by Paula Fox
He gripped her arm. “You were so smart to know I’d been hiding that.” She said nothing. She didn’t know how to explain that what she’d wanted from him was not his secret. Could no one ever tell her what it was like to be himself?
She held his hand on the way back to the room on Sycamore Street. He didn’t turn on the light. For a while, they smoked and watched Ivan’s window.
The Beast, wearing a dark suit, was drinking from a jug of wine, and Ivan was fiddling with his phonograph. A murmur of sound crossed the few yards separating the two windows. It was a quiet night in the freak house. Jake held her arms and hands when they weren’t smoking. It seemed uncanny to sit there and watch that room.
Finally, Jake stood up and led her to his bed. He placed the afghan carefully in a chair, then undressed himself. She took off the hateful suit and removed her underwear. She was frightened because there could be no backing out. From that moment when he’d emerged so uncertainly from the shoe-store entrance, she had marked herself for this.
It hurt her in a way she had not expected; it was such personal secret pain. And she was dazed at the suddenness with which it happened and then was over. Jake was brief and light and nearly silent—she listened to his heavy breathing thinking of Walter’s mad howls that had always filled her with embarrassment even though things had never gone this far between them.
The silence was total; the man lying next to her, so slender, so silken-skinned, seemed now a manifestation of the darkness, something she’d imagined. Then he spoke, his mouth against her ear. “You were new,” he said, whispering. “I didn’t know that.” There was a touch of pride in his voice. She suddenly felt angry, angry in the same way she had been with Walter when he’d said he hated virgins. Jake was making some claim on her. She wouldn’t allow it.
“I should have used something, I guess,” he said. She couldn’t worry about that—how could they have made a baby when she lay there like the dead.
He went all the way home with her. The light was beginning to break over the hills, a light the color of water in a tin pail. “I’ll come and get you from work tomorrow,” he said. He kissed her before she went in. She liked that, his light boy’s kiss.
Underneath a door was a telegram from Walter that announced his arrival for the following Sunday. She looked at the Sheriff’s alarm clock, two hours left for sleep.
Lying awake in her bed, knowing she wouldn’t sleep at all, she thought of Walter. She thought of her father, laughing and on his hands and knees in front of a fat woman in some Village bar he’d taken her to once. She thought of the high-school teacher from Summit, his awful kisses. She thought of Jake.
Her job was terrible; she’d never get Jake’s room now. But she’d done one thing for Walter. She’d removed the condition he’d objected to. Then, wanting to cry out with shame, she said aloud, “Jake did it. I got him to do it…”
Chapter 8
On the second day of her job, Annie asked the manager for a stronger bulb for the basement. He said, she could see the boxes, couldn’t she? Well, then, enough is a sufficiency; there hadn’t been any complaints before—maybe her eyes were at fault.
She imagined that after a few weeks in that basement, you would lose the heart to complain. The day was no better except that Miss Gluck, with rather insidious smiles, seemed to suggest they were allies against the poor women who searched so dejectedly through the racks of sleazy dresses.
Beneath the weak yellow light, she made lists of stock, tossed away into the darkness damp boxes covered with mold, and whenever the manager shouted down to her, carried up the articles he demanded, emerging into the store with a pile of boxes in her hands, half blinded by the bright lights. Like a mole, she began to prefer to be underground. She suspected that the manager and his salesladies were afraid to descend the long flight of stairs leading into her dungeon. She felt malicious and triumphant and made a point of telling Miss Gluck about the rats, concealing a mean smile when she saw the woman’s thick throat pulsate with disgust. She went back downstairs, thinking the basement was the only fit place for a nature as cruel as her own.
All day she’d been troubled by a vague physical discomfort; perhaps she was about to menstruate. Uncle Greg had taken her off to a doctor when she was thirteen. He’d shown her a drawing of a naked woman pasted on a piece of thick cardboard. She would see that woman forever—she’d had no face. Numbered arrows pointed to various parts of the woman’s body. The doctor, looking at her sternly, had read aloud the explanatory legends which had matched the numbers. But she’d known all that for years. One of the girls in school had carried around a sanitary napkin in a business envelope with her father’s address printed on the back. Her classmates had all touched it in the girls’ lavatory, giggling and shuddering. She remembered how she’d angered them, saying, “It’s all boring…” But she hadn’t meant to be superior—she didn’t know what she’d meant. When she was very small, her father and Bea had taken her with them to a movie. It had been The Squaw Man. She wondered to this day what there had been in the movie that had made her ask Bea, as they walked out of the movie house, “How are babies made?” Bea had answered in a voice of glacial rage, “Sexual intercourse!” What had James St. Vincent said about Bea? She hated helplessness. Sex made people helpless.
The store was closing for the day; Miss Gluck was gathering up her parcels, her cardigan sweater, her purse; the salesladies went home; the manager smoked a cigarette. Annie saw Jake across the street, waiting for her.
She waved at him timidly. His arms went up in a gesture of welcome. If he knew how she’d used him! She moved nervously out of range as she approached him, fearing he would embrace her. “Wait…” she said. He took her arm and led her into the entrance of an office building. There, he kissed her cheeks, pulled at her braids, and draped his thin arms around her shoulders. “I’ll burn down that place for you,” he said.
Tonight, the Greek recognized them and took them to a table himself. After dinner, they went directly to Jake’s room. He’d bought a flower for her, a gardenia, lying in a wrinkle of white tissue paper. Its aroma filled the room.
“I’ve told my buddy, Carson, about you, and he wants to meet you. He’s decided to be a stunt man—they make lots of money—and he wants us to get a place together, maybe rent a little house. I’m going to stay. Did you hear me, Annie? I mean, things are looking up, aren’t they? Do you want me to stay, Annie? If Carson and I get a little house, it would be nicer for us than this room, wouldn’t it? I had another idea for you, The May Company. It’s the biggest department store out here. They’ll give you decent wages.”
Annie saw the future—herself returning to the “little house” where Carson, the stunt man, and Jake, the dancer, waited. Like the Sheriff, she would return with a burlap bag full of stolen objects. Soon, they would both begin to call her the Sheriff, too. She looked down at her shabby shoes, the heels so worn on the outside that it was a strain to stand upright.
“My father told me there were hotel rooms that cost five hundred dollars a week,” she said.
Jake frowned. “What?”
“Just that.”
“Saturday, we can go to the beach.”
“Every Saturday? You and me and Carson?”
“I mean, this Saturday.” The frown gave way to bewilderment. “What’s the matter?”
“Sorry,” she said coolly, smiling. Uncertainly, he smiled back. “How’s your colitis?”
“Okay,” he said, subdued.
“When does your picture start?”
“My picture?” He walked to the window. “It’s only a few days’ work.”
“Are those little houses you were talking about furnished?”
“I don’t know.”
She pitied him as she might have pitied an animal being baited, a little less, perhaps. He could stop her if he only knew it. She looked at the waxy petals of the gardenia. What was that? A celebration of sexual intercourse? That loss of grace, that sprawl of limbs, tha
t revelation that only the outside of life was dry and imperishable but that the inside was all wetness and blood and the perishable and perilous beat of pulses?
Frightened by the tumult of anger that raged within her, she began to pace about the room.
There was a noisy thud, her ankles were gripped and she fell to the hard floor. Jake had tackled her; he lay on the floor at the end of her own length, his hands still holding her ankles. They were both gasping, the wind knocked out of them. Jake began to climb her as if she’d been a rope, hand over hand, keeping her immobilized, until his face was only a few inches from hers.
“Annie, Annie…” he said.
She clenched a fist.
“You’re crying.”
“I’m not,” she cried.
He helped her up and led her to the gardenia. “Now smell that,” he said, and pushed it in her face. “Smell it good!”
Later, he showed her a contraceptive. “That’s the ugliest thing I ever saw,” she said. “It looks like something old dwarfs make in a cellar.”
He wanted her to stay the night and go to work in the morning from Sycamore Street. But she couldn’t, she said. He took her home on the streetcar. From its windows, she spotted Johnnie’s parked car. Hurriedly, she began to tell Jake about him. He listened without comment. “He’s helped me so much, shared his food with me. When I haven’t had anyone to talk to…”
“Where does he sleep when he stays over?” Jake asked.
“On the floor…he gets into trouble and can’t go back to his room.”
“Those people are always in trouble,” he said.
“So is everybody!” she cried. “It’s not the same,” he said as he followed her over to the car. Johnnie was sitting up in the front seat, squinting at a newspaper in the light of a street lamp. He looked up as they approached, his eyes on Jake.
She introduced them quickly, then grabbed Jake’s arm and led him away toward the streetcar stop, aware that Johnnie was watching them intently. She felt everything was about to be revealed, all her secrets, all her lies. She wished Jake gone forever.
“I’d better go back,” she said pleadingly. “I haven’t seen him for a while and I owe it to him. He’s probably just going to stay an hour or so.”
“I want you to come back with me,” Jake said.
“Oh! I can’t, Jake!” She was exasperated. “I’m too tired!”
He gave in with a shrug, then kissed her cheek. She turned away, frantic to be in her room, not caring what Jake thought. “Tomorrow?” he asked almost timidly. “Yes, yes…” she promised.
She looked back once. Jake stood there, looking down at the tracks, a tall lank figure, his head drooping.
“So that’s what you’ve been up to,” Johnnie said. “You bad thing…you certainly fooled old Johnnie.”
“Oh, hush!” she said.
He continued hectoring her even as he took his accustomed place on the bed. She hated the sour smell he gave off when he shifted from side to side. But she suffered from her own ingratitude. She sensed that she hadn’t wanted Johnnie to see her with Jake; she didn’t want to be painted with Johnnie’s brush—sexual intercourse. For God’s sake, how could she explain to him that she didn’t see what all the noise was about? That what she loved was lying there with Jake, talking softly in the dark, their legs tangled, their faces close together, their hands clasped. It was such a comfort! What did Johnnie’s awful stories about thin little men with enormous sex organs have to do with that?
The next evening, she met Carson Brody. He had an ugly hard-looking skull and narrow gray eyes. In his presence, Jake grew excited and expansive. Carson, at first, was silent, watchful. She felt the iron quality of his suspicion. He refused to speak to her directly, but his words seemed meant for her, sentences that uncoiled like snakes, about bitches and bastards, about stunt men who drove motorcycles off cliffs and bashed in their brains, about a certain bar where they kept a record of those men who’d survived three assignments without breaking a limb. But mostly he spoke of the bitches who “snowed” men, who took them for a ride, who wanted to “get laid,” who betrayed men as naturally as they breathed. Jake was a baby, he said once, a rube who didn’t know his ass from his elbow, but he, Carson, was there to see to his interests; Carson would never let him down. Jake glowed. Carson said he couldn’t see how a nice American Arizona boy like Jake could get mixed up with a goddamned Communist like Max Shore.
“He’s all right, Carson,” Jake said. “You just take it easy there.”
But Carson grew more venomous, like a spider that poisons itself; his outbursts grew louder; he flung out observations, warnings, threats like bottles, and they shattered haphazardly against the surface of a world he judged to be without hope of redemption. Now, it was Hollywood.
“All the pansies in the U.S. of A. come here and get themselves little nests and drag these boys off the street and corrupt them …they wanta be actors so they can show their asses to the world under the hot lights, rubbing up against women like they like it when all the time they got their eyes glued to some poor little hick who’s running errands for the director…you notice how their eyes look when they’re supposed to be mooning over some actress? I’ve studied them, studied them. They’re thinking of all these lost little boys that come out here for fortune and fame, and not asses, like they do. And the women, they’re all crazy because there’s no men out here, just pansies and gypsies and fortunetellers and Communists…”
“Carson, cut it out,” interrupted Jake amiably. “You’re talking too rough.”
Carson lifted his lip in what might have been a smile.
“We ought to get in that war,” he said. “Purify the whole country, get them all in uniform, yes sir! No sir! Get their asses in those uniforms, they’d stop waggling them for sure.”
His flat blunt fingers played with the brown fabric of his trousers where it tightened over his knees. His bullet head was aimed at her but his eyes rested on Jake. He sucked down half a bottle of beer.
“Were you born out here?” she asked.
“Boston,” he said curtly.
“Why did you come to California?”
He didn’t answer her at all. “Jake, what’s doing with that movie. I bet there’ll be some beautiful gash walking around half naked.” He shot her a sudden glance.
Annie stood up. “I’d better go,” she said to Jake. Brody’s fury was swallowing all the oxygen in the room. She could hardly breathe.
“I thought we’d go out and get some coffee at the Greek’s,” Jake said uneasily.
“No. I’ve got some things to do,” she said. She went to the door, seeing Carson out of the corner of her eye, slumped over the bed, fiddling with the afghan. Jake joined her at the door. “I’ll go down with you,” he said.
On the stairs, she said, “Oh, Jake, he’s—”
“No, wait!” He put a finger on her lips. “He really worries about me. He’s had the saddest life I ever heard about. His father died and left his mother and nine children. She had to put six of them in a foundling home.”
They went out to the porch. A cat leaped from the shadows and ran into the house. “Listen,” Jake said. “There was nothing to eat. I mean nothing. His mother had some withering disease, it just ate her up, day after day. He was one of the three kids that stayed with her, so he had to watch it happen. Her relatives were as bad off, and he saw how the priests didn’t help her, and they would have starved to death if she hadn’t got a job scrubbing floors in an insane asylum outside Boston, taking home garbage the patients wouldn’t even eat. He ran away when he was just a little kid. He was always so big no one knew he was weak—because of that build. He got jobs, and for two years, he told me, he just ate, day and night. Then he worked for the CCC and wanted to send the thirty dollars a month back to his mother. But they couldn’t find her.”
“Boston’s where St. Vincent comes from,” Annie said. Jake continued, as though he hadn’t heard her.
“She’d just go
ne up in smoke,” he said. “He’s never been able to track down a single member of his family, he’s never had the money to really concentrate on it. I think it drives him crazy, all those people just disappearing, like a boat sinking, and you’re the only survivor.”
“But why was he so angry with me?”
They started down Sycamore Street.
Jake spoke seriously, as though he were really trying to think about it.
“It’s not you. It’s me. I’m the only real friend he’s got. I met him back home. He was working in a place near the farm. My family was pretty nice to him. He thinks women are two kinds, bad and worse. The bad ones are old and can’t do much to you. He knows all about the worse ones. He thinks I’m a pushover, you see, and that I’ll get taken advantage of.”
“Did you tell him about me?” she asked, a tremor in her voice.
“I tell him everything,” Jake said. “It makes him feel good, like I trust him. It comforts him.”
She was struck by the idea that Jake’s confidences could provide that starved gray dog with comfort. For a moment she was silent. They were nearing the boulevard.
“Why does he talk so much about pansies?”
“He was nervous, he always is in front of strangers. I know he’s hard to understand. But he can be really funny! He’s got the damnedest schemes for making money. He can talk all night about money, how it can fix everything. Listen, don’t go. I know you’re only going because of Carson. Look, you go to the Greek’s and wait for me. I’ll go back and explain—”