“But you were in love with him.”
“Oh yes—with all my heart.” She looked through the window, shading her eyes. “It’s light out there. Let’s go down to the beach.”
He jumped up exclaiming:
“Why, I think it’s the grunion!”
“What?”
“It’s tonight. It’s in all the papers.” He hurried out the door and she heard him open the door of the car. Presently he returned with a newspaper.
“It’s at ten-sixteen. That’s five minutes.”
“An eclipse or something?”
“Very punctual fish,” he said. “Leave your shoes and stockings and come with me.”
It was a fine blue night. The tide was at the turn and the little silver fish rocked off shore waiting for 10: 16. A few seconds after the time they came swarming in with the tide and Stahr and Kathleen stepped over them barefoot as they flicked slip-slop in the sand. A Negro man came along the shore toward them collecting the grunion quickly like twigs into two pails. They came in twos and threes and platoons and companies, relentless and exalted and scornful around the great bare feet of the intruders, as they had come before Sir Francis Drake had nailed his plaque to the boulder on the shore.
“I wish for another pail,” the Negro man said, resting a moment.
“You’ve come a long way out,” said Stahr.
“I used to go to Malibu but they don’t like it those moving picture people.”
A wave came in and forced them back, receded swiftly leaving the sand alive again.
“Is it worth the trip?” Stahr asked.
“I don’t figure it that way. I really come out to read some Emerson. Have you ever read him?”
“I have,” said Kathleen. “Some.”
“I’ve got him inside my shirt. I got some Rosicrucian literature with me too but I’m fed up with them.”
The wind had changed a little—the waves were stronger further down and they walked along the foaming edge of the water.
“What’s your work?” the Negro asked Stahr.
“I work for the pictures.”
“Oh.” After a moment he added, “I never go to movies.”
“Why not?” asked Stahr sharply.
“There’s no profit. I never let my children go.”
Stahr watched him and Kathleen watched Stahr protectively.
“Some of them are good,” she said, against a wave of spray, but he did not hear her. She felt she could contradict him and said it again and this time he looked at her indifferently.
“Are the Rosicrucian brotherhood against pictures?” asked Stahr.
“Seems as if they don’t know what they are for. One week they for one thing and next week for another.”
Only the little fish were certain. Half an hour had gone and still they came. The Negro’s two pails were full and finally he went off over the beach toward the road, unaware that he had rocked an industry.
Stahr and Kathleen walked back to the house and she thought how to drive his momentary blues away.
“Poor old Sambo,” she said.
“What?”
“Don’t you call them poor old Sambo?”
“We don’t call them anything especially.” After a moment he said, “They have pictures of their own.”
In the house she drew on her shoes and stockings before the heater.
“I like California better,” she said deliberately. “I think I was a bit sex-starved.”
“That wasn’t quite all was it?”
“You know it wasn’t.”
“It’s nice to be near you.”
She gave a little sigh as she stood up so small that he did not notice it.
“I don’t want to lose you now,” he said. “I don’t know what you think of me or whether you think of me at all. As you’ve probably guessed my heart’s in the grave—” He hesitated, wondering if this was quite true, “—but you’re the most attractive woman I’ve met since I don’t know when. I can’t stop looking at you. I don’t know now exactly the color of your eyes but they make me sorry for everyone in the world—”
“Stop it, stop it!” she cried laughing. “You’ll have me looking in the mirror for weeks. My eyes aren’t any color—they’re just eyes to see with and I’m just as ordinary as I can be. I have nice teeth for an English girl—”
“You have beautiful teeth.”
“—but I couldn’t hold a candle to these girls I see here—” “You stop it,” he said. “What I said is true and I’m a cautious man.”
She stood motionless a moment—thinking. She looked at him, then she looked back into herself, then at him again—then she gave up her thought.
“We must go,” she said.
Now they were different people as they started back. Four times they had driven along the shore road today, each time a different pair. Curiosity, sadness and desire were behind them now; this was a true returning—to themselves and all their past and future and the encroaching presence of tomorrow. He asked her to sit close in the car and she did but they did not seem close because for that you have to seem to be growing closer. Nothing stands still. It was on his tongue to ask her to come to the house he rented and sleep there tonight—but he felt that it would make him sound lonely. As the car climbed the hill to her house Kathleen looked for something behind the seat cushion. “What have you lost?”
“It might have fallen out,” she said, feeling through her purse in the darkness. “What was it?” “An envelope.” “Was it important?” “No.”
But when they got to her house and Stahr turned on the dashboard light she helped take the cushions out and look again.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said as they walked to the door. “What’s your address where you really live?” “Just Bel-Air. There’s no number.” “Where is Bel-Air?”
“It’s a sort of development near Santa Monica. But you’d better call me at the studio.”
“All right… good night, Mr. Stahr.” “Mister Stahr,” he repeated, astonished. She corrected herself gently. “Well then, good night, Stahr. Is that better?” He felt as though he had been pushed away a little. “As you like,” he said. He refused to let the aloofness communicate itself. He kept looking at her and moved his head from side to side in her own gesture, saying without words “you know what’s happened to me.” She sighed. Then she came into his arms and for a moment was his again completely. Before anything could change Stahr whispered good night and turned away and went to his car.
Winding down the hill he listened inside himself as if something by an unknown composer, powerful and strange and strong, was about to be played for the first time. The theme would be stated presently but because the composer was always new, he would not recognize it as the theme right away. It would come in some such guise as the auto-horns from the technicolor boulevards below or be barely audible, a tattoo on the muffled drum of the moon. He strained to hear it, knowing only that music was beginning, new music that he liked and did not understand. It was hard to react to what one could entirely compass—this was new and confusing, nothing one could shut off in the middle and supply the rest from an old score.
Also, and persistently, and bound up with the other, there was the Negro on the sand. He was waiting at home for Stahr with his pails of silver fish, and he would be waiting at the studio in the morning. He had said that he did not allow his children to listen to Stahr’s story. He was prejudiced and wrong and he must be shown somehow, some way. A picture, many pictures, a decade of pictures, must be made to show him he was wrong. Since he had spoken, Stahr had thrown four pictures out of his plans—one that was going into production this week. They were borderline pictures in point of interest but at least he submitted the borderline pictures to the Negro and found them trash. And he put back on his list a difficult picture that he had tossed to the wolves, to Brady and Marcus and the rest, to get his way on something else. He rescued it for the Negro man.
When he drove up to his door the porch lights went on and his Filipino came down the steps to put away the car. In the library Stahr found a list of phone calls.
La Borwits
Marcus
Harlow
Rienmund
Fairbanks
Brady
Colman
Skouras
Flieshacker
The Filipino came into the room with a letter. “This fell out of the car,” he said.
“Thanks,” said Stahr, “I was looking for it.”
“Will you be running a picture tonight, Mr. Stahr?”
“No thanks—you can go to bed.”
The letter, to his surprise, was addressed to Monroe Stahr, Esq. He started to open it—then it occurred to him that she had wanted to recapture it, and possibly to withdraw it. If she had had a phone he would have called her for permission before opening it. He held it for a moment. It had been written before they met—it was odd to think that whatever it said was now invalidated; it possessed the interest of a souvenir by representing a mood that was gone.
Still he did not like to read it without asking her. He put it down beside a pile of scripts and sat down with the top script in his lap. He was proud of resisting his first impulse to open the letter. It seemed to prove that he was not “losing his head.” He had never lost his head about Minna even in the beginning—it had been the most appropriate and regal match imaginable. She had loved him always and just before she died all unwilling and surprised his tenderness had burst and surged toward her and he had been in love with her. In love with Minna and
