The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

In a waterfront café, he drank rye with a beer chaser, and ate fried eggs and bacon. She had a meat-loaf sandwich and coffee and thought she’d gone mad with hunger, hardly able to chew for the sheer bliss of filling herself up.

  “Tell me…”

  She told him about the first part of the ride, the fat man wearing glasses who handed her a book to look at. “Pretty pictures, he said. At first I thought it was about Greek art, all the faces were like statues, you know? But the drawings were bad, and these statues were all doing things to each other.”

  “Dirty book…”

  “Yes. Then he said he’d show me, and he stopped the car. I got out and ran into the woods. He was too fat to follow me for long. I walked a long way, then came back and sat down on the road …didn’t really know what to do. I was afraid to thumb another ride. But I was saved. A man and a woman stopped and picked me up. The man was very nice really. But the woman wasn’t. She was talking about boring things and trying to make them sound important and acting as if I was not to know what she was talking about. I don’t know why I’m so hungry…”

  Walter went up to the bar and returned with another shot glass of rye.

  “What am I to do with you?” he asked, raising his eyes to the ceiling. “In one fix, then another.”

  “I couldn’t walk to San Diego.”

  “A bus?”

  “There’s the money.”

  “How was the trip out west?”

  “That crazy woman May Landower—she was drunk all the way. We had a flat tire in Arizona in the middle of the desert. She got out on the road and started to pray, on her knees, in the middle of the road. In Virginia, she said we had to go look at a natural bridge, it was in the cards that morning. There weren’t any people there in the park, and she began screaming we were in mortal danger. Once, in a store where we’d stopped to get cigarettes, there was a woman with hair growing all over her face. After that, she talked about nothing but the menopause, said I’d look like that someday, then I’d see what life was. She had a little aspirin box she kept pills in, said they were ground up monkey glands and did her a world of good. The only nice thing was the man we picked up just before we got to the Rockies. He was a tall old man with red hair, a cook at a CCC camp, and his wife was having a baby in some little town on the other side of the mountains. So he drove us. It was night. It was such a narrow road. There was fog sometimes. You could see, way down, the lights of maybe one other car. He drove like the wind. He was so worried about his wife. She was just a girl, he said. And we got to this little town, in the middle of the mountains. There was one hotel, and he left us there and ran down the middle of the street to the hospital. It was three in the morning. They gave us some white bread to eat, we were so hungry. She’d been drinking out of her bottle all the time he was driving, saying, ‘My, it’s nice to have a man to drive, isn’t it, Annie? My, my!’”

  He sat absolutely still, his eyes never moving from her face. She began to eat the toast he’d left on his plate.

  “And then?” he asked. She felt she’d won a victory of some kind. He wanted to hear more.

  “That night, drunk as she was, she consulted the Ouija board. It spelled tears. She said sorrow was in store. I said it meant we’d have another flat. Oh, it was terrible, terrible! That’s why I had to get out away from her. In Hollywood, she wasn’t just crazy; she said I was too, everybody was.”

  “How did you get my letters after you moved out?”

  “There’s a man, Johnnie Bliss. Somebody she used to know. He’s been bringing them to me.”

  “Just the letters?”

  “He doesn’t like women.”

  “A pansy?”

  She didn’t answer. “What kind of job?” he asked.

  “Stock girl. In a store in Los Angeles. They sell dresses, women’s things.”

  “How much?”

  “About fourteen dollars.”

  “About?”

  “Thirteen fifty.”

  “And the room rent?”

  “It’s eight dollars.”

  “How the hell did you manage to pick a woman like that to drive out here with? All right, all right…”

  His hair looked damp. She did not tell him about the German and his dog. She looked at him as he played with the shot glass, his eyes half shut, and she imagined with what disgust he would look at the room she’d rented. “I’ll tell you about my trip,” Walter said, placing the shot glass in front of him.

  It was hard for her to listen. She was thinking of that room, its ash-colored walls, the screech of the rusty springs when she pulled the bed down from the wall, the two grease-encrusted burners of the stove, the dusty, decayed smell of the apartment house.

  “Did you hear me, Annie?”

  “What?”

  “I can’t sign off till Seattle. It’ll be another week or so. I’ve only got a few hours before I have to get back to the ship.”

  She concealed her relief—at least he wouldn’t be able to see the room for a few more days. Then she wondered how she would get back to Hollywood. Somehow, she hadn’t thought of that. She had imagined returning with Walter.

  “Did you notice a bathroom?” she asked timidly.

  “In the back, past the bar,” he said, grinning suddenly. “Where did you get that suit?” She rose quickly without answering him.

  The toilet was dirty. The suit bunched up around her waist. She knocked her head against the naked light bulb. The toilet itself was in an unresolved condition; it neither flushed nor ceased to pour down into the bowl a trickle of water. Walter’s grin accompanied her discomforts; she was painfully shy about bathroom functions. What a heaven of unconstraint other people must inhabit! People were always getting up, or leaving rooms, to go to the bathroom; she herself had a weakness for imagining the exalted and great roosting on toilet bowls. What an idiot she was!

  On the way back to the table, an old man lurched away from the bar and grasped her arm. He was drunk and smelled of catsup. Croaking like a rusty mechanical bird, he said, “What a life!” She caught a glimpse of Walter watching her. She put her hand over the hand that grasped her arm. “I know,” she said. “The hell you do,” he muttered.

  As they walked away from the café, they argued about the old man. “You sentimentalize everything,” he said. “He was a used-up old bum. He only wanted to cadge a drink from you.” But he hadn’t, she insisted. He only wanted to talk to somebody; he wanted to say what a life to someone living, who would respond to him. What else was there?

  “Socialism!” Walter said angrily. “A society where old men don’t wind up begging for drinks.”

  “But he didn’t!” Walter walked resolutely ahead of her. “Goddamnit!” she cried. “He didn’t!”

  Walter strode on as though he were alone, and it seemed miles to Annie as she straggled along behind him, exhausted by the day, by unjust accusations, by her utter dependence, at this moment, on Walter. They had left the outskirts of San Diego behind them; they were walking along a cliff above the beach. The California landscape was so wild, so unassailable in its un-human nature; one no sooner left some colony clustered about the milder reaches of its coastline than the noise and busyness of town life seemed empty deception.

  Walter suddenly sank to his knees among hummocks of sand and sword grass, then lay down, his arms outstretched, and shut his eyes.

  Annie stared out at the Pacific. Her father had said it was the only thing, except the desert, worth looking at for more than five minutes; as she gazed at the vast emptiness through narrowed eyes, it seemed a nebulous waste, a shapeless moving waste. On the beach below, she caught sight of a lone swimmer as he leaped into the surf, arms swinging, knees cranking.

  “Lie down, Annie,” said Walter sleepily.

  She sat and looked at him. He’d come all this way, down one coast, through the Panama Canal, up another coast—for her? His demand was heavy on her, as though it carried all the hours, the days of his journey. She was not worth it—he seemed to know t
hat already. She leaned toward him. He lay there like a stone, a man on his back, his feet pointing straight up in their heavy work boots, smelling of warm skin and clean cotton work shirt. He placed his hand on her back.

  “Annie?”

  He had written her nine letters, the last one mailed from Colón; his handwriting was like barbed wire strung across the pages. The letters were all about her; her ignorance, her exhibitionism—did she remember the night she had paraded around in her underwear in Jersey Lighter’s loft?—she was ignorant of the world, of people, of her own class origins, of sex, of money. She knew nothing of the world of struggle, of what it was like to work for a living. She was spoiled; all women of her class were spoiled. Working women, working-class women were different; he described them; he said they met men on real terms; they had real cunts, he wrote, and knew what to use them for. But he was going to change her —he was going to teach her.

  The letters thrilled her as much as they repelled her. To be told what one was! Such unforgiving criticism argued honesty, exactitude. He knew her! Yet she destroyed all the letters—she did not like to touch them as she dropped the scraps into the garbage pail. She imagined them to be damp, as though a faint sweat covered them; the letters were about her, but in them was the presence of other women, grown-up women, and she snatched her fingers from the paper as though she might reach right through them to glistening female flesh.

  “Let me,” he muttered, and pressed her down into the sand and rolled over onto her. She twisted her head away for she remembered he did not like to kiss her mouth. Beneath his chest, pressed against hers, his hands struggled up to clutch her breasts. “It’s all right,” he whispered. “This way, it’s all right.”

  She heaved him off of her and sat up. One of her braids slowly lifted itself from the anchor of hairpins and drooped down the side of her face.

  “I don’t like virgins,” he said coldly. They stared down at the beach. The swimmer had gone.

  He was silent most of the way back to town. He’d put on his watchman’s cap and pulled it down over his hair. When he did speak, it was in a milder voice than she’d had any reason to expect. Had he known how she was going to behave all along?

  Did she have any money at all? he asked. No? Not even bus fare? She lied. He pressed some bills into her hand. Back at the docks, he put his hand on the back of her head and pulled her toward him, kissing her cheek. Just before she turned away from him, she caught sight of his eyes fixed on her. They were his best feature, his eyes, large, brown, limpid. What a mystery he was! She felt dizzy with a rush of excitement; she could have him—even if she didn’t want him; a Communist, a sailor, a womanknower, he held the world’s secrets. Perhaps she’d find out something after all—she would allow him to do that simple thing to her, and in entering her body, perhaps he would free her from some other, more significant ignorance.

  At the bus station, she looked at the bills he had thrust at her —thirty dollars. Food, rent, safety for a little while. In her imagination, she embraced him with pure gratitude.

  Chapter 4

  The first time Annie saw Walter Vogel, he was drunk. A high-school teacher from Summit, New Jersey, had taken her to a party at a Greenwich Village walk-up on Perry Street. It was early December; frost-glazed muck glittered in gutters; a strong wind blew through the nearly empty streets, tumbling lids from garbage cans, rolling them along like hoops.

  In a smoke-filled room on the second floor, a Negro guitarist sat on a high stool, a black ship in a gray fog. He played a song, “The Midnight Special.” When Annie asked him to play it again, he glared at her from red-veined eyes. “You like that song?” he asked. “It’s lovely,” she said. “Hunh!” he grunted. “You don’t know nothin’ about that song. But I’ll play it for you ‘cause it’s me that’s lovely.” He wasn’t smiling. He leaned over the guitar and seemed to thrust it into his belly. He flung the words at her, his eyes never leaving her face. The guitar moved under his hands like the piston of a locomotive, thrusting now toward her. A man leaned against her, laughing. She thought it was the high-school teacher, amused at her discomfort—the guitarist seemed to be trying to play her to her knees—but it was a handsome youngish man in a thick black sweater. “He jus’ loves you,” he’d crooned. She saw the guitarist’s eyes flicker—“when the midnight special come to town,” he suddenly roared.

  The stranger found a corner behind a couch. “I’m Walter Vogel,” he said, pulling her down to the floor beside him. The guitar music had grown softer; around and above them, the party cranked on in its noisy way. She couldn’t see the high-school teacher; she didn’t really care if he was still in the room. She drank a sickening sweet wine from Walter’s paper cup; he placed the cup between them on the floor; he held both her hands in his; their knees touched. His rapt attention to her, drunken or not, made her giddy. She knew she was talking too much. But how he laughed! “Who are you, who are you…?” he asked softly. No answer would have been worthy of the mystery, the significance of such a question…who was she, indeed? But she tried. The party vanished from her consciousness. He’d pitched a tent for her in the desert—she threw aside her veils. She had never known she could be so charming; she’d never seen how comic her life had been, was…her mad-for-marrying father who had only recently left her alone in a West Seventy-third Street flat with a case of beer and twenty-seven dollars, left her, to marry again, of course, and her former stepmother, Bea, the one who’d taught her solitaire to amuse herself with, and—suddenly, the veils looked like rags. Walter Vogel, winey mouth and glassy eyes, was laughing at her with disbelief, or could it be disgust? In anguished self-recognition, she stood straight up, back into the party. He rose unsteadily and clasped her at once in his arms. She struggled; he held on.

  “Now, baby, now you stay still. Here…” He let go of her for a minute and thrust a crumpled pack of cigarettes in her hand and a pencil. “Now, you write down where you live, right there on that little corner. Write it.” And she did, hopelessly.

  The high-school teacher had his coat on and was standing by the door. “I won’t have time to take you home,” he said, “it’s so late. I’ve got a long ride to New Jersey, come on, I’ll put you in a taxi.”

  To Annie’s astonishment, Walter Vogel came to her door the very next night.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’ve come to take you to a meeting.”

  He walked into the little apartment, looked at it critically, shook his head. “Hurry up. We’re going to be late as it is.”

  “What meeting?”

  “A discussion…maybe you’ll learn something.”

  In a small loft building on lower Broadway, a dozen or so people sat in a long narrow room listening to a man speak through a stern bristle of mustache. Several people nodded to Walter as he and Annie sat down.

  “I ask you,” said the man, frowning, “to consider the strange frivolity—and frivolity is by far too mild a term to describe the notorious behavior I am about to describe—of these so-called comrades who have so quickly abandoned their faith in the country of socialism, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the seat and heart of the triumphant victory of the working class over the tyranny of class repression—the faint hearts of these comrades, the soft brains of these comrades”—a man laughed somewhere behind Annie and Walter—“who are unable or, to put it more properly, refuse stubbornly to understand Comrade Stalin’s strategy. How many of us have been subjected to cries of ‘poor little Finland,’ following only by weeks the defection of those weak hearts, these Mensheviki I shall call them, with their childish and willful refusal to understand the necessity of the delaying tactics involved in Comrade Stalin’s pact with the German, Hitler? It is of utmost importance that we distinguish between tactics and strategy, Comrades, utmost…”

  Walter was standing. “For the benefit of a guest, would you discuss the difference between tactics and strategy?” he asked the speaker quite formally. The speaker looked broodingly at Annie, then nodded briskly. A
nnie didn’t listen; she perceived, vaguely, that she was among people who saw the world she hastened through so nervously, so uncomprehendingly, as having meanings, categories, explanations that made it possible for them to know where their next thought was coming from. That Walter should be one of this group made her feel, for the moment, at rest; the speaker’s words didn’t matter; that he struggled in a thicket of lost sentences didn’t matter. Whatever it was he was talking about, he was convinced!

  Later, everybody was so agreeable to her. A middle-aged man and woman, dressed incongruously in rusty evening clothes, held her hands. A young man touched her braided hair. “Well, Walter, where did you find this little dearie?”

  Walter took her to a cafeteria. They ate rice pudding and drank several cups of coffee. He took a volume from the pocket of his jacket and pushed it across the table to her. She picked it up. It was called Man’s Fate. “I want you to read that,” he said. They walked up Broadway. Above the spires of a dark church, two brilliant stars appeared to drop downward toward their own impalement.

  “He’s an old-time functionary,” Walter said, referring to the speaker at the meeting. “Self-taught. He never even went to school —his people were immigrants.”

  She thought he sounded defensive. “Oh, he was fine,” she said, her heart lifting with a kind of happiness as she looked up at the little stone church.

  “He’s dry as sawdust, but he can’t help it. The main point is that he’s loyal,” Walter said.

  “I didn’t even know he was talking about Russia until he said Stalin,” she said.

  “You don’t know much,” he commented. “Where have you lived your life? In a hole in the ground?”

  She hadn’t thought much about where she’d lived her life, only each day of it. Her father had said he would be back in a few weeks. A few weeks had passed. The case of beer remained in the closet along with a tweed jacket of his. Her mother had died when she was two. Annie lived, had lived, in a world of men. Now she would have a new stepmother, another woman who would behave toward her, she imagined, more or less as Bea had.