Let It Come Down Read online

  Dyar was not a reader; he did not even enjoy the movies. Entertainment somehow made the stationariness of existence more acute, not only when the amusement was over, but even during the course of it. After the war he made a certain effort to reconcile himself to his life. Occasionally he would go out with two or three of his friends, each one taking a girl. They would have cocktails at the apartment of one of the girls, go on to a Broadway movie, and eat afterward at some Chinese place in the neighbourhood where there was dancing. Then there was the long process of taking the girls home one by one, after which they usually went into a bar and drank fairly heavily. Sometimes, not very often, they would pick up something cheap in the bar or in the street, take her to Bill Healy’s room, and lay her in turn. It was an accepted pattern; there seemed to be no other to suggest in its place. Dyar kept thinking: “Any life would be better than this,” but he could find no different possibility to consider. “Once you accept the fact that life isn’t fun, you’ll be much happier,” his mother said to him. Although he lived with his parents, he never discussed with them the way he felt; it was they who, sensing his unhappiness, came to him and, in vaguely reproachful tones, tried to help him. He was polite with them but inwardly contemptuous. It was so clear that they could never understand the emptiness he felt, nor realize the degree to which he felt it. It was a progressive paralysis, it gained on him constantly, and it carried with it the fear that when it arrived at a certain point something terrible would happen.

  He could hear the distant sound of waves breaking on the beach outside: a dull roll, a long silence, another roll. Someone came into the room over his, slammed the door, and began to move about busily from one side of the room to the other. It sounded like a woman, but a heavy one. The water was turned on and the wash basin in his room bubbled as if in sympathy. He lit a cigarette, from time to time flicking the ashes on to the floor beside the bed. After a few minutes the woman—he was sure it was a woman—went out of the door, slammed it, and he heard her walk down the hall into another room and close that door. A toilet flushed. Then the footsteps returned to the room above.

  “I must call Wilcox,” he thought. But he finished his cigarette slowly, making it last. He wondered why he felt so lazy about making the call. He had taken the great step, and he believed he had done right. All the way across on the ship to Gibraltar, he had told himself that it was the healthy thing to have done, that when he arrived he would be like another person, full of life, delivered from the sense of despair that had weighed on him for so long. And now he realized that he felt exactly the same. He tried to imagine how he would feel if, for instance, he had his whole life before him to spend as he pleased, without the necessity to earn his living. In that case he would not have to telephone Wilcox, would not be compelled to exchange one cage for another. Having made the first break, he would then make the second, and be completely free. He raised his head and looked slowly around the dim room. The rain was spattering the window. Soon he would have to go out. There was no restaurant in the hotel, and it was surely a long way to town. He felt the top of the night table; there was no telephone. Then he got up, took the candle, and made a search of the room. He stepped out into the corridor, picked his key off the floor, locked his door and went downstairs thinking: “I’d have him on the wire by now if there’d only been a phone by the bed.”

  The man was not at the desk. “I’ve got to make a call,” he said to the boy who stood beside a potted palm smirking. “It’s very important. Telephone! Telephone!” he shouted, gesturing, as the other made no sign of understanding. The boy went to the desk, brought an old-fashioned telephone out from behind and set it on top. Dyar took the letter out of his pocket to look for the number of Wilcox’s hotel. The boy tried to take the letter, but he copied the number on the back of the envelope and gave it to him. A fat man wearing a black raincoat came in and asked for his key. Then he stood glancing over a newspaper that lay spread out on the desk. As the boy made the call Dyar thought: “If he’s gone out to dinner I’ll have to go through this all over again.” The boy said something into the mouthpiece and handed Dyar the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  “Hotel Atlantide.”

  “Mr. Wilcox, please.” He pronounced the name very carefully. There was a silence. “Oh, God!” he thought, annoyed with himself that he should care one way or the other whether Wilcox was in. There was a click.

  “Yes?”

  It was Wilcox. For a second he did not know what to say. “Hello?” he said.

  “Hello. Yes?”

  “Jack?”

  “Yes. Who’s this?”

  “This is Nelson. Nelson Dyar.”

  “Dyar! Well, for God’s sake! So you got here after all. Where are you? Come on over. You know how to get here? Better take a cab. You’ll get lost. Where are you staying?”

  Dyar told him.

  “Jesus! That——” Dyar had the impression he had been about to say: that dump. But he said: “That’s practically over the border. Well, come on up as soon as you can get here. You take soda or water?”

  Dyar laughed. He had not known he would be so pleased to hear Wilcox’s voice. “Soda,” he said.

  “Wait a second. Listen. I’ve got an idea. I’ll call you back in five minutes. Don’t go out. Wait for my call. Just stay put. I just want to call somebody for a second. It’s great to have you here. Call you right back. O.K.?”

  “Right.”

  He hung up and went to stand at the window. The rain that was beating against the glass had leaked through and was running down the wall. Someone had put a rag along the floor to absorb it, but now the cloth floated in a shallow pool. Two or three hundred feet up the road from the hotel there was a streetlight. Beneath it in the wind the glistening spears of a palm branch charged back and forth. He began to pace from one end of the little foyer to the other; the boy, standing by the desk with his hands behind him, watched him intently. He was a little annoyed at Wilcox for making him wait. Of course he thought he had been phoning from his room. He wondered if Wilcox were making good money with his travel agency. In his letters he had said he was, but Dyar remembered a good deal of bluff in his character. His enthusiasm need have meant nothing more than that he needed an assistant and preferred it to be someone he knew (the wages were low enough, and Dyar had paid his own passage from New York), or that he was pleased with a chance to show his importance and magnanimity; it would appeal to Wilcox to be able to make what he considered a generous gesture. Dyar thought it was more likely to be the latter case. Their friendship never had been an intimate one. Even though they had known each other since boyhood, since Wilcox’s father had been the Dyar’s family doctor, each had never shown more than a polite interest in the other’s life. There was little in common between them—not even age, really, since Wilcox was nearly ten years older than he. During the war Wilcox had been sent to Algiers, and afterward it never had occurred to Dyar to wonder what had become of him. One day his father had come home saying: “Seems Jack Wilcox has stayed on over in North Africa. Gone into business for himself and seems to be making a go of it.” Dyar had asked what kind of business it was, and had been only vaguely interested to hear that it was a tourist bureau.

  He had been walking down Fifth Avenue one brilliant autumn twilight and had stopped in front of a large travel agency. The wind that moved down from Central Park had the crispness of an October evening, carrying with it the promise of winter, the season that paralyses; to Dyar it gave a foretaste of increased unhappiness. In one side of the window was a large model ship, black and white, with shiny brass accessories. The other side represented a tropical beach in miniature, with a sea of turquoise gelatine and tiny palm trees bending up out of a beach of real sand. BOOK NOW FOR WINTER CRUISES, said the sign. The thought occurred to him that it would be a torturing business to work in such a place, to plan itineraries, make hotel reservations and book passages for all the places one would never see. He wondered how many of the men who stood in
side there consulting their folders, schedules, lists and maps felt as trapped as he would have felt in their place; it would be even worse than the bank. Then he thought of Wilcox. At that moment he began to walk again, very fast. When he got home he wrote the letter and took it out to post immediately. It was a crazy idea. Nothing could come of it, except perhaps that Wilcox would think him a goddam fool, a prospect which did not alarm him.

  The reply had given him the shock of his life. Wilcox had spoken of coincidence. “There must be something in telepathy,” he had written. Only then did Dyar mention the plan to his family, and the reproaches had begun.

  Moving regretfully away from the desk, the fat man walked back to the stairway. The telephone rang. The boy started for it, but Dyar got there ahead of him. The boy glared at him angrily. It was Wilcox, who said he would be at the Hotel de la Playa in twenty minutes. “I want you to meet a friend of mine,” he said. “The Marquesa de Valverde. She’s great. She wants you to come to dinner too.” And as Dyar protested, he interrupted. “We’re not dressing. God, no! None of that here. I’ll pick you up.”

  “But Jack, listen——”

  “So long.”

  Dyar went up to his room, nettled at not having been given the opportunity of deciding to accept or refuse the invitation. He asked himself if it would raise him in Wilcox’s estimation if he showed independence and begged off. But obviously he had no intention of doing such a thing, since when he got to his room he tore off his clothes, took a quick shower, whistling all the while, opened his bags, shaved as well as he could by the light of the lone candle, and put on his best suit. When he had finished he blew out the candle and hurried downstairs to wait at the front entrance.

  II

  Daisy de Valverde sat at her dressing-table, her face brilliant as six little spotlights threw their rays upon it from six different angles. If she made up to her satisfaction in the pitiless light of these sharp lamps, she could be at ease in any light later. But it took time and technique. The Villa Hesperides was never without electricity, even now when the town had it for only two hours every other evening. Luis had seen to that when they built the house; he had foreseen the shortage of power. It was one of the charms of the International Zone that you could get anything you wanted if you paid for it. Do anything, too, for that matter—there were no incorruptibles. It was only a question of price.

  Outside, the wind was roaring, and in the cypresses it sounded like a cataract. The boom of waves against the cliffs came up from far below. Mingled with the reflections of the lights in the room, other lights, small, distant points, showed in the black sheets of glass at the windows: Spain across the strait, Tarifa and Cape Camariñal.

  She was always pleased to have Americans come to the house because she felt under no constraint with them. She could drink all she pleased and they drank along with her, whereas her English guests made a whisky last an hour,—not to mention the French, who asked for a Martini of vermouth with a dash of gin, or the Spanish with their glass of sherry. ‘The Americans are the nation of the future,” she would announce in her hearty voice. “Here’s to ’em. God bless their gadgets, great and small. God bless Frigidaire, Tampax and Coca-Cola. Yes, even Coca-Cola, darling.” (It was generally conceded that Morocco’s appearance had changed considerably since the advent of Coca-Cola and its advertising.) The Marqués did not share her enthusiasm for Americans, but that did not prevent her from asking them whenever she pleased; she ran the house to suit herself.

  She had a Swiss butler and an Italian footman, but when Americans were invited to dinner she let old Ali serve at table because he owned a magnificent Moorish costume; although he was not very competent she thought his appearance impressed them more than the superior service the two Europeans could provide. The difficulty was that both the butler and footman disapproved so heartily of this arrangement that unless she went into the kitchen at the last moment and repeated her orders, they always found some pretext for not allowing poor old Ali to serve, so that when she looked up from her plate expecting to see the brilliant brocades and gold sash from the palace of Sultan Moulay Hafid, she would find herself staring instead at the drab black uniform of Hugo or Mario. Their faces would be impassive; she never knew what had been going on. There was a chance that this would happen tonight, unless she went down now and made it clear that Ali must serve. She rose, slipped a heavy bracelet over her left hand, and went out through the tiny corridor which connected her room with the rest of the house. Someone had left a window open at the end of the upper hall, and several of the candles in front of the large tapestry had been blown out. She could not bear the anachronism of having electricity in the rooms where tapestries were hung. Ringing a bell, she waited until a breathless chambermaid had appeared, then she indicated the window and the candles with a stiff finger. “Mire,” she said disapprovingly, and moved down the stairway. At that moment there was the sound of a motor outside. She hurried down the rest of the way, practically running the length of the hall to disappear into the kitchen, and when she came back out Hugo was taking her guests’ coats. She walked toward the two men regally.

  “Darling Jack. How sweet of you to come. And in this foul weather.”

  “How kind of you to have us. Daisy, this is Mr. Dyar. The Marquesa de Valverde.”

  Dyar looked at her and saw a well-preserved woman of forty with a mop of black curls, china blue eyes, and a low-cut black dress, to squeeze herself into which must have been somewhat painful.

  “How nice to see you, Mr. Dyar. I think we’ve got a fire in the drawing-room. God knows. Let’s go in and see. Are you wet?” She felt Dyar’s sleeve. “No? Good. Come along. Jack, you’re barman. I want the stiffest drink you can concoct.”

  They sat before a scorching log fire. Daisy wanted Wilcox to mix sidecars. At the first sip Dyar realised how hungry he was; he glanced clandestinely at his watch. It was nine-forty. Observing Daisy, he thought she was the most fatuous woman he had ever met. But he was impressed by the house. Hugo entered. “Now for dinner,” thought Dyar. It was a telephone call for Madame la Marquise. “Pour me another, sweet, and let me take it with me as consolation,” she said to Wilcox.

  When she had gone Wilcox turned to Dyar.

  “She’s one grand girl,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Yes,” Dyar replied, without conviction, adding: “Isn’t she a little on the beat-up side for you?”

  Wilcox looked indignant, lowered his voice. “What are you talking about, boy? She’s got a husband in the house. I said she’s grand fun to be with. What the hell did you think I meant, anyway?” Mario’s arrival to add a log to the fire stopped whatever might have followed. “Listen to that wind,” said Wilcox, sitting back with his drink.

  Dyar knew he was annoyed with him: he wondered why. “He’s getting mighty touchy in his old age,” he said to himself, looking around the vast room. Mario went out. Wilcox leaned forward again, and still in a low voice, said: “Daisy and Luis are practically my best friends here.” There were voices in the hall. Daisy entered with a neat dark man who looked as though he had stomach ulcers. “Luis!” cried Wilcox, jumping up. Dyar was presented, and the four sat down, Daisy next to Dyar. “This can’t last long,” he thought, “It’s nearly ten.” His stomach felt completely concave.

  They had another round of drinks. Wilcox and the Marqués began to discuss the transactions of a local banker who had got himself into difficulties and had left suddenly for Lisbon, not to return. Dyar listened for a moment.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear,” he said to Daisy; she was speaking to him.

  “I said: how do you like our little International Zone?”

  “Well, I haven’t seen anything of it yet. However”—he looked around the room appreciatively—“from here it looks fine.” He smiled self-consciously.

  Her voice assumed a faintly maternal note. “Of course. You just came today, didn’t you? My dear, you’ve got so much ahead of you! So much ahead of you! You can’t know. Bu
t you’ll love it, that I promise you. It’s a madhouse, of course. A complete, utter madhouse. I only hope to God it remains one.”

  “You like it a lot?” He was beginning to feel the drinks.

  “Adore it,” she said, leaning toward him. “Absolutely worship the place.”

  He set his empty glass carefully on the table beside the shaker.

  From the doorway Hugo announced dinner.

  “Jack, one more drop all round.” She held forth her glass and received what was left. “You’ve given it all to me, you monster. I didn’t want it all.” She stood up, and carrying her glass with her, led the men into the dining-room, where Mario stood uncorking a bottle of champagne.

  “I’m going to be drunk,” thought Dyar, suddenly terrified that through some lapse in his table etiquette he would draw attention to himself.

  Slowly they advanced into a meal which promised to be endless.

  Built into the wall opposite him, a green rectangle in the dark panelling, was an aquarium; its hidden lights illumined rocks, shells and complex marine plants. Dyar found himself watching it as he ate. Daisy talked without cease. At one point, when she had stopped, he said: “I don’t see any fish in there.”

  “Cuttle-fish,” said the Marqués. “We keep only cuttle-fish.” And as Dyar seemed not to understand, “You know—small octopi. You see? There is one on the left, hanging to the rock.” He pointed: now Dyar saw the pale fleshy streamers which were its tentacles.