Children of Light

by Robert Stone

  That would be the place to swim, she thought, to work the negativity from her frame, to contend. She sat quietly in the sun, eyes closed, imagining the half-heard surf, forcing, as well as she was able, all other thoughts aside.

  A rapid knock sounded on the casita door. She rose, thoroughly annoyed, and opened it to find Jack Best, the unit publicist, and a writer named Dongan Lowndes, who was down to do a feature for a prestigious magazine and was not, one was forever being reminded, just another hack.

  In Lowndes’s company, Jack Best, who was just another flack, assumed an elevated diction.

  “Miss Verger,” he declared, “I’d like to introduce Mr. Dongan Lowndes. I’m sure you know each other’s work and I’m sure you’ll have a really interesting conversation.”

  Lowndes did not seem embarrassed. He was a tall man with a long narrow face; its up-country Scotch-Irish frankness was spoiled slightly by the smallness of his close-set brown eyes.

  Lu Anne and Dongan Lowndes shook hands; she gave him a sympathetic smile, which she noticed he did not return.

  “Shall we go in?” Jack asked. “I’ve ordered lunch sent down.”

  “Gosh, I’m sorry, Jack,” Lu Anne said. “I just spaced this interview. I was going to skip lunch and prep.” She turned to Lowndes, expecting that he would offer to go. He only stared at her, not unpleasantly, but quite fixedly. His stare might have been taken for one of polite interest had its object been other than human.

  Jack Best looked unhappy. In his book Lee Verger was not big enough medicine to space lunch dates with the highbrow press. Mr. Lowndes declined his assistance.

  “Well,” Jack said nervously to Lowndes, “we’ve got a bit of a condom here.”

  “I suppose,” Lu Anne said after a moment, “it must have washed up on the beach from town.”

  Lowndes kept his small eyes fixed on Lu Anne. “I bet you meant to say conundrum, didn’t you, Jack?”

  “Yeah,” Jack said quietly. He looked awestruck. “How could I have said that?”

  “There you are, Mr. Lowndes,” Lu Anne said. “Your first Hollywood malapropism.”

  “I’ve lived among ignorant people most of my life,” Lowndes told Lu Anne, “and I’ve never heard better.”

  “Well,” she said, “come in, guys.”

  “I’m really sorry,” Jack Best said. “I mean, Jesus, it just popped out.”

  “That’s O.K.,” Lowndes said. “Miss Verger and I know each other’s work and now we’re going to have a really interesting conversation.”

  “Are you going to stay, Jack?” she asked.

  The service wagon arrived, propelled by a waiter who wheeled it into the patio. Best stared at the floor, then stood up and helped himself to a glass of tequila. He looked at Lowndes, then at Lu Anne.

  “Come here, kid,” he said to her. He motioned her toward the door with a toss of his head.

  “Me too?” Lowndes asked.

  Best ignored him. Lu Anne followed the publicist outside.

  “So I look like a jerk,” Jack said. “Let him have me fired.”

  “The hell with him,” Lu Anne said kindly. “I mean, where’s your sense of humor?”

  “I’m supposed to stay with you. You want me to?”

  “I believe by now I can hold my own with the Dongan Lowndeses of the world.”

  “I humiliated myself in front of him,” Jack Best said through his teeth. “I’d like to punch his smart mouth.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Jack,” Lu Anne said, laughing, “it’s just a giggle. Forget it.”

  “He’s a rat, this guy,” Jack said. “You watch yourself. He’ll use everything you say against you. I know the kind of rat he is. The stupid thing I said—he’ll put that in.”

  “You know they’re not going to print that.”

  “You be careful. I mean, I oughta stay but I can’t stand him. I’ll kill the son of a bitch. Don’t tell him nothing, tell him your hobbies. See, Charlie doesn’t know—he’s out to screw us. Make us look funny.”

  “Well,” she said, “I’ll proceed from there.”

  Best gave her a dark look and went up the path.

  In his patio chair, Lowndes smoked a cigarette, ignoring the food before him.

  “You’re a wonderful actress,” he told Lu Anne.

  “Thank you,” she said, wondering again what people thought they meant when they said that. “I work hard. I try to get it right.”

  “And what is it?”

  “To inhabit them,” Lu Anne heard herself say. “To be in the place you’re supposed to be.” She watched him stare at her. “Don’t you take notes?”

  He shook his head. “Aren’t you going to tape us? So I don’t misquote you?”

  “You’ll misquote me anyway. Then your magazine’s lawyers will read it and if they say it’s O.K. I’ll come out the way you like.”

  “Do you always talk to interviewers like this?”

  “Can I tell you something off the record?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Lowndes said, “ask me later.”

  “I haven’t given an interview in years. Not a real one.” She thought his eyes seemed somehow soiled. Mud-colored. Shit-colored. “You go to est training or something?”

  He laughed but she thought she had embarrassed him.

  “Do you go to est training?”

  “I meditate,” Lu Anne said. Lowndes had an aura, she realized. His aura brought forth creatures, like the Long Friends. They were attracted to him. She could hear their prattling from inside the casita. Something about lost things, lost jewelry, old photographs, old-time things. He would not be aware of them, she reminded herself, because they were not there for him.

  “You mean like Zen?” Lowndes asked, amused. “Alpha states?”

  The Sorrowful Mysteries, she thought. In the casita she could hear the rattle of rosary beads. They were not hers, they belonged to Props but she had appropriated them.

  “Everyone meditates,” she said. “It’s just clearing your mind for concentration.”

  “What is acting?” Lowndes asked. “How is it like living?”

  “Those aren’t possible questions,” she said. “They don’t make sense.”

  “Yes, they do, Miss Verger. You can answer them.”

  She laughed. “Mr. Lowndes, you don’t ask those questions of a person.” He had power over her. The aura that drew the Long Friends gave him great strength. And his contaminated eyes. “If you want to speculate on those things, if you want to hold forth on life and acting and whatnot for your readers, well, do it. But don’t ask me to give you the words.”

  “Do you really know my work?”

  “I read your novel, Mr. Lowndes. Some years ago. I admired it.”

  “The novel? Not a studio synopsis?”

  His eyes held her; she knew she must look troubled. His arrogance did not offend her but that he dared to speak so made her fear he knew his own power. Perhaps he was the same with everyone, she thought. He had humiliated poor foolish Jack Best. Considering his cruelty, she examined his stance, the lines of his body. When she felt the first faint thirst of desire, the Long Friends inside sounded a chorus of stern whispers.

  “You-all hush,” she said softly.

  “I’m sorry,” Lowndes said, surprised. “I was kidding.”

  “Yes,” Lu Anne said. “Of course.”

  “You’re from Louisiana?”

  “Yes,” she said, “it’s in the handout. From Boulanger.”

  “I’m from Georgia.”

  “I know,” Lu Anne said. “I know from your name. Lowndes, that’s a Georgia name.” She was only flattering him now to keep him at bay, starting to tell lies. She saw that he was pleased.

  “I love to swim,” she told Lowndes. “When I was sixteen I was an Olympic candidate. But I had a fall and broke my leg.”

  “A fall from a horse?” Lowndes asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “but I still swim regularly. And I ride occasionally.”

  Lee had never
been an Olympic candidate for anything. At four she had broken her leg being chased by a hog during a Christmas party. If her cousins hadn’t rescued her, her father said, she might have been eaten and gone into sausage.

  “You went to Newcomb?”

  “I went to Newcomb on a Madison Foundation scholarship. Then I went to Yale drama school.”

  “And you were in that production of As You Like It where everybody in it became rich and famous.”

  “People said it was like John Brown’s hanging. I was Rosalind.”

  “Rosalind,” Lowndes mused. “Tell me about that.”

  She shook her head with a secret smile. “No.” She has nothing to do with you, Lu Anne thought. With your bent back and your shitty eyes.

  He was studying her refusal to answer when the telephone rang. It was transportation and her call.

  “Time for me to go to work,” she told him pleasantly, and went into the bedroom to change. The Long Friends had left a smell, like sweet wine and lavender sachet, and Lu Anne was aware of it as she sat by the bedroom mirror.

  She chewed a piece of sugarless gum and brushed out her hair, hoping to see Rosalind and not some ugly thing. When she had been married to Robitaille he had accused her of constantly looking in mirrors. Because, she had told him, my face is my fortune.

  They had told her to stay out of the sun, to keep the character’s genteel pallor. In the end it could not be done without the most rigorous efforts and they had relented and let her tan. It had been a good idea; with the right makeup and in the right colors, she photographed young and golden.

  It was Edna in the glass now, not Rosalind. Lu Anne studied herself. Gone, that young Queen of the New Haven night. Sometimes it seemed to Lu Anne that she missed Rosalind the way she missed her children. She turned to study herself in profile.

  Years ago in Boulanger, a judge who was one of her ex-husband’s relatives had called her “a lousy mother,” right out in court, in front of her daughter and in front of her own mother and daddy. Now she was Edna Pontellier. Of Edna, Kate Chopin had written:

  She was fond of her children in an uneven impulsive way. She would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart; she would sometimes forget them.

  You lost it all anyway, Lu Anne thought. You lost the child inside yourself, then the person that grew there, then the children you never bore and the children you did. The boys, the men, the skin outside, the self inside. Feelings came and went like weather. You could not tell if they were real. You could not tell if they were your own. You could never even be sure that you were there. People pretended.

  “She looks fine,” Lu Anne told herself in the glass. The unseen Friends buzzed. They were all guilty agitation, old-auntly admonitions.

  Don’t say she look fine, she heard one whisper. Say she is fine.

  Lu Anne smiled, lowered her head and put a finger across her lips.

  “Lee?” It was the voice of the writer, Lowndes. “Your car is here.”

  She stood up and went out; meeting his eyes, her own gaze faltered and he saw it.

  At the door, Billy Bly, the stuntman, was waiting for her with the driver. Seeing each other, they both blushed.

  “Hi,” he said, and glanced quickly at Lowndes behind her. “They told me to ride over with you. See if there was anything you wanted.”

  “Just your good company, Brother Bly,” she said. She introduced him to Lowndes; they got in the hosed-down Lincoln that would carry them to the set.

  Looking out the car window as they approached the sea, she was struck by the uncanny light. The sky seemed to threaten a storm out of season.

  “You look fine, Lu Anne,” Bill Bly said. She laughed. They had sent him out as her protector, replacing Jack Best. A heavy-handed touch, she thought.

  “I am fine, Billy,” she told him. She was aware of Lowndes, a watching darkness on the seat beside her. “I am.”

  Around twelve, Walker pulled off the freeway in Del Mar and drove to a drugstore on the coast to telephone Shelley.

  “Everybody’s thrilled,” she told him. “They think it would really be great. In other words, they’ll put up with you for a day or two but don’t push it.”

  “I will be their guest, will I not?”

  “Yes, Gordon. You will.”

  “That’s what you said they’d do.”

  “People don’t always do what I say they’ll do. Very often, though.”

  “Doesn’t that make you feel good?”

  “No, shitty. It’s depressing. How do you want to travel?”

  “I’m driving.”

  “Is that wise?”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “Buen viaje, Gord. Don’t get sick.”

  He was about to hang up when Al Keochakian came on.

  “Smart guy,” Al said.

  “Take it easy,” Walker said. He was afraid of Keochakian’s anger and afraid of his own.

  “I’m taking it easy, Gordon. I want to tell you something Shelley said to me. She’s off the line.”

  “Don’t get pissed at her. I asked her to set it up.”

  “Of course you did. And she owes you her job here.”

  “What are you going to do, fire her, for Christ’s sake? Why are you so hysterical about this?”

  “I would never fire Shelley, Gordon. She’ll grow old in my service. I want to tell you something. I want to tell you what she said about you.”

  “If it’s something I should hear I’ll hear it from her.”

  “She said, ‘He’s dying, Al.’ That’s what she said to me this morning. ‘He’s really going to die.’ ”

  Walker felt the sudden sweat under his arms and on his palm that held the telephone. A charge of fear exploded beneath his heart, like the fear that had seized him at the mirror the morning before.

  “You malicious son of a bitch,” he said to Keochakian. “You’re cursing me.”

  “You think so?”

  “I understand you now. I don’t know why I didn’t before.”

  “What I’m trying to make you understand,” Keochakian said, “is that you’re very sick. Your life is in danger.”

  “I don’t believe that motivation,” Walker said. “I heard the satisfaction in your voice.”

  For a few moments there was silence. When Keochakian spoke again his voice was tremulous.

  “You are sick, man. Physically and mentally you’re sick. You have me on the phone here … in this unprofessional way … we are arguing like a couple of faggots here. I won’t stand for it.”

  “Al,” Walker said, laughing, “go fuck yourself. You’re fired.”

  He stayed on the line until he heard Keochakian hang up. Then, deliberately, he replaced his own receiver. His insides churning with fear and anger, he pulled recklessly out into the coast road traffic, forcing the southbound lanes to a squealing halt. Pursued by obscenities and shouts of outrage, he headed for I-5 and the border.

  In their oversized custom-built trailer a short distance from the setup, the Drogues, father and son, watched a young woman in turn-of-the-century costume ride a horse-drawn trolley car on a video screen. The woman was Joy McIntyre, Lu Anne’s Australian stand-in. The vehicle was moving against a dimly perceived woodland background; Joy held tight to the standee pole, her hands clutching both the pole and her folded parasol.

  “Pretty kid,” old Drogue said.

  “Looka the way she holds the parasol,” Walter Drogue the younger said. “She thinks she’s on the bus to Kangaroo Springs.”

  “A proletarian reflex,” the old man said. “And a cute ass. I think she’s endearing.”

  “The more I look at her,” young Drogue said, “the more I realize we have a true original here. I mean, you get the McIntyre touch. You get McIntyrisms. Like there was Lubitsch, there was Von Sternberg, now there’s McIntyre.”

  “Maybe there’s something there, eh? Maybe nature didn’t intend her for just an extra.”

  Young Drogue blew his nose on a Kleenex.
r />   “Nature intended her for a water spaniel. She can’t name the days of the week.”

  They watched pretty Joy, her jaw set, grimly hang on.

  “Kind of a phallic pole,” Drogue junior said.

  “You know,” old man Drogue intoned, “we had an extra once—they called him Freddy the Fag. He was six-eight, three hundred pounds, and he had Gloria Swanson’s moves. One time we’re making a Western—big saloon fight scene, roulette wheels flying, guys crashing through balconies—and Freddy walks up a flight of stairs like he’s on his way to get a bouquet from Bert Parks. Next take, the A.D. says, ‘Freddy, for Christ’s sake, can’t you walk up those stairs like a man?’ Freddy turns around and says, ‘If you want me to play character parts you’ll have to pay me for it.’ ”

  On the screen, Joy’s trolley swung past a line of wooden structures and rolled on through a grove of live oaks.

  “She should sit,” the old man croaked. “The stance is passive.”

  “It’s comical,” his son said. “It’s a comic composition. It won’t do.”

  He kicked open the trailer door and stepped out into the strangely turned Mexican light, calling for his assistant.

  “Eric!”

  In a few moments Eric Hueffer, the A.D., rounded the edge of the trailer.

  “Yeah, boss.”

  “Let’s take her around again sitting down. I mean, Christ, she’s holding the parasol wrong. It doesn’t feel right.”

  “Right,” Hueffer said. “Toby was wondering about the light on her face under that hat. She had her head down.”

  They were walking toward the camera setup, Hueffer and young Drogue in step, the old man a few steps behind. As they approached, they heard Joy McIntyre begin to sing.

  “And it was grand,” she sang in an antipodean quaver,

  “Just to stand

  With his hand holding mine

  To the end of the li-i-i-ne.”

  “How come you let her hold the parasol like that?” young Drogue asked Hueffer.

  “I thought it was natural.”