They were very friendly now. She had not made a move or a gesture that was out of keeping with her beauty, that pressed it out of its contour one way or another. It was all proper to itself. He judged her as he would a shot in a picture. She was not trash, she was not confused, but clear – in his special meaning of the word, which implied balance, delicacy and proportion – she was “nice”.
They reached Santa Monica, where there were the stately houses of a dozen picture stars, penned in the middle of a crawling Coney Island. They turned downhill into the wide blue sky and sea and went on along the sea till the beach slid out again from under the bathers in a widening and narrowing yellow strand.
“I’m building a house out here,” Stahr said, “much farther on. I don’t know why I’m building it.”
“Perhaps it’s for me,” she said.
“Maybe it is.”
“I think it’s splendid for you to build a big house for me without even knowing what I looked like.”
“It isn’t too big. And it hasn’t any roof. I didn’t know what kind of roof you wanted.”
“We don’t want a roof. They told me it never rained here. It…”
She stopped so suddenly that he knew she was reminded of something.
“Just something that’s past,” she said.
“What was it?” he demanded. “Another house without a roof?”
“Yes. Another house without a roof.”
“Were you happy there?”
“I lived with a man,” she said, “a long, long time – too long. It was one of those awful mistakes people make. I lived with him a long time after I wanted to get out, but he couldn’t let me go. He’d try, but he couldn’t. So finally I ran away.”
He was listening, weighing but not judging. Nothing changed under the rose and blue hat. She was twenty-five or so. It would have been a waste if she had not loved and been loved.
“We were too close,” she said. “We should probably have had children – to stand between us. But you can’t have children when there’s no roof to the house.”
All right, he knew something of her. It would not be like last night when something kept saying, as in a story conference: “We know nothing about the girl. We don’t have to know much – but we have to know something.” A vague background spread behind her, something more tangible than the head of Shiva in the moonlight.
They came to the restaurant, forbidding with many Sunday automobiles. When they got out, the trained seal growled reminiscently at Stahr. The man who owned it said that the seal would never ride in the back seat of his car but always climbed over the back and up in front. It was plain that the man was in bondage to the seal, though he had not yet acknowledged it to himself.
“I’d like to see the house you’re building,” said Kathleen. “I don’t want tea – tea is the past.”
Kathleen drank a Coke instead and they drove on ten miles into a sun so bright that he took out two pairs of cheaters from a compartment. Five miles farther on they turned down a small promontory and came to the fuselage of Stahr’s house.
A headwind blowing out of the sun threw spray up the rocks and over the car. Concrete mixer, raw yellow wood and builders’ rubble waited, an open wound in the seascape for Sunday to be over. They walked around front, where great boulders rose to what would be the terrace.
She looked at the feeble hills behind and winced faintly at the barren glitter, and Stahr saw…
“No use looking for what’s not here,” he said cheerfully. “Think of it as if you were standing on one of those globes with a map on it – I always wanted one when I was a boy.”
“I understand,” she said after a minute. “When you do that, you can feel the earth turn, can’t you?”
He nodded.
“Yes. Otherwise it’s all just mañana – waiting for the morning or the moon.”
They went in under the scaffolding. One room, which was to be the chief salon, was completed even to the built-in bookshelves and the curtain rods and the trap in the floor for the motion-picture projection machine. And to her surprise, this opened out to a porch with cushioned chairs in place and a ping-pong table. There was another ping-pong table on the newly laid sod beyond.
“Last week I gave a premature luncheon,” he admitted, “I had some props brought out – some grass and things. I wanted to see how the place felt.”
She laughed suddenly.
“Isn’t that real grass?”
“Oh yes – it’s grass.”
Beyond the strip of anticipatory lawn was the excavation for a swimming pool, patronized now by a crowd of seagulls, which saw them and took flight.
“Are you going to live here all alone?” she asked him. “Not even dancing girls?”
“Probably. I used to make plans, but not any more. I thought this would be a nice place to read scripts. The studio is really home.”
“That’s what I’ve heard about American businessmen.”
He caught a tilt of criticism in her voice.
“You do what you’re born to do,” he said gently. “About once a month somebody tries to reform me, tells me what a barren old age I’ll have when I can’t work any more. But it’s not so simple.”
The wind was rising. It was time to go, and he had his car keys out of his pocket, absent-mindedly jingling them in his hand. There was the silvery “Hey!” of a telephone, coming from somewhere across the sunshine.
It was not from the house, and they hurried here and there around the garden, like children playing warmer and colder – closing in finally on a tool shack by the tennis court. The phone, irked with delay, barked at them suspiciously from the wall. Stahr hesitated.
“Shall I let the damn thing ring?”
“I couldn’t. Unless I was sure who it was.”
“Either it’s for somebody else or they’ve made a wild guess.”
He picked up the receiver.
“Hello… Long distance from where? Yes, this is Mr Stahr.”
His manner changed perceptibly. She saw what few people had seen for a decade: Stahr impressed. It was not discordant, because he often pretended to be impressed, but it made him momentarily a little younger.
“It’s the President,” he said to her, almost stiffly.
“Of your company?”
“No, of the United States.”
He was trying to be casual for her benefit, but his voice was eager.
“All right, I’ll wait,” he said into the phone, and then to Kathleen: “I’ve talked to him before.”
She watched. He smiled at her and winked, as an evidence that while he must give this his best attention, he had not forgotten her.
“Hello,” he said presently. He listened. Then he said “Hello” again. He frowned.
“Can you talk a little louder,” he said politely, and then: “Who?… What’s that?”
She saw a disgusted look come into his face.
“I don’t want to talk to him,” he said. “No!”
He turned to Kathleen:
“Believe it or not, it’s an orang-utan.”
He waited while something was explained to him at length; then he repeated:
“I don’t want to talk to it, Lew. I haven’t got anything to say that would interest an orang-utan.”
He beckoned to Kathleen, and when she came close to the phone he held the receiver so that she heard odd breathing and a gruff growl. Then a voice:
“This is no phoney, Monroe. It can talk and it’s a dead ringer for McKinley.* Mr Horace Wickersham is with me here with a picture of McKinley in his hand…”
Stahr listened patiently.
“We’ve got a chimp,” he said, after a minute. “He bit a chunk out of John Gilbert* last year… All right, put him on again.”
He spoke formally, as if to a child.
&n
bsp; “Hello, orang-utan.”
His face changed, and he turned to Kathleen.
“He said ‘Hello’.”
“Ask him his name,” suggested Kathleen.
“Hello, orang-utan – God, what a thing to be! – do you know your name?… He doesn’t seem to know his name…. Listen, Lew. We’re not making anything like King Kong, and there is no monkey in The Hairy Ape…* Of course I’m sure. I’m sorry, Lew, goodbye.”
He was annoyed with Lew, because he had thought it was the President and had changed his manner, acting as if it were. He felt a little ridiculous, but Kathleen felt sorry and liked him better because it had been an orang-utan.
* * *
They started back along the shore with the sun behind them. The house seemed kindlier when they left it, as if warmed by their visit – the hard glitter of the place was more endurable if they were not bound there like people on the shiny surface of a moon. Looking back from a curve of the shore, they saw the sky growing pink behind the indecisive structure, and the point of land seemed a friendly island, not without promise of fine hours on a further day.
Past Malibu, with its gaudy shacks and fishing barges, they came into the range of humankind again, the cars stacked and piled along the road, the beaches like anthills without a pattern, save for the dark drowned heads that sprinkled the sea.
Goods from the city were increasing in sight – blankets, matting, umbrellas, cook stoves, reticules full of clothing – the prisoners had laid out their shackles beside them on this sand. It was Stahr’s sea if he wanted it, or knew what to do with it – only by sufferance did these others wet their feet and fingers in the wild cool reservoirs of man’s world.
Stahr turned off the road by the sea and up a canyon and along a hill road, and the people dropped away. The hill became the outskirts of the city. Stopping for gasoline, he stood beside the car.
“We could have dinner,” he said almost anxiously.
“You have work you could do.”
“No – I haven’t planned anything. Couldn’t we have dinner?”
He knew that she had nothing to do either – no planned evening or special place to go.
She compromised.
“Do you want to get something in that drugstore across the street?”
He looked at it tentatively.
“Is that really what you want?”
“I like to eat in American drugstores. It seems so queer and strange.”
They sat on high stools and had tomato broth and hot sandwiches. It was more intimate than anything they had done, and they both felt a dangerous sort of loneliness, and felt it in each other. They shared in varied scents of the drugstore, bitter and sweet and sour, and the mystery of the waitress, with only the outer part of her hair dyed and black beneath, and, when it was over, the still life of their empty plates – a sliver of potato, a sliced pickle and an olive stone.
* * *
It was dusk in the street, it seemed nothing to smile at him now when they got into the car.
“Thank you so much. It’s been a nice afternoon.”
It was not far from her house. They felt the beginning of the hill, and the louder sound of the car in second was the beginning of the end. Lights were on in the climbing bungalows – he turned on the headlights of the car. Stahr felt heavy in the pit of his stomach.
“We’ll go out again.”
“No,” she said quickly, as if she had been expecting this. “I’ll write you a letter. I’m sorry I’ve been so mysterious – it was really a compliment, because I like you so much. You should try not to work so hard. You ought to marry again.”
“Oh, that isn’t what you should say,” he broke out protestingly. “This has been you and me today. It may have meant nothing to you – it meant a lot to me. I’d like time to tell you about it.”
But if he were to take time it must be in her house, for they were there and she was shaking her head as the car drew up to the door.
“I must go now. I do have an engagement. I didn’t tell you.”
“That’s not true. But it’s all right.”
He walked to the door with her and stood in his own footsteps of that other night, while she felt in her bag for the key.
“Have you got it?”
“I’ve got it,” she said.
That was the moment to go in, but she wanted to see him once more and she leant her head to the left, then to the right, trying to catch his face against the last twilight. She leant too far and too long, and it was natural when his hand touched the back of her upper arm and shoulder and pressed her forward into the darkness of his throat. She shut her eyes, feeling the bevel of the key in her tight-clutched hand. She said “Oh” in an expiring sigh, and then “Oh” again, as he pulled her in close and his chin pushed her cheek around gently. They were both smiling just faintly, and she was frowning too, as the inch between them melted into darkness.
When they were apart, she shook her head still, but more in wonder than in denial. It came like this then, it was your own fault, now far back, when was the moment? It came like this, and every instant the burden of tearing herself away from them together, from it, was heavier and more unimaginable. He was exultant; she resented and could not blame him, but she would not be part of his exultation, for it was a defeat. So far it was a defeat. And then she thought that if she stopped it being a defeat, broke off and went inside, it was still not a victory. Then it was just nothing.
“This was not my idea,” she said, “not at all my idea.”
“Can I come in?”
“Oh, no – no.”
“Then let’s jump in the car and drive somewhere.”
With relief, she caught at the exact phrasing – to get away from here immediately, that was accomplishment or sounded like it – as if she were fleeing from the spot of a crime. Then they were in the car, going downhill with the breeze cool in their faces, and she came slowly to herself. Now it was all clear in black and white.
“We’ll go back to your house on the beach,” she said.
“Back there?”
“Yes – we’ll go back to your house. Don’t let’s talk. I just want to ride.”
* * *
When they got to the coast again the sky was grey, and at Santa Monica a sudden gust of rain bounced over them. Stahr halted beside the road, put on a raincoat and lifted the canvas top. “We’ve got a roof,” he said.
The windshield wiper ticked domestically as a grandfather’s clock. Sullen cars were leaving the wet beaches and starting back into the city. Farther on they ran into fog – the road lost its boundaries on either side, and the lights of cars coming towards them were stationary until just before they flared past.
They had left a part of themselves behind, and they felt light and free in the car. Fog fizzed in at a chink, and Kathleen took off the rose-and-blue hat in a calm, slow way that made him watch tensely, and put it under a strip of canvas in the back seat. She shook out her hair and, when she saw Stahr was looking at her, she smiled.
The trained seal’s restaurant was only a sheen of light off towards the ocean. Stahr cranked down a window and looked for landmarks, but after a few more miles the fog fell away, and just ahead of them the road turned off that led to his house. Out here a moon showed behind the clouds. There was still a shifting light over the sea.
The house had dissolved a little back into its elements. They found the dripping beams of a doorway and groped over mysterious waist-high obstacles to the single finished room, odorous of sawdust and wet wood. When he took her in his arms, they could just see each other’s eyes in the half-darkness. Presently his raincoat dropped to the floor.
“Wait,” she said.
She needed a minute. She did not see how any good could come from this, and though this did not prevent her from being happy and desirous, she needed a minute to t
hink how it was, to go back an hour and know how it had happened. She waited in his arms, moving her head a little from side to side as she had before, only more slowly, and never taking her eyes from his. Then she discovered that he was trembling.
He discovered it at the same time, and his arms relaxed. Immediately she spoke to him coarsely and provocatively, and pulled his face down to hers. Then, with her knees she struggled out of something, still standing up and holding him with one arm, and kicked it off beside the coat. He was not trembling now and he held her again, as they knelt down together and slid to the raincoat on the floor.
* * *
Afterwards they lay without speaking, and then he was full of such tender love for her that he held her tight till a stitch tore in her dress. The small sound brought them to reality.
“I’ll help you up,” he said, taking her hands.
“Not just yet. I was thinking of something.”
She lay in the darkness, thinking irrationally that it would be such a bright indefatigable baby, but presently she let him help her up… When she came back into the room, it was lit from a single electric fixture.
“A one-bulb lighting system,” he said. “Shall I turn it off?”
“No. It’s very nice. I want to see you.”
They sat in the wooden frame of the window seat, with the soles of their shoes touching.
“You seem far away,” she said.
“So do you.”
“Are you surprised?”
“At what?”
“That we’re two people again. Don’t you always think – hope that you’ll be one person, and then find you’re still two?”
“I feel very close to you.”
“So do I to you,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Thank you.”
They laughed.
“Is this what you wanted?” she asked. “I mean last night.”
“Not consciously.”
“I wonder when it was settled,” she brooded. “There’s a moment when you needn’t, and then there’s another moment when you know nothing in the world could keep it from happening.”
This had an experienced ring, and to his surprise he liked her even more. In his mood, which was passionately to repeat yet not recapitulate the past, it was right that it should be that way.
The Last Tycoon Page 10