Five minutes later she outmaneuvered Pelley to pick up the check.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
IN TIME, I came to meet a lot of Lulu’s friends. The one who counted the most was Dorothea O’Faye Pelley, and my nights at The Hangover began again. Some few years ago when Dorothea had the gossip column, Lulu was one of her favorites, and the friendship remained the same. Of all the people Lulu saw, and they were numerous enough, it was only with Dorothea that I ever knew her to relax. On the hours we spent visiting, Lulu would put herself on a hassock near Dorothea’s feet and listen to what was said, her face set between her hands. Since Lulu was now more of a name than Dorothea, it must have been startling for any new visitor to find her set in place between the real-estate operator and the drunk O’Faye, but I know if Lulu had tried to match Dorothea, they could hardly remain friends.
For me, Dorothea’s charm had turned, and the better I came to know her the less I was impressed by her. I had come to realize it was court procedure for everybody to expose their lives to Dorothea. She liked nothing better than to discuss their problems, and she always gave the answer which fixed her friends at The Hangover. So, for example, Jay-Jay parading his loves:
He had a girl friend I never saw. She was supposed to have saved him from the needle—he had been on main-line, Jay-Jay would explain—and his girl had taken him through the cure, the two locked in a room for a week. He was over it now and he would never go back so long as he had his girl. She was a true diamond.
“Only you don’t want to marry her,” Dorothea would say.
“Well, now, that’s it, I don’t,” Jay-Jay would admit. “I got to marry her, she’s put in five years on me, but I got a wandering eye. I can’t think about nothing but cheating on her.”
“With that face she has,” Dorothea would snort, “I’d cheat on her myself.”
Jay-Jay would laugh as hard as any of the others. “Oh, I pick them, I can really pick them,” he would say, and then with a seriousness which begged to be thrown on its back, he would add, “A lot of the time like now, when I think about her, I think I’m really in love, so help me.”
Pelley would cough. Madame’s maid to Dorothea, he would say sternly, pompously, “If a man’s really in love he wants to get married,” and Dorothea would chuckle with her heavy laughter. “How’s that other bag you’re running around with?” she would ask.
“You mean the one that looked like she was sucking a fig?” Jay-Jay would ask, and shake his head. “I gave her up before she could wear me down.” Jay-Jay would smile. “I got another gal now,” he said, “she’s crazy. Sweet little kid with two little girls. Roberta, her name is, Bobby. Her husband and her has broken up and she wants to become a call girl. Man! I could be a call girl before she could.”
“Man, you could,” I thought, but you can’t say everything.
This sort of story brought Marion Faye to mind, and Dorothea’s pleasure was spoiled. Maybe Jay-Jay wanted to spoil it.
Sooner or later, it would be my turn. Dorothea had come to the conclusion that I was good for Lulu, and so it became one of her projects to better my life. Dorothea always had a job for me—she knew a columnist who would take me on as a leg-man, there was a studio where she could arrange a place as assistant to a very big director, there was a businessman who could groom me for a spot—I only had to say yes. I would try to turn the conversation, I would be flippant, I would be dull. Once, I even threw her a bone. “It’s all right, Dorothea,” I said, “one of these days I’ll go respectable.”
To everybody’s surprise, Lulu came to my defense. It was the only time she ever crossed Dorothea. “Leave him alone, sweetie,” she said. “Sergius is respectable now. If he gets a job, he’ll be a dupe like everybody else.” That ended it for a few days and I was left in peace without a career.
Lulu’s dilemmas were dilated at length. She loved to give Dorothea each new bulletin on the progress of Herman Teppis’ desire to marry her off to Teddy Pope, and it became one of the jokes at The Hangover. Lulu was always wondering how she could entertain Teddy’s friends. “They’ll have to know who I am,” she would say, “I mean, how will they be able to tell I’m not in drag?”
“Just leave off the make-up, dearie,” the drunk O’Faye would lisp with a lopsided smile.
“Oh, God,” Lulu said to the laughter of the court.
“Oh, God, my eye,” said Dorothea on this night, “if you don’t want to marry Teddy, you better do something. Herman Teppis is one man who really tops me.”
“Why don’t you marry Sergius?” Pelley asked, and I knew Dorothea had instructed him.
“Cause he won’t have me,” Lulu said, and showed her pretty teeth.
Such talk left Lulu more tense than ever. She was beginning to suggest these days that we ought to get married, and I think she never found me so attractive as when I would turn her down. The thought of marriage left me badly depressed. I could see myself as Mr. Meyers, a sort of fancy longshoreman scared of his wife, always busy mixing drinks for Lulu and the guests. I suppose what depressed me most was that I was forced to think about myself and what I wanted, and I was not ready for that, not by far. Once in a while, depending on my mood and my general estimate of my assets, I would think of becoming everything from a high school coach to a psychoanalyst, and several times I found myself thinking vaguely of a career in the FBI or more easily being a disc jockey with one of those sinuous lines of patter which mean so many things to so many people who stay up late at night. Once in a very great while, with a lack of ambition as cheerful as a liver complaint, I would remember that I wanted to be a writer, but like all my other inspirations, the central urge was not there—the only hint could be that I wanted to find some work I liked.
But talk of marriage was the death of enjoyment for me. Lulu and I had come to the point where we fought more often than not, and the fights had taken on some bitterness. There were times when I was sure we had to break up, and I would look forward with a sort of self-satisfied melancholy to the time when I would be free. In fact, I felt it would be easy to give her up. That much confidence is banked when a woman wants to get married.
Other times I have to admit she could make me miserable. No sooner would she ask me to marry her, no sooner would I turn her down, than she would tell me how attractive she found other men, especially for those qualities in which I was considered lacking. One man was sharp, another masterful, a third suave—she was always enjoying the theory that to have such an affair would pass the same qualities over to her. At times like that, I would have to admit I was in love with her, for I used to look for her faults, even feel a false relief at each fault I discovered, as if I believed I could thereby reduce her to size.
Of course it didn’t work. Preparations on Lulu’s new picture were moving and she decided to go to the capital for a few days to sit in on some conferences. Each of us looked forward to the separation. She was always saying she was bored with Desert D’Or, and I felt how nice it would be to remain in my house, read a book for once, relax and see nobody. The desert dust was probably gathering on my camera and tape recorder. I needed to think, I thought slowly in those days. I found myself remembering the pleasures of loneliness, thinking that if loneliness was difficult well then so was love, until I would wish Lulu off to the capital in order to leave me at rest.
Once she was gone, I could not get myself together; the book I read only underlined my restlessness and the days went with nothing done. I was so used to fighting her, that I could spend a morning talking to myself about whether or not to take a walk. While she was gone, we were always on the phone. I called her up to tell her I loved her, she called me back half an hour later and we had the same conversation again. So, like old gypsies who make a sign a hundred times a day, we swore we loved each other. A day earlier than she planned, she ran back to Desert D’Or, and we had a royal tourney that night. “You carry me so far,” she said. “Sergius, it’s just the best.” This she told me many times. By morning she was d
own and so was I. We had overdone it. Once we were dressed, Lulu told me she could smell herself. “I have the most awful body odor, Sugar.”
“All I can smell is your perfume.”
“No, you have no sense of smell. I tell you, I know it’s there. That happens to people. They suddenly develop terrible smells and they have them for the rest of their lives.”
“Where do you pick up these witches?”
“I know someone it happened to. Sugar, I have to take a bath.”
She bathed, she came out of the bath, she bathed again. She got me to powder her; she had now decided the smell was somewhere in the room. “Oh, it’s awful,” she cried aloud.
For several days she was taking baths all the time. Then she decided she had breast cancer, she ordered me to search for a lump. I told her to see a doctor. Instead, she went to see Dorothea, and came back afraid of something else. “When I get older, my breasts are going to droop,” she said sadly. “There’s no way I can stop it. Will you promise to be careful when you touch them, Sugar?” She burst into tears. What was the matter, I asked? Nothing was the matter. Something must be the matter; I made her tell me. It was disclosed that Lulu had always planned to have an operation to raise her breasts once they began to sag. But, today, she had seen Dorothea’s breasts, and Dorothea had had such an operation.
“They’re so unattractive,” Lulu said miserably. “They’re square.”
“They aren’t.”
“But they are. She showed me. They’re square. I feel like it’s happened to me.”
“Well, it hasn’t … yet.”
“You don’t know anything. You’re just a brute.”
As the starting date to the shooting of her next picture came nearer, was only a few weeks away, her nervousness got worse. One day she declared she was going to take acting lessons. “I’m going to begin from the very beginning. I’m going to learn how to walk. And to breathe. I’ve never been properly trained, Sergius, did you know that?”
“You’ll never take lessons,” I snapped at her.
“Of course I will. I’m going to be the greatest actress who ever lived. That’s what nobody understands.”
I learned later that this was partly the result of bad studio publicity. I felt her pain as she showed me a news photo of herself. She was bruised by the photo. “Look at Tony Tanner,” she said, “he looks better than me, and he’s just a feature actor. I dislike him intensely.” She was so bitter. “They ought to shoot the photographer,” she said. “Haven’t they any brains, releasing such a still?” Lulu wanted to call Herman Teppis. “I’ll put it up to him. I’ll say, ‘Mr. Teppis, they’re ruining my face, and it isn’t fair.’ It isn’t. They’re plotting against me cause they hate me at the studio.”
“When did you meet Tanner?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s a nothing. He’s going to be with Teddy Pope in my next picture. They’re coming out here soon to do publicity with me.”
“You don’t look so miserable with his arm around you,” I commented.
“And you’re a fool,” Lulu said. “Why, that’s just publicity. I can’t stand him. He’s an ex-pimp, that’s all he is. He and Marion Faye used to go around together, only he’s even worse than Marion. I think they’re both despicable.”
“Marion isn’t that simple,” I said to irritate her.
“Yes, dear Marion. He’s a homo like you,” Lulu said. “Why don’t you go see your homo friend again?”
“Just because I don’t want to marry you doesn’t make me a three-dollar bill,” I said.
“Poor Dorothea,” Lulu said out of nowhere.
It piqued Lulu that I saw so much of Marion Faye. I had taken the habit of visiting him in those early morning hours after I had been with Lulu and she wanted me to go home. I could never explain to myself what I looked for in Faye. I even wondered about Lulu’s interpretation, trying to catch some fear which might prove her correct. If I looked in deep enough I could catch anything—there were some little memories from the orphanage—but I think maybe what I looked for at Faye’s was something else entirely. Marion had not changed a bit; in everything he said was contempt for me and Lulu. And it was for this reason, I think, that I went to see him. I have noticed more than once how people in an affair surround themselves with friends who like their affair or dislike it altogether, in order to see outside themselves the faces of their own feelings. For example, Eitel looked for me since I liked Elena and so helped Eitel to like his affair, just as I hunted out Marion to keep me from marrying Lulu for I was always being weakened by her constant attacks, her declarations of helplessness, my sneaking sense of my own helplessness, and perhaps worst of all, the steady hurrah and approval which Dorothea made the court pay to our romance, the outside pressure to love being stronger finally, I decided, than love itself, until I was forced to wonder if people would ever be in love if there weren’t the other people to say that love they must, and I was sure that Lulu and I marooned on a desert island would mumble over whose turn it was to catch the fish, and leave love to the people on the ocean liners which passed just out of sight.
I say, therefore, it was probably for that, that I saw Marion so often. Still, we did not talk so very much about Lulu and me. There is probably no passion greater than the philosopher looking for an audience, and Marion seemed decided to make me his audience. I didn’t have to be surprised that we ended by Marion talking about himself. Somewhere, he had picked up a line in a book he had read: “There is no pleasure greater than that obtained from a conquered repugnance,” and as an example, he would talk to me about his sessions with Teddy Pope.
“All right,” he would say, “take my life with the girls. When I gave Teddy his first smile, I figured I’d hate it and have to work. Then that way I could really make it. Only it didn’t turn out just so. You see what I caught is that deep down I’m half queer anyway, so it wasn’t repugnant. I was doing the whole thing backward.”
“I saw you once with Pope,” I said.
“Cruelty, yes. That’s where I dig being homo. You see, cruelty is repugnant to me. When I tell Pope he’s disgusting and repulsive, and all he wants is for me to give him the time of day because he’s willing to do all the loving, deep down he’s nothing but a sweet little flower waiting to be stomped, well at times like that I have to force myself to be cruel, but afterward I feel fine. Almost, that is. I’ve never made it all the way, not in anything in life.”
“You know,” I said, “you’re just a religious man turned inside out.”
“Yes?” murmured Faye. “You have a brain like a scrambled egg.”
“No, look,” I said. “Take your formula and change one word.”
“What word?”
“Listen: ‘There is no pleasure greater than that obtained from a conquered vice.’ ”
“I have to think about that,” he said, and he was angry. “What an Irish cop you are,” he said with cold admiration.
Two nights later, he answered me. “I think I’ve worked it out,” he said. “Nobility and vice—they’re the same thing. It just depends on the direction you’re going. You see, if I ever make it, then I turn around and go the other way. Toward nobility. That’s all right. Just so you carry it to the end.”
“And what’s in the middle?” I asked.
“Slobs.” He snuffed the ember of marijuana on the edge of his lip, and put the remains back in the jar. “I hate slobs,” he said. “They always think what they have to think.”
Self-swindles roiled Faye; in this sense he was absolutely opposed to the human race. Through the course of the nights we spent in talk, I came to know him better, and he grew less of a mystery to me although I never thought I understood him. But at least I got a picture of how he spent his time when I wasn’t there, and in those stories he fed me to make a point, I came to have an idea of the kinds of things he would do when I was not there, and from the vague notion of how he spent his afternoons—for he was seldom up before twelve—passing through the larger hotels t
o take a drink at the bar and drum up assignments for his girls, I saw past the rounds of the gamblers, the oilmen, the actors down for a night, and the politicians from the capital, into some of the smaller corners. He didn’t go to bed before dawn, and it was his habit to keep the last two hours of the night for studying odd books, laying new arrangements of his Tarot cards, and thinking about the little things, or so he would put it. For the evening and the night, that layover between the work of afternoon and the solitude of early morning, he took whatever happened, and I learned finally that it was usually something new which happened, so for a night he could be busy with the hysterics of one of his girls, for another be the host to mobsmen or hoods, for a third be away at that business he despised—it was become so routine—of working a new girl in, for the fourth, like the flip of a coin, make his appearance at Dorothea’s, for the fifth drive to the capital to hear some new musicians, or as easily drive in the other direction across the state line to one of the gambling cities of the desert. He could visit friends like Eitel, he could drop in on Teddy Pope or the friends of the set, he could even catch a movie or a drink in a bar, but by three o’clock or four, he was home. Out of all this, there are twenty stories I could tell about him, but I pick the one which most applies, I think.
This passed in the not so early morning, shortly after I left his house one night. He was sitting there alone, the deck of the Tarot out, when the telephone rang. He was used to this no matter how it annoyed him; his profession surrounded him with people who thought it was important to talk to him right away, and although he was equally sure that there never was a call which could not wait a week or more, he took the irritation as one of the wastes of his work.
So Faye answered the phone, and was hardly surprised when it was Bobby, Jay-Jay’s girl, who had been working for him just ten days.
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