Robert Stone - Children of Light

As his gaze swept the valley, he saw sharp glints of reflected sunlight from the seaside edge of one of the eucalyptus groves. Before a line of wooden structures, tiny human figures went to and fro along the shore. The sunlight was striking silver-paper reflectors, metal and glass. It took him a moment to understand that he was seeing The Awakening unit at work.

There was a copy of Peterson’s Western Birds and a pair of binoculars behind the rear seat of the Buick; Walker’s wife was a birdwatcher and he had driven her car to Seattle. He took the glasses, walked back to the edge of the ridge and picked out the unit. He saw a woman in an old-fashioned gray bathing suit walking toward the water. As he watched, the woman stopped short and sauntered back to the spot from which she had begun.

Walker watched her start again, noted the camera crane on its track and the figures on the turret. A sound man attended the woman like an acolyte, carrying his boom aloft. He saw the woman remove a bandana from around her head and toss it to the sand. He saw her walk on, remove her bathing suit and stand naked and golden in the sun. He was seeing, he supposed, what he had come to see.

It was very strange to see them as he did — tiny distant figures at the edge of an ocean, acting out a vision compounded of his obsessions and emotions. He had never been so in love, he thought, as he was with the woman who stood naked on the beach in front of that camera and several dozen cold-eyed souls. It was as though she were there for him, for something that was theirs. He felt at the point of understanding the process in which his life was bound, as though the height on which he stood was the perspective he had always lacked. Will I understand it all now, he wondered, understand it with the eye, like a painting?

The sense of discovery, of imminent insight excited him. He was dizzy; he checked his footing on the uneven ground, his closeness to the edge. Her down there, himself on a rock miles away — that’s poetry, he thought. The thing was to get it straight, to understand.

He saw them dress her again, saw her walk, lose the bandana, then the bathing suit in what, from where he stood, read as a series of effortless moves. Tears came to his eyes. But perhaps it was not poetry, he thought. Only movies.

The seed of meaning he had touched between his teeth began to slip away. He was struck by the silence between their place and his; he strained for the director’s voice, the sound of the sea. Gulls were what he heard, and wind in the mesquite.

What had it been? Almost joy, he thought, a long-lost thing, something pleasurable for its own sake. It had slipped away.

Fuck it, he thought. I got something almost as good.

He went back to his car, looked up and down the road to see that he would not be surprised and managed with some difficulty to do a few lines. Some of his cocaine blew onto the car seat and he had to brush it away and see it scatter on the wind.

It had been just like a dream, he thought, the same disappearing resolution, the same awakening to the same old shit. It wasn’t there. Or was hardly there — a moment’s poetry, a moment’s movies. Hardly enough there to count, not for the likes of him.

The coke was no help. It had been something like a daydream, provoked by the smell of the wind and the dizzying height and his impatience to see her; no drug would bring it back. Rather, the drugs gave him the jitters — made him feel exposed, out there in the open beside the road, pursued and out of breath. When he went out to the ridge again and fixed his binoculars on the naked figure he saw it was not Lu Anne but a younger woman who somewhat resembled her. There’s your poetry, he thought. Your movies.

The Drogues, Blakely and Hueffer crowded into the director’s trailer to watch tapes of Joy’s undressing.

When the screen showed her stripping, a reverent silence fell over the group.

“What was the big fuss?” old Drogue asked.

“She bitched. She didn’t want to show her ass.”

“Did you tell her that Lu Anne would?”

“I told her. She had the nerve to tell me her problem was the Mexicans. She said, ‘They take it wrong.’ ” He mimicked her accent and demeanor. “ ‘They take it wrong,’ she said.”

A murmur of disapproval arose in the dark trailer. They all sat quite still, watching Joy naked on the screen.

“A frame like that,” the old man said, “and she never took off her pants for a camera? Hard to believe.”

Young Drogue froze the frame.

“That’s going to be broken up,” he said. “It does turn out to be a striptease.”

“Remember,” Hueffer said, “with Lee it won’t be as flamboyant.”

Drogue was thoughtful for a moment.

“I think the opposite,” young Drogue said. “Joy’s so built and busty and dumb that you kind of … the thing gets this wild unpredictable quality. You don’t know what the hell’s happening but it’s weird and it turns you on. With Joy I might use it.”

“The kid does something for a camera,” Blakely said. “No question.”

“She’ll be my angel,” old Drogue said.

“With Lu Anne, you might have her bare her breast and it’s tragic. You don’t want to see her undress. She’ll look humiliated and anorexic and crazy. The whole ending goes limp and we’re dead.”

“He’s right for once,” old Drogue told Hueffer. “You’re wrong.”

“Let’s do this in one take, guys!” young Drogue shouted. He motioned Eric to his side. “When you get Lu Anne on her mark, Eric, clear the set.”

“Why?” Heuffer asked.

“The Mexicans,” young Drogue told him. “They take it wrong.”

Joe Ricutti had set up shop under a beach umbrella beside the bathhouse. He sponged and powdered Lu Anne’s face and gave her a neck rub. Josette worked on her hair, no more sulkily distant than was usual. The gaffer and best boy were winding cable for an arc. Lu Anne had a look at the sun and picked up her worn copy of Kate Chopin’s novel. The wording was a solo Liebestodt , death as liberation.

Edna had found her old bathing suit still hanging, faded upon its accustomed peg , Chopin had written.

When Josette finished with her hair, Lu Anne stood up.

“I’m going to walk it through,” she told Ricutti, and reading as she walked, set out for the bathhouse.

She put it on, leaving her clothing in the bathhouse. But when she was beside the sea, absolutely alone, she cast the unpleasant prickling garments from her, and for the first time in her life, she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited it.

“Clear the set, please,” Eric Hueffer intoned through his megaphone. “If you’re not working, we don’t want you on the set. Clear the set, everybody, please.” The Peruvian continuity girl made the announcement in Spanish, for the Mexicans.

Lu Anne leaned her head against the side of the bathhouse and thought of Edna naked in the open air for the first time. How sad it was, she thought. There was no way to film it. She had never thought of herself like Edna, but some things, she thought, they’re the same for everyone. A little Edna in all of us.

Naked for the first time, the open air. In the heat of the day it should be. A beach on the Gulf, midday, the water just cool, the sun hot on your body, the wind so still you can smell your own skin.

She finds out who she is and it’s too much and she dies. Yes, Lu Anne thought, I know about that. I can do that, me.

Too bad about the sunset, because it was clichéd and banal. Low-rent theatrics. Middle-income. Middlebrow theatrics.

She strolled at the water’s edge, reading. No one had called for quiet but the gaffer and the best boy spoke in low voices.