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The World in the Evening

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

PART ONE

An End

1

The party, that evening, was at the Novotnys'. They lived high up on the slopes of the Hollywood hills, in a ranch-style home complete with Early American maple, nautical brasswork and muslin curtains; just too cute for words. It looked as if it had been delivered, already equipped, from a store; and you could imagine how, if the payments weren't kept up, some men might arrive one day and take the whole place back there on a truck, along with Mrs. Novotny, the three children, the two cars and the cocker spaniel. Most of the houses Jane and I visited were like that.

It was quite late already and several people were drunk; not acting badly, just boastful and loud and thick-voiced. I was about halfway; which was the best way for me to be. As long as I was sober, I sulked. If I went on drinking, I was apt to turn nasty and say something embarrassing, or else fall asleep and snore. Jane was always worried about that, and yet she never could tear herself away until the end. "Why in hell don't you go on back home, if you're so bored," she sometimes whispered to me furiously, "instead of drooping around like a Goddam martyr? What's the matter? Afraid I might do something you wouldn't do?" I used to grin at her without answering. That was exactly how I wanted her to feel: unsure of me and uneasy and guiltily aggressive. It was the only way I knew of hitting back at her.

I was alone, now, at the uncrowded end of the living room. A mirror on the opposite wall showed me how I appeared to the outside world: a tall, blond, youngish-oldish man with a weakly good-looking, anxious face and dark over-expressive eyes, standing in a corner between a cobbler's table and a fake spinning wheel, holding a highball glass in my hand. A miniature brass ship with a fern growing out of it was fastened to the wall beside my cheek. I looked as if I were trying to melt into the scenery and become invisible, like a giraffe standing motionless among sunlit leaves.

I was wearing my usual crazy costume, the symbol of my protest against this life I was leading: a white tuxedo jacket, with a crimson bow tie and carnation to match my moiré cummerbund. Elizabeth, if she could have seen me, would have said, "Darling, what on earth are you supposed to be? No—don't tell me. Let me guess. ..." In a way, I think I did dress like this just because it would have amused Elizabeth. Certainly, no one here saw the joke, not even Jane; my masquerade as a musical-comedy Hollywood character passed entirely unnoticed. And why, after all, should any of these people notice it? This was the only way they knew me—as I appeared, night after night, at Jane's side, in the doorways of their homes. (We never stayed home alone together in the evenings, any more; it would have been unthinkable.)

If you had asked who I was, almost every one of them would have answered "Jane Monk's husband," and let it go at that. It had been the same right from the start, when we'd first arrived in California, the previous year. Even the society columnists decided I was no fun and had better be ignored. They never mentioned me directly if they could avoid it, though they bubbled with items like "Saw Jane (Mrs. Stephen) Monk looking gorgeous (as usual) in white satin with some stunning antique Brussels lace. They're here from New York, via Nassau. Plan to settle for a while. Jane tells me ..." etc., etc. Jane loved it. She never seemed to get tired of being talked about, no matter how bitchily. She even told me once—taking it as a huge joke—how a man at Chasen's had been overheard saying "Well, he may be a Monk—but, brother, she's no nun." That was one of the things about her I still found charmingly innocent and touching.

"Out here on the Coast," someone declared, in the group nearest to me, "you just don't know what the score is. Why, back East, we're practically in the war already." Someone else agreed that F.D.R. would get us in as soon as he could find an excuse. There was talk about the London blitz, and Rommel and the fighting in Africa (this was April, 1941) but you could tell that none of them cared very much. Their fears and their interests were elsewhere. Sid Novotny was a screen writer, and this party was just in case the studio might be hesitating to take up his option. Alice Faye, who was to have been the guest of honor, hadn't shown up. However, several of the front-office executives were present, a couple of second-magnitude stars, and a lot of young actresses and actors. Such as Roy Griffin, for instance.

A man disengaged himself from the conversation and came over to me. I'd been watching him preparing to do this for several minutes. We'd been introduced to each other earlier in the evening; I knew he was a producer, though I'd forgotten his name. He had a crew cut, clean hairy hands, inquisitive eyes and a very sincere manner.

"Say, Mr. Monk, you know I've been wanting to get together with you ever since I heard you were out here? It was quite a thrill, meeting you tonight. It really was. Believe it or not, I'm one of the old original Rydal fans. Yes, I'll bet I was one of the very first in this country."

I made a suitable noise.

"The World in the Evening: Jesus—that's a great book! One of the truly great books written in our time." The producer lowered his voice, as though we were just entering a church. "You know something?" He glanced quickly at the group he had left, afraid, apparently, that they might be listening. "Somewhere in that book, there's a great movie. One hell of a movie. Most people wouldn't be able to see that. But I can. I can give you my word that it's there. Did anyone ever buy the rights?"

"I don't think so." I was looking over the crowd at the other end of the room. I had just noticed that Jane wasn't there. "I could find out, if you're interested." Roy Griffin wasn't there, either.

"I'm definitely interested. Definitely. Say, supposing we manage to work something out, would you possibly consider helping us on the screen play?"

"I'm not a writer, you know." Jane might be in the bar, of course. Or with Mrs. Novotny, admiring some new clothes. Maybe she wasn't with Roy at all.

"Not a writer, Mr. Monk? Come now—let's not be so darned modest! What about that introduction you did to the Collected Stories? I read that over and over. You did a beautiful job. Fine. Sensitive. No one but yourself could have written that way. No one else was in a position to know her as you did."

"Well—I'm glad you liked it, but ..."

"And it's not a question of movie experience. Let me put it this way—we'd need you as a sort of a, well, an artistic conscience. Someone to tell us when we're getting off the beam. You're the only man who could tell us that. And we've got to watch our step clear through, from start to finish. Got to watch every darned little nuance, or we're sunk. Every word Elizabeth Rydal wrote is sacred to me. Sacred. I'm not kidding. I'd want to make this picture just as she'd have wished it—catch that wonderful delicate style and preserve it in celluloid, if you get what I mean...."

I've got to find them, I said to myself. Now, at once. I can't stand any more of this. This time, I've got to be absolutely sure.

The producer's voice faded in again: "Say, how about lunch, some time? Say, why don't I call you around the first of the week?"

"All right." I tore a leaf from my notebook and scribbled the telephone number, substituting one wrong digit; a favorite trick of mine. If they finally track you down you can always pretend it was a slip.

"And Mrs. Monk too, of course. If she'd care to join us."

"I'll ask her." I thrust the paper into his hand and walked away before he could say another word.

At the entrance to the bar I ran into Mrs. Novotny, dainty and haggardly bright, in a dirndl costume with slave bangles.

"Getting yourself a drink? Good!" She smiled brilliantly, squeezing the crow's-feet around her eyes. "I like a man who knows how to look out for himself."

I grinned at her numbly. ("Your dying-Jesus grin," Jane called it, when she was mad at me.)

"Sid and I were both so glad you could come, this evening. Jane's such a lot of fun. She enjoys herself so. She always gets a party going. She's such a happy person...."

"Yes," I said.

"Excuse me...." She gave me another smile, touched my arm lightly and headed eagerly back into the crowd. I'd been getting ready to ask her if she knew where Jane was. It was so hard to hit on exactly the right tone of voice; casual, but not too casual. Now I felt glad that I hadn't tried.

The bar was three steps down from the living room. Here, the dueling pistols and the ships' compasses, the Toby jugs, the clay pipes and the Currier and Ives prints clustered around a gay altar of colored bottles, and the air was thick with smoke and chatter. I stood on the top step, looking down. A couple of men recognized me and nodded, and I nodded back; but I knew very well that none of them really wanted me to join them. A cold, bored, boring highbrow: that was how I seemed to them, no doubt. Or else a snooty, half-Europeanized playboy with a limey accent and a Riviera background, who knew Italian princesses and French counts. An alien, in any case, who didn't belong to their worried movie world, where you lived six months ahead of your salary and had to keep right on spending lest anyone should suspect that your credit wasn't good. I had no part in their ulcers and anxieties, their mortgages and their options. I had never sweated it out at a sneak preview or a projection-room post-mortem. And so, when these people thought of me, they certainly envied me my unearned money but probably also despised me for my irresponsible, unmanly freedom.

I came near to startling them all, at that moment, with a great bellow of despair, like an animal trapped in a swamp. Somehow or other, I'd wandered into this gibbering jungle of phonies and now here I was, floundering stupidly in the mud of my jealous misery and sinking deeper with every movement. I hadn't even the consolation of being able to feel sorry for myself. I wasn't in the least tragic or pitiable; no, merely squalid and ridiculous. I knew that, and yet I couldn't help myself. I couldn't get out of the swamp. I tried to think of Elizabeth and what she would have said, but it was no good. Elizabeth wasn't here. I was all alone. I should go on struggling and sinking. I had no control, any more, over what was going to happen.

Jane wasn't in the bar. Neither was Roy Griffin.

Turning from the steps, I walked quickly along a short passage, opened a glass door and stepped out into the garden. It was cut from the steep hillside in two terraces; a dichondra lawn above, and, below, a small kidney-shaped swimming pool. The water of the pool must have been heated for it steamed gently in the beams of submerged lamps, its greenlit fumes rising theatrically against the enormous cheap-gaudy nightscape of Los Angeles which sparkled away out to the horizon like a million cut-rate engagement rings.

There was nobody in the garden.

I came to a halt at the edge of the pool. It was brilliantly clean; not one leaf floating on its surface, not one speck of dirt on its tiled floor. God curse this antiseptic, heartless, hateful neon mirage of a city! May its swimming pools be dried up. May all its lights go out for ever. I drew a deep dizzying breath in which the perfume of star jasmine was mixed with chlorine.

So this time was going to be like all the other times. I wasn't going to find her. I wasn't going to know for certain. Later, she'd walk into the living room quite casually, smiling as she said, "We took a ride. I felt like I needed some fresh air." Or else simply smiling and not bothering to explain at all. And Roy would either be casual too, as some of the others had been, or else embarrassed and in need of a stiff drink, avoiding my eyes. And I'd look at Jane and she'd look right back at me; and there would be nothing to say about it because I could prove nothing.

She and Roy had probably driven off into the hills together, the way the high-school kids did. The other day, at another party, a man had told us how he'd had a flat tire on Mulholland Drive, and how he'd gone over to a car parked near by, after suitable warning coughs, to borrow a jack, and surprised a couple of them—the boy around sixteen, the girl maybe less—stark naked. "Holy smoke," the boy had said, "for a minute I thought you were a cop!" They hadn't seemed the least ashamed of themselves. Jane's comment on this story had been, "Well, good for them!"

I became suddenly aware of my hand, and the glass in it flashing green with the magic light of the water. The glass was empty, asking to be filled. I would have to go back into the house to fill it. I'd fix myself a huge drink and then sit down somewhere and figure out a very clever way to trap her once and for all, and be sure.

Wait, though. What was that?

Not the distant noises from the house. Not the crickets, which were chirping all over the hillside. Not the beating of my own heart.

There it was again. Quite close.

But—of course! I had entirely forgotten about the doll's house.

It was a playhouse, actually; fixed up to look like the witch's candy cottage in Hansel and Gretel, with curly pillars that were supposed to be sugar sticks and shingles painted the color of toffee. The three Novotny children were still just small enough to squeeze into it together; Mrs. Novotny thought it was cute to make them demonstrate this to her guests, on Sunday afternoons. All you could see of it now was a black outline, standing back among the shadows of the oleanders around the pool.

I set my glass down very gently on the paving and tiptoed across to it, holding my breath.

Small but unmistakable sounds. Out of the darkness, right at my feet.

And then Jane's voice in a faint gasping whisper: "Roy ...!"

I stood there, death-still, clenching my fists. But I was grinning.

For now, suddenly—now that there was never again to be any more doubting, dreading, suspecting—here, right in the brute presence of the simple unbelievable fact—I felt what I had never guessed I would feel; a great, almost agonizing upsurge of glee, of gleeful relief.

Caught. Caught her at last.

At my first boarding school in England, on winter evenings, we had played hide-and-seek sometimes, turning out the lights and hiding all over the big house. When you were It, you tiptoed around holding your breath and listening, until your ears grew so keen it seemed you could hear every sound within miles. I had always hated being It, but it was worth bearing the tense, spooky loneliness just for the sake of that one intoxicating, gleeful instant when you knew you'd caught them, those whisperers lurking and mocking you in the darkness.

A funny thought flashed through my head: I've been It for nearly four years. What a long game ...

Right at my feet, Jane giggled. "Roy—you sonofabitch ..."

And, as if this were the signal they had been waiting for, my clenched fists jumped from my sides and pounded thundering on the doll's house roof.

Then, light and quick as a murderer, I turned and ran laughing up the steps from the pool, jumped a flower bed, burst through a line of bushes and was out on the driveway. Luckily, my car was parked some distance from the front door of the house. I fumbled frantically for the key, started the engine, backed out like a rocket, smashed into another car—crumpling the fenders, probably—bounced off it, whirled the steering wheel around, and was away.

After that, everything came unstuck. The car bolted headlong with me down the road, squealing and skidding around the curves. My left hand wanted to swing it over the edge and plunge it to a blazing wreck in a gully; but my right hand refused, and was stronger. My voice was yelling dirty insane words about the things it would do to Jane. My mind sat away off somewhere, calm and strangely detached, disclaiming all responsibility for this noisy madman, just watching, listening and waiting for what would happen next.

And then I was up in the bedroom of our house. I had found one of her lipsticks and scribbled the mirror and the walls with the words I had been shouting, in big scarlet letters. Now I was throwing stuff into a suitcase as if the place were on fire. Reaching into the closet for clothes, my hands touched an evening gown, gripped and crumpled it and dragged it out, and it was Jane I was going to kill. "Rip her up. Rip her wide open," I muttered, hunting for a razor blade in my shaving kit. The blade was double-edged, awkward to hold. I cut my thumb deeply as I slashed with obstinate rage at the dress; the silk was amazingly tough. But it was done at last. Sobbing, I flung the poor, beautiful, harmless thing into a corner, all gashed and bloodied and spoiled. How horrible! I was going to vomit. I stumbled into the bathroom with my bleeding thumb in my mouth and reached the toilet bowl only just in time.

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Excerpted from The World in the Evening by Christopher Isherwood. Copyright © 1954 Christopher Isherwood. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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