The Black Marble

by Joseph Wambaugh

  The kind of abandoned smile seldom seen on Pasadena Junior Leaguers, unless they were ignited by Bombay martinis at Annandale Country Club. A smile which would unquestionably be deemed provocative by the socially wed and nearly dead at the all-woman Town Club. Oh God, she dreaded the day she’d be old enough to want to join. Madeline Dills Whitfield unleashed a smile she had reserved for Mason Whitfield on those rare occasions he bedded her in the last dreadful years of their marriage.

  A smile which carried a promise made instantly, consciously, irrevocably—to screw the patent-leather loafers right off this Minnesota greaseball.

  A smile which was not even seen by the hairy stranger. Because he was admiring Vickie. Staring after Vickie.

  The oily stranger turned again to his friend and said: “Look at the muscles in her legs. She moves like a stallion, I tell you!”

  Then Madeline felt loneliness all right. And real fear. The kind that choked her awake in those first months after Mason had gone. The worst kind of fear, born of loneliness, which only became manageable when Vickie came.

  Vickie. Madeline sat there with Vickie by the pool and drank three double Chivas with water-back, and controlled that fear and looked at the hairy stranger scornfully. She wasn’t jealous, she was proud. Vickie belonged to her, and Madeline loved her obsessively.

  The rain was steady. She wondered if she’d be awake the entire night. Probably, if she insisted on these tormenting thoughts. But as she lay in the dark and looked at Vickie’s elegant jaw, she couldn’t help admitting that she would have given a healthy chunk of a secretly unhealthy trust fund if that oily man had said drunkenly to Madeline: “You bitch, you carry yourself like a stallion!”

  Madeline wryly wondered if, in the history of the old Huntington Hotel, any “sustaining” Junior Leaguer had sat by the Picture Bridge and yearned for a man to look at her thighs and arouse her with an antiquated, vulgar, erotic cliché. By comparing her to a male horse.

  Victoria stirred in her sleep. Madeline touched her lovingly and risked awakening her by snuggling closer until her mouth was touching Vickie’s ear.

  “Sleep, love, sleep,” Madeline whispered. She stroked that arched neck and said, “Sleep, my darling.”

  But Vickie opened her eyes: perfect ovals, blinking in momentary confusion. Madeline kissed each eye, marveling at the luster: wet chocolate irises, whites like lapis lazuli in the moonlight.

  “Sleep, love, sleep.”

  Vickie sighed and turned just enough for Madeline to see how deep those eyes were set, how shaded by brows of silver white. Madeline wanted to touch her face and kiss that lovely ear.

  Like most insomniacs, Madeline toyed masochistically with her devils in the night. Today’s tennis exhibition at the Valley Hunt Club.

  It is the oldest social club in the Los Angeles area. Where ladies still sit courtside and worry over coming-out parties. Where Old Pasadena strives to nourish its moldering roots by presenting the family flowers at frantic and archaic debutante balls.

  Madeline had been courtside at the Valley Hunt Club, ostensibly watching a listless college tennis exhibition while downing the third double Scotch and water of the afternoon. She had waited an appropriate time to order her fourth because of the presence of Edna Lofton, an obtrusive bitch Madeline had known since Kappa House days at the University of Southern California, when Edna was a smartass sorority viper.

  Edna Lofton, another “sustaining” Junior Leaguer, also active with Madeline in the Junior Philharmonic and the Huntington Library Docents, seldom missed the opportunity to grin knowingly whenever Madeline ordered more than three or four afternoon cocktails at the club.

  Like other “younger” Valley Hunt Club members, Edna had switched from Yves St. Laurent sunglasses to the latest from over the hill: oversized sunglasses with logograms engraved on the lower lens. In Edna’s case it was a little white tennis racquet. It should have been a spider and a web, Madeline thought. Madeline herself had bought a pair in Beverly Hills at the Optique Boutique. She had wanted the tennis racquet too, but resisted because Edna had beaten her to it, so she settled for a white flower. Madeline thought the glasses chic and becoming, though the little speck was annoying when she looked at anything below eye level. The price tag annoyed her even more.

  One day while shopping on Lake Avenue in Pasadena she had encountered something considerably below eye level: a barefoot black girl about seven years of age. The child stopped her skateboard. “Lady?” She was licking a green Popsicle, gawking at Madeline’s ninety-dollar, double-gradient sunglasses.

  “Yes, dear, what can I do for you?” Madeline smiled.

  The girl stopped licking and said, “I was wonderin. How come you don’t jist wipe the bird shit off them funny glasses?”

  The following Sunday, Madeline’s Mexican housekeeper, Yolanda, wore those glasses proudly to a picnic in Elysian Park.

  Edna flipped up her sunglasses with the little tennis racquet on the lens, and said sweetly: “Madeline, go easy, we’re playing doubles later and may need you as a fourth.”

  Madeline tried a sassy, nose-wrinkling grin. She stuck out her tongue at Edna, but given the pain and the fear and the Chivas Regal flush in her face, it didn’t come off.

  “Put your tongue in, dear,” Edna purred. “You look like the victim of a hanging.”

  The second set was as dilatory as the first. Most of the spectators were of course U.S.C. rooters. Old Pasadena, if the money was still intact, seldom attended state-supported institutions like U.C.L.A. It was impossible to concentrate. She imagined Edna’s vindictive gaze on her back.

  Madeline was in tennis whites and hated it. She was considering trying tennis pants, but was fearful that the club would disapprove if she played in anything but a skirt. Actually she didn’t want to play at all anymore. She had always hated the game, but without some exercise she’d probably look like a medicine ball. (Why the continual weight gain, Doctor? I don’t drink that much. I haven’t eaten a really full meal since my husband left me, I swear!)

  Mason Whitfield. Stanford, class of ’48. Infantry officer in Korea. Decorated for typing a report in a tent near Seoul in freezing weather after the company clerk was evacuated with the clap. He had typed for six hours without gloves and was frostbitten. Mason returned to Pasadena wearing a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.

  Like his father before him, Mason had gone to Harvard for his LL.B. and joined a law firm in downtown Los Angeles. One of those giant firms where the lawyers in Probate don’t even know the guys in Corporate. He managed to work ten years without ever setting foot in a courtroom. He made big bucks. He was a near-perfect, Old Pasadena scion. He and Madeline prospered. But they didn’t multiply. He had a flaw or two.

  Madeline felt Edna’s eyes on her back, and self-consciously tucked a roll of cellulite under the tennis panty which was cutting into her flesh. Madeline just knew Edna was still telling the Filthy Story about Mason Whitfield, when he made a boozy revelation to the barman at the Hunt Club: “Wanna know why I left my wife? Zero sex appeal, that’s why. And I just came back from a wonderful holiday in Aca-pulco. Wanna know what I like best about my secretary? The moustache doesn’t scratch my balls as much as Madeline’s did.”

  The secretary’s name was Herbert.

  Madeline was sure it was a rotten lie, because within a year Mason fired Herbert and married a San Marino widow without a moustache.

  “Mrs. Whitfield? You probably don’t remember me? We met at dinner? At the Cal Tech Atheneum?”

  Madeline looked up, blankly. She was feeling the Chivas Regal more than usual.

  “Remember? I was with Dr. Harry Gray?”

  He was a balding little man in a lumpy warm-up suit and dirty canvas Tretorns. He made every statement a question.

  “Oh, yes,” Madeline lied, “of course, you’re …”

  “Irwin Berg? Remember?”

  “Oh, yes, Dr. Berg! Of course!”

  Now she knew him. She had enjoyed talking with him at a Ca
l Tech dinner party to raise funds for foreign students. He was said to be an extraordinary astrophysicist and a candidate for Big Casino: a hot prospect for a Nobel Prize.

  “May I buy you a drink?” His round, steel-rimmed eyeglasses were fogging and slipping over his perspiring nose.

  “I’d love a drink,” Madeline said. She was settling down, the last Scotch working nicely now. She leaned closer and whispered, “The barman probably couldn’t make change for you anyway. Since I’m a member and you’re a guest, I’ll buy.”

  Then Madeline took the little scientist by the arm and walked him into the Hunt Room, where Edna Lofton was ordering a Virgin Mary, her muscular lacy bottom pressed against the mahogany.

  Edna was laughing uproariously at one of Wendell Hargrove’s dreadful jokes. Hargrove was a third-generation stockbroker and an “A” tennis player, which was the only thing keeping his fifty-year-old body intact, what with the fifth of booze he consumed at noon luncheons at the California Club in downtown Los Angeles. Were it not for his daily tennis, everyone knew that his fierce aging body could never withstand the massive bourbon dosage.

  “Guess we won’t need that fourth for mixed doubles, Madeline,” Edna Lofton smiled. “Marcie’s going to play again. So you can go ahead.”

  “Go ahead what?” Wendell Hargrove asked.

  “Go ahead and have another double Scotch,” Edna laughed. Then she added: “I might even have one.”

  But the damage was done. Madeline blushed painfully. Edna looked with curiosity at Madeline’s companion and thrust out her hand: “Hi, I’m Edna Lofton.”

  “Oh? Pleased to meet you. I’m Irwin Berg.”

  Madeline said, “Dr. Berg’s a guest of … who are you a guest of?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Bates. I met them at the Atheneum. They’re watching the match.”

  “You an M.D.?” Hargrove asked thickly and Madeline saw that he was well past any more tennis this day.

  “Dr. Berg teaches at Cal Tech. He’s an astrophysicist,” Madeline offered, subtly eyeing the barman, who nodded and reached discreetly for the Chivas Regal.

  “Really?” Edna said. “Don’t get many astrophysicists in the Hunt Club.”

  Later that evening, Madeline, showered and dressed in a basic dark pantsuit, was standing alone at the dessert table deciding to pass the entrée in favor of some strudel and chocolate mousse when Edna Lofton got up from her table and crossed the dining room to talk to her.

  “Is Dr. Goldberg with you, Madeline?” she asked, walking Madeline toward the empty drawing room.

  “Dr. Berg. No, he’s not with me. Why?”

  “He’s sure a cute little fellow,” Edna winked, batting her evening eyelashes.

  “I suppose so,” Madeline said cautiously.

  “Play your cards right, Mad, and he might invite you to some of those fun Cal Tech science parties at the Atheneum. A lot of mature, visiting professors must be awfully lonely for one of the few available single ladies they’d be proud to take just anywhere!”

  “Edna …” Madeline sputtered, but too late. Edna Lofton had turned and was hurrying toward her guests in the dining room.

  Madeline Dills Whitfield had stood alone in the empty drawing room and looked vacantly at the landscape painting as though she had never seen it before. She had seen it all her life. She suddenly longed for the paintings of hunters and hounds. In the bar.

  A single lady. As though it were Madeline’s fault. As though she had planned to be a single lady. She had never known anyone who had planned to be a single lady. Madeline Dills had never even lived away from her parents except for college terms at U.S.C., ten miles from Pasadena. Had never lived anywhere else except for six months in Europe with her parents when her father sold his interest in the orthopedic clinic and took a long vacation. She had never in her life given a single thought to being a single lady.

  She was the daughter of Dr. Corey Dills and the wife of Mason Whitfield. She had willingly surrendered her Christian as well as her maiden name.

  It had always been: “Mrs. Mason Whitfield is giving a tea Wednesday afternoon …”

  Madeline Dills, by Dr. Corey Dills out of Mrs. Corey Dills. Edna Lofton, by Mr. Bradford Lofton out of Mrs. Bradford Lofton. They had to give up both names. Androgynous. Mr. Mason Whitfield and Mrs. Mason Whitfield. Hermaphroditic!

  The stag ruled. It was her heritage and she accepted it. Which is perhaps why she didn’t make a fuss during the divorce. Her family trust fund was much larger than his. She paid him for his share in the home and furnishings bought as community property. No alimony. She didn’t need or want his money. Her mother was hale and hearty then. Madeline didn’t make a fuss and Mason said he appreciated it. He said she was a perfect lady.

  Now there was the new Mrs. Mason Whitfield living in San Marino. He hadn’t the decency to give up his Annandale Country Club membership. So how does one address invitations? Mrs. Madeline Dills Whitfield? The return of her names was … awkward. As awkward as having single ladies at dinner parties. How does one seat them? And the clubs where single ladies were never meant to be? It wasn’t awkward, it was horrible.

  Thank God for Marian Milford’s homosexual brother, Lance. He danced beautifully, had impeccable manners, and for ten years had eased dinner problems in Old Pasadena society by escorting half the widows and divorcées in town to social and charitable gatherings. Old Pasadena and San Marino had an exceedingly low divorce rate thanks to the continuity and tradition of society. And thanks to disapproving parents who structured wills and trusts which pauperized many a misbehaving daughter who opted to take the bit in her teeth like less constant, free-spirited sisters over the hill, on the west side.

  The Dalmanes and Chivas were interacting. Madeline was about to drift asleep when Victoria sat up.

  “Oh, no, Vickie!” Madeline groaned. “Not now. I’m dead!”

  But Vickie yawned and stretched languorously and got out of bed. Madeline moaned, got up reeling, and stood naked in the moonlight, reviving when she threw open the French doors to the cold January air.

  Suddenly she hoped that someone, anyone—man or woman—would see her through the rain and white oak trees and Canary Island pines. Perhaps someone higher up San Rafael, in a hillside mansion, a gardener, a maid, anyone. She was dizzy, yet she stood defiantly naked under a leering moon, convinced that if someone could see her through the wall of camellias that someone would be aroused by her naked body.

  Then she looked down into the valley and saw that the rain had cleared the smog from the Rose Bowl. It would be an ugly carnival on Sunday when Super Bowl XI hit Pasadena, but she and Vickie would be across town winning the Beverly Hills Winter Show. She and Vickie would be basking in attention, glory, celebrity.

  Vickie looked at Madeline for a moment, then turned and trotted over to an American Beauty. She squatted beside a puddle of fallen rose petals and emptied her bladder. Then she shook herself, scampered across the lawn, in through the French doors, and leaped up onto the bed.

  The Dalmanes and Chivas turned Madeline’s legs gelatinous. She closed the doors and threw herself into bed, hardly noticing the crumbs of mud and garden mulch on the pearly sheets.

  “You’re impossible, Vickie,” she scolded. “Impossible!” Then she stroked Vickie’s neck once, twice, and her hand fell limp.

  Madeline had a wonderful dream that night. Vickie won best in show, easily earning the last of fifteen major points she needed to become a champion. And then she went on to Madison Square Garden to win. She became the unquestioned grand champion—the finest miniature schnauzer in America.

  Vickie grunted uncomfortably for a moment. She growled and squirmed until she managed a puffy fart. Then another. Now she sighed happily and licked Madeline’s face. Then she snuggled, and snored, and slept as deeply as her drugged mistress.

  3

  The Terrier King

  The natural mascara around the eyes of the Dandie Dinmont was the blackest he had ever seen.

  “Look
at those saucers,” he said, admiring their roundness. Then he turned to the girl, looked at her breasts and grinned. “Your saucers are beautiful too.”

  The girl feigned naïveté and said, “Not as pretty as the Dandie’s, Mr. Skinner.”

  Then Philo Skinner turned his critical eye back to the Dandie Dinmont and startled the girl by flashing the straight razor so quickly in the face of the terrier. She was glad she hadn’t gasped. He was mercurial, but with good cause. Philo Skinner was a top terrier man on the West Coast. In the past six years he had big wins at Madison Square Garden, Chicago International and Beverly Hills. With a Lakeland, a Kerry blue and a Dandie. The girl knew that if she could survive his temperamental eruptions, like the one earlier in the evening when she left a tassel inches from the bottom of the ear leather in a Bedlington terrier (he measured it), and if she could get used to never being paid on time and having a few “clerical errors” in her paycheck (always errors which made her check short), and if she could repel his sporadic sexual advances, well, Philo Skinner was a champion dog handler. A champion. And she could learn.

  “Don’t ever let me see you trying this,” Philo Skinner said, holding the Dandie firmly under the chin with the long fingers of his left hand while the straight razor in his right stripped the nose from the top to the tip. The Dandie’s white topknot was electric from back-combing.