The Deer Park by Norman Mailer Read Free Book Online

she was well known in Rumania, and when the war came she was put in a concentration camp, although for all I know she could just as well have been a
collaborateur
. In any case, she came here with nothing but an atrocious Rumanian accent. It doesn’t matter what kind of star you were in Rumania, there aren’t many roles you can play when you’re over forty, your looks are going and you have an accent with all the wrong sounds in it. She made some sort of living being technical advisor for films with a Balkan locale.”
    We were sitting on the patio which opened from the living room of Eitel’s house, and he stopped abruptly and made a face at the yucca tree turning blue in the twilight shadows. “Sergius O’Shaugnessy,” he said with the comic pompousness he loved to give my name, “what are you doing here in Desert D’Or? Just what the hell are you doing, you smart Mick?”
    “Nothing,” I said, “I’m trying to forget how to fly a plane.”
    “Do you have money to do this forever?”
    “For a year or so.”
    “Then what?”
    “I’ll think about the next town when my money is gone.”
    “That kind of remark makes me feel old-fashioned. You’re really here to have a good time?” Eitel asked suspiciously. I nodded. “Women?” he went on.
    “If I can manage it.”
    “Sergius, you’re a twentieth-century gentleman,” he said, and we laughed at this.
    “The worst thing about my Rumanian,” Eitel continued, as if to explain himself now that he had an idea of me, “is that she had been beautiful once, and too many men had been in love with her. Now, I’m afraid, it was the reverse. She had lost her looks and so she adored me.” He couldn’t stand her, Eitelexplained, and therefore he felt obliged to be as nice as possible. “An affair like that can go on forever. It went on for a whole year. I’ve never been the kind of man who can be faithful with any regularity. I’ve always been the sort of decent chappie who hops from one woman to another in the run of an evening because that’s the only prescription which allows me to be fond of both the ladies, but I was faithful in my way to the Rumanian. She would have liked to see me every night for she hated to be alone, and I would have liked never to see her again, and so we settled for two nights a week. It didn’t matter if I were in the middle of a romance or between girls, whether I had a date that night or not—on Tuesday night and Thursday night I went to her apartment to sleep. I can say, parenthetically, that she was passionate in a depressing way.”
    “How can passion be depressing?” I asked.
    Eitel was kind about it. “You’re right, Sergius. It wasn’t really passion, and that’s why it left me low. She was hungry, that’s all.” He started to pour himself a drink, and instead rattled the ice cubes in his glass. “As I say, I believed I went to see her because I didn’t want to hurt her. But, looking back, I can say I was wrong. I needed to see her.”
    “I don’t know if I follow you.”
    He shook his head. “Maybe I was in bad shape after Lulu moved out.”
    “Some of the people here think you’re still in love with her,” I said directly. I guess I believed this myself. I had seen Lulu Meyers not more than a year ago, but I had seen her when she passed for a minute through our officers’ mess escorted by generals and colonels, and I had seen her again with ten thousand soldiers between us while she told her jokes and prattled a little song on an improvised overseas stage like some fairy princess of sex who had flown across the Pacific to anoint us with tiny favors, a whiff of her perfume, a lift she lost from her heel, a sequin from her evening gown. I even remembered having heard the name of her husband, and having forgotten it, andso the situation seemed impressive to be able to talk casually of her now.
    “In love with Lulu?” Eitel asked. He began to laugh. “Why, Sergius, our marriage was the meeting of zero