Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

He closed the door behind him. I could hardly bear to look at the screen. Rosita was undressing directly in front of the camera; then she and the SS colonel re-created all the fantasies that a perverse and misogynistic and depraved sex addict was capable of imagining. The film lasted nineteen minutes. When the colonel rose from her body, she washed him with a towel and a pan of water while he combed his hair in a mirror.

I took the reel off the projector and replaced it in the tin container. Then I sat down in a wood chair, staring at the floor, a train whistle blowing inside my head. When I closed my eyes, I saw a snowfield under a blazing moon and a primeval forest that was dark and green and pure and smelled of colossal trees reaching into the clouds, the way the earth probably smelled before the first man despoiled it with his scat.

I got up and tucked the container under my arm and walked out to my automobile with the precision of a drunk man making his way along the edge of a precipice. I heard my friend calling to me from the door of his shop, but the words were like the underwater sounds you hear in a swimming pool when you have caught your foot in the drain and think you are about to drown.

Chapter

17

THE PHYSICIAN HAD told Linda Gail the sedatives would allow her to sleep without dreaming and to arise rested and fresh in the morning. But that was not how she felt now. The light outside was brittle and harsh, the inside of the house too warm, even though she had opened all the windows. Her skin was clammy, her breath sour, her coffee cup trembling on the saucer when she set it down.

She had awakened in the predawn hours from a harrowing dream, one in which she was covered with tentacles that searched in the cavities of her body and wrapped around her chest and face and squeezed the light from her eyes.

All of this was Jack Valentine’s fault. After he had filmed her on the gallery of the general store, he had taken her to dinner and then to a private club in Bogalusa. She had never had a vodka Collins. The cherries and orange twists and crushed ice and the sweetness of the mix were wonderful. Perhaps she drank three. Or was it five? Her throat was cold, her skin warm, her nipples hard. When he placed his hand on her thigh under the table, she clasped it as she would the hand of a friend. He told her what the ocean looked like from the deck of a house on the cliffs of Malibu. He showed her the photographs in the celluloid windows of his wallet: Jack Valentine standing next to Tom Mix, both of them wearing tall-crown snow-white Stetsons; Deanna Durbin handing him a Coca-Cola on a tray; Bob Steel showing him how to load a six-gun. She hardly remembered what occurred later at the motor court.

Or at least that was what she told herself. In the middle of the night, she had gotten up and gone to the bathroom and realized that something terrible had happened and that she was in a place she had never seen and that there were scratch marks on the tops of her shoulders and a soreness inside her like a shard of broken glass. Her stomach was nauseated, the backs of her thighs shaking, her face a bloodless white balloon she hardly recognized in the mirror.

She told Valentine at breakfast that they were adults who had made a mistake and they would treat their situation as such. That’s what adults did, didn’t they? Whatever had occurred was the result of circumstances that were unplanned and nobody’s fault. They would remain friends. He was a nice man. If he didn’t wish to introduce her to his fellow directors and producers in Hollywood, she wouldn’t hold it against him.

While she spoke to him across a plate of eggs and greasy bacon that made her sick to look at, he gazed out the café window, a merry gleam in his blue-green eyes, eyes she had associated with a buccaneer on the Spanish Main.

“Do you find this humorous?” she asked.

“I guess I shouldn’t suggest the hair of the dog that bit you,” he replied.

“I think I’ll go now,” she said. “You can leave me out of your documentary. I’m going to erase the last twenty-four hours from my memory and restart my life without any of this in it. Good-bye, Mr. Valentine.”

He clenched her wrist as she started to rise from the chair, his eyes still focused out the window. “You’re going to Hollywood, and the world is going to be your oyster. It’s your destiny, Miss Linda. You’ve got it all. Do you have any idea what the average Gump would pay to see a sweet-faced girl like you in a negligee?” He held up his thumb and index finger an inch apart. “You’re that far away from having your name on every marquee in the country. Don’t throw it away.”

Now it was obvious that Hershel knew of her infidelity and that Valentine had sullied her name with anyone he could. She could have confessed, but she saw no reason that she should carry the responsibility, or the odium, for an act that was not the result of a conscious choice. Plus, she would hurt Hershel, she told herself. Yes, she needed to protect Hershel.

There was a problem in her thought processes. After she and Valentine had left a cottage party on the beach north of Malibu, he made another pass at her, this time for a go-round in the backseat of his convertible. He had been smoking marijuana and drinking whiskey and had put his arm around her shoulders and was walking her t

oward the sand dune where his vehicle was parked, as though their coupling were a foregone conclusion. “We’ll do it au naturel, out in the fresh air,” he said.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” she replied. “You’re drunk and you smell bad. As far as skill in the sack is concerned, your reputation among the extras is between a D-minus and an F-plus. You avoided getting an F only because of the Japanese rubbers you supposedly use.”

“You’re fast on your feet, kid. But there’s a little matter you’ve never latched on to. Do you believe you got your contract because of your brains or the space between your front teeth? The people who wanted your name on a contract had other reasons, and it wasn’t that heart-shaped twat, either, although they’ll probably get to it eventually.”

He got in his convertible and drove away, stranding her on the beach. The wind was cold and blowing hard, full of sand that stung her eyes and invaded her person. The ocean was as black as satin, lustrous when the moon peeked out from a cloud, the waves welling over the rocks along the shore, forming pools where trapped baitfish skittered like handfuls of silvery dimes thrown on the water. One hundred yards away, the party at the cottage was still in progress. Should she go back and ask for a ride from people she hardly knew, signaling to all of them the squalid nature of her relationship with a man like Jack Valentine?

She walked up the incline among huge wind-sculpted formations that resembled abstract works of art and came out on the highway and began walking back to Los Angeles, ignoring the backdraft of trucks that sucked past her. At dawn a police cruiser picked her up and a patrolman drove her home. He was young and had olive skin and a dimple in his chin and sun-bleached hair and was obviously impressed when she told him about her acting career. “Sounds like you’re on your way,” he said.

“I bet you’re from the South,” she said. She was riding in front with him.

“You caught my accent, I guess,” he said.

“No, I can tell because you’re a gentleman. They seem in short supply out here. I grew up on a plantation in Louisiana. All the young men I knew were very much like yourself—courteous and genteel. You’ve been terribly kind.”

“Can I buy you breakfast?”

She touched his arm. “Another time. I think I’m going to sleep for a week,” she said. “You’ve been quite gallant.” She let her eyes linger on his.

“Here’s your place,” he said. “That’s Muscle Beach down yonder. I’m gonna take my little boy swimming there one day. Don’t be walking on the highway again, you hear? There’s people here’bouts that don’t care two cents for the welfare of others.”

When she got back to Houston, the first person she called was Roy Wiseheart. “Jack Valentine said I was given a contract at Castle for ulterior motives.”

“He’s a gofer and a public fool and one cut above a pimp. He shouldn’t be allowed around you.”