Love Among the Cannibals

by Wright Morris

  I sat there thinking of that, and how I had turned from the sight of that wonderful girl the same way, having on my mind’s eye nothing that I could call a picture of her. Over the loud-speaker system, which they had in every room, I could hear the ghostly rumble among the drums and the asthmatic whisper in the trombones that swung me back, just the way they did Fitzgerald, to a world that seemed obliged to get better and better in every way. Listening to the band it occurred to me that every sentiment had its own pitch, the way that every generation has its own sentiment. Good or bad. The pitch we hear today, the phony pitch, is absolutely right for the phony sex, the phony sentiment, and the phony mountain ballads poured out of the pine-scented plastic maple syrup cans. If you think that crime doesn’t pay you haven’t been to the movies lately, or checked the juvenile and senile delinquents on your local jukebox. The word for it is slobism. They grunt, groan, and grind, but seldom reach the level of speech. If I sound a little bitter, remember that I’m old enough to know better, but I’m paid according to how well I can forget what I know. The current crop of singers are medicine men and snake charmers. Everything is in the sales talk and nothing in what they sell. The phony pitch has to make up for what the song lacks. The pitch of Pussy Amor, singing one of our songs, is based entirely on the assumption that you have heard better songs, but at least this reminds you of one of them. I thought of all this because I was listening to one of the few songs I wish I had written, and I sat there, just the way Mac would have, crooning “Just One More Chance.” I sang the refrain, but it had been so long since I wanted another chance, I’d forgotten the words. The way Bing used to do it, I whistled. I finished off with the refrain—

  “Just one more cha-ance …”

  like I really meant it.

  My drink was on the floor, I had this plate in my lap, and I sat there facing this view through the window—but the window itself, as I gazed, obstructed the view. In it I could see, clearly reflected, the girl who stood in the doorway behind me. The girl I had looked for. The one I doubted was real. She saw my own reflection in the window—she saw that I saw her now, and said:

  “Just one more chance … what for?”

  How long had she been there? I was certain that if I turned to look at her, she would disappear. As a rule I am handy with words, glib, you might say, but I said nothing. I gazed at her face—I tried, that is, to penetrate behind the impression, the one reflected in the glass, that she was beautiful. The face oval. The hair, I hardly thought of the color, in loose ringlets. The mouth—as I looked at her lips they slowly parted, as if to speak, but instead she raised the glass she was holding and took a sip. That was all, just moistening her lips, leaving a cool film that made them shiny, and perhaps exaggerated the whiteness of her teeth. I’m a little uncertain without my glasses, but whether it was her reflection or the window that wavered, what I saw blurred in focus and rippled like the shadows that water casts.

  “Yes—?” I heard her say, as if expecting an answer. Then I heard a voice in the hall calling, “Eva! Oh, Eva!” and she turned away. I rose out of my chair spilling the plate on the floor and kicking over my drink. Behind her, through the door, I could see this big fellow coming toward her with two plates.

  “Look!” I heard myself say, and she wheeled around toward me, took that flower from her hair, and as she tossed it toward me said:

  “—in case you want that chance.”

  The young fellow with her saw what she had done, and they both laughed. I let the flower lie there while I cleaned up the mess. I tossed it on the tray, with the celery, the ice cubes, and the pieces of plate I had broken, carrying them down the hall to where the dirty dishes were stacked. In the dim light of the hall my hand went out and picked off the flower. I slipped it into the pocket of my coat, then stood in the main room, with perhaps forty people, listening to an old lecher sing the usual run of dirty songs. He got a big hand. At one point I heard Mac shout, “That’s great, man!”

  I saw her twice. Looking for the men’s room I saw her seated on one of the landings, her back toward me, two young men at her feet and her hand held by the one seated at her side. I was relieved to see their fingers were not laced. Then, an hour later, looking for Mac, I saw her reflected in a cloakroom mirror, running a comb through her hair, her strong brown arms raised above her head. That was where I recognized it. I may have said it aloud. The word Greek. One without the mutilations. One with all the limbs intact.

  I would have gone at that point rather than see who would be holding her hand on the next landing, but I couldn’t go off without Mac. You may find it hard to believe that a man of thirty-eight, who flies his own airplane, neither drives nor has the nerve to drive a car. I couldn’t leave him to a cab, since I’m never sure he knows where he lives. I asked one of the caterers if they had a piano, and he replied that they did, in what he called the playroom, and, as I might have expected, Mac was there. So were fifteen or twenty other people, listening to him. He loves old upright pianos, and he has this idea they go with his music. They don’t. But he loves the idea. He had been trying some of our new stuff on them, and this little Southern chick, with her big damp voice, was talking the words I had put into her mouth.

  “What next?

  The life of love I knew

  No longer loves

  The things I do.

  What next?”

  If the test of a song is what it stands up under, this was a good song. She got a hand from the crowd, and she was set to run through the few little things she knew, which would have been plenty, but I stepped forward at that point and raised my hand. The answer to “What Next?” I said, was that I had to take its composer, the gent seated at the keyboard, home so he could finish the song. We had just three verses, I said, and it called for four. Then, to make this little chick feel good, I made a few remarks about our new songbird, and how much her style brought back the old days of Fanny Brice.

  Nobody laughed when I said that. They gave us all a big hand. There you have the new show business in a nutshell. You tell them what they’re going to like, they like it, then they all stand and applaud themselves. In the general happy hubbub I got Mac away from the piano, grabbed hold of the girl, and got them to the stairs. I kept my eye peeled for the Greek, but she was gone. Some prankster had propped up a poster of Rin Tin Tin in the back seat of our car, lifelike as hell in the moonlight, and I just left it there and drove off. We drove this little chick back to her apartment, where Mac kissed her chastely on the forehead, then let me wait five or ten minutes while she looked for her keys.

  Driving west along Sunset, cruising through the blinkers and coming out above the lights, on some of the rises, kept the feeling that was building up in me from being localized. Not till I parked the car, came in through the back, and made Mac his usual nightcap of whisky—not till I had one myself, a little stiffer than usual, did it all come back. I hadn’t eaten. I felt squeamish and a little sick.

  “Whassamatta?” Mac said, dunking his cubes, the way he likes to, with his finger.

  “Must be something I ate,” I said, which he didn’t question, since that often happened.

  Our bedroom is at the top front of this mansion, from where you can view the sea in the morning, but I could hear Mac, after I had gone to bed, hammering the baby grand. Like everybody in the world, he likes to play Rachmaninoff. I lay there thinking, of one thing and another, and when it was clear I was not going to sleep I got out of bed and looked in my pocket for that paper flower. I stepped into the bathroom, closing the door, to examine it. I know nothing about flowers. This one had white petals you could pluck off. I plucked off several, then I noticed that one petal seemed to have a serial number. I could see very plainly the number 2-8117. I could not make out the letters that preceded it. It was slow to dawn on me that what I had was a phone number. Part of one, that is. We have about a dozen telephones in the place, but it took me half an hour to find a phone book, then another half-hour to grasp the problem. I had no
exchange. Thirty-two were listed in the general Los Angeles area.

  What did I know about the girl?

  Her name was Eva. That was not very much.

  II

  My mother used to say to me, “Earl, you’ve got to eat to live.”

  I usually start the day with bacon and eggs, some fresh or stewed fruit, three or four slices of toast, then a pint of strong coffee I brew in an espresso I carry around.

  I had a glass of orange juice. I poured it, that is, but I could hardly get it down. But to live you have to eat, and since I wanted to live I took one of Mac’s diet crackers, two of his vitamin pills, and then went in search of a phone. A private phone. I might have to put in some thirty-odd calls.

  I began with the A’s. Women invariably answered the phone. I would ask for Eva and they would tell me that I had the wrong number. As a rule, of course, the operator told me that first. You have dialed the wrong number, she would say. We got to know each other very well. “Did you try Superior?” she suggested at one point. So I tried Superior. That was not it, but it took me up farther in the alphabet. I dialed Vandyke, a small child answered, and in a routine way I asked for Eva. “Just a sec—” the child replied, then she turned from the phone and screamed:

  “Ohhhhhbh, EEEEE-vaaaaa.”

  The next thing I knew there she was.

  “Hello?” she said.

  My mouth was dry. Was this the one? “Hello,” I said.

  “I was wondering when you would call,” she said.

  “If who would call?” I said. “Which one am I?”

  “You want another chance,” she said, “don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “At what?”

  “At you,” I said.

  Only now as I write it down do I see how corny it is. At the time it struck me as wonderful. I suppose I hoped it would bowl her over, since I was quite aware that it didn’t. I could hear a child yelling.

  “Are they all yours?” I said.

  She laughed. “I suppose they are mine.”

  “You suppose?”

  “I’m a governess.”

  A minute may have passed. I had time to read, four or five times, the Fire and Police warnings on the directory.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “You seem to have your hands full—already,” I said.

  “It’s a job,” she replied. “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, then I blurted it out. “I found this phone number, my dear, and I don’t remember having asked for it.”

  That set her back. I fully expected her to hang up. I could hear that child in the background—that doll-like wheeze of very young babies—and I don’t know why I didn’t hang up myself. It flashed through my mind that this girl had a husband, a house full of brats, and Christ knows what all in one of those lovely new developments you see springing up. Running an orphanage by day, and playing Mamie Stover by night.

  “I’m just so damn poohed,” she said. “I got in so late.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am. I—”

  “I’ve got the baby right now,” she interrupted. “He wants to be fed. You want to call me back about eleven o’clock?”

  “Sure,” I replied. “Sure, at eleven.” Then she either hung up or someone on another phone in the same house cut us off. I sat there. I made note of the Vandyke exchange. Then I got up and came back to the kitchen where Mac was soft-boiling himself three eggs.

  “You feel any better, man?”

  “I think so,” I said. But I could see that I didn’t look it.

  “There somethin’ on your mind?” he said.

  It occurred to me that there was. “Christ!” I said. If you have lived through a war with somebody and then tied your habits of living and dying up with him, it hardly matters what sort of a boob he actually is.

  “What’s wrong, man?”

  “I forgot to ask her name,” I replied.

  He rocked the saucepan with the eggs in it, something I’ve told him a thousand times didn’t help any, then he turned and said:

  “How you like Billie? Ain’t she some chick?”

  I could see that he thought so. When I said the same to him, I knew what it was I wanted to hear.

  “You’re a lucky slob,” I said. Nothing pleased him more than to hear he was a slob—but a lucky one. It braced him up enough so he could put to me the big one.

  “Think she’s got a talent?” he said.

  If he’d said voice, he would have had me. But a talent she had. Look what she had done with it.

  “That chick’s going to go a long way,” I said, and weak as I was, my voice carried conviction. He felt it.

  “She’s got sumpin’, man. You know what I mean?”

  I sure did. I was looking at it. She had it, all right, and the question was what would she be doing with it.

  I filled two of our thermos jugs with iced coffee, took along some zwieback to keep myself alive, and we headed for the beach. I needn’t tell you who we found camped smack on our spot. Miss Billie Harcum, with fresh nail polish where she had chipped it off her toes, wearing a trim little tank suit that did a good deal to improve her voice. Along with her was a tall, cool drink of water from the Veronica Lake period, one of the chicks who couldn’t face up to a date with a man of forty-one. Miss Harcum introduced her to me in the nice quiet way that indicated I was a man finally faced with his destiny, and this chick played it cool in the way they had both mapped it out. I just happen to have a peculiar distaste for the fashionable phase in female contours, even when, as in this instance, it was nicely tanned. The fact that I was one shade darker than she was drew us together for two or three minutes, plus the information that my cigarettes made her think of Caporal Bleus. We did France and Spain once over lightly so she could slide quickly into Mallorca, where Robert Graves had been the turning point in her life. That too, strangely enough, had been on the beach. He had asked one of their mutual friends “who that Cretan sort of creature was,” and of course it had been her.

  Since Mac had never heard of Robert Graves this story didn’t catch fire the way it should have, and I think the word “Cretan” seriously troubled him. The one he knows, they spell with an i, I think. It being ten to eleven at that point, I excused myself, in a professional manner, and walked back to the corner of Sunset Boulevard to make my call. The drugstore there had a public telephone, but very public, behind the drug counter, and I had to stand where the woman at the fountain could listen to me. I put the call through, and it was Eva who answered.

  “What an awful day,” she said, before I could say anything. I could hear the sound of her breath in the mouthpiece, as if she had run to catch the phone.

  “It’s a beauty down here at the beach,” I said, but I didn’t mean it the way she took it.

  “That’s very interesting,” she replied.

  “Except for one little thing,” I added.

  She got that, all right, but it didn’t seem to impress her.

  “There’s always some little thing,” she said, then cupped her hand over the mouthpiece, but not before this child she was holding let out a howl. It left me deaf in that ear for a second or two. When I could hear again I said:

  “It is now seven minutes past eleven, and I have just walked half a mile to put in this call.”

  That is what a howling kid does to me. If she had hung up, and she might have, I would have died.

  “I’m just so damn poohed,” she said. “If I just hadn’t gone to that party—”

  “I wouldn’t be calling you,” I said. She covered the mouthpiece again, and I could hear her pass the child to someone. I had only one dime along with me and my time was running out. “When am I going to see you?” I said.

  “I get an hour off about three o’clock.”

  “You get what?”

  “Forty-five minutes, but I might stretch it to an hour.”

  I took a deep breath, said, “Where will I meet you?” Alo
ud she said, “Let me think,” the way a woman does who finds it a help to state the problem like that.

  “Just remember I’m on a pay phone,” I said.

  “You know the campus?”

  “What campus?”

  “The UCLA campus.”

  “I can find it, I guess,” I said.

  “I’ll be on the corner of Westwood and LeConte. It’s a main corner. I’ll be on the west side.”

  “At three?”

  “I take the kids to a matinee which begins at two forty-five. I should make it by three.”

  “Okay,” I said, “three o’clock,” just as the phone chime rang in my ear, and the operator told me my time was up.

  I’ve no idea whether I believed a word of that or not. I stood there till the woman at the soda fountain asked me if there was something I wanted, and I said no, then I changed my mind and asked for a glass of milk. I had to eat to live, and I still wanted to live. It took me five or ten minutes to force down that milk. Then I walked the quarter mile back to camp, where they had all moved in under Mac’s umbrella and were listening to Pussy Amor sing her version of “What Next?”