William Boyd - The New Confessions

We met in the Los Angeles Airport departure lounge. I was flying a Transcontinental and Western Sky Chief to El Paso and then flying on up to Albuquerque. Druce was traveling to New York. Both our planes were delayed. Druce was with an elegant woman (his wife?) and two other men. I was alone. It was the first time we had met face to face in six years. He was gray-haired now and stouter. He looked well off. I decided to ignore him and carried on reading my newspaper, but he came over. He was smoking a cigar and I suspect he’d been drinking. He stopped about six feet away from me. I looked up.

“Hello, Todd. Still here?” he said.

I ignored the implied insult. “So are you, I see.”

“Ah, but I’m on my way home. To England.”

“Bon voyage.” I returned to my newspaper. It was full of speculation about a second front.

“Any message for the folks back home?”

“Just go away, Druce,” I said. I am sure it was my indifference that galled him most.

“Been a long time in your funk-hole now.”

I stood up and advanced on him. He stepped back quickly, then recovered himself.

“Listen, Druce,” I said quietly but full of venom, “I don’t need to prove myself to you or anybody. I was three months in that fucking Salient and six months in a prison camp while you were convalescing and totting up figures in the quartermaster’s store. So just go away and leave me alone.”

“The next time you go up in a balloon make sure the wind’s blowing in the right direction.”

“The next time you shoot yourself in the leg, cut the powder burns out of your trousers.”

I swear, until that moment I had never regarded the bullet that had passed through Druce’s leg as anything other than German. The shock in his eyes confirmed the accuracy of my gibe.

He slapped my face.

“You bloody coward!”

I am told that my yell as I leaped on him was quite inhuman. I was hauled off him quickly enough by some TWA officials, but not before my flailing clubbing fists had connected with that self-satisfied, dishonest, craven face. I had shut one of his eyes and split his top lip. I felt a silent howl of atavistic triumph echo through me as I saw his party lead him away to the washrooms groaning, doubled over.

“Madman!” he shouted weakly at me. “You’ll pay for this!”

“Can’t you think of anything more original to say!” I yelled back. I’m delighted to report that the entire departure lounge burst into laughter.

I was in Albuquerque and then Roswell when the story broke in the newspapers and so saw nothing of it. I believe it was all reported with clumsy irony: the “Britishers” fighting each other in L.A. while the real enemy lay overseas. At any rate that, plus the Zanuck incident, was enough to get me branded as a “hellraiser.” For a good while afterwards, people greeting me would recoil with gestures of mock terror and hostesses would whimsically entreat me at parties not to rough up the guests. Never believe anything you read in newspapers.

We were within a week of completing the film when I received the message. The crew were in Padika shooting a scene under the shade trees in the square when the runner from the production office in Roswell arrived with a telegam:

DOON HOGAN LIVING IN MONTEZUMA ARIZONA STOP NEAR WINSLOW STOP GOOD LUCK RAMON

When the film ended I hired a car and drove up to Albuquerque and on through the mountains into Arizona. It took me two full days but I have no recollection of the splendid scenery through which I traveled. I have no recollection of my mood: I was moodless, I think. It had been so long; I didn’t want either pessimism or optimism to prejudice me. I would find what I would find.

I turned off the highway before Winslow and found Montezuma, a small town on the edge of the Navajo reservation. Distant mountains ringed the wide mesa. It was hot and dry.

I drove down the main street. There was a gas station, a used car lot, a Piggly-Wiggly supermarket and a cut-rate clothes emporium. I parked outside a funeral parlor and strolled down the cracked sidewalk to a small street market. At the market the stalls — fruit and vegetable — were manned mainly by Navajo Indians. If you wanted to hide away, Montezuma seemed like a fair choice. I asked one fellow selling cheap trinkets and bright woven rugs if he knew where Doon Bogan lived.

“Miss Bogan? Sure. Go back to the gas station and take a right. There’s an old ranch house two miles down the road — The Colony. Can’t miss it.”

I followed his instructions. The road ran through a dusty scrub of sagebrush and manzanita bushes. The Colony announced itself with a freshly painted sign. It was a low wooden ranch house with rusted screens on the windows and a tumbledown corral. Three cars were pulled up outside. Two had California plates. My mouth was quite dry. My movements were slow and studied, as if I were recovering from a grave illness.

I knocked on the door and got no answer. I went round the side of the house. In a kitchen a thin, bald, shirtless man in chino shorts washed up dishes in a tin basin.

“I’m looking for Miss Bogan,” I said.

“Hi. You must be Wally Garalga. Pleased to meet you, Wally. I’m Morris Drexel.”

He wiped his hands on a towel and offered me his right one to shake. I shook it.

“We kinda figured you wouldn’t get here till late,” Drexel said. He had a thin chest with gray hairs grouped round the nipples.

“My name’s Todd. I’m not expected. I’m an old friend of Doon.”

“Oh.… I’m sorry. We were expecting a Mr. Garalga.” He led me to the door and pointed. “See that arroyo? Just follow it down a way. Doon’s there.”

I set off. My God, had Doon set up home with Morris Drexel?… I couldn’t imagine it. I walked down the sandy bed of the arroyo, contemplating this notion further. I began to perspire. The heat seemed trapped in the gully. I took off my tie. I had left my jacket in the car.

Then I saw Doon and stopped. She stood with her back towards me, in front of an easel. She was wearing a denim shirt over white duck slacks. She had a wide-brimmed straw hat on her head. I felt faint. My mouth was still as dry as the arroyo bed.

“Doon,” I said and advanced a few steps.

“Morris?”

“No, for Christ’s sake, it’s me !”

She took off her sunglasses and put on spectacles.

“My sweet Lord,” she said. “If it isn’t John James Todd.”

I sat in the main sitting room of The Colony, trying to bring under control the competing emotions of profound shock and mounting irritation. The comfortable plain room was lined with abstract paintings that might just have passed for landscapes. Doon’s work. To my eyes they seemed entirely without merit. Doon was in the kitchen making a pitcher of iced tea. She came back in.

“Sorry,” she said, “Rita hasn’t been into town for the ice. Will fairly cold tea do?”

“Fine. Perfect. Don’t you have an icebox?”

“We don’t have electricity.”

I forced a smile, trying to come to terms with the transformation in her. Doon was thinner and deeply tanned. Her hair was long, dry, dark brown streaked with gray. I had lived with her bobbed blond fringe for so long it was as if the person I was now conversing with were, an older sister, or an aunt. She put on her spectacles, searched for her cigarettes, found them and lit one. Her voice was deeper — raggedy — from smoking.

“You want one?”

“No, thanks. I’m trying to stop.”

“Don’t snap, Jamie.… So what happened after Mexico?”

I finished the brief sketch of the intervening years, leaving out my marriage to Monika. Doon had already told me her story. She had left Sanary, gone to Neuchâtel to tell me her decision to return to America. She had found no trace of us, only news that the film had collapsed. She went back to America and Hollywood. She stayed there for a month and found she was lonely, miserable and forgotten. She hated it and so, as she put it, she “resigned.” She bought this ranch house and took up painting. When her funds began running low, she established it as an artists’ retreat. She made ends meet with no great difficulty, she said.