by Paula Fox
“I may get a six-week go at Warner’s,” said the Beast. “They’ve been kicking around an Ambrose Bierce story for months, and Larry Green said he might give me a crack at it.”
Ivan looked at him scornfully.
“I’m not making this up,” said the Beast. “Seventy-five dollars a week.”
“I’ll believe you when I see the money,” Ivan said.
“What happened to Cusimano?” Annie asked. Jake was laughing under his breath.
“How the hell do I know?” asked Ivan in an offended tone. “He never came back here.”
“The loony bin,” said the Sheriff grimly. “What else was there?”
“That’s a terrible story,” Annie said distinctly to the room at large.
“Annie darling!” Ivan protested. “It’s just what he deserved. That dumb wop! Why should he have gotten away with his delusions—any more than the rest of us do?” He handed the Beast a ratty pack of cards, and sitting down on the floor with him, said, “Deal, stupid!” The Sheriff appeared to have lapsed into a coma.
“I’d better go,” Annie said to Jake. “I haven’t got an alarm clock and it’ll be luck if I wake up on time.”
The Sheriff suddenly rose and, leaning over his loot, picked out a large plain-faced clock, handing it to her, a look of irritation on his face. “Don’t thank me,” he said hastily. “It’s stolen. Bad luck.”
Annie stood up. “Don’t go, darling girl,” said Ivan, looking intently at his cards. “Your presence improves the atmosphere.”
“Good night, Ivan,” said Jake. “Thanks.”
“Sorry not to have been able to offer you anything,” Ivan said, without looking up from the game. “But we’re broke right now. Next week the Beast will bring us delicious things to eat and drink, won’t you, you lying bastard?”
“Gimme three cards,” said the Beast.
“But what are they?” Annie asked later as she and Jake stood on Hollywood Boulevard waiting for the streetcar which would take her home.
“Writers,” said Jake.
“Writers!” She thought of James St. Vincent. “For what?”
“Ivan says he used to work for MGM. The Beast too. But I think the Sheriff is from the moon.”
“They’re so rough with each other,” she said.
“Let’s walk a ways,” he said. “I don’t see anything coming.”
They set off, passing Grauman’s Chinese Theater, empty shops, a few dimly lit bars. A dull thud accompanied their steps. “Damn!” exclaimed Jake, hopping on one foot. The sole on the other shoe hung from the heel like a cow’s tongue. “I had it fixed just a few weeks ago.” He started to laugh. “Look at that big ugly clock you’re carrying. We are a pair! Here. Let me wind it. Guess what time it is?” They were just passing in front of a jewelry store. Inside, a wall clock was striking midnight. The sound of the chime came delicately through the glass.
“At least, it doesn’t snow here,” he said. “It must be awful to have nothing in a cold climate.”
“It’s awful to have nothing anywhere,” she said.
They both heard the rumble and clank of an approaching streetcar. He said, “Let’s have supper tomorrow?”
“Okay.”
“At the Greek’s, around seven?”
She waved at him from the car window. There was only one other passenger sitting in the rear. She took a seat in the middle of the car. A minute or so later, she heard movement behind her. The man had moved up to take the seat directly back of hers. She kept her head stiffly forward until just before her stop when she glanced out the window.
Beyond the sidewalk, she saw the dark apartment house. A flicker of white was reflected for an instant in the trolley window. She heard the rustle of a newspaper, and, caught between reluctance and curiosity, she darted a look at the other passenger. He was old; his eyes were half closed; in one hand he held up a furled newspaper revealing for her his naked genitals resting on his lap like a newborn cluster of hairless animals.
Johnnie Bliss was not waiting for her tonight. She was relieved. She’d had enough talk for the day. The bed dropped down with its hideous squawk. She listened tensely for a moment, her head against the wall, but there was no groan, no whimper from the room next door.
The people she’d met the last forty-eight hours were like beads from a broken string, rolling senselessly all over Southern California. Except for Walter, whom did she know who had purpose? She shuddered at the thought that she too might roll away into some corner and die, grow crazed like Ivan, grow old in a room like this, become a witch like the crone down the corridor and frighten some young girl not yet even born.
She had liked Jim St. Vincent and Jake, and especially Max Shore, even Ivan. But Walter might save her. She did not, she whispered to herself, like Walter much.
Chapter 7
Whatever notion Annie might have had about becoming a regular wage earner, she was by the end of her first day in the dress shop so disheartened that she wondered where she had gotten the idea that working for a living would give her a sense of legitimacy, the appearance, at least, of being like everyone else. She had wanted to break out of that precarious and anarchic life in which only chance ruled.
Still, to live, one had to eat.
By late afternoon, it struck her that anyone with an ounce of sense would never have agreed to confinement in a basement for nearly nine hours each day in order to collect eleven dollars at the end of a week.
The stock she was supposed to organize rose in pyramids of flimsy boxes. Beyond the few feet lit by a weak bulb, the vast basement was dark. Water dripped constantly in the farther reaches of the darkness. She heard rats. Once stepping outside the circle of sickly yellow light, she ran into a cardboard herd of monstrous deer propped up against a wall. Around their necks hung pine wreaths which disintegrated at her touch.
At midday, a voice shouted to her from above that she should go and get her lunch. She went to a lunchroom a block or so away and ate an egg-salad sandwich, blinking a little in the white dusty light that all but obscured the sky. People looked whey-faced. She passed through a Japanese section on the way back to the store. The toys and cups and fabrics in the display windows emitted a special cheap brightness; in the depths of these shops, small figures moved like silhouettes. In the morning, she had overheard the store manager say to a clerk, “They ought to send all those Japs back to Tokyo.” Walter had once described to her how Japanese soldiers were trained in the use of bayonets—they kept them away from women for months, “to harden them,” he’d said, and they used live Chinese prisoners for spearing. He’d shown her a photograph—soldiers bundled uplike children about to go out and play in the snow, plunging their bayonets in bound prisoners at the bottom of a ditch. A bleaching substance appeared to have affected the sunlight; the color of things ran together, turning the streets gray. All of Los Angeles was a basement.
In the last hour of the day, the manager summoned her upstairs. “Go help Miss Gluck,” he said. Miss Gluck, a middle-aged woman wearing an enormous pompadour of jet-black hair, twitched and shook and mumbled as she snatched dresses from the long metal bars on which they hung and pushed them brutally into the hands of old Negro women or Mexican girls or very fat white women looking for odd-size dresses.
“They don’t wash,” Miss Gluck whispered harshly to Annie as she stuffed dresses into paper bags. “They sweat like pigs—they can’t speak God’s language. One day, they’ll rise up and destroy us…there’ll be nothing left in God’s world. Close your pocketbook! Close it! Don’t ever leave it lying about like that! They’re so dumb. Imagine buying this shit. I wouldn’t buy this shit if I had to go stark naked up the Angel Flight Stairs. Here comes Aunt Jemima with an evil look in her eye! She’s a thief. That old nigger lady’d steal your teeth. Watch her!”
Miss Gluck’s own odor was suffocating, stale apricots and ammonia with an overlay of musky perfume.
The day ended; the clerks rushed out into the dusk. Tomorrow it woul
d begin again.
Annie arrived at the Greek’s a few minutes before Jake. The restaurant was full. A number of men leaned on the bar watching a girl in high heels play the ski-ball machine. The Greek moved lightly about the room, a soiled white cloth tied around his enormous belly. Two waitresses with ferret faces and dyed yellow hair carried plates ranged along their arms and slammed them down before their customers.
Jake looked eager and happy as though he’d had good news. He slid into the chair across from her. “How’s the working girl?” he asked and grabbed her hand and pressed it. He was very sweet, fresh as clover, yet his question angered her. She couldn’t bring herself to answer him. Instead, she read the food-spotted menu. “Hey?” he asked.
“It was terrible,” she said. “I spent the whole day, nearly, in a cellar that must run under the whole town. These poor people buy dresses for a dollar ninety-nine. If you washed them, they’d melt. The store has going-out-of-business sales, but they’re never going to go out of business, not from what I saw in the basement. I took twenty-five minutes for lunch and you’re only supposed to have fifteen. When I came back the manager asked me if I thought I was doing them a favor, ‘lending your presence to our little emporium,’ he said, and didn’t I know the Depression wasn’t over, and how many places would hire someone he doubted even knew the name of the capital of the state. I’m supposed to have the stock organized in a week. After that, I expect, they’ll kill me. The last stock girl, somebody told me, stole four dresses and wore them all out of the store. She must have been in a bad way—to steal that stuff.”
“Well, stay there a few weeks. You can get another job, you know.”
She hadn’t even thought of that.
“It’s always easier to get a job when you have one, I don’t know why.”
“I don’t know why I think I can never get out of things,” she said, defeatedly. “There’s something so dumb about it. You’re right. I’ll find another job.” Her spirits rose. The Greek’s seemed a cheerful place to be.
“Well, I got that job,” he said. “You must bring me luck. It’s nothing much, but it’s something. Maybe some big director will spot me behind all the midgets. Listen, why don’t you get that writer friend of yours to help you get a screen test?”
“Not me.”
“Okay,” said one of the waitresses impatiently. “Let’s have it. You want the special, shrimp cocktail and steak?”
“Could I have a sandwich?” Annie asked, smiling placatingly up at the girl.
“Looka the menu,” she said.
“Have a real dinner,” Jake offered. “I’ve got money.”
“No, I’ll just have a ham sandwich and coffee.” She felt nervously along the bottom of her pocketbook. There were a number of coins among the tobacco shreds. She wouldn’t be paid for two weeks, the manager had told her. Probationary period.
“Look!” she exclaimed. “There’s a red-headed man I saw here before. I think he just comes here to play a special record. He looks rich, doesn’t he? I wonder why he comes to a place like this? He’s drunk, don’t you think?”
The red-headed man was peering into the jukebox. He shoved in a nickel, then looked truculently around the room. Quite suddenly, as though she’d called him, he made straight for Annie. He swayed above her, ignoring Jake.
“You like Sibelius?” he asked in a husky, slightly accented voice. Before she could answer, he hit the table with his fist. “Greatest damn living composer!” The Greek was there in an instant. He led the man to the counter and placed a cup of coffee in front of him. The man pushed it away and rested his head on his arms. The Greek smiled triumphantly at Annie.
She laughed at the expression on Jake’s face. “That’s always happening to me,” she said. “If there’s a drunk within a mile, or a crazy person, they head straight for me.”
“I saw Max last night. He asked me if you’d called. It’s funny how people meet, isn’t it?”
“Max?”
Then she remembered. She grew ill at ease. Had they talked about her?
“He asked about the man and the dog.”
“The man and the dog!” she cried. “I forgot to tell you. When I got home tonight, before I came to meet you, the police were there. The man started howling in the middle of the afternoon, and I guess the other people got scared. They took him away.”
“And the dog?”
The waitress placed their orders on the table. Jake took out his medicine bottle and swallowed a few drops.
“The dog…I don’t know about it. Maybe the old woman was right and there wasn’t a dog…That’s not true. I heard it whimpering. People can bark but they can’t make that hurt sound. I hate to think about the dog.”
“Did you see the man?”
“No, no…I closed my door. I didn’t want to look at him.”
“Listen. Do you have any dresses? You look like you’re dying in that suit.”
“I’ve got a dress,” she said.
He looked so sorry for her, she laughed. “Maybe I’ll get a discount on some of those numbers in the store,” she said.
They stayed a long time at the Greek’s, long after the diners had left, after the red-headed man had been led to the door by one of the waitresses, until there was only a solitary drinker at the bar talking quietly with the Greek, who was picking his teeth thoughtfully, one huge hand grasping a glass of beer.
Jake was telling her about himself. At first she listened without much interest, content to observe him as though he were a pleasing landscape, noting the small shifts of his body, the expressions which gave unexpected life to his face. Then, as she nodded sympathetically at the somewhat halting narrative, she realized its ordinariness, full of a triviality of event inconsonant with the intensity of his voice.
She felt a thrill of anticipation, of fear too, at the thought of what he’d say if she told him a few things about herself. He probably imagined she came from some Sears, Roebuck life like his. There’d be disbelief, indignation perhaps. He might even dare to pity her! At the very idea of such a thing, she glared at him scornfully!
But how could he have noticed when there were tears in his eyes? He was speaking about a girl named Wendy.
Wendy! From some half-remembered conversation among forgotten adults, Annie dredged up the memory of a voice, her father’s?—someone’s—saying that certain names were a dead giveaway of low-class origins—names like Wendy, April, Dawn.
And Jake was crying! Over a Wendy. Annie’s sense of possessing a personal saga of dramatic superiority collapsed.
The girl had married his best friend a month after high-school graduation. She’d met him down near the spring where the cows drank, given him back his high-school ring. That’s really why he’d left and come to California, and he’d been out here for years, but, “I’m still not over it. I still think about her and how she could ever have done that to me.”
She felt her heart would stop with envy. She coveted that girl’s life, wanted to be that girl, already a mother with two children, living in a small town with a husband who had his own secondhand car, and a little house, and Sunday dinners with—
“Hey, what’s the matter with you?”
“What?”
“You’re scowling so!”
“No, no. I’m fine, just listening to you—” Why, her life had been shameful! She might as well tell Jake the story of the man on the streetcar who had exposed himself!
“Would you like to go see Ivan?” he asked in a subdued voice. He looked at her worriedly.
“No, not now,” she said. And then, her voice cracking with dismay, she cried, “I’m a freak myself!” He turned pale and looked hurriedly around the restaurant. She took his hand instantly. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s only the job, the dog, everything…”
The Greek was standing next to their table.
“Come on, kids. I gotta close up now.”
Later, as they walked up Cahuenga, she asked him why he wanted to be an acto
r.
“Oh, the money, I guess…I always liked movies. I’m a good dancer, you know. And I didn’t want to be stuck in a small town all my life.”
She glanced at his face. He wouldn’t make it. She didn’t know why she knew, but she did. His being was too plain; it was his virtue, his limitation. They stopped in front of a shoe store.
“Look at those red shoes,” she said. “Aren’t they pretty!”
He put his arm around her and his soft hair fell against her cheek as he ducked to kiss her. “I’ll get them for you,” he murmured. She pulled away from him violently. “What’s the matter?” She looked at the few people walking down the street. He saw the direction of her glance. “They’re not thinking about us,” he said. Then, “Come back with me, to my place.”
She was silent.
“Come back,” he repeated softly.
She looked at the red shoes. “But what did it feel like to be you?” she burst out. “Oh, I’ve looked in windows, I have seen people sitting around a table together, but what’s really going on? You’ve told me about basketball games and cows and Sunday dinners and cold winters. Cows! And a graduation ring! And you just decided to be an actor, just decided to come to Hollywood! How does that happen? How do you decide? What does it mean? And you got drunk with your brother and drove the truck into a ditch. What did you feel about it? And your mother made you that blanket and you had a teacher you liked. What it’s like to be you!”
He retreated into the recessed entrance of the shoe store from where he stared out at her in astonishment as though she were about to assault him. A man passed them and looked questioningly at her.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said humbly. “Come back, come out of there…”
He took a few cautious steps. She smiled. He laughed nervously. “You didn’t do anything to be sorry about,” he said.
They walked on. “You must have felt I’d left out something,” he said finally. “I did. I stole a car and spent six months in jail. I don’t know why I did it. I was just eighteen. There it was, parked in front of the movie house. Sometimes I worked there at night, changing the posters, you know, behind the display glass, and ushering. The key was in the car. I drove it out of town past the Burma-Shave signs, and when I got to the last one, a state trooper was waiting for me. I knew him, we all did, the kids always do in a small town like that. They went easy on me. I could have got a lot more time. My father cried. I won’t be in the army, even if there’s a war, because of the record, a criminal record.” He was silent for a while. “It wasn’t criminal though. It was an impulse. I didn’t want the car. It was just there! And I felt like breaking out…”