The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

  It was still an effort to walk. Cletus saw her glance toward the hall. “Bathroom?” She nodded. He lifted her up, took her down the hall and placed her on the toilet seat, bowed elaborately, and left. She hobbled back and heard Melvin talking about his girl friend. Cletus said women would be the death of him and Melvin said better women than some other things he knew about.

  Annie and Melvin grew bored with the game because Cletus always won. They talked softly into the night. Miranda Katz, Cletus reported, had found out that the Swedish freighters which tied up in San Francisco needed messboys, and she’d gotten some girls and gone to the seamen’s union and managed to get seaman’s papers from the union officials. She was actually shipping out. Just like Miranda. Annie told them she was thinking of taking a secretarial course. Melvin shook his head and put on his white sailor cap and took it off again. “I like you the way you are.”

  “She’s not going to change just because she learns to type,” expostulated Cletus.

  “Everything changes a person,” Melvin said. “I changed soon as I learned to play the horn.”

  “For the better,” said Cletus.

  The feeling of lateness came to them all at the same moment—Melvin yawned enormously, and Cletus nodded dreamily in his chair. But Annie never wanted them to leave. It was a happy evening.

  She wondered about the woman Cletus loved. She wished Cletus would love her that way. She wished someone would. That steady longing…her father had said that when you get what you want, it turns to ashes. It was all in the anticipation.

  And then, as she flung an arm across the pillow, she remembered that only a few weeks ago, the crook of her arm had rested against the neck of the Catalan as he half slept, his breath warming her face. But, like the week she and Walter had spent in Yosemite, the time with the Catalan was sealed away, and though she craved his living presence, if only to see him walk so nakedly across the room to his clothes, she did not think he would come again to her room, her bed.

  She would have to go down to the plant to quit and hand in her badge. But she need not go to the shed, although she felt a pang at the thought of Hannah Groops, sloping along past the lockers looking for her. Well, the woman was used to everything; she wouldn’t think about Annie for long. And she could ask Max to tell her what had happened.

  A month later, Annie enrolled in the secretarial school; even though it was the middle of the course, it didn’t seem to matter to the instructors. It was like coming into the middle of a movie. You just stayed until it began again.

  Paul Lavan came by one Saturday with an excruciating look of self-importance on his face. He felt responsible in some small measure, he said, for bringing her into the party and he owed it to her to tell her that he was dropping out.

  “I’ve started psychoanalysis,” he said. “Even though the party asserts that many psychiatrists are stool pigeons for the FBI.”

  “I don’t really understand what you’re dropping into,” Annie said. Psychiatrists were for maniacs. She didn’t think Paul Lavan would know how to go crazy. In his gray little face the tiny jawbone flexed with purpose and self-love, the delicate nose pointed at heaven.

  “Not many people do,” he said grandly. “It is a long exhausting process. I expect my treatment to last at least three years. I have a child to think about. I don’t intend to pass my neuroses on to a helpless innocent. Besides, the party is only a political organization. It has arrogated too much to itself. History teaches us that there is more to life than economics and class warfare. There is personality, not to mention inner conflicts, ambivalence. A spectre is haunting the party, if I may paraphrase the Communist Manifesto. It is the spectre of individual psychic need. I will be a better person socially if I understand my unconscious and become mature.”

  “Paul, have you been in the party long?”

  He looked faintly nervous. “Actually, I’ve never really joined in the full sense of the word.”

  “You mean you don’t have a card?”

  “Well—Let me put it this way. Paul Lavan is not my real name. I won’t burden you with the information of what my real name is. It’s better to remain ignorant in the event you’re ever questioned.”

  She permitted herself a comment. “You sound like Dr. Hackenbush,” she said.

  Lavan looked startled.

  “A movie. The Marx brothers, where Groucho—”

  He drew himself up to his full height of five feet. “You are not, I’m afraid, a serious person. I think I owe it to you to tell you that you are not regarded as a serious person by people in the party, you are thought of as one of the dubious people.”

  “What about the army?” she asked, suppressing a coarse roar of laughter.

  “I had rheumatic fever as a child,” he answered coldly, “and my heart’s not right.”

  She detected a note of self-pity. Would his heart stand this new party he was about to join? The psychiatric party?

  He put on his pretty little hat. “I hope you won’t take this amiss,” he said maliciously, “but as I once implied, you are a very driven girl. I would say that if you are ever in a position to afford it—it is an expensive process—you better run, not walk, to the nearest psychiatrist. Frankly, I don’t think you have the faintest idea of what motivates you. As a case in point, let me point out that you married a man who is, in fact, tormented by his hidden homosexual drives. It is that that explains his Don Juanism. Well, good-by.”

  Although Annie’s landlady had looked with indifferent eyes at her various visitors, when she brought home a white terrier puppy she had bought, the woman came knocking at her door.

  “You cannot keep an animal in my house,” she said.

  The puppy wagged its tail and sat down at the landlady’s feet.

  “Animals foul the air. I’m sorry but I can’t have it.”

  “But I’ll keep things clean.”

  “Impossible! I’m quite content with you as a tenant. You’re neat, and I appreciate that in a person as young as yourself. I don’t even mind your colored friends. One of them, obviously, is of mixed blood and they’re often superior types, having the virtues of both races. But a dog is out of the question. Or a cat. Or a bird.”

  The puppy squatted and urinated.

  “Need I say more,” intoned the landlady.

  Theda said she couldn’t take it; the puppy would be alone all day and would go nuts. Cletus said he had all he could do to put up with himself. She found a girl in the secretarial school who was willing. The girl came to get the terrier who gave Annie a lick on the cheek and was carried away.

  She took profound pleasure in her shorthand. Once she took down everything Cletus said on a Saturday visit to his loft and read it back to him. “Jesus!” he said. “I don’t want you around!” He was only fooling, wasn’t he? Cletus came over to the broken couch where she was slumped down holding the notebook and pencil, and lifted her onto his lap. “Now cut that out!” he said.

  “I wish you liked me more.”

  “I love you.”

  “I don’t mean that way.”

  He stood up and she slipped to the floor. “Listen, you’re too nervous for that way. I don’t want nervous girls hollering and jumping around and suffering in my bed. I don’t want that suffering.”

  She saw that his laughter, too, was a kind of nervousness.

  She stood up and brushed her skirt. “Okay,” she said quietly.

  “That’s a good girl.”

  She’d never made a direct and unencouraged offer before. She tried to feel hurt, but when she reflected upon it later, it just seemed comic. Cletus was a deep one. He wasn’t just cozy old Cletus with his put-on jive talk and his poetry, his Brahms and Louis Armstrong.

  Theda got her an interview with the office manager of the story department. She was given a typing test. She managed thirty-eight words a minute. Then she took down a fast paragraph from a thin impatient writer dragged in by the office manager to dictate to her. She was hired.

 
———

  Had Joe walked out of the bar that night and gone straight to a cliff? Had he jumped? Had he walked into the water from the beach? Had he not thought he was going to die until a spasm of his will made it too late? Had he walked a long while alone, thinking of his yet to be experienced death? Had he pulled the sea around him as he had once covered himself with a blanket to wander out on a field covered with snow? Cold and wet, in such misery of body and mind and spirit that only oblivion could cure him? Had he cured himself of life as of a disease? Had he cried? Once in the water, had he tried to swim? How long had he suffered suffocation?

  Why was she thinking about him so much, whose life had barely touched hers, no more than his body had touched hers? Yet Joe was taking deeper possession of her imagination. Her thoughts of him grew ritualized; the unanswered questions a litany she chanted before sleeping.

  In life, he had weighed barely at all, a bland-looking, fair boy with the face of a sleepwalker, a certain offhand kindness, a mania, a secretive tight mania for cleanliness. She remembered his shirt sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms. If he was so light an object, so insubstantial a being, how could he have felt life so heavily, so bitterly?

  Joe was coming back, his voice whispering to her in the dark, in a language she strained to understand even as she pretended to think of other things.

  She had shocked him. Her life would have appalled him. But he had taken his own life. What had he hidden in himself?

  Her days were agreeable. She liked the atmosphere in the studio’s story department. Somewhere, at the periphery of the small offices where she accepted uncritically the exaggerated companionability of the people from whom she took dictation, raged a world of handsome, exotic half-wits—or so they were described by the writers—and in the evenings she often went to the movies, where she watched stars on the screen whom she occasionally caught a glimpse of walking from the commissary to a car, or a lot or an office, the very real movement of their legs making them smaller than life.

  Since Ethel Schaeffer’s death, she had not attended a party meeting; Theda told her grimly that 110,000 Japanese had been tossed into concentration camps, whole families going down like the Titanic—people would never change—one had to make a safe hole for oneself and survive—as long as it was worth it. As for Annie’s going to meetings, it was folly. What did she think she was protesting? “Me, I’m different,” Theda asserted. “The Jews lead a mass life. The Jews are like one body, what happens to any member happens to all. People like you have personal beginnings. Why should you be allowed to make believe? Even Max has reasons—he belongs, at least, to a distinct class, but Annie, what are you intending to overthrow?”

  Theda was baying at her like a wolf. She took her by the shoulders and shook her. “You see, you’re taking what I say in a stupid personal way.”

  “What other way is there?” Annie protested weakly. “I did not have a personal beginning. I was born and thrown away.”

  “Poor thing,” Theda said sardonically.

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Get off the cross! To be born is the beginning of endless outrage! Your fate is not exclusive.”

  Theda phoned her at one in the morning. “I’m sorry, I was mean to you. I’m getting so irritable! Everybody seems to me to be lying, lying! The party, some of them, they knew what was happening to the Jews even in 1937. Jews knew about Jews! I don’t know what’s happening to me! I stopped being a Communist, and this Jewishness—it’s been waiting for me all along. I’m in a rage night and day. If Simon were here, alive…there was a thing about him that blotted up my acid. Not that he knew what he was doing—do you think he had the faintest idea of why he went to Spain? Simon?” She laughed harshly. “They claim him now as one of the honorable dead in the war against fascism. He couldn’t have spelled honorable, or fascism. He had a kind of willfulness. He wasn’t against reading, you understand, he only didn’t want to read. He never even said people talked too much, but I knew he hated talk. He was, himself, silent. He was so silent!” Theda emitted a little moan. “I wish I could be silent, still in the center, like Simon.”

  “But why did he go then?”

  “Go?”

  “To Spain, Theda…”

  “I don’t know, because he was bored, because he felt the motion of it, all those young men leaving. Because he thought he’d get to Paris and find Braque waiting for him, I don’t know.”

  She fell silent. The phone hummed, Annie stirred, pressing the receiver into the pillow.

  “Well, I only wanted to say I’m sorry. I’m beginning to feel old. I should marry a rabbi. It’s terrible—not to believe in anything except safety. I don’t even like animals.” She hung up abruptly.

  Annie lay on her back, frightened. Someone seemed to be whispering terrible prophecies. Imperiled and well-fed, mortally afraid, and with money in her pocketbook, she heard her own voice as though it emanated from someone else; “You won’t get away with it,” it said, pitilessly.

  Miranda was given a party by Cletus two days before she was to embark on a Swedish boat from Long Beach. Melvin was there, his great white eyes moving from face to face, laughing, telling his horse stories, his big-band stories. Listening to him were a dozen or so other people, some of whom Annie had met casually. Miranda wore a black velvet dress, her blonde hair falling across her velvet shoulders. “I’ll pay for it when I get back,” she whispered to Annie’s compliment. “My body belongs to Bullock’s.”

  Cletus said to Annie, “Beautiful, isn’t she? Nobody’s girl.” Annie told him what Miranda had said. “Her clothes are her house,” he said. “She wants the first fifteen minutes of any love affair. She’s got a lot of fifteen minutes in front of her, before the rest of the hour catches up.”

  Miranda’s skin gleamed in the light. She was pale and queenly, and her large blue eyes were empty. Just before Annie left, Miranda asked her to keep her clothes for her. “You can wear the leopard jacket, if you want,” she said shyly, almost apologetically. She would bring them round to Annie’s room. “He has a car.” She pointed to a young man talking to Cletus. “Or so he told me. I’ll get him to drive me over to you with everything.”

  Long after Miranda left, and until she finally returned to claim her clothes, Annie would open the closet and look at the dresses, the coats, the leopard jacket, hanging there like the wardrobe of somebody who was dead. No books, no jewelry, a pair of fawncolored thin-heeled soiled shoes, no letters or pictures, nothing but clothes.

  It was incongruous, unbelievable to think of Miranda, with her unknown antecedents, her capacity to always lay her hands on cash, her careless rich-girl’s fearlessness, walking the passageways of a Swedish ship on its way to Australia, those waters across which she voyaged being inexorably possessed by the Japanese as though they were drawing up the ocean like a carpet, rolling within it the Philippines, Malaya, Burma, Indonesia.

  In February of 1942, men with dependents were permitted to enlist in the army. In March, Max enlisted. He had decided not to offer himself as a candidate for officer candidate school. He expected to be sent away on the day of his enlistment. The night before, Eva prepared a large but spiritless dinner for a few friends, including Theda and Annie. Among the other guests was William Lester, a short man whose skin was the color and the apparent texture of white sole. He gazed up at the ceiling when he spoke, as though addressing a higher authority, and referred frequently to “Uncle Joe.” Each time he invoked Uncle’s name, Max managed, with unconcealed irritation, to say “Joseph Stalin.” William Lester’s every action and word contained a strong note of disapproval except for the reverential way he named the almost ineffable name of Uncle. He ate very little. From time to time, he drew his hand across the thin strands of hair on his head as though reassuring himself of the sound condition of his somewhat pulpy-looking skull. Eva treated him with respect but was noticeably cool to Mrs. Lester. Lester evidently disapproved of Max’s enlistment in the army, alluding to it as “M
ax’s impulsive action.” Eva looked miserable most of the evening.

  Theda, meeting Annie in the hall outside the bathroom, informed her that Lester was a minor party functionary, and his wife the beloved of Cletus. After that, Annie paid little attention to anyone else.

  Mrs. Lester was a very strange-looking woman; rising from the table, sinking into the couch, curling and uncurling her legs, sliding and coiling and twisting, she was like a mildly unhinged acolyte of modern dance. Annie wondered if Mrs. Lester imagined herself in brown homespun, raising dust with the meaningful slap of a bare foot on a stage. Her tight cap of dark hair with its Psyche knot at the nape of her neck, her small head on the smooth long neck, the opposing rigid angles of her body as she lay back against the couch pillows all added to Annie’s conviction that the woman was engaged in a sacred drama of self. She hardly spoke, nodding her head or shaking it with languorous exposure of her neck. There was an Oriental cast to her features. Her skin was the color of a reddish plum. Sometimes she held her fingertips together, exactly meeting, and regarded them with amazement. Her name was Leora. When her husband was speaking, she kept her head bowed.

  Theda whispered to Annie, “Mad love!”

  But Annie was astonished that Cletus nurtured passion for such an odd creature and wondered what on earth had drawn him to her.

  War talk rose around them that evening, an ineluctable flood. For William Lester, it was a chapter that would someday be included in a Marxist history he intended to write about the United States. When Max said there might be no United States if Hirohito and Hitler had their way, Lester predicted, “That matter will be resolved by the international solidarity of the working classes joined together against the moribund forces of international monopoly capitalism of which this Pacific adventure is but an expression.” Leora Lester swayed back and forth in her couch nest, communing with her cobras.

  Cleopatra, that was it! thought Annie, the old queen of the old Nile.

  At the door, Max said, “I’ll try to get by tomorrow evening for a few minutes.” Eva looked at her blankly. She was clearly on the verge of tears.