Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled

by Harlan Ellison

  Handy nodded, walked toward the foyer. Across the room, forcing him to raise his voice to reach Crewes, still lost in the dimness of the living room, the fireplace casting spastic shadows of blood and night on the walls, Fred Handy said, “Why the extra horsepower, Arthur? I get nervous when I’m told to spend freely.”

  Smoke rose from the chair where Arthur Crewes was hidden. “Good night, Fred.”

  Handy stood for a moment; then, troubled, he let himself out. The living room was silent for a long while, only the faint crackling of the logs on the fire breaking the stillness. Then Arthur Crewes reached to the sidetable and lifted the telephone receiver from its cradle. He punched out a number.

  “Miss Valerie Lone’s bungalow, please…yes, I know what time it is. This is Arthur Crewes calling…thank you.”

  There was a pause, then sound from the other end.

  “Hello, Miss Lone? Arthur Crewes. Yes, thank you. Sorry if I disturbed you…oh, really? I rather thought you might be awake. I had the feeling you might be a little uneasy, first night back and all.”

  He listened to the voice at the other end. And did not smile. Then he said, “I just wanted to call and tell you not to be afraid. Everything will be fine. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Nothing at all.”

  His eyes became light, and light fled down the wires to see her at the other end. In the elegant bungalow, still sitting in the dark. Through a window, moonlight lay like a patina of dull gold across the room, tinting even the depressions in the sofa pillows where a thousand random bottoms had rested, a vaguely yellow ocher.

  Valerie Lone. Alone.

  Misted by a fine down of Beverly Hills moonlight—the great gaffer in the sky working behind an amber gel keylighting her with a senior, getting fill light from four broads and four juniors, working the light outside in the great celestial cyclorama with a dozen sky-pans, and catching her just right with a pair of inky-dinks, scrims, gauzes, and cutters—displaying her in a gown of powdered moth-wing dust. Valerie Lone, off-camera, trapped by the lens of God, and the electric eyes of Arthur Crewes. But still in XTREME CLOSEUP.

  She thanked him, seeming bewildered by his kindness. “Is there anything you need?” he asked.

  He had to ask her to repeat her answer, she had spoken so softly. But the answer was nothing, and he said good night, and was about to hang up when she called him.

  To Crewes it was a sound from farther away than the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was a sound that came by way of a Country of Mildew. From a land where oily things moved out of darkness. From a place where the only position was hunched safely into oneself with hands about knees, chin tucked down, hands wrapped tightly so that if the eyes with their just-born-bird membranes should open, through the film could be seen the relaxed fingers. It was a sound from a country where there was no hiding place.

  After a moment he answered, shaken by her frightened sound. “Yes, I’m here.”

  Now he could not see her, even with eyes of electricity.

  For Valerie Lone sat on the edge of the bed in her bungalow, not bathed in moth-wing dust, but lighted harshly by every lamp and overhead in the bungalow. She could not turn out those lights. She was petrified with fear. A nameless fear that had no origin and had no definition. It was merely there with her; a palpable presence.

  And something else was in the room with her.

  “They…”

  She stopped. She knew Crewes was straining at the other end of the line to hear what followed.

  “They sent your champagne.”

  Crewes smiled to himself. She was touched.

  Valerie Lone did not smile, was incapable of a smile, was by no means touched. The bottle loomed huge across the room on the glass-topped table. “Thank you. It was. Very. Kind. Of. You.”

  Slowly, because of the way she had told him the champagne had arrived, Crewes asked, “Are you all right?”

  “I’m frightened.”

  “There’s nothing to be frightened about. We’re all on your team, you know that…”

  “I’m frightened of the champagne…it’s been so long.”

  Crewes did not understand. He said so.

  “I’m afraid to drink it.”

  Then he understood.

  He didn’t know what to say. For the first time in many years he felt pity for someone. He was fully conversant with affection, and hatred, and envy, and admiration and even stripped-to-the-bone lust. But pity was something he somehow hadn’t had to deal with, for a long time. His ex-wife and the boy, they were the last, and that had been eight years before. He didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m afraid, isn’t that silly? I’m afraid I’ll like it too much again. I’ve managed to forget what it tastes like. But if I open it, and taste it, and remember…I’m afraid…”

  He said, “Would you like me to drive over?”

  She hesitated, pulling her wits about her. “No. No, I’ll be all right. I’m just being silly. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” Then, hastily: “You’ll call tomorrow?”

  “Yes, of course. Sure I will. I’ll call first thing in the morning, and you’ll come down to the Studio. I’m sure there are all sorts of people you’ll want to get reacquainted with.”

  Silence, then, softly: “Yes. I’m just being silly. It’s very lonely here.”

  “Well, then. I’ll call in the morning.”

  “Lonely…hmmm? Oh, yes! Thank you. Good night, Mr. Crewes.”

  “Arthur. That’s first on the list. Arthur.”

  “Arthur. Thank you. Good night.”

  “Good night, Miss Lone.”

  He hung up, still hearing the same voice he had heard in darkened theaters rich with the smell of popcorn (in the days before they started putting faintly rancid butter on it) and the taste of Luden’s Menthol Cough Drops. The same deep, silken voice that he had just this moment past heard break, ever so slightly, with fear.

  Darkness rose up around him.

  Light flooded Valerie Lone. The lights she would keep burning all night, because out there was darkness and it was so lonely in here. She stared across the room at the bottle of champagne, sitting high in its silver ice bucket, chipped base of ice melting to frigid water beneath it.

  Then she stood and took a drinking glass from the tray on the bureau, ignoring the champagne glasses that had come with the bottle. She walked across the room to the bathroom and went inside, without turning on the light. She filled the water glass from the tap, letting the cold faucet run for a long moment. Then she stood in the doorway of the bathroom, drinking the water, staring at the bottle of champagne, that bottle of champagne.

  Then slowly, she went to it and pulled the loosened plastic cork from the mouth of the bottle. She poured half a glass.

  She sipped it slowly.

  Memories stirred.

  And a dark shape fled off across hills in the Country of Mildew.

  3

  Handy drove up the twisting road into the Hollywood Hills. The call he had received an hour before was one he would never have expected. He had not heard from Huck Barkin in over two years. Haskell Barkin, the tall. Haskell Barkin, the tanned. Haskell Barkin, the handsome. Haskell Barkin, the amoral. The last time Fred had seen Huck, he was busily making a precarious living hustling wealthy widows with kids. His was a specialized con: he got next to the kids—Huck was one of the more accomplished surf-bums extant—even as he seduced the mother, and before the family attorney knew what was happening, the pitons and grapnels and tongs had been sunk in deep, through the mouth and out the other side, and friendly, good-looking, rangy Huck Barkin was living in the house, driving the Imperial, ordering McCormick’s bourbon from the liquor store, eating like Quantrill’s Raiders, and clipping bucks like the Russians were in Pomona.

  There had been one who had tried to saturate herself with barbiturates when Huck had said, “À bientot.”

  There had been one who had called in her battery of attorneys in an attempt to have him make restitution, but she had been informed Hu
ck Barkin was one of those rare, infuriating, “judgment-proof” people.

  There had been one who had gone away to New Mexico, where it was warm, and no one would see her drinking.

  There had been one who had bought a tiny gun, but had never used it on him.

  There had been one who had already had the gun, and she had used it. But not on Huck Barkin.

  Fearsome, in his strangeness; without ethic. Animal.

  He was one of the more unpleasant Hollywood creeps Handy had met in the nine Hollywood years. Yet there was an unctuous charm about the man; it sat well on him, if the observers weren’t the most perceptive. Handy chuckled, remembering the one and only time he had seen Barkin shot down. By a woman. (And how seldom any woman can really put down a man, with such thoroughness that there is no comeback, no room to rationalize that it wasn’t such a great zinger, with the full certainty that the target has been utterly destroyed, and nothing is left but to slink away. He remembered.)

  It had been at a party thrown by CBS, to honor the star of their new ninety-minute Western series. Big party. Century City Hotel. All the silkies were there, all the sleek, well-fed types who went without eating a full day to make it worthwhile at the barbecue and buffet. Barkin had somehow been invited. Or crashed. No one ever questioned his appearance at these things; a black mohair suit is ticket enough in a scene where recognition is predicated on the uniform of the day.

  He had sidled into a conversational group composed of Handy and his own Julie, Spencer Lichtman the agent and two very expensive call girls—all pale silver hair and exquisite faces; hundred and a half per night girls; the kind a man could talk to afterward, learn something from, probably with Masters earned in photochemistry or piezoelectricity; nothing even remotely cheap or brittle about them; master craftsmen in a specialized field—and Barkin had unstrapped his Haskellesque charm. The girls had sensed at once that he was one of the leeches, hardly one of the cruisable meal tickets with wherewithal. They had been courteous, but chill. Barkin had gone from unctuous to rank in three giant steps, without saying, “May I?”

  Finally, in desperation, he had leaned in close to the taller of the two silver goddesses, and murmured (loud enough for all in the group to overhear) with a Richard Widmark thinness: “How would you like me down in your panties?”

  Silence for a beat, then the silver goddess turned to him with eyes of anthracite, and across the chill polar wastes came her reply: “I have one asshole down there now…what would I want with you?”

  Handy chuckled again, smugly, remembering the look on Barkin as he had broken down into his component parts, re-formed as a puddle of strawberry jam sliding down one of the walls, and oozed out of the scene, not to return that night.

  Yet there was a roguish good humor about the big blond beach-bum that most people took at face value; only if Huck’s back was put to the wall did the façade of affability drop away to reveal the granite foundation of amorality. The man was intent on sliding through life with as little effort as possible.

  Handy had spotted him for what he was almost immediately upon meeting him, but for a few months Huck had been an amusing adjunct to Handy’s new life in the film colony. They had not been in touch for three years. Yet this morning the call had come from Barkin. Using Arthur Crewes’s name. He had asked Handy to come to see him, and given him an address in the Hollywood Hills.

  Now, as he tooled the Impala around another snakeback curve, the top of the mountain came into view, and Handy saw the house. As it was the only house, dominating the flat, he assumed it was the address Barkin had given him, and he marveled. It was a gigantic circle of a structure, a flattened spool of sandblasted gray rock whose waist was composed entirely of curved panels of dark-smoked glass. Barkin could never have afforded an Orwellian feast of a home like this.

  Handy drove up the flaring spiral driveway and parked beside the front door: an ebony slab with a rhodium-plated knob as big as an Impala headlight.

  The grounds were incredibly well-tailored, sloping down all sides of the mountain to vanish over the next flat. Bonsai trees pruned in their abstracted Zen artfulness, bougainvillea rampant across one entire outcropping, banks of flowers, dichondra everywhere, ivy.

  Then Handy realized the house was turning. To catch the sun. Through a glass roof. The front door was edging past him toward the west. He walked up to it, and looked for a doorbell. There was none.

  From within the house came the staccato report of hardwood striking hardwood. It came again and again, in uneven, frantic bursts. And the sound of grunting.

  He turned the knob, expecting the gigantic door to resist, but it swung open on a center-pin, counterbalanced, and he stepped through into the front hall of inlaid onyx tiles.

  The sounds of wood on wood, and grunting, were easy to follow. He went down five steps into a passageway, and followed it toward the sound, emerging at the other end of the passage into a living room ocean-deep in sunshine. In the center of the room Huck Barkin and a tiny Japanese, both in loose-fitting ceremonial robes, were jousting with sawed-off quarter staves—shoji sticks.

  Handy watched silently. The diminutive Japanese was electric. Barkin was no match for him, though he managed to get in a smooth rap or two from moment to moment. But the Oriental rolled and slid, barely seeming to touch the deep white carpet. His hands moved like propellers, twisting the hardwood staff to counter a swing by the taller man, jabbing sharply to embed the point of the staff in Barkin’s ribs. In and out and gone. He was a blur.

  As Barkin turned in almost an entrechat, to avoid a slantwise flailing maneuver by the Oriental, he saw Handy standing in the entranceway to the passage. Barkin stepped back from his opponent.

  “That’ll do it for now, Mas,” he said.

  They bowed to one another; the Oriental took the staffs, and left through another passageway at the far end of the room. Barkin came across the rug liquidly, all the suntanned flesh rippling with the play of solid muscle underneath. Handy found himself once again admiring the shape Barkin kept himself in. But if you do nothing but spend time on your body, why not? he thought ruefully. The idea of honest labor had never taken up even temporary residence in Huck’s thoughts. And yet one body-building session was probably equal to all the exertion a common laborer would expend in a day.

  Handy thought Huck was extending his hand in greeting, but halfway across the room the robed beach-bum reached over to a Saarinen chair and snagged a huge, fluffy towel. He swabbed his face and chest with it, coming to Handy.

  “Fred, baby.”

  “How are you, Huck?”

  “Great, fellah. Just about king of the world these days. Like the place?”

  “Nice. Whose is it?”

  “Belongs to a chick I’ve been seeing. Old man’s one of the big things happening in some damned banana republic or other. I don’t give it too much thought; she’ll be back in about a month. Till then I’ve got the run of the joint. Want a drink?”

  “It’s eleven o’clock.”

  “Coconut milk, friend buddy friend. Got all the amino acids you can use all day. Very important.”

  “I’ll pass.”

  Barkin shrugged, walking past him to a mirrored wall that was jeweled with the reflections of pattering sunlight streaming in from above. He seemed to wipe his hand over the mirror, and the wall swung out to reveal a fully stocked bar. He took a can of coconut milk from the small freezer unit, and opened it, drinking straight from the can. “Doesn’t that smart a bit?” Handy asked.

  “The coconut mil—oh, you mean the shoji jousting. Best damned thing in the world to toughen you up. Teak. Get whacked across the belly half a dozen times with one of those and your stomach muscles turn to leather.”

  He flexed.

  “Leather stomach muscles. Just what I’ve always yearned for.” Handy walked across the room and stared out through the dark glass at the incredible Southern California landscape, blighted by a murmuring, hanging pall of sickly smog over the Hollywood Freeway. W
ith his back turned to Barkin, he said, “I tried to call Crewes after you spoke to me. He wasn’t in. I came anyway. How come you used his name?” He turned around.

  “He told me to.”

  “Where did you meet Arthur Crewes!” Handy snapped, sudden anger in his voice. This damned beach stiff, it had to be a shuck; he had to have used Handy’s name somehow.

  “At that pool party you took me to, about—what was it—about three years ago. You remember, that little auburn-haired thing, what was her name, Binnie, Bunny, something…?”

  “Billie. Billie Landewyck. Oh, yeah, I’d forgotten Crewes was there.”

  Huck smiled a confident smile. He downed the last of the coconut milk and tossed the can into a wastebasket. He came around the bar and slumped onto the sofa. “Yeah, well. Crewes remembered me. Got me through Central Casting. I keep my SAG dues up, never know when you can pick up a few bucks doing stunt or a bit. You know.”

  Handy did not reply. He was waiting. Huck had simply said Arthur Crewes wanted him to get together with the beach-bum, so Handy had come. But there was something stirring that Barkin didn’t care to open up just yet.

  “Listen, Huck, I’m getting to be an old man. I can’t stand on my feet too long any more. So if you’ve got something shaking, let’s to it, friend buddy friend.”

  Barkin nodded silently, as though resigned to whatever it was he had to say. “Yeah, well. Crewes wants me to meet Valerie Lone.”

  Handy stared.

  “He remembered me.”

  Handy tried to speak, found he had nothing to say. It was too ridiculous. He turned to leave.

  “Hold it, Fred. Don’t do that, man. I’m talking to you.”

  “You’re talking nothing, Barkin. You’ve gotta be straight out of a jug. Valerie Lone, my ass. Who do you think you’re shucking? Not me, not good old friend buddy friend Handy. I know you, you deadbeat.”

  Barkin stood up, unfurled something over six feet of deltoid, trapezius and biceps, toned till they hummed, and planted himself in front of the passageway. “Fred, you continue to make the mistake of thinking I’m a hulk without a brain in it. You’re wrong. I am a very clever lad, not merely pretty, but smart. Now if I have to drop five big ones into your pudding-trough, lover, I will do so.”