Officialdom took over and shooed us off the dock. The boats began to head for home, toward the women who would indeed cherish this morsel.
I tell you, Helen, I just knew there was a lot of things going on over there. A regular orgy. All those city people, romping around stark nakid. Dope fiends too, I’ll bet you. Well, they say you shouldn’t speak bad things about the dead, but I can tell you, Helen, I’m sure not sorry trash like that isn’t going to be coming up here any more. I hope some real nice people get that house. You know, that Judy Jonah was over there too. If she comes on again in the fall, I’m not going to let the children watch her. I’m going to write to the sponsor. I say if a person don’t live decent, Helen, they’ve got no right to put themselves up in front of the public.
I looked around for Judy but I couldn’t find her. I guessed she had gone to her room. I was heading toward the kitchen, thinking vaguely of hot coffee, and it was some time after the body had been found and the world was full of murky daylight when we were all herded into the vast living room. Mr. Fish had a few words for us.
I guess I was staring at Judy like a lovesick pup. I wanted to check on how she looked in daylight. I wanted to know what she liked for breakfast, how long she’d owned that beat-up sweater, what books she read, what sort of things made her cry, what size shoes she wore.
And I heard Fish saying something crazy. I stared at him and finally caught on. Not an accident. Not just a drowning. Not a fatal combination of alcohol, darkness, and lake water. But a hole in the back of her head.
So instead of a drunken scandal, we had us a nice juicy murder. Brother! I started thinking of a million things all at once, relating it all back to the job I was trying to do. Effect on the market? What approved advertising programs would be in bad taste now? Who would be running the whole thing now?
We were warned to stick around pending the arrival of more important brass. I surrendered my car keys to a trooper. Noel Hess had walked out on the group. People had begun to mill around. The other trooper was talking to Judy. I was thinking of some good way to break it up and get her off where I could talk to her. Just talk. Just look at her. She made the trooper laugh. Beyond Judy I could see Mavis, not crying, her face unpleasantly bloated with too many tears for too long a time. Mavis looked shocked and angry.
I saw it start to happen and at first I didn’t understand and thought it was some sort of game in poor taste, and then when I did see what was going to happen, saw Judy turning to stare too, there was a moment when I felt as though I stood neck-deep in glue, unable to move or speak. It went on in slow motion. In horrid slow motion, with descending glint of brass, and nothing in the world could stop it. And nothing did.
Then the trooper and I got there at the same moment. Too late.
Too late. I saw the oiled blue arc, heard the bite of impact, the face turned up and still and away for a moment before the falling. And all of us there for a moment, a tableau, stillness, with the memory of a scream clotted against the high walls, so that in turning, so as not to look, I saw Judy’s eyes, saw them on me, clear and real and known, and took a half step toward her.
The young doctor knelt. I saw his face when he looked up. It is all the same to them. Always they meet the same adversary, though he may wear many masks. It’s an adversary that always wins. And the doctors, those fighters of delaying actions, must wear closed faces.
It was ended, of course, and nothing would ever be the same again.
Eleven
(JUDY JONAH—BEFORE)
THERE WAS A SPECIAL EXPRESSION the photographer wanted for the still that would be a part of a testimonial, and after it was over I walked up Madison to Forty-sixth, feeling as if somebody had used a sponge on my face. I told myself it would keep me young—maybe. Muscle tone or something.
Hilda smiled and said Willy was alone and I could go right on in. He got up from behind his gray steel desk and patted my shoulder and looked at me with the concern of a family doctor and patted me into a chair.
“Judy, honest to Gawd, you look nineteen.”
“Good old Willy. Boy of my dreams.” Willy is built close to the floor. He has no hair, a size twenty neck, and a pair of big soft damp brown eyes, like an abused setter’s. Several generations ago he did songs and light chatter and a soft-shoe routine on the Keith circuit. Now he agents. He’s a fighter and he’s sharp. And he stays as honest as he can and still keep his self-respect.
“This I will get over with quickly, Judy. Carlos and Jane want out. Now understand. They’re good kids. I can keep them tied down. You know that. They’ll stick. But it looks like a break for them.”
“Let ’em go, Willy. No. I’ll talk to them. I’ll do it. They’re good. They ought to have their own show.”
He leaned back and laced fingers across his tummy. “I knew you’d say that, but I sort of wished you wouldn’t. If you were tougher …”
“Tough like you, Willy?”
“The wrong business, kid. Both of us. But if it breaks right, I got people. We can put something together that will knock them dead.”
“It’s been a long time, Willy. I think you better let me have it between the eyes. I think you better stop kidding Judy. I think you owe me that, Willy.”
He fumbled with a yellow pencil. “O.K.” He picked up the pencil. He wrote down five names. He slid the piece of paper across to me. I read the names, nodded. He said, “Big-time they were. In 1951. Their own shows. Nice ratings. Fat. This damn medium, it eats you. It’s like this: Suppose a guy likes pickled beets. So for a year his wife feeds him pickled beets twice a day. Then what? He never wants to see another beet. Radio, you could last. Tough, but you could last, given the writers. But this damn thing, they see you and hear you. Judy-Time has had what? Over a hundred weeks. Better than the ratings is ticket requests for the studio. They go by that. Those five on the list, where are they? One is singing in Paris for peanuts. One is on radio sustaining out of Chicago. One of them in a casino in Brazil, for God’s sake. And the other two, they could find work, but it isn’t good enough work for them. They think they’re still on top, but they’re dead. This thing, it eats you up, and then it’s a hell of a long drop to the next thing because … right between the eyes like you said … people get damn sick and tired of looking at you. Pickled beets.”
“One more season, Willy?”
He shook his head. “I doubt the hell out of it. You could put a show together. Put it on the market. See who you could get by paying scale, and it would still eat up your bankroll before you could find any kind of sponsor. And the odds are you won’t. The word is out.”
“How about a new kind of show? Situation stuff.”
“I know you could do it. I know it would be good. But it’s a hell of a gamble. Take it this way: Why gamble? You’ve got it made. It’s tucked away. How much living have you done lately?”
“Not much, Willy. Not much at all.”
He made a lunge across the desk and grabbed my hand. It startled me. His voice got hoarse. “Look, Judy. Like an ad. Switch to Willy. Not easy on the eyes, but easy on the nerves. I haven’t got anybody any more. We can get a place maybe in Connecticut. My God, grass. Trees. I can commute. I mean you don’t have to be in love with me. That, maybe, would be a good trick. But we talk the same. We think the same. We could make it work.”
Those brown eyes nearly got me. But he saw the answer on my face. He released my hand. He said spiritlessly, “Well, it was a try.”
“I’m sorry, Willy. I mean that. I wish it could be.”
He smiled. “I guess you do.” He sort of shook himself like a fat dog coming out of the creek. “Now, what’s all this thing with that Ferris woman?”
“She wants me up there. She says it’s purely social. But she let me know Dorn would be there. And the sales manager, Dockerty. And Steve Winsan.”
“My word to you. Drop Winsan. A luxury at this point. Look, girl. The standard advice, no commitments, is out. Because up there you get no offer. I can smell
that. This is the hatchet.”
“I think so too. Just a question of how she does it.”
“That woman, she’s a sadist. She gets a sexy bang out of squashing people like bugs. You got to go up there with a special attitude. You got to go up there saying to yourself, I couldn’t care less. Can you do that?”
“I can do it without even pretending, Willy. I’m just … so damn tired. I think I want the hatchet.”
“Then what will you do?”
“Get out, Willy. Get rid of all the junk. Load the wagon and head west. Change this hair to black so I don’t get stared at. I want a mountain cabin twenty miles from no place, with a stream in the back yard and a grassy bank to lie on, and a bunch of books that will be tough to read. Hard books. There’s things I want to do. Learn the constellations. Learn to cook. You know, all I can do is fry stuff. I just want to slob around, Willy, and take walks and turn into plain Jane Jones.”
“Take me along.”
“We’ve been through that, Willy,” I said, smiling.
“O.K. Look, don’t let that bitch unravel you, Judy. Ride with it. I don’t know Dockerty. That Wallace Dorn is a chunk of nothing. Steve will be on your side, just to save his fee on you, but he won’t be able to do a damn thing. Don’t let her get you sore. She’s the kind who’ll ask you to do some routines for free to entertain her guests. If so, you got a headache.”
“A brute of a headache.”
I said good-by to Willy. I went to see Carlos and Jane. They were shy and apologetic and they acted ashamed. But it wasn’t hard to see the joy and excitement when I told them I’d release them. Then they kept interrupting each other telling me about their chance. It sounded hot. It made me feel old. It made me feel as if never again would I be able to hoke up that much enthusiasm over anything.
Friday morning after I packed I phoned the garage and had them bring the white Jag around. When I leaned out the window and looked down, it was parked right in front, and Horace, the doorman, was talking to the garage man, who was unhooking his little delivery motorcycle from the rear bumper. The Jag was pretty in the morning sun. From up there at the window, it looked like a boat. I took the two bags down and Horace helped me stow them in the car, one in the tiny luggage space and one in the spare bucket seat beside me. To Horace I’m a riot. I ask him what time it is and he goes into helpless laughter. It’s very wearing.
As I drove north on the parkway, I pretended it was all over and this was the first leg of my trip west. But it didn’t feel right. Because, I decided, the car was part of the window dressing. Part of what I would be leaving behind. I loved it, loved its fine response, but it was just too damn gaudy for the mood I was going to be in. And not enough room in it for a girl to carry along everything she had left in the wide world. Nice as it was, there was something a little phony about it. A little bit too too.
So this was going to be the hatchet, and I couldn’t care less.
Or could I?
Hess had mailed me a marked map, so I had no trouble finding the place. Steve was getting out of his car when I drove in. The place wasn’t exactly a cabin. It looked like an outpost of the United Nations. Steve and I talked a little business.
Every time I talk to him, I keep remembering how I had to set him back on his heels. Guys like that. The town is loaded with them. That big palsy approach with the hand that wanders. I busted him across the chops. That public eye. Rumors and rumors. Snicker and smirk. Now you take that Judy Jonah. Man, oh, man. Hot pants. Dirty little men and it makes them big in the bars when they can give that reflective leer and lip smack and thusly label you round of heel. Round enough so the other dirty little men who hear them have to make their try at you. You smack them down, but their vanity won’t let them admit it to the brethren in the bars. Then they, too, add themselves to the mythical list of your lovers. It’s the same with any other presentable gal in show business. We all have to stand for the same thing. Rarely, very rarely, there will be one who tries to live up to the billing she gets in the cocktail lounges. And, in trying, will fizz out of the business like a wet rocket. The fringe gals, who end up by calling themselves models and paper the town with their uptown phone numbers. And collect pictures of ex-presidents. By the time they work their way down to Grant, they’re still around. But by the time they get down to Hamilton and Lincoln, they’ve moved their base of operations. Juárez or Troy. Milwaukee or Bakers-field.
But the myth persists, and I won’t say that Steve had been suckered by it. I’ll say only that he’s the type that always makes the automatic try. Though seldom belted as hard as that. He had to wrap an ice cube in a napkin and hold it against his lip. Poor lad.
He led me around the house. I could see that he had the jitters, even though he had anointed himself liberally with ersatz confidence. Wilma and the Hesses and Gilman Hayes were on the terrace. Hayes nodded at me with his normal cold-eyed contempt. Three times I have met him. I started out with a violent dislike, and each time since I have liked him less. But a chunk of male. Biblical movies he should be in. In the Roman arena, with shield and sword and one of those metal dinguses around his biceps. Everybody says he’s good. I saw one of his things. A bunch of black lines like a wrought-iron fence after a tornado, with some big blobby things behind it. It had a title. “Reversion.” I gave it my rapt look because the owner was damn proud of it. But it meant nothing to me. It could be good. That’s one of the things I’ll take along some books about.
My room was plush and the weather was fine, so I skinned quickly into my suit and trotted down to the big twin docks. Hayes was prone in the sun. The water was blue. With eyes shut against the glare I felt as though Wilma, up on her terrace, were watching me, with some mental licking of chops.
I concentrated so much on keeping my guard up that I sort of blinded myself to what was going on around me. Steve and Hayes and the Hesses and the Dockertys and Wallace Dorn were just part of the scenery. I suppose I nodded and spoke in the right places, but I was as aware of Wilma as is the mouse of the cat.
I didn’t begin to react to people until after we had dinner, and I got snared into a Scrabble game with Paul Dockerty and Wallace Dorn, while Mavis Dockerty danced with Gilman Hayes, and Steve and Wilma played rabid gin. Wallace Dorn, whenever it was his turn, took a great deal of time. I sat and smoked and listened to the Latin music while Randy jangled around like a bride in the late afternoon. Noel Hess, mild, dark, watchful, and pretty, had gone to bed. She seemed to me like a toy I had once. A girl clown standing on a drum. You wound her up. She whirled around and around and the music was inside the drum. Then I wound her up too tightly and the spring snapped. No music and no more whirling for Noel. Randy had snapped her spring. It’s sad. It’s something that happens. It’s the reaction one sort of woman will have. Another would pack her bag and take off. Another would bend his skull for him. But the Noels sit around with snapped springs. I’m more the skull-bending type.
I watched Mavis Dockerty. Her dancing was pretty clinical. Paul Dockerty sat at my left, studying the Scrabble board. What is that word? Empathy. Yes. That’s what I had then. For Paul. A nice big decent-looking guy with a very silly lady. And said lady under Wilma’s dark spell. I had the feeling they could have gone along indefinitely with a fair to middling marriage. But Wilma was steering it firmly toward the rocks. Using Hayes, perhaps, as one of the rocks. Maybe at one point in the past Paul would have got up and broken up the dance act. He had enough reason to. But they’d gone by that point. So he had to sit and sweat it out. I could see by the little glances he’d flash toward them that he was edgy about it, and didn’t know what to do about it. And maybe he was close to the point of not wanting to do anything about it. I saw Hayes dance her out onto the terrace. I guess Paul didn’t see the change of dance floors. I saw him look around and saw his face harden and change and saw him start to get up. I put my hand out quickly and stopped him and jerked my head toward the terrace. He looked through the glass and saw them. He relaxed a bit as he saw t
hem. Then he looked at me. Grateful. I gave him a public-property-type grimace.
Dorn beat us both badly and we paid off. I wanted some fresh air. Paul surprised me by asking if he could go along. I didn’t want to be any part of one of those husband-wife jealousy gambits, but I sensed right away that he wasn’t trying to pull anything like that.
We went down onto the dock and he flipped the wet mat over to give us a dry side to sit on. There’s a funny intimacy about sitting in the night under stars. And I always talk too much. I’d wanted to keep my guard up all the way, but I found myself gibbering on about being tired. He was that kind of guy. The safe, kindly breed. The kind that always disarms me.
Once upon a time a drunken psychiatrist told me, at a party, what makes Judy tick. He said, “Your spotty emotional life, dear, is the result of trudging through the world looking for the father you never had.” And it was just right enough to make me self-conscious. Just right enough to chill me.
So it is with the Paul Dockertys that I find my hair coming down. I had yakked too much. It was late. I felt ashamed of myself, so I got up and clowned it, doing my Kid Jonah, the Boston Butcher Boy.
So what does he do? He grabs me by the arm and sort of shakes me and tells me he likes me. I don’t know how I got off the dock without blubbering. I said some stiff-faced good nights on my way through the big room, and I got my door shut and draped myself carefully across my bed and said go. But no dice for Judy. No tears. What can you do with a girl like that?
I know what I did with her. I scrubbed her face, brushed her teeth, put her in pajamas, and put her into bed. I managed one muted and unsatisfactory sniffle, and then I went to sleep.
There was one dream that was a beaut. Like they say, significant. They had shoved me in front of the cameras. Something experimental. But not the cameras I’m used to. No booms, no dollies. A room shaped like the inside of a beehive, and the inside of it was all camera lenses. All looking in at me. I tried to make up lines, and when I would say them, all the echoes would get in the way. I danced and there wasn’t any music. Then all of a sudden I was in Delcy’s office standing and yelling at him, telling him I never was any good on ad-lib stuff and I didn’t like this new idea of his, and he just kept smiling at me, his eyes goggly behind those thick lenses of his. And he told me that it came out well, no matter what I thought. I asked him what he meant. And he said I was standing on it. I looked down and the floor of his office was all new linoleum, like a kitchen. Big squares. And in each square there was a naked photograph of me, in color. Then I suddenly realized that he’d tricked me. They hadn’t broadcast it at all. And each camera had made one square of linoleum. So he had no more use for me, because there’d been enough cameras to cover his whole office. Wall to wall. And he said in a voice that echoed around, “Look closer. They move. Look closer. They move. Look closer.…”
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