The Barbarous Coast (18 page)

“I don’t think so.”

“I think so. I got a lot of friends. I got connections. You’re through in L.A., you know that? All finished.”

“Put it in writing, will you? I’ve been wanting to get out of the smog.”

“Speaking of connections,” Bassett said quietly to Stern, “you’re not a member of this club.”

“I’m a guest of a member. And you’re going to get crucified, too.”

“Oh, my, yes. What fun. Whose guest would you happen to be?”

“Simon Graff’s. I want to see him. Where is he?”

“We won’t bother Mr. Graff just now. And may I make a suggestion? It’s getting latish, more for some than for others. Don’t you think you’d better leave?”

“I don’t take orders from servants.”

“Don’t you indeed?” Bassett’s smile was a toothy mask which left his eyes sad. He turned to me.

I said: “You want to be hit again, Stern? It would be a pleasure.”

Stern glared at me for a long moment, red lights dancing on his shallow eyes. The lights went out. He said:

“All right. I’ll leave. Give me back my knife.”

“If you promise to cut your throat with it.”

He tried to go into another fury, but lacked the energy. He looked sick. I tossed him the closed knife. He caught it and put it in the pocket of his coat, turned and walked away toward the entrance. He stumbled several times. Bassett marched behind him, at a distance, like a watchful policeman.

Mrs. Graff was fumbling with a key at the door of the
cabaña
. Her hands were shaking, out of control. I turned the key for her and switched on the light. It was indirect, and shone from four sides on a bellying brown fishnet ceiling. The room was done in primitive Pacific style, with split-bamboo screens at the windows, grass matting on the floor, rattan armchairs and chaise longues. Even the bar in one corner was rattan. Beside it, at the rear of the room,
two louvered doors opened into the dressing-rooms. The walls were hung with tapa cloths and Douanier Rousseau reproductions, bamboo-framed.

The only discordant note was a Matisse travel poster lithographed in brilliant colors and advertising Nice. Mrs. Graff paused in front of it, and said to no one in particular:

“We have a villa near Nice. Father gave it to us as a wedding present. Simon was all for it in those days. All for me, and all for one.” She laughed, for no good reason. “He won’t even take me to Europe with him any more. He says I always make trouble for him when we go away together, any more. It isn’t true, I’m as quiet as a quilt. He flies away on his trans-polar flights and leaves me here to rot in the heat and cold.”

She clasped her head with both hands, tightly, for a long moment. Her hair stuck up between her fingers like black, untidy feathers. The silent pain she was fighting to control was louder than a scream.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Graff?”

I touched her blue mink back. She sidestepped away from my touch, whirled the coat off, and flung it on a studio bed. Her back and shoulders were dazzling, and her breast overflowed the front of her strapless dress like whipped cream. She held her body with a kind of awkward pride mixed with shame, like a young girl suddenly conscious of her flesh.

“Do you like my dress? It isn’t new. I haven’t been to a party for years and years and years. Simon doesn’t take me any more.”

“Nasty old Simon,” I said. “Are you all right, Mrs. Graff?”

She answered me with a bright actress’s smile which didn’t go with the stiffness of the upper part of her face, the despair in her eyes:

“I’m wonderful. Wonderful.”

She did a brief dance-step to prove it, snapping her fingers
at the end of rigid arms. Bruises were coming out on her white forearms, the size and color of Concord grapes. Her dancing was mechanical. She stumbled and lost a gold slipper. Instead of putting it on again, she kicked off the other slipper. She sat on one of the bar stools, wriggling her stockinged feet, clasping and rubbing them together. They looked like blind, flesh-colored animals making furtive love under the hem of her skirt:

“Incidentally,” she said, “and accidentally, I haven’t thanked you. I thank you.”

“What for?”

“For saving me from a fate worse than life. That wretched little drug-peddler might have killed me. He’s terribly strong, isn’t he?” She added resentfully: “They’re not supposed to be strong.”

“Who aren’t? Drug-peddlers?”

“Pansies. All pansies are supposed to be weak. Like all bullies are cowards, and all Greeks run restaurants. That isn’t a good example, though. My father was a Greek, at least he was a Cypriot, and, by God, he ran a restaurant in Newark, New Jersey. Great oaks from little acorns grow. Miracles of modern science. From a greasy spoon in Newark to wealth and decadence in one easy generation. It’s the new accelerated pace, with automation.”

She looked around the alien room. “He might as well have stayed in Cyprus, for God’s sake. What good did it do me? I ended up in a therapy room making pottery and weaving rugs like a God-damn cottage industry. Except that
I
pay them. I always do the paying.”

Her contact seemed to be better, which encouraged me to say: “Do you always do the talking, too?”

“Am I talking too much?” She gave me her brilliant, disorganized smile again, as if her mouth could hardly contain her teeth. “Am I making any sense, for God’s sake?”

“From time to time you are, for God’s sake.”

Her smile became slightly less intense and more real. “I’m sorry, I get on a talking jag sometimes and the words come out wrong and they don’t mean what I want them to. Like in James Joyce, only to me it just
happens
. Did you know his daughter was schizzy?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “So sometimes I’m a wit and sometimes I’m a nitwit, so they tell me.” She extended her bruise-mottled arm: “Sit down and have a drink and tell me who
you
are.”

I sat on the stool beside her. “I’m nobody in particular. My name is Archer.”

“Archer,” she repeated thoughtfully, but she wasn’t interested in me. Memory flared and smoked inside of her like a fire in changing winds: “I’m nobody in particular, either. I used to think I was. My father was Peter Heliopoulos, at least that’s what he called himself, his real name was longer than that and much more complicated. And I was much more complicated, too. I was the crown princess, my father
called
me Princess. So now—” her voice jangled harshly off-key—“so now a cheap Hollywood drug-peddler can push me around and get away with it. In my father’s day they would have flayed him alive. So what does my husband do? He goes into business with him. They’re palsy-walsies, cerebral palsy-walsies.”

“Do you mean Carl Stern, Mrs. Graff?”

“Who else?”

“What kind of business are they in?”

“Whatever people do in Las Vegas, gambling and helling around. I never go there myself, never go anywhere.”

“How do you know he’s a drug-peddler?”

“I bought drugs from him myself when I ran out of doctors—yellow jackets and demerol and the little kind with the red stripe. I’m off drugs now, however. Back on liquor again. It’s one thing Dr. Frey did for me.” Her eyes focused on my face, and she said impatiently: “You haven’t made
yourself a drink. Go ahead and make yourself a drink, and make one for me, too.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea, Isobel?”

“Don’t
talk to me as though I were a child. I’m not drunk. I can hold my liquor.” The bright smile gashed her face. “The only trouble with me is that I am somewhat crazy. But not at the moment. I was upset there for a moment, but you’re very soothing and smoothing, aren’t you? Kind of kind of kind.” She was mimicking herself.

“Any more,” I said.

“Any more. But you won’t make fun of me, will you? I get so mad sometimes—angry-mad, I mean—when people mock my dignity. I may be going into a wind-up, I don’t know, but I haven’t taken off yet. On my trans-polar flight,” she added wryly, “into the wild black yonder.”

“Good for you.”

She nodded in self-congratulation. “That was one of the wit ones, wasn’t it? It isn’t really true, though. When it happens, it isn’t like flying or any sort of arrival or departure. The
feel
of things changes, that’s all, and I can’t tell the difference between me and other things. Like when Father died and I saw him in the coffin and had my first breakdown. I thought
I
was in the coffin. I felt dead, my flesh was cold. There was embalming fluid in my veins, and I could smell myself. At the same time I was lying dead in the coffin and sitting in the pew in the Orthodox Church, mourning for my own death. And when they buried him, the earth—I could hear the earth dropping on the coffin and then it smothered me and I was the earth.”

She took hold of my hand and held it, trembling. “Don’t let me talk so much. It does me harm. I almost
went
, just then.”

“Where did you go?” I said.

“Into my dressing-room.” She dropped my hand and gestured toward one of the louvered doors. “For a second I
was in there, watching us through the door and listening to myself.
Please
pour me a drink. It does me good, honestly. Scotch on the rocks.”

I moved around behind the bar and got ice cubes out of the small beige refrigerator and opened a bottle of Johnnie Walker and made a couple of drinks, medium strength. I felt more comfortable on the wrong side of the bar. The woman disturbed me basically, the way you can be disturbed by starvation in a child, or a wounded bird, or a distempered cat running in yellow circles. She seemed to be teetering on the verge of a psychotic episode. Also, she seemed to know it. I was afraid to say anything that might push her over the edge.

She raised her glass. The steady tremor in her hand made the brown liquor slosh around among the ice cubes. As if to demonstrate her self-control, she barely sipped at it. I sipped at mine, leaned on my elbow across the formica counter in the attitude of a bartender with a willing ear.

“What was the trouble, Isobel?”

“Trouble? You mean with Carl Stern?”

“Yes. He got pretty rough.”

“He hurt me,” she said, without self-pity. A taste of whisky had changed her mood, as a touch of acid will change the color of blue litmus paper. “Interesting medical facts. I bruise very easily.” She exhibited her arms. “I bet my entire body is covered with bruises.”

“Why would Stern do it to you?”

“People like him are sadists, at least a lot of them are.”

“You know a lot of them?”

“I’ve known my share. I attract them, apparently, I don’t know why. Or maybe I do know why. Women like me, we don’t expect too much.
I
don’t expect anything.”

“Lance Leonard one of them?”

“How should I know? I guess so. I hardly knew—I hardly knew the little mackerel.”

“He used to be a lifeguard here.”

“I don’t mess with lifeguards,” she said harshly. “What is this? I thought we were going to be friends, I thought we were going to have fun. I never have any
fun.”

“
Any more.”

She didn’t think it was funny. “They lock me up and punish me, it isn’t fair,” she said. “I did one terrible thing in my life, and now they blame me for everything that happens. Stern’s a filthy liar. I never touched his lover-boy, I didn’t even know that he was dead. Why would I shoot him? I have enough on my conscious—on my conscience.”

“Such as?”

She peered at my face. Hers was as stiff as a board. “Such as, you’re trying to pump me, aren’t you, such as? Trying to dig things out of me?”

“Yes, I am. What terrible thing did you do?”

Something peculiar happened to her face. One of her eyes became narrow and sly, one became hard and wide. On the sly side, her upper lip lifted and her white teeth gleamed under it. She said: “I’m a naughty, naughty, naughty girl. I watched them doing it. I stood behind the door and watched them doing it. Miracles of modern science. And I was in the room and behind the door.”

“What did you do?”

“I killed my mother.”

“How?”

“By wishing,” she said slyly. “I wished my mother to death. Does that take care of your questions, Mr. Questionnaire? Are you a psychiatrist? Did Simon hire you?”

“The answer is no and no.”

“I killed my father, too. I broke his heart. Shall I tell you my other crimes? It’s quite a decalogue. Envy and malice and pride and lust and rage. I’d sit at home and plan his death, by hanging, burning, shooting, drowning, poison. I’d sit at home and imagine him with them, all the young
girls with their bodies and waving white legs. I sat at home and tried to have men friends. It never seemed to work out. They were exhausted by the heat and cold or else I frightened them. One of them told me I frightened him, the lousy little nance. They’d drink up my liquor and never come back.” She sipped from her glass. “Go ahead,” she said. “Drink up your liquor.”

“Drink up yours, Isobel. I’ll take you home. Where do you live?”

“Quite near here, on the beach. But I’m not going home. You won’t make me go home, will you? I haven’t been to a party for so long. Why don’t we go and dance? I am very ugly to look at, but I am a good dancer.”

“You are very beautiful, but I am a lousy dancer.”

“I’m ugly,” she said. “You mustn’t mock me. I know how ugly I am. I was born ugly through and through, and nobody ever loved me.”

The door opened behind her, swinging wide. Simon Graff appeared in the opening. His face was stony.

“Isobel! What kind of
Walpurgisnacht
is this? What are you doing in here?”

Her reaction was slow, almost measured. She turned and rose from the stool. Her body was tense and insolent. The drink was shaking in her hand.

“What am I doing? I’m telling my secrets. I’m telling all my dirty little secrets to my dear friend.”

“You fool. Come home with me.”

He took several steps toward her. She threw her glass at his head. It missed him and dented the wall beside the door. Some of the liquid spattered his face.

“Crazy woman,” he said. “You come home now with me. I will call Dr. Frey.”

“I don’t have to go with you. You’re not my father.” She turned to me, the look of lopsided cunning still on her face. “Do I have to go with him?”