The end of the night (11 page)

I cannot forget what it was like to awaken there that first morning and hear the sound of the sea, and see the sun against the mint-green wall of my room. I had that feeling of inexplicable and joyous anticipation which had been gone for a long, long time. I felt renewed. All things were possible.

I was served on the terrace, elegantly, with papaya, toasted muffins, strong, black coffee. I went down to the sea and swam out until the blue house was a sandbox toy. The sea sighed and heaved and glittered. I floated there, and yelled for no reason, and went all the way in, using a long racing crawl, spending myself. I baked in the sun. I showered. Rosalinda served lunch. I napped until three, then drove into Aca-pulco and bought myself an ornate silver lighter and a snake-skin billfold, sat and drank black beer at a sidewalk cafe and smiled at pretty girls who walked slowly, arm in arm, in the

dusk, while the birds made a great clatter over settling down for the night in the big green trees.

Those four days before John and Kathy arrived were good days. They were the last good days of my life. Had I known they were, I could not have enjoyed them more. I did not think of the future in terms of purpose or direction. I just had the unreasonable confidence that everything was going to be fine and golden. It was euphoria. And it could not, of course, last. I sent a card to my folks. I bought a lottery ticket and won two hundred pesos. I worked diligently on my tan, and my Spanish. I waited for the phone call from my employers.

I picked John and Kathy up at the airport at noon on Friday. There were two men with them. August Sonninger and Frank Race. August was a squat, bald, imperious little weasel in a soiled scurfy beret, Bermudas, Indian sandals and a sports shirt emblazoned with pastel fish. He was obviously the dominant, completely in charge, full of power plays and rude contradictions, snapping his fingers for service. The others treated him as if he were king. Frank Race was a towering, languid, storklike man in a cotton cord suit and a tasteful tie. He drawled in an inconsistent Limey accent, and seemed to be trying to give the impression that all this was a sort of grotesque game, and he was playing along for kicks. He was almost amusing, in a withdrawn, ironic way. Kathy was being very windblown and girlish with them. It didn't seem to suit her. The big surprise to me was John Pinelli. The great soft pink-and-white thing had come alive. He was full of snap, glitter and enthusiasm. For the first time I was aware of the quality of his mind—quick, perceptive, agUe, imaginative.

They were hopped up, so busy with plans and schemes that they seemed only vaguely aware of being in Acapulco.

August Sonninger and Frank Race stayed through until the following Tuesday afternoon when I drove them and John Pinelli back to the airport. I guess it was not what Rosalinda had expected. She had a sense of order. They would not conform to any schedule. They seemed to take no pleasure in the house. They talked business endlessly. They fought over details. To the four of them I was a part of the background, like the house and the sea and the servants.

I learned that Kathy and John were still being remote and formal and polite with each other. From their arguments I gathered that John PineUi had bought into the enterprise by

signing over, in exchange for a stock interest, his piece of the successful television property.

They had brought a pile of scripts with them. They called on me for some special service on Saturday night, at about eleven o'clock. They were all in the big living room. Frank Race came and got me off the terrace. He had me sit down with a script in my hand. He and Kathy both had copies. Son-ninger sat scowling at us.

"Read the Wilson lines, old boy, if you will," he told me, pointing to a speech that started a scene.

"I don't know anything about . . .'*

"Just read the lines, old boy."

I started to read the first speech, feeling like a damn fool, trying to sound the way I thought Wilson should sound from what little clue I had.

Sonninger broke in. "You!" he said.

"Yes?"

"This is not talent scouts," he said in his slight Mittel European accent. "It is not Actors' Studio. Just read, please. Nothing more."

I shrugged and read my lines as if I were reading a market report. That's what they wanted. That's what they got. Kathy had the corner on emotion. Frank Race and I read our lines woodenly. She emoted. I thought she did fine. But I thought the script was horrible stuff, full of pretentiously poetic expression. It went on until three in the morning. They would quarrel viciously, yell at each other, and then mark up the copies of the script. Sonninger was boss. I couldn't see how they were improving it in any way. If this was going to be the first release by Sierra Productions, it looked Uke a poor place to stick your money.

The only other time I wasn't totally ignored was on Monday morning at about eleven. I had swum and I was baking on the platform above the beach. Frank Race came gingerly down the steps, his pallid, narrow body gleaming with oil. He carried a beach towel and a script.

After a casual greeting, he stretched out and worked on the script for about a half hour. When he put it aside, I said, "Is that thing really as bad as I think it is?"

He looked at me, slightly startled, and then smiled. "They can read bad, old boy, and play well. We're all happy with it. And, forgive me, we have the benefit of professional judg-

ment. The people who will release it are happy with it too. And they're quite shrewd about these things."

*'There seems to be a hell of a lot of talk in it*'

"We're taking a little out, here and there."

"Kathy will play the lead?"

**That's the idea. The old dear is a little long in the tooth for the part. But that's a camera and lightmg problem. It's worth that gamble to have John."

"John or his money?"

He looked at me intently. "You are a very brash young man. You seem to like to talk about things you know nothing about."

"I'm just asking questions. People haven't been falling over themselves to hire him. So all of a sudden he's wonderful?"

"I'll tell you a little more than you need to know, old boy. John Pinelli is a director of the first grade, sensitive, creative. A director must have one additional talent. He must be able to control his stars, keep them from acting like petulant children, keep them from bluffing him. John used to have that. When he lost some of his confidence, he lost that first. The rest is intact. Sonninger will produce. I will be unit manager. We will work closely with John, and we'll control the talent. He can do the rest. Once we wrap this one up, and it's good, then all the confidence will be back. And he'll be an enormous asset to us on the other pictures we've scheduled. I expect him to make me rich, old boy. The feds cleaned me last year. I miss the money.'*

"So this first one has to be tops?"

"It wUl be."

"I hope it is," I said. I didn't see how it could be. The story seemed silly to me. But maybe they knew what they were doing. Then I thought of all the brilliant, confident people who use up a whole year out of their lives to bring something to Broadway which lasts three performances. It seems Hke a mutual hypnosis deal. They all tell each other the material is great until they finally believe it.

Anyway, I took them to the airport on Tuesday, and Kathy and I were left alone in the house with the three servants. Nadina, the maid, was a round, brown girl with broad, bare feet. When you addressed her directly, she would put one of her black braids in her mouth, bite down upon it, try to turn her head all the way around on her shoulders, and giggle.

When working, she sang softly to herself in a clear, true voice.

There was a sense of isolation about that house. It was as if the concrete steps were a rope ladder, and when you were up there, they were pulled up and you were alone.

I saw more of Kathy than I expected. We ate together. This seemed to please Rosalinda. There were always fresh flowers on the table. Kathy was casual and remote. She spent a lot of time on the beach and on the sun platform. And she spent a lot of time grooming herself, exercising. I did not mention my plans. At the time I made an accounting and gave her the balance from the two thousand pesos, she gave me the hundred dollars I had been promised. But she did not ask me what I would do. It seemed agreeable to her for me to stay on. She gave me errands to do. I drove her to and from town when she wanted to shop. It annoyed me that she preferred to sit in the back.

Things changed between us on the following weekend, late on Sunday afternoon. We were down on the sun platform. Rosalinda called her to the phone. She had been expecting John, and had been growing more irritated when there was no word from him. When she came back down, her face was pale under the new copper-gold of her tan, and she was so furious her hand shook visibly.

"Was that John?" I asked. _

"Be still!" She stretched out with her back toward me. Her hip in gay nylon was mounded high. The nape of her neck looked tender and touching and defenseless, like the neck of a child. The strap of the halter top bit into the slender softness of her back.

She rolled up onto her knees abruptly, turning to face me. "Come on," she said, a whisper almost lost in the sound of the ocean. It had come up under the platform. She looked at me over a gun sight. She got to her feet. "Come on," she said. It was a command that needed no explanation. She went quickly and lightly up the steps without looking back. I followed her.

We went to the master bedroom. She adjusted the heavy wooden shutters so that narrow strands of the late sun lay against the far wall, filling the room with a luminous golden light. As she fixed the shutters I could hear the shallow quickness of her breathing and the whispery sound of her bare feet on the blue-green tiles. She turned, tiny and imperative, and

held her arms out toward me, and it was as if reality had merged with my own erotic imaginings, making the present moment dreamlike.

I believe it would be ridiculous for me to waste any of this imprisoned tag end of my life in description of the mechanics of copulation, in the more intimate devices of this particular pair of adulterers. Go to any loan library. Select a novel with a reputation for naughtiness. Open it to the section where the pages are most smudged. Substitute Kathy and Kirby for the names in the text. Our novelists seem to write of physical love as though they were under some obligation either to acquaint a herd of Martians with the fleshy facts, or to compose a handbook for the inexperienced.

Now that I am so far away from it, I can coldly chart the short history of our physical affair. In the beginning, as is always the case, pleasure was handicapped by the awkwardnesses of new lovers. As we learned each other, on the physical level, in the way the tricks of performance of a new sailboat or sports car must be learned through use, pleasure was heightened. As with all lovers since the origins of mankind, as pleasure was heightened, we indulged ourselves more often. Such intensity invariably creates a hypnotic aura which dims all the other aspects of existence.

And now I must account for the change in Kathy, a change which astonished her. She tried to explain it to me many times-When John had phoned her from Mexico City he had taunted her with an account of Sonninger's continual pressure to sign a younger actress for the lead in their first production, and he had tried to make her feel insecure by telling her he might back down and let Sonninger have his way. Kathy, furious at John, had sought the handiest weapon of revenge, to take a boy who meant nothing to her into the bed of her husband. It was to have been a meaningless and destructive act, a service she would require of me which would lead to no emotional involvement.

But to her surprise, and her mixed joy and consternation, she did become emotionally involved, and far more quickly than she would have beheved possible. I now know that it was not some uniqueness in me—it was her vulnerable condition.

Her marriage had turned so bad she could not be sure John Pinelli cared whether she lived or died. She had fought the ravages of age to a precarious draw for several years, but now

the other side was growing dangerously strong. She had let herself slip into an emotional pattern dangerous to any woman—telling herself she did not need anyone and did not want to be needed by anyone.

She had sought a quick, dirty little revenge, not sensing the depth of her own vulnerability, and suddenly found in the circle of her arms a young man who adored her. There had been too many men who had tried to use her to their own advantage. Here was one whose only humble desire was to be close to her, serve her, love her.

There was, in addition, a physical aspect to her vulnerability. She was a woman with a strong sexual drive, and except for those rare times in her past when she had not been working at her profession, she had sublimated that drive, used the force of it to refine her actress art. She was not working. John had not touched her—she said—since we had left New York. She was strongly ready to be used. And I had a youthful vigor she was soon able to surpass.

It was the small and dubious miracle of my life to watch such a woman slowly, and then more rapidly, turn all her clocks back to eighteen. It must be remembered, and understood, that in all my life I had never given of myself. I knew nothing of the pattern of giving. Those six weeks are as close as I ever came to love. I felt both humble and exultant I believe that for those six weeks I was a good man. I struck no poses. I had no devious ideas of gain. I wanted only to love her and watch the continuous blossoming of her, a special gift that intrigued us both.

A warm spell in autumn will trick a flower into bloom. It was that way with my Kathy. Her harshness and her coldness went away. Her eyes were soft for me. The textures of her body changed with the flowering of her heart, silky, scented, poised always for acceptance.

We became fools, as do all true lovers. We had our own language, invented our own ceremonies, created our own jokes —and in this way made our own shining wall against the world. I had never heard her laugh aloud until those six weeks of our love. I learned the meanings of all her kinds of laughter, from paean of joy to bawdy guffaw, to velvety chuckle of pleasure. We bought absurd presents for each other down in the city. She was an actress, and a dozen women, and I knew that should I ever learn all aspects of that dozen, I would find a whole second series beyond that, like those cloth-