A Small Buffet in Maldita

They got me to Marian Delmore's party, in the end--but only under duress and over my own dead body.

In the beginning I thought I'd beaten the rap. It was our first morning in the finca, or country house, that we'd rented in what turned out to be a gringo-riddled Mexican town. Polly, along with our son, Jock, and the cook, had driven off to market to buy staples. I was alone, sitting under an old pepper tree in the patio, at one of those round, hide-topped tables whose design hasn't changed since before stout Cortez hit the beach, and trying to put down some ideas about the novel I wanted to do. There was an open notebook on the table, but my mind was shut and locked. I felt ill at ease and uncomfortable, and I was damned if I knew why.

A big black bird beat through the air over my head and set up shop in another old pepper tree at the far corner of the patio. It may have looked like a crow's idiot cousin, but it had a distressingly well-stocked sound department. I listened to squawks, trills, ripples, whoops, a rattle like distant snare drums, and the cut-short gurgle of somebody making the deep six the hard way. Then it broke off, in the middle of what I took to be the French alphabet as recited in the elementary schools of Dahomey, and flew toward the Rio Maldorado, swearing.

A girl came in through the open mesquite gates.

She might have been a lanky, awkward boy. A pair of gray-flannel trousers was held up to a certain extent by a scuffed belt, over which a frayed pink Brooks Brothers shirt drooped like untrimmed pie crust. Her auburn hair was cropped much too short, her face was a problem in solid geometry, and she stood, God help her, more than six feet tall. The lace of one dirty white tennis shoe was untied, flopping along on the tiles as she shuffled up to the table and lurched to a halt.

"I know you," she said. Her voice resembled someone walking on gravel toward a badly played French horn.

"All right," I said. "You know me."

"But you don't know me. I'm Lalage Delmore."

My mouth, which often leads a life of its own, let its corners turn up a little. "Lalage," I said pointlessly. I nodded. The nod had no point, either.

"La-la-gay," she repeated, expelling the last syllable as though it had a bad taste. "It's a fool name, I know. I hate it. Go on and laugh."

"Why should I?"

"You started to."

I closed the notebook and brushed a few pepper leaves from the table. "I never start to laugh, Lalage," I said. "I either laugh or I don't. And as far as your name's concerned, I've heard it before and I like it."

I guess that nobody had ever said such a thing to her about her name, because she stared at me in surprise and disbelief before she got around to asking: "Did you know a girl named Lalage?"

"In a way, yes."

"Where is she now?"

"Long gone, I'm afraid."

Instead of pursuing the matter as a normally curious female might have done, Lalage went off at a tangent. "You don't look as old as I thought you would."

The remark shouldn't have cut, but it did. "That's nice," I said, bleeding a bit. "In spite of your disappointment."

"What?"

"How old did you think I was?"

"My mother says you're over fifty."

I should never have gone to Hollywood: The price of fame, like that of almost everything else, is slightly higher west of the Rockies. "In that case, the back of my hand to your mother," I said.

Lalage frowned at the table. "It doesn't matter," she mumbled.

"It does to me," I told her. "Not to mention my wife. Or my son. He takes age very seriously, my son does. How old are you, incidentally?"

"That doesn't matter, either." She went over to one of the rosebushes along the wall and lightly batted a bud around. "Twenty-two," she said. Her back was toward me and I could barely hear her. "A horrible age," was her afterthought, spoken to the rosebud.

"Want to swap ages?"

"If I----" She treated the bud to a last left hook and spun about clumsily. "My father's dead. Is yours?"

"No, he lives in Boston. Amounts to the same thing, though."

"Is he nice?"

"My father? He's a dirty old man."

"Oh, he isn't!" I'd shocked her.

"Well, maybe not, Lalage, when you come right down to it. But he would be, understand, if I didn't send him soap."

She smiled, for the first time. I drank the smile in quickly, but not so fast that I couldn't taste a jigger of bitters in it. "I know," she said. "You're teasing me."

"That's the way we men in our fifties are, always teasing girls in their thirties."

She sighed and folded into the chair across from me like a dropped pawnshop accordion. "How old are you, Mr. Culloden, honest?" she wanted to know, leaning forward with her weight on her thin forearms. "Or shouldn't I ask?"

"On the contrary, Lalage, I've been hoping for weeks that somebody'd ask me. I'm forty-five. And on August nineteenth, I'll be forty-six."

"You don't have birthday parties, do you? Not anymore, anyway. They're for small children. You know, very small children."

"That's where you're wrong, Lalage," I said. "Believe me, I'm a man who has fantastic birthday parties, a man who hasn't been told he's not a very small child anymore."

"Oh, I do believe you!" she exclaimed, and waited eagerly for me to go on. I guess it was then that I realized how desperate she was to be talked to, even if what she heard was nonsense or bombast or merely a ten-cent tinsel lie.

"One birthday a year," I said. "And sometimes two. And with the strangest guests, in the strangest places."

She laughed. "Oh, you're teasing again!"

"It doesn't mean a thing. Nothing I say before noon ever means a thing. Didn't your mother tell you that about me, too? Why should it?"

"I don't know."

"Neither do I. Any more than I know why you came calling."

My tone was casual, but the pitchout caught her ten feet off base. She swallowed and said: "Why, I came--I thought I--it's about the party my mother's giving you. She said to----"

"What party?" It was my turn to dive back to second, safe by a whisker.

Lalage flushed and sagged away from the table, letting her big hands drop into her lap. "Wants to give you, I should've said." She blinked at her hands. "Yes, that's it, she wants to give you a party, my mother does, and she sent me over here to tell you. Ask you, I mean."

"That's very kind of your mother," I said. "We've never met, though."

Lalage's reply could have been the memorized opening of a set speech: "Naturally, everybody in Maldita--from the foreign colony, that is--won't be invited. Only the ones who are most interesting and who have something to offer, the ones you'd be most apt to like. It would be a pleasant, small buffet dinner outdoors, weather permitting, with not more than ten or twelve other people, none of----"

"None of whom I know." I spoke more sharply than I'd intended.

Her shoulders twitched. "I'm sorry," she said. "I could've told her. People don't."

Her voice was so low that I thought I'd missed the end of a sentence. "Don't what?"

"Invite somebody they haven't even met. To their houses, I mean." Lalage stopped whatever the latest thing was that she was doing with her fingers and lifted her eyes to mine. They had become wet somehow. "It's not what they expect, don't you see? It's not what they expect at all."

"Listen, Lalage," I said, "I came down to Mexico to work. Not to eat. Not for love. Not even to glide. I dare say I'll meet your mother, and everyone else who's around, but I don't want to commit myself to the people who live in Maldita when I haven't even had time to commit myself to the place where they live. So please thank your mother for us, tell her that I appreciate her invitation, and ask her if she won't give us a rain check. That make sense?"

Lalage stood up as though I weren't there and went over and paid attention to the roses again. Her left hand banged away at the same old rosebud. It was beginning to look shopworn.

After a while she cocked her head, and her body stiffened as if she were being summoned by a whistle pitched too high for my ears. Then she made for the gates, ambling loose-jointedly like some giant marionette manipulated, perhaps, by an apprentice god.

Halfway down the patio, she stopped and turned. Under her eyes the flesh had become damp all the way to the jawline, and at least one friendly neighborhood teardrop had left its mark on the old pink Brooks shirt, above where her insignificant breast must have been. "Whatever you're thinking," she said in a flat voice, "I'm glad you can't come."

Something began to bother me as soon as she was gone, something that only after several minutes of concentration resolved into a mental picture of an enormous pair of eyes. I couldn't connect them with a person at first, and then it hit me that they belonged to Lalage Delmore. To discover them burning out of Lalage Delmore's spare-shanked, puppet-loose body struck me as being a sick joke, of dubious decency, on the part of Almighty God. I therefore tore my mind away from the vision of Lalage Delmore. It was not an easy thing to do.

It was a lot easier than escaping the Delmore party, however, as I learned the next day around noon.

I'd spent the morning wandering about Maldita, mostly on the other side of the Rio Maldorado, where an old dirt road went by a baker's dozen elaborate gringo-built country houses. Their style, although indigenous to Maldita, seemed to be made up of elements of Spanish Colonial, Ludwig II Bavarian, Romanesque and, let's face it, Visigothic.

Be that as it may, when I got back to our finca, the mesquite gates were open and a Mercedes 300 was parked there in gleaming-black arrogance. At one of the patio tables, Polly was sipping rum with a good-looking, raven-haired woman (continued on page 110)A Small Buffet(continued from page 104) whose race-horse legs were crossed under a little something Pucci had whipped up. I thought she was about 35, but as I went toward the table, I saw that I'd flattered her by 15 or 20 years. The face had been lifted until it was so taut you could play handball on it, the hair had been dyed by a master and the fine body kept trim by gymnasium tortures and ruthless dieting.

"Sam," Polly said before I'd made it to the table, "this is Mrs. Delmore. She was----"

"Marian Delmore," the woman broke in, smiling up at me. "And I'm so glad you put in an appearance before I had to leave. I've been wanting to meet you for years, ever since I read The Flowers of the Forest, and when Jack Weatherby wrote that you'd taken his house--I can't tell you how pleased I was. Especially since I was in New York last April and saw the off-Broadway revival of your play."

"I caught it, too," I said.

"Oh, I did love it, that play," Marian Delmore said. "Didn't you think it was a beautiful production, considering how tiny the theater was, and all?"

"Unusual, anyway," I said.

"Oh? You wouldn't give it higher marks than that?"

It had been a prancing fiasco. The Shooting Gallery called for seven male and five female parts, but there hadn't been a single heterosexual in the off-Broadway cast that, during an interminable evening, dragged the corpse of the play, feet first, back and forth across a quivering Lilliputian stage. The drill-sergeant dykes made violoncello declamations above the footlights; the upstaged fruits fluted happily as they tried to flutter up the walls of the set.

"I thought your daughter was charming," I told Mrs. Delmore.

There were a hundred ways of answering her question about The Shooting Gallery, but she never expected that one. When she recovered, she said hurriedly: "Oh, no, no, no! She was very rude to you, Mr. Culloden. I made her tell. And she was very foolish, besides. Utterly foolish. You should have slapped her."

"Sorry," I said. "I liked Lalage."

"Then you made a mistake, my dear man." The Delmore smile had gone. "The girl's impossible, and in every possible way. I've just about made up my mind that she and I would both be better off if I sent her to----"

"Marian's invited us all to a buffet tonight," Polly interrupted. "And I've said yes," she went on sweetly--so sweetly, in fact, that I forgot to throw a table at her. "Isn't that nice, Sam?" She was spooning out the words like vanilla junket.

• • •

The Delmore-party sequence might as well open with a close shot of me, standing alone and pretty well stoned by a wooden column at the end of one of several Delmore loggias, gloomily watching the ice cube melt in my second rum on a rock and brooding about the wolf-on-the-fold block that had descended, Assyrianlike, on my writing.

A comedy is merely a tragedy that has come out to take the sun for a while, after which all the characters will have to go back in the house. Such, at least, had been my theory; and such was the basic attitude I'd taken in the work I'd come to Mexico to do--a novel about Hollywood. Originally, it had seemed to be a project that would be pleasant to develop and simple to carry out. For years I had been challenged by, and had responded to, this commercial-diamond society of clever Jukes and cute Kallikaks, and most of its flawed facets had glittered around me at one stage of the game or another. I had planned the novel in the conviction that all I had to do was assemble what I'd seen and heard, invent some characters who'd do and say the remembered things, wrap characters and incidents in a sturdy Manila-paper plot, and then hold the package up to a mirror of mercurial readers. Now I knew better.

A stampeding herd of second thoughts had driven my shorn flock of first thoughts out of the grazing ground and into the next county. Lately I'd begun to see Hollywood not as a society but rather as a private reflection of the kind of society it would have liked Society to be. Therefore, any novel written about the place would only be holding one distorted fun-house mirror up to another, with a crazy series of images shrinking within themselves to ultimate invisibility. And in my head the novel was well on the way to invisibility, too, growing smaller as my frustration swelled--a diminishing will-o'-the-wisp that capered in a mad marsh-gas dance, always inches beyond my clutching fingers. Frustration: That was the key word.

But I'd had enough of such thoughts. I reckoned it was time to find Polly, since the Saint Bernards had obviously lost her in all the snow. And I also needed another drink.

It was a sleeper jump across the Delmore patio to where the liquor hung out. I use the word "patio" because I can't come up with a more precise one. It certainly covered an acre; it may have covered two. Anyway, more trees than a man in his right mind would count were lost in it. Beneath the trees a confusion of tile paths meandered through wall-to-wall lawn as smooth as a putting green.

The main house sprawled along better than half of one side of the patio. French doors opened onto a terrace the size of a basketball court, where garden furniture was strewn helter-skelter like a crowd leaving after the game. Running parallel to this terrace was a swimming pool in which the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa María could have been anchored.

Several light-years away, on the side of the patio opposite the main house, was a pair of ill-matched buildings; and although there shouldn't have been another loggia between them, that's where another loggia was. The newest of these constructions was a shambles of glass-brick modern design, and the less said about it, the better. The other, however, was an old tower, charming and full of interest. A beautifully graduated exterior staircase rose to a circular room at the top. The proportions were good and the stones had obviously been in place for centuries.

No hard knot of guests was on the terrace; in fact, the only living thing there was the liquor table. As I paid my devoirs to the genteel by plopping an ice cube into my glass before dumping in the rum, I tried to locate Polly and couldn't. I saw Jock, though, 75 inches of him, sitting under the grandfather of all jacarandas with a family named Young, about as far from me as second base is from home plate. The Youngs, who'd arrived in Maldita a week before us, were also holding to American punctuality and had reached the Delmore house simultaneously with the Cullodens.

Bruce Young was a full professor of United States history at one of those large, economy-size Midwestern state universities; his particular field was the 1840-1870 period, which covered the Causes, Waging and Aftermath of the Last War Between Gentlemen. I liked the cut of his jib, if only because he was handsome in an ugly way, or vice versa, and was about my own age, give or take a year. His wife--oh, Helen Young was attractive, in the same way that a suit of Gothic armor is attractive. She impressed me as being compact, useful and steel-hard; a description, incidentally, that fits the U.S. Army helmet. I didn't doubt that she had more to do with getting that full professorship, with tenure, than Professor Young himself.

Their daughter, Nancy, was willowy rather than compact, and in her the steel had become blancmange. She was Jock's age, or a year younger, and she was the only reason that he was sitting where he was. I couldn't blame him. Nan Young was the prettiest little lily-light to have come tripping down his pike in a good many months. Her beauty, of course, probably made her more than he could handle--at his age, and in his dubious state of grace and confidence. Whenever Jock, wrapped in his mute, 17-year-old longings, his neither-child-nor-man pains, (continued on page 248)A Small Buffet(continued from page 110) finds himself nose to nose with a thoroughly desirable girl, he could give lessons in silence to a Trappist monk.

Then I saw Lalage Delmore coming down the stairs from the tower. I recognized her, in spite of distance and the dying light, by the ridiculous way she moved. I thought she intended to walk that last mile across the patio to the terrace, but when she got to the bottom of the stone staircase, she sat down and became a breathing stone herself. I decided to join her.

Lalage's marvelous eyes were having a personal twilight. "You don't have to talk to me," she said. "Not after what I----" She stopped and gnawed her lower lip. But she also shifted her body to make a place for me. I sat down.

She was wearing a dress. Her calves, which I now saw for the first time and which I'd have thought would be pipe-stems, were in excellent shape. "After you what?" I asked.

"I was rude."

"Not to me. Want a drink? Cigarette?"

Lalage shook her head. "I don't like parties," she said, as though this explained the double refusal. "It's going to rain, too. Good."

"What do you like, Lalage?"

"The things I like don't count. They don't have importance, my mother says."

I flipped my cigarette at the nearest tree. "Such as?"

"Who was she?"

I should have known. To sail with Lalage Delmore was to risk uncharted shoals. You believed you were on a true course until you looked at her compass and found the needle pointing west-southwest. "She?"

"The girl. The one with my name."

"Oh, that Lalage." I guzzled the rest of my rum and set the glass against the balustrade on the lowest step. "Weren't you ever curious about your name before?"

"No," she said. "But I am now. So please tell me all about the girl. And my name. Only----" I was amazed to see that she was ready for tears. "Only don't tease me. Please don't."

I felt such a flood of pity for her that I was embarrassed. "No, I won't," I said, my eyes fixed on nowhere, "but I'll have to tell it in my own way. If you get the shell open, though, the nut'll be inside."

"Thank you." A whisper.

No, I wouldn't tease; but, yes, I'd have to tell it in my own way. And if that I wasn't a properly serious person--even when I was at my most serious. I've always warmed to old Vespasian, so long in the Roman army, so long in command of bloody men in an especially bloody time, who could have been a cold and cruel presence on the Palatine--except for a sense of humor, which really means a sense of the unimportance of almost everything; and who, when he calmly faced up to the fact that he was dying, could still stick his coated tongue in his cheek, and wink, and murmur: "Poor me! I think I'm becoming a god."

The sad, awkward girl beside me wasn't becoming anything, except more perplexed and lonely. As she moved into each fresh morning, she found that the doors of the day were locked against her and that under the gorgeous sylvan scenes painted on their surface, they were made of tempered steel.

"Well, the original Lalage," I began, "the real-McCoy Lalage, was a beautiful Greek girl. She was a high-bracket slave, like as not, which means her life was the top of the bottle, all cream and no curds. In those days, a good-looking female slave, if she played her cards right, had it made--as we used to say around the Christian Endeavor Society. She'd have more fun than the emperor's wife, that's for sure, and----"

"What emperor?"

"Man named Augustus. A complicated character. He had all the virtues except the right ones, which means that the present world would be made to order for him. But while the first Lalage was on this side of the one-strand river, kicking up her pretty pink heels, Horace went plumb off his rocker for her. He even----"

"Horace? Who was he?"

My jaw dropped. After it finally drew itself back up against the rest of my skull, I asked: "Where in God's name did you go to school?"

"The wrong ones, I guess. All over the place."

"Well, you might not've heard of him, even if you'd gone to the right ones. They've blown the whistle on teaching the classics in American schools, bless their little technological hearts. Anyway, Horace was a pretty fair country poet, with only one bad habit: He wrote a Latin that's almost untranslatable--due to the subtlety of the word order and various other matters that I won't go into. And it just so happens that I can quote some of what Horace said about Lalage number one, because I got my education a whoop and a holler before science lowered the boom on the humanities. Let's see, now----"

I intended to recite the last Sapphic strophe of the great ironic ode beginning Integer vitae, lines I'd once known as well as my own name, if not better. I stared up to where darkness and leaves were blending together to form the equivalent of v--0 while I eased out of a deep, reclusive alcove of my memory the words that had waited there, unspoken, for so long.

"Pone sub curru nimium propinqui," I heard myself saying, "solis in terra--uh--terra----" Something was wrong. "Solis in--in terra--uh--terra--in ----" Nothing more remained. Nothing. The rest, whatever it was, was gone, all gone, utterly gone, the resounding fine lines dissolved like leaf smoke in late October, gone like the young Sam Culloden who'd loved them. Something was indeed terribly wrong--much, much more than a mere forgetfulness.

I felt a thinning of the air, grabbed the balustrade and pulled myself to my feet. After a moment I relaxed my grip--and damned near fell headlong. I clutched the chill stone again and clung to it until the world made sense, more or less. As Lalage gradually came into focus, I saw that she was standing, too. And she was asking: "You're not sick, are you? You're not sick?"

"It's the altitude. The--damned altitude."

"Yes, the first few days," she said. "Somebody should've told you."

"I'm all right now, though." I gulped air. "I'm fine. I mean it."

"Then--what was it, what you said?"

"What I---- Oh, the Latin. Look, Lalage, I'll tell you tomorrow. Sometimes my memory----" I flapped my right hand in a silly and meaningless gesture and grinned in a silly and meaningless way. "'Bye, Lalage," I went on. "Got to track down those Saint Bernards. Jock, too. He's the brain. You ought to meet him. Meanwhile, darling, hold fast." I took maybe six steps, then stopped and looked back at her. "Your eyes----" I said. "Your eyes are the most beautiful on any living woman. In case nobody ever told you."

With another ridiculous flap of my hand, I began my return trek across the endless plain, pointed in the general direction of Cape Town.

I finally got to Cape Town. "Where's old Jock?" I demanded. "My son, my son. He used to be here, just before the battle. Mother!" I counted muzzles: Mother Young, Father Young, luscious Miss Young. But no Master Culloden.

"Why, he went looking for you," Young said. "Some time ago. Where's your drink?"

To sit is amazingly easy. All you have to do is withdraw support from a few joints here and there among your knees and hips and--plop!--down you go. Of course, it helps to have a coccyx like white leather, and if what you land on isn't harder than concrete, and especially if you're feeling no pain to begin with. Suddenly, there I was, arranged in comfort on the grass.

"Must've left it someplace," I said, filling the lower part of my face with my new clownish smirk. "Saint Bernards must've swiped it."

"What were you drinking before the robbery?"

"Huh? Oh, rum. Straight. Three thick fingers. And one ice cube. One lonely, meltable, opaque ice cube. Lonely--that's the countersign in the camp tonight. General Burnside's orders."

"Get Mr. Culloden what he wants, Nan," Young told his daughter. She scrambled to her feet and made for the terrace.

"What's growing in the groves of Academe, Young?"

"Why, the mixture as before, what else? When we're not reading, we're writing something for someone else to read. Never a dull moment."

"Never an exciting one, either," Mrs. Young said.

"That's because we're a balanced lot, Helen," Young said. "Followers of the golden mean." He added, wryly: "On a pinchbeck standard."

"Domibus negata!" The forgotten phrase of Horace had broken loose in my brain. Before I could catch myself, I'd said the words aloud.

Young was amused. "Your charm against inflation?"

"No, the countersign for the camp tomorrow night. General Hooker's orders."

"Too bad, I'll be on pass."

"So will the camp."

"You two sound like an Ionesco first draft," Mrs. Young said. "Not that I can imagine such a thing." Her tone had dropped a fast 40 degrees, but the curled-down smile was still there.

Young ignored her. "And what's new in the, as it were, entertainment business?"

"Very businesslike, Mr. Bones. Not very entertaining. But we have to draw the line somewhere, don't we? After all, it's these bleeding hearts who think audiences ought to be entertained, who cause----" I heard someone closing in on me from the direction of the terrace, undoubtedly a pretty Saint Bernard named Nan bearing rum to succor the lost traveler. "Well and good," I said aloud to myself, "and not a moment too soon."

"You're right, Sam, not a single moment." Polly was standing beside me, sober-faced. "Aren't you hungry, Sam? The clans are starting to gather."

"I didn't hear any pipers," I said sullenly. "Besides, Nan's bringing me a drink."

"No, she isn't. I saw her on the terrace and told her never mind."

"Taking a lot on yourself, weren't you?"

"No more than what I hope you'll take on now." Polly glanced quickly at Helen Young. "Or have you given up handling my plate at buffets?"

"Ah, no, Polly," I said. "I'll handle your plate. Sure I will."

There was guile in my guilelessness. Cunning old Sam saw several ways by which he could toss off another rum while Polly thought he was filling her plate with ham hocks or collard greens or whatever it was that the Widow Delmore had placed on the altar of the Great God Buffet. "Wait here," cunning old Sam said, taking care that his voice didn't show how sly he was. "I'll be back in two shakes." And cunning old Sam climbed to his feet, only to discover that several of his legs had lost a lot of their own cunning.

"No, it's nicer when we're together," Polly said, slipping her arm through mine. So we set out abreast for the table of vittles. It started to rain before we got anywhere near the terrace. And the hell of it was, I'd left the Ark in my other pants.

Two maids scuttled twittering through the rain. They snatched up whatever came to hand from the buffet table, then tottered into the house again under loads of earthenware and food. My chore was to salvage the liquor. There was so much headless-chicken confusion going on at the time that eight or so ounces of rum found a home in the Culloden belly, un-perceived. After all, Polly couldn't be everywhere at once, and she was then helping the Widow Delmore and her muchachas arrange another buffet table inside.

On my last slosh through the deluge, a couple of slim forms swept past me in tandem. Their brows were lowering, their nostrils dilated, their lips pressed tightly together. The first man's angry mask was topped by a mop of curly chestnut hair. The mask of the other, also angry but less securely in place, was set beneath hair that was long and lank and black and greasy. Both wore what amounted to a uniform. Their Adam's apples rested on foulard stocks, their skimpy torsos were enclosed by mauve form-fitting shirts, and what remained had been poured into much-too-tight black jeans that made their buttocks stick out like sore thumbs. On their feet were rope-soled canvas shoes. They were each about 30 years old. A talkative raindrop, trickling down my ear lobe, said in passing that they weren't what you might call heterosexual, that they were in the middle of a fearful tiff and that they would never again be on speaking terms--or not for a whole hour, anyway.

Twenty minutes later, when I'd crossed the living room from the buffet, juggling Polly's plate and my own, I floated into a chair across the rectangular table from her to find that Curly Chestnut had made a place for himself and some chicken mole at the end nearest the terrace doors. Another couple--the Gutierrezes--was between us. I found out that the table-crasher's name was Francis St. Albans and he dabbled in, as it were, painting. He also had a British accent that he must have learned through some correspondence school; the nearest he'd ever been to England was thumbing through the pages of Queen.

His fellow tiffer, Philip Payne, who was, as it were, a poet, was seething in the Coventry of Marian Delmore's table, the middle of three that had been set up hurriedly in a living room that was only a few inches lower and a few degrees colder than the main chamber of Mammoth Cave. Payne, who looked several days dead, came from a moldy mansion that stood across from the decaying courthouse in the rotting county seat of Upper Piraeus, Alabama. I had never seen any of his poems in print. I don't think he had, either.

A pair of oddly shaped women, one a polyhedron, the other an isosceles triangle, were also at the Widow Delmore's table. They were halfhearted Lesbians who considered themselves ceramists, or maybe ceramists who considered themselves halfhearted Lesbians. They lived in a little finca and made little post-pre-Columbian pots without the use of a little potter's wheel and decorated them with little gruesome designs that could only have come from their little primary-color nightmares. Elizabeth Piper and Barbara Saltus would never see 45 again, even on a TV rerun. They were known, up to several kilometers away, as "Pepper and Salt."

Beyond this cheery crew, the Youngs and a dry-brained retired lawyer and his wife, named McDermott, were breaking bread together; and next to the nubile daughter of the Youngs, his hide as silent as the rind of the expanding universe, but with a clanging brain and kettledrum heart making loud music in his core, huddled a son of mine named Jock Culloden, as miserably happy as any adolescent would want to be.

There I was--doomed to spend an hour or more in small talk with Francis St. Albans and Señor and Mrs. Gutierrez. The only satisfaction I got out of being introduced to them by my occasional social secretary, Polly Lockridge Culloden, was that during the nods and becks and introductory smiles, I was able to fill my glass with wine--my water glass, that is, which was impressively bigger than the wine one. Polly objected in the only way she could, by kicking me high on my shinbone. The objection wasn't overruled, merely ignored.

The other couple at our table, whom I purposely called Señor and Mrs. Gutierrez, were, in their mating, as ancient as the human race and as modern as tomorrow afternoon at five o'clock.

Angela Ammon DeKalb Pierce Gutierrez, nee Wade, had burst from her chafing girlhood as a lusty ripsnorter out of Pittsburgh who might have been used as a character by Rabelais, had she been French and born not too many years before her actual birth. You knew she was rich, because she banked a great deal of her money on her fingers and neck. Around 1928, when she bounced into the bed of the late DeKalb, the second and richest of her four husbands, she was a damn-the-torpedoes, full-speed-ahead heller, with a wide, painted mouth and a broad, uncolored viewpoint. Now, however, the Jazz Age body had been caught up in a fleshly inflation, the mouth was no longer so painted or so wide, the lip-rouge hues were muted, and the broad viewpoint was narrowing, against her will, with each runaway anxious month. The anxiety came from her having to do unrelieved guard duty against the various Dianas who kept trying to slip into the preserve for a shot at Lorenzo Gutierrez, her tame young unicorn.

He was known as Lencho, which is the Mexican nickname for Lorenzo, and he was the only beautiful man I've ever seen. If every above-ground Mexican male were one quarter as stunning as Lencho Gutierrez, there wouldn't be an unmarried woman to be found in the rest of this bloated, beefcake world. They'd all be flat on their backs, love-drunk and goggle-eyed, somewhere between the Rio Grande and the Guatemala border.

When we were introduced, he gave me no more than a glum nod, which struck me as peculiar. Among the few things I'd learned about Mexicans was that, as heirs of the Spanish language and culture; they have a fantastic jargon for use in social intercourse, with elaborately polite formulas for such major events as introductions and, like as not, for such minor ones as shooting you dead in the street.

"I'm surprised, señor"--I said to Lencho, whose bored face should've stopped me, but didn't--"surprised that Hollywood hasn't snapped you up."

He turned empty eyes away, and anger put a hammer lock on me--not only because of the man's seeming rudeness but also because I'd let myself come out with such a tattered cliché.

Then Angela W. A. DeK. P. Gutierrez broke the hammer lock. "Mr. Culloden," she said quietly, "my Lencho's twenty-eight years old. He's been married to me for three years. During those three years he's heard English being spoken constantly, and he's had every chance to learn it. But as of July 1966, his entire English vocabulary consists of three words. Yes, No and"--A strange smile touched her lips--"and Don't. He comes out with any one of them at random, and sometimes the result is funny and sometimes it's shocking. Although mostly when he hears English being spoken he--well, you'd have to call it withdraws. Lencho knows what's best for Lencho."

"Ah, does he, Angel?" St. Albans drawled. "Does he cross-his-pretty-red-heart truly know what's best for Lencho? Or do you?"

"I think so." She was concentrating on her plate.

Her lackluster response irritated St. Albans, who'd evidently expected a verbal Roman candle. "Well," he went on, "all I can say, Mrs. Den Mother, is that my finca's a hotbed of English being spoken, so he can come and withdraw with me any time that tickles his fancy."

"That'll do, Saint!" Angela's glance was like a fishhook, blue-steel and barbed. "Don't bring your dirty linen to any table I'm at."

"No fear, ducks," St. Albans said gaily. "It's at the next table and it's going to stay there." He called to Mrs. Delmore: "Marian, I'm depressed, and it's because that grotesque daughter of yours isn't here to amuse me. Don't you let her appear in public anymore? Do you keep her caged these days? And if she is in a cage, doesn't she have feeding hours like the rest of the rare animals? I tell you, Marian, I miss that questing beast. The zoo's simply nothing without our Ugly."

"Ugly eats in her tower now, Saint," Marian Delmore said. "Either that, or she creeps into the kitchen at some ungodly hour and nibbles cheese."

"Like a great ungainly mouse, yes!" St. Albans crowed. "And she lives in a mouse tower. Oh, so perfect!"

"I'll be content if she never shows her face in the main house," the Widow Delmore said. "Especially if I have guests. It's so easy, you know, to get the wrong impression--not about her, but about her mother. She's reached the stage where I can't do a thing with her, not that I ever could. She's become so silly and willful--the most willful, silliest creature in Christendom."

"Ah, not quite," St. Albans said, "not quite, lovey. I know a person who's far more willful." His smile, as friendly as the working end of a wasp, darted toward the pallid Payne. "And infinitely sillier."

Pepper and Salt, strangely, were shaken into a defense of the poet. "Oh, that's not fair, Saint!" exclaimed Pepper.

"And it's not true!" cried Salt.

St. Albans went cold on them. He decided that the subject was closed and, wiping everybody at the next table from the slate of his interest, sprinkled a pinch of attention on what his plate contained.

It was an unconsciously wise move. My hope that he and Payne would start a ruckus was dying, and its place was gradually giving way to a desire to shove St. Albans' face into his food. After all, Marian Delmore was owed a scene; and he who scened this night was quit for the next.

If I'd been standing at a window watching it, the rain would have been a fused and furious mass; but to a man sitting with closed eyes, it became a form of hypnosis, untouched by human hands. Then, filtered through an immensity of bone and an opiate of water, I seemed to hear my name being spoken on a mountaintop in Tibet. It was so far away, so faint, that I----

I was still treading water when a strange woman floated by. I grabbed her by the neck and held her head above the current until I recognized her as Angela Gutierrez. "Sorry," I said. "Thinking of something else."

"I asked you, Mr. Culloden, how many films you'd written."

"Never counted them. Enough to kill a more sensitive man, though."

"Fifteen," Polly said.

Angela leaned toward me. "Did you ever write a film that Robert Taylor was in? Lencho's a great Robert Taylor fan." At the mention of the actor's name, Lencho nodded, with more vigor than I'd thought he had.

I ran through my credits mentally. "Let's see, there were three, I think, altogether. There was Whaler, and The Hunters of Kentucky, and--and--oh, sure, Falaise Gap."

After the Gutierrezes spoke rapid Spanish to each other, Angela said: "Lencho liked them all very much, very much, indeed. And he'd like to know, were you--are you--a friend of Robert Taylor?"

"Too bad, but I only met him once, on the set of Whaler." Angela translated for Lencho, who thereafter paid no more attention to a man who'd written three pictures for Robert Taylor and yet had only met him once.

I refilled my giant wineglass, which had cleverly emptied itself, to the tune of another kick from Polly. This one landed on my instep. Her reward was a pitying smile from her put-upon husband; and I was in the act of rearranging my facial muscles, when one of the terrace doors was flung open and Lalage came backward into the room, struggling to shut an umbrella that was too wide for the door. Her dress clung wetly to her thighs and the leather of her thin Capezios was waterlogged.

"Oooo, look!" St. Albans cried. "If it isn't Miss Uggle!"

Nobody else said anything until Lalage got the umbrella down and had closed the door against the wild rain. Then Marian Delmore said coldly: "I thought you were staying in the tower." Nothing, of course, about the girl's drenched dress.

"I was hungry," Lalage said. She ignored everybody else in the room and walked to the end of the table where Polly and I were sitting. "I know you, Mrs. Culloden," she said to Polly, "but you don't know me. I'm Lalage Delmore."

"Little Miss Uggle," came from St. Albans.

"Yes, of course," Polly said. "But, darling--you're soaked. Aren't you afraid you'll catch cold?"

"It doesn't matter," Lalage said. She swallowed, and went on hurriedly: "Could your husband come to the buffet with me?"

Polly glanced appraisingly at her husband before saying: "I don't see why not."

"Thank you." Lalage waited while I got up. I was delighted to find that there wasn't as much instability around as there had been. The quadruple shot of 80-proof vaccine, plus the 12-percent boosters, had helped the old stability a lot.

At the buffet table, however, Lalage wouldn't let me serve her. "I'm used to getting my own food," she said. "But I wanted to talk to you."

"No reason why you shouldn't," I said.

"To tell you I love you," she whispered.

"No reason why you----" was coming out automatically when something, from somewhere, hit me a karate chop under the jawline. "Lalage"--I mumbled as soon as I could focus again. "Child--please don't kick that word around. Do you know what love is, Lalage?"

"What I'm feeling. Very warm and steady and calm."

"You can feel that way any summer afternoon, as long as nobody gives the hammock a shove," I said. "Love's not a dead calm. It's an apex."

Lalage was occupying herself with putting things on her plate and avoiding my eyes. "Apex sounds right," she said. "I don't know the word, but I'm apex."

I sighed. I might as well have been saying "Nice pussycat" to a lion I'd met on the Colosseum sands. "Another thing you don't know," I told her, "is that after the apex, it's downhill. All the long, long way."

She decided then that perhaps she'd better look at me, and I nearly drowned in those eyes. While going down for the third time, I remembered a smooth side-overarm I used to do, and I made for the edge of the pool.

"Prove it," said Lalage.

I was nowhere near the edge yet, but the nymph of the pool had grabbed my ankle and the smooth side-overarm was going to waste. "I can't," I said. "Nobody can, or ever could. But maybe I can give you an idea of what happens during the rise and fall of that particular barometer. So listen very carefully, Lalage. When two people are in love, each with the other and beyond all thought or caring, they're given this one perfect moment. It may not be longer than a few seconds, and it's never longer than a few hours; maybe, with very great luck, it might last through a whole afternoon, or part of a summer night. While it's happening, of course, neither the man nor the woman knows it, but it's perfect, and that's the important thing. And sooner or later, if you've been one of the lovers, you'll discover that those few seconds, or those few hours, were the most magnificent seconds, or the richest few hours, in your entire life. But----" I stopped. I didn't like the turn that my thought was about to take.

"But what?"

I let my thought take the turn, every tire screaming. "But there's a catch to it," I said. "And the catch is: Once you're over the shock of knowing how perfect that one moment was, you get the sustained and killing shock of knowing that everything since has been imperfect and, no matter how long you live, nothing will ever be perfect again."

"Oh," said Lalage, very quietly.

"I love you, too," I murmured. "As I would a daughter."

"That's all I want," she said. "Oh, that helps! Now I'd like--that is, may I sit with you and your wife?"

"Wouldn't have it any other way. Come on."

Lalage brought her plate back to our table and I lugged a heavy antique chair over from where it was brooding beneath a bad 17th Century painting of the Assumption. I placed the chair at the end of the table opposite St. Albans, which put Polly at Lalage's right and me at her left. "My father named me Lalage," she said as she sat down.

"Bully for him," I said. Polly, who was puzzled, kept silent. The Gutierrezes ignored her presence, and St. Albans, after a single disapproving stare, preferred to pretend that she didn't exist.

"He was very tall and very thin, my father," Lalage said, "and he wasn't handsome at all." She paused, then went on, speaking in a low-pitched, rapid monotone, addressing no one in particular and directing the words at her plate: "He gave me his worst features, my mother says. But he couldn't have, because he had to wear glasses all the time, and I have very good eyes. His family owned a big department store in Cleveland, Delmore and Company, but everybody called it just Delmore's. My mother says my father didn't want to work there, all he wanted to do was sit around and read. But he was an only child, like me, and my grandfather had a stroke and died, so my father worked there for a while until he died, too. Until he was killed, I mean----"

"Killed?" Polly glanced at me before she fixed her gaze on Lalage again.

Lalage nodded absently, then continued, the scarcely audible words tumbling over each other: "Yes, and on my sixth birthday. He'd left the store early to be at my party, and the phone call came right in the middle of this game we were playing. And then all the children went home. And I remember how hard I cried, but I don't know if it was because of what happened to my father or because they stopped the party before the ice cream and cake. I had a funny pink paper hat on. Six years old. You don't understand things when you're six years old. Or any other time, I guess, not really. But I kept that funny pink hat for years. And then one night, when I was alone in the house, I took it from this special secret place and tore it into little pieces and flushed them down the toilet in my mother's bathroom. She used to keep a picture of him around, my mother did, and I'd sit and study it for hours. His mouth was very gentle, in the picture, and his eyes were, too, under the glasses. He was sweet and loving and kind to me, but he wasn't happy, not very often. My mother says she told him a thousand times not to drive so fast, but he never paid her a bit of attention, she says. And I think he was unhappy because in his heart he hated her, and maybe he got this fantastic idea that if he drove fast enough, and closed his eyes real tight while he drove, then he'd leave her and everything else he hated behind him forever--and then there'd be just him and me. Do you suppose that's what he was trying to do, at the end there?"

"Yes," I said, "I think that's what he was trying to do. And I wish he'd been able to bring it off."

Lalage took a deep breath. "But you could say he killed himself, couldn't you?" she asked.

"Not with conviction, I couldn't," I told her. "No." I then tossed off the rest of my wine. As I peered over the rim of the glass, I saw the unassuaged eyes of a feather-boa constrictor named St. Albans fixed on a helpless baby bird named Sam Culloden. I stopped scratching for bugs in the gravel, cocked my downy head at him, opened my tiny yellow beak, and chirped: "Something bothering you, Buster?"

I instantly received another kick from Polly, which hurt. Her earlier salvos had merely bracketed the target. This one was zeroed in, and she was firing ten-inch Delman shells.

"Sorry, Sam, an accident," she said. "Incidentally, you haven't eaten a bite." She didn't sound at all like a battery commander.

"I'm saving my strength for dinner," I said.

"Tell me, Mr. Uggledon," St. Albans drawled. "Why did you----"

"Speaking to me?" I cut in sharply.

"Trying to, Mr. Uggledon. Why did you come to Maldita--with the whole wide world to pick from--or don't you remember?"

No matter what lay behind the words, St. Albans' remark was just what the doctor ordered. While I placed my glass on the table, I sent the baby bird scurrying behind a big rock, from which he popped back immediately with a companion--a razor-beaked, needle-taloned golden eagle that considered any snake up to, and including, a feather-boa constrictor as a kind of sinuous caviar and, oddly enough, was also named Sam Culloden. The golden eagle spoke very softly to the snake: "What would you like me to say, Mary?"

"Something sensible. Unless you're beyond that--Mr. Uggledon."

"Now, Saint..." Angela Gutierrez' voice trailed off in a semiwarning.

"I came to Maldita," I said, still very softly, "because they told me, Heraclitus, they told me the town was awash with people I'd be apt to like, ten or twelve hundred of them. They also swore on a stack of André Gides that there wouldn't be any fruits of the earth in Maldita, because they favored the assier-crassier places, or maybe the bell-bottom hangouts like Acapulco. They also told me----"

"Sam!" It may have been only a whisper, but it was Polly's goddamnyouto-hellsamculloden whisper, which is never hissed around Hook and Ladder No. 7 unless the fifth alarm has rung. I had enough sense remaining for it to stop my slide when I wasn't quite halfway down the pole.

"And what can I do for you, my dear old Carian guest?" I asked her.

"You can go to the buffet and bring me some more ham, not much, a nubbin, maybe, and a little of that wonderful salad, and one piece of bread, unbuttered."

I must've slipped into one of my more hideous faces as I got up, since he was suddenly too busy counting his fingers, all 15 of them, to take the trouble to answer me. So I hauled anchor, put on sail and pointed my bow for the buffet.

I had just reached port when the loudest clap of thunder that the world has heard since Sodom and Gomorrah got their comeuppance shattered the air above the house, so close that it arrived simultaneously with its lightning.

The room shook, as did everything and everybody in it. A terrified wail came from what sounded like Mrs. McDermott and a variety of caterwauls from the other guests. Hot on the heels of this exclamatory period followed a moment of awful silence, honoring the unknown thunderbolt. During this quiet time, I bowed my head at the buffet-table cenotaph and tried to find the ham and the salad and the bread. I wasn't having much luck. Everything had begun to resemble ratatouille.

Then I heard St. Albans cry: "Well, Miss Payne, that was your real Big Daddy cursing you! He hates you, Miss Payne, because you're disgusting, the way everybody hates you because you're disgusting. And later tonight, Miss Payne, yes, later to----"

"Oh, stop it, Saint, for pity's sake," Payne squealed. His voice cracked on "pity." He was a very frightened unpublished poet.

There was another thunderclap, not quite overhead and not quite as loud as the first, but a substantial citizen, nevertheless. Before its rumbles had run their course, St. Albans was back in the sidesaddle and riding an octave higher: "Tonight, and I mean it! If you dare to so try to come back to the finca, if you dare to try to come in, if you even dare to so much as knock on the door, I'll take my letter opener with the jade handle and--oh, damn damn damn it----"

The lights had gone out.

"Now please sit right where you are," I heard Marian Delmore say. "The candles are in the cocina. Lalage, go into the kitchen and tell the girls to bring out the candles. They never do anything unless they're told. Please stay right where you are, the rest of you."

I was aware that nobody was going along with the Widow Delmore's last request, though. Invisible people were pushing back invisible chairs and standing up and talking to other invisible people with invisible cheerfulness. "When they do go out," an unseen McDermott said, "they invariably choose a time when you're at dinner, or when you're shaving."

"In-vair-iably," replied a deep Pepperish voice. Somehow, I was glad to learn that the Pepper not only ate dinner but shaved.

For a millisecond, lightning made it midday in the room. At our table, everyone was standing, even Polly, who'd felt her way to a terrace door--everyone, that is, except St. Albans. He was lounging in his chair and, by God, while he was shrieking at Payne, he was calmly picking at his chicken mole.

That lightning-fathered glimpse of him, making cool little stabs with his fork while doing his best to destroy another human being, was what made me open the ball. Actually, I wasn't concerned about Payne, or even about myself. My decision to do something sprang from the rude and unnecessary remarks that St. Albans had passed about Lalage earlier. For all I knew, uttering rude remarks about Lalage when she wasn't around--or, if one wanted to try for a double point score, when she was around--might have been the favorite indoor sport of Maldita. But I was explicably protective, all of a sudden, toward that sad young mock-up of a woman. For, although I'd reached a dead end of creativity myself, she'd made up her mind to see me as her father--and God knows that fathers have to create, on a fleshly plane, or they wouldn't be fathers. And she also had told me she loved me--and, no matter how incompetent or useless a man is, when a woman tells him she loves him, he damned well has to go to bat for her, even long after the game is lost and beyond any rally, even when she doesn't realize he's stepping in against a spitballer. I figured I owed Lalage a little something, if only because she saw things in me that weren't there.

Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Culloden. I headed back to the table I'd started from. In the utter dark.

I couldn't have crossed that room more precisely if I'd been escorted by a kennel of seeing-eye Saint Bernards with arc lights in their mouths. And when I had my hands on the table, I wasted no time. There was a slop and sliding of earthenware, a clatter of crockery and a crash of smashing glass, and one scared yelp from St. Albans as he and his chair tumbled backward to land hard on the floor. "Compliments of the ones, you third bastard," I said, and let the table drop.

When the legs slammed down on the floor tiles, it sounded as though they cracked a few. Then, while a babble got under way among the unseen and unseeing witnesses, I managed to get out of the Delmore living room and out of the Delmore house. The rain faded and died as I stumbled toward our rented finca, and all the lights of Maldita came on again as I passed through our gates. I'm at a loss as to how I got home in an obsidian night, over unfamiliar terrain, but I did, I swung it somehow.

As soon as I switched on the night-table lamp, I spotted a scorpion, the size and weight of a short lobster, brooding on the wall above the bathroom door. I suppose I should've sent it to join its ancestors--but in the long run, you can't kill everything, even with a license. So all I did was strip, drop my soaked clothes on the floor and crawl into the antique, creaky bed. I left the lamp on, and I left the scorpion where it was--a brown, disgusting, poisonous, mindless, antediluvian horror.

Just like the still-blocked drunken writer who'd let the critter live.