The Puzzleheaded Girl

by Christina Stead

  “Well what is all this about being a Red?”

  “It’s poppycock, malarkey,” he said furiously. “They’re making themselves important; it’s vengeance. Sully and Barb are doing it for the money and the excitement, and the vengeance. They’re rivals but they’re combining to ruin me! American girls are bloodthirsty. Their honour is in sucking a man dry; then they throw out the corpse. Why, I have known women here who destroy a man’s happiness and faith in himself, ruin his career, divorce him, turn his children against him, blacken his name to all his friends, suck him dry, and then marry him again to show they own him.”

  He stood with his head, his back and shoulders straight. He murmured, “Of course, they are beautiful, all beautiful harpies; but only beautiful to work their game. And Barby, who is a spiteful, lying, vengeful little thief—she has just taken my typewriter and my rugs and my typewriting chair. All the sweet young girls in the American high-school plays are cute little cheats and liars, getting round everyone! They’re taught it. It’s in their mothers’ milk. Barby is delicious,” he cried out in rage, “delightful! Winning! But only to torture and curse you. I loathe her. And if she finds out about Renee she will rush right over there and tell Renee disgusting lies and turn her against me. She is on the trail now: she knows there is something. She is a little devil, a little gold-headed fiend.”

  He turned to Martin and said forcibly, “In Europe I won’t be pestered and nagged by this swarm of little-girl gadflies. I have nowhere here to live. I have this apartment in University Place, up four stairs, a walk-up but a good roomy apartment at the top, where I have worked for three years; and now Barby is there. I won’t stay there with her. I told her, We’re divorced; you have no right to stay here. She said, I want a place to stay; I am doing business in New York. I said, Go away. She said, I’ll sleep on the divan, I don’t want to sleep with you. And the next evening, she came in late, she turned up with a Reverend she is running round with and they slept there in my bed, while I was still finishing my work; and I had to get out. I walked the streets and I had more work to do. She is there now—” He waved his arms, his eyes started and he flushed. “I ought to call the police. She is stealing everything, taking all my photographs—”

  “Your photographs!”

  “You know the room I had, under lock and key, the double room downstairs, dug in the ground, with a darkroom. It was full of crime photographs from my cases. I brought them here and she is stealing them. They’re dynamite and not for the public and they’re valuable. Some of them are police photographs. I haven’t insured them and I can’t call the police.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not supposed to have them. They slipped them to me—or to Barby, out there, not here. We were working together. We were married and she wouldn’t let me say we were married. There was a police officer crazy about her and she worked on him. They hated me. I had to pass as her bodyguard. That was reasonable, with the places she had to go to and the hours she worked. The little wicked thief claims they are all hers; and she always snuggles up to anyone; she gets them on her side. And the police would confiscate them anyway. If not, she wants me to pay her for them; and she wants everything, prints, serialization, second and third rights—she will ruin me. And she says she needs money for her business, that is why she is doing it; but I know she wants it for her uncle who is in hiding from the police, because he is involved in some deal about fake art masterpieces. She is always keeping some lame duck.”

  The telephone rang; and George said, “Don’t answer it; it’s Barby.”

  Barby’s sharp voice said, “Laura, is George still there? I’m coming over. I’m not having him tell lies about me. Is Martin there, or are you alone? Are you alone with George? I’m coming over. I’ve got a big bunch of friends here, we’re at Elgar Mancando’s and I’m bringing them all over. They were all in Washington when George was running around there with the blondes and they want to see I get justice.”

  “I have nothing here, Barby, no whisky, no food, nothing. George and Martin are just going out.”

  “They’re not going out! We’re coming over!”

  Laura once more telephoned to the doorman to keep them out. “Yes,” he said.

  George Paul was sitting with a stubborn confused face. His face cleared, became gentler. He said plaintively, “I was walking along the beach in California; and I was furious. I had a furious quarrel with Sully and I told her I was leaving her. She was working for my agent, then she fell for him and stole my story and said it was his. She looked like milk and honey. And as soon as she falls for him she goes into court and swears, swears on the Bible in which she believes, as cool as a cucumber, that she was with him when he wrote it and helped him. It was a quiet day, a weekday, hardly anyone on the beach. I saw a big sports car rolling along the beach, blue. It stopped and a little girl got out of it with a long dog. At first I thought it was a boy. She wore a little loose-fitting denim suit and had short yellow hair. And she began to run towards me, exercising the dog, which had long hair like feathers and a bow back, and loped along lamely. It could hardly run—a wolfhound. I stopped and looked and could not take my eyes off this beautiful little boy-girl. When she came near me, I saw she was crying. She was running, crying, and the dog was loping along very weakly behind, trembling and dropping on its haunches, and getting up again.

  “I said to her, Isn’t your dog too sick to run? She ran past me blubbering and as I turned after her, she pushed me away with her arm and ran on. I sat down. Presently she came walking back, helping the dog and when she came up to me, she dropped down in the sand, made a smooth patch in the sand and began drawing the dog which was lying on its side, panting; and she told me about it. You know the stars and starlets want pets to be photographed with, and usually dogs. They don’t know what to do with them; it’s only for the newspapers. Then if they flop or they move or go away, back to their gas-station or hometown or up to the top, they leave the dog behind, sometimes in the backyard. There was a scandal, a grisly tale. They said there was a wolf about that ate things at night. They followed it and it jumped over a backyard fence. It was one of these dogs, an alsatian that had been left behind. Sometimes they give it to a pet shop to board.

  “Barby was living with Elgar Mancando, in his little house in one of the glens, and sleeping with him, although he was engaged to Miriam Green and waiting for his divorce to marry Miriam; and he had one or two other girls then. That is why she was crying. She wanted to marry him. He is still unmarried and she believes in him still. Barby was miserable and wanted a pet, a monkey, and she heard of this place where you could get abandoned pets cheap. She went there; a little storefront, a dark store. The man said he had a monkey in the backyard. They went through a narrow dark passage, with tiers of animal cages on both sides; and as they went through, one of the piles of cages fell over and she saw in the bottom cage where it had been lying, a starved dog. It was a large dog curled round to fit in the cage; and it just lay there. Don’t you feed the animals? she asked the man. Then the man told her how the dogs and other pets were left there by the stars. Sometimes they paid a few weeks ahead, sometimes, only one week and said they were coming back; but he knew he would never get any more. If someone wants them I sell them cheap, he said.

  “Barby couldn’t bear to see the dog, so she bought it instead of the monkey, though the man said it was dying. She brought it home to Mancando’s in her car; and she took it out every day to exercise it; or she gave it to the writer Billy Exmouth. She and Mancando were keeping Billy Exmouth then: he was living with anyone. No one believed in him but Barby. He had a manuscript written in sewer-language which he sold and which made him rich. Barby still believes in him. Barby gave Exmouth food and he took the dog out every day for exercise, and no one could say then which was the more miserable.

  “Barby told me all this and took me back to her car. She was cooking Mancando all the exotic dishes he liked, but she did not believe he would marry her. So she had made
up her mind to marry Billy Exmouth, to get out of it; though she had read the manuscript, all smut and excrement. I mean it,” he shouted; “that is what it was. I prevented her. She married me.”

  He said seriously, “You see, even at that age, sixteen, she was earning big money doing sensation stories. California’s full of them. An undertaker left a shed full of unburied corpses and went out to California on the money. A retired man knocked off his wife’s head somewhere in New Mexico on the way out, because he calculated there wasn’t enough money for both. There was a man who could live without air and who burrowed holes under the buildings in a business block in Los Angeles, and lived on the food and the cash registers. There was another man who fished ties with a fishing-rod through the mail boxes in men’s stores, and sold them. There are plenty of stories; and there’s a market for them. You must have something extra, get there first, have a fast car, be a good photographer, have good shock photographs; and you must be friendly with the police, who may tip you off.

  “Barby had all that, but she needed a good photographer, so she took me in. I was a teacher in Sofia, but a good amateur photographer; I won prizes. I was a newcomer here, so I developed my sideline. I thought I could work in the studios; I had special cameras, but they don’t want art photography. So I went out on my own. She let me use her car. But she stipulated that our marriage must be secret. First, she said her parents would not like me; then she admitted that she had admirers in the police. I noticed that. She was dainty and daredevil; and some of them were wild about her. So I had to sit there at the wheel, like a heel, while they pawed her and eyed her. The police did not like me at all, even incognito, as her partner; but going where she went, at all hours, they knew she needed a strong-arm man. It made me furious. They’d stop us anywhere to give her some information and look at me with contempt. I wasn’t always at the wheel. She drove that big car like a racing-driver. So I sat there. In the end they got used to me; I even got on with them. That was how we got the big stories; the tip-off and racing with the fast car, and the photographs. The police gave us some photographs too; most you couldn’t use and they weren’t the sort to show young girls, but they took a pleasure and a pride in their rare specimens and they thought of Barby as one of them. They respected Barby more and more for her work and for liking them. I had this chamber of horrors; no one was allowed to enter. You remember I wouldn’t let you in? I had to promise that no one would ever see them. When I came to New York I burned some, gave some back and brought the others. Barby came with me, but she couldn’t work in with the New York police; and she wanted to write. So now when she’s desperate, lending money to the Reverend and trying to keep up with Mancando, who’s wasting an inheritance his aunt left him, she wants the photographs and the typewriter for her stories. And I suspect her,” he said indignantly. “There are cranks who pay anything for that sort of photograph.”

  At this moment the doorman spoke on the house-phone and said a lot of people were coming up. “Don’t, don’t, John; I asked you not to.” But before Laura had finished speaking, there was a loud noise of voices and the grinding of feet in the stone corridor. “They have got in,” said Laura, frightened.

  Martin gave a timid grin; George sat flushing.

  The bell rang. Laura opened the door. A wedge-shaped group of men stood there, with a small fair girl in front, head lowered, fists doubled. Of the men, Laura knew only Mancando, a tall, pale personable man-about-town.

  “You can’t come in,” said Laura. “I have no room and no food and I’m packing.”

  Barby, head lowered, started forward and led the men into the room. There was a small square entry in which stood the kitchen unit and the other kitchen stuff. Barby and the men choked their way through this, all pushing together, Laura retreating before them; and they flowed through the archway into the room beyond where, without greeting anyone, the men began laughing, passing remarks, fingering things, lounging against tables and walls, and surveying the Italian-style courtyard from the windows.

  “How long have you been here telling lies about me, Pie-otter?” squealed Barby, running forward and facing George, who had got up and was standing by the table, half turned from the room, his handsome rosy face composed now.

  “I have not been talking about you, Barby, and telling no lies. What did you come for? I am going out with Martin. Why did you bring these people here?” he continued, with more heat. He looked across at Elgar Mancando, who had seated himself by Laura. His large soft hands lay loosely on his thighs, drawing attention to them; and the hand nearer Laura began to move towards her. Mancando’s face began to lower towards her, with obsequious insulting flattery. Laura got up and handed round glasses of California red wine, from a gallon jar. “No Scotch?” said one of the men. “Go out and get some.” Taking a ten-dollar bill from his billfold he handed it to her. Laura laughed and pushed it back. The man was puzzled. The others looked on in incurious silence, as if waiting for a scene to begin.

  Barby seated herself in a knot of men on a low cane stool woven with reeds, which she removed from under a looking-glass in the inner hall.

  She said, “Pie-otter is going round town telling lies about me. He says I am stealing his photographs. Those photographs belong to me; I had to kiss cops to get them. That typewriter is an old one he doesn’t need and I do need. When we divorced he did not share as he was told to. He was told to divide up even the coffee. Pie-otter would never have got the big stories at all if he hadn’t had me helping him. I was right in business when he moved in on me. I had the connections, I had the car. I took Pie-otter because I fell for him, I fell for his big baby-blue eyes and a big baby-blue tie he had on one day. And he thought he was a bigshot, but he was a big blue-eyed goof baby, weren’t you, goof baby? And Pie-otter let me down and ran around with Miriam Green when Elgar threw her out, because she had big baby tears in her eyes: he can’t resist it. You know you did. And you did, too, Elgar; you threw her out with tears in her eyes. And I believed Pie-otter was my man. You were rotten to me, Pie-otter.”

  “Don’t call me that,” exclaimed George Paul.

  “Isn’t that your name? Your name’s Pie-otter Pay-vell. His mother called him Pie-otter.”

  “Barby,” shouted George, in a husband’s voice, “you know it’s Pyotr and you can say it as well as I can. Stop it now.”

  “Pyotr,” she said, rather faintly, bending over and looking up at him; then she sat up straight, laughed. “Pie-otter. Pie-otter and Pay-vell Fornyehkatorovich,” and she burst out into a rattling laugh, and the men laughed. She cried out, “Get after him, get after Pie-otter. He let me down and stole my work; and get after them, they’re sitting there all evening swallowing his lies; and get after her, she’s holding his hand and listening to his lies. Laura, you were at my house in the Glen and all the time I suppose you were listening to his lies about me; and all the time he was rolling his big baby-blue eyes at Miriam Green and slee-eeping with her, and anyone who would love him. He is always looking for someone to love him.”

  “Stop telling lies,” shouted George; “stop being a cat and a bad girl, Barby. Go away and take the men with you. I am talking to my friend Martin.”

  “Yes, a very sudden visitation, quite an incursion,” said Martin, chuckling and looking around at the sneering curious faces. Barby was now sitting on the priest’s lap. “A very sudden visitation—he-he—an incursion yes—ha-ha—but I see you are getting some red ink, anyway,” and he repeated, gleefully, “some California red ink, anyway.”

  “Martin Dean,” said Mancando, standing by the bookcase and smiling at Laura, “the only man I know who carries his own echo with him; it’s so good, such a treat, he encores himself, he sings the song twice over, in case you might have missed the first fine careless rapture.”

  The others laughed or sat dully; but Martin, who could not comprehend ill-nature and did not know what was meant, nor that this was against himself, looked around merrily to catch the drift, to join in, with a smile, half-w
hispered, “first fine careless rapture, first fine careless rapture,” rubbed his hands, and laughed with joy. He sensed that there was a difficult situation; he did not know what it was, but he tried to get it over by laughing. He said, “Go on, boys, have a good time; drink the red ink, come on, Laura, sit down, join the brigade, the boys want you to be along.” He rolled the fun and good will out of his mouth; he was tickled by what he said; he kept laughing, a long golden laugh, from the south.

  “How can you be so rude?” said Laura to Mancando. “Do you go to other people’s houses to insult them?”