The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

  Annie told her the worm was gone and that she felt a little weak still but the lab said they’d found the head—

  “Jesus! Don’t tell me no details!”

  —and Sigrid didn’t understand about the landlady, who was always being beaten up by her lover and was not drunk but sick.

  “I got no charity to spare,” Sigrid said. She lit a cigarette and settled back against the cracked leather seat.

  Sigrid, who had been to Laguna a few times before, gave directions but was silent most of the time. They stopped once for gas, and later she asked Annie to pull over near a stretch of woods so she could answer a “call of nature.” There was no special restraint between them. They didn’t ever have much to say to each other. After work in the Greek’s with Sigrid, Annie knew that her bursts of conversation always had to do with some immediate or imminent event. The nearest thing that could pass for speculation was that occasional guileful look of the Swedish girl’s—as for that, it seemed more mimetic than an indication of thought. But, Annie thought, she was “goodhearted,” which was the most one could expect as a rule. One could put up with a lot if people were goodhearted, even their cruelties.

  Max Shore, whose visit had only taken place a few days earlier, was more complicated to think about. Shore’s presence during that terrible day and evening had been of greater magnitude than mere goodheartedness. Alone, Annie told herself, she might have cut her own throat in order to escape the vermin’s emergence. Even as Max had knocked on her door, she had been in a condition of such utter panic, at the furthermost reaches of paralyzed terror, that she had hesitated to open the door for fear that she would fling herself into the street and try, impossibly, to outrun the hours still to be endured.

  So he had sat there with her, watchful, tense, his attention, the whole attention of a man she didn’t know, given over to her as though he’d handed her himself to use as she might want. They had gone through it together. He had covered her; she had taken the stale sandwich from his hands. Yet she had been unable to take up his offer of help, then anyhow. Her sense of obligation to Sigrid, about whom she cared little, weighed more heavily than the promise of Max Shore’s taking a place in her life. Not that she believed there were any jobs for her except drudgery. As for the lady friend he’d mentioned, what did she care about her except to see who it was Max had as a friend.

  She had told him her stories out of dread lest her mind be consumed by the worm. But she’d not told him all her stories.

  There were the movies. She spent days at the movies; she went to work from the picture houses; she bore on her forearms the imprints of the movie-chair arms because she pressed down so in dread that a man would come and sit beside her and put his hand on her thigh—or worse, as had once happened when, instead of a hand, a man laid across her skirt, like a bound roll of pennies, his naked penis.

  It was movie music that hypnotized her—those swollen pulsating chords, the pudding texture of beaten pianos and whipped violins as the lovers kissed, as the mist covered the mansion, as the ship’s prow rose and sank upon orderly oceans, as calendar pages fell through apple blossoms and snowflakes to tell of the passing of time, as cowboys took their guns from holsters, as Bogart drove straight toward her down a narrow city street, as girls danced in dreams for themselves. Dimitri Tiomkin! It was a name that made her reel even as she carried four shrimp cocktails along her arm to a table full of sallow-faced caddies munching crackers at a corner table.

  That movie music, when she left the theater, lifted her from the sidewalk, obscured the light, whether of afternoon or night or morning. She knew it was awful stuff; she wept, not for the humble Viennese girl who, deserted by the successful composer, threw herself into the Danube, but because of that music, a smothering syrup that drowned her brains, yet released in her a flood of melancholy that through some alchemy became a kind of exaltation.

  Gunther Wildener, the white-haired man she’d met at the actor’s house where Walter had taken her, managed to track her down. He had the weighty jocularity Annie had come to recognize in middle-aged men who wanted to put their hands on the bodies of young girls. He had advised her what to do with her life from the same chair in which Max Shore had sat; he suggested she make a little extra money posing for pictures. She was driven to someone’s estate. She sat naked on a diving board, the rough warp of its rope surface cutting into her buttocks, while several men who did not speak to her took photographs. She moved this way and that according to Wildener’s directions. Someone said, “Do something about the nipples.”

  She dressed. Wildener took her to a restaurant on Sunset Strip. An actor she recognized was sitting in a corner drinking by himself. After a number of drinks, he threw up, without apparent strain, into his handsome gray fedora. Then gave it to a waiter and staggered out. Brocade hung in threatening folds from the corners of the room. She felt she was in a tent that was about to collapse.

  “There’s nothing wrong with it,” Wildener assured her. “You have a marvelous body. So we make little color pictures and gentlemen from all over the country can enjoy and admire you. Have the stroganoff.” He ran his thick strong hand down her arm. “You need some clothes to set you off,” he said. She asked him about his students. He was not distracted for long. They both understood. After he’d gotten up heavily from the bed in his apartment, he headed toward the bathroom and said, “Poor thing,” in such a tone she thought he was about to burst into tears. She thought he’d meant himself.

  She discovered, or, rather, recognized at last, that men wanted to do this thing to her that they wanted to do to anyone. Her body, the object, was of no value to her. Yet somewhere, like a hidden depravity, she felt love for it, pitied it like the lost animals she sometimes saw slinking into the doorways of closed shops late at night.

  The movie music was almost always with her. A man’s glance, the million-dollar chords began; he spoke, a violin played a cheap and tender tune; they walked down the night streets of Hollywood, cellos stained the night sky plum; they looked at each other in his or her room, a low muffled roll of drums. Then the male body covered her and the whole orchestra fell into its own pit with a tinny crash of instruments. Yes. Then the whole goddamned bunch picked up their lunch boxes and instruments and put on their old coats and went home.

  Paul Lavan had caught up with her too. She’d told him she’d read all the books. She hadn’t. He took her to several meetings.

  She felt she had no right to be in the bare rooms with the rows of ordinary people, some of whom dropped cigarette butts on the floor and carefully smashed them out, all of whom listened to the speaker with silence and attention. “The inherent contradictions of monopoly capitalism.” What a roll of drums that was! They were so serious! If Lavan knew, if they knew what her life was like, if they had known about the movie music, the hamburgers, the men, the distraught midnight wanderings.

  But Lavan did, apparently, know something. “You’re neurotic,” he said to her one evening after they’d heard a discussion on “art as a weapon.” He was taking her to her streetcar. He had his own car, but said his wife had a new baby and he really couldn’t take the time to drive her home.

  “Neurotic?” she asked.

  “Have you ever heard of Freud?”

  “Yes,” she answered. She tried to recall the jokes she’d heard that somehow involved Freud.

  “Listen,” he said with sudden uneasiness, “don’t mention what I said to anyone. Actually, I shouldn’t employ such phrases. It’s only that you seem so troubled and I—”

  “I won’t say anything,” she said quickly. What did he care whether she “mentioned” what he’d said? Perhaps he knew she slept with men. Perhaps he felt bad for Walter. She went home that night, brooding about Walter, whose infrequent notes always ended with the admonition to keep her legs crossed. Why didn’t she feel something about Walter? About the men she “betrayed” him with?

  She knew that people, once married, were not supposed to do what she did; somewhere
in the back of her mind hung pale abstractions, motionless as painted clouds, God, orderliness of meals, gravity of mien, classroom papers, one’s name neatly written on the upper-right-hand corner, families grouped around the dining table, the elders teaching the young, undying love, music of the spirit, not of the kisses and deaths of movie stars.

  She burst out laughing, and Sigrid said, “Jesus! You scared me!” and Annie said, “Only a thought, an old joke.”

  “Tell me, I wanna laugh too,” Sigrid demanded. So Annie told her an old grammar-school series of jokes that had to do with book titles—The Halt in the Desert, by Mustapha Pee…And Sigrid shrieked with laughter.

  It would be fine to travel on forever like this, safe in the car, carrying in the trunk a rag or two to throw on one’s back, plenty of cigarettes in the side pockets. But a large sign announcing the imminence of Laguna Beach dispelled the snugness. A touch of dread, familiar as morning light, made Annie’s hands tighten on the wheel.

  The village lay still beneath the midday sun. With wary eyes, Annie took in the expensive-looking small shops that lined the ocean side of the road. On the left, up in the hills, the blood-red roof tiles of estates hung like awnings among the brilliant leaves of the trees.

  “There’s the drive-in,” Sigrid announced, pointing to a circular building on the ocean cliff. One car was parked on the asphalt apron, a tray clamped onto the driver’s window, a crumpled paper napkin on the tray.

  Less than a mile farther on, Sigrid shouted, “Here! Turn here!”

  They drove up a crushed-shell-covered road to an innocuous little house that might have once been the servants’ quarters of a large estate. Flowers climbed along the outer walls, one thick vine followed the rail of the stairs that led to an upper floor. As Annie parked, Sigrid’s brother, his white shirt sleeves rolled up, opened the narrow door on the ground floor and stood blinking there in the sunlight, stretching and rubbing his face.

  He was a slender boy of about twenty and he looked less like Sigrid’s brother than a son she might have thrown off in an earlier, more innocent time when her hair had been the same light-brown color as his. Sigrid leaped upon him, and Annie had a sudden picture of Sigrid love-making, awkward, bumpy, an inept farmer girl, cows thumping in barns, smells of clover and sweat and dung.

  They went to work the next day. Ernie Cotts was from Oklahoma and he intended to make his fortune out of the drive-in. His pale, flat-chested wife did the books on a cleared table in the back of the kitchen, sitting there like a weed, her face wrinkled in distaste among the thick smells of fry cookery. A Filipino, erect as a toy soldier, his apron unaccountably clean, bowed to Annie whenever she looked in his direction. The cook, an old navy man, sometimes wore his false teeth. On days when his face was symmetrical, he was sober and occasionally made a sour joke. When his teeth were out and his mouth caved in, he was bound to be full of gin and given to violent rages, smacking the grill with the long-handled spatula as though he would murder it, grabbing off orders from the wheel that hung between kitchen and counter, and cursing at what he read as he seized the French-fry basket to shake out portions.

  Ernie slouched around, his ham face nearly expressionless, with lips like two leeches lying one on the other. When Annie passed him, he often reached out a hand and let it fall where it might, on her back, her buttocks, or her belly, keeping a dead eye on his wife. The Filipino called her “Miss Annie” and looked up at her from his five feet of self and spoke to her incoherently, when they weren’t too busy, about his thoughts.

  Weekends were marathons of exhaustion. Sigrid did the outside car work, and Annie was behind the counter, where there were three rows of customers stacked up, shouting and yelling and laughing, most of them young and rich from Hollywood, movie children, children of the industry. They demanded elaborate concoctions that Annie had to make, mixtures of soda and ice cream and walnuts and whipped cream and sauces and pistachio nuts. The girls were brutally rude to her; the boys flirted and looked at her suggestively past the bright clean hair of their girl friends.

  She imagined herself as they saw her, a young waitress who did their bidding with an imperturbable face, sweat stains on her uniform from her exertions for them, a working-class girl, poor, out of bounds. One night, she and Sigrid found mouse turds in the whipped-cream containers. Sigrid laughed but Annie, still shuddering at the memory of her own grisly parasite, threw all the cream out. When Ernie found out about it, he took the little skimp of her skirt in his hand, held it tight across her rear end, and hollered that he’d fire her if she ever threw out anything again without his permission. There was spit on his lips.

  One afternoon an actor, famous for his gangster roles, came in and ordered ginger ale. The killer sat there in his silk shirt, a little thin man with graying hair. He gave her a dollar tip. She remembered Tony’s story of the young girl who’d been taken backstage to meet Sarah Bernhardt and when the girl wept with excitement, the great actress took her hand and kissed it and, Tony said, she wouldn’t wash that hand for weeks. The actor’s dollar disappeared into her pocketbook, and she spent it along with the other dollars. Sigrid warned her that Ernie’s wife was working on him to get rid of her. “That dried-up old tit wants you outa here, honey, ‘cause that Okie hick can’t keep his hands off you. Stay out of his way.”

  There were bloody automobile accidents almost every weekend; that same group from Hollywood roaring down in their little convertibles, slamming themselves into eternity with the same dumb insistence with which they ordered their sickening sweets. So on the weekends the police often came around and stood inside the drive-in to “keep a lookout for troublemakers,” they said. They were two middle-aged local cops. When the crowd got too obstreperous, the cops would collar the young men and throw them back into their cars, telling them to be sure and kill themselves outside Laguna. Sometimes, they drove Annie home in an old police car that rattled like a half-empty toolbox. One night they took her down to San Diego, then to the Mexican border, right across from Tijuana. They had been kind to her; she felt their protectiveness toward her. But that night they’d talked as if she weren’t there; yet she knew the conversation was for her to hear. It was about the parties that went on up in the hills in the beautiful, opulent houses, and a kind of terror seized her as they all sat with the motor idling at the border crossing, the two stocky middle-aged men in their blue uniforms gagging with outraged laughter at the doings of the rich and exempt, and she thought, What if they knew about me? What if they knew I had been to Communist party meetings? What if they discovered I’m married? To a Communist? Ernie had told her not to wear her wedding ring to work. He’d grinned and said, “I suppose I don’t have to explain, do I?” She’d heard about Red Squads by then; she’d heard from Paul Lavan about cops in their strongholds, kicking the genitals of men who’d marched for Tom Mooney, or who’d tried to organize unions. She thought for a terrible moment she was simply going to cry with fear; then it would all come out. But nothing happened; they drove her home, quiet all the way, and when she got out of the car, one of them said, “Be a good girl, Annie-Fannie.”

  On afternoons when she was off work, she went to the beach in her new green bathing suit she’d bought with her pay, and lay in the sun. She grew quickly bored and began to walk along the lovely shore with its fine sand and intricate rock formations, looking up sometimes at the house on the cliff that someone told her belonged to Bette Davis.

  One night, all the lights in Laguna Beach went out. She learned for the first time that there was a submarine alarm system set up between Laguna and Catalina Island. Something had triggered it. The waves pounded on the shore; the street was full of people, “What happened? What happened?” giggling, drunk, some of them, the smell of honeysuckle everywhere, and of roses. She left the drive-in and went to the bar a few hundred yards down the road where Sigrid’s brother had gotten a job as bartender. Candles had been lit and she saw Joe smiling, his arms on the counter, talking to a pretty girl. He waved when he saw her.


  The three of them, Annie, Sigrid, and Joe, had a kind of spiritless family life, eating breakfast together, sharing domestic chores. Annie had lost her passion for hamburgers, and ate so much of Sigrid’s colorless, starchy food that she put on weight.

  “I can’t get over it,” Joe said to her. “I mean, maybe there’s a real Jap sub out there.” The girl he’d been talking to left the bar stool and disappeared into a dark corner where a young man lay sprawled in a wooden captain’s chair among the shadows.

  Other people drifted in and talked over the possibilities. Annie never looked at a newspaper, not because Lavan had told her that the press was controlled by the capitalists and all the news was biased, but simply because the very idea of sitting down to actually read a newspaper seemed preposterous.

  She really wondered if she’d missed the news that war had been declared between Japan and the United States, knowing at the same time that, of course, it hadn’t. People were excited by the momentary death of electricity. Joe made drinks steadily. Bourbon mostly. Annie had two drinks, and found herself talking to a group of people with faintly English accents, which, she judged, were put on. She realized suddenly that these people were the very ones who lived in the houses up in the hills.

  Like the people at the party St. Vincent had taken her to, these people, too, developed an intense, if brief, interest in her. They were older than she had thought they would be, the men were perfumed and the women had that lifeless deep tan of middle age, of passive self-indulgence and idleness. They bought her more drinks. She made up a fanciful story for them, thinking they were not the sort to come to a drive-in. She told them she’d been brought up in Paris, that her parents had been killed in a plane accident, their private plane, that she had determined to make her own way in the world—that she intended to become a pianist, that her fiancé had been drowned in the south of France—