Children of Light (23 page)

Bly with very little seeming effort drew Lowndes from the sand and shouldered him. Axelrod steadied the burden with his right hand.

Walker saw that Bly was smiling at him. The smile seemed friendly enough, not triumphant or malicious. In any case, Walker looked away. When Bly and Axelrod went off with the prostrate Lowndes, he found himself alone with Helena.

“Had breakfast?” she asked him. He had been on his way to Lu Anne’s cabana, hoping somehow that she had not spent the night with Bly after all. The notion to swim had seduced him en route.

“No. Have you?”

“I haven’t, actually. Shall we get some coffee?”

“Yes,” Walker said. “Yes, of course.” Helena’s beauty, her youth and her lightly pretended interest in him made Walker suddenly quite sad. The sadness and the thought of Lu Anne with Bly hit him with the force of his rallying hangover and fatigue. He required a line but the cocaine was hidden away in his suitcase in his room.

“We’ll walk up, shall we?” he proposed to Helena. “Then I’ll just have to get something from my room.”

Helena threw him a stagey smile and they walked up the coral steps together. He was tense, unhappy, out of breath. Helena seemed at the point of song.

Breakfast was being served on the terrace that adjoined the bar. Walker took a table with Helena, ordered them coffee with Mexican sweet rolls and excused himself.

He reached his room just ahead of the chambermaid, hung up his
No Molestar
sign and hurriedly prepared himself a measure. In his haste he had more than he intended; the effect was neither exhilaration nor the horrors but a confused enthusiasm without object. He felt for the moment as if he had replaced his true emotions, whatever they might have been, with artificial ones, artificially flavored. When he went out this time he brought a paper fold of cocaine in his beach bag, wrapped in foil to keep it from melting in the heat.

Jon Axelrod and Jack Glenn had joined Helena at the breakfast table.

Glenn and Walker, who had not seen each other for a year or so, shook hands.

“This is the only man I know who
likes
Mexican locations,” Jack Glenn told the people at the table. “I hope you didn’t come to make changes.”

“I am death,” Walker said, “destroyer of worlds. I’ve come to write people out of the script.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jack Glenn said.

Walker picked up his coffee and drained half of it at a swallow. It was really liquor he wanted, something to slow him down now that he was speeded up.

“To some people,” he declared, “Mexican locations are just dollar-ante poker and centipedes. I’m not like that.”

“Really?” Helena asked.

“I come,” Walker said, “to see the elephants.”

“Well,” Helena said. “This is all very tame stuff, if you ask me. Outside of the usual drunks. It’s so tranquil and businesslike it’s almost boring.”

Walker saw that she was pitching Jack Glenn. He found himself liking Helena a little less each moment.

“That could change overnight,” he told her.

“The last thing I did yesterday,” Axelrod said, “was put a drunk to bed. And what was the first thing I did this morning?”

“It’s psychodrama,” Glenn said. “All location shows are psychodrama.”

“Some of us get a little more psycho than others,” Axelrod said.

There was a brief tense silence.

“A friend of mine was down here making a movie a couple of years ago,” Glenn told them. “It was over by San Miguel. They were all staying at a hotel there and the restaurant cashier fell madly in love with him.”

“I do hope this has a happy ending,” Helena said.

“The thing was, he never even noticed her. So she went home to her village warlock and got a love potion. Like condor wattles and iguana testicles—she had the cook slip them into his
huevos rancheros.
”

“Did it work?” Axelrod asked.

“It worked fine. They had to fly him out in a helicopter. I mean, it was Mexico and everybody was sick, but this guy was ready for El Morgue-o. He sent for a priest.”

“What about the girl?” Helena asked.

Axelrod lit a cigar. “She married the cook.”

“Those were the days,” Glenn said, “when the movies spelled
romance.
”

Walker stood up and as he did so Helena and Axelrod exchanged quick glances.

“I’m coming with you,” she told Walker gaily. “I’m to show you around.”

“She’ll show you the location,” Axelrod told him. “You can go to the beach. Tonight Charlie’s giving a party for you.”

“Good,” Walker said. “Then you get to carry
me
home.”

“Writers sleep on the beach, Gordon.”

In the moment before they left the table, Walker noticed Helena try without success to catch Jack Glenn’s eye. She was out of luck, he thought with malicious satisfaction. Jack worked harder at sex than anyone Walker knew and did not miss his moments.

Walker went with Helena to the production offices, which were deep in early morning silence. One of Axelrod’s
pistoleros
was summoned to drive them to the setup. The drive was accomplished in silence. Helena’s good humor was turning steely. When they were at the setup, their driver got out and waited in the shade of a live oak tree. Walker and Helena sauntered along the trolley tracks toward the bay.

The trolley was parked at the end of the line. Walker climbed aboard, felt the brasswork and the varnished benches.

“Frank found that one in Texas,” Helena told Walker briskly. “He worked from the old Grand Isle photographs. Piece by piece, he found it all fairly close by.”

“How about Frank,” Walker said.

From the trolley, they walked across the waving fields of mock camomile to the dunes. Walker looked over the bathhouse and then walked along the beach to the camera track where Drogue’s Titan
had rolled the night before. A couple of Mexican watchmen hunkered by the trolley, watching.

“It must be a kick,” Helena said, “seeing all this. I mean, all of it coming out of something you wrote.”

“Definitely,” Walker said. “A kick.” He was looking out over the bay toward a raft on pontoons that was anchored some forty feet offshore. It was secured by cables to pulleys on the shore to keep it steady in the chop. “Once they built a house I used to live in. Reproduced it in every detail inside and out. It probably cost them more to do it than it cost to build the actual house.”

“You must have been thrilled.”

“As I recall, I was thrilled. It was a long time ago and I’ve done a lot of shows since.”

“And now you take it all in stride? Or find it boring? Or what?”

“What’s that raft out there for?” he asked Helena.

“Walter thought he might want a reverse angle on Edna’s walk. There would have been a bloke on it with a Steadicam.”

“Dr. Zoom,” Walker said. The patches of troubling weather he had seen earlier were still hovering offshore.

“I mean,” Helena said, “I don’t see how you can be so superior about it.”

Walker looked at her. “You’re a film student?”

“No,” she said. “I … just like films. I respect them. I respect the people who make them.”

“Why are you trying to pick a fight with me?”

“I’m not,” she said, protesting. “Maybe I think more highly of cinema than you do. I’m sure I know less about it.”

“How do you come to be here?”

“Through friends.”

“Your friends?”

“Yes, why not? Is that your last question?”

“Let me guess,” Walker said. “You’re here through business connections of your father’s. Your father is something like a bookmaker-turned-mogul and he doesn’t sound like you at all. You’re doing the world, a little slumming, a little high life …”

“And you’re a fucking burned-out mediocre film writer with a whiskey face and no manners.”

“And here we are beside the Pacific. Just the two of us, more or less. As a film buff, do you think there’s a scenario here?”

“You’re not very highly regarded on this set. I was warned about you.”

“Well,” Walker said, “next time you’re warned pay attention. What were you supposed to do, keep me dangling with smiles and compliments?”

Helena turned away. “Keep you away from her. So you wouldn’t get her drinking or give her drugs.”

“When your old man turned you loose on the wide world, Helena, didn’t he warn you about pimps? Ponces? You let the people who sicked you on me—Drogue, Jon, whoever it was—turn you out. You pretended to like me. I could have gotten the wrong idea. I was supposed to.”

The young woman looked at him strangely for a moment.

“You’re a tenderhearted soul,” she said.

“Goddamn right,” Walker said.

“Flirtatiousness is fair, you know. It’s a legitimate device.”

“Of course it is.”

“I suppose you’ll go and see her.”

“I’ll go to her bungalow, yes. And you’ll report me.”

“Why shouldn’t I? I owe them hospitality. I don’t owe anything to you.”

“Helena,” Walker said. “If I find her—give us a while. You don’t have to go straight back to Axelrod.”

“It’s not right,” the woman said, “to give her drugs. You’ll harm her.”

“I’m not going there to give her drugs.”

“All right,” Helena said. “We’ll go back.”

They went back to the limousine; the driver left them near the beach at the base of the cliff.

“I’m sorry I was rude,” Walker said when they were out of the car. “I get angry all the time.”

“I really don’t mind exchanging insults,” Helena told him. “I was trained to it from an early age. Anyway, you’re the first person here who’s talked to me as though I were human.” She pointed down the beach toward a point beyond the curve of the cliff. “That’s where the bungalows are.”

“I know,” Walker said. “Give my best to the gang in Katmandu.”

She turned for the water’s edge. Walker trudged along the beach toward the row of bungalows.

A
moment after his knock, through the closed door, he heard her startled motion; a shifting step on the tiles, the rustling of cloth. When she opened and saw it was he, she closed her eyes and opened them again.

“Thank God,” she said, and leaned her head against his breast.

“Amen,” Walker said.

She stepped aside to let him come in.

“Have you anything to drink, Gordon?”

“No,” he said. “And you shouldn’t.”

“Last night. I was so demented. I was out of my gourd. I couldn’t handle seeing you.”

“You went to Bly’s.”

She looked at him in alarm and shook her head.

“I went to Billy’s place to sleep because I didn’t want to sleep alone. I mean, he’s gay, Gordon. He’s my pal.”

“You had an affair with him once, Lu, I know you did. When I saw you creep off to him I was a little put out.”

“Gordon, you know I bend the truth from time to time.”

“We all forgive you, Lu. As best we can.”

“But I’m not lying now, Gordon. I went to Billy’s and he gave me a ’lude and we talked. I swear it. I’d just seen you—how could I
make it with Billy? I may tell stories, Gordon, but I’m not capable of pushing that many buttons.”

“It’s funny,” Walker said. “I started out being jealous of that Lowndes guy.”

“He’s a piece of shit,” Lu Anne said. She stated it so positively and unemotionally that it sounded like a considered analysis.

“He wrote a good novel,” Walker said. “Of course,” he added with some slight satisfaction, “he only wrote one and that was a while ago.”

“I read his novel,” Lu Anne said. “I don’t care how many he wrote. He’s a piece of shit and he’s after me.”

“Why?”

“Because he knows I’m crazy and he wants to write about it in
New York Arts.
He’s always watching me.”

“Lu,” Walker said patiently, “he digs you.”

“Do you think,” Lu Anne asked brightly, “that if I called the room service people they’d send down a bottle of tequila?”

“Not if they’ve been told not to.” He paused a moment. “You can always try,” he heard himself say.

“
Mezcal
,” Lu Anne said wickedly, “that’s what we want.” She put her arm around Walker’s neck and buried her face in his shoulder. In an instant, as though she had been posing for a quick snapshot, she leaped to the telephone. “We’ll have ourselves an alcoholic picnic. As we were wont.”

“We were wont to lose the odd weekend with our alcoholic picnics.”

Lu Anne ordered her
mezcal
without objection from the house. The prospect seemed to cheer her; she sat on the edge of the sofa with her hands clasped between her thighs watching Walker.

“Funny about last night,” he said to her. “You’re with Lowndes, you go off with me. You’re with me, you go off with Bly. Lots of
La Ronde
, entrances and exits, bedrooms and closed doors and nobody really gets any. Very Hollywood.”

“We used to think we were too late,” Lu Anne said. “That we had missed out on Hollywood.”

“How wrong we were.”

Within a few minutes, two waiters wheeled in a rolling table with a liter bottle
of mezcal con gusano
attended by bottles of mineral water, glasses, lemon wedges and an ice bucket.

Walker poured them out two glasses of straight liquor.

“How about you, Lu Anne?”

She took the drink and drank it down unflinching with a childlike greediness and poured herself another.

“You want to know, Gordon? How it is with me? Is it really your business?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“That I bend my eye on vacancy and with the incorporeal air do hold discourse?”

“Sure. And why. And if you want to, you’ll get to hear how it is with me.”

“You played Lear,” she said.

“Yes.”

“How was it?”

“It was like life but easier to take. I could spend the rest of my time on earth playing Lear.”

“I wish I could play Lear,” Lu Anne said. “Maybe I can. Beard up and play Lear.”

“You could play the Fool.”

Their eyes met. Lu Anne poured them more
mezcal.

“That’s good,” Lu Anne said. “Because I could. We could do it together.”

“When this is over,” Walker said. “Well talk it up. I’ll talk to Al.”

“The hell with agents. Well do it on campuses. We’ll do it in church halls for free.”