It was already one o’clock. “Courthouse,” he told the Filipino, settling back into the car. “My God, I want a drink.” He rode with his eyes closed against the sun; the secretary had already sprung onto the runningboard before he realized that they had reached the courthouse.
The secretary, bareheaded too, wore a jacket of authentic tweed; his turtleneck sweater was dead black, his hair was black too, varnished smooth to his skull; he spread before Ira a dummy newspaper page laid out to embrace the blank space for the photograph beneath the caption: APRIL LALEAR’S FATHER. Beneath the space was the legend: IRA EWING, PRESIDENT OF THE EWING REALTY CO., — WILSHIRE BOULEVARD, BEVERLY HILLS.
“Is thirty percent all you could get?” Ira said. The secretary was young; he glared at Ira for an instant in vague impatient fury.
“Jesus, thirty percent is thirty percent. They are going to print a thousand extra copies and use our mailing list. It will be spread all up and down the Coast and as far East as Reno. What do you want? We can’t expect them to put under your picture, ‘Turn to page fourteen for halfpage ad,’ can we?” Ira sat again with his eyes closed, waiting for his head to stop.
“All right,” he said. “Are they ready now?”
“All set. You will have to go inside. They insisted it be inside, so everybody that sees it will know it is the courthouse.”
“All right,” Ira said. He got out; with his eyes half closed and the secretary at his elbow he mounted the steps and entered the courthouse. The reporter and the photographer were waiting but he did not see them yet; he was aware only of being enclosed in a gaping crowd which he knew would be mostly women, hearing the secretary and a policeman clearing the way in the corridor outside the courtroom door.
“This is O.K.,” the secretary said. Ira stopped; the darkness was easier on his eyes though he did not open them yet; he just stood, hearing the secretary and the policeman herding the women, the faces, back; someone took him by the arm and turned him; he stood obediently; the magnesium flashed and glared, striking against his painful eyeballs like blows; he had a vision of wan faces craned to look at him from either side of a narrow human lane; with his eyes shut tight now he turned, blundering until the reporter in charge spoke to him:
“Just a minute, chief. We better get another one just in case.” This time his eyes were tightly closed; the magnesium flashed, washed over them; in the thin acrid smell of it he turned and with the secretary again at his elbow he moved blindly back and into the sunlight and into his car.
He gave no order this time, he just said, “Get me a drink.” He rode with his eyes closed again while the car cleared the downtown traffic and then began to move quiet, powerful and fast under him; he rode so for a long while before he felt the car swing into the palmbordered drive, slowing. It stopped; the doorman opened the door for him, speaking to him by name.
The elevator boy called him by name too, stopping at the right floor without direction; he followed the corridor and knocked at a door and was fumbling for the key when the door opened upon a woman in a bathing suit beneath a loose beach cloak — a woman with treated hair also and brown eyes, who swung the door back for him to enter and then to behind him, looking at him with the quick bright faint serene smiling which only a woman nearing forty can give to a man to whom she is not married and from whom she has had no secrets physical and few mental over a long time of pleasant and absolute intimacy. She had been married though and divorced; she had a child, a daughter of fourteen, whom he was now keeping in boarding school. He looked at her, blinking, as she closed the door.
“You saw the papers,” he said. She kissed him, not suddenly, without heat, in a continuation of the movement which closed the door, with a sort of warm envelopment; suddenly he cried, “I can’t understand it! After all the advantages that . . . after all I tried to do for them—”
“Hush,” she said. “Hush, now. Get into your trunks; I’ll have a drink ready for you when you have changed. Will you eat some lunch if I have it sent up?”
“No. I don’t want any lunch. — after all I have tried to give—”
“Hush, now. Get into your trunks while I fix you a drink. It’s going to be swell at the beach.” In the bedroom his bathing trunks and robe were laid out on the bed. He changed, hanging his suit in the closet where her clothes hung, where there hung already another suit of his and clothes for the evening. When he returned to the sitting room she had fixed the drink for him; she held the match to his cigarette and watched him sit down and take up the glass, watching him still with that serene impersonal smiling.
Now he watched her slip off the cape and kneel at the cellarette, filling a silver flask, in the bathing costume of the moment, such as ten thousand wax female dummies wore in ten thousand shop windows that summer, such as a hundred thousand young girls wore on California beaches; he looked at her, kneeling — back, buttocks and flanks trim enough, even firm enough (so firm in fact as to be a little on the muscular side, what with unremitting and perhaps even rigorous care) but still those of forty. But I don’t want a young girl, he thought. Would to God that all young girls, all young female flesh, were removed, blasted even, from the earth. He finished the drink before she had filled the flask.
“I want another one,” he said.
“All right,” she said. “As soon as we get to the beach.”
“No. Now.”
“Let’s go on to the beach first. It’s almost three o’clock. Won’t that be better?”
“Just so you are not trying to tell me I can’t have another drink now.”
“Of course not,” she said, slipping the flask into the cape’s pocket and looking at him again with that warm, faint, inscrutable smiling. “I just want to have a dip before the water gets too cold.” They went down to the car; the Filipino knew this too: he held the door for her to slip under the wheel, then he got himself into the back. The car moved on; she drove well. “Why not lean back and shut your eyes,” she told Ira, “and rest until we get to the beach? Then we will have a dip and a drink.”
“I don’t want to rest,” he said. “I’m all right.” But he did close his eyes again and again the car ran powerful, smooth, and fast beneath him, performing its afternoon’s jaunt over the incredible distances of which the city was composed; from time to time, had he looked, he could have seen the city in the bright soft vague hazy sunlight, random, scattered about the arid earth like so many gay scraps of paper blown without order, with its curious air of being rootless — of houses bright beautiful and gay, without basements or foundations, lightly attached to a few inches of light penetrable earth, lighter even than dust and laid lightly in turn upon the profound and primeval lava, which one good hard rain would wash forever from the sight and memory of man as a firehose flushes down a gutter — that city of almost incalculable wealth whose queerly appropriate fate it is to be erected upon a few spools of a substance whose value is computed in billions and which may be completely destroyed in that second’s instant of a careless match between the moment of striking and the moment when the striker might have sprung and stamped it out.
“You saw your mother today,” she said. “Has she—”
“Yes.” He didn’t open his eyes. “That damned Jap gave it to her. She asked me for money again. I found out what she wants with it. She wants to run, to go back to Nebraska. I told her, so did I. . . . If she went back there, she would not live until Christmas. The first month of winter would kill her. Maybe it wouldn’t even take winter to do it.”
She still drove, she still watched the road, yet somehow she had contrived to become completely immobile. “So that’s what it is,” she said.
He did not open his eyes. “What what is?”
“The reason she has been after you all this time to give her money, cash. Why, even when you won’t do it, every now and then she asks you again.”
“What what . . .” He opened his eyes, looking at her profile; he sat up suddenly. “You mean, she’s been wanting to go back there all the time? That all these years she has been asking me for money, that that was what she wanted with it?”
She glanced at him swiftly, then back to the road. “What else can it be? What else could she use money for?”
“Back there?” he said. “To those winters, that town, that way of
