Children of Light

by Robert Stone

  “Miss Verger, please,” Eric Hueffer called into his megaphone. Mechanically, she turned back toward her chair and the makeup table. Ricutti put a dry sponge to her temples. Josette ran a comb through her hair.

  “Please, everyone,” Hueffer was telling the stragglers, “if we don’t need you, we don’t want you here.”

  Lu Anne read on about Edna Pontellier’s last swim.

  She thought of Leonce and the children. They were a part of her life. But they need not have thought that they could possess her body and soul.

  Well, Lu Anne thought, nothing is free, Edna. Her life had not afforded her the opportunity to experience that sentiment. No doubt it was dreadful. A Doll’s House. Empty days. Childbirth. Massa having his nights out with the boys, his quadroon sweetie. The kids night and day. She decided it did not do for her to think about children.

  They were waiting for her. She put the book down and stood up and Drogue came up to her, guiding her toward the bathhouse, telling her about the shot, how to come out, where to take the suit off, when to go into the water.

  The mercy of the sun, Lu Anne thought. The informing words. Awful. Naked. Delicious. Sensuous. Soft close embrace. Dying was always fun. Immortal longings. Exaltation beyond despair. So much popcorn, she thought. To get the character you had to go down and inside to where your grief was. The place your truest self inhabited was the place you could not bear.

  She stopped and leaned against Drogue. They were at the door of the bathhouse, and the camera was advancing on her. Two Mexican grips waited beside the Titan, privileged characters who were expected not to take it wrong when she undressed.

  “O.K., partner?” Drogue asked.

  “I’m fucked, honey,” she told him. “Life’s a condom.”

  She looked into his panic-stricken face. He’s seeing it, she thought. Yes, she thought, behold the glory, Jim. Look at me shining, I’m the Queen of Lights.

  “How about a half-moon on the bathhouse door, Walter? I could come out and do Judy Canova.” She bared her front teeth at him.

  “Great,” Walter Drogue the younger said. “Only—some other time, maybe?”

  “Have no fear,” she told the director. She stepped inside the bathhouse, closing the door behind her. There was only one of them inside.

  How can you dare speak so to them? it asked gently in the old language. They don’t understand you. It’s we alone who do.

  “Which one are you?” she asked it wearily. It was Marie Ange, she knew.

  “Marie Ange,” she sighed. “Monkey-face. Go away, eh? Va-t’en.”

  Eric was calling for quiet.

  She raised her eyes into the darkness. “Oh, darkness above,” she prayed, “help your sister darkness below.”

  She crossed herself quickly. She hadn’t meant such a terrible prayer. She thought that she might go to church in town that evening.

  Drogue’s voice cut through the silence on the other side of the door.

  “Action!”

  She opened the door and walked out into the golden sunlight and caught a quick glimpse of Charlie Freitag, the producer. She fixed her gaze on a point above the reddening horizon where the sun’s fading glare might light her eyes yet not dazzle her. At the appointed mark, she stopped and lowered the shoulder straps of her one-piece gray bathing suit. It was not, she thought, of any thwarted love that Edna died. The suit peeled away easily as she eased her torso free. She kept her eyes on their quarter of the sky.

  It was dangerous to probe one’s inward places. The chemistry was volatile, fires might start and burn out of control. What if I, Lu Anne thought, who cannot see past mirrors, should confront myself there? My self.

  If I, who see everything in mirrors, who cannot approach the glass without some apprehension, were to see my inward self there, I would not die. But Edna might.

  Medusa, she thought. That’s what that’s about. It’s your own face that turns you to stone, your own secret eyes.

  Poor Edna. Poor Edna gets a sight of herself, she explodes, crashes, burns. Never knew she was there. Catches fire like the feckless child of family legend, little Great-Aunt Catastrophe in her going-to-mass dress on Christmas morning, alight from the Christmas candles, a torch-child spinning around the parlor.

  Poor old Edna, little Dixie honey, sees her own self on the shield of hot blue sky and dies. Sees all that freedom, that great black immensity of righteous freedom and swoons, Oh My. And dies.

  Stepping out of the suit, Lu Anne tossed it aside and walked on toward the water. All at once she was reminded of Walker, but whether it was of something he had told her or something in the script, she could not recall. Something of him had come to her mind for a moment and gone. She stepped into the warm water; two brawny men in swimming trunks stood waist deep just outside the shot, a third waited thirty or so feet out, resting on a float with a coiled length of line.

  Shoulders back, head high, she walked along the inclining sandy bottom. The camera tracked with her, eye to eye, and when she lost her footing and pushed off, she was aware of it pulling back and hovering overhead as she swam out from shore.

  When Drogue called cut, the man with the float advanced toward her but she turned back. Wading out of the water she heard a little clatter of applause.

  “Where’s the crew?” Lu Anne asked, shaking her hair. Vera Ricutti brought her a beach robe.

  “We cleared the set,” Drogue told her. “We thought it would be friendlier just us.”

  “Well, Walter,” she said happily, “if you-all are going to applaud I would like a lot of applause rather than a little.”

  “Shall we bring them back?” he asked. “Want a claque?” He strode away from her, calling for his soldiers.

  “O.K., muchachos! Once more for protection.”

  “Arcs ready if you want it,” Hueffer told him.

  “I don’t want it. I want reflectors in place.”

  Lu Anne went to the trailer to have her hair dried and combed.

  Light was fading; the sun seemed to hang suspended above a thin curl of purple cirrus cloud. They were running out of clear sky. A gray wall of rain was approaching from the northwest; the wind carried a few fat drops to spatter on the beach and people looked at the sky in alarm. In the end, the rain held off and they had time for two more takes of Lu Anne going to the water.

  “I’ll give it to you two ways, Walter,” Lu Anne said.

  Drogue was on the crane with Blakely and the camera operator. Eric Hueffer stood beside the truck watching the sky.

  “Anything you want, babe,” Drogue told her.

  Action was called, Lu Anne flung her suit aside and went in.

  Vera brought her the robe and they started back to her trailer.

  “That was the James Mason ‘think I’ll do a few laps around Catalina between Old-Fashioneds’ one,” she called to Drogue as she went by.

  As they set up for the sky and ocean shot, Drogue looked grim.

  “Watch this,” he told his assistant. “We’re gonna have the Lu Anne Happy Hour.”

  “Is that a bad sign?” Hueffer asked him.

  “Fuckin’ right. But it’s the up side.”

  She came out again for their last take of the day and repeated the scene. The bathing suit was tossed aside. Numb with self-recognition, Edna went to her death.

  “Hey, Lee,” Hueffer asked her as she came out of the water, “what was that called?”

  “That,” she told him, clutching the robe about her shoulders, “is called Lupe Velez Takes a Dunk.”

  Hueffer broke up. Drogue, Blakely, even the operator chortled as they clung to their uneasy perches.

  When Lu Anne had passed, the laughter froze on Drogue’s face. He looked at Blakely and shrugged.

  “She’s funny,” he said.

  It had been dark for over half an hour when Walker’s road began its snaking descent from high desert to the canyon floor. His headlights were focused on a wall of deepening green that seemed to spin before him; the indifferent
ly banked road felt as though it were falling away beneath his tires, threatening to send him out of control. At last, to his relief, the road ran flat and straight. He kept to the center, wary of animals, riders, pedestrians—and in less than a mile he saw the hotel sign.

  Its entrance was tree-lined; a fountain played in front of the foyer. Its buildings were of white stucco that glowed under decorative lamps. To Walker after his weary drive it seemed all compounded of inviting sounds, liquefactive shadow and soft light.

  An attendant took his bags and at the desk he found himself expected. The room to which he was conducted was as tasteful as its elegant extravagance could bear, a showy red-and-black room that suggested Spanish melodrama, theatrical sex and violence. Carmen. He overtipped the bellman with a ten from his winning roll.

  He felt anxious and weary. On a whim, he had come to a place where he was without friends to see a woman whom he had no business to see. There were no other motives of consequence behind his journey.

  In the shower he hummed an old number:

  You take Sally, I’ll take Sue.

  Makes no difference what you do.

  Cocaine.

  The breeze that came through his open balcony window was fragrant with sage, jasmine, eucalyptus. At Santa Anita his winner had been called O.K. So Far.

  Among his supplies he found a packet of cologne-soaked towels, part of a first-class flight kit issued him on a flight that someone else had paid for. Not the Shakespeare people; there was no first class with them. Television. He dressed and brought out his works. He was preparing a snort, thinking O.K. So Far, when there sounded a knock on his door. He put the drugs away and went and opened it.

  His visitor was Jon Axelrod, the unit manager.

  “Hey, Gordon. Our house is”—he gave his hand a flip—“you know?”

  “Thank you, Jon. I’m glad to be here. May I offer you some blow?”

  Axelrod took a chair.

  “I have to tell you the unit has very strict rules regarding the use of drugs. We report narcotics to the police. Otherwise we can’t get insurance.”

  Walker spread a few lines out on his mirror.

  “Stop at Siriwai’s?” Axelrod asked.

  “Mexico’s not Mexico without the doctor.”

  “Did you tell him we all miss him?”

  “He knows.”

  Axelrod removed a crisp U.S. twenty from his wallet, rolled it and took a snort. He was a slightly built man with an ageless fey face. He regarded Walker from the corners of his eyes, which were blue and bright with fractured whimsy. Walker took a line for himself and they sat in reflective silence for a moment.

  “Lu Anne is good,” Axelrod said. “What I seen. Not a whole lot. But good stuff.”

  “How’s her head?”

  “She seems cheerful.”

  “I can’t imagine,” Walker said, “what you mean by that.”

  “She’s working well. We’re watching her. See, her husband just took their kids off on a trip. We weren’t expecting that. We thought—the guy’s a shrink, he’s her shrink. We put them all up on the budget. Then he leaves.”

  “Where is she now?”

  Axelrod smiled.

  “Take a guess.”

  Lu Anne, Walker thought, would be either screwing in a Jacuzzi or in church.

  “In church?”

  “Pretty good, fella. She went to church in town. Billy Bly took her down.”

  Walker was not too pleased to hear about Bly.

  “Billy’s keeping an eye on her,” Axelrod told him. “We’re trying not to leave her alone too much.”

  “How come he’s here? What do you call him on the budget?”

  “Stunt coordinator. Hey, we made some changes in the shooting script, Gordon. We have a lot of falls.”

  Walker was not amused.

  “We got him down for special effects. He supervises the guys in the water, the guys with the horses. Lu Anne likes him.”

  “They keeping company?”

  Axelrod looked puzzled. “No,” he said. “I mean, her old man just left.”

  “It’s a bad sign,” Walker said, “when she goes to church.”

  They finished what was on the pocket mirror.

  “How’s Walter?” Walker asked.

  “Walter’s the same. What a talent, huh, Gordon?”

  “Fuckin’ A. Will he be happy to see me?”

  “Maybe he’s scared you might get to Lu Anne. Maybe not.”

  Walker said nothing.

  “You know Walter, Gordo. He doesn’t care if people like him. He thinks most people are wienies.”

  “What does he think I came down here for?”

  “He knows, Gordon. Everybody does.”

  “Do they really?” Walker said. “Isn’t that something?”

  “Wipe your nose good,” Axelrod said. “We should go see Charlie.”

  The hotel restaurant had a terrace overlooking the bay. Adjoining it was a blue-tiled lounge with a service bar and a few candlelit tables. Two graying men sat at a table near the door. One was Charlie Freitag, esteemed gentleman producer. Charlie rose when Axelrod and Walker came in.

  “Hello, Gordon,” Charlie called. He looked quite surprised. “How was your drive?” He turned to his companion. “This man drove down from L.A. He insisted!”

  Walker was always happy to see Charlie Freitag, a pleasant, friendly man, possessed of a fatuous manner and many well-laid plans.

  Charlie introduced the man he was drinking with as Howard Robinson. Robinson had the best suntan of anyone there; he wore checkered slacks and white loafers.

  “Don’t care to fly?” he asked Walker.

  “I like driving in Mexico,” Walker said.

  “I could keep you in that for life,” Howard said, “if that’s what you like.”

  Walker decided he represented Las Vegas investors, and it developed after a brief exchange that he did. He and Axelrod proved to be old acquaintances and Axelrod was the son of an IATSE enforcer from the days of the labor wars. There were always a lot of hoods around on Walter Drogue’s pictures and Walker had never determined the reason for it.

  “Walter told me to greet you on his behalf,” Charlie said to Walker. “He bids you welcome.”

  “Ah,” Walker said.

  “You know who I think you should meet?” Charlie Freitag asked Walker. “You should meet Dongan Lowndes. Know his work?”

  Walker knew it. It was a single novel of great force.

  “I’m glad,” Freitag said. “He’s doing a piece on us for New York Arts. It can do us a lot of good where it counts.”

  They went toward a dark corner where another party of two were sitting. Walker recognized one as Jack Best, the unit publicity man. Best hated him relentlessly over some drunken misadventure he could not recall.

  “Mr. Lowndes,” Charlie said, with the air of a man opening first one expensive cigar and then another, “let me introduce Gordon Walker, who adapted The Awakening for the screen. You know Mr. Axelrod, I think.”

  Lowndes when he leaned forward turned out to be a bulky man with a pitted face and aviator spectacles. The hand he offered Walker was big and thick-fingered like a countryman’s.

  “How’re you?” Lowndes said. Walker saw that he was drunk and so was Best.

  “This is Dongan Lowndes, Gordon,” Freitag said. “Our guest from New York.” He clapped Walker on the shoulder. “Listen,” he said, “we finished the late work today, so tomorrow we can drink and be merry. People are coming for a cookout at eight o’clock. Carne asada under the stars. We’ll talk.”

  “Great,” Walker said.

  “Claire would have loved to make it, but—you know, she’s busy with groups. She sends her best.”

  “And mine to her,” Walker said.

  Freitag took a quick rueful glance at his publicity man and went back to his table.

  Walker smiled and murmured and made himself small. He was exhausted, propped upright by cocaine; he wanted people to be agreeabl
e.

  “We’ve been waiting for your girlfriend,” Jack Best said to Walker. “She just stood us up for dinner.”

  “It was very informally arranged,” Lowndes said. He spoke in a quiet lowland southern accent. His diction was just ever so slightly blurred about the edges. “I probably misunderstood.”

  “No,” Jack Best said. “She’s like that. A lot of them are. They don’t care about the public anymore.”

  Studying Best across the table, Walker blundered into eye contact and suffered the full weight of his gratuitous hatred.

  “I figured she was probably with him,” the publicist said, indicating Walker and staring him down.

  “C’mon, Jack,” Axelrod said. “Be nice.” He put a friendly arm around Best’s shoulder and squeezed him.

  “I liked your novel,” Walker told Lowndes, still wanting to please. “I mean your most recent one.”

  Lowndes raised his glass. “My one and only,” he said.

  Walker saw that he had said the wrong thing. He had intended to be polite and Lowndes was offended.

  “Walker,” Jack Best intoned. “Gordon Walker.” He rose gravely and staggered off toward the toilets.

  “I don’t know what he’s got against me,” Walker said to Axelrod when Best was gone. “What’s his problem?”

  “His problem is you humiliated him in front of about a hundred people in Colorado two years ago. You don’t remember?”

  Walker tried remembering. “No,” he said.

  “Too bad,” Lowndes said. “It must make a funny story.”

  “I think I’ll have a drink,” Walker said. He had decided that he was not among friends and that there would probably be some kind of trouble. He supposed that had been in the cards all along. “Have they closed the bar?”

  The bar was still open; Axelrod found a waiter and they ordered another round. Lowndes ordered for Jack Best.

  “He’s so amusing,” Lowndes said. “I thought we should keep him greased.”

  When Best returned, he drank a full half of his drink and settled his gaze on Walker again.

  “Jack’s been telling us the history of film,” Lowndes explained. “I’ve learned a lot too.”

  Lowndes’s tone held a warning for the unwary but Walker decided the hell with it. He wondered if Charlie Freitag really thought that an article about a Mexican location in New York Arts would do any good where it counted. He concluded that the reference was to where it counted for Charlie Freitag.