Robert Stone - Children of Light

He staggered as he walked and turned on her.

“I mean,” he asked in a foggy voice, “you want to hear about the men’s room in the Albuquerque bus station? What you wanna hear?”

“I’m sorry, Pig.”

He brought her her half pill and she took it and he climbed into bed with her. They both got under a decorative Mexican quilt to shelter from the air conditioning.

“I did once,” Lu Anne said. “In New Haven. After the show. It was winter. We were doing As You Like It. I played Rosalind.”

“You told me a thousand times about that night, Lu Anne, and you never told me that. I think that’s foolishness.”

“No,” she said. “No, it’s true. A man offered me two thousand dollars. He was a depraved Shakespeare scholar. He would stop at nothing to have me and I suspect he was a Jesuit. ‘Top it off with harlotry,’ he said, ‘you’ll feel like a million and you’ll make an old man very happy.’ ”

“Bullshit, man,” Bly murmured. His eyes, half open, stared into his pillow.

“He took me down Stoddard Street,” Lu Anne told Bill. “The cast was holding one of those Communist-inspired parties we used to have in those days with drugs and promiscuity but I didn’t stay for it. I snuck right out of that green room. I was wearing my fake rat fur coat and he took me down Stoddard Street. I remember the Valle’s steak house with all the red snowflakes. He said, ‘It’s Ganymede I’m after’—I said no foolin’? Because they always are, I assure you. I mean, he wasn’t telling me a thing I didn’t know myself.”

“So,” Bly struggled to ask, “did he buy you a steak?”

“He took me to a house on a hill. Greek revival. It belonged to another century. The furnishings were exquisite and all the walls were glass. Old glass. From every room you could see all the others, you could see rainbows and tropical fish, everything crystal, Pig, and firelight in the mirrors and outside the glass walls the red snow was falling. In every room there were little glass bells, they shined and they tinkled. Of all the rooms, Pig, there was one into which a body could not see. And do you know why that was?”

“Well, sure,” Bly said. His eyes closed. “Why?” he asked.

“Because it was curtained off in furs. And that was where we went. And the man said, ‘You are the finest Rosalind that ever was, my dear child.’ He says, ‘I’ve traveled the world,’ he says, ‘I’ve seen them all, Stratford and the Aldwych, forget ’em all,’ he says. ‘Your voice is dulcet and you know your blocking and your moves are neat.’ ”

Bly roused himself slightly. “Hot shit for you, Lu Anne. Did he give you two thou?”

“Better,” Lu Anne said. Bly smiled and she stroked his neck.

“Better than two? Three?”

“Better,” she whispered. His eyes closed but the happy smile lit his lean face.

She leaned her head on his shoulder. Great silly Quaalude tears like Disney raindrops were rolling down her cheeks.

“If you can hustle, Billy,” she whispered to Bly, “you don’t have to go home. You need never. You can’t ever.

“Pig?” she asked. “You hear my little ’lude poem, home?”

His smile had drained away into sleep. It looked to her like dying. “You get to have a few laughs,” she told the aging boy asleep beside her, “but your head will fucking kill you.”

Early the next morning, Walker was treading water in the lukewarm Pacific. He felt less driven after his sedated sleep. His face was turned toward the beach and the dry mountains that rose above the coastal cliffs. The peaks outlined against the morning sky formed a contrast of surfaces so pure and unambiguous that it was literally joy to behold. As he basked in the day’s matutinal innocence, his hangover salved with cocaine, he became aware of a disharmony. On the beach itself, still half in shadow, he saw a small man in the resort’s livery struggling with a second man twice his size. Walker set out toward shore and as he swam he recalled Joy McIntyre’s story of rained-out romance. Two animals fighting on the beach.

He picked up his towel, threw it over his shoulders and walked toward the scene of conflict. Winkles.

One of the hotel’s bellmen was attempting to bring a drunken man to consciousness by standing him upright. Having attempted several mechanical strategies to accomplish this, he had fallen back on the old heave-ho and was pulling on the man’s arm.

“You’ll dislocate his shoulder,” Walker told the bellman. Together they took the drunken man by his underarms and balanced him on his heels. Walker saw that it was Dongan Lowndes.

“I never seen him,” the bellman said. “I don’t think he’s from the movies.”

Walker saw Jon Axelrod descending a coral stairway toward the beach. A black-haired girl of singular beauty whom Walker had never seen before stood watching from the lowest turreted landing, a princess in a tower.

“Lookit the fucking guy,” Axelrod said. “Mr. Class. His first drink in three years, he says. Then has about twenty of them.”

“In the sun,” the bellman told them, “he can die.”

“Listen,” Axelrod told the servant, “this isn’t your job. Go get Mr. Bly — you know who I mean?”

The youth nodded.

Axelrod, gripping Lowndes by the one arm, took a loose bill from his pocket.

“Go get him. Wake him up if you have to.”

The bellman pocketed his bill and ran off up the stairway. As he passed the girl on the landing he paused to bow and smile deferentially before bolting on up the higher stairways.

“In the sun,” Axelrod said in imitation of the bellman, “he can die. Because he already fuckin’ dead. And he no make it home to his coffin.”

“What are you looking for?” Walker asked. “A weapon?”

“I wanna see if he’s wired. Some of these fucks, you say something dumb and they write it down. You sue them and next thing you find out they were wired. I’m gonna get Billy to go through his room for a video camera.”

“You think he’d do that?” Walker asked. “He’s the correspondent of New York Arts , not Confidential. ”

“Some of these writers are the lowest scum that ever walked the earth,” Axelrod explained. He looked thoughtfully at Walker. “Then there’s some that are O.K.”

The smell of Lowndes’s sweating body was making Walker sick. He turned his face to the wind.

“Who’s the lady?” he asked Axelrod.

“That’s Helena,” Axelrod told him. “She’s our valued assistant. She’s going to show you around. Come down, doll,” he called up to Helena. “Help us hold up this guy.”

Helena descended the last flight of steps. She was blue-eyed and lightly freckled. The expression of condescending concern with which she regarded Lowndes made Walker feel like a zookeeper displaying a sick seal.

“Is he drunk?” Helena asked in the British interrogative.

“He’s in deep alpha state,” Axelrod said, “from trying to meditate with his clothes on. Helena, this is Gordon Walker.”

“Ah,” Helena said brightly.

Walker braced his legs to adjust his leverage on Lowndes and reached out to take her hand.

“Helena will show you around,” Axelrod told Walker. “She’s been wanting to meet you.”

“Oh,” Walker said. “Well.” He looked at the young woman to see if such a thing might be true and saw quickly that it was not.

“Your script is wonderful,” Helena said. “It’s going to be a marvelous film.”

Lowndes pulled himself free of their hold and immediately lost consciousness again. Walker and Axelrod just managed to catch him.

“You know what I think?” Axelrod said after a moment. “I think fuck this.” He let go of Lowndes and Walker did the same. The author collapsed in a heap at their feet.