The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

  The man laughed. The sound of it echoed in the big empty room. “Americans, they’d sell brimstone in hell,” he said. “If there was a place where there was nothing, nothing, you understand, and there were two citizens of our country standing there in that nothing, one would rent out standing space to the other, and the other would tax him for running a space-renting business.”

  “They paid us nine dollars a week,” said Annie.

  “Well, you can’t go far on that kind of wage.”

  “They kept promising us piecework.”

  “Mexicans? I mean were the other girls mostly Mexican?”

  “All except me.”

  The man looked shrewdly at his desk, then took a cigar from his jacket pocket. He lit it and threw the cellophane wrapper on the floor.

  “Reason I ask is because they couldn’t get away with it if the girls weren’t Mexican. See, anybody else would know better.” He grinned at her.

  “I’m not Mexican and I took the job because I needed the money.”

  The man stared at her. She thought she knew what he was thinking—you’d have to be Mexican for nine dollars to make a difference.

  “I didn’t say you were. Not that it’s a disgrace. I’m what they call in Pennsy a hunkie. All right, gimme the address.” She wrote it down on a piece of crumpled paper he took from his pocket. “Maybe we can scare them,” he said. “Listen, there’s lots of good jobs. And there are going to be lots more, once we’re in the war.”

  “War?”

  “My Christ! Listen, don’t think they’re not going to pass that selective training and service act! How old are you?”

  “Nineteen,” she lied.

  “How come you come to us?”

  “I didn’t know where else to go,” she said backing toward the door. “I’d heard about you.”

  “You heard about us, eh?”

  The man wanted her to stay. A fly buzzed somewhere.

  “Well, in a sense, you got the right idea. You go to the A.F. of L., they won’t give you the time of day if you haven’t been on a machine for eighty years. You people haven’t got no skills, you’d just be up the creek without oars if it wasn’t for us.”

  “What did the union do?” Max was asking her softly.

  “I don’t really know. But a month later, I went by the place and it was boarded up.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then I got a good job. In a Greek restaurant where I used to eat. With tips, I made about twenty dollars a week. That’s why I’m sick now.”

  She paused, taking up the blanket and wrapping it around herself.

  “Are you cold?”

  “I can’t tell.”

  “I know a couple who run a little ceramic place,” Max said. “They make their own things and sell them to retailers. The pottery is pretty awful, vases with sleeping Mexicans in sombreros painted on them, all that, birds for the lawn, but still, they’re always needing people. Have you ever done any drawing—anything like that?”

  “I went to the Art Students League for a while,” she said. “It wasn’t anything, just something to do.”

  “You wouldn’t have to be Leonardo for this. It’s mechanical.”

  “I’m not ungrateful. But the thing is—I have a job waiting for me—in a drive-in at Laguna Beach. As soon as this—this thing is out of me. There’s a waitress where I worked who’s going down there. The tips are supposed to be good, and it’s supposed to be nice there.”

  Despairing at the thought of her disappearing again, he cast about in his mind for something compelling enough to hold her, here, where he could see her. But what was he thinking of?

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  “My clock is broken,” she said. “But I’d guess it’s around six or so.” She switched the blanket away from her feet and went to the window. “What a joint this is!” she exclaimed. “I have to put my head out the window into the flowerbed to see what the weather is. But it’s so cheap.” She pushed aside the cloth and looked out. “How odd! There’s actually a cloud in the sky, like real weather.”

  “I must telephone now,” he said. “Is there a drugstore around?”

  “It’s three blocks from here,” she said. “Far.”

  She looked at him quickly, then away, and he realized she was making an effort not to ask him to stay. “I won’t be long,” he said, “I have to call the neighbor who takes care of my son—”

  A curious expression crossed her face. He knew he’d given her an important piece of news, one that disturbed her.

  “My wife has a secretarial job and the neighbor will tell her I’ll be late.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Not quite three.”

  “Is he alone a lot?”

  “No, no. I’m home a good deal. It’s Eva who goes off in the morning. He loves the neighbor.” Then he added for no reason, “She’s a big dumb woman, easy on a child.”

  She laughed a little; the laugh broke off as she lowered herself carefully to the bed. “It’s moving,” she gasped.

  She had turned to lie on her stomach; her face was hidden by a pillow. His skin prickled as he gripped one hand with the other. There was nothing he could say to her. The worm was dying. It was as if she were dying.

  She was very good to talk the way she did, losing herself in her stories, not clinging to the ghastly process taking place inside her. But he could not really think about what she was telling him. He was listening for that other thing—as though it would have a voice, a subterranean mouthless moan.

  He had been with her for hours now, and his memory of her had faded, replaced by a living presence.

  That quality he had attributed to her when she’d walked away from Fern’s car in San Diego, of stubbornness, of will, was here confirmed. What at first had been so easy for him to grasp, the forlorn facts of her life, the room, the damp, the dripping tap, her poverty, her jobs, the marriage that seemed so negligible, had gone feeble, tenuous, as he had begun to feel the force and mystery of her nature.

  He reminded himself sharply that everyone was made of class and fortune and circumstance, of food and work, given or withheld. But in the rawness of his openness to her, he kicked all such categories out of his mind like bums, knowing at the same time that he could not utterly abandon the beliefs he had acquired over nearly a decade. Ordinary life had its ordinary powerful truths. God damn all! She needed work, care, knowledge of the world! How long could that will of hers lead her like a Seeing Eye dog through idiot events? Helpless now to help her, afraid of his own thoughts, he was, on this painful occasion, suddenly happy.

  An hour later, he left to phone. She had begged him to go and when he hesitated, she had said, “I’ve got to collect what comes out for the laboratory. The doctor said the head of it must be there, otherwise it will grow again. And—please go now!” She had turned then and stumbled toward a small door near the couch. His bowels trembled as he went down the street. What she must be going through in the bathroom he visualized at once, obliged to attend every second of her travail as much as he was able.

  He made his phone call, then bought two egg sandwiches and a Hershey bar from the drugstore luncheonette counter and walked back to Annie’s cellar. In the twenty minutes he had been gone she had managed to pull the bed together, and she was sitting up in the large chair, her face ashen but tranquil.

  “Is it all right?”

  She nodded.

  “Did you?”

  “Yes. I did. I won’t tell you about it. It’s done now. I feel very tired.”

  “I’ve brought you a sandwich.”

  She smiled musingly, gently, as though some delicate thought had touched her. She said, “I can’t yet. It’s that I can’t put anything in my stomach. I could eat watercress, but not real food, it’s too much like the other…I feel as if I never wanted to eat again. I’ve had a glass of water. It was so good.”

  “Will you mind if I eat?”

  “No. I started to tell you how I got t
he worm. After I got the job in the restaurant, well, I made more than twenty dollars a week, really, with the tips, although most of the people who come in there aren’t rich, just caddies, people like that. And there’s a Finnish man, he always gave me a dollar even if he only had a cup of coffee. I’ve gotten to hate Sibelius though. I didn’t eat there except for a sandwich late at night when the Greek closed up. And I developed this craving, oh, it was terrible! For hamburgers. I found a place called Tips. The hamburgers were thirty-five cents but, even now, just thinking about it, I want one. They had about ten different ways of making them. One was with mayonnaise and pickles, and I could have eaten ten. As it was, I used to have two for lunch. The waiters laughed at me, but I was like a hog in a dream, I couldn’t ever get enough. I thought about them the moment I woke up and—when I realized I had enough money to really buy them for lunch! Then I began to try other places, drive-ins and drugstores and diners. That’s how I must have gotten the worm. I lost weight, and I felt strange, and the girl who works at the Greek’s told me I was beginning to look like a nun, that white papery look. I couldn’t ever get enough to eat. Sometimes the Greek let me finish the shrimp cocktails and even cook myself a steak on the grill after everyone had left, early in the morning. I ate and ate and ate. I was going crazy with food. But it was the taste for the ground meat—everything else was secondary to that. And finally the girl sent me to a doctor. I took him a specimen and he said I had a tapeworm. Listen…when he told me what I had to do, I couldn’t make myself do it. I didn’t know which was worse, to have the worm or to get rid of it. And then, a few days ago, I fell down carrying a tray to a table, and spilled catsup all over a customer. So I took the pills.”

  “I think you want to sleep,” he said.

  “I could sleep, I think.”

  “I’ll stay with you.”

  She rose somewhat unsteadily and he helped her to the bed where she lay down. He covered her with a blanket and went to the chair. She was asleep almost instantly.

  His vigil lasted until late that evening. She awoke all at once, her eyes opening, coming to rest on him. She smiled. “You never believe terrible things will be over,” she said.

  “I saved a sandwich for you. It’s a little stale.”

  She took it and ate it all.

  “Won’t you stay here in Hollywood, and let me help? I have a friend, a woman you might like. And that job. Do you really want to go to that drive-in? It’s hard work. People won’t treat you well.”

  “I have to. I promised the waitress, Sigrid, I’d go with her. I’ll just try it. I can always come back.”

  He had to leave now. He lit a cigarette, aware he hadn’t smoked since he’d been with her—he’d been waiting. She asked him for one and, when he gave it to her, said, “This time, I really don’t have any. When you gave me those cigarettes in the car, I had some in my bag. How crooked I’ve gotten! You know, that woman upstairs, she wants to be listened to. I listen to her because sometimes she makes cocoa for me while I’m sitting at the kitchen table. She says that now that she’s up against life, she sees it’s a cruel fraud. She likes to talk about that—she seems satisfied to have found it out.”

  She was too young, he reflected, to know what people were like —she only knew what they did to her.

  But he was struck by her expression. She was looking up at the ceiling as though she could see the beaten woman and her nervous child. She was smoking; she was thinking. The harrowing hours she’d spent with the worm had left her weak, but her thoughts were already on something else.

  “What happened to that woman who drove the car?”

  “Fern? Oh, Fern.”

  “She thought I was foolish to be upset about that dog.”

  “Fern casts her eyes beyond the bones at her feet.”

  She looked puzzled.

  “She’s the kind of person, she—” But he was bored already. Talking about Fern was like eating stale bread. She grinned at him. “She’s not so bad,” he said, a touch defensive. “She’s loyal, she does all the work no one else wants to.”

  “I suppose that fellow, Lavan, came looking for me at the place I used to be. Walter wanted me to go to meetings. He wanted me to be in the party.”

  “Why aren’t you?”

  “What would they want with me?”

  “What would you want?”

  “I went to a meeting in New York. Bourgeoise, Walter calls me. I had never thought of that, belonging to a class, a class that oppresses others.”

  “People suffer needlessly,” he said, exhausted now.

  She flared up. “Everybody suffers. I don’t know what you mean —needlessly. You think suffering is a failing?”

  “I mean, there are sufferings that can be stopped. There is slavery, corruption, exploitation of many by a few.”

  “You think you can make it different?”

  “Better. Socialism can make it better. Things are awry.” He thought for a moment. Class conflict, the English orphans virtual slaves in factories, the mad utopianism of the nineteenth century, inevitable revolution—he’d read so much, Liebknecht and Alcott and Brisbane and Saint-Simon and Fourier and Kautsky, Engels and Marx, and—

  “How can you do that? With the good will of the capitalists?”

  “No.”

  “Force?”

  “The force of the working class.”

  “And then?”

  “‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’”

  “Who said that?”

  “Louis Blanc.”

  “And when one has no abilities?”

  “When true Communism comes, one will receive what he needs, with or without abilities.”

  “People are too wicked.”

  “Because of the system.”

  “It can’t be that Communism is the first system that will work. No. Even I know that. Even I know…”

  “You must read history.”

  “Walter says bourgeois history is all distortion.”

  “Listen. You must learn something of the world outside you.”

  “You stayed with me today. You were so good to do that.”

  He stood silently by the door, feeling the wrench of leaving her.

  She walked over to him.

  “I’ll want to know what happens to you,” he said. “Will you write me from Laguna Beach?”

  “To your house?”

  “Yes, yes. Of course to my house.” He found a piece of paper in his wallet, a laundry ticket—he’d never get his shirts back—and wrote down the address and put it in her hand as he visualized himself in mortal combat with the Chinese laundryman.

  Suddenly she seized his hand, the pencil still gripped in his fingers, and brought it to her mouth and pressed her lips on it. “Thank you.” she said.

  He arrived home to find the door ajar and heard voices, one loud, two murmuring. He sighed bitterly.

  It was Levi Lewis and his wife, Cleo. Max walked into his living room. Eva was standing in the middle of the room looking rather lumpish, a cigarette hanging from her lips, her eyes fixed on Levi, whose arm clutched Cleo’s plump shoulders. As usual, Cleo looked dazed. She was Levi’s chief exhibit, perhaps the only one in his life. His Negro bride. His bona fides couldn’t be questioned.

  He asserted himself feverishly on every occasion, talking, talking, talking, as though Cleo’s presence—and look how he was gripping her as though she might disappear—gave him limitless license to explore the caverns of his mind. Wretched man! Poor Cleo with her young round soft face, the tendrils of hair that curled around her ears, the neat brown hands pressed against one another on her lap, her whole body pulled into Levi’s embrace, his talisman, his object.

  He managed to refer to his heroic act in every conversation, at meetings, at caucuses, just as Fern dragged in her family. And some were impressed. Yes, Calvin Schmitter was impressed. Why, Levi had actually married one of them!

  “Hello, Cleo,” Max said warmly. She smiled u
p at him, trying to inch away from her frantic husband’s frantic grip.

  “I’m here too,” said Lewis. “I realize my wife’s singular attractions, but you might speak to me, Shore.”

  Eva nodded at him companionably. That was part of their bargain. If he stayed out, if she stayed out, no questions.

  They were both serious people.

  “Hello, Levi.”

  “We were speaking of the repercussions of the Disney strike. Walt and his seven hundred dwarfs. Have you noticed, by the way, that all the mice are white?”

  Max snorted. “Not entirely,” he said. It was going to be a while before they left. “I’m going to grab a bite,” he announced somewhat belligerently, and went to the kitchen.

  The Lewises left at one. Eva sank into a couch. Max had been watching her, hardly listening to the conversation. A kind of pity welled up in him. He did not know where it had come from. She looked so tired; she had gained a good deal of weight, he noticed, and her breasts seemed so heavy, and sad somehow. He went over to her and flung his arms about her and buried his face in her neck, smelling her familiar odor, the odor of her thick hair, her neck. He put his leg on her lap and pulled her closer and she said, “Well, what’s come over you?” But she was pleased. He knew that.

  Sometime during the night, Max awoke in a state of acute alarm. He disengaged his arm from under Eva’s shoulders and went to Thomas’s crib. For a while, he listened to the child’s soft, even breathing. Without touching him, Max leaned over the cribside and examined each small feature of his face by the weak light of a night lamp. Even if Thomas awoke, Max could hardly expect the boy to tell him that everything would be all right.

  Chapter 12

  Sigrid dyed her short stiff hair canary yellow and painted new, swollen lips over her own thin mouth. When Annie drove up to Ivar Street, Sigrid was standing there among packages and a suitcase, looking like a neon sign that had been left on during daylight. They loaded up the car. “Jesus!” said Sigrid from time to time about nothing particular.

  Having settled herself at last in the car, she looked calculatingly at Annie. “Well, we’ll see what’s to happen. You got rid of that worm? My brother’s found us an apartment a mile from the drive-in, near the beach. I called that stink of a landlady of yours but she wouldn’t go get you. I called three times. The last time I said, ‘Jesus! you old bag! why don’t you lay off the hootch sometime?’ and she hung up. What I wanted to tell you was about the apartment Joe got. Joe’s going to stay awhile. There’s a room downstairs in the garage with a cot in it. He’s got nothing better to do right now. He said he’s going to try for a bartender’s job. They’ve got lots of joints down there. You look awful.”