The Song Is You

by Megan Abbott

  So he said now, pointedly, to Barbara Payton, bleached-brittle hair and toreador pants, smell of bar vibrating off her, “You’re the last person, Barbara, that I’d expect to take stock in rumors.”

  “Hey, I got nothing to hide,” she said, crossing her legs, lipstick-red mule hanging from her twitching foot. “They’re probably all true, every last one. Did you see the photos Mr. Franchot Tone spread all over town a few years back? Those private dick shots of me on my knees, all black garters and beads, before my beloved boxing partner, Tom Neal? How many girls get out of that?”

  Hop nodded his signature knowing, understanding nod.

  She sighed, rubbing her arm wistfully. “What was I supposed to do? Play the blessed virgin or Betty Crocker? I was having a ball. And I wasn’t about to pull the brakes for Louella Parsons or Daryl Zanuck. I know it’s hurt me. I’ve paid. You don’t see me on-screen with Gregory Peck or Jimmy Cagney these days. The money ran out. There were some bad men. I hit the sauce. A bottle of Seconal a hotel doctor had to suck back out of me with a tube. Then I took the route, as the junkies say. It started sticking to me. You know the song. You could sing it to me.”

  Beneath the hard stare, the pancake, the waxy coat of lipstick, beneath that… hell, Hop had long ago stopped looking beneath that.

  Chances were too great that the underneath was worse.

  “I can try, Barbara. I can make some calls. I will.”

  She smiled, sweetly this time. “Thanks, kid. Thanks. I’ll say thanks ‘cause I need the dough. Truth is, Hoppy boy, I don’t know if I want to go back to pictures for the long haul. The shadow life. It never seemed real, you know?”

  Hop smiled and looked surreptitiously at his watch.

  “Do you ever start to feel like none of it’s real, Hop? Like” — she moved forward in her chair, eyes still, behind the skein of red, jewelblue—”like you’re not real. Like I think maybe if I reached across the

  desk toward you, my hand would go right through you. I know it would. Do you ever feel like that?”

  “No,” he said, surprised at his own abruptness. Suddenly, he felt like he’d do anything to get her out of his office. What did she mean, her hand would go right through him? What did it have to do with him? “Never. But I know a lot of stars do think about that. About the persona—”

  “I’m not talking about that,” she said. “I’m talking about the shadow life. The life you’re living instead. The life you’re living because you can’t fight yourself anymore. You’re too goddamned tired to fight yourself anymore.”

  Hop looked at her. He could feel himself bracing. He was ready for it.

  “See, me, Hop,” she said. “I’m thinking I may go back to fighting.”

  “Good luck.”

  That night, Hop returned to his new place, still paint-fresh, at midnight. He’d begged off when—What was her name? Maura? Mona? Mina?—the one with the spangly dress and little-girl lisp offered to fry him up a steak at her little place in West Hollywood. He was tired. He didn’t feel like talking. He was bored.

  He poured three fingers of scotch before taking off his dinner coat. Unloosening his tie and collar, he sat in his new Italian leather armchair.

  He’d thought he wanted to be alone, but the quiet, the tomblike quiet of the place made him feel suddenly panicky. Why did he always forget this about himself? When had he ever wanted to be alone?

  He thought about calling someone. He could call someone and then she would talk and then she would come over and then there would be no reason to sit in a chair with a drink in the quiet apartment and look out the window and think about things and recall things and recall people and remember stories and faces and feelings and voices that had flitted through him once in a coffee shop, at a bar, in a room smelling sharply of pine.

  Iolene, she once said to him, You think you can forget.

  And now he couldn’t stop remembering. It was the thing he dreaded most. By the time he finished his drink, he was remembering everything.

  The pictures, the fast-moving images, the flickering lights like a movie playing in his head. Only by now, it had gotten so mixed up for him, he couldn’t separate real memories from things he hadn’t even seen, things he’d only been told about. They were all there. A belt across the mouth. A ring of blood. A revolver to the back of a head, pressed against a hair comb glittering. A girl falling over a chair.

  There was something lost. There was something lost. He could look in the mirror a thousand times and he would never see it again. He’d snuffed it out. Had he known he’d never get it back… Had he known it would be gone forever…

  He got up and walked into his bedroom. He knew it would be there and he shouldn’t do it, but he couldn’t stop. He opened the drawer to his bedside table and dug under the handkerchiefs, phone book, cigarettes, matchbooks. There it was.

  He pulled it out. It was thin as a cobweb now, this postcard. It had become delicate with time. Postcards, after all, aren’t meant to last. They’re less than a letter. They’re a fleeting thing. A whisper in the ear reminding you, “Merry Lake’s Waiting for You.”

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  1949

  The Petty Girl

  Park La Brea

  Cinestar, Gil Hopkins, Reporter

  Two Years Later — September 1951

  Cloquet

  Sweet Iolene

  Girl Reporter

  King Cole

  Stardust Eyes

  Love Is a Memory

  The Red Lily

  Gotcha

  Satin Doll

  Reno, 1946

  Merry Lake

  Four Years Later