Come On Out, Daddy

He would say, "Hollywood a prison? What town isn't – for the ones who need walls? I've been in a lot of places and I've never been arrested except for speeding."

His friends kept at him. Some of them had worked for the movies and they saw corruption waiting for Gordon Rengs, novelist; sloth, emotional flabbiness, moral shrinkage, a watering-down of values. He was bound, they said, like all tweedy westerers this too late day, all who looked to the far coastal spaces for boons that were now nowhere, to wind up hooked on over-zoned Pacific Palisades and overpriced Malibu surf. According to them, money, yearly doses of it handed over smilingly every third Friday, would become the monkey, no, the trumpeting elephant on his back.

They worried about him because, no matter how much ground he had covered in his travels, he had not in the emotional sense been around much: his head had for years been filled with himself and his work. In Hollywood, they warned, his spirit would in the end have no more pickup than his Jag, his vision would soar no higher than his picture-window house in the Laurel Canyon hills, his imagination would end where his tufted wall-to-wall carpets ended. As for his integrity, it would be grown over with the toadstools of compromise and the lichens of main-chanciness.

For those who promised him the full inventory of collapse under the guise of wishing him well, Gordon Rengs had a ready reply:

"I've reached forty. I've written nine novels about the Things that ultimately count, I've sounded the most reverberant tocsins, cried a thousand full-lunged wolfs – and nobody's listened. The most successful of my books sold a little over six thousand copies. Not that I'm painting myself as the prophet in his own country, that's a disgusting kind of self-softness. All the same, I feel like a man mumbling to himself and beginning to look a little silly. Discriminating music lovers may enjoy the sound of my thin and reedy whistling in the dark but as for me, I want for once in my life, just for the crash of it, to make an all-out symphonic noise, a well-under-written and mass-funneled shout. That's what you can do in the movies: shout centrally, rather than whisper around the edges. You don't say much, true, but you say it loud and wide, sometimes even in full color. That's not my reason for going, of course. It's a minor bonus I'm expecting. The main thing is that they're offering me two thousand dollars a week to do this Charlemagne picture, almost as much money as a publisher would advance to me for a book, more than I've made overall on some of my books. With my savings I can go off and write more books. Don't talk to me about corruption, please. If you were corrupted out there you must have opened yourselves wide to it. You know the one thing I'm terrified of now? The creeping dry rot that comes with one decade after another of worrying about the rent and the groceries. That's a corruption too, Where does legitimate dedication end and plain self-abuse begin? I'm going out there to subsidize my serious work to come; by subsidizing my stomach, which has a history and a need too."

His friends inquired whether he was going West to be nice to his vital organs or for the chance to make an all-out noise? One or the other, they said. No having it both ways.

He found that there was carping in this, a quibble he didn't need. He packed his scuffed canvas bags, sublet his Village walk-up, and took the early-morning jet for L.A.

Letters from him began to arrive in New York. Written on studio stationery and paid for by the studio at the rate, roughly, of fifty dollars a letter – he took about an hour on each and he was making exactly fifty dollars an hour – they were filled with a kind of trium-phant I-told-you-so:

"All is lovely past words. The biggest thing is the sense of physical well-being you get out here – I'd forgotten how the body, too, can chirp. I'm living in a clean-lined, beam-ceilinged, pool-adjoined apartment above the Strip, one with a private Japanese-style patio; I wake up to the chatter of birds, I open my eyes to see the blooming rose and gardenia bushes outside my windows, the spreading banana tree. Each morning I drink a pint of freshly squeezed orange juice, swim five lengths in the pool, get in my red Alfa-Romeo and drive to work through show-stopping Laurel Canyon – thinking of you slaves fighting your way into the sooty 'F' train! Conditions at the writers' building are plush, plush. My office is a fine large room complete with air conditioner, leather sofa, horsy-doggy hunt prints, electric typewriter, and the world's most efficient secretary just one push of a button away, not to mention the admirable grassy hill slanting up and away from my window. The fellow in the next office is Jamie Beheen, the Anglo-Irish playwright, who's out here doing the story of Noah – delightful man. (Jamie, I mean; though I have nothing against Noah.) I was taken with my producer the first time we met; he said, 'My philosophy is very simple, movies should be about rich people.' He's absolutely right, of course, philosopher or no, he understands the Lowest Common Denominator of fantasy. My assignment's coming along. As you know, they're going in for Biblical and historical stories this year, that's why they're up on Charlemagne, who was very rich. (Noah was low on cash but, as Jamie points out, he had an impressive amount of livestock.) By the way, you may be interested in the reason they picked me for the Charlemagne job. They'd been given to understand that my last book was a psychoanalytic study of a young man in rebellion against his father and they want to give this same slant to the young Charlemagne. Their assumption, naturally, is that I'm an expert on said slant. I didn't tell them that I'd never written a book remotely like the one they'd heard about; I understand the nature of fantasy too. Neither did I let them know that my head is a total vacuum as regards Charlemagne and his father (Pepin the Short, I gather from the Encyclopaedia Britannica). When I proposed that I spend a week or two doing research, to brush up on the subject, my producer was categori-cally against it on the quite valid grounds that my job is not to draw a historically accurate portrait of Charlemagne but simply to make him like Tony Curtis, whom they're hoping to line up for the lead. So I am turning Charlemagne, about whom I know absolutely nothing, into Tony Curtis (and Pepin the Short, entirely on my own initiative, since he hasn't been cast yet, into Claude Rains), a dÈlightful finger exercise at which I spend five or six hours a week – they expect ten pages from you each Friday, and I'm used to turning out that much copy, and much more difficult copy at that, in a day. There's an interesting script girl on the lot named Marian Huddlesfield, she's been telling me about the effects of Iysurgic acid, LSD, the stuff that induces a lovely schizophrenia. More about her later, she's making me a pair of sandals. Can this be corruption? Can overpaid vacations corrode the soul? I feel too good."

Later he wrote in a less exclamatory vein:

"I will grant you there are some unusual types out here. Been seeing Marian Huddlesfield – had her to the Be-heens' a couple times – once to dinner at the Aware Inn ('organic' foods: fruits and vegetables that haven't been sprayed with insecticides or chemically fertilized, meats from non-injected animals) – even spent an evening at her Yoga meditation center (crossed legs, minimum breathing, etc.). She has a sweep of enthusiasms: she's a vegetarian, basically a fruitarian, she's interested in Yoga techniques for controlling the bodily functions, she knows Krishnamurti by heart, she goes to poetry-read-to-jazz sessions, she combs and rolls her own reefers and bakes marijuana brownies, she takes a negative attitude toward what she calls negative thoughts (among them anger and desire: self-serving, self-featuring), she also disapproves of insecticides and artificial fertilizers, she reads pamphlets on astrology and Bahai, she makes her own candles and sandals and is enthusiastic about all handiwork crafts, she used to live with a modern jazz bass player who has a habit and a Zen library, she collects interesting nuts and roots and leaves to Scotch-tape to her walls and ceiling, she's a volunteer subject in some experiments being conducted by a UCLA psychiatrist into the effects of certain hallucinogenic roots and molds (peyote, mescaline, LSD, all that). Simply the nuttiness brought out by the Southern California sun? There's too much of this everywhichway ferment out here to be dismissed that cavalierly. Where there's so much space the mind too stretches, yeasts up. I suspend judgment and try to understand. It may be a mass lurching but it's an exploration too. Possibilities of the organism are being brought out. What worries me about Marian is that she took a nasty spill when she was riding her bike a couple weeks ago up in Beverly Glen and ripped open the palm of her left hand on a wire fence. She's got a gaping hole there that refuses to heal, maybe, (continued on page 106)Come onout, Daddy(continued from page 46) as a doctor friend of mine suggests, because of a protein deficiency due to her vegetarian diet; but she's going to an osteopathic surgeon who approves her eating habits and is sure everything will be all right, especially if she increases her daily consumption of pi-nuts (rich in proteins). I would be happier if she wore a bandage on the theory that every part of the body, most particularly the damaged parts, should have a chance to breathe freely. She and her friends say they are getting at a new and more fundamental reality and claim to have had full glimpses of it under LSD; not to be brushed aside, no really intense groping is. You don't have to be cultist about it, just open-minded. People out here are beginning to take this lysurgic acid seriously now that Cary Grant has stated in public that he has been using it under his psychiatrist's direction and that it's made a new man of him. Call this a failure of nerve if you want. It may be an opening of significant doors. Of course, Marian should cover up her stigmata. I feel stirrings and awakenings. Marian has put my name on the list of volunteers for the UCLA experiments."

Five weeks after his arrival Gordon Rengs stopped writing to his friends altogether. Not because of Marian Huddlesfield. He had met Wilhelmina Sproulle.

...

It came about this way. On a certain Tuesday morning, at ten-fifÈeen, Gordon arrived at the writers' building. As usual, Jamie Beheen came over to his office; as usual, they had morning tea prepared for them by their secretaries. This day the ceremony was particularly pleasant because Gordon's secretary had brought in some homemade pecan buns which were almost as tasty, though not as heady, as Marian Huddlesfield's pot cakes.

"I've something to do tonight," Jamie said, "and I wonder if you'd be interested, Gordon? There's an all-Negro musical being done in town, somewhere in the Negro district. My New York agent has wired me that the man who wrote and produced and directed the thing is said to be quite talented, and she'd like me to see it and send her a report. I've got two extra tickets for tonight – would you and Marian like to come along with me and my wife?"

Gordon called Marian. She said it sounded like fun. She liked Negroes because they were very Zen. That night they all had drinks (Marian had carrot juice) at the Beheens', a fine Japanese-modern house high up on Sunset Plaza Drive, well above the smog level; then, close to eight, they set out for the theatre. It was a small place just off Western Avenue, a converted warehouse or garage. The writer-producer-director, a soft-spoken man named Mitchell Bascoyne, was more than pleased to see them. He had been told that Jamie Beheen was scouting, in a sense, for his New York agent, with whom Bascoyne wanted very much to sign. There were four seats reserved for the Beheen party in the first row.

This was a little theatre in every sense of the word. It had no elevated stage; the performers simply came through a side door and took up positions on the floor immediately in front of the first row. There were fifty people in the cast and hardly more than thirty in the audience. The house lights went down, the spots over the playing area came up; the dancers came high-stepping out in a sort of Haitian cakewalk and the show, an extravaganza having to do with a highly musical election campaign in a Caribbean island town, was on. Marian slipped her hand into Gordon's but he did not caress it with his fingers; it was the one with the open wound.

Almost from the first scene, a Mardi Gras fiesta featuring several barefoot girls with bunches of bananas on their heads, Gordon was tensely aware of the girl in the leftmost position in the chorus. She handled herself gracefully enough and sang with a sweet husky contralto, but it was not her talents that held him. She could hardly be more than twenty-two; as against the more polished girls in the cast she carried herself with an almost awkward, endlessly touching, pertness, a held-in zest, a faintly comic air, as though she might at any moment jump away from her assigned role and burst out laughing. Though short, she was beautifully built, with well-fleshed thighs, ample hips, a fine prideful jut to the rear and high, perfect breasts. She was creamy in complexion, a beginner brown, and the shiny, jet-black, perfectly straight bangs that framed her wide, thrust-cheeked face made her look almost oriental. Absurdly, but marvelously, her eyes were a cool blue.

She was special. Gordon could not look away. Often she was standing inches from him, it was a real temptation to reach out for that generous, curvy body that was made to be taken hold of. Early in the performance she became aware of him and began to look his way, checking to see if his eyes were still on her.

After a while he worked up enough courage to smile at her. At first, though with what seemed an effort, she kept her face at rest; then she began to smile back, in little darting movements of the full lips. She had delightful dimples.

Holding Marian's hand with just his fingertips, to avoid touching the wound, Gordon began to feel a bubbling excitement. This was the first absolutely unplanned, unprogramed gush of enthusiasm he had experienced toward any girl since coming to Hollywood. And there seemed to be a response in her. He could not be absolutely sure, but weren't thereÈsigns? Glancings, dimplings?

When the girl was not on stage he studied the program in the dim light, hoping to locate her name in the cast listings. But there were six girls in the chorus: Maxine Frettengille, Georgianna Balsam, TeriWhite, Wilhelmina Sproulle, Bettina Rouse, Babette Fortunata; no way to single out anybody's name from such a roster. How to make contact with this girl?

With Marian and the Beheens along, he could hardly excuse himself after the show and go trotting off backstage – which might be awkward anyhow, since the girl could be married (though there were no rings on her fingers) or tied up with one of the young men in the cast. But if she had been returning his looks, if some interest had really been sparked in her, she just might come out in the lobby after the show to give him an opportunity to speak to her. It was a long shot, but one worth exploring.

Luckily, there was good reason to linger out front: Jamie had to chat with Mitchell Bascoyne. While the two men were exchanging pleasantries, Gordon stood to one side with Marian, watching the doors.

In a matter of minutes the girl came out.

She looked directly at Gordon as she advanced slowly down the lobby. She was wearing skin-tight toreador pants of electric orange, their stretched material was alive with taut ripplings as the full bold muscles of her thighs worked. She walked slowly, deliberately, to the side-walk, then made a turn toward the parking lot alongside the building. She disappeared into the dark there.

In another moment she came into sight again, sauntering back to the theatre. All the while she looked directly and deliberately at Gordon.

He waited until she was a few feet past him. Then he left Marian and walked rapidly over to her, catching her as she was nearing the door.

He would not have felt free to go after her if there had been anything serious between him and Marian. There wasn't. Sometimes they met for dinner or to see a movie or a play, that was about it; in between meetings they both understood they were free agents. If on this or that night she stayed at his place, or he at hers, she did not take this as a commitment on either side. Gordon knew (she had told him herself) that from time to time the bass player with the habit, the one she had lived with, came to spend the night with her; she enjoyed talking with him about Zen and the twelve-tone scale. She said herself, with the casualness she believed everyone should have about personal strivings, that she did not have a strong physical urge and was more interested in the spiritual side, in purging herself of toxic acids and the negative thoughts they gave rise to. Though she was perfectly willing to lend herself for the pleasure of men she liked, she was against any spirit of possessiveness in them or herself – the idea of private property as applied to living beings she took to be the most negative thought of all. She was ready to be enjoyed but she would not be claimed. She hated the idea of people plastering no-trespassing signs over each other, it disrupted the true placidities and prevented the higher concentrations.

The girl had stopped at the door and was looking at Gordon expectantly. He put his hand lightly on her forearm.

"I liked the show," he said. "Particularly you. I thought you were fine."

"Well, then, thanks," she said in her vibrant voice, and dimpled marvelously.

"I wonder," he began. He was about to ask what her name was, and give her his, then approach the possibility of their having lunch together – but there was a hand at his back and Jamie's voice was saying, "Well, Gordon, are you about ready to go?" With Jamie was his wife, behind them, Marian, looking placid.

So he had to answer her encouraging smile with a hasty, ambiguous twist of his own lips, with a little humorous lift of the shoulders, and go off with his party. He still had no idea whether she was a Maxine, a Georgianna, a Bettina, or what.

DriviÈg through the mountains next morning, Gordon found himself thinking about this little dancer. There was, he could not help feeling, something pathetic about her, about all the actors in the show. They were obviously people who worked during the day as busboys, waiters, clerks, cashiers, stenographers, beauticians: if, in addition, they were ready and willing to spend six tough nights a week performing before a handful of spectators for something even less than Equity minimum, there had to be a big thirst in them. In all their heated minds, certainly, were shimmering images of Lena Horne, Sammy Davis, Jr., Harry Belafonte; how could you point out to them the many thousands of Lenas and Sammies and Harries who'd fallen by the wayside, not always because of deficient talents? Why should Negro theatrical hopefuls be any more subject to dissuasion than whites? The show-business bug ignored color lines and was impervious to common sense; it was simply a double misfortune when it took up its obsession-breeding quarters in a Negro because, while it was color-blind, movie and television producers were not. But Hollywood was a dream world. Here they made, and lived, dreams about rich, and therefore free, people. Negroes became as dreamy as the rest. They dreamed of themselves being rich enough to be free, or free enough to be rich, free-rich, very white.

Gordon knew why these thoughts were running through his mind. He was determined to meet this nameless girl – the picture of those solid thighs and unskimped bosoms was not to be shaken loose from his mind – and suddenly, for the first time in his life, he, Gordon Rengs, lone-wolf novelist with no institutional connections in this world, was smack in the center of show business and immediately identifiable with all its institutions. He knew that if he could arrange to meet this girl she would see him, not as the isolate he was, the bystander, but as an important man in a key position at a major studio – and the bug in her would begin its soft shoe. Certainly he did not want to make any headway here, or anywhere, on the basis of a grotesque mistake about who he was: he would not have this or any girl sleep with him in the expectation that he could do things for her. He knew very well that he was still, rich Charlemagnes to the contrary, the two grand a week notwithstanding, the writer of serious books that nobody read, a man without connections, and he had to hold to his identity, it had been won too hard. The main reason he had taken up the now-and-then relationship with Marian Huddlesfield was that she was not after anything from him, she merely offered herself on a plain redwood platter, hand-carved, garnished with pi-nuts, while she went on thinking undisturbedly of Zen precepts, inner unities, unsprayed tomatoes.

That morning, over tea, Gordon said to Jamie Beheen, "Jamie – there was a girl in that show last night, I don't know her name. I'd like to get in touch with her and to do that I've got to call the theatre, there's no other way. You must tell me – will it embarrass you if I pursue this?"

"Pursue away, my boy," Jamie said. "If it's that little trick you were talking to in the lobby, I thought she was quite a fetching thing myself. May the race go to the swift – and if you carry it off, bring her to dinner one night."

So Gordon called the theatre. The man who answered the phone identified himself as Mitchell Bascoyne; apparently he ran the box office too.

"This is Gordon Rengs," Gordon began. "I was with Jamie Beheen's party at your theatre last night?"

"Yes, truly, Mr. Rengs," Mitchell Bascoyne said. "I remember you well and it's nice to hear your voice."

"Nice to hear yours. I enjoyed your show, Mr. Bascoyne. We all did." Gordon cleared his throat. "Mr. Bascoyne. There's a girl in your chorus – I'd like very much to know her name, she's small, rather buxom, with a wide face and big dimples, her voice is a deep contralto ..."

"You mean,È the softly neutral voice said, "the girl you spoke some words to in the lobby?" It was a carefully factual statement; you could read either accusation or congratulation into it, anything you wanted.

"That's the one. I couldn't tell from the program what her name was ..."

"Wilhelmina Sproulle. Yes, that would be Wilhelmina." A pause. "Mr. Rengs – may I ask – what, just for purposes of information, is your connection with Mr. Beheen?"

The sense of the question was clear. Bascoyne wanted to sign with Jamie's agent, so Jamie was important to him. He was asking: did Gordon figure in Jamie's picture in such a way as to make him important too? If there was to be any bartering over this Wilhelmina – Bascoyne was not closing any doors on any possibilities prematurely – the stakes had to be defined ..."

"Mr. Bascoyne," Gordon said, raising his voice a little, "I'm a friend of Mr. Beheen's, that's absolutely all. We're both writers here at the studio, we happen to share offices in the writers' building, we don't work together, we're simply friends, but Miss Sproulle impressed me last night and I was wondering ..."

"Will you allow me to put in another question, Mr. Rengs? To get ourselves oriented around this thing, if you don't mind – is the nature of this call what you might term professional?"

Well put. There was the crux of it, of course. And here now was the big temptation: not to lay it on the line but to throw out sneaky, standard lures. Gordon wanted above all to remain intact. He wanted this girl but he cherished his sense of himself too. He knew quite clearly that he was the peripheral writer of peripheral books, the man way over to one side, not in any sense a good contact...

"Let me make this very clear, Mr. Bascoyne. I'm not a Hollywood writer, not primarily. I'm a novelist, you wouldn't have heard of me, I live in New York, I'm out here on my first movie assignment, I don't mean to stay ... The best way to put it, Mr. Bascoyne, is this – I'm not in a position to do anything for anybody, I don't carry any weight in the movie industry, my interest in Miss Sproulle is a personal thing, I'd like to contact her and take her to lunch, I thought, if I could reach her, with your help, that is, I might ask her to lunch here at the commissary . . ."

At this point Gordon clicked his teeth together. He could not believe that this last statement had come from his mouth. Lunch, yes, lunch was a fine idea – but why at the studio commissary? The lure, the pitch, the come-on, after all? He was suddenly despising himself for having added those four strategy-dictated words that exploded his sense of self and stood all his down-the-line intentions on their heads.

"Personal, Mr. Rengs?" The voice was some shades cooler. "May I ask your meaning in that, please?"

"Mr. Bascoyne – I thought Wilhelmina Sproulle was a very attractive young lady. I'd like to know her better. If you will be good enough to put me in touch with her, I'd like very much to take her to lunch – at any place that's convenient for her." Gordon immediately felt better for having gotten that phrase out. "Would you ask her to call me at my office? I'll be here all day."

"I will communicate the message, Mr. Rengs." There was another pause. Then, with something that was no longer hope but a nostalgia for hope long gone: "Mr. Rengs – do I follow your meaning – you share some offices with Mr. Beheen? Your connection with him is, you're in the same offices with him, that's the whole extent of it? I was wondering, if you're from New York, if by any chance you have an agent back there, I know Mr. Beheen has an agent . . ."

It had to be said once more, still more unequivocally:

"I have an agent in New York, yes, but it's not Mr. Beheen's. I've never met his agent, I don't have anything to do with her, but if you can manage to get word to Miss Sproulle . . ."

"The message will be conveyed, Mr. Rengs. The young lady will be informed, and thank you for your interest . . ."

When he hung up, Gordon had the sweaty feeling that he had come close to the ordeal by fire. He knew for the first time the full meaning of temptation, the devious ways in which sharp memories of thighs and dimples can make the tongue spring from its true tracks and juggle plain truths. But, except for those four upstart words, he hadn't faltered, he had stuck to his course and his concept of himself. He was not proud, exactly. He simply had the sense that he had survived, that his head was still above water.

Exactly seventeen minutes later his secretary buzzed him to say that a Miss Wilhelmina Sproulle was on the line. He reached energetically for the phone. Did Miss Sproulle remember him? Sure did. She'd gotten the message about lunch, his wanting to invite her to lunch? Oh, right, Mr. Bascoyne had explained the whole deal. She would accept the invitation? Why, why not, sounded like a cool idea, most any time and any place, why didn't he name it? Well, he'd like to do it tomorrow, Thursday, and about the place, why didn't she pick a restaurant near where she worked, he assumed she worked somewhere, he could easily drive over? Well, Mitch, Mr. Bascoyne, he had been saying something about lunch at the commissary, she had a car, she could easily make it? Good enough, the commissary, he'd leave an auto pass at the main gate for her, why didn't she come to his office say about twelve-thirty? Twelve-thirty, fine. Wonderful, and he'd be looking forward to it. All right, then, deal, fine, cool, she'd be looking forward too, twelve-thirty it was, Thursday, his office.

...

All her accessories, linen shoes, floppy hat, mesh gloves, wide leather belt, were white with tiny, pale blue polka dots, and her very tight dress, choked to an impossible slimness at the waist, was pastel blue; from these unexclamatory background colors her bronze limbs and exposed chest sprang like patina'd objects of art; the generous haunches soared, the only partly captured breasts ballooned. And above all this delicious suggestion of momentarily arrested expansion, of stop-frame heave, there under the wavy-brimmed hat, were the working dimples and the wide, wide and laughing eyes of blue – she was a vision of Hollywood form-exaggerating chic, she was sensational.

As soon as they took their seats in the crowded commissary – where, from the moment of their entrance, Gordon was itchily aware of all the eyes turning their way – she began, unaccountably, to call him daddy.

"Daddy," she said. Again: "Oh, daddy."

At first he thought that, with the easy malice of twenty-two, she was making tart comment about the difference in their ages; he was already a little sensitive about that. But she wasn't even looking at him. Her eyes were directed across the room and her words were reined exclamations.

"What is it, Wilhelmina?" he said.

"It's Henry Fonda," she said.

"Yes."

"And, daddy, there's, there's Rock Hudson."

"Right."

"Look over that way, daddy. There. James Stewart."

"I see him."

James Beheen sat down to chat for a moment. He was very happy to see Miss Sproulle, very happy indeed. What movie was he on? Well, it was the story of Noah, more exactly, a story of Noah, in it Noah was to be portrayed as a sort of exalted veterinarian, it was one possible approach. No, Noah, this Noah at least, didn't have any daughters, there weren't any daughter parts, and no, while he didn't know this for an absolute fact he was pretty sure there weren't any young-girl parts open, shooting was due to start quite soon, the major casting had been done. But it was a genuine pleasure to see Miss Sproulle again. She was even more attractive off stage than on. If she wanted to see how they went about making a movie he would be very happy, as soon as shooting began, to have her visit the set as his guest. WheÈher or not Gordon happened to be free on that particular day. What was she asking? What was this Noah a veteran of? The animal kingdom, he supposed. Or the shipwrights' union, he very possibly organized it. In any case, he was delighted to be able to have a few words with Miss Sproulle. She looked well and happy and it was gratifying to feast the eyes on her once more. He would most particularly relish seeing her again, whether or not Mr. Rengs could make it.

"The corner," she said when Jamie had gone, "see there in the corner, daddy. Jeff Chandler."

"Sure," Gordon said.

"Oh, daddy. Oh, daddy. Cary Grant."

"That's who it is." If there had been any point to it he would have added that Cary Grant was taking LSD and reported good results.

"All in one room," she said almost in a whisper. Meaning: a room she was in. A room with a dream view, and she doing the viewing. All the rich, rich people and she, seam-busting Wilhelmina Sproulle, in the middle and therefore almost free, if not yet rich.

"I want to explain something, Wilhelmina," he said. "They're all working here, some in television, some in the movies. It's a big studio, I don't know any of them. I don't know anybody around here except for a couple of writers who work in the same building with me. The thing I'm working on, this movie, it doesn't have anything to do with these stars, it's not in production at all, they won't get around to making it until months after I'm gone. It's about Charlemagne, you know, a king of olden times. I'm just doing this movie script about an ancient king named Charlemagne. It's not even cast yet, I don't know who's going to be in it, that's not my end of things."

He suppressed the impulse to add: Charlemagne, who was very rich.

She said wholeheartedly, "Cary Grant. Too much."

"Yes. He eats here all the time but I've never met him."

Marian Huddlesfield stopped by to shake hands. She wanted Wilhelmina to know, she assumed it was all right to call her Wilhelmina, how good it was to see her. Wilhelmina was a fine-looking person with positive thoughts, she, Marian, could tell by her unseeking eyes, and it might interest Wilhelmina to know that she, Marian, had lots of good friends who were colored, some of the best and most intelligent vegetarians she knew were colored, and she wasn't just saying that about having good friends who were Negroes, it came out under LSD, lysurgic acid, this new chemical that helped you to think and see right, under LSD she, Marian, felt important and rock-bottom unities with other people, felt a warm closeness with others, and often, more often than not, they were Negroes, many Negroes come to her in her bright visions. She felt, too, she should remind Gordon that his name was down on the doctor's list for LSD, she'd been around to the doctor's for a dose last weekend and he'd said Gordon would be hearing from him about an appointment very soon. Meantime, Gordon wouldn't forget this Saturday, she hoped, they had this date to go out to the Gashouse in Venice West to hear this authority on Zen lecture on Aldous Huxley and the gates of perception. It was a privilege to see Miss Sproulle, what nonsense, she didn't mean to cool it with formality, to see Wilhelmina. If Wilhelmina wanted to drop over to her place some evening, why, call any time, Gordon had the number, they'd have a long talk about LSD and things.

Marian left. For two or three minutes Wilhelmina was quiet. Then she said, "That's a thing, all right, to be eating every day in the same place with Cary Grant. Right here, where everything is. Daddy, you must have the good life."

"You don't understand, Wilhelmina. I'm here almost by accident, you might say. Yes. Just to do this one picture. Then I go back to New York. That's where I live. Mostly I sit in my apartment in New York and write books, novels, you wouldn't have heard about them, they're not read very widely . . ."

"You meet all kinds of people when you're in the movies," shÈ said with pleased conviction. "All the big ones."

She was lovely, her dimples danced footnotes to her serene blue eyes, and there was no way to get it established in her dreaming head that a man might be in this business just passing through, an outsider, a nonentity by program. There was no room in that head for the concept of a truly unconnected man. She could not imagine a world without connections because all her dreams were of connections and her entire life was rooted in her dreams.

"The way it could happen," she said, almost as though pointing out vital facts that he had overlooked, "you could write this movie about Charles the Main and then they could get, say, Cary Grant to play him."

She was intent on building this kind of packaging dream around him, her one connection with the world of the connected ones. The implication in her words was clear – he could get Cary Grant to play Charlemagne, he, Gordon Rengs, personally, as easily as Jamie Beheen could get Cary Grant to play Noah. All he, Gordon, had to do was walk across the dream room and ask the dream man. People who ate in the same room with Cary Grant were very rich. They were all, finally, Cary Grant.

And she was lovely, she was lovely. Her pastel blue dress was astonishingly tight and low-cut. Her breasts were past belief, the only riches not yet signed over to the richest men of this rich world.

He got her to talk about herself. She was twenty-one she worked as an electrotherapy technician in a massage institute, she was taking singing and dancing lessons, also, she went on Tuesdays to an acting class run by a New York fellow with a bright red beard who'd come out of Actors' Studio, she believed the times were ripening for another and bigger Lena Horne, she felt the race lines were being broken down fast, there would be wide chances for the talented ones of her generation in television and the movies, things were trending that good way, she didn't have to go back to the massage institute today, she'd taken the day off to go shopping in Beverly Hills for this sharp new dress and things, she'd wanted to look right for her first visit to a studio, she was free as a bird this afternoon, what did he have in mind?

It was too nice a day to work, he thought. They could run down to Malibu, do some swimming and get the sun, they'd have two good hours there, there was a writer in his building who lived out in Malibu, he'd gone to Palm Springs for a few days and left the key to his place with Gordon.

That sounded cool and she was with him. What about her car?

Easy. They'd go in his Alfa-Romeo, this was a day for an open car. They'd leave her car here at the studio and pick it up tonight. He'd make arrangements so they would let him in the back gate after hours.

She was with it, daddy. A gas, daddy.

. . .

They helped themselves to swim suits at the beach house and hurried down to the water's edge. She was something for the eyes to gourmandize on, this honey-colored Juno from the electrotherapy room: childishly slim at waist, knee, ankle, elbow, wrist, touching frailties at the vital junctures, and lush, lush, every-where else, leavening in calves, thighs, bosoms, a study in burnished abundances. Somehow, in his swirling thoughts, she was becoming confused with the roses and gardenias and banana trees and Laurel Canyons of this luxuriating Hollywood; all the objects of generous curves and lovely colors, all the things in bloom that had called his body into a singing wakefulness, she was all of them, lying there dark and lavishly shaped against the sands, her breasts fearlessly in bloom, her blooming thighs rubbing tightly, slowly, one against the other.

"A gang of stars live in Malibu, don't they," she said. It was a statement of movie-magazine fact rather than a question.

He ran his finger the length of her forearm, down the soft folds radiating from the armpit, along her side.

"I guess so," he said. "The only one I know out thisÈway is my writer friend, Ivan, the fellow who owns this house."

She looked back appreciatively at the structure with its dashing overhangs, an odd-angled sweep of glass and redwood beams, cantilevered out over the dunes and resting on sturdy stilts.

"I'll bet they have some crazy parties in that house," she said. "Lots of parties with gone drinks and all the celebrities."

He let his finger go softly over the blue-tinted seam of her full and outturned upper lip.

"Well," he said, "I've been to a couple of Ivan's parties. Cary Grant wasn't there."

"I've often wondered," she said, "about how you write up a part in a movie play. I mean, do you think of some one particular actor, first and then write the words for that actor, like, or do you put down the words first and then find the right actor to play the part?"

He let his palm go over the firm rises of her upper leg, then closed his fingers on the fine lean place under the knee, the relief of hollow there, framed with cartilage. No open wounds on this perfect body, no stigmata, this was an unmarred bloom of a body.

"There's no one rule," he said. "Sometimes you do it one way, sometimes the other. The actor I'm supposed to have in mind for this Charlemagne script is Tony Curtis, I'm writing all the people like Tony Curtis."

He was startled to hear this last sentence come from his mouth; it was self-mockery of a sort he had not permitted himself since coming to Hollywood, precisely the kind of snide, self-nibbling joke his friends back in New York were fond of making, the kind he always got a little sore at. Had he said this to impress her or just to let her know, in the form of a joke, that there could be no part in his movie for her? But obviously Wilhelmina Sproulle was not the sort to be deterred by the threat of competition. She could imagine herself winning a part away from Tony Curtis too; ambition here could stretch that far, along with imagination, along with appetite.

"Well," she said, "Curtis can't do all the parts. You'll have to get other people, all kinds, I'll bet a whole gang of them."

He was playing with the tie-strings of her bikini halter, his fingers aching with the need to hold her completely, finally, and suddenly he was full of a babble and letting some of it out:

"Wilhelmina Sproulle, the movies are on the other side of the moon, never mind the movies, you're a jewel, the way you're made, you're a marvel. I don't know if you can understand this but for a long time, for years and years, I was living above my neck, drowning in myself, mired in me, my head full of projects and words, and I don't know, out here, all of a sudden, I feel the rest of me rising up, pushing up, it's because everything here sprouts so fast and in so many directions, there's such a stir of living stuffs." Both his hands were on the halter now, making their urgent claims. "And you're all the green and brown stirring things. You're the direction of all the want. Oh, you're worth having, Wilhelmina Sproulle."

She looked straight up at him, into him, with her wide, clear eyes; there was absolute unafraid candor and straightness in their deep blue as she dimpled just a little and said, "Well, sure, let's go in the house, daddy."

They went up the steps quickly, his arm tight around her shoulder, hers resting easily on his hip. He was irritatingly aware of the absurdity in a man like him, a man on the sidelines of everything but the main ideas, babbling papercover passions to a girl half his age, someone lightyears away from his aims, his focuses – but he didn't care. At this explosive point he was not afraid of being absurd. His want was as big as his consciousness and his conscience, blotting out all the want-damping thoughts. He needed the full feel of her for the only kind of concentration and validation that counted now.

As soon as they were inside the living room he reached for her, took hold of all of her, as though with enough pressure he could merge theirÈbodies through the barriers of bathing suit and skin. She let herself go against him, all her length. She could not help but feel the wild and gasping excitement in him.

She tilted her head back and said calmly, "I guess I got to give you some."

They were the most incendiary words he had ever heard from a woman's lips.

He was exasperated with himself for letting these words burn him so. Because she had said them coolly – and in this coolness was the real source of their excitement.

"Yes," he said.

"Daddy,"she said, thinking hard, "didn't they have all kinds of people in those olden courts? Didn't the kings and big ones get all different kinds of people around them?"

So she was announcing a moment of barter: herself, all of her, for a place near Charlemagne's throne and within camera range. But he was not a trader. There were parts of him he would not sell, no matter what the offered price.

"Let's talk about it later," he said. "Come with me now."

"No, listen, daddy," she said. "I can act, you know? They say good, good things about me, my teacher in acting class, he says I find real right things to use when I do my improvisations. I'm ready, I can do real good."

"You're probably very talented," he said, his voice unsteady, his fingers working at the ties of her halter: but the strings were firmly knotted, they would not come apart. "But, listen to me, lovely Wilhelmina, it's not so easy. Any young actress has to struggle, maybe for years. It's a thousand times tougher for you. It's not your fault but that's the way it is. There just aren't any parts for you. There couldn't be anything for you in my picture because there weren't any girls like you around Charlemagne. We'll talk about it later, Wilhelmina. If you can think of anything I can really do for you, you just have to name it, I'll do it. You think it over and let me know. We'll go into it another time. Come on, now."

Around the edges of his bubbling thoughts he felt a certain pride: he was being spectacularly invited to throw out the lures and he had not thrown, not much. She was doing almost all the throwing.

But she went on in her quiet, steady way: "You're the writer, daddy. You could write in most any part you had a mind to. If you made up some part that I could play I would do it real good, daddy, that's no hype. It doesn't have to be a girl like me, daddy. It can be any kind of a girl, I can play all the kinds, they say at acting class I'm very, versatile."

And there it was: she had reached the point in her thirst where she had totally forgotten that she was a Negro, and therefore next to unemployable; had forgotten it, or had dismissed it as a roadblock to her ambition and therefore irrelevant. The color of her skin, being one attributes she had not been able to use in acting class, she had dropped from her list of attributes. She had fallen into the worst prison of all – the rosy idea that there are no prisons, or that the ones that do exist are flimsy enough to be broken through by dismissing negative thoughts and singing up for Method instruction. For the self-appointed rich, no walls too thick for tumbling. In this town of rich people, you could be anything you wanted. That was the definition of this democratic land and that was the definition of the acting talent. She was a good American and a good actress and so, obviously, she could play any Cary Grant part that any writer would be so good as to write in for her. Gordon Rengs happened to be the only functioning movie writer she knew. It therefore fell to him to write a part for her, any Cary Grant part, so that she could begin to function as an actress who play anything. There would be rewards in it for him, big ones, immediately collectable. But they were not to be collected without the all-important down payment. It was up to him to arrange for her to play Pepin the Short, or Claude Rains, or either of the snails that came aboard the Ark – the male or the femÈle, whichever part was open, name it. This rich town was a career town and she had her way to make. Writers would come and writers would go but her career was a constant and therefore the touchstone of her decisions as to how she would squander her person. If she had to give him some, he was expected first to give her some. The street of dreams was a two-way street. Until he made his move she was immovable; she stood perfectly still, resisting the efforts of his hands to urge her toward the bedroom.

Her soft masses were alive against him, jutting with promise.It was hard for him to breathe.

"All right," he said huskily, hearing the words coming from far off and shuddering from head to foot at the sound; she no doubt took this quiver for a further surge of passion but he knew what it was, all the revulsion he could or would feel in this life. "All right, Wilhelmina. Let me see what I can do. Maybe I can work up some part that would fit you. I'll look over the script tomorrow and see where I can work you in. When I get the part in shape I'll speak to the director and arrange a reading. I'll recommend you strongly for the part, I know what you can do, I've seen your work, I'm sure you can handle any role." He had come all the way awake in this hot California, his nerve-ends were reaching, reaching for the boons and bounties of wakefulness. "Come with me, Wilhelmina. Come on, let's go. Right now."

She leaned away from him. She looked straight at him again, a study in dimples, face full of warmth, and said, "You know I'm going to give you some, daddy, you know it."

She had found her rightful place along-side Charles the Main, or thought she had, she had lured him into dropping all the fake lures, and she now walked with pride and gratitude into the next room.

He went along behind her, arms curved around her, body concave to her delicious convexities, hands flat against her bare middle bold with promise; he knew that he was not on the sidelines any more, he was in the thick of it, a charter member of all institutions, a true belonger, a man connected with everything.

As the halter came away he thought: just a stranger passing through, and arrested all the same. The fine, blooming body came into sight and he told himself: arrested for speeding in this strange town, held without bail.

• • •

His friends in New York had not heard from him in weeks. Suddenly one of them got a peculiar, murky note which said, among other things:

"There's space. And it's cluttered. Weeks ago I went swimming in Malibu with a girl named Wilhelmina Sproulle. She'd left her car at the studio; late that night we drove over to pick it up. Some-how or other I got lost after we went through the night gate and we wound up in the back lot, an area I hadn't seen before. A turn in the road and suddenly we were surrounded by the debris of all the enterprises and all the institutions: Swiss chalets, Lower East Side tenements, Civil War stockades, a Hopi Indian camp site, a Burmese pagoda, a Victorian ballroom, a section of the Roman catacombs, assorted gambling casinos and torture chambers, several frontier saloons, a portion of Grand Central station, a space-probe launching site complete with missile, next to it a moldering stagecoach, and in the middle of all these uncollated goodies, lying there in this landscape of history's odds and ends – Noah's Ark, built full-scale. I couldn't help myself, I had to climb aboard with my partner Wilhelmina. We stood on the narrow deck, surrounded by the ghosts of the animals in paired terror. I could hear their hot breaths, they echoed my own. I drew Wilhelmina to me and kissed her heartily. I said softly to her, 'We'll get through it. These waters too shall recede.' She wanted to know what kind of oldtimey boat this was; I explained that they were getting ready to shoot the exteriors for Jamie Beheen's picture out here. She was excited about the whole thing because, as she remembers it, all sorts of creatures, alÈ without exception, one lady and one gent from each of the species, were taken on board this Ark, which meant a holocaust of parts, a whole gang of parts, would be opening up. Just that afternoon, at lunch in the commissary, Jamie had told her the Noah picture was already cast, but she knew there was something in it for her, she just knew it. Couldn't I talk to Jamie and fix it for her? She knew I was a big man out here so what was I doing pretending to be a nobody? She wanted her daddy to come on out in the open, stop hiding his important self, be the Cary Grant he so clearly is. So I came on out. I promised to do what I could to get her located on the Ark. (A few hours before, I'd promised to set her up in Charlemagne's court, possibly as Pepin the Short.) I didn't have the heart to tell her there wasn't any part for her on the Ark, either. How can you keep telling another living being that there are no parts for her anywhere in the world, that the whole damn stage is closed tight against her, that she's got to sink or swim in this special-effects flood without benefit of Ark? Besides, she had just made a present of herself to me, her daddy, under the impression that I was a very big man, a real Cary Grant who was somehow reluctant to come all the way out. I forgot to tell you, Wilhelmina Sproulle is a colored girl, a beautiful one. I've stopped seeing her because she expects me to get her set up with Charlemagne and I can't give her any progress reports. Jamie's Beheen, though, Jamie's changed his tack with her. He now believes he can find a place for her on the Ark in some capacity, maybe as stewardess. He's been auditioning her all week. She's out at Malibu with him this afternoon, doing a reading for him. (He's got keys to the same beach house I've got keys to, the owner, a fellow named Ivan, is out of town auditioning some carhop or other in Palm Springs.) I won't be seeing Wilhelmina any more but I suppose there'll be other Wilhelminas. They come in assorted colors out here. This may not be a selling out, friend. It may amount to nothing more than joining the human race. When you make your application this late you've got a holocaust of catching up to do, a whole gang of catching up..."

The man who received this letter was disturbed by its tone. He tried to put in a long-distance call to Hollywood but Gordon Rengs was not home. At that precise moment he was stretched out on an oversized Japanese-style couch in a Beverly Glen cottage, kissing Marian Huddlesfield, who was saying placidly into his lips, "I've never told you this before but you have the odor of corruption on your breath, Gordon." He asked her what she meant. She explained that meat eaters have a lot of rotting matter in their systems, all sorts of toxic materials and mucus-producing elements, and so carry the odor of corruption on their breaths, as against vegetarians and fruitarians, who are free of mucus and sweet-smelling, like babies.

Gordon did not take offense. He knew perfectly well that Marian had not meant anything by this, she was merely conveying the evidence of her nostrils. Gordon was feeling too expansive to take offense at anything, he was keyed-up, in tune with himself and the outside: this morning, quite early, he and Marian had both had a dosage of lysurgic acid at the UCLA hallucino-genesis research center, they were now in the eleventh hour of exaltation and felt themselves literally bursting with love for all the lush, beautifully patterned, vividly colored forms that came from all directions as feasts for their wide, ready eyes. In all things, even in each other, they saw enticements and gifts. Marian was prepared to love and accept him regardless of the quality of his breath, and he was in the mood to hold her lovingly to him no matter what she thought of his diet and his ways.

He held her lacerated palm close to his eyes. He studied the open gash with close attention, with absorption, love. Deep in the glisteningly pink, gray-edged interior of the wound was an ancient craft, Noah's proud and sÈaworthy Ark, and two by two the animals were marching up the gangplank into the hold, into the bright-tinted, welcoming flesh. Gordon saw himself marching in the stately procession, hand in hand with Wilhelmina Sproulle. Deep into the warm and comforting flesh they walked, to the comfort of living stuff, to the depths of inner-most hot flesh. Was this a prison, this warm, walled place they were going into? They were all meat eaters, they wanted only to ride out the storm so they could eat their meat again, two by two. Gordon walked into the steamy, cushy interior of Marian Huddlesfield's palm, deep into the secrets of her centers, hand in hand with Wilhelmina Sproulle, for whom he had finally come out, feeling warmed, groping along the damp soft walls of pink flesh, pulling the moist pink folds shut over his head, thinking that when prisons were pink and damp, slimed deliciously, you could walk in and feel good, very good, if you were a meat eater you could eat your way along and not worry too much about the quality of your breath.

Marian Huddlesfield began to say something in her relaxed and accepting way, something about the dangers of mucus over-production in chronic meat eaters, the stampede of toxic materials. He leaned over to kiss the yawning stigma in her palm, a prison he could make his headquarters in, a meal he could gorge himself on, a place where he belonged at last.