Rubicon Beach (21 page)

On the day he saw the new housekeeper in the kitchen he heard the actual stop of his heart, a thump as though it had fallen from his chest onto the floor. He wrenched his eyes from her so that his heart might begin again; by the time he was in the other room he was suffocating. He ran into Maddy. “Going to the studio?” she asked, and he just answered, “We can’t afford her.” At the door he said it again, and got in the car and drove up Sixth Street to La Cienega, north on La Cienega to Burton Way, and out Burton Way into Beverly Hills, where he crossed Little Santa Monica Boulevard to Big Santa Monica and turned west. Not the beach, I can’t take the beach today, he said to himself half a mile from the beach. He turned around. He paid three dollars to park in a lot in Westwood where he just sat in the car. On the street adjacent to where he sat beautiful women passed him by, dressed and toned and carnivorous. You’re
nothing
, he whispered to them: don’t you know what I’ve seen? He had red visions of The Beast mounting The Earth and fertilizing it, the soil splitting open and the housekeeper emerging, her hair a hollow black and her mouth the drooling purple of carnage. He sat five hours trying to remember the faces of his wife and child.

After that he went out each day, driving aimlessly. Maddy kept telling herself he was going to the studio. Are you going to the studio? she would ask him on his way out. Yeah, he’d say, the studio. When his friends like Richard called, she said, He’s at the studio. Richard said, Yeah but is he working? One day the studio called looking for him. He’s in the study working, she told them.               

On the day Catherine broke the mirror in the Edgars’ living room Llewellyn was sitting in his car parked on Canon Drive. A New Jersey photographer he knew named Larry Crow was walking up the sidewalk, and Llewellyn sank down into his seat so Crow wouldn’t see him. He closed his eyes and the next thing he heard was the car door on the passenger side opening and closing; he could feel the weight and heat of someone sitting next to him. Crow, he said, his eyes still closed. Crow was a man of such odious self-assurance that no amount of hostility or indifference could discourage him. He’d been in Los Angeles eighteen months pushing very hard; unfortunately he was a very good photographer, and he was good at persuading the magazines and agencies for whom he worked what it was they really wanted and believed. He understood that he lived in a world where the arbiters of taste and trend and image had no idea what they wanted or believed; they were in a race to discover what their competitors wanted and believed before their competitors discovered it for themselves. Crow had been introduced to Llewellyn by Eileen Rader six months before at a party. The acquaintance of the two men had gone through three stages. The first was the stage in which Crow learned Llewellyn was the writer of
Toward Caliente
and had received an Academy Award nomination for it. The second was the stage in which Crow learned Llewellyn hadn’t worked in two years. The third was the stage in which Crow learned Llewellyn had just gotten the
Nightshade Part II
assignment. The first and third stages found Crow very interested in Llewellyn, and the second stage found him not the least interested. If
Nightshade II
is a disaster, Lew thought hopefully, I won’t have to put up with this asshole sitting in my car anymore.

Llewellyn opened his eyes. He was always disconcerted to find Crow a more pleasant-looking man than he appeared in Llewellyn’s mind. Crow had a large envelope with him filled with photographs; they were all pictures of women. Crow had found working in Los Angeles exactly the same as working in New York except that there were more beautiful women in Los Angeles and the venality of the city was closer to the surface; in Los Angeles, Crow could identify more readily what he was dealing with. All the women Crow showed Llewellyn in the car were predictably gorgeous, in all hues and variations of gorgeousness. “Check this one out,” Crow said. “This one here.” He moved through the photographs. “This one. This one.”

He looked at Llewellyn. Llewellyn looked back at him with something resembling superior benignity. “They’re nothing,” he said to him.

“Shit,” said Crow in disbelief.

“I know a face that will crack your lens like a diamond.”

“All right,” said Crow, “let’s see her.”

Lew was disgusted with both of them. “I gotta go.” He motioned to the door.

“Maybe another time,” said Crow, out of the car and leaning in the window.

“I gotta go.” Llewellyn pulled from the curb and headed up Wilshire.

I think you’re right we can’t afford her, Maddy said in a rush before he’d gotten in the door; her voice expanded and tottered. He saw the mirror. What happened? he asked calmly. She broke the mirror with her hands there’s blood on the carpet: our good mirror, said Maddy. Forget the carpet and the mirror, Llewellyn said, what about the girl? Is that all you care about, Maddy cried; she could hear the sound of Catherine’s blood in her voice. I think she’s disturbed, Maddy said.

Then let this disturbance pass, he said, before we deal with it.

Catherine fell asleep still naked on the bed, the remains of the dress unraveling from her hands and her white kitten asleep on her thighs. She was awakened in the middle of the night by something moving like a web across her eyes. It was several moments before she realized her face was alive. It was inching slowly, almost imperceptibly across the front of her head, a large flesh spider attaching itself to her and spinning its web in her hair. She panicked, believing her own face would smother her. She wrestled with it and soon fell back in exhaustion from the effort. When she slept again she was aware of the face slithering off her and crawling across the bed and floor to the other side of the room. It settled over the fragments of glass still lying at the bottom of the sink, and there in the night she could hear it breed, until the room was filled with them.

In the mornings Catherine took a small bowl of cold water from the kitchen and dabbed at the blood on the living room carpet. Maddy found her doing this after two days of avoiding her completely. It doesn’t matter, she said to the girl, the frenzy of her expression barely containing itself. Catherine looked up at her and continued what she was doing. Maddy began staying more and more in her bedroom upstairs and kept Jane upstairs with her.

Llewellyn would not look at Catherine. After years of knowing nothing but men’s looks Catherine was now con fronted with a new phenomenon, a man who always looked away. As Catherine spent her mornings slowly but surely removing the blood from the carpet, the entire Edgar family situated itself on her perimeters. Every day Maddy remained upstairs, every day Llewellyn went out driving. Two months had passed since he had gotten the Elm assignment from Eileen Rader. In the past weeks the studio had called each afternoon, only to be told by Maddy that Llewellyn was working. Llewellyn never returned the calls; he had not written a single word of the script.

The less he saw of Catherine, the more he saw of her. The less he saw of her in his life, the more he saw of her in his head. He took to seeing her around town, not as an actress or model or any of the beautiful women in town but as a house keeper in a light-brown dress with no shoes. He saw her in the places where he knew it was impossible for her to be. He was hounded by her captivity in his house, though he began to believe it was the house held captive by her. Finally one night, after sitting awake in his study until four in the morning, he picked up the telephone, heavily, slowly, and made a call. “Crow,” he said, a familiar sob bubbling up from inside; to cut it off he croaked, “The girl I told you about. Want to shoot her?”

On the other end Crow was barely cognizant. “Is it daytime?” he kept saying.

“Now, if you want to shoot it,” Llewellyn said.

“What time is it,” said Crow. “Lee Edward? Is this Lee?”

“Come now.”

She woke to find two men standing over her, watching her. She touched her face. One of the men was Llewellyn and the other she didn’t recognize, though she remembered the camera as a source of rituals at the pyramids of Mexico. The men were staring at her intently; they didn’t see the glass still in the sink after a week’s time, or the kitten sleeping in the drawer of the chest, or the outline of her naked form beneath the bed sheet. They motioned for her to come with them. She wrapped the sheet around her and went into the kitchen; she was surprised to see that outside it was still dark.

Crow set up the camera. Llewellyn was looking out the window. Crow looked back and forth from Llewellyn to Catherine with a strange expression on his face. These aren’t exactly ideal circumstances, he said to the other man. Five in the morning in a kitchen, l don’t know what l can make her look like. Llewellyn said, after several long moments, Don’t make her look like anything. Crow spent thirty minutes moving Catherine nearer and farther from the wall, under his lights. He touched her hair to arrange it and she jerked away. Llewellyn said, watching from the corner of his eye, Don’t make her look like anything I told you. Just shoot it.

Maddy came in. She was wearing a robe. She looked at Llewellyn and Catherine and Crow and said, What’s going on? Her voice was little when she said it, as if it were the voice of only half of her. Llewellyn? she said, and he didn’t answer. Her voice kept getting smaller, and when he finally glanced in her direction, he saw the look on her face she had the first time she made his heart melt. He turned back to the window, and she brushed her red hair from her eyes and looked straight into Catherine’s eyes and backed out of the room silently, through the door, never taking her eyes away.

Crow took a long time. At five-thirty the sky was a shade lighter. Finally Crow took a picture and then set up for a few more. I think I fucked that one up, he said to Llewellyn, who realized Crow was procrastinating. He realized Crow was afraid, maybe for the first time he was ever afraid, that he had a picture he couldn’t get. Llewellyn never turned from the window. The sky grew lighter and lighter, and after an hour Crow finished. In all the time he had taken the pictures Catherine just remained with her eyes open, in the same place; neither man understood she was sleeping.

When Crow returned late that afternoon Llewellyn knew he had something. If he didn’t have something, Llewellyn told himself, he wouldn’t have had the nerve to come back. Crow was moving around the room, excited; he’d come straight from the lab via an agency on Wilshire Boulevard. He carried an envelope which he emptied on the coffee table; he began sorting its contents. Screwed this up in development, he said, and this and this. He was throwing aside the misfires. Maddy, on the stairs, crept down several steps and stood watching them. Crow got to the last photo he’d taken as dawn had shone through the window. Llewellyn looked at it.

Took it to the Harris people on Wilshire, Crow said. “They flipped.”

“Forget it,” Llewellyn said.

“Forget it?”

“She’s not modeling for anybody.”

“What are you talking about,” said Crow. “What did I drag myself over here at five in the morning for?”

“Sorry if you got the wrong impression.” Llewellyn laid the picture on the table.

“The wrong impression! What’s the right impression? What’s going on here? You know, Lee,” he said angrily, “this is a seriously weird scene you’ve—” He stopped, for the first time seeing Maddy on the stairs. Llewellyn turned to Maddy too. Maddy was looking at the kitchen doorway, where Catherine stood with her bowl of cold water for the living room carpet.

Not to be discouraged from what had become a point of honor for her, the excision of her blood from the Edgar house, Catherine came into the room and set to work. There she saw the pictures on the table. She stood up from the floor and went over to the table and picked up the picture Llewellyn and Crow had been studying. She looked at it and then looked at Llewellyn. He has taken, she said to herself, the image of my father’s murder and made a map of it.

“Have it,” Crow said to her. “I can print a zillion.”

She crumpled it into her fist, still staring at Llewellyn.

She backed away from the two of them and something else caught her eye. It was one of Crow’s discards, lost in the lab in a blur of light: it had come out a large black spot. Catherine picked it up and turned it from side to side, as though reading it. She looked back at Llewellyn and spoke to him in a language they’d never heard. This is the real map of me, she said, holding it up to them, if you’re not too blind to see it. Then she took it to her room where she set it up against the wall by the bed, pointing out to her kitten its astounding sights.

That night Catherine had the strongest dream of her life, in which the world of the dream was full-blown, in dependent of the gaps in sense that dawn and awakening re veal in dreams. She was running down a long corridor in a dark city. She could feel her arms wet with something, she could smell the thick redness of it, and in one hand she carried something; the feel of it was familiar and fatal. She turned a corner and went through two large doors out into the night, stone steps dropping before her feet. She stopped for a moment and there, at the base of the steps, was a woman she’d never seen before. The woman wore a spotted dress and had long amber hair. Catherine didn’t think her dreams could invent someone so distinctly. The woman raised a camera and aimed it directly at Catherine, who turned and ran back the way she had come. A while later Catherine woke. There was a beginning and end to this dream she’d forgotten before she even opened her eyes. She was alone in her room with the kitten and the black map against the wall, everything just as it had been before she went to sleep. But she had the feeling she’d been somewhere else.

In the days and nights that followed, her face became more. Her eyes became more and her mouth became more. Her hair became more. Her beauty blossomed like the flower of a nightmare; it pulsed through the house. The throb of it kept her awake at night; the throb of it kept Llewellyn awake at night. They both lay awake feeling the throb and pulse of her face at opposite ends of the house. I’m caught in America, thought Catherine, where people know their faces and wear them as though they own them. Perhaps, she thought, in the beginning their faces were the slaves of their dreams. Perhaps, she thought, in the end their dreams are the slaves of their faces. At his end of the house Llewellyn thought to himself, It wasn’t enough to capture her face within the boundaries of a photograph; it hasn’t rid me of the vision. He got up and, for the first time in two years, went into his study. When Maddy woke in the morning she was flooded with joy to hear the sound of his typewriter.