The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

  Her part of the house, her “apartment,” was the most cheerful place she had ever lived in. A crazy quilt was spread over the large bed. There was a writing desk with many pigeonholes, scatter rugs covered the floor, and the furniture was sturdy and useful. The bathroom had a clean white tub, and the rubber stopper that prevented water from flowing away was brand new. A little cooking area was closed off from the rest of the room by a wooden screen upon which had been painted a peacock and three yellow butterflies. There were white curtains at the windows, and a bookcase made of redwood planks and glass bricks near the bed. One window faced the street, the other looked out on a long narrow neglected garden with a dry cement pool in the center. The two women were not interested in gardening, and the children didn’t play there. In any event, whatever the children played at, it was not recognizable as such. They read; they played mental chess; they played two-handed bridge. They did not seek out friends.

  Max was highly entertained by Annie’s accounts of the household. The father, according to Mrs. Ives, had run off to Bangor with his doxy and never wrote to his children. A check arrived once a month with a regularity that Mrs. Ives said was uncharacteristic. “I think,” Max said, “the little girl will murder the other three one moonless night and become a famous movie star.”

  “They’re like a gang,” Annie said once, eating a cucumber sandwich which Mrs. Gannon had fixed for her that morning. “That’s really what they are, a gang of desperadoes.”

  Once a week, Annie went to a party meeting. She had completed six weeks in what the party called State School and had read only excerpts from books that she was supposed to have read in their entirety. The school was on the second floor of an old office building in Los Angeles. The windows were covered with steel mesh. There was one classroom and an office. It was there she met Ethel Schaeffer. The older woman occasionally took her to a dairy restaurant where, beneath a slowly turning fan which moved flies languidly across the tin ceiling, she tested kasha and matzoth-ball soup. Ethel’s voice was like a bubbling stream; she spoke gently, continually, and her conversation had neither beginning nor end, flowing along effortlessly. Annie had trouble understanding the old woman’s heavily accented English, but she was content to be bathed in the exceptional, if somewhat impersonal tenderness that emanated from her. She knew Ethel was regarded as a kind of saint, so she seemed to be, yet Annie’s judgment did not remain in total abeyance. Ethel was—she could not banish the treacherous thought—too simple. The whole weight of Ethel’s nature burdened her comrades with the demand, made ruthless by her single-mindedness, that they release the good in themselves, the virtues they were hiding only out of timidity and ignorance. Only society was complex, not its members. Exclusiveness was patrician; one must love everyone. It was a killing tolerance. It embraced even the stiff-faced party doctrinaires about whom Ethel made mild fun. “When you really know,” she said, “you are not so uneasy. Like the state, those poor chaps may wither away.”

  Once she asked Annie, “And how do you like our Karl Marx?”

  “Oh—”

  “No, no,” Ethel had protested, laughing. “You will say something silly. Don’t do that. Leave close reading to the ones for whom such activity is meant. For you, only the vision is necessary. No more.”

  By then, Annie had met Calvin Schmitter. He had given her a curt nod, addressed her as “Comrade,” and congratulated her on working in a shipbuilding plant where she would come into contact with real workers. Annie’s glance had come to rest on a Soviet poster which Schmitter had hanging on the wall of his small office. In it, four enormously muscled figures strode forward, one grasping the staff of a banner bearing the hammer and sickle. Behind the leading workers, identical replicas repeated themselves, diminishing in size until they disappeared behind the curve of the earth itself.

  Sliding and stumbling through the droning afternoons at the plant, Annie thought grimly of the empty-eyed poster monsters. Real workers! She looked around her at the women, bubbleheaded in curlers, at the little groups of men near their lockers, playing cards or passing around pints of bourbon. She listened to the talk, often combative, seeming to consist solely of code words echoing from mouth to mouth, about money and sex, sports and drinking. The men looked witlessly and boldly at her body; the younger men seemed older than their years, the older ones, locked up in themselves, dour, hard-voiced. What she found difficult to explain to Max was their friendliness, even if perverted, even if shallow. It was strange, she thought, that Max, concerned about the rights of labor, should be at an aristocratic remove from his co-workers, while she, muddle-brained, and bored with hardly digested Marxist theory about labor and capitalism, should find the people milling around the great shed so familiar, even sympathetic.

  He was somewhat offended when she described him as aristocratic, and reminded her that the Communist party was the vanguard of the working class, and what she thought of as hauteur in him was simply that he was more advanced in his understanding of social forces. She must have looked bewildered. He shook her arm. “That isn’t what I’m talking about,” she said stubbornly. “You are different!”

  “We’re all different!” he exclaimed.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “You’re not being clear.”

  “You’re pretending!” she accused him.

  He frowned angrily—she kept looking at him. Then his face cleared. “Oh, well, I have to, I suppose,” he said.

  She became friendly with one or two of the women. One was Hannah Groops, a turret-lathe operator from Alabama. Her family troubles were somewhat rank. Her father, she said, “got this itch for my daughter, his own grandchild. I got to do a search at night, make sure he isn’t crawled into her bed.”

  “Why don’t you lock the door?”

  Hannah Groops gave her a scornful look. “What door? You think we live in some kinda palace? We had one room back home. Now we got two. We ain’t got to locking doors yet.”

  She went to a meeting where she discovered Max several rows behind her, sitting by himself on a wooden bench. The occasion was in honor of a visiting union leader from Detroit, a comrade who’d come to report on some factional dispute among the United Automobile Workers. She looked around her at faces that were mostly unfamiliar. There were certainly workers here, but not like those in the plant. After, she started over to speak to Max, but he waved quickly and left. Later, she asked him why he’d avoided talking to her. He said he didn’t know. It had been an impulse. He had found the idea of speaking to her at the meeting intolerable. Inside the plant, Max was special; inside the party, Max treated her as special. She didn’t understand it but was vaguely stirred.

  One day, Max quoted something to her. “Karl Radek said, ‘Apart from sleeping, I have never in my life committed any undeliberate action.’”

  He looked at her expectantly. She was uneasy. What did he hope she would say?

  “I could hardly make that statement,” she said dryly, at last.

  “It is the most hateful thing I ever read,” Max said. “It never occurred to me until last night how hateful it really was, and I’ve read the transcripts of the Moscow trials often enough.”

  “How’s Eva?”

  “Fine.”

  Annie never visited their apartment any more. Her life had become a series of compartments; the plant, and Max on the bench; the party meetings, where she listened to reports on money-raising for the party paper, discussions on dialectical materialism, Menshevism, the Mexican community of Los Angeles, the writing of a pamphlet for the ship-scalers’ union, the discrimination practiced against women in the International Machinists Union, the recruiting drive for Negro comrades, the possibility, always present, of a wave of repression, the cells which would have to be organized, the imperialist war, the Berlin-Tokyo-Rome Axis, and scrap iron, scrap iron, scrap iron!

  Christmas, Annie spent with the Ives who had no tree, although Mrs. Ives made a cake in the shape of a Yule log. “This is the way they do it
in France, much more sensible, not the orgy of meretricious gift-giving that goes on in this country,” Mrs. Ives boasted, and each of the children received a book. Mrs. Gannon gave Annie a metal lunch box containing a Thermos bottle. She had painted Annie’s name on it in yellow letters. After the holidays, Max turned up on the bench with a package in hand for her, a collection of the poetry of William Butler Yeats. She put it on her bookshelf next to Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, and Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

  She saw a good deal of Cletus Moore, and through him met other people, some of whom became her friends.

  In his big, echoing loft, Cletus entertained her in a smart new hat pushed over his forehead and an old brown flannel bathrobe tied with a tassel. On Saturdays they listened to Gregorian chants, Brahms and jazz. Cletus read her poetry, Countee Cullen:

  So I lie, who never quite

  Safely sleep from rain at night—

  She burst into tears. Cletus roared with laughter, flung his hat on the floor, jumping on it, swung her up from the partly eviscerated couch into which she had sunk while listening to him, and danced her around the room.

  She went to a few parties where she met rich people. They weren’t Communists, Max explained, but they supported various organizations such as Spanish refugee aid groups. She wandered through beautiful silent rooms full of real paintings and leather furniture and bowls of fresh flowers. In the living room, Calvin Schmitter might be sitting bolt upright, at his feet the hostess in a long gown, gleaming up at him with factitious interest. “They only play,” Max said.

  One of Cletus’s friends was a trumpeter named Melvin Johnson. His skin was black, his eyes were huge, his teeth were white and even. He was in the navy for a six-year hitch.

  “Guess how old I am?” he asked Annie. “Thirty,” she said. He hooted with triumph. “Forty-three!”

  He carried his trumpet around with him in its purple velvet case. Sometimes he took it out and fitted it together and blew a riff. He had an Italian woman friend whose husband was away in the army, stationed in the Philippines. He showed Annie her photograph. “Beautiful!” said Annie, looking at the somewhat blurred but opulent figure of a handsome middle-aged woman.

  “Like me,” said Melvin.

  He told her stories about the great jazz musicians. He’d been with Basie for a while. He’d played with different bands all over the country, even up north near Canada where your cheeks froze solid and you couldn’t hardly blow a note. He was just a little kid when he’d started working back down South in the hotels, bringing the men their whiskey and women. He loved the horses and, when he was in the money, used to spend all he had at the track. By some special magic, he was able to imitate the particular characteristics of famous racers. Gallant Fox was his favorite.

  “See, he had those short little legs, up to here, you see?”—measuring on his own long legs—“and just when you thought he was dying on his feet, here he’d come!” And Melvin would gallop along the rail with his arms. “Look,” passing the first horse, “now, see!” passing the second, “and here he is!” racing past Annie’s shoulder, “winning!”

  Melvin brought around a beautiful blonde girl to Cletus’s loft. Her name was Miranda Katz, and she was the adopted child of a wealthy Chicago clothing manufacturer. She drove a taxi for a living and had a mania for clothes. Her latest purchase from Bullock’s Wilshire was a red wool coat with an enormous fox collar which had cost five hundred dollars. They were garnisheeing her salary because, of course, she couldn’t pay for the damn thing all at once! Her other passion was the ballet, which she attended at any opportunity, escorted by several rich homosexuals she knew. They liked to be seen with her, she remarked without emphasis. It was possible to stare unrestrainedly at Miranda; she neither preened nor fidgeted, accepting impassively examination of her features as though she were a garment being tested for the fineness of its seams. Cletus reported that the only way to distress the girl was to mention her family’s wealth. She refused to take a cent from them—he didn’t know why. Yet she continually indulged in such extravagances as the red coat. “There’s a net of money around her wild preserve,” Cletus remarked, “and she knows it’s always there. She can’t help knowing it.” Annie gazed longingly at the golden hair. Miranda had never had a permanent wave; she cut her hair herself, bringing it around her neck and lopping it off with heavy shears. Without making the slightest claim on individuality, she was unlike anyone else. “She’s not even like herself,” said Cletus.

  Often, the four of them played poker late into the night, and even though Annie had to get up so early for work and drooped with fatigue, she could hardly bear to leave. Each evening she spent with them ended in uncertainty; she felt a pang of grief as she stood at Cletus’s door, her hand raised briefly in farewell, that the four of them might never meet again. It was more than Melvin’s magically evoked horses and Miranda’s yellow mane, more than the charm of Cletus’s knowing ways, that made her tarry at the door.

  How had the three of them met? Perhaps in the same way she had come to know certain people in the party, the ones Schmitter called “unstable.” Like attracted to like. Her few party friends joked about Calvin, about the local functionaries with their Stalin mustaches, about a slogan someone reported was actually used by the New York party branch: PEASANTS OF BROOKLYN, ARISE!, and a pamphlet entitled: “What Means This Strike in Steel?”

  Oh, they laughed! But yet the party was creeping over Annie, making her judgments about Stalin mustaches irrelevant, her laughter the laughter of contingency. No one had to tell her that there was a growing order in her life.

  But there were terrible nights when something heavy and dank and lifeless came to lie upon her like the cat that breathed away the infant’s life. She lay rigidly, gasping for breath. She got up and turned on the light and paced the room, she took a book and tried to read the incubus away.

  At first, she attributed it to fatigue or, more fancifully, told herself it was Joe’s poor sea-soaked ghost. Then, sitting on the couch at Cletus’s one afternoon, watching him work at his typewriter, it came to her that the night visitation was the weight of her life, that earlier life she had put out of consciousness. The room on Hollywood Boulevard was still there, and Johnnie Bliss still slept on beside her on the bed that pulled down from the wall; Uncle Greg waited in the dark house on the Hudson; Samuel, trailing odors of musk and dust, opened his cigar box again and again, counted out five ten-dollar bills again and again; Walter Vogel was still her husband, and her father caught still another train to a destination unknown to her. She had imagined she’d learned a few things. Delusion, all of it!

  In a panic, she left Cletus—“Hey, girl, where are you going?” —and ran down the stairs to the street. In a telephone booth, she rang up Bea. No answer. St. Vincent’s phone was permanently disconnected. Hadn’t Tony said where he was going the last time she heard from him? Wasn’t there a letter from him at home in the box where she kept her papers? She would call Uncle Greg! But when she emptied her pocketbook of change, she saw there wasn’t enough. She took a cab for the first time since St. Vincent had sent for her that night so long ago. She went to Theda’s.

  A kind of white light filled Theda’s apartment. How scarred the old table legs were! And Theda was wearing glasses. Had she always worn them? Annie stood in the doorway, looking at the woman sitting at the table, a typewriter near her arm. The woman was looking up at her in astonishment.

  “Annie!”

  “Can I use your phone?”

  “Are you ill?”

  “Ill?” Annie’s voice rose hectically. “No. Not ill.”

  “Use it…”

  “It’s long distance. I’ll pay the charges.”

  Theda looked at her mutely.

  She thought she’d forgotten the number but it rolled effortlessly off her tongue.

  It had been over a year since she’d heard that phone ring, since she’d imagined the stairs, the stained-glass window, the
pier glass, the lion and the mouse. The phone rang and rang. She heard Theda saying something about a time difference. “What?”

  “It’s eight in the evening there.”

  “Sometimes on Saturday, the church has a social,” Annie said and replaced the receiver.

  “You look terrible.”

  “I was trying to call my uncle. Do you know that feeling? That something awful has happened?”

  But it was not to her uncle that Annie thought something awful had happened. She looked desperately at Theda as though the woman might evaporate in front of her.

  “I hate California. I hate this state.”

  “It’s only another place…”

  “No. It’s absurd and cruel, and it’s all made up.”

  “You ought to divorce Vogel. Have you done anything about it? I have a lawyer friend. It’s not so hard out here. You ought to get clear of that.”

  How like Theda to have picked out one of the threads that bound her now to this senseless fear! Theda wanted her to get rid of something, a lump sticking out in the middle of her new smoothed-out life. She supposed she ought to, she supposed—

  “You’re too goddamned self-involved,” Theda said in a hard unforgiving voice. “Look at you!” She hit the table with the palm of her hand, then looked silently at her fingers. Her expression softened, and her eyes met Annie’s with a kind of apology.

  “It’s true, what I said. But the way I said it wasn’t true. It’s like telling someone they breathe. People come here and I drink with them and feed them and they imagine they have my attention when all the time I think of nothing but a dead man. I’m sorry. …It’s all so painful. But about the divorce…maybe you could get an annulment. That might be better. After all, you hardly lived with him.”

  They talked for a while about Theda’s lawyer friend, of how much of a fee he would demand and whether Walter would be willing to pay for it or not. They spoke of the book Theda was reading for the studio, and then Theda said she did have some good news; she had been hired by the story department beginning the first of June, and she would be working steadily there. Perhaps she would write a scenario and make a mountain of money.