My feet crunched the glaze of plaster dust on the koa-wood boards. A plastic dust cover crackled as I leaned against a bookshelf. The woodsmoke was fragrant, the scent of mature cedar.
Just as a feeling of domestic calm was beginning to allow me to enjoy the fire, there was a gentle movement against a wall.
I turned, ready to seize the poker.
There in the shadows was the figure of a woman. Her gown rustled across the dust floor. She was easier to see as she approached the firelight and stood before me, looking into my eyes. I recognized her. She was the remarkable woman who had attended the reception. I was happy enough to see her, and at the same time felt that she should not be where she was.
Her eyes were dark. They reflected the fire.
My voice startled me. “How did you get in?”
She offered only silence. She was stunning, and as awestruck as I was at the sight of her I was also aware of a mild sense of outrage. She was trespassing. The thought had the weight of moral authority—she should not be here.
I took a step back to get a better view of her, and to sense whether she had any companions. I had the further sensation that we knew each other well, as though this woman were an old and treasured friend whom I had forgotten until this night.
I heard only the snap of the fire. “Are you alone?”
She still kept her silence, but her gaze was searching, and there was another impression I had as she looked upon me, studying me.
“Forgive me for being blunt,” I said, my voice calm now. “But now and then I meet someone who means harm. There are people who for one reason or another are dangerous.”
I did not have to ask the question explicitly: What sort of person are you?
Her hand was on my arm. “You must believe in me now,” she said.
I hesitated for an instant. She had answered my question, perhaps without knowing it. I knew how to handle this: I would humor her. She must be an eccentric, or deranged. She was unsettling, but there was no need to be unkind. “I never doubted,” I said.
“You must begin to understand what I can do for you.”
I realized that I had not entirely understood her first remark. Or perhaps I had. It is wise to be polite until it’s clear that courtesy is useless. “I can’t tell you how happy I am tonight,” I said, attempting to keep the conversation on solid footing.
“This does change everything for you, doesn’t it?”
I tried to turn away and stir the fire, but she kept her hand on my arm. “It does indeed.”
“It gives you—a future.”
She used the word future as though she did not quite believe in it herself. I agreed that I supposed it did accomplish just that, but she lifted a finger to silence me and smiled.
I continued my course of using hospitality as a form of self-defense, at least until I figured out what else to do. “May I offer you something?” I said. When she did not make a sound, I added, “A drink?”
“I see that you don’t quite understand me.”
My eyes must have communicated a question, for she answered what I had not asked. “I am an old friend,” she said.
For an instant I believed her. Then I wished that I had Nona with me to overhear such an outrageous and yet strangely plausible remark. “I’m sorry this room is such a mess,” I said.
“You got my gift.”
I watched the firelight in her eyes.
“The feather,” she said.
Some power in me kept me steady. I laughed, self-consciously, but I was not at all comfortable. I made it sound easy. “Who are you, really?”
“But surely you have guessed by now,” said the charming woman, both elegant and oddly out-of-date in her gown.
“I’m afraid,” I said, “that you are the most puzzling creature I have ever met.”
She laughed. I had once known a soprano, one of my first loves, with such a laugh, only perhaps not as musical. “You are happy, aren’t you?”
I glanced around, hoping to be rescued by some idle activity, sweeping ash from the hearth or arranging a book on a shelf.
She said, “Of course you’re unsure of yourself.”
There was something else going on here, something I could not guess. Perhaps she intended us to be lovers. I found it hard to breathe. “I wish that I could say I understand what you are talking about.”
“It’s not difficult to comprehend.”
Deepest puzzlement kept me from speaking for an instant. “I really must have had too much champagne.”
“You have to decide what you are going to do next.”
I tried to caution myself against talking to her. “Regarding what?”
“You can’t leave things as they are.”
Ask her to leave. Now. “I’ll begin getting real commissions,” I said. “I’ll have a career, not just a string of minor contracts. Things will be fine.”
“You’ll need help.”
Who was she?
But I responded to her statement with a gesture. Maybe I would need help, and maybe not.
“Tell me what you want,” she said.
The thing to do, I warned myself, is to stop talking to her. Now. I stepped away, and glanced around. “I have what I want. Really.”
“I trust you, Stratton.”
For some reason this remark took my breath away, perhaps because she had used my name.
Of course she knows your name, I told myself. But you certainly do not know hers.
She continued, “Let all the harm that has fallen you cease, from this point on.”
“Yes, that would be a pleasant thought, wouldn’t it?” I did not want to hear any more.
And yet I could not break away from her eyes, the sound of her voice. I did, indeed, want to drink in more of her words. She touched me once again lightly on the arm. I shrank back, and she withdrew her hand, saying, “You’ve always wanted our help.”
“I’m afraid you’re confusing me.”
“I think not.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“But you do.”
My lips were stiff.
“You are right,” she said, “to be afraid.”
I was past thinking that my alluring visitor was mad. I could not make any sense of her at all. I tried to clear my throat, to speak, to behave as though reality made sense to me.
“You knew,” she said, “exactly what you wanted, and now you have it. You asked for our help, and we helped you.”
My mouth was dry. “What are you doing here?” This was the tone I used with nuisance-suit lawyers, with photographers outside nightclubs at two in the morning.
“We know you so well.”
Don’t waste your time talking to this creature, I told myself. Make a telephone call and get her out of here. I bowed, as I would to any aristocratic madwoman at a time like this, preparing to take my leave.
“It’s too late for that, Stratton.”
“Too late to ask for help?” I couldn’t laugh. I felt queasy. “Thank you for coming tonight,” I said. “It was wonderful to see you.”
That was truthful enough. I knew her from somewhere, some hidden part of my life. She was familiar, a sibling I had never had. She smiled. “Your enemies are ours.”
“I don’t,” I said, as smoothly as I could, “have any enemies.”
She laughed softly, and slipped toward me. She lifted her lips to my ear. Her breath was warm. “Tell us what to do.”
I could not keep myself from moving away from her.
“You know how,” she smiled.
I brushed against a side table. A vase fell and burst on the floor. The sound made me bite my lips. When I turned back to look at her, I blinked and took a few steps forward.
She was gone.
It was impossible. No one could leave so quickly.
I hurried into the hall and tried the front door, which was latched and solidly locked. I searched from room to room, until I began to be convinced that I had never received a visit
at all that night.
Surely that was the explanation. I had been experiencing a vivid fantasy, a waking dream.
But this was a disturbing thought. I stayed by the fire, letting the warmth knead me into a more settled frame of mind. I gradually convinced myself that I had endured a brief interview with a very unusual visitor, and that my shock at the shattering of the vase had rendered me unable to hear her leave.
But I did not want to go upstairs, into the even deeper solitude of the dark.
18
I was afraid to sleep that night.
I was afraid of what I might dream. When I did sleep, a little after dawn, I was awakened by the ringing of the telephone. There were many telephone calls, one after another. The answering machine kicked in each time, but I was aware of voices on the speaker, some of the voices familiar, some unknown to me, offering congratulations, offering commissions, urging me to call. The distant-sounding voices were a reminder of the city, the real lives, around me.
As a result of these calls, the following day was a pleasant one. I was on the phone all day, when I was not meeting with someone from the mayor’s office at one of the sunny, flowery restaurants off Civic Center. They wanted to begin work on rebuilding the park immediately, and I had a delightful meeting with a firm of landscape architects in the Bank of America building on California Street.
I forced myself not to think about my visitor of the night before. I warned myself several times: Put her out of your mind.
Often throughout the day a delicious word formed itself on my lips: success.
This was it. This was what I had wanted. Some of the calls I did not respond to, from film producers and the representatives of real-estate developers. Some of these deals would have excited me a few days before. Now I was not interested in drawing up my ideas for a carp garden in Honolulu, or a saguaro fantasy for a retired movie director near Tucson. One or two of the film projects looked exciting, including the sets for a movie about the building of the Eiffel Tower, with a “version of the Tuileries as that area must have appeared back then.”
I tried to reach Nona by phone all day, but she was in a meeting or out to lunch, according to an assortment of receptionists. All morning, and all afternoon, I persisted.
Nona eluded me.
Only in the evening, after supping briefly on a veal with mustard sauce, one of Collie’s best dishes, did I have time to sit for a moment in the studio near my bedroom, and try to gather together my sense of what was happening.
My thoughts were interrupted. I was aware of a familiar laugh downstairs, and aware that Collie was happy to see someone. I was pleased to recognize my brother’s voice, but only when I hurried down the stairs did I fully realize what Collie was saying.
“It’s terrible, the things we have to put up with today,” said Collie. “To see such good people suffering. It’s a terrible thing.”
“Your house looks like a storehouse for phantom furniture,” said Rick.
The sight of Rick silenced me for a moment. Then I managed to sound cheerful. “Things are going to get better. Commissions are starting to come in again. This will all get fixed.”
There was something wrong. Both of us pretended that all was well, and our conversation remained superficially cheerful. “Patient—you’re a patient guy,” Rick was saying. “But look at that armoire, shrouded like that. And look over here. You expect to see a mummy sitting under a chair like this.” He lifted a plastic drape and it settled, stiffly, over the structure it protected, an Empire vintage sedan chair. The slightest spill of plaster dust sifted to the floor.
Rick thanked Collie and said he did not want coffee. He motioned me up the stairs, and when we both sat in my studio I could see clearly what was wrong, and why Collie had been upset. I had been trying to deny it to myself, saying that surely he didn’t look as bad as I thought.
One of his eyes was swollen, the flesh around it blue. His lip had been cut. He withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket. The white cloth was starred with blood. He dabbed at his nose.
“You know what I think, Strater? I think you have about as much money as I have.”
“There’s something you wanted to tell me,” I prompted him. I poured brandy from the decanter in the corner.
He did not respond at once. “Trouble,” he said. He took an inelegantly large swallow of cognac and had to blink his eyes.
“It stings your lip,” I suggested.
He nodded, and yet he took another swallow.
I had endured my concern over my brother by ignoring it, suppressing it, pretending to look the other way. The truth was that I had been, at times, worried about him, finding in Rick the capacity for recklessness that I recognized in myself.
“I might as well hear it now,” I said.
“I had a little difficulty this evening. Nothing overwhelming. Just a little unpleasantness.”
I waited, saying, with my eyes: Tell me.
“First of all, I owe people money,” he said.
“Gambling,” I said.
He made his finger-pistol gesture. “But the problem is: I’ve always owed people money. People let it slide. They know they’ll eventually get their cash.”
“Something has changed.”
Rick studied me for a moment. “Suddenly they want it all back now.”
“How inconvenient,” I said dryly. Then, at once, “I’ll help you if I can, Rick. How much do you need?”
“I can come up with a few dollars. I’ll sell that Miró. I won’t like parting with it. But I’ll buy something to replace it some day. And that odd Cornell, that box that looks like the view out a hotel. That’s worth a lot, and that’s one piece I never really liked. So it’s not the money.”
I spoke for him. “It’s the sudden pressure.”
“The suddenly very vigorous pressure. That’s what has my attention.” He dabbed at his nose. “Do you think about money as much as I do, Strater?”
“Probably.”
A cruel and unfeeling observer would have said that my father was profligate. It was after my father’s death eight years before that my mother began to make grievous mistakes. She had been a woman with a steady gaze and long silences, cool where my father had been jovial, calm where my father had been energetic. Awed by her fine profile, and her way of offering a cheek for me to kiss on arriving and departing, I had loved her without, I was to ultimately understand, really knowing her.
My father’s death destroyed her. Beneath her peaceful smile, which we assumed was a calm sustained by religious or at least philosophical strength, was a deep passion for self-destruction. Within less than a year she had donated extravagantly not only to my father’s favorite charities, but to charities no one had ever heard of before, foundations that sprang up, it seemed, with little purpose but to batten off Fields funds.
It took an effort, even with dwindling resources, to immolate the estate, but by the time I responded, in the midst of my own travels, to a call from the family attorney to the effect that “Mrs. Fields has been secretly and cunningly committing financial suicide,” it was too late. By the time I took a moment from my own career to survey my mother’s circumstances, the family estate was abysmal, and only the fact that Rick and I had inherited some money directly from my father had protected us from losing everything. My brother had, characteristically, spent his money quickly, and his wives had relieved him of what reserves he seemed too busy to consume himself. Stories regarding my brother involved baccarat and thoroughbreds. There were hints of bribes in order to avoid jail after sportscar races or New Year’s celebrations gone awry.
The two of us enjoyed the silence, and then Rick asked the question he had been withholding. “Is there any reason that someone would want to punish you, Strater? Get back at you somehow, I mean?”
“You know who it is.”
His tone was kind, philosophical. “What are we going to do about it?”
“I won’t let them hurt you, Rick.”
He shook his
head with a thoughtful smile. Rick was always an active man, all color and energy, a man women liked and men mistrusted. He had confidence, but now something had snapped in his spirit. “We can’t fight these people. Well, we can literally fight them, if and when it comes to that. I did fairly well tonight. But tonight was just a friendly tap on the shoulder. We can’t really fight back. Not in any way that matters.”
“I’ll talk to DeVere.”
“Good idea. What will you say?”
I felt punished, for a moment, by his sarcasm. “I’ll think of something.”
“You shouldn’t have made him mad, Strater. He’ll stay mad. He doesn’t have our forgiving nature.” This was said with more than a dash of irony. Rick had a way of thinking as I thought, physically resembling me but at the same time unlike me, the same coloring but a slightly different mold.
“He won’t hurt you again.”
“I know things about the world that you don’t.” My brother stood and began to pace. “The world is a contest. A long war. You link up with powers, the law, government, organized crime, you name it. But we all need some sort of power behind us. By ourselves, alone—we’re nothing.”
I listened, thoughts and feelings churning.
“So the point I’m trying to make, Strater, is—there’s not a thing you can do.”
I did not answer.
“What weapons do we have? You know how long it takes for lawyers to do anything, and we can’t afford much in the way of representation anyway. The police? They do what the DeVere people want. Sure, they’ll be sympathetic. But months will go by, years will go by. And the people he knows. They have long memories.”
“It’s going to be all right,” I said.
I was a different man now. No more harm would be done to us. I would not let my brother suffer. I would not let myself suffer further indignity. It was all changed now, transformed. I could not fully comprehend how I had achieved this new confidence, but it was real. It would not fade.
I laughed.
Rick was startled, although, even in his anguish, a little pleased to see me so spirited. “This is funny?”
The Horses of the Night Page 10