by Jake Hinkson
“It’s not so strange. Sometimes it’s good to talk to someone who won’t judge you.”
“You’ve made no judgments of me?”
“Only good ones.”
She said, “I lost the baby. I’d been afraid that I could lose it. My mother lost three babies herself. I wrote to Obadiah to tell him, but by that time he’d already been wounded and lost his sight. The man who read him the Bible also read him my letter. After what he saw over there, and after losing our baby, I think Obadiah just decided there was nothing except God worth seeing anymore.”
“So when he came back you followed him here.”
“I thought I should. I thought it was the right thing to do. Everyone seemed to think it was the right thing to do. He got the Medal of Honor. I was marrying a hero who wanted to dedicate the rest of his life to God.” She looked around her bare home as if she was seeing it through my eyes. “I just didn’t know it was going to be like this.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say to that. I just stared at her.
“Let’s go outside,” she said.
I fought the impulse to reach for her, to pull her to me. I could still feel the single strand of hair wound tightly around my finger. Somehow, it kept my hand from moving.
She took a step into the den and tilted her head toward the backdoor. I nodded. As I pushed myself off the wall to follow her, she turned and walked through the den.
I had not noticed that my breathing was irregular, but as I followed her I became aware that it was returning to normal. I was starting to cool because I knew this game too well. The empty flirtation that led nowhere. I’d seen it before. Some people like to get right up to the edge of what they desire so that they can feel, however briefly, the heat of its nearness before they back away unsullied by the thing itself.
She opened the backdoor of her home. Three narrow steps led down to a small green field boxed in by trees.
She stood on the second step. I stood on the top step. She reached past me, our chests almost touching, and closed the door. But she didn’t pull away as I expected her to. She leaned in, closer to me, her face against my ear. She smelled my hair, and she ran the tip of her finger down my neck.
I raised my hand, the strand of hair unspooling around my finger and falling away as I gently brushed the soft curls from her face.
“Do you want to touch me, Billie?”
“Yes.”
“Touch me,” she said.
I ran my fingers across her cheek, to her neck. With my left hand, I pulled up her skirt, caressing the smoothness of her thighs. She closed her eyes. I kissed her. Her lips, so soft, kissed me back as if she were tasting something delicious for the first time. This was new for her, I could tell, and the softness and warmth of it sent a shudder through her and she pulled me close, pulled my hand further up her thighs, to her naked clit. Caressing her, I watched her mouth as a moan escaped her lips like a trembling prayer.
“Please don’t stop,” she whispered.
I didn’t.
“Oh God,” she said. “Oh God.”
I ran my other hand up her shirt, around her back and unclasped her bra. As I fondled her breasts, she pulled up my skirt and slipped her hand down my panties. When she started to caress my clit, my knees almost buckled.
I slid my fingers inside her while I rubbed her with my thumb. She moaned blasphemies in my ear and begged me not to stop.
I didn’t.
~ ~ ~
She walked me back to my car, hovering close to my elbow. After we’d collapsed against each other on the back steps of the church, we’d lay there together, entangled in each other’s arms, feeling the gasping breaths beneath each rise and fall of our breasts. Now, however, we didn’t touch, but we walked in time like we were in a wedding precession. I could still feel her sweat on my face, but I didn’t wipe it away. I wanted to feel it dry against my skin.
We walked through the shadow of the church and I had to ask her, “Will he be returning soon?” I wanted to know, but I didn’t want to say his name.
“Yes,” she said. “He never stays long when he goes to visit. He’s not that kind of preacher.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that. What kind of preacher is he?”
“Well,” she said, “I haven’t been married to the ministry very long, but I have figured out that if you want to know what kind a preacher a man is you ask yourself what he would be doing if he wasn’t a preacher. Some men would be snake oil salesmen, because they’re basically just greedy. Other men would be doctors, because at heart they’re healers. Others would be college professors, because they’re really just frustrated intellectuals.”
“What would Obadiah be?”
“A police officer,” she said.
“Really?”
“Yes. I think he was drawn to the ministry because it gave him authority – at least as far as a lot of people around here are concerned it gave him authority.”
Walking back into the sunlight, we arrived at my car. “What do you think now?” I asked.
What I meant was, what did she think now of her husband’s authority. But she seemed to hear the question in a different way, as a question about us. She said, “I don’t know what to think anymore, Billie.”
She seemed fragile and unsure of herself now, standing back from me and clutching her elbow as if she’d bumped it on something.
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to leave, to go back to my room and reflect on what had just happened, to remember it in all its quivering glory. For me, reliving experiences were almost as good as having the experiences. I’d gotten a reputation in Los Angeles for loving and leaving– one angry girl had told me I was “a worse dog than any boy who ever picked me up” – but in truth, I wasn’t putting notches on a belt. I had no fellows to drink with and brag to. I’ve always lived alone with my memories of the women I’d known.
Amberly was waiting for some kind of reply, so I told her, “I should probably go now.”
Her eyes narrowed and she pulled back. “I see. That’s it, then?”
“No, of course not. I want to talk to you more, but you just said he’ll be returning soon. I’m afraid of him coming home to find me here.”
She glanced at the road, biting her lip. “That’s true.”
“When can I see you again?”
“What would be a natural place?”
“Maybe the dry goods store, Pickett’s.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“I’ll go after breakfast.”
“So maybe ten o’clock.”
“Yes.”
I leaned forward to kiss her, but she instinctively pulled back. Then she checked the road again and leaned forward and our lips touched. It sent a shudder through me. I placed a hand on the car to steady myself.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
I got in the car and backed out. I drove back to the motor lodge. I collected my things. I got in the car and drove. I could still feel her beneath my fingertips, could still taste her skin on my lips. I could still hear her whispering, “Don’t stop.”
I didn’t stop driving until I was out of Arkansas.
Hollywood Interlude:
The Poverty Row Blues
One sunny afternoon, the man at PRC sat me down in his office and said, “We might all be fucked here.” He had a cigarette going in the tray on his desk, but he mashed it out and started another. He saw that I was watching him. “My wife thinks these things make me cough too much, so she wants me to only smoke half of each one. Healthier to do it that way she says.”
“Don’t you just end up smoking twice as many cigarettes?”
He shrugged. “Hell, who knows. She read it in some magazine.” He extended the pack of Chesterfields to me. I drew out a cigarette and lit it with the matches on his desk.
His office was next door to the men’s room. As he and I smoked at each other, we heard the
flush of the commode.
“So we’re sold?” I asked.
“Yeah. Some British guy. We’re going to be called Eagle-Lion Pictures from now on. They’re shifting things around, combining departments.”
“That shouldn’t affect us, though, should it? I mean, they still need to move pictures, don’t they?”
He pressed the palm of his hand to his eyes and I watched the smoke from his cigarette waft into his slicked-back brown hair.
“I don’t know, Billie. I don’t know. They fired Ray. You hear that?”
“Jesus. No.”
He puffed on his cigarette. “Ray. Henry. The Greenbaum kid. All three. Gone.”
I leaned forward, elbows on my knees. “But they haven’t said anything about us.”
“No. Not yet.”
“But they need us. Right? We’re not dead weight. I’m out there schlepping the company shit all over the country for them.”
He nodded. “Yeah. That’s right. Yeah.”
“Someone’s got to go talk to these people in Missouri and Tennessee.” I looked at the burning tip of my cigarette. “And Arkansas.”
“That’s true.”
“So we have nothing to worry about.”
He stared out his window at the shadowy wall of the building next door like it was a distant sunset, let out a long sigh and said, “Well, they might bring in their own people. You never know. That might happen. Some fellow in England is sitting in an office right now looking at a sheet of paper. He’s going to do some math and draw a line through some names. It’s really as simple as that.”
I leaned back in my seat.
“So we might all be fucked,” I said.
He just stared off into his brick sunset. “That’s a distinct possibility, yes.”
~ ~ ~
The Moonlight Bar and Lounge was a dim, smoky little joint with two great selling points: it was quiet, and it was located within stumbling distance to my rooms at the Chateau Michel below Franklin. It had a long marble bar up front, and deep dark booths in the back. It wasn’t a girl-girl place, but I didn’t go there for that. I went there when I just wanted to drink alone, which was not infrequently.
I was sitting in a booth in the back when I saw a group of girls come in. There were three of them. All had the look of studio secretaries still dressed in their work clothes. As they sat down at the bar, a couple of guys who’d been drinking there in complete silence for an hour suddenly got the urge to make small talk, so they slid over to two of the girls. The odd girl out was a short blonde with sturdy legs and a big ass.
I made note of her, but I turned my attention back to the newspaper beneath my half-empty vodka martini. Congress was hunting Commies. At some hearings in Washington the month before, a bunch of people had appeared before a House Committee and warned the whole world about communist subversion in Hollywood. Representing the screen actors guild, guys like Robert Montgomery, Ronald Reagan, and George Murphy had testified that the Reds had been making inroads into the picture business for years. Walt Disney had testified that the Screen Cartoonists Guild was taking orders from Moscow. Even Mickey Mouse wasn’t safe anymore. Now a bunch of leftie writers were refusing to testify in front of Congress. The paper said they could all go to jail.
That didn’t bother me all that much since I wasn’t a Commie, but more problems for the picture business only meant more potential problems for me down the road. I had enough problems already. The meeting that afternoon had given me the willies. Sure, I hadn’t gotten the axe yet, but people were getting fired and departments were getting shuffled around. I felt like I was clinging to my job like a heroine hanging off a cliff in one of our shitty westerns.
At the bar, the little blonde with the plump ass excused herself to go to the powder room. She had to pass by my booth to get to the back, though, and when she did she saw me sitting there in slacks and a comfortable shirt and tie. I gave her a smile.
“Bill,” she said.
I kept smiling. I knew I knew her, but I did not know her name. It wasn’t one of those deals where the name was on the tip of my tongue, either. I’d just forgotten it completely.
She waited for me to come up with it, and while I smiled and stammered, she said, “Felicia Charbonneua …”
I said, “I don’t know how I could have misplaced a five dollar moniker like that one, Felicia.”
Uninvited, she sat down in the booth across from me. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
I gestured at the martini in front of me. “I fear that after a few of these, my memory starts getting a little spotty.”
Felicia Charbonneua wore a little azure hat atop some swirling pale hair. Under it, she had a round forehead and round cheeks and a round chin – all of which seemed to be held together by a button nose. As she leaned forward, I could see that her eyes were clear and blue. “I’ll give you ten dollars if you’ve had more than one drink, Bill.”
She had me there. I’d only had half of the one.
“Maybe it only takes one,” I said.
“No, but after two, you get mean.”
“What?” I searched my memory for Felicia Charbonneua, but I could not put her together with anyone I knew.
“It’s fine,” she said. “You forget lots of girls. You and I met at the Well Well Club one night. That was probably ’44 …”
“Oh.”
“Oh, yes.”
“And did I get mean after two drinks?”
“We had an unfortunate experience, let’s just leave it at that.”
I gave her a tight smile, but she just stared at me.
“So what do you do when you’re not having unfortunate experiences at the Well Well Club, Felicia?”
“Script girl at Republic.”
“How’re things at Republic?”
“Fine. I heard you were at … is it still called PRC or did that change?”
“It’s Eagle-Lion now. You heard I worked there?”
“It’s a small town.” She gestured at the newspaper headlines. “You worried about that?”
“About what? The hearings?”
“Yes.”
I chuckled. “I’m not a Commie.”
“Well, neither am I, but …”
She let her voice drift off. She seemed to be hinting at something, but I was missing it. “What?” I asked.
She crossed her arms on the marbled tabletop. Her voice lowered. “It just alarms me to think that the government might come poking around the all studios.”
“But if you’re not a Red …”
“Our guardians of public probity pretty much equate any degeneracy with being a Red.”
“Oh. Yes. But there’s enough degeneracy to go around in this town.”
She bit at her plump bottom lip. “I know. That’s exactly what worries me. Once they start, where are they going to stop? There’s enough fuel here for a pretty big fire.”
I sipped my drink. “We’re small potatoes.”
“You’re not worried.”
“Not about the Committee on Un-American Activities, no.”
She sat back. In a normal tone of voice she said, “Well, you never did worry about much, did you?”
I glanced at her friends at the bar. The men sweet-talking the women, the women allowing themselves to be called “Baby” in exchange for a free drink.
“Are your boyfriends going to miss you?”
She shook her head. “There’s only two of them. Mildred and Catherine will keep them busy. Besides, I already have a steady fella.”
“He got a name?”
“Harvey.”
“What’s Harvey do?”
“He’s an electrician at Republic.”
“You going to marry him?”
She tilted her head. “If he asks me, yes, I think I will.”
“Mrs. Harvey …?”
“Wilson.”
“Mrs. Harvey Wilson. That’s a real step down, name-wise.”
“We have to make sacrifices in this
life,” she said.
I nodded. “I suppose that’s true.”
“Except for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t strike me as someone who has to make sacrifices.”
“You don’t know the first thing about me.”
Now she smiled, she smiled wide, and the wider she smiled the less she seemed to mean it. “Well, that’s where you’re wrong, Billie. All I know about you is the first thing, which is that you’re charming. What I don’t know about you is the second thing. I don’t even know if there is a second thing.”
“This conversation has taken a turn for the worse,” I said. “You’re starting to hurt my feelings.”
She leaned forward. “Do you have feelings, though, Bill? Do you really?”
“Maybe you should go back to your friends and your electrician before we have another unfortunate experience.”
“You know, as a matter of fact, I was just on my way to call Harvey,” she said. “Let him know that I’m coming over tonight to make him dinner after I have a drink with the girls.”
“Give him my love.”
“I give him my own. That’s enough for him.”
“Oh, you love him. How sweet.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t say I love him. I said I give him my love. And pretty soon he’ll give me a man’s paycheck and a home that my parents can be proud of, and after that he’ll give me children. Like I said, we make sacrifices in this life. Except you.”
“Guess I’m not ready to trade myself in for a garbage disposal and house full of brats in Pasadena.”
She smiled sadly, knowingly, like she was talking to a headstrong adolescent. “Oh God, that’s what you tell yourself, isn’t it? That you have some kind of integrity.” She shook her head and pressed the back of her hand to her mouth like she was trying to hold back a laugh. “There were plenty of gals at the Well Well Club, Bill. Why didn’t you settle down with anybody? You know why? Because once people get past the charm, they always figure out there’s nothing else to you. You’re nothing but a needy child.”