CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Felix Demeter
Doris Day and Audrey Meadows both cringed when asked about the beach scene in “Bermuda Shorts.” Although Felix Demeter—yes, progeny of director Rex Demeter—is only one of the four writers credited with the 93-minute disaster, insiders tell us that the grating sand-in-your-suit dialogue is all his.
—Movie Star Confidential, February 1962
There it was: a pocket knife. A Boy Scout knife. Reggie Stout had a fucking camping knife in the fingers of his left hand, his right hand shielding most of it. But for a brief moment, Felix had seen it. He’d had a knife just like it himself when he’d been a boy. And, it seemed, this PR man had one too. Still. At the age of forty or forty-one.
Its body was black, though the metal was supposed to look like tree bark, and it had, Felix believed, a flat-head screwdriver, a can opener, a bottle opener, and the knife blade. But the blade couldn’t have been more than three inches long when you flipped it open. Did Reggie really believe it was any match against a rifle—plus the gun their driver was packing?
But it seemed that Reggie was scheming. He leaned forward, adjusting one of his socks, and whispered something to Carmen.
“What?” Felix asked his wife, his lips barely moving. “What is he doing?”
She shook her head vaguely, ignoring him. Whatever Reggie was planning—whatever Reggie and Carmen were planning together—it did not involve him. They knew the depth of his cowardice. It was among his defining features: his eyes, his hair, his craven soul. He was useless.
Casually, she took off the scarf that she had tied around her neck, the scarf that had seemed to begin each day in Africa there but by lunchtime was covering her hair and her ears against the dust and the sun. She was holding it in her hands, stretching it out. It was yellow, just like the one that Joseph Cotten had used to strangle Marilyn Monroe in Niagara.
He wanted to press her, but he was trembling and he was afraid to draw further attention to her or to Reggie. Because now he knew. He knew. And he didn’t know which scared him more: the idea of his wife and this PR flak doing something dangerous or, like him, doing nothing at all.
* * *
.?.?.
And yet, just yesterday, neither his wife nor Reggie Stout thought he was such a pitiful child. God, along with Charlie Patton, Peter Merrick, and Reggie Stout, he and Carmen had had a rather good time. The five of them were sitting on two big blankets eating lunch: Coca-Cola and sandwiches made from cheese and leftover gazelle from last night. It was before they raced to the Mara River like Indy car drivers to see the great crossing. He had been thrilled by the company, because it was another chance to bond with Merrick and show the agent that he was （or could be） a force in his own right. He wouldn’t drop his father’s name （he wouldn’t drop any names） the way he had during their first breakfast in Nairobi, and he would play entirely by the rules of etiquette that seemed to apply here on safari: you didn’t try and leverage who the hell you were professionally in real life （because, except for Patton, this sure as hell wasn’t real life）， but instead shared the details of your life that were genuine and personal—that is, if you spoke at all of your life back in America. Mostly you focused on the way the sight of a rhino in the wild changed you. Because it did.
And, suddenly, he wasn’t thinking about what he could say that would make him sound smart, or whether he needed to jump in so he wasn’t forgotten in the conversation. Charlie Patton was talking about elephants.
“There really is such a thing as an elephant nursery,” he was saying. “An old girl, not likely the mom but maybe the grandmom, keeping an eye on a bunch of the young ones. I always enjoyed it when I stumbled upon an elephant nursery.”
“And yet you never had children yourself,” Carmen said.
“Never even married,” he replied, and Felix thought for a second that Charlie was going to say more, perhaps file this reality under regrets. But he didn’t, instead continuing as if he had never paused. “I also love it when I come across some new mother trumpeting the birth of her son—or daughter. Elephants are smart: they love daughters, too. They’d like your Betty Friedan.”
“And yet you hunt them,” Carmen reminded him. It was an observation, but there was a hint of judgment in the tone. “And you will too, Peter, next week.”
“Honestly? It was usually the old men I was collecting,” Charlie said. “The ones who’d been kicked from the herd or had chosen to leave because, well, it was just their time. Their backs are moss, their ears are rags. Their tusks are broken, but still, it seems, too damn heavy for them to manage. You can tell from their tracks that they’re dragging their feet because it hurts like hell just to walk.”