by John Boyd
Standing there, where the mountains look on Malibu and Malibu looks on the sea, he felt, finally, the catharsis of a Prometheus, chthonian yet Olympian, who had stolen from the gods not the gift of fire but of death. His dialogue with this segment of the young was complete. They had learned by example always to do unto others before it was done unto them.
Now, to the festival and the continuing dialogue.
Ward took off his shirt, weighted it with his boots, and hurled the evidence that connected him with the Patriots onto the pyre. He hated to lose the shirt, an eighty-dollar item, but the boots were ruined. If he wore them around Palo Alto, every cat in the neighborhood would be trailing behind him.
In barefeet and T-shirt, Ward jogged back to the ranch house. In the twenty-five minutes before Gollenberger and Stein were to play he had to dress and make three anonymous calls to report his location to the LAPD, the FBI, and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office. To be fair and to create jurisdictional confusion, he wanted all departments on the scene with Joe Cabroni as a witness who could recognize Ruth Gordon. Now, as a civic duty, he would also have to report the fire, before he ripped the veil from the face of Medusa and revealed her attendant Gorgons.
When Ward reached the eucalyptus grove on his return to the meadow, he knew Diana had established the competitive factor in her experiment beyond doubt.
Drifting up through the trees, hollow-eyed from shock, dazed, some weeping, a horde of young people were making their way toward the parking lot. Ward had seen such expressions among civilian evacuees of war-shattered towns in Europe, and as of old he cloaked his mind with a soldier’s apathy. But his cloak was tattered from long disuse and it took an effort of will to count a random sample of the émigrés, twenty girls and two boys. One of the boys was being drawn, almost forcibly, by a girl, possibly his older sister, so Ward was somewhat uncertain that his sampling was accurate.
They had a right to be shocked. They were the walking wounded from point zero of a biological nuclear explosion. He wanted to shout, “Forget it, girls. This bomb will be defuzed.”
But they would not forget. In her own continuing dialogue with the young, Diana had convinced them, with utter finality, they should never trust anyone, over or under thirty.
On the other hand, they would not talk, and the experiment would never reach the record books of science for other biologists to attempt.
To the final movement of Bach’s Passion, Ward emerged from the eucalyptus grove dressed in Establishment style. In the distance, Diana bent over her piano in a concentration touching on the sublime, because the intervening scene made Bach’s Passion resemble a Parcheesi game between two maiden aunts.
As Ward foresaw, the rejuves had not completed the Beethoven processional, since remnants of miniskirts were still draped around their waists, shoulder straps dangling, breakaway panties broken away. Spread below him, bodies undulated like waves on a lake. Here and there the surface boiled in a sudden frenzy as if some underground trout had risen to bite a fly.
As Ward strode nearer, the general view yielded to the particular. Some of the youths slept from satiety, others sat and waited, while some more enterprising—Establishment material—stood and looked around for the flurry of activity which indicated the impending availability of a rejuve.
Moving among them, now, very carefully, listening to the low moans of lewd females, Ward realized the scene might appear shocking to anyone who had never seen an X-rated movie. On the other hand, some inveterate habitués of the stroke houses might find reason to be critical—the bodies weren’t aligned at good camera angles. But at the moment Ward was less concerned with cinematic verities than with his shoes; already, today, he had ruined a pair of good boots.
It was no scene for a man from the swinging years of selective love-ins, yet if the pianist from the flapper era on the stage in front of him had her way, these undulations were the wave of the future—and all for a few million bucks.
Ward was disgusted with the woman at the piano, but he had another contribution in his continuing dialogue with the young which would teach these boys that sex was a hormone-based LSD that hallucinated today’s Waldorf salad from tomorrow’s cold potatoes.
As he bounded up the steps, Diana was finishing the finale and Ward realized that, in her, no great artist would be lost to arthritis. Her staccatos skipped, her allegros wept, and she hung to a bar like a dipsomaniac. He could get better Bach from a player piano.
Inside the artists’ dressing room, Ward found Gollenberger reading Odet’s Waiting for Lefty and Stein reading Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class.
“Time, gentlemen.” Ward spoke with authority that needed no introduction. “Give me ‘Flutter High, Butterfly’ with an encore, if needed. If not, I’ll give you the cut signal and you can go home.”
Gollenberger and Stein accepted his authority and rose to get their instruments.
Ward hurried to the control room and turned the amplifiers to maximum treble. The last five notes of Bach’s Passion clanged over the meadow like whangs from an epicene Chinese gong.
As Gollenberger and Stein plugged in their instruments, Ward walked over to Diana. She was exhausted by her hour’s ordeal, drooping on the piano bench, but she revived when he bent and kissed her neck.
“Darling, your performance was incredible,” he spoke honestly. “If you never play again, you can always remember this hour.”
Glowing wanly at his compliment, she flexed her hands and looked up at him. “But, dearest, you were not in the sound booth.”
“I stopped by the restroom, and when I heard you playing I was transfixed,” he answered truthfully.
“That’s sweet of you, Alex, but your pro rata is predicated on your services. I’ll have to dock you a percentage for being absent.”
“No cost is too great for this experience. Come, and while you get rested we’ll peek.”
As he helped her from the stool, she asked, “Where is my beautiful auburn hair?”
Again he answered truthfully. “It got too hot for the wig.”
Hand in hand they walked to the stage and gazed out over the undulations. Diana’s courses in interpretive dancing were paying off. Definite classical elements were in the movements below them, Ionic merging with Doric, and here and there the opulence of Byzantine.
Clinging possessively to his arm, Diana disturbed his thought by beginning her infernal humming, throating a few bars of “Hello, Young Lovers.”
“Isn’t love grand?” she asked rhetorically. “Such a many-splendored thing. Really though, Alex, it’s not what you do but the way that you do it.”
Frankly he was getting slightly tired of her pop-titled libido and answered rather brusquely, “It’s what’s up front that counts.”
“Now, you’re being crude,” she flashed, but the scene spread before them was not one to permit prolonged vexation. Obviously she was eager to get down among them, but he was done with his days of grass and roses.
“Alex,” she beseeched, subliminally, “we’ve got syncopated rhythm. Don’t you think we could teach these youngsters a thing or two?”
“They’ll synchronize better with music. We’ll sit here on the stage and watch pragmatism pay off. Then, when you’re rested…”
Turning back to Gollenberger and Stein he said, “Hit it, boys.”
As the first waves of “Flutter High, Butterfly” tore through them, they sat, Diana snuggling close in a liquefaction of thighs.
Arms around each other’s waists, they sat and listened, watching the tempo on the grass speed up to the tempo of the music.
Suddenly she said, “You mouth the word ‘pragmatism’ like a preacher pronounces ‘prostitution.’ ”
Already she was two weeks past the honeymoon period, beginning to pick at trifles.
“I don’t disrespect prostitution, dear. A skilled prostitute is a commercial artist.”
“Love’s not a financial arrangement, Alex. You sound materialistic.”
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sp; Her first projection of her own defects onto her spouse, he noted. This meant she was well past the honeymoon stage, but he answered her charge with silence, and his silence disturbed her. They listened for a moment and she turned to him, contrite. “You do love me, don’t you, Alex?”
Now she was seeking the reassurance so vital to an aging matron, he observed. The high notes were vibrating against her unstable molecules of reconstituted DNA. Her innercellular structure was being altered; the random errors of age were piling up.
“Whenever you want me to,” he answered.
“That’s not what I meant at all,” she said. “After all, there’s more to the relationship between a man and a woman than just sex. There’s companionship.”
Her years were truly winging by.
“If they both enjoy a good game of backgammon,” he agreed. “I don’t play backgammon.”
Now she lapsed into a frigid silence which he welcomed because there were other observations he wished to make. Watching the celebrants below, he hoped the cellular structure of the rejuves held until the sustained staccato he had written into the song’s finale. Out of sheer humanity, he wanted their last act to end in a soaring climax.
Also he was looking for Freddie to arrange transportation to Hollywood, where he could catch the airlines bus. When he spotted his former soul brother, he felt disgust.
Freddie had cut E-44 from the herd and was attempting a Kittibangi Crawl with an ineptness that was wrecking the image of black exoticism Ward had erected and, unknown to the High Wheeler, setting the progress of African eroticism back two generations.
Fixing the coordinates of Freddie’s location in his mind, Ward shifted his gaze to a closer view. Almost below him, he saw E-24 in the arms of a towheaded lad of sixteen or seventeen. As Ward watched, Gollenberger and Stein swung into the sustained staccato. E-24’s partner responded, but the little Cajun seemed stuck in gumbo mud.
“My guests are breaking rhythm,” Diana complained. “They’re not holding the beat.”
Her voice quavered and he glanced down. Her skin was growing crêpey and her eyes crepuscular. Once disintegration commenced, it progressed on a sine curve, he had calculated. Diana was swooping down the curve.
“What’s happening to T-ll?” she asked. “Her arms look withered.”
“She’s taking an awful pounding,” Ward commented, “because love’s a total involvement in a maximum environment.”
His quote was taken from her text, but she made no comment as he looked back toward Gollenberger and Stein and gave them the “cut” sign.
“She’s growing old, Alex,” the beldame beside him shrieked. “Look at her flesh… Where are those boys going? I’m paying them to play.”
“I dismissed them, Ruth. Your voice is so weak I couldn’t hear what you were saying.”
“Quit calling me Ruth. Look, my guests are beginning to look repulsive.”
She was breezing past fifty, now, at the point where his innercellular structure would hold.
“You’re applying the aesthetics of the ‘now’ generation to the ‘then’ generation,” he explained.
“But what’s happening out there?”
Polite as always, Ward attempted to break the news to her gently. “Did you ever read Hawthorne’s Doctor Heidegger’s Experiment, Ruth?”
“This is no damned time for a literary discussion,” she snapped, “and quit calling me Ruth.”
Ward was tired, himself, slightly irritable, and he didn’t like to hear a woman use profanity.
“You are Ruth. Look at your hands,” he snapped.
She looked.
“I’m growing old!”
Horror in her voice aroused his compassion, and he turned to her gently. “One can grow beautiful with age, Ruth. So many fine things do. Old lace, old wine, Swiss cheese…”
“Like W-27 there?” She pointed a bony finger, her voice cracking with disgust.
She had a point, Ward admitted. It would take a complex theory of esthetics to advance an argument favoring the rejuves over the Rockettes, and the other half of his control group was becoming aware of the transfigurations. A male voice screamed from the center area, “Bad trip… Get my guru. I’m freaking out.”
In the upper right quadrant, another boy screamed in a shriller tone, “Save me, Filmore. My Virginia’s a werewolf.”
But the most plaintive wail of all reached his ears from close at hand. “Grandmother, you!”
Curses, moans, pleas, religious invocations were rising from the crowd. A young theorist jumped to his feet, shouting, “It’s the smoke, fellows. The pot fumes are caught in an inversion layer. We’re hallucinating. Everybody keep calm and quit breathing.”
Ward glanced down at E-24.
The petite and bouncy French girl, a scaled-down 46, was rising from the arms of her teenage lover, who had fainted. Her chestnut hair once glossy with highlights resembled a rag mop. The breast which had launched the only Springbok Spin of a white man had fallen, and the sight was enough to cure any but the most confirmed deviate of breast obsession.
She struggled to her feet with the strength of a woman of eighty years fast dwindling to that of the ninety-year-old who finally stood up, bent, tottering, looking around her with the dazed wonderment and helplessness of the very old. Remembering the fatigue accelerated aging had caused in him the first time, Ward felt the weariness that crushed her ancient frame. Yet, she stood there, a tiny, gallant veteran, home from the wars she now must barely remember.
Even so, remembering the charm of her accent, the grace and vitality of her youth, he could have loved her, still, as antiquarians love the Parthenon, for the glory that once had been.
Ward welcomed the distraction of approaching helicopters. Cabroni’s was the northern one, he assumed, coming from the Camarillo air strip. The blue one from the west with the Navy star was definitely the ONI from Point Mugu. Two eastward were the FBI and the LAPD, and one from the south was the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office. On Fiend’s Crest Drive, he could hear a siren sounding louder and clearer over the subdued sounds of weeping from the meadow.
“Listen, Ruth. They’re playing our song.”
She had no ear for subtle humor.
“Alex, what shall I do?”
It was the first time he recalled her asking his advice.
Since he was a considerate person, he considered her problem in relation to the fire, which had swept out of the canyon and was rolling down the hillside toward the ranch house.
“I suggest you hurry to your office and call in your mini-buses to get your patients back to their homes, because your ranch house will soon be burning.”
“You go, Alex. I’m too tired.”
Since Ward was a just man, he considered this her mess and her duty to clean it up.
“I have only enough time to arrange transportation back to Hollywood.”
Above them, to the east of the grove, the helicopters bearing officials were touching down on a grassy knoll.
He was walking from the stage when a thought struck him and he turned and called back to her, “You’ll soon be getting aid from local, state, and federal authorities, possibly even the CIA.”
Shouldering through dazed young men and stepping around seated oldsters, Ward approached the High Wheeler, who was explaining to a member of his trio, “This is what they call group hysteria or the madness of crowds. We were just conned into thinking the old babes were chicks.”
Every man here would have his own explanation figured in another ten minutes, Ward realized, as he walked up.
“Freddie, I’m Doctor Alexander Ward. Al told me you were a very accommodating and resourceful young man. He left a check for you and I’ll add a little extra if you can drive me back to Hollywood in something of a hurry. We’ll settle both accounts when you get there.”
Remembering the news story, the High Wheeler reverted to the Hustler. “Yes, sir, Doctor Ward. You just circle around that hill there, keeping out of sight of those gen
tlemen by the helicopters, and slide into the back seat of the only lavender Cadillac in the parking lot. Soon as we pick up our instruments in the artists’ dressing room, I’ll have you to Hollywood in no time at all.”
Ward ducked into the crowd, keeping low, as if heeding Freddie’s advice. He did not wish to deny Freddie this last furtive pleasure.
Composed dignity would be his ploy with the authorities, Ward decided as he made his way toward Cabroni to wish him a good day. The only charge they had against him was the suspected murder of Ruth Gordon, and they were stuck with the charge.
Face-saving would be their shuffle. No officer would detain a Nobel nominee for murder in the presence of his alleged victim, alive though slightly confused, and in the presence of rival authorities. The story would not look good in the S.F. Chronicle, the L.A. Times, and the Washington Post. His dinner with Ester would not be delayed.
Thoughts of Ester swung Ward’s mind from less immediate considerations.
At times, all of us wish to go back and follow the path not taken, he thought, to know loves brighter than loves we have known, but the same player would make the same errors in a different ball park. From his first youth he owned a graveyard in Germany and from his second a crematorium on Malibu.
Youth, he decided, was not merely a chronological condition, but a process of learning. To grow old was to become aware of one’s limitations and, now, he accepted his, knowing within his limits his theoretical skills would still provide the more abundant life. One final application of the youth solution to Ester’s upper torso would do it.
Backgammon and Parcheesi were not in his retirement bag.