A Way of Life, Like Any Other

by Darcy O'Brien

  My father broke in at one point, starting an anecdote about the time that he and Ford had been on location in Monument Valley, when they were sitting around the campfire near the chuck wagon beating their gums, swapping stories, laughing and scratching. An old Indian who had been hired as an extra stood up and recited a poem. Nobody understood a word of it, except Dolores del Campo, who was part Indian on her mother’s side, but it must have been one heck of a poem, because . . . and here my father faltered. He covered himself with:

  “Well, you know me, Jack, I’m a man of a few thousand words, but frankly, the long and the short of it was . . .”

  “We can hear that one after,” Ford said.

  To which my father: “You’re the director, Jack.” And Ford resumed his reading.

  He told me that Swift, Dr. Johnson, Fielding, and Sterne were the great masters of English prose, and the greatest of these was Swift, except for Joyce, who could write circles around anyone. He discoursed on literature for an hour or more. He showed me a book that was dedicated to him, Famine, by Liam O’Flaherty, I had seen The Informer and I asked Ford whether he was going to make a movie out of Famine too. No, he said, he was too old, but he should have and now somebody else should. He didn’t have the strength any more. It would take a strong, young man to make that picture. He filled his coffee cup with whiskey. The Irish famine was the ugliest event in the history of the western world. The English had been worse to the Irish than the Germans had been to the Jews. A picture about the famine could show just how evil people could be to one another. He took a long drink, started to doze off, and we left.

  I told my father I thought Ford an extraordinary man.

  “He’s got a lot of bitterness in him,” my father said. “He’s one of these guys, no matter what he does, he always wants something he doesn’t think he has.”

  “He’s an artist,” I said.

  “That’s right, Salty.”

  I said that I was going to start reading the writers Ford had recommended right away. My father approved of this resolve, but he cautioned that I should take care not to neglect a regular program of physical exercise. He had known Scott Fitzgerald in the old days, when Fitzgerald was still a young man but ruined by alcohol:

  “Died before his time, living with a woman not his wife.”

  I asked him for his reminiscences about Fitzgerald.

  “Sure. I knew H. L. Mencken, too. He was an atheist, you know, but very famous in his day.”

  Now that we had rationalized the telephone and address book and established contact with its surviving entries, I hoped to get on with the business of cleaning up, filing away, and ordering the rest of the contents of the day room, which were as numerous as they were chaotic. But that evening, after our visit with Ford, my father grew feverish and took to his bed, complaining of pain in his eyes. He told me not to be concerned for him, that during the war he had been bitten in the eye by a rare insect in the tropics, and that from time to time the poison then injected into his system revived. I was not to call a doctor. But within a few days he was worse. It was difficult to watch him, who took such pride in his physical person, which though fat and the skin dry on it from years of exposure to the sun, was yet impressive, the legs and arms generously muscled, the neck measuring near eighteen inches around. He lay crippled up with pain, unable to rise. After a week of this, I brought in an ophthalmologist, who determined that the cornea of one eye must be removed and replaced with another. If this were not done, my father would be blind in both eyes within a few months.

  He bore the surgery manfully. He bit the bullet, lying for weeks in the hospital with both eyes bandaged, with only his thoughts to occupy him. I would draw up a chair beside his bed and listen to him talk. His life was passing before him, and during those weeks he narrated the adventures of his movies, speaking often of Ford and of Duke Wayne, Harry Carey, Tom Mix, Georgie Sherman, and Mervyn Leroy, with whom he had journeyed to Mexico in a covered wagon, in the days when they starved to death together at the Hollywood YMCA. Occasionally he referred to his leading ladies, as he called them, but always with a courteous obliqueness, and as Mother had been one of these, the subject usually led back to Casa Fiesta and the rending of our family. I had written Mother about his illness and I told him that she had written back expressing concern, which cheered him, but that I had misplaced the letter, which annoyed him. In truth she had said that she hoped now he would understand a little of what suffering was and all she had gone through on account of him. She knew damned well that his veteran’s benefits would pay for his operation, but what would happen to her if she got sick? The Italian doctors were all quacks, and they charged a fortune. He could count on footing the bill.

  “Your Ma and I,” my father never tired of saying, “are still married in the eyes of the Church.”

  I took advantage of his confinement to pursue Linda. My father knew about her, because he had intercepted some of her letters to me when she had been on her grand tour. I never accused him directly of reading my mail, and he never admitted it, but when he started warning me about the danger of putting things in writing and how a paternity suit could ruin a man’s life, I knew what he had been up to, and I started hiding her letters under his saddle in the garage. He must have formed an unfavorable impression of her. She wrote that she might even love me and that mine were the most wonderful letters she had ever read, but mostly she described her progress across the Continent. In Copenhagen she had tasted aquavit and gravlaks with dill. The sun never set and she had met an athletic archaeology student who took her to see the people who had been dug up from bogs. He was very masculine but had long thin hands like a woman and she had not been able to resist them. In Vienna, Gumpoldskirchner, the Due de Reichstadt’s heart, an American diplomat who had followed her down the street and told her she reminded him of a girl he had once seen wading on the Jersey shore but had not had the courage to speak to. Had she eaten Sacher torte yet? He suspected his wife of sleeping with the Turkish naval attaché. He was nervous but sweet and took her everywhere, and at the Hapsburg palace she had let him put his hand under her skirt. The weather was boiling, unusual for Vienna. She liked my idea that we should be frank with each other and I could not know how much she valued writing me freely. I was becoming the best friend she had ever had, maybe something more. That was wild about Jerry Caliban and his father’s mistress, but what was I up to? It wasn’t fair if she was going to tell me everything. She was still confused about Marty but it was good to be away from him, he was so insistent, she felt sometimes like he was smothering her and restricting her spirit and she didn’t like that at all. The beer halls in Munich were awful, smelling of stale beer and urine, but there were these four Princeton boys travelling across Europe in a Volkswagen. They had been absolutely fantastic, the funniest guys she had ever met, and the handsomest one was heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. They had finally got off alone together and after an evening in a really nice bierstube she went back to his hotel room with him. She couldn’t remember ever being so hot. She would have done anything. Well, boy, was he a disappointment! It looked like she had picked the wrong Princetonian. How great it would have been if he had been me. Couldn’t I imagine? That would be ideal, for us to meet in some strange city and go off together. of course we had never really done anything together, but she knew I understood why, and if we ever did, she knew it would be perfect. Maybe we were fated never to do anything, because knowing it would be so perfect was too much to bear. Maybe the thing to do was to wait for years, until we were both grown up and completely experienced and married, and then meet each other by chance. It was too dreamy to imagine. She actually got a tan in two weeks in Italy. Zermatt was so quaint, perfect for a honeymoon. In Paris she got drunk at a place that had bread in the shape of penises and so had her date and they took a crazy bath together. He was from New York but he might come out to visit her at Christmas.

  I put the pressure on Linda to go out with me. It seemed a shame that we coul
d be so close in our letters and never see each other alone. We still had lunch together, and she told me what she hadn’t written of her adventures. Light and amusing she was about them, her hair fresh; I could sense the blood under her skin; other students would walk past and look at us; I was suspended in a warm cocoon of her words. Then one Wednesday she said she would be free all Friday night for me. I had put enough aside from the grocery money my father had allotted me to make a big night of it. I borrowed Jerry’s fake identification, a driver’s license giving my age as 22 and my name as Caliban, and I had the DeSoto.

  When I picked her up I asked her where we should have dinner. She said she liked a man to make the decisions. Fortunately I had everything plotted out. We drove to the Amigo in Malibu and had martinis cantilevered over the surf. It was a warm October. They had the windows open and the candles fluttered. We smoked cigarettes. Linda noticed I didn’t inhale and she showed me how. The smoke went to my head with the gin.

  “I wish we had done this before,” I said.

  “I don’t like to rush things,” Linda said.

  “But we’ve been friends since April at least.”

  “I know. And you really are a friend. But you’re different. You’re so serious. I think it scares me a little.”

  “I can be pretty funny, can’t I?”

  “Oh, I love your sense of humor. Your sense of humor is really unique.”

  The steak was good and we had a bottle of good California red with it. I could have stayed there forever looking at her, floating over the sea. She wore a short Italian print dress that seemed hardly to touch her. Her legs were bare and her feet bare in her sandals. She was still a little tan from the summer.

  “I love to drink,” she said, finishing the wine. “Could we have a Grand Marnier?”

  “Sure.”

  “That’s what we had the night I took the bath with that guy.”

  “Do you still hate people?”

  “Not now. This is a nice place. How did you find it?”

  “I think my mother mentioned it.”

  “Why does your mother live in Rome?”

  “I don’t know. She got fed up with this country.”

  “And your father’s in the hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe we could go to your house.”

  “I thought of that. But there’s this jazz place I wanted you to see first. It’s on the way.”

  “We don’t want to get too drunk.”

  “That’s true. We’ll hear the music and have one drink. Then we’ll go to my house.”

  We heard Bud Shank play the tenor sax and the flute. It was a good thing we were having only one more drink because I was about broke. The music lifted us higher. I had plotted it to put her in the mood for something. It hadn’t been necessary, but she liked the music and it let her see I knew my way around. I had felt she thought of me too much as a brother and I wanted to show her I was somebody who knew what to do with an evening. She sat close to me, playing with the hair on the back of my head. She was better looking and sexier than any other girl in the place. I knew that when other people looked at her they could tell she fucked and I wanted them to think we fucked each other, often.

  In the DeSoto she was up against me with her arms around me as I drove. I was afraid she was falling asleep but when I pulled into our driveway she sat right up and got out. I let us in the back way and didn’t turn on any lights. I took her straight into my bedroom and she turned around and kissed me with her arms around my neck. Then she took out my cock. I had the best hard-on of my life. We fell onto the bed and she helped me get her pants down and I went right into her. Her pants were still around one foot and she brought that foot up and pressed me hard under my balls, pressing me up all the way into her. We were caught fish squirming. I could feel something at the top or bottom of her that I thought was probably a diaphragm and I let myself go. When we lay there I asked her if she always wore her diaphragm. She said she didn’t wear it to school, if that’s what I meant. But maybe she should. Maybe she should wear it to school so we could go out to the parking lot and screw like hell during lunch hour. That would be better than lunch anyway, wouldn’t it? We did it again right away. By the end of it her dress was open down the front and after it we took off the rest of our clothes and contemplated each other. Linda said she was glad I was circumcised even though I wasn’t Jewish because circumcised ones felt better. The uncircumcised penis moved within itself. She took damp from herself and smoothed me with it. I told her how much I admired her frankness and I kissed her belly and breasts and took breaths of her, feeling I was breathing in wisdom and experience with the complex bouquet of her body. I told her I wished we were older and that I loved her and that this was the happiest moment of my life. She said she wanted to see the rest of the house.

  I had not counted on a tour, but we stayed naked and I thought it might be fun. I could show her the house and say good-bye to it. After this how could I go on living here? I was no longer a boy, I was—someone’s lover. We must have had so much in common to have found each other. I had little in common with my father, he was merely my father and not a woman anyway. I would have to find a way to get out and get money and spend every night lost in Linda. She would have much to teach me about life, she had lived a score of lives to my one. Maybe she could get money from her parents. I knew they were rich. Her father was a lawyer with big show business clients. She walked out of my room with self-sufficient grace, as though she preferred going naked. I resisted my impulse to hide from her eyes the parts that mattered of my lust glistening body. She went into the day room and I switched on the lights.

  It was still a mess. We hadn’t done anything since the telephone and address book.

  “I thought you said your father was a movie star. This place is a pig sty.”

  “I said he was a movie star. He hasn’t worked in years. He’s been pretty down since my parents’ divorce. I’ve been trying to help out. Then he got sick.”

  “That’s funny,” Linda said, “my parents would be divorced right now if it weren’t for me.”

  “They think it would upset you?”

  “No. It’s my father. He’s in love with me. He doesn’t want to leave me. I honestly think he’d marry me if he could. They’ll get divorced when I leave. I’d bet on it.”

  I could almost understand her father’s feelings, looking at her. What a remarkable girl. Even her father. She was vain about her body, irresistibly vain. She stepped around the room pushing at the piles of papers with her feet. She said her parents didn’t sleep together any more, hadn’t for years. Her mother was having an affair with a Paramount executive. Her father didn’t see anyone because he cared only for her. He bought her presents and took her out, and he had arranged the appointment for her diaphragm.

  “Don’t you ever get carried away,” I said, “just looking at yourself in the mirror?”

  “I’ll have to try it. What’s this?”

  She rummaged through a cardboard box and pulled out a photograph. It was an old publicity still. It was my mother. The box was filled with glossies of her. Linda said it was sick for my father to keep this stuff around. When something was over, it was over. It was very sad, but it was over. I said that one day I hoped he would get over it but maybe he never would.

  “He should get married again,” Linda said.

  “He says he can’t because he’s Catholic.”

  “It’s sick.”

  “I don’t understand it either,” I said.

  She said her father would never marry again, but that was because he loved her. My mother was very beautiful. Did she still look like that?

  “Sort of.”

  “What color hair did she have?”

  “Red.”

  “Do you like red hair?”

  “I’ve never liked a girl with red hair. I like your hair.”

  I wanted to get off the subject of my parents. I was getting depressed.

  “It’s li
ghter when I’m in the sun. Do you like the rest of me?”

  She looked down at herself, holding the photograph away from her. She was near a chair and she put one foot up on the seat of it.

  15

  THE BEACH

  MY FATHER was glad to give an eye for his country. Other men had made the ultimate sacrifice, and he was proud that the Government was paying for the operation, which was a complete success. His left eye was now that of a twenty-five-year-old female with a social conscience killed on the freeway, and so fiercely did the male eye compete with the female, that it discovered strength, matching youth in brightness. My father was of the opinion that half a century of intelligent care for his body, not discounting the grace of God, had made possible this rejuvenation. In the history of medicine I can think of no more apt an analogy than the effect of the Steinmetz monkey gland operation on the poet Yeats. In my father’s case no bawdy lyrics resulted, nor any increase in sexual desire, so far as I could see; but in genital matters, my father kept himself to himself, and I could neither read his thoughts nor know the dreams that gave him torment or delight.

  Eagerly he joined me in ordering the day room. I had nothing better to do. The rest of my night of love with Linda had not gone so well. She said I was just like all the others. Then she took that back. It was true that I seemed to know and understand what a girl felt, that was what attracted her to me in the first place, and my letters proved that it was so. But I was too young and inexperienced, that was probably the real problem. She had not planned to tell me this, but she and Marty were engaged to be married. He was graduating from UCLA this year and they would be married in a big ceremony at the Bel-Air Hotel. There were already 300 guests on the list including Danny Kaye, who was going to do a routine especially for them. Her father would put Marty through law school and Marty’s father was going to help out too. Marty’s father was a shoe manufacturer with outlets from coast to coast. But I shouldn’t get the idea that any of this meant that she was giving up her freedom. She would always be Linda and she would always be free. She told me these things parked outside her house early in the morning. I had an idea I could talk her out of it given enough time, but she said that light meant her father was waiting up for her and would want to talk. He confided everything to her. When I got home I kicked in a window but I replaced the glass before my father got out of the hospital.