The Deer Park

by Norman Mailer

  WOMEN WHO HAVE COME to know me well have always accused me sooner or later of being very cold at heart, and while that is a woman’s view of it, and a woman can rarely know the things that go on inside a man, I suppose there is a sort of truth to what they say. The first good English novelist I ever read was Somerset Maugham, and he wrote somewhere that “Nobody is any better than he ought to be.” Since it was exactly what I was thinking at the time, I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought because it seems to me that some people. are a little better, and some a little worse than they ought to be, or else the universe is just an elaborate clock. Nonetheless I can hardly claim that I am the most warmhearted man-and-jack to come sauntering down the pike.

  Among the different people each of us has in himself is the gossip columnist I could have been. Maybe I would have been a bad columnist—I’m honest by inclination—but I would have been the first who saw it as an art. Quite a few times I have thought that a newspaperman is obsessed with finding the facts in order to tell a lie, and a novelist is a galley-slave to his imagination so he can look for the truth. I know that for a lot of what follows I must use my imagination.

  Particularly for Eitel’s affair with Elena Esposito. I have to wonder a little if I am the one to write about it. I have picked up something of an education since I was in Desert D’Or, but Eitel is very different from me, and I do not know if I can find his style. Yet, imagination becomes a vice if we do not exercise it. One of these days I am going to write a book about a town I visited for twenty minutes, and if I do it well enough, everybody will believe I lived there for twenty years. So there is no use in making apologies—I have the conceit that I know what happened, and at the least everybody in Desert D’Or knew that their affair began well.

  When Teppis told him to leave the party, it put Eitel in a good mood, for to find his self-respect Eitel usually had to do something which was of no advantage for himself. On the walk to the car, with Elena on his arm, he was pleased enough to be giving imitations of the people they had talked to at the party. “I love the dignity of Italian women,” he said, mimicking Jennings James, and Elena breathless from laughter, could only plead, “Oh, stop!”

  Once they arrived at his house, she went in with him quite naturally. He made two drinks and sat beside her on the couch, thinking that nothing could be more of a tonic for her than to make love gently, showing the affection he felt. Yet his pulse was quick. “I think I’ve seen you before,” he said after a silence.

  Elena nodded. “You did. But you weren’t even looking at me.”

  “I don’t believe that’s possible,” he said with his best smile.

  “Well, it’s true.” She nodded seriously. “I used to do wardrobe work at Supreme. One time I brought up a couple of dresses for you to look at, and you didn’t even see me. You just looked at the dresses.”

  “I thought you were a flamenco dancer.”

  Elena shrugged. “I wanted to be. Once in a while my agent would get me a job for a couple of nights. But no career to speak of.”

  Her words gave him a picture of the men through whom she must have passed: would-be agents, unemployed actors, real-estate operators with a one-room office, musicians, a man or two with a name for a one-night stand, a man perhaps with a name like his own.

  He disliked mentioning Munshin but he was curious. “Collie said he met you at a benefit.”

  She laughed. “That’s Collie’s story. He likes to build things up. Why he never even saw me dance. He used to make me feel too inhibited.”

  “Then how did you meet?”

  “Collie wasn’t like you. He noticed me.” Her green eyes teased him. “I had to take some costumes into Collie’s too, and what with one thing and another, Collie finally took me to dinner.” She sighed. “You know what I hold against Collie? He got me to quit the job, and then he put me in an apartment. He said he couldn’t keep on seeing me if I worked at Supreme.” She gave a wry twist to her childlike mouth. “So that’s how I got kept. I guess I’m lazy.”

  Eitel was studying her face, considering Elena as a possibility for a small role in his film. She would not do. He could tell that at a glance. There was the sad fact that her nose was too long and the sensuality of her nostrils would be exaggerated by the camera.

  He changed the subject. “Have you ever done any skiing?” Eitel asked.

  “No.”

  “We must do it sometime. There’s nothing like skiing,” he said as though in an hour they would be on a plane to a ski resort.

  “I haven’t done anything much.”

  “I bet you have,” Eitel said, his voice low from the nearness of their bodies. “I’ve always thought that everything you learn is done by fighting your fear.”

  “Oh.”

  They each sat sipping their drinks. “I think I can get some Spanish music on the radio,” Eitel said. “Would you dance for me?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “But you’ll dance for me sometime?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “I’d love to see you. I hear you do a great flamenco.”

  “You’re just being nice.” Her hand was playing nervously with his. After a minute or so, she leaned forward with a sad little smile and kissed him.

  In no time at all, they were in the next room. Eitel was amazed. How much she knew, he thought numbly, how very much she knew. With the exception of a moment when she tried to hold him off, and cried out, “No, no,” to which he answered not brutally, “Oh, shut up,” only adding to her excitement by the words, he had never had a woman give so much the first time. For Eitel, who had decided more than once that when all was said, not too many women really knew how to make love, and very few indeed loved to make love, Elena was doubly and indubitably a find. He had blundered on a treasure. It was one of the best experiences of his life. Long after his enthusiasm had passed, and he catered to her with the art and technique he had been at such competitive turns to pick up, he could picture Munshin’s round face and its unhappy look. “Et tu, old friend,” Munshin would be saying, and it gave Eitel new appetite. She caught every improvisation, she stimulated others; he was a ferment of invention. Eitel always felt that the way a woman made love was as good a guide to understanding her character as any other way, and from the distance of an inch Elena was a woman of exceptional beauty. Never had he seen such a change. Where she was timid with people, she was bold with him; where crude in her manners, subtle with intuition. So it went, her energy almost ruthless in its call on him. When at last they were done and Eitel could glow from a show of skill more valuable to him than the pleasure itself, they lay side by side smiling at each other.

  “You’re …” she started to say at last, and ended by using an odd word. “You’re a king,” Elena said. And with a groan she turned away from him. “I just never … you see … it never happened like this.”

  Since the day on the beach with the girl and her surfboard, he had begun to doubt himself. As he had grown older, he had become more sensitive to the small ways in which women refused his body even as they accepted it, and this had made him fragile. He had thought that in a few more years this part of his life would be gone.

  It was nice to believe Elena then, not only because it was nicer than to think she usually made such a speech, but from an instinct now finely tuned after many such remarks made to him by women who were more or less honest, by women who had loved him, and by women who wished to use him. He had heard it so many times, and not without justice, for satirically he considered this his true art. “To be a good lover,” I had heard him say, “one should be incapable of falling in love.” But he believed her out of something more. To give herself as she had given, was past flattery. It was not the sort of thing one could deliver at will. In the course of the years he had had affairs which had been hardly despicable, pearls as he would think of them drily, but never, no, not ever, had the first night opened such a
n extravaganza. It was not so bad, he thought, to be called a king by a girl who must be on speaking terms with everything from an acrobat to a tango dancer. Loving himself, loving her body as it curled against him, he closed his eyes, thinking with drowsy contentment that if he usually wanted nothing more than to quit a woman once they were done, now he not only wished to sleep the night with Elena but to hold her in his arms. He fell asleep a happy man.

  In the morning, both were depressed. They were strangers after all. Eitel left her in bed and put on his clothes in the living room. The ice-cube bucket held an inch of water, and he washed it out, poured some liquor neat, and cleared his throat. When Elena came out in her evening gown, her face without make-up, her long hair hanging forlornly over her cheeks, he was almost forced to laugh. If she had been beautiful the night before, she looked sullen at this moment and not at all attractive.

  “Let’s have breakfast,” he said, by an effort smiling at her, and when she nodded, he began to scramble some eggs and put the coffee on.

  “After we get a little food in us,” he called from the kitchen, “and feel human, I’ll take a drive out to your hotel and bring you some clothing. It’ll pick you up.”

  “I’ll get out. You don’t have to worry about me,” she said in a surly voice.

  “I’m not talking about that.” She had sensed he would just as soon be rid of her, and he was moved to be kind. “I want you to spend the day with me,” he said quickly.

  She softened. “I’m always in a bad mood in the morning.”

  “Oh, so am I. We’re alike, I tell you.” And on an impulse he reached to kiss her. She offered her cheek.

  Over breakfast, given the stimulation of coffee, his humor improved. “How would you like to take a swim at the Yacht Club?” he asked.

  “There?”

  He nodded, he could see she was wondering how it would be to appear at the pool. So many strangers would see her with Eitel the morning after the party.

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “We’ll shock them.” He was in clownish good spirits. “If Teppis comes along, we’ll push him in the pool.”

  “He’s an awful man,” Elena said. “So cruel. The way he talked to you.”

  “It’s the only language he knows. He doesn’t use words. He just throws out language to convey emotion.” Eitel laughed. “Now, there’s a man who’s all emotion. Not like me.”

  “You’re full of emotion,” she said, and then looked at her plate in embarrassment.

  A bad mood slipped over Eitel. He had not answered Teppis properly. There were any number of things he might have said, but he had thought too long and then merely smiled and walked away with her.

  “I just remembered something,” he told her, starting himself up again. “I know a water hole in the desert. It’s kind of pleasant. Lots of cactus. Even a tree, I think. Why don’t we go swim there?”

  Despite signs to the contrary, she was still his sullen little Italian. “I guess I’ll take the bus home today,” she said quietly.

  “Oh, you’re out of your mind.”

  “No, I want to go home.” He noticed she did not dwell on how little she could expect there. “You’ve been very nice,” she added clumsily, and began to shiver.

  “Look, Esposito,” he began in a light tone, but tears came into her eyes, and she left the room. He could hear her close the bedroom door.

  “Stupid,” Eitel said aloud. He hardly knew if he meant Elena or himself.

  He was thinking that she had given herself to him in order to humiliate Munshin. Now, the next day had come and she had only humiliated herself. He went to the door, opened it, and sat down beside Elena on the bed. “Don’t cry,” he said tenderly to her. She was dear to him suddenly. He liked her ever so much. “Don’t cry, little monkey,” Eitel said and stroked her hair. It let loose a watershed of tears from Elena. He held her in his arms, a little amused, a little bored, and yet not without sympathy. “You’re very sweet,” he said into her ear.

  “No … you’re so nice to me,” she sobbed.

  After a time, she got up to examine herself in the mirror, made a small sound of horror, and whispered to him, “Once I get my other clothes, let’s go to the pool.”

  “Oh, you’re a terror,” he said, and she hugged him hungrily.

  “Please don’t look at me,” Elena said. “Not until I fix myself.”

  He obeyed her. Given the key to Elena’s room after she confessed her room would be messy, and he swore it was a matter of indifference to him, Eitel went for a quick drive through Desert D’Or and found her hotel. Her room was not a large room, and its window looked on an airshaft, the only airshaft in Desert D’Or, he thought. She had brought but one suitcase, a shabby piece of luggage, yet she had managed to strew its contents over every piece of furniture. She was certainly sloppy, and as a hint to the standards of the hotel, the chambermaid had done no more than make the bed. Sadly, Eitel studied the disarray. She was so messy, he thought, tossing a slip on top of a rumpled blouse in order to clear a space for himself. He sat down on the chair he had cleared, and lighting a cigarette, said to himself, “I’ll have to get around to putting her on the bus tonight.”

  Put her on the bus, he did not. The afternoon turned into fun. If no one came to their table to talk, it suited his mood exactly. Ever since he had awakened, his temper was shifting between melancholy and excitement. It satisfied him somehow that the news of his quarrel with Teppis had spread so quickly. Let him be all alone, he thought; let them be all alone, Elena and himself. “Fresh beginnings,” Eitel repeated to himself all day like the line of a song which one cannot get out of mind.

  He was very pleased with Elena. Her body, which he had not had time to study, was delightful in a bathing suit. He felt a slow warmth sitting in the sun, able to know that in a few hours he would have her all over again. It was pleasant beyond pleasure to put off that moment. She had a merry laugh today. Her soft mouth widened, her beautiful white teeth gleamed to his sight, and he discovered that he was trying to make her laugh. She was aware of how people looked at them, she was not at ease, far from it, and yet unlike the night before at the party, she succeeded in showing some poise. He had to value the dignity with which she listened to him, her eyes alive to the meaning of what he said. “I could make something of this girl,” he thought. It would not be so difficult. He could teach her to speak without moving her hands, he could direct her deep voice away from its vulgarities. Eitel was in love with the afternoon. Everything was so perfect. “Charles Francis against the world,” he thought with cautious irony, but it could hardly trap his exuberance. He found himself thinking of those years when he had been in college at an Eastern university which had put the crown to his parents’ ambition; and with a shock—it was truly so long ago—he remembered how clumsy he had been in his late adolescence. With what hunger he had watched, and with what hatred, while wealthy students paraded their dates through the doors of all those fraternity houses to which he had never been invited; what contempt he had felt for his own dates in college—town girls, working girls, an occasional night with some unattractive student from the neighboring college for women. He had left school with the fire of knowing that the world saw him as homely and insignificant, and maybe that had been the spur to make those early movies. If it was true, then his success had come from hunger and from anger, and in those years at the capital, while his hunger had been fed and his anger mellowed into wit, he had spent his urge and been admired and lost the energy of his talent. Sitting beside Elena, thinking of how he was back where he had begun, he had a hope that his talent would return. She would help him, he could live with such a woman now. She was warm, and she had given him so much last night. How necessary that had been for his confidence. “You’re wonderful,” he said to her like a boy, and was even more taken by the doubt with which she took his praise. She was sensitive. That he had decided beyond a doubt. Of her own accord she began to talk about Munshin, and he enjoyed the way she
saw him. “He’s not a bad man,” Elena said. “He thinks he would like a woman to be really in love with him. I was mean. I made him think I loved him.”

  Her honesty drew Eitel. “Collie thought you loved him?” he asked.

  She surprised Eitel by what she said next. “I don’t know. He’s sharp. You know he has a lot of understanding of relationships.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “My analyst thought I should try to make a go with him.”

  “You’re finished now?”

  “I stopped going to the analysis. I don’t think I made the right kind of transference.” It seemed odd, somehow, to hear such words from her mouth. “You know,” she said, “my doctor was like Collie to me.” A devil shone in her eyes for an instant. “I think I used to go out and get in some of the nutty things I did with men, just so I could be more unusual to my doctor.” She giggled. “You know, so he’d write me up as a case or something.”

  Eitel tried not to wince at her language. “How did Collie take all this?” he asked.

  “I hate him,” she said suddenly. “He’d have forgiven me if I’d, you know, maybe let him watch. He’s such a hypocrite,” she said furiously, and squeezing Eitel’s hand, added, “I don’t know how I could have stayed with him so long.”

  Eitel nodded. “Collie wasn’t so nice when it came to divorcing his wife.”

  “Oh, it was impossible. I’m disgusted with myself.” She fingered her mouth vacantly. “He’s a funny man, Collie. He’s so full of guilt and anxiety.”

  “That blasted jargon again,” Eitel said to himself. It carried unpleasant connotations from other affairs. So many of his women had been in analysis, and they had carried gossip back and forth: what Eitel had said about the analyst; what the analyst had said about him. A modern ménage-à-trois.

  But Elena was off on her own thoughts. “Collie is very complicated,” she told Eitel. “He wants to think he’s unselfish, and he also wants to think he’s no good. The only time he’s happy is when he feels both things at the same time. Does that make sense? I, mean, I don’t know, I don’t know how to say things.”