Children of Light

by Robert Stone

  “I know,” Walker said. “Give my best to the gang in Katmandu.”

  She turned for the water’s edge. Walker trudged along the beach toward the row of bungalows.

  A moment after his knock, through the closed door, he heard her startled motion; a shifting step on the tiles, the rustling of cloth. When she opened and saw it was he, she closed her eyes and opened them again.

  “Thank God,” she said, and leaned her head against his breast.

  “Amen,” Walker said.

  She stepped aside to let him come in.

  “Have you anything to drink, Gordon?”

  “No,” he said. “And you shouldn’t.”

  “Last night. I was so demented. I was out of my gourd. I couldn’t handle seeing you.”

  “You went to Bly’s.”

  She looked at him in alarm and shook her head.

  “I went to Billy’s place to sleep because I didn’t want to sleep alone. I mean, he’s gay, Gordon. He’s my pal.”

  “You had an affair with him once, Lu, I know you did. When I saw you creep off to him I was a little put out.”

  “Gordon, you know I bend the truth from time to time.”

  “We all forgive you, Lu. As best we can.”

  “But I’m not lying now, Gordon. I went to Billy’s and he gave me a ’lude and we talked. I swear it. I’d just seen you—how could I make it with Billy? I may tell stories, Gordon, but I’m not capable of pushing that many buttons.”

  “It’s funny,” Walker said. “I started out being jealous of that Lowndes guy.”

  “He’s a piece of shit,” Lu Anne said. She stated it so positively and unemotionally that it sounded like a considered analysis.

  “He wrote a good novel,” Walker said. “Of course,” he added with some slight satisfaction, “he only wrote one and that was a while ago.”

  “I read his novel,” Lu Anne said. “I don’t care how many he wrote. He’s a piece of shit and he’s after me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he knows I’m crazy and he wants to write about it in New York Arts. He’s always watching me.”

  “Lu,” Walker said patiently, “he digs you.”

  “Do you think,” Lu Anne asked brightly, “that if I called the room service people they’d send down a bottle of tequila?”

  “Not if they’ve been told not to.” He paused a moment. “You can always try,” he heard himself say.

  “Mezcal,” Lu Anne said wickedly, “that’s what we want.” She put her arm around Walker’s neck and buried her face in his shoulder. In an instant, as though she had been posing for a quick snapshot, she leaped to the telephone. “We’ll have ourselves an alcoholic picnic. As we were wont.”

  “We were wont to lose the odd weekend with our alcoholic picnics.”

  Lu Anne ordered her mezcal without objection from the house. The prospect seemed to cheer her; she sat on the edge of the sofa with her hands clasped between her thighs watching Walker.

  “Funny about last night,” he said to her. “You’re with Lowndes, you go off with me. You’re with me, you go off with Bly. Lots of La Ronde, entrances and exits, bedrooms and closed doors and nobody really gets any. Very Hollywood.”

  “We used to think we were too late,” Lu Anne said. “That we had missed out on Hollywood.”

  “How wrong we were.”

  Within a few minutes, two waiters wheeled in a rolling table with a liter bottle of mezcal con gusano attended by bottles of mineral water, glasses, lemon wedges and an ice bucket.

  Walker poured them out two glasses of straight liquor.

  “How about you, Lu Anne?”

  She took the drink and drank it down unflinching with a childlike greediness and poured herself another.

  “You want to know, Gordon? How it is with me? Is it really your business?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “That I bend my eye on vacancy and with the incorporeal air do hold discourse?”

  “Sure. And why. And if you want to, you’ll get to hear how it is with me.”

  “You played Lear,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “How was it?”

  “It was like life but easier to take. I could spend the rest of my time on earth playing Lear.”

  “I wish I could play Lear,” Lu Anne said. “Maybe I can. Beard up and play Lear.”

  “You could play the Fool.”

  Their eyes met. Lu Anne poured them more mezcal.

  “That’s good,” Lu Anne said. “Because I could. We could do it together.”

  “When this is over,” Walker said. “Well talk it up. I’ll talk to Al.”

  “The hell with agents. Well do it on campuses. We’ll do it in church halls for free.”

  “Yes.”

  She took the bottle of mezcal and examined the little embalmed creature at the bottom of the bottle.

  “The worm’s an odd worm.”

  “I wish you the joy of it,” Walker said.

  “I want to be Cleo too, Gordon. I’m tired of Edna. I’m glad she’s dead.” She sipped her drink and laughed. “I mean, I just can’t die too many times. I can’t get enough of it.”

  “You’re such a ham, Lu Anne. You’re lucky you can act.”

  “And you’re such a ham,” she said to him, “it’s a crying shame you aren’t any better.”

  “What’s happening with Lionel? Where’s he gone?”

  “He’s gone visiting with the kids. But I don’t think he’s coming back.”

  Walker poured himself some mezcal.

  “He can’t just not come …”

  “No,” she said, “he can’t just not come back. I mean he’s going to leave me. He was aching to get away from me. It was horrible.”

  “He can’t take your kids from you.”

  “Sweetie,” Lu Anne said, “with the right lawyer in the right state he could get me put to sleep.”

  “Things have changed, you know. You don’t have to let him get away with it.”

  “No,” she said. “I can kill him. But I don’t think I’d be able.”

  They sat in silence drinking. Walker went to the window and saw the sky blighted with thick dark yellowing clouds, as though there were a dust storm over the ocean.

  “Connie left me, you know.”

  Lu Anne lay on the bed with her eyes closed.

  “I never understood why she stayed,” Lu Anne said.

  “I was very upset,” Walker said. “I think I still am.”

  “Poor baby,” Lu Anne said. “Is that why you came down here?”

  “No,” Walker said.

  “Then,” Lu Anne asked him, “why did you?”

  “I have a lot of excuses,” Walker said, “but I guess I came to see you.”

  “Ah,” Lu Anne said briskly. “Yesterdays. Golden sweet sequestered days.”

  “Of mad romance and love. Yes, I was moved by the prospect.”

  “A reunion.”

  “Just so.”

  “Well, Gordon,” Lu Anne said, inventing a character for herself as she went along, “I too am moved …” She stopped and put her fist to her forehead, letting the character fall like a shed skin. “I too am moved.” She went to him and reached out, gently touched his cheek and leaned her head against his shoulder. Walker thought he felt an infinite weariness there. “I too.”

  He held her and he was thinking that this was his golden girl and that she was in his arms and that they could never have peace or a quiet moment or a half hour’s happiness.

  “It was so foolish of you to come, Gordon. Good heavens, man, no wonder Connie left you.”

  He said nothing. She broke away from him.

  “Connie and I, Gordon mine, we’re confronting hollow-eyed forty-odd. We’ve been screwed, blued and tattooed. We’ve been put with child and aborted, hosed down ripped open chewed and spat out seven ways from sundown! We’ve been burned by lovers, pissed on by our kids, shit on by mothers-in-law, punched out for laughing and punched
out for crying and you expect us to sit still for your romantic peregrinations? Foolish man!”

  “I don’t believe Connie had lovers,” Walker said.

  She stuck out her lower lip and thrust a curved pinky toward him, the gesture of a child’s wager. He put his hand over his face; they both began to laugh.

  “Foolish man!” she cried. “Stay home and fuck your fecund imagination!”

  “I could do that in my garage,” he said. “When I had a garage.”

  “I know all the things one can do in garages,” she said.

  He kept smiling but her words gave him a vague chill. The picture they brought to his mind’s eye was not agreeable.

  “The girls get all shriveled and the boys get soft and sentimental. That’s how the damn world goes.” She went back and put her arms around him again. “What do you want from me, fool? You want us to be kids again?”

  “I wouldn’t have put it that way.”

  “Indeed you wouldn’t, sweetheart, but that’s what you want.”

  “Who knows?” Walker said.

  “Jamais, mon amour. Jamais encore.”

  They sat down together on the sofa and he kissed her. She pulled back to see his face.

  “You closed your eyes,” she said, “you still do it.”

  He shrugged.

  “We’ll never be kids again, Gordon.” He felt her arms encircle him, he put his around her and kissed her.

  “We’ll have to be spirits of another sort,” she said. After he had kissed her again, she whispered in his ear. “We’re not alone here.”

  It brought him up short; then he realized she must be speaking of her Long Friends. They lay together for a moment, then she got to her feet. He stood up and took her in his arms again. The liquor, he supposed, had been a bad idea. It seemed not to matter any longer.

  “No more romances for us, Gordon.”

  When he started to answer, she covered his lips with her fingertips.

  “There’s only work now. That’s all that’s left, it’s all that matters. That’s why I had to stop my pills.”

  “If there’s only work,” Walker said, “where does that leave me?”

  “You should have made provision,” she told him. “You should have lived like other people.”

  “I always thought I could deliver. You know. Eventually.”

  “When we do our Lear,” she told him, “and I’m your Fool, you’ll deliver.”

  “I wasn’t bad, you know,” Walker said. “I was all right.”

  She took his hands in hers. He gently disengaged and kissed her again.

  “If I’m the Fool,” she told him when they caught their breath, “I’ve got to be Cordelia. They’re the same.”

  “Yes,” Walker said.

  “But I’m too old.”

  “You aren’t,” Walker told her. “Anyway, I think it’s as much a question of weight.”

  “That is what they say. Isn’t it, Gordon?”

  “Yes, it is. Absolutely true.”

  She let him pick her up, clasping her hands around his neck. She was not at all hard to lift, thinner than he had ever seen her and as quick.

  “That’s the way they do it at the ice show,” she told him. “Did I tell you, Gordon, about when I was with the ice show?”

  “Of course,” Walker said. “Of course you did.” He walked toward the bed carrying her.

  “Howl!” she half cried. Clinging, she looked up at him. “Howl,” she whispered. “Howl.”

  He swung her gently around once.

  “See,” she said. “I can be a light Cordelia. And I can be a shy Cordelia. Warlike, on-the-march Cordelia.” She let go her grip on the back of his neck and sank down across his outstretched arms with a sigh. “And I can be a dead Cordelia.”

  He placed her on the bed and sat down beside her. When they were both naked he rolled over to face her and found himself beside dead Cordelia.

  “Hey,” he said. “Come back.”

  They made love over a daylight hour or so. Once she told him that she had joy in his arrival; her words, while their spell lasted, swept away his weariness and fear and anger. Later they slept awhile.

  When he awoke the sun was low in the sky. A blade of sunlight was edging across the bed where they had been, threatening the shadows in which Lu Anne lay sleeping.

  That she had taken joy in his arrival, he thought, that she had spoken those words to him should be all that mattered. He wanted more than anything to stay in a time where her words and his love were all that mattered. When it began to slip away, he had a drink of mezcal and quietly went to his stash for more cocaine. He brought the drug and his works into the bathroom.

  As he was chopping the crystalline powder, he happened to glance in the cabinet mirror. He saw the bathroom doorknob slowly turn. It was too late to hide anything; he steadied the stuff on the ledge in front of him so as not to spill it. In the next moment, as he expected, the door flew open and she was standing in the bathroom doorway, laughing.

  “Aha,” she cried. “Gotcha.”

  In a pink palazzo at the top of the hill, the Drogues and their womenfolk were whiling away the afternoon watching films in which people walked into the sea and disappeared forever. They had watched Bruce Dern in Coming Home, Joan Crawford in Humoresque, James Mason in the second A Star Is Born and Lee Verger in The Awakening. Now Fredric March and Janet Gaynor were on the out-sized screen before them. March stood clad in his bathrobe in the character of Norman Mayne.

  “Hey,” he called to Janet Gaynor. “Mind if I take just one more look?”

  Old Drogue picked up the remote-control panel and stopped the frame. His eyes were filled with tears.

  “Listen to me,” he told the others, “this guy was the greatest screen actor of all time. That line—the emotion under it—controlled—played exactly to movie scale. There was never anyone greater.”

  Joy McIntyre lay on some heaped cushions beside him, weeping unashamedly.

  “Wellman was good,” the younger Drogue said.

  “The vulnerability,” old Drogue said, “the gentleness, the class of the man. Never again a Fredric March. What a guy!” He let the film proceed and settled back with head on Joy’s bare belly. “You see what I mean, sweetheart?” the old man asked his young friend. But Joy was too overcome to reply.

  “Look at the nostrils on Gaynor,” young Drogue said. “She acted with her nose.”

  “Do I have to remind you that she started before sound?”

  “I love it,” Patty Drogue said. “Before sound.”

  “She was ultra-feminine,” old Drogue said.

  The younger Drogue studied the images on the screen.

  “Her face suggests a cunt,” he said.

  The old man sighed.

  “I don’t know why it does,” young Drogue said. “It just does.”

  “You’re a guttersnipe,” Drogue senior said.

  “Something about the woman’s face, Dad. It makes a crude but obvious reference to her genitals.”

  “Some people are brought up in poverty,” the old man said, “and they become cultivated people. Others grow up spoiled rotten with luxury and become guttersnipes.”

  “You look at her face,” young Drogue declared, “and you think of her pussy.” His brows were knotted in concentration. “Can that be the primal element in female sexual attraction? Can it explain Janet Gaynor?”

  “People are surprised,” Drogue senior said quietly, “when they find out you can get sex education lectures at the morgue. They’re not in touch with the modern sensibility.”

  Joy was glaring sullenly at young Drogue. The old man shifted his position, the better to fondle her.

  “What does he mean,” Patty Drogue asked her husband, “sex education lectures at the morgue?”

  “In San Francisco,” young Drogue said absently. “The coroner explains about bondage. Pops got fixated on this.”

  On the screen, Fredric March’s body double was wading toward the setting s
un. This time it was Drogue junior who stopped the frame.

  “This one was the best,” his father said smugly. “Of all the walk-into-the-ocean movies this one was it.”

  “In the Mason and Judy Garland,” his son told him, “the Cukor version, the scene’s exactly the same. Frame for frame.”

  “The scene is conditioned by what’s around it. The other one is a Judy Garland film. Entirely different thing.”

  Young Drogue went pensive.

  “Well,” he said, “with Judy Garland now, see, she …”

  “Stop,” his father said sternly. “I don’t want to hear it. Whatever idiotic obscenities you were about to utter—keep them to yourself. I don’t want to hear your sexual theories about Judy Garland. I want to go to my grave without hearing them.”

  “Some of us want to remember Judy the way she was,” Joy McIntyre said primly.

  “Who the fuck asked you?” young Drogue inquired.

  Old Drogue kissed Joy on the thigh to soothe her.

  “Ours is the best,” the young director declared. “We took a great risk to honor the author’s intentions. We had to reinvent a virtual chestnut because it was in the book.”

  “You’re lucky you had a strong script,” his father told him.

  They watched Norman Mayne’s funeral and the end of the film.

  “There was another Cukor version, right?” young Drogue asked. “Before Wellman’s. It had a walk to the water, didn’t it?”

  “There was What Price Hollywood? by Cukor. It’s a similar plot but it doesn’t have anyone in the water.”

  “You sure?”

  “Absolutely certain,” the old man said.

  The chimes of the main door sounded. Patty rose to her feet and lifted the drawn shutters to peer out.

  “Tell them to fuck off,” said Drogue minor.

  “It’s Jack Best,” she said. “But he doesn’t look his jack best, ho ho.”

  “I’ll bet he doesn’t,” young Drogue said.

  “Please don’t be rude to Jack,” his father told him. “He’s got a job the same as you. And he’s been doing stills for us.”

  “He’s been underfoot all morning with his stills,” the young director said, going to the door. “Helena saw him trailing after Walker by the beach—like we’re going to sell the movie with Walker’s picture.”