The Song Is You

by Megan Abbott

  Sutton, one eye still grazing the room, began talking to Bob about racehorses. The redheads were starting to look bored.

  “Let’s dance, Marvy,” one said, hooking her shimmery hand around Sutton’s lapel. Sutton looked over at Bob, who took his cue.

  “He only dances for a fat bill,” Bob said, shaking his head. “Won’t sing a note, either. That’s the sound of money, honey. Opens his mouth and you can see the pretty dollar signs fluttering out into the air.” Bob held his hand out to her. “But I’ll twirl with you, sugar. And we’ll get someone for your girlfriend, too.”

  The three rose and made their way to a spot on the shivering dance floor.

  Hop ordered a double scotch and tried to remember what he was doing there. Making sure everything was nailed down or trying to peek under the floorboards? The job, kid, he told himself. It’s all you got.

  With that, Hop took a swig of his drink and tried to imagine a way to exit …

  “Hey, pal, bring me a pocketful of that,” Sutton said abruptly, without breaking his mile-long stare. He was pointing to a young, damp-foreheaded waitress carrying a heavy tray of glasses, her uniform pulled too tight across farm-girl hips. She was a real San Gabriel Valley hick, a teenage face lit with shooting nerves.

  “That one?”

  “I’d like to fuck her blind,” Sutton said, turning to Hop. And his voice stirrings of something that edged into the grotesque, Hop somehow knew Sutton meant it. An ugly thing, thought Hop, even to him, who had brought a hundred girls to a hundred movie stars in the last twenty-odd months. It had never been like this. Had it?

  The thing he was seeing in Sutton now—had he seen it that night with Jean Spangler? Fuck, sure, he saw it, but what did he care? How was it his business what these fellows needed to get them hot?

  Hop looked again at the girl and took a long drink, thinking and then deciding not to think. The job, kid. The job.

  Hell, he’d done this a million times before—made an introduction like this. Greased the gears for these boys. It was just an intro. Why the fuck not.

  Catching her as she leaned over a tub of dirty glasses by the bar. Placing one hand gently on her arm and talking as softly as he could amid the din. The girl’s eyes as wide as a hoot owl’s, mouth falling open. A babe.

  “But you don’t have to be interested.” For the second time, Hop interrupted his own spiel. His own velvety patter. He couldn’t keep it up. Looking at her downy cheeks, her raw, pliant face, her guileless, insipid eyes, he couldn’t. “You really don’t.”

  “Why not?” she said again, with a dreamy smile.

  “Because he may not be a nice guy, Ann,” he said. “People talk. Say he’s rough with the ladies.” He wanted to close her gaping mouth with his fingertips and send her home to Paw.

  “People say things,” she said, shrugging. Then, “I saw him in a picture just last week.”

  “Ann, how ‘bout I just tell him you’re taken? I say you got a strapping ranch-hand boyfriend on his way here to pick you up and take you home?”

  But Ann didn’t hear a word. She pulled a small lipstick—a child’s play toy—from her apron pocket and applied a waxy coat of what Hop guessed might be called Apricot June.

  “Can you take me to him now?”

  Fifteen minutes later, having put off wet-eared, thick-ankled Ann as long as he could, Hop found Sutton coming out of the back room after a few quick hands of blackjack.

  “Three hundred just nestled into my lap. I’m primed for that Cinderella.”

  “You don’t want her, Marv.”

  “What do you know about what I want?” Sutton asked, more surprised than angry.

  “I talked to a few people about her. One of the bartenders and one of those”—Hop pointed to the five-piece jazz band—”and I heard the same thing.”

  “What? Virgin tail?” Sutton said.

  Hound’s-Tooth Bob, who had sidled up beside them, the redhead in midnight blue on his arm, grinned. “Doesn’t matter to him. A few hours and we can have her dumped back here on the doorstep with some beautiful memories.”

  “Believe me, Marv, you’ll carry the memories a lot longer than she will.” Hop cocked his head in the waitress’s direction. The girl, twenty yards away, waved eagerly. “Got a dose worse than a two-dollar whore.”

  “Well I’ll be …,” Sutton said, eyes wider than a half-squint lor the first time that night. “The question is, am I sober enough to let that stop me?” He rolled a toothpick along his tongue.

  Look at the dewy-lipped beauty painting her pan at your own table,” Hop said, gesturing toward the redhead in yellow, pressing powder into her face with the concentration of a master builder at work. “She’s ready and waiting. I’d give my eyes and my kneecaps for a taste of that.”

  “She’s all yours,” Marv said, tapping his toothpick on Hop’s lapel. “I’m going to take a chance that the cunt’s fresher meat than the word on the street.”

  He headed toward the girl, Bob scurrying behind him with both their raincoats. Sutton looked over his shoulder at Hop and added, “I been lucky all my life.”

  Hop watched as the waitress’s face turned red and she threw off her apron. She barely had time to grab her own coat from behind the bar before Bob had her in his maw, hound’s-tooth arm nearly covering her body and Sutton not so much as bothering to look her in the face. Even from the other end of the bar, Hop was sure he could hear her panting, squealing, squirming—and the sounds were playful and fearsome at once. It was impossible to tell the difference.

  And then they were gone.

  As he walked back to the table with the idea of finishing every drink the group had left there, he wanted to laugh. He nearly laughed. Rarely in life do you get a second chance and look what happens. He wanted to laugh, but the sound wouldn’t come up his throat.

  As he downed the rimy bottom of a gin and tonic, the redhead in yellow made her way back from the ladies’ room to find only Hop left.

  “Did Vera skip too?” she said wearily, leaning her impeccable curls

  against the wall beside Hop.

  “The other girl? Yeah.”

  “Since you finished my drink, how about ordering me another?”

  They drank a round.

  When they finished, she sighed, “I’m going to call a friend to pick

  me up.”

  “I can take you home,” Hop said, playing the gentleman.

  “No, we’re going to Café Zombie. But you can have a smoke with

  me out back until he comes.”

  Hop waited while she made the call. Then they stood in the loading area by the back exit. Hop felt glad for the air and for the chance to distract himself from thinking about Sutton and the waitress.

  As they breathed in the dusty wind, the redhead abruptly turned to him. “You never even bothered to get my name, did you.” As she said it, she lifted her leg slightly from behind the crinkly yellow pleats of her dress.

  The leg was nice.

  “Name, huh? Let me guess,” Hop said, going with it. “You look like a … Ethel? Mavis? Clara Mae?”

  The leg nudged out farther. To Hop, it looked like it was dusted with gold.

  “Hazel? Millicent-Ann? Lazy-Eye?”

  “I may have lost the big gun, but hell if I’m writing off the night,” she said, giving Hop ten yards of leg now. “At least a publicity man has a shot at getting me in Winchell.”

  “Is that what the other publicity men have told you?” Hop said, shaking his head.

  Looking around, she pushed open the door of the storage room she was propped against. Her hair was so red it was almost blue in the dim hallway light.

  “I have been having a really bad day,” Hop said, a tad wistfully.

  She backed into the small room and he followed. He reached his hand out, meaning to slide it around the back of her neck.

  But instead he saw his hand cover her face, the heel of his hand on her bright red mouth. He half wondered why he was doing it but then fo
rgot to care. As her head knocked hard against the wall she made a sharp, excited little noise.

  When they walked out of the room, the girl tugging her bodice higher over her flushed chest, two of the jazz musicians looked up from packing their instruments. Hop recognized them from a bigger gig they’d had the week before at Moulin Rouge. One grinned at him as he snapped his trumpet case shut. “There’s our boy,” he said.

  He could barely get to his car fast enough, his head foggy from the smoke, noise, drinks, and especially from the close, overripe smells in the storeroom and the girl’s loamy perfume, which seemed to have tunneled down into his throat. At last in the safety of his sedan, he rolled down the windows and took a deep breath. He considered smoking a cigarette, but just the thought of the smell clogged his head all over again. He stared ahead, out into the black desert, letting a gritty breeze coat him. Then, shaking himself out of his trance, he tried to flatten the wrinkles on his suit. Twisting the rearview mirror closer to him, he saw a map of the redhead tracing down his face and neck. A skein of mascara on his jaw, a bloom of lipstick on his neck, a shimmer of pancake down one side of his face.

  I’m meeting with Carl Heinrich at Casting on Tuesday. He’ll get a call from you, right? she’d said as she rolled her skirt back down.

  Sure, baby, sure.

  The Red Lily

  It was a long drive from the Eight Ball to the harbor and Hop’s mind jammed itself with doubts and self-recriminations. Especially about what he thought he was accomplishing by nudging his way back into these places, these lives. A movie-star tour of one very bad night.

  He looked again and again at the card Freddy Townsend had given him, its cryptic notations guiding him to a sludge-brimmed corner of the San Pedro docks.

  As he drove, he remembered writing pieces about Sutton and Merrel back at Cinestar, fizzy bits of dross about their “peculiar duo magic.” They were coming off their famous string of wartime musicals—Merry Marines (1943), Air Force Follies (1944), Sailors’ Serenade (1944), Army Antics (1945)—all box-office bonanzas, as they say. As Hop wrote. Endlessly.

  Merry Marines was the one that started it all, sealed their fame. Seventy minutes of splashy patriotic-themed numbers choreographed to regimental perfection by drillmaster extraordinaire Busby Berkeley. And then that famous last number. Gene Merrel’s final solo, shot in glorious close-up, with his curlicue forelock dangling and Irish blues shining, face lit soft and luminous as Lillian Gish. It was “God Bless America,” with Merrel, using every bit of his God-given, milk-and-honeyed tenor and wet-eyed boyish looks, famously looking straight into the camera and, in so doing, transforming himself into every audience member’s son, brother, fiance. As he hit the second verse, Marv Sutton, every inch the dream American man, entered the frame, pointed his finger directly into the camera, and, with that gesture, took hold of the heart of every warmblooded moviegoer in the land as he beseeched the audience, Sing along, America. Sing along for our boys.”

  The timing couldn’t have been better, the whole country at its war-craziest, Stars and Stripes bursting out of every mouth. In theater after theater, audiences sang along, full-voiced and buoyant. And then, one afternoon, three days into the pictures release, a returning soldier, one arm lost from the elbow down in the Coral Sea, stood as he sang, stood up right in the movie theater, and others followed suit, setting off a wave of similar phenomena. Finally, to seal it, the celebrated Life magazine photograph of the cavernous Electric Theatre in Kansas City, filled to capacity with twenty-two hundred audience members on their feet, hands over hearts, illuminated only by the projector’s smoky ray and the screen itself, where Gene Merrel’s face loomed, beatific.

  Fuck, if that don’t make them stars … America’s goddamned sweethearts both.

  Now, as Hop arrived at the docks, the flickering movie image in his mind darkened, blurred. Merrel’s on-screen face shed its balmy innocence, its patriotic glimmer. In its place was something else.

  Something he didn’t want to think about. America’s sweethearts, sure—who in their offscreen time liked to pick up eager starlets and bang them into no-man’s-land. For kicks.

  Townsend’s card in hand, Hop got out of his car and wound around the docks in search of the storied Red Lily. At first, he felt pretty ready to admit to himself that he was a sap. Letting that skinny-legged colored-girl extra pull him by the nose into a third-rate fleshpot scavenger hunt—how’d she pull it off? But the more he wandered, the sound of water agitating beneath him, almost bubbling, the more the whole thing had a bad feeling—the smells, the creaking boards, ropes pulling on wood, the echoing sounds of someone calling out somewhere, calling someone’s name—it felt all wrong.

  Finally, he found the narrow passageway marked with the crimson X on one side of a glowing streetlamp. He knocked intermittently on the sea-warped door for close to five minutes before it opened. He didn’t know what he was expecting, but it wasn’t this: a girl no taller than five feet, one skinny arm beckoning him, her eyes as heavy, as world-wise as a veteran seaman, her body elfin and forlorn as Margaret O’Brien’s.

  Dressed in an oversize, billowing pinafore of some kind, she walked in front of him without saying a word. They moved down a long, low-ceilinged hall to a parlor filled with slack velvet sofas and a large Victrola. Whorehouses are whorehouses wherever you go, Hop thought to himself, a little disappointed with the Red Lily. Another Hollywood legend up in smoke.

  “Have a seat, mister. Someone will be with you right away,” she said, turning to go.

  “Wait,” Hop said. “That’s not why I’m here. Let me explain something.”

  “You don’t have to explain anything here, honey bear,” she said, her voice taking on a practiced lilt.

  Under the henna glow of the standing lamps, he got a better look at her. She was of indeterminate race with a kind of muddy skin and a spray of freckles across her nose and chest. She looked about thirteen with a thirteen-year-old’s body—a downy curl under her chin, spindly legs longer than fit the compact body.

  “Come here a second,” he said, bending over slightly to speak, feeling like Lionel Barrymore to her Shirley Temple. “So what’s your name, anyway?”

  With a keen look of suspicion as old as the profession itself, she ambled back in the room. “Lemon Drop,” she said, tongue flashing for an instant behind her teeth. So much for Shirley Temple.

  “So how’d you end up in a place like this?”

  “Gee, you’re the first person to ever ask me that,” she said, hip popping out as she adopted a seen-it-all slouch.

  “Tough guy, eh? Listen, I really want to know,” Hop lied. The whole place was making him uncomfortable, disgusted, and vaguely aroused at the same time—a combination he’d become very familiar with.

  “Listen, if you’re here to ask questions, you’re in the wrong place. This here is just the wrong place. The Wrongest Place there is,” she said, clicking her teeth with her rosy tongue.

  “You see a lot here, eh?”

  “It’s all here.” She pulled at the faded blue ribbon on her pinafore. “It’s all I’ve ever seen.” Lifting one thin arm, she gestured around

  the room. “I’ve never been anyplace else.”

  “You get some famous faces.”

  “No faces,” she said, with just a ghost of a grin. “No one has a

  face. Not even you.”

  The way she said it inexplicably unnerved Hop. Something in her gold-fleck eyes.

  “Listen, Lemon Drop,” Hop said, then shook his head. “What’s your real name, anyway?”

  “You think a girl born in a place like this has any other kind of name?”

  “Okay. Okay. But listen, listen.” He wondered why he was saying everything twice. “I need your help. I really do. I’m no cop and no

  private eye. I’m just a fellow looking for a lady.”

  “This is the place, sailor.”

  “One lady in particular.”

  The girl eyed him. “She work here?�
�

  “No, no. But she came here one night about two years ago. And

  she hasn’t been seen since.”

  Her tiny jaw tightened. “Happens all the time, mister. It just does. It’s a place people come to vanish. Or the vanish meets them here.”

  “Maybe you remember,” Hop said, taking the curled publicity photo of Jean Spangler from his raincoat pocket and holding it in front of her eyes, which were, he saw now, green and gold both and

  as tired as his great-grandmother’s.

  Expecting nothing.

  He expected nothing.

  But it was there. A flicker of recognition.

  Ah, Lemon Drop …

  “Somebody might help you. If you got the green.”

  “And who might that somebody be?”

  “Somebody might be Lemon Drop if you got twenty dollars.”

  “What’s a little girl going to do with twenty dollars?”

  “Get me a new hat and a pair of gloves for church,” she said serenely.

  “Smart acre, eh.” Hop pulled two tens from his wallet and waved them.

  “I’ll give you one now and one after I hear what you got.”

  “Come here,” she said, taking one bill from his hand and summoning him through a rickety door to their left.

  He expected to end up in a red-lit bedroom, but instead they came out into a dank back alley filled with the thick smell of urine, vomit, seawater, and something perfumey like gasoline. He looked up and saw a dozen windows with scarlet blinds drawn shut. Through one, he could hear a woman cooing, as if to a baby, but it sounded broken and it quickly crumbled into a long, low moan of “No, no, no … no-no.”

  “Okay, listen up,” Lemon Drop said, her voice taking on a new urgency. “Stay out of that place with questions about your girl.”

  “She: s not my …” Hop tried to keep focused, but the smells and the woman’s persistent voice were mingling uneasily in his head. Now he could hear a man’s low voice talking constantly nonstop, as if reciting a worn prayer.