The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

  “Explain what?”

  “I’ll tell him something. He’ll get the idea. Please. Tomorrow is Sunday. Tonight, you could stay all night, couldn’t you?”

  Sunday.

  Her life was blowing up. She didn’t know whether to get on the streetcar that was even now lurching toward them, go to the Greek’s, go back to her room and wait for the hour of Walter’s arrival, go to May Landower’s and beg for mercy, get out of California at once, hitchhike her way back east, or just stay with Jake Yes, they’d get a little house together; Carson could drink beer in the living room and break glasses on the wall while she and Jake huddled in the bedroom…She didn’t know what she was doing with coins in her hand, where she was going.

  “No!” she cried out.

  “No, what?”

  “Jake, I’ve got to go!”

  But he held on to her and the streetcar passed. She looked at it hopelessly. “Annie, what is it?”

  They walked back up Sycamore. “Are you sick? Is that it?”

  She told him. She spoke quickly, her eyes on his feet; his footsteps began to drag; she observed, remotely, that he’d had his shoe resoled. Then she stopped talking. She looked up at him. His face ashen, his eyes rimmed in red. “Wait—” she begged.

  “You’ve been waiting for him all this week, then,” he said in a lifeless voice. “You’ve just used me.”

  Her legs were weak. Did he know how she’d used him?

  “I didn’t mean to,” she said. She wanted to explain to him that she was caught. But she didn’t understand that herself, the how of it. Most of all, she wanted to do something, say something that would change his expression.

  “My life’s been a mess,” she said, her eyes on his face, willing him to listen. “Not like Carson’s. Just a mess. I don’t know anything. I don’t even know how to wash my teeth the right way. It’s as if, every day, I start all over again, like an ignorant baby. This man, Walter, well, he’s a little like Max Shore. I mean, he can teach me.” Jake turned his head away, looked up at the houses, the trees, the empty street. What was it some man had said to her once? “I’d like to take you in hand,” he’d said, grinning.

  “I need to be taken in hand,” she said wretchedly.

  “You’re afraid of that man,” Jake said. She began to deny it. Out of Ivan’s house, a giant suddenly appeared carrying a stuffed pillowcase. She and Jake went back a few steps. The giant had a chin like a ledge.

  “Santa Claus,” Jake whispered. Annie laughed weakly. “Maybe he’s gone into business with the Sheriff,” she said. Jake placed a hand on her arm.

  “You don’t mean it. Stay with me. You looked sick when you were talking about Vogel. My God! He’s twelve years older than you!”

  For a long time, they argued back and forth passionately. Then she saw him glance up uneasily at the windows of the house, worrying about Carson Brody, she knew.

  “He’s a real son of a bitch, your old buddy,” she exclaimed. “Where do you get off, telling me what to do? What’s good for me? You sat there all evening with a silly grin on your face while he vomited on everything.”

  “He’s loyal!” Jake cried. “You wouldn’t know about that!”

  “I’m going.”

  “Go!”

  “Jake?”

  “He was right. Carson was right!” he shouted and suddenly bolted, leaping up the steps to the porch, coughing and sobbing. She saw him flying toward the stairs. She listened for several minutes as if to catch the last echo of his weeping. The grief was about her. What was the matter with her that she should stand there listening, hoping to hear more! Stand there, touched by joy as though she were increased, made substantial by the grief she’d caused. Yet something neutral in her stood aside; neither she nor Jake had felt as much as they’d pretended. She ran past the freak house, down to Hollywood Boulevard.

  On Saturday night, the small bars were full. People promenaded, stopping now and then to gaze into shopwindows. From the streetcar window, Annie caught glimpses of the clothes displayed, all so new, so unobtainable. With her job, there was no possibility of saving up enough to buy anything; there wasn’t really enough to eat on. Her underwear was ragged, her shoes nearly gone.

  At her stop, she looked for Johnnie’s car. But it wasn’t there. She dreaded being alone.

  On impulse she telephoned James St. Vincent before she went up to her room. The woman who answered—Annie assumed it was one of the two who’d been at the dining table that evening—said curtly that Mr. St. Vincent was in Palm Springs for an indefinite stay.

  Just after midnight, as Annie was trying to concentrate on Man’s Fate, Johnnie showed up, drunk and twirling his toupee. He was carrying a paper bag from which he first took six grapefruit, then a glass orange-juice squeezer. She watched him listlessly, grateful that he was there but too desolate to talk to him.

  “Here I worry about you so! You’ve just deserted your poor old Johnnie.” He hacked away at the grapefruit with a pocketknife until he’d managed to cut them into ragged sections. Then, grunting with effort, his toupee askew, he squeezed. He grabbed a glass and presented her with the results of his efforts, kicking away a rind near his foot.

  “California!” she exclaimed.

  “Shut up, Annie-Fannie. Drink it.”

  She drank it, then she told him about Carson Brody whose hatred had pursued her to this room and hour.

  “There are thousands of boys like that—rough boys out to make a million, plotting how to do everybody in.” Johnnie’s voice was slurred only slightly; as he spoke he picked up the grapefruit rinds and dropped them back in the paper bag.

  “It’s something about the way we’re all brought up—the way we grow up.” He sighed and dropped the bag on a table and sank heavily into the chair. “Everybody wants to make a million. He’ll marry some poor Mary, and get six children off her. He’ll drink too much and consort with whores. My mother said we all go to God, and every Sunday for twelve years she shoved me into the family pew. Christ! The only joke she ever made in her life—that I heard—was when my daddy died of heart trouble in Chicago —he had a little meat-packing plant and after he left Mama, he married a woman half his age—well, my mother said, after she’d read the telegram, ‘He got away scot-free!’ My uncles were deacons in the church. The church was everything in our lives. But all the time I was holding the little Jesus-cards in my hand in Sunday school, I was thinking—get out! You got a cigarette?”

  She handed him one. He lit it, saying, “Wait! Wait!” as he puffed. And she waited, seeing all those fathers running away.

  “I had a French boy once,” he was saying. “Claude. He came here to make it in pictures. But he was too beautiful. It made you sick, just to look at him. Well, he said to me, ‘You’re all so boring wiz your unhappy-happy…Your pricks grow but your leetle minds stay in muzzer’s lap…’” Johnnie laughed and coughed. “You too, Annie? Thinking about your millions?”

  “No, no…”

  “What then? What are you after?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Whatever it is, this is the place for it.” He took off his jacket and untied his shoes. “I drank too much,” he said, belching heavily. He lay down on his side of the bed. “Our last night, Queenie. I hate to think what’s going to happen here in this bed tomorrow!” He made his Pola Negri love face and buried his head in the blanket.

  In the morning, he was cold, distant, sarcastic. Perversely, she wanted to go with him when he left.

  Walter arrived in the late afternoon, and Annie, nervous and pale—she’d not gone out for anything, eating a couple of oranges and a box of crackers—looked at him with a frozen face as he dropped his sea bag on the floor, the thump she’d been anticipating all week.

  “Hello, baby,” he said. She huddled against him, feeling the metal buttons of his work shirt pressing against her. His presence made the room shrink; he smelled of soap and machine oil.

  “Is there anything to eat?” he asked, unbuttoning the sh
irt, pushing her away.

  “I didn’t go out. I was afraid you’d come.”

  “Later…”

  Without his clothes, he seemed less massive. There was a thick lurid scar on his right thigh. Jake’s thin bones had pressed against her under cover of darkness like the bones of an invalid child; she’d imagined his flesh to be faintly blue. Walter’s chest and back were the color of light amber. As he lay down next to her, she wondered what he would feel upon discovering that that crucial, yet ridiculous, obstruction was gone. He might accuse her of having held out on him. She began to invent a story to herself, then gave it up and put her arms around him. He muttered into her neck that she would have to do something about a contraceptive.

  His hands, his mouth, at last his sexual organ, invaded her; she could not control the stiffening of her limbs; she fled him even as she lay there so passively.

  He was subdued as he had never been when he’d tried to make love to her before. She thought, as the sweat of his exertion covered her belly and thighs, that it would be possible to love him even for this, though that female response he’d had so much experience of, with which he’d taunted her so mercilessly, might be forever beyond her, she might learn to love the helpless animal hidden behind clothes and speech—if it was this humble and sightless and mute. But it wasn’t mute! That wordless cry against her breast had tossed into life every human being, the old witch in the corridor, the mad German, the multitudes. As she felt him slide out and away from her, she wondered at the silence of the helpless animal in herself. Had she been born without it?

  “You’ve been thinking,” he whispered, “all the time.” She looked at his reddened eyes. “Annie…sometimes you’re a little homely.”

  She gasped with pain and turned away. He said nothing more. It grew late. She went down to the boulevard and walked until she found an open grocery store. When she returned, he was in his Levi’s, shirtless, clean, handsome. He emptied the grocery bag. “Oh, Annie. Christ!”

  She had bought little hot dogs in pastry.

  “This isn’t food!”

  “I got what they had…”

  “You should have gotten stuff like canned macaroni—” She burst into tears. She danced around the room, sobbing. She threw herself across the bed; she rolled to the floor. Wrapped in her grief, she heard remote sounds, footsteps, a strange little whistle.

  She coughed. Her sobs stopped and she looked through her tangled hair at Walter. He was buttoning on his work shirt with intent concentration. Their glances met. He smiled.

  She got up and went to the toilet where she blew her nose on the rough gray toilet paper. When she came out, Walter was making the bed.

  “We’ll eat now,” he said.

  Chapter 9

  Annie emerged from the basement at the end of each day to the bright lights of the store, then out to the streetcar, which, rattling and shaking, bore her home to the apartment house. Walter was often waiting for her. Sometimes he was out and did not return until she was asleep. Although the job demanded little physical effort from her, the intense boredom, the isolation, exhausted her.

  She met some of his friends, most of them from the Federal Theater days. Their living arrangements measured the degree of success they’d attained in movieland. One couple shared a huge shadowy house with a director and his wife out in the valley. What valley, Annie didn’t know. The actor husband came to pick them up in a Chrysler touring car that had seen better days. It smelled pleasantly of leather and mint. Mitchel Lowe, the actor, said his wife had been growing mint and selling it to little markets around town. He drove the old car with great verve; he was happy, he’d just gotten his first substantial part in a movie. He teased Walter about his “shipping out.” “Next, you’ll be in a factory, Walt. A worker! A worker!”

  Lowe was the oddest-looking man Annie had ever seen. He had a jester’s face, a huge bony nose, eyebrows like small hedges that rose and fell as he talked. His eyes seemed amused by everything he said, as if they were the audience of his mobile face.

  Walter was smiling, somewhat angrily, she thought. “Anyone who changes his name for the movies is hardly in a position to sneer at the revolutionary efforts of a man who’s trying to rid himself of middle-class attitudes. For God’s sake! Mitchel Lowe! The ultimate Gentile nothing name!”

  Lowe grabbed Walter’s knee and squeezed it. “Envy!” he shouted. “Wished it was you, don’t you, Walt!”

  They began to talk about movies, Walter saying that most of the new ones were ruined by Jewish sentimentality. Annie shrank back against the seat. But Lowe seemed indifferent, even amused. “You anti-Semite…” he said without rancor.

  They rode up a driveway to a house similar in size and architectural hysteria to the ones Annie had seen in Arizona Canyon. Inside the vast living room, a middle-aged woman knitted by the light of a small lamp. A small, elegantly dressed man leaned on a grand piano while another paced up and down, fingering his chin thoughtfully. The room seemed to have very few lamps for its size.

  Everyone greeted Walter familiarly. As Lowe was introducing Annie to the knitting woman, a girl walked heavily into the room and went up to Lowe.

  “Murray—”

  “Mitchel!” shouted the actor. “Lottie, please!”

  “Whatever your name is—did you pick up the bread?”

  “Forgot…” said Lowe, smiling warmly at Annie.

  “We were speaking of Chaliapin,” remarked the small man at the piano. “Play the ‘Death and Farewell’ again, will you, Natasha?”

  The woman put down her knitting and went to a record player. The pacing man had halted in front of Annie and was staring down at her. He was tall, heavily built, with white hair and black eyebrows. In the dim light of the room, Annie could see how silken his skin was, how rosy his cheeks. “Who’s this, Walter?” he asked with a trace of an accent.

  “This is my Annie,” said Walter.

  Natasha glided back to her chair and picked up her knitting needles. “What a young one, Walter,” she said.

  “Please,” said the Chaliapin lover. “No one talk. I want to hear this.”

  “I’m Gunther Wildener,” said the white-haired man, extending his hand to Annie. She shook it briefly. Lottie was looking gravely at Walter. Her eyes widened slightly. “Hello, Walt,” she said. They put their arms around each other and stood silently together. When they drew apart, Walter said, “Are you all right? Murray says he has a big job coming up.”

  “Mitchel!” said the actor. “What are you, my enemies?”

  Lottie looked coolly at Annie. “How are you?” she asked formally and turned away at once to her husband. “We won’t have any bread for breakfast.”

  Annie felt a little stab of fear. Lottie was beautiful; Walter treated her so respectfully. But she was so cold!

  They were all talking together now—they’d drawn away from her, and she was surprised when a hand took hers. It was Gunther’s. He drew her over to the long heavy drapes that hid the windows.

  “What are you doing in this insane place? I assume you come from somewhere else? Everyone out here does.”

  For a second she thought he meant that room they were standing in, and she looked over her shoulder at Walter who was talking animatedly to the knitter.

  “Hollywood,” said Wildener. “Hollywood, I mean.”

  “I’m not interested in the movies,” Annie said hastily.

  “Good for you!” Wildener said, laughing. “Then what are you doing with Walter Vogel? He spends people like pennies, especially people your age.”

  “We’re together.”

  “You’re together?” The conversation on the other side of the room began to drown out Chaliapin.

  “Don’t bother to try and hear what they’re saying. They’re talking about Trotskyites. Trotskyites and Russian culture. Kulturni. Very grand subjects. But Lottie is thinking about the bread her husband forgot. Lottie pays no attention. Look at that!” He pointed to a painting hanging on the wall betwe
en the windows. “A Landseer! Imagine a Landseer in this dwelling. The former tenant had English inclinations, perhaps. Or animal.” He walked over to the painting and drew a finger across its surface. Annie had followed him, not quite knowing what else to do. “It’s a copy. I must get glasses.”

  “What a pretty dog,” said Annie.

  “Yes. Pretty…Were you born in California? Is such a thing possible? Have you seen the avenue of fortunetellers? The swamis? It’s the biggest gypsy encampment in the world, Hollywood. These people”—he waved at the others—“they think you can be good out here. Some of them have never seen lawns before. They think a lawn is the substance of Paradise! Every day is invented here as if there’d been no day before it. But wait. When we are at war, how things will change! Pretty girls will wear uniforms and march down the boulevards singing patriotic songs—”

  “It’s an imperialist war,” said a voice at Annie’s shoulder. It was the man who’d been standing at the piano. He’d apparently given up Chaliapin for the moment.

  “This is Israel Kuyper,” said Wildener. “He intends to become a famous director, don’t you, Israel? What is your last name, Annie? Walter doesn’t think women should have last names.”

  “Gianfala,” she said.

  Kuyper nodded at her wearily. “We will not be in this war,” he said to Gunther.

  “Oh, but we will. Before it is over, we will!” Gunther said. “You forget. I’ve been in Germany as late as last year. I have seen what I have seen.”

  “We must mobilize the people against imperialist war,” Kuyper said insistently. “Tell me, Gunther, how are your students reacting to events?”

  “My students,” Wildener said, “are either passive or stupid or both. But they are all rich. I have had to teach a little course in the Depression. I told them there is no more bitter sight than men without work. But they think that is the ideal condition of life.”

  “Would you like to hear Chaliapin again?” asked Kuyper.

  “I loathe opera!” roared Gunther. “Especially Russian opera!”