Children of Light Read online

  They went out. It had turned into a Santa Ana day with a dry comfortless breeze, a hot hazy sky. At the corner of Bronson, Keochakian took hold of Walker’s lapel.

  “People are watching you,” he said. “Always. Evil people who wish you bad things are watching. You’re not among friends.” He turned away, walked a few steps and spun round. “Trust no one. Except me. I’m different. You can trust me. You believe that?”

  “More or less,” Walker said.

  On the way back to West Hollywood, he stopped at his health club, had a swim and read his reviews in the sauna. The reviews were, in the main, good. One of them was good enough to drive him out of the heat with angina pains. It called his performance a revelation. “Walker’s anguished king, descending from impotent frenzy to an almost fey, childlike madness, comes as a revelation to those familiar only with his street-smart movie turns.”

  He thought it cheering, although the pains rather worried him.

  Back at the Chateau, he packed up, left a wake-up call and took a short nap. His dreams were stormy. An hour later he was south of Long Beach in rush-hour traffic.

  Deep into Orange County, he pulled off the San Diego Freeway and cut over toward the coast road. On his left, the future of southern California was unfolding; he passed mile upon mile of development divided into units by redwood fencing and bougainvillea, mock villages centered on a supermarket and a Bob’s Big Boy. Every half mile or so a patch of stripped, empty acreage awaited the builders and better times.

  On his right, through some realtor’s stratagem, the land was unimproved. Herefords grazed in fields of yellow grass; wildflowers and manzanita flourished. From somewhere came the smell of orange trees, as though it were spring and twenty years before. The nearest groves were miles away now.

  He drove into fog among the dry hills, the warm wind died away and on the coast it was gray and cool. He felt better suited.

  On the coast road, he turned south. For a few miles it was all suburban maritime; there were condominiums with marinas, dive shops, seafood restaurants. Further down the Herefords wandered among undulating oil-well pumps, a landscape of tax deductions.

  At seven-fifteen, half an hour before sunset, he was pulling into San Epifanio Beach, the last repair of untranslated seediness in the county. The beach had oil rigs offshore and an enormous German Expressionist power plant on the city line. There was a fishing pier borne seaward on spindly pilings in defiance of the Pacific rollers, the far end of which vanished into enshrouding fog. At right angles to the coast road, garnished with a rank of rat-infested royal palms, ran the lineup of tackle stores, taco stands and murky cocktail lounges that was the beach’s principal thoroughfare.

  Walker braked at the intersection to let a party of surf punks cross. The slashes of green or orange in their close-cropped hair reminded him suddenly of the patch of white that had appeared in his brother’s hair following rheumatic fever. The four youths glared at him with impersonal menace as they went by.

  Three blocks beyond the main drag rose the San Epifanio Beach Hotel, a nine-story riot of exoticism that dominated the downtown area. It was a shameless building from another age, silent-movie Spanish. With its peeling stucco walls, its rows of slimy windows and soiled shades, it was a structure so outsized and crummy that the sight of it could taint the nicest day. Walker was fond of it because he had been happy there. He had lived in the hotel years before in a room beside an atelier where a blind masseur cohabited with Ramon Novarro’s putative cousin. He had been married there, in the dingy ballroom, amid cannabis fumes.

  Walker pulled over into the guest parking lot. A tough-looking little Chicana with a ponytail, a baseball cap and bib overalls handed him a claim ticket.

  He went past the theater-style marquee over the main entrance and walked round to the beach side of the building. Several empty tables were arranged on a veranda overlooking a nearly deserted park. At the far end of the park four black teenagers, stripped to the waist, were playing basketball. Nearer the hotel, some Hare Krishnas from Laguna were chanting for the entertainment of two elderly couples in pastel clothes.

  Walker ambled across the park to the beach. The wind was sharp, it had grown chilly with the approach of sunset. The declining sun itself was obscured in dark banks of cloud. Walker watched the waves break against the dark purple sand. Once he had seen porpoises there, seven together, playing just outside the break line of the surf. He had been standing in the same place, on the edge of the park around sunset. His wife had been beside him. His children were digging in the sand and she had called to them, pointing out to sea, to the porpoises. It had been a good omen in a good year.

  He walked along the sand until he felt cold, then climbed back to the park up a dozen cement steps that were littered with plastic carriers and beer cans and smelled of urine.

  The wall of the corridor between the main entrance and the inner lobby of the San Epifanio was covered in worn striped wallpaper against which were hung ghastly seascapes at close intervals. Once past them, he strolled into the candlelit gemütlichkeit of the Miramar Lounge, all nets and floats and steering wheels. There was not much sunset to be seen through the picture windows but the lights were low and the bar and adjoining tables fairly crowded. The customers were middle-aged, noisy and dressed for golf—a hard-liquor crowd. Walker took the only vacant stool at the bar and ordered a Bloody Mary. The drink when it came was bitter, hefty with cheap vodka. Strong drinks were a selling point of the place.

  On the stool next to Walker sat a blond woman who was drinking rather hungrily of her gin-and-tonic and toying with a pack of Virginia Slims. She appeared to be in her early thirties and attractive, but Walker was not certain of either impression. He was not altogether sober and it was difficult to see people clearly in the lighting of the Miramar Lounge. That was the way they liked it there.

  At the entrance to the bar, adjoining the corridor through which he had passed, was a phone booth, one from the old days decorated with sea horses and dolphins in blue and white tile. After a moment, Walker picked up his drink and went to the phone booth. He took out his black book with its listing of the Baja location numbers and his telephone credit card.

  He took a long sip, held his breath and dialed. The resonance of submarine depths hummed in the wires as he waited for the ring. When it came, he closed his eyes.

  When the telephone rang she was outside, in a lounge chair on the sand, looking into the afterglow of sunset. Her children were playing with their father at the water’s edge; she had watched the three forms darken to silhouettes in the dying light. The soft honey glow of the children’s bodies had faded in the quick dusk; now their scamperings and her husband’s thin-limbed gestures against the radiant foam and magenta sky suggested puppetry to her. It was an ugly thought and she forced it aside. She let the phone ring until she saw that her husband had heard it; knee deep in light surf, he had turned at the sound. She stood up and took her sunglasses off.

  “I’ll get it,” she called to him.

  She jogged up to the open door of their bungalow, wiped her sandy feet on the straw mat and rushed to the phone.

  “Lu Anne,” said the voice on the far end when she answered. “Lu Anne, it’s Gordon. Gordon Walker.”

  She had known, she thought, who it would be. Watching the sun go down she had been thinking of him and thinking that he would call that night.

  “Hello? Lu Anne? Can you hear me?”

  His voice sounded from the receiver in her hand as clearly as though he were there in Mexico, somewhere in the same hotel.

  “Lu Anne?”

  Slowly, guiltily, she replaced the receiver.

  It had grown dark in the stone bungalow. The only light came from fading pastel sky framed in the doorway. She sat on a high-backed wicker chair looking out. In the darkness behind her she could feel a presence gathering. A confusion of sounds rang in her ears and among them she heard Walker’s voice saying her name. Watchful, perfectly still, she stayed where she was
until she saw a figure in the doorway. At first she thought it had to do with the things that were manifesting themselves behind her back; she watched fascinated, virtually unafraid.

  “Señora?”

  She knew who it was then.

  “Sí, sí,” she said, and she reached out for the light that was right over the phone. “Hello, Helga. Good evening.”

  Helga Machado was the children’s nanny, supplied by the production unit through the hotel. A stout, pale, heavy-browed young woman, she watched Lee Verger with caution and a formal smile.

  “Now,” Helga said, “I may take the children for their dinner. Or else I can come back a little later.”

  Lu Anne was blinking in the sudden light. The wariness in Helga’s expression did not escape her.

  “Well,” she said cheerfully, “let’s see. Why don’t we call them and they can go to dinner and I’ll say good night to them when we get back.”

  “Very good, señora.”

  Lu Anne went past Helga and through the doorway. At the water’s edge, Lionel and the children were still playing in the darkness. The shallows flashed phosphorescence where they ran.

  “David and Laura,” Lu Anne called to her children. “Dinner time, you-all.”

  She saw the dim figures fall still, listened to her little son’s protesting moan. They would be early to sleep. If she missed them that evening there would be only the shortest amount of time available for goodbyes in the morning. She and Lionel were to dine that evening at Walter Drogue’s casita. It was a courtesy—a farewell meal for Lionel—and there had been no chance of declining.

  When the children came up from the beach, Lu Anne led them into the bungalow and bent to them, holding each by the hand. They were only a year and a half apart; David was five and Laura seven. They had their father’s red-blond hair a shade darker, and their mother’s blue eyes.

  “You guys go with Helga and wash off all the sand and salt. Then you eat your dinners like good children and you can go see The Wizard of Oz in the suite.”

  Thus bought off, the children murmured assent.

  “Laura,” Lu Anne called after her daughter, “don’t forget your glasses, honey. Or you won’t be able to see the movie.”

  “If I had contacts,” the little girl said, “then I’d never forget them.”

  Going out, Helga and the children stopped to talk with Lionel, who had come up from the beach. She listened as he joked with them.

  “Who was it?” Lionel asked her when he came inside. He was over six feet in height and dramatically thin, with a long face and a prominent nose. His hair was thinning, the sun-bleached strands pasted across his tanned scalp. Lee was facing the dressing-table mirror; Lionel watched her in the glass.

  “Oh,” she said, “it just rang and stopped. It must have been the switchboard or something.”

  Her husband took off his bathing suit and stood beside her at the mirror rubbing Noxzema on his face and chest. Their eyes met.

  “Take your medicine, love?” he asked.

  There was a look he had when he asked about the medicine. A stare. It made him seem cruel and unfeeling although she knew perfectly well that he was neither.

  “Can’t you tell?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m like an old woman about it. I’ll stop.”

  She had stopped taking the pills ten days before. Held her breath and stopped. Sometimes her old pal Billy Bly gave her something to get her through the night. She felt quite guilty about it but she was convinced it had to be done. They were ruining her concentration. They were ruining everything.

  “You’ve seemed very well,” Lionel said. “I mean,” he hastened to add, “you’ve seemed happy. That’s what it comes to, I suppose.”

  “I’ve been working,” she said. “Nothing like it.”

  “It’s good, isn’t it? This.” He meant the film.

  “Yes. I mean I think so. Edna—I love her.”

  “Do you think she’s you?”

  “Are you asking me that as a doctor?”

  He had a way of seeming especially serious when he was joking. Sometimes it was hard to tell.

  “As a fan.”

  “Well, of course she isn’t me. I mean,” she said with a laugh, “things are tough enough as they are.”

  She looked up at him in the mirror and saw him smile. He reached out and touched her shoulder and she put her hand over his. After a moment, he went into the bathroom and she heard the shower go on.

  If he wanted to, she thought, he could count the pills. Then he would know. She looked at herself in the highlighted mirror, bent toward her own image.

  A month before, she had done a face-cream ad that was running in the women’s magazines. They had asked her because she was visible again, working. It was an over-thirty-five-type ad and doing it had proved to be a good idea because in it she looked smooth and sleek and sexy. She had given the photographer a face she associated with Rosalind in As You Like It, whom she had played at twenty-three in New Haven.

  Lu Anne looked into the mirror at her Rosalind face, stared into her own eyes. There were people, she thought, who must be studying the magazine ad, looking into the eyes.

  There would be nothing compromising there. Rosalind was nothing if not sane. Lee Verger loved her above all women.

  Rosalind in the looking glass smiled, a tiny curve of the lip on one side. I am Rosalind who can strike you lame with reasons and be mad without any.

  Lee Verger smiled back into her mirror. A circus taste bubbled up in her mouth. She thought of a voice but never heard it, only imagined what the voice might say. She closed her eyes and made a fist and rested her forehead on it.

  When Lionel came out of the bathroom she straightened up. He had dressed after his shower in white duck trousers and a Filipino wedding shirt; he glowed. He stood beside her again, just where he had stood before, combing his sparse red-blond hair, humming “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.”

  “How are you?” he asked after a minute.

  “I’m all right,” she said, smiling for him. “Mostly tired, I guess. Those period clothes, poof …” She shook her head. “It makes you feel for those women back then. The stays. The pins.”

  “Have you stopped taking your medication?”

  “Oh, honey,” she said, “please don’t.”

  “I’m very sorry,” Lionel said. “Truly I’m sorry to press you. But I must know.”

  “Did you count them?”

  He hesitated. “I had a quick look.”

  Aware of his displeasure and his eyes on her, she bent her head in shame. Presently, he reached out a hand and began to massage the back of her neck. She could not relax. His touch, the strong fingers kneading the base of her skull, seemed perfunctory and unloving, a fidget.

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” she said.

  “No. Look,” he said softly, “you were acting guilty.” He pursed his lips, embarrassed. “If you feel guilty it can mean something’s wrong.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like to try and work behind the fucking things. Your eyes hurt, you can’t use them. Your head weighs a ton.”

  Lionel took his hand away. “Really, I wish we’d had this out earlier.”

  “Lionel,” Lu Anne said, “I want to try something. I’m finding the drug very hard to work behind and I want to try cutting it for a while.”

  She looked up at him but his gaze was fixed on some place behind her. He was avoiding her pleas, her sickness. He wanted it simple, done with pills. She supposed she could hardly blame him.

  “When did you stop?”

  “A week ago,” she said. “More than a week.”

  “And you feel all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You haven’t been hallucinating?”

  “Oh, Lionel,” she said. She affected a dismissive shudder and a condescending smile.

  “Don’t bullshit me,” he said fiercely.

  “I’m not. I’ve been fine.”

  �
��Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “If you stop taking your medication,” Lionel told her, “I can’t go.”

  Lu Anne took a deep breath, looked in the mirror and covered her eyes.

  “Are you hallucinating now?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Look at me!”

  She was staring at the tiled floor. Suddenly she raised her head and looked him in the eye.

  “What do you expect to see?” she asked him coldly. “Do you expect to see it?”

  Lionel removed his glasses and wiped them on a Sightsaver. He rubbed his eyes.

  “As though,” she said, “it soiled my eyes. And I should avert them from the doctor’s godlike gaze.”

  “I’m very sorry,” Lionel said. “Sometimes I get so frightened I can’t function.”

  She watched him turn away confounded and her heart filled with pity for him and with love.

  “It’s my enemy,” he said, and she thought she heard a throttled sob in his voice. He was looking at her. He was dry-eyed. “It frightens me. I hate it.”

  She walked up to him and took his right hand and kissed the knuckle of his forefinger, which was callused where he chewed it in his terrors and rages. They were endured, she thought, for her.

  “You are my hero beyond fear,” she told him. “My knight.”

  “I’ve finally come to think of it as evil,” Lionel said. “That’s a term I’ve always resisted.”

  “As unscientific,” Lu Anne suggested with faint malice.

  “As meaningless. As a word belonging to false consciousness.”

  “It doesn’t have a moral. This … condition. Not of the kind you’re comfortable with.”

  “Evil,” Lionel agreed, “is not the sort of term I’m comfortable with.” He raised his spectacles toward the overhead light and inspected their surfaces. “How extraordinary that the thing should be metabolic. Like gout.”

  “An undigested bit of beef,” Lu Anne said, “like Jacob Marley’s ghost. An underdone potato.”

  Lionel slapped the back of his neck so savagely that Lu Anne started.

  “Here I am, see, a specialist in medical practice. In my specialty there are two, maybe three basic pathological conditions. For Christ’s sake,” he cried, “maybe just one. I can’t heal it. I can barely treat it. I don’t even have a fucking insight into it.” He released his neck and stared wildly into the mirror. “I should go about with a bowl of leeches. I should have become a bloody palmist.”