[The gardens of Adonis] were baskets or pots filled with earth,
in which wheat, barley, fennel, and various kinds of flowers were
sown or tended for eight days […]. Fostered by the sun’s heat,
the plants shot up rapidly, but having no root they withered
as rapidly away… — Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough
“Hold.”
Six young men stood motionless on an empty stage, each in a different pose that showed the progress of a discus throw. From left to right: Charley, the youngest, bearing his discus at his side, eyes cast down in thought; Ned, the classicist down for summer vacation, a little too relaxed in the wind-up; Lewis, the only one who had ever thrown a discus, in crouched rotation, his arm raised behind him at the high point of the orbit; Sidney, frozen in motion, headband askew where he had wiped his sweat, buckling within from the tension; Leo, the real actor, his hands empty, concentrating on the imaginary discus that flew from him; Clifford, brought on for the boxing scenes, taking the easiest pose, the completion. The camera whirred, and the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica played on a phonograph in the house.
The director whistled. “Sidney! You’re wobbling.”
Sidney dug his toes into the stage to balance his weight and took a deep, silent breath. He and Lewis, once again, had been given the most difficult positions to hold.
“Cut.” Shadows began to dart around the theater. An assistant said, “All right, boys, take it easy. Lewis, you’re up.”
The young men, exhaling as one, stepped out of their poses, relaxed their bodies, and, handing off their discuses, shuffled into the semi-darkness beyond the lights—all except Lewis, who would now perform a series of actual throws to show the event in motion. A crewmember rushed up to him with water and a towel, and another came to check his hair and makeup. The others reached absently for sandwiches, robes, seats behind the director, who had scolded them early on, in heavy German tones, for talking too much and disrupting the atmosphere. All week long they had been Olympians in ancient Greece, staging, sometimes in tableau vivant, sometimes in action, most of the events of those original games: pankration, the long jump, the stadion, the javelin and now the discus throw. There was no room in the theater for equestrian events, though Sidney had grown up with horses in the Gabilans and could handle them; he was used instead for a long jump over three comrades bearing shields. Clifford, an amateur boxer who trained at the same gym as the producer’s son, came on as a favor but still was not especially prepared for the different techniques of pankration, and neither was Leo, his partner for that segment, who had never been in a fight with rules; yet they pulled off a choreographed match with surprising aplomb, looking for a full afternoon as if they would kill each other and then shrugging it off afterward. The director had made them all practice calisthenics together—fully paid, to the producer’s chagrin—during the weeks leading up to filming to get them into the right spirit and impose some uniformity on them.
They watched now, mostly silent—except Charley, who kept whispering something to Ned—as Lewis wound up, once, twice, three times, and released the discus off the stage, out of frame. In a moment he was brought another so that he could do it again. He performed with an almost exaggerated seriousness, not an actor’s seriousness, but the seriousness of an Iowa boy brought up by a preacher grandfather—an Iowa boy, however, who had grown accustomed to sunlight and beaches and literature, whose monkishness now was visibly compounded with a sinewy, fresh-air sensuality. The others at first had found him too self-absorbed, too alone with himself in their midst. But he told good jokes and smiled more often than they expected him to, and they had grown to like him.
This was the last day they would be filming in Hollywood. It was summer, 1924, and the days had been hot. The scenes they had completed here were meant at first to be the entire film: a one-reel documentary short, no more than ten minutes long, on the ancient Olympics, inspired by the Summer Games being held that year in Paris—a modest project, with no established actors, filmed not even in a studio but in an empty theater with a simple black curtain as a backdrop. But the producer, who owed a small debt to the director that dated back to their school days in Europe, was nevertheless unnerved by the intellectual stylization of even this insignificant film as envisioned, and suggested that perhaps a plot could be tied in, something brief, an athlete’s coming of age, a skirmish or two, an argument between the gods, any of the above, with some outdoor photography, a villa in Malibu, Aphrodite with an olive wreath—just another ten minutes, yes? The director, after some time, agreed to certain of these demands, but asked to film them not on the coast but further afield, in the Coachella Valley. When the producer objected that Malibu looked more like Greece than the Colorado Desert did, the director insisted that if he was going to film the gods, then it had to be in an alien landscape, and in any case the mountains were more dramatic there, sheer granite upthrusts from the valley floor, with none of the coastal peaks’ hazy sea-softness. The producer at last relented, and so tomorrow they were all to travel to Palm Springs for a week to give the film a second half—though exactly what this second half would include remained somewhat nebulous.
“One last time, Lewis.”
Lewis said nothing, but something in his face registered a vague amusement before he picked up the discus once again, turned his attention inward, and then wound up again, his strength restrained, coiled, and then let loose as the discus shot off once more into the wings. He finished in suspension, eyes flashing, following the direction they had all received, to look in the moment of victory like an immortal among men.
The director was satisfied. Lewis stepped down from the stage, nonchalantly, as if he had been doing nothing, and joined the others without a word.
“Tomorrow morning, eight o’clock,” said the director. “The cars leave from here. Go rest. It will be hot.”
“The dog days,” said Ned, almost to himself, refraining this time from the Latin or Greek term. “They’ve just begun.” He was thinking of the sun, and pools, and midday silence—an hour or two of oblivion, just for once.
“Each of you please take a document here.” The director pointed to a pile of papers on the seat beside him. “There is dialogue. Learn it.”
Leo, his interest piqued, was the first to get up; the others followed, still in their bare feet, to get their scripts; and Charley, now that the house lights were on and the cameras had stopped rolling, had to suppress the usual self-conscious blush as he weaved through the throng of shouting, very fully clothed crewmembers going about their business. Scripts in hand, the actors ambled off together to the dressing room, exhausted but flushed with stage adrenaline, and in the cramped blue space they changed out of their costumes and left them for Irene from wardrobe, who would wash and dry them for the next day. Not that there was much for her to do: each of them wore only a tainia around his head and a kind of swim brief fitted at the front with a sash that hung like a cravat from the waist—an accessory that had puzzled them at first until Clifford, with a sudden guffaw as he looked at himself in the mirror, announced: “It’s to hide our balls, fellas!” They were hungry now, earth-shakingly hungry, in Ned’s words—the little finger sandwiches were hardly enough—and back in their street clothes, caps on, vests buttoned, they took off, each in a separate direction, down the dark streets, to meatloaf, baked ham, fresh air in the park, an unmade bed, a green reading lamp, a long sleep. The streetcars clattered by.
At the theater the crew stayed late, packing everything up for the trip next day. The director went home and left a notebook and pen beside his bed should inspiration for the second half of the film strike at night. Perhaps it did—but it made no difference, for the film, as it turned out, never would be completed, as none of the actors ever returned from the desert.
***
The young men had not expected, when they reached their destination, that the accommodation chosen by the producer, a small Spanish-style inn called The Gardens, would be situated not in Palm Springs itself but some distance down the road, in a rocky secluded spot at the base of the mountains—a spot chosen, it was said, primarily in order to avoid any disputes with either of the rival matriarchs who effectively controlled most of the land development within city limits. At the end of a drive lined with tall desert fan palms, there appeared gradually in the afternoon haze, as if it were being developed in a photograph, a white stucco building, of more modest size than the palm drive would have led one to expect, with a red tile roof, wooden shutters on all the windows, rows of arcades, and desert gardens where once there had been a lawn, populated now with cactus and agave, yuccas of all varieties, ocotillos, sunburst gazanias, palos verdes, sprawling bougainvillea. Somehow it did not quite come together: there was quiet, and a kind of faded color to the gardens, but the atmosphere of the place was one of vague if affectionate neglect. The inn seemed out of place in the bare desert, so far from town. It was dwarfed by the intrusions of rock behind it. The cottonwoods gave it too much shade in places, making it seem as if the structure were closing in on itself; from the front you would never guess that there was a pool with a terrace cloistered in the back. It seemed like an idea that had never quite panned out, but now that it was here, there was nothing to do but keep it going.
The hostess of the inn, a woman of indeterminate age named Della, a retired dancer who had come to California from New York an indeterminate number of years ago, had once been the mistress of the film’s producer. That was the reason this particular inn had been chosen, though the given reason was that it was especially convenient, as it was located closer to the mountains where they would be filming than anything in town was. That the film crew, on the other hand, was lodged in the center of Palm Springs was a perplexing detail, one that was not made any clearer by the explanation that there were not enough rooms at Della’s inn for everyone involved, as a good two-thirds of those remained unoccupied. Della herself was blithely indifferent, breezing in and out of rooms with coffee, deviled eggs, date nut bread, now and then some Turkish delight; they could tell she was coming by the matter-of-fact clack of her day shoes on the tile floor. She had filled out with age, and her face had lost its delicacy, but she remained a dancer who had trained in Paris and performed in New York: when she appeared, invariably it was in dark, drop-waisted dresses with ornate patterns in beads or embroidery, a string of pearls around her neck, her not naturally platinum wave crowned sometimes with a bandeau, at other times with a black capeline hat to keep off the sun. She had greeted them, when they first arrived, with a cool half-smile, saying, in a voice made deep and vinegary by her daily chain of Gauloises, “What a handsome bunch of young bucks.” Then, casually: “Once they called this place The Gardens of the Sun, and then The Gardens of Araby—does it look at all like that?—as if they wanted you to think a sheikh would come wooing you at the pool. This week we’ll call it The Gardens of Adonis—why not? You boys behave yourselves.”
There was a small staff that came in each day to work on the gardens and help with the cleaning, the laundry, and the cooking, but Della herself was more actively engaged in the running of the inn than they would have expected. She was the only member of the staff who lived on the premises. Mostly she left them to themselves, unless they asked for her, and they quickly appreciated the almost masculine forthrightness with which she addressed them, for though she would wear silk and furs to the grave, underneath there was an austerity she shared with the inn itself. The rooms bordered on the monastic, with bare white walls and beamed ceilings of dark redwood, simple armoires, and no electric lighting; but there were plants, the beds were comfortable, and the wooden shutters over the windows kept out the glare. With the actors had come costumes and props: crested helmets and breastplates laid out on the beds, scripts on the tables, javelins and shields lined up against the walls, leather sandals everywhere, the odd amphora no one quite knew the purpose of. There were no other guests at the inn, and they had made it their own. Early each morning they gathered at the poolside terrace to do calisthenics together for forty-five minutes before breakfast, pairing off to help each other with stretches and sit-ups, then all together jumping, lunging, and sprinting until Della called them in. They spent their evenings in and out of the pool, Lewis in particular, who swam lap after lap and had beaten both Sidney and Charley in freestyle races. Now and then they would stop everything and watch as a jackrabbit or a roadrunner scurried through the arcades.
They had been filming for a few days now, in the cooler hours, odd bits of scenes, most of them static, just like the ones they had done in Hollywood, only this time they were often dressed as hoplites—more or less—in tableaux the director had devised from photographs of Greek vases in his art books. But the director had also let his imagination wander into experiment now that he had the desert as a backdrop and there was some distance between himself and the producer back in Los Angeles. In one tableau, he had staggered the actors up the slope of a rocky mountainside, each in an attitude of combat with an invisible enemy. For another scene, he asked five of them to pose—each balanced, excruciatingly, on one leg—as if they were day-runners to Athens, while Sidney ran past them, take after take, in full motion. Yesterday, on the grounds of the inn itself, he had situated them around a juniper tree with baskets and poles in imitation of olive harvesters; Charley had climbed into the branches with a basket to add to the illusion.
“Arete,” said the director. “Excellence: moral, physical, mental. Fulfillment of purpose. Even as we pick the olives. They were not like the young men of today.”
The scripted sections, such as they were, were set to be filmed next.
The director, truth be told, was pleasantly surprised to find that his actors were a rather tolerant bunch, unconcerned about the tentative and improvisatory aspects of the project, and, more importantly, not prone to laughter or derision about what they were asked to do. Each day, in fact, they seemed to take it more seriously, slipping into their personas more and more readily, staying in costume longer, sometimes lolling about the pool in breastplates and sandals, practicing maneuvers in the dirt at the foot of the mountains behind the inn. After filming the previous day, Charley, glistening with sweat in the noonday sun on the mountainside, had turned to the director, surveying the valley stretched out in the heat before them, and said:
“It’s so peaceful. I’ve never been to the desert before.”
None of them had, in fact—a circumstance that had surprised the crew at first, until it was revealed that of the six, only Charley and Leo had lived in Southern California for more than a year or two, and despite being native Angelenos, neither had ever had reason or means to go east of the San Gabriel Mountains. Charley in particular, son of a Glendale grocer, had barely traveled outside of the city since he had grown old enough to work in his father’s small corner store. Yet Della found them outside all the time, even in the afternoon inferno, in heat that could melt the cameras, barefoot, lolling by the pool, joking in the shade of the cottonwood trees, running up the foothills later to see the sunset shadows over the valley.
“How did a dancer from New York end up all the way out here, in the middle of nowhere, under these bare mountains?” Ned asked her one evening. “You can’t even see the town from here.”
Della thought for a long minute, drawing leisurely on her cigarette. The factual answer was that the producer, several years ago, when he had still been vaguely recognizable as the mountaineering Austrian with a passion for automobiles, international travel, and modernist art who had wooed her between winter performances in Manhattan, had called in a favor from a friend of his, to give her something to do after her retirement. The two of them had long since broken off the romantic aspect of their relationship—or rather, she had. He, having achieved some reasonable success, had been surprisingly quick to abandon his big creative ideas; he stopped going to the mountains and the ballet and soon began to complain of taxes and back pain. He became, in fact, before her eyes, what she had never expected him to be, a self-satisfied, conspicuously mediocre middle-aged man. When, one evening, he had said to her after a performance, “My dear, you are perfection, ageless, always at work,” she grew mutinous, and within a few days she had let him down, graciously enough that they were still old friends. She enjoyed it when he visited and felt she owed him a great debt. The desert had been kind to her.
The answer she gave to Ned was the one that felt truer. “Here’s a story people tell,” she said, with a deliberately enigmatic smile. “Here in the desert there are waters which, if you drink them, make you unable to tell pure fact ever again. The water becomes part of your blood, your sweat, the tears in your eyes, and so everything you see, you see through it. You become a great liar—that’s what they say. But then a fly sees things that we don’t.”
Ned nodded, apparently satisfied.
“Come on,” said Clifford. “We’re racing to the road and back. No shoes. Gotta toughen up our feet.”
That night the sky was moonless, exceptionally clear. The desert seemed emptied of air, completely still, except for the buzzing of crickets and cicadas, the familiar hum of the desert night. Charley, looking up, said he never knew there were so many stars in the sky. The Great Rift opened over the valley like a geode of amethyst split in the dark. It seemed tonight to be part of the landscape, not something an infinite distance away from them in space. There was something pungent in the air, the smell of roots and night creosote. Della said, “There will be a storm,” and the young men were giddy in physical anticipation of it. They left her to go outside. They found a ladder and propped it against the outer wall of the pool house to get to the flat roof above. Though Della protested at first, they soothed her out of her misgivings, and soon enough she was bringing them blankets, binoculars, and, later, a bowl of dates and a thermos of coffee for them to haul up the ladder and pass around.
“Vega, Altair, Deneb.” Sidney sat with his arms around his knees, looking up at the sky. “That’s how you know it’s summer.”
“There, there, and—there.” Charley was sitting beside him, binoculars raised.
Lewis lay on his back, gazing at the smudge of Andromeda, which astronomers were observing from Mount Wilson, he had read, to determine the size of the universe.
“Have some coffee,” said Clifford. “Ned’s drinking it all.”
The granite batholith of the mountains loomed over them, hovering and dark, ninety million years old, the spot where two tectonic plates met, ground against each other, and thrust the earth skyward. Everywhere on the mountains there was evidence of cataclysmic heat and pressure. The rocks here had been sheared down the middle, laying bare the bands of minerals that had been pressed into them, quartz and feldspar from deep within the earth’s mantle. There was a special thrill to these mountains at night—they all felt it—as if the force of the plates below them were radiating out through the peaks into the darkness. Della told them there were underground rivers and waterfalls beneath these mountains, a hidden world inhabited by dangerous spirits; they saw no reason to question her. They felt conspiratorial together tonight, sitting on blankets up on the roof, surrounded by stars and Mesozoic rock, waiting for the storm to bear down. Though the sun had set hours ago it was still blistering hot, and the coffee made them sweat even more. Now and then the low hooting of an owl echoed over the valley; each time, Clifford gave out a gleeful ha in response.
“It’s at the top of a hill by the reservoir in Edendale,” said Leo to Ned. “Crestfield. They just built it last year. A great big Mediterranean villa with nothing else around it, some orange groves and fields, that’s it. That’s where Moreno lives. He talked to me. He’s got an accent like mine, but even more—you can’t understand him. Good thing it’s just pictures and no sound when you see him. We talked in Spanish instead.”
“Did you see inside?”
“Not much,” said Leo. He had been on the staff for a lavish party hosted by the film star Antonio Moreno and his oil heiress wife earlier that year, in the spring. “Just the entryway and the kitchen and a few other places, the pool—that’s all I got to see. But it was fancy. I never saw anything so fancy. They had these huge gold mirrors, gold everything, chandeliers, a stuffed zebra. It’s like they built the place for parties.”
“What was he like?”
“Nice,” said Leo. “A little bit tense. I don’t know if he wanted to be at this party. Seemed kind of relieved to just chat with little nobody me for a bit.” He snorted. “I told him I wanted to be an actor in pictures. So stupid. He must hear it all the time.”
“What did he say?”
“He was fine,” said Leo. “Just kind of waved his hand around and said, ‘Remember, all this stuff is not important. Only the work is important. Everything else, it makes you sick.’”
“Is that what you think?”
“Sure.” Leo nodded. “Everything seems more real when you’re on stage. That’s where I’m happy. I work at a hotel all day, and it’s fine, it pays good money. But I don’t have time for the stuff that matters. And these little parts I get in melodramas and variety shows—they don’t pay. I got to aim higher. Aim for the pictures.”
He did not tell Ned about the middle-aged lady with the scarab brooch and empty grey eyes who in a dim corridor had quietly offered him a certain sum to meet her somewhere private after the party. It was not the first time such a thing had happened to him, but it was the first time the offer had come from a face he might have recognized from some film or other, probably one from years ago.
Clifford, hot and restless, spat a date pit at Charley, who jumped when it hit him in the neck. He looked at Clifford in confusion but then laughed, picked up the pit, and tossed it back.
“Charley,” said Clifford, “turn those binoculars around and watch me from the big end.”
“Why?”
Clifford, standing up, peered over the edge of the roof and straightened his shoulders. “Think I can jump into the pool from here, fellas?”
They were not sure. There was a hard distance between the pool house and the pool.
“I’ll get a good run up.” Clifford kicked off his shoes. “Don’t tell Della.”
“Don’t kill yourself,” said Ned.
Clifford hopped in place once, twice, three times, loosening his muscles, then stepped back. He blew out his air. “Get ready, Charley,” he said. He shot an eagle look at the others, and with a sudden grin, he bolted, sprinting, right off the roof, hurling himself through the black night air, forward, forward, and then down, with a whoop, into the water. The splash drenched the lounge chairs by the poolside. There were cheers from the roof above.
“Charley,” yelled Clifford as he surfaced, shaking the water out of his eyes, “what did it look like?”
“Like you jumped off the face of the earth.”
Clifford said nothing but smiled in animal delight, stretching his arms and rolling onto his back to float in the bobbing waves. Charley turned the binoculars around just in time to see him murmur something drowsily to the air and then dip beneath the white surface of the water, headfirst, out of sight.
***
The sky broke early the next morning. Clouds had gathered overnight, the pressure had dropped, and shortly after breakfast the lightning that had been flashing on and off since dawn erupted into thunder and surges of hot, dusty monsoon wind that blinded all the views from the windows. It was a dry storm with no rain, but briefly there was hail, which pelted the roof and windows, leaving a thin white blanket over the rocks and the chollas that looked like snow but took longer to melt in the heat. Della marched coolly up and down the halls, checking the windows for cracked glass, replacing the flapping shutters. The staff had been dismissed for the day; the inn was entirely hers to preserve through the storm. Her hair kept coming undone as she went from one room to the next. Later that morning, when the storm had subsided for a while, all the young men, possessed by the eerie electric atmosphere outside, dashed from the inn in shorts and sandals, javelins in hand, and off through the smoketrees toward the mountains, bruise-colored and blistering with heat beneath the storm clouds. They raced along the low paths in zigzag patterns, laughing, stamping their feet, calling things out to each other that only they could hear, until they sensed a change in the air, a lifting like an updraft, and when the lightning began to flash again they knew it was time to return, sweat-drenched and with feet scratched and bleeding from the loose stones, to the shelter of the inn.
Della, waiting for them in the vestibule, regarded the dusty, grinning mass before her with a certain indulgence, puffing on her cigarette. Leo and Sidney had stalks of yarrow they had picked over their ears. Charley held out his hand.
“Look.” He opened his fingers to reveal a fossilized mollusk shell. “We found it on the mountain. It used to be the bottom of a sea.”
Della blew smoke through her lips and gazed placidly at the shell.
“Today we’ll look at it,” she said. “Tomorrow put it back. For now—” She ordered them all to bathe and warned them that the crew was coming, in an hour, to film inside the inn, whatever was possible, rather than lose a whole day to the storm.
“In the meantime,” she said, “I’m making the parlor Greek.”
What she meant, they found out an hour later when they came in costume to the parlor from their baths, was that extra space had been cleared from the far wall, which was empty except for an antique mirror in the corner that could be used or not used according to the director’s whims; centered in the foreground were a chaise longue, a stool, two potted plants, and an amphora made from terracotta. Della muttered something about a symposium and ran a cloth over the furniture. There was a dark, resinous smell in the air, bitter to the nostrils, that disconcerted the young men and put them in mind of old stone spaces, mossy groves, half-remembered landscapes from museum paintings. Ned asked Della what it was.
“Myrrh,” she said. “Pure myrrh. I have it shipped from Paris.” Then, struck by a thought, she looked up from her dusting and said, “I wonder if the smoke will ruin the lighting.”
She need not have worried, however, because a short time later, a telegram arrived with news that filming for the day had been canceled after all, as the director’s gout had flared up with the weather, and he had taken to his bed for the rest of the day. “Evidently,” said Della, “the bland diet has not helped.” A crackle of energy passed between the boys, who looked at her expectantly, smiling, arms around each other’s shoulders. “Yes,” she said. “You’re free. Only stay around—don’t go into the mountains. The dust could kick up at any moment.”
Back outside they went, to the courtyard around the pool, unable to resist the open air and the weltering monsoon light. Inside it had been stifling, too hot and too dry, but out here they could move, jogging through the arcades, stretching against the stucco walls. They transformed the poolside into their own palaistra, hauling out some mats the crew had brought them for practice. They paired up—Lewis and Sidney, Clifford and Leo, Ned and Charley—and began to spar, pankration-style, in the sun and the dust. Clifford had been teaching them everything he had learned in the past weeks; they were planning their own scene, which they would present to the director later, only now the scene itself had begun to interest them less than the odd moments of euphoria they all felt when they truly threw themselves into it. After a rest, Clifford and Leo showed them the flying mare they had performed back in the dark theater in Hollywood. Clifford clutched Leo’s wrist, turned away from him, then pulled him over his shoulder, through the air, and down onto the mat with a loud whop. One after another they tried it, laughing, sailing over each other, crashing into the mat, over and over, switching roles, until their backs were chapped and red.
“Look at those clouds rolling down over the mountains,” said Charley, gazing up from the mat. “Throw me again.”
But Ned and Clifford lifted him up and, crossing over to the pool, tossed him into the water instead. Sidney and Lewis grappled on the mat, making it up as they went along, each trying to take the other down; but they were evenly matched, and as the minutes passed, they seemed suspended in an equilibrium of tensed quads and deltoids, frozen in place, until at the same moment each shifted his weight and moved a leg; then the energy between them snapped like a bowstring, and together they fell down onto the mat, gulping in mouthfuls of air.
“If only,” said Sidney, laughing, “we had any idea what we were doing.”
“We need a centaur from the mountains to show us,” said Ned, flopping onto the mat beside him. “That’s how it used to be done.”
After a while, the wind picked up again, in arid gusts that bent the palms and the black cypresses above the arcades. As the sun went down, the color drained out of the trees and the mountains, and the desert was washed with stormy grey light. There was dust in the air now, and a kind of spark to the wind. The sky crackled in the distance. “It’s like a landscape on Venus,” said Ned. Hungry, roused by the smell of ozone flooding the valley, the young men packed up their mats and ambled back through the agave beds toward the inn. Lewis, at the rear, was smiling to himself. He was picturing his grandfather, the minister, in his stiff black coat, telling him, as he so often did, that there was no fulfillment to be found in this life in anything except God, for there was nothing earthly you could attain—marriage, honors, knowledge, achievement—that would not disappoint you once you had attained it: all of it was an endless road leading back on itself. “Even the scientists now tell us that we are merely machines, and they are right, in their way, only they have forgotten the life to come.” Lewis, just now, could think of nothing more alien than that frail old man, who still expected him to become a banker somewhere, and he felt sorry for him. Here, he thought, in the wildness of the desert, with the hot wind filling his lungs, and his fingers brushing against those of five men whom in some way he already loved; here, right now, there was nothing else to want, and nothing that could disappoint him later—he was sure of it—except only that it would be in the past and not the present. But that hardly mattered: there was only the single, overwhelming feeling that he was alive and in this moment always would be. He kept the thought to himself, but the smile remained on his face. He hoisted the mat a little higher on his shoulder and took in the last of the sun.
In the dining room, they fell without hesitation upon the dinner Della had laid out—her chicken à la King was a particular favorite, and today there was Jell-O salad afterward—until there was nothing left. They drank jug after jug of water and still felt thirsty. Leo said he had never drunk so much water in his life.
“So parched, all of you—what were you doing out there?” said Della, after another trip to the kitchen and back.
“Couldn’t you see us?” said Leo.
“Women are not allowed to watch the Olympians,” said Della, but they could not tell from her tone whether she meant it or not.
After dinner they sprawled around in the parlor, which Della had left as it was, only now it was dim and inviting with the soft warm glow that came from the gas in the wrought-iron light fixtures. Blasts of wind rattled the windows at irregular intervals, whistling over the glass and making the wood of the frames creak with the strain. A hot draft bore in through the cracks but did nothing to cool the room, where the heat seemed compressed as in a furnace, even more intense than it had been earlier in the day. There was an earthy tang in the air that lingered from the myrrh Della had burned, only now it had faded enough to blend with the sweet odor of the redwood beams swelling in the heat above them. “It’s like we’re sitting on a volcano,” Clifford said, wiping the sweat from his brow; yet in their light Olympian gear they found the heat bearable, even a little invigorating. Ned brought out a deck of cards and called everyone to gather around. But before they could decide what they wanted to play, Della had stepped back into the room, this time with a jug in her hands that was different from the water jug, large and opaque, with a stopper. She placed it on a sideboard, from which she then pulled out six small glasses. She set the glasses beside the jug and smiled mysteriously. She said:
“Here, boys, have some whiskey.”
They stared at her blankly. There was silence for a moment until Charley broke it with a nervous laugh. Ned opened his mouth to say something, but Della raised a hand to silence him.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “No one is coming here tonight. It’s my treat. Don’t let it go to waste.” She pressed a conspiratorial finger to her lips and winked. Then she was gone once more, back to the kitchen, or somewhere else; they were never sure. They had the parlor to themselves.
For a moment no one made a move; they only looked at each other, one to the next, trying to gauge each reaction to this unexpected development. It was Clifford who broke the silence. “Well, you heard what she said.” He sprang to his feet and padded over to the sideboard, where he pulled the stopper off and lifted the jug to his nose. “Whew,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Smells good, boys.” He poured the whiskey into six glasses, neat. “Come and get it.”
They took their first drink as a shot, but for the second round they went back to their places on couches and cushions to savor it. Their reticence melted away, and they settled around the parlor now flushed with a different kind of heat, muscles loosened, blood buzzing. The floor became a maze of ankles, whiskey glasses, and interlocking Turkish rugs.
“Some pretty nice stuff,” said Clifford. “Not your usual rotgut.”
He was lounging against the mahogany leg of a chair in an attitude of extravagant ease, swirling the liquor around in his glass and listening to the roar of the wind outside. His mouth curled in a satisfied smile that lingered between sips of his drink.
“I found it,” said Sidney, at the other end of the room. He had brought in a map of the Coachella Valley from the study. “Look, right here.” He pointed to a dot in the brown contours that represented the San Jacinto Mountains. “Oasis King Mine.”
“It was a mine!” said Charley. In the foothills earlier they had stumbled upon a ramshackle structure of buckled wood built into the mountainside. Nearby there had been a small stamp mill and scattered bits of old rusted metal. “Do you think it was a gold mine?”
“Maybe,” said Sidney. “Whatever was there, it’s long gone now.”
Lewis moved closer to peer at the map. “What about that narrow path, the one we went up that trailed off the main route?” he said. “It should be right about—here. Just past the mine.”
“Was that really a path?” said Sidney, scrutinizing the topographical lines. “No, it isn’t here… Oh—but look. 1898. That’s when this was made. It’s all changed since then.”
Lewis looked intently at the map, then settled back against the ottoman behind him. The path—he was sure it was a path—had been in shadow, winding through dark metamorphic rock walls veined with quartz. There was just enough space for one person at a time to sidle through. He and Sidney had stepped into it only for a minute, eyeing the rocks and trying to see where the path might lead. Not far in, it pitched up into a scramble, so that Sidney had had to lift him up to give him a view of what lay beyond: an upward slope, along which the path curved and disappeared, and then a view into the distance, where much to his surprise Lewis had spied a pair of bighorn sheep traversing the rocky expanse. There had been no time to go farther.
“What do you think it led to?” said Lewis. “I wanted to keep following it.”
“Probably just some rocks.”
“Good enough.” Lewis smiled. “Imagine a great big rock you can climb up and lie on, and sun yourself on it all day like a lizard. Just you and the mountain, thinking lizard thoughts, rock thoughts. Doesn’t that sound nice.”
Sidney understood. The desert had revived in him something that as a boy he had taken as a plain fact: that the earth around him was entirely alive, a place of possibility and excitement, and that at any moment it might reveal itself and in some way be known. He had felt that in the wild golden hills of Central California, where the dark groves of old oak, the talus caves and pyroclastic boulders, the deep gorges burning in the sunlight all seemed animated by something mysterious that existed just below the surface, barely touching the mundane structures of small-town life but always just behind them. Back then he had lived half out of doors, and dreamed of far-off places, and saved up his money for adventure magazines, an atlas, leather notebooks, a book of philosophy he did not understand but hoped one day he would. That world seemed an infinite distance now from Los Angeles, where he did carpentry work for one of the studios, day in, day out, from an anonymous street in Westlake to a pile of wood and back again—decent work, but nothing that touched him in his depths, and not what he had come to the city to do. But here in the desert the light flooded over the mountains again, the sun blasted the valley, the rocks burned in the clear spring air, and it seemed, if only for a few days, as if in that old existence there was less illusion than he had come to believe.
“Well,” he said, “the only way to find out is to go exploring.”
“Mmm.”
Lewis closed his eyes and took a long sip of his whiskey.
Ned meanwhile had been telling a story to Clifford. “From Lucian,” he insisted, though it meant nothing to his listener—who, however, had asked for the story, which Ned had begun but not finished in the morning as they watched the storm roll in over the valley.
“They weren’t Greeks, but Scythians,” said Ned. “Dandamis and Amizokes. From the arid steppe. They had drunk each other’s blood, because in Scythia they were always at war, and it was important to have a blood brother on the battlefield with you.”
Clifford said, “They really drank it?”
“They did,” said Ned. “They would test each other out for a while. You only wanted a man who had true valor for a blood brother. It couldn’t be just anybody. Then, once they had proven themselves to each other, they would slice their fingers and let them bleed into a cup. Then they would dip the tips of their swords into it, and each drink from the cup.”
“Hm.”
“So Dandamis and Amizokes have done the ritual,” Ned continued. “But then a few days afterward, the Sauromatians invade. They’re another war people on horses, from across the river, the Tanais. Doesn’t that sound like a barbarian river? Now it’s the Don in Russia. Anyway, in battle the Sauromatians take Amizokes prisoner. Dandamis hears his friend’s cries for help and with no second thought he jumps into that cold, black river and swims across it to the enemy camp. They’ve got their javelins on him, but he faces them down, says he’ll stand ransom for Amizokes. Anything the Sauromatians ask from him, he’ll give, including his own freedom in place of his friend’s. The chief of the Sauromatians agrees, and says he’s only got to give up one thing: his eyes.”
“Shit.”
“Well,” said Ned. “Dandamis does it. He can’t stand the thought of his friend being degraded, body and soul, so he goes to the blade without a word of protest. After they scrape his eyes out, the Sauromatians set Amizokes free, and off they go, those two friends, only now Amizokes has to help Dandamis along, guide him, bear back him across the river to the Scythian camp. Now, this is too much. The Sauromatians get the jitters. They don’t want to fight an enemy with that kind of courage, that kind of bond. So they pack up and retreat home, leaving the Scythians in peace. But when it’s all over, Amizokes can’t bear the fact that he can see while his friend is blind, so what does he do? That’s right. He cuts out his own eyes. Just like that. And for the rest of their lives, then, Dandamis and Amizokes live together—in darkness, but in honor.”
“Is it true?”
Ned shrugged. “It’s a story a Scythian tells a Greek man in this old Roman-era dialogue because he wants to show him what true, heroic friendship should look like—something the overcivilized Greeks of that late date had apparently forgotten. To Lucian it’s probably nuts. But who knows.”
Clifford fell silent, his thoughts turning inadvertently to his brother, scattered in the dust in the fields of France, like so many other young men, only months after he had turned twenty-one. Clifford himself was already older than that; his brother would be twenty-one forever. Fifty-two thousand American boys dead within six months—that’s the number they had told him. He would never trust a senator, a preacher, or a banker again. He wondered what it would have been like for those Scythian heroes to have to return to people like that.
“I guess it was different for them,” he said. “They didn’t have all these big shots lying to them and making them get blown up for nothing.”
“I don’t know if it’s ever been for something.”
Clifford shook his head. “There are good fights. Just not anymore.” He took a sip of his whiskey. Then he said, “Didn’t some of those old heroes go to the underworld before they were dead? To find out what was there?”
“A few did. Not all of them made it back.”
“Hm.” Clifford considered this. “I bet if you get your eyes cut out with your buddy it’s kind of like you’re in the underworld together now forever. The rest of us just close our eyes and see our own black nothing, but those two see the same black nothing, with their eyes open, because they’re there together. Probably speaking some underworld language, seeing underworld things—real things, not the fake things they make us look at here. Just the two of ‘em together. That’s peace.” He took another sip and finished his drink. “Is that what your guy says? That’s what he should say. That’s what those two are actually doing in that hut.”
Ned grinned. “Cliff, you’re a poet. Who knew?”
Clifford shook his head. “It’s just the giggle juice, my friend. Speaking of which—” He looked at his empty glass and raised his voice. “Men!” he said. “Round three. We haven’t even made a dent.”
They did make a dent after the third round, with glasses filled rather higher than they had been before. Charley, flushed and happy, not accustomed to alcohol, sat down again beside Leo, whom he had been pumping for information about being in pictures.
“I didn’t know it would be this fun,” he said. “I couldn’t be good like you, but—maybe some small stuff.”
“You want to try for real, man?” said Leo.
“It’d be nice sometimes,” said Charley. “I never got to do anything like this before. Maybe it could help make a little money. I don’t like to say anything to my parents, but—what I’d like—”
“—is not to be stuck in that shop all the time?”
“Oh—” said Charley, “it’s not so bad. I don’t mind it. Not really. It’s just—it’s not really what I want to do. I’m twenty years old, and I’ve been working there since I was fourteen. That’s a long time. I feel kind of like I can’t grow up. The idea of doing it forever… I don’t know.”
“They really need you?”
“They do,” said Charley. “They can’t afford to pay somebody for real, not after they bought our house. They’re barely breaking even. And my dad’s getting older. He can’t lift some of the heavy stuff anymore. Somebody’s got to help him. That’s all right for now. But if I could just make a little extra money to help them pay all that debt off, and then get myself started—that would be swell.”
“Started—with the farm?”
“Yes.”
Charley, though he rarely admitted it to anyone, had begun to formulate plans for himself and his future, if it ever came about that he could be untethered from his parents’ shop. He had contemplated this problem for years without having ever been able to come up with a solution. But the previous summer he had stayed with relatives to help out on their small farm in the Santa Ynez Valley after their eldest son married and moved away to Bakersfield. He found that he enjoyed his days out of doors, tending the crops, working the gardens, lunching under the shade of an oak tree, alone with his thoughts, existing for a little while just as himself and not as a pair of hands for somebody else. He got on unusually well with the pigs and cows, and for once he looked forward to waking up early and getting to work for the day, feeding the animals, taking care of them, now and then treating them for colic or ringworm. He felt he had some purpose. When, one morning, the calves were taken to slaughter, this interest took a different turn. He did not watch it but was sick when he saw the results, and for several days he felt unmoored from himself and his family. But the idea came to him that if he worked hard enough, he could in time have his own farm, where there would be apple trees and lettuce and grape vines, and the calves would not be killed. It would be a small thing, but it would be his. For his remaining days on the farm, he tried to learn everything he could from his relatives, and when he returned, he raided the library for everything he could find: farmers’ manuals, biology textbooks, almanacs. He thought perhaps if he studied hard enough and could come up with the money, he might be able to go to veterinary school and in the meantime make that his trade. He was not an especially quick study, but he had the drive to do something that was his own; all that was required, he thought, was time and means. Neither was at all forthcoming—his parents needed him in the shop every day, what little money he could save was nowhere near enough, and he was always, always exhausted—and the one friend he had told about it responded frankly that financially education and property were equally impossible. But in his imagination he persisted, with the blind faith that somehow, if it was meant to happen, soon enough some way could be found.
“I’d just like a little time,” he said to Leo. “I need to get a breath and catch up. But I need some money to do it. Maybe pictures could help.”
Leo smiled and gave a slight nod. He had surprisingly kind eyes, Charley thought, for an actor. “Well,” he said, “it’s not quite the thing to make a quick buck, the pictures. Sometimes—you know, it all just makes you want to jump in front of a car. Don’t forget that. But if you strike it right, you can do it. Don’t sell yourself short. Start now. Be really good in this one.”
“Sure.” Charley took a sip of his whiskey and gazed around the room, content. “Out here,” he said, “it all kind of doesn’t seem to matter, does it? It seems like everything will just be fine.”
“Brother, I know.”
Leo drank with him, then raised his knee and wrapped his drinking arm around it, holding the glass in front of his face and swirling the liquid around in the candlelight. He looked for a moment as if he were about to say something, but instead he smiled at Charley and took another sip.
“The clang of armor, the grit of the sand, the smell of myrtle and leather,” said Clifford. He was reading from the battered pages of a screenplay someone had left on the end table beside him. “Pff. Not bad.”
“What’s that?” said Charley.
“Stage directions for tomorrow, Charles,” said Clifford. “You didn’t read ‘em?”
“But not a battle this time,” said Leo. “The hoplite race.”
Most of the battle scenes, the director had quietly told them, would probably be cut, and not only because the producer was sure to object to the stylization necessitated by the small number of actors at hand. “This is not a war picture—our battles are different,” the director had said. “But those scenes have raised the stakes. In any case, all battles stop for the Olympics.” There would be a montage: single combat; Pheidippides running over the mountains to Sparta; then the hoplite race in full armor. “The hoplitodromos,” the director insisted. “No one knows it anymore. A beautiful race, difficult. Only,” he added artfully, “we will not tell our esteemed producer any of this, eh?”
In practice, they found that the race was hardly going to be beautiful, but still they wanted to please the old man and were determined to tough it out until they got it right and could at least give it some glory on film.
Ned, leaning back, sighed, and said, “That thing is going to be a backbreaker. Especially after all this liquor.”
“We’ll sleep it off,” said Leo. “It should look like hard work, anyway.” He got up to get himself some water. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror but ignored it. He was looking forward to the hoplite race tomorrow. They would probably have to do it several times—so much the better. It had been a long time since he had worked his body as hard and as regularly as he had in these past few days, and he had forgotten the sheer physical exhilaration of it. More than once during filming, the thought had occurred to him that he, like all the others here, was lucky to get to do this now, to play a young athlete at his peak, while he could still look like one on a film screen that forgave nothing. Sooner or later that window would close for all of them. Already around his eyes he had begun to notice the first signs of age, faint wrinkles around the edges from smiling, and across his brow the creases were starting to linger, especially when he was tired. His father was bald, and he watched the hairline at his temples with some trepidation as the months of his youth raced on. Physically he could tell that he was just past his summer peak: on these hot mountain paths, it was impossible to ignore the fact that sometimes his energy would flag in a way it never had on the tennis court or the soccer field only a few years ago, when he had been in practice and, it seemed, all but invincible. He had spent enough time around film people and the artificially young to absorb some of their anxious fixation on their looks, and now and then the thought would come: This is impossible. It’s already too late. How long, indeed, could he remain poor and young? But he made a resolute, if not always successful, effort to shake it off. It seemed to him somehow weak and poor-spirited to dwell on it, to mask it, to look in the mirror too often. He was determined not to live that way. Better to take each moment as it was, if you had the courage, and let the rest of it be damned.
From the other end of the room, Lewis spoke.
“Look, Charley,” he said, pointing to a passage in a book he had pulled off the shelf. “Maybe it was gold at that old mine.” The Geology of Southern California had apparently interested either Della or one of the previous owners of the inn. “But look what else: beryllium, tungsten, limestone, copper. Garnet and tourmaline. It sounds like a spell.”
“Xeric plants?” said Charley, leaning in to see. “I don’t know what half these things are. “Hey—wait—” He showed the pages to Lewis and Sidney. “Look at this—a legend about a subterranean city somewhere in these mountains. Some miners say they found tunnels and art on the walls and even—really?—an amphitheater.”
“And—giant reptiles?” Sidney grinned. “What is this?”
“Now we have to go and explore it,” said Charley. “It’s a proper adventure. I’ve never had a proper adventure.”
Leo, meanwhile, had ventured over to the Victrola and wound it up. From the top of a small pile beside it he picked up a record, placed it on the turntable, and brought down the needle. As soon as the music began and he heard the ascending scales of a breezy piano and cornet, he recognized the tune, as did everyone else in the room.
“‘Dardanella,’” he said. “How’s your foxtrot, boys?”
“It’s too hot,” said Clifford.
“Never.” Leo laughed, shuffled his feet for a few bars in something that was clever but not a foxtrot at all, then after a few moments shrugged dramatically and gave it up. “You’re right, there’s no air!” he said. He went over to the jug of whiskey and made his way around the room with a light step, topping off each glass while the music played.
“‘By the Dardanelles with glowing eyes—’” said Clifford, beating out the rhythm. “Man. I used to fight at a fairground where they played this song over and over and over again at the tent next to the ring. Back when I was just starting out. Thanks, Leo—” He took a drink from his newly filled glass. “I made up my own words for it. Can’t repeat ‘em, though.”
He did repeat a few of them.
Charley, chewing on his lip to keep from spitting out the whiskey as he laughed, bit down on the spot where yesterday he had been socked playfully in a boxing match. He felt a sting from the alcohol, which made him laugh even harder. He swallowed and wiped his mouth. When he looked at his hand, there was a trace of fresh blood on it from his lip, and he felt proud of it.
“If you Boy Scouts are gonna go out exploring lost cities,” said Clifford as the music continued, “then we should take over one of those ancient palaces and make it home. Hide out in the mountains. Hunt for food. Keep old ladies in the valley safe. Steal when we need to, but only from the rich.”
“Desert bandits!” said Charley. He felt a strange sense of déjà vu—hot rocks, a bandana to keep off the sun, sand on his boots, pocketknife in hand, on the hunt, exploring—a dream.
“Yep,” said Clifford. “Just think of it. Sun, action, something to do. That’s life with some juice in it. Who needs to go back? I can’t throw punches till I’m eighty. What’s your bandit name gonna be?”
Ned, lounging on one arm, had grown quiet since the music had begun. The last time he had heard “Dardanella” was at the Santa Monica Pier with Jeanette, only a few weeks ago, when she had come to visit and they had finally called it all off, in a setting very much like the one Clifford had just described—Jeanette from the lunch counter, back in the Bay, where he went to escape from campus and the growing suspicion that the secret of life was not to be found in study, or at least not in the academy. “Don’t you want to be a professor?” Jeanette asked him, and he had been able only to hedge with the answer, “Well, it’s a lot of observing.” He had been disappointed, as an undergraduate, that his college years had not been what he had imagined they would be, some passage into an adult world that was deeper, more liberating and profoundly experienced than the world of youth he was leaving behind. He had continued as a postgraduate almost out of inertia—what else was there to do that really meant anything?—but still was surprised that what it turned out to be was mostly a continuation of the old student life, and not a radical break into something new. His love for Virgil and Plutarch was undiminished, but more and more he was conscious of the airless classroom, of his growing suspicion that there might be a limit to observation and analysis, especially at twenty-three years old. He became depressed. He felt as if he had graduated into a void. He found, increasingly, that what he looked forward to most each day was not his studies, but the time when he could leave campus and roam around the town, stopping sometimes at a park or a theater but most often at his favorite lunch counter, where he would sit reading novels or scribbling epigrams on napkins over coffee and a cigarette. The only things coursing through my veins are caffeine and nicotine. Life is nowhere to be found. That was a favorite. It made him laugh. Jeanette worked part time at the bookstore down the street and came in as often as he did, though her vice was not coffee or cigarettes but large ice cream sodas. She was a journalist for the local paper but was just starting out and needed the extra money from the bookstore job. She was very forward, a Berkeley native, with spirited eyes and what Ned called a crackerjack tongue, which she exercised immediately and at length. They talked until the café closed at ten o’clock, then met the next day and did it again; they kept it up for about a week until finally, one night, she invited him up to her apartment above a jewelry and watch repair shop, and within the hour he had lost his virginity, an experience he approached at first with certain qualms, but then, after the point of no return, with great, unexpected enthusiasm. Over the days he lost count of how many times they did it.
For a while this thrill of discovery lifted him out of his doldrums. The weeks unfolded out of focus. He would wander through campus during the day feeling the maleness of his body through his clothes and could not believe that others did not see it on him. He grew less tolerant of the remove he felt at the university. Once in a seminar on the Latin novel he found himself unduly annoyed by the standard translation of a humorous erotic scene, where the single phrase They embraced stood in for an entire paragraph of ribald details in Latin—details which in an exuberant mood he acted out that night with Jeanette, to the great amusement of them both.
But soon enough he learned the lesson that a crisis of purpose cannot be put aside; it can only be lived through. Life continued to grind on—his studies, her shifts at the bookstore, lunch, work, chatter—and Ned began to find that sex too had a limit, after which, if it was not nourished by some deeper passion, it became a routine like anything else. On its own it was not enough. It became apparent to them both that though they were fond of each other, that was the extent of it, and the only future they could envision together—careers, a house, kids, days at the university, dinners at home—failed on any level to excite them. There seemed nowhere for them to go. Ned began to have a creeping doubt that the emptiness he felt in university life was not just a feature of the university but was in fact a reflection of some emptiness in life itself, a barrenness in the soil of this existence that prevented anything real or enduring from taking life. And so things progressed to the inevitable conclusion, there on the pier with “Dardanella” in the background, after which the two of them spent a pleasant weekend together as acquaintances, and it was almost as if nothing at all had ever happened.
“Cliff,” he said the other day, lounging by the pool while everyone else was off in the rocks playing some game Lewis had invented, “have you ever been in love?” And of course he knew that he had not been, not this time.
Clifford was not put off by the question. “Who hasn’t been in love?”
Ned was silent. “Did it work?”
Clifford smiled and closed his eyes. “I don’t think that stuff is supposed to work, mate.”
The song came to an end. As the cornet trailed off, Ned felt an arm hook around his neck from behind. It was Leo, raising his own glass to Ned’s lips.
“Wake up, Ned,” he said. “Have a drink.”
Ned laughed, took a sip of Leo’s whiskey, and then took another sip from his own glass.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m back.”
A little later, after the wind had mellowed, they were interrupted by a chorus of yips and howls that rose over the murmur of the rustling manzanitas outside and echoed throughout the parlor. The sound shaded into cries, then into barks. It came from somewhere in the near distance.
“Coyotes,” said Sidney.
The boys crowded around the windows to get a look. The contours of the pool and the palms were smudged in the dark copper haze of the night, abstract shapes brimming with unseen life under a blanket of rolling heat. The howling pierced through the darkness, pricking their nerves, raising the hairs on their arms and necks. They could feel the arousal in their guts. They remained like a pack at the windows, spellbound, smiling at this unexpected gift from the desert, until after a few minutes it subsided back into the night, hot and silent.
“That was fucking great,” said Leo.
“Christ,” said Ned. “It’s beautiful out there.”
“I want to go out again, just for a minute,” said Clifford.
Someone had the idea that they should strip and run a race around the arcades, quick before the storm or Della could come back. Clifford and Leo volunteered immediately, and after some prompting—“We need a gold, a silver, and a bronze”—Sidney at last agreed to join them. He was not fated to win. Halfway through the first lap, he stumbled over a rock in the path, twisted his ankle, and had to be helped back into the inn. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” he insisted, but the race was abandoned, they put their shorts back on, and Sidney got pride of place back in the parlor on the chaise longue, with his foot raised. They put a crested helmet on his head and refilled his whiskey glass.
“You win this one,” said Leo. “Next time we race in the daylight.”
It was not long before Della did return, bearing a jug of water and a plate of nectarines and stuffed celery. “Let’s be sure we can all get up for filming tomorrow,” she said, filling water glasses and passing the plate around. They thanked her, stuffing themselves as if they had eaten nothing all day, and pressed her to sit down and have a drink with them before she went to bed.
“Whiskey?” she said. “Oh, no, not for me. Champagne or a drop of gin, that’s to my taste—only not gin that has come from a bathtub.”
But they insisted, and she gave in. “Just a dram,” she said, and was given rather more than that. She took a sip—“You see, I’m not afraid of it”—and sat on a sofa to finish the rest. She opened a fan of ostrich feathers to keep herself cool. The wind had picked up again, driving dust against the windowpanes. “What a storm,” she said, “all day, all night. And not even a cool wind, but a hot one. I thought there would be rain. Sometimes when it storms the whole valley becomes a curtain of water, from one end to the other. The lightning looks like fireballs in the sky. Thrilling.” She bit on a slice of nectarine. “This place wasn’t built for rain,” she said. “I have to run up and down the halls with pots and pans and pray the roof will stay on. Well, it always does.” She smiled vaguely. “You know, in the high desert it sometimes snows. Imagine that. Snow on the yuccas. Not like here.”
She put down her whiskey and lit a cigarette. She had a case and holder of matching ebony and mother of pearl which the producer had given her many years ago, a gift from his travels in the Levant. This time she did not demur when they asked her about him. They could not square her with the amiable old clod—her words—they had come to know over the past weeks.
“Oh, he was rather dashing back then,” she said. “Tall and bronzed, and he had all these ideas about making pictures that were like Wagner operas, the total work of art. I was in one of those early ones—a nymph coming out of the sea. But they were all like that, those men. He had his ideas secondhand.”
“But—what happened?” Ned had grown bold with the alcohol.
“Oh—” Della waved the question away. She was silent for a moment, concentrating on her cigarette. Then her expression became serious, and she said, “Listen. You must remember this. You men—you must not get lazy as soon as you have some money, as soon as some woman wants you back. You must develop. You must preserve. You must understand your own beauty, and not shy away from mystery and death. Those come in many forms, and you must face them when they do. Otherwise you will remain frozen at twenty, and soon enough you will be twenty years old with a body that’s fifty years old. Grotesque. Better to die at twenty.”
She chuckled, a dry, good-natured laugh that let out the smoke she had inhaled. “That’s quite enough whiskey, eh?” She sighed, and then her expression changed once again. Her eyes were fixed on Sidney’s ankle, raised on the chaise longue. It had turned purple with bruising.
“Sidney,” she said, frowning. “What is that?”
He responded with a half-smile, embarrassed. “I took a spill.”
“I see.” She put out her cigarette and looked at him with some concern. “Where did this happen?”
“Um—outside.”
“How did you get back in?”
“Sort of—hobbled along. Cliff gave me his shoulder.”
“It doesn’t look good.”
“It’ll be okay tomorrow.”
Della appeared unconvinced. “Shall I get you some ice?”
Sidney had barely responded before she was up and out of the room. She came back with ice wrapped in a pink towel that smelled lightly of roses, surely from her own bathroom. After a thorough examination she placed it gently on Sidney’s ankle.
“Stay off that, love,” she said. “Trust me. I know about ankles.”
“Thanks for the ice, Della,” said Sidney. “That was sweet.”
“We’ll figure out what to do with you tomorrow.” She rose and straightened the folds of her dark ornamented dress. There was something stony about her as she stood there, at her full height, her mind seeming to wander somewhere beyond the room. But it passed, and she came to life again. “Good night, boys,” she said. “One o’clock, I’m told, you should be ready. They want the afternoon light. That means it will be hot.”
She dimmed the parlor lamps as she went out. The glint went out of Sidney’s helmet, laid now on the cushions of the chaise longue beside him. The water jug was passed around. They drank straight from it, one by one, until it was empty. Charley spilled a little down his chin and wiped it off with the inside of his elbow. The water here had an alkaline taste, like metal that had been rained on, but they had grown used to it and had even come to like it.
“All this water, and I haven’t pissed all night,” said Leo.
Outside, the wind still coursed through the trees. The sound of it came in a low ambient rush over the valley, constant, charged with something from the atmosphere. Palm fronds and cottonwood branches swayed black against the sky. Thunder rumbled, or the mountains. They all felt it at once. Clifford was at the window, stretching his shoulders. His wide back shuddered, the vertebrae stiffening as he lowered his arms.
“Only a couple more days,” he murmured, returning to the others on the floor. The light caught the set of his jaw. “I feel like I’ve got more purpose playing make-believe here than I ever have at home.” He closed his eyes. “What happened to the time?”
The heat and the liquor had made them drowsy. Charley said he could sleep until next summer. They had all slept to depths of stillness out here that they had rarely experienced before, waking with a clarity that seemed a property of rock and light, not flesh. The mornings here were balmy, perfect, something to look forward to. But for now they enjoyed this moment, when it seemed they six were alone in the world, that this room was all there was, and outside was only the dry emptiness of unformed space. Before they left, they gathered in a small circle and huddled together, arms around each other’s shoulders. They could smell on each other the salt, sweat, and whiskey of the long night. Ned recited something in Greek. Words made the round. Then, with spontaneous precision, they reassembled around Sidney, took hold of his arms and legs, and with a collective heave they lifted him off the ground and onto their shoulders. He held in his laughter, as they carried him all the way down the corridor and up the stairs to his room, so as not to wake Della. Once they had got him into bed, they raised his foot with spare pillows and opened the window a crack to let in some air. His helmet they placed on the table beside him. On the way out, Leo gave him a playful smack on the back of the head, and Sidney laughed and lay back on his pillow.
Afterward, Lewis and Charley returned to the parlor to pick up the whiskey glasses and turn off the lights. When they had finished, they too disappeared down the hallway into their rooms, and all that was left in the inn was the sound of the hot driving wind.
***
“What happened?”
It was nine o’clock in the morning, and the desert was in a white heat. Beams of light angled through the slats of the shutters into Sidney’s room and fell on him as he lay in bed, woken by Charley, who was crouching beside him now in full armor: helmet, breastplate, sandals, greaves. Shield and javelin he had left somewhere else. His eyes burned with excitement.
“There’s no more filming,” said Charley. “Della told us this morning. We went out early to practice and watch the sun come up, and then when we got back, she was making breakfast already and told us they’d sent a telegram. The old guy’s still got the gout, so they’re scrapping the scene and sending us back home tomorrow.”
“So—that’s it?”
“They said we’ll have to come back in for close-ups and some filler, but otherwise we’re done,” said Charley. “How’s your ankle?”
The bruise had grown uglier overnight.
“We missed you this morning,” said Charley. “The sunrise here is incredible. It’s so quiet, it’s like you can hear the light breaking over the valley. We just lay on our backs and watched it come. Were you all right up here?”
“Sure. Just slept.”
He had not just slept, but had dreamed, and the dream still seemed real. Yesterday, he had sat with Lewis at the edge of a switchback leading up the mountainside, looking out over the valley in a moment of stillness. They had been talking about old stories in which people transformed in moments of heightened reality into trees or animals or rocks. In the desert it no longer seemed fantastic. “When you’re up here,” Lewis had said, “what’s real seems so different. You hardly want to go back.” To Sidney it had brought back old rhythms, the dark mountains of his youth, the ancient oak trees, that familiar feeling of the pulsing earth. During the night he had dreamed of Flora, through the oaks, coming to find him in her ribboned hat and gloves, Flora who had brought him books on jungle plants and South America, who had told him once, when they were much younger, that he was so handsome they should lock him away in a chest so that no one could see. She called him Sunny because he put everyone at ease. Flora the mayor’s daughter, somewhere in Boston now, like him a child of the new century, born January 1900, and like him waiting in September 1918 for the new draft, which lowered the age to eighteen. They had gone to the ball in town but afterward went back to the oak trees, the night, the pool by the cave where once she had come upon him bathing but had never said a word about it. They neither touched nor spoke, yet it was Flora in the dark who had made him feel there was nothing in the forest that he was not. Lewis on the mountainside had said, “Well, we have to find a way to take it with us.” And Sidney had thought, yes, but for now we are just life on a mountain, all of us together, happy in the dust.
Charley said, “It doesn’t feel like we’re all finished, does it?”
Through the open window Sidney could hear the sparrows in the trees outside. There was dry sage in the air. It was so hot already that even lying in bed, barely moving, he could feel the sweat pooling under his arms.
“Charley, open the shutters, would you? Let’s get some air in here. Then pull up that chair.”
The sun at first was blinding; Sidney had to shield his eyes. Everything in the room, even the dark wood of the ceiling beams and the furniture, seemed to radiate light. When Charley sat down beside him again, he saw the grains of dirt on his feet, under his fingernails, in his hair. He smelled like the desert.
Charley said, “We did it, anyway, the scene. We were all warmed up and nobody wanted to give up. So we just did it, ran up the mountain ourselves. Even if nobody was filming it.”
“In all that armor?”
Charley nodded. “Well, we just went up to where you stopped yesterday. It was Lewis’s idea.”
“Feel good?”
“It’s hard, even going that far,” said Charley. “But then you feel like you’ve done something. You feel alive.” He paused. “I had kind of a headache from all that whiskey, but—I didn’t want to start not going out like we always do. The morning wouldn’t feel real.” He took a drink of water that he had poured from the pitcher beside Sidney’s bed. On the table with the pitcher was a sketch Clifford had drawn up the previous night, of a classical Greek statue topped with the head of John D. Rockefeller. Under it he had scrawled the word ARETE. It made Sidney laugh.
“Did you race?” he said.
“It wasn’t really a race,” said Charley. “More of a team effort, with the four of us.”
“Four?”
“Cliff wasn’t there. He wanted to stay behind, in case you needed anything.”
Sidney smiled.
“But listen,” said Charley. “Here’s what we’ve decided to do. We went on, up that path past the old mine, the path you and Lewis explored yesterday. If you keep going up that path, past the scramble where you and Lewis stopped, eventually you get to this pretty spot in the shade, it’s like a circle of boulders all around you, and sagebrush, and some tree, I don’t know what it was—not big, but it was there, and it had a good tree smell. If you look out in one direction, you can see the valley, and if you look in the other, you can see how the mountain goes way, way up, and there are pines up there that look like they’re touching the sky. We stopped there for lunch, and then Lewis said, wouldn’t this make a perfect rock hideout, it could be our own mountain, we’d just need to find a cave and some water and get some bows and arrows, and that would be it. I thought that sounded like the best idea all week. Then Ned said, why don’t we do it, at least for today. We don’t have to leave until tomorrow. Maybe we don’t have to leave at all. So we kind of got up and looked around, just to see what was there. Right away Leo saw that somebody had carved the word ‘OASIS’ into one of the rock walls, so we weren’t there first.”
“Oasis—like the mine?”
“I don’t know, I think so,” said Charley. “Or maybe water nearby. There’s oases all over the place. Lewis says the whole valley sits on a basin of water. We thought it was worth looking for. Everybody else went off to explore while I held the camp. Ned came back after a bit, and—well, you know Ned. He told me somebody with goat hooves had come out of a tree and called him by name and then asked him why no one paid attention to him anymore when he was everywhere out here in the wilderness and wanted to help.”
Sidney smiled. “That’s in the script, Charley.”
“I know,” said Charley. “But he wouldn’t give it up. He insisted it was true. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘you can’t imagine what’s up here, I think Lewis has found the gate to the underworld.’ I told him that’s not what it was, but he didn’t care. I think what they found is another way into the mine. But—here’s the thing. Ned got the idea that we should have an adventure up there, a real one, not an imaginary one. Something we can’t get when we return. I asked him what he meant, and he said he couldn’t tell me, I had to prove myself first by not knowing. I know—he was joking. But he still wouldn’t tell. Just said that they had all agreed we should stay up there tonight, and really do it all, and that means all six of us, if you can make it.”
“Della agreed to that?”
“She doesn’t know,” said Charley. “We’re leaving her a note. Or you can tell her later if you stay. She’ll be mad at first, but she’ll forgive us.”
“This is really happening?”
Charley nodded. “A true adventure,” he said. “They sent me and Leo back to get some supplies and check on you. Leo’s down in the kitchen now. He’s amazing, quiet like a cat. What do you think? Do you want to come with us? Can you?”
Sidney looked down at his ankle. He rotated his foot. Before there had been pain, but now it felt almost as if nothing had happened. Just a nuisance, he thought, it was half in his head. He could not understand what Charley was telling him, yet there seemed some logic to it just beyond his grasp, as if he had not quite finished dreaming. He felt irresistibly drawn back outside, to the others, to the sun.
“I think I can do it. Let’s see what they want.”
Charley beamed at him. “Get up and see how you feel,” he said. “I have to go and sneak some water. We need so much water. And a lantern. If we’re quick maybe we can get back in time and not get in trouble. Come to the garden when you’re ready.”
“What about Cliff?”
“He’ll be there if you will.”
Sidney lay still for a moment after Charley left, thinking of nothing. Then he gathered himself and got out of bed. He tested his ankle. It was not as bad as it looked. He could walk if he was careful and kept his weight as much as possible on the other foot. The others would help him, anyway.
He stepped to the open window and looked outside. He could see the heat in the air, shimmering on the palm fronds, the rock faces. The mountains towered above him in silence, into the sky, every detail of stone and shrub sharpened by the white summer light. The peaks seemed taller today than they had before. No clouds, no shade. He could feel the rays of the sun on his skin. It was too bright even to glance at, a brilliant flash in the atmosphere, ten thousand degrees of burning gas. In the gardens all was still, all but the sparrows and the flowering red gum trees that brushed against the neighboring windows. Yet in the stillness he could feel, almost, the hot sap running through the cacti and the agaves, the chuparosas and the tangled saltbushes, the soft palos verdes. He felt his own sap hot in the blaze of the sun. There were star thistles in a vase by the window that had come from a bed by the pool; he could see the golden crowns of those that remained. He had never felt such heat. There was nothing outside he could not see. A vast open space, and freedom.
It would pass, he thought. And yet it would not.
On the path below, Clifford stood proud and silent, like a bronze charioteer, powerful in the sun, looking up at the window. His eyes flashed, and he waved.
“Jesus, Sidney,” he said, “what a fucking glorious day. My guts are burning out through my skin. You coming?”
“If you help,” said Sidney.
The wind recircled, brushed against Clifford’s hair, and Sidney felt it, too, the desert in the air, the smell of rock and time, the heat on his face and shoulders, peace. Each sensed it in the other and laughed, as if they were sharing a secret joke. Clifford stretched his arms wide and grinned.
“Come on, then,” he said. “Let’s show these boys what we’re made of.”
***
At the foot of the mountains now, where the inn once stood, there is a golf course. Of the inn itself nothing remains. The building materials were not recycled, and even the ground was reshaped to suit its new purpose. Somewhere near the ninth hole there is a depression and an artificial pond where the pool had been, but otherwise there are no reminders of the old inn. In time its loss was regretted, though in latter days its luster had, by all accounts, considerably faded. Della had held on to it for another thirty-odd years, through the end of the war and a bit beyond, with increasing help from a staff she had carefully expanded. When she died it was decided that the building was too expensive to be modernized and in too awkward a location, and so it was razed. At the estate sale, certain items caused a modest stir: a dress that had been worn by Pola Negri in a famous photograph; a producer’s half-finished memoirs; and, among a number of modern replicas, an amphora that turned out, quite unexpectedly, to be a genuine artifact from Asia Minor, soon acquired by the Getty Museum Trust. On its obverse side, black-figure athletes were depicted in hoplite armor, racing in funeral games for a dead hero. On its reverse side, an ephebe hunted in the mountains with his dog during a long initiation into adulthood on the frontier. Della, it seemed, had used it as a flowerpot in a rooftop garden she had fashioned for herself as a place of refuge from her guests. Not that she had become in any way reclusive. Over the years, she had opened a small hat shop in town, sometimes designing her own pieces; and when she was not there or at the inn, she could be seen at Bullock’s or the Racquet Club, chatting with the older clientele, or taking walks in the canyons along the low easy paths that wound along the creek beds through the palm oases. After the war, someone from the Desert Sun took an interest in her and came to sit with her by the pool at the inn for an interview. She talked about her time in New York, about her experiences during the old silent film days, and then about the inn itself, its varied guests, the strange monsoon summers that sometimes blew over. One year, after incredible heat, the rains had finally come, sending mud down the mountains and making the streams overflow their banks. The water wiped out the drive of the inn and flooded its grounds and washes. She had had to replant whole swathes of the garden and have six men come and repair the damaged roof of the inn. “Look at it now,” she said. “You can’t even tell. Time gets stuck sometimes, but even then it never stops. All you can do is try and make it right.” She adjusted her hat for a photo but, as it happened, was looking elsewhere when it snapped.
— Philip Bartling lives in California. He makes his debut here. He is indebted to Jean de Rovera’s 1924 film The Olympic Games as They Were Practiced in Ancient Greece, which gave him the initial idea for this piece, as well as a few of its details.