“I’m leaving,” I said.
“But why? You wanted me to remember. Well—here in the bottle is my memory. Stick around, pal. When I get lit enough I’ll tell you about all the women I have murdered.”
“All right, Wade. I’ll stick around for a while. But not in here. If you need me, just smash a chair against the wall. ”
I went out and left the door open. I walked across the big living room and out to the patio and pulled one of the chaises into the shadow of the overhang and stretched out on it. Across the lake there was a blue haze against the hills. The ocean breeze had begun to filter through the low mountains to the west. It wiped the air clean and it wiped away just enough of the heat. Idle Valley was having a perfect summer. Somebody had planned it that way. Paradise Incorporated, and also Highly Restricted. Only the nicest people. Absolutely no Central Europeans. Just the cream, the top drawer crowd, the lovely, lovely people. Like the Lorings and the Wades. Pure gold.
35
I lay there for half hour trying to make up my mind what to do. Part of me wanted to let him get good and drunk and see if anything came out. I didn’t think anything much would happen to him in his own study in his own house. He might fall down again but it would be a long time. The guy had capacity. And somehow a drunk never hurts himself very badly. He might get back his mood of guilt. More likely, this time he would just go to sleep.
The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss’s daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich—small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader’s Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I’ll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.
I got up and went back to the study. He was just sitting there staring at nothing, the Scotch bottle more than half empty, a loose frown on his face and a dull glitter in his eyes. He looked at me like a horse looking over a fence.
“What d’you want?”
“Nothing. You all right?”
“Don’t bother me. I have a little man on my shoulder telling me stories.”
I got another sandwich off the tea wagon and another glass of beer. I munched the sandwich and drank the beer, leaning against his desk.
“Know something?” he asked suddenly, and his voice suddenly seemed much more clear. “I had a male secretary once. Used to dictate to him. Let him go. He bothered me sitting there waiting for me to create. Mistake. Ought to have kept him. Word would have got around I was a homo. The clever boys that write book reviews because they can’t write anything else would have caught on and started giving me the buildup. Have to take care of their own, you know. They’re all queen, every damn one of them. The queer is the artistic arbiter of our age, chum. The pervert is the top guy now.”
“That so? Always been around, hasn’t he?”
He wasn’t looking at me. He was just talking. But he heard what I said.
“Sure, thousands of years. And especially in all the great ages of art. Athens, Rome, the Renaissance, the Elizabethan Age, the Romantic Movement in France—loaded with them. Queen all over the place. Ever read The Golden Bough? No, too long for you. Shorter version though. Ought to read it. Proves our sexual habits are pure conventions like—wearing a black tie with a dinner jacket. Me, I’m a sex writer, but with frills and straight.”
He looked up at me and sneered. “You know something? I’m a liar. My heroes are eight feet tall and my heroines have callouses on their bottoms from lying in bed with their knees up. Lace and ruffles, swords and coaches, elegance and leisure, duels and gallant death. All lies. They used perfume instead of soap, their teeth rotted because they never cleaned them, their fingernails smelled of stale gravy. The nobility of France urinated against the walls in the marble corridors of Versailles, and when you finally got several sets of underclothes off the lovely marquise the first thing you noticed was that she needed a bath. I ought to write it that way.”
“Why don’t you?”
He chuckled. “Sure, and live in a five-room house in Compton—if I was that lucky.” He reached down and patted the whiskey bottle. “You’re lonely, pal. You need company.”
He got up and walked fairly steadily out of the room. I waited, thinking about nothing. A speedboat came racketing down the lake. When it came in sight I could see that it was high out of the water on its step and towing a surfboard with a husky sunburned lad on it. I went over to the french windows and watched it make a sweeping turn. Too fast, the speedboat almost turned over. The surfboard rider danced on one foot trying to hold, his balance, then went shooting off into the water. The speedboat drifted to a stop and the man in the water came up to it in a lazy crawl, then went back along the towrope and rolled himself on to the surfboard.
Wade came back with another bottle of whiskey. The speedboat picked up and went off into the distance. Wade put his fresh bottle down beside the other. He sat down and brooded.
“Christ, you’re not going to drink all that, are you?”
He squinted his eyes at me. “Take off, buster. Go on home and mop the kitchen floor or something. You’re in my light.” His voice was thick again. He had taken a couple in the kitchen, as usual.
“If you want me, holler.”
“I couldn’t get low enough to want you.”
“Yeah, thanks. I’ll be around until Mrs. Wade comes home. Ever hear of anybody named Paul Marston?”
His head came up slowly. His eyes focused, but with effort. I could see him fighting for control. He won the fight for the moment. His face became expressionless.
“Never did,” he said carefully, speaking very slowly, “Who’s he?”
The next time I looked in on him he was asleep, with his mouth open, his hair damp with sweat, and reeking of
