Eve's Men

by Newton Thornburg

  This morning, however, no one could have accused him of anything but the best behavior. From the twins’ bedroom Eve had been watching him down in the pool, patiently trying to teach a fearful Terry how to swim while Mama looked on from her shaded lounge, both hands firmly locked onto her life support system. This day Stephanie had forsaken her lounging pajamas for white culottes and an awning-stripe blouse, not a happy choice, since her lower legs looked like bags of grapes.

  Though Eve thought it odd that a healthy eighteen-year-old would have to be taught to swim in her own backyard pool, she of course didn’t plan on saying anything about it. Rather, she decided to join the two of them down in the pool. Unfortunately she hadn’t been able to find her favorite swimsuit—a one-piece black faille—and instead had to make do with a skimpy monstrosity Brian and bought for her at a Victoria’s Secret shop, a white bikini that covered little else besides her nipples and crotch. Though she didn’t care much for either of the Hodges, bloated Stephanie or the boardlike Terry, she took no pleasure in showing them up, waltzing out to the pool finally, almost as naked as her namesake.

  “God in Heaven!” Stephanie bawled. “The news helicopters see you in that, they’ll land right on top of us.”

  Eve made a face. “The joys of travel. It’s the only thing I could find—one of Brian’s little inspirations.”

  “It’s okay by me. But I think you’re going to make Terry blush.”

  “Oh, come on. You two must sunbathe naked up here all the time.”

  Stephanie laughed. “Not bloody likely. Not anymore, not with my skin. And Terry’s as modest as a nun.”

  “I see she’s learning to swim.”

  In the pool, the girl was dog-paddling furiously, supported by Brian’s hands under her belly.

  “Well, let’s hope so. If she can learn from anybody, it’d be Brian. If he told her she could fly, I think she’d jump right off the wall here and start flapping her arms.”

  “Her Svengali, huh?”

  “No, her hero’s more like it.”

  Eve made no response to that. After testing the water with her foot, she balanced on the pool’s edge and made an adequate little dive into the deep end. She swam the length of the pool three times, then got out and lay facedown on a beach towel, feeling that if she was going to burn anything, it might as well be her fanny. As usual, the sun acted on her like a narcotic and she soon fell asleep. When she woke, she found herself quite alone, the other three apparently having gone back into the house. Worried that she already might have acquired a touch of sun burn, she moved into Stephanie’s shaded chair and lit a cigarette. Through her sunglasses she saw Terry looking down at her from her room, caught her for just a second before the girl dove out of sight. And she saw Brian and Stephanie talking heatedly about something in Stephanie’s room. Then, a little later, through the same patio door, she saw Brian looking at a magazine while Stephanie hovered next to him, grinning and shaking her head in amusement.

  Later still, Brian came out and sat down next to Eve. “Did you have a good sleep?” he asked.

  “You might have woken me up, you know. I could’ve burned.”

  Brian ran his hand along her thigh. “I don’t know—you look okay to me.”

  “Wrong side,” Eve said. “Incidentally, what was all that quacking about inside? You and your mistress.”

  “Hostess, remember?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Nothing important.”

  “Naturally.”

  A short time later Brian went back into the house, then reappeared a few minutes later carrying a large white telescope and tripod, which he set up near the parapet, pointed down at Bel Air. He spent some time looking into it and adjusting it, and soon Stephanie came out and peered through the viewer and adjusted it some more. Then, announcing that she was going to lie down a while, she went back inside. Eve lit another cigarette and lay there smoking as long as her curiosity permitted. Then she got up and went over to where Brian was.

  “What’re you looking at?” she asked. “Naked ladies? Fellas? What?”

  “Just messing around.” Brian patted her on the bottom. “Speaking of naked ladies.”

  Eve slapped his hand away but continued to stand there, wanting a look. Brian was slow to respond. Finally, almost peevishly, he stepped aside.

  “Well, all right, have a look,” he said. “Be my guest.”

  “If you insist.” Smiling in puzzlement, she put her eye against the viewer, which was situated at a right angle to the body of the telescope. But all she saw was real estate, a large Bel Air house on an acre or so, walled in, very private and luxurious.

  “Stephanie’s showing me the houses of the stars,” Brian explained. “That one’s Tom Selleck’s place. When he’s in town.”

  “Fascinating,” Eve said. “I didn’t realize you were a fan. Or that he was an art lover.”

  “You mean those sculptures outside? Yeah, I guess he is.”

  “And even a totem pole.”

  Brian took hold of the end of the telescope and moved it a few inches, which had the effect of pulling the viewer from Eve. “There’s a lot more to see down there than one stupid house,” he declared. “The Capitol Record building, for instance. On a clear day you can see the young executives jumping out of windows.”

  Eve swung the telescope back towards Brian. “Here, you take it—I didn’t realize it was private property.”

  He forced a laugh. “What the devil you talking about? You want to look, look.”

  “Later,” Eve said. “Before I burn to a crisp, I’ve got to get out of this classy suit you bought me.”

  As she headed for the house, Brian got in the last word. “Hey, it shows off your finer qualities.”

  By the time Charley got back to his hotel, he was not feeling very optimistic about his rescue mission to California. The way things were going, it seemed a safe bet that he wasn’t going to rescue much of anything: not Brian, not Eve, and not his money either. But thanks to Dan Courtney, he at least had a nice hotel to come home to.

  Courtney was one of a dozen or so rich Chicago lawyers who lived in Flossmoor and belonged to the country club. Not having the best of marriages, Courtney and his wife made it a point to have the best of everything else. They loved to travel almost as much as they loved coming home and telling anyone who would listen about the places they had visited: just which restaurants and hotels and spas were the very best. In L.A., he told Charley, one simply had to stay at the Bel Air Hotel. So at the airport, when the taxi driver asked an exhausted Charley his destination, nothing else came to mind.

  “The Bel Air,” he said, like any other millionaire movie producer. Still, he was not unhappy with his choice. Located up a small canyon off Sunset Boulevard, it looked like a group of beautiful old Mediterranean villas set amidst an arboretum. Charley could just imagine how the Courtneys, taking it all in, had immediately set about composing paeans for the folks back home, all the untraveled yokels at Flossmoor’s Nineteenth Hole.

  Though Charley’s room was one of the less expensive, at three hundred a night, it was so beautifully furnished he almost hated to see it wasted on him. For as usual, his first moves were to kick off his shoes, stretch out on the bed, and turn on the television, which had been carefully hidden in a cherry-wood armoire. Absently he surfed through the channels, barely noticing what was on, still unable to get his mind off what he’d learned from the last name on the list.

  The address was in Ojai, a small artsy-horsey town located in the mountains about seventy miles northwest of Los Angeles. Since it was a rural address, just a road name and a box number, it had taken him almost as long to find the place as it did to drive up from L.A. Even then he almost missed it: a run-down five-acre horse ranch squeezed in between two scrabbly hills. The return address on Brian’s letter home had said only c/o Bannister, so Charley wasn’t sure whether he was looking for a man or a woman. Whichever, it was a man who appeared, coming out of a small metal barn as Charley
drove in and parked. The man appeared to be in his late fifties or sixties, bent and wiry, with a stubble of white beard on his dour face.

  “I’m looking for Bannister,” Charley said.

  “Well, you found him. What can I do for you?”

  Charley told him his business, and Bannister looked even more dour. He lit a cigarette and kept staring intently at the ground, as if eye contact would have cost him dearly.

  “So you want to know if Brian Poole is here?”

  “Or if you’ve heard from him. Anything you might know.”

  “You want to get to him before the police, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sort of save him from himself?”

  “Something like that.”

  Still not looking at Charley, Bannister smiled crookedly, as if in pain. “Well, mister, you sure have wasted your time. Oh, your brother stayed here all right, a long time ago. And lemme tell ya, if all I had to do was spit to save his life, I wouldn’t do it.”

  Charley didn’t know what to say to that. “Hard feelings, huh?”

  “Yeah, you sure could say that. We figured him and our Joan was engaged, you know? Gonna be married. It was, oh, ten or twelve years ago. Yeah, we even let them sleep together, in her room, just like they was already married. And Joanie, our beautiful Joanie, she couldn’t of been happier. She really loved the guy. And he even took her home to Illinois—you probably met her then.”

  “Thanksgiving?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Around Thanksgiving.”

  And Charley did remember the beautiful young blonde that Brian had brought home with him, the girl he referred to as Harpo, because she was so shy and quiet.

  Bannister lifted his gaze now, pale blue eyes that seemed to burn like gas flames. “Then one day your brother, he just up and disappears. And Joanie finds he’s got a new girl, someone else to use and throw away.”

  “Well, I guess you were right—I seem to have wasted my time.” Charley started to turn away, wanting to get out of there as soon as he could. But Bannister’s words held him.

  “For us, though, it didn’t end there. No sir. Joanie just couldn’t accept it. A one-man woman, I guess. Anyway, from then on for her it was just booze and drugs, ODs and rehabs. Till finally it got to the point where her mom and me, we just almost didn’t care no more. Then one night the L.A. police phoned us. Joanie’d overdosed again. Only this time she never woke up.”

  “I’m very sorry. As you say, she was a beautiful girl. A nice girl.”

  “But not nice enough or beautiful enough for your brother, was she?”

  Charley didn’t even try to answer that. He shook his head in commiseration, then got back into his car and drove away.

  Lying on top of his bed in the hotel, Charley reflected that it was not yet six o’clock on the first day of his quest, and he was already finished. There were no more names on the list, no more places to go. Nevertheless he didn’t feel inclined as yet to fold up his tent and head for home. That undoubtedly was what he should have done, but he simply wasn’t ready yet for such a total defeat. So instead of watching the news on TV and then cleaning up for a Courtney-like evening at the hotel—drinks in the mahogany paneled bar and dinner later in the celebrated French restaurant—he slipped into a sportcoat and headed for the open sewer of downtown Hollywood, thinking he might just as easily stumble into Brian and Eve there as anywhere else.

  He left his car in an attended parking lot and set out on foot, walking up Hollywood Boulevard toward Sunset. Though it was still daylight, he couldn’t actually see the sun, just an area of greater brightness in the heavy, smoggy air. There was no breeze, but the countless cars whizzing past kept the dirt and waste paper moving constantly, right along with the tourists, who Charley imagined were feeling as uneasy as he was at finding themselves on foot amidst what appeared to be one huge perambulating sex bazaar. The pimps and whores came in all colors and costumes, most of them painted children, brazen as riot cops. And they were thoroughly modern too, sporting not just dreadlocks and rainbow beehives but also the latest in technical support: beepers and cell phones and probably laptops in their pimpmobiles, which were not pink Cadillacs anymore but dark green and black BMW sedans.

  Charley thought of going to a bar and developing a mild buzz before dinner, but decided it was still too early. So he began checking the theaters as he walked along, thinking he might take in a movie before dinner, preferably something not about space wars or time travel or the burdens of teenage virginity. Not that he actually wanted to watch a film—he had too much on his mind for that—but he did want to sit in quiet solitude, without having squads of prepubescent criminals fighting popcorn wars all about him.

  Leaving Hollywood Boulevard, he came back on Sunset for a few blocks, about to give up when he spotted a small porno theater on a side street. And this surprised him. He had thought that VCRs had put all such theaters out of business long before, yet here one lived on, like an artifact of another age. Figuring that it at least would be dark and quiet inside, he went on in.

  Charley had no problem admitting that he enjoyed pornography, all those sexy young women who seemed to like giving head even more than the men liked getting it. From experience, though, he knew that ten or fifteen minutes after he took his seat in the theater his eyes and brain would glaze over and he would watch the rest of the film much as he might sit on the beach and observe the surf rolling in, with the same pleasant feeling of uninvolvement and abstraction. At the moment, however, he found himself entirely caught up with what was happening on the screen, where a beauteous girl named China was doing her thing on a rug of animal pelts with a man and a teenage girl. As his interest mounted, he wondered why the supposedly imaginative sex entrepreneurs of Southern California had never thought to introduce midget prostitutes to patrol the theater aisles, blowing dirty old men like himself for twenty or thirty dollars a shot. He speculated that the entrepreneurs might have feared that the midgets’ tiny feet could have stuck to the floor, or that if they had fallen, they might never have gotten up again, would have been caught in the primordial sludge forever, like the mastodons in the nearby La Brea Tar Pits.

  Hours later, in a Sunset Boulevard cocktail lounge, Charley sat nursing his third vodka tonic as a boxing match was playing on the television set behind the bar. The lounge was the kind he preferred, small and dark and devoid of chic, having no stained-glass windows or antique wooden bar or sawdust on the floor, nothing that might pull in the yuppie crowd. Of the seven men at the bar, Charley judged that he was the youngest by a good ten years. There were a couple of Chicanos, an African American, and the rest Mediterranean ethnics of one kind or another. They were drinking beer or boilermakers, and they wore polo shirts and dark polyester trousers with bladelike creases. There was also an Asian woman sitting alone at the end of the bar and three young hookers in a back booth, evidently taking a breather from their labors. Every so often their brassy laughter would ring out, and some of the men would turn and look at them with disapproval.

  In the mirror behind the bar, Charley’s gaze occasionally connected with the almond-shaped eyes of the Asian woman, who would then smile warmly at him. She had long, upswept black hair and the delicate features of a Thai or Vietnamese. Much of the time she seemed on the verge of smiling, which gave her a look of amused sophistication largely undone by her taste in clothes: skintight purple velour slacks and a green sateen blouse topped off with pound of junk jewelry. Charley would have figured her a prostitute had she been younger, or conversely, if she had looked older, more used up.

  In any event, before long the bartender brought him a fresh drink “compliments of the dragon lady,” and since this was a first in his life—a woman unknown to him buying him a drink in public—Charley felt he couldn’t simply smile at her in the mirror and leave it at that. And anyway, the woman interested him. So he picked up his new drink and moved down the bar, taking the stool next to hers. In heavily accented English she told him that
her name was Mary Lee and that she had bought him the drink because he looked so troubled and she wanted him to know that he had at least one friend in the world. He asked her why the bartender called her the dragon lady, and she said she often wondered the same thing, which made him laugh, which in turn brought a lovely smile to her face. They went on drinking and talking, and Charley learned that she was a movie theater cashier on her day off, that her family had been wiped out in Vietnam, and that she had been in America for twenty years and had divorced the marine sergeant who had married her and brought her over.

  Later, Charley took her down the street to a steakhouse, where they had dinner and brandies. Afterwards, he walked her to her apartment, and when she invited him in, he declined.

  “Why?” she asked. “You don’t tink I’m sexy?”

  “Oh no, I think you’re very sexy. It’s just that my life is pretty complicated right now.”

  “You spend anudder hour wit me, dat make your life more complicated?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  She looked at him with open disgust. “You know what? I tink you a fag. I tink you a dirty fag.”

  “Well, you’re wrong,” he said. “Anyway, thanks for the drink.”

  As he turned away, she repeated her charge, loud enough for a couple across the street to stop and look. He kept on walking.

  When he got back to the hotel, there was a note for him to phone Waldo Trask. After dialing the number on the note, he waited through six rings before anyone answered. It was the lesbian.

  “Yeah? Teddy here.”

  Charley asked for Trask. Without responding, the woman left the phone. Finally Trask came on.

  “After you left, I started thinking,” he said. “And it finally came to me, the name up on Mulholland. It’s Stephanie Hodges. I don’t know her exact address, but I can give you directions. You want to try it?”

  “You bet I do,” Charley said.

  Chapter Nine