Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

He pulled her through the room to the bar on the other side. Hello Lee, people said to him uneasily. He didn’t answer. Soon the room recovered its composure. Llewellyn was standing at the bar with his second drink, holding tight to Catherine, when Eileen flowed by in an airy blue dress. Eileen looked at Catherine’s light-brown dress and her bare feet. Hello, she said to Catherine. Catherine watched her mouth move. Hello Lee, Eileen said, turning to Llewellyn. She asked how he was. He said he was fine. She asked how Maddy was. This is Catherine, Llewellyn answered. I hear you’ve been working, Eileen said. Yeah, working, said Llewellyn. There was a pause between them and Eileen said, Lee, let’s talk later, all right?

Llewellyn had his third drink. He and Catherine stood at the bar with him holding onto her. When she tried to pull away, he held her tighter. He made no attempt to hide this behavior from anyone else; she kept looking around her. His face and eyes were still crazy, as they’d been for a while. People greeted him cautiously as they passed. They congratulated him on the Nightshade sequel; he didn’t hear them. He only wanted them to look at her face. They all looked at her face.

He heard someone speaking to him and glanced over at Larry Crow. The photographer looked past Llewellyn to Catherine. “How you doing Lee,” he said. “I hear you’re working hard.” Llewellyn ignored him. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you. Phone rings and rings or your wife answers. Your wife sounds like she’s not feeling well.” He looked at Catherine again and laughed like a machine gun.

“What do you want,” said Llewellyn.

Crow took a folded paper from his inside coat pocket, “I have good news, Lee.” He handed Llewellyn the form. It was a model’s release from a magazine. Llewellyn handed the form back. “They’re nuts about that last shot. Remember? In the kitchen, your lovely lady here in the bed sheet.”

“Forget it.”

“Sign the release,” Crow said merrily, swirling the ice in his drink, “and we all do well by it. I do well, your friend here does well. You especially do well. I mean, being the girl’s. . executor, so to speak. Handling her finances, that sort of thing.”

“I’m not pimping her,” said Llewellyn.

Crow went from merriment to annoyance very quickly. “They’re giving it a hell of a spread, Lee. An art approach, basically.” He looked at Catherine and then back to Llewellyn. “You see the way everyone looked at her when you walked in here? Two dozen aspiring nubiles in this place and it all stops for an Indian girl with no shoes and a dress from Thriftimart.” He lowered his voice. “The Harris people will sign her tomorrow, no questions.”

“My name isn’t Lee.”

“What?”

“Come on,” Llewellyn said to Catherine, but not to her, past her. He began to pull her away.

“Listen you crazy bastard,” Crow said with anger, then gave a short laugh; he was trying not to get excited. “Lee or whatever your name is,” he laughed again. “I want this credit. I want this layout. I want to take a hundred pictures of this girl, a thousand. It can be very much worth your while. This isn’t another Hollywood airhead, you and I both know that,” he said, pointing at Catherine. “This is a look here.”

He pointed at her eyes, her mouth.

“Come on,” Llewellyn said to Catherine.

“Where’s Chiquita’s green card, Lee,” Crow said angrily. He looked around and lowered his voice again. “What do you think you’re doing.” He put his face right next to Llewellyn’s, practically snarling. “I don’t want to ice your groovy thang here, Lee. But this girl’s an ixnay immigration-wise, and I got a feeling otherwise too. You employing her in that house or what? And I don’t mind telling you I’m leaning toward ‘or what.’ Her running around in bed sheets and all.”

Llewellyn, in a series of very tidy movements, turned to Crow, opened Crow’s coat, and pulled the document out of Crow’s coat pocket. He set his drink down, took a pen from Crow’s other pocket, signed the model’s release on the top of the bar. He put the pen back in its pocket, opened Crow’s coat and put back the release; and then gazed into Crow’s face, sighing deeply. There was a dimple above the corner of Crow’s mouth, on his left side, Llewellyn’s right. Never taking his eyes from that spot above the corner of Crow’s mouth, Llewellyn stepped back and brought his fist rocketing into its target. There was a crack and Crow literally flew across the room into the volcanic candle, as though the candle had been wheeled onto the set for just such a scene.

Llewellyn also did one other thing during this series of very tidy movements. He let go of Catherine.

Momentarily the living room came to a standstill. Streaked in light and shadow, the antique music box wound to a low groan in the background, and a woman at the edge of the room lost her balance slightly and froze in a stumble. The expressions on all the faces were suspended, the air turned to a haze in the explosion. The candle rose balletically. Crystal and glass and wax flowed upward and then cascaded down, the table splintering in a thousand fragments. The wax cooled in midair and rained on the floor in flakes. Crow moved on the floor in a slow thrash, and an actress from Portland in a silk top giggled a moment and then stopped, the look on her face becoming very curious. She stared down at the front of her silk top to find it mottled with ellipses of red. Only after this did something burst loose, an ugly offended roar imploding on the core of the room. Five men grabbed Llewellyn by his head and every limb.

In the downpour of the glass and the wax and the roar Catherine walked across the room, up the steps and out the front door, as though through a blizzard of arrows and jungle and fever.

Because there always existed at the bottom of Maddy’s cynicism the cynic’s usual sense of failure, she was all the less prepared to accept the devastating failure of her marriage: it seemed too sudden and battling, and she hadn’t seen the early signs — which perhaps justified her sense of failure after all. When Llewellyn took Catherine out the front door that night, once again Maddy sat on the edge of the bed upstairs with her hands in her lap, looking out the window and wondering what to do. Slowly she removed a suitcase from the closet and opened it on the bed; she began to fill it up. By the time she had carried the process as far as Jane’s room, however, where the scenario would have her gather the child in her arms along with a favored toy or two, she had balked, reminding herself, I’m not really going to do this. Not really.

She had a glimmer of an idea, which was to go to Llewellyn’s study and read the script in progress; and for the moment she balked at this transgression too. Instead she put lane back to bed and went to bed herself. She seemed to toss endlessly, and thought, I’m fooling myself if I think I’ll sleep tonight. So it was a shock for her to wake, sometime early in the morning around three, and End she must have slept after all, since her husband was passed out on the bed next to her and she had no idea how he’d gotten there. He smelled of liquor. He also looked bruised and cut, and what instantly and inevitably flashed through Maddy’s mind was a scene in which the bruises and cuts were received at Catherine’s hands, never mind everything leading up to it. Downstairs, in the part of the house with the housekeeper’s room, things were quiet.

Thus transgressions now seemed appropriate. Maddy got up from her bed, put on her robe and went to the study. She slid open the door and went to the desk with the typewriter and several yellow pads of paper. She turned on the small desk lamp; there wasn’t a sound in the house. She opened up the folder in which her husband kept his script, except that there was no script. Instead she found a thin collection of fifty or sixty poems, and by the time she had read a few, she understood they all had the same subject: she could recognize her immediately, the hair the color of night and the rage to match, and her mouth the color of blood. Her eyes, he wrote, had the opaque rushing depthlessness of the blind, like the color of white skies and seas meeting at some point in the distance. They were poems about a face that was ignorant of its own image, and a man whose cognizance of that image divided his life in two. She closed the folder and shut off the light on the desk and thought to herself, The surprise is that I’m surprised.