They were already like a little family, the kind that kept busy all day and never discussed unpleasantries at dinner.
And he wanted her. In the car, on the lawn, in the pool. Morning, noon, and night. He stopped the Mercedes once on Wilshire Boulevard, suddenly pulled it to the side, without a word, two wheels on the curb, and dragged her into the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, paid for a room in cash, and took her to the ninth floor. And even then he couldn’t wait; he lifted her skirt in the elevator and had it inside her on the way up. Her back pushed into the buttons, and the door began opening on the fifth floor.
Another night, as she collected herself in a small kitchen adjoining an art gallery in Hollywood, a hundred people milling around on the other side of a thin door and the damp print of her buttocks still visible on the surface of a wooden table, she looked over and saw her panties hanging from the edge of the refrigerator. In those moments when he was crazy in that particular way, she felt safe. Afterwards, she looked at him sometimes and could not get the feeling back. Afterwards was when she tried to think of what happened as a story with different people.
She pointed behind him now to the suntan lotion, and as he reached for it she touched his penis in a medical way, as if she were checking for a pulse, and then set it back against his leg. He looked at her— it had only been a few minutes; they had only just caught their breath— and gave her the lotion. She turned his hand over and squeezed the lotion into his palm until it spilled over his wrist and onto his legs. A few drops floated in the water and began to dissolve.
“I want to see how you do it,” she said.
He paused, and she glanced over his shoulder to the second floor of the house next door. The house was a brick and wood Tudor on two fenced acres of manicured gardens. The Moffits kept a koi fish pond on the grounds, and a small waterfall, and flamingos. Mrs. Moffit was long and angular and kept her face stretched tight. About twice a year, she took it in and had them ratchet it back another notch, which was how it happened that she was the one person in Beverly Hills who looked more beat-up than Norah in the days after the attack on the boat.
You could not tell much about what went on over there, except to say that Mr. Moffit appeared to be the one in the house who rode sidesaddle.
Norah had been noticing Mrs. Moffit’s face in various windows over there ever since Packard began showing up.
The Moffits were Democrats, and the morning Howard Hughes bounced his plane off the roof, they’d volunteered to host the fund-raiser for the Waycross boys themselves, in their own backyard. Had insisted, in fact, and helped the caterer move the tables and the food and the liquor over there.
The next morning, all the koi fish were dead. Someone had spiked the pond with the gin— there were three empty fifths of Beefeaters lying in the grass— and Mrs. Moffit mailed Alec several pictures of the dead fish floating on their sides, along with the bill to replace them— no note, just the bill and the pictures— and neighborwise, it was never quite the same.
Norah saw movement now in the upstairs window.
“Instead of looking in the refrigerator?” Packard said.
She looked back at him and saw he was already hard. “No,” she said, “but one thing at a time.”
She stood still in the pool, her face a foot away from his hand, watching. Upstairs, the glass door opened and the maid came out to the balcony to shake the mop. She saw what was going on in the pool and stopped moving for a little while, dead still, and then disappeared back into the house. Before the door shut behind her, they heard her say “Mercy.”
He moved into her house a carload at a time, all that week. Twenty suits, handmade shirts. More shoes than she had herself. An elaborate brace for his leg— it must have weighed fifty pounds. He lived somewhere in Newport Beach, and between the drive and the loading, he was gone three and four hours at a time. She offered to help, but he made excuses, the kind that meant he didn’t want her in his place.
When he was gone back to Newport Beach for more, she looked over each load that he’d brought. It was mostly clothes. There were some old newspapers from Philadelphia— she couldn’t tell, scanning the headlines, what he’d kept them for— but no books or records or paintings or furniture. No family pictures or yearbooks, no diplomas, no papers or medals from the army.
From what he didn’t bring, she knew he hadn’t given the other place up, but she didn’t ask about that.
He left the house at odd times in the morning, and seemed to come and go as he wanted, and she wondered sometimes what sort of job he had with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. And why he worked for the police at all. He had money, although she didn’t know how much, and seemed to have always had it. It was one of those things she could sense. But his work was a mystery, like the house or apartment in Newport Beach, none of her business. One more thing that lay between them unexplained.
He moved more of himself in all the time. At night, they went to movies and art galleries and once to a Harry Belafonte concert out in Griffith Park. He fucked her everywhere.
They went to the show at the planetarium. She sat long minutes in the dark, looking up at the starry ceiling, with her hand in his lap and his fingers moving inside her. He walked out of the planetarium into the afternoon sun with his zipper still open, two hundred children in uniform coming past them from the parking lot, Catholic kids on a field trip. And in front of all the children and nuns and the volunteer parents, she stopped walking when she saw it and turned around and fastened him up herself.
There was a brown envelope in the mail. The mail came every morning at ten. She had no idea what Alec had tipped the postman at Christmas, something else to figure out. There were several magazines today—
Time, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post
— a bill from the funeral home, which had already been paid, a postcard from the Belgian Congo. An old friend was on safari— the world seemed full of Alec’s old friends— and reported he’d made some excellent kills. “Alec— by God, this country is full of game!”
And then the brown envelope, her name handwritten in tiny letters with a pen that had been dipped in ink. No return address.
She opened the envelope, two pages inside. A petition on one page, written in the same hand that had addressed the envelope, signed and dated on the second page by eleven homeowners along the block. She went over the names and addresses and some of them she recognized, and some of them she didn’t. She imagined Alec had introduced her to all the neighbors at one time or another. She imagined they had all been at the funeral.
The petition did not mention her specifically. It said only that certain recently observed acts of flagrant turpitude and immorality had threatened the character of the neighborhood, as well as the potential values of the properties therein, and would not be heretofore tolerated.
Later in the day, she went through the cards of condolence that had come in after the funeral, and found the one with the same tiny lettering. “With Deepest Sympathy, the Moffits.”
She made a drink and walked through the house, feeling suddenly free. She felt like dancing.
8
PARADISE DEVELOPMENTS
T
HE DAY RATES AT PARADISE DEVELOPMENTS were posted on the wall behind the cash register. Four dollars for eighteen holes, two-fifty for nine. Weekends, it was a dollar more. Prospective home buyers— brought in occasionally by Cooper’s only salesman, a part-timer named Jim Yard, who worked strictly on commission— were allowed to play free.
Near the door there were two bins of used golf balls, some marked ten cents each, and the others, mostly scuffed or cut, was a nickel. A handful of tees also cost a nickel, and you could rent a set of clubs for a dollar, but that required a ten-dollar deposit, refundable at the end of the round. The sign said NO EXCEPTIONS, although if Jim Yard brought somebody by, they let them use the clubs free too.
Customers sometimes complained that before Mr. Cooper bought the place, the tees were free.
Train had Sundays off, but he always came around anyway, sometimes before Whitey got there to open the gate. He liked to take off his shoes and walk around in the cold, wet grass, seemed like he could feel the place waking up.
The ball-droppers began showing up a couple of hours after Train did, somewhere around eight. They were people that liked to gamble, couldn’t afford a membership in a club, or, in the case of the Chinese and the coloreds, couldn’t get into one anyway. The Chinese wore silk shirts and drove everybody crazy, talking that Chinese. Sound like five people learning to play the clarinet at once.
The ball-droppers had to paid Whitey their five dollars before they went out to the driving range, and they usually bought a beer or a cheese sandwich too— everybody but the Chinese, a people that would bet on anything, who Train saw one day out behind the double-wide, squatted down, shoulder bones and knees and skulls, betting on crickets, but that wouldn’t spend a quarter for food. They just went out to the putting green and waited to see what other Chinese would show up.
The players dropped balls to decide the foursomes, and there was one player called Melrose English that nobody like to had in their group.
Everything come easy to Melrose English, and he wanted you to know it. There was a picture about him in the
Standard
a year ago, said if he was white, he could be out on the tour with Ben Hogan. The picture was from high school, though, when he was the state champion at a hundred yards. He looked hard even then. The paper said his nickname back then was “Modern.”
As far as Train could tell, Melrose never went out his house looking like a ordinary human being. He came to the golf course dressed all in white or powder blue or pink, drove a black Lincoln that went with everything he wore. He kept his hair wavy and was always touching it to make sure it wasn’t misplaced. People said he thought he was white, but it wasn’t that. Train seen it wasn’t that. What he wanted was everybody to know that the world had saw him coming and made room in the good seats.
Melrose was a pimp and liked saying that there was a new busload of girls coming into town every day. He talked sometimes about how he sent one home to Iowa, a hard-headed girl, would not suck the customers, so he made her an example, cut her across the face, got her sewed up and put her on the bus out of town.
