Children of Light

by Robert Stone

  She let her song rise again and spread out her arms. In Louisiana the old black people called that kind of singing a bajo or a banjo song, a homesick blues for where you’ve never been, which for them was Africa but for her was God only knows.

  Be there, Lu Anne sang. Be there, Sweet Jesus. Be there.

  She leaned back in the lounger, exhausted. When she turned to the mirror she saw her own secret eyes. No other person except her children and the Long Friends had ever seen them. She had used them for Rosalind, but so disguised that no one looking, however closely, could know what it was they were seeing in her face. None of her children had secret eyes.

  She got to her feet, transfixed by what she saw in the mirror. The shock made her see stars as though she had been struck in the face. She watched the secret-eyed image in the glass open its mouth; she tried to look away.

  Clusters of hallucination lilacs sprang up everywhere, making a second frame for the mirror, sprouting from between her legs. In her terror she called on God.

  Suddenly the place was filled with ugly light, sunlight at once dingy and harsh. Trash light. Josette was standing in the open doorway, wide-eyed and pale. She took a step backward, her lip was trembling. It was the first time Lu Anne had ever seen the Frenchwoman show anything other than unsmiling composure.

  Look, you little bitch! Lu Anne thought. Then she was not sure whether she had not said it aloud. Look at my secret eyes!

  Vera Ricutti and her husband were behind Josette; Vera had a costume over her arm, a gray cotton garment and a blue bandana. The Ricuttis looked up at Lu Anne with something that might be reverence.

  “What’s wrong, kid?” Vera Ricutti asked.

  “I was prepping,” Lu Anne said. The accusatory malice and disgust she saw in Josette’s eyes made her feel sick.

  “You were screaming!” the girl cried. She turned to the Ricuttis for confirmation. “She was screaming in there!”

  “I was singing,” Lu Anne said quietly.

  Josette looked up at her with a twisted triumphant smile; Vera Ricutti was holding her by the arm.

  “Don’t tell me!” she shouted at Lu Anne. “You were screaming.”

  “I was prepping.”

  The woman shrugged and grunted.

  Joe Ricutti came forward and spoke quietly to her and she walked away.

  “We’ll take care of it,” Joe said in his gravelly voice. “We’ll talk to Eric. I mean, you don’t have to take that from her.”

  Lu Anne stood in the trailer doorway, her beach robe undone, leaning one elbow on her wrist and chewing her little finger.

  “Shit,” she said.

  Vera stepped up and gently urged her back inside.

  “So you were screaming. You got a right.”

  “Absolutely,” Joe Ricutti said.

  Walter Drogue and his father were walking from their trailer to the beach. The old man wore a blue bathing suit that scarcely concealed his privates and a gondolier’s striped shirt.

  “You think you have to be smart to direct pictures?” the old man asked his son. “Bullshit. Some of the biggest assholes you ever met are immortal.”

  “I never said you had to be smart,” his son replied. “I said it was useful. I was thinking of my own case.”

  “Ford,” the old man said. “A born political director. An Irishman with the eye of a German Romantic. Peasant slyness. He never got in trouble here and he wouldn’t have got in trouble over there like Eisenstein.”

  “You’re lucky it was here you got in trouble,” young Drogue told his father. “Over there they would have just shot your ass and no fancy speeches.”

  At the beach Blakely and Hueffer were waiting for them. The Chapman Titan had been driven onto its track.

  “Check out the sky,” Blakely said.

  Old Drogue went off to settle himself in a folding chair beneath a beach umbrella. Drogue junior, Blakely and Eric Hueffer looked at the horizon.

  The line of storm cloud seemed to have risen some thirty degrees, so that the horizon line was a convergence of two gold-flecked tones of blue. The sun’s intensity was just beginning to fade.

  “If those clouds will stay where they are when the sun sets,” Blakely said, “we’re gonna have us one fuckin’ humdinger of a sunset.”

  “I’m God,” Walter Drogue told his assistants. “I still the restless wave. I command the sun. Where’s Joy?”

  “Joy,” Eric Hueffer called, and Joy McIntyre stepped out from inside the nearest bathhouse door. She wore a form-fitting gray cotton bathing suit. A blue bandana was tied around her head.

  “Want to watch a tape?” Hueffer asked.

  “No,” Drogue said. “I want to watch her walk.”

  A pair of grips were summoned to lower the arm of the crane; Drogue climbed aboard the camera turret and was weighted in.

  “Joy!” Hueffer shouted. “Got your marks?”

  “Yeah,” Joy said.

  They weighted Toby Blakely in beside his leader.

  “Action!” Drogue shouted, and the mounted camera retreated before Joy’s advance down the beach, hauled along by the grips at their guide ropes. Young Drogue peered through the camera’s eye, his baseball cap reversed like a catcher’s.

  “O.K.,” he said, when he was satisfied.

  The grips swung the Chapman’s arm to its original position and brought Blakely and young Drogue to earth. Joy leaned on one extended arm against the side of the bathhouse. Drogue, Hueffer and Blakely hunkered down near the water’s edge.

  “She’s so fucking beautiful it’s gross,” Drogue said. “She comes out of there and you just think: I want to fuck her. You lose your sense of proportion.” He glanced over toward where his father sat and saw the old man’s glance fixed on the comely stand-in.

  “Lee has a lot more dignity,” Blakely said. “And a pretty sexy frame for a woman with two or three kids. Or even more.”

  The three of them walked over to where Joy was standing and looked her up and down.

  “I like this bathing suit,” Hueffer said.

  Drogue patted Joy’s shoulder, and seized a piece of her bathing suit between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s cotton. To be accurate, it should be wool, but we figured fuck it. So,” he said, pointing to Joy, “as not to cause unnecessary discomfort to our personnel.”

  Joy smiled gratefully.

  “Actually,” Drogue told his associates, “we’re cheating a lot with this suit. This thing is circa 1912. If we gave ’em the real Gay Nineties article this scene would look like Mack Sennett.”

  “I should think this ’un might be good for a few laughs,” Joy said. The three men looked at her sternly.

  “When you take it off, doll,” Drogue told her, “no one will be laughing.”

  “Crikey,” Joy said. “Take it off?”

  “Don’t you look at the script?” Drogue asked her. “Of course you take it off.”

  “Crikey,” Joy said.

  “Miss Verger is taking her suit off. It’s in the script. If she can do it, you can do it.”

  “I suppose,” Joy said doubtfully.

  Drogue turned to Hueffer and drew him aside. Blakely went along with them.

  “What I need to know here is how it’s going to look when she takes that suit off. It’s tight, she’ll have to wriggle—O.K., we don’t want a striptease. We’ll probably cut to the suit falling away but I’m not sure how far into the disrobing we want to go. So let’s roll tape on this shot—have her come down the beach to her marks, take the bandana off and toss it. Then let her get out of that suit as gracefully as she can and drop it aside. See if she can start by raising her right arm and baring her right breast.”

  “Good,” Hueffer said. Drogue reacted to his approval with a slow double take. “Do you want her to go into the water?”

  “No time for that. We’re shooting for sunset and that means three takes if we’re lucky. Otherwise we have to do it again tomorrow.”

  “If it doesn’t rain,” Hueffer said. />
  “Yeah, yeah,” Drogue said. “Hurry up. Go tell her what she has to do.”

  “I’m thinking eroticism,” Drogue said to Blakely. “I’m thinking sacrifice. Motherhood. Yes?”

  “Right,” Blakely said.

  “I’m thinking human sacrifice. Madonnahood.”

  “Tithood?”

  “Tithood too.”

  They watched Eric discuss the situation with Joy McIntyre. Eric was speaking enthusiastically and at some length. Joy was pouting.

  “Look at the ass on the little bitch,” Drogue said angrily. “Christ almighty.”

  “Well,” Blakely said, “don’t get pissed, boss.”

  Late in the afternoon, as the highway curved down from the Cerro Encantada, Walker found himself driving within sight of the sea. He pulled over at the next turnoff, got out of the car and walked to the end of a promontory from which he could see the ocean and the trail that lay ahead of him. The sun was low and losing its fire, the ocean a cool darkening blue that made him shiver in the desert heat. Between the ridge on which he stood and the sea lay the Honda Valley. It was every variety of green—delicate pastel in the circular irrigated cotton fields, silver-green in the stands of eucalyptus, a sinister reptilian emerald along the base of its canyon walls. Miles away, perhaps as much as an hour of cautious driving over the tortuous highway, a paved road descended in figure-of-eight switchbacks to the valley. He could make out the hotel buildings. From where he stood they seemed to rest precariously in the folds of a red table rock that commanded the coastal plain.

  As his gaze swept the valley, he saw sharp glints of reflected sunlight from the seaside edge of one of the eucalyptus groves. Before a line of wooden structures, tiny human figures went to and fro along the shore. The sunlight was striking silver-paper reflectors, metal and glass. It took him a moment to understand that he was seeing The Awakening unit at work.

  There was a copy of Peterson’s Western Birds and a pair of binoculars behind the rear seat of the Buick; Walker’s wife was a birdwatcher and he had driven her car to Seattle. He took the glasses, walked back to the edge of the ridge and picked out the unit. He saw a woman in an old-fashioned gray bathing suit walking toward the water. As he watched, the woman stopped short and sauntered back to the spot from which she had begun.

  Walker watched her start again, noted the camera crane on its track and the figures on the turret. A sound man attended the woman like an acolyte, carrying his boom aloft. He saw the woman remove a bandana from around her head and toss it to the sand. He saw her walk on, remove her bathing suit and stand naked and golden in the sun. He was seeing, he supposed, what he had come to see.

  It was very strange to see them as he did—tiny distant figures at the edge of an ocean, acting out a vision compounded of his obsessions and emotions. He had never been so in love, he thought, as he was with the woman who stood naked on the beach in front of that camera and several dozen cold-eyed souls. It was as though she were there for him, for something that was theirs. He felt at the point of understanding the process in which his life was bound, as though the height on which he stood was the perspective he had always lacked. Will I understand it all now, he wondered, understand it with the eye, like a painting?

  The sense of discovery, of imminent insight excited him. He was dizzy; he checked his footing on the uneven ground, his closeness to the edge. Her down there, himself on a rock miles away—that’s poetry, he thought. The thing was to get it straight, to understand.

  He saw them dress her again, saw her walk, lose the bandana, then the bathing suit in what, from where he stood, read as a series of effortless moves. Tears came to his eyes. But perhaps it was not poetry, he thought. Only movies.

  The seed of meaning he had touched between his teeth began to slip away. He was struck by the silence between their place and his; he strained for the director’s voice, the sound of the sea. Gulls were what he heard, and wind in the mesquite.

  What had it been? Almost joy, he thought, a long-lost thing, something pleasurable for its own sake. It had slipped away.

  Fuck it, he thought. I got something almost as good.

  He went back to his car, looked up and down the road to see that he would not be surprised and managed with some difficulty to do a few lines. Some of his cocaine blew onto the car seat and he had to brush it away and see it scatter on the wind.

  It had been just like a dream, he thought, the same disappearing resolution, the same awakening to the same old shit. It wasn’t there. Or was hardly there—a moment’s poetry, a moment’s movies. Hardly enough there to count, not for the likes of him.

  The coke was no help. It had been something like a daydream, provoked by the smell of the wind and the dizzying height and his impatience to see her; no drug would bring it back. Rather, the drugs gave him the jitters—made him feel exposed, out there in the open beside the road, pursued and out of breath. When he went out to the ridge again and fixed his binoculars on the naked figure he saw it was not Lu Anne but a younger woman who somewhat resembled her. There’s your poetry, he thought. Your movies.

  The Drogues, Blakely and Hueffer crowded into the director’s trailer to watch tapes of Joy’s undressing.

  When the screen showed her stripping, a reverent silence fell over the group.

  “What was the big fuss?” old Drogue asked.

  “She bitched. She didn’t want to show her ass.”

  “Did you tell her that Lu Anne would?”

  “I told her. She had the nerve to tell me her problem was the Mexicans. She said, ‘They take it wrong.’ ” He mimicked her accent and demeanor. “ ‘They take it wrong,’ she said.”

  A murmur of disapproval arose in the dark trailer. They all sat quite still, watching Joy naked on the screen.

  “A frame like that,” the old man said, “and she never took off her pants for a camera? Hard to believe.”

  Young Drogue froze the frame.

  “That’s going to be broken up,” he said. “It does turn out to be a striptease.”

  “Remember,” Hueffer said, “with Lee it won’t be as flamboyant.”

  Drogue was thoughtful for a moment.

  “I think the opposite,” young Drogue said. “Joy’s so built and busty and dumb that you kind of … the thing gets this wild unpredictable quality. You don’t know what the hell’s happening but it’s weird and it turns you on. With Joy I might use it.”

  “The kid does something for a camera,” Blakely said. “No question.”

  “She’ll be my angel,” old Drogue said.

  “With Lu Anne, you might have her bare her breast and it’s tragic. You don’t want to see her undress. She’ll look humiliated and anorexic and crazy. The whole ending goes limp and we’re dead.”

  “He’s right for once,” old Drogue told Hueffer. “You’re wrong.”

  “Let’s do this in one take, guys!” young Drogue shouted. He motioned Eric to his side. “When you get Lu Anne on her mark, Eric, clear the set.”

  “Why?” Heuffer asked.

  “The Mexicans,” young Drogue told him. “They take it wrong.”

  Joe Ricutti had set up shop under a beach umbrella beside the bathhouse. He sponged and powdered Lu Anne’s face and gave her a neck rub. Josette worked on her hair, no more sulkily distant than was usual. The gaffer and best boy were winding cable for an arc. Lu Anne had a look at the sun and picked up her worn copy of Kate Chopin’s novel. The wording was a solo Liebestodt, death as liberation.

  Edna had found her old bathing suit still hanging, faded upon its accustomed peg, Chopin had written.

  When Josette finished with her hair, Lu Anne stood up.

  “I’m going to walk it through,” she told Ricutti, and reading as she walked, set out for the bathhouse.

  She put it on, leaving her clothing in the bathhouse. But when she was beside the sea, absolutely alone, she cast the unpleasant prickling garments from her, and for the first time in her life, she stood naked in the open air, at the me
rcy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited it.

  “Clear the set, please,” Eric Hueffer intoned through his megaphone. “If you’re not working, we don’t want you on the set. Clear the set, everybody, please.” The Peruvian continuity girl made the announcement in Spanish, for the Mexicans.

  Lu Anne leaned her head against the side of the bathhouse and thought of Edna naked in the open air for the first time. How sad it was, she thought. There was no way to film it. She had never thought of herself like Edna, but some things, she thought, they’re the same for everyone. A little Edna in all of us.

  Naked for the first time, the open air. In the heat of the day it should be. A beach on the Gulf, midday, the water just cool, the sun hot on your body, the wind so still you can smell your own skin.

  She finds out who she is and it’s too much and she dies. Yes, Lu Anne thought, I know about that. I can do that, me.

  Too bad about the sunset, because it was clichéd and banal. Low-rent theatrics. Middle-income. Middlebrow theatrics.

  She strolled at the water’s edge, reading. No one had called for quiet but the gaffer and the best boy spoke in low voices.

  How strange and awful it seemed to stand under the sky! how delicious. She felt like some newborn creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that she had never known.

  The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body, in its soft close embrace.

  The cosmic fuck. Well, Lu Anne thought, who better than me? But the drowned people she had seen in the church hall after the hurricane down home had not looked particularly fulfilled.

  She read the line again aloud: “The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body, in its soft close embrace.” She looked out to sea. That’s how it would seem to Edna. Something out there for me. Life more abundant. You let it go and you lie back and you let it happen. You don’t have to keep your clothes on or your mouth shut, your legs crossed or your hair up or your asshole tight. You don’t have to worry. You don’t have to do a goddamn thing but …