The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

  Joe came home that night at 3:00 A.M., singing loudly to himself as he came along the road. Awakened by the noise, Annie and Sigrid went out to the steps and watched him stagger in the moonlight, grabbing leaves off the trees and scattering them around himself. “Dead drunk,” Sigrid muttered. “Like the old man.”

  He banged into his door, flung it open, and disappeared. Later, Annie heard him throwing up outside. In the morning, he was out scattering earth over a spot on the grass. He looked shaken, more fragile than ever. He stared up at her in her bathrobe on the steps. They looked deeply at each other for a moment. Then he smiled weakly. “Life’s just a bowl of cherries,” he said. Reassured, she laughed and went back inside, saying “He’s all right,” to Sigrid.

  “No,” said the girl. “That he ain’t.”

  One afternoon that week when the sun was a constant blow of heat, the trees still, the ocean flat, everything gleaming and dead at the same time, Annie went into a bar on Laguna’s main street. It was a pleasant place to sit. The bar itself was a long fish tank and while you were drinking, you could look down at the green water and follow the darting movements of the fish. She knew a few of the regulars at the bar. The bartender made her a martini. She’d developed a strong taste for gin. She looked down into the tank. “What did you call this one, Harry?” she asked. “That’s a neon tetra,” he said. “Lots of those, honey.”

  Someone was playing a tune on the upright piano in the corner near the window that looked out to the ocean. Annie felt cooled off and light and easy. There was something about being in a bar like this, paying for her own drink, knowing a few people, that was enormously comforting. Her heart seemed to beat more slowly.

  “Fish!” said a voice. “They’re too remote.” She turned her head and saw a man of about thirty-five or so looking at her. He was drinking from a tall glass. Despite the heat, he was wearing a tweed jacket and a hat pushed back on his head. Its soft brim curved around his face.

  “They’re only remote,” she replied.

  “That’s true,” he agreed, approvingly. “The adjective, too, is out of place. I meant remote in relation to dogs, I suppose. Fish don’t cater to one. They don’t know you’re there watching them with eyes as big as their bodies.”

  She turned away, not wanting a conversation.

  “Do you live here?”

  She nodded.

  “You don’t want to talk to me?”

  He spoke seriously, as though seriously concerned about her answer.

  She was annoyed. He was breaking into her quiet afternoon. “I guess not,” she said with a polite bow of her head in his direction.

  “I wish you would,” he said without flirtatiousness.

  He heard her sigh, and he looked unhappy. “Oh, well, then.”

  “It’s only that I don’t have much time to myself,” she said reluctantly.

  “What takes up your time?”

  She gave up. “I’m a waitress in a drive-in down the road. It’s pretty busy. I don’t have a lot of private time.”

  A middle-aged woman in a beach robe was singing “You don’t know what love is-is-is-” in off-key accompaniment to the piano player, an elderly sport in a Norfolk jacket.

  The man in the hat nodded. “I hardly have any time to myself either. I came down here looking for time but now I seem not to want it.”

  He waited. She felt his desire to have her question him. But she remained silent.

  “From Hollywood,” he said.

  The distinction between Hollywood and Los Angeles was not lost on her. The movies.

  “You work in the movies?”

  “You see? I can’t be plain. I said that so you’d know. I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t understand his apology. Harry asked if anyone wanted a drink, otherwise he was going to eat his turkey sandwich right now. The man bought her another martini. He was drinking plain soda. His eyes were dark, shadowed, and his black hair was thick and curly around his ears. He had small, bony, tanned hands that tapped and moved about above the fish as though accompanying their ceaseless movement.

  “I write for the movies,” he said. Then he added with deliberation, “I just sold an original screenplay for a lot of money.”

  “That’s good,” she said.

  “It doesn’t make me especially happy,” he said.

  She looked at him with a certain impatience. “Then you don’t need money,” she said.

  “It’s not the answer,” he said.

  “It’s the answer when it’s the question.”

  He laughed and his hands stayed quiet. “Let’s have a conversation about money,” he said. “I’m really interested in what you think about that.”

  Made braver than usual because she was in her own bar, she said, “There’s no reason for you to be interested in what I think about it.”

  “There is, there is…You look like a Gibson girl. Isn’t that reason enough?”

  She moved back, away from the personal comment.

  “No. I didn’t mean that,” he said, “the way you thought.”

  “I have to leave in a few minutes,” she said.

  “Could I see you again? I’ve rented a place down the road for a couple of weeks. To talk. After your work? Could you come here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come anyhow. I’ll go back and have a nap and dinner and return here—”

  He was giving her domestic details, his plan, and she was amused by his seriousness.

  “If I’m not too tired, I’ll come back around eleven tonight,” she said.

  “I’m Ben Greenhouse.” He extended his hand toward her. “Annie Vogel,” she said, touching his hand lightly. “Ann,” he said. She felt suddenly breathless and slipped off the bar stool.

  “Thank you for the drink.”

  “My pleasure, Ann.”

  She put on her uniform in the upright coffin provided by the management. Why had he called her Ann? His tone had been softly insistent; she suspected an intention to make the distinction suggest something about his own specialness.

  She spent the next three evenings with him at the bar. He was cross with her the last night because Ernie had kept her late cleaning up. Ernie had begun to play the cruel employer with her recently as though to make up for those earlier days when he’d slid and slipped about her like a suitor.

  “I couldn’t help it,” she protested.

  “You could have called here and left a message with Harry,” Ben said. He yawned loudly.

  “If you’re so tired, you could have gone on to your place. I wouldn’t have minded.”

  “I’m well aware of that. That’s the trouble with you. You don’t mind enough. It’s all too soft. You don’t know it, perhaps, but what you’re expressing is contempt. For men.”

  She was nervous because of his crankiness, yet faintly pleased. They were arguing tediously, the way she’d heard relatives argue.

  The air in the bar had a pleasant bouquet of gin and salt water, tanning lotion and men’s cologne.

  “We’re having a good time, aren’t we,” she said suddenly. His face broke into smiles. “You are a funny girl,” he said. Then he continued where he’d left off the night before. It all added up to a long interview; did he keep notes?

  “You said your father never worked when he was drunk. How often did he work? How often was he drunk?”

  “I don’t really know because I haven’t lived with him that much. But he told me that. I believe him. Anyhow, he’s had an unhappy life.”

  “Everyone has an unhappy life. That’s no distinction.”

  “Some people seem happy.”

  “Well, they aren’t. They’re just trying to be superior to the general condition.”

  “There are people who can’t even consider such a question—they suffer from not having enough food or shelter—”

  “Stop!”

  “I won’t. Look at the way you’re dressed! How can you speak of unhappiness when you have the choices you have!�
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  “You don’t know anything about my choices, and I’m aware of the suffering of the vast majority of mankind and I don’t want to hear about that ideal socialist state full of hairy little domestic groups, running around hacking each other to death in the name of progress. You’re looking for a way to explain things to yourself. You’ve picked the inevitable one at your age. Shaw said that anyone who wasn’t a socialist before thirty had no heart and anyone who was a socialist after thirty had no head.”

  “I’d rather have a heart.”

  “That’s a disgusting line to draw. As if we don’t have to live with both! That’s the curse of it all!”

  “Why are you attacking me so?”

  He sighed and patted her hand. “I suppose because you’re so young and I’m getting to be so old.”

  “Why do you want to know all these things about me?”

  “Because, because, I like you for one thing. And I have to know everything about what I like—” he laughed. “To the point of wrecking it! Also, I’m consumed with a frightful curiosity. It is destructive, I know that. I’m eaten up with it. When I’m bored, I go into a coma.” He looked broodingly at his drink. “I’m like a bear,” he said. “I bury myself in silence for half the time, the other half, I’m full of rage and energy. A Jewish bear.”

  He’d made a number of references to being Jewish. She had some questions of her own but did not know how to put them. She’d known a few Jews. They had happy families. Assured that his interest in her was singular and nonacquisitive, she ventured. “I’ve seen Jewish families. They’re happy.”

  He shouted unintelligibly, so that everyone in the bar ceased their activities momentarily and stared at him. He shook his head, saying, “Ignorant girl! They live in frozen regions among the Gentiles, huddling together, rending each other in their enforced intimacies, assuring each other of their superiority to the forces that hold them to each other in bonds you can hardly conceive of! Even now—this minute, they’re being readied for slaughter—children that look like my children are going to die by the thousands. Happy! It is not the concern of a good Jew! My father was a gross peasant who drove my mother and me mad! A furrier who smelled of animal rot and tanning fluids and went about his life’s business like a blind mole, snuffing out passages and hiding places, dragging his food about him in the evenings and grunting as he ate. I ran away…I sat on the steps of the telephone company until early morning. I was seventeen. I called my mother and said I would never come back. But I went back and didn’t speak one word to him for two years. This! In two rooms no bigger than this bar! He didn’t even notice.”

  She was silent. Jews huddled in warm groups among the frozen Gentiles—the animal-rotted father…

  “Now,” he began, his tone back to its familiar avuncular equableness, “what kind of a painter is he? I mean, is he traditional? Has he been influenced by any special school? Braque? Gris? Picasso? Cubism? Impressionism? What?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Have you seen your father since then?”

  He cried out again that she was an ignorant girl and brushed aside the question irritably. “I don’t want to talk about him.”

  “Do you always decide what’s to be talked at?”

  He grimaced. “Yes. Partly as a result of arguing with Communists who drive me wild with their blandness and savagery, their ignorance and insistence. My wife, of course, has the children to talk about. I’ve read her a number of times. I’ve read that book so well I know it by heart.”

  He shook his head and looked in despair. After three evenings with him, each one of which had lasted four or five hours, she was somewhat accustomed to the rapid swings of mood and expression.

  “Maybe she knows you like a book.”

  “Oh, indeed, she does! Did I sound arrogant? Presumptuous? I am. But, poor thing—”

  “That’s patronizing—”

  “I wish I were different.”

  “Could I have another drink?”

  “You drink too much. Yes.” He called Harry over and ordered her another drink.

  “If I had to work like your father probably had to, I might have been like a mole. He couldn’t help smelling the way he did!”

  “If you had been like him, then you would have to condemn yourself! Do you imagine that objective evil disappears simply because you have a generous imagination? What nonsense! You could be that way and so you are all ready to forgive it! How tenderly you hold yourself!”

  She drank down the gin quickly, angered, frightened by her anger, as though it existed outside her, coming at her from the world. She didn’t reply.

  “Well, I have gone and offended you now. You are offended, aren’t you?” He laughed. “See, I know how you feel. I have a plan. Let’s go to the beach in the morning. Let’s have a little daylight life! I haven’t been on the beach since I got here—knocking about that shack like a prisoner. Don’t you think the California beach life astonishing? It’s vile. Hundreds of miles of insane maggots stretched out beneath the sun. I hate the Pacific Ocean. I’m really afraid of it. California is the most hostile place I’ve ever lived! What a perfect setting to turn out sugarplums! Do you know about the San Andreas Fault? We may all of us be spilled out into the water like ants—our little limbs flailing in the beautiful sunlight as we drown.”

  They stayed a while longer—then he walked her home, leaving her at the beginning of the shell road and going on to his place a half a mile or so farther down. She watched him from behind a tree until he’d disappeared. He wore his hat at all times.

  When she saw Sigrid she thought for a terrifying moment that the girl was dead. Her lids were half closed. At first Annie could detect no breathing. Slumped into a chair by the window, a glass nearly escaping from one slack hand, Sigrid’s face was like a snuffed-out lantern. Annie thought to run away, to get Joe, to send for people, the police, but to remove herself instantly above all. Then Sigrid belched.

  “God! I thought—”

  “Wha—”

  She was drunk.

  She burst into drunken tears, swallowing them as they poured toward her mouth. Her mascara had run; her hair was limp. She was a sad sight.

  “It’s Joey,” she sobbed. “He didn’t come home for two nights. Wha’s happened to Joey? Oh, Jesus…”

  Annie had not even noticed. Why hadn’t that dumb fool said anything?

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You! Who could tell you things? With that stuck-up face? Like you’re different from everyone else?”

  Stricken, Annie fell back against the wall.

  “Oh, Jesus!” wailed Sigrid, trying to get up, her legs giving way beneath her, the glass at last released and falling to the floor, where it broke. “Now, look what’s happened! We’ll have to pay for that glass. You see what’s happened?”

  “You’d better go to the bar and see if he’s turned up,” said Annie, thinking, What stupidity! Why hadn’t she gone to the bar? It was the first reasonable place to look.

  “I didn’t want to walk in there alone,” Sigrid said pitifully.

  My God! Is she shy? Looking like a whore the way she does? Timid? Looking, as Walter would say, as if she carried a mattress on her back? Sigrid was staring fixedly, with a drunk’s cunning, at Annie.

  “You think you’re the only one’s scared?” the girl asked in an ominous whisper that contained a threat of a scream.

  “No.”

  “Yes you do! Oh, Joey!”

  “Let’s go to the bar.”

  “Can’t walk.”

  “I’ll go.”

  “You go.”

  The bar was closing just as Annie reached it. A last customer, his eyes glittering, gave her a long look as she passed him in the door. “Dear girl…” he entreated.

  Joey had not been there for two nights. They didn’t know where he was but he’d better get his ass over there and explain to them what the hell he thought a job was for!

  Sigrid was snoring in the chair. Let i
t be until morning, Annie decided.

  At breakfast, Sigrid was cool although she looked ravaged. She listened calmly to Annie’s news of the bar. Then she shrugged. “It’s his life and his business,” she said, putting on her carhop uniform.

  Annie felt as forsaken as though it had been she whom nobody was bothering to look for. “I think you ought to go to the police,” she said. The girl gave her a look of pure dislike. “I don’t go to the police for nobody,” she replied sharply.

  Annie met Ben Greenhouse on the beach just below the drive-in. That way, he said, she’d be able to stay until the last minute. She took a path down the cliff to the sand. It was too early for the sun bathers, and the beach was empty except for a boy of about twelve playing a few yards from where Ben was sitting with his hands clasped around his knees.

  “Where did you get that blue mark?” he asked pointing at her thigh.

  “In school, a long time ago. I was walking back to my desk. A boy stuck out a pen and I walked into it.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Nine. I think it was the fourth grade.”

  “How did you feel about it?”

  “Hurt. I mean, aside from the pain itself.”

  “Hurt because he’d wanted to hurt you?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked over at the boy. “What a stupid place to sit and talk,” he said. His skin was so white and his body hair patchy like indifferently planted shrubbery. “I wonder if children start out by knowing about the world’s malevolence and then forget as they join the rest of us? I suspect that people who talk about essential human goodness are the worst ones. It’s hardly to be borne, the world’s malevolence.”

  The boy suddenly ran over to them, knelt and said, “Look!” He released a small crab from his closed fist that instantly took off across the sand in a diagonal direction. The boy caught it and put it back where the same action was repeated. He looked up laughing at Ben. “I like that,” he said. “The way it moves.” He went back to where he’d been playing. “It matches something in his mind,” Annie murmured. Ben took hold of her hair. “That’s a nice thing to say,” he said. “I like that.”