The Deer Park (17 page)
It was not for this alone he loved the situation. He saw it now that he had one true love—those films which had flowered in his mind and never been made. In betraying that love, he had betrayed himself. Which led into another theory. The artist was always divided between his desire for power in the world and his desire for power over his work. With this girl it was impossible to thrive in the world except by his art, and for these weeks, these domestic weeks when all went well and the act of sitting beside her in the sun could give him a sense of strength and the confidence of liking himself, he would feel indifference to that world he had found so hard to leave. To quit it by the bottom—that was nice, it gave a feeling there was fruit to life. And he was warmed by the knowledge that he was good for Elena, that for the first time in was-it-forever? somebody improved by knowing him, someone grew, he did not spoil all he touched. So, he could see their affair hopefully. He would teach her all the small things, that was nothing. What was more important, she understood the rest. Eitel could see
her becoming one day the wise mistress of his home, confident in herself and what she could give to him. So, at the end of fantasy, was his return to the world after all.
He was always making references to the future, he would talk of what they would be doing together a year from now, two years from now. As if a slave to his tongue, he would listen helplessly while he wrapped the net around them. “Let’s go to Europe sometime, Elena,” he would say. “You’d love Europe.” She would nod. “You know when the picture is finished,” he would go on, “then maybe …”
“Maybe what?”
“I don’t offer you anything now, do I?”
She would be upset. “I don’t think about it. Why do you?”
“Because you’re a woman. You have to think of it.” He would be furious suddenly. “I know all these people, sitting around, waiting for us to break up.”
“They’re squares. I don’t think about them.” Somewhere she had picked up the word, and it served for her shield. When he was jealous he was being square; when she was nothing she was at least not square. “If I left you because you wouldn’t marry me,” she said quietly, “it would mean I didn’t really love you.”
He adored her for that. She did possess dignity. If he could make his film, he would do well by her. No matter what, he would treat her well. He promised that to himself.
All this while, ideas formed for that movie with which he had teased himself so many years, and for the script which he had begun several times in the last months. There were nights when he would lie awake in the excitement of creating whole passages of dialogue, whole scenes, and he would hear Elena murmur in her sleep as he turned on the lamp and scribbled still another item into the notebook he kept on the bed table. The notebook was filling quickly now, and he had the hope that finally he was ready, he could succeed. With the pride that other people might feel for their children, Eitel was in
love with his creation, impatient for all the months he had to work before he had a script, and then money, and then his production.
One night his feeling for the picture came to such a point that he sat down and wrote an outline, pressing into it by the choice of his language all the enthusiasm he could no longer contain. And some of his doubts. He showed it to me the next time I came over to visit.
I will try to sketch the tale of a modern saint. A man who has risen in the world by profiting on the troubles of others. He will have a famous television program where people are selected to tell their problems and he will give them the advice an audience wishes to hear. Through the seasons my hero will market sentiment and climb the heights of his own career while the anonymous ones, the faces which visit his program, stammer their laments and disasters about the parents who are incurably ill and the children who run away, the cripples who are dying for love and the lovers who spurn the cripples, and always there, and never named, will be the sensual envy of jealousy, the jealousy of the desperate. Jealousy for the missing husband, the lecherous wife, the fast sister, the weak brother. All of them, and my hero gives them advice on his enormous program and converts their suffering to theatrical material.
I will have to make it clear that this is a fairy tale. For we will come to the moment when my hero cannot bear to listen to these stories any more. Rich through the suffering of others, that suffering swallows him. There is no more than a little door opened to his heart, but through that door floods the gulf of the world’s pain. My hero tries to give genuine advice to his supplicants, and thereby destroys the interest of his program. So, brouhaha, pressure from the front office, storms and alarums and excursions until the
explosion
and the program is gone. Only the smoke.
Then my hero goes down to the bottom of the world and he wanders through the slums and the soup kitchens and the dreary cheap saloons, all the black shadow and gray light of the city where he has been king, trying to bring comfort to the people he sees and so saying the wrong comfort for he has taught dishonesty and they must turn on the honest man, until in the anger of his chain of defeats he turns on them, he destroys himself with some pathetic violence, his sainthood remembered only by the despairing round of his sins.
If I work it well enough there’s a beauty beyond the picture, the beauty of a man who opens himself to an ocean of pity and there is drowned. Scathe the world with this mirror of itself, the hypocritical world, the brutal world. Gone is the idea that the evils of life exist so that man may destroy them.
My favorable comment: If I do it well enough, the hero can be truly beautiful, and the picture a masterpiece.
My adverse comment: One doesn’t usually make a masterpiece by beginning with that idea. Am I just playing with the enthusiastic emotions of the night?
C.F.E.
I gave it back to him and told him I thought I saw what he meant, and he nodded and said, “Of course in two pages it’s all a little ridiculous, but I do have a
vision
of it.” He laughed at the word. “Elena thinks it’s beautiful, but she’s prejudiced.”
“Don’t joke about it,” Elena said from across the room.
The devil in Eitel pushed him a little further. “Do you know, Sergius,” he said with one of his ambiguous smiles, “Elena thinks I have you in mind as the model for this improbable hero of mine.”
“Now, keep quiet,” Elena said, not looking in my direction.
“Listen, Charles Francis,” I said, pretending to be indignant,
“I’d pose for a weight-lifter’s magazine before I’d model for your hero. What a future for me!”
We all laughed, and I kept my eye on Elena, beginning to think for the first time that Eitel might have more of a woman on his hands than he would always be ready to realize. Though we had never made much about it, Elena and I liked each other, we had things in common—my first girl friend had been a Greek and her father had owned a fly-specked hash-house. So before two minutes went by, I was not surprised that Elena’s eyes met mine. We laughed in private, just the two of us, while Eitel looked puzzled. I think that was the moment Elena and I made an instinctive agreement that we would be friendly about the little thing we felt and never go near one another, at least not so long as her life was running parallel to Eitel.
“Let’s go over to that nice little bar,” Elena said to him.
They had taken the habit of going to a little French bar a few doors from their house, and I would often find them there. It was a new place, and the only entertainment was accordion music. The musician was not very good, and yet I used to think that the melody of the accordion wound itself into their affair, its breathy notes leaving the whisper of the
bal musette
: “Life is sad, life is gay, life is gay because life is sad,” soft as the music of an old song, and I believe it turned Eitel back on those movies he made when he was young. He was getting ready to begin work again. For a change, he was busy, he wrote letters to his business manager, calculated the money he still had left, and with a kind of pleasure at the modesty in which they lived, announced to Elena that possibly they would have enough for three more months. Afterward, he could sell his car and sell the mortgage on the bungalow. That much was left from fifteen years. Yet it did not leave him depressed.
One night in his house with the accordion washing through the desert air, he showed for Elena and himself, on his own projector, a print in sixteen millimeter of one of his early
films. It was very powerful, he felt; a picture about jobless people with the ideas of a young man and the enthusiasm of twenty years ago, but still it was so good that he knew why he had not looked at it in a long time, and while the camera and the actors went their short course, he watched with an aching heart, excited with the artist’s self-love for what he had done, suffering from the dull fear that he could never do it again, and yet caught by the sudden enthusiasm that he could do more, that he could do everything. And all the while he wondered at the young man who had made such a film. “I didn’t know a thing when I made those pictures,” he said to Elena, “and yet somehow I knew more. I wonder where it’s hiding in me.” Elena kissed him when the movie was done. “I love you,” she said. “You’ll do a wonderful strong movie like this again.” And Eitel, frightened beyond fright, knew his vacation was over, and he must begin again that script, that skeleton of an art work he had until now been unable to create.
I
HAD NEVER KNOWN
a girl like Lulu, nor had I ever been in such a romance. Of course I had had my share of other girls—one doesn’t go through the Air Force without learning something about women—but I had always been a poor detective and ladies were way ahead of me.
Yet I think Lulu would have had her surprises for any man. I couldn’t tell from one hour to the next if we were in love or about to break up, whether we would make love or fight, do both or do nothing at all. The first time I saw her
again, she was with friends and never let me be alone with her; the next day she came to visit my house and not only made it easy, but told me she was in love. Naturally, I told her the same. It would have been hard not to, and for sure I was in love if love is the time to do nothing else. Before she left, we had a quarrel; we would never see each other again. A half hour later she telephoned me from the Yacht Club and burst into tears. We loved each other after all.
It was out of control, beyond a doubt. I was able to discover emotions I never knew I owned, and I must have enjoyed it as much as Lulu. So I thought by virtue of the things we did I would put my mark on her forever. What she may have intended as a little dance was a track and field event to me, and I would snap the tape with burning lungs, knotted muscles, and mind set on the need to break a record. It was the only way I could catch her and for three minutes keep her. Like a squad of worn-out infantrymen who are fixed for the night in a museum, my pleasure was to slash tapestries, poke my fingers through nude paintings, and drop marble busts on the floor. Then I could feel her as something I had conquered, could listen to her wounded breathing, and believe that no matter how she acted other times, these moments were Lulu, as if her flesh murmured words more real than her lips. To the pride of having so beautiful a girl was added the bigger pride of knowing that I took her with the cheers of millions behind me. Poor millions with their low roar! They would never have what I had now. They could shiver outside, make a shrine in their office desk or on the shelf of their olive-drab lockers, they could look at the pin-up picture of Lulu Meyers. I knew I was good when I carried a million men on my shoulder.
But if I caught her in bed, I caught her nowhere else. There were days when Lulu told me to leave her alone, there were other days when she would not let me quit her for a minute, but the common denominator was that I had to follow every impulse. I could go over at noon to her suite in the Yacht
Club after a summons by phone; she would be decided that we go horseback riding in the desert. I would arrive to find her still in bed. Breakfast had not yet come, would I have coffee with her? The moment room service left a tray, Lulu told me she wanted a Stinger.
“I don’t know how to make Stingers,” I would answer.
“Oh, sweetie, everybody knows how to make a Stinger. There’s brandy, crème de menthe. What did you do in the Air Force, milk a cow?”
“Lulu, are we going horseback riding?”
“Yes, we’re going horseback riding.” She would hold up a minor, study her face with the stare of a beauty-parlor operator, and stick out her tongue at the reflection. “Do I look good without make-up?” she would ask in a professional tone which allowed no nonsense.
“You look very good.”
“My mouth’s a little too thin.”
“It wasn’t last night,” I would say.
“Oh, you. A corpse could satisfy you.” But she would hug me matter-of-factly. “I love you, darling,” she would say.
“Let’s go horseback riding.”
“Do you know, Sergius, you’re neurotic.”
“I’m neurotic. I can’t stand to waste a day.”
“Well, I don’t feel like getting on a horse,” Lulu would decide.
“I knew you wouldn’t. I didn’t want to either.”
“Then why did you wear jodhpurs?”
“Because if I didn’t wear them, you would want to go.”
“Oh, I’m not like that.” Sitting in bed, she would hug herself, her beautiful face arched above her cool throat. “Honest, I’m not.”
The phone would ring. It would be a call from New York. “No, I’m not marrying Teddy Pope,” she would say to a columnist. “Of course, he’s a son of a bitch. Yes, say we’re good friends and that’s all. Good-bye, sweetie.” She would hang up,
she would groan. “That stupid press agent I’ve got. If you can’t handle a gossip columnist what kind of press agent are you?”
“Why don’t you let him try?”
“He’s beyond hunger.”
So it would go. About the time I was past exasperated she would begin to dress. The coffee was cold she would tell me and call room service for more. I would lose my temper. I was definitely leaving I would tell her. She would run after me and catch me at the door. She knew I was willing to be caught. “I’m a bitch, I tell you,” she would say. “I was trying to get you mad.”