The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  But she was thirty-five years old, busy day and night raising her two children and working, and it had been a long time since she had been to bed with anybody. Actually, Burt had been around for a few days when she moved into the little house behind the store, helping connect the stove and painting the two tiny bedrooms, but although he slept in the same bed with her he did not try any lovemaking. Maybe it was just as well, she thought, because for the past few years sex with Burt hadn’t amounted to much. Usually he was drunk and would fall into bed with a woozy grunt, grasp her and begin kissing her with a mouth that smelled foul with beer and potato chips. Burt never completely undressed in front of Eleanor, not even at his drunkest, and they always made love in the dark, so for Eleanor the sensual experience was limited to his bad breath, the way his stubbled cheek felt against hers, the heavy sound of his breathing and muttering, and the few pokes he would take at her with his usually half-erect penis. Burt was not the lover of her dreams. Nor was Dick Westerhaus, who never removed his undershirt and often ejaculated on her leg or her stomach, his lips pressed tightly together to keep him from making a sound. Eleanor was a very shy person and could not talk about sex. She wished sometimes that she could talk to Lindy about it, because Lindy seemed to have a much better time, and secretly Eleanor was pleased that her daughter was so attractive to so many men and took such unceasing advantage of it. In a different life Eleanor might have loved many men.

  But in this life she was afraid her sex was going to dry up and blow away, and she would be an old woman. She knew a great deal more about menopause than she did about sex in general; a lot of the women she worked with in her life had been through it, or were going through it, and Eleanor dreaded the day. Sometimes she would lie in her bed, perhaps waiting for Lindy to come home or telephone, and she would suddenly grasp her breasts and clench her teeth in deep frustration. She wanted a man. She wanted somebody to wrap her legs around. Even Burt. She did not love Burt anymore, but she understood herself well enough to know that she would never divorce him. She just didn’t have the guts, she told herself, to either end it with Burt or start it with somebody else. Dick Westerhaus had been an accident, a breezy but gentle automobile salesman who at least had a sense of romance and told her he loved her and sent her flowers. And of course she had been somewhat younger then.

  Plenty of the men who came through her line at the store flirted with her, but she put them off with a laugh or a smart retort, and that was all most of them really wanted anyway, and with a smile she would imagine their surprise, these grocery-store romeos, if she had taken them up on any of their proposals. She was almost tempted to try it on some of the more offensive ones. Only once a man waited outside for the store to close and then followed her through the parking lot. When she got around the corner and saw him coming, she ran up the steps and into the house, locked the door and called the police, but he was gone when the patrol car got there twenty minutes later, and she never saw him again.

  So she really did not expect anything to come of it when the nearly bald man with the beautiful eyes made jokes with her, even though these were the only little flirtations that made her blush. He looked about forty, and was a clean but sloppy dresser, always coming in the store wearing faded blue pants and a grey raincoat over his sport shirt. Often he would still have drops of water on his naked scalp, and she was tempted to make a joke about it but didn’t because she felt he might be sensitive about his baldness. Aside from the lack of hair, he was a very good-looking man, with a sensitive mouth and a large firm nose, supported by a good wide chin. Except for the clothes, he looked like a doctor or a lawyer, at any rate from a class well above Eleanor’s. He usually came in on Wednesday and Friday evenings just before closing, and he ate almost nothing but garbage—candy and bakery goods, prepared dinners and canned spaghetti or chili. Obviously not a married man.

  Her name was stitched onto her uniforms, and he always called her Eleanor. “Well, Eleanor,” he might say, “how do you like all that snow out there?”

  “I’m glad I work indoors,” she would say.

  “You have a long drive to get home? Looks like it’s going to snow for six months.”

  “Oh it won’t be that bad.”

  “Oh you never can tell, Eleanor. You never can tell. Once in Cleveland it snowed for exactly three hundred and fifty-two days. Right through spring and summer, didn’t stop snowing until Thanksgiving day.”

  “Must have piled up pretty high.”

  “Oh not at all. See, the temperature was always up in the eighties. Stuff melted as soon as it hit the ground.”

  She often wondered where he got his bizarre sense of humor, but when she found out that he was a professor up at Reed College, that seemed to explain it.

  Then one night as she was crossing the parking lot against a slanting rain, with an armload of her own groceries, she heard him call out to her from a parked car.

  “Eleanor!”

  He was sitting behind the wheel of a little black Plymouth, his window open and the rain spattering his face as he looked up at her.

  “Oh hello there,” she said. She knew what was coming, and even though her feet hurt as usual and her back was sore, she felt a thrill of anticipation.

  “Can I give you a lift? Or do you have a car of your own?”

  “I just live a few doors away,” she said.

  “Then let me help you with your stuff.” He opened his door, quickly rolled up the window and got out. “Here, gimme,” he said. This was the moment, and instead of saying, “Oh that’s all right,” and ducking around him and going on home, Eleanor, for reasons she never questioned, handed him the sacks of groceries.

  Jody did not like Quentin Corby. The eyes her mother thought beautiful were dark and shifty to Jody, and she did not like the fact that he was nearly bald or that his skin had a soft, almost silken look.

  “That’s a very nice-looking girl,” Corby said after Jody had gone into her room to listen to the radio. Eleanor smiled and wished he would go away. She was exhausted, and the impulse that had allowed him into the house had faded now, under the very real possibility of getting her shoes off and having some dinner. Fortunately he was sensitive to this and after only twenty minutes or so, just enough time to drink his coffee and smoke a couple of cigarettes, he got up, politely took her hand, smiled and said, “Look, are you doing anything Saturday night? I’d like to take you to a movie.”

  Eleanor withdrew her hand and said, “Oh, I’m married.”

  Corby looked around the room. “I don’t see anybody, is he really around?”

  “Well, no, not really.”

  “Then come out with me. Please.”

  “Well, all right,” she said, and tossed and turned all night dreaming about him.

  Corby was a professor of humanities at the college and was forty years old. He lived on a houseboat in the small colony on the other side of the Sellwood bridge with his eight-year-old son. His wife, he told Eleanor, had collapsed under the pressure of what he called “Ph.D syndrome.” She had worked as a file clerk in an insurance company office while he was attending graduate school at Boston University, and by the time he had gotten his master’s and doctorate their worlds were so different they had nothing in common but their son. “This happens all the time,” he told Eleanor over Italian food after the movie. “The man is constantly facing intellectual challenges and the woman’s brain is being turned into a sack of sawdust. I blame myself for letting it happen to us, though. I shouldn’t have let her take that damned job.”

  “Where is she?” Eleanor asked.

  “I don’t know,” Corby said, and changed the subject. After they had dated several more times, though, he admitted to Eleanor that he really did not know where she was. One day he had come home from school and she was gone, taking all her things but leaving their son in his crib. “She only took six months off work to have the baby,” Corby said. “I don’t think she ever loved him.”

  On their third date they went t
o a tavern on Sellwood Boulevard and Eleanor drank too much and had to be helped into the car. She was not sick, but it was a work night and her exhaustion turned into silliness. She could not stop giggling, and then she got the hiccups, and while Quentin Corby was kissing her she hiccupped and broke away laughing and said, “Oh please!” and he drove her out to 82nd Avenue to a motel. On the way there her hiccups stopped of their own accord, and neither of them spoke as they drove carefully through the rain.

  TWO

  IN ALL her life up to now, Eleanor had never been made love to by a man who knew what he was doing. Quentin Corby shut off the lights, but for her sake rather than his own, and was very slow and very gentle, taking off all her clothes and all his and then lying beside her for a long time holding her and kissing her softly. The motel radio was turned to an all-night soft music station, and gradually Eleanor’s nervous trembling stopped, and she began to respond less clumsily to him, touching his body with her fingertips and putting her tongue into his mouth when he kissed her. When he began sucking at her left breast she lay back in the darkened room with her eyes open and let the lovely forbidden feelings take control of her body, the feelings interrupted only briefly when she felt his hand cupping her, and then felt a finger slip inside her. She took hold of his head, to keep him at her breast for a while longer, and then, just as she felt she could no longer stand it, he came away from the breast, kissed her deeply on the mouth, and penetrated her. The shock of pleasure was so intense she almost cried out.

  She expected him to push in and out a few times and then it would be all over and she would drift into that hazy, tense afterward feeling she had always felt before, but Quentin Corby was in no hurry, and instead of stroking rapidly in and out he moved so slowly that she could hardly sense the pressure until at the last moment he seemed to fill her entire body; then the slow gradual withdrawal until that too became an excess of pleasure. At the same time he was kissing her mouth, eyes, neck, breasts, even gently running his tongue into her armpit until she did not believe that she could stand anymore. She began to writhe and grind her hips around beneath him, and as she did so he increased his pacing. In a few moments they were bucking and heaving on the bed and she could no longer keep from panting heavily and making a sound in her throat. And then a very strange tension took over the center of her body, a kind of tightness that almost made her sick as it mounted and spread over her body, until at last it broke in wave after wave of pure pleasure. “OHHHH CHRIST!” she cried out. In a few moments she was weeping and holding him tightly. These had been the most exciting minutes of her life, and she wept with relief as well as joy.

  But there was to be more. Quentin had not come yet; he merely stopped to allow her to have her orgasm in peace. After a few minutes, when she had stopped crying and had apologized without sounding the least bit sorry, he got into her again, heard her little moan of surprise and pleasure, and brought her to a second not quite as intense but still delightful orgasm. When he came, moments after she had, he was very emotional about it, crying out and grasping her shoulders in his hands. He did not seem able to speak for ten or fifteen minutes afterward, and when he did it was to say, in an awed voice, “God but you’re beautiful!”

  When he took her home at a little after two in the morning, they lingered on the front porch, kissing and holding each other.

  “I want to see you again, very soon,” Quentin told her, and when she got inside, she checked Jody, took a long hot shower in the cramped little shower stall and then put on her terrycloth bathrobe and sat in the living room another hour, thinking about what had happened to her, still feeling the release and the lazy sensuality in her body. She decided that she must be in love with Quentin, but she did not believe that he was in love with her. He did not have to be.

  She was going to be his for the asking anytime he wanted. She was certainly not going to make any demands on him. After all, she was still married to Burt, and Quentin was probably still married to his wife, wherever she was. It gave Eleanor a little thrill to know that she was starting out on an affair.

  But it was time to go to bed. She was due at work at noon the next day, and she had clothes to wash in the morning, and uniforms to starch and iron. She got up from the couch with a grunt of aging bones and went to lock the front door. As she turned out the porch light she saw that it was snowing out, the sky black above the streetlamp and the snowflakes seeming to appear magically in the cone of light. Eleanor had all her life loved the first snows of winter, and now she leaned her cheek against the cold glass of her front door and wept at the beauty of her day. Then she went into the bathroom and blew her nose, grinned at herself in the mirror and went to bed.

  THREE

  LINDY HAD been living downtown in an apartment on SW Park for the past few weeks with a man named Eddie Dorkin, who traveled up and down the West Coast selling drugs to doctors—a “detail man.” Although he supplied the doctors with a lot of routine medical supplies, the major part of his job was to talk the doctors into prescribing his brand of drugs to their patients. Lindy had met him at the Rialto Billiards, across the street and down the block. Eddie was a brilliant pool player and con artist, a bland, round-faced man in his late twenties who wore expensive inconspicuous clothes, and would often play an entire game of snooker or billiards with his hat and tweed topcoat still on.

  Very few women came into the Rialto. For a while, a few of the girls who hung around Broadway and Yamhill with the local hard gang would come into the place to watch their boyfriends play pool with each other, and this is how Lindy happened to be in the room, sitting in a row of theater seats alongside the number one billiard table while Eddie Dorkin trimmed a couple of her tough young friends at a game of Thirty-one. She noticed Eddie looking at her a couple of times early in the game, and she stared back at him coldly. After that he did not look at her at all, but concentrated on his game, and she knew that he was playing to her, that everything he did, every funny remark, every gesture, even his billiard shots, were calculated to impress her. She was not impressed. He was not particularly good looking. But when it was all over and her friends happened to be out of earshot, he came over toward her, his hand in his topcoat pocket.

  “You want something nice?” he asked her, and without waiting for the cutting answer Lindy was about to give him he removed his hand from the pocket and dropped a small bottle of pills into her lap. “Thank me later,” he said, and left the poolroom. The bottle was full of little green heart-shaped benzedrine tablets.

  The next time she saw him was in the Rialto also. It was close to midnight and she and a couple of girlfriends were drunk and had come up to have a hamburger at the long counter. The poolroom was full of smoke, loud talk and the clicking of the games, and the counter was crowded with people eating the excellent food. The three pretty girls had no trouble getting seats. Lindy was pouring catsup on her hamburger when Eddie came up behind her and said, “Did you like the pills?”

  She turned on her stool and looked coldly at him. “Yes,” she said. “Thanks a lot.” Then she swung her stool back around and started eating.

  “Little surprise in your pocket,” he said into her ear. She shrugged irritatedly at his contact with her hair, and did not bother to reach into her pocket. The next day, at home in Sellwood, she happened to reach into the pocket and pulled out the piece of paper, which turned out to be a one-hundred-dollar bill with Eddie’s name and address on it in red ink. Lindy laughed. She was delighted with the money, but she had no intention of going up to Eddie’s apartment. He had probably gone home and undressed and waited for her, thinking he could get her for a hundred dollars. She laughed again, and split the money with her mother. Eleanor did not believe Lindy’s story about where the money came from, but she needed it so she took it. And Lindy copied down Eddie’s name and address. Just in case.

  The next time they met was about two months later, in the palatial lobby of the Paramount Theater, on Broadway. It was late on a Tuesday afternoon and snowing h
eavily out on the street, the snow coming down in big wet clumps, Lindy wondering what to do with herself. She had come into the theater because there had been nothing to do that afternoon, and now she did not want to leave because there was still nothing to do. She was intensely bored with her present existence, but she did not know how to change it. Men were always asking her to go away with them, and others were always offering money to her for one thing or another, and yet, as beautiful as she was, as she knew she was, something was missing. None of her attempts to get into show business had panned out, because the men she always had to deal with wanted to fuck her, and she refused, not for any moral reasons but because she did not like being pushed against a wall by anybody. And besides, they were such greasy little men, the owners of the local night clubs, the managers, the bookers of talent. The pimps were a lot more handsome and a lot more fun to be with, but she was sick of pimps too. In fact she was sick of Broadway. Broadway! Broadway right in the middle of Portland, Oregon. And she was afraid to do what she knew she must if she wanted to get into show business, which was to get on a train and leave town. New York or Hollywood.