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begin to talk.
    I was surprised when we were introduced. Although he was over forty, and had a big reputation as a film director, Eitel was better known in other ways. He had been married several times, he was said to have been the cause of more than one divorce, and these were the least of the rumors. At different times I heard he was an alcoholic, a drug addict, a satyr; some people even whispered he was an espionage agent. Considering all this, it was unexpected to meet a middle-sized man with a broken nose and a wide smile. He had a large face to match his broad body, and his head was half bald, crowned with a circle of strong curly hair. He had eyes you noticed. They were bright blue, and when he smiled, they were alive, and his broken nose gave him a humorous look. But only his voice gave a hint of his reputation. It was a voice which had a hundred things in it, and a girl told me once she thought it was “seductive.” He had a way of offering something and pulling it back; just when you thought he was laughing at you, he seemed to like you—about the time you decided things were going well, his voice would turn you away. I’ve taken a few punches on the head, but I stillknow voices, I’ve got a good ear, and Eitel’s voice had more than one accent. I could hear New York in it, and the theater, and once in a while if he was talking to somebody from those parts, a trace of the South or the Middle-West came into it, and with all of that it was a controlled voice—most of the time he sounded like society. With the way he had of laughing at himself, he told me once that he picked up the English accent last of all.
    A long description, I know, but I had seldom liked anybody so much. I felt that he was a man like me, only many times smoother and he knew more. Later I learned that a lot of people saw Eitel this way. Of all the rumors about him, and most people seemed to enjoy saying that his career was finished, I believed nothing. He drank a lot, but I never saw him drunk; his speech only became slow; that he took drugs was a little strong for me, and his reputation with women I would have been ready to share. More than once I studied the friendly attention he was able to give them.
    All the same, he was forced to be a lonely man, and a good part of our friendship was due to the fact that I looked for his company. At least, I thought so. It was his habit to drive over to the open-air café in the early afternoon, and there, as I have said, he would drink, he would talk, he would look at his script. Once, he had been a great friend of the manager of the hotel, but now he was waiting for the day when he would be asked not to enter the Yacht Club. “You see, years ago I loaned the manager some money, and he’s the sort of man who boasts that he never forgets a favor.” Eitel grinned. “Right now, I find that a nice trait of character. For some silly reason, I like this place.”
    Many days, nobody besides myself would sit down at all, and I would help him drink through the afternoon and into the night. It seemed he was never invited anywhere, or at least anywhere he wanted to go. Usually, Eitel would get restless after a time and I would go along with him on a round of thesecond-rate night clubs and bars of the resort. All those hours were the same. Drinking friends would be found and lost, a girl might be picked up and dropped again, once he almost got into a fight because a drunk insulted a bar girl who was sitting with us, and yet it was a kind of occupation. On we would go, hiding from our insomnia, not even trying to sleep until the dawn lifted over the desert, and along the rounds of our drinking he drove himself like a man getting over a broken marriage. I could see him waste a day and then a night and do no more than answer a letter.
    I was told his story more than once, hearing it from former friends, false friends, and people who did not know him at all, but most of his story I got from Eitel directly, for