Desmond checked the doorknob several times, then let his weight rest against the door. Not until he was satisfied that all was secure did he put on his raincoat. The little pause in conversation, during which he’d done exactly as he wished, gave him back a sense of control. Checking locks, straightening his coat, were trivial actions but they were part of a larger preoccupation in him, an animal concern with covering evidence of his passage through his life, a guarded neatness which he abandoned only at the nadir of a long drunken bout. He was brought back to self-consciousness by Laura, who remarked wryly, “Always suspecting crooks.” Strengthened, momentarily, by his conviction of having done right, he gave the doorknob another turn. “Hotel robberies are a big business,” he said. “Maybe you could get in on it,” she suggested instantly.
Carlos, with one gesture of his hand as though blessing his own head, covered his bald spot with his beret. “Shall we go?” he asked with weary patience.
They moved off, Laura walking very slowly so that the others stopped from time to time to mark her progress. Above them in the ceiling was a row of lights, each bulb embedded in a sentimental plaster rosette giving off a pale illumination that conveyed an impression of anxiousness. Clara felt slightly breathless as though the feebleness of the light was a sign of an ever-diminishing supply of oxygen. She observed slashes in the peach-colored imitation brocade wallpaper through which had trickled grains of plaster. Perhaps restless and enraged hotel clients had dug at the paper with their keys like prisoners who carve messages on the walls of their cells. A harsh red carpet covered the floor. Unlike the other furnishings of the corridor, it had resisted all signs of human usage. At the foot of a door they passed a tray holding a dirty plate and a crumpled napkin covered with the blurred orange imprints of a large mouth. “Whore lipstick,” remarked Laura. She began to whistle stridently. “Christ, darling!” protested Desmond. Laura kept it up. Then she asked Clara, “Did you recognize that?”
“Beethoven?” said Clara.
Laura laughed raucously. “Beethoven! My dear, don’t you remember the Paramount News theme? The ‘Eyes and Ears of the World’?”
“She’s not our age,” Peter Rice said.
Laura gave her daughter a dazzling smile, her face so close that Clara could see the three plump cushions of her lips, the large, somewhat dingy teeth, and behind them the quivering mucosity of her tongue. This intimate view of the inside of her mother’s mouth so bemused her that she forgot, for the moment, the occasion of Laura’s laughter. Then Carlos, taking his sister’s arm and pulling her onward, said he hoped the rain would let up for their sailing tomorrow—so dreary to lumber out of the harbor in a downpour, and then they all turned the corner. At once, as though provoked by their presence, a great roaring of voices, a glutinous outpouring of sound flowed out from two open doors and filled the corridor. As they continued on down, they heard a shriek of laughter, stinging and glittering through the confused noise like a thrown stiletto.
“Is that the suite with the wailing wall?” Laura whispered.
“It’s a cocktail party, Laura,” protested Desmond. “Come on, let’s get out of here!”
Three men pushed suddenly into the hall, and at once formed a kind of human teepee from the top of which rose a thin column of smoke.
“We stayed too long in the room,” whispered Peter Rice. “Now we have to submit to the ordinary world. Only Laura is rich enough to escape it.”
Clara saw a glint of anger in her mother’s face. “Rich indeed,” Laura said loudly. “Certain seagulls are being beastly this evening and shall not be given their delicious sleepy-time helpers.”
Carlos, still gripping Laura’s arm, urged her forward, and they walked quickly by the men and the open doors, their faces rigidly averted as though they were passing a pesthouse. As Clara began to follow, one of the three men stepped away from the other two and held up a long, thin cigar in a hand so plump that his pink fingers seemed to have been stuck randomly into the massy fat. “Be careful,” Peter whispered to her as he passed. “They’ll invite you in.”
The man with the cigar was staring at Clara, at the same time brushing the sleeve of his apricot suede jacket. “Aren’t you from Elle?” he asked. “Haven’t I seen you before? At the party for Michele Trottoir last month? Didn’t I—”
“No,” Clara replied coldly. “You’ve got cigar ashes on your jacket,” she added. The man grinned at her. “Oh, you’re the one,” he said. She glanced into a room where, at the moment, a flock of people fluttered apart revealing a tall woman who had stretched her arms above her head and was clicking her fingers. She wore a red dress covered with sequins. Her black hair was elaborately curled and lacquered, her eyes sooty like blurred thumbprints, and on her lips there was an unctuous gleam. She opened her mouth as if to sing. Several people shouted.
“What’s going on in there?” Clara asked the man.
“My God! Don’t you know who that is? You’re really out of it.”
Clara saw Desmond staring into the second room. An elderly woman wearing a limp black hat rushed out and grabbed his arm. “Oh, Larry!” she shrieked. “I’m so glad you came. It’s fabulous—she’s fantastic—the goddamned place is full of gate-crashers, but, shit, what’s the difference. She’s autographed 183 books already. My God! She’s got an arm like a mouth!” Desmond shook his arm and the woman’s hand fell away. “Sonuvabitch!” the woman cried. “You’re not Larry!” He looked back blankly at Clara, then walked on toward the elevators as the woman retreated back into the room.
“You with him?” the sueded fat man asked Clara. “Kinda old for you, ain’t he? Not that it matters. Right?” He waved a hand at the room. “In there is Randy Cunny. Her little life story was published today and we’re giving her a little party. You don’t have to be from nothing…so if you wanna meet her? We got all the press here and a whole bunch from publishing and all like you wouldn’t believe it.” He put an arm around her waist. “Come on, you’ll love it!” But Clara pulled away. “Thanks but I’m with some people,” she said. She walked on to join Desmond.
“Did you find out what that was about?” he asked her.
“A publisher’s party, I guess, for someone named Randy Cunny.”
“Randy Cunny!” he exclaimed.
“Is she famous?” Clara asked. At the end of the corridor, she saw that Carlos and Laura were speaking together, their heads bent forward toward each other. Peter Rice was watching them silently.
“She’s in the movies,” Desmond said with odd reluctance.
“I’ve never heard of her.”
“Sex movies,” he muttered.
“The elevator isn’t working,” Carlos called out resentfully.
“You’re so impatient,” Laura said with mock severity. “So American. It is working. Think! It’s that time of evening when people are going out to dinner—the festive time, Carlosito. Listen! I can hear it rattling its cables in there.”
“You see? It’s gone by again,” he said with such misery in his voice he seemed to have forgotten anyone was there except Laura, who would, from habit, allow him a ceremony of disappointment.
“Now, Carlos, a little stoicism, please,” she said tolerantly. “Just imagine how would you feel if you were inside a huge airplane brought down in the desert, and no water, and men in burnooses pointing machine guns at you, and you the only Jew among the passengers.”
“I’d prefer it to this,” Carlos replied sharply. “And I don’t have to imagine being a Jew!”
Peter Rice laughed suddenly, shortly. At the same time, there was a prolonged screech from the party rooms back up the hall.
“Good God!” Laura cried. “What is going on in there? Are they undressing a coon?”
Desmond Clapper made a shushing sound. “Party,” he whispered. “Publisher’s party, Peter. You know…”
“I don’t know,” Peter said with such utter disaffection that Clara wondered if she was not hearing the accents of his real mood, a prevailing truth over which he drew a thin cover of amicability, not, she thought, to deceive, but to avoid an indelicate show of some suffering, some estrangement she sensed in him. He was so unlike the Spaniards; everything about him—his different stance, his hands, so clean, so fleshless, so little given to gesture, his plain suit—spoke of a central idea of manners from times past, a strict intention to keep the solitary wounded self where it belonged, in the private dark.
She was aware that Carlos was pressing the elevator button violently, again and again. He turned his back on it suddenly, fell back against it as though it were an insect he could smash with his weight, then stepped forward and raised his hands to his head and clutched his great skull as if he would twist it from his shoulders. Did he keep nothing in reserve except his stupid secrets which everyone knew anyhow?
“What do you mean, you don’t know!” Desmond said truculently to Peter.
“Did you get even with the elevator?” Laura asked her brother gently.
“I don’t go to publisher’s parties,” Peter said distinctly but with so pale a human tone, he might have been speaking to a table. “I don’t give parties. I have enough between morning and evening of the company of crazed writers shouting out their names on their way to extinction. And if I were the Lord, I would snuff them out in the first sweat of their heat, when their will is aroused—”
“How damned unpleasant!” exclaimed Desmond. “I think I’ll go back to that party.”
Laura clucked and murmured, “Now…now…” and drew her coat around herself with burlesque hauteur. Clara saw, for the first time, that it was a handsome fur coat. She recalled, at once, the story of how Laura had gotten it. But she would not think about that now, she told herself. She had suffered enough this night from recollection.
“It’s getting too high-toned around here for me,” Laura remarked, smiling. “Goodness! All this wonderful male activity! Elevator-baiting, drunken malice, biting the hand that pays one…. Really, Peter Rice. How does anyone put up with you? And, see here, no one has told me a word about that party.”
“It’s for Randy Cunny,” Desmond said with dull defiance.
Carlos’s bad-tempered scowl gave way to a sardonic smile. “She’s the one in that pornographic film, isn’t she?” he asked.
“I suppose so,” Desmond replied. “A man doll in a suede jacket told Clara she’s published a book, an autobiography.”
“What a surprising thing you said,” Laura remarked. “A man doll! Yes…those leathered people. Desmond! How amusing of you.”
At that moment there was a loud thud as the elevator doors opened on the floor above them. Carlos was staring at Laura intently. Suddenly, he fell back against the elevator door, his features convulsed with laughter. “Randy Cunny!” he cried as Laura pulled him by the coat away from the door. “Autobiographies! Publishing…editors…interviews…leather…the world of literature!”
“What better place for a cocksucker?” asked Laura.
The elevator doors opened. The five silently took their places among a group of middle-aged women in evening dress, each one of whom wore, pinned to her gown, a badge inscribed with her name.