The Song Is You

by Megan Abbott

  “Listen,” she said, leaning forward, winding that scarf back around

  her pearly skin. “I want you to understand.”

  “I understand.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re one of those who like to stay in the muck,” she said, shaking her head. He wondered how she might know that. And then he realized anyone would.

  She went on. “What I figured out, from all that, it’s … it’s like this: Sometimes you have to do bad things to get pure again,” she said. “Like burning something to make it clean.”

  He paused, thinking. The moment suddenly seemed heavy with meaning, but he wasn’t sure what the meaning was. Then he looked at her and said, “Do you really think you can do that? Make yourself over new? Don’t you carry it with you? Doesn’t it stick with you, like a scar?”

  She looked at him, her eyes hooded.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  She shook her head. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, her voice turning cool, distant. “Wait here a minute,” she said, rising to her feet. She walked into the adjoining bedroom. When she reemerged, moments later, she was carrying a brown, creased accordion file. “I wonder if you can do me a favor,” she said, holding the file to her chest.

  “What’s that?”

  “My family, they’re better off, you know. Christine is, that’s for sure. But Iolene … I want Iolene to know I’m okay.” As she spoke, her voice changed again. From remote to nearly broken. Her eyes, for the first time, filled with tears. “If you can tell her that I’m sorry for skipping on her and that… I wish only the best for her.”

  Hop looked at her and said nothing. He knew at that moment that he wouldn’t tell her what had happened to Iolene. And, looking in her face, he hoped she’d never know.

  “And there’s something I want you to give her for me,” she went on, composing herself. “The files I took from the house—I didn’t sell all the ones I took to Davy. I kept a few. The most valuable ones.” She shifted the file forward onto her knees. “I wanted them in case I was in a real bind. I didn’t know if anyone was going to be coming after me. I didn’t know if I could make a clean break. I needed something to bargain with. Anyway, it’s been a while now and I’m moving again. Farther this time. And I don’t think I need them. Not as much as Iolene might.” She looked off to some invisible space over Hop’s shoulder. “You see, I left her holding the bag and she … she was as close to me as anyone ever was. Closer.”

  So close you took her name, Hop thought. Before he could stop himself, he said, “You love her.” He didn’t know where it came from or what he meant by it.

  She shook her head vaguely and didn’t say anything and it was all right there in front of him. As many questions as he had left, he knew enough to stop asking.

  “I’ll give them to her,” he said, rising. She didn’t move. He began walking toward the door. His hand on the knob, he looked back at her sitting there, her forearms posed tensely on either arm of the chair, her fingers wrapped hard around the wood. Her head tilted down, dark hair lit through by the lamp, as if on fire, brilliantly.

  He wanted suddenly to give her something, but he couldn’t think of what.

  “Midge—you know my wife, Midge? She said you were so lovely, that you had something bright and shiny about you. Something special, she meant.”

  Her head lifting slowly, she looked over at him. Abruptly, he had the feeling you get the split second before the blow comes. Midge taught him that feeling.

  “Why’d you do it?” she said, eyes suddenly narrow, like slits.

  “Do what?” he asked.

  “To Midge.”

  “You’re going to have to be more specific,” Hop said, hands

  turning around the knob damply.

  “I ran into her at Good Samaritan back in, oh, ‘48. Before all this. I was in the emergency room—a boyfriend broke my arm— and I saw her for the first time in two years. She spotted me right off.”

  He remembered as if it were happening again right before his eyes: Jean and Iolene in his living room that night, October 49. Jean

  looking over at a set of framed photos. “This is your wife?”

  ‘You saw Midge?” he said.

  Jean nodded. “So why’d you do it?”

  “Do what?” he repeated.

  “She was glad to see me, to see someone,” she said coolly. “She

  looked like she’d been crying for days. Her face was raw. And then she told me how she’d gotten married. To a reporter.

  And then she told me how he’d pushed her over a chair and she fell and lost the baby.”

  “She fell,” Hop said mechanically, turning the doorknob right and then left. “That much is true.”

  “Are you saying you didn’t push her or she didn’t lose the baby?”

  “I’m saying she was never pregnant,” he replied, shaking his head. “She just hoped she was. And she fell because she was trying to throw a marble ashtray at me.”

  She nodded. “That’s a big difference. Between your stories.”

  “Isn’t there always?”

  On the long drive back, he thought about a lot of things. About Iolene and her last desperate hours. Her unblurred beauty and her tenderness. Her only mistake was judgment. In coming to him, she picked the wrong guy to step up for rescue. For anything. And he thought about fresh-faced, clear-voiced Frannie Adair, so majestic, cool, striding above it all like some goddess, soles of her feet just grazing the ugliness the rest of her kind had sunk into up to the chin or more. And there was Midge. Midge and the half-truth that always lingered, twisting and turning in the hollow between them. And Midge and her stubborn, battered heart because she might love Jerry forever, but she’d never let him touch her where Gil Hopkins had. It was a horrible lesson to learn. He taught it to her a thousand times.

  These were the most sentimental thoughts Hop had allowed himself in years and they felt awkward and ill-fitting and he fumbled with them and then let them go. Poof.

  He was halfway home when he looked over at the accordion file on the seat next to him. The string had snapped and on his last sharp turn, something had slid out from one of the folders. He reached over and saw it was a piece of paper. He placed it in front of him and pressed it against the steering wheel so he could get a look.

  It was a postcard. A lake lined with fir trees and a fawn at the shore, just about to set a hoof in. In script at the top were the words “Merry Lake Is Waiting for You.”

  He turned it over and sure enough, behind yellowing tape, was a four-leaf clover.

  She must have thought Iolene needed it. She was right. Late, but right.

  Hop pulled the car over to the side of the road. He held the postcard in his hand. He could hear his breath, jagged and harsh. He rolled down the window and listened to the wind blowing through the trees, the thudding sound of cars passing, the stillness in between. He looked at his eyes in the rearview mirror for a long minute. Then he dug for a cigarette and matchbox in his glove compartment. He shook out a cigarette and tore a match free.

  At last, he caught his breath, caught himself. He lit the cigarette and inhaled until his chest hurt. Then he blew the smoke out and laughed. A funny kind of laugh he’d never heard from himself before. He started the car, still laughing.

  Who was Jean Spangler to think her luck was worth giving?

  Four Years Later

  “You’re going places, kid.” The burnished cliche Hop never tired of hearing, held close to his chest at night, keeping him warm. There was a high-breasted, swivel-hipped secretary outside the door. His secretary and his alone, from her fine-turned ankles and buttery locks, to the delicious way she purred “Mr. Hopkins’s office. How may I help you today?” in her honeyed Carolinian voice.

  The phone, it rang all day, and he spoke, gazing out his large window at the lot—the lot like a circus filled with the most beautiful and fragile people in the world, all dancing, high kicking, somersaulting, tightrope walking just for him.

&
nbsp; He spoke to the contract stars and the beauties who floated over from the other studios for a picture or two. They all came to him. Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, too, even Humphrey Bogart. And the women, Jeanne Crain, Doris Day, Jennifer Jones, Jane Wyman, Anne Baxter. They all came. And finer, less flinty fare in the up-andcomers: Janice Rule, Dorothy Malone, Jan Sterling, Carroll Baker. Every day. And, of course, the columnists— the rumor monkeys he worked like a carnival organ grinder. Walter still kicking around, Hedda, Louella, Sheilah, and all their lesser models—all dancing for him.

  And he went to premieres with the glimmering girls of the moment, lunch at the Derby, to the track with John Huston and his rough-living crowd. When someone needed to pick up the big-shot buccaneer at the drunk tank and slip some green to the blue, he sent Mike or Freddy or reliable old Bix, whom he’d hired himself. They kicked needles down sewer grates, slipped suicide notes into pockets, gave screen tests to hustlers quid pro quo. Hop had it taken care of. He had it fixed. Mr. Blue Sky. All from his chrome and mahogany office, cool and magisterial and pumped full of his own surging blood. He fucking loved his life. What did he do to deserve it?

  He was surprised, if he let himself think about it, how easy it had been to release the Spangler story into oblivion. He tied up all the loose ends. He tipped Frannie Adair to another, hotter story about SAG president Ronny Reagan and his closed-door deals with MCA. Hell, he’d even gotten Peggy Spangler a good job as a thanks for forgetting a few things. She was a receptionist at a snazzy talent agency and got to meet big stars every day. He was happy to help.

  And, when Tony Lamont negotiated a better deal for Sutton and Merrel at Universal, Hop was secretly more than glad he would never again have to work his magic for the likes of those two. He’d never do that. That he would not do. Truth was, it was Hop himself who gave Tony the idea, on the sly. Even greased the wheels. Hop also did his best to spread the word, discreetly of course, that those two were bad news, especially for ladies. And he tried not to listen when the rumor mill churned, every six months or so, about their peccadilloes, their deviancies, light and dark. Privately, on rare occasions, he would let himself wonder how long Gene Merrel could go on, shot through with doom, convincing himself he had nothing left to lose so that he could go down those dark, rutted tunnels time and again.

  There’s things I can’t fix, he said to himself on those long nights, those long nights when he ended up drinking bourbon at his kitchen table after an attenuated evening of premieres and Slapsy Maxie’s and Don the Beachcomber’s and the Ambassador Hotel. There’s things I can’t change. You do what you can. You do what you want. You do what you do. How could he really help any of them? They all made their own choices. All the girls coursing through the whole bloody story. How could you stop any of them? All you could do was lock the door, close the box, kick the dirt over the hole. He wished he’d figured this out long ago. Maybe he had.

  He also took care of something. There was a headstone of camiliawhite granite to replace the simple plot: Iolene Harper, 1922-1951, with a gardenia etched on either side. The grandest headstone in the cemetery, cost more than anything he’d ever bought in his life. There was that. He’d done that. You couldn’t forget that.

  He’d meant to stop by Jerry’s place the day they left town. To say good-bye, even offer to help pack the last few boxes, help load Jerry’s long, low sofa, his hundreds of jazz records, including his favorite 1925 recording of Bessie Smith singing “Careless Love Blues.” He’d meant to slip his arms around Midge’s tiny frame one last time, smell the hyacinth in her hair, feel the slenderest tuck of new flesh around her WASP waist. Meant to shake Jerry’s hand, his firm, solid hand that he’d seen holding tight to his ramshackle camera during the war, seen rat-a-tat-tat-ing at typewriters, covered with ink, curled around highball glasses, wherever. Jerry, he was it.

  They were long gone now, two years gone, Jerry diving into the foxhole at another Hearst rag, the San Francisco Examiner. Can’t leave Old Man Hearst without a conscience, Jerry had said, laughing hollowly. He was ready to get in the trenches again, no more editing from a glass-enclosed office, he’d be covering city hall. First time in the building, though, he’d be saying “I do.”

  I do I do I do, Midge. Here’s to you and to the future showgirl in your belly. You could only give the world beauty queens, showroom models, accesses, jingle singers, round-card girls brokenhearted from too many tries for the brass ring and from disappointments with men. You’re one mean son of a bitch, Gil Hopkins. She may give birth to a librarian, a schoolteacher, a social worker in her gut. Even a boy. No, never a boy. Midge …

  Truth was, he’d been too busy to get over there and say goodbye.

  Truth was, he’d rather remember Midge as he last saw her:

  I missed you my whole life, she’d said, and that was something else. It was something better than he deserved. That was her gift. The words that came at you so fast, so hard, they almost made you cry before you could stop yourself. Making you weak. Lost. And when he thought of it now, he wanted to laugh. Even she, who knows the worst of me, still can’t see what I see just by looking in the mirror.

  And Jerry, well, Jerry. He knew he’d see Jerry again. That was in the cards. Jerry knew him. He knew him. There were things Jerry … Jerry understood everything. Jerry, he …

  Sometimes Frannie Adair came over. She’d been engaged to a fellow at the DA’s office, but it didn’t work out. He was fired for racking up a six-thousand-dollar gambling debt and “compromising the office” when a loan shark showed up at the courthouse to collect his vig. Frannie covered bigger cases now, knocking on doors downtown and bending elbows with the boys who worked for the boys who made things happen, and unhappen.

  And she would call and, as long as he was alone, he’d invite her over to his new place in Holmby Hills (sure, he couldn’t pay for it yet, but it wouldn’t be long). And then he would fix a drink and wait for her, and as he waited he’d always think about the faint line he once saw on her face, the sheet crease as delicate as gold leaf, antique lace. And he would remember it until she got there.

  One of the first times, he walked her to the cab stand on the corner. As she slid down in the backseat, patting her mussed hair with trembling hands, she said, “I guess I live here now,” and he said, “You’ve lived here for years,” even though he knew what she meant and she was right.

  Startled out of his reverie by the buzz of his receptionist, Hop jumped forward in his seat. “Yes?”

  “Barbara Payton is here to see you. I told her she needed an appointment. Should I send her away?”

  He sat back in his chair. Here was a sad story, a cliche far more timeworn and rubbed to dullness. The girl, she had it all, but her legs went only one way—out. A few more bad headlines—Barbara attracted them like she did bad men—and the parts stopped coming. But the stories never stopped. Divorce from Franchot Tone. Divorce from wife-beating drunk Tom Neal. Paying a two-hundred-dollar bar tab with two fur coats. Rumors of heroin and picking up bellboys at the Garden of Allah on Sunset. A whore who got lucky, someone, not Hop, once called her. Her luck finally ran out.

  “You can send her in,” Hop said without thinking. She’d caught him in a rare sentimental mood.

  “Look at you, as I fucking live and breathe,” she announced, walking in, a cloud of teased-out hair, skin mottled, eyes burst through with red.

  Oh, Barbara, he thought, all that’s left are the tits and your dirty mouth.

  “When I met you,” she said, sitting down, her blouse pulling tighter across her chest, one button gone, “you were just a fast-talking kid with a slick and tasty way about you. You were good enough to eat, but you only ever looked me in the eye. You never even shot a glance at my rack.”

  Hop shook his head. “I may have talked fast, but I could look even faster. Besides, your dance card was full at the time.”

  “Maybe. I would have penciled in an extra line for you. But I was never smart enough about those things,” she s
aid, with a half grin. “But look at you now. You’re a real world-beater. Maybe if we’d danced back then, you’d be nostalgic now and help a gal.”

  He knew this was coming. Were there no surprises? “I would do it anyway, Barbara, if I could,” he said, with a full grin. “But I’ve got no pull with casting or production. I’m just publicity.”

  Raising her eyebrows, she leaned back in her chair. “Yeah,” she said, nodding her head and watching him closely. “You know, I didn’t just roll in from the pasture. I know what it is you do here. And what you undo. And there’s no more precious tackle on the lot. You know where all the bodies are buried,” she said, looking him straight in the eye. “You bury them.”

  Hop smiled vaguely and shrugged. “I wish I had half the muscle you think I have. Haven’t you heard? It’s all a sinking ship, anyway. The two-eared monster is taking over. Me, I don’t own a television set.”

  She smiled back, but it was a moll’s smile, a pay broad’s smile. No more shades of cheerleader and homecoming queen. She was all swivel and Hollywood Boulevard now. Where was the soft blonde thing he’d honey-tongued to Minnesota and back?

  “You know, I heard things,” she said, pointing a torn fingernail at him. “I heard about the things you knew. The secrets you had on the big guns. They would’ve promoted you to emperor to keep those secrets kept.”

  Hop looked at her.

  In his head, the familiar volley: What should he have done? A few files that would have come to nothing. No Iolene to give them to. Anyone in his shoes would have done the same. Why not make something from this big, gnawing nothingness? But it wasn’t like Barbara was suggesting, a promotion for a clipped lip. He never would have done it that way. He’d delivered those files to the men involved—the studio head’s daughter knocked up by a Negro, the thirteen-year-old deaf-and-dumb girl given a dose by one of the studio’s biggest stars—so they could dispose of them as they would. It was their overflowing gratitude that gave Hop the big boost from junior publicist to senior publicist to head publicist and a thick and juicy raise. It was a mean, messy thing, sure, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t all worked out for the best in the end. He was doing a great job; everyone thought so. The on-screen talent enjoyed him, felt comfortable with him, trusted him with their lives. And the brass felt positively serene. Then, through his own grit and guts, from head publicist to, now, this year, nineteen fifty-fucking-five, chief of publicity. He was a climber, yes, but in the best way: the way that meant that what he wanted most of all, all he wanted, really, was to make them happy.