left him with an impression his martini was freezing to a lump of solid ice in his hand. Well, yes, I did have a daughter, but her stepmother and I killed her. How about a refill?
Her arms looked very soft and round on the rim of the life ring. Somehow he wanted to touch them. Water coursed down her face.
‘Did you have any?’ he asked.
‘No.’ Then, without knowing why, she added, 'I had abortions instead. Two of them.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘They were induced. My husband didn’t want children.’
‘I’m not a professional Angeleno,’ Goddard said, ‘but don’t they have the pill in San Francisco?’
‘They were still experimental then.’ She said nothing else. Well, it was an unlikely place to hold a seminar on planned parenthood. But at least neither of them had anybody else to worry about, and if they didn’t start slopping over about each other— So why had he come back here? He didn’t know.
‘I’m sorry I said that,’ he apologized. ‘It must have been left over from some cocktail party. And God damn your husband.’
She gave him a strange look, but said nothing. That was understandable, however; he wasn’t making sense even to himself. If he wanted to stamp his foot and stick out his tongue at somebody, why not Lind, instead of some anonymous dead man?
'I mean, it’s degrading,’ he said, still floundering. ‘For Christ’s sake. I don’t know what I mean.’
‘It’s all right,’ she said gently. 'I don’t even know why I said it.’
We gotta do something with this scene, fellas; it’s fuzzy as hell and the dialogue stinks. Maybe what the script meant was our boy Shrdlu—we got to find a better name for him, let’s make a note of that—Shrdlu is about to buy the John Donne bit, only he’s still all
There was a simultaneous flash of lightning and a crackling explosion of thunder. Water beat at his face. And after the squall would come the agony of the sun. I’m not so sure, Mannie; this is just off the top of my head, but I think what it is with Shrdlu is he’s scared spitless.
* * *
Gerry hadn’t entirely given up on the over-twenty-five generation; there was still hope even if a good many of them did seem to have the moral outlook of howler monkeys. The Haight-Ashbury routine wasn’t for her, with its promiscuity and pot; she was at UCLA, fulminating against Rusk and the CIA and Dow Chemical recruiters, even if it was her opinion that blaming the latter for napalm was about as logical as crusading against fever because it sometimes killed people with malaria. You were still only treating the symptoms.
He didn’t know what she’d come home for that afternoon. He’d come back from the studio for some notes he’d forgotten that morning in regard to the third cut they were taking at
The studio had served notice they were going to drop his option, but that wasn’t what was riding him; he was pretty well fixed financially. It was simply the failure. The picture was a bomb, and it was his baby from beginning to end; he’d written the script and produced it. On the surface it would seem to be a good comedy situation, the misadventures of a sailing yacht in mid-ocean with a male captain and a five-girl crew, but when it was in the can there wasn’t a belly laugh in it. He should have known to begin with that there weren’t five good comediennes in the industry, that if there were they wouldn’t work together, and that, finally, with all five of them in full cry after the one male within two thousand miles and he the Godhead, Authority, the Captain, nothing in Christ’s world, script, director, or threat of death, was going to make them be funny; they were going to be sexy. He had a headache, which he’d had almost a month ago, and no amount of Miltown could any longer retract and sheathe his nerve-ends.
Gerry was living on campus, when she wasn’t working in Watts or picketing an induction center somewhere, so she didn’t know yet how near he and Suzanne were to calling it quits. Not, he thought, that he’d known it had gone that sour, until he got to the house. There was a strange car in the driveway, but he didn’t pay any attention to it; it was just one of Suzanne’s friends. He went in through the front and back to the den, but he couldn’t find the notes. Maybe she’d know where they were; she was probably out by the pool. He went out through the sliding glass door of the living room, apparently just ahead of Gerry. He hadn’t heard the Porsche pull into the driveway, so it must have been while he was in the den.
He didn’t see Suzanne, but the shallow end of the pool was around the corner of the master bedroom. He stepped around it and almost onto two nude bodies on the poolside mattress with the wet trunks and swimsuit discarded beside it, Suzanne in an equestrienne attitude with her eyes closed and beyond hearing anything less than an amphibious assault, the recumbent one a posturing and epicene writer named Ransome he’d always assumed was a fag. Ransome’s eyes were open, looking up at him; they kept growing wider in horror as he made a strangled sound and fought to escape, both of which could have been interpreted as ardor until at last his voice returned and he wailed, ‘Oh, good heavens!’ Suzanne’s eyes opened and she looked around at him with the blank stare of someone in a trance. It hadn’t been more than two seconds.
In spite of the roaring in his head, his voice seemed to be perfectly matter of fact. 'I don’t care if you lay this double-gaited son of a bitch,’ he said, ‘but could you do it somewhere else? I’d like to think the pool’s exclusive, anyway.’
There was a gasp behind them then. He whirled, and Gerry was staring at all three of them, her eyes sick with loathing. She turned and ran. There was a snarl from the Porsche out in the driveway, a scream of rubber, and she was gone.
There was no use trying to catch her; he’d just have to keep calling her at the dormitory tonight until he could get her to come to the phone. Maybe he could make her understand he’d been operating in shock himself. He went back to the studio, and was in one of the projection rooms two hours later when the call came from the California highway patrol. She’d spun out through a guardrail on the San Diego Freeway.
Afterwards, when he walked away from the hospital isolated from everything in his private world of silence, all he had to hang onto was the knowledge she hadn’t done it deliberately; she was too healthy-minded and vital for that. She was just burning out her anger and disgust by driving too fast, a kid hitting back blindly at the only things available at the moment, the throttle of an overpowered car and the speed laws promulgated by the same can of worms.
* * *
It was a lovely face, he thought, with magnificent bone structure, and he was conscious of a desire to tell her this, but she was probably already convinced he was some kind of nut. He was appraising the exquisite effect of that slight tilt to the eyes when a little black streak trickled briefly down her cheek like running mascara and then disappeared under the pelting of the rain. Now another oozed from the blond hair plastered to her head. He was wondering at this when she said, ‘There’s soot or something in the rain. It’s on your face.’
The ship, of course! It was the fallout from the fire. He swung his head, searching the limits of the rain-swept void around them, but could see nothing except the short and choppy sea fading away into the murk. In the squall it could be blown for miles. But there was more of it now. Sooty splotches were dotting her arms. It had to be nearby. He turned, eyes slitted against the spindrift and rain, and stared directly to windward. Then he saw it—not the ship itself, but a faint and shapeless wash of orange glowing through the gray. He spun Karen around and pointed.
There was no way to tell how far away she was or in what direction she was going. It was simply a color without form or dimension, and they had no framework or orientation except the wind, which could be veering all around the compass. But it was growing brighter, he thought, conscious of the pounding of his heart.
Then they could see the flames and the dark clouds of smoke, and the side of the ship began to materialize in the mists at the limit of visibility. It was in profile, going past them very slowly with scarcely any disturbance to the swell or the confused and choppy sea set up by the squall.
‘The engine’s stopped!’ Goddard said. ‘And she’s lost most of her headway.’
Karen slipped out of the life ring. They each hooked an arm through it and began to kick in the direction of the ship. She was fading from view into the curtain again, off to their right, but the glow was still visible and he knew she was slowing all the time.
