The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

  But somehow, in the conversation about law and enlistment and lawyers, he’d managed to get from Jake Annie’s last address.

  He hardly glanced at Jake when he left, looking instead at the wet outline of Jake’s body on the couch. Eva came up behind him and put her arms around his waist. She leaned against him. He had the fancy that he was carrying her on his back.

  “Max?” she questioned in a low voice.

  “I’m out of cigarettes,” he said shortly. “I’ll go out and see if the drugstore is open.”

  “You know it isn’t,” she said, breaking away from him.

  He shrugged and gave her a strained smile. They went to bed and lay sleepless, listening to the rain beating against the windows.

  A week later, when Max and Eva were in Los Angeles, he’d seen Annie standing in front of a movie house. She’d looked toward him once, then quickly away. He didn’t know whether she’d seen him or not. Eva had hurried him on. They were due at a committee meeting about the pamphlet. Max had glanced over his shoulder in time to see Annie enter the movie house with a man.

  Then a few days later he’d written her a note.

  The instant he mailed it, he was ashamed. The short paragraph had held nothing but gross patronage, offering help for troubles he could not guess at. He thought about nothing else the rest of the day; he realized that his shame came from the deception he was trying to practice.

  The real reason he wanted to get in touch with her was curiosity, a wish to interfere with her, to get her in front of him, to look at her as long as he wished, to question her as much as he wanted. Max’s response to Jake’s story, the boy’s feeble, pathetic protestation of betrayed love, revealed to Max, the more he had brooded upon it, the extent to which the girl had taken hold of his imagination. To write the letter, he had told himself that he was acting in the best tradition of social responsibility, a political priest concerned about the erring stray outside the saved flock. And upon that thought came the question, Was it because she was a stray that he was so interested in her?

  The strays that interested the party were not road wanderers and seamen’s girls with unidentifiable accents. A Negro shipscaler, or a member of a reactionary union, a textile worker from the South, a union official, class workers such as printers, anyone working on the waterfront, but not a girl like that. He wasn’t desirable himself, a man whose face stiffened when Balzac was referred to as railroad-owning bourgeois or who quibbled about Rousseau, whose income came from “timber barons,” who, in fact, need not ever work if he chose not to. Eva gave him, he thought, his only legitimacy. She was real; she was correct, even her impulses were undeviating as though charged by an instinct entirely political. She never said the wrong thing; she never thought the wrong thing.

  Several months passed but Annie did not answer his note.

  It might have ended. Then Calvin Schmitter brought up Theda Rothstein at a closed meeting at the State School. Theda had been neglecting her weekly column in the party paper, he said. It was clear to anyone who kept a careful eye on these matters that Theda was drifting. He had heard she was writing a book. A book about herself and Simon Concannon. She should have gotten over Simon’s death, by now, Calvin said. It was getting to be six years since the painter had been killed in Spain. Furthermore, he’d only been an ambulance driver. She was behaving in an obstinate, improper way. Theda was morbid. Her grief increased with time instead of decreasing—in the correct way. She had walked out of an editorial meeting in a rude manner. Although he felt nothing personal about it, he’d heard she’d referred to him as “that missionary.” As a functionary, he represented the party. If Theda was offensive to him, she was being offensive to the party.

  Listening to Calvin raging, Max had wondered if, after the revolution, the world wouldn’t be largely composed of Calvins. Unless one were permitted to shoot both forward and backward at the barricades.

  Unhappily, Calvin had designated Max to go and see Theda and talk matters over in a comradely way. Find out. Report back.

  So he’d gone to see her. The door to her apartment was open. Directly across from the door, the leaves of a eucalyptus tree flickered against the window. A table was drawn up against the sill. On it stood a candle in a wine bottle covered with melted wax. There were several newspapers on the table and a mug. Theda was sitting on a bench looking at her fingers. She looked up as Max walked in, then motioned him to silence. “Sixty-three, sixtyfour,” she said aloud, counting out the numbers on her fingers.

  He smiled at her. She looked at him distractedly. Then, without taking her eyes from his face, she pushed a stack of books to the edge of the table, and watched them topple to the floor.

  “Mr. Irving Blond was eighty-four when he died,” she said. “A French Jew, you think? But he was only sixty when the picture was taken.”

  When he stood next to her at the table, he saw she was looking down at the obituary page in a Los Angeles newspaper. There was a picture of Mr. Blond taken in 1926.

  “Did you know him?”

  “No. I don’t know any of them.” She waved toward the page. “I’m interested in life spans.”

  He remembered, then, how Theda always asked the names of pet animals in houses, how once, at a meeting in someone’s apartment, she had enraged Calvin by interrupting in a loud voice his dissertation on Menshevism to ask the age of the mongrel sitting beneath the table, then figuring out its life possibilities as though Calvin had simply been snatched away by magic. It was Theda’s habit to calculate such possibilities. The death of a child whose passing she had noted in a newspaper or whom she had heard about seemed to stun her. “Seven years old,” she would say again and again, disbelief and shock in her voice.

  “I’d forgotten,” he said.

  “I haven’t seen you in a while, Max, but I’m glad you’re here. I’ll get you coffee. Or do you want a drink?”

  He shook his head.

  She went across the room to the stove and brought back a coffeepot. Interrupting his vision of the window, her long arm interposed itself. It was slender, brown, faintly freckled. The coffee poured, she sat down and placed her elbows on the newspapers.

  “Have you come to offer counsel, Comrade?” she asked with light irony.

  “Are you writing a book?”

  She scowled. “Oh, hell. Who said so? I’ve started a diary, a kind of backward diary. You know, I have all these paintings of Simon’s.” She waved toward the wall. “I don’t know what I had in mind. A memorial, I guess.”

  “Calvin is concerned about your column.”

  “Don’t speak to me in that unreal voice, Max.”

  He bowed his head. Her narrow fingers tapped the paper. She drank, put the cup back. He looked up at her.

  “Calvin is a dirty little rat,” she said pensively. “A knothead, a fool, a tiny monster of voracious vanity, a louse, a loon, a false man.”

  He began to laugh. Then he was struck by a sudden languor, as though he’d been given a drug. He realized how tense he’d been as he walked up the hill to Theda’s apartment. From the floor below, he heard the familiar opening bars of Showboat. He looked at the floor.

  “They start the day with it,” she said. “It’s not the only record they have, but it’s the only one they play. I wonder what happened to them with that music? You’d think it was their marriage they were listening to, or a Kern version of it. They’ve got a life-sized picture of Helen Morgan on the wall. Funny.”

  “Are you all right, Theda?”

  “I’m all right”

  “How’s the reading?”

  “Warner’s keeps me busy,” she said, looking at the books on the floor. “I’m getting damned good, you know. I can read a seven-hundred-page Chilean novel on transparent paper in three hours.”

  She looked worn. She was older than Max by at least a decade; he didn’t know how old, really. She was a tall, thin woman with a face that was plain in repose. But when she spoke, when her interest was aroused, her hands flew about an
d her shoulders moved, and the plain face with the dark narrow eyes and narrow features radiated a kind of passionate energy. She was never beautiful, in any sense that Max could think of, but she could make beauty seem insignificant. Now, assigned to tell her she was derelict in her duties, he realized how wearisome and grating a task it was. If she was “drifting,” as Calvin had said, she would indeed drift.

  “Calvin said you were drifting,” he said.

  “He’s right, that flea,” she said with a touch of a tall woman’s contempt for a little man.

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “No,” she said. “Not yet. I’ll tell you this. I’m not going to write the column any more. You can tell them I haven’t the time, too much work. Don’t say anything about Simon’s book.”

  “Theda. It’s been six years since Simon died. And they know you’re writing something.”

  A nerve jumped along her jaw. Her skin turned a shade lighter. She got up and went to a peg where she took down a sun hat and placed it on her head. Then she came back and sat down. She took the hat off, put it on. For a moment he thought she’d gone crazy.

  “I’m not crazy,” she said. “The sun’s in my eyes. I like sitting near the tree, but the sun is beastly at this window. I know how long he’s been dead.”

  He tried to say what he knew he ought to say to her, but uncertainty kept him quiet.

  “Oh, I know,” she said. “Why am I brooding about him? Well, I never stopped. It simply surfaced. Why did it surface this last year? Because I’m getting old, and all the dead things are floating up. The dead things in my mind. I’ve been throwing them out one by one. When I came to Simon, I began to grieve all over again as if I’d never grieved before. And I hadn’t. What monsters…I am a monster, I mean. His death made me into something special for myself, you see. It was exciting. I was excited by his death.”

  He remembered Simon. His paintings, three lines, beach, sea, sky, always the same, empty as though he’d seen and been hypnotized by a stopped world. Max looked at the ones Theda had hung on the wall. Always the beach, sea, sky, swept clean of all that was animate. He’d met him only once, at the party that had been given him before he left for France, as a “tourist,” from where he intended to make his way to Spain. Simon had been silent, stiff with drunkenness in this very room, slumped into the canvas wing chair while Theda, her sallow cheeks flushed, attended him, managing to keep the space around him empty as though she’d known he could not bear the press of people. He hadn’t been a party member, just an Ohio country boy who’d traveled to Cleveland once a month to spend his time in the library there, poring through volumes of drawings. In the end, he hadn’t drawn anything.

  “When I took him to the ocean that first time, it was as if his heart fell out of his body,” said Theda. “He gasped. I remember that.”

  He’d been a womanizer in a glazed, implacable way, even while he was living with Theda. Max remembered at the party the way Simon would focus his vision on a girl, looking at her with a grim sexual desperation.

  There was a faded photograph of him in a gold frame on a bureau. He seemed smaller than Max remembered but the delicate blank face was the same, the arrowy nose, and Irish secrecy about the eyes, the thick curly hair. They had surely been an odd couple, Theda and Concannon. She was watching him reflectively.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “About—attachments.”

  She snorted faintly.

  “Why don’t you tell them you’re not going to do the column,” he said with unexpected resentment. Silly damn long drink of water, picking over a dead man’s life…

  She smiled and took his hand and held it until he began to feel embarrassed, wanting to pull his hand away. She dropped it.

  The room felt too warm.

  “Max, I’m on my way out.”

  “Wait—”

  “No. you don’t want to hear it, even though you know it. I don’t have enough sense to have reasons. I know there are good reasons, but I don’t even want them. I was never good at this, this view of life. I laughed at things I shouldn’t have. There are people who would as soon die as leave the party, I know that. It’s the content of their lives. Not mine. I don’t feel pain about it. I don’t want people to be angry at me. But that doesn’t weigh as much as what I want to do. I can tell what I’m going to do.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “You sound scared…I’m going to get a job at Warner’s in the story department. I can see it’s coming. I’m going to buy a little car and go to the studio every morning. Maybe there’ll be someone who would like to marry me someday. Maybe there’s someone who will. I’m going to write my diary.”

  “What was it? The war? The Hitler-Stalin pact? What was it?”

  “It should have been. But no. I want a common life. I want to read Jane Austen and make a little money.”

  “You can read Jane Austen.”

  “No. Not now. Later.” She laughed. “What do you think of my ambitions? And you? Listen, even I know there’s going to be a war, we’ll be in it, everyone. The party line will change. I don’t even mind that. All lines change. But I don’t want to be tangled in any lines. They’re killing Jews in Germany. They’ll kill them in Poland, everywhere. Maybe everyone will die.”

  “Theda!”

  “What about you, Max?” She grinned. “Tell me. I won’t tell.”

  He was silent a long time. The sunlight was touching his hand. He looked at the glistening leaves of the eucalyptus. Then he told her about the girl, Annie.

  “What is it you have in mind?” she asked softly. “You want to shack up with her? You want to leave your little family?”

  “No, no, no…”

  “But why, then?”

  He looked at her desperately. “I don’t know. She caught my interest. But so do other people. It was more drastic. I can’t get her out of my mind. It’s as though I had to see her again.”

  “You’d better then.”

  He felt sanctioned, as though he’d gotten permission. He began to pace about the room.

  “I went from college to the party and marriage,” he said. “It’s as if I had never been outside.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve always had something to do. I have a persistent wish to do nothing. To sit. To not think.”

  “To think,” she amended.

  “I mean, in the way I have thought.”

  “You’ve drifted too, Max. Calvin will have us up on charges, both of us.”

  “He’s always had me up on charges,” Max said. “In his head, he’s shot me a hundred times.”

  “Don’t be romantic about it.”

  “I’m not, I’m not,” he protested.

  She sighed. “You’d better find that girl.”

  He left her looking back at the obituary page, turning now and again to the window, her face hidden by the straw hat.

  He went directly to the apartment house to which he’d mailed his letter and eventually roused up an aged man who gave him the forwarding address Annie had left. Then he drove up Cheremoya Avenue until he came to a plain ugly stucco house sitting on a plot of rusty grass, a hose flung across the cement walk.

  A thin middle-aged woman opened the door to his ring. When he asked her for Miss Gianfala, she looked blank. “Annie,” he said, afraid he’d come to a dead end.

  “Oh, Annie. You mean Annie Vogel,” said the woman feverishly. She kept looking uneasily behind her, as though concealing someone in back of the door. “She’s in the basement apartment, down there. Go around to the back.” A small child with long braids came and stuck her head under the woman’s arm. “Who’s that, Mom?” The woman pushed the child’s head back and abruptly closed the door.

  Max followed the cement path around to the back of the house. Several steps down was a door. He knocked. There was no answer at first. He was prepared to sit down in that damp corner until she came home. The door opened suddenly.

  They looked at ea
ch other for several seconds, neither of them speaking.

  “You’re the man who gave me the ride,” she said at last. Behind her the room was dark. She looked pale and thin, as though she’d lived for too long in that darkness. He didn’t reply, being speechless, frightened, wishing he had never come.

  “You wrote me too. It was nice of you to write me. I’m sorry I didn’t answer.”

  Then she stood aside; he walked in as though she’d asked him to. Instantly, he stumbled into a table.

  “Wait!” she said. “I’ll put on some lights.”

  The room was a square of fourteen or so feet. A sofa bed, unmade, was in a corner. Across one wall ran a line of utilities, a small refrigerator, a stove, a white laundry sink. A huge shapeless chair sat in the middle of the room, a chenille throw covering it. He righted the table he’d bumped into.

  “Please, sit down,” she said.

  He had not yet said a word. She looked ill but the smile was as he had remembered it. How had she landed up in this cave with its musty smell, its promise of damp corners and insects and mold? She’d changed her hair style. The braids were gone. Her hair hung down, bedraggled, limp. She was wearing a man’s shirt and blue jeans, and her feet were bare. As she sat down on the bed, she tried to hide her feet beneath the blanket which drooped to the floor.

  She waited.

  When he finally spoke, his own voice was unfamiliar to him.

  “I wondered what had happened to you,” he said.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all. I’m fine.”

  “I saw Jake Cranford and that’s why I wrote.”

  She didn’t answer. Jake’s name evoked no response. She looked broodingly at the floor, then up at Max. Her eyes were strained, enormous. It struck him she was possessed of some immense idea that was taking up her entire concentration, her being. She really didn’t see him.