Children of Light (17 page)

She senses a freedom the scope of which she has never known. She has come beyond despair to a kind of exaltation.

Well, Lu Anne thought. Well, now. She had a little scotch and put the script face down in her lap.

“Really, now, Gordon,” she said.

Of course, that was the spirit of the book and its ending. But exaltation beyond despair? She had never found anything beyond despair except more despair.

There were some questions to take up, some questions for the writer here. Did Walker really believe in exaltation beyond despair? Did that mean she had to? Would she be able to play it? For that she had an answer which was: absolutely, you betcha. We play them whether they’re there or not. And once we’ve played them they’re there and there they stay, just like Marcel Herrand’s Larcenaire, Henry Fonda’s Wyatt Earp, Jimmy Dean’s Jimmy Dean. Exaltation beyond despair, she thought. Christ, I can stand that out in the middle of the floor and tap-dance on the son of a bitch.

It was wearying to have to think about despair, to have to think about Edna and Walker and what was there and what not. About the last especially, she wasn’t sure she had the right to an opinion. Who knew what was there and what wasn’t? The liquor made her head ache. Who could say what exaltations there were?

What if walking by the water one day you broke through it?
You’re walking into the water like our Edna and bam! Life more abundant.

That’s a trick, she thought suddenly. That’s a mean trick, because Walker was right about the lure of life more abundant. To go for it was dying. That kind of abundance, going for that was dying.

That was what he had meant. That, and
Antony and Cleopatra
, Act V, scene 2.

Very clever, Walker, she thought, but a pretty tough one to lay on your old pal. He had rewritten the ending over the past year, not the action but the emotional tone in his descriptions. It occurred to her that he might think he was about to die. Or be wishing himself dead, or her.

There was, she decided, no point in getting upset about it. It was only the script, and the script an adaptation from what was only a book.
Beyond despair to a kind of exaltation
as far as she knew was nothing more than a theatrical convention, just as walking into the drink at sunset was only movies. Her trouble with Walker was that, down deep, she thought he knew everything. The past, the present and future, all the answers. But he was just a writer, as she was what she was.

She drank a little more; a confusion of emotions assailed her, her head ached. She took a couple of aspirin, turned out the lights and slumped into a chair with her legs up on the lounger, the glass in her hand.

What’s going on, Walker? she thought. What’s happening here? Who are we and what are we playing at? Where does one thing leave off and the other stuff commence?

“I’m real,” she said aloud. Having so declared, she had to have a drink and think about it. I know that I am. I know what’s me and what’s not me. That’s all I know. She finished what was in her plastic glass and threw it gently onto the makeup counter.

It was not quite dark inside the trailer. The late-afternoon sunlight hurled itself against every hatch, every weld and seam in the big metal compartment. The Long Friends came out to gossip and brush her with their wings. They were always there when it was dark and reality in question. Their lavender sachet breath was cloying, narcotic.

“Hush now,” she told them.

They prattled on about secrets. Much of their talk was about things that must never be known, ruinous scandals, undetected crimes.

The incessant undercurrent of noise drove her to rise and turn on the overhead lamps. Only one of the Long Friends remained with the light, curled up in the darkest corner, smiling vacantly.

The ones born aren’t enough for you, the Friend said. The ones unborn, they’re too many.

“Don’t
unborn
me,” Lee said. “Really,” she said, “really, you have a nerve giving that abortion crap to me. I gave life to four and you took one back.” She turned to the corpse-like creature in the corner. “Want me to lie awake nights? No, thanks.” She cursed it in Creole French until it raised chalk-white splayed fingers to stop its ears. Watching it do so, she raised her own hands to the side of her head.

“You’re a sickness,” she said without looking at it, “that I breathed in from a graveyard.”

She had an inward vision of a hot September day that sometimes came to her in dreams. She was small, always a child in her dreams, and walking a sandy road down home. On one side of the road, government pines were planted in rows and beyond them tupelos grew beside the motionless river. She crossed herself walking beside a cemetery wall; the oven graves on the far side were invisible to her. She held her breath as long as she could but she could hold it only so long. It was before the hurricane and the high water, just before they’d moved to town, the same summer she remembered her father huge and drunk in the doorway, looking past her for somebody real. Sometimes it pleased her to imagine she had breathed in the Long Friends that day, although it was years before she began to hear and finally to see them.

She turned and looked at the one in the corner. The rough cloth in which it had wrapped itself, the colorless god’s-eye pattern of its wing seemed as vividly present as anything in the trailer.

“Do you love me?” she asked. She began to laugh and cut herself off. Her prescription pills were in the pill case in her carry bag. She took them out, poured them into her hand and mentally counted
them. There were enough to put her out forever. That was what she had wanted to see. All right, she thought. There were enough—there would be enough tomorrow. Next year and the year after that. It was always there. She put the pills back into their plastic capsule.

Resting her brow on her hand, she tried to think about the scene she was about to play. Cleopatra. Immortal longings and exaltation beyond despair. She clenched her teeth and shook her head violently, wrapping the beach robe closer about her shoulders. Then she began to sing.

Her song was a wordless prayerful hum. Years before, she had sung in convincing imitation of the saintly folk sopranos of her youth; she had no training but she liked to sing. As she sang, she relaxed, closed her eyes and let her arms go limp beside her. The song located her to that September day when walking beside the burial ovens she had breathed in some evil fateful thing.

Save me, she sang. That was what the song was about. Somebody, save me.

She leaned her head back, clasped her hands and let her voice rise in a strong tremolo. The song summoned up such a wave of sadness, of recollected hopes, old loves and losses that she thought she would die.

Where’s my exaltation beyond despair? she thought. There’s nothing here but this dreaming child, all unhappy.

She let her song rise again and spread out her arms. In Louisiana the old black people called that kind of singing a
bajo
or a
banjo
song, a homesick blues for where you’ve never been, which for them was Africa but for her was God only knows.

Be there, Lu Anne sang. Be there, Sweet Jesus. Be there.

She leaned back in the lounger, exhausted. When she turned to the mirror she saw her own secret eyes. No other person except her children and the Long Friends had ever seen them. She had used them for Rosalind, but so disguised that no one looking, however closely, could know what it was they were seeing in her face. None of her children had secret eyes.

She got to her feet, transfixed by what she saw in the mirror. The
shock made her see stars as though she had been struck in the face. She watched the secret-eyed image in the glass open its mouth; she tried to look away.

Clusters of hallucination lilacs sprang up everywhere, making a second frame for the mirror, sprouting from between her legs. In her terror she called on God.

Suddenly the place was filled with ugly light, sunlight at once dingy and harsh. Trash light. Josette was standing in the open doorway, wide-eyed and pale. She took a step backward, her lip was trembling. It was the first time Lu Anne had ever seen the Frenchwoman show anything other than unsmiling composure.

Look, you little bitch! Lu Anne thought. Then she was not sure whether she had not said it aloud. Look at my secret eyes!

Vera Ricutti and her husband were behind Josette; Vera had a costume over her arm, a gray cotton garment and a blue bandana. The Ricuttis looked up at Lu Anne with something that might be reverence.

“What’s wrong, kid?” Vera Ricutti asked.

“I was prepping,” Lu Anne said. The accusatory malice and disgust she saw in Josette’s eyes made her feel sick.

“You were screaming!” the girl cried. She turned to the Ricuttis for confirmation. “She was screaming in there!”

“I was singing,” Lu Anne said quietly.

Josette looked up at her with a twisted triumphant smile; Vera Ricutti was holding her by the arm.

“Don’t tell me!” she shouted at Lu Anne. “You were screaming.”

“I was prepping.”

The woman shrugged and grunted.

Joe Ricutti came forward and spoke quietly to her and she walked away.

“We’ll take care of it,” Joe said in his gravelly voice. “We’ll talk to Eric. I mean, you don’t have to take that from her.”

Lu Anne stood in the trailer doorway, her beach robe undone, leaning one elbow on her wrist and chewing her little finger.

“Shit,” she said.

Vera stepped up and gently urged her back inside.

“So you were screaming. You got a right.”

“Absolutely,” Joe Ricutti said.

W
alter Drogue and his father were walking from their trailer to the beach. The old man wore a blue bathing suit that scarcely concealed his privates and a gondolier’s striped shirt.

“You think you have to be smart to direct pictures?” the old man asked his son. “Bullshit. Some of the biggest assholes you ever met are immortal.”

“I never said you had to be smart,” his son replied. “I said it was useful. I was thinking of my own case.”

“Ford,” the old man said. “A born political director. An Irishman with the eye of a German Romantic. Peasant slyness. He never got in trouble here and he wouldn’t have got in trouble over there like Eisenstein.”

“You’re lucky it was here you got in trouble,” young Drogue told his father. “Over there they would have just shot your ass and no fancy speeches.”

At the beach Blakely and Hueffer were waiting for them. The Chapman Titan had been driven onto its track.

“Check out the sky,” Blakely said.

Old Drogue went off to settle himself in a folding chair beneath a beach umbrella. Drogue junior, Blakely and Eric Hueffer looked at the horizon.

The line of storm cloud seemed to have risen some thirty degrees, so that the horizon line was a convergence of two gold-flecked tones of blue. The sun’s intensity was just beginning to fade.

“If those clouds will stay where they are when the sun sets,” Blakely said, “we’re gonna have us one fuckin’ humdinger of a sunset.”

“I’m God,” Walter Drogue told his assistants. “I still the restless wave. I command the sun. Where’s Joy?”

“Joy,” Eric Hueffer called, and Joy McIntyre stepped out from inside the nearest bathhouse door. She wore a form-fitting gray cotton bathing suit. A blue bandana was tied around her head.

“Want to watch a tape?” Hueffer asked.

“No,” Drogue said. “I want to watch her walk.”

A pair of grips were summoned to lower the arm of the crane; Drogue climbed aboard the camera turret and was weighted in.

“Joy!” Hueffer shouted. “Got your marks?”

“Yeah,” Joy said.

They weighted Toby Blakely in beside his leader.

“Action!” Drogue shouted, and the mounted camera retreated before Joy’s advance down the beach, hauled along by the grips at their guide ropes. Young Drogue peered through the camera’s eye, his baseball cap reversed like a catcher’s.

“O.K.,” he said, when he was satisfied.

The grips swung the Chapman’s arm to its original position and brought Blakely and young Drogue to earth. Joy leaned on one extended arm against the side of the bathhouse. Drogue, Hueffer and Blakely hunkered down near the water’s edge.

“She’s so fucking beautiful it’s gross,” Drogue said. “She comes out of there and you just think: I want to fuck her. You lose your sense of proportion.” He glanced over toward where his father sat and saw the old man’s glance fixed on the comely stand-in.

“Lee has a lot more dignity,” Blakely said. “And a pretty sexy frame for a woman with two or three kids. Or even more.”

The three of them walked over to where Joy was standing and looked her up and down.

“I like this bathing suit,” Hueffer said.

Drogue patted Joy’s shoulder, and seized a piece of her bathing suit between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s cotton. To be accurate, it should be wool, but we figured fuck it. So,” he said, pointing to Joy, “as not to cause unnecessary discomfort to our personnel.”

Joy smiled gratefully.

“Actually,” Drogue told his associates, “we’re cheating a lot with this suit. This thing is circa 1912. If we gave ’em the real Gay Nineties article this scene would look like Mack Sennett.”

“I should think this ’un might be good for a few laughs,” Joy said. The three men looked at her sternly.

“When you take it off, doll,” Drogue told her, “no one will be laughing.”

“Crikey,” Joy said. “Take it off?”

“Don’t you look at the script?” Drogue asked her. “Of course you take it off.”

“Crikey,” Joy said.

“Miss Verger is taking her suit off. It’s in the script. If she can do it, you can do it.”

“I suppose,” Joy said doubtfully.

Drogue turned to Hueffer and drew him aside. Blakely went along with them.

“What I need to know here is how it’s going to look when she takes that suit off. It’s tight, she’ll have to wriggle—O.K., we don’t want a striptease. We’ll probably cut to the suit falling away but I’m not sure how far into the disrobing we want to go. So let’s roll tape on this shot—have her come down the beach to her marks, take the bandana off and toss it. Then let her get out of that suit as gracefully as she can and drop it aside. See if she can start by raising her right arm and baring her right breast.”