Night of Fire and Snow

by Alfred Coppel

  “It’s perfect, Nora,” he said.

  She looked down at the sand with a strange expression. “I have a lot to learn, haven’t I?” she said.

  Miguel sat down beside her and said, “Nora—”

  “No,” she said. “I want to know these things. Promise me you’ll always tell me. Everything. About my clothes, the way I speak. Promise me, Mike.”

  “Nora, I don’t think—”

  “Promise.”

  “All right. If you want it.”

  She leaned against him and the texture of her sun-warmed skin against his was like an electric shock. He pulled away instinctively.

  She threw her head back and laughed at him. The gamine was gone and the old Nora took her place. “The snowman. The ice-and-snowman,” she said.

  “You know better than that.”

  She held the thin cloth of the halter to her and squeezed herself delightedly. “Let’s have a martini,” she said.

  He poured two drinks into the little plastic cups. “Salud,” he said. “Salud y pesetas.”

  “Y tiempo para gozarlas,” she finished the toast.

  Man-pleaser, he thought. “Where did you learn that?”

  “I’ve watched you drink before. I’m very observant.” She finished her martini watching him over the rim of the cup. “Más,” she said, holding out the cup. “Más, por favor.”

  “A regular paisana, aren’t you?”

  “Te quiero.”

  “What did you say? That isn’t the way to ask for more to drink.”

  “I know what I said.”

  “Be careful, Nora. A man’s control is pretty marginal under conditions like these,” he said a trifle unsteadily.

  “Te quiero, te amo, te adoro—I’ve been studying, you see.”

  He dropped his cup and kissed her, hard, feeling her fingernails biting into the flesh of his back.

  She broke away and stood up, breathing through parted lips. Her eyes were bright and drowned in triumph.

  “Nora—”

  ‘Tm going swimming,” she said. “This sun is too wonderful to waste.”

  “You’ll freeze,” he said. His voice sounded strained and unnatural and he knew she must be laughing at him, really laughing at him now.

  “Then stand by to fish me out,” she said, and turned and ran down to the water. He watched her go. She moved with the grace of a yearling filly, sleek and glistening. When she reached the water’s edge, a hundred yards away, she turned and waved to him. He waved back. She stripped off the halter and slid out of the shorts with a twisting, gliding motion. Miguel could see the contrast of tanned and untanned skin, the flatness of her belly, the tipped curve of her breast. She splashed out into the water and he retrieved his cup and poured himself another martini and drank it slowly, not taking his eyes from her.

  At waist depth, she met a slow swell and dove into the sea, swimming straight out from the shore. She had a strong stroke. The water frothed at her feet.

  Miguel stood up, not wanting to lose sight of her in the ground swell. She waved again and he heard her call to him. His limbs felt heavy as he walked through the sand.

  He stood where she had dropped her clothes. A pool of silk and linen on the hard, wet sand.

  Nora’s head was a speck on the great face of the sea. She turned and started back. The waves washing onto Miguel’s bare feet were icy.

  She was close inshore now, standing in shoulder-depth water, swaying with the waves, her hair tangled and awry. He moved forward, impelled by an urge that would surely smash him if he resisted.

  She came to him, rising out of the white water, her icy nakedness gleaming in the sunlight.

  When he touched her at last, she said, “It had to be like this. You’ll never get away from me.”

  They watched the sunset that day, lying together wrapped in her coat with a driftwood fire burning nearby, the green and blue dancing in the flames.

  It had seemed the most natural thing in the world for them to be together so. Alone and together they could create a moment in which nothing else existed. But only while they were alone.

  After that came the deceits, the petty lies, the accounting for minutes and hours away from places where they should ordinarily have been. And all the while the strain of seeing Tom and Alaine go on living as though nothing had changed. But everything had changed. He was trapped, possessed by a thousand remorses, goaded by a thousand jealousies.

  So often in the years that followed Miguel had waited, hoping, for that release that was said to come with time. Nora had said, “You’ll never get away from me.”

  And he hadn’t—not to this day, this hour.

  NINE

  “Well,” Victor Ziegler said, “what do you think of it, Mike?” It took Miguel a moment to realize that Ziegler was still talking about The Green Hills of Home. It was hard to concentrate when you were as tired as this. You could be drunk with fatigue. A double jigger of Old Fatigue, please. And a chaser of loquacity on the side. God, he wished Ziegler would shut up.

  “What about it, Mike?”

  “It sounds like it will make a picture,” Miguel said neutrally. Ziegler sounded a little disappointed at Miguel’s lack of enthusiasm. “Well, perhaps we can talk contract now. I’m a little surprised you didn’t know we were doing Green Hills. I was under the impression Nora explained everything in her cable. She insisted on being the one to let you know.”

  “No, the only thing she said was that you were offering me a chance to do one of her scripts.”

  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter too much, does it? It’s simply a piece of writing to do. We might just as well finalize your position with us as soon as possible, don’t you think?” When he spoke of contracts and “finalizing” (everything was “finalized” at one time or another in Hollywood; it had nothing whatever to do with something reaching its ultimate form) a film seemed to fall over Ziegler’s eyes.

  “Don’t misunderstand me, Victor,” Miguel said. “Any objections I have to Bellamie’s garbage won’t stand in the way of us making a satisfactory arrangement.”

  “Have you other commitments?”

  The sight of Nora and Tony Ayula coming out of the terminal, still surrounded by people, saved Miguel from having to make an immediate answer. Nora waved to the crowd and walked toward the car with that loose-limbed, graceful, athlete’s walk of hers. The driver brought up the rear carrying Miguel’s bag and brief case.

  Ayula held the door for Nora, and then, since there was no room in back, climbed in front with the driver.

  Nora sat down next to Miguel. Her face was flushed and excited. “Darling,” she said. “I’m sorry. It couldn’t be helped.”

  “He understands,” Ziegler said, leaning forward to give the driver instructions. “We can drop Tony off, then to the Plaza.”

  The car started and they drove past the lines of hangars, each marked with the name of an airline.

  “Tony?”

  Ayula half turned and looked into the back. There was a pleased smile on his pink face. The trip to Idlewild had not been wasted after all.

  “Have Henderson get the contracts ready for Mike’s signature this afternoon. We’ll be down after lunch to take care of it,” Ziegler said.

  “Not this afternoon, I’m afraid,” Miguel said. “I have to see someone at Hillyer Press.”

  “Mike,” Nora cried. “Today?”

  “I’m afraid so. I have a lunch date with Karl.”

  “Lunch, too,” Nora said.

  “Well, in that case,” Ziegler said, “Tony can bring the contracts over to the hotel first thing in the morning.”

  “There’s no question in your mind, is there, Mike?” Nora sounded a trifle aggrieved.

  “It’s not that. I simply have to see what arrangement Hillyer Press wants to make on the new book.”

  “The Hillyer people haven’t got you tied up, have they?” Tony Ayula said aggressively.

  Miguel fought to control his irritation. “They have an opt
ion on this book and my next. It’s customary, you know.”

  “Oh, I was thinking about the rest of it. You can do any outside writing you want, of course, and they have no claim on it.”

  “Whatever outside writing I can find the time for,” Miguel said.

  Ayula laughed. “If that’s all it is—”

  “Why all this fuss about the book, Mike?” Nora asked.

  “I simply want to see Karl about it and find out what he wants me to do, Nora,” Miguel said. “Hillyer gave me an advance and I have a responsibility to them on that score, at least.”

  “Jesus,” Ayula said jokingly. “This is the first writer I’ve ever met with a sense of responsibility.”

  Miguel decided to ignore Ayula and he addressed his words to Ziegler. “My relations with Hillyer haven’t always been the best possible,” he said. “I suppose no writer has ever gotten along perfectly with his publisher. There’s always something upsetting the balance—though you would imagine they both wanted more or less the same things. However, I personally owe a great deal to one of their people—the senior editor there. That’s why I have to see him—even before I check with Magnussen.”

  “Does it have to be today, though?” Nora asked. She was feeling rather put upon, Miguel knew.

  “I’m sorry, Nora,” he said.

  “You couldn’t postpone it?”

  “Not very well. Since I have to give him some bad news.”

  “Mike!” Nora sounded really angry now. “You mean you didn’t finish it.”

  He had to remind himself that she had every right to be angry. He had spoiled most of last summer for her by refusing to leave the shabby beach house he had rented in Malibu and move into her new place in Canoga Park. And for all that, she had tried very hard to get him working, writing again. The trip abroad had been a last resort. Still, he was too tired now to be tolerant and understanding.

  “No,” he said shortly. “I didn’t finish it. I couldn’t.”

  “Then all these months we spent apart were a waste of time.”

  “You could call it that, I’m afraid.”

  Ziegler interrupted their exchange with a cough. He crushed his cigar in the ash tray and said, “We fly back to the coast tomorrow night. Will that give you all the time you need in New York?”

  The approach to New York, Miguel thought distastefully, was really incredibly ugly. He remembered the almost breathtaking sight you got of San Francisco approaching from Marin and the Golden Gate Bridge: the city itself, all stark white and shades of gray, with the piers thrusting like fingers into the cobalt waters of the bay. And the brilliant orange spans of the Bay Bridge pulsing in great graceful arcs to Yerba Buena Island and then descending in a gentle, yet immensely sturdy, cantilever section to the flat tidelands of the Oakland side. The memory was painfully nostalgic. It made him think of Maria, the vaguely remembered Maria of long ago, before the bums on her lips and the awful death on the white, hexagonal tiles of an upstairs bathroom. It made him think of a verse Maria used to read to him. Here he lies where he longed to be, home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill—What golden lands must she have been remembering as she read that verse? The purple dusk of the Sierra Morena, and the rolling forest lands of Sinaloa with their edges laved by the semitropical sea? How continuity was lost, he thought. He was cut off from the golden lands, from the dark and stem-faced Don Miguel Castana of the forgotten portrait, from the sunlight shimmering on the white-capped chop of waves in the Golden Gate—What am I, who am I, he wondered. A nothing, as Tom used to sing. You’re nothing but a nothing—with syncopation by Patty, LaVerne and Maxine at the University Creamery, Palo Alto, California, circa 1938. What are you and where do you belong? Listen to the song. A nothing, a nowhere...

  “Mike,” Nora said with annoyance in her voice. “Victor asked you a question.”

  “There’s nothing to hold me in New York,” he said. Or anywhere else. He remembered that in his days at Stanford he had developed a surpassing admiration for Thomas Wolfe. But with the snide and sophomoric destructiveness of youth he used to ask derisively, “What in hell is a great, lost beast? This Eugene Gant is always thrashing about like a great lost beast.” Now, after fifteen years, all he had to do was look in a mirror to see one. No, not quite, he told himself. Beast for sure and lost for goddam sure. But not great. It was given in this world to few people to be great beasts. He was only a small one. Minuscule. A little lost sheep who has gone astray, with tearful homesick harmonies by Aviation Cadets of Class 43-B of Luke Field Advanced Flying School, USAAF, circa 1942. Christmas, 1942—to make the sentimentality more poignant, the nostalgia more lachrymose. And he had joined in, like the faker he was, and yearned to be home at Christmas to deck the halls with boughs of holly and Lysol stains So he hadn’t belonged there, either, except for that one instant between participation and self-discovery. The time it took a thought to travel from one part of the brain to another. A microsecond in eternity. That was exactly how long he had spent at home. And now, if he worked very hard, there would be that ranch in the valley or maybe a place in Canoga Park with a Jaguar and a station wagon in the garage and an underwater light in the swimming pool.

  Nora could make the difference, he told himself. Couldn’t she? God, couldn’t she? He could feel her hurt and anger right now. It was like an aura. No, more tangible than that. Like the horns on a mine. She had a perfect right to be hurt, but was it always going to be like this? He wished he could have her away from these others—alone, he could explain and she would listen. It had always been that way. Alone together they had usually been able to do anything, be anyone. It was only when others invaded their private world that they quarreled. That, as much as his inability to work, had been the reason for his decision to go abroad. He wished he could explain this to her. He wished he could tell her how it had been with the constant stream of movie people racketing around the tiny beach house, having a long party. It would help if he could say all this to her but he felt sure that she couldn’t and wouldn’t understand it now. His resentment focused on Ayula and Ziegler and he felt sullen and cloddish.

  An uneasy silence had fallen among them and they rode for a time without saying a word.

  Presently, Nora turned to Miguel. “I’ve often wondered why you have tied yourself so firmly to Karl Olinder,” she said coolly.

  So the lunch date was still rankling. “He’s one third of my Holy Trinity,” he said. “Magnussen, my rather sluggish agent, Hillyer Press, my munificent benefactors, and Karl Olinder, my Socrates, the Schumann to my Brahms.”

  “I’m serious, Mike.”

  “I know you are. I don’t feel like being.”

  She bit her lip and fell silent.

  At Broadway, the driver stopped the car and Tony Ayula climbed out.

  “I’ll bring the papers to the hotel this evening, Victor,” he said. “See you then.” He walked jauntily away, disappearing in the crowd of early morning shoppers.

  “I really hate being a bitch,” Nora said suddenly. “Today of all days.”

  Miguel took her hand and held it. The desire to close his eyes was almost unbearable, but he knew that if he tried to sleep when he reached the hotel, he would begin thinking about his meeting with Karl and he would get no rest at all.

  Nora seemed to read his thoughts. “Must you see Karl when you’re so tired?” she asked.

  “Look, Nora,” he said. “I’m not looking forward to it. I’m not doing it to pass the time of day talking over old times. Hillyer financed my trip with their advance. I can’t just tell Olinder to sit on his hands until I’m ready for him. Even if you choose to disregard what a complete bastard it would make me—think of the position it would put him in with the check signers. It was Karl who got me enough to make the trip possible.”

  “You could give back the money.”

  He did not feel like explaining that he did not have the money to give back. He was afraid she might offer to lend it to him, or even
suggest that he ask Alaine.

  “No,” he said shortly. “I can’t.”

  Nora said, “Then I suppose the only thing to do is to finish the damned book as soon as we get home. Victor wants a shooting script on Hills by the end of the year.”

  Miguel sighed. Nora had, he noticed, picked up that irritating Hollywood habit of shortening titles when speaking of a “property.”

  The second floor of the Hillyer Building was as plush and modem as free-form furniture, wall-to-wall carpeting and sliding glass panels could make it. It commanded a low angle view of Madison Avenue interrupted only by the corner posts of the building and a planetary system of genuine Calder mobiles suspended from the high, acoustic tile ceiling.

  This was the home of Hillyer’s money-maker, Hillyer’s Monthly—an upper-middlebrow periodical devoted to fashions, stories by the more fashionable authors, and advertising. Karl Olinder variously referred to it as a little magazine for the millions and the Bible of suburban intellectualism. There were elements of an appeal to both in it. Its editorial policy was devoted to something called “dynamic conservative liberalism” and was, ambiguous enough to appeal to almost everyone. Its contributors included CIO men and members of the China Lobby, the United Nations and the Silver Bloc. Adlai Stevenson was as welcome as Senator McCarran between its covers. Miguel could never read the magazine without having the uncomfortable sensation of having stumbled into a schizophrenic’s analysis.

  The third floor of the building, where Olinder’s office was located, was the base of the Hillyer Press. Here on the third deck were bare floors, walls in need of paint, and golden oak office furnishings. There was always the faint odor of printer’s ink here, and piles of galley proofs, new bindings, packaged book jackets, and stray yellow sheets on the floor. The typewriters were old Underwoods and not the electric, silently cybernetic IBMs found below. Nor did the secretaries resemble the Charm and Vogue models of the magazine staff. Instead, they looked efficient and purposeful.

  He walked through the labyrinth of halls and offices into the nook Karl claimed for his own. He had a new secretary, a severe young woman with dark hair and heavy rimmed harlequin glasses. She was banging hard on an obsolete typewriter and she did not look up when he knocked on the open door.