Эд Макбейн - Last Summer

I was in charge of the garbage detail. I reached into the oily bag and tossed the bird a moldy piece of orange. He swallowed it whole. It was easy to see how he had once managed to get a fishhook caught in his throat.

“Okay,” Sandy said, “here we go again.” She lifted the bird, and, holding him tightly between both hands, swung him back and then forward again in a wide arc, releasing him suddenly.

The bird opened his wings.

He braked and fluttered down to the sand.

“You goddamn stupid bird,” Sandy said.

“Let’s go for a swim,” David said.

“I don’t know how to swim,” the girl said.

“I wasn’t asking you.”

“Are you still here?” Sandy asked.

“Yes, I’m still here. I want to see what happens.”

“He’ll fly, that’s what’ll happen.”

“Maybe he’ll try it himself if we leave him alone,” David suggested.

“What’s the point of that?” Sandy said. “We want him to know we approve.”

“You’re only going to make him more neurotic than he is.”

“Approval never made anyone neurotic,” the girl said.

“Let’s take a dip anyway,” I said. “It’s hot as hell.”

“I don’t know how to swim,” the girl said again.

“How’d I ever get involved with such quitters?” Sandy said. But she came into the water with us.

The dark-haired girl sat on the shore and watched us swim for a while. When it became apparent we were going to ignore her, she got to her feet and walked down to the water’s edge, testing it with her toes, glancing at us every now and then. At last, she wandered off up the beach, looking back at us only once before she climbed over the dune and disappeared.

“Good riddance,” Sandy said.

When we came out of the water, we were all too tired to try with the bird again. We rolled up the line, put the leash back on his collar, and walked up the beach to Sandy’s house. There was a note waiting for her on the kitchen table.

Sandy darling:

I have gone into the city to meet Mr. Caudell for dinner. There is food in the freezer. I will be catching the early boat back tomorrow morning.

Love,

“I’ve got a great idea,” Sandy said. “Let’s go over to the mainland for chowder and lobster.”

“I don’t think my folks would let me,” David said. “Not so soon after being grounded.”

“Give it a try.”

“Where’s your phone?”

He called his parents, and to his surprise they said it would be all right. We both went home to change our clothes, and then met Sandy on the dock in time to catch the six o’clock ferry over.

The dark-haired girl was sitting on one of the pilings, watching us.

We had lobster and chowder at a place called Lambert’s, and then we walked over to the movie house to find out what was playing. The feature was scheduled to start at 8:10 and break at 10:20, which meant we could see the show and still catch the last ferry back to Greensward at eleven o’clock. We stood on the sidewalk under the marquee and counted our money. A few hulking townie kids were nudging each other over near the glass cases where the movie posters were, ogling Sandy’s miniskirt and bare feet. We ignored them completely. We had just enough money to pay for our admission, but we had already bought round-trip tickets on the ferry, so we decided to go in.

The movie was exceptionally good.

It was about man’s alienation from his society, we decided later on. It was also about the difference between illusion and reality. A sign at the box office warned that the picture was recommended for mature audiences, but nobody questioned our maturity, so we didn’t bring up the matter either. The film was made by a French director and was set in the city of Los Angeles, California. The first shot was of a young man surfing in at Malibu. He comes ashore onto this empty beach where a girl surfer is waiting for him. They begin making out like mad, and then the titles come on, and the guy and the girl get into a red T-bird, and he drops her off someplace and then continues driving out through those brown California hills, the air all shimmering around him, almost as if the hills themselves are a mirage, the photography was really quite excellent.

It turns out that the young man is really an actor working in a weekly television series. He makes a great deal of money, and he’s very efficient at what he does, which is portraying the owner of a small nightclub in Santa Monica. The weekly series was gone into in great detail because it expressed the contemporary confusion between illusion and reality. As the owner of this nightclub, the hero becomes involved in the lives of everyone who comes into the place, usually helping them to resolve their problems before the hour is over. The irony, of course, is that the man playing the hero of the series is incapable of solving his own real-life problems, whereas he is portraying a level-headed, sensible person in the film within the film.

The television series, too, provides the opportunity for some sex stuff, because naturally there’s a chorus line and some strange, disreputable LSD and surfing types, all part of the film within the film, which shows the actor at work as the hero in some very exciting footage in the dressing room of one of the dancers. Then the director calls “Cut,” and we’re left with the impression that this love-making with the girl was all make-believe. In fact, the actor’s life in that studio out in the Valley someplace is all make-believe, and we begin to wonder where the reality lies, it was very interesting.

In order to make contact in this impersonal world where his days are full of phony fistfights and love scenes with the director calling “Cut,” the actor belongs to a legitimate theater group at night, and he goes there to try acting seriously. But even there (in his real life now and not in the weekly television phony life) he finds himself surrounded by people who are more interested in the plays they’re doing than their own very real and personal problems. Also, in addition to the hero’s fake television work and his even phonier nighttime acting, he’s involved in some very suspicious comings and goings to San Diego and the naval base there — in short, he’s a spy. This was not as far out as it sounds because the spying was made to seem like an extension of this man’s estrangement, spying being a job without a product, a detached sort of work in which even the old slogans like patriotism and freedom become lost in all the double-crossing done by both sides, boy what a picture.

Then, at rehearsal of the theater group one night, after the hero has taken detailed pictures of a nuclear submarine in San Diego, something happens that causes him to reconsider his entire way of life.

He finds a baby in his T-bird.

He goes inside to where everyone is rehearsing a scene from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and he asks if anyone left a baby in his car. Nobody seems to know anything about the baby, and besides they’re more interested in exploring the intense reality of Martha and George. So he goes out to the car again and, instead of calling the police (on the ferry ride home, we tried to figure out why he didn’t call the police — probably because he was a spy), he takes the baby home with him. This is the first time there’s been anything real in his life, you see, an innocent baby, who incidentally symbolizes hope for the new generation.

Well, to make a long story short, he doesn’t know anything about child care, and when the baby gets sick one night, he fails to call the doctor in time because he’s making out with two Chinese starlets in the bedroom upstairs, and the baby dies, which symbolizes the death of all hope for even the new generation, pretty grim. I know it sounds rather confusing in synopsis, but it was really crystal clear when you watched it.