Los Angeles Page 4

  He laughed heartily. “Sounds like a commercial!”

  “Isn’t. Really. Not with this ‘dish.’ Others—”

  He had wondered. Perhaps she knew. His curiousity was only that. But her answer might be informative, as her refusal to answer, also, might be. “Gant and the Amazonian lifeguard?”

  “Well, perhaps. Though it’s her favorite role, too. I wouldn’t be able to say, for that little, wizened tarantula. But the milk-rich Juno—her name in some swinging circles—is certainly the steel magnate’s idea of bliss.”

  Glenn was nodding. A man who makes steel makes it with a wet-nurse. A mother-symbol. Talk about oedipal complexes! And then, the idea turned around and fascinated. He’d never had a wife, children, a chance to.…

  “I wish I could,” she said, reading his reverie. “If you want, I could arrange it, sometime. Hormones.”

  “For God’s sake!”

  And that, he thought, is from shock. Not from repulsion. People don’t usually understand they are and remain … mammals. The great American big-bust fetish was visible to him in that new way. An infantile regression by grown males. And a blow-up of the object to … what? Stimulate erotic images without attaching guilt to the source?

  She answered that, too. “It’s really not abnormal, Glenn. Everybody does—who’s not inhibited—and gets a chance. Should we have Helga in, later tonight?”

  “Later tonight, I sleep.”

  “Want to bet?”

  “Sure. A hundred to one?”

  “Dollars? Take that. Or a thousand to ten.”

  “Big risk—for you, Bessie—of ten bucks.”

  Impulse. In his suite after lunch Glenn kept saying that word to himself. Why that bet? Obviously, after the second meeting ended, the handsome young swinger was going to make an opportunity and an effort to get him to do what he had no reason not to do, what, actually, he’d felt toward and about the girl when she spoke one word from the clear, warm water at his feet—the mermaid with streaming hair and eyes so wide they held wonder, whatever they concealed. She had been genuine in wanting to meet him—“meet”—his euphemism!

  Now, assuming what was not specific but certain in some form, he was going to have to add a thousand dollars to the gift of himself, a fair exchange with the woman at no cost and surely not of money. So why the bet? Vanity? Playing hard to get? A thousand dollars was not important to him. He’d spent much more to travel to some alien and romantic land in order to overtake a woman with promising eyes who had pinned the promise to the journey. Given presents more costly out of simple desire and affection.

  So, did he make that bet as a brake on himself? Was there something about this prefabricated affair that turned off his subtlest senses? Or about the girl? Surely, she hadn’t told everything about herself. Surely, she’d added a few white lies to her seemingly uninhibited sketch. What? He thought back and decided that, for causes too minute to become conscious and not even remembered there might be one minor duplicity. She was not Bessie Billings or Bessie, even. He’d caught that and now could be nearly sure though he couldn’t remember where the evasion had shown. There might be others.

  She was clever. He thought of the way she’d told him about the lady lifeguard, lady-wrestler in build yet as feminine as huge, and in perfect proportion for that signal act of bearing and nursing human children. With breasts that looked, even under her halter, like dinners. And he had been shifted from a minor revulsion (where she and Gant were considered) to a brief, flaring and unexpected rush of erotic thought. What in hell had the shrinks called it? The primal experience. All, or at least many husbands, some noted shrink had told him (or written, said in a lecture, mentioned on TV?) if they could, enjoyed the primal experience.

  And right then, it reached him. Not as a new gimmick to try just as novel—he wasn’t made that way. But as something that he had been made to feel—by Bessie—in the way that those others, husbands, normal men, felt. And the way the breast-fetishists, that American male majority, to judge by the girlie magazines, felt but couldn’t admit.

  Why had Bessie offered so much? Had she meant it? Did she expect, as her words suggested, that an affair begun here would go on when he returned to his Los Angeles offices, his home in the Canyon, and then, went on to his other offices and abodes as seasons changed, as business required? Or was it part of her need to pretend any relationship, actual or contemplated, would be lasting, whatever she knew to the contrary. She was almost too knowing, too perceptive, too quick to catch mood shifts in him and exploit them (maybe) before he was aware of the shift of feeling or rise of a fantasy.

  What of it, then? In that sense living is fantasy and sex relations are its purest and most intense form, or should be. That, after all, was what the most expensive girls knew and used—along with a few of the single women and wives who had learned, by trial and final success, not counsel, that what held a lover, legal or no, was the female’s perception of his fantasies and her cooperation in making them come true. Up to a point—one these wise women had to set for themselves. And that, of course, would untangle many male shames, as he thought, and hesitancies, repulsions wholly induced by the anti-sexual culture so that he might or would then, trade. Her fantasies could become his missions.

  But not in marriage, usually. And if in marriage, usually, with risk. Until, Glenn thought, this present shift in America’s sexual talk, reading, movie-going and true acts had commenced to be, for millions, surely, and more to come, an almost total leap into the puritanical opposite, the sad, overdetermined swing of a long-stuck pendulum to its other extreme.

  As for Bessie, he would see.

  It was possible that, with a few efforts to hide her origin and identity, all she had said was true.

  In that event, she was some female!

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE PLOT

  There were thirty-seven men in the room, again.

  Through its picture windows before the blinds were automatically drawn, the desert lay naked, dazzling and hot. The distant Spectral Mountains were all shades of hazy blue through purple. The valley between Glenn and them was almost devoid of plantlife—a few cacti, a patch of dessicated greasewood, and dunes, flats, hillocks, of many hues that seemed new and raw, as if from yesterday’s eruption of a volcano with painted lava.

  There was a difference in the attitude here, now.

  Merton, the micro-biologist and ecologist, was jittery. He’d been calm in the morning session, almost limp, turning his big head and thick glasses toward speakers only gradually and showing almost no reaction to what was said. Now, as chairs were moved about on the thick carpet, as men sat, as ashtrays were slid into easy range, he was talking to Leo Benton, the lumber “king” with near-manic intensity. And Scone, of Scone Power and Light was slack, now, another reverse. Ballinger, the leading authority on limnological life-chains was flushed.

  Drinks? Perhaps. But Glenn wasn’t convinced. Merton looked like a speed-freak—as far as manner went and if “freak” could be applied to one whose suits and shirts were tailored, whose dress was expensive and almost glaringly perfect. Ballinger was flushed in a special way, too. Red cheek-daubs in an otherwise pallid countenance. And Ted Scone was not drunk. Glenn knew that because he knew Ted well and the intimacy provided the deduction: you couldn’t get Ted drunk—not in a few hours, or in twenty-four. Something else, but what? As the meeting came to order Glenn had a grim hunch that their host catered to more than the sexual desires of his guests. Could it be—methadrine for the scientist, heroin for the lumber baron, and for the limnologist, what? Cocaine?

  Glenn knew what it was to “shiver” internally, feel a coldness that was not physical.

  When Rufus Cooper stood, however, things became orderly enough. His opening words were, again, urbane, abstract, unemotional and to the point. He summed up what the scientists had said and then called on Dr. Albert Bush to speak next.

  Bush was a marine biologist, senior scientist at Farhnham Institute and well known for
his TV appearances where, for years, on panels and in interviews, he had tried to explain his field to the mass audience. Bearded, reddish of hair (which was longer than anyone else’s, here), eloquent and gifted in simplifying difficult theories and facts, casual—the tweed-and-slacks professor (though, here, he wore an off-white, drip-dry jacket and trousers, no socks and sandals). Bush rose gracefully and began to talk.

  “I’m a marine biologist, as you know. And my Institute, as you also probably know, has devoted the past several years to ocean research with a number of aims, many not relevant to this meeting. Many, however, are to the point.

  “These relate to world-expectations from the sea, seven-tenths of the planet’s surface. We have reached a number of definite conclusions—”

  Ted Scone broke in, without opening his eyes. “That’s a welcome note!”

  There was a scud of chuckling. Bush laughed, too, and went on:

  “In a world that is worried about the exhaustion of its on-land resources, much hope is held for resources in and under the seas. These are, of course, enormous, largely untapped, and include sources of minerals as well as food. Our research shows, however, that many of the predictions about the sea as a resource-salvation will be disappointed. We are taking vast amounts of petroleum from the oceans and searching for more supplies. Many short minerals, in the USA, especially, can, theoretically, be recovered from the bed of the oceans. But—” he paused to ponder.

  Rufus Cooper prompted him, with calm geniality. “But—the cost is or will be high? I know. My company has made dozens of studies. Copper, tin, manganese, cobalt, a score of elements seem to lie around for picking up or digging out. But it’s not easy, technically.”

  Albert Bush nodded at his host. “Not impossible, if you wish to use the oceans for multiple purposes. In fact, that idea of ‘multiple uses’ is both a federal slogan and the fastest road to destitution.”

  “Why?” Logan, the supermarket-chain genius, said that.

  “Because,” the scientist calmly replied, “nature isn’t a multiple-use resource. If you gentlemen aren’t familiar with my area, you surely are aware that the land-surfaces of this nation, in particular, are being ruined, millions of acres a year, by this ‘multiple-use’ myth.”

  Benton, the lumber man, said, “Bull,” and asked to be excused for a moment.

  Eyes followed him as he went out. For what? They’d just started. Surely, he didn’t need to relieve himself so soon?

  Bush spoke at the door through which Benton had gone. “He has his bias, here, plainly. He—his huge company—takes out yearly an immense reach of wild forest. It is sometimes lumbered ‘selectively.’ But the hauling off of the best and largest trees changes the entire ecology. He often ‘scalps’ a forest and then plants two trees for every one cut. Boasts about that in double-page, four-color ads. As if he had put back twice what he took. But even if he does plant two little trees for each board-producing giant, there’s something he cannot plant: the century that he also took away, or fifty years, and maybe two centuries.”

  Adams, the railroad man, spoke with vexation. “Is that accurate? Won’t he go on doing the planting and cutting till, fifty years hence, say, he returns to crop his own trees? And so on, without damage or loss. Gain, even?”

  Bush disregarded that for the moment. “Now ‘multiple use.’ The same area that is lumbered, or will be, is also used for grazing. Cattle, maybe sheep. And sheep take the ground cover off to the crowns—roots, even. Cattle are bad enough. So our forest, virgin, re-planted after selective cutting or a scalping, is ready for erosion. It takes a lot of rain to make a tree. When the roots of the tree itself and the surrounding ground cover die, or even diminish, the rains tend to wash away, not sink in. This same area, let’s suppose, with its multiple-use license, is open to camping and hunting and therefore to whatever man does there: his trash, his toxic debris, his hard-trodden paths, his paved trailer-parks, his junk-filled brooks, the game he takes away if he is a hunter, the dead predators meant to keep a balance which his ignorant hatred of that kind leads him to destroy—the wolf, bobcat, cougar, coyote, and the rest. Now, yet another use is common in this once-balanced and self-sustaining wilderness. Somebody has mining rights.”

  “Like me,” Rufus Cooper put in, good humoredly.

  Albert Bush turned and pointed at his host soberly. “Like you. How many million acres of once untouched forest or grassland, swamp, even, or inshore waters has your big and very enterprising company left a dead place—a ruin of tailings? A mile-wide hole in a white pine forest? An underground gallery that, when the metal veins are exhausted, becomes a drain for the rain and destroys the previous ground water tables? How many offshore sulphur bores have spilled the sulphur, or dumped the low-yield portion into what reaches of once-living sea till, today, it is without valuable fishes or crustacea? That’s my area, of course.”

  Cooper was visibly distressed. But he spoke with a sort of sweetness, a dangerous sort. “Stick to it, then, for a bit. We get your forest allusion, all right.”

  Bush nodded, paused, shrugged. “Very well. Let’s move on to Addison Lewis, here, and his tanker fleet. Shipping. Man carries about a hundred million tons of petroleum and its products on the seas, yearly. Fine! USA and many other nations need the import. How much of it, though, is spilled or washed out of bilges and left on the oceans?” Someone, Glenn saw, must have tried to interrupt but Albert Bush raised a hand, palm out and flat.

  “One per cent. Not a great loss, economically. But in amount, a million tons. You’ve all seen how any petrochemical liquid spreads on water. A drop of kerosene becomes a molecule-thick layer on a big area of a pond. Same, at sea. And when oil, even one molecule thick, covers an aquatic surface, it kills many life forms—you use it, that way, to destroy mosquito larvae. Also, this thin veil changes surface tension. And yet, the very organisms, phytoplankton, that we heard about this morning, live at or near the ocean surface—have to—because they need the energy of sunlight to do that job of changing the carbon dioxide we flush into the air, to oxygen, again, the most vital of all life-needs for nearly all forms, near enough to all to say—all.”

  He looked at a restive audience, cleared his throat and went on. “Already we have fished out many of the best and most productive areas in the oceans. Already, some animals, whales, are as near to gone as doesn’t matter. What will be next? Tuna? Perhaps. And, then, too, we have already polluted, or filled so many of the estuaries where innumerable fish and crustacea breed, that their numbers are being reduced.”

  He looked, slowly, from face to face. What he saw evidently distressed him. “I am prepared to support those and a hundred other claims, with fact. I realize this aspect of ecology isn’t being well received here. I understand the reason. Many of you are deeply involved in these destructive procedures. To carry on your industries and do so without the lethal side-effects would be so costly you couldn’t sell your products—”

  Somebody muttered loudly, “Damn right!”

  “So let me be brief. As a source of more food, whether by better fishing and netting means, or even by aquaculture—fish farming, in enclosed bays or the like—the seven seas offer very little hope of increased fecundity. We may be reaping the peak today. And what I would have said in more detail, and will, if asked, is this:

  “We cannot continue our multiple-use policy anywhere—especially in the seas. If we spill enough oil, from undersea wells and tankers, or start large-scale mining with, of course, tailings and masses of other wastes and discarded material, as a certain result, we will be merely adding biological insult to the half million chemical and waste compounds we already dump at sea, directly and by way of rivers—all these, new to nature, alien to its life forms and thousands, very toxic, the least harmful one, still, replacing what was in its space, and had been there in nature for hundreds of millions of years! Our sea foods are already loading up with poisons, lead, pesticides, mercury, radioactive isotopes of a thousand sorts. The sea, gentlemen,
to sum up, needs less of the load it is getting, not more, even to remain a source of edible food, perhaps, a source of breathable air, and certainly, a source of anything but more oil, more metal, if that’s how we use it on the scale contemplated. Thank you.”

  There was, then, a long silence.

  When it became unduly long, Rufus Cooper said, quietly, “Any questions?”

  One of the two military men rose, oddly, like a school boy. He glared at the scientist. “My command happens to keep me in touch with the Army Engineers. I therefore realize they have been the butt of a campaign of villification by the—conservation people, bird-watchers, old ladies in sneakers, the wilderness fools, and some scientists—all assorted nuts who have never offered a word on the other side. The fantastic achievements of the Corps and their scores of billions of dollars worth of general gain rising from their endeavors goes unnoted. If I understand your implication, doctor, you are telling us we are crazy, not the nuts who want to pick pussywillows? Do you, do you and your colleagues intend to go on with your un-American, your damnable effort to be a roadblock in the path of American progress? Would you want national security set aside to allow your precious salt waters to remain open to enemy use only? And if your propaganda is correct, why hasn’t it proved up? Where are those disasters chaps like you keep predicting? All you do is create panic. Confuse the citizens. And for what? Publicity?”

  Glenn watched Bush. He was too angry to reply right off.

  That gave Donald Royce of Royce Heavy Machines the chance to say, coldly and flatly, “I think you better answer that, Al. And favorably. Otherwise, my firm’s annual hundred thousand contribution to your Institute may—will be—cut to zero.”

  Bush had guts. And, Glenn knew, he was right. He stared with rising anger at Royce. “If we, we scientists, don’t go on telling these things to every soul who will listen and till we get action, Mr. Royce, a time will come when you won’t manufacture bulldozers, back-hoes, earth-movers or tanks. You—or your heirs, or company managers won’t—be around, is all.” He sat down.