Children of Light

by Robert Stone

  ROBERT STONE

  CHILDREN of LIGHT

  Robert Stone’s first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, won a William Faulkner Foundation Award. Dog Soldiers received a National Book Award, and A Flag for Sunrise won both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. His other honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the John Dos Passos Prize for literature, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Both A Hall of Mirrors and Dog Soldiers were made into major motion pictures. His most recent novel is Outerbridge Reach. Mr. Stone lives with his wife in Connecticut.

  ALSO BY ROBERT STONE

  A Hall of Mirrors

  Dog Soldiers

  A Flag for Sunrise

  Outerbridge Reach

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MARCH 1992

  Copyright © 1985, 1986 by Robert Stone

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1986.

  Portions of this work were originally published in Esquire, The Paris Review, Playboy, and TriQuarterly.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stone, Robert.

  Children of light / Robert Stone.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81417-3

  I. Title.

  PS3569.T6418C5 1992

  813’.54—dc20 91–50034

  Author photograph © Jerry Bauer

  v3.1

  The author gratefully acknowledges a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a residency at the Villa Serbelloni through the generosity of the Rockefeller Foundation.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  First Page

  CHILDREN OF LIGHT

  Waking, he saw aqueous light on the blue-white ceiling—the morning sun reflected from the swimming pool just outside the window. The moment he raised his head the poison struck; thirst, nausea, a barbed pain behind the eyes. When he turned he felt the warm girl beside him, naked, belly down. He reached out, and with the lightest touch his sodden state could bring to bear, ran his fingers along the small of her back, over her buttocks and firm thigh. In his first moments of consciousness, he had not been able to remember who it was there. The touch of her cool young skin brought recollection quickly enough.

  As gently and silently as he could, he climbed out of bed and padded across the tiles to the chair on which he had piled his clothes the night before. He did not want to wake her, wanted to be alone in spite of his loneliness.

  Dressed, he went out through the bedroom door and found himself in her enormous kitchen. It was stark white, gleaming with steel and glass, resplendent with morning. At the tap, he drank long and breathlessly, resting his elbows on the cold edge of the sink. He wet his hand and rubbed his face. When he looked up he saw brown mountains through the kitchen window, a steep ridge crowned with mist commanding a neat green valley. It was a shimmering day, dappled with promise.

  “Fucking California,” he said aloud. He was still half drunk.

  Even after twenty years he was not immune to California mornings. He supposed they must represent the pursuit of happiness to him.

  He closed his eyes and gripped the sink. His eyes were swollen. They want pennies, he thought. Pennies over them. He took a deep breath, swallowed and drew himself erect.

  Now go, he told himself.

  Adjoining the white kitchen was a small dining area. A little spiral sculpture of a stairway led down to the living room, where he had left his bags. He opened his suitcase across the sofa and rummaged through it for clean socks, underwear, a fresh shirt. Gathering up the clothes, he went to the spare bathroom and locked himself in against the fulsomeness of the morning. He turned on the shower, trying to calm himself with the familiar sound of the spray. His hands trembled. He was about to be afraid.

  Instantly he was sick, vomiting into the fixture, sweating, dysenteric. Purged for the moment, he sat down on the covered toilet seat, holding his head in his hands. Desolation.

  Of course he was poisoned. He had been poisoning himself for weeks.

  As he stepped into the shower, he caught sight of himself in a mirror on the door of the medicine cabinet. The thing itself. Unaccommodated man. He did not let his gaze linger.

  Standing under the veil of warm water, he began to recite. He made his voice large, comically orotund:

  “Thou art the thing itself,” he declared to the tiny white room. “Unaccommodated man is no more than such a poor bare forked animal as thou art.”

  He felt better then, but only for a while. A wave of regret had massed and was advancing on him; he had hardly time for breath before it ran him down. Bitterness—stifling, sour, the color of jaundice, gagging him.

  “Pour on,” he declaimed, “I will endure. On such a night …” He stopped and fell silent.

  At times like the one he was presently enduring, Walker, who was a screenwriter, would think of the days behind him as a litter of pictures. Light on the water, his wife at twenty, a sky, a city, his children at tender ages. One remembered image or another might move him almost to tears, then presently the emotion stirred would seem trivial and false, like some of the scenes he had written. His phantoms of conscience, his deepest regrets would appear petty, vulgar and ridiculous. These moods afforded Walker a vision of his life as trash—a soiled article, past repair. Observing things compose themselves into this bleak spectacle, Walker would wonder if he had ever had the slightest acquaintance with any kind of truth.

  He held fast to the safety bar in the shower stall. What we need here is a dream, he told himself, a little something to get by on. For the past few weeks, he had been getting by on alcohol and a ten-gram stash of cocaine and he had begun to feel as though he might die quite soon.

  Showered, he stepped out of the stall, dried himself on the guest towel and, avoiding the mirror, checked out the medicine cabinet. To his sharp delight, he found a little tube of Valium beside a bottle of vitamin B complex. The perfect hostess, he thought. A marvelous girl.

  When he had helped himself to a five-milligram tablet of Valium and some B complex, he stepped on the bathroom scale, closed the cabinet and was confronted once more with his own image. Men Walker’s age were held to be responsible for their faces, a disquieting notion. But his was hardly a mask of depravity. He drew himself erect and stared it down. Just a face, quite an ordinary one. Caught, he squinted to examine the creature in the glass. It was his business to know how he looked; he worked as an actor from time to time. He looked, he decided, like a man in his forties who drank. For most of his life he had appeared younger than his age. Perhaps it was just the light, he thought. He looked away and stepped on the bathroom scale.

  Walker found that he weighed just over one hundred and seventy pounds, which he thought not bad for one his height and build. He poked two fingers under his rib cage on the right side, checking for evidence of liver enlargement. Everything seemed as usual there.

  Stepping off the scale, he blundered into his reflection yet again. This time he was paralyzed with the fear of death. He turned away and leaned against the wall, closing his eyes, taking deep deliberate breaths. It took him some moments to calm himself. His inner resources were in some disarray, he thought. Valium would have to serve in the present emergency. Another line from
Lear came into his mind: “he hath ever but slenderly known himself.”

  For the first time in his articulate, thoroughly examined life, Walker wondered if that might not be true of him. Not possible, he decided. He knew himself well enough. It was the rest of things that gave him trouble.

  He dressed. Returning to the kitchen, he half filled a water glass with vodka, then poured clam and tomato juice mixture over it. Walking carefully down the stairway, he sprawled beside his suitcase on the light gray sofa and savored the cozy impeccability of Bronwen’s living room. When he had taken a few sips of his drink, he reached into the lining of the case and drew out the fold of pink notepaper that contained his ready-to-hand cocaine. He set the envelope on the coffee table in front of him but left it unopened.

  How well she lives, he thought, for one so young. He himself was homeless and had been so for more than a month.

  Walker worked in the film industry, having come into it seventeen years before as an actor. He had gone through the Hagen-Berghof studios with the thought of learning the theater and becoming a playwright. A few years later he had written the book and lyrics for a very serious and ambitious musical version of Jurgen and been astonished to see it fail utterly within a week. There had never been a play and he had come to realize that there would never be. Walker made his living—quite a good one—chiefly as author, adjuster or collaborator on film scripts. During the past summer, he had been acting again, on stage for the first time in years as Lear. Over the years he had advanced in station within the old black fairy tale. At different phases of his life he had played Cornwall’s servant, then Cornwall, then Kent, finally the King. He was still up on Lear-ness, chockablock with cheerless dark and deadly mutters, little incantations from the text. They were not inappropriate to his condition; during the run of the show his wife had left him.

  Drink in hand, he went up the stairway again and stood just inside the bedroom door, looking in at the young woman. Such a nice house, he thought. His jaw was tight with anger. Such a pretty girl.

  He leaned in the doorway and watched her. She lay facing him, her red-blond hair partly covering her eyes, her lips parted over long cowgirl’s teeth. She slept on, or pretended to. A deep blue silk sheet was gathered about her naked body; she was sheathed in it.

  Bronwen was a writer, a midwestern girl honed smooth by early success and the best of California. Observing, or rather ogling, her at rest, Walker was stirred in equal measure by lust and resentment.

  Basically, they disliked each other. They were both, in their diverse ways, performers, comics; much of their companionable humor turned on mutual scorn.

  She had written three short novels, witty, original and immensely pleasurable to read. Bronwen was nothing if not funny. Each of her novels had been received with great enthusiam by reviewers and by the public; she had become famous enough for Walker, to his deep inward shame, to take a vulgar satisfaction in his liaison with her. She was intelligent and coldhearted, a spiky complex of defenses mined with vaults of childish venom and hastily buried fears. Kicked when she was a pup, Walker would say behind her back. The game they played, one of the games, was that she knew his number. That his stratagems to please, his manner of being amusing, the political sincerities that remained to him were petty complaints to which she was immune. Others might take him seriously—not she, the hard case, worldly-wise.

  He ran his eyes over her long frame and wondered if she knew he knew about the pistol she kept in the wicker chest beneath her bed, wrapped in a scarf with her Ritalin tablets. Or whether she knew his number well enough to imagine the measure of his rage, or the murderous fantasies that assailed him—of destroying her, transforming her supple youth to offal, trashing it.

  He was immediately stricken with remorse and horror. Because he liked her, really, after all. He must, he thought; there had to be more than perversity. She was funny; he enjoyed her wit and her high spirits. And she liked him—he was sure. She could speak with him as with no other friend; she respected his work, she had said so. It occurred to him suddenly how little any of this had to do with the terms of the heart as he had once understood them; love, caring, loyalty. It was just a random coupling, a highbrow jelly roll. Might she imagine that violent fantasies beset him with herself as their object? She might well. She was very experienced and knowing; she had his number. And the Lord knew what fantasies she spun round him.

  Back in the living room, he found his wallet on the sofa where he had been sitting. It was thick with bills, jammed in haphazard. He remembered then, having almost forgotten it in his malaise, that he had won a great deal of money at Santa Anita the day before. He had gone with Bronwen; it was a glorious day and they had lunched at the clubhouse. Walker had scored on the double, a perfecta and an eight-to-one winner. His take was over a thousand dollars, the largest amount of money he had ever won at the track. It had paid for dinner at the San Gabriel Ranch and it would pay a week’s rent at the Chateau. He had been living at the Chateau Marmont since the closing of Lear, having rented his house in Santa Monica. He did not care to be alone there.

  Walker caressed the disorderly wad between thumb and forefinger. The touch of the wrinkled bright new bills gave him a faint feeling of disgust. He took out a hundred, examining the lacy engraved illumination at its border. Then, on an impulse, he rolled the bill into a cylinder, laid out a line of his coke and blew it. Nice. He sniffed and rubbed his eyes. Confidence. A little surge for the road. Immediately it occurred to him that in the brief course of his waking day he had consumed Valium, alcohol and cocaine.

  We need a plan, he thought. A plan and a dream, somewhere to go. Dreams were business to Walker, they were life. Like salt, like water. Lifeblood.

  He touched the tip of his index finger to the surface of the coffee table, capturing the residue of cocaine that remained there, and rubbed it on his gum.

  Go, he thought. It seemed to him that if he did not go at once death would find him there. He stood up and packed his suitcase, leaving the small fold of cocaine on the table as a house present. He had plenty more in the case.

  Stacked on the mantel above the fireplace were Bronwen’s three novels; Walker found that each was engagingly inscribed to him. The drill was for him to take them and leave a note. He turned the topmost book to the back jacket and looked at Bronwen’s picture. Her eyes were fixed on the middle distance, her lips were slightly parted, her cheekbones high and handsome, her chin dimpled. She looked hip and sympathetic and fingerlickin’ good. He placed the book back on the mantelpiece and left it there. Then he put on his sunglasses, picked up his bags and went forth into the morning.

  As he drove the freeway, KFAC played Couperin, the Leçons de Ténèbres.

  Walker thought of himself as a survivor. He knew how to endure, and what it was that got you through. There was work. There were the people you loved and the people who loved you. There were, he had always believed, a variety of inner resources that the veteran survivor might fall back on; about these he was no longer so sure. The idea of inner resources seemed fatuous mysticism that morning. He had drugged and drunk too much, watched too many smoky reels of interior montage to command any inner resources. It was difficult enough to think straight.

  As for work—after weeks of living on his nerves it would take nearly as much time of disciplined drying out before he could begin to face a job. And love—love was fled. Gone to London. The thought of her there and himself abandoned made his blood run cold. He put it out of his mind, as he had trained himself to do since Seattle. He would deal with it later, he would do something about it. When he was straightened out. A dream, he thought. That’s what we need.

  He left the freeway at Sunset and parked in Marmont Lane behind the hotel. At the desk he bought the morning’s L.A. Times and Variety. He rode up to the sixth floor in the company of a famous German actor and two stoned young women.

  The air in his apartment held a faint scent of stale alcohol and undone laundry. He opened the leaded bedroom
windows to a tepid oily breeze. Below him were the swimming pool and the row of bungalows that flanked it. Dead leaves floated on the surface of the dark green water. The pool gardens smelled of car exhaust and eucalyptus.

  This time it was not going to be easy to get straight. He would have to go about it very skillfully. Above all he would have to want to. There would have to be a reason, and Walker knew that inquiry into his reasons for surviving would bring him into dangerous territory. The world in general, he had conceded at last, required neither him nor his works. His wife was gone—for good as far as he knew; his children were grown. He was going to have to pull out for his own reasons, alone and unrequired, in a hotel in West Hollywood. The taste of death and ruin rose in his throat again.

  He decided not to think about it. In order to postpone thinking about it he opened his suitcase, took out the tubular talcum container that held his cocaine and tapped out a small mound of the stuff onto the smooth dark marble of his bedside lamp table. He did it up with the hundred-dollar bill. Fine, he thought. For the moment he had obviated motivation; he was the thing itself again. The thing itself shortly came to self-awareness in the kitchen pouring out a shot of vodka. Perplexed, Walker looked at the drink he had prepared. He sniffed, drew himself erect and emptied the glass into the sink drain. He had made a luncheon engagement with his agent and keeping the appointment was all he owned of purpose. He must at least postpone the next drink until lunch. A small gesture toward renewal, nothing ambitious.

  Drinkless, he went into his living room, turned the television set on, turned it off again and began to pace the length of the room.

  This is where we begin, he told himself. We reinvent ourself. We put one foot in front of the other and we go on.

  In a moment he went back to the bedroom and did another line. Then he leaned back on the bed and stared through the balcony windows at the still surface of the pool five stories below.