Children of Light

by Robert Stone

  Walker stirred his drink.

  “You aren’t simpleminded, Mr. Lowndes. You know the secrets of the heart. I know you do because I read your book. It’s a true article, your book. It made me cry, what do you think of that?”

  “With envy?” Lu Anne asked.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Walker said, looking into her fixed smile. He saw that she was off her head and in some character of her own construction. He rejoiced; he had thought it was really she there—cold, mocking and lost to him. “I don’t think envy makes you cry. It was for the usual reasons. For love of it.”

  “Shit,” Lowndes said. “Love my dog, love me.”

  He extended his hand. Walker looked at it, paused and shook it briefly.

  “I see what you mean,” Walker said. “My compliments. But even if you were country-simple, as you plainly aren’t, even if you were Pogo’s great-grandpuppy, I’d have trouble believing you were as naive as you claim to be. I think you’re trying to make me feel bad about what I do.”

  “Say that again?” Lowndes asked.

  “I said that even if your grandfather was a fucking alligator you ought to know more about the movie business than that. Do you really need it all explained to you, or are you just trying to give me a hard time?”

  “You got me wrong, man. You’re touchy.”

  “I’m sorry. I had a long drive.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Bein’ touchy’s good. It indicates you have your pride. Where’d you say you were from?”

  “Kentucky,” Walker told him. “Lexington.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought that,” Lowndes said. “But you know, I have relatives in Kentucky named Walker. I wonder if you’re one of those Walkers?”

  “No,” Walker said.

  “Well, let’s pretend my granddaddy was an alligator. How would you explain to me the screenwriter’s role?”

  “Oh Christ,” Walker said, “the screenwriter’s role?”

  “Is that the wrong terminology?”

  “You have to believe that it’s worthwhile,” Walker told him, “and you have to accept the rules. You can’t be a solitary or an obsessive. You can’t despise your audience. It requires humility and it requires strength of character.”

  Lowndes turned to Lu Anne.

  “Now that’s a very eloquent defense of an often derided trade, don’t you think?”

  “Oh yes,” Lu Anne said brightly.

  “Very eloquent, Mr. Walker, and I believe every word of it. Only tell me this: isn’t it true that on the screen what you and I might call a cheap shot works infinitely better than on the page?”

  Walker thought about it.

  “Yeah, O.K. That may be so.”

  “Doesn’t it follow then that an instinct for the cheap shot is an advantage to a screenwriter?”

  “There are rules, Lowndes, I told you that. You usually work within the terms of genre. Your flights of fancy are reduced to technical possibility because on one level you’re moving machinery. If you’re heavy-handed your characters will flatten out very badly. You have to be good at it.”

  “Suppose I say,” Lowndes said, “that as a movie writer you’re restricted to a literal-minded so-called realism that changes its nature every five years or so. Would I be wrong?”

  “I have a feeling we’re going to read that in New York Arts whether I think it’s true or not.”

  Lowndes laughed.

  “I don’t think it’s true,” Walker said. “Nor do I think I have an affinity for the cheap shot.”

  “Well,” Lowndes told him, “maybe that’s why you haven’t been as successful as you should.”

  “How successful should I be, Mr. Lowndes?”

  “Secrets are forbidden,” Lu Anne said helpfully. “There’s a clause.”

  “There’s also,” Walker observed, “a sanity clause.”

  When Axelrod arrived back from the gents’ a wet spot had replaced the stain on his shirt.

  “G’wan,” he said as he resumed his seat, “you no foola me. There ain’t no Sanity Claus.”

  Walker and Lu Anne looked blankly into his fading smile. Lowndes kept his eyes on Walker.

  “Nobody makes you do it,” Walker told Lowndes. “You’re usually well paid if you don’t get cheated, and you usually don’t. There are things you can do. You can have your moments.”

  “I know that’s true,” Lowndes said. “I just wanted to make sure you felt as bad as you should.” He punched Walker on the arm. “Hey, I’m only foolin’ with you, man. I know you’re a serious guy.”

  “How bad do you feel, Gordon?” Lu Anne asked.

  “Medium,” Walker said.

  Jack Glenn came in with some production people and the Peruvian script girl. They waved, hesitated for a moment and took a different table inside the bar. Charlie Freitag and his Las Vegas pal had gone off into the night.

  “I’m going to turn in,” Walker said. “I enjoyed our talk. I hope it was helpful.”

  “You bet,” Lowndes told him. As he got up he saw Lowndes put his hand over Lu Anne’s.

  “Me too,” Axelrod said. He wandered over to the other table.

  As he went down the corridor toward the opposite wing he heard running steps on the carpet behind him. For an instant he thought himself pursued by Dongan Lowndes but before he turned he knew it was Lu Anne. Her face was contorted with terror. As she crowded into his arms, she held her hands protectively over her temples as if to ward off a blow. He had to untangle her from her cringing stance to kiss her.

  “Gordon,” she said, “you have to help me. That man’s been put over me.”

  “Put over you? I thought you were going to let him climb on top of you. I’ve been high on you for five hundred miles and when I get here you’re playing footsie with that big swamp rat.”

  “Gordon, you just don’t understand anything at all. I’m really scared, Gordon.”

  “It’s all right, Lu. Everybody says you’re doing fine. You look very beautiful.”

  “I went to church tonight,” Lu Anne said, “and there was a thing on the cross that wasn’t Jesus at all.”

  He experienced a brief surge of panic. The panic was compounded of several fears—his fear of her madness and of his own folly, his fear of death and of life. It was too late for panic to do him any good. He did not propose to let her go.

  “You’re alone, aren’t you, Lu Anne? Your husband’s gone and the kids?”

  “I’m alone,” she said. “With that man over me. Don’t you think he looks like the winner of a flaming-cat race?”

  “Absolutely,” Walker said. “Are the … are you seeing those people you see?”

  She put a finger across his lips and nodded.

  “What about your pills?”

  “I tried,” she said. “I can’t work with them.”

  He let her rest her head against his shoulder and stroked her hair. He had no idea what to do.

  “That man,” Lu Anne said, “he saw me run out after you. I left him and he’ll take it out on us.”

  “I thought you were making it with him.”

  “I was fooling him,” she said. “They said I had to. They said he’d write about me.”

  “Who said?”

  “Well, Charlie. And Jack and Walter.”

  “Forget about him. I don’t think it matters what he writes.”

  Standing with Lu Anne in his arms, he saw Lowndes appear at the far end of the corridor. Lowndes stood watching them with an expression that appeared vaguely benign. He was uglier upright, slope-shouldered and paunchy, a poor soul. After a moment he went his way.

  “Is he there?” she asked without turning around. The perception of schizophrenics was unnatural, Walker thought.

  “He’s gone.”

  “There’s always someone to be afraid of,” Lu Anne said.

  “We don’t have to play their games, Lu.”

  “But we do,” she said.

  He stepped back, holding her.

  “Come with
me tonight.”

  She shook her head.

  “There’s tonight,” he said. “I don’t know what else there is. It’s touch and go.”

  “Touch,” she repeated dully, “and go.” She shook her head. “I can’t,” she said. “I’m afraid. I don’t know why you want me.”

  “I think we settled that,” he said, “a long time ago.”

  “And you never learned better?”

  “I never learn, Lu Anne.”

  “The geisha and the samurai,” she said. “You’re the geisha,” she told him. She fingered his cheek with a long unpainted nail. “I’m the samurai.”

  “That’s so,” Walker said.

  People passed at the end of the corridor but he never turned to look. Lu Anne took his hands in hers and they stood with their fingers twined like old friends at some family ceremony.

  “I’m so fucked up, Gordon. I mean, I think I love you—it’s been so long. It was always someone and I think it was always you. I’m sick and I’m scared. I have to hide.”

  “Hide with me.”

  When she eased away from him he followed and took her in his arms again.

  “Don’t make me,” she told him. “Wait for me. Wait for tomorrow.”

  We are not promised tomorrow, Walker thought. He would wait for her, for that unmerited, far-off day.

  “Yes,” he said. “All right.”

  Then she was off, barefoot, down the hall. She had left her going-to-church shoes where she stood. As he bent to pick them up he heard an insistent pounding from the wing of the hotel to which she had retreated. He walked to the end of the passage and saw her rapping against the door of an apartment on the court three stories below. The condominiums here faced the mountainside; they were less expensive and less elaborately appointed. Teamsters lived here and technical assistants and people who liked to be where the serious card games were.

  Walker stepped to the metal rail and saw the apartment door open and Billy Bly appear in the lighted doorway. He watched as they spoke, saw Bly close the door to her. Waiting, she leaned her forehead against it until Bly came to open it again. This time she went inside and, though Walker waited for almost ten minutes on the upper landing, holding her shoes under his arm, she did not reappear.

  Please, Pig,” Lu Anne pleaded. “Honestly, honey, I don’t want to be alone. I’m afraid I’ll die.”

  Bly was looking down at her bare feet on his plastic doormat. He worked his jaws in embarrassment.

  “I figured you were waiting for Gordon Walker.”

  “I was,” she said. “I am.”

  “Well,” Bly said, “he’s here.”

  She shook her head.

  “But I’m not, Pig. Just suddenly I can’t handle it. I told him—wait for tomorrow. He’s so nice, you know. He said he would.”

  “You scared?”

  “I am deathly afraid,” Lu Anne said. “I have to hide. I must.”

  “Well,” Bly said, “this is the thing. I ain’t alone tonight.”

  She stared at him and, without a sound, mouthed the words.

  “Please. Pig.”

  He watched her as though he were trying to gauge the measure of her fear. “You want to wait,” he said. She made a move to rush past him but he blocked her with half a step.

  “Honey,” she whispered urgently, “I’ll talk to the boy. I’ll explain.”

  “I told you to wait, Lu Anne. Now you wait.”

  He closed the door and she leaned her head against it. When she heard the Mexican boy’s angry incredulous voice, she raised her hands to stop her ears.

  After a minute or two, Bly opened the door and stepped aside. As she went into the large bedroom suite, she thought she caught a glimpse of a moving figure on the mountainside balcony. A pot broke on the tiles outside.

  “Was he real mad?” Lu Anne asked.

  “Yes, he was,” Bly said.

  “He broke a pot, didn’t he?”

  “Probably just knocked it over. Climbin’ down.”

  “Honestly, Pig, I’d do it for you. I’ll make it up to you. You know there’s always a day and there’s always a way.”

  “Just so you know, Lu Anne. It’s the same as if …”

  “Pig,” she said earnestly, “I realize that, you know. I’m not so insensitive. Gosh, I hope you were … like … done.”

  Bly shrugged. He was standing by the mirror taking his shirt off, checking his pecs.

  “I never really feel done,” he said.

  He was a serious man and not given to humor. It was Lu Anne’s delight to make him laugh. She rushed to him.

  “I’m so happy now,” she said, “and I was so scared before.” On the counter she saw a cluster of amyl nitrate caps. She went over and stirred them affectionately with her forefinger as though they were a litter of pet mice.

  “You want a Quaalude?” Bly asked.

  “I can’t think of anything nicer,” she said brightly.

  Bly’s tanned face reddened, he pursed his lips. It took Lu Anne a moment to realize that he was laughing. She hugged him.

  “You smell so nice,” she said.

  As he went into the bathroom for some Quaaludes, she realized that in the moment of their embrace she had felt him tense very slightly and that the moment of resistance to her body’s pressure constituted a discreet discouragement of any notions she might be cultivating of fun and games. It would not have been unconscious. Bly was as free of involuntary physical responses as a person could be.

  They lay down on the unmade bed together and had their Quaaludes with ice water from a pitcher that sat on a silver salver on the floor.

  “I could give that boy some money,” Lu Anne suggested. “I feel so bad about it.”

  “He don’t want money. You know,” Bly added after a moment, “we get the wrong idea. Lots of these Mexican people—they don’t want money.”

  “Forgive me,” she said.

  “No problem. This time.”

  The room was chill with air conditioning and the windows were closed. No breezes came from the mountainside. She snuggled next to Bly, put her hands on his muscular shoulders, then guiltily withdrew them.

  “You know how it gets.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Now don’t think I have it mixed up, Pig. I mean, I always understood that you and me was a one-time thing. It wasn’t going to go on and all. Because of how we both were.”

  “One of them bells,” Bill said, “that now and then rings.”

  “How nice Quaaludes are,” she said. “The world is possible with art.”

  He turned over, looked at her eyes and lay back on his pillow.

  “What’d you tell Drogue about me?” she asked him. “You tell him I was O.K.?”

  “You are as far as he’s concerned, Lu Anne. He doesn’t care how you really are. He’s just worried about his ass. Like Charlie’s worried about budget and insurance and all that.”

  “How do you think I really am?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t always tell because I ain’t as smart as you.”

  “I was a quiz kid, Pig. Did you know that?”

  Bly yawned.

  “Lu Anne,” he said, “if you was half the things you claim you been you’d have to be seventy-five years old.”

  “I’m older than people think,” she said sadly.

  “I mean,” Bly told her, “I don’t know why you lie. I don’t understand it. You’re a great star, what more do you want? What are you trying to prove?”

  She bit her finger and looked at him. Billy Bly believed in never borrowing money to gamble with, that it cost a fortune to erase tattoos, in reincarnation and in Great Stars. The Greater they were, he believed, the easier they were to get on with. Lu Anne was hot really a Great Star in Bly’s order of precedence but he afforded her an honorary inclusion.

  “I want you to tell me location stories,” she said. “Then I’ll tell you some.”

  Bill Bly loved location stories about high-rolling, monster fu
ck-ups and partying with Great Stars. He loved show business stories of all sorts. So did Lu Anne. Who didn’t?

  “Hell,” Bly told her, “I told you all my good location stories a couple of times.”

  It was a stylized demurrer. He told her about the Western director, mortally behind in a heavy poker game, who had heaved the once-in-a-lifetime pot into a bunkhouse fireplace. About the actor who had started shooting lights out from his Vegas hotel room. About misassignations, absurd love affairs, fights, comedians and local good-wives. Suits of armor pissed in, motel rooms filled with dirigible-sized polka-dotted water bags, child actors poisoned, chimpanzees released.

  Lu Anne told Bill about Werner, the stunt bunny. The concept of Werner evoked his silent laughter.

  “We had a stunt mule one time in Durango,” Bill said. “We had to pull his legs out from under him every time he got shot.”

  “Werner was a European hare,” Lu Anne told Bill. “He was always wonderfully dressed and he had perfect manners. We met him at the airport and showed him his fall. It was down the south face of the Jungfrau. He looked that old mountain up and down. ‘Zo,’ he says. ‘Ach, zo.’ You’d a been scared, Pig. We said, ‘Can we get you anything, Werner?’ ‘Chust show me my marks,’ said Werner.”

  Bly laughed again, his eyes closed. Lu Anne made a little man with her fingers and walked them along Bill’s chest.

  “Werner had the nicest luggage you ever did see,” she told Bly. “He knew how to fold his napkin. You could take him anywhere. You could take him to Le Cirque.”

  “Where the fuck’s that?”

  She fingered a circle on his chest.

  “Ever turn a trick, Pig?”

  The sleepy smile on his face vanished. He opened his eyes but did not look at her.

  “I guess you know the way I come up, Lu Anne. I guess you know the answer to that.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lu Anne said, and shivered. “I was thinking about something. I was wondering about something. Hey, Pig, could I have another half a Quaalude?”

  Bly stirred himself and put his feet on the floor.

  “How come you asked me that?”

  “I wanted to hear about it.”

  “Well, it’s ugly as catshit,” he said. “It’s dirty and scary. It smells. Sometimes you dig it. You know yourself there’s plenty of people around here can tell you more about it than me.”