Part 9 (1/2)

'Look,' I said. 'If you have to feel this way, why don't you just let me out. I can walk.'

She immediately put her foot on the throttle. We raced through the downtown streets. I sat hanging on and thought of jumping. Then we reached a section where the traffic was spa.r.s.e. We were two miles from Bunker Hill, in the east part of town, in the section of factories and breweries. She slowed the car down and pulled up to the kerb. We were 152 alongside of a low black fence. Beyond it were stacks of steel pipe.

'Why here?' I said.

'You wanted to walk,' she said. 'Get out and walk.' 'I feel like riding again.'

'Get out,' she said. 'I mean it, too. Anybody that can't shoot any better than that! Go on, get out!' I reached for my cigarettes, offered her one. 'Let's talk this over,' I said.

She slapped the pack of cigarettes out of my hand, knocked them to the floor, and glared at me defiantly. 'I hate you,' she said. 'G.o.d, how I hate you!'

As I picked up the cigarettes the night and the deserted factory district quivered with her loathing. I understood it. She did not hate Arturo Bandini, not really. She hated the fact that he did not meet her standard. She wanted to love him, but she couldn't. She wanted him like Sammy: quiet, taciturn, grim, a good shot with a rifle, a good bartender who accepted her as a waitress and nothing else. I got out of the car, grinning, because I knew that would hurt her.

'Good night,' I said. 'It's a fine night. I don't mind walking.'

'I hope you never make it,' she said. 'I hope they find you dead in the gutter in the morning.' 'I'll see what I can do,' I said.

As she drove away a sob came from her throat, a cry of pain. One thing was certain: Arturo Bandini was not good for Camilla Lopez.

Chapter Sixteen.

The good days, the fat days, page upon page of ma.n.u.script; prosperous days, something to say, the story of Vera Rivken, and the pages mounted and I was happy. Fabulous days, the rent paid, still fifty dollars in my wallet, nothing to do all day and night but write and think of writing: ah, such sweet days, to see it grow, to worry for it, myself, my book, my words, maybe important, maybe timeless, but mine nevertheless, the indomitable Arturo Bandini, already deep into his first novel.

So an evening comes, and what to do with it, my soul so cool from the bath of words, my feet so solid upon the earth, and what are the others doing, the rest of the people of the world? I will go sit and look at her, Camilla Lopez.

It was done. It was like old times, our eyes springing at one another. But she was changed, she was thinner, and her face was unhealthy, with two eruptions at each end of her mouth. Polite smiles. I tipped her and she thanked me. I fed the phonograph nickels, playing her favourite tunes. She wasn't dancing at her work, and she didn't look at me often the way she used to. Maybe it was Sammy: maybe she missed the guy.

I asked her, 'How is he?'

A shrug: 'Alright, I guess.'

'Don't you see him?'

155.

'Oh, sure.'

'You don't look well.' 'I feel alright.'

I got up. 'Well, I gotta go. Just dropped in to see how you were getting along.' 'It was nice of you.'

'Not at' all. Why don't you come and see me?' She smiled. 'I might, some night.'

Dear Camilla, you did come finally. You threw pebbles at the window, and I pulled you into the room, smelled the whiskey on your breath, and puzzled while you sat slightly drunk at my typewriter, giggling while you played with the keyboard. Then you turned to look at me, and I saw your face clearly under the light, the swollen lower lip, the purple and black smudge around your left eye.

'Who hit you?' I said. And you answered, 'Automobile accident.' And I said, 'Was Sammy driving the other car?' And you wept, drunk and heartbroken. I could touch you then and not fuss with desire. I could lie beside you on the bed and hold you in my arms and hear you say that Sammy hated you, that you drove out to the desert after work, and that he slugged you twice for waking him up at three in the morning.

I said. 'But why see him?'

'Because I'm in love with him.'

You got a bottle from your purse and we drank it up; first your turn, then mine. When the bottle was empty I went down to the drugstore and bought another, a big bottle. All night we wept and we drank, and drunk I could say the things bubbling in my heart, all those swell words, all the clever similes, because you were crying for the other guy and youdidn't hear a word I said, but I heard them myself, and Arturo Bandini was pretty good that night, because he was talking to his true love, and it wasn't you, and it wasn't Vera Rivken either, it was just his true love. But I said some swell things that night, Camilla. Kneeling beside you on the bed, I held your hand and I said, 'Ah Camilla, you lost girl! Open your long fingers and give me back my tired soul! Kiss me with your mouth because I hunger for the bread of a Mexican hill. Breathe the fragrance of lost cities into fevered nostrils, and let me die here, my hand upon the soft contour of your throat, so like the whiteness of some half-forgotten southern sh.o.r.e. Take the longing in these restless eyes and feed it to lonely swallows cruising an autumn cornfield, because I love you Camilla, and your name is sacred like that of some brave princess who died with a smile for a love that was never returned.'

I was drunk that night, Camilla, drunk on seventy-eight cent whiskey, and you were drunk on whiskey and grief. I remember that after turning off the lights, naked except for one shoe that baffled me, I held you in my arms and slept, at peace in the midst of your sobs, yet annoyed when the hot tears from your eyes dripped upon my lips and I tasted their saltiness and thought about that Sammy and his hideous ma.n.u.script. That he should strike you! That fool. Even his punctuation was bad.

When we woke up it was morning and we were both nauseated, and your swollen lip was more grotesque than ever, and your black eye was now green. You got up, staggered to the wash-stand and washed your face. I heard you groan. I watched you dress. I felt your kiss on my forehead as you said goodbye, and that nauseated me too. Then you climbed out the window and I heard you stagger up the hillside, the gra.s.s swis.h.i.+ng and the little twigs breaking under your uncertain feet.

156 157.

] am trying to remember it chronologically. Winter or spring or summer, they were days without change. Good for the night, thanks for the darkness, otherwise we would not have known that one day ended and another began. I had 240 pages done and the end was in sight. The rest was a cruise on smooth water. Then off to Hackmuth it would go, tra la, and the agony would begin.

It was about that time that we went to Terminal Island, Camilla and I. A man-made island, that place, a long finger of earth pointing at Catalina. Earth and canneries and the smell of fish, brown houses full of j.a.panese children, stretches of white sand with wide black pavements running up and down, and the j.a.panese kids playing football in the streets. She was irritable, she had been drinking too much, and her eyes had that stark old woman's look of a chicken. We parked the car in the broad street and walked a hundred yards to the beach. There were rocks at the water's edge, jagged stones swarming with crabs. The crabs were having a tough time of it, because the sea gulls were after them, and the sea gulls screeched and clawed and fought among themselves. We sat on the sand and watched them, and Camilla said they were so beautiful, those gulls.

'I hate them,' I said.

'You!' she said. 'You hate everything.'

'Look at them,' I said. 'Why do they pick on those poor crabs? The crabs ain't doing anything. Then why in the h.e.l.l do they mob them like that?'

'Crabs,' she said. 'Ugh.'

'I hate a sea gull,' I said. 'They'll eat anything, the deader the better.'

'For G.o.d's sake shut up for a change. You always spoil everything. What do I care what they eat?'

158.

In the street the little j.a.panese kids were having a big football game. They were all youngsters under twelve. One of them was a pretty good pa.s.ser. I turned my back on the sea and watched the game. The good pa.s.ser had flung another into the arms of one of his teammates. I got interested and sat up.

'Watch the sea,' Camilla said. 'You're supposed to admire beautiful things, you writer.'

'He throws a beautiful pa.s.s,' I said.

The swelling had gone from her lips, but her eye was still discoloured. 'I used to come here all the time,' she said. 'Almost every night.'

'With that other writer,' I said. 'That really great writer, that Sammy the genius.' 'He liked it here.' 'He's a great writer, alright. That story he wrote over your left eye is a masterpiece.'

'He doesn't talk his guts out like you. He knows when to be quiet.'

'The stupe.'

A fight was brewing between us. I decided to avoid it. I got up and walked towards the kids in the street. She asked where I was going. 'I'm going to get in the game,' I said. She was outraged. 'With them?' she said. 'Those j.a.ps?' I ploughed through the sand.

'Remember what happened the other night!' she said.

I turned around. 'What?'