“I am rather a trollop,” she said, following his thoughts. “I suppose that’s why I didn’t get on to Edna.”
“Who is Edna?”
“The girl you thought was me. The one you phoned to – who lived across the road. She’s moved to Santa Barbara.”
“You mean she was a tart?”
“So it seems. She went to what you call call houses.”
“That’s funny.”
“If she had been English, I’d have known right away. But she seemed like everyone else. She only told me just before she went away.”
He saw her shiver and got up, putting the raincoat around her shoulders. He opened a closet and a pile of pillows and beach mattress fell out on the floor. There was a box of candles, and he lit them around the room, attaching the electric heater where the bulb had been.
“Why was Edna afraid of me?” he asked suddenly.
“Because you were a producer. She had some awful experience or a friend of hers did. Also, I think she was extremely stupid.”
“How did you happen to know her?”
“She came over. Maybe she thought I was a fallen sister. She seemed quite pleasant. She said ‘Call me Edna’ all the time – ‘Please call me Edna’ – so finally I called her Edna and we were friends.”
She got off the window seat so he could lay pillows along it and behind her.
“What can I do?” she said. “I’m a parasite.”
“No, you’re not.” He put his arms around her. “Be still. Get warm.”
They sat for a while quiet.
“I know why you liked me at first,” she said. “Edna told me.”
“What did she tell you?”
“That I looked like – Minna Davis. Several people have told me that.”
He leant away from her and nodded.
“It’s here,” she said, putting her hands on her cheekbones and distorting her cheeks slightly. “Here and here.”
“Yes,” said Stahr. “It was very strange. You look more like she actually looked than how she was on the screen.”
She got up, changing the subject with her gesture as if she were afraid of it.
“I’m warm now,” she said. She went to the closet and peered in, came back wearing a little apron with a crystalline pattern like a snowfall. She stared around critically.
“Of course we’ve just moved in,” she said, “and there’s a sort of echo.”
She opened the door of the veranda and pulled in two wicker chairs, drying them off. He watched her move, intently, yet half-afraid that her body would fail somewhere and break the spell. He had watched women in screen tests and seen their beauty vanish second by second, as if a lovely statue had begun to walk with the meagre joints of a paper doll. But Kathleen was ruggedly set on the balls of her feet – the fragility was, as it should be, an illusion.
“It’s stopped raining,” she said. “It rained the day I came. Such an awful rain – so loud – like horses weeing.”
He laughed.
“You’ll like it. Especially if you’ve got to stay here. Are you going to stay here? Can’t you tell me now? What’s the mystery?”
She shook her head.
“Not now – it’s not worth telling.”
“Come here then.”
She came over and stood near him, and he pressed his cheek against the cool fabric of the apron.
“You’re a tired man,” she said, putting her hand in his hair.
“Not that way.”
“I didn’t mean that way,” she said hastily. “I meant you’ll work yourself sick.”
“Don’t be a mother,” he said.
Be a trollop, he thought. He wanted the pattern of his life broken. If he was going to die soon, like the two doctors said, he wanted to stop being Stahr for a while and hunt for love like men who had no gifts to give, like young nameless men who looked along the streets in the dark.
“You’ve taken off my apron,” she said gently.
“Yes.”
“Would anyone be passing along the beach? Shall we put out the candles?”
“No, don’t put out the candles.”
Afterwards she lay half on a white cushion and smiled up at him.
“I feel like Venus on the half-shell,” she said.
“What made you think of that?”
“Look at me – isn’t it Botticelli?”
“I don’t know,” he said smiling. “It is if you say so.”
She yawned.
“I’ve had such a good time. And I’m very fond of you.”
“You know a lot, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, from little things you’ve said. Or perhaps the way you say them.”
She deliberated.
“Not much,” she said. “I never went to a university, if that’s what you mean. But the man I told you about knew everything and he had a passion for educating me. He made out schedules and made me take courses at the Sorbonne and go to museums. I picked up a little.”
“What was he?”
“He was a painter of sorts and a hellcat. And a lot besides. He wanted me to read Spengler* – everything was for that. All the history and philosophy and harmony was all so I could read Spengler, and then I left him before we got to Spengler. At the end I think that was the chief reason he didn’t want me to go.”
“Who was Spengler?”
“I tell you we didn’t get to him,” she laughed, “and now I’m forgetting everything very patiently, because it isn’t likely I’ll ever meet anyone like him again.”
“Oh, but you shouldn’t forget,” said Stahr, shocked. He had an intense respect for learning, a racial memory of the old shuls. “You shouldn’t forget.”
“It was just in place of babies.”
“You could teach your babies,” he said.
“Could I?”
“Sure you could. You could give it to them while they were young. When I want to know anything, I’ve got to ask some drunken writer. Don’t throw it away.”
“All right,” she said, getting up. “I’ll tell it to my children. But it’s so endless – the more you know, the more there is just beyond, and it keeps on coming. This man could have been anything if he hadn’t been a coward and a fool.”
“But you were in love with him.”
“Oh, yes – with all my heart.” She looked through the window, shading her eyes. “It’s light out there. Let’s go down to the beach.”
He jumped up, exclaiming:
“Why, I think it’s the grunion!”
“What?”
“It’s tonight. It’s in all the papers.” He hurried out the door, and she heard him open the door of the car. Presently he returned with a newspaper.
“It’s at ten sixteen. That’s five minutes.”
“An eclipse or something?”
“Very punctual fish,” he said. “Leave your shoes and stockings and come with me.”
It was a fine blue night. The tide was at the turn, and the little silver fish rocked offshore waiting for 10.16. A few seconds after the time they came swarming in with the tide, and Stahr and Kathleen stepped over them barefoot as they flicked slip-slop on the sand. A Negro man came along the shore towards them, collecting the grunion quickly, like twigs, into two pails. They came in twos and threes and platoons and companies, relentless and exalted and scornful, round the great bare feet of the intruders, as they had come before Sir Francis Drake had nailed his plaque to the boulder on the shore.*
“I wish for another pail,” the Negro man said, resting a moment.
“You’ve come a long way out,” said Stahr.
“I used to go to Malibu, but they don’t like it, those moving-picture people.”
A wave came in and forced them back, receded swif
tly, leaving the sand alive again.
“Is it worth the trip?” Stahr asked.
“I don’t figure it that way. I really come out to read some Emerson.* Have you ever read him?”
“I have,” said Kathleen. “Some.”
“I’ve got him inside my shirt. I got some Rosicrucian* literature with me too, but I’m fed up with them.”
The wind had changed a little – the waves were stronger farther down, and they walked along the foaming edge of the water.
“What’s your work?” the Negro asked Stahr.
“I work for the pictures.”
“Oh.” After a moment he added, “I never go to movies.”
“Why not?” asked Stahr sharply.
“There’s no profit. I never let my children go.”
Stahr watched him, and Kathleen watched Stahr protectively.
“Some of them are good,” she said, against a wave of spray, but he did not hear her. She felt she could contradict him and said it again, and this time he looked at her indifferently.
“Are the Rosicrucian brotherhood against pictures?” asked Stahr.
“Seems as if they don’t know what they are for. One week they for one thing and next week for another.”
Only the little fish were certain. Half an hour had gone, and still they came. The Negro’s two pails were full, and finally he went off over the beach towards the road, unaware that he had rocked an industry.
Stahr and Kathleen walked back to the house, and she thought how to drive his momentary blues away.
“Poor old Sambo,” she said.
“What?”
“Don’t you call them poor old Sambo?”
“We don’t call them anything especially.” After a moment, he said, “They have pictures of their own.”
In the house she drew on her shoes and stockings before the heater.
“I like California better,” she said deliberately. “I think I was a bit sex-starved.”
“That wasn’t quite all, was it?”
“You know it wasn’t.”
“It’s nice to be near you.”
She gave a little sigh as she stood up, so small that he did not notice it.
“I don’t want to lose you now,” he said. “I don’t know what you think of me or whether you think of me at all. As you’ve probably guessed, my heart’s in the grave” – he hesitated, wondering if this was quite true – “but you’re the most attractive woman I’ve met since I don’t know when. I can’t stop looking at you. I don’t know now exactly the colour of your eyes, but they make me sorry for everyone in the world—”
“Stop it, stop it!” she cried laughing. “You’ll have me looking in the mirror for weeks. My eyes aren’t any colour – they’re just eyes to see with, and I’m just as ordinary as I can be. I have nice teeth for an English girl—”
“You have beautiful teeth.”
“—but I couldn’t hold a candle to these girls I see here—”
“You stop it,” he said. “What I said is true, and I’m a cautious man.”
She stood motionless a moment – thinking. She looked at him, then she looked back into herself, then at him again – then she gave up her thought.
“We must go,” she said.
* * *
Now they were different people as they started back. Four times they had driven along the shore road today, each time a different pair. Curiosity, sadness and desire were behind them now; this was a true returning – to themselves and all their past and future and the encroaching presence of tomorrow. He asked her to sit close in the car, and she did, but they did not seem close, because for that you have to seem to be growing closer. Nothing stands still. It was on his tongue to ask her to come to the house he rented and sleep there tonight – but he felt that it would make him sound lonely. As the car climbed the hill to her house, Kathleen looked for something behind the seat cushion.
“What have you lost?”
“It might have fallen out,” she said, feeling through her purse in the darkness.
“What was it?”
“An envelope.”
“Was it important?”
“No.”
But when they got to her house and Stahr turned on the dashboard light, she helped take the cushions out and look again.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, as they walked to the door. “What’s your address where you really live?”
“Just Bel Air. There’s no number.”
“Where is Bel Air?”
“It’s a sort of development, near Santa Monica. But you’d better call me at the studio.”
“All right… goodnight, Mr Stahr.”
“Mister Stahr,” he repeated, astonished.
She corrected herself gently.
“Well, then, goodnight, Stahr. Is that better?”
He felt as though he had been pushed away a little.
“As you like,” he said. He refused to let the aloofness communicate itself. He kept looking at her and moved his head from side to side in her own gesture, saying without words: “You know what’s happened to me.” She sighed. Then she came into his arms and for a moment was his again completely. Before anything could change, Stahr whispered goodnight and turned away and went to his car.
Winding down the hill, he listened inside himself as if something by an unknown composer, powerful and strange and strong, was about to be played for the first time. The theme would be stated presently, but because the composer was always new, he would not recognize it as the theme right away. It would come in some such guise as the auto horns from the Technicolor boulevards below, or be barely audible, a tattoo on the muffled drum of the moon. He strained to hear it, knowing only that music was beginning, new music that he liked and did not understand. It was hard to react to what one could entirely compass – this was new and confusing, nothing one could shut off in the middle and supply the rest from an old score.
Also, and persistently, and bound up with the other, there was the Negro on the sand. He was waiting at home for Stahr, with his pails of silver fish, and he would be waiting at the studio in the morning. He had said that he did not allow his children to listen to Stahr’s story. He was prejudiced and wrong, and he must be shown somehow, some way. A picture, many pictures, a decade of pictures, must be made to show him he was wrong. Since he had spoken, Stahr had thrown four pictures out of his plans – one that was going into production this week. They were borderline pictures in point of interest, but at least he submitted the borderline pictures to the Negro and found them trash. And he put back on his list a difficult picture that he had tossed to the wolves, to Brady and Marcus and the rest, to get his way on something else. He rescued it for the Negro man.
When he drove up to his door, the porch lights went on, and his Filipino came down the steps to put away the car. In the library, Stahr found a list of phone calls:
La Borwitz
Marcus
Harlow
Reinmund
Fairbanks
Brady
Colman
Skouras
Fleishacker, etc.*
The Filipino came into the room with a letter.
“This fell out of the car,” he said.
“Thanks,” said Stahr. “I was looking for it.”
“Will you be running a picture tonight, Mr Stahr?”
“No, thanks – you can go to bed.”
The letter, to his surprise, was addressed to Monroe Stahr, Esq. He started to open it – then it occurred to him that she had wanted to recapture it, and possibly to withdraw it. If she had had a phone, he would have called her for permission before opening it. He held it for a moment. It had been written before they met – it was odd to think that whatever it said was now invalidated; it possessed the interest of a souvenir by rep
resenting a mood that was gone.
Still he did not like to read it without asking her. He put it down beside a pile of scripts and sat down with the top script in his lap. He was proud of resisting his first impulse to open the letter. It seemed to prove that he was not “losing his head”. He had never lost his head about Minna, even in the beginning – it had been the most appropriate and regal match imaginable. She had loved him always and, just before she died, all unwilling and surprised, his tenderness had burst and surged forward and he had been in love with her. In love with Minna and death together – with the world in which she looked so alone that he wanted to go with her there.
But “falling for dames” had never been an obsession – his brother had gone to pieces over a dame, or rather over dame after dame after dame. But Stahr, in his younger days, had them once and never more than once – like one drink. He had quite another sort of adventure reserved for his mind – something better than a series of emotional sprees. Like many brilliant men, he had grown up dead cold. Beginning at about twelve, probably, with the total rejection common to those of extraordinary mental powers, the “See here: this is all wrong – a mess – all a lie – and a sham…”, he swept it all away, everything, as men of his type do, and then instead of being a son-of-a-bitch as most of them are, he looked around at the barrenness that was left and said to himself, “This will never do.” And so he had learnt tolerance, kindness, forbearance and even affection, like lessons.
The Filipino boy brought in a carafe of water and bowls of nuts and fruit, and said goodnight. Stahr opened the first script and began to read.
He read for three hours – stopping from time to time, editing without a pencil. Sometimes he looked up, warm from some very vague happy thought that was not in the script, and it took him a minute each time to remember what it was. Then he knew it was Kathleen, and he looked at the letter – it was nice to have a letter.
It was three o’clock when a vein began to bump in the back of his hand, signalling that it was time to quit. Kathleen was really far away now with the waning night – the different aspects of her telescoped into the memory of a single thrilling stranger, bound to him only by a few slender hours. It seemed perfectly all right to open the letter.
The Last Tycoon Page 11