Joyce Carol Oates - The Dark Prince

The power of the actor is his embodiment of the fear of ghosts.

(from The Actor's Handbook and The Actor's Life)

I  guess I never believed that I deserved to live. The way other people do. I needed to justify my life every hour. I needed your permission.

It was a season of no weather. Too early in the summer for the Santa Ana winds, yet the harsh dry air blown from the desert tasted of sand and fire. Through closed eyelids you could see flames dancing. In sleep you could hear the scuttling of rats driven out of Los Angeles by the crazed, continuous construction. In the canyons north of the city the plaintive cries of coyotes. There had been no rain for weeks, yet day followed day overcast with a pale glaring light like the inside of a blind eye. Tonight above El Cayon Drive the sky cleared briefly revealing a sickle moon of the moist-reddish hue of a living membrane. I don't want anything from you, I swear! Only just to say-You should know me, I think. Your daughter.

That night in early June the blond girl was sitting in a borrowed Jaguar at the side of El Cayon Drive, waiting. She was alone and she appeared to be neither smoking nor drinking. Nor was she listening to a car radio. The Jaguar was parked near the top of the narrow graveled road where there was a fortresslike property, vaguely Oriental in design, surrounded by a ten-foot cobblestone wall and protected by a wrought-iron gate. There was even a small gatehouse but no one was on duty inside. On lower ground, spotlights flooded properties and sounds of laughter and voices lifted like music through the warm night, but this property, at the summit of El Cayon, was mostly darkened. Around the high wall there were no palm trees, only Italian cypresses, twisted by the wind into bizarre sculpted shapes. I don't have any proof. I don't need any proof. Paternity is a matter of the soul. I wanted just to see your face, Father.

A name had been given the blond girl. Tossed at her as carelessly as a coin tossed at a beggar's outstretched hands. Eager as any beggar, and unquestioning, she'd snatched at it. A name! His name! A man who'd possibly been her mother's lover in 1 925.

Possibly?-probably.

Amid the debris of the past she'd been scavenging. As a beggar too might scavenge trash, even garbage, in search of treasure.

Earlier that night at a poolside party in Bel-Air she'd asked please could she borrow a car?-and several of the men had vied with one another offering her their keys and she was barefoot running, and gone. If the Jaguar was missing for too many hours the "borrowing" would be reported to the Beverly Hills police, but that wasn't going to happen for the blond girl wasn't drunk and she wasn't on drugs and her desperation was shrewdly disguised. Why, I don't know why, maybe just to shake hands, hello arid good-bye if you want it that way. I have my own life of course. I won't be losing anything I'd actually had.

The blond girl in the Jaguar might have remained there waiting through the night except a private security guard in an unmarked car drove up El Cayon to investigate. Someone in the near-darkened mansion at the top of the hill must have reported her. The cop wore a dark uniform and carried a flashlight which he shone rudely into the girl's face. It was a movie scene! Yet no music beneath to cue if you should feel anxiety, suspense, humor. The cop's lines were delivered flatly so you had no cue from him, either. "Miss? What business do you have here? This is a private road." The girl blinked rapidly as if blinking back tears (but she had no tears left) and whispered, "None. I'm sorry, Officer." Her politeness and childlike manner disarmed the cop immediately. And he'd seen her face. That face! I knew she'd got to be somebody, someday. But who? He said, faltering, scratching at the underside of his slightly stubby jaw, "Well. Better turn around and go home, miss. If you don't live up here. These are kind of special folks live up here. You're too young for..." His voice broke off though he'd finished about all he had to say to her.

The blond girl said, starting her borrowed car, "No, I'm not. Young."

It was the eve of her twenty-third birthday.

In her purse, the.38-caliber Smith & Wesson she figured now, maybe she'd never use.

The End