Robert Stone - Children of Light

How strange and awful it seemed to stand under the sky! how delicious. She felt like some newborn creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that she had never known.

The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body, in its soft close embrace.

The cosmic fuck. Well, Lu Anne thought, who better than me? But the drowned people she had seen in the church hall after the hurricane down home had not looked particularly fulfilled.

She read the line again aloud: “ The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body, in its soft close embrace. ” She looked out to sea. That’s how it would seem to Edna. Something out there for me. Life more abundant. You let it go and you lie back and you let it happen. You don’t have to keep your clothes on or your mouth shut, your legs crossed or your hair up or your asshole tight. You don’t have to worry. You don’t have to do a goddamn thing but …

“Miss Verger, please,” Eric Hueffer called into his megaphone. Mechanically, she turned back toward her chair and the makeup table. Ricutti put a dry sponge to her temples. Josette ran a comb through her hair.

“Please, everyone,” Hueffer was telling the stragglers, “if we don’t need you, we don’t want you here.”

Lu Anne read on about Edna Pontellier’s last swim.

She thought of Leonce and the children. They were a part of her life. But they need not have thought that they could possess her body and soul.

Well, Lu Anne thought, nothing is free, Edna. Her life had not afforded her the opportunity to experience that sentiment. No doubt it was dreadful. A Doll’s House. Empty days. Childbirth. Massa having his nights out with the boys, his quadroon sweetie. The kids night and day. She decided it did not do for her to think about children.

They were waiting for her. She put the book down and stood up and Drogue came up to her, guiding her toward the bathhouse, telling her about the shot, how to come out, where to take the suit off, when to go into the water.

The mercy of the sun , Lu Anne thought. The informing words. Awful. Naked. Delicious. Sensuous. Soft close embrace. Dying was always fun. Immortal longings. Exaltation beyond despair. So much popcorn, she thought. To get the character you had to go down and inside to where your grief was. The place your truest self inhabited was the place you could not bear.

She stopped and leaned against Drogue. They were at the door of the bathhouse, and the camera was advancing on her. Two Mexican grips waited beside the Titan, privileged characters who were expected not to take it wrong when she undressed.

“O.K., partner?” Drogue asked.

“I’m fucked, honey,” she told him. “Life’s a condom.”

She looked into his panic-stricken face. He’s seeing it, she thought. Yes, she thought, behold the glory, Jim. Look at me shining, I’m the Queen of Lights.

“How about a half-moon on the bathhouse door, Walter? I could come out and do Judy Canova.” She bared her front teeth at him.

“Great,” Walter Drogue the younger said. “Only — some other time, maybe?”

“Have no fear,” she told the director. She stepped inside the bathhouse, closing the door behind her. There was only one of them inside.

How can you dare speak so to them? it asked gently in the old language. They don’t understand you. It’s we alone who do.

“Which one are you?” she asked it wearily. It was Marie Ange, she knew.

“Marie Ange,” she sighed. “Monkey-face. Go away, eh? Va-t’en. ”

Eric was calling for quiet.

She raised her eyes into the darkness. “Oh, darkness above,” she prayed, “help your sister darkness below.”

She crossed herself quickly. She hadn’t meant such a terrible prayer. She thought that she might go to church in town that evening.

Drogue’s voice cut through the silence on the other side of the door.

“Action!”

She opened the door and walked out into the golden sunlight and caught a quick glimpse of Charlie Freitag, the producer. She fixed her gaze on a point above the reddening horizon where the sun’s fading glare might light her eyes yet not dazzle her. At the appointed mark, she stopped and lowered the shoulder straps of her one-piece gray bathing suit. It was not, she thought, of any thwarted love that Edna died. The suit peeled away easily as she eased her torso free. She kept her eyes on their quarter of the sky.

It was dangerous to probe one’s inward places. The chemistry was volatile, fires might start and burn out of control. What if I, Lu Anne thought, who cannot see past mirrors, should confront myself there? My self.

If I, who see everything in mirrors, who cannot approach the glass without some apprehension, were to see my inward self there, I would not die. But Edna might.

Medusa, she thought. That’s what that’s about. It’s your own face that turns you to stone, your own secret eyes.

Poor Edna. Poor Edna gets a sight of herself, she explodes, crashes, burns. Never knew she was there. Catches fire like the feckless child of family legend, little Great-Aunt Catastrophe in her going-to-mass dress on Christmas morning, alight from the Christmas candles, a torch-child spinning around the parlor.

Poor old Edna, little Dixie honey, sees her own self on the shield of hot blue sky and dies. Sees all that freedom, that great black immensity of righteous freedom and swoons, Oh My. And dies.

Stepping out of the suit, Lu Anne tossed it aside and walked on toward the water. All at once she was reminded of Walker, but whether it was of something he had told her or something in the script, she could not recall. Something of him had come to her mind for a moment and gone. She stepped into the warm water; two brawny men in swimming trunks stood waist deep just outside the shot, a third waited thirty or so feet out, resting on a float with a coiled length of line.

Shoulders back, head high, she walked along the inclining sandy bottom. The camera tracked with her, eye to eye, and when she lost her footing and pushed off, she was aware of it pulling back and hovering overhead as she swam out from shore.

When Drogue called cut, the man with the float advanced toward her but she turned back. Wading out of the water she heard a little clatter of applause.

“Where’s the crew?” Lu Anne asked, shaking her hair. Vera Ricutti brought her a beach robe.

“We cleared the set,” Drogue told her. “We thought it would be friendlier just us.”

“Well, Walter,” she said happily, “if you-all are going to applaud I would like a lot of applause rather than a little.”

“Shall we bring them back?” he asked. “Want a claque?” He strode away from her, calling for his soldiers.

“O.K., muchachos ! Once more for protection.”

“Arcs ready if you want it,” Hueffer told him.

“I don’t want it. I want reflectors in place.”

Lu Anne went to the trailer to have her hair dried and combed.

Light was fading; the sun seemed to hang suspended above a thin curl of purple cirrus cloud. They were running out of clear sky. A gray wall of rain was approaching from the northwest; the wind carried a few fat drops to spatter on the beach and people looked at the sky in alarm. In the end, the rain held off and they had time for two more takes of Lu Anne going to the water.

“I’ll give it to you two ways, Walter,” Lu Anne said.

Drogue was on the crane with Blakely and the camera operator. Eric Hueffer stood beside the truck watching the sky.

“Anything you want, babe,” Drogue told her.

Action was called, Lu Anne flung her suit aside and went in.

Vera brought her the robe and they started back to her trailer.