The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

  Annie went over and stroked the dog. He placed his big head in her hand and looked up at her with saintly eyes. She felt a pang of hunger. She wished someone had offered her a piece of cake. She hadn’t eaten anything since that stale orange.

  Jim’s voice had undergone a curious transformation. Now its timbre was rough, his speech like a movie gangster’s. He finished his conversation and turned back to look at her. She grew restive under his silent investigation. “You have,” he said finally, “a very good face. Although I don’t know what’s behind it…Brazzi is a prize fighter and might have been a good one if he hadn’t given himself over to women. It’s worse than drink. I’ve put a lot of money into his sad career. Ah, well…now I propose we get clear of this house and have an evening.”

  The jacket he took from a closet looked much like that one of her father’s she’d left in the Seventy-third Street apartment.

  Interrupting her wary recall of those rooms, Jim said, “Beatrice is out here, did you know that? I’ve seen her twice but she won’t speak to me, holding me responsible for the break with your father, no doubt. Women do that…”

  When she didn’t reply, he came over and stood in front of her. “Beatrice?” he repeated with a touch of irony.

  “Oh! That Beatrice. I always called her Bea.”

  “But you lived with them, didn’t you?”

  “Years ago, for a little while.”

  He touched her cheek with his fingers for an instant. “Well, the old man wasn’t much good in the father department, was he? But it’s just as well. Beatrice is a very rough girl. Your old man thought she was the spirit of Italy, but for all her temperament, I knew her for the Mediterranean haggler she is. Low-class vamps specialize in temperament. I’ll tell you some fine funny stories about her…if you like.” He took her hand and she stood up. “We must tiptoe,” he warned. “We mustn’t let the Gorgon ladies know what we’re up to. Byron, lad, don’t give us away!”

  The house felt deserted. They met no one on the stairs. It was only when they came to the front doors that the servant who had paid Annie’s taxi fare glided up from under somewhere, the rug, perhaps, and silently opened the doors. Jim said, as they walked out into the fragrant eucalyptus-smelling night air, “He’s in my gang. When the play is produced, he’ll go east with me. He’s very good about the play, got me out of second-act troubles with a touch of genius. Brazzi is crazy about him.”

  She made no comment—the people, the connections, the things of his life were utterly strange to her. She sensed he was glad to have her company, and that was enough. He took her around the house to a garage. The sound of the brook was louder here. “Is there a stream?” she asked. “Artificial,” he said. “Oh, Christ, look at the way they’ve parked the car! The hell with it. Let’s take a taxi.” She looked at the big Buick, at an angle half in, half out of the garage. “Come on,” he urged. “They’ll see us from a window.”

  They walked down the road, Jim holding her arm tightly. “Garland’s house,” he said, gesturing vaguely up the hill. A car passed them slowly, the driver’s face lit by the dashboard. He looked familiar to Annie. A movie star? “The Brandleys’ cook,” said Jim. “Given to opium, I’ve heard. I’ve played golf with him…very elegant fellow with a terrible slice. He won’t talk about anything except golf; he calls it the green mistress.”

  At a crossroad, they saw a taxicab parked in front of a driveway which led up to a large Tudor-style house. Jim went over and spoke to the driver while Annie stood a few steps behind him. “I’ll pay double his fare,” Jim promised. “And a good deal more than that before the night is over.”

  “I’m sposed to wait,” said the driver.

  “He’ll never come out, pal,” insisted Jim, almost singing his words. “I know who lives in that house. You’ll be here until the morning, and I’ll give you odds your fare beats it out the back way.”

  “Well…”

  “Yes,” Jim said decisively. “You know I’m right. We’ll have a grand time.” He held the door open for Annie, and as she settled back he turned to look at her directly. “Where is the old man?” he asked with such somber accent that she felt a quiver of apprehension as though her outrage about her not knowing her own father’s whereabouts might have led her to think him into extinction. She answered Jim hastily. “He’s somewhere near Santa Fe, in a place called Taos—I don’t know where in Taos, or even what Taos is —and he’s married again, I never saw his new wife.”

  The news did not appear to surprise Jim. “Your mother was a nice girl,” he said reflectively. “But not up to it. Not up to living. And so for his next wife, there was Beatrice. Your father played with illusions—sometimes she was an Italian peasant, sometimes an aristocrat, depending on the bastard’s mood. She was so tough, he thought, she’d live on her own, leave him to his work. But they never do…women.”

  By the time the exhausted taxi driver had pulled up to her apartment house, its stucco softened by the first rosiness of dawn, and Jim, gray-faced, slumped against the seat, his catlike hands folded into each other on his lap, Annie knew she’d been in an unearthly region where money was not counted, where the impulse of the moment had the authority of law.

  They first had stopped at a miniature golf course where Jim had led her through the doll-sized puzzlements with a kind of pedantic protectiveness that made her instantly happy. On the tiny putting green, she began to whistle, and he broke into loud laughter, saying he wished it was as easy to please other women. They stopped in a number of small bars where Jim, without visible consequence, tossed down drink after drink. In a place called the Melody Garden, he broke into a conversation between two sailors and a thin tanned blonde girl whose honey-colored hair coiled at the back of her head in a heavy braid. She said she was Viennese. The sailors said they were hillbillies, goddamn all! And took to calling St. James “Pappy.”

  The five of them crowded into the taxi. The driver, enjoying himself now, caught up in that expectation of the great adventure Jim managed to imply was waiting for them at the very next stop, drove at reckless speed to Santa Monica. There, Jim directed him south until they came to an amusement pier where an orange glow licked up a portion of the moonless sky.

  “I love Venice Park,” the driver said. Jim ran off and returned shortly with two hot dogs, which he thrust in the driver’s hand, then he gave him a fistful of change. “Enjoy yourself, lad…”

  They walked down the long stretch of the pier lined with shooting galleries and funhouses, Ferris wheel, chute-the-chutes, snap the whip, what Jim called “contrived delight.” Here and there they stopped to toss darts at balloons, or to shoot at wheels of circling ducks, until they came to the pier’s end where the narrow tracks of a roller coaster, supported by spidery black struts, rose directly from the water, rose to hidden heights, the inclines lit here and there by naked bulbs feebly lighting the way to certain annihilation.

  “You must!” Jim insisted to Annie, as the sailors and the girl, Karin, stepped into a waiting car. “You must do it, because it frightens you. That’s the reason, nothing else.” Wordlessly, she shook her head.

  “Yes,” he said. “What one is afraid of becomes one’s only real life. You cannot let it be a thing like this. You will be riding this beast forever—if you don’t do it now.”

  “Come on, Pappy!” shouted one of the sailors. Karin sat primly between them but they pushed up against her, their arms entwined about her rigid shoulders.

  With an impatience that made him seem suddenly commonplace —it was a fleeting thought, she was too frightened to pursue it—St. Vincent grabbed Annie’s arm and pulled her into the front seat, which the sailors had left empty, perhaps out of deference to St. Vincent as the king of this night’s pleasures.

  Machinery rattled, the little car moved and swayed violently as it turned the first corner. Annie looked down at the black water. She saw the pilings which held up the pier, the stilts of the roller coaster walking the flat sea. “Oh, God…” she moaned. Jim p
ut his arm around her. “It will be over soon…”

  It was never over. The car clanked up the swaying inclines, paused viciously at summits, lunged forward into a hellish drop, an abandoned fall that drove her lungs against her spine, emptied her of air, her screams, drowned like those in nightmares, her mouth open, larger than her whole face. In a valley, she said shrilly, “Make it stop…I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!” But Jim was leaning over the side of the car, vomiting. The sailors shouted joyfully. Only the Viennese girl was silent. When Annie glanced back to see if the worst torment was over, she caught sight of Karin sitting up straight, her face utterly composed. Annie turned back and gripped the iron safety bar with wet hands. Suddenly, it was over; the car rattled back to its place. The sailors leaped out; Karin straightened her skirt and refused the help of hands extended toward her. Jim, a handkerchief held against his mouth, took Annie’s arm and pulled her free of the car. “Very good, pal,” he murmured through the handkerchief.

  Trembling, she yanked her hand away. “Ah, well, I don’t blame you. I’d be sore too,” he said.

  In the taxi, she held the stuffed bear Karin had won at a dart booth. She was silent all the long way to Malibu Beach, listening without interest to the talk among the others, Jim with his poking comic questions, his speeches about women and money and work, his sudden shift of accent when he lapsed into the jargon of prize fighters. The sailors asked about the secrets of the movie stars, and punched each other with delight at his sardonic replies. But Karin didn’t laugh; she watched him stolidly, her eyes never leaving his face. Jim said, “You want to be a moom pitcher star, do you, lass?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what for?” he asked with somewhat menacing gentleness. The driver cried, “And why not! For God’s sake, looka the money they make! Looka the things they do! I could tell you—”

  “No, lad,” Jim said with that same unpleasant softness, “you could not tell me anything.”

  “How did you know there’d be a party?” Annie asked as Jim told the driver to park the car right there, in back of that house.

  “There’s always a party,” he said. “Have you forgiven me now? Am I to take it you’ve forgiven me?”

  This time, the driver stayed with them. Once, during the hours that followed, Annie saw him sitting on a woman’s lap, counting the pearls in her long necklace. The party house was shaped like the midsection of a small steamer. There were portholes for windows and a ship’s ladder instead of stairs. The women, most of them, wore gaily colored beach pajamas; the men’s white linen trousers set off their bare tanned feet. The atmosphere was charged with a peculiar intimacy which instantly absorbed the newcomers. Yet the easy familiarity had a thinness to it, as of a light mist through which one passed briefly to emerge with a slight dampness of the spirit. Perhaps, Annie thought, it only seemed that way because of the vast amounts of liquor being consumed by all these handsome men and beautiful women whose voices rose like the cries of tropical birds as they caressed each other with glances and hands.

  But as they questioned her, eagerly, hopefully—what did they want of her?—they began to look different. Their delicious tans covered but did not conceal shoulders thick with fat; the men’s bellies strained against gold and silver buckles; teeth so white and gleaming at a distance looked, close up, like matched sets of cheap china. She saw the traces of lines where eyebrows had been plucked away and raised to pencilled heights of hauteur. A woman with a great angel’s halo of ash-blonde hair kicked off her shoes, revealing a large mushroom-colored bunion on one narrow foot. They touched her a great deal, they kissed her, they said she was a darling. Whose girl was she, though? Wouldn’t she tell? Not that old hack, St. Vincent’s, surely? And my God! Why was she wearing that depressing tweed suit?

  She escaped up the ladder stairs. At the top was a “Captain’s Bridge,” a small square bedroom, as Annie discovered when she opened the door. On the bed, which took up nearly all the space inside, a naked man straddled a woman whose head was half hidden by a pillow, her hands drawn into fists. Annie brought the door to, but the picture remained, snapped up by her mind—the man’s thighs, hairy and gleaming with sweat, gripping the woman whose long legs shot out from beneath him, her feet upright at the end of the bed, the soles soiled and the heels orange-hued.

  She went back downstairs to find Jim reading aloud to a group gathered around him, silently miming attention. Karin watched him from a corner; her eyes glittered. The sailors were lying on the floor like sailor dolls while the woman with the bunion danced in exaggerated abandon around them—or was it exaggerated? Did she imagine herself at that moment to be superb?

  Jim glanced up from the book and, seeing Annie, pushed it into the hand of a man standing next to him. She saw the name, Rupert Brooke, on the cover. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said. They went out the door and on to the beach. No one seemed to notice their leaving; the people to whom St. Vincent had been reading stood together apathetically, as though no one had told them the entertainment was over.

  Lights from other beach houses faintly illuminated the wide stretch of sand. The beach dropped off suddenly into darkness where the slow somber fall of waves followed one another like an unknown word repeated over and over. A line of whiteness gleamed against the dark horizon. “Reef,” said Jim softly. They walked by the water’s edge, which was made visible by a line of silver luminescence.

  Jim stooped suddenly and picked up a handful of tiny silver fish, held them up for her to see, then flung them into the waves.

  “They come to the sand to breed, and die, thousands, millions of them. It drives me mad. It’s why I won’t get a place out here.” Then, in a paroxysm of stooping and straightening up, he flung handfuls of the little fish into the sea. As she watched his hectic efforts, she was overcome by hilarity. He could command cars and women and dogs and sailors, he could produce parties and amusement parks, yet was helplessly, furiously opposing himself to the dumb fate of these bits of tide-driven creatures.

  He shook her by the shoulders. “Don’t laugh,” he shouted. But she only laughed louder and shook herself free of his grip. Then, leaning toward him, she caught a glimpse of his contorted face. He is sick from drinking, she thought, sick of all the awful fun, and her laughter died.

  They walked in silence to the last house. A few yards beyond it they found a sloping bank of sand upon which they sat. Then, snapping his fingers and rubbing his hands, as though words alone were not enough to convey his feeling, he talked about a getaway.

  “The play…the play. I’ve had fearful luck, and the theater has changed so much since the twenties, I don’t know. But Gaskin called from New York last week and he’s interested, more than mere interest, although he’s not wild for the third act. He may be right, but I can’t abide this moving around of ideas like so much furniture to appeal to an idiot audience. Oh, your old man and I, we were as young as you once. When we first met, we hated each other, circled each other like warring cats, then we became the dearest of friends until I came out here and, well, really, it was before that, when the marrying started. He was sore at me for coming to the Coast, said I was on the road to ruin. It only goes on and on and on…But if this play works, I’ll take the whole tribe back east, away from here where we live like mad gypsies—”

  “But why do you stay anyway? If you hate it so?”

  He laughed shortly. “I’ll be damned! And why the hell shouldn’t I? I suppose it won’t cut any ice with you, but I’ve got that pack of children to take care of…Why, I hate the silly brutal place. I’m only happy when it rains…Nobody brings you to work, you know, you bring yourself to work. Let me tell you, your old man was the bigger fool! Bea demanded the soul out of his body—she ran him ragged so he turned out art layouts for the Macfadden magazines, for those beautiful stories about girls named Tanya from Cornflakes, Nebraska, who get knocked up by gray-haired cads—filthy stories! Yes! He did that to keep Bea in twenty-five-dollar shoes and it was life’s blood to her, his l
ife’s blood, but you know her, lass, you know her…”

  “But what about you?”

  “Never mind about me!” he cried. “I pay my damned dues.”

  “I don’t really remember her,” Annie said, placatingly. “Just her eyes…”

  “Her eyes,” he echoed. “Extraordinary, like a wild animal’s.”

  “She didn’t like anyone to be sick,” Annie said absently.

  “No. She hated that,” he agreed. “She hated all helplessness.”

  “I just remembered a time when I told Tony—”

  “You call him Tony?”

  “Yes. Tony. I told him I had a toothache. She was there, pacing around the room with a drink in her hand. She said she’d take care of my toothache. Well, she lifted me up—I must of been six or so—and dropped me into a rumble seat of some car they had at the time. She drove up the Storm King Highway along the Hudson River, I could see her through the back window, bent over the wheel like a demon. I thought the seat would close over me.”

  “They lock into place.”

  “I didn’t know that!” Annie exclaimed. “How could I have known that? When we got back she asked me, ‘Well, is the toothache gone?’”

  “And was it?”

  “Yes.”

  “My mother was a lush, an Irish lush, the worst of the worst,” Jim said, clasping his knees. Annie lit a cigarette and he took it from her companionably. “And the dear old man, St. Vincent himself, left us and beat it back to Donegal or County Clare—I never inquired—and there we were, the seven of us, in Boston, with her falling down, urinating in her clothes. Well, we all had to go to work, except the littlest girl, and she died anyhow. We had to beg the money for a box for her. I can tell you all of it in a few minutes, fourteen years of it. The truth may not be important in the way of real lives, anyhow. By the way, would you like to see Bea?”