Children of Light

by Robert Stone

“I want to watch her go around again on the tape. I want her sitting up straight, with her head up. I want the parasol in one hand, touching the floor. With her other hand she can hold the pole. Maybe. Well see.”

  “Lee’s here,” Hueffer told his director.

  “Well, I’ll talk to her now. We’ll watch the shot again while she gets into costume.” He watched his assistant walk back toward the setup. “Eric!”

  The A.D. turned, squinting.

  “Anybody heard anything about Walker?”

  “He’s supposed to be coming down,” Hueffer said, “but he wasn’t on the plane with Charlie.”

  “Good,” Walter said. “The guy’s bad luck,” he told his father.

  “He’s a contentious drunk and that’s never good luck. Charlie—with his reporters and writers—he doesn’t know what’s good for his picture. In my day we’d have either kept a guy like Walker off the set or we’d have kept him busy with rewrites. Don’t you think he might upset Verger?”

  “I think Lu Anne might extend with him around,” the younger Drogue said. “It’s a calculated risk. Anyway, I don’t want to fight with Charlie over it.”

  “Give him to Lowndes,” old Drogue said. “Give them each other.”

  Lu Anne sat in front with the driver, Lowndes and Bill Bly in the back seat. The big stuntman’s presence had a subduing effect on Lowndes. It was a presence that was straightforward and physical and created about itself an atmosphere unsympathetic to leading questions and intimidation. Lu Anne was glad to have him along. They drove in silence over a dusty road lined with giant eucalyptus. On the way they passed Jack Best trudging flat-footed through the dust. When the driver slowed for him, he waved them on. Best’s face was red and he appeared to be talking to himself.

  “Is he all right?” Lowndes asked Lu Anne.

  “He’s fine,” Bill Bly told him.

  At the end of the road was the great laager of trailers and light trucks that marked the borders of the Grand Isle set.

  In the center of an enormous clearing stood a grove of live oaks that had been trucked in from the Tamaulipas coast. They stood beside this alien shore looking as natural, as firmly rooted and grave in authority as the ancient trees of her home place, garlanded, like those, in beards of Spanish moss. The open ground between the grove and the beach was covered in anthemis vines that seemed to bear the same white and yellow flowers as Lu Anne’s native camomile but lacked the apple fragrance. This air was too thin, she thought, to bear the scents of home.

  Getting out of the car, she stood and looked over the scene. In the strange light it had a sinister magic. Dongan Lowndes came and stood beside her. Bly stayed in the car with the door open.

  “Thanks, Billy,” she said. He closed the door and was driven away.

  “Weird, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Make you feel funny?”

  “They always do,” she said, “these tricks. I think I like it. I think it puts me in the working vein.”

  In the center of it all, beside the thickest oak, stood a small antique trolley, looking a bit like a San Francisco cable car. The trolley rested on a narrow-gauge track that ran a long parabolic route between the oak grove and a row of bathhouses at the edge of the dunes. Two handsome chestnut horses were harnessed to the car. An elderly, ebony-skinned man, wearing a period derby and a faded, collarless striped cotton shirt, sat on the driver’s platform. Joy McIntyre swung loosely from the trolley bar, grasping it one-handed. She was wearing an exact replica of the Gibson girl costume that Lu Anne herself would wear for the scene.

  “Hi, Joy,” Lu Anne called. “Hi, Joe Gates.”

  “I’m Judy Garland,” Joy said happily. She leaned forward from the bar, balancing on the edge of the trolley, waved and displayed the eagerest and most brightly toothed of Judy Garland smiles. “When you have a costume, you can be Judy Garland too.”

  Joe Gates half turned in his buckboard and tugged on the bell cord beside him.

  “Zing, zing, zing went my heartstrings,” he sang to them, in flatted hipster tones.

  “Joe Gates was actually in Meet Me in St. Louis,” Joy said. “Right, Joe?”

  “Naw,” Joe Gates said. “That was another man.”

  Camera crew were struggling to mount the Panaflex aboard the trolley and keep it fixed in place. Joe Gates climbed down from his perch and one of the Mexican grips took up the team’s bridle. Lu Anne turned and saw young Walter Drogue approaching.

  Lowndes, standing next to her, was holding her copy of the script. She took it from him quickly but not before Drogue saw.

  “Don’t read the script, Lowndes,” Drogue said. “You’ll spoil the end for yourself. I mean, give us a chance, huh?”

  “I want to see what one looks like,” Lowndes told the director. “I wanted to read what she wrote in it.”

  “I understand,” Drogue said smoothly. “Now if you’d like to watch—and I’m sure you would—you could get a fine view from the back of that pickup behind the camera.”

  He directed Lowndes’s attention to a red Ford truck near the clearing.

  Lowndes ignored him.

  “Work well,” he told Lu Anne. She smiled at him as he walked away, a smile she knew would encourage his quickening attentions. She had no particular idea why she had done it.

  “Work well?” Drogue demanded. “Who the fuck does he think he is?”

  Lu Anne helped herself to another stick of sugarless gum.

  “I know his type, Walter. He’s what a former husband of mine would call a moldy fig.”

  “And you have a weakness for that type?”

  She shrugged. “I’m indifferent. I believe that type has a weakness for me.”

  Drogue stared at her. “What former husband?”

  “Oh,” Lu Anne said, “the clarinet player.”

  He took her by the arm and they walked together toward the trolley.

  “Look at this light,” he said. “What does it do for you?”

  “It makes me sad,” she said.

  “Come on,” he told her, affecting an excited tremolo, “this is El Greco light. It’s holy.”

  She looked at the sky, hoping to catch his excitement. It looked to her like late-summer weather at home. Edna, she thought, would know the oppression of that yellow-gray dog end of summer light. But the air was different where they were. It was the West, and not old Pierre Pelican land. Even in famished Baja there was an edge of hope to the air.

  “We’ve just done Joe Gates on his buckboard,” Drogue said. “Atmospheric, sinister as shit. I mean,” he said, “the dude’s been a millionaire half his life. Give him his cue and he’ll give you three hundred years of servitude and lonesome roads.”

  Lu Anne smiled for him.

  “Joe was in Salt of the Earth, you know that? Dad brought him in. He played the Black Worker, or as they used to say, the Negro Worker, and let me tell you, the Negro Worker was bad! This big young hulk of a guy—huge pecs, chest like a fucking draft horse. He didn’t give a shit about blacklists, he was rich in real estate.”

  Toby Blakely, the cinematographer, walked up to join them.

  “Turned out,” Drogue went on, “they never even noticed him in Salt. He worked through the whole decade. He played weepy singing convicts on death row, he played old wimpy butlers, the whole shtick. But you should have seen him as the Negro Worker.”

  Blakely took off his baseball cap, a half-servile gesture.

  “If we’re gonna use this light we’d best be doing it, boss. It’ll be hell to match and I’m afraid there’s a storm coming.”

  “That’s not possible,” Drogue said. “I’m assured it’s not possible.”

  “Well,” Blakely drawled cautiously, “they do have these out-of-season storms, Walter. They’re called chubascos.”

  “Well, fuck that,” Drogue said. “ ’Cause I gotta match that light. And I’m gonna personally piss on the Virgin of Guadalupe if it rains on my picture.”

  “Th
at’s not helping, Walter,” Lu Anne said. Lowndes had put his glasses on; he was watching them from beside the truck.

  “Now listen,” Walter said to her. He walked in step with her and they performed a wide paseo around the sweating figure of Toby Blakely. “We’re going to do great things with this trolley ride to the beach. We have a wonderful spooky light and we know how to use it. Then if the light holds—if we have any kind of sunset at all—she gets to walk on water.”

  Lu Anne said nothing. She had been hoping to save Edna’s walk down the beach for a special day, even perhaps for the last day of location. But they were shooting out of sequence for reasons of economy. There were at least ten days of filming on the Grand Isle set.

  “Do you mind doing both those scenes today?”

  “I can do them both,” Lu Anne said. “They go together.”

  Drogue stopped, facing the trolley, arresting Lu Anne in mid-stride, clutching her arm.

  “Look at that light, kid.”

  “Yeah,” Lu Anne said. The light frightened her.

  “So tell me—if you were taking your last trolley ride, how would you do it? I mean, would you do it standing up holding the bar like Joy or would you sit?”

  Lu Anne thought about it.

  “Maybe I should try it both ways. I sort of think sitting. You know, a little stunned. Standing, it’s like Queen Christina.”

  Drogue smiled. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “I think what you want is an anti–Judy Garland, right, Walter? I’ll take care of that for you.”

  “The question is sitting or standing and for me it’s a question of composition,” Drogue said. “I’ll get another tape of Joy on the trolley while you sit up here. I’ll watch the tapes, you think about it.”

  “When the time comes,” Lu Anne said, “we’ll know.”

  “Hey, I like the way you think, kid.”

  Lu Anne watched him walk off in his crouched, bent-backed scurry. His movements were always startling. He was given to sudden violent gestures that continually caught her off guard and made her feel like cringing.

  As she watched, he pivoted without warning, as though he were dodging the swoop of a predatory bird.

  “Tell Frank you love it,” he said. With a limp outstretched arm he indicated the faked trees and the trolley, the whole artificial world they had made there. Frank Carnahan was the production designer. “Tell him you feel like you’re back in the bayou.” She nodded. On the way to her trailer she saw Carnahan headed toward the beach that would be their next location.

  “Frank!” Going up to him, she tried a little variation on Walter’s walk. “Hey, I love it,” she told the designer. “I feel like I’m back in the bayou.”

  Carnahan looked pleased. His breath smelled strongly of rum. All designers were alcoholic Irishmen; it seemed to be traditional. The smell of liquor made her want a drink. Or something. Carnahan smiled with pleasure.

  “Don’t think there isn’t a story behind it, Lee.”

  As Carnahan unfolded the story behind it Lu Anne’s eye roamed the location in search of people from whom she might score. She had already solicited Joy and Jack Glenn, the young actor who played Robert Lebrun; both had disclaimed possession. Bill Bly, who stood stroking one of the trolley horses, was always a prospect. But Bly and Lu Anne had a past which she did not care at that moment to reexamine; and she knew he had been appointed to oversee her secretly. George Buchanan, a middle-aged actor who played Alcée Robin, was not in sight. A few years earlier George had been able to produce anything conceivable at an hour’s notice but he had become a family man and joined A.A.

  “So, Christ, I thought,” Carnahan was telling her in his broad Pawtucket accent, “jeez, Spanish moss, it’s a goddamn tree disease. They’ll never let me get away with it. I thought we’d have to fake it …”

  Lowndes kept watching her. He had opened his shirt to the sun, thrust out his pale chest and assumed a somewhat fascistoid stance. This, Lu Anne thought, might be a modified variation of the Country Come-on, which she had seen performed quite often enough. Cocaine, est conditioning, childhood trauma—who could tell what such a posture reflected? In any case, there was no chance of asking him for drugs. He was the enemy.

  “So I sez,” Carnahan said, “don’t shit me, I sez. I seen this shit growing on trees at Rosarita Beach. Of course,” he said with a burst of emphysemic laughter, “I ain’t never even been to Rosarita Beach.”

  She came right in on the laugh. “That’s too much, Frank,” she giggled. “Hey, is it true that Gordon Walker is coming down?” She squared her shoulders, straightened up and leaned her fists on her hips, having a short shot at Lowndes’s stance to see what it would feel like on her.

  “I dunno,” Carnahan said. “Who is he?”

  “The writer.”

  “Aw,” Carnahan said, “I dunno. He didn’t fly in with Charlie and the dailies.”

  She felt relief. Ever since the call she had been waiting for him with combined joy and anxiety. Better that I rest, she thought. That evening, she decided, she would take a little of her medicine as prescribed and sleep. That was the purpose of the operation after all. That her scenes be played with clarity and the right moves and the right timing.

  Things were under control. The landscape was a bit overbright, that was all. She was not saying inappropriate things, and the only voices she heard were concealed under the wind or in the sound of the sea and she knew them for illusion and paid them no mind.

  Vera Ricutti, the wardrobe mistress, overtook her on the way to the trailer.

  “I just been looking at these seals,” she said excitedly. “There must have been dozens. These darling little seals,” she exclaimed, “with their little faces sticking up out of the water.”

  “Oh, I would love to see them,” Lu Anne enthused. “I hope they come back.”

  “So cute!” Vera said as they went into Lu Anne’s trailer. “You gotta see them.”

  The assistant director’s voice sounded across the laager. “Joy, please? Driver? Everybody ready? I want quiet, the director wants to hear the sound on this. Right,” Hueffer shouted. His voice was turning hoarse. “Quiet! Roll! Action!”

  Vera closed the door of Lu Anne’s air-conditioned trailer. Lu Anne herself sat down before her mirror, wiping her brow with Kleenex. Everything in the mirror was shipshape. She felt ready to work.

  As she undressed, Vera held up a light-colored corset for her inspection.

  “See what we got for you? This goes on first.”

  “My God,” Lu Anne said, lifting her arms for the fit, “is this thing wool?”

  “It’s a synthetic. This is the same one you had on at the fittings except we made it out of lighter stuff and put a zipper on it. But the real ones, the ones they wore then—they were real wool. This one was for tennis and jumping around in.”

  “I can’t believe they went around in wool corsets in Louisiana in summer.”

  “So they shouldn’t see your bod sweat, that was why they had it. No underarm stain and your dress couldn’t stick. We tried this number out on Joy and it photographs O.K. Anyway, we got another dozen white dresses if you do sweat it up.”

  “I’m a sweater,” Lu Anne said when she was zipped in. “But I mean, how could they play tennis in woolen corsets?”

  “India,” Vera said. “Africa. The white ladies wore woolen corsets. The locals, I guess they got to let their jugs dangle.”

  The door opened and Josette Darré, the hairdresser, came in. There was a thin film of frost between Lu Anne and Josette; they never spoke except about the business at hand. Josette was a sullen Parisian hippie. She had rebuffed Lu Anne’s French with a pout and an uncomprehending shrug and that, for Lu Anne, had been that.

  Josette stood by while Lu Anne got into her dress and stood before the mirror, letting Vera tie her loops behind and straighten her hem. Then she sat down to let Josette work on her hair, making faces at herself in the glass.

  “Lucky locals,” she
said, wiping her forehead again.

  There was a knock at the door and Joe Ricutti, who was the makeup man, came into the trailer. He was laughing.

  “That McIntyre kid is a barrel of laughs,” he rasped. “She’s in her own musical.”

  “I don’t know,” Vera said in a weary tone. Vera was Joe’s wife; they worked together most of the time. “Where do they find them?”

  Josette stepped aside; Joe Ricutti stepped in behind Lu Anne’s chair. Lu Anne raised an upturned hand and the makeup man squeezed it. They made small talk and gossiped while Joe gently held her chin and turned her face from side to side, examining her profile in the mirror. His fingertips delicately probed beneath her bones; in his free hand he held a makeup brush. Lu Anne sat, a prisoner, listening to the trolley outside and watching as Joe found the soft spots around her jaw, the lines to be disguised. She examined the stringiness at the base of her throat and it made her think of a dry creek bottom—cracks, dry sticks, desiccation where it had been serene, smooth and cool and pleasing.

  There was a Friend in the room. I don’t like her, it said, the way she look. Lu Anne hushed it silently.

  “I think,” she told Ricutti, “I think the kid’s a little long in the tooth for this one.”

  Joe sang a few bars of protest. “Whaddaya talkin’ about? You look good! Look at yourself!”

  He turned her head to reflect her profile and ran his finger from her forehead to the tip of her chin. “I mean look at that! That’s terrific.”

  Gazing sidewise, she saw in the mirror Josette’s expressionless eyes.

  Made-up, she sat for Josette’s last applications. Vera Ricutti brought forth a straw boater from one of several identical boxes and ceremoniously placed it on Lu Anne’s head. The Ricuttis drew back in admiration. Josette stood to one side, arms folded. Lu Anne caught a scent of lavender sachet. She saw the inhabited mask of Edna Pontellier before her.

  The Drogues were watching Joy McIntyre ride her trolley on their tape monitor. Now, instead of standing and clinging to the pole, she sat on the car’s wooden bench. Her back was ramrod straight, her chin raised so that the weird light, refracted through overhanging tree boughs, played dramatically on her face, which was partly shadowed by her straw hat.