Robert Stone - Children of Light

“I know that, love.”

“Yessir. Four.” She held her hand, the long fingers splayed and trembling, before his face. “Four counting the dead and I insist on counting the dead, that’s the custom in Louisiana, Gordon, where the living and the dead are involved in mixed entertainments. And are not tucked away in the ground but dwell among us. Their hair grows and their fingernails and they go on getting smarter in those ovens under their angels. Which represent the angels that attended them in life. Or their crosses. Or their Médailles miraculeuses. ”

“Stop,” he said.

“Life too much for you, brother? Huh? What says the gentleman?”

“The gentleman allows that things are tough all over.”

“Gordon,” she demanded, “are you listening to me?” She took her glasses off and gave him a look of pedagogic disapproval. “Show the courtesy to listen to the person in the same bed as yourself. I have four!” Her hand quavered before his eyes. “They don’t care about me. I’m a biological function of their lives. That’s it. Three lives, one death. That’s all, man. Would I let them destroy me? No, I would not, Lionel. Gordon, rather. You wrote the book, Gordon. She doesn’t let them dominate her life! She will die for them, sure, but she won’t live for them. Isn’t that the way it goes? They need not have thought that they could possess her. Isn’t that what you wrote, Lionel?”

“Lionel didn’t write it and neither did I. Madame Chopin wrote it.”

“A red-necked Irishwoman who would trade her kids for a pint of Jim Beam. That’s the big secret, you know. She didn’t care about her kids. What she really wanted to be was an actress. Isn’t that right, Gordon?”

“I don’t know what’s right, my love. I’m drunk and you’re bananas. That’s the score.”

“I want more now, please, Gordon.”

“Well, honeychile,” Walker said, “you ain’t getting no fuckin’ more. Because you have degenerated into a goddamn lunatic. What kind of party has a lunatic at it?”

“Plenty,” she insisted. “Plenty of parties do. And I want more. Damn it, Gordon!” she said. Then she cocked an ear as though she had heard something.

“Listen, Gordon. A recitation. Sir King, we deem that ’tis strange sport, to keep a madman as thy fool at court.”

“Rest easy, Lu Anne.”

“This is the forest primeval.” She paused thoughtfully and repeated the line. “Gordon, do you know how long it took me to understand that Evangeline was not a good poem?”

He put her arm under his head and wrapped his arms around her. His thought was to suffocate her fire, keep her from burning up.

“Longer than most, I bet.”

“That would be about right,” she said. “Late in life.

“Do you know why I take so many showers?”

“Yes,” he said, “sort of.”

“Say why.”

“Because you have hallucinations in which your friends advise you to take showers.”

“They hardly advise me, honey. French,” she breathed confidentially, “can be the vehicle for some very low observations. And Frenchman French, well!”

“They aren’t really there, Lu Anne. That’s all there is to it.”

“They aren’t there in your life. They’re in mine.”

“Lu Anne,” Walker said. “Do you understand that I love you?”

“Yes, yes.” She patted his arm. “Yes, I understand.”

“Does that penetrate the … whatever it is?”

“Whatever it is,” she said, “I guess love penetrates it.”

He took his arms from around her and kissed her hand.

“Gordon,” she whispered, “what I said about our children …”

A long time ago he had learned to watch for a catch in her voice, a look in her eyes. He had learned what it portended. He had called it shifting gears. Once he had told her that she had two speeds: Bad Lu Anne and Saint Lu Anne. There on the bed beside him he saw her slide into Bad Lu Anne. Bad Lu Anne was not in fact malign, but formidable and sometimes terrifying. As soon as he saw her eyes, he jumped.

He body-checked her as she rose, and like a coach miming a tackle, eased her in his grip across the foot of the bed and held her there. It took all his strength and weight to keep her down. Her face was pressed against his chest, her mouth was open in a scream of pain, but not a sound came out of her. Panting, he held on. If she chose to bite him he would have to give way. Sometimes she bit him, sometimes not. This time she only kept on screaming, and in the single moment that his grip relented she drove him off the bed and clear across the room and into the beige cloth-covered wall. He hung on to her all the way. His body absorbed her unvoiced scream until he felt he could hardly contain, without injury, the force of her grief and rage.

At last she stopped thrashing and he loosened his grip. He backed away, and they lay together on the floor. She cradled her hands prayerfully beneath her cheek; she was facing him. Her lips moved, she prayed, mouthed words, sobbed. He put his hand on her shoulder, an inquiring hand, to ask if she wanted him there or not. When he touched her, she drew closer to him.

“Hey, now,” he whispered absurdly. He put his arm around her, his every move seemed feeble and irrelevant to him. “Hey, now,” he kept repeating, like a man talking to a horse. “Hey, now.”

Around sundown, Axelrod walked into the Drogues’ bungalow with his envelope full of photographs. Young Drogue and his wife were watching a Spanish-language soap opera on their television set. Axelrod set the envelope before them.

“Should I be overjoyed?” Drogue asked. “Is this all of them?”

“All except one print. Dongan Lowndes has it.”

“Jack gave it to Lowndes? But that’s ridiculous.” He looked from Jon to his wife, with an expression of pained mirth. “Isn’t it?”

Axelrod presented Walker’s theory of the Picturesque Lead with Jack’s photograph to support it.

“Somehow,” Drogue said, “I find it hard to take this dopey snapshot seriously.”

“According to Walker, Lowndes is gonna really dish it to us. He says the NYA story will make this location look like Butch’s Garden.”

“What’s that?” Drogue asked. “Some S & M joint known only to weirdos?”

“I don’t think it’s in L.A.,” Patty said.

“He means Lowndes is gonna make us look bad. That’s what he thinks.”

“The hell with what he thinks. He got the whole thing started with his dissolute ways. Anyway, no story in New York Arts is going to hurt us. Or is it?”

“It wouldn’t hurt to get the picture back,” Axelrod said. “Lowndes is unfriendly. The Europeans might go for it. Oggi and those clowns.”

“Christ,” Drogue said irritably. “Does Charlie know about this? He’ll make the night horrible with his cries.”

Axelrod shook his head.

“I think it’s a minor matter,” Drogue said. “It would be nice if we could sort it out without bothering Mr. Freitag.”

“Don’t tell him while he’s eating,” Patty said. “He’s had a bypass.”

“Not only that,” Axelrod said. “He’s got guests.”

“Well,” Drogue wanted to know, “can you get the damn thing back?”

“We’re gonna suggest to Mr. Lowndes that he do the right thing.”

“Don’t start bouncing him off walls. Then we’ll really be in the shit.”

“What I’d like to do,” Axelrod said, “I’d like to have the local police athletic league take his head for a couple of laps around the municipal toilet bowl. Except we’d have to pay mordida and the pigs would probably swipe the print.”

“If he’s unfriendly,” Drogue said, “be my guest. Put the screws to him. Just don’t give him anything to sue about.”