***
She can think of a lot of good reasons not to go with him. She can think of a new one every few seconds, and she tells them all to him as they come to her. He doesn’t try to shoot down a single one, even though she can also think of the ammunition he might fire back: She’ll find another room later, another job. It isn’t her brother’s life to live, or her father’s. If she wants to see California, live for three months in Los Angeles with him, why shouldn’t she?
But all he says is “let me know,” and that’s infuriating. She’s aware that she can’t even deploy the biggest reason of all: that it’s a sin. After the dancing they became a couple, and it was the dancing that showed her what, physically, a couple could be. He drove from Jantzen Beach to a small, neat-looking motel on the road back. He pulled into the lot, engaged the brake without turning off the motor, and asked, “How ’bout it?”
She was not wholly inexperienced. There were passes made by other men, and there were other flasks. What struck her was Carl’s absolutely straightforward approach, compared to the wheedling and sulks of the soldiers. It was a real choice he was offering—after all, he hadn’t cut the engine.
The whiskey made her feel loose and warm, but it didn’t do the talking for her. So who was she when she answered yes? Kay, she supposed, who seemed daily to belong more and more to this man who one night determined that it was his job to keep her out of the rain, and one afternoon appeared to feed her ripe fruits almost still warm from the sun. A man who could make her so graceful that even Harry James had to take notice. Who christened her someone else, somebody freer. It’s also true that the soldiers were back in their hometowns now, out of uniform so they couldn’t be spotted, even the one whose engagement ring she wore for a month. There was no one to be loyal to except herself, and that elusive person didn’t seem to be protesting.
Was it so much of a step, then, to move from Sunday nights of dancing and stopping off at the Columbia Motel (which smelled wholesomely of soap and crisply laundered sheets) to saying, yes, she’ll go to Los Angeles while he works on a new bank tower? She very much wants to see Los Angeles and palm trees. She likes trailing her elbow out the window with a lit Parliament when he drives her places. She likes when he puts the receipt that says Mr. and Mrs. on the motel dresser. She likes, more than she thought she would, the press of his embrace, of being so urgently wanted. The bare skin of the encounter, the sharpness of smell, then the warm shower after, their clean clothes still clean on the chair. He takes care of her with his precautions, he takes care of her in all ways. Though he hasn’t raised the topic of Mr. and Mrs., she supposes they would travel that way. And it is partly a relief, not to have to make a decision like that, but to try it out for a time.
So she never actually says yes but falls into talking about it first as a possibility. Then when he shifts the terms of the discussion to an actual plan, she doesn’t correct him. The date approaches and she is all of a sudden packing and delivering notice at her rooming house and at the restaurant.
“A wedding?” Helen asks, her eyebrows raised in cautious surprise.
“Elopement,” Kathryn says, telling Mrs. Johnson the same, which causes her to go up to her room and sob for a full hour one night, not because of telling the lie, but because of telling it to the two women who have taken a motherly interest in her. When she kisses Lucy’s damp curls, getting her up on her last morning, the little girl points to her and says, “Bide.” Bride. And Kathryn goes to her room and cries again, to the point where she needs to wear dark glasses, descending the stairs while Mr. Johnson follows with her suitcase and Carl with her trunk.
To her brothers in Oregon and Ohio, and her father in Illinois, she writes that she is taking a vacation with a friend, and might see what the jobs are like in California. In the course of telling five lies she snips the threads to all the people who keep track of her, making herself invisible to them—no forwarding address, no telephone number—and visible to only one man, whose apartment she has never seen, whose family she has never met, and whose history, though told to her, is uncorroborated.
They drive down the Oregon Coast, removing their shoes in the velvet sands at Seaside, eating corn dogs on the prom, buying a bag of saltwater taffy to keep on the seat between them in the car.
They lean against the cement wall at Coos Bay, feeling the sea spray in their faces and watching the boat traffic. Carl chases down Kay’s kerchief when it blows away in the whipping wind, and when he returns it to her the wind comes between them and snatches it again. They watch it sail in corkscrews over the rocks before being abandoned by a sudden stillness. It floats down between some boulders below them where she thinks it might be claimed for a bright flowered layer in a gull’s nest.
When they drive inland to the freeway there is the greenness of farmland, then the tawny stretches of ranch country, then the climb into mountains with thin, medicinal air, then down the other side into—suddenly—California.
She claps and lets out a little squeal, caught up by the glamour of change and migration, and the very word on the highway sign, California. He looks at her sideways and smiles at what he caused.
They stop for lunch at a diner, and he makes some calls. He still has buddies in San Francisco, and when he rejoins her in their booth he tells her they will see some of them at a party a friend is cooking up. By the time they reach the city it is evening, and the Golden Gate is all lit up. He tells her about the bridge men, who walked a mesh catwalk hundreds of feet above the water during construction. Then he takes her on a little sightseeing tour, winding up and down the hills.
Couples are arriving at the small bungalow at the same time they do, carrying bottles for the host, slapping Carl on the back. They shake hands with Kay and give her sizing-up smiles, particularly the women. For camouflage, Kay has been wearing a ring she bought herself when she first moved to Portland, gold-filled, with a paste emerald. The men take off their jackets, roll up the carpet from the living room, and stick it upright in a corner. Kay tries to help the women make the plates of sandwiches, but finds she is mostly in the way as they lean across her to chatter to one another. They keep stealing glances at her, and especially the emerald on her ring finger, as if they have a question they would like to ask, but never do. A heavy mix of perfumes hangs in the kitchen.
When she and Carl dance, everyone watches. One man jumps up after, saying, “Okay, clear the floor now. Peggy and I are going to show you how it’s done,” but he merely shuffles around, jerking his wife to and fro.
“Carl, where’s your sax?” one of the men asks.
“Gone—a long time now,” Carl said. “Sold it during the Depression.”
“A shame,” a woman said. “You were so good at it.”
“You were?” Kay asks.
Carl shrugs, and Kay feels like she’s seeing him brand-new again through these people’s eyes. He belonged to them, part of his long history without her.
After her second whiskey sour, Kay sits one out, perched on the arm of the divan. She blows smoke at the ceiling, toward the blue haze hanging there. She watches Carl twirl someone else’s girl around and doesn’t mind. It’s all about the dancing for him, and she likes having this perspective on who he is. All the women want a turn with him, and he finds her eyes from time to time over their heads, looking to see if he should stop and come back. She feels as if she’s the most attractive female in the room; she’s undoubtedly the youngest, and her short, pin-curled waves are naturally dark, not like some of the bottle shades around her. Her waist, cinched in with her patent leather belt, is the smallest. She can afford to share.
In the wee hours, she dozes against his shoulder, listening to the men’s political talk. The mayor fought off a recall election over cable car fares. They have no use for him—pro-business, all the way, always on the wrong side of any scrap. Remember ’34, though? The pickets, the soapboxing, the feeling in the air then? Remember the meetings? Party’s gone to hell; Stalin
queered everything.
She listens through a veil of almost-sleep, half alarmed at the radical talk, half soothed by the joking, the low voices. Things are getting better; things are getting worse—she can’t tell. She feels that these words, if she can just make them out properly, are the essence of the men, and Carl especially. There are stories he loves to trot out—about roaming the hills as a boy shooting rabbits with his dog, about learning how to go down in the mines with his father and older brothers. But she’s beginning to figure out that the stories that matter most he doesn’t tell. She has to piece them together by way of his reactions to things in the news, or here, by way of his membership in a group of men who think she’s asleep and not listening. They are so different from her in their rough speaking and bare schooling and political anger. They’re ready to kick over the traces. There’s something brave about it to her, but also something boorish.
If her cousins, Lois and Boots, could see her now, would they think her bohemian, and therefore glamorous? Or would they think she had fallen among a low sort, and was fallen herself? As teenagers, the three of them sequestered themselves after Sunday suppers to share giggling secrets, and to sing country music harmonies, dreaming of being on the radio. Boots left Illinois to work in the Foreign Service, and wrote in her letters that she liked traveling better than anything else. Lois taught school until her first baby was born, but plans on getting her master’s degree when the children get older. They would understand, Kay thinks, that she’s a modern woman collecting experiences.
“How old are you, really?” Kay asks Carl as they drive out of the city the next day. She feels unpleasantly smoky and stale. They slept on a pullout sofa and she dared only to give herself a sponge bath over the bathroom sink, knowing that the hosts and Carl all needed a turn in the lavatory.
He laughs, glancing over and grabbing her hand with his right one. He plies her fingers back and forth.
“I’m just right for you.”
“But you’re also a big liar.”
He laughs again, seemingly delighted with this line of questioning.
“Do you blame me if I shaved off a couple of years, so I wouldn’t scare you away?”
“So you’re thirty-eight?”
“You got me.”
“Older?”
“Now you’re being mistrustful. Why are you suddenly so worried?”
“Because your friends are all as old as the hills.”
He hoots. “We’re not old. You’re just a baby. And a mean one, too.”
They motor down the Pacific Coast Highway, the curves and cliffs above the Pacific terrifying but also thrilling her. Even here he drives with one arm at the wheel and one arm out the window with his lit cigarette. He glances over from time to time, smiling when she gasps at the view or the drop.
“Don’t watch me, watch the road!” she implores.
“But I like to see you see it.”
“When we park somewhere you can see me see it. Oh my Lord, they’re passing.”
The convertible coming straight at them tucks in ahead of the sedan it is overtaking with only seconds to spare. She can see their fate unspool like a movie—the car tumbling off and somersaulting down the stone face into the surf. It will turn balletic loops on the way down. It will be beautiful and fatal, the orchestra delivering the horrified exclamation point.
***
Fruit ripens too quickly in its bowl on the table. Their small apartment in West Hollywood takes no more than an hour to clean, and she does this faithfully every day—runs her landlady’s Hoover, scours the basin and bathtub after each use, wipes surfaces that show no dust. No one could make it cleaner. She buys a pair of small round sunglasses and spends a good part of each day walking, then uses up most afternoons in the cool of a matinee or reading books brought home from the library. She paints her mouth to look like the actresses, and once her fingernails, which was too much. But the mouth is wonderful, and she carefully creates it before going out—lining, powdering, coloring, blotting, coloring again. She hates to eat it off.
Carl makes terrific money. He comes home and washes up and they go out again, hardly ever cooking dinner in their cramped kitchen. Instead they spend his pay as fast as he makes it—eating steaks at Lindy’s, or barbecue at Billy Berg’s, or shish kebab at Har-Omar. Since they go dancing nearly every night and she walks so much during the day, Kay eats as much as she wants and is still slimmer than before, even with the sweet cocktails she’s grown fond of. They go to all the big ballrooms, but her favorite is the Palladium. It’s a quarter-acre and can hold four thousand people at once on the dance floor. She likes the feeling of anonymity it gives her, being part of a big sea of people, even though Carl always leads them to the spot nearest the orchestra, and the space around him always widens, in tribute to him for being someone worth watching.
It’s a dreamy kind of monotony, and nothing about it feels like real life. She thinks maybe she should get a job. Besides waitressing, she’s been an elevator operator at Meier & Frank in Portland. They outfitted her in a smart blue shirtdress, very professional. She stepped out of the elevator at each floor to hold off the incoming riders; stepping back in, she’d take everyone’s floors, rattling off the departments as they rose. When she was hired, she memorized the trainee card overnight, so from her first day of work she never had to look at the list. All the memorizing of Scripture in her childhood had given her a knack for that. She bought loads of new clothes, using her ten percent employee discount on top of markdowns. When she tells Carl her idea about the job, pointing out that with her pay she can buy some new gowns to wear dancing, he responds by fanning out bills from his wallet and apologizing for not thinking of that. How much does she need? he asks. Twenty? Forty?
Though he tells her to work if she wants to, he also lets her know that she doesn’t have to. After all, they’re just here for a few more weeks. Why not let it be a vacation? Perhaps it’s indolence that seizes hold of her, or perhaps she just needs to be reassured that what he wants, in fact, is to take care of her. In any case, she lets the matter drop. She goes to Bullock’s, but instead of taking the elevator to the personnel office, she gets off at Evening Wear, and spends hours mulling her options until she’s satisfied that she’s found the best values: a strapless peach organza and a cream off-the-shoulder in viscose, both with full skirts that will swirl around her. She has enough left over for new pumps.
Her father would say her soul is lost. His words come to her as if thundered from the pulpit: If she has no responsibilities, if she spends her days and nights watching movies and dancing and drinking cocktails, if she’s living in sin with a man who buys her things, how can she be anything other than lost?
She should feel on fire with damnation. Instead she feels rather normal—part of a couple enjoying what Los Angeles has to offer, as everyone around them seems to be doing. The collective air of wartime sacrifice is over, and the national mood emphasizes enjoyment—every sign, every billboard, every advertisement encourages them to have fun. So she’s having it, and understands this to be an interlude. As a teenager in her father’s house she envied others their freedoms. But now if she wants rhinestones on her earlobes she puts them there, and no one prays over her lapse.
Carl’s three-month job turns into four, then five. She eventually needs to write at least a few letters to her father and one to each of her brothers. The Kathryn who writes them has found secretarial work and lives with a female friend. She puts the correct return address on the envelopes so they can write her back, but lives in fear that her brother Russell and his wife, Bertha, will decide on a sudden trip down from Portland. Or that her father will instruct Russell to come check on her. But Russell has his job driving a bread delivery truck, and not a lot of spare money or time off. And he and Bertha have two children. The odds are on her side that they will never be able to manage it.
The replies are measured and brisk. Her brothers, both still Mennonites, have a way of
sounding like her father, disapproving of all things. Almost a preemptive disapproval, in case she might be merely thinking of doing something wrong. Her sisters-in-law still coil their hair in a knot, covering it with a net cap. Kathryn—Kay—has long since cut hers, but in L.A. she no longer gives herself home permanents. She goes to a salon around the corner, where she sits under the large bubble dryer and reads film magazines. She makes appointments with the same beautician, Evelyn, who cheerfully combs and parts and trims, then rolls the permanent rods while itemizing her roster of unsatisfactory boyfriends, telling Kay she can’t wait to be married and settled like she is.
To Helen and Mrs. Johnson, who think her departure with Carl was an elopement, Kay sends postcards of Bixby Bridge, of Sunset Strip at night. She’s careful to say things that are true—Carl’s job working out well or Taking in the nightlife, and the very truthfulness of those bulletins starts to convince her that she is, in fact, who she purports to be.
At Thanksgiving, they eat dinner with a fellow Carl works with and his pretty, round-featured wife, who is newly expecting. When the men talk about the job and the union over coffee and dessert, Millie shows Kay magazine clippings of the various improvements she plans for the baby’s room. She’s going to sew everything herself because they are saving for a down payment on a house, just a little two-bedroom bungalow to start with. And when do Kay and Carl plan to start, Millie wonders? And are they going to settle in L.A., and wouldn’t it be fun if they had children around the same time?
Kay’s been all along intending to let Carl know that their match can’t last, that he’s too old for her, that she pictured something different for herself. Though she has, in fact, pictured nothing specific, except, like Millie, interiors and children—a home she would shape and be mistress of, babies she would bear and raise. And here he, Carl, specifically is, and she finds herself taking more comfort in his solid know-how than she would have imagined. Nothing seems to alarm him, ever. Easygoing in a way that at first bewildered her, he judges no one except political figures. He has a sense of right from wrong, but it has to do with governments and greed, not sin and damnation. He seems to find nothing, whatsoever, wrong with her. He likes to see her have fun; she has the feeling that when she does, it’s the cause of his fun.
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