The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

  “When did you start wearing glasses?”

  “I’ve always worn them,” said Theda. “Oh, Annie!” and she broke into laughter.

  Annie told her about the young painter who’d been to the party State School with her. One night he asked if he could drive her home to Oxford Street. He took her out on a country road. A few miles along he stopped the car and put his arm around her. “You remind me of the paints in unopened tubes, crimson and alizarin and vermilion.” Then he kissed her once, grinned toothily, and drove her home with not another word. Later, at some party meeting, someone had pointed out the painter’s wife. One of her legs was drastically shorter than the other so she seemed to topple forward at each step. She was a hairy woman who looked ten years older than her handsome young husband. “I think,” Annie said, “that I am full of cruelty. I had to go out to the street to laugh.”

  “Only admit it,” Theda said dreamily. “Perhaps you’ll be saved.”

  “I’ve told such awful lies.”

  “Have a drink.”

  “No. I’m going home. I have to wash out some things.”

  “How is the job?”

  “Dumb. A dumb job. Nothing’s happening there. I go through the gates every morning with my badge pinned to my blouse. The place is like some sullen social club where half the members are drunk all the time and the other half wishes it were. Max says things will change once there’s plenty of work to go around. Meanwhile, I have some money. I’ve not had money before. Neither have most of the people there, I guess.”

  “I saw the Shores the other night.”

  Annie stood up, ready to leave. She didn’t want to hear about the Shores, only about Max. She sighed, felt the tangle of her recently permanented hair and thought of Miranda.

  “I’ll tell you something,” Theda went on. “I think Max is killing Eva. She’s like some helpless thing breathing in poisoned gas. She watches him all the time. He’s so nice to her. Something deadly is happening between them. He’s so ruthless in his insistence on being…good.”

  “He’s been my best friend, except for you and Cletus,” Annie said. “I thought if I grew up, I could become good too.”

  “You’ll drive me to drink,” muttered Theda.

  ———

  Annie’s haunt pursued her into daylight. She thought people looked at her in a different way. One morning she knocked over the screen with the three yellow butterflies, frightened to see that behind it was what she had known all along was there, the little clean cooking place which she hardly ever used. She brooded constantly on that other life of hers that had been nearly blotted out by the last six months.

  In the plant, people were growing fat in anticipation of the coming meal of a holocaust. Or their diets had changed for the better. Hannah Groops said, “In Alabama, we only heard about eating the way we do now. Not a single one of us got a worm now, not even the children.” Annie shuddered.

  Her own room was growing fat with things: a radio, four pairs of shoes, dresses, lipsticks, a new leather pocketbook with cash in the change purse. But the tweed suit still hung in the closet, its iron-textured nap undiminished.

  The workers at the plant to whom she sometimes condescended by laughing too much at their asinine jokes, or by touching the women because she found them repellent, began to look different to her, too. She wondered that she had ever thought she had anything in common with them, in common with anyone. Only Max seemed unchanged by the painful inconsistencies of her own vision. Still, Theda’s words had bothered her, and at their lunch meetings on the bench, Annie searched his face for the mark of a murderer.

  Party meetings, at which she once sheltered, had begun to afflict her with the sickness of boredom. She dreaded the dry, mildly threatening lectures by people sent down from the party headquarters to remonstrate with her branch because they hadn’t raised enough money, because certain comrades were defaulting on their dues, because some of the comrades, it had been reported, were not clear in their understanding of the European war. There were to be seminars and discussions to be led by reliable Marxists. The comrades were faltering, they were being taken in by propaganda about concentration camps and persecution of Jews. Their thinking was not “correct.”

  Then Ethel Schaeffer was taken to the hospital for an exploratory operation. A cancerous growth was discovered in her lower intestine.

  Annie went to see her. Ethel was shrunken, her silver hair a ghostly breath on the meager hospital pillow. Horribly, a tube led from beneath the sheets to a bottle on the floor. She was heavily drugged. Her eyes opened and then shut as though under the press of unbearable weight.

  She took Annie’s hand and held it limply.

  Annie told her stories about the plant, about some of the people there. Ethel smiled remotely. Then she said, “Dear girl, I have been thinking of what Marx said. He said”—and she stopped and moaned, and the tube echoed with a ghastly rasping sound—“he said that the Jews were a bourgeois group, and therefore a bulwark of the exploiting class. Dear girl—it seems I’ve forgotten your name, but, oh, I do know who you are—it seems that I am frightened.” She opened her eyes very wide and looked straight at Annie. “Not of this,” she said. Then she made a joke accompanied by a small smile. “Even Communists don’t live forever.”

  Annie discovered from Paul Lavan, whom she saw now and then at party meetings, that Walter was still living in their old room. She wrote him a stiff little note suggesting that he might like a divorce, there didn’t seem any point…A few nights later as she was reading in bed, she heard a car idling outside on the street. She went to the window. It was their old car and Walter was sitting in it, smoking a cigarette. She put on her new bathrobe and went out the door to the car.

  They drove around the Hollywood Hills. He was a little drunk. He rambled somewhat. He was going back into the merchant marine. Was Annie serious about a divorce? He thought they’d started off on the wrong foot, the cart before the horse. He could see she’d changed. Yes, that was clear to him. He felt those things instantly. Did she know that when he’d been a boy, he’d gone up into the San Francisco hills and wept? What did she think of that? He’d wept for the beauty of things and the hopelessness of life. That was a nice bathrobe. She looked well in mannish clothes because of her lovely figure. Actually, they’d be fine together now, he thought. They’d both probably got a lot out of their systems. Would she like to go to the beach awhile?

  They went and sat on the sand at Santa Monica. The dawn began to break. It was chilly. Thank God for the chilliness, she thought. She’d forgotten what real weather was like. The gray waves beat hugely on the shore. Walter put his arms around her. No, she said. He laughed his ironic laugh, his only possession, she thought, of any consequence. “You’ll go up and I’ll go down,” he said. “It’s in the cards.”

  He drove back to their old place and got out of the car, then flung the key onto Annie’s lap. “You ought to get something out of all this,” he said. “I’ll mail you the registration, all that. Too sad now, Annie…” She watched him stumble up the stairs. When he’d disappeared from view, she started up the car and drove back to Oxford Street, singing wildly and tunelessly to herself all the way.

  Mrs. Ives was looking out the front window. It was 6:00 A.M.

  Annie hastened to explain. Mrs. Ives waved an imperious hand. “Your life is your own. As is mine. I have news. Mr. Ives phoned at midnight from Bangor, Maine. I have been packing all night. Here. Have some coffee. Mr. Ives wishes us to return to him. He said—he wept too—he said he’d made a ghastly fool of himself. Would we forgive him? Didn’t I think it better for the children? My mother and I discussed it. He was paying for the call so I merely put the receiver down, and my mother and I considered various aspects of the matter. To make a long story short, we decided it would be best to return to him. My mother is very fond of California because of the sunlight and the salt air. But Mr. Ives seems to have started a little business in Bangor and has already priced a house where the
children will have three acres to explore and play in.”

  Still standing, she took a great draught of coffee. Then, staring down at the kitchen table, she burst into a shriek of laughter. “I’ll have his balls for this!” she cried.

  Mrs. Gannon, dressed in a kimono, at that instant appeared in the doorway. She looked at her daughter, then at Annie. Her expression was unfathomable. As Annie drank the last of the coffee, she saw one huge tear make its way down across the ridges of Mrs. Gannon’s old face. But the old woman said nothing.

  Cletus Moore helped her move. She had acquired more than would fit into the old leather suitcase. She’d found a room only a block from Theda’s in a huge frame house that reminded her of the place where Jake Cranford had lived. But it was clean inside, the banisters shone with wax, and the landlady, a middle-aged, strong-looking woman, was herself working in a defense plant.

  That first night, lying in the strange bed, she listened for the sound of the Ives children talking through the walls, playing their interminable word games, speaking their special language in spite and triumph against the world of all adults.

  Chapter 16

  When Annie drank too much alone in her room amid the mild evening sounds of the boardinghouse, she was transported into the realm of her most secret, most hidden self where a mythic life, without law or reason, held sway.

  As she slowly drank her first gin, she dreamed of Max. His belt buckle gleamed at her eye. Above it was his diaphragm, his rib cage, the swelling of his chest, the straight line of his shoulders, his compact upper arms, his narrow wrists, the articulate hands which never flung themselves about in vague gesture, never threatened or importuned or hung in foolish vacancy. His neck rose out of a closely buttoned collar, supporting the classic, careful face with its unexpected joke of blue eyes beneath dark eyebrows, his dark hair.

  She took her second drink more quickly, and turned about the figure of the man, a tight, nervy figure with a distancing refinement, as though his body refused to join the causes of his mind.

  By her third, fuller glass of gin, Max evaporated, his place taken by unknown players caught up in a painful scene of reconciliation, forgiveness, weeping. A few tears flowed down Annie’s cheeks. How good everyone was to her! Even Hannah Groops, that base Southern weed, rested an incorporeal head on Annie’s incorporeal shoulder. In the forest of her fancy, Cletus and Theda and Melvin advanced toward her with open arms.

  She ate a piece of bread. But were they so good to her? Or did they only tolerate her? Did they laugh at her among themselves? Black Melvin and putty-skinned Hannah danced around her, joined together in scornful joy.

  She knocked back a fourth gin; the silent actors returned, in dramas that felt more epic as they grew more incomprehensible. Figures writhed among flames, and Annie pulled them out like twigs; great clouded mirrors crashed, people fled crumbling houses. Annie moistened the lips of unknown victims with brandy. After the conflagration, in the smoky dark, Max returned. She felt her arms gripped strongly.

  But it was not Max. It was the young Catalan welder, the one whose eyes so often followed her as she walked through the shed. One day, her hands clumsy, she had been trying to insert a drill in the drill press. She had been sweaty, holding the bit in her hand, twisted around her machine, when he’d walked by, come back a few steps, watched her silently, and when she’d scowled at him, ashamed of the shirt clinging to her wet back, he’d placed his hands on her arms and pressed them deeply, then released her almost at once. The touch of his hands stayed with her all that day, and every time she saw him, she felt the force of his hands and looked at them intently, as though the square brown fingers might explain why she had been so helplessly stirred when they’d clasped her arms. And it was the Catalan who followed her patiently into an alcoholic sleep.

  Each day, at the plant, she sought him out with her eyes, and having assured herself he was there, kept her back turned to him whenever he came near her.

  Then one day he followed her out of the machine shop, a few steps behind her, all the way to where she had left the car. She turned to look at him, the key in her hand. The whole force of his question was concentrated in his large black eyes. He suddenly smiled, very faintly. God! He wasn’t much older than she was! She was breathless; the afternoon sun enclosed them in warmth. She left the passenger door open and got into the driver’s seat. The Catalan swung himself into the car and dropped his lunch box in the back seat.

  In her room, he looked at her books. He picked up a lipstick tube on her bureau and opened it and held it to his nose. Then he said, “Your name is Annie?”

  She heard a tremor in his voice. She took a step toward him, almost weeping with the desire for him to take her arms in his hands again, to feel that extraordinary breathless release where, it had seemed, body and spirit had been clasped together, the ragged rift healed. His hands rose as she drew close, then caught her arms. She forgot everything, lost in the apple and salt smell of his skin.

  He came home with her every day for two weeks. They learned about each other in the late-afternoon silence of her room; he spoke little English, but enough to tell her he had been born in New Mexico in the mountains above the desert, that he was unhappy among so many people, that he was saving money to go back and buy a farm, that he had five brothers and a sister, that when she had first come to the plant, he had looked at her. “So tall, I thought,” he said, leaning on his elbow, looking down at her. “But not so tall, after all.”

  They did not meet on the weekends. He lived with a married sister in Pasadena. But it was not because of that, his family, that they didn’t meet. Everything was clear between them; it was their privacy they guarded.

  They hardly spoke in the machine-shop shed. And ashamed of her shame, Annie didn’t want Max to even guess that she knew the Catalan. But more important than that concern was the power of their secret—she looked up to see him in the distance, walking to his locker with a patient countryman’s walk. On her way to buy an afternoon soft drink, she saw him look up from his welding, lift the heavy protective mask for a minute as she passed.

  Then, several weeks after the Ives family had departed for New England, Max failed to appear one noon hour at the bench, and Annie felt a tick of dread. She spent the afternoon in desultory conversation with Hannah Groops, although now and then they had to go and stand at their machines. Things had been stiffening in the shop, and the foremen who passed through had begun to make a show of efficient impatience. “Goddamn lend-lease,” Hannah said. “We’re gonna be working soon, and here I got used to taking my ease.”

  That afternoon, she told the Catalan she could not spend the evening with him. His mouth turned down. He scraped the sidewalk with his foot. Then he looked up quickly. “Is that man? The man you eat with?”

  “No, no…I have some things I must do. No. Not that man. He’s my friend.”

  He shook his head. “Friend?” he said with a slight touch of disbelief. As she drove away, she saw him in the rearview mirror, standing there, his hands in his pockets.

  Her room seemed exceptionally silent. There was a sallow yellow light in the sky that evening which persisted in the dark like a flush of illness. Not a leaf moved. She tried to read. She turned on her radio. A sweet tenor voice sang “I’ll Remember April.” Annie tried to remember April. She flung herself out the door and walked down to Hollywood Boulevard. She walked for miles. Confronted with this special and painful emptiness, she felt uneasy, embarrassed at the thought of phoning Cletus or Theda. Melvin was out of reach of a message and in any case was either with his Italian lady friend or at his naval unit. Miranda Katz was driving her taxi. Perhaps she would call Paul Lavan to ask him about Ethel Schaeffer. She really did want to know how Ethel was. She hadn’t been to see her for a week. She drifted into a news store and bought a copy of Photoplay, a grimace of self-dislike on her face.

  Reluctantly, she made for home. The night was so airless, she felt half suffocated. A throb of pain came and went in the lowe
r regions of her stomach. It was sharp, a physical manifestation of the panic she’d felt at Max’s absence from the bench.

  She went into a phone booth and looked up Ben Greenhouse’s number. He was right there, his name in print; he lived on Beechwood Avenue. She remembered that May Landower also lived there. May! Was there nothing behind her but broken-off conversations? She recognized, then dismissed the combination of mischief and loneliness that had led her to even consider calling Greenhouse, and went directly home. There, she wrote a long letter to Uncle Greg. When she read it over before sealing it into its envelope, it seemed to her that the letter was about someone entirely other than herself. The pain in her belly persisted.

  Max was back the next noon. He looked forbidding, abstracted.

  “You weren’t here yesterday!” she said accusingly.

  “I tried to enlist in the army,” he said.

  He took her hand. “Close your mouth,” he said. “You’ll catch flies.”

  “But why!” she cried.

  “I’m bound to be drafted unless I get myself into some essential job here. I don’t want to do that.”

  “You’re running away.”

  “If you like. Only I’m not. They won’t take me because I’m married.”

  “Max!”

  “It would have been better all around,” he said, sighing heavily. “My motive wasn’t entirely personal. I do really believe Hitler is the devil himself.”

  What did he mean, not entirely personal? What was more personal than belief in the devil? Her anger was intensified by her awareness that she had no claim on his confidences, that she was not someone he would take into account when he had decided on a course of action. She spoke with sulphurous resentment, trying, mid-sentence, to modify her tone. But it was too late. Her words snapped out like a whip: “I thought the comrades had decided it was an imperialist war?”