Elmo stayed awake just long enough to guide me through El Paso, and then I had three sleeping drunks and a long road ahead of me. I had toyed with the idea of getting off at the airport and flying somewhere, but once the men went to sleep and weren’t able to stimulate my hostility, I didn’t feel like stopping. I had never driven such a powerful car, and the sense of speed and power it conveyed was exhilarating. The road was spotted with red taillights, mostly of trucks, and the sky overhead was filled with white stars. The road was four lane, so I didn’t have to worry about traffic. It was like I was on a small freeway, crossing a vast desert.
The place where Elmo told me I had to turn in order to get to Austin was 120 miles away, so I got in the fast lane, feeling reckless, and let the big car fly. The trucks were big slow troglodytes, compared to me. I left them behind me in strings. By the time I had really settled into the thrill of the speed, and stopped worrying about collisions and traffic cops, I had covered the 120 miles to Elmo’s turnoff. A mountain loomed behind the turnoff, with a thin white moon just over its crest. The new road seemed lonelier and more endless than the one I had been on. Behind me, the trucks didn’t even sniff at it. They lumbered on past, like elephants in a circus parade.
The stars were white all night. I only had to stop twice, at little towns, for gas at all-night gas stations. Both times Winfield grunted, rolled out, went to pee, and came back, without having really opened his eyes. Elmo and Joe slept on. I felt a bit of tiredness in my shoulders and neck, but not much. I was temporarily in love with the night and the speed. Only the land near the road seemed really dark. The sky was pale with moonlight, and I could see dark ridges far across the white plateau. Several times I saw deer and, now and then, far off, the light from some lonely house. How amazing, to live so far from anything! What were the people in those isolated houses doing, with the lights still on in the middle of the night? I had no idea what kind of people would live in such emptiness—possibly people who were even stranger than Elmo and Winfield and Joe and myself.
The car ran all night, without complaint, its engine quiet and tireless. I seemed cut off from consciousness, absorbed by the curving, sometimes dipping road, and the pale light and the speed. Occasionally one of the men would grunt, wheeze, snore a little. When it began to get light I was sorry, for the first light was not as lovely as the moonlight. The land and the sky were the color of gray flannel. Then Elmo, who was in the front seat with me, began to thrash around uncomfortably. Suddenly he began to try and get the window open, and as soon as he did he hung himself out it and began to vomit. I braked gently, but before I got stopped he was through being sick.
“Couldn’t keep down my quail,” he said glumly, staring at the impending sunrise. It was just beginning to burn the horizon ahead and to deepen the blue of the upper sky. The men all woke up and began to groan from the fullness of their bladders, so I stopped at a small town called Roosevelt and took a walk by a little river while they attended to themselves. When I meandered back, thirty minutes later, they were all looking worried.
“Thought you’d left us to the tender mercies of the S.W.A.T. team,” Winfield said when I came up.
“They ain’t no harsher than the mercies of West Texas,” Elmo said. “We’re purt near the womb of my youth. This here’s about the cervix. Let’s get some breakfast to weigh us down. I feel kinda light on my feet, from all that tequila.”
We ate breakfast in a small cafe, and were stared at by cowboys, and indeed by everyone who came into the cafe.
“If this is the womb of your youth, you must be illegitimate,” Joe said. “I don’t think they cotton to our kind.”
“They better not sass me,” Winfield said. “Dreaming about my first wife always makes me mean. It might take a good fight to get the spleen out of my system.”
After breakfast we lazed around for a while, sitting on the banks of the cold little river until it was time for the post office to open. We had unanimously decided to mail back the film.
The postmistress was a rawboned woman who looked at the cans of film with no particular surprise.
“We ain’t never had a show here,” she said as she considered her instruction book. “Too close to Junction. Folks here don’t feel like they’re going no place unless they can drive a few miles.”
After some research she advised us to send the film back by bus, which we did across the street at the grocery store that doubled as a bus station. Later that morning, from just outside of Austin, I called the studio and told Wanda, Abe’s secretary, what time to have the film picked up at the bus station.
“Stolen film?” she said. “Who stole any film? I don’t know anything about it. Abe’s been gone, you know. He got married. It’s his honeymoon he’s gone on. Not too much has been happening around here. You mean you stole the film?
“That’s the funniest thing I ever heard of,” she said when I confirmed that I had. “Maybe we just won’t tell Abe. I don’t think we ought to confuse him, so soon after his wedding.”
“Who would marry Abe?” I asked.
“Dunno, think she was from Vegas,” Wanda said, and took another call.
11
WHEN I CAME OUT OF THE PHONE BOOTH I FOUND THAT the men had whiled away their time in a liquor store. They had tequila and limes and the ice chest out on the hood of the Cadillac and were making margaritas. Elmo had bought a hammer and was hammering some ice cubes he had wrapped in a towel.
“They don’t even know we took the film,” I said.
“You mean we wasted a gesture?” Winfield said.
“Who cares about a movie anyway?” Elmo said. “We should have kidnapped Abe and threatened to throw him out of the Goodyear Blimp unless we got final cut. These are violent times. Simple theft don’t count no more.”
They made a shaker of margaritas and spent the rest of the drive to Austin drinking them and licking salt off the backs of their hands. Joe had a white stubble on his cheeks and looked hollow under the eyes. The sun was hot and I soon got sleepy. The boys tried to show me some of the landmarks of Austin as we drove into town, but I felt sort of glazed and nothing registered except that there was a lake.
“I want to sleep,” I said. “After all, I drove all night. You can just let me off at a motel and pick me up later.”
“You don’t need no motel,” Elmo said. “Winfield and me have upwards of forty old girl friends in this town. Any one of them will let you use her apartment for a few hours. Hell, they ought to. We support most of them.”
“Could get sticky, Elmo,” Winfield said. “How are they going to know our relations are platonic?”
I insisted on a motel and they were forced to drop me at a big round Holiday Inn on the lake. I tried to get Joe to stay with me and get some rest, but he was too stubborn.
“Look, you’re not as young as them,” I said. “Can’t you be sensible this once? You don’t need to drink all day and all night just because they do.”
He was already half drunk, and that curious, resentful light came in his eyes when I pointed it out to him. I guess it was the male need to be forever boyish, although the man was in his sixties. Any effort on my part to try and restrain him from being boyish only got me resentment. We almost had a fight in the lobby of the strange motel, only it was just an eye fight. The fact that I was suddenly so tired kept it from flaring out.
They drove off, to continue their drinking, and I went to my room and undressed and stood under a shower for a long time, then sat with a towel wrapped around me, looking out the window at the blue lake. The room was dim and the sky outside very bright. After a time I pulled back the bedspread and lay down on the cool sheets. I started to pick up the phone and tell the operator to hold my calls, but it suddenly occurred to me that there was no need. Not a soul in the world knew where I was except the three men in the Cadillac, and they were undoubtedly so relieved to escape my censorious presence that they would be unlikely to bother me for a while.
I was, I guess, free. That
bondage to the telephone, which in Hollywood is as vital as blood, was broken. My agent didn’t know where I was. No actor knew where I was: no producer, no writer, no director. Nor my mother, my son, nor any lover. There would be no calls while I slept, and none when I woke up—not unless I chose to put the plug back in by calling someone, somewhere.
I was too tired not to sleep, but it wasn’t good sleep. I felt like I was floating. There seemed to be space between me and the bed, and more space between the bed and the floor. I felt feverish and uncomfortable and kept trying to get down to the cool sheets, but I couldn’t make it. I was always a few inches above them.
When I woke up I was lying on sheets that were no longer particularly cool, and I had a headache from the concentration I had had to practice in my sleep, to keep from floating away.
The sky outside was still just as bright, but the sun had moved and now the room was bright, too. Eventually, despite the air conditioning, the sun warmed the sheets and me, and I felt a little more relaxed. Owen had ruined me for motels. I associated such bedrooms with his body, coming down to mine. I always got scooted up in bed, with Owen, until my head was right against the headboard. I could remember exactly how that felt, the moment when my head had gone as far as it could go and that pressure merged with all the other pressures. It even became a part of coming, after it had happened enough times.
I got up, in an effort to direct my thoughts into more constructive channels. While I was staring out the window I saw the pink Cadillac returning. It wheeled into the driveway of the motel, filled with people, some of them female. In a minute Winfield walked out on a little parapet over the lake, holding hands with a girl who was approximately twice his height. She had long, gorgeous blond hair and looked very young.
I expected the party to sweep in eventually, but it didn’t, so I put on some clean pants and a blue T-shirt and went down. I found them out on the veranda. Joe was sitting with another of the large, healthy-looking girls.
Elmo, looking somewhat sour, had no girl. He was sitting with a brown, dried-up little man who managed nonetheless to look English, perhaps because of the way he combed his wisps of gray hair.
“That’s the woman herself,” Elmo said, when I walked out. “Our conscience, you might say.”
“I’m not your fucking conscience,” I said. I was getting tired of that line, and of all lines that elevated me in any way. The tireder I got, the less elevated my language became.
“This here’s Godwin Lloyd-Jons,” Elmo said. The man rose, took my hand in a steely grip, and more or less bowed.
“My dear, I’m extremely pleased to meet you,” he said. “Though it’s perhaps the dullest opening remark imaginable, I have to tell you that I admire your film profoundly.
“Profoundly,” he repeated, pausing for effect. “Not only was it wonderful cinema, but it helped me in my work. I have a whole chapter on it in my forthcoming book.”
“Godwin’s the greatest living student of the fuckin’ middle class,” Elmo said. “We bought him right off the Oxford campus. Greatest living student.”
“It’s the truth,” Winfield said. “If scholars could be as famous as screenwriters, old Godwin would be as famous as Elmo and me.”
Godwin sighed and sat back down. “Isn’t it ridiculous that these boys are so rich?” he said. “I have just one thing to say to you, Winfield.”
“What?”
“Go stick your dick in a beer can,” Godwin said.
One of the girls giggled, but she was ignored by all.
“Godwin’s sharp-spoken when he’s sober,” Elmo said. “Then when he’s drunk he loses control entirely and buggers students and such. It’s a wonder he ain’t been kicked out of this fair town of ours.”
“Fair town?” Godwin said. “This place is as bad as Kabul. The cuisine is no less nauseating. But why should Miss Peel have to listen to this drunken twaddle of ours?”
I was wondering that myself. I wished they would all go away, except Joe. Then maybe he and I could sit on the veranda by the quiet lake and become, again, the friends we had once been. That seemed to me to be the thing I wanted most, and maybe it would happen if we could be alone in a place where he could drink comfortably and relax. His girl looked big enough to pick him up and throw him in the lake if she wanted to. She had a broad face and in no way resembled the fine-featured, expensive women he was prone to. She was more Winfield’s type, and indeed Winfield seemed a little uncertain as to which of the two girls he was interested in, holding hands with one and constantly making eyes at the other. Elmo seemed to have no interest in them—he drank steadily.
I asked Godwin what his book was about, a question that caused Buckle and Gohagen to look pained.
“Don’t ask Godwin something like that,” Winfield said. “Have you ever listened to an English sociologist before? Now he’ll talk for seventeen hours.”
Godwin smiled wearily. His eyes were a washed-out blue and his lower teeth crooked, as if some giant had taken his face and squeezed them loose from his jaw, but despite that, he was not entirely unappealing.
“I like to think that these men’s brains have gradually assumed the shape of a local delicacy called a chicken-fried steak,” he said. “That is, a thin, flat piece of meat. An interesting evolutionary development, if true. As for my book, there’s not much to say, though it’s kind of you to ask. I have the misfortune to be a sociologist with a prose style. Quite a good one too—Flaubertian, if I do say so myself. I writhe around on the floor of my study for days, searching for the mot. I even run a fever.”
“Is that true?” one of the girls said. “I’d like to see that.”
“Only way you’ll see it is if you happen to be writhin’ underneath him,” Winfield said. “Or on top of him, as the case may be.”
Godwin suddenly stood up and came over and took my hand. “Can you imagine how lonely it is for an ironist, in a land like this?” he said. “You’re clearly very intelligent—the most intelligent woman I’ve met in years. Perhaps we should marry.”
Joe Percy burst out laughing, which irritated me.
“In all likelihood,” I said.
“Don’t give him no encouragement,” Winfield said. “Godwin will marry anything that walks, male, female, or chicken.”
“Let’s take a walk and get to know one another better,” I said lightly to Godwin. “I didn’t leave home to sit around among crazy people. I was among crazy people to begin with.”
Godwin looked surprised. He let go of my hand, and drained his drink. “Your suggestion is so civilized it startled me,” he said. “Walking isn’t precisely a local custom. However, only the brave deserve the fair.”
We left them and found a path down to the water. A few black women were fishing at the edge of the lake. Downtown Austin was lit by the setting sun.
“I say, that old man’s seriously depressed,” Godwin said. “Is he in love with you?”
“I hope so,” I said. “We’re such old friends we’ve forgotten how to be friends. Maybe we really aren’t friends any more and just don’t want to admit it.”
“Nonsense. The man’s dying and wants desperately for you to make it up to him,” Godwin said. “He talked about you all afternoon, though from his talk I couldn’t tell if you were his daughter or the love of his life. I’m not young myself, and I know what such talk means—also I went through something not unlike what you’re describing with my first wife, and then again with a lover—a great gentleman many years older than me. It’s love struggling in the grip of death. Stop fighting him and give him anything he wants, before he drops dead on you, as dear Alain did on me. Else you’ll have terrible regrets.”
It made my hair stand up. Even as I began to believe it, my voice disputed what he had said.
“He’s not going to die,” I said. “He’s not that old.”
Godwin smiled, showing his crooked teeth.
“Quite irrelevant,” he said. “Some men are able to die when they stop being able to find
a compelling reason to live. I’m of the opposite sort. I should have died in World War II, with my dearest friends, but I didn’t and now I’ve flourished quite unjustifiably for three more decades, in defiance of a complete lack of significance. But your friend’s different. He’s lost his vanity. At his age, vanity is vital.”
It was very upsetting, what he was saying, but we continued to walk down the brown path by the quiet lake, with the falling sun burnishing the water far ahead of us and throwing its golden light on the brown buildings of Austin.
“How can you say complete lack of significance?” I said. “You write books.”
“I’ve never pretended to myself that they mattered,” he said. “Not one middle-class heart will ever be moved by my analyses, or one pattern changed. My writing provides occasions for academic disputation, and it gets me a good living, but there it ends. I live for what used to be called love—now it seems to be called relationships. Unhappily, my colleagues and myself are largely responsible for that word change.”
“Did you ever know Danny Deck?” I asked. I had just remembered my old love. Danny had talked of a professor named Godwin.
The question startled him. “Of course,” he said. “He took my girl from me. She ruined him, ultimately, or so I like to think. Absolutely horrible woman.”
“I think I met her once,” I said.
“How extraordinary you should have known them,” he said. “Sally’s still around, you know. Married to a black legislator now, very rich. Dope dealer, actually. Elmo knows them. I may yet kill the woman, if I get the chance. Daniel’s child is quite beautiful. I often see her in the park, near my house. I’ve even thought that when somebody finally kills Sally I might try and make her my ward. Such a fetching girl. Love to make her my ward.”
And do what with her? I thought. His washed-out eyes were shining. He looked at me shrewdly.
“I remember him as vividly as if it were yesterday,” he said. “We almost drowned together once, in the middle of a desert. Was he in love with you?”
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