must act, manufacturing warmth he did not feel.
He had come to the conclusion that to be able to end this affair, he must understand it first. Why should a second-rate man spend so much time on a fifth-rate woman? It was not logical. Second-rate men sought out second-rate women; the summits of society were inhabited by such people, and why had he deserted his caste? But he knew the answer or thought he did; there was always Faye’s mocking presence, and the words he had said a week ago, “You’re scared, Charley, you’re really scared.” Was it true? In the last two years he had performed badly with many women. Those were the laws of sex; borrow technique in place of desire, and sex like life would demand the debt be paid just when one was getting too old to afford such a bill. If he had clung to the Rumanian, he was chained to Elena. Could the fishing contest be another joke he played on himself, and would he never let her go, not so long as his delicate manhood depended on her? He had come to resent the attraction of their love-making. The confusion these days was that often he enjoyed her as much as ever, and in his sleep, he would sometimes be aware that he was holding her and whispering love-words to her ear.
In the past his pleasure had been created by the situation; a rendezvous with a woman in a hotel room had more charm than to take her to his home. Now, his life seemed stripped of interest. The inevitable progress of a love affair, Eitel thought. One began with the notion that life had found its flavor, and ended with the familiar distaste of no adventure and no novelty. It was one of the paradoxes he had cherished. The unspoken purpose of freedom was to find love, yet when love was found one could only desire freedom again. So it was. He had always seen it as a search. One went on, one passed from affair to affair, some good, some not, and each provided in its own way a promise of what could finally be found. How sad to finish the journey and discover that one was unchanged, that indeed one was worse; still another illusion was lost. He had merely succeeded in spoiling the memory of his old affairs. Elena stimulated his perception of what it meant for a woman to desire a man, and with his vulnerability to being found unattractive, he wondered how he could make love now to someone else. It was true; he was frightened; and he brooded for such comforts as the blessing of living alone. He had come to desire an affair with a woman for whom he cared nothing, an affair simply exciting, exciting as the pages of a pornographic text where one could read in safety and not grudge every emotion the woman felt for another man. It was the only sort of affair for which he was suited, he told himself, and instead he was locked in Elena’s love. He could not even manage to have some trivial affair, for he had neither time enough nor money and Elena could never be deceived three times a week. It was true, Eitel would think, marriage and infidelity were wed, and one could not exist without the other. Many nights he sat in the living room with Elena and felt if he did not quit her for an hour, he would leave her forever.
The visits of Marion Faye made these feelings more intense. Eitel tried to say to Marion, “But she loves me. Don’t you understand why I feel responsible?”
“She doesn’t love you,” Faye said. “She wouldn’t know what to do if she didn’t think she was in love with somebody.”
“You give her no credit,” Eitel insisted, but something turned in him. How loathesome was the thought that she didn’t love him.
“When a man gets older,” Faye said, “there comes a time when he can be a sport with only one woman.” He smiled. “For instance my stepfather, Mr. Pelley.”
“Maybe one of these days I’ll ask you for a girl,” Eitel heard himself say.
“What’s the matter? You getting tired of the circus?” Faye said, and Eitel could imagine what Elena’s night with Marion must have been. “Let’s make it for this evening,” he said.
“What will you tell Elena?”
“I’ll tell her something,” Eitel snapped, and his date with Bobby was arranged.
He told Elena that Collie wanted him for a conference on the script and that they were going to meet in a town midway between the capital and Desert D’Or. That was easy enough. For one night almost any excuse would do, and the arrangements made with Marion, he drove out to the bar where Jay-Jay was waiting for him, trying not to think about Elena alone in the house. She hated to be alone, starting at noises, oppressed by the silence of the desert, careful to lock all the doors and windows.
Jay-Jay was drunk already. He was crazy about Bobby, he told Eitel, she was a good little girl. She had registered already in a hotel room and would be waiting for them. So they went off together, Jay-Jay stopping long enough to buy a bottle, and then they went on to meet her. As luck would take it, the hotel where Bobby had rented a room was the one in which Elena had waited for Collie, and with the sour bite of memory Eitel was forced to think of the morning he had come here to pick up her clothing.
As soon as he was introduced to Bobby, he was convinced it was a mistake. If he had a type, Bobby was certainly not it; her eyes seemed to say, “I wish we didn’t have to meet under such circumstances.” This would be another of Faye’s jokes.
The three of them sat around in the hotel room, Jay-Jay passing the bottle while they dipped into a melting bowl of ice cubes. Bobby was shy. She would keep her head turned to Jay-Jay, talking to him about friends Eitel did not know, saying Larry had lost a roll at poker dice, and Barbara was pregnant again, and Dan was marrying a bar girl in the capital, and Lillian had her band organized but no good contracts, and on it went; Eugene was doing female impersonations and Renee had another crush. Eitel listened, watching Jay-Jay with amusement, for Jay-Jay was so warm, he liked Bobby so much, he would cluck his tongue at other people’s troubles and give Bobby passing compliments. “You’re the loveliest, sweetie,” Jay-Jay said, and Bobby smiled. “I adore this man,” she told Eitel.
“It’s a romance,” Jay-Jay said and looked at his watch. He would have to be moving on, he told them. Eitel knew where; in the course of an evening Jay-Jay might arrange three or four introductions for Marion. As he was about to leave the room, he motioned to Eitel. “Sweetie, you got to excuse us,” he said, “Charley’s promised me a tip on a horse.”
“If it’s a good bet, let me in,” Bobby chimed, and Eitel smiled. “Jay-Jay and I only bet losers,” he said.
In the hotel corridor, Jay-Jay swayed slightly. “Charley,” he muttered, “she’s a good kid, she’s all right, Bobby. Only I ought to tell you, she’s kind of cold, can’t help it, one of those. But you don’t have to worry cause she’ll do anything you want.” In a quick resumé, Jay-Jay explained exactly what was “anything.” Eitel listened with distaste. “Poor Jay-Jay, he’s worse than me,” Eitel thought, and gave him a farewell tap on the shoulder.
Back in the room Bobby continued to chat in her bright little voice. “Jay-Jay’s a wonderful person,” she said to Eitel. “Do you know anyone nicer?”
“Hard to say,” said Eitel.
“When I get the blues he’s always very kind and considerate. Sometimes I wouldn’t know what to do wit
hout him.”
“Do you have the blues often?”
“Well, the last couple of months have been very hard. You see, I just got divorced a little while ago.”
“And you miss your husband?”
“It isn’t that. He was hard to take. But I don’t care how old-fashioned this sounds, you need a man in the house, don’t you think so?”
They had to get out of the hotel room, Eitel thought; it was stifling to remain here. “I’ve seen you somewhere before, haven’t I?” he said, as he had said once to Elena.
Bobby nodded. “You did, Mr. Eitel.”
“Recently?”
“Well, maybe it was two years ago. You see, I was an actress. I still am, of course. I think I’m good, really I do, people have said I have talent, but you know, no pull.” She sighed. “Anyway, my husband knew a producer who owed him a favor, and so I was able to get an extra card. Once I was an extra in a crowd scene in one of your pictures.”
“Which one?” he asked.
“Flood on the River.”
“Oh, that,” Eitel said.
“No, Mr. Eitel, really I think it was a wonderful picture. You’re a wonderful director.” She looked carefully at him, and then said with energy, “I’m so happy to meet you at last.”
She had a personality which was interchangeable with a thousand other actresses. It was obvious she had been taught that an actress must use her personality, and so she was forever using it, forcing her wan face and soft voice into artificial enthusiasm, artificial disgust, artificial gaiety.
“You enjoyed working with me?” he offered.
“It was an awful day for me,” Bobby said despondently.
“Why?”
The Deer Park: A Play Page 21