One way or another he had had the idea that this picture was going to be his justification. Back perhaps so far as the Spanish Civil War, certainly through all of the cocktail parties and the jeep rides and the requisitioned castles which had been the Second World War to him (excepting that visit to a concentration camp which had terrified him deeply because it matched so exactly his growing conviction that civilization was capable of any barbarity provided only that it be authoritative and organized), along all of that uneven trip from one beautiful woman to another, there had been the luxury of looking at his life as wine he decanted in a glass, studying the color, admiring the corruption, leaving for himself the secret taste: he was above all this, he was better than the others, he was more honest, and one day he would take his life and transmute it into something harder than a gem and as imperishable, an art work. Had he been afraid to try, he would think, for the fear that his superiority did not exist? The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful. So, in brooding over his past, he came to remember the unadmitted pleasure of making commercial pictures. With them he had done well, for a while at least, despite all pretenses that he had been disgusted, and looking back upon such emotions, concealed so long from himself, Eitel felt with dull pain that he should have realized he would never be the artist he had always expected, for if there were one quality beyond all others in an artist, it was the sense of shame, of sickness, and of loathing for any work which was not his best.

“Stop living in the past!” Munshin looked at him levelly. “Brother, can’t you believe that maybe I want to change, too?”

Eitel gave the lonely smile of a man who has ceased to believe in the honesty of others. “You know,” he said, “it’s not the sentiments of men which make history, but their actions.”

Talk of my talent, I ended by losing a lot of money. There is no point in going into how I would feel afterward on winning nights and losing nights. The common denominator was the same; I wanted to go back for more, sure if I had won that my new system had shown itself, sure even more if I lost that the mistakes I made were now taken into account and the error would be fixed tomorrow. Win or lose, I controlled the situation with my mind, I was superior, I understood; that is the sweet of gambling; and so, long description is unnecessary—all real gambling is more or less the same. Why tell how my seven thousand dollars went to five, and the five, eight, and how eight thousand dropped to three, nor the interesting hours of that night when three thousand became ten thousand and went back to five again. What counts is that I came back to Desert D’Or with a third of the money I had when I left, the itch for gambling gone with the cash.

Somehow, I had known Eitel would help me to refuse the offer. On the way back, knowing my decision was made, I discovered I was feeling fairly well. I knew that my decision didn’t mean very much; if my movie was not made then others would be made, but at least my name would not be used. I suppose what I really was thinking is that I would always be a gambler, and if I passed this chance by, it was because I had the deeper idea that I was meant to gamble on better things than money or a quick career. I had a look then into the kind of vanity I shared with Eitel. Each of us judged himself hard, for strong in us was the idea that we must be perfect. We felt we were better than others and therefore we should act better. It is a very great vanity.

“You don’t have to worry,” I said, “I’m indifferent to you.” At the moment I was indifferent to her. If I had spent my days not knowing whether I loved her or was capable of killing her, I had arrived for the moment at that passing calm which teases us that we are cured. I was to feel her loss again; months from now I would catch a quick knife seeing her name on a cinema marquee, reading a word she was supposed to have said in a gossip column, or I would see a girl who by a gesture or a trick of speech would bring back Lulu for me. All this is pointless; what carried the moment was that I was indifferent to Lulu, I thought she could no longer hurt me. So I could be generous, I could say, “I’m indifferent,” and feel the confidence of a man who has lived through a landslide.

I could have had other jobs. I could have been a male car-hop as Munshin had warned, or a parking-lot attendant, or I could have gotten work of some sort in one hotel or another, but I chose to wash dishes as though my eight-hour stint in the steam and the grease and the heat, with my fingers burned by plates which came too hot from the machine and my eyes reddened by sweat, was a sort of poor man’s Turkish bath for me. And when I was done for the day, I would grab a meal in a drugstore, an expensive drugstore, but it was the cheapest I could find, for it would have been easier to come on a yacht than a hash-house in that part of the desert, and the restaurant where I worked did not feed the help, except for what help I could get from a friendly waitress—the last of Munshin’s predictions—who would slip me a Caesar salad or a peach melba which I would eat with water-puckered fingers, hardly missing a beat on the plates as they erupted from that gargoyle of a machine which threw its shadow over me, while the most simple lesson of class, the dirge of the dishwasher, steamed furiously in my mind: did those hogs out there, those rich hogs, have to eat on so many plates?

I had found the orphanage again and I was home; I might just as well never have left home. After work, after my meal in the expensive drugstore, I would go back to my furnished room and I would bathe—what luxuries have the poor—and lie naked and powdered on my bed, covered with heat rash, reading the newspaper until I fell asleep. That way I passed three or four weeks, my mind sleeping on pointless calculations. I would spend an hour going over my budget, deciding on any particular night that I could reduce my expenses to no less than thirty-four dollars a week, which meant after all the pieces were taken from my pay, that I could never bank more than fifty dollars a month. So it would be six hundred dollars saved in a year, and after six years and eight months of dodging lobsters, I would earn back what I had lost in twelve days with Lulu, and this thought gave me a sort of melancholy glee, allowing me to relish like a saint counting his sores, how hard the work would be tomorrow.

“All right, Charley,” Elena said, sitting up in bed, her face filling with hard wisdom and hatred of him, until she was beautiful to his eyes, and more than a little frightening. “Now, you listen to me,” she said. “You were the one who arranged everything tonight, and yet you call me a pig. If it had turned out better for you, you would be loving me all over again, you would be telling me how wonderful I am.”

He was weary, he was exhausted—a defeated man cannot be asked to have the moral bravery of a victor. So Eitel turned on Elena, and in his best accent he said, “Must you worship stupidity as if it were your patron saint?”

Eitel learned. Everything was all right until they tried to make love again. Then, Elena was far away, and it was no better for him. He hated her. It was impossible not to remember how she had given herself to the others, and whatever expression might cross her face became deformed to him and infected the past until he saw beyond Beda the legion of her numberless lovers to whom she had probably given herself in exactly this way. Thus, losing the pride that it was he who gave her everything, that there was finally something worth while about himself, Eitel was stripped; he had never felt so small.

“I called him yesterday. Then I made my appointment for the haircut. This haircut you don’t like. Does that surprise you? Did you think you’d have to kick me out? All right.” She cleared her throat. “Maybe I’ll become a prostitute. Don’t worry. I’m not trying to make you feel sorry. You think I’m a prostitute anyway, so how could you feel sorry?” Her eyes were dull. This was one time he knew she would not burst into tears. “In fact you always thought of me as a prostitute,” Elena said, “but you don’t know what I think of you. You think I can’t live without you. Maybe I know better.”