“Isn’t that real grass?”
“Oh yes — it’s grass.”
Beyond the strip of anticipatory lawn was the excavation for a swimming pool, patronized now by a crowd of seagulls who saw them and took flight.
“Are you going to live here all alone?” she asked him. “Not even dancing girls?”
“Probably. I used to make plans but not any more. I thought this would be a nice place to read scripts. The studio is really home.”
“That’s what I’ve heard about American business men.”
He caught a lilt of criticism in her voice.
“You do what you’re born to do,” he said gently. “About once a month somebody tries to reform me, tells me what a barren old age I’ll have when I can’t work any more. But it’s not so simple.”
The wind was rising. It was time to go and he had his car keys out of his pocket, absent mindedly jingling them in his hand. There was the silvery “Hey!” of a telephone, coming from somewhere across the sunshine.
It was not from the house and they hurried here and there around the garden like children playing warmer and colder — closing in finally on a tool shack by the tennis court. The phone, irked with delay, barked at them suspiciously from the wall. Stahr hesitated.
“Shall I let the damn thing ring?”
“I couldn’t. Unless I was sure who it was.”
“Either it’s for somebody else or they’ve made a wild guess.”
He picked up the receiver.
“Hello…. Long distance from where? Yes, this is Mr. Stahr.”
His manner changed perceptibly. She saw what few people had seen for a decade — Stahr impressed. It was not discordant because he often pretended to be impressed but it made him momentarily a little younger.
“It’s the President,” he said to her, almost stiffly.
“Of your company?”
“No, of the United States.”
He was trying to be casual for her benefit but his voice was eager.
“All right, I’ll wait,” he said into the phone, and then to Kathleen, “I’ve talked to him before.”
She watched. He smiled at her and winked as an evidence that while he must give this his best attention he had not forgotten her.
“Hello,” he said presently. He listened. Then he said “Hello” again. He frowned.
“Can you talk a little louder,” he said politely, and then “Who?… What’s that?”
She saw a disgusted look come into his face.
“I don’t want to talk to him,” he said. “No!”
He turned to Kathleen.
“Believe it or not, it’s an orang-outang.”
He waited while something was explained to him at length; then he repeated:
“I don’t want to talk to it, Lew. I haven’t got anything to say that would interest an orang-outang.”
He beckoned to Kathleen and when she came close to the phone he held the receiver so that she heard odd breathing and a gruff growl. Then a voice:
“This is no phoney, Monroe. It can talk and it’s a dead ringer for McKinley. Mr. Horace Wickersham is with me here with a picture of McKinley in his hand — “
Stahr listened patiently.
“We’ve got a chimp,” he said after a minute. “He bit a chunk out of John Gilbert last year…. All right, put him on again.”
He spoke formally as if to a child.
“Hello Orang-outang.”
His face changed and he turned to Kathleen.
“He said hello.”
“Ask him his name,” suggested Kathleen.
“Hello Orang-outang-God, what a thing to be! — Do you know your name?… He doesn’t seem to know his name…. Listen, Lew. We’re not making anything like ‘King Kong’ and there is no monkey in ‘The Hairy Ape.’… Of course I’m sure. I’m sorry, Lew, good bye.”
He was annoyed with Lew because he had thought it was the President and changed his manner acting as if it were. He felt a little ridiculous but Kathleen felt sorry and liked him better because it had been an orang-outang.
They started back along the shore with the sun behind them. The house seemed kindlier when they left it, as if warmed by their visit — the hard glitter of the place was more endurable if they were not bound there like people on the shiny surface of a moon. Looking back from a curve of the shore, they saw the sky growing pink behind the indecisive structure and the point of land seemed a friendly island, not without promise of fine hours on a further day.
Past Malibu with its gaudy shacks and fishing barges they came into the range of human kind again, the cars stacked and piled along the road, the beaches like ant hills without a pattern, save for the dark drowned heads that sprinkled the sea.
Goods from the city were increasing in sight — blankets, matting, umbrellas, cookstoves, reticules full of clothing — the prisoners had laid out their shackles beside them on this sand. It was Stahr’s sea if he wanted it, or knew what to do with it — only by sufferance did these others wet their feet and fingers in the wild cool reservoirs of man’s world.
Stahr turned off the road by the sea and up a canyon and along a hill road and the people dropped away. The hill became the outskirts of the city. Stopping for gasoline he stood beside the car.
“We could have dinner,” he said almost anxiously.
“You have work you could do.”
“No — I haven’t planned anything. Couldn’t we have dinner?”
He knew that she had nothing to do either — no planned evening or special place to go.
She compromised.
“Do you want to get something in that drug store across the street?”
He looked at it tentatively.
“Is that really what you want?”
“I like to eat in American drug stores. It seems so queer and strange.”
They sat on high stools and had tomato broth and hot sandwiches. It was more intimate than anything they had done and they both felt a dangerous sort of loneliness and felt it in each other. They shared in varied scents of the drug store, bitter and sweet and sour, and the mystery of the waitress with only the outer part of her hair dyed and black beneath, and when it was over, the still life of their empty plates — a sliver of potato, a sliced pickle and an olive stone.
It was dusk in the street, it seemed nothing to smile at him now when they got into the car.
“Thank you so much. It’s been a nice afternoon.”
It was not far from her house. They felt the beginning of the hill and the louder sound of the car in second was the beginning of the end. Lights were on in the climbing bungalows — he turned on the headlights of the car. Stahr felt heavy in the pit of his stomach.
“We’ll go out again.”
“No,” she said quickly as if she had been expecting this. “I’ll write you a letter. I’m sorry I’ve been so mysterious — it was really a compliment because I like you so much. You should try not to work so hard. You ought to marry again.”
“Oh, that isn’t what you should say,” he broke out protestingly. “This has been you and me today. I may have meant nothing to you — it meant a lot to me. I’d like time to tell you about it.”
But if he were to take time it must be in her house for they were there and she was shaking her head as the car drew up to the door.
“I must go now. I do have an engagement. I didn’t tell you.”
“That’s not true. But it’s all right.”
He walked to the door with her and stood in his own footsteps of that other night while she felt in her bag for the key.
“Have you got it?”
“I’ve got it,” she said.
That was the moment to go in but she wanted to see him once more and she leaned her head to the left, then to the right trying to catch his face against the last twilight. She leaned too far and too long and it was natural when his hand touched the back of her upper arm and shoulder and pressed her forward into the darkness of his throat. She shut her e
yes feeling the bevel of the key in her tight clutched hand. She said “Oh” in an expiring sigh and then “Oh” again as he pulled her in close and his chin pushed her cheek around gently. They were both smiling just faintly and she was frowning too as the inch between them melted into darkness.
When they were apart she shook her head still but more in wonder than in denial. It came like this then, it was your own fault, how far back, when was the moment. It came like this and every instant the burden of tearing herself away from them together, from it, was heavier and more unimaginable. He was exultant; she resented and could not blame him but she would not be part of his exultation for it was a defeat. So far it was a defeat. And then she thought that if she stopped it being a defeat, broke off and went inside, it was still not a victory. Then it was just nothing.
“This was not my idea,” she said. “Not at all my idea.”
“Can I come in?”
“Oh no — no.”
“Then let’s jump in the car and drive somewhere.”
With relief she caught at the exact phrasing — to get away from here immediately, that was accomplishment or sounded like one — as if she were fleeing from the spot of a crime. Then they were in the car going down hill with the breeze cool in their faces and she came slowly to herself. Now it was all clear in black and white.
“We’ll go back to your house on the beach,” she said.
“Back there?”
“Yes — we’ll go back to your house. Don’t let’s talk. I just want to ride.”
When they got to the coast again the sky was grey and at Santa Monica a sudden gust of rain bounced over them. Stahr halted beside the road, put on a raincoat and lifted the canvas top. “We’ve got a roof,” he said.
The windshield wiper ticked domestically as a grandfather clock. Sullen cars were leaving the wet beaches and starting back into the city. Further on they ran into fog — the road lost its boundaries on either side and the lights of cars coming toward them were stationary until just before they flared past.
They had left a part of themselves behind, and they felt light and free in the car. Fog fizzed in at a chink and Kathleen took off the rose-and-blue hat in a calm, slow way that made him watch tensely, and put it under a strip of canvas in the back seat. She shook out her hair and, when she saw that Stahr was looking at her, she smiled.
The trained seal’s restaurant was only a sheen of light off toward the ocean. Stahr cranked down a window and looked for landmarks but after a few more miles the fog fell away and just ahead of them the road turned off that led to his house. Out here a moon showed behind the clouds. There was still a shifting light over the sea.
The house had dissolved a little back into its elements. They found the dripping beams of a doorway and groped over mysterious waist-high obstacles to the single finished room, odorous of sawdust and wet wood. When he took her in his arms they could just see each other’s eyes in the half darkness. Presently his raincoat dropped to the floor.
“Wait,” she said.
She needed a minute. She did not see how any good could come from this and though this did not prevent her from being happy and desirous she needed a minute to think how it was, to go back an hour and know how it had happened. She waited in his arms, moving her head a little from side to side as she had before, only more slowly, and never taking her eyes from his. Then she discovered that he was trembling.
He discovered it at the same time and his arms relaxed. Immediately she spoke to him coarsely and provocatively and pulled his face down to hers. Then, with her knees she struggled out of something, still standing up and holding him with one arm, and kicked it off beside the coat. He was not trembling now and he held her again as they knelt down together and slid to the raincoat on the floor.
Afterwards they lay without speaking and then he was full of such tender love for her that he held her tight till a stitch tore in her dress. The small sound brought them to reality.
“I’ll help you up,” he said, taking her hands.
“Not just yet. I was thinking of something.”
She lay in the darkness thinking irrationally that it would be such a bright, indefatigable baby, but presently she let him help her up…. When she came back into the room, the room was lit from a single electric fixture.
“A one — bulb lighting system,” he said. “Shall I turn it off?”
“No. It’s very nice. I want to see you.”
They sat in the wooden frame of the window seat with the soles of shoes touching.
“You seem far away,” she said.
“So do you.”
“Are you surprised?”
“At what?”
“That we’re two people again. Don’t you always think — hope that you’ll be one person and then find you’re still two?”
“I feel very close to you.”
“So do I to you,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Thank you.”
They laughed.
“Is this what you wanted?” she asked. “I mean last night.”
“Not consciously.”
“I wonder when it was settled,” she brooded. “There’s a moment when you needn’t and then there’s another moment when you know nothing in the world could keep it from happening.”
This had an experienced ring and to his surprise he liked her even more. In his mood which was passionately to repeat yet not recapitulate the past it was right that it should be that way.
“I am rather a trollop,” she said following his thoughts. “I suppose that’s why I didn’t get on to Edna.”
“Who is Edna?”
“The girl you thought was me. The one you phoned to — who lived across the road. She’s moved to Santa Barbara.”
“You mean she was a tart?”
“So it seems. She went to what you call call-houses.”
“That’s funny.”
“If she had been English I’d have known right away. But she seemed like everyone else. She only told me just before she went away.”
He saw her shiver and got up, putting the raincoat around her shoulders. He opened a closet and a pile of pillows and beach mattresses fell out on the floor. There was a box of candles and he lit them around the room, attaching the electric heater where the bulb had been.
“Why was Edna afraid of me?” he asked suddenly.
“Because you were a producer. She had some awful experience or a friend of hers did. Also I think she was extremely stupid.”
“How did you happen to know her?”
“She came over. Maybe she thought I was a fallen sister. She seemed quite pleasant. She said ‘Call me Edna’ all the time. ‘Please call me Edna’ — so finally I called her Edna and we were friends.”
She got off the window seat so he could lay pillows along it and behind her.
“What can I do?” she said. “I’m a parasite.”
“No, you’re not.” He put his arms around her. “Be still. Get warm.”
They sat for a while quiet.
“I know why you liked me at first,” she said. “Edna told me.”
“What did she tell you?”
“That I looked like — Minna Davis. Several people have told me that.”
He leaned away from her and nodded.
“It’s here,” she said, putting her hands on her cheekbones and distorting her cheeks slightly. “Here and here.”
“Yes,” said Stahr. “It was very strange. You look more like she actually looked than how she was on the screen.”
She got up, changing the subject with her gesture as if she were afraid of it.
“I’m warm now,” she said. She went to the closet and peered in, came back wearing a little apron with a crystalline pattern like a snowfall. She stared around critically.
“Of course we’ve just moved in,” she said, “ — and there’s a sort of echo.”
She opened the door of the verandah and pulled in two wicker chairs, drying them off. He watched h
er move, intently yet half afraid that her body would fail somewhere and break the spell. He had watched women in screen tests and seen their beauty vanish second by second as if a lovely statue had begun to walk with meagre joints of a paper doll. But Kathleen was ruggedly set on the balls of her feet — the fragility was, as it should be, an illusion.
“It’s stopped raining,” she said. “It rained the day I came. Such an awful rain — so loud — like horses weeing.”
He laughed.
“You’ll like it. Especially if you’ve got to stay here. Are you going to stay here? Can’t you tell me now? What’s the mystery?”
She shook her head.
“Not now — it’s not worth telling.”
“Come here then.”
She came over and stood near him and he pressed his cheek against the cool fabric of the apron.
“You’re a tired man,” she said putting her hand in his hair.
“Not that way.”
“I didn’t mean that way,” she said hastily. “I meant you’ll work yourself sick.”
“Don’t be a mother,” he said.
“All right. What shall I be?”
Be a trollop, he thought. He wanted the pattern of his life broken. If he was going to die soon, like the two doctors said, he wanted to stop being Stahr for a while and hunt for love like men who had no gifts to give, like young nameless men who looked along the streets in the dark.
“You’ve taken off my apron,” she said gently.
“Yes.”
“Would anyone be passing along the beach? Shall we put out the candles?”
“No, don’t put out the candles.”
Afterwards she lay half on a white cushion and smiled up at him.
“I feel like Venus on the half shell,” she said.
“What made you think of that?”
“Look at me. Isn’t it Botticelli?”
“I don’t know,” he said smiling. “It is if you say so.”
She yawned.
“I’ve had such a good time. And I’m very fond of you.”
“You know a lot, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, from little things you’ve said. Or perhaps the way you say them.”
She deliberated.
“Not much,” she said. “I never went to a university if that’s what you mean. But the man I told you about knew everything and he had a passion for educating me. He made out schedules and made me take courses at the Sorbonne and go to museums. I picked up a little.”
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 126