“Great! Great! Alys, tie up the girl! You lead her back to the oasis! You tell your Arabs to go off and chase the Egyptians, so you can be alone with the girl!”
Flogging my camel, I cut off Moira’s mount skillfully and brought it to a stop. Without a word, even though our knees were touching, I snapped out a length of rawhide from under my saddle and bound her hands behind her. She offered no resistance, only looking back at me with a seraphic calm, and I carried out my feat of tying her wrists without taking my eyes from hers. I couldn’t have looked away even if Reiter had shouted at me to do so; I was hypnotized by my desire for her and by the excruciating magnetism of the moment. Finally I managed to govern myself and turned to shout at my Bedouins.
“AFTER THE PACK CAMELS!
THEY ARE VALUABLE!”
They galloped away, grinning and brandishing their Lee-Enfields. I turned back to Moira, ready to attach a rope to her camel and lead it away to the oasis.
“Hold it!” shouted Reiter. I turned to see his thick eyeglasses glinting in the sunshine. “Roll it up, Sid! This is a medium close-up! About twenty-five feet! Wait! Cut! Stop the camera! Moira’s camel is a mess! Is it shedding or what? Why doesn’t somebody else take care of these details? Why do I have to think of everything? Get a comb, somebody! Comb the camel!”
The costume-girl came running up with a comb. Everybody was getting down off the flatbed truck. I took a clip from the bandoleer around my shoulder and reloaded the Lee-Enfield, then I shot Reiter at point-blank range. He fell with an astonished look, his glasses breaking and scattering like tiny diamonds over the sand. I swung around and fired in succession at the camera, the cameraman, and the grips who were unloading reflector-screens from the truck. I missed the cameraman, who developed an unexpected adroitness at ducking, and it took me three shots to bring him down. The clip was expended and I reloaded again. The costume-girl went down with grace and crumpled on the sand, as though she were a trained actress. I wheeled around and noticed the script-girl fleeing away over the sand, rising up and down over the convolutions of the dunes, the book still in her hands. I galloped after her and dropped her with a single shot. She fell sprawling, the leaves of the book spilling out over the sand around her.
I came back and shot Morton, the two reflector-screen men, and the rest of the grips. Then I rode back to Moira and attached her camel to mine with a length of rope. Reiter, the cameraman, and the others had all fallen down in various conventional postures of agony. Now they got up, brushing the sand off themselves, and stood looking after us rather foolishly as we rode off toward the oasis.
“This isn’t going to work, Alys,” said Moira.
In the tent I treated her with great correctness, even with deference. I untied her hands and invited her to remove her jacket. This she did, looking around for something to set it on, but there was no furniture in the tent except for the couch with a pile of cushions on it in the corner. She dropped it onto the carpet, and I threw back the hood of my burnoose. In some way it had become almost evening now; the inside of the tent was a gray and indistinct gloom.
I clapped my hands. Hassan the noiseless servant appeared with pastel drinks, clinking with ice, and oriental sweetmeats. Moira ignored these. Instead she watched me fixedly, withdrawing a little and holding her hands behind her. I noticed that the top button of her blouse had become unbuttoned, perhaps in the gallop over the dunes or in some other violence of the episode. She seemed to be aware of the direction of my glance, although she never took her eyes from my face. Mechanically we went through our lines. Her lips moved and she spoke in a faint voice.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?”
With infinite slowness, like the hand of a clock, she raised her arm and extended it with the palm down. The glass jewel in the ring caught the light and flared. I looked first at the ring and then back at her pale and intent face. Then I moved slowly toward her, bent, and applied my lips to the outstretched hand.
At the touch of her fingers against my lips the rush of desire overwhelmed me again. I hardly knew what I was doing and I realized I had forgotten my line. For a short time, perhaps only a second or two, I struggled to remember it. I released her hand, which sank in the dim air, and glanced at her meaningfully.
“IT IS NOT THE RING”
She backed slowly away from me across the tent in the direction of the couch. Mechanically, and with a professional competence, we carried out the gestures of our roles: she her knowing and slightly ambiguous fear, I the narrowed eyes and bared teeth of my lust. At the edge of the couch she stopped. Even though my face was still frozen in its conventional grimace of desire, I contemplated her with calm. It seemed to me that the moment was a terribly significant one, and I struggled to grasp why this was. Then with the suddenness of a revelation the answer fled up to me out of my memory: it was the exact moment of the still from Pictureland, the one I had cut out and put in the silver frame in my house in St. Albans Place. The lips in the papery-white face seemed on the point at last of pronouncing the word significant with richest expectation, a word that up to this moment had remained concealed in the microdots of the magazine page and now was to be revealed at last. Her mouth tremored a little at the corners and her lips parted. With her dark eyes fixed on me, she spoke.
“YES.”
This word too was written for us. Everything was written; and yet, even as I performed the conventional gestures and grimaces, in another part of me I struggled against these roles that other wills had commanded for us, roles we were obliged to play and yet confined us to a flimsy and shabby artificial existence in which all the depth, all the suffering and intensity of human experience was denied, a world in which violence was unreal and corpses rose up from the sand to dust themselves off, in which love ended with a tremulous kiss like two flowers touching and all else was forbidden, in which an impenetrable barrier, like a screen of pitiless and resilient gray plastic, interposed between one body and another. In this will to rebellion I sought above all to define whether I myself was a creature of flesh and blood or only a shadow and play of light, whether the promise of bliss that hung before us in this moment was a thing of substance or only a black-and-white dance of mute ghosts.
The blood pulsing in me was real, and so was my desire. I stepped forward and she was in my arms. I felt the hardness of the two delicate bones behind her shoulders, my hands touched the pale eloquent face, they slipped pulsing with desire down the blouse and the sides of the snugly cut riding breeches. Her own arms around my shoulders seemed to pull me backward and downward. Weightlessly and magically we floated down onto the heap of silken cushions. She lay with her eyes closed and lips slightly parted, her head moving back and forth like a slow pendulum with the urgency of her desire. “Alys, Alys,” I heard her murmuring. “Quickly, quickly.”
From overhead, as though it were coming from the stuff of scarves and carpets that hung over us and shielded us from the world, I was aware of a subdued and insistent humming. I grasped at the blouse and fumbled with the buttons, but my fingers were too slow, the buttons too tiny and intricate. “Quickly, quickly.” I pressed my hand over the soft convexity of a breast, feeling the point at the center harden under my touch, then I seized at the seam of the blouse and jerked it impatiently. The buttons flew away and there was a sound of tearing cloth. I had a glimpse of a perfect pale hemisphere, like a tiny moon, with a delicate upright aureole in its center. Then the murmur overhead gradually grew fainter until it stopped altogether. The body lying under me seemed to dissolve, and a kind of darkness fell over my eyes, growing deeper and deeper until everything was black and there was nothing.
16.
Moira said very little on the drive back toward the city. After our long swoon in the tent—which had perhaps lasted all night, since we had come back to the oasis at nightfall and now it seemed to be morning with the sun shining brightly—we got into the Ford and started off without very much conversation. The dunes were deserted; there was nobody in sight. The t
raffic on the country road was light and the Ford buzzed along making good time. As we passed through Whittier there was no more talk of our settling down in a little bungalow and washing the dishes together. Moira had put the hunting jacket back on over her torn blouse and fastened it tightly so that nothing showed. She looked steadily out through the windshield at the black road winding its way toward us. She seemed subdued and a little depressed.
After a while I said, looking not at her but out through the windshield at the road ahead, “I’ll think of some way.”
“Will you?” she said with false brightness.
“Once,” I said, “I went back out through the Screen with Nesselrode and then came back in. We have to talk to Nesselrode. He can take us out if he wants to.”
“Yes,” she said rather vaguely. I wasn’t sure she was following what I was saying. Or perhaps she simply felt that everything I was telling her was futile, but didn’t want to say so. After a while she said just as brightly, “Of course he’s a…pervert. You know that.”
At first I was about to remark that mutilating paper dolls seemed to be a fairly harmless sport. Then I remembered the riding crop. After all she had been his mistress and knew a good deal more about his private nature than I did.
“Did he ever really …”
“What?”
“Hurt you?”
“That depends,” she said, “on whether you would say that a prisoner is being hurt.”
“As I said. If we talk to him, maybe be would …”
“Yes,” she said again. It seemed she was greatly addicted to saying yes this morning. I remembered her pronouncing the word the night before as she had stared at me fixedly in the tent. Now, for some reason, it didn’t produce my usual reflex of purely animal lust. Instead I felt a warm rush of protectiveness for her; I wanted to steal her away to some rose-covered cottage or other and take care of her and live there with her the rest of my life, to be with her every day and make toast with her in the morning and go to bed with her at night, where I would be skillful and tender and solicitous and think about her pleasure instead of always thinking about myself.
“Moira.”
“Yes.”
“I know another way. Without Nesselrode. At least it’s worth trying.”
“Yes,” she said, looking out through the windshield and lifting her chin with something, at least, of her old confidence and flair.
* * *
When the downtown traffic was behind us I continued out west on Washington Boulevard, dodging around an occasional parked truck or a pedestrian making his way blithely across the street in the middle of a block. But when I came to La Cienega, instead of continuing on toward the lot a mile or so ahead I turned right abruptly, skidding around the corner so that Moira had to grab the door for support. She looked at me with an air of slight puzzlement, or perhaps, since her aplomb was unmarred even now, surmise would be a more precise term. After that she never took her eyes from my face, as though she hoped to read there some answer to her unspoken question. We didn’t have far to go. At the corner of Pickford, without slackening my speed, I made another violent turn and swung around in a circle to stop in front of the Alhambra Theater. Moira clutched at the windshield in order not to be thrown out. Then, after we had come to a stop, she looked at me calmly to see what I was going to do next.
I went around the car and opened the door and she got out. The stucco of the theater was fresh and new, and the playbills in their glass frames announced a new picture with Vanessa Nesser. “That tart,” said Moira mildly. This reassured me a little; she seemed her old self again. The front doors of the theater were of course locked, since it was only ten o’clock in the morning. Everything was phenomenally quiet. There was hardly any traffic on the streets; now and then a black car buzzed by, or a square truck with the name of a bakery or a furniture store on it. The sidewalk was deserted in both directions as far as the eye could see.
Then, several blocks away, I made out a small gray figure bobbing up and down slightly as it came up the sidewalk toward us. It was too small to make out any details, but the rhythm of the motion was unmistakable. Almost at the same moment Nesselrode seemed to catch sight of us, or perhaps of the Ford parked at the curb. The bobbing stopped, the figure straightened and elevated a little, and then set into motion again at a brisker pace.
I took Moira’s hand and pulled her after me around the theater to the rear door. It was unlocked and we slipped in quickly. I had no key to lock the door and could only fasten it with the flimsy wire hook. We mounted up the steps to the stage, where the usual junk was standing around: a stepladder, piles of lumber, crates. But all these things seemed newer now, as though they had been recently used, and there was no more dust on them than there was in the backstage area of an ordinary theater. I looked around. At the same instant I heard a kind of scratching or grating from the latched door behind us.
To pass through the Screen on previous occasions it had been necessary for me to hold Nesselrode’s hand, or so he had given me the impression. I remembered the creep}’ feeling of intimacy, a kind of inversion or perversion of human companionship, that this had given me. I took her hand and we moved forward. Our bodies struck limply, with a kind of bounce, onto the Screen. It had a slick surface that felt like rubber, but it was tough and strong. It hardly gave under the impact of our bodies at all.
“It’s no use, Alys.”
Releasing her hand, I stepped back a few feet and flung myself at it with all my force. I bounced off it and ricocheted back onto the pile of lumber, collapsing in a sprawl.
“It’s no good. It’s no good. It won’t work, I tell you.”
I inspected the pile of lumber more carefully. One timber in particular seemed suited to my purposes. It was heavy and strong, probably a four-by-four, and it had been cut off diagonally at one end for some reason so that it ended in a kind of chisel-point. Lifting the timber, I pushed this sharp end against the bottom of the Screen. Even though the grayish material was tough it had a certain elasticity. I heaved at the end of the timber with all my strength. The diagonal end slipped under the Screen, lifting it a little. After more pushing, and some waggling of the timber back and forth, I was able to work its entire thickness under the bottom of the Screen so that two feet or so of the timber projected out onto the fore-stage. Then I attempted to lift the other end of the timber to pry up the Screen.
It was an extraordinary substance. It seemed as tough as steel, even though to a certain point it had the elasticity of rubber. Beyond that point—the point where I managed to lift my end of the timber to the height of my waist—the resistance intensified so that it was all I could do to hold the timber up, let alone lift it any higher. I had now pried the bottom of the Screen six inches or so up from the stage, nowhere near enough for us to crawl under. In any case, I couldn’t let go of the end to crawl through, or the timber would have slammed down onto the stage with the violence of a Roman catapult. The perspiration broke out on my face and prickled under my arms. I looked around to see if perhaps there wasn’t another timber or something, about three feet long, that Moira could hand me to brace up the end of the timber at least temporarily while I took a breath and thought what to do.
At this point Moira, without a word, tugged at my sleeve. I turned and she pointed out through the gray luminescent Screen into the theater. Although the light was dim, my eyes had adjusted now and I could make out the rows of seats and the projection booth above. Something was happening out there. A figure stole along behind the last row of seats and turned to look behind him. Two more figures followed.
The three Chicano boys were dressed almost alike, in tight-fitting black pants, shiny shoes, and flowered shirts. They hurried on down the aisle at the side of the theater, still, looking behind over their shoulders. At the rear of the theater a pair of policemen in black uniforms came into view, and then another, this last one evidently a motorcyclist since he was in boots and a white helmet. All three of them had their guns
out. Their eyes were still adjusting to the darkness and they stood for a moment at the rear of the theater, keeping close to the wall behind the projection booth.
I lowered the beam to the floor, with an excruciating strain as though my backbone was about to split. Taking Moira by the hand, I drew her behind the pile of lumber where we were half hidden but could look over the top and see what was happening. We could see only dimly through the Screen, but we could hear every sound clearly as though magnified.
“Pendejo, tira la arma.”
The boy in the lead, glancing around at his companion, took something from his belt and slung it away in a single adroit gesture. A small snub-nosed revolver struck the stage with a clink and came to rest against the Screen, near the point where I had been trying to pry it up.
The three officers had caught sight of the boys now. “Okay, hold it right there,” said one of them in an offhand tone. They still had their guns out but in a way as though they didn’t expect to use them. They were all very professional, both the cops and the boys. Nobody got excited. The boys were neatly cornered and they saw it. They made no real effort to find other exits from the theater.
“All right, boys, on the wall. Are there just the three of you?”
“That’s right, just the three of us.”
As though they were repeating a game they had played many times, the boys faced the wall and put their hands on it while the cops patted their pockets. When they heard the clink of the handcuffs coming out their meekly put their wrists together behind them. One turned to the other and shrugged, with a little grin. Like all boys, they enjoyed playing cops and robbers. There was not much else to do in this part of town. As for police brutality, the cops gave the impression that they were too overworked to hit anybody. They probably had three or four other things to do that morning.
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