Night of Fire and Snow

by Alfred Coppel

  She looked at him for a long while, gently, almost sadly, and then she said, “All right, Mike.”

  “Will you be? Really?”

  “All right,” she said again. And then she laughed. “But don’t look so unhappy about it.” She was on her feet, brushing the stickers from her cotton dress. “I have to go now,” she said.

  Miguel stood up. “I’ll be here tomorrow,” he said tentatively.

  “Ill be here too.”

  A new and unaccustomed shyness possessed him. She touched her lips and began to walk down the hill. When she reached her bicycle, she turned and waved to him. He waved back. And when she was riding away and he was sure she could not hear him, he shouted, “Allie—I love you!” Then he ran down the hill with great loping strides.

  ELEVEN

  The cocktail party turned out to be everything Miguel had expected it to be. The room, a double suite opened up to accommodate the press of moneymen, picture exhibitors, reporters and photographers, agents with something or someone to sell, critics with knives to bury, show people, socialites, columnists and free loaders, was not nearly big enough to provide circulating space for everyone. Nevertheless, people circulated. Spilling drinks, rubbing buttocks, squirming through—they circulated.

  The noise had been detectable as far away as the elevator, but when the door was opened by one of the red-faced uniformed maids, the blast of sound was like a roar out of bedlam.

  Nora had been whisked away by a mincing young man who designed clothes and Tony Ayula had plunged into the melee with every evidence of relish. Ziegler had introduced Miguel to a dozen or so people whose names he promptly forgot and who forgot his as quickly. He found it impossible to talk to anyone, nor had he seen anyone he wanted to talk to besides the perspiring barman.

  He stood near the bar with a martini growing warm in his hand, listening to the shrill bits of conversation that bobbed to the surface of the turgid roar.

  Nora, across the room, was surrounded now by paunchy men in banker’s gray. The hip-swinging dress designer was still prancing before her, accenting his rapid-fire talk with wide,

  Nora caught his eye and pursed her lips at him and he wondered if he really looked as sullen as all that.

  Tony Ayula appeared out of the crowd and grinned at him. “Having a ball, Mike? Isn’t this the greatest?”

  “I’m living,” Miguel said. “Really living.”

  “The joint is crawling with VIPs,” Tony said. “That’s Halloran over there talking to Nora. Bank of New York. He owns forty-two per cent of Artfilm. Mon-ee, friend. Big money. And the guy next to him trying to grab a feel is Vincent Clay. Pasadena, Pebble Beach. And twenty-seven per cent.”

  “If Mr. Twenty-Seven Per Cent doesn’t take his penny-picking paws off Nora, I’m apt to reduce his holdings for him,” Miguel said.

  Tony laughed. “Hell, boy. A moneyman has got to dream. It’s part of the territory. Nora can handle him.” He banged Miguel on the back and disappeared into the press with two manhattans held at shoulder height.

  Miguel finished his martini and picked up another. A large, dark-haired woman stationed herself in front of him.

  “You’re Miguel Rinehart,” she declared aggressively. “I recognized you from the picture on the dust jacket of The Exile.” Her lipstick was purple and her mouth had a rather marshy look. Miguel’s face felt wooden. He wondered if he were getting drunk.

  “Oh, God, I simply loved that book. I cried. I wept like a baby when I read it.”

  Miguel’s tongue seemed stuck to the roof of his mouth. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say to the woman. She wore a strapless wired dress of shiny amber color. Her breasts were enormous. The cleft between them was like a ravine between two burial mounds.

  “But tell me, for God’s sake, why you had to make the crippled man so unsimpatico. He was a perfect horror. He turned my blood to ice water.”

  Miguel said, “I’m sorry.” It was an idiotic thing to say, but somehow he didn’t think it would matter.

  “Oh, Christ. Don’t be sorry. You gave me the thrill of my whole literary experience. When Laura went back to that hideous husband without any legs—Oh, God...”

  Miguel could feel an icy trickle of sweat on his ribs. The woman’s voice seemed to pierce his skull. The great, white breasts surged and heaved.

  He said thickly, “I’m sorry. I have to go.” He turned and shoved his way into the crowd, leaving the amber woman standing by the bar.

  He stopped by the windows and looked down into the canyon of darkness and light forty stories below. A waiter passed him with a tray and he reached for another drink. His throat felt hot and dry.

  Ten feet away from him, Victor Zeigler, dressed in a dark blue gabardine suit, was telling a group of men about the changes that would have to be made in Kathryn Bellamie’s book to cut production costs. Katie, he was explaining, was in Haiti with her fourth husband and was leaving everything in his, Victor’s, hands—which was what all novelists should do, he added jovially, when their books were made into films. The man seemed to be acting out a part, Miguel thought. It was as though he carried a sign on his royal-blue gabardine back. A sign that said: I AM A PRODUCER.

  Miguel listened to the mass of people trying to out-scream one another, he watched them waving their hands about, giving shape to dreams, conveying alcohol and intricately fashioned tidbits of caviar and cheese and anchovy into the constantly working apertures in their faces. He was filled with an almost overpowering loathing for all of them. He knew he was being unfair. There were decent people here, there had to be. But they were all hidden, their worth as human beings camouflaged with mink and flashy jewelry and expensive tailoring.

  He turned to a glassy-eyed man standing next to him and said, experimentally, “You make me want to vomit.”

  The man smiled twistedly and replied enthusiastically, “It really is a brawl, isn’t it?”

  Miguel shook his head and looked out the window. He could feel the liquor pumping through him. He wanted to leave before something went really wrong.

  “Get me a drink, darling?”

  He looked around to see that it was Nora standing at his side. “Hello,” he said.

  “A drink?”

  They walked over to the bar and Miguel handed her one of the specially watered cocktails Ziegler insisted she drink. “You don’t even get a proper shot,” he said. “If I were you I’d bitch like hell.”

  She smiled at him. She seemed to be having a wonderful time. He felt like a spoil-sport as he said, “How soon can we clear out of here?”

  “Do you want to go right now?”

  “Do you, Nora?”

  “I shouldn’t. Victor will be terribly upset if I leave.”

  He felt leaden inside. “Is this rat race doing you some good?”

  “I imagine so. Victor is very pleased.”

  “And boola-boola Ayula is happy as a clam,” Miguel said. “Delighted as a hog in a bog.”

  Ziegler appeared and took Nora by the arm. “I want you to meet some people, Nora. You’ll excuse us, Mike?”

  “Of course. Naturally.”

  Nora gave him a flashing smile. “And stay away from your amber admirer with the great white bosom. I was watching you.”

  “Eyes like an eagle,” Miguel said. “Like a hawk.”

  “It won’t take a minute, Nora,” Victor said. His eyes were alert now, not dull and filmed as they had been in the morning at the airport.

  Miguel watched them vanish into the crowd. He picked up another martini. He felt sure that if he took several more he could keep ahead of the depression that kept stalking him. He spilled a bit on his suit as he lifted the glass. He thought of something old Tom used to say with that familiar, go-to-hell grin on his face: “Might as well be drunk as the way we are.”

  Tom. Oh God, he thought. Tom was the crippled man of The Exile. Tom was the lonely one, the dead man hung around the neck of his destroyer like a bloody chicken wired to the neck of a killing mon
grel dog—

  I should never get drunk, he thought fearfully. God, I should never get drunk.

  The glass in his hand was empty. He reached for another and stood, rocking back and forth slightly, letting the babble of senseless talk wash over him in stinging, disconnected sprays.

  A woman said, “She got into my apartment and took photostats of every letter he ever wrote me. The checks, too. Oh, I tell you.” Her red-painted mouth moved like the lips of a fish in a tank.

  A man’s voice said, “Everyone knows he’s a lush. He’d cheat his mother out of her last buck to buy himself a skinful. But, hell, I don’t want to say anything against the guy.” Miguel turned around, but could not separate the speaker from the crowd.

  He glanced at his watch. It had stopped with the hands at eight-forty.

  He found himself caught up momentarily in the incomprehensible currents of alcoholic sociability, exchanging vacant conversation with a thin brunette who wanted to talk about dogs.

  “John and I plan to have a kennel. No, I’m really serious about it. He wants to get away from the city because of the A-bomb and I said to him, really, what can you do in the country? To make a living? Well, he said there was no reason we couldn’t make a living raising dogs because I was such a bitch, after all. Isn’t that a scream? I wish you could meet John. He’s around here somewhere.” She wandered off vaguely looking for John and Miguel found Victor Ziegler at his side.

  “Having a good time?” Ziegler asked.

  “Not particularly,” Miguel said. “The drinks are good.”

  Ziegler spread his hands. He looked suddenly tired and aging. It was as though the shellac coating of the harried businessman had cracked to let the inner core of ennui through. “It’s necessary,” he said. “You can do nothing without money.” He sipped sparingly on a Scotch highball. “This party will cost Artfilm five thousand dollars. It will earn us a hell of a lot more.”

  Miguel looked around for Nora. He couldn’t locate her.

  “Your trip was difficult?” Ziegler asked.

  Miguel put down his empty glass and lit a cigarette. The room was foggy with smoke and noise. “Not bad,” he said. “Rough between Paris and Shannon. The rest of it was all right.” The liquor lay hot and thick in his stomach. His lips felt tight-skinned and he could feel his pulse in them.

  “It’s been years since I was in Paris,” Ziegler said, “1935 it was.”

  “You wouldn’t recognize it now.”

  “I suppose not.” Ziegler’s eyes kept searching the room restlessly. If a Somebody appears untended, Miguel thought, hell bolt. For some reason the notion of Ziegler bolting amused him. He decided to make a game out of keeping Ziegler’s attention.

  He asked, “You made films in Europe?”

  “In Germany, until the Hitlerites took over. Then in Hungary. Finally, in 1935,1 arrived in Paris. But there was nothing there for me. I followed Lubitsch to America.” Ziegler pursed his lips thoughtfully.”A man cannot know where the four winds will blow him.”

  “You’ve never wanted to go back?”

  Ziegler’s eyes looked dark and liquid in the gross fleshiness of his face. He looked at his highball and said, “To Germany? No. never.” He paused and then said distantly, “My wife and I had a small apartment near the Kurfursten bridge—you know Berlin?”

  “Not well.”

  Ziegler shrugged. “It was a pleasant little flat. Two rooms and a kitchen. I was working for UFA then. Things were not easy, you understand. But we were happy enough. On the Sabbath, when work of any sort is forbidden, we used to hire a neighborhood boy to light our candles. A big, handsome youngster—blond like our son. We hired him because my wife was very devout and we could not light the candles ourselves. It would have been a breach of the Jewish Sabbath—”

  Miguel was disturbed to see tears standing in the dark, far-seeing eyes. I didn’t want this, he thought. He wished Ziegler would stop.

  Zeigler said, “We called him a shabbas goy—You know Yiddish?”

  Miguel shook his head:

  “In 1933, our shabbas goy came to the house in a brown uniform. I was fortunate to be away, out of the country at the time.” He sipped at his highball carefully. His eyes had gone flat and opaque again, searching the room. “It was a long time ago. But you see why I never went back. I am no longer devout, either. A man must change with the times.”

  Someone behind them shrilled, “Jesus Christ, that’s the best one I’ve heard tonight! Listen, Carmody told me this one—about the two dogs who were better off than people: they could both watch television?”

  Ziegler smiled thinly in the direction of the voice and said, “Shall we get another drink, Mike? I’d like to talk to you about the job.”

  At the bar, Ziegler continued. “You’ve had screenwriting experience?”

  “Yes. Two of my books were filmed. I worked on the screen versions with Frank Steinmetz. You know him?”

  “A good craftsman.”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Steinmetz,” Ziegler said, “is in South America. We will not be able to get him for Green Hills. It will have to be your screenplay without help from anyone. If I seem blunt, forgive me, I am a businessman. I once thought of myself as an artist—when I was only directing and didn’t have to worry about financing and distribution and production problems. But now I am a businessman with a product to sell and I must be sure you want to do this picture.”

  “I’ll be just as blunt, Victor,” Miguel said. “Nora wants me to do it and I would like to please her. But I’m not certain about what I want to do, not just this minute.”

  “I see,” Ziegler said.

  “I don’t think you do. I can understand your point of view. Actually, writers aren’t as woolly-headed about money as people think they are. If I do this picture, Victor, I’ll be doing it for the money. But I’ll give it the best I have.”

  “That’s fair.”

  “I’m a novelist. I don’t know why a man should decide to try making his living by writing books. All I know is that it’s the one thing I’ve been consistent about all my life. There might be a good Freudian reason for it. I don’t know. What I’m trying to say, in my slightly tight way, is that I may be the wrong man for you. It’s something we’ll have to work out. I may as well go the whole way and tell you I need the money badly—but I’ll have to think about it.”

  “Mike,” Ziegler said, “if you need money in a lump sum for anything, it can be arranged. I know about these things. We could even arrange to have the money deposited to your account here in New York or even abroad, where there are no community property laws—”

  “This is the second time this thing has come up,” Miguel said. “Are you concerned about my wife?”

  “If she is giving you trouble about money—”

  “What the hell, Victor,” Miguel said angrily, “didn’t Nora tell you Alaine could buy and sell the lot of us? If I need money it’s for Nora, not for Alaine.”

  Tony Ayula pushed his way to them and whispered in Ziegler’s ear. Ziegler said, “All right, Tony, I’ll attend to him.” To Miguel he said, ‘Tm sorry again. We’ll talk about it later.” Miguel watched his beefy back disappear in the crowd.

  Tony Ayula moved close to Miguel and said in his ear, “That Clay fellow from Pasadena tried to lock himself in the can with one of the starlets and the goddam dame made a scene. Jesus, what a guy has to go through.”

  Miguel started to walk away, searching for Nora. Ayula followed him. “Say, did you go to school in the east, fella? I keep thinking I’ve seen you before.”

  “I went to Stanford,” Miguel said shortly. “Where’s Nora?”

  “I wouldn’t bother her right now, fella.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’ll be here in a minute. Take it easy. Have a drink.” Miguels eyes grew dangerous.

  “Oh, for chrissake, Mike,” Ayula said reproachfully. “She’s out on the terrace talking to Halloran—the bank guy. She’ll be bac
k in a minute.”

  Miguel could feel the tenseness growing inside him. There was a taste of salt in his mouth. The shrill talk and laughter pierced his ears painfully. He started for the sliding doors leading to the dark terrace.

  Ayula’s hand closed on Miguel’s arm. “Now wait a minute, fella. You can’t just barge in out there. Nora will blow her stack.”

  “Take your hand off,” Miguel said in a dead voice.

  They stood in a tiny clearance in the crowd. People were turning to look at them curiously. The big woman in the amber dress started to laugh. “Somebody’s tight,” she giggled.

  Ayula said, “Come on, cool down a little. Let’s have a drink.” He pulled at Miguel’s arm.

  Miguel’s head felt tight, as though it were wrapped in wet rawhide. There was a climbing spiral of fire in his stomach, in his chest. He spun around and hit Ayula.

  Ayula stumbled backward, striking a waiter’s arm as he fell.

  A tray of drinks overturned into the press. A woman screamed as ice cubes and liquor drenched her naked back. Tony sat on the floor, holding his hurt mouth.

  Miguel turned and pushed through the crowd to the terrace. He could see Nora standing with Halloran in the darkness. The cool air made his head ache. Nora turned toward him, her astonished face illuminated by a shaft of light from inside. People were staring out into the night, their expressions blank and curious at once.

  “Nora,” Miguel said. “Let’s go.”

  “Mike—whats the matter? What happened in there?”

  “I just knocked Ayula on his can. Let’s get out of this zoo.” Halloran moved bulkily in the darkness. Miguel turned on him.

  “Now take it easy, young man,” Halloran said, frightened.

  “Mike! For heaven’s sake, what’s the matter with you?” Nora’s voice was shrill with displeasure.

  “I’m drunk and I want to get out of this stinking bedlam,” Miguel said. “Get your coat, Nora.”

  “Just wait a minute, Mike—”

  Miguel felt as though he were trapped in a vat of sticky ugliness. He was sure that if he didn’t get out he would crack wide open.

  “I want you to come with me, Nora,” he said doggedly. She would come. She had to. When it came right down to it, he thought, they belonged together. “Let’s get going,” he said.