Amy screamed.
She connected to him only by her hand, not by her pain. He felt so impotent.
“Bear down,” the doctor in charge told her.
Her face went red.
Her mouth opened wide, stretched open, so much it seemed her lips would tear at the corners. From almost directly above Peter could see into her mouth, the pink pillow of her tongue, the slicker, more crimson membranes of the back of her throat, from which came another, longer scream.
The doctor in charge motioned him to the foot of the table, to stand back out of the way but where he could see everything.
There was some blood running from the lower juncture of Amy’s vagina, which was distended and parted. It seemed unfamiliar. Impossible that it had ever been a source of pleasure.
Amy’s stomach was like a mound of risen dough, that pale. Its skin so tight it was almost transparent. The doctor in charge kneaded her stomach expertly with both hands.
“Here we go,” said the doctor in charge.
“That’s a good mother,” said the other.
Amy’s vagina expanded its fleshy perimeter, changed shape into an elasticlike ring to accommodate the top of the new human head.
All the head emerged.
Neck and shoulders.
And the rest of it came easier, eagerly it seemed, almost spurted out.
It was a boy, he thought, from what he could see. But the doctor in charge said, “It’s a beautiful girl.” He always used that adjective.
It would be sometime later, at least a day or two. The child in Amy’s arms. No embrace more possessive. He, Peter, there to watch a feeding. The child given Amy’s nipples, that dripped the sweetest kind of milk, love in it.
Amy Javakian thought of a future morning.
In Peter’s studio, an extension of where they lived.
A spacious room with the skeleton of its framework left exposed for warmth and a skylight of numerous panes.
Sibelius on the stereo.
Sunlight to guarantee the truth of the colors squeezed from tubes by Peter.
Peter there, her love. Before the challenge of a huge fresh stretch of canvas. That moment a contemplative moment within his need to paint. His eyes, fixed on the white infinity, searched for the endless beginning. His face was pulled toward his mouth and his eyes, tightly, as though in pain, as though he were looking directly into the sun or trying to make out some distant object on a bare, bright horizon.
For the longest while he found nothing. But then he must have hit on something. His concentration reflected off the blank expanse, back to him, causing an opening in the creative part of him. At first a mere pinpoint, a distant single star in the sky of his unconscious, then quickly it dilated and he was able to reach down in, grab hold and bear it out.
She saw, she thought, squeezes of color on a palette. But no. More paint than that needed for such a major canvas. Buckets of it.
Green.
Peter dipped the wide, bristling head of a brush into green and gave it to the canvas. In all creativity, she realized, there had never been two brush strokes exactly alike.
The green went on. He continued with a different color, others, working rapidly, caught up in it. Images crowded out of him, the next pushing the next. A rare sort of labor. A birthing.
Every so often, without stopping work, unable to, really, he used the sleeve of his shirt to wipe perspiration from his forehead and upper lip.
Finally, suddenly, the painting was done.
And they named it together.
Lois Stevens pictured herself transformed into a different kind of creature.
A puma.
From her nose to the end of her tail she was as long as a tall man. With a fawny coat, light grayish brown, luxuriously thick, that only she could rub the wrong way. Ears and tail tipped puce to black, as though she had dipped them into dyes. The fur on her belly white and softest.
She was a roamer, a lethal vagabond.
Born, one of a litter of two, on a ledge beneath an overhang in the Crazy Mountains of Montana. For most of her life she had wandered from range to range, never staying more than a night or two anywhere — from the Flat Tops of Wyoming, the San Raphael Swell of Utah, to Sweetwater Park in the Sierra Nevadas. An independent with no destination.
She traveled the greater distances at night, her eyes peripherally set like polished citrines, naturally capable of night sight, and her blonde whiskers, out left and right, equalled exactly the width of her body to measure and warn her when the going got too narrow.
She lay now on a huge domelike boulder, typical of the dry terrain there on the western shoulder of the Sierras. She nearly matched the hue of the boulder, knew that and found security in it. Resting in the sun, blinking, sweeping her tail back and forth to entertain her edgy disposition. Cleaning her fur with long licks.
Finally, she settled into a nap. But was bothered by a blue fly that peskily lighted on her ear, tickling. She twitched it off. The fly, or perhaps another, circled and lighted on her again. She was almost irritated enough to scratch. The fly flew away, probably frightened.
Noises then, from below in the canyon less than seventy yards away.
A hunter.
According to his senses he believed he was being silent.
Lois, the puma, watched the older man picking his way, following her tracks. It amused her. She stood, so she was profile against the sky, asking for attention.
He saw her, brought his rifle up, got it butted snugly into the socket of his shoulder but did not have time to aim before she leaped from sight.
She led him on, purposely padded over soft, sandy places to leave impressions for him. Several times he lost her and she had to snarl for him to reestablish direction. After a while it became boring for her, too easy. She circled around from rock to rock to be at his back. There he was, thirty feet away, confused about which way to hunt.
She crouched, head low, ran her tongue over her teeth, extended and retracted her twenty claws, while deciding whether or not she loved or disliked him enough to spring.
Spider Leaks had his fuck-you money.
Now he thought what he was going to do with it, not if, but when he got out of the mud.
For sure he wasn’t going to start flashing green all over the place right away. He’d stash it, keep scuffling straight as usual, so his parole officer had nothing to get on him for. Wouldn’t be easy, having all that bread and not showing it. Maybe every once in a while, like on a Saturday night, he’d treat himself to a hundred to spend. But that would be the limit. No matter how good a deal came along he’d cool it for three, maybe four months.
Then he’d put in to have his parole transferred to New York. No reason why his parole officer shouldn’t go along with that. No suspicions. Spider had an aunt and a bunch of cousins welfaring it back east. He’d leave California looking trashy and hit town looking to take care of business.
A white El Dorado with automatic twin antennas, not a mile or a scratch on it, his. Glad rags, like those he’d seen Clyde, Walt Frazier, wearing in a magazine article. He’d ask around and find out who Clyde’s tailor was. He’d also get himself a three- or four-room crib in one of those big apartment buildings, thirty stories above the dirt. Chrome and mirrors and lots of upholstery that looked like real fur and stereo speakers everywhere, even in the bathroom, both bathrooms.
Chicks. He’d have two main ones. Two of the foxiest, a tall black and a tall blonde, so he could mix them up. They’d wait on him every minute, do anything he wanted, let him do anything he wanted. Fight over him.
Soon as he had it all together he’d shag ass to radio station KBLS for a job. KBLS, New York, the soul station. He’d look so good they’d have to believe he could do it good. He knew how. All those years in slam he’d practiced disc jockeying in his mind and sometimes aloud. And since he’d been out he’d kept at it at home, using a pair of grapefruit crates up on end for turntables and the empty socket of a gooseneck lamp bent to his
mouth for a microphone, while he turned the volume of his radio up or down according to his own verbal cues, as though he were actually on. They’d dig him at KBLS, sign him up right away, long-term unbreakable contract. He’d play Barry White and James Brown punctuated by his own appropriately cool phrases, and before long he’d be as famous as Frankie Crocker. He’d never heard Crocker, but from what he’d heard of him from back-east blacks that man was what Spider wanted to be.
Spider Leaks.
It just didn’t sound as good as Frankie Crocker.
Maybe, Spider thought, he ought to change his last name, so no one could make any more of those pissing jokes.
Elliot Janick distracted himself with a moral accounting.
Entering rights and wrongs on a mental ledger.
He only concerned himself with what he’d done professionally. Otherwise, his thoughts became jammed, too much to handle.
He sorted through the years, the deals, starting way back. Strange how clear and chronologically correct those events, important and minor, were presented by his memory. He refused to fool himself, called a right a right and a wrong a wrong. But too soon the ledger was way out of balance, and he was deep in the red.
That wasn’t going to get him anywhere but bankrupt. He had to be easier on himself. There were two sides to every life.
Maybe, instead of all this self-accusing mishmash, if he could settle things with just one, face up to just one sort of representative offense, that would take care of the rest.…
Walter Nyland came to mind.
Elliot pushed him aside. Not Nyland, he told himself.
But Nyland returned. He’d been chosen and there was no use trying to get away from him.
Nyland was an author who had written his first novel at age forty. He’d quit a steady career to take that late longshot. The first novel came pouring out. It was acceptable but a psychological catharsis with too many of Nyland’s own problems in it to be a critical or popular success. Nyland went at his second less sure of himself and with more respect for the craft. Somehow he tapped an extremely perceptive source in himself and the result was Love Knots, a story about a marital infidelity that managed to keep on the fine line between artistic frankness and sensationalism.
One of the assistant editors at Nyland’s publisher was a woman named Janet Hamlyn. Ambitious, underpaid, more of a clotheshorse than a workhorse, she was one of the links in motion picture producer Elliot Janick’s chain of inside connections. He had women in similar positions at every major New York publishing house. Not on his steady payroll but part of a reward system. When a promising manuscript came in, they immediately made duplicates that they sent to Janick.
That way he got first look, first chance at all the better material, and if, as a result, a deal was made by him, the editor involved received a nice chunk of cash that she didn’t have to report as income.
Janet Hamlyn passed a copy of Nyland’s Love Knots manuscript on to Janick, who read it and realized it had all the ingredients of a best seller and a big grosser at the box office. Janick had the jump on all the other producers. He personally got to Nyland, who was hungry for recognition. Nyland ate up the famous filmmaker’s attention and flattery. Talent should be appreciated, and how much he wished he’d been blessed with such ability, Janick told him among other things. No mention of wanting to buy Love Knots.
Next, on a public bench opposite the Sherry Netherland Hotel, Janick put Nyland’s agent in his pocket by promising to buy at least two other properties of lesser quality the agent had been trying to peddle. Plus fifty thousand cash on the side.
Janick made his firm offer on Love Knots.
Forty thousand and a small percentage of the producer’s net.
The agent recommended Nyland take it. Nyland signed where he was told and didn’t learn until much later that he could have gotten as much as four hundred thousand. The book went on to be on the lists, a bestseller. Nyland made a considerable amount from the paperback sale and a book club but the bigger money would have been from the movie rights.
Mainly it was Janick who screwed him.
Nyland knew but didn’t have a fact to stand on.
Love Knots, as it turned out, was Nyland’s only important book. Some said it was the only one he had in him. Actually, being suckered by Janick brought so much disillusion and rage it blocked him, got in the way of any other feelings he tried to put down on paper.
As a film, Love Knots earned sixty million, was the picture of the year and took over eighteenth position on the all-time box-office grossing list.
One night years later Janick happened to run into Nyland at the La Scala Restaurant in Beverly Hills. Nyland couldn’t really afford the dinner he’d just signed for. Aside, to hell with pride, he asked Janick for a screenwriting assignment. Janick, with a big smile and no hesitation said, “Why not?” and told Nyland to call him the next afternoon at the studio, knowing he was leaving for London in the early morning.
The next week Nyland was dead from downers and booze and ingrown anger.
Now there he was on the screen of Elliot’s mind, waiting to be answered to. Elliot tried to diminish the hard edges with contrition. Nyland stared out, stiff, damning.
“It was a deal,” Elliot explained. “All’s fair in making a deal.”
Nyland appeared to soften.
Elliot grabbed the opening. “Forgive me.”
“I forgive you,” Nyland said, exactly as Elliot wanted, a sincere pronouncement.
The trouble was Elliot didn’t believe him.
Marsha Hilbert saw herself with a new strong man. Better looking, younger, certainly more masterful than Elliot.
Her new one had a jaw that set, clamped like a lock, and eyes that reached out dark and hard as stones to punish her for the slightest infraction. He wouldn’t let her get away with anything, no matter how much she tried. He was poor but with taste, one of those who knew and wanted the best if only he could afford it. He adapted immediately to having her money.
There she was, in something gray and relaxing by Ungaro. A little loose sable around her neck.
He in proud, dominant black serge with a subtle stripe.
They’d be in Zurich together, beating Elliot to the bank by an hour, withdrawing every cent. Without a hitch because she had it memorized like a line in a part: One, three, nine, eight, zero, nine. Zephyr.
Worth, she was sure, millions.
They’d wait in the car across the street from the bank for Elliot to arrive. They’d watch him go in and, when he came out, she’d call him over so she could wave the Swiss bank’s cashier’s check at him. She’d fold it slowly, deliberately and, with beautiful insouciance, tuck it into the breast pocket of her new love’s suit.
Up would go the car’s electric window as she zoomed away, watching Elliot become smaller in the sideview mirror.
Gloria Rand thought how certain she was that she and Brydon would never do anything ordinary.
They wouldn’t, for example, ever go to an obvious, over-trampled place like Hawaii or Bermuda. Two weeks on a barge, nomadizing on the canals of Holland would be their style.
A comfortable, Dutch-clean barge hired privately by them. No more expensive than staying at a hotel, renting a car and all that. Much more romantic. Cheese and wine on deck at twilight. Friendly windmills turning into entertainingly ominous silhouettes. Them making long, good love, falling asleep overlapped, and then waking to a flood of pastel tulips as far as they could see.
Lots of such times.
Years and years of such times.
How true he’d be. Compulsively loyal. Never even a turn of the head for young legs or the walking pump of a young derriere. He’d tell her she was far more attractive than any other woman or girl, in every department, and mean it. Better yet, demonstrate it.
All ways.
Next she had them in Provence — the beautiful old religious city of Avignon, where they vowed and worshipped one another and placed alms in the form of loving
pleasure upon their plates. Walking the banks of the Rhone. Napping beneath almond and fig and olive trees.
She went on and on and on with her romantic itinerary.
Frank Brydon spent some of the time on thoughts of that Navajo healer he’d heard about.
In his mind he went to Taos, New Mexico, inquired about her. The mere mention of her name, Sky Touching Woman, made other Indians suddenly silent. Brydon took that to mean respect and was encouraged by it.
He finally located Sky Touching Woman ten miles out on the wasteland — in a crude adobe hut. It seemed consistent that she should be apart from everyone. Brydon tried to disregard the Ford pickup truck parked around back.
He entered the hut but had to stoop because the doorway was so low. She was sitting on the earth floor off to one side, profile to him. With a handwoven robe around her, although it was a warm day. She might be immune to such mundane conditions, he thought.
She was about fifty, squat, plump-breasted. Her face was flat as it should be, time-lined. Eyes with dark pupils, yellowed whites, an appropriate vacantness to them.
She didn’t greet him, remained unmoved, as though she had expected him. Was there the chance that someone, one of those he’d asked, had told her he was coming? He had to put himself into her line of sight. Still she said nothing. He told her his name, his problem. In the corner off to her left was a regular brown paper shopping bag on its side, its contents partially spilled out: two cans of Chef Boy-ar-dee spaghetti and an economy-size bag of potato chips. She had to eat, he told himself.
She spoke for the first time. A single word.
He undressed as instructed and understood from her gesture that he was to lie down on the rug that was spread before her. She raised her head, looked briefly skyward and then down to him, not at his face but his chest. She repeated that motion several times, more and more rapidly, until it became a sort of delirious nod. He decided it might be her way of trying to connect him spiritually with her source of supernatural power.
She stopped doing that a bit too abruptly and reached for an object by her side. A carved piece of hardwood with a series of toothlike notches. A rasp. She held it above him, ran another piece of wood over it, back and forth, creating a hard scrubbing sound. He took that, possibly, to be the cleansing of him prior to the operation.
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