We were within a week of completing the film when I received the message. The crew were in Padika shooting a scene under the shade trees in the square when the runner from the production office in Roswell arrived with a telegam:
DOON HOGAN LIVING IN MONTEZUMA ARIZONA STOP NEAR WINSLOW STOP GOOD LUCK RAMON
When the film ended I hired a car and drove up to Albuquerque and on through the mountains into Arizona. It took me two full days but I have no recollection of the splendid scenery through which I traveled. I have no recollection of my mood: I was moodless, I think. It had been so long; I didn’t want either pessimism or optimism to prejudice me. I would find what I would find.
I turned off the highway before Winslow and found Montezuma, a small town on the edge of the Navajo reservation. Distant mountains ringed the wide mesa. It was hot and dry.
I drove down the main street. There was a gas station, a used car lot, a Piggly-Wiggly supermarket and a cut-rate clothes emporium. I parked outside a funeral parlor and strolled down the cracked sidewalk to a small street market. At the market the stalls — fruit and vegetable — were manned mainly by Navajo Indians. If you wanted to hide away, Montezuma seemed like a fair choice. I asked one fellow selling cheap trinkets and bright woven rugs if he knew where Doon Bogan lived.
“Miss Bogan? Sure. Go back to the gas station and take a right. There’s an old ranch house two miles down the road — The Colony. Can’t miss it.”
I followed his instructions. The road ran through a dusty scrub of sagebrush and manzanita bushes. The Colony announced itself with a freshly painted sign. It was a low wooden ranch house with rusted screens on the windows and a tumbledown corral. Three cars were pulled up outside. Two had California plates. My mouth was quite dry. My movements were slow and studied, as if I were recovering from a grave illness.
I knocked on the door and got no answer. I went round the side of the house. In a kitchen a thin, bald, shirtless man in chino shorts washed up dishes in a tin basin.
“I’m looking for Miss Bogan,” I said.
“Hi. You must be Wally Garalga. Pleased to meet you, Wally. I’m Morris Drexel.”
He wiped his hands on a towel and offered me his right one to shake. I shook it.
“We kinda figured you wouldn’t get here till late,” Drexel said. He had a thin chest with gray hairs grouped round the nipples.
“My name’s Todd. I’m not expected. I’m an old friend of Doon.”
“Oh.… I’m sorry. We were expecting a Mr. Garalga.” He led me to the door and pointed. “See that arroyo? Just follow it down a way. Doon’s there.”
I set off. My God, had Doon set up home with Morris Drexel?… I couldn’t imagine it. I walked down the sandy bed of the arroyo, contemplating this notion further. I began to perspire. The heat seemed trapped in the gully. I took off my tie. I had left my jacket in the car.
Then I saw Doon and stopped. She stood with her back towards me, in front of an easel. She was wearing a denim shirt over white duck slacks. She had a wide-brimmed straw hat on her head. I felt faint. My mouth was still as dry as the arroyo bed.
“Doon,” I said and advanced a few steps.
“Morris?”
“No, for Christ’s sake, it’s me!”
She took off her sunglasses and put on spectacles.
“My sweet Lord,” she said. “If it isn’t John James Todd.”
I sat in the main sitting room of The Colony, trying to bring under control the competing emotions of profound shock and mounting irritation. The comfortable plain room was lined with abstract paintings that might just have passed for landscapes. Doon’s work. To my eyes they seemed entirely without merit. Doon was in the kitchen making a pitcher of iced tea. She came back in.
“Sorry,” she said, “Rita hasn’t been into town for the ice. Will fairly cold tea do?”
“Fine. Perfect. Don’t you have an icebox?”
“We don’t have electricity.”
I forced a smile, trying to come to terms with the transformation in her. Doon was thinner and deeply tanned. Her hair was long, dry, dark brown streaked with gray. I had lived with her bobbed blond fringe for so long it was as if the person I was now conversing with were, an older sister, or an aunt. She put on her spectacles, searched for her cigarettes, found them and lit one. Her voice was deeper — raggedy — from smoking.
“You want one?”
“No, thanks. I’m trying to stop.”
“Don’t snap, Jamie.… So what happened after Mexico?”
I finished the brief sketch of the intervening years, leaving out my marriage to Monika. Doon had already told me her story. She had left Sanary, gone to Neuchâtel to tell me her decision to return to America. She had found no trace of us, only news that the film had collapsed. She went back to America and Hollywood. She stayed there for a month and found she was lonely, miserable and forgotten. She hated it and so, as she put it, she “resigned.” She bought this ranch house and took up painting. When her funds began running low, she established it as an artists’ retreat. She made ends meet with no great difficulty, she said.
“But why,” I had asked carefully on hearing this, “why in God’s name didn’t you contact me?”
“I tried. I tried to call you in Berlin; I got some policeman on the line. I went to Neuchâtel; you were all gone. It was over, Jamie, you know that. I couldn’t go chasing around Europe looking for you.”
I let that one go.
“I’m happy now,” she said. “Really, I wasn’t happy in Paris.”
So I told her what had happened to me. I felt glum, suddenly immensely tired. I could have slept for a week.
“So you’re making Westerns? For Eddie Simmonette? Isn’t that a bit degrading?”
“I make ends meet with no great difficulty.”
“See. We’re arguing already.… Sorry,” she said. “Have some more tea.”
She stood up to fetch the pitcher. I went over to her.
“Doon, I saw Alex Mavrocordato—”
“Alex? How is he?”
“Stop it! Stop being so fucking hardboiled!”
Morris Drexel glanced into the room. I calmed down.
“Don’t you see? I thought you had gone off with him. I thought you had chosen him instead of me.… That’s why I never tried to get in touch. I was trying to get over it, do you see? Trying to forget you.”
“Well, of course. You had to do that.”
“But then he told me what really happened.” I looked out of the window and saw two ladies walk by with canvases under their arms. Two “artists,” Like Morris, paying guests.
I shut my eyes. My head seemed to hum with a high, keening melancholic whine. I had been driving too long. The huge needless frustrations of the years without Doon were almost insupportable. Only my irritation with her own calm was preventing me from weeping. I was exhausted too from my weeks’ work on the film. What had I expected to find here? The Doon I had known in Berlin in the twenties? In her green dress and her short blond fringe? Dully, I started calling myself names: fool, idiot, hopeless romantic … I opened my eyes; Doon had sat down and was looking at me. She had hooked a leg over the arm of the soft chair she was sitting in. She still had that lean dancer’s grace I always associated with her. Perhaps, in time, we could reestablish old intimacies.… But too much history bulked between us. My Doon was a blond, smooth-skinned, provocative beauty full of crazy enthusiasms. This thin, tanned, deep-voiced cynic was someone else entirely.