WHEN SONNY LEFT THE PARTY, the party began to drain out the door. Eleanor had seen it happen often. Though no one there particularly liked Sonny, they all immediately noticed it when he left and became nervous and restless. The tone of the party broke—the company seemed to become collectively insecure. Where was Sonny? Perhaps he had gone to a better party. Perhaps they were no longer where the action was. It bothered them, and after gulping a little more free liquor, they left.
A few came over and told Eleanor it had been nice, but not many did even that, and the few that did were diffident toward her, as if they were not sure they ought to say anything.
“Why is everyone scared of you?” Jim asked. He was tipsy and not scared of her.
“It’s uncertainty,” she said. “They don’t quite know where I fit in. If they were really sure I was Sonny’s mistress they’d be on solid ground.”
“Mistresses,” Jim said vaguely. He thought she was the most attractive woman he had ever seen. He liked her smile, he liked the way she spoke, he even liked her chuckle. Eleanor, in her turn, found him a pleasant young man, very easy to talk to. If he had not been there she would have spent the evening exchanging sophisticated witticisms with Vaslav Joe Percy, who, besides themselves, was the only guest remaining. He was at the liquor table drinking his dozenth drink and telling the bartender jokes.
“Don’t tell me you’ve had mistress problems,” Eleanor said, smiling at Jim shrewdly.
“No. I haven’t had any to have problems with, unless I count my wife just before we were married. I don’t suppose a fiancée is the same as a mistress, even if you’re sleeping with her.
“Not in the classical sense,” Eleanor said.
Jim put his hand to his mouth suddenly, as if he had just received a bad signal from his stomach, but he quickly lowered it again and went on talking about Stanley Kubrick. Eleanor had never seen a Kubrick movie but listened politely, pretending that she had. Jim began to talk more rapidly, as if he knew he was going to topple over asleep at any minute and was desperately trying to keep himself awake. He was talking about Dr. Strangelove. Suddenly he stopped, set his whiskey glass carefully on the floor, and looked blank.
“Come on,” Eleanor said. “I think it’s time you slowed down. Stretch out here on the couch for a minute. I have to excuse myself for a little while, anyway.”
Jim obeyed. Eleanor went to the bedroom and when she came back he was asleep. She turned the lamp at the head of the couch so it wouldn’t shine in his eyes. Asleep, he was very good-looking, and very young. She went over to the picture window, where Joe Percy was standing. It was late, he was without an audience and looked tired.
“Drank him under, I see,” he said. “Nice boy. He’s probably got a crush on you already. I could probably get a crush on that wife of his if I let myself.” He looked at her and smiled. “And on you as well,” he said, raising his glass. “Isn’t it awful?”
“What?” Eleanor said.
“The way people go around getting impossible, inappropriate crushes on one another.”
“Where did the cowboy go?”
“He didn’t tell me.”
“Pursuing that young lady?”
“Very probably,” Eleanor said.
“Well, he’s a dumb-ass,” Joe said. “It would take her twenty years to catch up with you, if she ever does. Besides, he won’t get anywhere with her.”
“My feeling exactly,” Eleanor said.
“Well, you don’t seem very insulted,” he said. “I doubt he has much luck with women of intelligence.” But he realized instantly what he had said and gestured uncomfortably, as if to brush the remark out of the air. But Eleanor was amused.
“In all frankness—as we say in Hollywood—I’ve had none with them myself,” he said. “Fortunately they’re a rarity. I guess I better be going.”
“I hope your script works out all right,” she said as he was at the door.
“It will. Mine always do. I’m a screenwriter, if there’s one left in the world.”
Eleanor was taken with a sudden slight melancholy, brought on by the talk of Sonny’s absence and probable whereabouts. Though it was a tranquil melancholy, and an element in her beauty, it showed, and Joe Percy looked at her kindly.
“Cheer up,” he said. “It’s all ridiculous, you know. If you ever happen to be in L.A. and bored, I wish you’d give me a call. Oddly enough, I’m listed.”
“Oddly enough, I might,” she said. “Who can say?”
She went back and looked at Jim, regretting that she hadn’t made him take his sports coat off before he passed out. She went into her bedroom and found three empty glasses on her dressing table. It annoyed her and she carried them back to the other room. She was sitting on the bed pulling off her stockings when Sonny came in. He looked moody—half pleased with himself, half depressed.
“Where’s your new beau?” he asked.
“Don’t be smart,” she said. “He’s asleep on the couch and he’s a very nice young man. Let him sleep.”
“Seen some of the party going down the road,” he said. “Hope you took care of everything.”
“Not very well. You’re an insulting bastard, I must say.”
He grinned, sat down beside her, and ran his hand along her smooth calf. “Well, it never got me nowhere,” he said.
Eleanor shifted her leg away. “Mr. Percy and I had already concluded that. He remarked that you probably had no luck with intelligent women.”
Sonny snorted. “I never had no luck with any kind,” he said. “Who’s that dull little turd to talk?”
“He’s not dull. He’s a little chubby but his essential charm comes through. And he’s certainly no fool.”
“Spend a week with him sometime and see what you think then.” He stood up and stretched. “I’m worn out,” he said. He tossed the red shirt in a corner and slipped out of his jeans.
“You’re really going to make a movie? Finally?”
“It won’t be worth seeing. What I want is a TV series. That would be real money.”
Eleanor went to the bathroom to undress and clean her face, and when she had finished went to the phone and called her pilot. “I want the plane in four hours,” she said.
“Where for, ma’am?” he asked groggily.
“Dallas. But we’ll stop by the ranch first. I need some things.”
When she returned to the bedroom Sonny was stretched on his back, asleep. She got in bed and lay resting, looking across him, seeing the rise and fall of his chest. In a few minutes he groaned and turned toward her and groaned again. His bad leg was cramping—it often happened. He didn’t wake up, but he kept groaning. His foot, calf, and thigh were drawn tight as iron. Eleanor tried to knead them, but as always it was like kneading a section of iron pipe. She persisted, but when the cramp finally loosened she didn’t know whether the muscles had relaxed because of her efforts or merely of their own accord. His foot remained drawn, but she rubbed it and twisted it until the toes loosened. Sonny half awoke and raised on his elbows, but then lay down again. When his foot was normal she lay down too and he reached over sleepily and fondled her belly, just at the place where she was heaviest.
“I’m in better shape than you,” he said.
“Well, you’re a professional athlete. You ought to be.”
But he had gone back to sleep, and she was glad. She awoke easily when it was time and dressed, feeling content and ready to leave. She felt at peace with Sonny. Jim was still on the couch. It was very dark when her cab came and only faintly gray in the east when she got to the hangar where the pilot was waiting. She saw the desert sunrise from the air as they were winging east, saw rose and gold spread upward from New Mexico. The pilot had a thermos of coffee which they shared. She dozed again over West Texas, tired, lulled by the smoothness of the flight and the brownness of the land below. When the plane dropped over the ranch house the gardeners were tending the flower beds and the cowboys had gone for the day.
She was there an hour. Lucy was furious. She hated Eleanor’s spates of irrational traveling. In Dallas she told the pilot she would be back in four or five days and caught a plane for New York.
That evening, alone at the Carlyle, she found herself tired and depressed and regretted that she had not had the good sense to stay at the ranch. She had a theater date with a man who had hoped for eleven years that she would someday marry him. Her depression deepened and she called and broke the date. She put on a robe and sat at the window drinking brandy and watching the lights of the city come on. It had begun to drizzle and the window dripped and blurred, softening the lights. Eleanor felt grateful for the drizzle. It was a time when she preferred things blurred and misted to things dry and clear. In time she replenished her brandy. She became very glad she had broken the date and opened the window a little so she could smell the rain. A fall of rain on New York City smelled so different from a fall of rain on the country.
The next morning New York seemed a wonderful city, and she felt fresh and cheerful and had lunch with the banker who hoped to marry her. In the afternoon she shopped a little, dropped in at a couple of galleries, and strolled up Fifth Avenue. She went back to the hotel and pulled her shades, meaning to nap and go out in the evening. But she couldn’t nap. A familiar restlessness hit her, a desire to be somewhere else, somewhere she had never been. With it came a desire for something strange and harsh, something unfamiliar, inappropriate, something in contrast to the good bed, the quiet service—all the ease she was accustomed to. She regretted not staying in Phoenix longer, and she broke another date with the patient banker—not exactly to his surprise. It was Sonny’s doings and had always been that way. If they could not be together for a week or more it was better not to go near him at all. It left her with an edge. She called Phoenix, but Sonny was gone and no one knew where. She looked out the window, but New York no longer seemed attractive—merely noisy, crowded, dirty.
On a reckless impulse she called Mr. Joe Percy in Los Angeles and reached him at a studio.
“Hiya, Joe,” she said. “Isn’t that what girls say in movies?”
“At one time it was. Is this Eleanor?”
“This is Eleanor. I thought I might come and see you tonight or tomorrow, depending on connections.”
“Sure, delighted,” Joe said. “Passing through?”
“No, coming especially,” Eleanor said, feeling wild.
“Especially to see me? I’m flabbergasted. Why, for god’s sake?”
“Because my father wouldn’t let me date cowboys,” she said. “It had a complicated effect on me.”
“It sure must have,” Joe said. “Well, now that you’ve explained it, come ahead.”
“Do I detect a note of trepidation?” she asked.
“Oh, no,” he said. “What have I got to fear? Neither of us has any reason not to do anything we want to do, that I can see.”
She hung up and that evening they had a good late dinner in a restaurant off La Brea. Eleanor realized as they were eating that she liked Joe Percy very much, and all the sense of harshness and strangeness that she had felt on the flight west left her. She began to feel herself again, and very foolish, and Joe Percy realized it and did his gentlemanly best to make a graceful exit possible for her, but his tact only made Eleanor feel the more confused. He offered to get her a hotel room but she declined. “No,” she said. “Maybe I better try to get a flight back to Dallas. I really don’t know what I thought I was doing.”
“You look a little worn,” Joe said. “I’ve got a perfectly secure guest room you’re welcome to. You can’t get a flight this late.”
Eleanor accepted gratefully. Joe Percy, modestly clad in green pajamas and a blue robe, came to his guest-room door to say good night and found her in bed crying. He came and sat down on the bed and patted her hand and then held it. “Come now,” he said. “Cheer up. I’ll survive the disappointment. I didn’t let myself believe it, anyway.”
“Oh,” Eleanor said. “I’m just distraught. I don’t know what I’ve been doing the last three days. This is the silliest thing I’ve done in years.”
Joe smiled at her. He had good teeth and his mustache worked for him. He was clearly a man who had handled the tears of many women. Eleanor was trembling from her cry and held his hand tightly.
“Maybe you’ve been reading too much Iris Murdoch,” he said. “Your coming out here like this reminds me a little of her stuff. People are always getting into bed with one another out of the blue.”
“No I haven’t,” she said, beginning to feel a little less wretched. “I don’t read very good books, really. I read a lot of magazines.”
Joe chatted with her until she was feeling calm and pleasant. She told him about her ranch. He had seen most of the world but had never been on a really large ranch and she told him he would have to come sometime. He had been in Australia and told her about a couple of old Australian cattlemen he had known and the stories they told. As he was about to leave he bent to give her a light kiss, looked at her quizzically, smiled, and gave her a real kiss. Eleanor found she had been wanting him to. He drew back and gave her his little sly look, frank and merry and sexy, before he kissed her again,
The next morning she sat naked on the bed looking out at the smog-white Hollywood hills. The sheet was around her waist, and she felt heavy and good, uncombed and unkempt, but good. Joe Percy had just come to ask what she wanted for breakfast. He was wearing a pair of red briefs and a blue Hawaiian shirt.
“How’d I get here?” she said. “Did you hypnotize me in Phoenix. You need to lose some weight, you know.”
“Nonsense,” Joe said. “This potbelly is my secret. It was obviously my roly-polyness that got to you.”
“You must have got to me with more than that,” she said, yawning. “I feel downright despoiled.”
“Well, I’d brag about you but nobody would believe me,” Joe said. “They’d think you were a fantasy.”
“Sonny would believe you,” Eleanor said. “He knows my erratic nature. Besides, I told him you were attractive.”
“You did? Somehow I’ve always felt attractive, despite my appearance. How did you contract that horse’s ass? He must be worse than syphilis.”
“No, talk nicely about him,” she said quietly.
“I’m sorry,” Joe said at once. “That was thoughtless.”
Eleanor was silent, looking out the window. Joe looked at her and felt sad inside himself, for he would have liked to have seen her right where she was for many mornings, her hair uncombed and her breasts sagging just as they were—and he knew he would probably never see her there again.
“I must say you’ve got your nerve,” she said, noticing his red shorts and grinning at him. “You certainly were greedy.”
“Yep,” Joe said, unabashed. “Get up and let’s eat.”
“I guess I’m glad you are,” she said, pulling the sheet off the bed to hold around her. “Men have always rushed to give me things. Very few have ever dared to grab.”
“Anyone who gets you in reach and doesn’t grab is a fool,” Joe said. “I can’t figure you being single. All your looks, all your dough. How come?”
“Oh, I’m too sleepy to go into it,” she said, yawning again. “Isn’t it almost noon? You’re better than sleeping pills.
“I really said most of it yesterday,” she added, going to the window to look out at the hills. “Daddy wouldn’t let a cowboy near me, or vice versa. There were only about five men in Texas rich enough to marry me when I came of age. The one I married was sixteen years my senior, and queer to boot, though he didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t know anything and Daddy paid no attention. He wouldn’t have known it if he had paid attention. He had twelve thousand head of cattle to take care of. My husband and I lived together in honorable wretchedness for eight years and then he killed himself in a rest room of the Adolphus Hotel, in Dallas. It didn’t get in the papers the way it was, I assure you. Three months after Daddy died I met Sonny. He took me off in one of his hearses to a secluded spot in Oak Cliff and I found out what a cowboy was. I found out a lot of things I hadn’t known. I was twenty-nine. All that time I was married I did the conjugal act maybe twice a year. I didn’t know enough to complain, and I had no one to complain to. For weeks after I met Sonny I wouldn’t turn him loose. I couldn’t believe it was me, but I liked it. That’s why I can’t help feeling protective of Sonny. He brought me into being. No one else had the nerve. You can’t imagine how isolating wealth is unless you’ve lived in Texas. There are places where wealth makes people a little more companionable. In Texas it just guarantees you a comfortable loneliness.”
“Have to look Texas over sometime,” he said. “Sounds like a fine place for a novelist manqué. Lots of frustration. Hardly anybody screwing readily. There’s too much ready screwing out here—it drains off the poetry of it all.”
“You can have the poetry of it all,” Eleanor said. “You’re going to work, I take it.”
“I have to,” he said. “I’m an underling, comparatively. But I could take you to dinner at an even better restaurant, if you care to hang around.”
“Nope,” she said. He went back to his room and when she had put on a robe she went in. He was dressed in a conservative blue suit. On his dresser was a picture of a woman, a brunette in an off-shoulder dress. Her hair style belonged to the forties. She caught a glimpse of herself in Joe’s mirror—she looked full, even a little overblown. She certainly looked her age.
“God,” she said. “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to go to bed with either of us. That’s a nice suit.”
Joe Percy turned from tying his tie and looked at her fondly. “Maybe not me, but certainly you,” he said. “Of course, out here you might have problems. Out here you need to be sixteen and weigh about ninety-eight pounds to be considered prime.”
“Your wife was lovely,” she said.
Joe sighed. “Some old girl she was,” he said. “A serial queen, if you can imagine it. She could swing through trees and fall over waterfalls with the best of them. I truly haven’t been the same since she died.”
“What happened?”
“Cancer,” he said. “About ten years ago.”
She looked out the window again. The hills were brown and the smog white as the white houses. It would be nice to arrive home, to fly through the clear plangent evening, with the whole of the Red River Valley spread out below her. She would exchange the neuter smell of Hollywood for the smell of alfalfa and mesquite and perhaps have a word with the cowboys if she got home in time.
“You really won’t stay?” he asked. “I’ll be so bereft without you that I’ll have to get drunk.”
“No,” she said. “I have to go. Anyway, you failed me. I wanted to feel low and wicked. Now I just feel fat and carnal and a little goofy.”
“So?” he said.
“Well, damn,” she said. “You’re too domestic, Joe. You make me feel like I might have made somebody a nice middle-class wife. I don’t want to feel that way now.”
“High romance just ain’t my metier,” Joe said. “I’ve written too many bad situation comedies.” He looked in the mirror and could not help smiling a dapper smile. He turned his irresistible dapper smile on her.
“Quit,” she said. “I don’t want to get comfortable with you. I might marry you. That would throw my directors into a tizzy.”
“You’ve got directors too?”
“Certainly. Daddy never figured I’d have enough sense to run the estate myself. I don’t have much trouble, though. They’re all scared of me.”
They ate the breakfast Joe had fixed, chatting pleasantly. “You really will have to visit,” Eleanor said. “I want you to meet Lucy, my maid. The two of you ought to be exposed to one another. She has a wit not unlike yours.” After breakfast Joe put on a driving cap and they kissed lightly at the door, as if they had been married ten years and had just remembered that they were fond of each other. He drove off in a Morgan with red seats, and Eleanor had more coffee and drank it while looking at his pictures and his books. She made the guest-room bed, called a cab, and when she got home that evening the bullbats were swooping over the long lake in the horse pasture, the cowboys were unsaddling at the barn, and her two dairymen were just turning the Jerseys into the oatfield for the night. She ate some cold shrimp while Lucy solemnly filled her in on the doings of the week. They prated awhile and Eleanor went to bed with the magazines that had accumulated in her absence. She didn’t leave the ranch again for almost three months.