At six that evening Hook telephoned home and spoke with Aunt Marian and Jennifer and Bobby, telling them that things were going along all right but not very rapidly and that the family should not expect him back home very soon. They all said they were doing fine and told him not to worry about them, but their voices belonged to strangers, a family he had not heard before.
After hanging up, he then tried to call Icarus, twice, five minutes apart. But each time no one answered. On a vagrant impulse then he looked up Jack Douglas’s home address in the phone book and found a Douglas, John D. at 300 Sutton Lane in Montecito. He wondered if he ought to drive by and have a look, though he had no idea what he could learn by doing so. But it was still early in the evening and there was not much else to do, so he decided to go ahead.
On the way he stopped at a drive-in and choked down a pair of doughy hamburgers, canners-and-cutters beef if ever he tasted it. But then he knew his palate was somewhat spoiled by the corn-fattened prime Black Angus beef he enjoyed daily at home. While other beef-raisers often fattened cheap dairy steers for their own use, Hook had always figured that if his beef was fine enough for the hotels and restaurants of Chicago and New York, then it was also fine enough for the Hooks. And anyway he doubted that he could have endured the sight of a dairy steer on his farm; he was a snob in that at least.
Montecito was to Santa Barbara as Beverly Hills was to Hollywood—adjacent, separate, unequal. In Santa Barbara people lived and worked; in Montecito they only lived. It was a bedroom community, and to Hook’s eyes it looked as if each bedroom had its own dressing room and bath. It also had trees, great drooping sycamore and eucalyptus and live oak crowding the narrow serpentine streets so tightly Hook wondered how drunks ever managed to negotiate the maze at night, as he was trying to do now, sober, driving slowly, watching for street signs. What houses there were sat far back from the road, looking as dimly lit as forest cabins through the trees, and in front of each there was usually a rustic stone wall or iron-bar fence, the kind Carl Sandburg said would be penetrated only by death and rain and tomorrow.
By the time Hook found Sutton Lane he was convinced that he was driving the only non-foreign, non-sports car on the western seaboard, and he was happy for the difference, because most of the natives apparently thought of the streets as strictly one-way, their way, and swerved their low-slung Jags and Porsches and Triumphs out of Hook’s lane at the very last second, as if “chicken” and not polo or tennis were the favored local sport. But then Hook reminded himself that they knew the roads and did not expect to find a jealously preserved historic fig tree growing in the center of the pavement just over the next hill or beyond the next bend.
The house at 300 Sutton Lane was newer than most in the area, modern and glassy, though it too had the required stone wall along the road. In the back, above a picket of small Mediterranean cypress, the superstructure of a swimming-pool slide was visible. A late-model station wagon was parked in the attached three-car garage, which also had a basket and board above the door. And as Hook watched now, as he was about to drive on, a boy came dribbling a ball out of the darkness of the garage and hooked a shot up at the hoop. If he was the son Douglas had mentioned, the twelve-year-old, then he was small for his age. His hair, long and bowl-cut in the style of the Kennedy young, flopped like a pennant as he moved and jumped under the basket. Hook depressed the accelerator and drove on, not anxious to have the boy see him and run inside and report to his mother that a strange man had stopped his car to watch him—Hook already had enough problems without adding that.
So he started back toward Santa Barbara wondering why he had bothered to drive out to the house in the first place. What had he learned? Did it look like the house of a murderer? No—no more than the “murderer” himself looked like a murderer. And Hook was beginning to face it now, that ever since meeting Douglas that morning and talking with him he had been losing his gut conviction that the man was somehow involved in Chris’s death. The fact that Douglas had gone out to the beach house with Liz Madera, had even allowed himself to be seen alone with her, knowing that Hook was in town and what he was after—it just did not smell of guilt. But even more to the point, Douglas simply did not seem like the violent and jealous type, in fact seemed more like its antithesis, cool and calm and sure in his sense of his own worth, the kind of man not likely to be shaken by a mistress’s infidelity, especially in a milieu in which infidelity was the rule, almost the one true badge of belonging. And there was also the matter of how Liz Madera had reacted to Hook’s indictment of Douglas—with amusement more than anything else. The lady did not protest nearly half enough. So the simple fact was that Jack Douglas had not turned out to be the man Hook had imagined during the trip home with Chris’s body and through the long days of the funeral and the longer days afterward. No, that man had existed only in Hook’s mind, had been born and fleshed there, and Hook mourned his passing now, because he feared his death also meant the death of Hook’s hopes for swift redress and, yes, vengeance—for Liz Madera had been right about that too, that poison in his blood. He felt it now, could admit its existence, live with it. Still, more than anything else he wanted the truth. But right now that truth did not seem to involve Jack Douglas.
So where did that leave him?
It left him with Dorothy Rubin.
And twenty minutes later, in El Cielito, the restaurant where Sergeant Rider had taken him that first night in Santa Barbara, Mrs. Rubin was still with him. She was the one who claimed to have seen Chris jump; she was supposedly the last one to have heard him say he had nothing to live for; and probably most important, she was the only one obviously filled with hatred, possibly sick with it, sick enough to commit murder. So as he took a stool at the end of the bar and ordered a vodka and tonic, Hook tried to conceive of what possible circumstances, what intricate mechanism of character and cause and effect could have resulted in Chris’s “suicide.” But there was nothing to go on, no raw material for even hypotheses. Was the woman a lesbian? Did she have a lover? Or lovers? Was she broke? Or rich? Was she a widow? A divorcée? He had no idea, in fact knew next to nothing about her. And that was a lack he was determined to end as soon as possible, and even tried to make a beginning now, by pumping the bartender. But the man was so busy Hook could not get anywhere with him, and contented himself with the drink and a cigarette, then another drink, and left before nine o’clock.
He drove past Icarus’s place, past the driveway leading back to the apartment, but all he could see was darkness, no psychedelic lights burning this night. So he went back to his motel then, stopping off at the Galleon bar in the basement for another few drinks before turning in. Besides himself and the bartender, there were only two couples sitting at tables, a fat man at the bar and two girls alone, apparently waiting for their dates. The room was flooded with a ghastly green light from the swimming pool, whose depths a floor-to-ceiling window exposed. The pool was being used by a thirtyish married couple and their two children, all of whom stayed protectively in the heated water, which had to be a good thirty degrees warmer than the December night air.
Sitting at the bar, and staying with vodka, Hook tried to make conversation with the bartender, a heavy man about his own age, with slicked-down black hair and a pencil-line mustache and an air of aggrieved embarrassment, as if he were appearing on stage in a very bad play. Hook told him that he was from out of town and was thinking of opening a business in Santa Barbara but wanted some good public relations counseling before he did anything definite. Did the bartender know anything about local public relations firms, like say Jack Douglas Associates? No, the man didn’t know a thing, in fact wasn’t even sure what they meant by public relations. What the hell was it anyway? Pretty much what the words said, Hook explained. Maybe the bartender knew Douglas as a politician; he had run for Congress last year. But no, the man couldn’t help him there either. There were so goddamn many names and propositions on the ballots these days that a body just couldn’t keep it all straight anymore, so he didn’t even bother to vote. Had he ever heard of Mrs. Dorothy Rubin? No, never.
And that was that. The man had glasses to wash and moved down the bar to wash them. For a time Hook sat there looking down at the drink in his hand and tried not to think about anything at all, but he was just stalling and he knew it. The time had come finally, the time to face it, to think about it, deal with it. All through the late afternoon and evening, in fact ever since she had hit him with it on the beach, he had tried to pretend it was not there and simply had gone on about his business as if everything were still the same. But it was not the same.
What bothered him most was the way she had said it, off-hand, almost as an afterthought, a result of his having struck the hippie. He had the feeling that if he had not done that, she would not have said any of it, ever. So it had if not the ring of truth at least the trappings of it. And he knew the first part of what she said was at least possible. Though he had always been a good father to Chris, even a loving father, he could see that in the boy’s eyes he might at times have seemed “unbending” and “always, always right.” But it had never been Hook’s practice to insist on his own way of doing things; he had never been bullheaded or dictatorial. What he was, simply, was right. And most of the time. But he could not see anything unusual or harmful in that, anything Chris would have resented. After all, Hook was Chris’s father; he had twenty-five years more experience of life than the boy had had, so naturally he had known more, been “right” more. And anyway, as far as Hook was able to judge, what boys seemed to resent in a father was not competence, not decency and strength, but ineptness and weakness. He had seen enough examples of that around Banner Hill, the contempt many of the young showed openly for lazy, boozing fathers, transplanted hillbillies who were basically coon hunters and whittlers by nature and not farmers or businessmen. And Hook in fact resented this attitude, for it was his experience that these shiftless whittlers were usually a lot longer on humanity than some of their more successful neighbors. But now Hook wondered if this general indictment might not include himself as well, that in his “strength and rightness” he had been less warm, less human in Chris’s eyes than he would have wanted to be. What was it she had said? “He was freezing to death in your cold shadow.” And so had left home. No, that Hook could not believe. To believe it would be the same as accepting someone’s word that the sun rose in the west despite his observations to the contrary. All his senses, all his experience with the boy, all his memories of their life together told him otherwise. Yet she had an answer for that too, that the young had to “play roles” with their parents. So this son he remembered, this bright and happy and loving Christopher David Hook, was not real at all but just an actor. The real one had fled his home and father “in order to breathe,” had found nothing but more coldness and misery and unhappiness wherever he had gone, and so had killed himself.
But it was not true. Hook knew it was not true. Only now he had to prove it more than ever, for he had to prove it to himself. Elizabeth Madera had sown in him not some small seed of doubt but a nascent cancer, and he knew that if he was to go on living he would have to cut it out of himself, all of it.
Lighting a cigarette now, he studied the massive rusted old ship anchor hanging above the mirror behind the bar, and then as his gaze drifted downwards he found himself looking into the eyes of one of the two girls at the other end of the bar. She smiled warmly, in open invitation. Beyond her, Hook saw the other girl on the phone near the door, and he knew suddenly that it was not a date she was making but an appointment. They were professionals. Looking back at the first girl—by way of the mirror still, for the fat man was sitting between them—Hook returned a fraction of her smile. Then he told the bartender to give her another drink—this even though he was not sure what his motives were yet, whether he just wanted to talk with her and get her whore’s lowdown on Santa Barbara high life or whether he actually wanted her, wanted sex.
Whichever it was, he apparently was about to find out very soon, for when the bartender served her drink, a bloody mary, she smiled again and got up, bringing the drink and her purse down the bar with her. Hook stood as she joined him. She thanked him for the drink and said her name was Rita. He suggested that they move to a table, and followed her to one next to the pool window. Pulling the chair out for her, seeing her close up, he estimated her age at around nineteen or twenty. She was totally Latin, dark, sexy, unfashionably voluptuous, the kind of girl he would have once described to Kate as “fat by thirty,” a private joke between them. During the first summer of their marriage a girl across the hall from their Greenwich Village apartment had called on Hook to open a stuck window for her while Kate was away at work, and when he related the incident to her later, trying to minimize it, he described the girl as the type that would be fat by thirty, which as Kate later discovered meant someone who was very attractive and sexy now, at twenty.
Across the room the second girl hung up the phone and, putting on her coat, waved to Rita and left. Rita gestured out the window at the family frolicking in the distant shallow end of the pool. “They look creepy, don’t they? They never go under. You just see their bodies. Never their heads.”
Hook agreed that they looked odd. “My name’s David Hook,” he added.
She was pleased to meet him, she said. Then she leaned toward him confidentially, smiling in happy embarrassment. “Would you believe I skinny-dipped in there one night? Well, I did. Me and this other girl. Some guy took over the whole bar for a party, and Jules there, the bartender, he hired us to put on a little show. Just swim around, you know.”
“I wish I’d been here,” Hook said.
It was not much, but it pleased her. She smiled hesitantly at him, almost timidly. “At the bar,” she said, “before you saw me, I watched you. You looked so kind of—oh, not sad, I guess—but tense, you know? I mean, like—well, like you’re not exactly having a ball, you know?”
“I wasn’t.”
“Would you like to?”
He doubted that she was intentionally making a pun on the word ball, but there was no doubting her meaning. He looked at her, this girl who would be fat by thirty. She was dark and attractive, as Liz Madera was dark and attractive. But she was not beautiful like Liz. She was Liz Madera unlit by mind, unshaped by spirit.
“Yes,” Hook said. “I think I’d like that.”
She leaned toward him. “Forty?”
He nodded.
“That’s regular. Normal.”
Hook did not know the nomenclature here, but he assumed it was the same as in St. Louis. “Half-and-half?” he said, feeling, as always, diminished by the utterance, irredeemably degraded.
She smiled happily. “That’s normal.”
Later, in the crepuscular light of his room, Hook lay on his back in bed watching her perform the first “half” of her task, the way her lush black hair, loosened, draped over his belly much as Liz Madera’s had on the rock at the beach. And his eye traced the long and lovely line of her back and waist and hips, finally her buttocks, beautiful as no other thing to him, his favorite pounds of flesh, as they were to Voltaire, he reflected, recalling the great Frenchman’s hilarious letters to his niece and how in them he was forever “pressing” kisses on her “ravishing round bottom.” And Hook figured he would press a few himself this night, for the girl did reach him physically; he felt as big as a corner post. But he was cold in his heart. He was a voyeur to his own act.
Yet this same coldness gave him a high fine endurance, so that when he mounted her finally he deliberately stayed with her until she began to come alive under him and he could feel her whore’s surprise at it, at being reached, and wanting it then, wanting to come, and finally he was able to stay with her all the way, not letting himself go until he could feel her going over first, and then raging after her, driving like some wild desperate kid trying to break an ultimate tape. Why he had waited, pacing himself, he was not sure. He felt no love for the girl, and certainly it was not something she had expected. Yet for some reason he had felt that his pleasure was dependent on hers, hers a condition of his. And hers evidently had been keen enough, for afterwards she offered to stay the night if he would let her, and said she would do him again if he wanted it later, and that it would be a “freebie.” Hook had expected to be alone, had wanted to be alone to think, but the girl was so warm and decent, not at all the embittered hustler yet, that he did not want to put her down. And anyway it had been so long since he had slept with another human being through all the hours of a night that he said yes finally, yes he would like her to stay.
Later, after cigarettes, and after a number of unsuccessful attempts at conversation—did he like movies? did he go to many of them? she dug them herself, much more than TV, because they told it like it really was—she lapsed into silence and finally fell asleep. He looked at her lovely breasts and abundant hair, at her Latin darkness, and wondered if he would have taken her at all if she had been blonde, if she had not borne at least a physical resemblance to Elizabeth Madera.