West of Sunset

by Stewart O'Nan

  After lunch, while the sun hung directly overhead, the Germans emerged, lanky and dark as natives, spread their towels on the sand and lay down to bake. The woman looked nothing like Sheilah, yet recalled her, by nubile youth alone. When he was stuck he wandered out to the balcony to spy on them, and toward the end of the day was horrified to find Zelda in her coolie hat stopped beside them, her easel folded away, engaged in conversation with the woman.

  “They’re Danish,” she reported. “From Copenhagen. They come here every year. I invited them to dinner but they’re going to Havana to see the opera.”

  “They don’t get enough opera in Copenhagen.”

  “I guess not. They’re very nice. Bengt and Anna. He’s a professor of archaeology. She does some sort of social work with children.”

  While he was curious about them as well, he imagined what they made of this stout older woman in her pageboy haircut and paint-smeared blouse asking them to dinner. Could they tell she wasn’t quite right, or did she come across as your typical off-season busybody? Either way, short of an enforced luau on the beach, he didn’t expect to be dining with the Danes.

  It was a blow, he supposed, to admit they were no longer an amusing couple. They ate in the main room, undisturbed, one of three far-flung tables attended by a single waiter. The menu was the same as last night’s; from the stains he assumed it never changed. He’d had better carne asada on the streets of Tijuana. Zelda was telling him her plans for tomorrow, which involved painting the different faces of the village church all day. “Like Monet,” she said. From across the room the bar called to him, promising release. He ordered the tres leches cake with rum sauce and a coffee and left feeling slightly high.

  As loudly as Zelda touted her new freedom, she stuck to her hospital schedule, turning her light out at nine, leaving him to read. He thought of sneaking down to the bar for a nightcap but resisted. In the morning she was up with the sun, not wanting to waste a minute of light.

  There was something obsessive in her painting. Like his writing, it was an escape, a way of making time pass. What would happen if they had to spend the whole day together? But they hadn’t in years. Even in Saint-Raphael their lives were separate, given to solitary pursuits. Why should that change now, with Scottie gone?

  She seemed fine at lunch, not at all tired, relating what the sexton had told her about the church being the only building to survive the great hurricane as if it were proof of divine intervention.

  “What about the fort?”

  “They all drowned.”

  “All.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  He wasn’t used to her being so sure of herself, and expected, any minute, the bowed head and slumped shoulders, the mumbled liturgy. Instead she was direct and pleasant, making him impatient. He’d waited so long for her to be well again that he was skeptical, as if she were playing a trick on him.

  That afternoon while she was occupied with the church he went through her room like a guard tossing a prisoner’s cell. On her bureau rested a five-and-dime comb and brush set and a single vermillion lipstick, in the drawers several new pairs of underwear and hose. Her closet was a mélange of shifts without personality. She hadn’t brought a swimsuit or sandals, which was unlike her. The nightstand held the Gideon Bible, a vial of her medication and a glass of water. The drawer was empty. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for—an incriminating diary, maybe—but most of what she owned didn’t reflect her, coming, as it did, from the hospital. The only real clue he could find was left in plain sight on the desk: a cardboard portfolio of her watercolors.

  As she would admit, they were studies, quickly done. Technically, while the palms and fishing skiffs were somewhat clumsy, in the best of them she’d managed to capture the wide open feel of the sea and sky. They were pastoral—cool and blue, a touch bland. There were no burgeoning orgies of flowers, no molten whirl of demonic faces, no lapping flames. They were the work of an earnest amateur, and if they were less interesting, they reassured him as nothing else could. He closed the portfolio, set it back on the desk and shut the door.

  At dinner she went on at length about her afternoon. She had to go back tomorrow. She’d spent hours on the bell tower alone—she needed to buy some more white. The pictures of the hurricane the sexton showed her were fascinating. She thought she might do a whole series on them. He’d written badly at his story and was immune to her enthusiasm. He knew he was being uncharitable, in a mood, and forced himself to concentrate on what she was saying, but it was a struggle. Was it a side effect of the medication or his being sober that made her so dull?

  After coffee she wanted to go for a stroll on the beach—an innocent request, yet inwardly he balked. They left their shoes by the lifeguard stand. The sand was cool and soft as flour. There was no moon, only the lamps of the fishermen spreading their nets, laughter floating across the water. Far down the strand a tiny kaleidoscope of a Ferris wheel beckoned. As they walked toward the colored lights, he was afraid she would take his hand.

  “What is she like?” she asked.

  At first he thought he’d misheard.

  “Who?”

  “Please, it’s obvious.” She didn’t stop, didn’t glance at him. “Let me guess. She’s an actress. Blond and petite and very young. She thinks you’re a genius.”

  He scoffed as if it were impossible. She might have been describing Lois Moran, fifteen years ago.

  “I know you, Dodo. You’re no good on your own.”

  “There isn’t anyone.”

  “Really, I don’t mind. I’ll give you a divorce if you want.”

  Was she bargaining with him—a divorce for her freedom? The one had nothing to do with the other. And why, after all this time, would he want one now?

  “I don’t want a divorce,” he said. “I want you to get better.”

  “And once I’m better, then what?”

  “Then you can go home.”

  “What about you?”

  They’d been so miserable together that he’d never invented a happy ending for them. He assumed they would go on like this indefinitely.

  “I’ll go wherever I have to go.”

  “Will you still come see me?”

  “Of course I will.”

  He believed it when he said it, though later, wide awake in bed, he wondered if it was true. The whole conversation was strange. Until she’d brought up the possibility, he never dared imagine a life without her. Now the idea teased him, exposed him as weak and unprincipled. He was tempted to go down to the bar but held off, and then, the next night, when he finally gave in, he found it dark, the doors locked.

  He ended up at the cantina, nursing a beer and admiring the local rituals of courtship as the young slowly processed around the zocalo beneath the eyes of the entire village. The waiter, as if it were a standard courtesy, asked if he wanted a woman.

  “No, gracias,” he said, waving him off. “I have too many already.”

  “You like the marijuana?”

  “I’m happy with my cerveza.”

  “Uno mas?”

  “No mas,” he said, shaking his head, because he’d promised Sheilah.

  Beyond the main square, the side streets were shadowed and rife with vice. On his way back to the hotel he passed a nightclub exuding a slinky rhumba, and a barker for a cooch show dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief, and, down a sinister alley, a crowd gathered in a garage lit by a bare bulb to bet on a cockfight, and thought of Ernest. When had he lost his sense of adventure?

  The Danes were in the pool, naked, the water turning their bodies cubist. He detoured around the shuffleboard courts so as not to intrude. Upstairs, he closed their balcony doors, brushed his teeth and went straight to bed, knowing Zelda would be up early.

  The next morning, to avoid writing, he went fishing, taking a charter out into the straits with a c
ouple other guests. Hopeful pelicans rode their wake. From the water the peninsula was a green strip of jungle dotted with white and pink and yellow boxes. Columbus had been here, and the conquistadors. Though it wasn’t yet lunchtime, the other men drank beer and smoked cigars as if at a stag party. He concentrated on his casting and caught a sizable tarpon and an impressive hammerhead shark. Did senor want the kitchen to prepare them for dinner?

  “Oh, you should have,” Zelda said.

  “That’s what tourists do.”

  “We’re tourists.”

  “We don’t have to act like them.”

  “Didn’t you want to take a tour of the fort?”

  That night, as if to refute her, he lingered at the cantina, switching from beer to a local cane liquor, tipping the waiter outrageously. On the bandstand in the middle of the zocalo, a guitarist picked limpid tunes. Scott watched the young couples promenade beneath the strings of lights and remembered his first cotillion with Ginevra, the soft white gloves and boxed orchid he saved all month to buy, giving up cigarettes, and, later, on the balcony of the club, the darkness of the golf course and the lights on the dock, the sleek yachts at anchor. That summer the world was all promise and sweet fumbling, driving her father’s Pierce-Arrow along the north shore to their lake house. She kissed him in the garden and at the rail of the ferry and in the boathouse with the rain tapping in the rafters. Everything unattainable was his, bestowed like a gift. By winter all of it was gone as if it never happened.

  He sneered at his own sentimentality. His glass was empty again.

  “Uno mas?” the waiter asked.

  “Uno mas,” Scott said, holding up one finger.

  Later, after the indestructible church had tolled midnight and the paths of the zocalo were empty, a fat gray moth lit on the rim of his glass. It sat there a long time, it seemed to him, flexing its wings as if testing them before fluttering away over the other tables. He thought the moment remarkable, charged, but the waiter had vanished and there was no one to bear witness. He decided he needed to leave, otherwise he might not make it home, and then was amused when, attempting to don his suit jacket, he kept missing the armhole.

  The waiter appeared, bottle in hand.

  “No mas,” Scott said, swaying with the palms, and gave him two more pesos. “Muchas gracias, amigo. Buenos noches.”

  Did senor want a taxi?

  “No, gracias. I can walk.”

  He could, miraculously, from years of practice, leaning forward and keeping his feet moving, using an occasional pole or wall to correct course. An insistent music thumped from the nightclub, all congas and maracas. He vamped, waggling a hand and shaking his hips as he passed the open door. He was sweltering and his mouth was dry. He could use a cold beer, but he needed to get to bed. Zelda would be up early, ready to paint the whole damned island.

  He thought he was going the right way, but must have made a wrong turn, because he never reached the cooch parlor. The street he was following dead-ended at the churchyard, giving him a chance to pay his respects and relieve himself against a tree. Zipped up again, he reversed field, heading back toward the zocalo, tracing a maze of unfamiliar streets, led on by a riot of mingled voices like bidders at an auction till he found himself at the mouth of the alley with the brightly lighted garage he’d seen last night.

  There were no tourists here. The garage was airless and stank of men’s sweat, old motor oil and cheap cigars. Under a bare bulb hanging by a wire and haloed with smoke thick as opium, a circle of field-workers pressed against a knee-high ring of rough boards, waving pesos and calling out bets. Cinco, el negro! El rojo, dos! In the middle of the arena, to show their champion’s fighting spirit, the two handlers danced toward each other, mimicking the sexual combat of the tango, the birds flaring, trying to strike. He’d seen this type of fight before, in a gypsy camp outside Nice, with Ernest, who’d propounded upon the savage nobility of the sport, imparting lore from the age of Charlemagne before two half-starved chickens cut each other to pieces.

  The birds squawked and slashed the air. The ceremony was designed to excite the bettors as much as the combatants. As the only white man there, in his linen suit, Scott drew stares. To deflect suspicion, he unfurled a peso note and declared himself for the smaller El Negro, siding, as always, with the underdog. As if he possessed some occult knowledge, the betting shifted to the black one. The mob had all the logic of the stock exchange.

  If they had simply let the cocks fight to the death, satisfying their atavistic drive for dominance, that would be cruelty enough. To improve on nature, the handlers fitted their claws with spurlike razors. Then, as now, Scott thought it a perversion. Ernest liked to believe the war had made him pitiless, but, having boxed with him, Scott suspected he enjoyed the superior feeling that came from watching another suffer. He’d never liked Zelda. When she was going through her first bad time, he told Scott directly that he was better off without her. True or not, they’d broken over it, though Scott still wished to be friends. Since then, Ernest hadn’t missed an opportunity to kick him.

  The handlers were ready, bent over their birds, whispering last-minute instructions. The ringmaster collected the final bets, locked them away in a tin strongbox and high-stepped over the boards and out of the arena, leaving behind an expectant silence. The handlers met in the center of the ring with all the solemnity of duelists. They went to one knee, setting the birds on the stained concrete, still restraining them. Around him the crowd was reverent, ready for a sacrifice. The ringmaster raised a hand like a starter, nodded to each handler in turn, and then, without a word, chopped his arm down.

  The handlers stepped back and the crowd shouted. The birds flew, spurs flashing, colliding in a flurry of feathers under the bright light. They squabbled in midair, locked together, flapping and clawing, then dropped to the ground, stalking each other. They reared and tangled, scratching and jabbing. Three, four times they clashed and rested before one did any damage. Scott didn’t see the blow, but after a skirmish the black was dragging a wing. The fellow beside him, a backer of El Rojo, laughed and clapped him on the shoulder.

  The birds faced off and launched themselves again. With only one wing, the black barely left the ground, the red sailing high, stabbing it below the eye, landing near the far wall, where it strutted about as if the fight were over. The crowd jeered, and the handlers prowled the ring, urging the birds on. The red charged and the black squared, game. It tried to fight, but the red flew and struck it in the breast, the spur sinking in to the hilt. The black staggered back and fell on its side directly in front of Scott, its inky eye blinking up at him, a fresh drop of blood on its beak. The spur must have punctured a lung because its breast was wet and bubbled with every breath. Again, the red strutted in the center of the ring, declaring victory.

  Still the crowd demanded the kill. The black’s handler cursed and flung up a hand in disgust, disowning it, while the red’s enjoined his bird, clapping. The black flapped and blinked up at Scott, its beak opening and closing mutely, and as the red homed in and the crowd howled, Scott stepped over the boards and scooped up the dying bird like a loose fumble.

  He hadn’t known beforehand he was going to do this, and had no plan. He made for the far wall, thinking he’d vault it, stiff-arm the ringmaster and keep going. There had to be a back door. Once he reached the street he could outrun the mob like Groton’s heavy-footed secondary. He had surprise on his side, God and the right, like a knight errant, but he was drunk and old and caught his toe on the wall going over, and before he could get up they were on him.

  CHER FRANÇOISE

  He could not remember a hotter summer, or a lower time in his life. For weeks there wasn’t a cloud, the arroyos drying up, the fields withering, sparking a water war between the valley farmers and the city. He couldn’t stop drinking and fought with Sheilah and the platoon of nurses who invaded Belly Acres to give him the cure. Overtaxed, he col
lapsed and his TB flared, stealing his breath, drenching him in night sweats. The doctor prescribed strict bed rest and IV fluids. He was confined to his room, the blinds drawn against the heat, and as the stifling days eked by and he slowly regained himself, Sheilah visited less and less.

  While he was incapacitated, rather than tend to him herself, she brought in a full-time housekeeper, a blue-black churchwoman from Fort Smith, Arkansas, who might have been Flora’s cousin. Erleen wore a lavender turban and listened to the afternoon soap operas turned up loud while she cleaned the downstairs, talking back to the characters as if she had a role in the show. Though he didn’t use any of the rooms, she ran the vacuum daily. Every morning while he was in the shower, she made his bed with clean sheets, laying out a fresh pair of pajamas and taking away the soaked ones; later they would be drying on the line like the dissected halves of a scarecrow. She catered to his sweet tooth, whipping up angel food cake and egg custard and generally making herself indispensable, and though Scott enjoyed her company, her presence only served to remind him of what she was—a paid stand-in for Sheilah.

  He understood her reservations. He shared them, knowing too well his own faults and weaknesses. He’d apologized many times for the scene with the gun, for his constant lapses. In the beginning his shame had moved her, as if it were her responsibility to save him. Now she saw him as he saw Zelda, a helpless purveyor of chaos.

  With rent money in the bank and no job prospects, he was free to start his novel, and resolved to win her back via sober industry.

  Before he could write a sentence, he needed to get organized. The first step was registering at an employment agency for a secretary. After interviewing her to make sure she had no ties to the studios and swearing her to secrecy, he hired a bookish young woman named Frances Kroll. Lithe and pale and slightly knock-kneed, she was a transplanted New Yorker like Dottie, unimpressed with L.A. She said she’d read some of his stories in high school, which pleased him, though she couldn’t recall which ones. Her father was a furrier in Hollywood, a connection he thought might prove useful. She was also Jewish, which would help him with his hero, Stahr, a far-flung son of the Old World.