Woman Enters Left

by Jessica Brockmole

  “They won’t suspend me. They don’t want to lose me.”

  “They’re going to know you’re bluffing. That, after the holidays, you’ll be back at the studio door with your palms out.”

  “Who says I’m bluffing?” she said evenly.

  He didn’t answer. She wondered if he was just sitting there puffing on a cigarette. She wondered if he had hung up.

  Over the line, she heard a slurp of coffee. “Well,” he finally said, a creak of a word. She held her breath. “I have a mean poker face. What do you say we ante in?”

  She wondered if he could see her smile. “Charlie, you’re a sweetheart.”

  He sighed. “You need anything else, LuLu?”

  “Could you wire me some money here in Williams, Arizona?” She could see a squat bank right across the street. “I’ll stop back after seeing the Grand Canyon. Should be enough time for it to get here.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “And Charlie?” She hesitated. “Could you swing by the house? Not today, but…Well, if you could just stop by. It’s been a while since Arn’s seen you and—”

  “LuLu, honey. Consider it done.”

  As she drives to the National Park, still glad that she’d gotten Charlie on the phone, something eases in her shoulders. Her agent never looks like he fits in to Hollywood, with his cheap suits, his food-spotted ties, his overflowing paunch, but he’s sharp as nails and tough enough for even the movie business. “Consider it done,” he always says, and she always knows it will be. That quick phone call had cost almost three dollars, but had left her feeling immediately relieved that the studio, her money, and Arn were all in Charlie’s competent, nicotine-stained hands.

  She pulls into the park, following the road past a log-cabined visitors’ center, past a souvenir shop, a garage, a railway station. She’d left the brochures back at the motel and couldn’t be bothered to stop at the visitors’ center, already crowded with camera-toting men and women in plaid shirts. A lot in front of a long, low building glistens with cars, and she parks.

  It’s a hotel, the El Tovar. She vaguely recalls mention of it in one of the brochures. It’s part Victorian resort, part Swiss chalet, part desert lodge, all peeled pine and limestone and wide verandahs. A woman in a pink cotton dress leans against a porch rail, lazily fanning herself. She blows a kiss to a man walking past with a mule.

  The lobby looks like a hunting lodge, with antlers and rough-hewn beams. Pine boughs swing between the beams and along the stone fireplace. There’s a line of people waiting to place calls, so she leaves the number with the desk and orders a coffee, black. While she waits, she wanders across the reception room. Through the windows, she can see the back terrace and realizes that the hotel is perched straight on the rim of the canyon. It’s a terrifying thought, this expensive hotel teetering on the edge of the wilderness. The fact that it has been doing so for half a century doesn’t make her feel any better.

  “Miss?” A uniformed man waits patiently to be noticed. “There’s no answer at the number you gave us. Would you like us to try another number?”

  She thinks for a moment of calling Pauline next door and asking her to check on Arn, but she doesn’t know Pauline’s number.

  “No.” She shakes her head. “No, thank you.” She sets the coffee on a table next to a lamp and drifts out onto the terrace.

  It’s cold here, seven thousand feet above sea level. Cold enough that she wishes she had a sweater on. The other people scattered on the terrace, sipping cocktails or steaming mugs of coffee, are dressed in turtlenecks and soft jackets and wool trousers. One woman even wears chocolate-brown earmuffs, like she’s at a ski resort.

  They don’t belong, in their resort wear. She doesn’t even know if she belongs, in her white dress and heels. She doesn’t know how any of them do, because, right there, straight ahead, is the real, wild world.

  The curved terrace is edged in wooden rails, but they don’t keep the nature out. The rim of the Grand Canyon is a handful of yards away. Oranges and browns and spatters of white that might be snow. So close that she could throw a penny into its yawning, breathless emptiness. She walks straight up to the rail and leans against it, wondering how far below she can see. A stone-bordered path winds down into the canyon, dotted with a few distant mules and riders, but they’re far enough away that all she hears are faint jingles from the mule bells. Even the conversation behind her on the terrace, the clinking of teacups on saucers, fades.

  She leans and she breathes and, in that cold inhale, she forgets for a moment everything she’d driven to escape and everything she’s driving toward to uncover. It’s just her and the impossible depth of the canyon, the impossible height of the sky.

  For a quick, wild moment, she imagines jumping. Not to find the bottom, but to find the air in between here and there. She pictures her white dress billowing, her hair streaming. She pushes her shoulders out over the railing.

  “First time, Louise?” a voice asks, and she jumps back.

  It’s Duane, of the freckles and the sedan and the impending divorce. If she’s surprised to see him here in Arizona instead of in Nevada, she doesn’t say.

  “Obvious?” she replies.

  “Want to go down to the bottom?”

  Whether he means on foot, on mule, or floating in a weightless billow of white, she doesn’t care. She just nods.

  He offers his hand. He pulls her back from the edge of the railing.

  —

  The El Tovar is an enthusiastic blend of rich and rugged, of East and West. Louise unabashedly loves it. She’s already mentally redecorating her house, adding a moose head to her space-age living room, a Navajo rug to her bedroom.

  She and Duane eat lunch in the dining room. The furniture is almost Arts and Crafts in its clean lines and in its chairs and tables that wouldn’t be amiss in her dad’s house. Above are hewn beams, yellow hanging lights, and far too many Christmas garlands. In this rustic room, they look through menus elegant with hearts of celery, shrimp Louis, stuffed avocado. She knows she should have the fruit bowl with cottage cheese, or maybe the turkey salad, but at the same time as Duane, she drops a finger on the Harvey House hamburger.

  “Are actresses really allowed to eat that many hamburgers?” he asks.

  It takes a moment before his comment sinks in. Earlier, she realizes now, he’d called her Louise. “You know I’m not Anna, don’t you?”

  He waits until they order to answer. “I should probably say that I watch nothing but monster movies or macho Westerns. But”—and here he leans closer, whispering across their coffees—“but what I really like, when no one is looking, is a good musical.”

  She’s sure he’s making fun of her, and takes a scalding sip to avoid a retort.

  He pushes her sweating glass of water closer. “What, can’t a man enjoy a good song-and-dance number?”

  “Not a man like you,” she says. “At least I don’t think so.”

  He gives her a wide grin, and suddenly she doesn’t care if he’s teasing or not. “Really, though, I’ve seen all of the Betsey Barnes movies. Even that god-awful last one.” His eyes widen. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “Me too. It was god-awful.” She takes a more careful sip of coffee.

  “What do you think we all watch out there in Korea? The guys like to see a pretty face.” He folds and unfolds his napkin. “I recognized you right away.”

  “Then why’d you let me introduce myself as Anna?”

  He shrugs. “I figured you had a reason.”

  The waitress sets down a sloshing cup of vegetable beef soup in front of Duane. Louise ordered a chilled fruit cup to start, to make herself feel better about the hamburger and French fried potatoes to follow. As she spears a chunk of soft pear, she says, “You’re not in L.A., so you didn’t go home to kiss and make up.”

  He shakes his head.

  “But you didn’t stay in Nevada.” She eats the pear and fishes for a peach slice. “Does that mean that Mavis and her marital bl
iss are safe for the moment?”

  He grins. “For the moment.” He breaks a saltine into the soup and stirs. “No, it’s what you said, about not knowing which battles were worth fighting at home. It made a lot of sense.” He leaves the spoon in the bowl. “Mavis isn’t the enemy. It’s just battle weariness that’s got us both. It wears you down until you can’t see straight. You know?”

  She does.

  “Anyway, I convinced her to come out here and meet me. A little holiday vacation. A rendezvous between jobs.” He slurps a spoonful. “Well, she said yes. She’s on her way to the Grand Canyon.” Through his mouthful of soup, he manages to grin.

  “Oh, I’m glad,” she says, and means it. “But what about the dog?” She’s just realized that his cheerful beagle isn’t there, waiting for a bite of hamburger.

  “The what?” He winks. “Joking. He’s my brother’s. They’re on their way back to Comstock.” He eats another spoonful and wipes his mouth. “So what about you?” His eyes are back on his bowl. “Last I saw, you were headed to Vegas. If you don’t mind me saying, you’ve gotten a little off course.”

  “I’m driving home for Christmas,” she says.

  “And where’s home?”

  A year after moving out to California, she was already calling that “home.” Her room in the Hollywood Studio Club, her booth at the diner down the street, her “accidental” run-ins at the Wilshire library with a cute writer named Arnie. But now when she says the word, she’s thinking of snow, carols on Dad’s piano, ham and overcooked potatoes. Unquestioning warmth. Home. “Too far away.”

  “Home isn’t with your husband?”

  She shifts and tucks her hands on her lap. “I didn’t say I was married.”

  “You don’t have to. I read the Hollywood rags.” At her raised eyebrow, he qualifies. “The good ones.”

  “It’s not as though Arnie is a secret.”

  “Is that his name?”

  “Arnold Bates.”

  “I don’t remember. Film editor?”

  “Screenwriter.”

  “And it’s been four years.”

  “Ten!”

  He coughs on a mouthful of soup. “Ten, eh? I guess it’s not surprising that things are on the outs after that long.”

  “On the what?” She sets down her fork.

  He waves the soupspoon. “Hollywood rags, remember?”

  Arnie reads them—he used to write for them, after all—but Louise gives the gossip magazines and newspapers a wide berth.

  “The past year or so, you’ve been seen with Don Jensen. The papers all show it. All the premieres, all the parties.”

  “What?” She’s outraged. “Donnie’s a good pal.” A good pal in need of a girl on his arm, at least for the photos. Not that the papers know that.

  “And he’s been your constant escort. The papers have had a field day.”

  She pushes the cup of fruit away, suddenly not hungry. “I didn’t know,” she says. “I don’t read them.”

  “Well, if you’re bringing Don instead of Artie…”

  “Arnie.”

  “…then what are we supposed to think?”

  She wonders what else he’s seen in the papers.

  Their plates arrive, the meat and bun piled artfully with sliced onion, tomato, dill pickle, and a dainty spoonful of slaw. A pile of French fried potatoes, golden brown at the edges, nestles up to the hamburger. Duane busies himself with salt and ketchup, giving her a moment to think.

  “He was in Korea,” she says. “Arnie was.” She takes the onion from her hamburger and separates it into rings. “He’s only just gotten back.”

  Duane looks up from his plate. “Why didn’t the papers say that? A Hollywood type taking a break from pictures to enlist. They’d eat that up. It sure makes a change from the headlines these days.”

  She drops the rings of onion in a scatter on her plate. “He didn’t enlist, okay? Bum ticker. 4-F. He was there as a war correspondent, this war and the last.”

  “That’s it!” He snaps his fingers. “I recognized the name from more than the Hollywood papers. I was stationed in Tokyo. I remember his articles. He interviewed me once.”

  Louise straightens. “He did? Wait, you knew Arn?”

  “Skinny kid with glasses? Fondness for bow ties? After you buy him a few drinks, he starts singing ‘Skip to My Lou’?”

  She leans over the two hamburgers, takes Duane’s face between her hands, and kisses him soundly on the forehead. He doesn’t need to ask if he’s got the right guy.

  But they’ve just begun applying themselves to their hamburgers when Duane asks something else. “If everything’s good and you’re not on the outs, if he’s there, back in L.A., well then, why are you here?”

  She wipes coleslaw from the corner of her mouth. “Sometimes things aren’t as easy as that.”

  “Yesterday, when you were giving me a dressing-down over running off on Mavis, you made it seem that it was exactly that.”

  “Easy?”

  He nods.

  She folds her napkin as tight as it can go. “Sometimes problems are more than marriages and work and busy little households.” She squeezes the cloth between her hands. “Sometimes they’re about how much of life we can handle. Every once in a while, it’s more than fits in our hands.”

  FRANCIE

  Beryl, what would you say if I apologized?

  BERYL

  (yawning)

  For what?

  FRANCIE

  Oh, I don’t know.

  BERYL

  Can’t it wait until morning?

  FRANCIE

  Maybe.

  (waiting for one, maybe two minutes while crickets chirp)

  No.

  (rolling over on her cot)

  I haven’t told you the whole truth. About…a lot of things. About important things. And maybe I never will. But can you forgive me for all of those things unsaid? Can you trust me on that?…

  Beryl? Beryl?

  BERYL

  (snoring)

  FRANCIE

  Well, maybe apologies are easier when you’re the only one who hears them.

  —Excerpt from the unproduced screenplay When She Was King

  Chapter Nine

  1926

  Wednesday

  Lucky I wake up before F. every day. I was up at five and in the bathhouse. Sick to my stomach over and over and then just sat on the floor next to the toilet crying until I had nothing left.

  I feel wretched and all I want is my C. and my A.L. Reread his Indianapolis letter forward and back. Why offer all that and then say nothing? Why has he turned my world on end?

  Supper: Fried chops and potatoes, bread pudding. (Still galls me to pay for meat of all things.)

  Camp Columbia

  25¢

  Gasoline

  $1.52

  Milk, pint

  7¢

  Butter

  49¢

  Eggs

  25¢

  Bread

  7½¢

  Pork chops

  54½¢

  Postage stamp

  2¢

  APRIL 21, 1926

  Guilt can be a demon sitting on your chest. I could scarcely breathe last night, thinking about that envelope tucked in my duffel. I don’t even know why I did it. I’m not a thief (that long-ago chocolate bar notwithstanding). But I am a liar. I’ve had years of practice in that. The very fact that I’m writing these words, that I’m swearing I have no idea why I took the letter, that, right there, proves it. Liar.

  I didn’t sleep last night. I lay in my cot, feeling breathless and heavy and angry and sad. When it got to be too much, I wrapped myself in my blanket and left the tent. I walked, to the edge of town and beyond. I walked until the first fingers of dawn touched the edge of the horizon. I walked until my legs ached and my head felt lighter. I knew I had to give her the letter. No matter that I wanted her to stop thinking about C. No matter that I wanted her to look out the window, loo
k at me, look anywhere but back toward Newark or ahead to Nevada. I had to.

  When I got back to the campsite, my skirt and stockings were soaked and E was gone. I changed and brought my journal out to a log by the campfire. The envelope was tucked inside. But E didn’t come back. It was early, but other campsites were starting to wake up. I watched the door of the bathhouse, wondering what was taking so long. It could be nothing, but it could be Ethel stretched on the floor beneath the sinks. I was up and ready to head in there after her, when she came out so pink and scrubbed and smiling that I couldn’t help but smile back.

  I’ve decided there’s no sense in spending the trip worrying about all and everything, she said. It’s about the journey, not the destination. She sat right there on the log, so close I could smell the soap she’d used. I’m sorry for being such a Gloomy Gus. She said more, lots more, but I don’t remember it all. It didn’t matter. None of what she said mattered. She nudged my shoulder and touched my arm and gave me silly apologies.

  And just like every time she’s near, I couldn’t think straight. All I could think about was her.

  It’s why I left all those years ago. She was marrying Carl and I didn’t want to be the friend who would be invited by for baptisms and birthday parties and cold chicken luncheons. Carl would kiss her on the forehead, she’d have a baby on her knee, they’d both offer me another slice of cake. But cake wasn’t what I wanted. I’d have to sit across from her at the lace-topped table, sit next to her on the sofa, sit right there and know that what I felt meant absolutely nothing. At least to her. To me, it meant the world.

  Thursday

  What a day. It made me, for the first time, wish I’d just taken the train to Nevada.

  Though that would’ve meant no F. And I’m not sure if I’d have been willing to give that up. There have been too many years without.