by Howard Fast
“I’m to be cremated.”
“I’ll work that out too. Let’s eat. I’m starved.”
“You look twenty years younger than you have any right to look. Are you sure nothing happened last night?”
“Eggs, sausage and fried potatoes — home fried, not French fried. Croissant and coffee.”
“My God,” he whispered, “don’t you gain weight?”
“No. I worry it off.”
After the order had been taken, Barbara said, “Last night — what did you decide?”
“Decide? I was too stupidly drunk to decide anything.”
“Before you took me here. Those men from the Salvador resistance asked you to send a correspondent down there. It’s important. We’re the most Hispanic part of America, out here in California. You used to talk about the need to develop a Mexican readership. This fits in, doesn’t it? We should not have to depend on the wire services and gleanings from the New York Times. “
“What’s all this leading up to?”
“Last night, those three men asked you to send a correspondent to Salvador. Will you? Yes or no?”
“I don’t like anyone telling me how to run my newspaper.”
“Oh, come on, Carson. This is Barbara.”
“Who always knew better how a newspaper should be run.”
“Carson, about the correspondent — yes or no?”
“I happen to have thought about it several weeks ago. I’ll take it up at our meeting today.”
“Then your answer is yes?”
“I suppose so,” Carson agreed.
“Good. I want the job.”
He stared at her. The food came, and he continued to stare. She dipped a piece of potato into the yellow of a fried egg and swallowed it.
“So that’s it,” Carson said finally. “That’s why you trailed around and let me in —”
“Carson, for God’s sake, I love you, I’ve always loved you, and one thing has nothing to do with the other. So get off that horse. I asked you something.”
“The answer is no.” He began to eat furiously, and then, mouth full, added, “I love you too. That’s why the answer is no. No. No matter what you say, no!”
“You’ll feel better after you’ve eaten something. I shouldn’t have asked you to decide on an empty stomach.”
He stopped eating and pointed his fork at her. “Do you see? It’s exactly that kind of thing that broke up our marriage. No matter what it is or where it is, you have to be so goddamn superior!”
“Oh, Carson, I’m trying to be nice. But suddenly there’s a chance to do what I do best and to stop decaying and disintegrating, and I think that if I went to the New York Times and asked them to give me the assignment for that beautiful Sunday magazine section they publish, they’d give it to me. I have a very good reputation in New York. A prophet is always without honor in his own place, and I realize you can’t afford a Sunday section like that. Nevertheless —”
“You’re doing it again,” he interrupted. “You know, you’re childish when you begin to plead and you think you can tease me into something. Not only are you totally transparent, but it comes off insulting.”
“Carson, come on, I couldn’t be insulting to you —”
“And furthermore, we don’t have to copy the New York Times, and that magazine of theirs is not too expensive for us, but I’m not a damn bit sure that what’s right for New York is right for L.A. We’re unique, a place of our own, and don’t tell me that L.A. is a great place to live if you’re an orange.”
“I like you when you’re angry,” Barbara said. “I wouldn’t like it if you were my boss, because your eyes get very cold and nasty, and that would frighten me. Your food’s getting cold.”
“So is yours,” he growled.
“That’s because I’m excited about this assignment.”
He continued to eat without further comment, and after a minute or two, Barbara said, “I did have an offer for an assignment from Good Housekeeping magazine.”
“Oh?”
“To do a story on Demel.”
“Who was Demel?”
“The father of Viennese pastry. Do you want that to happen to me?”
“I need more coffee,” Carson said. “I’m dry and my head is beginning to split.”
“Oh, no,” Barbara said. “That won’t get you anywhere with me, because I remember very well all the times I had to telephone someone you didn’t want to talk to and tell him —”
“O.K. Now look at it sanely for a moment, Barbara. Last night wasn’t my introduction to that mess called El Salvador. I’ve been reading the dispatches for months. The army’s death squads murdered reporters and photographers, as well as Catholic nuns, as well as maybe thirty thousand men, women and children in the past few years. You want me to send you into that? You want me to be your executioner?”
“Carson, I’m not a fool, and I’m not an amateur. I have something of a track record, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“I know your track record. Like mine, it was made a long time ago.”
“Carson, the place is full of reporters. They’re not going to kill me, and you simply don’t know what it is to vegetate and have your friends tell you to take up knitting. Carson, I’m in good health and strong and possibly with more brains than I ever had in the past. Oh, I admit I sort of connived when I heard who you were going to see last night. So what? I want this. I need it. There are better ways to go than to dry into nothingness and become what they so euphemistically call a senior citizen. To hell with that! I need work, because if I don’t work, I’m going to die — the wrong way. And there is a right and a wrong way to die. Stop protecting me, and give me the one thing you can give me.”
He was silent for a while, and then he said, “You really want it that much?”
“Yes, I do.”
“All right, it’s yours.” Then he added, “You know, Barbara, you don’t need me or my paper. You could go down there on your own, and I couldn’t do a thing about it.”
“I know that. I want a newspaper behind me. There was a time when I diddled lions and alligators, but that was stupidity, not courage. I was never anything to shout about where courage was concerned. I may have some store of moral courage, but when it comes to physical courage, I’m as barren as most people. It’s the gross stupidity that I feel I’ve overcome, and I like to have a press card from a big, fat, influential L.A. newspaper in my purse.”
“You haven’t asked about money.”
“The hell with money. I’ll take whatever you offer. It’s the job I want.”
“Not a job — assignment,” Carson said carefully. “I’ve turned away too many damn good newspaper people. You can have the assignment, not a job. Three weeks. That’s long enough to measure your background and dig out the story. When do you leave?”
“I’ll go home and put things together. Then I’m yours.”
Nine
Carla and Freddie had planned to spend a week in New York before going off to Paris; and Freddie, trying desperately to make each moment better than it actually was, had engaged a suite at the St. Regis Hotel on East Fifty-fifth Street. But not the hotel nor carriages in the park nor dinners at the best restaurants in town managed to shake either of them out of themselves — two gloomy selves who watched their uneasy romance begin to crumble around the edges. This mood had taken hold of them while they were still on the plane coming east, beginning, as Freddie recalled, with discussion about marriage. It was the first time he had unfolded any specifics of the future to Carla, and as he laid them out they consisted of marriage, possibly in New York, to be followed in due time by at least three children, the first, perhaps, to be born in France, symbolically in the wine country.
Concerning this, Carla had said nothing until after two days in the overfurnished suite at the St. Regis; and then one morning, refusing to make love, leaping out of bed angrily as a sleep-fogged Freddie began to run his hands over her body, stalking around the bedroom, naked
and beautiful and very angry, Carla shouted at him, “Everything you decided, everything — where we go, where we live, children I must have and how many, and everything else, even what dresses I buy — because to you here in New York, you have decided that I look like one of them Puerto Rican hookers, and in this stinking city, anyone who hasn’t yellow-dyed hair and a pasty skin is a hooker or what they call a Hispanic, and I say fuck the lot of them in this stinking place with that Hispanic shit, because my people were here in this country before you goddamn Anglos even learned to sail a boat so that you could come and take away everything that belonged to someone else!”
“Hey! You’re really trashing the world!”
“And don’t laugh at me!” Carla shouted. “I’ll kill you if you laugh at me and try to show me how goddamn clever you are. I’m not clever! I’m a stupid Chicana.”
Freddie got out of bed, spreading his arms to mollify her. Like Carla, he was naked. She shouted at him, “Put something on! I don’t want to look at you naked!”
“You’re naked,” he protested weakly.
“That’s different.” Then she strode into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. Freddie stared after her for a minute or so, still not entirely awake, trying to analyze and understand the explosion that had greeted him. He dressed without shaving, since Carla still held the bathroom, and then he ordered breakfast sent up. He had no idea whether Carla’s anger had run its course, and he had no desire to share it with the guests in the dining room. However, and very much as usual, he had been unable to anticipate Carla’s mood, and when he had finished ordering breakfast, she came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a charmeuse dressing gown of lemon yellow, her face shining. She needed no makeup. She had scrubbed her face with soap and water, and her skin glowed. Her mass of black hair fell to her shoulders, and Freddie, always astonished by her beauty, could picture her as the mistress of some great California hacienda in an era gone by. The sight of her melted him.
“Ah, my poor baby,” she said, going to him and embracing him. “I make you so miserable. I am so rotten to you. I don’t know why. I swear I don’t know why. I pray to the Mother of God, she should make me like herself, sweet and loving and forgiving. I think I’m not one damn bit forgiving. Maybe I think of how you took my cherry when I was just a kid. Oh, that’s a miserable thought, but sometimes nice. Don’t look at me like that, sweetheart. I’m so crazy, but I love you so, and I don’t want any kids in France. Fuck France. I want to go back to California.”
“Why? You were delighted at the thought of living in France.”
“That was when I was in California. Everything comes up roses when you’re someplace where you’re unhappy, and you think that anywhere else you could be happy. No way, darling. You speak French. I don’t know one damn word of French. You know that in school when a Chicana picks a second language, if she’s a dumbbell like me, she picks Spanish. Sure, I was speaking Spanish since the day I began to speak anything.”
“All right. Maybe my own dream of France is crazy. When you go back to a place where you’ve been happy as a kid, it never works. Does it?”
“Maybe not, Freddie. Oh, the hell with all this talk. Take off your clothes and get back into bed with me.”
She stepped away from him, grinning and opening her dressing gown. Freddie began to unbutton his shirt. “We’ll have to make a lot of adjustments, but we’ll get married in California, if that’s what you want.”
“No.”
“No?” He stared at her for a long moment. “No? Not in California? Where, then? Here?” But he knew the answer.
“Freddie — oh, Jesus, what kind of a game are we playing? I keep telling you this, and you keep forgetting. What kind of marriage would we have? Freddie, I don’t want kids and I will not have kids. There are enough poor cursed Chicanos in this world. And I don’t want any children, period. Some women are mothers. They got to be knocked up every year to be happy. No, no. Not me. You know, you confuse everything, you don’t think straight, and I go along with you. My papa is Cándido Truaz, foreman in the growing fields. In your winery — hold on, don’t stop me — so it’s Adam’s winery and what did you just inherit, ten, twelve million dollars. You want to make a lady out of me —”
“Damn it, you’re a lady! A great lady!”
“Take off your clothes, Freddie. I’m sick of talking.” She dropped the robe and threw herself on the bed. “Come on. This is the only language we don’t talk different.”
Carla took an afternoon plane back to California, leaving Freddie too stunned to assess properly what was happening. He tried to force money on her, which she rejected, and managed to stuff only a few hundred dollars into her purse. She insisted that she would have no trouble finding a job in San Francisco, and Freddie went through the phases of her decision like a man in a trance. He embraced her and kissed her, and then watched hopelessly as she passed through the metal detector and down the passageway to the plane.
“Poor Freddie,” she had said. “I love you so much, I don’t want to louse up your life beyond any repair. As soon as I find a place, I’ll call Barbara and tell her so you can find me.”
Freddie went back to his hotel suite and tried to get drunk. It had never worked for him and it didn’t work now. If you grow up in a winery, you build unshakable defenses against drunkenness or else become a hopeless alcoholic, and he was not an alcoholic. Freddie sat and brooded until four o’clock in the morning, and then he fell asleep.
The following morning, at nine o’clock, he telephoned Sam. Nine o’clock in New York is six A.M. in San Francisco, and Sam underlined that angrily. “Damn it, Freddie, do you know what time it is?”
“Nine o’clock,” Freddie said miserably.
“No! No, you horse’s ass, it’s six o’clock in the morning out here.”
Freddie could hear Mary Lou in the background, telling Sam to have a little compassion. “For heaven’s sake, he’s in trouble,” Mary Lou was saying.
“Are you in trouble?” Sam asked him.
“My God, Sam, I’m on the short end of the worst mess of my life. No one ever fucked up the way I did, and I deserve it — goddamn it, I do deserve it for taking off with your wife —”
“Freddie, will you stop being a horse’s ass and talk straight for one minute. You did not take off with my wife. I was divorced, and believe me I was thankful that Carla had someone like you to turn to, and you did me the favor of taking on my guilt. Now will you please tell me what happened.”
“She took off. No marriage. She went back to the Coast. Tried not to take a dollar from me; just took off and left me here — and so help me God, I look at the window and think about what a pleasure it would be to jump out.”
“Freddie, I never thought you were particularly bright, but that’s stupid — high-class stupid! Did Carla tell you that I now pay her four hundred a week in alimony?”
“No, she didn’t.”
“It’s no fortune, but it keeps the wolf away from the door. Freddie, where are you staying?”
“At the Saint Regis.”
“O.K. Now today’s Wednesday, when the medical profession hibernates. I was going to take Mary Lou to the beach, but that can wait. I’ll get an early plane and we’ll have dinner together. Unless you can change your plans about France and come back here?”
“No. Oh, no — no. I can never go back there, never!” Then he added, “It’s cold and wet here, and it’s beginning to snow. Oh, God, Sam, I feel so rotten. I broke May Ling’s heart. I left my kid. Do you know I was going to France for two years? I wouldn’t have seen him. I wouldn’t even remember what he looked like. Sammy, I don’t know what’s happened to me — Jesus God, I feel so rotten I want to die.”
“Can you get on a plane?”
“I can’t go back. Sammy, I can never go back. I’ve just fucked up beyond repair.”
“Stay right there at the hotel. Get some sleep. Watch TV. But stay there, and I’ll be there about four o’clock your time. Please, Fredd
ie, just don’t do anything until I get there.”
When Sam finished speaking, Mary Lou said to him, “Do you have to?”
“He’s the closest thing I ever had to a brother. It’s not that Freddie’s my cousin — he’s my friend. How many friends do you have in a lifetime?”
But more than that, Sam sensed the illness of a man close to the breaking point, and when he greeted Freddie in the hotel room in New York, he felt that his apprehensions had been fully justified. Unshaven, always very thin and even thinner now, his eyes bloodshot, his hand shaking as a result of two ashtrays filled with half-smoked butts of cigarettes, Freddie was a man distraught.
“Did you eat at all today?” Sam asked him.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure.”
“Suppose you shave and comb your hair, and then we’ll go down to the dining room and have dinner and talk about this.”
“I don’t know how to thank you,” Freddie said woefully.
“Don’t. I’m starved. Wait a minute — give me your hand.”
Freddie’s pulse was seventy-six. Sam touched his brow, which was not too warm, and then pushed him into the bathroom. When Freddie emerged, shaven, hair combed, he looked less like a man at the edge of death. Sam, somewhat heavier in build than Freddie, two inches taller, a face dominated by a strong, high-bridged nose, had always looked upon Freddie, with his flaxen hair and his long, narrow head, as the quintessential Anglo. As a kid, he had envied him both his appearance and his easy flirtation with girls; as a man, he continued to admire and envy Freddie’s wit, his bright intelligence, and the fact that most women were totally enchanted by him. Now, rejected, disposed of like an unwanted pet puppy, a new and vulnerable Freddie appeared. Sitting at the dinner table in the hotel dining room, he said hopelessly, “I don’t know what to do with my life, Sam. I don’t know what to do with it anymore.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I’ve been thinking, brooding over that for hours, waiting for you — I swear, if I didn’t know you were coming, I don’t know what I would have done. I’ve finally painted myself into a corner, Sammy. The thought of going to France now, alone — it’s senseless. It chills me, like locking myself into a cell for two years. What’s the use of kidding myself? The only life I ever had that made sense is in Napa, and I can’t go back there. And if I can’t go back —” He shrugged.