"You know each other?" Hastings' voice, faintly pleased, was drowned by our greetings and I was pulled into a chair by Clarissa who had elected to dress herself like an odalisque which made her look, consequently, more indigenous than any of the other guests; this was perhaps her genius: her marvelous adaptiveness.
"We'll be quite happy here," said Clarissa, waving our host away. "Go and abuse your other guests."
Hastings trotted off; those who had been talking to Clarissa talked to themselves and beneath a flickering lantern the lights of Los Angeles, revealed in a wedge between two hills, added the proper note of lunacy, for at the angle from which I viewed those lights they seemed to form a monster Christmas tree, poised crazily in the darkness.
Clarissa and I exchanged notes on the months that had intervened since our luncheon.
"And you gave up Julian, too?"
"Yes… but why 'too'?" I was irritated by the implication that I gave up all things before they were properly done.
"I feel you don't finish things, Eugene. Not that you should; but I do worry about you."
"It's good of you," I said, discovering that at a certain angle the Christmas tree could be made to resemble a rocket's flare arrested in space.
"Now don't take that tone with me. I have your interest at heart." She expressed herself with every sign of sincerity in that curious flat language which she spoke so fluently yet which struck upon the ear untruly, as though it were, in its homeliness, the highest artifice.
"But I've taken care of everything, you know. Wait and see. If you hadn't come out here on your own I should have sent for you…"
"And I would have come?"
"Naturally." She smiled.
"But for what?"
"For… she's here. In Los Angeles."
"You mean that girl who came to lunch?" I disguised my interest, but Clarissa, ignoring me, went on talking as energetically and as obliquely as ever.
"She's asked for you several times, which is a good sign. I told her I suspected you'd be along but that one never could tell, especially if you were still tied up with Julian, unlikely as that prospect was."
"But I do finish some things."
"I'm sure you do. In any case, the girl has been here over a month and you must see her as soon as possible."
"I'd like to."
"Of course you would. I still have my plot, you know. Oh, you may think I forget things but I don't: my mind is a perfect filing system."
"Could you tell me just what you are talking about?"
She chuckled and wagged a finger at me. "Soon you'll know. I know I meddle a good deal, more than I should, but after all this time it would be simply impossible for me not to interfere. I see it coming, one of those really exciting moments and I want just to give it a tickle here, a push there to set it rolling. Oh, what fun it will be!"
Hastings crept back among us, diffidently pushing a star and a producer in our direction. "I think you all ought to know each other, Clarissa… and, ah, Gene too. This is Miss… and Mr… and here in Hollywood… when you get to New York… house on the river, wonderful, old… new film to cost five million… runner-up for the Academy Award." He did it all very well, I thought. Smiles gleamed in the patio's half-light. The star's paste jewels, borrowed from her studio, glimmered like an airliner's lighted windows. I moved toward the house, but Clarissa's high voice restrained me at the door: "You'll call Iris tomorrow, won't you?" and she shouted an exchange and a number. I waved to show that I'd heard her then, vowing I would never telephone Iris, I rejoined the party and watched with fascination as the various performers performed in the living room to the accompaniment of a grand piano just barely out of tune.
3
I waited several days before I telephoned Iris. Days of considerable activity, of visiting friends and acquaintances, of attending parties where the guests were precisely the same as the ones I had met at Hastings' house: every one of them bent upon combating boredom with boredom, creating a desert in a dry land. But I was capable of evoking mirages which decorated for me their desert, made unusual (for myself at least) what, with familiarity, might become impossible.
I met Iris at the house where she was staying near the main beach of Santa Monica: a fairly decorous Spanish house, quiet: among palms and close to the sea. The day was vivid; the sea made noise; the wind was gentle, smelling of salt and far countries.
I parked my rented car and walked around to the sea side of the house. Iris came forward to meet me, smiling, hand outstretched, her face which I had remembered as being remarkably pale was flushed with sunlight.
"I hoped you'd come," she said, and she slipped her arm in mine as though we'd been old friends and led me to a deck chair adjoining the one where she'd been seated, reading. We sat down. "Friends let me have this place. They went to Mexico for two months and lent me the house."
"Useful friends."
"Aren't they? I've already put down roots here in the sand and I'll hate to give it back."
"Don't."
"Ah, wouldn't it be wonderful." She smiled vaguely and looked beyond me at the flash of sea in the flat distance. An automobile horn sounded through the palms; a mother called her child: we were a part of the world, even here.
"Clarissa told me you've been out several months."
Iris nodded. "I came back. I think I told you I was going to."
"To see the man?"
"Would you like something to drink?" She changed the subject with a disconcerting shift of her gaze from the ocean to me, her eyes still dazzled with the brilliance of light on water. I looked away and shook my head.
"Too early in the day. But I want to take you to dinner tonight, if I may. Somewhere along the coast."
"I'd like it very much."
"Do you know of a place?"
She suggested several. Then we went inside and she showed me a room where I might change into my bathing suit; we were to swim.
We walked through the trees to the main road on the other side of which the beach glowed white in the sun. It was deserted at this point although, in the distance, other bathers could be seen, tiny figures black against the startling white, moving about like insects on a white cloth.
For a time we swam contentedly, not speaking, not thinking, our various urgencies (or their lack) no longer imposed upon the moment. At such times, in those days, I was able through the body's strenuous use to reduce the miserable demands of the yearning self to a complacent harmony, with all things in proper proportion: a part of the whole and not the whole itself, though, metaphorically speaking, perhaps that which conceives reality is reality itself. But such nice divisions and distinctions were of no concern to me that afternoon in the sun, swimming with Iris, the mechanism which spoils time with questioning switched off by the body's euphoria.
And yet, for all this, no closer to one another, no wiser about one another in any precise sense, we drove that evening in silence to a restaurant of her choosing on the beach to the north: a ramshackle place filled with candlelight, the smell of tar, old nets: "atmosphere" which was nearly authentic. After wine and fish and coffee, we talked.
"Clarissa is bringing us together."
I nodded, accepting the plain statement as a fact. "The matchmaking instinct is, I suppose…"
"Not that at all." Her face was in a half-light and looked as it had when we first met: pale, withdrawn, all the day's color drained out of it. Above the sea, Orion's belt dipped in the deep sky. The evening star all silver set. We were early and had this place to ourselves.