The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

  The lights came on.

  Later, someone said a duck had got itself entangled in the underwater alarm system. It became a village joke. No one ever found out what had really happened.

  She and Joe swam together. She observed that their limbs were somewhat alike, blond limbs covered with light-blond down. He told her he hated his sister’s dyed hair. He told her stories about Minnesota Indian families he’d known. He longed for cold winters where you could see your breath, where trees were black against the snow. He rolled over closer to her on the sand and said, “I didn’t want to come out here, but we were so poor after Mama died and Pa just went to the dogs drinking, so Sigrid and me, we’ve gotten jobs, you know, and kept ourselves together but I don’t know what it’s all about, this life, maybe I’ll go back someday and get a farm of my own. Boy! I miss those winters.”

  There was a much-forwarded letter waiting for her from her father.

  “My idiot girl,” it read, “where the hell are you? I’m supposed, they tell me, to know such things. Did you really marry that gink? Margo and I are going to Massachusetts for the fall and winter. She’s writing a book about the history of turquoise jewelry, and is very good and disciplined and puts me to shame. I’ve done some good work and should be cheered up by a firm gallery offer for November, but am not. The Indians get me down. They all look half starved and yet keep fat horses. I’ve developed an absolute terror of rattlesnakes. Margo found one, an infant, under a bucket yesterday, and since then I’ve been trying to devise a method of walking without touching the ground. I long for a more intimate landscape, so off we go, to the Cape or Salem or someplace. But I will write even if you are stubborn and won’t. Did you ever look up St. Vincent, my old pal? Love, you little rat.”

  It was nearly the longest letter she’d ever gotten from him and she carried it around in her hand until it was time to go to work. She’d answer it one of these days. If she could think of something really funny to write about.

  That night, late, she took a short walk along the shell road. When she came back, Joe was leaning against the door of his little room next to the garage. He was smoking a cigarette, the light from the ember grazing his narrow mouth. He kissed her, leaning forward to do so, without touching her. She started to go into his room. He put an arm in front of her so that she couldn’t pass. She backed away instantly. He seized her hand and crushed the cigarette beneath his shoe. His skin was damp. “You’re married,” he said almost inaudibly. She pulled her hand away and went toward the steps. Sigrid, a stolid sleeper, suddenly moaned in the bedroom above, and Annie felt a shock as though something made of stone had lamented. “Wait!” Joe caught hold of her skirt.

  They undressed in the dark. She lay on his cot. He said, “I’ve never—before.” She was afraid for him, she was afraid for herself. He stood above her, shifting from bare foot to bare foot. “You don’t have to,” she whispered. “I’ve got to,” he said desperately. “I’m afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  “I don’t know,” he cried softly and fell down by her side. He didn’t touch her. In the end, he lay across her, and by a sad, humiliating, brief motion of his hips, stained her belly. He cried softly, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

  “Nothing,” she said, and held him tightly.

  “Yes, yes. I’ve heard about it all,” he said indistinctly into her neck. “It’s been like some terrible thing I’ve had to do, like being shot, like being taken out into a field and shot. And see, see? I can’t, I can’t.”

  “It’s the first time.”

  “No, no, no. I’ve tried before. My friends have told me, my friends back home from when I was little. I let an older boy—do something to me. I hated that too. But I want—”

  “It’s all lies,” her voice rose. “We all hear those lies.”

  “Ssh!” he whispered fiercely, rearing up. “I don’t want Sigrid to know. I’ve seen her with men. She doesn’t care. She’s like a wildcat in the woods. She’ll say things to me. Oh, please, don’t tell her.”

  She hugged him and kissed his soft arms and covered him with a sheet and went upstairs to bed, tears in her eyes, the scent of honeysuckle all about, thinking, Everything is a lie, and found Sigrid sitting up in bed. Annie could see her face by moonlight; she was grinning.

  “I heard you,” she sang softly. “My little brother couldn’t lay nothing.”

  “You don’t know a goddamn thing,” Annie said in a voice so hard it seemed to freeze her throat muscles. “You say one thing to me about that and I’ll kill you!” She threw her clothes down and went off to the bathroom to wash herself. When she returned, Sigrid was smoking a cigarette.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl said humbly. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Jesus! None of my business anyhow. I got my own troubles.”

  Annie stayed wakeful. She’d never spoken to anyone like that before in her life.

  A week or so later an army Jeep swerved into the drive-in and a tall young redheaded man got out of it in a lieutenant’s uniform. He ignored the other customers—it was active ignoring, as though he’d ridden into a peasant hamlet looking for the local lord. He swung himself down on a counter stool and gave Annie a patronizing grin. One of his bright blue eyes was slightly askew; his brilliant coloring, the tense alertness of his movements, his palpable arrogance made him distinctive if not endearing. She found herself looking at him in the way she knew gratified him.

  “Something cold,” he said in a clear flat voice, instantly looking away from her toward the back of the kitchen, and as though in control of every motion of his life, at the same time pulled out a flat leather case rimmed in gold from which he extracted a cigarette with a gold tip. She could have stopped the whole show right there, she supposed, if she’d asked, “What do you want?” Instead, she filled a glass with ice and poured ginger ale over it. She placed it in front of him, centering it carefully, and instantly turned her back to him. He laughed. She observed that the other customers had begun to examine him with the kind of interest people give to an odd member of their species. He sipped his drink slowly. She went about other tasks. “Come over here,” he said. She stood where she was. “Please.”

  “Will you have dinner tonight?”

  “Yes.” Her mind said no.

  Both of them spoke in the same clear flat tone of voice.

  “When?”

  “Nine, tonight,” she said.

  At nine on the dot, the Jeep swerved down the ramp, snorted among the half-dozen or so parked cars, and he leaped to the ground with his long legs, then turned to look for her. She’d been waiting around the corner of the counter. She walked toward him, expressionless, got into the Jeep, and he turned on the ignition with a smart turn of the wrist. They roared up the ramp and onto the road.

  “We’re going to Balboa,” he announced.

  Having been caught by an impulse, having then decided to outwit him, she was now a prisoner. As they passed the shell road that led to her house, she nearly told him to let her out at once. Then it was too late.

  He talked continuously over the sumptuous dinner he bought her. He had enlisted in the army—he’d gone to Reed College. He spoke German and French like a native—an educated native…He’d taken out a reigning beauty queen only last week; she’d just won some kind of national contest. She was vulgar but lively. His cigarette case came from Bond Street but he doubted Annie had ever heard of Bond Street. He was being sent to Alaska shortly although that, in fact, was classified information. He supposed she’d heard about classified information? He was an officer because he was a gentleman. And vice versa. He was staying with friends in the hills above Laguna. Was she aware that one of his eyes was askew? As a child, he’d been teased. It had, he thought, become one of his greatest assets, along with his linguistic ability.

  He was, she thought, the most ridiculous fellow she’d ever met.

  Later, he drove her up one of the curving drives that led into the hills. The dark lush foliage, the faint glim
mer of a street lamp here and there, the glimpse of lighted windows reminded her of Arizona Canyon. They turned into a driveway that led to a vast, circular granite shelf where a huge car was parked. Below them was the village of Laguna, beyond, the great expanse of the Pacific. The house, he explained carefully, was a copy of a part of the Alhambra. In Spain. On one side, there was a large swimming pool. One could swim and at the same time look down on the ocean. Around the pool were delicate columns and sculptures of lions. Starlight turned the lions to tigers.

  “A swim?” he asked and, to her surprise, went into a kind of cabana at the end of the pool and came out carrying an armful of women’s bathing suits. “Sherry keeps these around,” he said. “Take your pick.”

  She lowered herself into the black water without a splash and extended her arms with as little motion as needed to keep her afloat. She forgot the redheaded fellow; she rolled on her back, the heavens were dark waters; she heard through her wet ears the distant sound of the waves. Enveloped and saved by this darkness, she seemed to hang in a painless void. Then, she caught sight of the man at the other end of the pool, standing in water up to his thighs, an ink drawing of a man, the bright colors of his hair and skin and eyes obscured. She fell, choking, beneath the water, rose and sank again, rose and gasped. Even though her feet came solidly to rest on the tiled bottom of the pool, it was as though there was no bottom anywhere. Clumsily, she ran toward the edge of the pool, moaning a little, indifferent to what strangers she woke in the silent house that loomed above her. He pulled her up and out.

  He took her to the dressing rooms in the cabana. He said he was staying until orders sent him north, next week that would be. He made her a drink, taking water from a leather-bound carafe on a table by the side of a wicker couch and adding it to the whiskey. She drank it down at once.

  In his bathing trunks, he was like a stork.

  “Where are the people? Sherry? The one you spoke of?”

  “At a party,” he said. “There’s a colored maid and a chauffeur, but they’re at the other end of the house.”

  He sounded uneasy.

  She simply waited, the wet from her bathing suit spreading into the chintz of the upholstered chair in which she sat.

  “It is very important,” he said. “Sex is.”

  Important?

  “For hygiene. You know what hygiene is? I mean, for tension, the release of tension.”

  She had heard a tremor in his voice, but as he said the last word, he seemed to gain assurance, and his voice had again the clear flat quality that had attracted and repelled her in the drive-in.

  “Well, don’t you agree?”

  “I’d be glad if you’d take me home.”

  “You’re a cock-teaser,” he said in the same tone.

  “All right. But—”

  “I had a mistress in Paris. I’ve had women everywhere. It’s no trouble for me to have women.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry, all right.” He smiled at his joke, then as his mouth widened the blue eyes crinkled, and she thought he was going to cry. He pressed his bony knuckles against his teeth.

  “Well, old girl, let’s go. Get your clothes. We’ll be off,” he said, and slapping both his knees, rose and took off his trunks and began to dress in his uniform.

  She had refused him and his hygiene program, but instead of relief, she felt more than ever his prisoner. Had she let him take her to his bed, she would have won. She did not know what she meant by that. Won her freedom until the next man? For a moment she was tempted to stand naked in front of him, let him do with her what he would. It had been a dreadful evening, as she swung back and forth between opposing impulses. She hated herself with the full consciousness of her self-hatred. How ugly he was!

  He drove her down the hills to the shell road. She said she would walk the rest of the way.

  He stopped the Jeep and let it idle.

  “Thanks for dinner,” she said, cursing herself for sounding so placating.

  “Thank you for your charming company.”

  She wanted to say something to him, something cataclysmic, something that would melt the gold rim of his damned Bond Street cigarette case. He was staring straight ahead through the windshield. A sudden weakness overcame her.

  “I’m really sorry,” she said softly. But he did not understand, thinking, she knew, she was apologizing for not making herself available to him, when what she really meant was, sorry about him, about everything. He nodded curtly. She walked up the road, listening to the receding sound of the Jeep. The moon had risen and the white shells glimmered like old cleansed bones.

  In the weeks that followed her encounter with the soldier, she grew so silent that Sigrid, already worried about Joe for reasons she ultimately revealed, began to hit her lightly whenever she was near her.

  “Wake up!” she’d bawl. “Jesus!”

  It did not seem to occur to Sigrid to ask what the matter was until one day Annie sat at the breakfast Sigrid had cooked and began to weep. Joe stood up as though he’d been struck, dropped a fork on the floor with egg yolk adhering to its tines, and fled down the stairs.

  “Are you knocked up?” Sigrid said, drawing her chair so close to Annie that their legs touched.

  “No, no, no.” She rubbed the tears off her face.

  “It’s that damned husband of yours? He hasn’t written? Is that it?”

  “No. I don’t know…”

  “Ernie? Is it Ernie? Are you scared you’re going to get fired? Listen, you been so quiet, that dumb wife of his thinks everything’s hotsy-totsy now. Listen. You want a drink? I got a bottle of rum from some guy…you want—”

  “I feel better,” Annie cried. “It was just a fit.”

  “But you been like this for weeks!”

  “I’m tired. Only tired.”

  “No. You aren’t tired.”

  She was trying to think of an explanation to prevent Sigrid from seeing that she, herself, didn’t know what the trouble was. It was that she felt thin and pale and helpless—helpless about what? Incapable of looking at Ernie’s face, of speaking civilly to the Filipino, of picking up the stained metal trays that were clamped onto cars, of the wild rages of the cook, of seeing the physical sordidness of that kitchen. Actually, she was tanned, almost plump, and had learned certain habits of hard work—those that bowed you to it, that you did without thinking, bringing about the fatigue, the emptiness of thought that is a mirror image of the work itself.

  But Sigrid, her hair in pin curls over her skull, lit a cigarette while another was still smoking in her coffee-cup saucer. Her large face with its thick features looked pasty. She stayed out of the sun, but her arms and neck burned. She was staring at a place just beyond Annie’s shoulder. The worry forced her eyes closer together as though she were trying to bear down on it with a lens, take a closeup, see it plainer.

  “Joe,” she muttered. “You got the weepies. But it’s Joe that worries me. Lately, he’s been like he used to be. He used to wrap himself up in old blankets and trail off into the snow when he was little and sometimes I would think he’d gone off and froze himself to death. You know he’s not said even good morning to me for over ten days now? I see him behind the bar at that place when I walk by at night, going home, and he’s making drinks and looking into nothing. Is there something going on between you two I don’t know about?”

  “Nothing,” Annie said. “He hardly speaks to me either.” She hadn’t even been thinking about Joe. He slipped up the stairs for breakfast every morning around ten, and was there when all their evenings off coincided, which was rare, for one of Sigrid’s tasteless, filling dinners; he took out the garbage; he went for groceries; he kept his garage room scrupulously clean. Annie would see him there, a broom in his hands, sweeping invisible dust out to the shell road, a knotted preoccupied look on his face, his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Annie did the washing for everyone, and hung wet clothes on a small line Joe had strung between two trees. Every
one had their job. What had happened between herself and Joe had sunk into insignificance. He took the car when he wanted it and spoke to her, when he did speak, without any sign of strain, just a certain tonelessness. Only they didn’t go to the beach together any more, and when he spent an hour or so in the upstairs apartment, smoking quietly and looking out the window where the vine grew, he was quite silent, Sigrid’s tone catching his attention from time to time as she made fun of the customers at the drive-in, or, if Annie laughed suddenly, he would stare at her fixedly, frowning a little as though puzzled.

  It was strange how delicate he looked when he was in Sigrid’s vicinity. She wasn’t actually coarse, but there was that thickness about her, and she’d aged herself with the dead brassy hair, the mascara that stained her eye sockets, the dark-red polish on her fingernails.

  The postman called up and said he had some mail for the girls. Sigrid fetched up a letter from Walter with a postmark that couldn’t be deciphered, and a note from a cousin of Sigrid’s, which she read aloud to Annie, hoping perhaps that Annie would read Walter’s letter to her. It was Sigrid’s way of seeking distraction from her troubles. She wasn’t really curious about Walter.

  “My cousin keeps asking me have I got in the movies yet. That’s her idea of a big joke.”

  She shook her head. “Jesus! Sometimes I think, what’s going to happen to me? I could go back up to Minnesota. I got so many relatives there. But, oh God!”

  Walter wrote that he’d gotten one of Annie’s letters and hoped there were a lot more than that waiting for him in New York at the NMU. He’d be back soon, he said. He’d had an extraordinary adventure which he’d tell her about. Was she being good? He hoped she was seeing the right people, and making big tips. The letter was dated a month earlier. She felt a great pang of apprehension, then threw the letter over to Sigrid who read it aloud, mouthing the words like a child learning to read. “He writes good,” she said. “He can’t be so bad.”