Trick of Light

by Bayer-William

  Mr. Lord, no doubt for purposes of intimidation, keeps me waiting outside his door. I can hear him shuffling on the other side as he studies me through his peephole.

  The moment he opens the door I understand why people call him Baggy. There're loose sacks of flaccid flesh beneath his eyes and bags of excess skin about his jowls. A decadent old man's face with wicked little eyes which gleam as they appraise me. I make my own eyes glow as I peer back.

  "Ms. Kay Farrow, I presume," he says with a gravity affected, no doubt, for purposes of irony.

  "And you, sir," I say, "must be the Gentleman Who Cannot Be Flattered."

  He smiles slightly to show approval. He's wearing one of those at-home belted evening jackets with satin lapels you see on wealthy guys in old movies, and a pair of velvet slippers with the monogram SL elaborately applied to the tips. Having never seen a live human wearing such accessories, I'm amused.

  He leads me through a living room fussily done up by a decorator.

  "Nice room, but I rarely use it," he explains, as he beckons me into the adjoining study. "I'm far more comfortable in here—what I call 'my salon of bad taste.'"

  He watches me closely as I take in his handiwork. Ah, the brilliance of such calculated vulgarity! Tiger-striped fabric on the couch and chairs. Leopard-spot fabric on the throw pillows. Execrable black velvet portraits of Marilyn and Elvis on the walls. And everywhere Barbie dolls, on every table, shelf and niche, Barbie here and Barbie there, not to mention her pals Skipper and Ken . . . except, on close inspection, the goddesses' dresses are bloodied and ripped to mimic the clothing of murder and rape victims, or the little creatures are arranged as if engaged in bizarre sex acts. Joel was right about Lord—it's a woman-hater's collection.

  I turn to him. "I see I'm in the room of a man who adores women."

  "Well, aren't you the clever little lynx! Want a drink?"

  I take a glass of wine, watch as he stirs himself a double vodka martini.

  "Soft butch, aren't we?" he says, scanning my attire. "Black boots, black top, black everything—quite the brave young artiste. Glickman didn't tell me you were queer."

  I shrug. "I'm not."

  He snickers. "Oh, straight? Got a sweet, blond, milk-muscled boyfriend, do we, stashed away at home?"

  I meet his eyes. "Have I offended you in some way?"

  "Offended me? I'd adore it if you offended me," he responds. "Nothing I like better than a woman out of control. Unless, of course, it's a divine feline creature licking my slippers like little Miss Courtney Barton here." He reaches down to scratch the ears of a fluffed-up Persian cat.

  "I named her after my old second-grade teacher. How I hated that bitch! 'Lord! Stand in the corner!' 'Oh, yes, Miss Barton. But please ma'am, tell me why.' 'Teach you a lesson, young man.' Oh, the heat of her temper, the sting of her words! The lash marks, I'm afraid, still stripe my soul!"

  "And so," I offer, "you named your loving cat after her to neutralize the pain."

  He glances at me, startled.

  I take a deep breath. I'm going to take Joel's advice, smack him hard.

  "But it doesn't work, does it?" I continue. "The pain, I mean—it doesn't go away. Because in your heart you relish it. Recalling your humiliation in the second grade makes you feel alive. When you feel the old pain, the deadening, from years of putting people down, suddenly falls away. Your nerve endings tingle. You feel young again and vulnerable. Best of all, able once again to feel!"

  He stares at me, astonished. I feel his rage rising. He's either going to throw me out for insolence or stop the stream of insults and start showing me respect. It can go either way—which is fine with me.

  "I think I'd like to do up one of my Barbies like you, Kay Farrow—black outfit, camera, even the sneer. Then put her through some . . . hmm . . . shall we say . . . 'exemplary contortions'?"

  "Why not just stick pins in her like a voodoo doll?" I ask. "Or is it the sexual degradation that turns you on?"

  "Touché! Quite a piece of work, aren't you? Though I must say your little riff about my being dead inside is corny stuff. Still you get an A-minus. I like a girl who tries." He softens, offering a timid smile. "Please, from now on, call me Schuyler." He pauses, shyly. "May I have permission to call you Kay?"

  Now that I've apparently passed his test, I decide to get to the point, telling him I've recently read some of his old columns in connection with a matter I've been researching. I tell him how disappointed I was when, after he promised further revelations about a scandal, he later appeared to backtrack, implying there was no scandal after all.

  "Hmmm," he mutters, "doesn't sound like me. I try hard to deliver on what I promise. Still, people send me loads of items. Some unfortunately don't pan out."

  I watch him closely. "The Goddess Gun Club scandal?" I ask. "Was that one that didn't pan?"

  He freezes, actually seems to pale. "Oh, I see," he says, distraught, "you're here about that?" Suddenly he glowers. "Who are you?" he demands.

  "Didn't Joel tell you? I'm a photographer."

  He glares at my camera. "I can see that! Who sent you is what I mean."

  "Nobody sent me. I've come on my own behalf." I pause. "You seem distressed, Schuyler. I'm sorry I've upset you."

  He stands, starts to pace his little "salon of bad taste," stops to fasten his eyes upon one of the victim Barbies.

  "I can't imagine why you bring that up," he says, "just as we were starting to get on. Unless—" He turns on me as if struck by a revelation. "They sent you, didn't they? Sent you here to bait me, even though I gave them my word I'd never mention them again. Well, young lady, here's a message to take back: Schuyler Lord will not be baited. Though gossip is my stock-in-trade, there'll be no more items about them. They and their godforsaken shooting club have been banished forever from my column."

  I stare at him. He's serious. He actually takes me for a provocateur.

  "For a guy who happily mutilates Barbies, Schuyler, you do get riled up. No, 'they' didn't send me. No, I didn't come here to bait you. No, I'm not an agent of the G.G.C. I'm working on a story, reached a dead end, thought maybe you could help. Perhaps you're scared." I pause, shake my head. "No, I don't think so. Mean and brittle as you are, you don't strike me as a guy who gets pushed around."

  He's studying me closely now. All his awful affectations, previously displayed, are discarded as he weighs my claim of innocence.

  "I believe you," he moans finally. "I'm so used to deceit I forget there are still honest people in this town."

  He sits, grins, offers me a look of deep complicity. "All right, let's start over," he says pleasantly. "How may I help you this evening?"

  "By telling me everything you know about Ramsey Carson and the G.G.C., for which I give you my word I'll never reveal you as a source and give you first crack at anything I find."

  He's amused. "Your confidentiality promise is accepted. As for 'first crack,' of course, being a gossip, I love knowing everything that's going on. But as I told you, Ramsey, his pals and the G.G.C. have been banished from my column, so even if you come up with a good story, I won't run it."

  "What can I give you then?"

  "I'm afraid to tell you for fear you'll think me foolish."

  "Come on, be brave, Schuyler! After all, a man who mutilates Barbies . . ."

  "Yes, yes! All right." As he pauses I catch my first glimpse of his vulnerability. "Be my friend." He speaks the words simply, guilelessly. They are, I believe, the only sincere words he has spoken since I walked in.

  "That's all you want of me?"

  He nods. "But you see, my dear, I think it's actually quite a bit. Look around you." He gestures at the Barbies, smiles. "I'm wealthy, famous, feared, with a six-month backlog of nasty items in my files. And the truth is . . . none of it means anything. Your friendship, on the other hand, would mean a lot. I don't know many young people." He smiles again. "So you see, Kay, my request is totally selfish. An old man's way of hanging on to youth. Anyhow, that's w
hat I want. Grant it to me and we have a deal."

  "Deal," I tell him. "Though I can't promise you much time."

  "I won't ask for much, just an occasional drink, say once a month, a breath of fresh spring air in this old bachelor's dusty life."

  Bargain sealed, he pours me another glass of wine, fixes himself another double martini, settles back.

  "The first I heard of Carson was when he bought that pair of guns made for King Farouk. Never saw them myself, but I heard plenty of tales. For a while people who saw them could speak of nothing else. He'd bring them out at dinner parties, show them off to guests. Do you know about the guns, Kay?"

  I shake my head.

  "I gather they're spectacular, superbly made, absolutely gorgeous to people interested in firearms and such. But above and beyond the typical qualities of a matched pair of handmade English shotguns, it's the unusual engraving that makes this particular pair stand out. Erotic engraving, I'm told, totally pornographic, stupendously, deliciously obscene. Which is why Carson liked to bring them out after dinner, then pass them around the room. The men would guffaw, the women would giggle. 'Oh, Ramsey, what an awful dirty mind you have!' 'Oh, not my dirty little mind, dear. Just randy old King Farouk's.' "

  I think back to the night at the Wongs' when I thought I saw the couple through the window playing with a gun.

  "I've never heard of that kind of engraving on guns," I tell him.

  "Neither had I. But since Farouk was famous for his obsessions with pornography and guns, I wasn't surprised to learn he combined them."

  He smiles, the same thin begrudging smile that brings out the cross-hatching on his face.

  "Look at my Barbies, displayed in flagrante delicto. Perhaps it's human nature to eroticize the objects one collects. I truly love my Barbies, enjoy stroking them ever so tenderly sometimes. Perhaps Carson strokes his guns as well. Wouldn't surprise me. In the end, they say, everything does come down to s-e-x."

  I ask him about the G.G.C. He says he's heard it's extremely difficult to join, with laborious prescreening and interviewing by members culminating in a one-blackball-you're-out-type vote.

  "It's a serious club, definitely not just a bunch of guys who get together to target-shoot and hunt. They've got this huge property up in Mendocino. Beautiful land. There's a compound on it including a luxurious lodge retreat where they eat, drink, make merry, puff on cigars, stroke their guns and do God knows what. They have a state-of-the-art firing range, stocked hunting grounds, everything their little-boy hearts desire. I hear there're celebrity members, a couple of movie stars, a big shot Hollywood director, a former governor of California, distinguished foreigners. It's men-only, of course, but I've heard they occasionally bring in party girls for fun and games. There are tales of 'rustic revels'—bacchanalian rites, orgies to celebrate the solstice, eclipses, Halloween. That's the thing about nasty boys, isn't it? Whenever they get the old urge to play nasty party games, you can count on them to come up with a good excuse."

  He stops a moment, constricts his face; when he continues it's in a more serious tone.

  "Then of course there's the matter of the 'accidents.' That's the real trouble up there. All those quote accidental shootings unquote—some reported, most, I hear, not. There are all these stories floating around. Tales of manhunts—catching poachers and vagrants, then setting them loose to be stalked down and shot. Nothing anyone can put his finger on. It's all really quite . . . strange."

  "You're saying people have been shot dead and no one knows about it?"

  He shrugs. "So the rumormongers say."

  "Schuyler, how can that be?"

  He shrugs again. "I only have the stories unconfirmed. As the saying goes, those who talk don't know and those who know don't talk. Anything's possible if you're rich enough. And from what I gather about the G.G.C., its members are veddy rich."

  I feel a hot flash of indignation, know the feeling well. It's fueled many of my projects. It's what Maddy always looked for in my work. "Your compassion comes out of your anger, Kay," she'd say. "Don't fear it. Work with it. Apply your outrage to what you see, use it to forge powerful images."

  "What can you tell me about the scandal?" I ask.

  "Ah, the scandal! That's where I stepped into it . . ."

  He sits back to tell me the story.

  It seems there were two factions within the club—a small core group, the Inner Circle, formed around Carson, that took part in the orgies and was responsible for the mysterious shootings; and the majority of members, who weren't involved, in fact knew nothing of these matters, men who simply loved guns and had joined purely for sport. Except that at a certain point, several of the outsiders became aware of what the Inner Circle was doing. Which led to the crisis reported in his column—angry meetings, resignations, all that.

  "Naturally," he says, "I can't tell you the name of my source. Suffice it to say she was the wife of a member who, discovering what was happening, became disturbed and wanted to clean things up. Call these disturbed outsiders the Reformers. They were led by a man named Chap Fontaine, an erstwhile buddy of Carson's, one of his real estate partners and, in contrast to the Inner Circle boys, a type rarely seen these sordid days. What we used to call, without an ounce of irony, 'a gentleman of the old school.'"

  When Baggy wrote his first column about the scandal it looked as though there would be an exciting last-man-standing showdown between Carson and Fontaine. The common perception was that the Reformers would take over, throw the bad boys out, clean up the mess, set the club back on its old path straight and true, and (this was the stinger) possibly provide information on the shootings to local law enforcement officials which might lead to the filing of criminal charges against Carson and his pals.

  Baggy shrugs. "I appreciate what you said earlier, how I don't strike you as a guy who gets pushed around. I only wish that were true! Alas, though I'm brave enough when puncturing reputations and truly heroic when degrading Barbies, I confess I'm not a man who enjoys the prospect of receiving a bullet in the head. Which was, I was warned by an anonymous telephone caller, exactly what would happen if I ever again reported gossip about the G.G.C. I was instructed to write about the club one final time, retracting what I'd previously implied. Which I did, not just because of the telephone warning or the bullet that came shortly afterwards in the mail with my initials cut into the lead—let me show it to you!"

  He steps over to the mantelpiece, brings down a small lacquer box, extracts a bullet, places it in my hand.

  "Note the monogram. Not as pretty as the ones on my slippers. But it wasn't just the telephone threat or the arrival of this delightful item in the post that persuaded me. It was what happened to Chap Fontaine, his death by quote shooting accident unquote on the grounds of the G.G.C. Because, Kay, the way I heard it, there was no accident, no suicide either. What I was told, on good authority, was that Fontaine was shot dead by Ramsey Carson in a duel."

  Baggy gazes at me.

  "How does that strike you? True or not, when I heard it I felt I'd heard enough. Best, I decided, to do as I was told: retract the story . . . and ever afterwards shut up."

  I stick around for another hour. Baggy, discovering I haven't eaten, disappears into his kitchen to rustle something up. While I wait I inspect several of the debased Barbies. Baggy's additions, I note, are intricate. He's not only carefully torn a raped Barbie's panties and bra, he's also fastidiously applied scratch marks to the poor dolly's plastic flesh. Looking at this mutilated specimen, I wonder if it's really going to be possible for me and Baggy to be friends.

  He reappears with a delicious sandwich of cold chicken on crusty toast, accompanied by a greens and cherry tomato salad. As I eat he gulps down a third double martini, then starts to wallow in self-pity, spewing out mea culpas and maudlin regrets over the way his life has turned, telling me that what I see when I look into his face is the wreckage of a man who once held great promise and then squandered it in pointless gossip.

  It
's half past eleven when I get up to leave. Too fatigued to walk home, I ask Baggy to call me a cab. He smooches me in the doorway of his flat, mutters, "If I weren't such an old nelly, Kay, you'd surely be the girl for me."

  Waiting outside his confection of a building, I can't rid myself of the indignation I felt when he told me about the G.G.C. Orgies, mysterious unreported shootings, manhunts of vagrants, death-threat bullets sent by mail, a mortal duel—Maddy was, I now understand, onto something big, her own outrage so inflamed she was mobilized to take up her camera once again.

  But how, I ask myself, did she find out about all this? What led her to find a place from which to spy on apartment 5? Particularly, I wonder, how did she know about the duel, which she mentioned in the little notebook she concealed in her folded sweater?

  There was, it's clear, a lot more to the life of Maddy Yamada, photojournalist, than I ever knew.

  Friday noon: Sasha and I depart San Francisco early to beat heavy exit traffic. By trading duty tours with another ER resident, he's managed to clear time for a three-day weekend.

  We cross the Golden Gate Bridge in his freshly washed BMW. Though it's a brilliant day, hard on my vision, I'm able to protect my eyes with a pair of dark wraps. The effect's similar to placing a dark red filter on a camera when shooting with black-and-white film—heightening contrast and turning fields of blue, such as water and sky, to inky black.

  When we reach the Marin side of the bridge I turn back, as always, to catch a final glimpse of San Francisco. Every time I cross the bridge, I feel the same frisson. There is the shining city, limned by wondrous Pacific light, clinging to its hills above the Bay. From the northern end of the bridge it appears a magical place—graceful city, fantasy city, white city of dreams and desires. Perhaps ephemeral city too, for there's always the chance at any moment the earth will shake and level it to rubble and dust.

  We follow 101 through Sonoma County, past meadows edged by produce stands, vineyards lining the hills; then we follow the Russian River as far as Cloverdale, where we fork west on 128 toward the Anderson Valley.