Deep breath. She heads to the squat liquor cabinet in the living room. This is her favorite room, sleek and modern. A low sofa, curved like a wave and the color of the Pacific. Two round orange chairs like upturned buckets. A wide glass-topped coffee table with two carefully arranged white vases and a book of Jackson Pollock paintings. Walls that used to be pale brown now painted something called “Columbia Green.” She redecorated the entire room, made it all fresh and smelling of paint for Arnie’s arrival home. She even bought him a silver Googie ashtray, shaped like a flying saucer, though she’d always hated when he smoked in the house. And yet, since he’s been home, he’s hardly spent an hour in the living room.
Though it’s less than two weeks until Christmas, she hasn’t gotten out any decorations. None of her strings of bubble lights or ropes of plastic holly. No bowl of artful glass ornaments. No mistletoe. She hasn’t put on a single holiday record. She’s been throwing away Christmas cards unopened. The Ebenezer Scrooge of Rodeo Drive. These days, she doesn’t know if she cares.
She turns on the lamp, the one that looks like a flower sprouting straight up from the floor. She finds the whiskey, the sweet vermouth, the bitters, and measures out a Manhattan. On the way back to the kitchen she drinks enough to make room for the two ice cubes she’ll twist from the metal tray. The bedroom door is shut, but lamplight shines from underneath.
The Manhattan does its job, and she starts to relax. Warmth spreads out along her shoulders and down her goosebumped arms. She turns on the little green radio in the kitchen and adjusts the dial until she hears Jo Stafford’s voice. She takes another sip. From the pantry and the Coldspot, she pulls tins and packages and bottles. Rain rattles against the window. She melts butter, slices onions and dried beef, pours far too much milk. The electric toaster pops. By the time she finishes her drink, she’s made two plates of creamed chipped beef on toast. Diet be damned.
She makes another Manhattan and fortifies herself with a healthy swallow before picking up one of the plates and heading for the bedroom. She starts to knock, but changes her mind. It’s her bedroom too. “Arnie, I brought you something to eat.” She pushes open the door.
He’s next to the dresser in his wheelchair, pajama shirt caught halfway over his head. He’s swearing in Latin.
“Oh, Arn.” She hurries into the room and sets the plate on the dresser. “Here.”
She reaches for where the shirt twists across his chest, but he flinches as though she’s touched him with an iron. She bites the inside of her cheek. Careful not to let fingers brush skin, she eases it over his shoulders.
He takes the shirt right from her hands. “I could’ve done it.”
Time was Arnie could run to Roxbury Park and back without breaking a sweat. Now he sits in the wheelchair, hunched over a crumpled pajama shirt, out of breath.
Silhouetted against the gray window, the curve of his ribs is clear against his chest. Since the accident, he’s subsisted on little more than black coffee and saltines straight from the tin. Though she isn’t much of a cook, she borrows Pauline’s cookbooks and makes bowls of farina, pots of custard and of oyster soup, plates piled with liver and onions or fried pork chops. All the things the doctor recommends. As tired as she is after a day on the set, ignoring leers and dodging pinches, she comes home and pretends to be a cook. She plays the role of a regular housewife just taking care of her husband. She wishes she’d been better about doing that all along.
But he ignores whatever she puts on the table. She even bought a TV tray to put in the bedroom, so that he doesn’t even have to get out of bed, but he ignores it. Sits in his chair at the bedroom window until she gives in and brings out the cracker tin. He’s as skinny as a street mutt.
“Do you want me to…” she starts, with a gesture to his waist, but he shakes his head, far too quickly.
“My pants are fine.” He tosses the pajama shirt onto the bed.
“You haven’t changed them in days.”
She knows it’s because he can’t bear to be touched, at least by her. Those times when he let her help him into the bathtub, when he first came home, he made her dim the bathroom lights. Now he has a bar attached to the tile wall. He does it alone.
“I said they’re fine,” he snaps. “Why can’t you leave me alone?”
If I did, then who else would take care of you? she wants to ask. Who would want to? On the back of her tongue, she tastes whiskey and swallowed bitterness.
He turns his head. “Is there more coffee?”
“No, but I have supper for you. Over on the dresser.”
“I told you…”
“Arn, you have to eat.”
“I’m not hungry.” He wheels next to the bed. With one hand on the bed and one on the wheelchair, he heaves himself up onto the wrinkled blanket.
“Do you want me to…”
Lying down, he turns his face to the wall. “Why can’t you leave me alone?” he says again.
She tries. She goes to the studio earlier each day, even before her call. She’s waiting in the makeup chair with a glass of tomato juice and the script before the artists get there at six-thirty to lay out their brushes and sponges. She stays late, changing into slacks and a sweater, going over the next day’s lines, taking off each and every smear of makeup before the car arrives to take her home. Every day, she lives a little more away from home.
But she can’t do that anymore. “They threatened me with suspension.”
He freezes at this. His head turns, just a fraction, enough to let her know that he’s listening.
She picks up his plate of food, now cold. “Merry Christmas, Louise.” And she leaves the room.
By the time he follows, she’s seated on the floor of the living room, back against the wall. She’s taken off her blue skirt and pantyhose, and is eating the creamed chipped beef on toast with the plate resting against her bare knees. She should be starting to read The Princess of Las Vegas Boulevard, but When She Was King is open in front of her. A third Manhattan sits on the book of Pollock paintings.
“The soldiers call that ‘S.O.S,’ ” he says, and picks up a cardboard book of matches from the ashtray. “ ‘Shit-on-a-shingle.’ ”
Louise looks up in surprise. Not because of the language, but because this is the first time he’s mentioned the war.
She swallows the bite of gravy and toast. “I know.”
Now it’s his turn to look surprised.
“I read that article of yours,” she says. “The one about the food soldiers miss from home.”
“Bah.” He throws the matchbook back into the ashtray. “I wrote what they told me to write. The kinds of things the folks at home want to hear. The kinds of things a good American would say. You think any of that was real?”
In the past thirteen years, she’s played showgirls and coeds and secretaries and debutantes. She’s been a princess and the girl-next-door. She understands pretend. But if “real” wasn’t the articles he wired home from Korea, if it wasn’t the soldiers eating chipped beef and missing their wives, then what was? Arnie’s jeep on the road to Taegu, the land mine, the hours he spent pinned under the vehicle waiting for someone to find him. The three coffins that came home on his airplane. She knows that’s real.
But he doesn’t talk about it. All she knows is what she’s read in his articles.
“Do you want to eat yours?” she asks, suddenly ravenous.
He shakes his head no, and she slides his plate toward her.
As she eats, he sits quietly, maybe waiting to talk, maybe waiting for her to. It’s odd, this. He doesn’t much come out from the bedroom. When he does, it’s never to the living room. And it’s never this expectant bit of waiting. She bends her head to her plate and keeps her mouth full. She doesn’t know how to start the conversation.
When he finally says something, it’s “What did you do with Klimt?”
The art book that used to be on their coffee table was all gold-tinted Klimt paintings. Strength and myth. She isn
’t sure she even likes Jackson Pollock, but the designer had assured her that he was as modern as the room.
“In the attic.”
“We bought that in London.” He doesn’t look at her as he says it. “Remember?”
“It was Ireland.”
“London.”
She’d been in Europe that summer of ’44 with the USO. All the soldiers wanted to see Betsey Barnes, and so she obliged with Betsey’s signature giggle and flutter and rendition of “A Polka in my Pocket.” Arnie was on assignment for the Associated Press, stuck farther from the front lines than he would’ve liked to be. Louise didn’t care—he was in Plymouth to meet her boat. They called it a belated honeymoon.
That’s where he bought her the Longines. The watch was already a few years out of fashion and plain next to the jewel-studded Cartier watches and sleek Omegas popular then. It felt wildly indulgent to shop for a luxury watch in the middle of wartime London, but back at home they lived on hot dogs and cheap beer and far too many kisses. It was wildly indulgent. Arnie called it a wedding present, so that she’d always make it to the set on time.
“It could have been either,” she says. “Either London or Dublin.” And, with the cocktails making her head swirl, it could have been. “We were all over those two months.”
“Where did you say it was?”
“The attic.” She puts the plate down on the coffee table. “Want me to go get it?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “Don’t.”
She doesn’t know why he brought it up just then. But she doesn’t have the words to ask him.
It didn’t used to be this. Time was they’d stay up all night talking over pots of coffee and candlelight. Not Hollywood gossip or anything like that, but books, politics, philosophy. That was when neither was working much. Enough to pay the rent and keep the pantry stocked with peanut butter and Ritz crackers, the fridge with hot dogs. That was just before the first Betsey Barnes came out. Before both of them had been sucked into the Hollywood vortex.
Even then, they talked. She’d come home as soon as filming was over for the day. He’d close up the typewriter and flick off the desk lamp the moment he heard her key in the lock. They’d do the crossword puzzle together over dinner. They were young, smart, and mad for each other.
But, somehow, between there and here, all those words had disappeared.
He clears his throat and shifts in his wheelchair. In one hand he shakes something, and she knows it’s a pill. Bottles line his nightstand. Some nights, by the light of the hallway, she eyes the row of bottles and wonders if he has something there for her.
She scoots up on her knees to reach for her drink. It’s left a wet ring on the picture book and she tries to rub it out with the cuff of her blouse.
Arnie clears his throat again. “Got another of those?”
He hasn’t touched a drop since getting back. She’d figured that would be a thing. Returning from war halfway to being a drunk. She wouldn’t have blamed him. But not Arn.
“Sure.” She jumps to her feet, sways a moment. “Do you want this one?” By the third glass, it was mostly whiskey.
“I can wait,” he says.
It’s what she feels like she’s been doing for weeks.
“Let me get some more ice.”
She brings the ice bucket into the kitchen and takes her time. The radio is still on, now playing Rosemary Clooney. She rinses the dinner plates and wipes them down with a towel before pulling out the ice cube tray. There are only four cubes left. Arnie was always the one to remember to refill it before they ran out.
She puts her hand on her chest and counts to ten again, one for each heartbeat. She turns the radio up before leaving the kitchen.
When she gets back, he’s just where she left him. She hadn’t noticed before, but he’d put on fresh pajamas. White, with a thread of a red stripe running up and down. At the liquor cabinet, she mixes his drink and wonders if he’s watching her, standing there in just her white blouse and underwear. But when she turns, he’s looking down at his hands.
She hands him the drink. He hesitates, then says quietly, “Thank you.” As Rosemary sings, Arnie shakes the pill in his hand into his mouth and chases it with his Manhattan.
She sinks back onto the floor, her back against the Columbia Green wall. She’s added fresh ice to her glass, and it sweats against her palms.
“When did you get suspended?” he finally asks. The question he’s put on pajamas for. The question he’s finally come out of the bedroom for.
“Monday.”
“What do you mean, Monday?”
One, two, three, four…She breathes. “I went to the studio today to read the latest script.” Five, six, seven…“I’m tired of these scripts. I’m tired of these roles. Charlie came along with me. He’s going to insist on script approval with my next contract.” She drinks and wipes her mouth indelicately with the back of her hand. “I even wore my lucky scarf.”
“The yellow one?”
She nods. “They all but patted me on the head. Said that they knew what was best for me. That they had the perfect part lined up.” She stares at her drink. “A cabbie’s daughter who becomes the toast of Las Vegas.”
“Of course.”
“Of course.”
He’s already weaving in his chair. “So you said no.”
She nods. “I thought I’d show them I could say no.” She licks her lips. “They just ignored me. Told me the filming starts on Monday in Vegas. Said to get myself to Nevada and be on set or else.”
“You’re going with the ‘or else.’ ”
“Yes.” She sighs. “Yes. No. I don’t know.” She drains the rest of the Manhattan. “It’s just a suspension if I don’t show up. Maybe I’ll get the contract I want.” She looks into her empty glass and snorts. “Maybe.”
For a moment, the only sounds are from the radio and the ice in their glasses. “Could be it’s not a bad part. Who’s writing?”
“Rachmann.”
He takes a gulp of his drink. His eyelids are starting to droop. “Could be it’s not a bad part,” he murmurs again.
She pulls herself to her feet. She sets her glass up on the liquor cabinet, where she’s set the bottles and dripping ice bucket. Finding her balance, she stumbles across to where she’s left her briefcase by the front door. It’s suddenly heavier than it was earlier, but she heaves it over.
“What’s that?”
“Not a bad part.” She opens it over the coffee table. Bound manuscripts clatter across the table. The ashtray falls to the carpet. Arnie drops his glass with a splash but she’s too drunk to care.
He doesn’t make a move toward any of the scripts, even though once they’d been his livelihood. Once he would’ve been unable to leave off sifting through the pages. Today he just stares at them, as though they’re snakes raining down in his living room. Maybe he can’t reach them there on the table, or maybe he doesn’t want to. She’s still feeling furious over today’s meeting and his casual dismissal of her anger. Furious at these scripts, sitting quietly forgotten on Florence Daniels’ bookcase. Furious at Arnie and their dark bedroom, his coffee-stained pajama shirt, the gleaming and unused Googie ashtray.
She picks up one of the manuscripts and thrusts it at him, daring him not to take it. “These are the parts I should be trying for.” She picks up another and pushes it at him. “These are the scripts you should be working on.” And another. “These are the characters who should be on the screen. I know you’ll agree.”
Bewildered, he juggles the books in his hand. “Where did you get these from?” He squints down at the white tag on the front of one. “Florence Daniels?”
“She gave them to me.” She doesn’t feel like explaining, not yet.
“And you brought them all home…Why? You don’t get to pick your scripts.” His voice is getting back that edge of irritation.
“Not yet I don’t.”
“Then what are you doing with them?”
“I
wanted to read them. To be prepared.” She picks up two more and adds them to the stack in his arms. “I wanted us to read them.” The combination of liquor and anger makes her bold. She looks him straight in the eyes. “Remember when we used to do that, Arn?”
Once the Betsey Barnes series hit it big and he was given an MGM contract, he wrote less and less for the newspapers and magazines. She loved that he was on the lot each day to eat lunch with her. He loved that he could slip in to watch her on set every now and again.
She hadn’t been able to argue about what scripts she was given. But she could bring them home and pore over them with Arnie, their empty dinner dishes pushed aside. He’d help her suss out the story, find the lines to hold on to. With Arnie reading by her side, she’d understood the character even before the first day of filming.
For a moment, his eyes soften. Maybe it’s the drink, maybe it’s the pill, or maybe, just maybe, he remembers too.
“If you read them, you could go talk to the studio. They’ll listen to you.” Because he’s a man, she tells herself, because he’s a writer, because he’s a broken remnant of a war nobody notices. Because, this time, he got closer to the front lines. “They’re good stories, Arn. The sorts of things we always wanted to work on together. Just read them and see.” She piles more in his arms, until they stack up almost to his chin. She scoops up loose manuscript pages and adds them, all in a jumble. “With me acting and you writing, it’ll be like the good old days.”
He’s out of bed. He’s drinking a Manhattan. For the first time in weeks, they’re actually talking. And, from the kitchen, Eddie Fisher is singing “That’s What Christmas Means to Me.” For an instant, it’s like everything is back to normal.
But he says, “Stop,” and the instant is past. “Louise, you’re drunk.”
She is, but she doesn’t know what that has to do with anything. Most evenings she’s drunk. It doesn’t mean she’s done. It doesn’t mean she’s ready to stop acting.
She picks up the last manuscript from the floor, the one she was reading over her creamed chipped beef. “But you need a project. If you just—”
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