—
It is the next morning when Louise runs out of gas.
She left Ludlow late, after a breakfast in the café, where she explained three times that she wanted her eggs poached. “Scrambled?” the waitress asked, as though she couldn’t conceive of another way to cook eggs. “Poached,” Louise said firmly.
They had no grapefruit, no melon, no fruit whatsoever on the menu. They had tiny glasses of orange juice, which the waitress reasoned was the same thing. Everyone in Los Angeles is on a diet, and Louise has to remember she’s no longer in Los Angeles.
She did, finally, agree to a slice of walnut pie, wrapped in cellophane and taken to-go. “The best pie this side of the Pacific,” the waitress insisted. Louise wondered if she realized that included a whole hemisphere. She left a too-big tip on the table; she didn’t have enough change.
But, when her car rolls to a stop in middle-of-nowhere Nevada, she’s glad for the pie. According to the map, she’s seven miles from the hopefully named Searchlight, the nearest town with a Shell station. She eats the pie with her fingers, sitting on the hood of the car. There’s not much to keep her company here, apart from a weathered green signpost, an ambling tortoise, and the distant Dead Mountains. The signpost is shaped, roughly, like a cactus. The paint is peeling so that the writing is illegible. Maybe it’s advertising a prickly pear farm, maybe indicating the spot of a long-forgotten botanical battle, maybe memorializing an untimely death by cactus-spining. She’ll never know. Unconcerned, the tortoise ambles on.
It’s hot and the road is quiet. In December, not many tourists are driving between Needles and Las Vegas. Every so often, when a car goes past, she thinks about waving it down. She could inch up her skirt and flash a calf, like Claudette Colbert. But that could get a girl anything from a stolen suitcase to a hasty burial in the desert. She licks walnut and sugar from her fingers and wishes she had a drink of water.
The sun is rising higher and her hair sticks to the back of her neck. She dabs at her temples and upper lip with a handkerchief. She shouldn’t be so hot. She’s wearing a crisp white dress, with a full skirt and turned-up collar. She’s topped it off with a wide white mushroom hat, very New Look. It’s well after Labor Day, but rules are for middle-class housewives and squares. Sitting on the hood of a car, sticky with pie, she’s neither. A housewife never would’ve let the gas gauge go unnoticed. A square would’ve walked the seven miles.
Arnie is always fanatical about the gas gauge. He keeps a notebook in his glove box, marking each gallon of gas he adds and how far he drives before the next fill-up. He drives a monstrous Hudson. At least he used to. Sometimes on the weekends, he’d drive them to the beach. They’d sit hip-to-hip, bare toes dug into the sand, reading through scripts and eating through a hamper of chicken sandwiches and tomato salad. Arnie adored that beast of a car. He never would’ve run out of gas in the desert of southern Nevada.
Not for the first time in the past twenty-four hours, she closes her eyes and summons up his face. She had months of that while he was in Korea. Months of trying to remember the little things—how his eyes dipped down like he was perpetually sleepy, how his bow ties were always slightly crooked, how he’d wink at her before stepping out the door, as though she were in on some great, beautiful secret. Maybe she had been. She wraps her arms around herself. It sure doesn’t feel like it anymore.
The sound of tires against gravel reminds her to open her eyes. A sedan, as black and sober as a priest, slows to a stop beside the road, and she balls up the cellophane. Automatically, she arranges her white skirt so that it falls in pleats across the red of the car hood. Against the white is a hint of color from the stones on her turquoise bracelet. She imagines it through the lens of a camera. All angles and brightness. One of those shots that hurts your eyes with artistry.
A man in a short-sleeved checked shirt leans out of the car window. He’s as clean-cut as a marine, but Jack the Ripper likely looked respectable too.
“Are you okay, ma’am?” he asks. His friendly words come with a watchful look, as though he’s also trying to decide if she’s harmless. Maybe she has a machete tucked underneath her white skirt.
“As well as can be in Nevada,” she replies, and slides from the hood of the car.
He’s younger than she is, with a spatter of good Midwest freckles across his nose. A spotted beagle wriggles across his lap. “Do you need help?”
She brushes off her dress, but doesn’t answer.
He rests a forearm on the open window. An army tattoo peeks from beneath his sleeve. He’s young to have already been in and out of the army. She wipes the back of her neck with her handkerchief. The other arm could have a tattoo that tallies the number of actresses buried beneath his garage, but at this point she’s thirsty and starting to perspire.
She tosses the cellophane in through her open window and retrieves her purse and white gloves. “I seem to be in need of gas. Are you headed toward Searchlight?”
“Hop in.”
—
His name is Duane. The tattoo on his other arm is a red rose, for his wife. Louise scratches the beagle’s ears and listens to Duane talk all about her. She’s a model, one of those busty girls Louise sees posing on the beach in sarongs or ruched bikinis. “You’ve probably seen her,” he says. “Magazines, catalogs.” He stares at the steering wheel. “A calendar, once.”
Louise had done a touch of modeling in her day, something to pay for sandwiches between casting calls. Nothing too risqué—back then she was too provincial to pose in a swimsuit and too skinny for anyone to even ask her to—but there are still a few ads out there for hubcaps and Ivory soap featuring her teenage self.
Those are the kinds of ludicrous things that the House Un-American Activities Committee digs up. Miss Wilde, did you knowingly pose with that bar of soap in a subversive manner? Did you know it would be marketed to Communists as well as to morally upright citizens? With Arnie, it was a single rally he’d gone to at Berkeley as a teenager. Youthful enthusiasm breeds regret.
She wouldn’t let herself appear on a Red list. These days she avoids parties. She rarely visits bookshops. She doesn’t know what’s safe to be caught reading anymore. She double-checks her scripts. It wouldn’t do to inadvertently deliver a fiery line with too much conviction.
But high heels and tap shoes keep her safe. Songs and dances and empty-headed giggles in front of the camera. A good actress.
Duane doesn’t seem to recognize her, but he doesn’t exactly seem like a Betsey Barnes–watching guy. She doesn’t lie. She says she’s driving to Las Vegas for business. He doesn’t flinch when she introduces herself as Anna.
Searchlight, Nevada, isn’t much of anything. A few houses, a lot of dust. A handful of bars and scrawny casinos. She wonders if she should’ve stayed out on the side of 95.
After filling her gas can, Duane treats her to lunch at a hamburger joint. Louise hasn’t had a hamburger since she was a teenager. When he asks her if she likes onions on it or chili, she doesn’t remember.
Duane eats his with a little bit of everything. Pickles and onions, chili, cheese, and an optimistic slice of tomato. She takes one with a spoonful of chopped onions and a thin slice of orange cheese. The first bite makes her feel ecstatic, the second guilty, but by the third, she’s settled back at ecstatic. For a brief, irrational moment, she vows to eat a hamburger every day she’s in Nevada.
“I followed Mavis to L.A. three years ago. She was the biggest thing to come out of Comstock.”
“That’s good,” she says through a mouthful. “Isn’t it?”
He seems to want to confide in somebody. Louise, in her white dress, like a vestal virgin, must look trustworthy. Duane tells her about early morning casting calls and screen tests, about tears, about finally meeting that one producer, who turned out to be a louse, and that one photographer, who turned out to be only marginally better. One career took off in the place of the other. Even without having met Mavis, Louise knows her story.
/> “She was just hitting it big when I was drafted. She’d send me letters telling me about this ad campaign, about that magazine spread. They sounded important, at least.” Duane runs a hand over his short hair. “Things were looking up.”
“She got that break.”
He sighs down into his bottle of cola. “But then I get out a few months ago, I’m back in L.A., and she’s never at home. Always out on one shoot or another.”
Her hamburger is far more interesting than his complaining. She focuses her attention on that. “But she’s successful.”
“She was in that Frigidaire ad. The one with the champagne bottle? That was Mavis.”
“I see that ad all over the place.”
“Sure. I open up just about any magazine and there’s her face.” He drains the bottle. “The rest of the country sees my wife more than I do.”
“She’s working. Most women aren’t.”
“Yeah, she’s working. And I’m the one sitting at home by the ironing board.”
She puts down the hamburger. “What do you expect, with you off in the army? That she was supposed to sit back and wait for your paychecks? She had to find her own.”
“That’s not what I—”
“Isn’t it?” She wipes her mouth and crumples up the napkin. “If you would be so kind, I’d like a ride back to my car now, please. Like your wife, I have a job to do.”
—
They don’t talk much on the drive back to where her car waits. Duane had brought the rest of his hamburger, wrapped in a paper napkin, which the dog happily eats in the backseat.
“You know, I thought about getting a divorce,” he says quietly.
She just shakes her head.
“I came out here on a fishing trip with my brother. A couple weeks camping on Lake Mead. Fishing. A chance to see the kind of stars you don’t find in Los Angeles.”
She thinks of last night, of the sun setting silently over the sagebrush and sand. She understands. There’s something about that quiet.
“But out there on the lake with nothing but a fishing pole and my thoughts, I wondered. I mean, divorce only takes six weeks in Nevada. Mavis wouldn’t even miss me.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees him shrug. “I don’t know. I thought you’d understand.”
She doesn’t respond. Instead she takes out a compact and reapplies her lipstick in front of the mirror. There’s no reason for him to think she’d understand, to confess so much, to expect absolution. She drops the lipstick back in her purse. In the distance, her red Champion gleams.
Duane pulls up to her car, but doesn’t shut off his engine right away. He rests his forearms on the steering wheel. “Look, I haven’t been out of the army long. Nothing’s like I thought it would be.”
“Isn’t that just life?” she asks, looking at him finally. “Nothing is as we expect.”
“I shouldn’t have unloaded all of that on you. But I haven’t talked to anyone in days, and that’s no exaggeration. Mavis and I, we hardly speak.”
She closes her purse, but doesn’t open the door.
“I suppose I wanted someone to tell me it was silly. The whole idea of divorce.” Outside, the wind picks up, swirling sand. “That, if marriage wasn’t worth fighting for, nothing was.”
“And would you believe me if I told you that?” she asks.
He shrugs.
“You’ve been through a war. But when you have to choose which battles at home are worth it, you have no idea which way to point your rifle.”
He reaches in the backseat and hefts up the metal gas can. “Don’t forget this.”
She takes the hint and the can. “Thank you for the ride, Duane.”
She waits until he drives off before starting to fumble with refilling her tank. Enough to get her into town, at least. And then fifty miles up to Vegas. When she gets there, she’ll take a bath. Send her dresses to be pressed. Call to find out where she’s to report in the morning. Maybe have a Manhattan or three.
She wipes off her face again with the handkerchief, knowing she’ll have to pull over and reapply her makeup before arriving at the Flamingo. An actress never knows who might be watching. The publicity department would collectively faint at a LOUISE WILDE SWEATS headline.
Does she really want to go through with this? If she shows up on set tomorrow, shows up for that bikini and ukulele and insipid script, that’ll be it. There will be no negotiating a better contract. No fighting for better roles. She’ll be giving in.
But giving in is better than hiding. Better than ignoring her problems, hoping they’ll just go away. They won’t. Life requires patience and, these days, she doesn’t have much of that.
She slides behind the wheel and pulls on her gloves. Beneath them she can just barely see the line of her wedding band. She turns on the car and looks out onto the road.
But she doesn’t get too far, because she’s staring at that cactus-shaped sign again. It stands in front of another road, barely a track of dust between the sagebrush. It suddenly comes to her that she knows exactly what that sign says. Though she still can’t make out any of the letters, not with the paint peeling in the relentless sun, she suddenly knows she’s read it before. PRICKLY PEAR RANCH—AN OASIS IN THE DESERT.
Vegas would have to wait.
She turns down the road.
BERYL
Did you hear the one about the artist who ran out of ideas?
FRANCIE
No…
BERYL
He was drawing blanks.
FRANCIE
(groaning)
Oh, Beryl. That was terrible.
BERYL
Got you to smile, though. I think that makes it pretty good.
—Excerpt from the unproduced screenplay When She Was King
Chapter Five
1926
Sunday
Rain. Matches my mood. Best not let F. see. With these roads, she has enough to worry about.
Supper: Restaurant meal: chowder, coffee, one shared slice of custard pie.
Boonsboro Camp
50¢
Gasoline
$1.96
Postage stamp
2¢
April 11, 1926
Ethel wasn’t in the front seat when I woke up.
I found her outside, sitting in front of the fire at the next campsite, her hair wild around her ears, sipping from a borrowed tin mug. I didn’t want to wake you, she said, so I made a friend, and offered me the neighbors’ coffeepot. So like Eth, introducing herself and flashing her dimple wherever she goes. She was wearing a borrowed cardigan and eating a doughnut. Her benefactors were off at the showers.
She looked brighter this morning. All cried out. Through mouthfuls of boiled-over coffee, she told me about yesterday. She’d returned from the market to an empty house and a folded note from each. Anna Louisa’s said that Daddy was taking her on a vacation to see horses and sagebrush and cowboys. Carl’s, without explanation, that he wanted a divorce. The house echoed, she said. AL is only six. Ethel misses her like the circus.
It’s been just as long since I’ve seen Carl. When I knew him back in school, I never would’ve thought him the kind of guy who’d walk out on his wife, the kind of guy who’d take a girl from her mother. He was a good kid, quiet, studious. Fragile, almost. A whiz on the piano. Loved Shakespeare, ice-cream sodas, and jazz music. The three of us were inseparable. We played and sang and acted, with me writing the scripts. We sat in a circle knee-to-knee and swore with crossed pinkies that we’d make it into the flickers someday. But we grew up. Carl went to war, he and Eth got married, and I was left alone to plan my trip to Hollywood. Maybe now too late, but better late than never?
These seven years later, I don’t know Ethel and I don’t know Carl. I don’t know what would cause that kind, timid boy to walk away and leave her alone and crying. I would never leave. At least not again.
Later
It
started raining before we left. We made it across Delaware by lunch and to a site outside Frederick, Maryland, before deciding to quit for the night. Lots of hills. Far too much rain. E kept up cheery conversation, mostly about Carl and the movies they’ve seen (they’re both mad for Gareth Hughes) and about Anna Louisa and the books they’re reading. (AL reads the Oz books when Ethel’s looking, C’s dime Westerns when she’s not.) As white-knuckled as I drove, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of irritation.
But then she told me to relax, that I was driving just fine. She reached out and squeezed my hand. She said that she trusted me. The rain stopped right then and there and we saw a sliver of blue sky that had her singing “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.” The hills and the puddled roads didn’t seem so bad after that.
When we got to the campsite, I stood for a moment in front of the pile of canvas and poles, stood still and nervous until E asked what was wrong. I only have one, I told her. I didn’t mean to sound so apologetic. I hadn’t known she was coming. One tent and one cot.
She just waved her hand, like it was no matter at all, like it hadn’t kept me up for hours the night before just knowing she was there. What do they call it these days, a “pajama party”? she said. We’ve done it before. Remember the time you slept over? We both fit in my bed.
Did I remember?
I spoke in a rush. I told her it wouldn’t work, that we couldn’t possibly fit on the cot, that I’d be happy to sleep in the car and leave her the bed, at least until we could buy another. In the end, she took the car. I’m left alone in the tent, with just this notebook and the rain on the canvas above.
Monday
Rain. Dizziness and I’m out of my tonic. Ankle aching. Wish it would stop raining. Wish I was already in Nev. Wish I understood what was happening to my careful little life.
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