The Three Sirens

by Irving Wallace

  It had surprised her that being the best female singer and dancer, and the most attractive, in Omaha, had not made her the best and the most in Hollywood, for in Hollywood there were so many. She had been gregarious, making many friends, and one, an agent, had got her chorus-line work in four gaudy musical comedies produced by major studios. These had led to nothing more, and after that she had made her way by doing singing commercials on radio and a solo in a few of the less select nightclubs. She had spent a portion of her earnings trying to learn to act in a little theater on La Brea Avenue, and it was to this little theater, after the war and his honorable discharge as a supply officer, that Cyrus Hackfeld had come as a spectator. He had seen her, and fallen in love with her, and adroitly managed to arrange an introduction. Although fifteen years her senior, Cyrus was younger than the young men she dated. He was more alive, more dynamic, more prosperous. After one year of going steady, she had happily married him and felt safe and snug about it.

  She had recalled all of this in the shower, and had been surprised at how quickly the seventeen years of her married life had sped by. During those years, the only holdover from her early career had been an interest in dancing. She had continued with lessons sporadically, more and more irregularly as their son, Merrill, who had her easy ways and not his father’s driving energy, had entered prep school in Arizona. And here she was, incredibly, with one last day between herself and forty.

  All through the morning, she had tried to be philosophical and think deeply, a disconcerting process that she usually left to the lecturers appearing at her monthly meeting of the Great Books Forum. This morning, she had ventured into the perilous stratosphere on her own. She had thought that calendars were, after all, man-made, and therefore arbitrary frauds. If calendars and clocks had not been invented, and you did not count the comings and goings of the moon, you would know no special age and you would always be young. How, in one day, could you pass from young to old? It was such deceptive foolishness.

  But the deep thinking gave her no relief. First of all, she had been remembering the past, which everyone said was a sure sign of advancing years. Second, she had been thinking of Merrill, and had known that you could not have a boy so old and still be no older yourself. Then, third, she had been thinking of Cyrus, and remembered that he had once been merely stocky and was now pachydermous, that he had once had only the small factory and now had twenty or thirty factories (and his Foundation, and Foundations were created by rich old men, not ambitious young men, and even if the Foundation was a tax thing and avocation, it represented a passage of many years). Finally, she had been thinking of herself.

  Once her hair had been a flaxen, natural blond, but now she had no idea of what it really was, after a decade of shampoos, and rinses, and coloring. And all the rest of her, if she would be honest about it this once, had gradually changed, so that the countenance of the prettiest girl in Omaha was now the countenance of an older, faded woman, exposed to the sun of too many years, the face rounder, fleshier, with lines on the brow, and lines under the big eyes, and nicks here and there that she would not name wrinkles. The throat and the hands were the worst, because they had not remained taut and smooth. And her figure, not properly a figure any longer, unless O was a figure, had thickened and obscured the curves, had become more and more shapeless, although not fat, never fat. Yet, despite Nature’s ambush, the essence of her that dwelt inside had not succumbed to years. An accurate wisp of wisdom, carried over from those monthly lectures, summarized her feelings. It was from one of those English playwrights who disguised truth in comedy. Probably, almost certainly, Oscar Wilde. What was the wisdom? Yes: The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. Yes!

  That was the hateful morning.

  Here it was late afternoon, and she slowly drank her Martini while considering the debacle of the hours between waking and this moment. She had tried to escape memories of the past, and the mirrors of the house, by driving into Beverly Hills and occupying herself, by generating too much activity to think deeply.

  Savoring her Martini, she relived the early afternoon as if she were participating in each action and event right now, as if each moment of it were the present, so that it, too, would no longer represent the past.

  She set her mind at twelve-thirty.

  She had a one o’clock date with Lucy and Vivian for lunch at the newest Scandinavian restaurant in Beverly Hills, The Great Dane, but at twelve-thirty she thought that she might cancel the engagement if she could seduce Cyrus into dining with her. She was wearing her latest acquisition, a softly draped jade-green dress that subtracted both pounds and years, and it was too nice to waste upon her own sex.

  She dialed and was put right through to her husband.

  “Lisa?”

  “Hello, darling. I just had an impulse to call.”

  “You caught me in the nick of time. I was rushing out to meet Rex Garrity at the Club.”

  “Oh. You mean, you’re tied up for lunch?”

  “I made the appointment some time ago. He was flying in for a lecture and wanted to see me on some Foundation business. We’re having a quick lunch and then we’ll come back here and—” He paused. “Why did you ask? Would you like to join us?”

  “No, no. I only wanted to say hello.”

  “You might enjoy him. He’s quite a talker.”

  “You’re kind, dear, but no. In fact, I have a date with Lucy and Vi.”

  “Too bad. What are you doing today?”

  “Well, this lunch. Afterwards, the hairdresser. Some shopping. You know.”

  “Fine. I’d better run. See you later.”

  “Yes, later. Good-by, dear.”

  After that, she drove into Beverly Hills. It was nice of Cyrus to invite her, she thought, especially in the middle of his always busy day. But she had no patience for the travel writer, whom she had neither read nor met, and had no desire to meet or read. She had wanted to be alone with Cyrus, to sit and chat, about anything, about themselves maybe. They had talked so little these last years, perhaps because he talked all day at his work, perhaps because she was so separated from his work (or anything interesting) that now they had almost nothing to discuss, nothing that is, beyond Merrill and friends and the news.

  Lucy and Vivian were already in the reserved booth when she arrived at The Great Dane. They admired her dress. She admired theirs. Drinks and ordering took up some time. There was gossip about a mutual friend who had separated from her husband, and speculation as to whether there was another man involved. They discussed the road-company performance of a play they had all seen at the Biltmore. They discussed the latest bestseller and wondered how much of it was autobiographical and whether or not the fictional heroine was really based on a scandalous movie actress. They discussed the First Lady’s new hair-do. With the entree, Lucy and Vivian began to speak of their daughters, and they discussed them interminably, and Lisa stayed out of it and was bored. Talk about growing children depressed her, like making out a will. The only subject she wanted to talk about was her birthday, but they would not understand this urgency, not yet, for Lucy was thirty-six and Vivian was thirty-one, and they possessed the luxury of time.

  When it was ten minutes before her two-thirty hair appointment, she was glad to leave her share of the bill and escape. She could have walked, but instead she took her Continental the five blocks to Rodeo Drive, and parked in the special area beside Bertrand’s Beauty Salon.

  Once inside, she left her coat with the receptionist, accepted the salon smock, and entered the private dressing room. After removing her dress, and covering herself with the smock, she emerged and went to the sink farthest back, where her regular girl was waiting. On the way, she acknowledged Bertrand’s lovely compliment in French, and Tina Guilford’s hand-wave of welcome from under a dryer.

  At the sink, she sat back in the tilted chair for a quick shampoo. The soap and water felt soothing, and she relaxed. What she liked most about the Salon was the ritua
l involved in preserving and enhancing beauty. It produced a pleasant euphoria that drained all anxiety from the mind. You became a subject that need make no decisions. Your only duty was to be there, a presence, existing, while practiced hands attended you. You were made to feel like—like Madame de Pompadour.

  Automatically, Lisa moved to the private cubicle, accepted the perforated skullcap, felt the strands of her hair pulled nimbly through the holes. As her hair was being tipped, each strand colored, and then bound, she stretched her legs and lifted her slip to her girdle, while the second girl, who had brought in the metal tub of wax, efficiently undid her nylons, rolled them down her legs, removed her pumps, and then the stockings. She gazed at her shapely calves, pleased that they had not deserted her as youth had. Lazily, she watched the kneeling girl pat the wax strips on her legs with the wooden instrument, and then rapidly pull them off, removing any unsightly hairs by the roots.

  When the tipping of her hair was done, and her legs were sleek as marble, she moved along the assembly line, her mind a vacuum. There was the second and more thorough shampoo, with the massage, and the rinse, and the stiff brush, and the fluffy towel. Then came the fifteen minutes with Bertrand, when he combed and swept and brushed, manipulating the metal rollers, at last clipping her hair in place.

  After the net was on, she settled beneath a dryer for the next hour. She had begun to shake off her depression of the morning, when she saw Tina Guilford, dressed to leave, approaching her. She did not mind speaking to Tina, for Tina must be fifty if she was a day, and Lisa could feel some superiority. She reached up and shut off her dryer.

  “Lisa, darling,” Tina was saying excitedly, “I won’t take up a minute of your time, but I’ve just heard of the most astounding miracle in Pasadena. A Swiss doctor, a plastic surgeon, has opened shop, and the girls are all raving, absolutely raving. He’s expensive, very expensive, but they all say it’s worth it. A new method discovered in Zurich. It’s fast and absolutely unnoticeable. One session and no more sagging chin and neck, no more bags under the eyes, and if you want to go as far as your bust, my dear—”

  “What makes you think I’d want to go as far as my eyes?” Lisa demanded icily.

  “Why, my dear, I just thought—why, everyone’s talking about him and—why, I thought when you get to be our age—”

  Lisa was about to say: our age, in a pig’s eye our age, your age you mean, you bitch. Instead, she said, “Thanks, Tina. If I ever decide I need it, I’ll ask you for more details. Excuse me now, I’ve got to get out of here.”

  She reached up and started the dryer, and Tina’s last words were lost in the whine and hum of the dryer.

  As Tina left, Lisa’s good mood vanished with her. She seethed at her friend’s impudence. That old lady of fifty-something daring to draw a thirty-nine-year-old young woman down to her level. Almost instantly, her rage flattened and crawled into gloom. Tina was simply trying to be helpful, she could see, helpful and truthful. It must show already, Lisa thought, forty must show already and to everyone. She was miserable now and determined to flee from this gossip trap.

  Once her hair had dried, and Bertrand had taken out the curlers and deftly combed her hair, all the while discussing his tiresome triumphs in Paris, she could not dress fast enough. She charged her visit, passed out three lavish tips, and walked to the car, wondering what method that Swiss facial surgeon had invented.

  Maybe he had the ultimate secret. Maybe he had found the means to make you young inside, too. That inner surgery, despite Oscar Wilde, would be worth her entire portfolio of stocks and bonds.

  When she reached the car, she realized that she was only a block and a half from Jill’s shop. She had not visited the elegant slacks and sportswear store in over a year. She needed some young slender toreador pants or capris for the spring and summer, for the patio and their place in Costa Mesa. With rising optimism about the future, she started for Jill’s.

  She had forgotten what she always resented about the shop, until she had reached it and gone inside. The moment that she crossed the heavy carpeting to the center of the huge, square, mirrored room, she wanted to turn around and run. Jill Clark, who owned the shop but was never there, made a fetish of callow girlishness in her decor, her furnishings, the damn mirrors, the cut of the shorts and slacks and swimsuits, the clerks, most of all the clerks. Lisa could see them now, gathered before a pillar, chattering. They were all unblemished female children, the clerks, ranging from seventeen to twenty-one. Their complexions needed no make-up and shone, their small breasts were high and straight, their stomachs flat, hips narrow, and all were flat-assed. They smoked, wore outlandish blouses, capris, and open gold sandals, and they waited upon you with the insolence and arrogance of youth. They were disgusting.

  Before Lisa could turn back to the door, one limber, light-footed adolescent approached her. This one wore a badge which identified her as “Mavis.” Her hair was platinum, her face narrow and perfect, and her body lithe. Confronting Lisa, her condescending charitable look was that of one who must deal with some old baggage of a woman, in a shawl, seeking haven from the snow.

  “May I help you, madam?”

  “Yes. Those violet capris in the window. I’d like to see a pair.”

  “Your size?”

  “You have all my statistics on file, sideways and up and down. Just look up Mrs. Cyrus Hackfeld.”

  She announced her name, rather than spoke it, but Mavis was a blank. No recognition registered. She drifted toward the cashier’s counter, while Lisa wandered toward the rack of slacks, boiling.

  Leisurely, after a long interval, Mavis returned carrying a card.

  “Your last measurements were taken three years ago,” she said meaningfully.

  Lisa’s anger surfaced. “Then that’s my size.”

  “Very well.”

  Mavis searched the rack, and finally jerked free a pair of violet capris.

  “Do you want to try them on, Mrs. Hackworth?”

  “Yes. And the name is Hackfeld.”

  “Hackfeld. I’ll remember. Right this way.”

  Trembling, and alone at last behind the curtain, Lisa hastily divested herself of the leopard coat, her dress, and her half-slip, and then pulled on the tight capris. She tried to zip them and they would not zip. She tried to button the waist but two inches separated button from hole. She wheeled and observed herself in the mirror and saw that the pants were too tight, impossibly tight, with ugly bulges at her hips and thighs. Filled with self-pity, Lisa rolled the capris down and struggled out of them.

  She stood in her brassiere and girdle, and called the young girl.

  After a few seconds, Mavis strolled in, smoking. “How were they, Mrs. Hack Hackfeld?”

  “You gave me a size too small.”

  “I gave you your size,” Mavis, the picador, said relentlessly. “It’s the size on your card.”

  Lisa was consumed by fury at the baiting. “Well, dammit, they don’t fit, so get me the next larger size.”

  Mavis smiled sympathetically at the old girl. “I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Hackfeld. That is the largest size we carry in the store. Miss Jill won’t carry a larger one. It’s her policy. I’m afraid you’ll have to go elsewhere to find something that fits.”

  Lisa’s fury had melted down into humiliation and grief. She knew her cheeks were hot and she hated their surrender. “All right,” she said, “thank you.”

  The girl had gone and again Lisa was alone. Dressing, she was perplexed. It was the first time that she could find nothing to fit at Jill’s. But then, she thought, finally adjusting her coat, it was also the first time she was going to be forty.

  She left the shop swiftly, eyes pointed ahead, but warmly aware that the group of silly slat-asses were watching her with amusement. Going through the door, she knew one thing wealth could not fortify you against—and that was age. Those silly slat-asses were richer than she. Good-by, Jill, good-by forever. And damn you, you’ll know one day.

  Blind
ly, she made for her white Continental, and drove to Magnin’s, where she belonged. Sweeping through the store, she shopped compulsively, but with constant disinterest, for toiletries and evening accessories. When she had what she did not need, she went out the rear exit, waited for her car, overtipped the attendant, and steered the vehicle to Wilshire Boulevard.

  As she halted at a signal, her watch reminded her that there still remained an empty stretch between four-fifteen and six o’clock, and she wondered how she could best fill it. Briefly, she considered driving east on Wilshire to the Hackfeld Building and surprising Cyrus. Quickly, she vetoed the idea. She did not have the spirit to face his employees, his receptionist, his secretaries, more bubbling slat-asses, the children who had inherited her good years. They would nudge and whisper, after her entrance, there goes the Mrs. Hackfeld, the old man’s old lady—how did she ever hook him?

  Instead of turning east, she wheeled the car west. She would look in at the Coast Tennis Club—it was on the way home—she and Cyrus were charter members—and maybe she would have a drink and join in a casino or bridge game for a short spell. Ten minutes later, oppressed by the slate sky, she was relieved to arrive at the Tennis Club, relinquish her car, and enter into the fireplace-and-mountain-lodge atmosphere of the exclusive refuge. Carried upward in the gleaming self-service elevator, she half-listened to the strains of Cocktails for Two being piped in and played by a predominantly string orchestra, and she dreaded to think how long it had been since she had danced to that number.

  Upstairs, the enclosed terrace was only partially filled, two tables of older men engrossed in gin rummy, one table with a pair of attractive young advertising-company types talking seriously and drinking, and a table of women, all familiar faces, playing bridge.

  Lisa waved the uniformed waiter aside, and stood next to the window peering down at the reddish clay courts. All were empty in the cold save one, and on this court two hearties, a young man and his young girl, both in white shorts, hit and ran and scrambled vigorously, laughing and clowning. With a sigh, Lisa turned away and headed for the bridge game. The familiar faces greeted her effusively, as one of their own, and one of them suddenly volunteered her place to Lisa. As suddenly, Lisa had no heart for the foolish numbered pasteboards. She declined politely, explaining that she had stopped by to see if Cyrus was here, and she could just stay a minute. The waiter had drawn up a spectator’s chair for her, and she accepted it and ordered a lemonade.