The center portion of the room was sunken. At one elevated end was a canopied bed. At the other end was an elevated portion with a conversational grouping of furniture around a small slate fireplace. The sunken portion was furnished in rather formal fashion. On the bed level there were two doorways. One, ajar, opened into a dressing room area. I could see pieces of matched luggage in there. The other door was closed, and I could hear an almost inaudible whisper of running water.
Though the draperies of all the windows were pulled aside, the room was not particularly bright. I went to a window. Tropical trees shaded it. Looking down I could see patches of shaded green lawn. Off to the left, through foliage, I could see one bright corner of a white swimming pool.
The bathroom door opened suddenly and Lysa Dean came out. She was not smaller than I had expected because I was prepared for a woman smaller than she had looked to me on the VistaVision Screen, in living color, in close-up, each slanty gray-green eye as large as a Volkswagen sedan.
She came across the bedroom elevation and down the three steps toward me. She made the absolute most of those three steps. She wore flat sandals with gold straps. She wore faun-colored pants in a fine weave. They fitted as tightly as pants, or paint, or a tattoo, could fit. She wore a strange furry blouse, with a big scooped neck and three quarter sleeves. It looked as if Skeeter’s Quimby and a couple of hundred of his relatives had contributed their pale belly-fur to this creation. Around her slender throat was knotted a narrow loose kerchief of green silk precisely matching the single jewel she wore, an emerald as big as a sugar cube on the little finger of her left hand.
She came swiftly toward me, hand outstretched, her smile full of the warm delight of a woman welcoming the returning lover. “So good of you to come!” she said in her light, breathy, personal voice. As I took her hand she turned slightly so as to face the bright and shadowed daylight. It is the most cruel light a woman can accept. Her hand was small and dry and warm, a trusting little animal as intimate as her voice.
They have the distinctive occupational tricks. A lot of expressive business with mouth and eyebrows, animation with gestures.
I could remember, quite vividly, a long conversation with a stunt man named Fedder. Arthritis had forced him out of the business.
“Don’t let anybody tell you they’re not worth the effort,” he had said. “A lot of them aren’t. You got to look close to see which type. They all have to be damned good-looking and well built. So suppose you get a chance at one who’s a pretty good little actress. Let it go. The thing there, they sublimate. That’s a word I learned once. They take all that steam and they shove it into their work and there isn’t enough left over for bed. Now suppose you got one thinks she’s a hell of an actress, but she’s a ham. You skip her too. She’ll take all that ham to bed with you and be so damn busy watching herself her heart won’t be in it. The ones to wait for, and go a long way out of your way to get, they’re the ones that plain started off with such damn good glands they don’t have to do any acting. The camera picks up how good they’d be. Man, they can’t rest from tracking it down and trying it out. The next one is always going to be the biggest and best yet. They’ve got what you call a real strong interest.”
I had the feeling Fedder would approve of this one. I had not expected her to have such a genuine flavor of youthfulness. By every way I could measure it, she had to be about thirty-three. Yet she was a young girl, and not in any forced way. She had the slimness, the clear-eyed look of enormous vitality, the fine-grained and flawless skin, the heavy swing of burnished hair. Her impact, so carefully measured it seemed unaffected, was of a kind of innocence aware. A gamin sparkle, hinting at a delicious capacity for naughtiness.
But I had known enough of them to know that this was but one role. The enticing woman who is not in the industry will have five or six faces to wear. One like this would have dozens, and this was the one she had momentarily selected for me.
She had the showbiz trick of close-range conversation. Normal people keep their faces a yard apart. Eight inches is the focal distance on the Coast. Eight inches keeps you aware of the girl-breath heat against your chin, and the upthrust breast-bud an inch and a half from your chest.
“Any friend of Walt’s…” I said inanely.
“I treasure that man.” She backed away a quarter step to give me a cock of the head and an urchin appraisal. “He said you were big, but he didn’t say how huge, Travis. Trav? He called you Trav, I think. I’m Lee to my friends. Dear Trav, he told me you were big and rough looking and sour and sometimes dangerous, but he did not tell me you are so terribly attractive.”
“A veritable doll,” I said.
“It’s so wonderful of you to agree to help, me.”
“I haven’t.”
She was quite motionless for a thoughtful second, her smile in place. The capped teeth gleamed between moistness. Green of iris speckled amber near the pupil. Delicate geometry of the hairs of red-gold brows. Fantasy length of the darker lashes. Faintest of fuzz on her upper lip. It was an unusual and grotesquely familiar face, the features slightly sharp, extremely sensuous, unmistakable.
With her head slightly bowed, looking up at me through her lashes, the gold-red weight of hair at the right side of her face had swung slightly forward. Suddenly I knew what she reminded me of. A vixen. A quick red fox. I had seen one in heat long ago on an Adirondack morning in spring, pacing along well in front of the dog fox with a very alert and springy movement, tail curled high, turning to see if he still followed, tongue lolling from between her doggy grin.
She turned. abruptly away, walking toward the elevated part of the room where the chairs and fireplace were.
“But you will help me,” she said in a small voice.
I followed her. She sat on a small couch and pulled her legs up. She took a cigarette from a table box. I held the light for her. She huffed smoke from the delicate oval nostrils of the slightly pointed nose, and as I sat in a big chair half facing the couch she smiled across at me. “You are refreshing, Trav McGee.”
“How am I managing that, Lee?”
Her shrug and laugh were self-deprecatory. “You don’t say what I always hear. I loved you in this. I adored you in that. I see every picture you make. You look better off the screen than on, actually. You know what I mean.”
“I’ll go through all that when I ask for the autograph.”
“You know, you are sour, aren’t you? Or are you afraid of seeming to be impressed. Or don’t you give a damn? It’s a little unsettling, dear.”
“Your Miss Holtzer unsettled me the same way”
“Dana is a gem. When she reacts, she lets you know it.”
I shrugged. “I loved you in this. I adored you in that. You look just fine in person.”
Again she was motionless. It was an odd feeling to be so close to her. It made me aware of the uncounted millions of men all over the world who had stared at her image, coveted her, lusted after her, mentally stripped her and plundered those silky little loins. I wondered. how many secret, solitary orgasms had been engineered with her in mind.
The unmeasurable scope and intensity of all that vast and anonymous wanting gave her a curious physical impact. True, she had spent years being starved, pummelled, flexed, rubbed, plucked, burnished, perfumed and trained into the absolute peak of lovely physical condition. Without a chromium ego and a savage will she could not have endured it so long.
But one could also believe that, as sex symbol, she also carried sex to an ultimate otherwise unknown-providing ecstasies unimaginable, greater heats, deeper spasms, longer agonies than mortal woman could know. And this, of course, was the nonsense a man must guard himself against. Her physical confidence, approaching arrogance, would lead the unwary to believe it.