But he didn’t really want to meet a woman more desirable than Sally tonight—Sally would be plenty for the time being, even in Hollywood—so he looked closely enough at Jill Jarvis to find something blank or stunned in her heart-shaped face, though he scarcely had time to inspect it before she turned away.
“Sally, look at this,” she said, and she thrust a heavy paperback book into Sally’s hands. “Isn’t it marvelous? I mean isn’t it marvelous? I sent away for it weeks and weeks ago and I’d about given up, but it finally came in the mail today.” Courteously peering, Jack saw that its title was The Giant Crossword Puzzle Solving Book. “Look how thick it is,” Jill insisted. “I’ll never get stuck in a puzzle again.”
“Wonderful,” Sally said, giving it back to her. Then she said, “Excuse me a couple of seconds, Jack, okay?” She hurried into the living room, which looked as wide as a lake, and he watched her pretty legs running up a soundless staircase in a shaft of pale afternoon light.
Jill Jarvis told him to sit down and went away somewhere to “get drinks,” leaving him alone with Kicker in what seemed an increasingly awkward silence.
“You go to school around here?” Jack inquired.
“Yeah.”
And that was the end of their talk. The funny-paper section from last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times lay on the hearth bench and the boy turned sideways to hunch and stare at it, but Jack was fairly sure he wasn’t reading or even looking at the pictures; he was only waiting for his mother to come back.
Above the fireplace, in a space plainly meant for some heavy old portrait or landscape, there hung instead a small painting on black velvet, in harshly bright colors, showing the face of a circus clown with a melancholy expression; the artist’s signature, so prominently written in white that it might have been the title, read “Starr of Hollywood.” It was the kind of picture you can find on the walls of third-rate bars and lunch counters all over the United States, and in the airless waiting rooms of failing doctors and dentists; it looked so foolishly out of place in this room as to suggest that someone had stuck it there as a joke—but then, so did The Giant Crossword Puzzle Solving Book, which now lay displayed alone on a coffee table that must have cost two thousand dollars.
“I can’t imagine what’s keeping Woody,” Jill said as she carried a liquor tray into the room.
“Want me to call the studio?” Kicker asked her.
“No, don’t bother; he’ll be along. You know Woody.”
Then Sally came downstairs again with a Mexican straw satchel that looked pleasingly full—she did plan to spend the weekend with him—and said, “Let’s just have one drink, Jack, and then we’ll go.”
But they had two, because Woody came smiling home during their first one and insisted that they stay for another. He was about Jack’s age or younger, of medium height and lightly built, wearing jeans, fringed Indian moccasins, and a complicated shirt that fastened with metal snaps instead of buttons. He moved in a very limber way with a frequent dipping of the knees, and his face showed an unguarded eagerness to be liked.
“Well, it’s certainly very nice out at Malibu,” he said when he had come to rest at last in one of the armchairs. “I had a place out there for a few years—a small place, but very nice. Still, I’ve really come to love it here in Beverly. I feel at home here, that’s the only way to put it, and you know a funny thing? I’ve never felt that way about any other place in my life. Get you a refill?”
“No thanks,” Jack said. “We’d better be getting started.”
“When’ll we look for you, Sally?” Jill inquired.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Sally called back as she and Jack made for the terrace door, with Jack carrying the Mexican bag. “I’ll give you a call sometime tomorrow, okay?”
“I won’t let you take her away forever, Jack,” Woody called. “You gotta promise you’ll bring her back soon, okay?”
“Okay,” Jack told him. “I promise.”
And they were free, just the two of them, hurrying out past the swimming pool and down to the driveway and into his waiting car. All the way home—and the ride seemed to take no time at all in the new-fallen darkness of this still and fragrant night—he wanted to laugh aloud because this was the way things should always have been in his life; this was pretty nice: good money coming in, a weekend coming up, and a girl coming out to love him at the shore of the Pacific Ocean.
“Oh, I think it’s sort of—cute,” Sally said of his apartment. “Of course it’s small, but you could really do a lot with it.”
“Yeah, well, I probably won’t be here long enough to do much. Can I get you a drink?”
“No thanks. Why don’t you just—” She turned from her scrutiny of the black picture window to smile at him, looking bold and shy at the same time and then subtly averting her eyes. “Why don’t you just come over here so we can sort of fall all over each other.”
No other woman he’d known had made a more graceful passage from acquaintance to intimacy. There was nothing embarrassed in the way she undressed, and nothing of the show-off either: the clothes fell and were flung from her as if she’d waited all day to be rid of them; then she slipped into his bed and turned to welcome him with a look of desire that was as pretty as anything he’d ever seen in the movies. Her long body was strong and tender, and so was the pride she took in knowing what men believe a woman’s flesh is for. It was a very long time before he could possibly have thought of any other woman, or girl, even if he’d wanted to.
“Oh, listen to the surf,” she said later, when they were nestled together in peace. “Isn’t that a wonderful sound?”
“Yeah.”
But Jack Fields, curled close at her back with his arm around her and with one of her fine tits alive in his hand, wasn’t paying attention to the surf at all. He was too happy and sleepy to accomplish more than a single coherent, mercifully private thought: F. Scott Fitzgerald meets Sheilah Graham.
Sally Baldwin had grown up as Sally Munk—“Jesus, I couldn’t wait to get rid of that name”—in an industrial California town where her father had worked as an electrician until his early death, and her mother had then worked for many years as a seamstress in a department-store fitting room. In high school Sally had been chosen as a supporting actress in a series of grade-B movies about adolescent life—“sort of like the old Andy Hardy pictures, only nowhere near as good; still, they were a lot better than all this dumb little beach-ball bikini stuff they’re fobbing off on the kids nowadays”—but her contract had expired when she grew too tall for the roles expected of her. She had put herself through college on what was left of her movie earnings, and later by working as a waitress. “Cocktail waitressing is the worst kind,” she explained. “Pays the best, but it can be really—really demoralizing work.”
“Did you wear those hip-length black net stockings?” he asked, thinking she must have looked terrific. “And those little—”
“Yeah, yeah, all that,” she said impatiently. “And then pretty soon I got married. Lasted about nine years. He was a lawyer—is a lawyer, I mean. You know how they say never marry a lawyer because you’ll never win an argument? Lot of truth in that. We didn’t have any children—at first he kept saying he didn’t want any, then later it turned out I couldn’t have any anyway. I have a whaddyacallit, a fibroid.”
And it was early afternoon, when they were lying back in canvas deck chairs on his sandy little porch, before Sally brought the story around to Jill Jarvis and her mansion.
“. . . Well, I don’t really know where all the money comes from,” she said. “I know she gets an awful lot of it from her father, someplace in Georgia, and I know his family’s had an awful lot of it down there for an awful long time, but I mean I don’t really know where it comes from. Cotton or something, I guess. And of course Frank Jarvis is rich too, so she came out of that marriage with quite a nice settlement, as well as the house. So then you see when my marriage broke up she asked me to come and live there, and I was sort of�
�thrilled. I’d always loved that house—still do; probably always will. Besides, I didn’t really have anywhere else to go. I knew the best I could do alone, on my salary, would’ve been some neat little place out in the Valley, and that’s my definition of spiritual suicide. I’d rather eat worms than live in the Valley.
“Oh, and Jill really went out of her way to make it nice for me too. She hired a professional decorator to do my apartment, and God, you ought to see it, Jack. Well, you will see it. It’s really only one big room but it’s about as big as three rooms put together, and it’s all bright and sunny and you can see green things all around. I love it. I love going in there after a day at the office and taking off my shoes and sort of dancing around for a minute thinking Wow. Look at me. Gawky Sally What’s-her-name from No-place, California.”
“Yeah,” he said, “that does sound nice.”
“Then after awhile I began to figure out that she’d wanted me there mostly for—well, for protective coloration, sort of. She was living with a college boy then, or graduate student, I guess he was, and she seemed to think it’d sort of look better if there were two women in the house. I finally found a way to ask her about that once, and she was surprised I’d even had to ask—she thought I’d understood from the beginning. Made me feel a little—I don’t know—made me feel funny.”
“Yeah; I can see that.”
“Anyway, the college boy only stuck around for a year or two, and since then there’s been quite a parade. I’ll just give you the highlights. There was a lawyer who was a friend of her ex-husband’s—a friend of my ex-husband’s too, which was a little uncomfortable—and there was a man from Germany named Klaus who runs a Volkswagen agency in town. He was nice, and he was very good with Kicker.”
“How do you mean, ‘good’ with him?”
“Well, he’d take him to ball games, or to the movies, and he’d talk to him a lot. That’s important for a boy without a father.”
“Does he see much of his father?”
“No. It’s hard to explain, but no—not at all. Because you see Frank Jarvis has always said he doesn’t think he is Kicker’s father, so he’s never wanted anything to do with him.”
“Oh.”
“Well, you hear of situations like that; it’s not uncommon. Anyway, Klaus moved out after a while, and now Woody’s the man in residence. Did you happen to notice the dopey little clown up over the fireplace? That’s him—I mean he painted it. Woody Starr. Starr of Hollywood. And I mean of course you can’t call him an artist, unless you want to be as dumb about it as Jill is. He’s just kind of an amiable guy trying to make a few dollars out of the tourist trade. He has a shop down on Hollywood Boulevard—he always calls it ‘the studio’—with his corny little sign hung out over the sidewalk; oh, and he doesn’t just do clowns—he does black velvet moonlit lakes and black velvet winter scenes and black velvet mountains with waterfalls and God only knows what the hell else. So anyway, Jill wandered in there one day and thought all that black velvet trash was beautiful. It’s always amazing to find out what crummy taste she has, in everything but clothes. And I guess she thought Woody Starr was beautiful too, because she brought him home the same night. That was about three years ago.
“And the funny part is he is sort of lovable. He can make you laugh. He’s even—interesting, in his own way: been all over the world in the Merchant Marine, knows a lot of stories. I don’t know. Woody grows on you. And it’s really touching to watch him with Kicker: I think Kicker loves him even more than he loved Klaus.”
“Where’d he get that name?”
“What name? Starr?”
“No, the boy.”
“‘Kicker’? Oh, Jill started that. She used to say he almost kicked her to death before he was born. His real name’s Alan, but you’d better not try calling him Al, or anything. Call him Kicker.”
By the time Jack got up and went into the house for more drinks he’d decided it would be much better if Sally lived in a regular apartment, like a regular secretary. Still, maybe they could arrange to spend most of their time together out here at the beach; besides, it was too early to worry about stuff like that. All his life, it now seemed, he had spoiled things for himself by worrying too soon.
“Know what, Sally?” he said, carrying their full, cold glasses back outdoors, and he was going to say, “You’ve got really great legs,” but went back to the old topic instead. “It’s beginning to sound like you live in a pretty fucked-up household.”
“Oh, I know,” she said. “Somebody else I knew called it ‘degenerate.’ That seemed too strong a word, but later I could see what he meant.”
It was the first time she had made any reference to “somebody else I knew,” or “he,” and as Jack sipped at his clicking whiskey he gave in to a sulk of irrational jealousy. How many guys had she met in Edgar Todd’s office and gone laughingly out for drinks with, over the years? And she had probably said, to each of them, “Could we make another stop first? Here in Beverly? Because I’ll have to pick up a few things, and anyway I’d like you to see where I live.” Worse: after thrashing and moaning in each man’s bed all night she had probably told him, as she’d told Jack Fields in the small hours of this very morning, that he was “wonderful.”
Had they all been writers? If so, what the hell were their names? Oh, there had probably been a few movie directors in there too, and movie technicians, and different kinds of people who had to do with the “packaging” of television shows.
He was making himself feel terrible, and the only way to stop it was to start talking again. “You know, you really look a lot younger than thirty-six, Sally,” he said. “I mean except for the—”
“I know; except for the hair. I hate it. It’s been gray since I was twenty-four and I used to dye it, but that didn’t look right either.”
“No, listen, it looks great. I didn’t mean—” And hunching earnestly toward her on the lower part of his deck chair he launched into an apology that carried him helplessly from one lame line to another. He said her hair had been the first thing that attracted him, and when her look told him she knew that was a lie he dropped it quickly and tried something else. He said he’d always thought prematurely gray hair could make a pretty girl “interesting” and “mysterious”; he said he was surprised a lot of girls didn’t dye their hair gray, and that was when she started laughing.
“God, you really like to apologize, don’t you. If I let you go on with this, you’d probably go on and on.”
“Well, okay,” he said, “but listen: let me tell you something else.” He moved over to her deck chair, placed one haunch on the edge of it, and began massaging one of her warm, firm thighs with his hand. “I think you’ve got just about the greatest legs I’ve ever seen.”
“Oh, that feels nice,” she said, and her eyelids lowered very slightly. “That really feels nice. You know what, though, Jack? We’re going to waste practically the whole afternoon if we don’t get up pretty soon and go back in the house and play.”
On Monday morning, sore-eyed and jittery from lack of sleep as he drove her back to Edgar Todd’s office, he began to be afraid they would never have such a good time again. All future days and nights might wither under the strain of trying to recapture this first weekend. They would discover unpleasant, unattractive things in each other; they would seek and find small grievances; they would quarrel; they would get bored.
He licked his lips. “Can I call you?”
“Whaddya mean, can you call me?” she said. “If you don’t, I’ll never let you hear the end of it.”
She spent several nights of that week with him, and the whole of the next weekend and much of the following week. Not until the end of that time was he obliged to visit Jill Jarvis’s house again, and then it was only because Sally insisted that she wanted him to see her apartment upstairs.
“Give me five minutes to get it looking decent, Jack, okay?” she told him in the den. “You wait here and talk to Woody, and I’ll come down and ge
t you when I’m ready.” So he was left alone and smiling with Woody Starr, who seemed nervous too.
“Well, my only quarrel with you, Jack,” Woody said as they sat down in leather armchairs, partly facing each other, “is that you’ve been keeping Sally away too much. We miss her. It’s like losing a member of the family. Whyn’t you bring her home more often?” Then, without waiting for an answer, he hurried on as if steady talking were the best-known remedy for shyness. “No, but seriously, though, Sally’s one of my favorite people. I think the world of her. She hasn’t had an easy life, but nobody’d ever guess it. She’s one of the finest human beings I know.”
“Yeah,” Jack said, making the leather creak as he shifted his weight. “Yeah, she’s pretty nice, all right.”
Then Kicker came hurrying in from the pool terrace for an intense, animated discussion with Woody Starr about a broken bicycle.
“Well, if the trouble’s in the sprocket itself, Kick,” Woody said when he’d sorted out the facts, “we’ll have to take it into the shop. Be better to let those guys handle it than mess with it ourselves, right?”
“But the shop’s closed, Woody.”
“Well, it’s closed for today, but we can take it in tomorrow. What’s the big hurry?”
“Oh, I dunno. I was—gonna go down to the firehouse, is all. Some of the guys from school hang around there.”
“Hell, I’ll run you down there, Kick; no problem.”
And the boy seemed to think it over for a few seconds, looking at the rug, before he said, “No, that’s okay, Woody. I can go tomorrow, or some other time.”
“Ready?” Sally called from the doorway. “Now, if you’ll just step this way, sir, I’ll take you up and show you my very own professionally decorated apartment.”
She led him out into the main living room—all he could see of it was an acre of waxed floor, with mounds of cream-colored upholstery seeming to float in the pink evening light of tall windows—and up the elegant staircase. She took him down a second-story hallway past three or four closed doors; then she opened the final door, whirled inside with a theatrical flourish, and stood beaming there to welcome him.
The Collected Stories Page 40