Now, Paco was threatening to kill him. Only a junkie would tell you he would kill you while he lay flat on his face.
“Why don’t you knock over a store?” Faye said.
“What store?” said Paco hoarsely.
“You don’t think I’m going to have it on record that I told you the store?”
This thought revived Paco. If he robbed a store there was money, and with money there was horse. So Paco got to his feet and staggered to the door. Possibly he could hold himself together for another hour. In his own body, Faye felt how Paco’s head was bursting.
“I’ll kill you soon, Marty,” Paco said from the door with his swollen tongue and his aching mouth.
“Come around and we’ll have a drink,” said Faye.
Once the sound of Paco’s footsteps had disappeared down the sidewalk of the empty street with its modern homes and its cement-brick fence, Faye went into the bedroom and put on a jacket. He felt as if he were close to bursting. There was no pressure in all the world like the effort to beat off compassion. Faye knew all about compassion. It was the worst of the vices; he had learned that a long time ago. When he was seventeen, he had spent a day out of curiosity begging money on the street. There had been nothing to it; the only trick was to look people in the eye and then they could never turn you down. That was why bums made so little; they couldn’t look people in the eye. But he could, he had stared into a hundred faces, and ninety had blanched their little bit and given him back some silver. It was fear, it was guilt; once you knew that guilt was the cement of the world, there was nothing to it; you could own the world or spit at it. But first you had to get rid of your own guilt, and to do that you had to kill compassion. Compassion was the queen to guilt. So screw Paco, and Faye burned for that sad pimply slob.
It was impossible to sleep. Instead, he went to the garage, got into his little foreign car, and raced it down the street, cashing a tight smile at the thought of how he might be waking people. To the east, ten miles perhaps, there was a small rise; it was nothing, but on all those roads which were laid in lines across the mesa of the desert it was the only one which had a view. There was a dirt track over the mountains, but he could never reach that summit in time. The dawn would be coming very soon and he wanted to see it and look into the east. There was Mecca. Faye raced his car until its light chassis quivered like a bird whose wings are clipped, giving all of himself to the task, looking for the peace which comes from curious contests, the ice-cream-eating derby, the public-speaker’s symposium, the apple-polisher’s jubilee.
He made the rise in time to see the sun lift out of the table of the east, and he stared into that direction, far far out, a hundred miles he hoped. Somewhere in the distance across the state line was one of the great gambling cities of the Southwest, and Faye remembered a time he gambled around the clock, not even pausing at dawn when a great white light, no more than a shadow of the original blast somewhere further in the desert, had dazzled the gaming rooms and lit with an illumination colder than the neon tube above the green roulette cloth the harsh dead faces of the gamblers who had worn their way through the night.
Even now, there were factories out there, out somewhere in the desert, and the tons of ore in all the freight cars were being shuttled into the great mouth, and the factory labored, it labored like a gambler for twenty-four hours of the day, reducing the mountain of earth to a cup of destruction, and it was even possible that at this moment soldiers were filing into trenches a few miles from a loaded tower, and there they would wait, cowering in the dawn, while army officers explained their purpose in the words of newspaper stories, for the words belonged to the slobs, and the slobs hid the world with words.
So let it come, Faye thought, let this explosion come, and then another, and all the others, until the Sun God burned the earth. Let it come, he thought, looking into the east at Mecca where the bombs ticked while he stood on a tiny rise of ground trying to see one hundred, two hundred, three hundred miles across the desert. Let it come, Faye begged, like a man praying for rain, let it come and clear the rot and the stench and the stink, let it come for all of everywhere, just so it comes and the world stands clear in the white dead dawn.
Part Four
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
EITEL did not go to sleep after the telephone call from Marion Faye. Elena had stirred just long enough to ask who was on the phone, and when he gave the answer Faye had been considerate to provide—that it was a tip on a horse, no more, no less—Elena grumbled drowsily, “Well, they have some nerve. My God, at this hour,” and fell back to sleep. In the morning she would not remember, he knew, for she often had such conversations in the dark.
So it was hardly the fear of Elena learning about Bobby which kept Eitel awake now. Still, the longer he thought about it the more convinced he became that Bobby must have been with Marion while they talked. He knew Faye; Faye would not have called otherwise, and Eitel thinking of how he had groaned, “Oh, God, never!” was sick at the thought Bobby might have overheard. In a day or two he could have paid the girl a visit, he would have known how to tell her that he would not see her again. He could even have left a present, not five hundred dollars this time, but something.
Abruptly, Eitel decided that he must have been out of his mind. After all these months of trying to remember that he was not rich any more, he had seen fit to throw away five hundred dollars on a ridiculous, sentimental, and sickly impulse, and thinking of that, Eitel knew no matter how long he lay in bed, the next day was ruined for work. Pressed next to Elena, trying to soothe himself by the warmth of her body, his memory, like a battered drunk at the end of a spree, groped over the events of the last six weeks.
Was it just so short a time ago that he had started work on his movie script? He had been in the state of mind of the gambler who puts all he owns on a single bet, so desperate to win that he comes to believe the longer the odds against him the better his chance. Yet, now, remembering that confidence, he thought that he had not had such very good luck. Finally, it was his own fault, finally it was always one’s own fault, at least by Eitel’s standards, but still things could have gone a little better. Six weeks ago, just the day before he was ready to begin writing, the world did not necessarily have to come knocking on his door, he did not have to be paid an unexpected visit.
Yet the world had come. It came in the shape of a man named Nelson Nevins who had worked as Eitel’s assistant for several years, and now had his own reputation as a director. Eitel despised Nevins’ work; it was tricky, dishonest, and with pretensions to art—in short all the blemishes he found in so much of his own work. What irritated him most about the visit was that Nevins had come to gloat.
Eitel and Elena spent an hour with him. Nevins had been in Europe for a year, he had made a picture there, it was the best he had ever done he assured Eitel. “Teppis cried when he saw it,” Nevins said. “Can you believe that? I didn’t believe it myself.”
“I never used to believe it when Teppis would cry over my pictures,” Eitel said languidly, “and I was right. He calls them degenerate now.”
“Oh, I know,” Nevins said. “He always cries. But that’s not what I mean. He really cried. You can’t fool yourself on something like that.” Nevins was plump, he wore a gray flannel suit and a knit tie. He smelled of expensive toilet water and his nails were manicured. “You should have been over in Europe, Charley. What a place. The week before the Coronation was fabulous.”
“Oh, was there a coronation?” Elena asked. Eitel could have throttled her.
“You know the princess is just fascinated by movie stars,” Nevins went on, and Eitel had to listen. Nevins had been here, he had been there, he had slept with a famous Italian actress.
“How is she?” asked Eitel with a smile.
“There’s nothing fake about her. She’s beautiful, intelligent, alive. One of the wittiest women I ever met. And in the hay, oh, man, she’s genuine.”
“I think it’s terrible how men talk about
women,” Elena offered, and by an effort Eitel kept himself from saying, “Don’t feel obliged to join every conversation.”
Minutes went by and Nevins continued to talk. He had had a most marvelous twelve months. It was the best period of his life, he would admit. There had been so many people he had met, so many fantastic experiences he had had; there was the night he got drunk with a distinguished old boy from the House of Lords, the week he spent with the highly placed American statesman who wanted Nevins’ advice on the delivery of his speeches; all in all it had been a diverting year. “You ought to get to Europe, Charley. Everything’s happening over there.”
“Yes,” said Eitel.
“I hear you expect big things from this movie you’re on.”
“Little things,” Eitel said.
“It’s going to be marvelous,” Elena said in a dogged voice.
Nevins glanced at her. “Oh, I’m sure,” he said. It chafed Eitel to see how Nevins looked at Elena. He was polite and rarely talked to her. Nevins seemed to be saying, “Why do you have to go to such lengths, old man? There are all those amazing women in Europe.”
When he left, Eitel walked him to his car. “Oh, by the way,” Nevins said, “don’t mention I was here. You know what I mean.”
“How long are you going to be in town?”
“A couple of days only. That’s the worst of it. I’m very busy. I guess you are, too.”
“The script will have me working.”
“I know.” They shook hands. “Well,” said Nevins, “give my regards to your lady, what is her name again?”
“Elena.”
“Very nice girl. Give me a ring and maybe we can find the right sort of place to have lunch.”
“Or ring me.”
“Of course.”
After Nevins had driven away, Eitel hated to go back in the house. He was met by Elena in a tantrum. “If you want to go to Europe, you can go right now,” she said in a loud voice. “Don’t think I’m holding you back.”
“How you talk. At the moment I can’t even get a passport.”
“Oh, so that’s it. If you could get a passport, you’d take off in five minutes, and tell me to kiss your ass.”
“Elena,” he said quietly, “please don’t shriek like a fishwife.”
“I knew it,” she said between her sobs. “It was just a question of time, just waiting for the trigger to explode.”
He could be distantly irritated by her use of metaphor. “All right, what are you so upset about?” he said in a weary voice.
“I hate your friend.”
“He’s not worth hating,” Eitel said.
“Only you think he’s better than you are.”
“Now, don’t be ridiculous.”
“You do. That’s what’s so awful. You call me a fishwife cause you can’t screw a princess the way he did.”
“He didn’t screw a princess. It was just an actress.”
“You’d like to be over in Europe right now. You’d like to be rid of me.”
“Stop it, Elena.”
“You stay with me cause I’m somebody you can feel superior to. That’s how you get your opinion of yourself. By what other people think of you.”
“I love you, Elena,” Eitel said.
She did not believe him, and all the while he comforted her, all the while he said that a thousand Nelson Nevinses were not so important to him as even one unhappiness for her, he hated himself that it was not true, hated the pang of jealousy, call it more properly the envy he felt that he was being forgotten, and men who had been his assistants went to coronations and slept with women who were more famous than any he had known in a long time. “Will I never grow up?” he asked himself in despair.
It was such bad luck. For the first time in several weeks, he was in a serious depression, and over and over he would complain to himself, “Did Nevins have to come today? Just when I was ready to begin?” All that evening he studied Elena, studied her critically, and when she could feel his attention on her, she would look up and ask, “Is anything the matter, Charley?” He would shake his head, he would murmur, “Nothing’s the matter. You look beautiful,” and all the time he would be telling himself that she was such poor material, she had such a distance to go. He knew by a dozen signs she gave that she was inviting him to make love again tonight, and he dreaded it a little and proved to be right, for afterward he found himself more depressed. It was the first time Elena had failed for him, and yet it was at that moment she said, “Oh, Charley, when you make love to me, everything is all right again.” And with eyes that longed for the safety of innocence, she asked him timidly, “Is it really the same for you?”
“Why more than ever,” he was obliged to say, and so with quiet and private defeat upon defeat, his mood turned on him still again and he felt lonely indeed.
Next day, by an act of will, he set to work. It was the third time he had started this script in fifteen months, not to mention the half-dozen occasions over the last ten years, and he was hoping that he was finally ready for the task. He had spent so many years thinking about this story, and in the last weeks at Desert D’Or since he had been living with Elena, he had outlined every scene, he knew exactly what he wished to do. Yet as he worked, he found that he kept seeing his movie as someone like Nelson Nevins might see it. No matter how he tried, and there were days when he drove himself into exhaustion, sitting before his desk twelve and fourteen hours, the work would always turn into something shoddy or something contrived, into something dull, into something false. Afterward, tired and irritable, he would lie inertly beside Elena, or rouse himself long enough to take her perfunctorily, no more he often thought than a quick coup to stun his brain.
Certain nights with his desire to understand himself, he would draw even more deeply from his depleted energy, he would gamble for knowledge by taking several cups of coffee and drugging them with sleeping pills, until like a cave explorer he would be able to wander into himself, the thread of his escape a bottle of whisky, for with the liquor he could always return when what he learned about himself became too large, too complex, too directly dangerous. And next day he would lie around, dumbed by the drugs. “I even compete with the analysts,” Eitel would think, “how competitive I am.” and feel that no one could help him but himself. For the answer was simple, he knew the answer. This movie of his was dangerous, he had so many enemies, they were real enemies—no analyst could banish them. Had he been so naïve as to think he could make his movie while men like Herman Teppis sat by and applauded? He needed energy for it, and courage, and all the wise tricks he had learned in twenty years of handling the people who worked for him, and to do that, to do all of that, perhaps a young man was needed, someone so strong and simple as to believe the world was there for him to change it. With rage he would think of all the people he had known through the years, and their contempt for the film. Oh, the film was a contemptuous art to be sure, a fifteenth-century Italian art where to do one’s work, one had to know how to flatter princes and lick the toes of condottieri, and play one’s plots and intrigue one’s intrigues, and say one’s little dangerous thing, and somehow delude them all, exaggerate one’s compromises and hide one’s statement until if one were good enough, one could get away with it, and five centuries later, safe in a museum, the tourists would go by and say obediently, “What a great artist! What a fine man he must have been! Look at the mean faces of those aristocrats!”
No, the work would not go well, and the more he tried to exercise his will, the less the story would return him. Each day, despite himself, he would find that he was weighing the consequences of every line, thinking of all the censors in all the world, and so he could not get rid of the technique he had spent fifteen years in learning. He could only work in that technique, choosing a bag of tricks one day, floundering in a bog of blunders for the next. During three weeks Eitel spent all his energy on the script and in certain ways they were the worst three weeks of his life. They seemed more than a year, b
ecause all his experience told him that the script was very bad: the little surprises, the bonuses, the unexpected developments of plot and character were simply not coming to him, and he had been so certain his work would go well. Somehow he had never believed that this script would be beyond his courage, no more than a boy expects his future to be made of defeat and failure.
One way or another he had had the idea that this picture was going to be his justification. Back perhaps so far as the Spanish Civil War, certainly through all of the cocktail parties and the jeep rides and the requisitioned castles which had been the Second World War to him (excepting that visit to a concentration camp which had terrified him deeply because it matched so exactly his growing conviction that civilization was capable of any barbarity provided only that it be authoritative and organized), along all of that uneven trip from one beautiful woman to another, there had been the luxury of looking at his life as wine he decanted in a glass, studying the color, admiring the corruption, leaving for himself the secret taste: he was above all this, he was better than the others, he was more honest, and one day he would take his life and transmute it into something harder than a gem and as imperishable, an art work. Had he been afraid to try, he would think, for the fear that his superiority did not exist? The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful. So, in brooding over his past, he came to remember the unadmitted pleasure of making commercial pictures. With them he had done well, for a while at least, despite all pretenses that he had been disgusted, and looking back upon such emotions, concealed so long from himself, Eitel felt with dull pain that he should have realized he would never be the artist he had always expected, for if there were one quality beyond all others in an artist, it was the sense of shame, of sickness, and of loathing for any work which was not his best.
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