Nathan took a long time before answering. DeMarco did not hurry him.
“A composite character,” the young man finally said. “I mean…I don’t see why not. Maybe he used one as the younger version of Annabel and one as the older. Or maybe he took qualities from each of them to build the character. The one thing he always preached to us was the need for complex characters. It’s the contradictions in a personality that make for conflict, he said. And that’s what a story is all about. Do you know the Faulkner quote from his Nobel speech? He said that the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.”
“The heart in conflict with itself,” DeMarco said.
“Right. So…” Then Nathan went silent.
“Is there something else?” DeMarco asked.
“Sorry, I was thinking about something he said about building characters. That we—as writers, I mean—have to really take our time getting to know them. To not just jump into a novel until we have a full sense of who our main characters are as people. That we have to let them build bit by bit.”
“I’m not sure what that means, Nathan.”
“In terms of his Annabel. He was still building her. Figuring out exactly who she was as a character. And probably using various people, not just one or two. The way this one looks, the way that one talks, bits of history from somebody else.”
“You’re saying that his Annabel wasn’t based wholly on one real person.”
“It’s unlikely that she was. After all, he was starting with Nabokov’s and Poe’s Annabels. And building his own from there.”
DeMarco suppressed a sigh that would have emerged as a groan. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks. I appreciate this. I apologize for disturbing you.”
“Not a problem,” Nathan said.
Afterward, in the reclining chair that, most nights, served as his bed, DeMarco tried to ignore the recognition that something had fallen in him, some inarticulable thing that left him feeling heavier than he was before, as if his center of gravity had dropped to his knees. Not only had Huston’s Annabel become more amorphous than ever, but the notion that Huston had cheated on his wife was even more troubling. DeMarco had wanted Huston to be better than that, someone he could admire. But now the equation was changed. It was a kind of Occam’s razor for law enforcement that adultery explained nearly everything. Infidelity. Lust. Stupidity and weakness.
It did and it did not. To be attracted to the kind of life Bonnie represented, to be drawn to that hedonism and self-indulgence when one’s own life is otherwise so structured and controlled, this much DeMarco could understand. But to lay a knife across the throat of a woman you apparently adored, to take the life of your own son and daughter and baby boy, this was incomprehensible. Mere lust, sexual attraction, the desires of the flesh—how could any of it account for such madness?
In the darkness and silence of his living room, with a cool glass of melting ice and whiskey in his hand, DeMarco wondered if he was trying to apply reason to a situation where reason did not exist. To a casual observer, Huston’s life would have appeared blessed. But this was the illusion Huston had created and maintained. A man patient and generous with his students, a picture-perfect wife and family, shirts and chinos always neatly pressed, fame and financial success; a man respected, envied; a man with a life each of his students longed for. Was it all a construction meant to conceal in himself the same dark urges that drove Huston’s characters? His life had seemed a sunlit lagoon, but what currents made the blue water shimmer? A lifetime of struggle and ambition. Parents taken away by violence. Professional jealousies. The stresses of fame, the loss of anonymity. The pressure to live up to the hype, to always be better, brighter, more successful, more worthy of praise.
Was it as simple as that? The facade, as thin and brittle as all facades are, had shattered? Huston had snapped?
DeMarco sipped his drink and wondered how it must feel to let everything go. Was Huston now deliriously happy in his insanity? Completely weightless and free? No shame, no remorse, no obligations, no sin?
DeMarco could not imagine such a state of being. Not in this world or any other.
Forty-Four
At first light, after three hours of restless sleep, he returned to Huston’s journal. He told himself that he was looking for the madness that would explain everything and solve the equation. He read each entry aloud, hoping to hear some vague insinuation he had missed on previous readings.
DeMarco now understood that much of a novelist’s life can show up in his fiction, thinly disguised as somebody else’s life. Portions of the journal were total fiction, but others were not. Discerning the difference would be the hard part.