The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

  Total silence.

  Then the sound of a heavy object dragged across the floor. A trunk? Then another frenzied yelp, a thud, the sound of a man sobbing grievously.

  Annie ran out into the corridor and banged against the man’s door, her fists sore, her heart beating violently in her throat. Movement within the room ceased. In her mind, she struck the man’s head until it burst open.

  Now he had begun to sing; it was something in German.

  “Liebe…liebe,” he crooned over and over. She heard footsteps behind her and turned to see a woman observing her from a half-opened door a few yards away. The woman took a few steps toward Annie, one arm reaching back as though to protect the vulnerability of her own half-glimpsed room.

  “Mind your own business, you crooked fool!” she snarled. “Go to your room this instant, I say!”

  “He’s torturing a dog!” Annie cried.

  “There isn’t any dog,” the woman spat out scornfully. “He makes both voices. Like a ventriloquist. He’s a dog ventriloquist specialist.”

  “You’re lying to me!” Annie said furiously. “I can hear the dog!”

  “He’s working up a little turn,” the woman said in a flat voice. “For stage, screen, and radio. There never was a dog.” She shook a thin finger at Annie. “Stop persecuting us!” she cried. Annie fled to her room. There wasn’t any noise from next door, only a radio playing somewhere, a car shifting gears out on the street. She ate an orange she found in the cupboard near the sink. It was huge, tasteless, nearly dry.

  She would have to find another room—she couldn’t endure this place! Her job started in two days. Except for the League modeling, she’d never worked; she couldn’t imagine how it would be. She almost wished it were possible to slip unseen back into May Landower’s little house on Beechwood Avenue in Hollywood. She and May—the whole arrangement had come to a grotesque ending, Annie running through the living room with her suitcase as May banged out hideous dissonant chords on the piano and Johnnie Bliss danced like a moth-eaten bear on the street outside. That night, with no place to go, he’d let her sleep in the back of his old Model T; she nested among scraps of fabric Johnnie had stolen from the property department at the studio where he was, he said, “a seamstress.” There had been other things beside fabric—rope, tools, cases of sewing needles, spools of thread, and the canned food he carried around in case he got locked out of his own room.

  “You’re better off,” he’d told Annie that night. “The old bitch is off her rocker. I should know. I’ve known her for several hundred years.” He’d first met May in the brilliant gone days when he himself had been a leading lover of the silent screen. May’s husband had been an actor too. “He preferred me to that cow!” Johnnie told Annie, up in the Hollywood Hills where they’d parked for the night. “Oh, she was a cow even then. You can spot them when they’re ten. Princess Cows. That’s how they raise them in the U.S.A.”

  “Am I a cow?” she asked drowsily from the back seat.

  “You!” he cried, and twisted his ill-fitting toupee to make her laugh. He’d been locked out of his own room that night because one of his young men had cut a wrist and run bleeding through the landlady’s parlor, dripping blood over her Turkey carpet, Johnnie weeping and wringing his hands, stumbling after him. But the landlady would get over it, he told Annie, she always did. That’s why he’d stopped by to see May, nothing else to do, and he could always get a drink out of her. Annie might not have nerved herself up to leave May’s place if he hadn’t been there.

  The two of them had been sitting in the living room, Johnnie belching softly after one of May’s Mexican dinners. She’d gone out with her recently acquired Pekingese. Johnnie was retelling Annie about the grand old times when his hair was rich and curly and black and his teeth hadn’t gone bad and he had had his pick of the most beautiful boys the world had ever seen…Now, he just drove around in his sinful old car and picked up what he could in the way of sewing jobs and young men. When she said she was sorry, he’d shown her his brown stubs of teeth and said, “My life has been a dumb thing, but don’t you cry for me, Susannah.”

  He was not at all like Samuel. He worried wholeheartedly about Annie, and comforted her from his small store of mercy. And unlike Samuel, he was miserably poor. They paid him so little for his work at the studio. “It’s worse than being a nigger,” he said. And then added softly, “There’s a beautiful colored boy who does errands out at the studio. He moves inside a cloud.”

  May had come back from walking the dog, actually she had staggered back, her hair in disarray, her dress pulled down on one fat freckled shoulder. The Peke was yapping. Johnnie had risen to his feet, walked toward her in a crouch, an arm flung across his forehead like a tragic hero.

  “Don’t you make fun of me, you rotten pansy!” May cried, and burst into sobs. “What is it? What is it!” Annie begged, as May lifted her mascara-streaked face from her hands.

  “Two blocks south of here,” she began in a kind of chant, “in the dark…a man bit me”…her voice rose to a scream…“on the breast!”

  “Bit on the tit!” Johnnie sang, banging at the piano.

  “Out!” howled May.

  “Why, you made that up!” Johnnie cried. “You lovesick old cat! Don’t you just wish—”

  Annie ran out of the room to her own small cubicle and packed up her bag. It was enough! Every night, May came back with a new tale of assault. She was drunk in the morning, sick until midafternoon, then, attired in a kind of monk’s robe, she cleaned the house, flinging furniture about and complaining bitterly about Annie’s idleness—Why the hell had she ever taken on such a helpless infant? Not even the goddamned Ouija board could be trusted!

  She hadn’t spoken to May since that night. Johnnie, bringing her Walter’s letters, said she could forget about her. “She blames you for anything that goes wrong, and believe me, everything does! I told her she should go and kneel at the little white feet of Aimee S. McPherson. Oh, don’t look so scared! She’ll forget all about you soon enough.”

  But Annie worried about it; she owed May something. Although she knew May had long since removed herself from the sound of human voices, living in a spectral world of Ouija-board spirits and the chance fall of cards, she wanted to explain herself to the old madwoman.

  It seemed to her that every time she left a place, she trailed a wake of debris: broken promises, disappointed expectations, expectations she had aroused without intention. Was there something exceptional about her? Something beyond those special circumstances of her own history, which by comic inversion she made into an entertainment just for the sake of making a claim on someone’s, anyone’s attention? But that was the misery of it! The story merely announced the presence of the storyteller; that was the hell of it!

  Was that why she was so moved by transient meetings? As though only in such fleeting episodes someone might catch sight of her, inadvertently? She thought of Mrs. Poole who had brushed her hair, the slim boy in the bulky suit who had stood by the piano in the hostel on Riverside Drive, Jersey Lighter handing her the scrap of paper, the old man in the bar this morning in San Diego.

  Next door the man was weeping; he must be standing next to the wall for his wretchedness seemed to sweat its way right through the thin partition. Annie got her purse and left the room. She wouldn’t be able to reach Johnnie; his landlady refused to call him to the phone in her living room, and he hadn’t had a telephone of his own in a decade. Johnnie just appeared at odd times of the day and night; sometimes he brought her sacks of groceries when he’d made a dollar or two.

  She stood on the street irresolutely; perhaps she just ought to go back to the room, stuff her ears with toilet tissue and try to sleep. Then she remembered that years ago her father had spoken of an old friend of his, a screenwriter who’d come to Hollywood in the late twenties. James St. Vincent, that was his name! She went into a public telephone booth and got the number from information. Without giving herself time to think, she call
ed. “St. Vincent residence,” said a man’s voice. “Mr. St. Vincent? This is Annie Gianfala, Anthony Gianfala’s daughter.” “Just a minute,” said the voice. A minute later, a slurred shout came through the receiver.

  “Annie? Annie, is it? My God! I’ve not seen you since you were a babe in arms…you’re here, then? In Hollywood? Come out here instantly!”

  She knew the sound of liquor. “I’m closer to Los Angeles than Hollywood,” she said.

  “Take a taxi. I’ll pay for it. Come right away. It’s important…”

  His intensity made her uncomfortable, yet the hectic command was thrilling. He gave her his address, a place called Arizona Canyon.

  She found a taxi on Hollywood Boulevard. It was a long ride down the whole length of the Boulevard, through the Sunset Strip where the driver said, the only time he spoke, “That’s the Trocadero where they go. I’m available for tours, tell you where the stars live and all…”

  They turned up a narrow road that wound among hills. Through trees and thick plantings of bushes, above sloping lawns, lights shone from mansions of such multiform character that they were more like exhibits than homes. It was as though the owners had feared they might miss even one architectural style, and so had crammed together in one structure turrets, Greek columns, Spanish balconies, and colonial façades.

  When the taxi stopped, Annie heard the sound of a running brook. A Saint Bernard dog was throwing itself against the taxi door, wagging its tail violently. Then the dog was heaved aside by a man in a dark jacket who paid the driver and led Annie up a driveway toward open doors. She was suddenly conscious, as brightness poured from a brilliantly lit hall, of how bedraggled she must look. She stepped inside uneasily. A voice from another room called out, “Come in, lass. Come in!” Annie followed instructions and entered a large dining room.

  Motionless, grim-faced, two women and a young boy sat at the long table, all three heads bent slightly forward over serving plates. At the head of the table sat a man with a linen napkin completely covering his head. As he spoke, the napkin quivered where his mouth must have been.

  “You look like neither of them,” said the napkin. “What do you think, my dears?”

  The woman who sat next to him kept her head stubbornly bent, but the other woman looked briefly at Annie and said in a tired voice, “I’ve not seen either of them in years. How would I know?”

  “How would I know?” mimicked the man ironically. “It’s an endearing way you have of speaking. What was it made out of, that sentence? Hand-hewn stone? Sit down, poor girl, and tell me about your old man.”

  But Annie remained on her feet, staring at the napkin. There was a muffled laugh. He said, “I can’t bear to look at these darlings of mine. I’m hiding out.”

  The boy gave Annie a covert glance. A colored woman came through a swinging door at that moment carrying an elaborately iced cake. It had fallen in on one side as though someone had pressed a hand down on it.

  “You want coffee, mister?” asked the woman listlessly, hardly bothering to wait for an answer as she went back toward the kitchen. The Saint Bernard, Annie observed, was creeping forward from the hall on his belly, moving with great artfulness as he silently advanced one heavy paw after another.

  “Beat it, Byron!” said one of the women sharply. It was only when the dog rose, his head hanging in dog apology, and left the dining room that Annie realized the woman had been addressing him.

  “I’m surrounded by hostile women and a child unduly influenced by them. Now, I’m presented with this boring cake, sugared to death. Let’s get out of here,” said the man, and twitched the napkin from his head. “No coffee!” he shouted at the closed kitchen door.

  James St. Vincent’s head was long, his face narrow. Gray hair, streaked with black, purled over his skull. His was a faintly simian face; the long narrow eyes moved restlessly. The face conveyed impatience and yet uncertainty, as though a child’s bewilderment at the strangeness of life had remained unmodified, unanswered, by all the data accumulated by those clever eyes.

  The woman next to him said, “But I want coffee, and Grace wants coffee, and—who knows? Andrew may want coffee!” The boy shook his head mutely and continued to stuff pieces of cake into his mouth with little pointed fingers. He looked fourteen or fifteen but seemed even younger.

  James St. Vincent rose, dropping the napkin on the table, and walked over to Annie to take her arm. “Upstairs!” he whispered.

  He led her to a bedroom where intimations of feminine fussing remained like a faint echo among the disordered papers on the floor and table, pencils on window sills, a typewriter lopsided on the silk-upholstered seat of an armchair, a man’s raincoat in a heap in a corner. There was a telephone on a pillow, its black wire curling over the beige satin cover.

  “Well, pal! What the hell are you doing out here?” He sat down, then reclined fully on one of the two beds. His gray sweater was full of small holes. She noticed his hands were like the boy’s, pointed, catlike, vaguely repellent. The dog appeared in the doorway. “Poor Byron. Come in, lad,” St. Vincent said to the dog, who at once jumped up on the unoccupied bed and groaned himself into a mound of white and brown fur. Annie moved the typewriter to the floor and sat down.

  “A lady was driving out from New York. I came along,” she replied, knowing that it was no answer.

  “Why aren’t you in school?”

  An equally unanswerable question. “Well, I don’t really know,” she said. “I guess I move around too much,” she added smiling, searching around in her mind for something to distract him from herself. “My father says you used to write plays…”

  Jim held up his hands as though she’d held a pistol to him.

  “I did that,” he said unhappily. “Yes, I did that. But no luck there. And I have not just Andrew, the poor fellow downstairs eating his cake, but two more sons and a girl, a year or two older than you, perhaps. I came out here in ‘28 because of the sound of money, not the money itself, you get me? It flows through this house like a flash flood every few months, then leaves us dry in a matter of days…No, it was the sound of it, the idea of it, thousands of dollars for a screenplay I used to be able to knock off in hours, not always, but there was a time when, in twenty-four hours, with the help of a little Benzedrine, I’ve done a script and gotten ten grand for it! Then we have a party for a while—I pay the girl’s tuition and buy a thing or two.”

  Annie wondered about the two women in the dining room. She didn’t brood on his lapse in not introducing her to them. Why should he have? He probably had his reasons. She liked being here alone with him. The presence of other women would have destroyed her pleasure. Other women made certain assumptions about her, the nature of which she only vaguely understood. St. Vincent was staring at her pensively.

  “The ladies downstairs…Hope who despairs, and Grace who is a lout…are sisters. My wife died, you see, a few years ago. I’ve known Hope for years…my wife was ill for a long time …well, never mind that. And so she moved in with ghastly Grace. Ghastly Grace says, ‘I don’t see why you eat that stuff, I don’t see why you have that huge dog, I don’t see why you go off to that boring Victorville, that boring sand.’ She maddens me with all that, yet I always feel impelled to try and explain, when I know that all those questions are just little curses of rage. She follows me from room to room, making observations about the way I light a cigarette, how long I pause before a window…But old Ghastly—the magic words, I am at work, and she is my slave, not from respect, pal, but financial expectation. Then she tends to my needs like a priestess when all I’m doing, for Christ’s sake, is turning out a movie! She’s easier on me than Hope, though. Poor Hope! She’s just given up! Ah well…I’ve done it myself, wrecked the women, pulled down the walls.”

  He sat up and rubbed his hands together vigorously. “We had good times together, your old man and I, before the harpies got us. He was awful with women, you know, fawned on them disgracefully. You see that stack of paper? It’s a pla
y, it may be my getaway. If it’s any good, pal, I’ll be back on the East Coast in a flash of your eyes. Now, take the first ten pages, read them aloud to me, there’s a good kind girl!”

  Annie read, holding the manuscript tightly in her hands. It was a commonplace conversation between a married couple. At one point, St. Vincent exclaimed, “Ah!” as though struck by a valuable thought. Walter’s “play” had moved Annie simply because he’d written it. But this!

  “You see?” he asked her when she’d finished the ten pages. “You see what their problem is?”

  “Is it because they’re married, Mr. St. Vincent?”

  He laughed. “Call me Jim. Yes, that is the problem exactly. But they no longer love each other and they wish to, again. What once was true, isn’t. They have begun to manufacture it. They are trying to recapture love. Did you see that? Truthfully?”

  Why was he asking her about recaptured love? How was it captured in the first place? Angered, perhaps, by his dumbness in expecting her to know anything about such matters, and in this way making her feel a fool, she said aloud, “Are you supposed to capture love in the first place?”

  He looked apologetic at once. “It was unfair of me,” he said, smiling sweetly at her. “It was mean. You know, your being here, it’s a little as if you were your father. Oh, God! I’ve got to phone Brazzi. He’s waiting for me at the gym. Hold the fort, pal!” He grabbed the phone from the pillow and gave a number to the operator.