The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

  Later, they walked, Ben saying, “I can’t stand this lying around like a lizard.” He talked to her about anti-Semitism. He spoke slowly, as though to a backward student. He mentioned a book, Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud. She interrupted him and said, “Someone once said I was neurotic,” and he turned and looked at her soberly. “Do you know what it means?”

  “In a way,” she answered. He seemed to ponder her answer a moment, then went back to the Jews. She was thinking that no one had ever noticed the blue scar in her thigh before. He saw so much; he seemed to live in a hole by himself, going out on forays for information and pulling what he found back in with him, to stare at in the dark with melancholy intensity. In this, she felt herself to be like him. “You are inward, like I am,” he said suddenly. “I knew that when I watched you drinking alone at the bar. You had an expression of relief on your face as though you were happy to be alone, happy to not have to respond to anyone. Then I made you respond to me. I want to ask you something very personal.”

  “That’s Bette Davis’s house,” she said.

  “Do you want to be in the movies?”

  “No.”

  “That’s untruthful. I would guess that you do. Because everyone does, even if only for an hour now and then. I would say you feel you can’t make it, and that you get some profit from saying no. Make yourself different from the peasants.”

  “Sometimes you make me feel bad…you talk about me as if I weren’t here, or as if I were my own representative, something like that.”

  “It’s because you’re like everyone else. You don’t want to think about anything. I would guess you already know a good deal but you pay no attention to what you know.”

  “You just said I wasn’t like everyone else, when you talked about my being inward.”

  “I didn’t say you and I were the only two inward people in the world,” he said and gave a short laugh. He didn’t often laugh. When he did, she had noticed, it sounded more like coughing.

  “I’m going to take a swim.”

  “Wait!” He stood still, looking at her. “Don’t. It alarms me. I had, instantly, a vision of you drowning.” His face twisted as though he were in pain. “I can’t stand watching anyone I know in the water or on the edge of a platform, even getting into a car. My children climb trees. I can’t look. The suffering is unspeakable…”

  “All right, I won’t swim then.”

  “You see how quickly you give in? It’s because you understand my feelings too well. I have another question, but let’s move on.” They walked. She waited with a kind of painful pleasure for what he would ask next. There was something about it that reminded her of modeling. It was as if he could, through her answers, paint a portrait of her. In the same way, when she’d been at the Art Students League, that she had wanted to step off the platform and run to see what the painter had made of her, so now she would like to have asked him how the portrait was coming along. He was silent for a moment, absorbed, apparently, in the placing of his small, white, delicately boned feet in larger footprints which disappeared a few yards ahead into the water.

  “You see what I’m doing?” he asked. “It’s a kind of humiliation, training perhaps. I don’t like to use what other people have used—foot space in this instance. Whose footprints are these? Perhaps it is someone with some horrible fungus disease, or a woman with flabby boneless feet like pork. Now, the question. No. I won’t ask it. I know the answer. I think you sleep around a good deal. I would guess you do it because you’re afraid to refuse—anything. Now, listen to me. You mustn’t do it any more. It’s an insult, given and taken. It is a form of terrible silliness…there will be consequences later on you can’t even imagine. Real morality is fundamentally good psychology—good sense if you like. There’s a time for sleeping around and a time for it to stop.”

  He was monstrous! She wanted to shout denials! She hadn’t “slept around” so much, had she? But the truth was there. She would, given a chance, turn down no one. The thought struck her full in the face like a blow. Her heartbeat thickened; her breathing grew rapid. She wished she’d never seen him.

  He was looking down at the sand, a grave expression on his face. For all his references to his sensibility, he didn’t take into account the way someone might feel being read like a book. She moved rapidly away from him.

  “Come back,” he said mildly. She stood still. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “My saying something doesn’t make the reality more, or less. I like you. Doesn’t that please you? Are you luckier than the rest of us? Do many people really like you—knowing the way you are?”

  “I’m not a whore!” she burst out.

  “No. I know that. You just enjoy the income from being a victim. Give it up. Try! Look! The boy’s in the water. Call him out, can’t you? I’m a terrible swimmer. What if something happens? There are sharks in this ocean.”

  “He’s a good swimmer,” she said coldly. “And you don’t care if he drowns. You just care how you’ll feel if he drowns.”

  “Ann…that’s right. It’s right.” He sank down in the sand and she, after a moment’s hesitation, sat next to him.

  She felt sticky, hot, ashamed. It was all too close. She felt as if she’d been forced into a closet with Ben for hours while outside the door that kept her prisoner the airy world raged with all its promise and freedom.

  “Do you have a pencil with you and a piece of paper?”

  Determined to do nothing to be agreeable, she glanced nevertheless at her pocketbook a few yards away where she’d left it. “Get it,” he said in a kindly voice.

  She fetched him back a scrap of paper and a yellow pencil. He began to write, using his knee for a table. “A maniac said this, but it doesn’t make it less true. Nietzsche. Funny that I’m quoting him now, at this time in the world. I’m a perverse Jew.”

  He handed her the paper. “Read it to me.”

  She read: “The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we have improved.”

  He emitted a kind of hag’s chuckle as though he’d done her mischief.

  “Do you know someone named St. Vincent?” she asked, eager to distract him from the subject of herself.

  “Yes. But not to know. He’s of an older school, the equivalent of an ancien régime out here. He regards us, the Jewish writers from the East, as upstarts. All those people do—the ones who came out in the twenties. His movies are absolutely passé. Old-time romantic plots with mean ironies. Now they’ve started on the propaganda movies. God knows where that will end.”

  She wasn’t listening. Down the beach, a figure was moving rapidly toward them. It was one of the policemen, Bob, making his way heavily through the sand. He was in uniform. She had the peculiar impression that the man, in his bulky police uniform, restored the beach to its natural state, that it was no longer a playground but only a waste of waters beating against a shore.

  “How is it that you know St. Vincent?”

  “Why is the policeman on the beach?”

  “Tell me…”

  “He’s an old friend of my father’s…he looks so hot.”

  “They always look hot. Well then, they were friends earlier, before St. Vincent came out here. How odd to think of the before time, before you came to Hollywood, before I came…I had another life too…Syracuse, the university, a certain kind of early-winter evening…”

  She was not listening to him. The policeman waved to her but he was not smiling. Did he want her to go to him? She stood up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I think he wants to speak to me,” she said, alarmed. She wished Bob had not seen her with Greenhouse on the beach—it might make the policemen treat her differently. She started toward him, intending to keep him away from where they were sitting.

  He was panting heavily, sweat poured down his face.

  “Where’s that Swede girl?”

  His tone was almost abusive; he was looking at her as if s
he were pavement.

  “She’s at work.”

  “Charlie’s gone to your apartment to fetch her. I’ll have to—Jesus! I got to take that path!” She thought he was relenting, complaining to her, but he only glared at the steep path leading to the top of the cliff.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked timidly.

  “That brother of hers has done himself in.”

  “But what’s happened?” she asked again, her voice rising; she hadn’t understood. What was he saying?

  Ben Greenhouse had moved up behind her. “What’s the trouble, officer?” he asked irritably.

  The policeman didn’t bother to look at him as he started on the path, heaving his weight upward and muttering to himself.

  Annie remained where she was. Some people had pitched an umbrella down toward the other end of the beach. She saw a picnic basket, a Thermos. A light breeze blew across the surface of the water.

  “Ann…”

  She began to walk in the direction from which the policeman had come. Far ahead, black figures moved clumsily, fragmented through the prism of heat into shards of black cloth.

  “Something terrible has happened,” she said in a stifled voice.

  Greenhouse caught hold of her arm. His hand was damp.

  “Let’s go back,” he said. “Let’s go back,” he repeated more urgently.

  But she went on until she was within sight of a body lying on the sand, a pale mound beneath the black birds moving above. She stopped, paralyzed with dread.

  “I don’t want to see that,” Ben said in her ear. “I will not be made to see that.”

  One of the figures detached itself from the group and came toward them.

  “There’s nothing to look at, folks,” said the trooper. She saw the tight puttees wound around the man’s legs. She moved forward. The trooper held up his hand. “Stay back, please,” he said.

  “I knew him,” she said in a whisper. The trooper shook his head angrily.

  Greenhouse dragged her away and they stumbled together in a brief struggle down toward the water and into the surf.

  She wrenched herself from Ben’s grip and turned to see Sigrid running down the cliff in her carhop’s uniform, her hands waving as she strove to keep her balance on the steep incline. The brass buttons of the girl’s shirt caught the sunlight, and sent off splinters of white light. She hit the beach, fell, got up to her knees, shouted some word, rose and ran on. Just behind her came Bob puffing and waving his arms.

  Annie ran. “Sigrid,” she called out as the girl flew past her, then stumbled in the sand, sobbing with open mouth, blinking under the brilliant sunlight. The policeman was walking now, looking out at the ocean as though he was merely on a stroll. The three people beneath the umbrella were sipping from small paper cups, watching the scene with mild interest.

  “They think they’re looking at a movie,” Ben said. She’d forgotten he was there. He pulled her down so that they both sat at the edge of the surf, the water circling around their feet then ebbing away.

  “Tell me what’s it about?”

  “She’s the girl I live with,” Annie said, looking down the beach. Sigrid had become a black figure like the others, as though she’d entered a different dimension. She was being held up by two men.

  “Your legs are knocking together,” Ben observed.

  “I’m scared,” she groaned.

  “And the—”

  “Her brother. The man said he’d killed himself.” She was suddenly perplexed. Is that what he’d said? She didn’t actually remember hearing the words. “Maybe not.”

  “In any case, he’s dead,” said Ben. “Did you like him?”

  “No, not especially,” she said.

  “It’s awful anyway, is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go and have lunch. I’ll buy you a drink although you shouldn’t drink so much—there’s nothing more absurd than a female drunkard—”

  “Don’t. Don’t teach me,” she cried in anguished protest, against him, against the body down the beach.

  He was silent. “I’d better go,” she said, “see if I can help Sigrid.”

  “No! You don’t want to see that!”

  She freed herself and got to her feet and started down toward the group. Bob had Sigrid by the elbows. She had covered her face with her hands. As Annie reached them, Bob shook his head warningly. Sigrid dropped her hands and stared at Annie. “Sigrid?”

  “Like something’d come off on your hands if you’d touch it,” said the girl shrilly.

  “He don’t feel it,” the policeman said, patting her on the shoulder. “Drowning case always looks like that.”

  “He was always unhappy,” she said.

  “Maybe he just went for a swim,” Annie said helplessly.

  “With his clothes on?” the girl asked, and began to laugh, and laughing still, to pound the policeman until he gripped her hands in his. She calmed down at once; almost to a stupor. “You go tell Ernie,” she said to Annie and then, still gripped by the policeman, began to move on toward the path.

  “I can’t have lunch,” Annie said. “I’ll have to do Sigrid’s work and mine too.”

  Climbing the path, Greenhouse following her silently, she was gripped with terror as though the event which had already taken place was still about to happen.

  Joe had been a plain, secretive boy, melancholy it was true. But now he was invested with a powerful mystery. To take one’s own life required unimaginable resolution. How long had it been forming in him? Had what happened between him and Annie strengthened the resolve? The sight of her weeping had sent him flying, in terror, from the breakfast table. She did not think, now, that it was because she had been weeping that he had fled. He must have lived in unremitting anguish, but it had not been apparent to either Sigrid or herself. How could she have known? Oh, Sigrid had been worried in her way, but then had shoved the worry aside brutally. Would she feel responsible now? And should she, Annie, have forced her out of her drunkenness that night to tell her Joe had not been to work?

  They had, by then, reached the top of the cliff. Annie saw Ernie’s wife carrying a tray of French fries and a malted milk to a waiting car, an expression of loathing on her face. Greenhouse, paler than usual, was staring down at the smooth surface of the macadam with its islands of oil patches where cars had idled.

  “The confusion,” he said. “I can’t bear it. Turgidity, confusion …” He looked up at her face. “I came down here to gather up my resources.”

  He was so full of complaint. So elderly.

  “It didn’t happen to you,” she said. “None of us count in your life.”

  “That’s stupid. You don’t understand. I’ve been on the verge of a breakdown. I’m thirty-seven years old. Everything bores me.”

  People did not grow up—they grew down, to the small patch of earth they’d marked out as their own. He was disgusting!

  “Every cliché of Christian sanctimony is written on your mug,” he flung at her. “Do you think I can’t see what you’re thinking? That I should be pitying that dead man? I should be concerned about his troubles? What cant! If you were truthful—”

  “I have to go. Ernie’s seen me. I have to tell him about Sigrid.”

  Greenhouse began to walk up toward the road.

  Released, she ran to Ernie. He received the news with no comment. After she’d put on her uniform, he came up to her. “Well, how long’s Sigrid going to take off? What am I supposed to do meanwhile? My wife can’t take this for long. She’s ailing. Well …” And turned away, shambling toward the table where the accounts were kept.

  An hour or so before closing time—Ernie conceded they could close a little earlier since it was a weekday anyhow and they were short-handed, although he had no sympathy for anyone who would take his own life—Ben Greenhouse drove up in a Chrysler touring car. Annie went out to him with order pad in hand.

  “You can bring me a ginger ale,” Ben said, “so we can talk a minu
te. I’m going back to Hollywood.”

  She brought back the drink and hooked the tray onto the rim.

  “Don’t let it scratch the car,” he said nervously.

  She was exhausted; her hair untidy, her lipstick chewed away.

  “You’re disappointed in me,” he said.

  “No…no.”

  He sighed. “Yes. You couldn’t help but be. I wish I could simply be awful and not be aware of it.”

  “The ice is melting.”

  “You’re going to think harshly of me. I wanted to leave you with something—pleasant. I’m sorry about the young man…but it’s part of my illness, that I’m not more concerned. I’m concerned about you, though. Will you be all right? Do you think so?”

  He looked at her with curious eagerness. He was very small in the huge car. For all the romantic swagger of the fedora on the back of his head, he merely seemed forlorn, the dark eyes lusterless.

  “I’ll be all right,” she said, asserting something against his soft sadness, meaning something other than what he’d asked which she understood as a kind of exoneration.

  “You’re a good girl,” he said. “Now take this stuff away. I don’t want it. I’m going to write you a letter. I’ll try to explain a few things. Good-by, Ann.”

  She walked home, dragging her feet, aching with fatigue. Sigrid was in Joe’s room. From the road, Annie could see her through the open door sorting out clothes. She wished it were a week later, a year later.

  On the narrow cot were two or three shirts, some boxer shorts, an old black cardigan with a raveled sleeve. As Annie came in, Sigrid swept some toiletries off a wooden shelf into a paper bag. One book lay on the floor. It was a Boy Scout handbook and there was a ragged marker of newspaper at a chapter on knot-making. When Sigrid moved the pillow, Annie found a length of line with which Joe had apparently been practicing knots.