The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

  One evening, Annie came home to Theda’s and found a party in the making. Among the people, some of whom she knew now, was a stranger, a light-skinned Negro who stood slightly outside the group around the fireplace (the never-used fireplace, Theda had put a basket of fruit on the hearth). He was elegantly dressed in a dark-blue jacket and light flannel trousers, a narrow knit blue tie, a white shirt. Annie went to wash up. She put on the amber beads which Ben Greenhouse had sent her. Theda was setting out a platter of thick cold pork chops and a huge bowl of apple sauce. The Negro was standing where Annie had seen him last. They looked at each other, she smiled, he nodded. She went over to him.

  “That’s beautiful amber,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Tree resin. Older than anyone can imagine. Sometimes they’ve found insects imbedded in pieces of it from hundreds of thousands of years ago. Wars have been fought for amber.”

  “Can I get you a plate of food?”

  “No. Thank you, not yet. My name is Cletus Moore.”

  “Annie Gianfala,” she said. “I’m staying here with Theda until I find a place.”

  “She told me.”

  He fetched up a drink from the table beside him.

  “Can I get you a drink?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I think Theda’s got some gin tonight.”

  “I’ll have that.”

  “It eats out the lining of your stomach.”

  “One thing less to worry about.”

  He appeared delighted with that. A smile revealed a gap between his upper teeth. He was the color of fine luggage and his eyes were faintly slanted. He looked like a giant chrysanthemum, a pale-golden one. He brought her a glass of gin and water and ice.

  He wanted to know what she did. She was in a training school, she told him, learning how to operate a drill press. He told her he wrote continuity for an afternoon soap opera—“All about the trials of white folk,” he said with the faintest irony.

  Later, they took their plates and sat down on some cushions and ate together. She had never had a conversation with a Negro, a conversation over dinner and drink. He maintained an even, pleasant demeanor although he drank considerably more than she did. He spoke of himself without constraint, yet she felt it was a prepared script he offered her, something to get done with before you got down to the real game. She offered him her own script in return, radically edited.

  “Your life’s messed up,” he said. “But you’re just beginning.” He began to laugh. “It gets worse, lady.”

  “It can’t.”

  “Can, always can. Now this week, they wanted to have a colored maid say ‘gwine to hebben,’ the story’s too dull to go into, but just hold that in your mind. They wanted me to have that girl say ‘gwine to hebben.’ I told them I was gwine to my lawyer and break my contract if they were going in for that jive.”

  “What did you have the maid say?”

  “I quit.” Her own laughter was not in response to what he had said, but to something playful in him. He was grinning at her. “That’s a beautiful jacket,” she said. “Yeah. Blues out my dark soul. Leads young women into thinking I’m a safe bet for a soft talk. Isn’t that what you think?”

  “I don’t know much about jackets.”

  “That’s good.” He had a lovely thick laugh; he could talk right through it; his Chinese eyes glinted, the fine wrinkles all around them creasing with merriment.

  “Where’s your daddy and mama?”

  “My father—I’m not sure now, somewhere in New England. She’s dead. It’s been a long time.”

  “I’m from here. I’m a Californian. My mother was a white woman and when she died, my father married another white. My stepmother is a bad lady. I had to clear out. My old man has a little chicken farm up in Petaluma, the egg basket of the West. He’s a dried-up little thing—he’s got a Japanese chicken sexer working for him. You know what that is? Somebody can tell what sex a chick is. He bullies that Japanese something terrible. You know the story about the bongo tree? There’s an island with a bongo tree. When there’s enough fruit on it, the natives don’t bother each other, but when the bongo tree is barren, they eat each other. One of those stories…the truth is, the natives eat each other regardless of what the tree is putting out. Theda lays on a good table. Some women can’t do it, you know. They just can’t put a meal together. I’ve got to go soon. I have to write this crap eight weeks ahead and the seventh week is sliding up to crush me. I’ll have to work all night tonight.”

  “Is it what you like to do?”

  “Ho! Choices! That’s another life. What I’d like is to write essays. Hazlitt, Arnold, like those people. I’d like to write about dumbness. If you think about it, you’ll see how many subtle variations there are, what nuances stupidity has, what grace and style accompany self-stupefaction.”

  “Don’t go!”

  “You like to listen to me? You come over and see me. I’ll play you some nice music and I’ll talk some more. And if the day isn’t too hot, I’ll wear my Harris tweed which I bought in London, made to fit my own bones and no one else’s.”

  “I’d like that!”

  “You know Countee Cullen? No? James Weldon Johnson? I’ll fix that.”

  She stood. He held out his warm, dry hand and she pulled him to his feet. He jumped up and down in place several times, shot his cuffs, and patted her head. “You mixed up with Theda’s congregation? The party?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t like groups,” he said. “Doesn’t matter what’s in their mouths. Somewhere there’s a lynching in the making. Don’t join anything. Do you read Kipling? There’s a story, The Cat That Walked by Himself. I’ll read you something else from him when you come over. Theda’s gang says he was a dirty old imperialist. Theda’ll tell you where I live. You might like it. It’s a big barn over a nightclub. Not far from here. Take care now.”

  She watched him go to Theda, touch her face, then leave. He was quick, moving out of the way of drunken staggerings, moving fast and neatly.

  After everyone had gone, Theda told her a little more about Cletus. He’d been in Carmel in the twenties and had known all the Negro poets who’d formed a little community there. No, he’d never married but he’d been in love with a woman for a long time, so long that people didn’t gossip about it any more. She was married to a party functionary—she’d been a cabaret dancer, from the South, Theda thought, and Cletus used to hang around their house, fighting with the functionary about party matters, while Leora served up her perfect little suppers on a white tablecloth. Somebody’d said she was half Mexican. And Cletus wasn’t interested in anyone else? Oh, well, he’d had a girl now and then over the ten years Theda had known him. He was nice to them. She supposed he took them to bed. But what he really liked to do was to teach them. Cletus knew a lot. He’d gone to Howard University in Washington. It had caused a fearful ruckus in the family because his stepmother wanted him to go to a white college. But Cletus wouldn’t budge. He went where he intended. He was a good friend, said Theda. Party people were really down on him. “I heard Calvin Schmitter almost call him a ‘bad nigger’ once and then bite on it and swallow it and turn green.”

  The place was a mess. They cleaned for two hours. Theda discovered a gallon of red wine behind a broom in the closet. “We’ll drink this,” she said, “and make the time fly.”

  “How is it people can hang around the party? I thought…I had some idea it was underground.”

  “Not here. Not now. In some cases I suppose it is. But since the popular front—it’s not like the old days, Palmer raids and all of that. Oh, it’s too long! I don’t feel like talking about it. I’m out, you know. I’ve quit it.”

  “How do you quit?”

  “I don’t really know,” Theda said glumly. “They’ve never paid much attention to me. I’ve been lectured to a number of times, but I have this terrible faculty of depressing them, I mean a kind of personal depression, the wa
y you’d feel about someone you don’t much care for who’s dying of an obscure disease. I suppose if I were important…well, I’ve used them as much as they’ve used me. You know, the serious ones, the ones who really believe, they even walk differently from other people…They know what’s right, all of history fits in their fists. Even in my shrillest days—that once upon a time when I thought there was a side I could take and hold forever—even then, I experienced the most terrible irritability—I think it was construed by some as conviction—and I realized that in me the idea that no truth could come from the capitalist press, its literature, its movies, its theaters, took the form of raging paranoia. I was tormented by suspicion of simply everything. When Simon went to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War, I listened to the kind of grim praise that was showered on him those last days before he left, political praise. But I knew why Simon was going. Simple Simon. He thought Franco was bad; he was troubled in his work; he was bored. Oh, Simon! He never had a political thought in his life. When I think of him, I become insane.”

  The rugs had been straightened, the chairs returned to their places, the glasses and dishes washed. Theda had opened the window and a eucalyptus-perfumed night breeze blew across their heated faces. She got up to pour them both more wine. They sat silently for a bit, smoking, looking out through the leaves to where the lamps illuminated the empty street.

  “How did you get in?”

  “My brother,” Theda said. “He’s what’s known as a party theoretician. He is not without learning, the shit! Implacable monster that he is! He went through college like a general, slaughtering his professors, putting Trotskyites to the sword, burning villages…I mean, of course, with his mouth. He has the most terrible mouth in the history of mankind. He’s in the East now, issuing directives. He came here once. Simon was sitting just where you’re sitting. He began to tell Simon about the true function of art. Simon listened. Then he went into my little kitchen and came back with a five-pound sack of flour. He cut open the top with my nail scissors. My brother, Carl, continued to address the furniture, the walls, the paintings. Simon dumped the whole sack of flour on his head. Then Simon said, ‘I’ll be back after you’ve swept up.’”

  Theda threw back her head and laughed. “I haven’t seen Carl since. I had always been afraid of him until I saw him whitened. It was a cruel way to lose my fear, but that’s the way it happened.”

  “You loved Simon?” Annie said with heedless emphasis.

  Theda drank. “I was taller than Simon. But that was fortunate because he liked tall women. He liked all women. We must have been a strange couple. I desired Simon. I desired to be in the place where he was all the time. Look! Someone put out a cigarette in my rug!”

  She got up and went to the white stub crushed in the rug pile and bent over. God, she was tall. She stood up, holding the butt in her hand. She caught Annie’s glance, its import. Annie flushed; Theda smiled. “Have another drink,” she said. “Love is not a subject any more than death is. I’m not especially vain about it, but I have yet to run out of men who want to make love to me. Make what? Love!” and she whirled and tossed the butt into the flower basket in the fireplace.

  They drank a good deal more. Theda spoke as though she plucked her thoughts from some clear medium. It was not her judgment that so impressed the younger woman; it was the way she didn’t count the costs of what she said.

  In her closet of terrors, Annie picked up words in the dark, hoping they would not turn out to be serpents. But Theda was uncongested. Annie asked her if she knew Fern Diedrich. Theda said that Fern was going mad—that it was not the party that had driven her mad, no, the party didn’t do that—in fact, it frequently kept madness at bay—“like religion,” Theda said. “She came here once with Max and Eva. I had a dog at the time. Jimmie, the dog. The dog jumped into Fern’s lap. She sat in a catatonic trance—Fern with dog on lap. We were all paralyzed, even Eva. Fern began to grin, her mouth stretched so, I thought her face would break. The dog licked her chin. She stood straight up, so quickly the dog fell on the floor. I never saw a dog do that before.”

  “Max,” said Annie sadly, drunkenly. “Max.”

  “No, no. Not Max.”

  They stared across the table at each other.

  “I didn’t mean anything…”

  “It wouldn’t do any good. I, asked him once if he’d murdered old ladies in his youth. Oh, he’s hopeless. Taking on burdens that appall him. But he can’t refuse anything, anyone. You did too mean something. Listen, I’m years older than you. Going to bed with men is your idea of good manners—offering the executioner a cigarette before he chops off your head.”

  “I think I’m going to throw up.”

  “Minnie was a moocher,” sang Theda, knocking over her glass. “Swine! Warrior runts! Mammary rooting swine!”

  “Knockers!” Annie shouted.

  “Pear-shaped, pig-snouted, apple-round, melons, moons, bangles, dangles, udders,” howled Theda, rising, staggering, leaping into the middle of the room. “Men, the hog species, the boob lovers!”

  “Tits!” shrieked Annie. They danced, they minced, they posed, living statues. “The Susquehanna,” whispered Theda.

  “Shenandoah,” sighed Annie.

  “The Missouri.”

  “Monongahela…”

  “The Santee…”

  “Mississippi…”

  “Allegheny…”

  “The Nile!” Annie cried.

  “The Nile?” questioned Theda, and in the middle of a burst of laughter, sank, spinning in slow motion to the floor, where she lay as if dead. The room spun on, still singing to itself.

  Annie lurched to the bathroom, knelt and embraced the throat of the toilet bowl, resting her head on the cold porcelain, then shook like a rattle, and gave up her guts.

  At last, weak, grateful for the feel of tile and porcelain, for the clear cold sound of flushing water, for all things cold, inanimate and odorless, she slipped to the floor and slept.

  Chapter 15

  Every noon hour, Max and Annie met at a bench in the central machine shed. All around them, the machines stood idle. The whole plant, the workers, the machines, the foremen, were waiting. There were as many explanations as there were people to account for the absence of materials, the lack of work, and, at the same time, the growing labor force. The air of inanition was at its worst in the late afternoon. Yet there were two shifts, and rumor had it there would soon be a graveyard shift from midnight to 8:00 A.M.

  Annie was surprised to find that anyone she spoke to attributed sinister purposes, in this hiatus, either to the government or the shipbuilding plant, or both. But Max said it was characteristic of American working people to distrust government and industry. “It has nothing to do with political awareness,” he explained. “It’s in the character of the people.”

  She had found a room in a private house on Oxford Street owned by a divorcee. Mrs. Ives lived with her two children and her mother, Mrs. Gannon, an alligator-skinned, knobby-fingered old woman who had spent most of her life in China. She made Annie’s lunch for her every morning, avocado or watercress sandwiches and a little glass jar filled with raw carrots and raisins. The old woman seemed to like her and was much given to slapping her on the back like a little jolly old man.

  Her daughter was sour-faced and withdrawn but a very good cook. On weekends, with a certain grudging pride, Mrs. Ives taught Annie some of the essential tasks of cooking. She showed her how to make béchamel sauce, to mince onions, to make white and brown stock. She said, “Everyone wants to get away with everything. You can’t be a real cook if you cheat. One thing, I never cheated in the kitchen. My mother used to say, if you have a button missing from a blouse, if you use a safety pin where a catch ought to be, you might as well give up. It’s not an easy law to follow.” She stood in the middle of the kitchen, one finger raised. Annie had the impression she was describing the movements of the planets.

  Mrs. Ives and her mother were, they informed Annie,
“progressives.” Sometimes in the evening if Annie wandered into their part of the house, she would find the two women brooding over the past, speaking in low voices about the outrages man perpetrated on man—and woman. Especially on woman. “If I had left my husband,” Mrs. Ives explained, “he would have gotten the children. I’m reasonably sure of that, even though he ran off with a very disgusting girl who thinks she has a stained-glass window between her legs instead of what we are all required to pretend we don’t have. It’s all very disgusting.”

  Her children, a boy and a girl of twelve and fourteen, had a strange glacial quality unlike any Annie had encountered in a child. They frequently reported that dogs were mating on the street. Once the boy told his grandmother that he was convinced his civics teacher was going through menopause. The grandmother told Annie that American children were infantilized—“their youth is prolonged into middle age. After living in China for so many years, my daughter and I do not intend for this to happen to Mai and Pavel.” The two women never raised their voices to the children. If Pavel made what the old woman or her daughter deemed a childish request, they said as much in reasonable modulated tones. “That is childish, Pavel. If you would give it a moment’s thought, you would see that the results of such an action would make you feel like a fool. The world is full of fools. Make sure you are not numbered among them.”

  They spoke in the same tone about minorities in the United States. The people who oppressed them were fools; the police were fools, especially the Red Squad; the Depression was a result of the mismanagement of fools.

  The house breathed a cold mild poison. Yet Annie did not find herself uncomfortable with the two women. She simply talked less than was her natural tendency. All in all, they were kind to her in their peculiar icy way.

  She did avoid the children. She felt vaguely menaced by their presence. They regarded her with clear brown eyes that seemed to ask, What are you? What on earth are you?