by Robert Stone
“How about another drink?” Patty asked.
“No, no,” Lionel said. “Your guests will be here. I’ve got to get back shortly to pick up Lu Anne.”
“Bela Lugosi played Hamlet for Reinhardt,” the elder Drogue informed them. “They called him the greatest Hamlet of the German-speaking theater.”
“But over here,” Patty Drogue pointed out, “Abbott and Costello were waiting for him.”
“Because he was a junkie,” Walter said, still smiling. “Because it was Hollywood.”
“Well,” Lionel said, “that’s how I see Lu Anne.”
“As a hallucinée, right, Lionel?” Patty asked. “Not as a junkie.”
“No, no,” Lionel reassured Mrs. Drogue. “As a hallucinée.”
“Like Dickens,” young Drogue suggested.
Lionel paused a moment, then laughed politely. “Well, I don’t have to tell you this, Walter, I’m sure. But some performers put a tremendous emotional investment into their roles. They can’t hold back. They pay a very high price for their work.”
“And that’s Lu Anne, isn’t it, Lionel?” young Drogue asked.
“Well,” Lionel said, “yes. I mean, I don’t know that much about acting—how it works from inside. It’s a mystery to me. Like all mysteries, I find it a bit frightening.”
“You’re a philosopher, Lionel. A student of the mind. And you think the price of this performance might be a mite high for your wife in her sensitive condition. The scenes we’re shooting from now on are some of the most intense in the script. It’s a shame you can’t stay for them.”
“I’m sorry,” Lionel said. “I thought I was performing yeoman’s service putting in so much time down here. I was led to understand location shooting would be over by now.”
“That was last year.”
“Yes. Well, last year is when I arranged for the journey. Originally we thought we’d go together. My parents have planned around it. The kids’ schoolwork has been arranged for. Why are you treating me like a deserter?”
“Come on, Lionel,” young Drogue said. “I’m not doing that. Do you know who Gordon Walker is?”
“He’s the scriptwriter.”
“Did you know he was coming down?”
“I heard something about it,” Lionel said. No one had breathed a word to him.
“Old pal of Lu Anne’s, right? Sort of a second Dickens?”
“I know who he is,” Lionel said. “I know he went out with Lu Anne. What are you suggesting?”
Young Drogue displayed opened palms. “Hey, Lionel, I never suggest. If I want to say something I just up and say it.”
“It sounded to me,” Lionel said, “as though you were implying something that’s none of your business.”
“Not at all, Lionel. Nothing of the kind. You have to leave, so you’ll leave.” He sighed. “I just thought everybody should understand everybody else’s feelings. See, we’re Californians. Compulsive communicators. We’re overconfiding and we’re nosy. Don’t mind us.”
“I wouldn’t worry about Gordon Walker, Lionel,” Patty Drogue said soothingly. “I mean, there’s much less sex on movie locations than a lot of people think.”
Lionel turned to her blankly. “I beg your pardon?”
“Ah, let him come,” young Drogue said. “Maybe tension will enrich her performance? Think so, Lionel? I think it’s possible. Anyway,” he told Lionel good-humoredly, “I can swallow that asshole with a glass of water.”
“She’ll be all right,” Lionel said. “We’ve agreed it’s time for her to handle it alone.”
“No second Vancouver?” Drogue asked delicately.
“She’ll be all right,” Lionel said.
“And you’ve got Kurlander covering in case of emergency, right? He’s agreed to come down if necessary?”
“That was privately arranged.”
“Should we put him on the payroll?” Drogue asked. “We might do that.”
“I’ve taken care of it. I don’t think you’ll need him.”
“I’m really glad we had this talk,” Drogue said. “So we could find out where we stood. By the way, have you read the script?”
“Of course,” Lionel Morgen said. But he had not. He had glanced at the Chopin book and leafed through a few of the scenes his wife was to appear in. That was all. He was instantly appalled at his own defensive lie.
“We thought you’d stay,” Patty Drogue intoned sweetly. “We thought you’d decide Lee needed you and stay.”
“I offered to stay,” Lionel said stolidly. “In spite of the difficulties. She agreed that I should go.”
“Well,” young Drogue said cheerfully, “you’re the doctor.”
There came the clatter and rustle of arriving guests ascending from the terraces below.
“Great eyes,” old Drogue said. Lionel’s own eyes had grown accustomed to the shadows and he saw that in the alcove where old Drogue was, a hammock had been strung between two date palms and the old man sat astride it. He looked, Lionel thought, like an old parrot on a stick swing. “But her pictures don’t make money.”
Lionel thought of his wife’s eyes and of his own image in them. “She said,” Lionel told them, “that if she couldn’t finish this one without me she was through.”
“That settles it, then,” young Walter Drogue said. He advanced and put his arm around Lionel’s shoulder. “You want to get our leading lady and bring her on up, right, Doc? Can’t have a party without her.”
Patty Drogue was wheeling an entire dollyful of canapés over the cobblestones of the patio.
“Make way,” she called. Her voice echoed over the hillside as she greeted the arriving guests across darkness. “Hello, you guys. Help yourselves to drinks while we get changed.”
Walter Drogue was walking Lionel to the path, holding him in an embrace. At the top of the pink steps, Lionel swept Drogue’s arm from his shoulder and started down, slowly and silently, ignoring the people going by. He came to the parapet at which he had stopped on the way up to watch the lights.
Drogue’s expensive liquor churned in his guts. For one self-loathing moment, he imagined he could smell his own cologne but it was only some overripe sweet odor of the place.
She had called him her knight and he was leaving her to them. He was numbed with his own betrayal. In their way, although they had it wrong, they were right to despise him. He loved her. But her madness was too much for him. It was stronger than he was, and evil.
Evil, a word attaching to false consciousness.
Now he would go, with his children, and in his faraway country he would think about it and he would see.
In the meantime, he recalled with a shudder, there was dinner to be endured. Dinner with the Drogues.
Dinner with the Drogues took place under the stars. Lionel was silent and vague. People who did not know him did not realize that he was drunk and thought he might be deaf or even a little slow, like someone recovering from a cerebral injury.
Lu Anne for her part had never seen her husband so utterly besotted. More like a drunken cricketer than a medical Svengali with his schizoid Trilby in tow. Those among the guests who had come to see him spoon-feed her got to watch her half carry him down the path to their casita.
In the bedroom, she had to undress him, practically put him in bed. He was not there at all, no more for her than for anyone else. She worked hard not to think about his leaving and she was tired and a little drunk and that helped.
Once, as they lay together, the full moon visible through the casita’s window, he reached out and took her hand. If she saw or heard anything, he told her—anything that might not really be there—she was to press his hand and wake him. Slim chance of that, she thought. They were already gathering. But that night at least she would sleep.
Well after she was certain he had passed into oblivion, he startled her by taking her hand again.
“I have discovered,” he announced, “the exact way in which America made sex obscene.”
“What?”
Intrigued, she struggled toward waking. But he had gone to sleep again, his hand still pressed to hers. So she was alone in the darkness. In solitude. What a beautiful word, she thought. And beautiful in Spanish, soledad. It was the name of a prison.
Still holding her husband’s hand, she began to pray.
In the dingy coffee shop, Walker took a breakfast of rye toast and tea. A hard steady rain drilled against the panes of the seaward windows. The ocean-borne wind rattled the ornate rusted fastenings that secured them and rainwater seeped through the rotten moldings to form small puddles on the checkerboard floor.
He smoked and watched the rain, ignoring the morning paper spread out on the unsteady table before him.
Shelley had gone while he was still asleep. She had left a note commanding him to stay in town until he heard from the agency and to call her that afternoon.
After a few minutes, he took his newspaper upstairs to pack and outwait the rain. As soon as he had closed the door behind him, he set about running more cocaine. He had no sure purpose for the day, only the dream of going south. The dream provided him a happiness against all reason, it was succor and escape. Coke turned it adamantine, to mythic longing. As he stood at the window over the rain-soiled sea, his blood quickened at the prospect. He felt then that it was all he had.
The rain increased. Walker paced the length of his room. He had begun to think about his script for The Awakening, sustaining a glow of proprietary satisfaction. He had not looked at it for many months. Suddenly now, a prisoner of the morning rain, he lusted after the thing and it occurred to him that in the addled state to which he had reduced himself he might have forgotten to bring it along. He brought his suitcase out of the closet and quickly found his two copies in their blue bindings. He picked one out and seated himself in one of the room’s musty elephant-colored armchairs to read it over. As soon as he turned the cardboard cover an airmail envelope slid from between the pages and landed in his lap.
The envelope contained a month-old letter from his younger son at prep school. He had received it just after the closing of Lear in Seattle, tucked it away with the scripts in token of a determination to respond, then forgotten it.
Walker sat looking at his son’s unanswered letter, smarting with guilt and shame. So stricken was he that he nearly put it aside. Ever since his sons had left home he had written them regularly, demanding replies. Even when his older boy, Tom Moore who was called Deak, had stopped writing or phoning back—had, in effect, stopped speaking—Walker had gone on writing, composing what he himself called sermonettes. That he had forgotten Stuart’s letter was a measure of the low place in which he found himself.
“Dear Parents,” Stuart Walker had written. “When I woke up this morning I asked myself where’s my change of season? Here it’s mid-September and the sugar maples are turning awesome colors. Everything’s the way it’s supposed to be except me because I’m just not feeling it …”
Walker folded the letter, put it aside and went to the suitcase for his book of telephone numbers. He looked at his watch: it was nearly twelve in Maine and he might catch his son in the dorm between his last morning class and lunch. When he had found the number he dialed it and asked the boy who answered for Stuart Walker. His son came on the line.
“Christ, kid,” Walker said, “I’m sorry I didn’t answer your letter. Things have been confused. I’ve been busy.”
“I guess that’s good, huh?”
“Yeah,” Walker said, trying to sound as though it was good. “Better busy than not.”
“Hey, Dad,” the boy said. “You know Mom was here. She was on her way to London.”
“That’s right. How was she?”
“She was really funny about it.”
“Was she indeed?”
“Really,” Stuart told his father. “She was a riot. Good old Mom.”
“Good,” Walker said cautiously. His son was opaque, a politician. “So it was all pleasant?”
“She was fine,” Stuart said. “You don’t have to worry about her.”
Walker felt a wave of simmering anger rise in his breast. He mastered it quite easily.
“When you wrote you said … you said … you weren’t feeling the change of seasons. I wondered … whether, you know … everything was all right with you. And if you were down … whether you still were. And if … I was hoping,” he stammered on, “that it was better.”
“Right,” the boy said. “Well, that was a couple of weeks ago.”
Yes indeed, Walker thought. How tidily this kid kept score. Deak never did, never in the same relentless fashion. Nor did Walker himself. His wife did but her way was gentler. She was forgiving. Her younger son was not.
“Sure,” Walker senior said. “Of course.”
“I think I was down because I’d just been hanging out with Deak. You know how he’s been.”
Walker knew something about the way his son Deak had been for the past year and his heart went cold with fear.
“He doesn’t write or call us,” Walker said to his younger son. The taste of a whine hung on his lips, a savor of special pleading. “We don’t know how it is with him.”
“Sometimes I get mad at him,” Stuart said. “Then I get brought down, you know, and I wish there was something I could, like, tell him. But what can I tell him? It was always Deak who told me what was what.”
“What I worry about,” Gordon Walker said, “is drugs.” It was painful for him to say it; his sons knew his ways well enough. Yet it was what he worried about.
“Yeah,” Stuart said, and no more.
Walker hesitated.
“Well,” he finally asked, “should I worry?”
“No,” the boy said without conviction. “I don’t think so.”
“Is he dealing?”
“You have to ask him, Dad.”
“I thought,” Walker said, “because we both loved him … we might … as it were … take counsel together.”
“Oh,” Stuart said. “Oh, for sure.”
Walker bit his lip.
“Did your mother see him?”
“Yeah. We went to dinner in Portland.”
“Good,” Walker said. “How was it?”
“He was a little wasted,” Stuart said. There was a suggestion of good-natured laughter in his voice.
“Oh God,” Walker said aloud.
“I think we ought to get together all of us. We might all go over to London. Deak would go for that.”
“I don’t know about that,” Walker said.
“I guess,” Stuart Walker said, “I’m being naive.”
Walker sighed. “I’m glad you enjoyed your summer of stock.”
“Oh yeah,” the boy said, “it was excellent. They asked me back, O.K.?” For the first time in their conversation Stuart seemed to speak without calculation. “Next year, wow, am I looking forward to that.”
“And you’ll be in the school play this year?”
“Hey, Dad,” Stuart said, “are you kidding? You know I’ll be in it. They don’t call it the school play,” he added. “They don’t like that. They call it Masquers. Because we’re all so preppie pre-professional here.”
“I suppose,” Gordon Walker said, “that’s what I’m paying for.” He heard his son laugh politely.
“Listen, kid,” he said. “Take care of yourself. I’ll see you at Christmastime.”
“How will we do that this year, Dad?”
“I don’t know. I’ll call you. And Stu—” he called before the boy could hang up. “If you hear from Deak—if you see him—tell him for Christ’s sake to call me.”
After a few minutes he took up Stuart’s letter and read it through again. Reading it oppressed him; when he had finished it he was left with a mixture of depression and anxiety that felt for all the world like grief.
The letter was a good one, observant, witty, boyishly rueful. There was a little about the opening of term and a few cautious lines about Deak that were a
t once concerned and humorous. Most of it recounted Stuart’s adventures with a summer theater company in Rhode Island. He wrote tellingly about the two plays that had been done—a ten-year-old Broadway comedy and Ah, Wilderness! He described his humiliation at being scorned for his youth by girls his own age who competed for the older actors. He described, without names, the artful, courteous and good-natured manner in which he had turned aside the advances of a homosexual actor who was an old friend of his father’s. He wrote about the audiences, the town, the adolescent social scene, about a drama student whose name was Blanche and who had called him an odious buffoon. It was a delightful letter. Any reader would conclude that its author was openhearted, generous and affectionate—all of which Walker knew well his younger son was not. Tom—Deak—the older boy, was all those things, or had been once.
Stuart Walker had talent and his parents’ good looks. He was unusually literate for a seventeen-year-old and successful at school. But it was as an actor that he truly dazzled. At fifteen he had performed on the Off-Broadway stage in the limited run of a surreal English drama. Since that debut he had been offered parts on the average of two a month. His summer theater experience had been intended by his parents as an exercise in humility and he had not objected. He was preternaturally wise, would wait, study longer, listen and learn. At times Walker and his wife would look on their younger son with superstitious dread, so bright did his possibilities appear.
In his oceanside hotel room, Gordon Walker examined the letter once more. He realized now one of the reasons that he had not answered it on receipt, unconfronted at the time but plain enough now. The letter had provided Stuart with an opportunity for one of his uncanny imitations of his older brother. “Uncanny” was one of the words critics had used in praising Stuart’s performance.
He was a shrewd, unconfiding boy, four years younger than Deak. Circumstances or a harder nature had driven him inward, toughened him and toughened him until his heart shriveled. The years of Stuart’s childhood had been a stormy time for Walker and his wife. They were both ambitious, jealous of each other, consumed with the Life. Connie had tried to keep working, rehearsing, studying. There had been the business with Lu Anne. Probably neither of them was there enough, in the right ways. They never spoke of it although they both knew; it was too hard.