Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [137]
--But Yvonne Constable had not become a star for the second time. Yvonne Constable had not even been on her way to becoming a star. She had acquired an agent who managed to execute some excellent publicity--excellent in spite of the fact that publicity of any kind, she persuaded herself, was one of her greatest secret fears--on the strength of her earlier rough-riding successes; she received promises, and that was all. In the end she walked alone down Virgil Avenue or Mariposa beneath the dusty dead shallow-planted palms of the dark and accursed City of the Angels without even the consolation that her tragedy was no less valid for being so stale. For her ambitions as an actress had always been somewhat spurious: they suffered in some sense from the dislocations of the functions--she saw this--of womanhood itself. She saw it, and at the same time, now it was all quite hopeless (and now that she had, after everything, outgrown Hollywood), saw that she might under other conditions have become a really first-rate, even a great artist. For that matter what was she if not that now (if greatly directed) as she walked or drove furiously through her anguish and all the red lights, seeing, as might the Consul, the sign in the Town House window "Informal Dancing in the Zebra Room" turn "Infernal"--or "Notice to Destroy Weeds" become "Notice to Newlyweds." While on the hoarding--"Man's public inquiry of the hour"--the great pendulum on the giant blue clock swung ceaselessly. Too late! And it was this, it was all this that had perhaps helped to make meeting Jacques Laruelle in Quauhnahuac such a shattering and ominous thing in her life. It was not merely that they had the Consul in common, so that through Jacques she had been mysteriously able to reach, in a sense to avail herself of, what she had never known, the Consul's innocence; it was only to him that she'd been able to talk of Hollywood (not always honestly, yet with the enthusiasm with which close relatives may speak of a hated parent and with what relief!) on the mutual grounds of contempt and half-admitted failure. Moreover they discovered that they were both there in the same year, in 1932, had been once, in fact, at the same party, outdoor-barbecue-swimming-pool-and-bar; and to Jacques she had shown also, what she had kept hidden from the Consul, the old photographs of Yvonne the Terrible dressed in fringed leather shirts and riding-breeches and high-heeled boots, and wearing a ten-gallon hat, so that in his amazed and bewildered recognition of her this horrible morning, she had wondered was there not just an instant's faltering--for surely Hugh and Yvonne were in some grotesque fashion transposed!... And once too in his studio, where the Consul was so obviously not going to arrive,
M. Laruelle had shown her some stills of his old French films, one of which it turned out--good heavens!--she'd seen in New York soon after going east again. And in New York she'd stood once more (still in Jacques's studio) on that freezing winter night in Times Square--she was staying at the Astor--watching the illuminated news aloft travelling around the Times Building, news of disaster, of suicide, of banks failing, of approaching war, of nothing at all, which, as she gazed upward with the crowd, broke off abruptly, snapped off into darkness, into the end of the world, she had felt, when there was no more news. Or was it--Golgotha? A bereaved and dispossessed orphan, a failure, yet rich, yet beautiful, walking, but not back to her hotel, in the rich fur trappings of alimony, afraid to enter the bars alone whose warmth she longed for then, Yvonne had felt far more desolate than a streetwalker; walking--and being followed, always followed--through the numb brilliant jittering city--the best for less, she kept seeing, or Dead End, or Romeo and Juliet,