I hadn’t gone more than ten steps down the hall when I heard a woman yelling. She was yelling from an office, behind a closed door, and I didn’t really pick up what she was yelling. It was incoherent yelling, about someone destroying her. Then, just as I was passing the door behind which she was yelling, there was the sound of a very loud slap.
“I’ll tell you why,” a man’s voice yelled. “Because you’re a fucking no-talent establishment creep, that’s why! You won’t fuck and you can’t draw!”
The door opened just then and a heavy-set redheaded man hurried out, trying to get into his coat. He glared at me, as if he suspected me of intentionally eavesdropping on the fight, but he didn’t stop to challenge me. He hurried on down the hall. Just as he was about to turn the corner a thin girl in a green dress stepped out of the office. Tears were streaming down her face. “I can draw!” she yelled after the man. “Don’t you ever tell me I can’t draw!”
The man went around the corner without ever pausing or looking back and the girl walked over and leaned her forehead against the wall. She rubbed her cheek with one hand and sobbed. I felt very awkward, but I didn’t feel that I could just go on and leave her sobbing, her forehead pressed against the wall. The slap might really have hurt her. Before I could think of what to say she turned and looked at me, her eyes overflowing. She had mousy blonde hair.
“Oh, why does everyone want to fuck me?” she asked. “Why does everyone want sex, anyway? I can’t even know anyone without sex messing things up. I can’t even have a simple job! Somebody always has to try and fuck me. I hate it! I hate it! I don’t even get to have friends.”
She wiped away her tears and gave me a very direct look, as if she suspected me of being someone else who wanted to fuck her. I wasn’t, though. She seemed very thin and lonely, and not sexy at all. What she touched were my sympathies.
“Can I be of some help?” I asked. “My name’s Danny. Does your jaw hurt?”
“Not enough to complain about,” she said. “Will you help me carry some stuff downstairs? I can’t work here now. He’ll just try it again. I’ll have to take my sketches home. My name’s Jill Peel.”
She went back in the office and threw what seemed like about a hundred pounds of sketches into some big portfolios. It turned out that she did drawings for animated cartoons. Not ordinary Tom and Jerry stuff, but serious animated cartoons. One she had worked on three years before had won an Oscar.
“That’s why he called me establishment,” she said. “He really feels very inferior.”
She had a red Volkswagen bus parked in the parking lot across Gower Street. I put her drawings in the back for her and she got in the driver’s seat and shut the door. But she didn’t drive off. Once she was under the wheel she turned and looked at me. She had a thin, sweet face, and very blue eyes. Her look was very direct. We hadn’t talked much, but I felt that I was going to be lonelier once she drove off, and I tried to think of something to say that would delay her a few minutes. To my surprise she thought of something to say.
“What do you do?” she asked.
I told her I was a novelist, writing a screen play for Leon O’Reilly.
“He’s the straightest man in the industry,” she said. “What’s your novel called?”
“It’s called The Restless Grass.”
“You’re not from L.A., are you?”
I told her I was from Texas, and we began to talk. She put her arm on the car window and her chin on her arm and I stood in the parking lot and we talked. She didn’t really want to drive off and be lonely, either. She just wanted a car door between us, so there would be no chance of my deciding to try anything sexual.
She gave me very straight, clear looks, to determine if I had any intention of trying anything. I didn’t have any intention at all of trying anything and I did my best to let her know I could be trusted to be friendly. After we had spent an hour and a half talking about Texas and Hollywood and novels and drawings we were both a little bit less nervous. I really wanted to ask her to have dinner with me, but I was afraid it might spook her. While I was debating with myself it occurred to Jill that I had been standing up for an hour and a half.
“You can get in if you want to,” she said.
“Okay,” I said.
I got in the front seat with her and we both felt awkward. Fortunately we really liked to talk to each other. I don’t think either of us had talked to anyone in a long time, not anyone of much sensibility, anyway. We liked to talk to each other so much that we managed to beat the awkwardness. The sky to the west had turned purple, and from a distance we could hear the low roar of evening traffic out the Hollywood Freeway.
“Would it scare you if I asked you to supper?” I said. “I don’t know anyone in L.A.”
Jill had a way of straightening her head suddenly so that I was forced to look her full in the face. She did it when I asked her to supper. I had never in my life met such a direct look, in such an uncompromisingly honest face. Her eyes weren’t blank, like Sally’s. They were clear and gray and intelligent.
“I’m glad you said supper,” she said. “No one’s ever asked me to supper before. Guys here ask you to dinner, which means they buy you a cheap steak and then try to fuck you before you even get it digested. Let’s go to supper.”
I was very pleased and did my best not to make her nervous. We ate at a diner near her place, which was in Westwood. After we ate we walked around UCLA for a while. To my surprise she invited me to her place. “Viva Zapata’s on TV,” she said. “I love it. Come watch it with me”.
She looked at me once more, very straight. I guess she had decided I wasn’t dangerous. We went to her apartment, which was extremely neat. It had white walls, hung with her drawings. Most of the drawings were of strange, curvy cartoon-creatures who reminded me of Reddy Kilowatt. Jill had black modern chairs, but we sat on the floor to watch Viva Zapata. I loved it too. “It was filmed in Roma, Texas,” I said. Henry, the old screenwriter in the Rice library, had told me that. He had gone down to watch them film it, hoping that Darryl F. Zanuck might be there. Jill cried twice during the movie. The sight of Texas made me sentimental, but I didn’t cry, mostly because it was such a great relief just to be with somebody again. As soon as the movie was over Jill and I began to talk. We talked for several hours. I told her about my life and career and she told me about hers.
At two in the morning, when it was very foggy, we got in her Volkswagen bus and drove to the Beverly Hills Hotel. We ordered a big pot of tea and sat on my huge bed, drinking tea and talking. We were also holding hands. I never expected it to happen and didn’t make any moves. Jill just took my hand.
I had hardly had my eyes off her face for six or eight hours and despite myself I was beginning to love her. She had an honest, unpretending face, and it had already become dear to me. It seemed to me I knew it much better than I knew Sally’s. I stopped being able to imagine myself living with Sally. Even before she took my hand I had begun to imagine myself living with Jill.
All the time we were holding hands Jill was telling me a wild story involving a baby bed. She was actually twenty-four years old and had a six-year-old son who lived with her parents in Santa Maria. The story was about a baby bed she had had when her son was an infant. It had been given her by the wife of one of her own former boyfriends. That was only the mere outline though. The baby bed, in only ten years, had passed from one young couple to the next all around the country, and the couples themselves were a great interlocking swirl of lovers and boyfriends and mistresses, ex-mistresses, wives, ex-wives. In its travels it had gone from UCLA to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, then to Utica, New York, then to Edmonton, Canada, and had come almost back to where it had started. It was presently in Redondo Beach. All the people it had belonged to had been friends or lovers of Jill’s at UCLA. She had a soft, rapid voice, and she filled out the story of the baby bed with wonderful, intricately detailed vignettes of the lives and personalities of the various girls and boys whose
off-spring had been infants in the same baby bed.
Almost before she completed the story I knew I wanted to steal it. I told her so right away and she didn’t seem to care. It could be my second novel. I didn’t know any of the people, so I could invent everything but the baby bed itself. It seemed to me the perfect subject—a picaresque novel with a baby bed as hero.
Jill thought it was very interesting of me to think of such a thing. Her clear eyes lit up and we began to try and think of a title for my novel.
“I wish I could illustrate it,” she said. “I’ve never done drawings for a book.”
She got some Beverly Hills Hotel stationery out of a drawer and did a quick sketch of a baby bed with twelve funny babies in it. She drew very fast.
I thought the sketch was charming. She had personified the baby bed, somehow. It looked like a mother. In a way it reminded me of Emma Horton. “That’s wonderful,” I said. Jill blushed. All the funny babies looked different. While I was watching, Jill drew some more. She was very bold and funny in her drawings. She drew a sketch of the baby bed hitchhiking through Mexico. Then she drew one of the baby bed on the banks of Lake Louise. Her face changed when she was drawing. She became very sexy. I leaned forward gently and tried to kiss her. She let me for about one second and then drew her face back. She was very tentative and hesitant. She wouldn’t let my face near hers again. She stopped drawing, though, and we lay on the bed looking at each other.
“I’m older than you,” Jill said.
I didn’t say anything. I was very tired, and I was thinking how accidental things were. If I had left Leon O’Reilly’s office one minute earlier I would have been in the elevator when Jill was having the fight. I wouldn’t even have met her. I noticed she had gone to sleep. I guess she trusted me. I went to sleep too. When we woke up the room was full of sun and Jill was sitting up, drawing sketches of the baby bed. She had used up all the stationery and was drawing sketches on the back of other sketches. She looked much perkier than she had the day before.
“I shouldn’t have given you that story,” she said. “It would make a great cartoon.”
“Go to San Francisco with me,” I said. “We’ll compete for it. If your cartoon is better than the novel I write I’ll burn the novel.”
“No, you should never burn things,” Jill said, looking at me seriously for a second. “What you should do is give it to the sea.”
She was drawing again. When she drew her face became beautiful. I tried to kiss her but she ducked. While I watched she did a little sketch of my novel being given to the sea. I had just dropped it off the Golden Gate Bridge and a scholarly-looking sea gull was trying to read it as it fluttered down into the bay. Then she did a sketch of me. My hair was very uncombed and I was standing on the Golden Gate Bridge looking forlorn. In my hand I held an empty box on which was written THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL. Finally she did a tiny sketch of herself being presented an Oscar. Jayne Mansfield, mostly bust, was making the presentation. When she finished Jill let me kiss her for one second.
“I mean it,” I said. “Go with me.”
“I know you mean it,” she said. “You couldn’t be insincere if you tried.”
“You’d like it,” I said, though I realized it was a silly thing to say. What I meant was that I liked her.
“I’ll go,” she said quietly, looking me straight in the eye. “But you’ll be sorry. I’ve got nothing to lose. I may come back here in two days. I probably won’t even sleep with you.”
“Why not?” I said.
“For one thing, I’m in love,” she said. “He’s a cinematographer and he’s been in Europe for two years and he never loved me anyway but it’s still there. Carl’s one major hang-up. Sex is another. I’ve had problems and I’m scared of it now. Also my son’s a big hang-up. I have bad guilt feelings about him. I’ve got more hang-ups than I’ve got good points. Besides, you’ve got a pregnant wife and you’re obviously very dutiful. If she wants you back you’ll go. I’m a very weak person or I wouldn’t even think of going with you. I just want someone to make my decisions for me.”
“I don’t mind that,” I said. “I make decisions easily.”
“Of course you do, dummy,” she said. “Ninety-nine percent of them are wrong, but you make them.”
“Can we go in your bus?” I asked. “I don’t know how to get to the airport.”
“A cabdriver could probably direct you,” Jill said dryly.
Cabs had just occurred to me as she said it. I still wanted to take the Volkswagen, though. Driving to San Francisco would be fun. Jill didn’t care. “You’re making the decisions now,” she said. She did a funny little sketch of two people fucking under the baby bed. Three babies hung over the rail, trying to get a glimpse of what was going on.
We went to her apartment and she showered and put on a blue and white striped sweater that made her look ten times as sexy as she had looked standing in the hall at Columbia Studios. When we left for San Francisco, late that afternoon, she left a light burning in her apartment.
“I don’t know when I might be coming back,” she said. “I hate stepping into dark apartments.” At Santa Barbara we stopped and ate seafood. While we were eating the sun went down into the Pacific Ocean. Jill sat in the same side of the booth with me. We held hands. From time to time I tried to think of Sally, and of what might happen, but I couldn’t. Jill was too present. She continued to tell me about the adventures of the people who had had the baby bed. “We were a wild lot,” she said. “I had an abortion when I was sixteen.”
I was thinking about sleeping with her. She was awfully shy and nervous and I knew it was probably going to take a few days. I didn’t care. We ate and drove on and Jill talked until midnight and then flaked out in the seat, her head on my thigh.
At three o’clock in the morning I parked the bus in the tiny little parking lot across from the Piltdown and led Jill up and left her on my creaky bed. I went back down to make sure the bus was locked. At the other end of the parking lot a couple of drunks were throwing rocks at a garbage can. I couldn’t imagine where they’d got the rocks. There was no one watching the counter at the Piltdown so I went back myself and got my mail. There were two air mail special delivery letters, practically the only two special deliveries I’d ever received in my life.
I took them to my room to open them—Jill was sleeping peacefully so I settled down in a chair. The first letter was from Leon O’Reilly and contained an outline of the movie I was to write. Sure enough, he had given the bad son a wife who was in love with the good son. In order not to lose the rape scene, he had had the bad son get drunk and rape his own wife. He had even given the good son a bad wife. Maybe I would make her rape her own husband. I felt very lackadaisical about the whole project.
Then I opened the other letter. It was from Bruce and contained a check for thirty-six thousand dollars. A note from Bruce said, “Leon pays promptly.” I held the check in my lap for several hours, and sat and watched Jill Peel, who stayed asleep.
11
WHEN I woke up, still clutching my check, Jill was trying to put a pillow behind my head. She looked great. She had only to wash her face to look fresh and intelligent and lovely, and she had washed her face. She had even cleaned up my room, somehow. It was the cleanest it had been since I moved into it. Jill had on another striped sweater, and pants and sneakers. She was somewhat put out with me.
“You’ve probably got a crick in your neck,” she said. “You’re already letting me trample you. You could have slept on the bed. I’m not that hung up.”
“I didn’t mean to go to sleep,” I said.
“I’m really compulsively neat,” she said, noticing me looking the room over. “It’s one of the reasons nobody can live with me. I guess it’s all connected with my sexual problem. Everything seems to be.”
Her face had already become dear to me. I liked the little blue shadows under her eyes. She gave me one of her looks, to see if I was going to hate her for having a sexual
problem. Meeting Jill’s looks made me wonder why I had ever been fool enough to think Sally was vulnerable. She might be vulnerable to cannonballs, but she wasn’t vulnerable to people. Loving her didn’t make her face change—neither did hitting her. She was not affectable.
Jill’s face changed constantly. She was always affectable, always vulnerable. The penalty she paid for being honest was that she lived most of her life poised on brinks. They were real brinks too. At first the sight of Jill poised on a brink scared me badly. I had no confidence in my ability to pull her back, and if I said something false or wrong and she went over she would really go over, into some kind of different life. She never poised on phony brinks.
“I don’t mind your being compulsively neat,” I said. “I’m compulsively sloppy. We’ll complement each other.”
She looked so darling that I got up and tried to hug her. She wanted to be hugged, but the hug didn’t really work. We were awkward and unfamiliar with each other, and just nervous. We weren’t used to being in small rooms with each other.
Fortunately we were both hungry. The minute we got on the street we both relaxed. Jill had a blue windbreaker, to go with her blue sneakers. She hooked her arm in mine and we walked several blocks and went in a diner and ate sweet rolls and drank several cups of tea. We talked about things we read in the paper.
“Gee, I’m glad we still like to talk to each other,” Jill said. I put my thirty-six-thousand-dollar check on the table. Now that I was back in the neighborhood of the Piltdown, that much money was an unreal thing. “What should I spend it on?” I asked.
All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers Page 13