Children of Light

by Robert Stone

  “For you, Lu Anne, anything. But not that.”

  “It was just a shot,” she said.

  “Hey,” Buchanan said, “this is me, Buchanan. I’m into staying alive. I mean, Christ’s sake, Lu Anne, you know I don’t use that stuff. It tried to kill me.”

  She shook her head in confusion.

  “I mean, I can’t believe you asked me.”

  She slammed his door shut, turned and saw Dongan Lowndes, the writer, apparently on the way to her trailer. He had seen her coming out of Buchanan’s quarters. He did a little double take to let her know that he had seen it.

  “Mr. Lowndes,” she said. “I’m sorry but I can’t remember your first name.” She bit her lip; she could not seem to lose the whininess in her manner.

  “Forget it,” Lowndes said. “Call me Skip.”

  “Skip,” she said, “Skip, you wouldn’t have a downer on you? Or maybe back at your room?”

  He stared at her. Had he taken the reference to his room for a proposition?

  “No,” Lowndes said. “Or uppers or anything else.”

  “Oh dear,” Lu Anne said. She smiled disarmingly for Lowndes. “I was hoping for a little something.”

  “Sorry,” Lowndes said, looking as though he were. She saw that he was anxious to please her.

  “Even liquor would do,” she said. “I don’t usually drink when I work, but now and then a small amount can prime a person.”

  “Right,” Lowndes said, “well, I don’t drink anymore myself. I can’t. But can’t you send out to the hotel for it?”

  She shifted her eyes from side to side broadly in a comic parody of guilt.

  “I don’t want people to know.” She paused and sighed. “Dongan, could you?”

  “Skip,” Lowndes said.

  She looked at him impatiently.

  “Skip,” he repeated. “Call me Skip.”

  “Oh, that’s nice,” she said. “I can just see why your folks called you that. Could you get us a bottle, Skip, so we can sneak a slug down here?”

  “I have trouble handling it,” Lowndes said. “I’m off the stuff.”

  For a little while he looked at her, a faint fond smile playing about his thick lips.

  “I guess I could, though.”

  She opened her eyes wide and swallowed bravely. So go and do it, she was telling him, you shit-eating bird. The Long Friends cackled admonition.

  “Scotch?” he asked. His gaze was sad. Whether he was begging for her favors or simply disillusioned, she could not tell and did not care.

  “Yes,” she said, sounding absurdly eager, “that’d be nice.”

  “I’ll go up and get a bottle,” he said. His voice wavered as he said it, like an adolescent’s.

  Lu Anne did not feel particularly like drinking liquor but it seemed important that there be something to take.

  “Oh great, Skip,” she said. “Now, you remember the car we came in, huh? Well, you just go back to that car and get him to take you up the hill and you can get us a jug. Only carry it in something, will you, because I don’t want people to think we’re a couple of old drunks.”

  “Right,” Lowndes said. “I’ll brown-bag it.”

  “And when you’re up there,” she said as he started for the car, “you ask them if a Mr. Walker has arrived, O.K.?”

  “Mr. Walker,” Lowndes repeated. “And a plain brown wrapper.”

  Across the clearing, Lu Anne saw Jack Glenn, the actor playing Robert Lebrun, in conversation with Joe Ricutti. She went over to them. A few years before, she had heard an agent describe Glenn—a natural who could fence, juggle, swing from vines and play comedy—as too small to be big. Whenever she repeated the story she got her laugh and people said it was a voice from Vanished Hollywood. But the agent had not vanished and Jack Glenn, at five feet nine inches, worked irregularly. Someone had told her it was because he was fair-skinned; a fair-skinned actor had to be taller. It was a matter of semiotics, the person had said.

  He turned to her approach. “Ah,” he said with his hand over his heart, “Les Douleurs d’amour.” He kissed her hand, correctly, with the appearance of a kiss. Glenn was nice-looking and bisexual but for whatever reason she had never been attracted to him. Perhaps because he was fair and short.

  “I don’t suppose,” Lu Anne said, “that since we talked you’ve come into any … you know, into possession of …”

  “What a coincidence that you should ask.”

  “You have!” she exclaimed joyfully.

  “No,” Jack Glenn said. “But I was just thinking about it myself. I was thinking of asking that guy.”

  He pointed to a middle-aged Mexican in a safari jacket who was holding one of the trolley horses with a twitch, examining its leg. As he worked, he was humming “The Trolley Song” from Meet Me in St. Louis.

  “Who is he?” she asked.

  “The vet,” Glenn said.

  “What?” she said.

  “The vet,” Joe Ricutti told her. “For the horses. So they shouldn’t get sick.”

  Lu Anne turned to watch him work.

  “I never thought of Mexican locations as having vets.”

  “I always thought they shot the horses,” Jack Glenn said archly. “Don’t they?”

  “This is No Help City,” Lu Anne said. “I mean, it’s a very bad situation.”

  “This unit doctor,” Glenn said, “you tell him you can’t sleep, he tells you how many gringos are locked up in Baja Norte. ‘One hundred twenty U.S. citizens in jail.’ That’s the only English sentence he knows. So I was just thinking, like hmm—there’s the vet. Maybe he has something nice for us.”

  “Oh God,” Lu Anne cried in exasperation, “like horse tranques? How about an STP trip? Or some angel dust?”

  “Get him to give you a shot,” Joe Ricutti said. “You’ll go off on the rail at Caliente and finish first at Del Mar.”

  “Well,” Lu Anne said, “we’ll have to tough it out, won’t we? Everything will have a clear black line around it, like a death notice.”

  Jack Glenn laughed. “You’re so weird, Lu Anne.”

  “That’s why we’re all here,” she told him. “You included.”

  “I don’t know how people can joke about drugs,” Glenn said in mock sadness. In fact, as Lu Anne well knew, Glenn was mainly indifferent to drugs. He was only trying to amuse. “We should get someone to score for us in L.A.,” he said. “Bring shit down with the dailies.”

  “Maybe Joy got hold of some,” Lu Anne suggested.

  Glenn shook his head.

  “Well,” she said, “I’m going to lie down and die again.”

  She went back across the field to her trailer and there was Lowndes, sitting on the three little metal steps with a brown bag beside him. He stood up and presented the bag.

  “Got any ice?”

  But of course she did not want Lowndes, only the liquor. Or something. She opened the trailer door, trying to think how she might get rid of him. He followed her into the trailer and closed the door behind them.

  She had some weeks-old ice in the trailer. She smashed the tray repeatedly against the miniature sink to get the cubes free, brushing aside Lowndes’s gestures of assistance. There were two plastic glasses on her makeup table; she filled them with ice and whiskey and passed one to Lowndes.

  “We’ll have to make this a quick one, Skip, O.K.? Because I’m not really through working, you see.” She could not keep her words from running together, so intensely did she want the drink and Lowndes out. “I just wanted something … you know, when I get out of the water to dry me out. Well,” she said, “I guess dry’s the wrong word, isn’t it? I just wanted something to keep me wet between takes, aha.”

  He was a magazine writer, she reminded herself, an important one, and he was there to write about the picture. With fascinated horror, she watched his upper lip draw back to expose a line of unhealthy red gum. “Not,” she laughed gaily, “that I’m planning to play the scene loaded, because that’s not how I work.
Hell no, why …” She broke off. The man in front of her seemed to grow more and more grotesque and she was no longer confident about the reality of what she was seeing. There was something familiar about him, familiar in a most unpleasant way. It might be that he reminded her of someone. Or it might be worse.

  “It’s been a very long time since I had a drink,” Lowndes told her.

  “Is that right?” she asked. “Well, here’s how.”

  When they drank, Lowndes’s features puckered with distaste. His eyes watered.

  “I’ll tell you what,” she said to Dongan Lowndes, “when I’m through this evening we’ll have a proper drink. We’ll set around and drink and talk. How’s that?”

  “I thought it would be all gnomes and agents and flacks,” Lowndes said. “I’d love to see you later.” He finished what was in his glass in a swallow and turned pale. “Shall we have dinner?”

  “Yes, yes,” Lu Anne said, standing up. “Dinner it is.”

  She gave him the one-hundred-and-eighty-degree smile. He was a starfucker, she thought, a cheap starfucker who wanted to get her in bed and then brag to all his colleagues about it and then, without fear or favor, humiliate her before all of with-it, literate America. Not, she thought, that it hadn’t been done before.

  “Yeah, that’s great,” Lu Anne told him. “After work.” She put a hand on his arm to shove him toward the door. Then she realized that she must not shove, so the hand on his arm was transformed into something like an affectionate gesture. She plucked an imaginary thread from his shirt. After work—it was just like waiting tables again, only they knew where you lived.

  “Are you working late?”

  “Sundown. After six.”

  “Well,” Lowndes said, “I’ll be in the bar around seven-thirty. I’ll see you there.”

  “Is he here?”

  “Who?”

  “Gordon. Gordon Walker.”

  “Gosh, I’m sorry. I forgot to ask. He’s the screenwriter, isn’t he? Is he a friend of yours?”

  “Yes. Yes, an old friend. Hey, thanks for the scotch,” she called as he went out. “Skip.”

  He had brought a full bottle of Dewar’s. The only problem was that it was whiskey and it would smell up her breath and the trailer, so she would have to rinse her mouth and spray evil-smelling deodorants around.

  She sipped her first drink slowly. It changed things for her; changed the trailer from a ratty piece of aluminum machinery into a cool, well-appointed refuge. She turned the overhead lamps down a few degrees of intensity and found that she had created a happy kind of light. It was all so much nicer.

  When she had finished her first drink, she poured a second into her plastic glass, half filling it. She wet her face with a cool towel, turned the air conditioning up and shivered comfortably.

  Her copy of the script was on the makeup counter beside her chair, face down, open to the scene that was to follow. After a moment’s hesitation she picked it up, not at all sure if she was in the mood for work or Edna, Kate Chopin or Gordon Walker’s take on things in general. She had read it many times before.

  The scene was the novel’s climax, her walk into the sea; if she opened her trailer door she would be able to hear the grips at work on the setup for it.

  She moves life Cleopatra, Walker had written, as though impelled by immortal longings. The lines of direction were addressed only to her, a part of their game of relentless Shakespearianizing, half purely romantic, half higher bullshit. He meant he wanted Edna going out like the Queen in Antony and Cleo, Act V, scene 2.

  She senses a freedom the scope of which she has never known. She has come beyond despair to a kind of exaltation.

  Well, Lu Anne thought. Well, now. She had a little scotch and put the script face down in her lap.

  “Really, now, Gordon,” she said.

  Of course, that was the spirit of the book and its ending. But exaltation beyond despair? She had never found anything beyond despair except more despair.

  There were some questions to take up, some questions for the writer here. Did Walker really believe in exaltation beyond despair? Did that mean she had to? Would she be able to play it? For that she had an answer which was: absolutely, you betcha. We play them whether they’re there or not. And once we’ve played them they’re there and there they stay, just like Marcel Herrand’s Larcenaire, Henry Fonda’s Wyatt Earp, Jimmy Dean’s Jimmy Dean. Exaltation beyond despair, she thought. Christ, I can stand that out in the middle of the floor and tap-dance on the son of a bitch.

  It was wearying to have to think about despair, to have to think about Edna and Walker and what was there and what not. About the last especially, she wasn’t sure she had the right to an opinion. Who knew what was there and what wasn’t? The liquor made her head ache. Who could say what exaltations there were?

  What if walking by the water one day you broke through it? You’re walking into the water like our Edna and bam! Life more abundant.

  That’s a trick, she thought suddenly. That’s a mean trick, because Walker was right about the lure of life more abundant. To go for it was dying. That kind of abundance, going for that was dying.

  That was what he had meant. That, and Antony and Cleopatra, Act V, scene 2.

  Very clever, Walker, she thought, but a pretty tough one to lay on your old pal. He had rewritten the ending over the past year, not the action but the emotional tone in his descriptions. It occurred to her that he might think he was about to die. Or be wishing himself dead, or her.

  There was, she decided, no point in getting upset about it. It was only the script, and the script an adaptation from what was only a book. Beyond despair to a kind of exaltation as far as she knew was nothing more than a theatrical convention, just as walking into the drink at sunset was only movies. Her trouble with Walker was that, down deep, she thought he knew everything. The past, the present and future, all the answers. But he was just a writer, as she was what she was.

  She drank a little more; a confusion of emotions assailed her, her head ached. She took a couple of aspirin, turned out the lights and slumped into a chair with her legs up on the lounger, the glass in her hand.

  What’s going on, Walker? she thought. What’s happening here? Who are we and what are we playing at? Where does one thing leave off and the other stuff commence?

  “I’m real,” she said aloud. Having so declared, she had to have a drink and think about it. I know that I am. I know what’s me and what’s not me. That’s all I know. She finished what was in her plastic glass and threw it gently onto the makeup counter.

  It was not quite dark inside the trailer. The late-afternoon sunlight hurled itself against every hatch, every weld and seam in the big metal compartment. The Long Friends came out to gossip and brush her with their wings. They were always there when it was dark and reality in question. Their lavender sachet breath was cloying, narcotic.

  “Hush now,” she told them.

  They prattled on about secrets. Much of their talk was about things that must never be known, ruinous scandals, undetected crimes.

  The incessant undercurrent of noise drove her to rise and turn on the overhead lamps. Only one of the Long Friends remained with the light, curled up in the darkest corner, smiling vacantly.

  The ones born aren’t enough for you, the Friend said. The ones unborn, they’re too many.

  “Don’t unborn me,” Lee said. “Really,” she said, “really, you have a nerve giving that abortion crap to me. I gave life to four and you took one back.” She turned to the corpse-like creature in the corner. “Want me to lie awake nights? No, thanks.” She cursed it in Creole French until it raised chalk-white splayed fingers to stop its ears. Watching it do so, she raised her own hands to the side of her head.

  “You’re a sickness,” she said without looking at it, “that I breathed in from a graveyard.”

  She had an inward vision of a hot September day that sometimes came to her in dreams. She was small, always a child in her dreams, and walkin
g a sandy road down home. On one side of the road, government pines were planted in rows and beyond them tupelos grew beside the motionless river. She crossed herself walking beside a cemetery wall; the oven graves on the far side were invisible to her. She held her breath as long as she could but she could hold it only so long. It was before the hurricane and the high water, just before they’d moved to town, the same summer she remembered her father huge and drunk in the doorway, looking past her for somebody real. Sometimes it pleased her to imagine she had breathed in the Long Friends that day, although it was years before she began to hear and finally to see them.

  She turned and looked at the one in the corner. The rough cloth in which it had wrapped itself, the colorless god’s-eye pattern of its wing seemed as vividly present as anything in the trailer.

  “Do you love me?” she asked. She began to laugh and cut herself off. Her prescription pills were in the pill case in her carry bag. She took them out, poured them into her hand and mentally counted them. There were enough to put her out forever. That was what she had wanted to see. All right, she thought. There were enough—there would be enough tomorrow. Next year and the year after that. It was always there. She put the pills back into their plastic capsule.

  Resting her brow on her hand, she tried to think about the scene she was about to play. Cleopatra. Immortal longings and exaltation beyond despair. She clenched her teeth and shook her head violently, wrapping the beach robe closer about her shoulders. Then she began to sing.

  Her song was a wordless prayerful hum. Years before, she had sung in convincing imitation of the saintly folk sopranos of her youth; she had no training but she liked to sing. As she sang, she relaxed, closed her eyes and let her arms go limp beside her. The song located her to that September day when walking beside the burial ovens she had breathed in some evil fateful thing.

  Save me, she sang. That was what the song was about. Somebody, save me.

  She leaned her head back, clasped her hands and let her voice rise in a strong tremolo. The song summoned up such a wave of sadness, of recollected hopes, old loves and losses that she thought she would die.

  Where’s my exaltation beyond despair? she thought. There’s nothing here but this dreaming child, all unhappy.