Children of Light

by Robert Stone

  She went to him and touched his cheek. “To each his doctor,” she declared. “This is mine.” She felt him fighting off tears; somehow he always succeeded. She herself had begun to cry.

  Wise as he was, he could not cure her. A part of her rejoiced in that as freedom; the part, she had no doubt, that was mad, bad and dangerous to know. It rejoiced in refuge from his mastery, his shrewdness and compassion. There was a wood through which he could not pursue her with healing arrows and a dark tower of retreat.

  “So,” he said after a moment, “I’m supposed to leave in the middle of a picture while you go off your medication. What happens then?”

  “I’ll hassle it.”

  “Will you indeed?”

  “Lionel,” she told him, “it’s like trying to work behind any drug—grass, Valium, cocaine. You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what you’re like.” His heavy-browed stare did not seem unsympathetic. “I mean,” she went on, “I can’t use my eyes. I feel like a droid. It might be neat for having tea with Alan Cranston, but as for work—well, why hire me? They could have anyone. Plenty of people can give a lousy performance without the use of drugs.”

  “I see your point,” he said impatiently.

  “What about tardive dyskinesia? Have we talked about that?”

  “Lu,” Lionel said, “don’t worry about tardive fucking dyskinesia.

  Worry about flipping out. Worry about a second Vancouver.” He stood up and paced the bungalow. “I mean, actual straitjackets, right? Actual padded cells. Want to try it Mexican style?”

  “I want to stop,” she said wearily. “I want to go to work like a normal human actress. I would like to try a little cautious experiment along the lines of … trying to do without it … for a little while.”

  “I can’t let you do it while I’m away,” Lionel said. “The risks are too high. We’re away from home. You could have a very bad experience.”

  He sat down on the bed beside her. She took his hand and looked into his eyes.

  “We always agreed that a time would come when I would have to try it alone,” she told him. She swallowed and licked her lips, mannerisms she had drilled away, never to be used except intentionally, in character. Well, she thought, I am acting for him now. Perhaps she always was, day in, day out. Perhaps away from the shadows and the Long Friends it was all acting. There was no Lee Verger after all.

  So dreadful and frightening was the thought that she doubled her grip on his strong lean hand.

  “This is the time,” she said. “While the kids are with you. While I’m doing something that I feel so strong about. Man, I want to put my pills aside and be that woman and be me.”

  Lionel said nothing. She gripped his hand but did not look at him.

  “Trust me, love. Trust me and I’ll make you proud. It’ll be me and it’ll be beautiful.”

  Something in his continuing silence troubled her.

  “I mean,” she said, “if anything goes wrong because I’m off the pills, won’t there be warning signs?”

  She heard his dry, bitter laughter. Gently he disengaged his hand from hers, stood up and went to sit in one of the wicker rocking chairs the kids had dragged in from the porch. The chairs were props, strictly speaking, but so comfortable that everyone who could misappropriated them.

  “I’ve been seeing the warning signs all week,” Lionel said.

  “You never told me.”

  “I hoped …” he began. “I knew you’d stopped. I hoped.”

  “And were you wrong?” she demanded of him. “Were you wrong to hope?”

  He shrugged. “What do I know?” He leaned back in the rocker, his sandaled feet on the bed, his eyes closed. “I hoped.”

  She went and knelt beside his outstretched knees. He had fallen silent again; it seemed the silence held a message for her but she could not make it out.

  “It was a miracle we didn’t blow it all in Vancouver,” he said at last. “A miracle we kept it under control. They could have been reading about it in every supermarket line in America.”

  “I was mostly drunk,” Lu Anne said contritely.

  “I was there,” her husband told her. “You were drunk and off your medication.” He kept his eyes closed and wiped his brow. “That goes together with you.”

  “You have to trust me,” she said. “This is the time.”

  More silence. Then he took his legs down and stood, raising her gently beside him.

  “Do you think that your performance has improved since you stopped taking those pills?”

  She smiled. “I think that’s one of the signs you’ve seen. You’ve been going to dailies, Lionel. You know it has.”

  “Christ,” he said.

  “I don’t want to give it up,” she cried at him. “I’m on top of the world. I don’t want to take them anymore.” She turned away weeping. “And be a slave and lose my work and our sex life, a zombie. I don’t want to, Lionel.”

  “It’s true,” he said. “Your performance has changed.” His voice was soft and remote as though he were speaking to an observer or to himself. “You look different in the rushes.”

  She laughed and turned on her heel.

  “I photograph alive now! I have feelings and I can get them out there. I mean, it’s so hard with just a camera, Lionel. But I’m doing it now. Acting, it’s called. Acting and sort of acting.” She exchanged another secret smile with Rosalind in the lighted mirror. “Sometime,” she said, “you should get Blakely to show you his collection of old-time rushes. He’s got a trunk full of tests and dailies from the old times—the golden age stuff, the old-time stars. Man, if you want to see people working ripped, tranqued and wasted, get him to show you them. Like Monty Clift. The junkies and alcoholics and the controlled crazies.” She touched her breast like a penitent. “It’s fascinating, Lionel, but it’s not pretty.” She had been speaking with her back to him; when she turned around he was gone. But he had only stepped out on the veranda. The dusk had given way to starry night. They had lighted the tiki torches along the perimeter of the beach.

  Clenched-fisted, his jaw set, he stood with his back against the adobe wall.

  “I have an odd superstition,” he told his wife. “I keep thinking that one day I’ll look over my shoulder—or turn a corner—and one of those things will be there, waiting for me. One of the things you see.”

  “They have a name,” she said. “To neutralize them.”

  “Don’t say it.” He cut her off quickly. “Never utter it.”

  “All right,” she said. She looked at him and suddenly understood what the silences had meant, the quick slides from anger into resignation, from obsessive possessiveness to indifference. “Dr. Kurlander told me the same thing. To not say it out loud.”

  He was going to walk. The surgical touch that passed for tenderness, the shifting moods—that was what they meant. He was tired and he was through with her. Eight years of patient martyrdom and at last he was saving himself, looking after number one. And why not? she thought. It was failure all around, his and hers.

  A small electric lamp, styled like a gaslight, gave off a soft light beside their veranda door. The night sky was ablaze with stars. He never turned toward her as she watched him across the shadows.

  “I want you to stay in close touch with Kurlander,” Lionel told his wife. “I’m going to telephone him and he’ll be checking in with you every day. If you’re in trouble call him. You can’t afford to stop the medication altogether, you’ll crack up. But if you take one fifty every morning and one fifty at night you might keep things the way you are at the moment. Remember, you may experience a bad attack as elation.”

  “So,” she said, “if I start feeling too good I’m in trouble.”

  “You won’t feel good long. But don’t panic and go back to your regular dose.” He turned to the cream-colored wall and struck it. “No booze, no grass, no dope—sorry. When shooting ends, go straight back to your regular dose. In the future,” he said, reaching t
oward her, “who knows? They may come up with something that works as well with fewer side effects. You may stop being crazy. One of us may die.”

  “There would still be the other,” she said. “There would still be the kids.”

  “The bomb might fall.”

  “Oh, trust me, love,” she said. “Trust me and I’ll give you something beautiful.”

  Lionel smiled. “A movie.”

  “Don’t you like movies, Li?” she asked him wryly. “I tell you, babe—even if they have to take me off this set in a blanket I’m going to work.”

  He stayed braced against the wall, immobile. She stared at him, knowing he would not turn, that he was afraid of her madness. Sweet Lionel, she told him silently, I’m gonna kiss the ground behind your fading shadow. Only let me keep my children.

  “You mustn’t cry,” he said when he faced her at last.

  She wiped her face with the back of her hand.

  “Why do you stay with me?” she asked him after a while.

  “Because,” he said, “to me you are life. And I will not give up on life. It’s as simple as that.”

  For a moment she thought she must be wrong, that he would not go. Then he kissed her, lightly once and then hard on the lips, and then released her. After that she knew he was lost to her.

  That’s the way you give up on life, she thought. But you go right on living.

  “And you,” she asked him. “You’ll be all right?”

  “Oh yes,” he said.

  She nodded, knowing it was no less than the truth. He would suffer and then he would be all right. And I’ll sing your song alone, mon cher, she told him. If I can keep my children. One of the things gathered itself up in the dimness at the unlighted end of the veranda.

  There were four children, counting the dead, and she did. The little golden ones, Lionel’s perfections. Charles, the dead one, in custody of the Long Friends. A girl who looked like her and whom she hardly knew, who lived in Baton Rouge with her ex-husband, Robitaille, because Momma was crazy in California. She slid her hand down the inside of Lionel’s arm, tracing the warm silk, and held his hand, the hand of the man who was getting his courage up to leave her. They stood together for a while and Lionel said with a theatrical flourish: “Well! We may live in hope of our fashionably late dinner, eh? If we don’t starve to death first.”

  She was able to summon a polite smile.

  Lionel sniffed the perfumed air. “Think I’ll have a walk,” he said. “Conceal myself and spy out the preparations for the feast. I can’t even remember the way, it’s so long since we were asked together.”

  “It isn’t hard to find,” she told him. “It’s at the end of the left-hand path. At the top.”

  “Where else?” Lionel said, and went out into the darkness. “I mean dinner with Walter Drogue—we’ve really arrived, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Absolutely,” Lu Anne said. “Landmarks crumble, baby, but when you say dinner with Walter you’re saying all you can say. It should be on the Universal Tour.”

  She watched him set out for the path; the taste of his betraying kiss was still warm on her lips. She was getting the universal tour. As he strode out of sight she considered herself as life, its deserving stooge and representative.

  The Long Friends were gathering in the dark; she felt beyond fear or anger.

  She had done her best—she felt sure she had. Lionel had done his, a tough, resolute, truly loving man. She thought she heard little Charles crying; she raised a hand to her mouth. Everyone had done their best.

  She must not hate him; it was wrong and no good would come of it.

  Then it occurred to her that Gordon Walker must be coming down.

  Walker did not try to place the call again. He picked up his drink from beside the telephone and went back to his barstool.

  She might have been on the line, he thought. Perhaps it was only a thrill of fear she felt at the sound of his voice. Perhaps calm resolution and refusal. Perhaps someone else had picked up the phone.

  But it was Mexico, Mexican phones. As likely as not he had spoken into a dead line, into an unheeding, untroubled past. There was so much to be said, he thought, for leaving things alone.

  Beside him, the blond woman on the neighboring stool had put a cigarette to her lips, supporting it with a bridge of fore and middle finger. It seemed somehow a quaint gesture, suggestive of film noir intrigue. Walker’s hand was on the lighter in his jacket pocket, but he checked the impulse. He did not want to pick her up. And although he was curious about her, he did not feel like forcing conversation.

  He studied her in the candlelight. Not bad for the San Epo, he thought. She seemed free of the principal undesirable qualities common to pickups at the lounge, in that she was neither a prostitute nor a man in drag. She seemed, in fact, a fresh-faced, confused and vaguely unhappy young woman who had no business on a San Epifanio Beach barstool. He was about to give her a light out of common politeness when, from somewhere behind him, a flame was thrust forth and she inclined her cigarette to receive it. She smiled uncertainly over Walker’s shoulder and murmured her gratitude. Walker, who had not turned around, found himself listening to merry masculine laughter of an odd register. A voice boomed forth, subduing all other sounds in the place.

  “I’ve recently had the opportunity to visit Mount Palomar,” the voice declared with a dreadful earnestness, “and was devastated by the sheer beauty I encountered there.”

  Such a sound, Walker considered, could only be made by forcing the breath down against the diaphragm, swallowing one’s voice and then forcing the breath upward, as in song. He listened in wonder as the voice blared on.

  “Everywhere I travel in California,” it intoned, “I’m—utterly dazzled—by the vistas.”

  He’s raving mad, thought Walker.

  “Don’t you find your own experiences to be similar?” the voice demanded of the young woman at the bar. It was a truly unsettling sound, its tone so false as to seem scarcely human.

  To Walker’s astonishment, the woman smiled wider and began to stammer. “I certainly … yes … why, I do. The vistas are ravishing.”

  “How pleasant an experience,” brayed the voice, “to encounter a fellow admirer of natural wonders.”

  With as much discretion as possible, Walker turned toward the speaker. He saw a man of about fifty whose nose and cheekbone had been broken, wearing a hairpiece, a little theatrical base and light eyeliner. Returning to his drink, Walker cringed; he had feared to see a face to match the voice and that was what he had seen. It was a smiling face, its smile was a rictus of clenched teeth like a ventriloquist’s. The thought crossed his mind that he was hallucinating. He dismissed it.

  “So few,” the man enunciated, “truly see the wonders nature arrays before them.”

  How true, thought Walker.

  The man eased himself between Walker’s stool and the lady’s, taking possession of her company and presenting a massive shoulder to Walker, his defeated rival. Walker moved his stool slightly so that he would still be able to see her.

  “I know,” the woman said, with an uneasy laugh. “The average person can be blind to beauty. Even when it’s right in front of them.”

  Walker sipped his drink. The neighboring dialogue was beginning to make him unhappy. Abandoning his observation of the two newly friends, he turned to see that Shelley had come in. She was standing in a doorway that opened to the windswept terrace; she was smiling, she had seen him. A tan polo coat was thrown over her shoulders, she was wearing pants to match it and tall boots. Under the coat she wore a navy work shirt and a white turtleneck jersey. Her dark hair was close-cropped.

  She waved to him and he watched her make her way through the bar crowd. When she was by his side he stood up and kissed her.

  “You look pretty tonight, Shell,” he said into her ear.

  “You look pretty too, Gordo.” She cupped her hands around her mouth and croaked at him. “Why are we whispering?”

  W
alker put a finger across his lips and moved his eyes toward the couple on his right. Shelley peered at them, then looked at Walker with an expression of anticipatory glee. Her black eyes were so bright he wondered if she had been doing drugs.

  “Do I discern a visitor to our shores?” the big man inquired in his awful voice. “Great Britain, perhaps?”

  The young woman, who spoke with the accent of southern Indiana or Illinois, hesitantly explained that she was not a visitor from abroad.

  “What a surprise,” the man had his voice declare, while his heavy face did surprise. “Your impeccable pronunciation convinced me you must be from across the water.”

  Walker looked away. Shelley was hiding behind him on the stool, resting her chin on her hands, grinning madly at the bottles behind the bar.

  “Let me see,” sounded the man through his morbid grin. “The eastern states, perhaps. I have it. I suspect Boston is the key to your refinement.”

  “No,” said the woman. “Illinois is my native state.” She giggled. “I hail from the central region.”

  Walker glanced at Shelley. She was batting her eyes, doing an impression of goofy cordiality.

  “Ah,” honked the big man. “How charming. The land of Lincoln.”

  They listened as he introduced himself as Ulrich or Dulwich or something close. “May I offer you a cocktail?” Ulrich or Dulwich asked gaily. “The night is young and we seem kindred spirits.”

  Shelley put a hand on Walker’s arm. She had seen a free table. They got up and went over to it.

  “How come you never say anything like that to me, Gordon? How about offering me a cocktail?”

  He called a waitress and ordered Shelley a White Russian, which was what she claimed she wanted. Before the waitress could leave with the drink order Shelley called her back.