Manhattan Beach

by Jennifer Egan

  “You’ve used that line a hundred times. And you got it from a fortune cookie.”

  “Seventy, eighty times at most.”

  They were laughing together, reveling in each absurd escalation of their repartee. Anna had always wanted to flirt; now, suddenly, it was effortless.

  At Chandler’s, on East Forty-sixth, they ate hamburger steaks with smothered onions and french-fried potatoes, followed by slices of apple pie. They drank champagne. Charlie Voss had a way of asking questions that kept the conversation safely in the realm Anna wished to inhabit: her diving test, Lieutenant Axel’s eccentricities, the progress of the Russians against the Krauts in the Ukraine. The darkness surrounding this well-lighted patch went unmentioned. Anna sensed in Charlie Voss a symmetrical darkness. In moments she felt at the brink of understanding it—some truth about him that was practically in view. But she was left merely baffled.

  After supper, as they walked toward Fifth Avenue, Anna took his arm. She felt as she had this morning underwater—unwilling to surface. Charlie Voss must have felt this, too, for he said, “Let’s not call it a night so soon. Have you a favorite nightclub?”

  “I’ve only been to one,” she said.

  * * *

  Moonshine’s top-hatted doorman was cherry-picking entrants from a crowd that had massed outside the lacquered door. It occurred to Anna that she could say, with some small truth, that she knew Dexter Styles, but it turned out not to be necessary. The gatekeeper admitted them, and Anna’s first impression was that nothing about the place had changed—that this night was a continuation of the last. In the glittering checkerboard arena, she sought out the table she and Nell had occupied. Strangers sat there now, and Dexter Styles was nowhere in sight. After a flash of disappointment, Anna was relieved not to find him. The day with Lydia at Manhattan Beach could remain intact.

  A maître d’ showed them to a table at the room’s outer edge, and Charlie ordered champagne. The orchestra’s ominous horns and snares sounded like the approach of a thunderstorm or an army. A wastrel-looking singer briefly silenced the room with her temblor of a voice. Anna and Charlie rushed the dance floor with dozens of other couples. Anna was nervous, recalling how badly she’d danced with Marco last October, but Charlie Voss made it easy. “Thank God you’re such a good dancer,” she said.

  “You’ve summoned it forth.”

  “Hah! A good liar, too.” She was dizzy from champagne and the pleasure of holding another person. Warm currents of air hummed on her collarbones.

  “Anna? Is that possibly you?”

  She turned and saw Nell, in strapless peach chiffon, dancing with an older man in a dinner suit. Anna broke from Charlie and threw her arms around her friend. “I can’t believe it,” she cried. “I looked for you everywhere.”

  “I hardly recognized you,” Nell said. “What happened? You’re gorgeous!”

  Nell looked bewitching, as always, if slightly more affected. Her curls had a new reddish tint and her skin was impossibly white, as if she never went outdoors. “I’m sure you two are seated in Siberia; we’ve room at our table,” she said. “This is Hammond, my fiancé.”

  Hammond gave a pinched smile, his aquiline nostrils flaring under a pair of inert green eyes. Anna supposed he was handsome. She introduced Charlie Voss, and the four of them threaded among dancing couples away from the orchestra. “We’re not really engaged,” Nell whispered. “I just say that to rattle his cage.”

  “Is he . . . that one?”

  “The same. He’s put me up in the most beautiful little apartment on Gramercy Park South. I’ve a key to the park! You should come visit. Number twenty-one. Say it, so I know you’ll remember. Twenty. One.”

  “Twenty-one,” Anna duly repeated. Her friend seemed jumpy, possibly drunk. “Did you find a better job?”

  “I haven’t any job at all,” Nell said. “Unless you count trying to look smashing all the time so Hammond doesn’t toss me out.”

  They seated themselves among a group who occupied several tables near the dance floor. Anna noticed Marco and reddened when he looked in her direction. But he was watching Nell.

  “Would he really throw you out?” Anna whispered.

  “Hammond is a pig,” Nell said, which dumbfounded Anna, Hammond himself being inches away, his arm around Nell’s shoulders. Anna averted her gaze as if she’d been guilty of an indiscretion. “Then why do you—”

  “Money,” Nell said brightly. “He’s loaded with money, and he pays for everything. He lives in an eight-bedroom mansion in Rye, New York, with his wife and four children. He’ll never leave them—I was nuts to think he would. Isn’t that right, darling,” she called to Hammond. “Anna worked with me at the Naval Yard. Hammond doesn’t like to hear about that. He thinks girls shouldn’t work at all; they should just dream up new ways to entrance him.”

  She kissed the side of Hammond’s pale cheek, leaving behind a lesion of fuchsia lipstick. As though he could see it, Hammond wiped it away with his hand, going over the spot several times. He seemed unnaturally still, like a man walking stiffly to hide drunkenness. But he wasn’t drunk; there was some other dissolution Hammond was fending off.

  “We’re going to the ladies’,” Nell cried, seizing Anna’s hand and tugging her onto her feet. “Grab your pocketbook, Anna, we girls must powder up!”

  Anna found it difficult to keep a straight face, Nell’s act was so overdone. Who was the audience? Not Charlie Voss, with whom Anna had already exchanged a wry look across the table. That left only Hammond. But Hammond, paralyzed somewhere between rage and panic, was too preoccupied to wonder why his mistress was playacting.

  “We’re not going to the powder room at all,” Nell said as soon as they were away from the table. “Everyone eavesdrops in there, and the girls are snakes. Plenty of them would like to get their hooks into Hammond.”

  They paused in an eddy beside a column. A tincture of dread had begun to infect Anna’s vision of her friend. “Are you happy?” she asked. “In the apartment?”

  “More or less,” Nell said. “Hammond works too hard to come around all that often.” She gave a secret smile. “I’ve someone else who visits me.”

  “Marco?”

  Aghast, Nell took Anna’s shoulders in her hot, trembling hands. “If someone told you that, I need to know exactly who it was,” she said.

  Anna swallowed, spooked by Nell’s disjointedness. “It was a guess,” she said. “Marco sat with us before, remember? When we came last October?”

  Nell gave her a long look, then released her. “I’m sorry. I get a little . . . I don’t know what.”

  “You’re afraid of Hammond finding out?”

  “I am. Although I shouldn’t be. If he cut me off, I would telephone his wife and tell her everything. Then he would get thrown out, too. But the question is, what would Hammond do then? That would be interesting to know.”

  “You don’t seem to like Hammond much.”

  “I hate him. And he hates me, too. It’s like a soiled, awful marriage, except without children—well, we might have had a child, but we won’t.”

  Anna stared at Nell’s sweet face and marveled that it had come to that. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I’ve no regrets. I didn’t want the child of a pig—I could never love it. I’d lose my figure over nothing.”

  “Oh, Nell,” Anna said. The dread was upon her, a sense of foreboding for her friend. The sad tales she’d heard all her life—Olive Thomas, Lillian Lorraine—seemed real to her for the first time. Those doomed girls had been just girls at first, like Nell. “Why not give all of it up—the apartment, Hammond, Marco? Come back to the Naval Yard! I’m a diver now. Maybe you could dive, too. In the big dress, remember? We saw them training on the barge?”

  Nell let out a cry of laughter, but Anna persisted, even knowing she sounded like a sap. “What about the war, Nell? Do you think of it?”

  “Mine with Hammond or the great big one?”

  Anna laughed despite
herself.

  “What can I do about it? Hammond won’t let me work; he said he could smell the Yard on me even when I’d bathed twice and sprayed myself from head to toe with Sirocco.”

  Anna smiled helplessly at her friend. Nell embraced her suddenly, their bare shoulders and arms making the gesture feel startling, intimate. Anna caught the briny tang of Nell’s armpits and the animal flux of her ribs. “You’re different,” Nell breathed into her ear. “It’s awfully nice.”

  “That’s funny. I’d have said you were different.”

  “That means we can be friends,” Nell said, drawing away and gazing into Anna’s eyes. “True friends, not like the serpents around this place. You work hard and come home exhausted, but I’m allergic to that sort of life. My ma says I think I’m too good for it, but it isn’t that. I’m just trying to live a different way. Even if it looks like nonsense.”

  “It looks . . . dangerous.”

  “I like not knowing what will happen, not waking up at any certain time, drinking champagne at ten in the morning if I’ve a mind to. And don’t think this is the end for me—I’ve big plans, make no mistake.”

  Anna noticed that sped-up quality in her friend. She wanted to say, What plans? but was concerned about getting back to Charlie Voss.

  “Now that we’ve settled everything, we can go to the ladies’,” Nell concluded, weaving her fingers among Anna’s and tugging her through the crowd.

  The long mirror in the powder room was jammed with the faces of girls appraising their own looks of astonished delight as if they’d never expected to meet themselves in such a place. Nell traded eager greetings with several. Anna gave her friend a wink and a wave and slipped back out.

  Before she’d reached her table, an elderly waiter intercepted her. “Miss Feeney?”

  The name, familiar and unfamiliar, seemed to wend its way toward Anna across a tortuous expanse. “Yes . . .” she finally said.

  “Mr. Styles would like to see you in his office.”

  “Well, I—I can’t right now. I need to—”

  But the waiter had already turned, intending that she follow. She saw Charlie Voss across the room and tried to wave but couldn’t catch his eye. Anna felt a thud of inevitability. Of course Mr. Styles was here. Of course she would see him. She had made that choice by walking through the lacquered door.

  She followed the waiter into the turbulent clatter of a kitchen, then up a flight of narrow steps, scuffed and bare, which led through another door into a hushed corridor. This felt like a different establishment: thick soft carpet, oil paintings lit by small lamps attached to their frames. Anna heard muted laughter from behind closed doors. The air was gamy with cigar and pipe smoke.

  Her escort knocked at a door at the end of this hall and pushed it open. Anna stepped inside a wood-paneled office and found Mr. Styles reposed behind an expensive-looking desk. “Miss Feeney,” he said in a hale, mannered voice, rising to his feet. “Swell of you to pay us a visit.”

  Anna felt accused, as if she’d been caught trying to avoid him. “I looked for you,” she said. “I thought you weren’t here.”

  “But I’m always here,” he said. “If I’m not, the whole place goes up in smoke. Right, boys?”

  Four young men with the unfriendly faces of hoods had been lounging about the room like gargoyles. They murmured assent, apparently recognizing the rhetorical nature of their conversational role.

  “In that case,” Anna said, “I suppose we’re lucky you stayed.”

  The bantering channel remained open in her; she angled her discourse toward it and listened with pleasure as it jingled through.

  Mr. Styles watched her with a gravity that bore no relation to his jocund tone. “Boys,” he said, “say hello to the exceptionally charming Miss Feeney.”

  Mumbled hellos. Her guide had left, shutting the door behind him. Anna watched the handsome gangster in his beautifully cut suit and felt their day with Lydia at Manhattan Beach dissolving like an aspirin into a tumbler of water. She longed to withdraw, to leave the memory intact, but the power to summon and dismiss seemed to lie entirely with Mr. Styles. She was suddenly angry.

  “Go on ahead, boys,” he said as they took up their hats. “I’ll see Miss Feeney out.”

  When they’d gone, he stood at his desk, glancing at a page or two that lay there. Then he turned back to Anna and spoke in an altogether different voice. “I’m glad to see you. How is your sister?”

  She froze, staring at her empty hands. As lightly as she could manage, she replied, “That’s a story for another day. I need to get back to my date.”

  “To hell with your date.” He was smiling.

  “He might feel otherwise.”

  “No doubt.”

  A buzzing filled Anna’s head. She was furious with Dexter Styles and could feel that he was angry, too. She’d no idea why.

  “I’ll drive you home,” he said.

  “Thank you, but I’ve no plans to leave at the moment, and I don’t need a ride. Besides,” she added mockingly, “won’t the whole place go up in smoke?”

  “That’s an added incentive!” he said with a laugh.

  She pushed past him through the door into the carpeted hallway. Making no effort to follow her or even raise his voice, he said, “My car is outside. Someone will meet you by the coat check.”

  She pretended not to hear. But as she wended her way along hushed turns of hall, she found herself planning her excuse to Charlie Voss. This discovery further enraged her. Who did Mr. Styles think he was?

  She fumbled through a warren of corridors and stairs and burst into the dining room through a different door than the one she’d left by. Hammond sat alone at their table, eyeing the dance floor with a look of pale fury. Following his gaze, Anna made out Nell and Marco pressed together.

  She was relieved to find Charlie Voss a few tables over with several men he seemed to know. “I’ve run into an old friend of my mother’s,” she told him. “He disapproves of my being out and insists on driving me home. I hope that’s all right.”

  If Charlie was surprised, much less hurt, he managed to iron every trace of it from his voice. “As long as I’ve your word that you’ll be in good hands.”

  “Thank you, Charlie, for a wonderful evening. Let’s do it again.”

  “I shall count the hours.”

  There were lines for the coat and hatcheck, but the elderly waiter who had brought her to Mr. Styles’s office was waiting. He took Anna’s claim checks and joined her a few moments later with her coat and hat. They left the club through an exit that deposited them a few doors down the block from the lacquered entrance. Mr. Styles’s Cadillac idled there discreetly.

  As the waiter was opening the passenger door, a man approached the driver’s window. Mr. Styles rolled it down. “Hello, George,” he said, shaking hands through the window as Anna slid into the front seat beside him.

  “Leaving early?” George asked.

  “Just to drive Miss Feeney home. Miss Feeney, this is Dr. Porter, my brother-in-law. Miss Feeney works for me.”

  The doctor peered into the dark car at Anna. She caught a mirthful gaze over glints of mustache. A ladies’ man.

  “Ask for a bottle on the house,” Mr. Styles told him. “I’ll look for you shortly. If we miss each other, I’ll see you at Sutton Place tomorrow.”

  He rolled up his window and pulled away. As the big car drifted uptown, headlights misting the icy air, he said, “Tell me what happened.”

  Anna explained what had followed their day at Manhattan Beach. It was the first time she’d told the story, and she told it carefully. The leather smell of the car transported her back to the day itself: holding Lydia’s warm weight, the heartbeat fanning out from somewhere deep. She was stricken by loss, as if her sister had just been torn from her arms. She remembered the roar of life under Lydia’s skin even in her stillness, and hungered for that life in a way that left her weak.

  When she finished, Mr. Styles said in a tight
voice, “I’m sick to hear it.”

  They drove uptown and then back down. On Fifth Avenue, they floated past the public library, where Anna had walked after seeing her mother off at Pennsylvania Station. It was here she’d first perceived the suctioning dark and felt its danger. She’d been fending off that danger ever since. A different kind of girl. How did you know what kind of girl you were, with no one around you? Maybe those kinds of girls were simply girls who’d no one to tell them they were not those kinds of girls.

  The night was everywhere, reaching and black; it filled the car and surrounded Anna. But her dread of the dark had vanished. Without knowing when or how, she had released herself to it—disappeared through a crack in the night. Not a soul knew where to find her. Not even Dexter Styles.

  He looked straight ahead as he drove, but Anna sensed his febrile restlessness from across the seat. The bones of his throat moved like knuckles when he swallowed. He must have felt her eyes on him, but he waited a long time before returning the gaze. A new understanding opened between them.

  “You look different,” he said softly. “In green.”

  “That’s why I wore it,” she said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  * * *

  Dexter cracked the car window and let the winter wind rake his face. An intelligent person sat beside him, a girl who was not silly, who would understand whatever he gave her to understand, who intrigued him through some combination of physical attributes and mental toughness, but really it was the latter, because physical attributes surrounded him daily and prompted little feeling. And yet there was a problem with the girl in his car—this smart, modern girl with correct values, joined to the war effort, a girl matured by hard times and familial tragedy—and that problem was that all he could think of doing, in a concrete way, was fucking her. The rest—vague notions that she might work for him, that her toughness could be of use, that she was likely a good shot (taut slender arms, visible in the dress she was wearing tonight); confusion about how they had originally met (had someone introduced them?)—flickered at a middle distance, well behind his need to have her. And even as that need made it hard to drive the goddamn car, he was also thinking: this was the problem of men and women, what made the professional harmony he envisaged so difficult to achieve. Men ran the world, and they wanted to fuck the women. Men said “Girls are weak” when in fact girls made them weak. At the same time, another line of thought was unspooling: Why this? Why now? Why her? Why take the risk when George Porter had just seen them? But those questions were theoretical, to be debated at some future point. For now, the explosive discontent that had been mounting in Dexter since his visit to Mr. Q. two weeks before had at last found an object. And another line of thinking: Where could they go? Somewhere private, somewhere indoors. Lust made an idiot of everyone it touched—Dexter felt stupidity shrouding his head like a hood in the shape of a dunce’s cap. Where? Where? Where?