by Alfred Hayes
7
AFTER dinner, we went to the Club Sierra, one of the more accessible Negro clubs on Central Avenue. She appeared to know the place. We sat at a miniature table, in the crowded room, listening to the five-piece combination, and we danced, once, on the tiny platform that served as a dance floor, with the spotlight conveniently subdued, and the faces, black and white, mutually flushed and mutually sweating, and then eventually there was a floor show of a kind. Dinner had been awkward; and now, at the Sierra, she seemed to be making an effort to enjoy herself, she seemed to like the music and the crowd; but I could see it was difficult for her. Something quite heavy, quite immovable, weighed her down. I wondered again, lightly, whether she’d simply been drunk, that night at the party, or whether the attempt had been genuine. I couldn’t tell. I mentioned, once, the martini she’d been carrying.
“In my hand?” she said, as though astonished; and when I explained that she had raised the cocktail in a celebrant gesture of some sort to what could be seen of a rather sober moon, she gave that small ambiguous smile again, as though it were another girl and it was only something silly the other girl had done. “Don’t you remember what you did?” I asked.
Apparently she didn’t: I thought it odd, and looked at her somewhat doubtfully. But she never remembered anything the next day.
“You’re fortunate,” I said, “there was a next day.”
“Oh,” she said, “nothing very fatal happens to me. The water would have sobered me up. I swim very well.”
“Not in that undertow.” I hesitated. I was curious; having her here, before me, someone I’d rescued, someone who’d tried, if she’d really tried, to kill herself, gave her a singularity; almost, I found, a distinctiveness. “You didn’t really intend to do it, did you?” I asked.
“What?”
“The fatal something.”
She seemed to genuinely try to remember. “I don’t think so,” she said, carefully. It left the possibility open. I thought: she’s not quite telling the truth, she simply wants to avoid talking about it. It seemed the more normal explanation. “Besides,” she said, seeing me frown, “it was the martinis. It’s been months since I’ve had as much to drink. I promised Dr. Ritter I wouldn’t.”
“Dr. Ritter?”
“An analyst I go to.”
So there was a doctor. I wondered if I’d expected a doctor. Then I decided that, yes, the existence of a doctor, somewhere, should not have been unexpected.
She looked at me: “The sea’s the source of all life.”
“What?”
“My father used to say that when I was little and we went to the ocean.”
“But we don’t return to it.”
“Don’t we, eventually?” she said. “There’s so much more water than land.”
“Did your father tell you that, too?”
“No.”
There was a pause then. She looked up. “But that shouldn’t be so important,” she said. “I mean, whether I did or not. The only thing is Dr. Ritter would have been horribly disappointed. I’d hate it if he knew.”
“Why?”
“He’s the only human being I know who has any trust in me.”
“You shouldn’t drink then.”
“I don’t, now. I’ve been good for months. It was awful a year ago.”
“What was awful a year ago?”
“Everything.”
It was that vague; and I didn’t question her further. She said, then, that she’d come from a small town near San Diego and she’d lived here now five years. She was, of course, in that loose category, an actress. She’d come because of, more or less, the usual compulsions: “my face for the world to see,” she said, quoting something I couldn’t identify. It was a pretty face, and I supposed somebody had convinced her it should be seen, and under the greatest magnification. “Do you go out much?” I asked. Rarely, she said. She was alone a great deal of the time. “This is the first night I’ve been out in weeks.”
“Really?”
I didn’t quite believe her about that, either. She seemed to be implying that with the exception of the party at Charlie’s, and this night, she’d been clinging closely to that bleak apartment of hers. But, later, I found it to be somewhat true: she had lived, for some months, a comparatively solitary life.
Christmastime she always went home. Mother would be waiting at the airport and they’d drive out to the small white bungalow they lived in now, and there would be goose or turkey for Christmas dinner. Some of the neighbors would drop in afterward, girls she’d gone to school with or played jacks or softball with, for she’d been on the girls’ softball team, long ago, in a life she hardly remembered now. She slept in the living room on the living-room couch because there was only one bedroom, and she had, under her mother’s watchful eye, one cocktail before dinner. Daddy didn’t drink so much now, which was nice, and Mother was happier, at least happier than she’d been. She’d stay there, the whole week, trying to be kind, and the neighbors would call, curious, a little envious, for she was, after all, the successful daughter who’d gone away and was living what to them seemed a glamorous life in what to them was a glamorous place, and she’d lie as best she could about whom she’d met and who her friends were and what pictures she’d been called for. They thought it was wonderful. They envied her. But it was wearying, finally. She was so glad at last to get on the plane again, and to be going away. It depressed her, the signs of visible age overtaking her parents. If she could only buy them the small house she had always planned to buy them when she was successful. She felt a stiffening of her resolution to make money. But it was depressing being with them; so exhausting; she liked Mother, and Daddy was a dear, but it was so depressing after the tree was decorated and the gifts were exchanged and the big Christmas goose and the ice cream and the brandy were all finally done with. She had to pretend so in the house. She had to be so much the daughter, and there was nothing really she dared talk about to Mother; besides, they’d prefer not to know. Well, it was only a few days a year, thank God. On the plane back she could hardly wait for the smoky and sullen bed of neons that was Los Angeles from the air.
“You’re married, aren’t you?” she said at the table. The floor show had ended and the dancing had begun again.
“A little. Why?”
“Nothing. Doesn’t your wife mind you going out like this?”
“She’s in New York.”
“Oh.”
The small exclamation made me look at her. It suggested a kind of experience. I assumed Charlie had told her I was married, or whomever it was she’d asked; and I assumed she’d asked. She sat there, with the diminutive glass of Scotch, and her face turned to the music as though she were attentively listening.
“Are their wives usually in New York?” I said.
“They have a tendency to be.”
“Does it bother you mine is, too?”
“Not really. It’s only I promised myself not to go out with a married man again.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s one of the things I shouldn’t do any more.”
“Is that Dr. Ritter’s advice?”
“He doesn’t give me advice. He thinks I shouldn’t, that’s all.”
“Because it’s a pattern?”
“Yes.”
“What happened? Did he go back to his wife?”
She looked up.
“No,” she said. “He fell in love with someone else. He wrote, too.”
“Oh.” I paused. “We’ll have to be careful, won’t we?”
She smiled at that.
“Yes,” she said. “Very careful.”
8
SHE WENT twice a week, now, to see Dr. Ritter. She had gone through a friend who had urged her to go, and the doctor had been kind. It was difficult for her to talk about herself, she said. She was only learning to now at Dr. Ritter’s, the way she’d learned to read, haltingly, at school. Dr. Ritter’s kindness had been, perhaps, only a professional
kindness, a habitual thing toward patients, but it was the first kindness she had known in some time, and she did think he had a special feeling for her. He’d been generous enough (the friend had explained her situation), and had deferred his payments, which were as expensive as the visits to an analyst usually are, and when she had money, in the future of course, she would repay him. She was very proud that he had taken her: a good many people wanted to go to him, because he had a fine reputation, and he had refused them. She explained to me that the deciding factor which usually determined Dr. Ritter’s decision about a patient was his hope or his belief in the patient’s ability to cure himself or herself. It was a co-operative healing; and what she was proud of was the fact that Dr. Ritter must have seen in her enough hope for a cure to justify his taking her on, moneyless at that. She saw it as though the doctor had looked into her, despite her fears of being looked into, and seen inside her, as in a caul, a little huddled fetus of hope. It was what was waiting to be born in her. A new girl: an unexpected girl: an utterly changed girl. That was why, too, the thing that had happened at the beach had been so painful for her; it would be such a disappointment to Dr. Ritter if he knew. She did not want to tell him although she knew that it was very important to tell everything. That was why one went to a doctor. It would be silly to go and to conceal things. One went to a doctor of that kind because one didn’t want any more to conceal things. She had concealed them so long. She wanted everything known, but she was afraid, too, of having everything known. It was such a terrible struggle to be able to speak of what had happened and even to admit they had happened. She had thought that one did things and that was the end of them. They had no consequences provided one didn’t think of them as having consequences. They all happened on the outside to someone you had decided to be at the moment you were doing them. The things which had happened to her, or the things she had done, she had always seemed to do when she was drunk and the consequences always seemed to be taking place when she was again sober. That had seemed in the past one more of the reasons for not being, when it was possible not to be, sober. If you could stay drunk long enough you might be able to avoid the consequences too. You could, she had thought, but no longer thought, it was another of Dr. Ritter’s triumphs, stay drunk right through the consequences.
9
I FOUND she struck the nerve of pathos, somehow; there was an air about her of a somewhat touching injury. It was possibly accentuated by the fact that she was pretty. I might not have been so sympathetic had she not been. I thought the love affair with the married man, hinted at, had something to do with that terrible atmosphere of negativity in which she seemed to move; the love affair, and the defeat of ambition. I supposed there had been other men. That would be inevitable. I wasn’t sure I liked her. There was something admirable about the small independence she exerted, the effort she made to maintain her pride. That was why the apartment was so neat; why the curtains were hemstitched. She wouldn’t go back home. Perhaps she couldn’t. Perhaps it was impossible for her to turn back. She had committed herself to the town. She could succeed or—I supposed that was the explanation of the ocean. It was too bad, though: a pretty girl like that. So many other lives seemed open to her, so many other opportunities. She had only to want them. But the pride, or something like pride, prevented her. Looking at her, it struck me that among the things wrong with her was that she had neither humor nor, really, charm. The eyes were fine, and quite beautiful, and she was undeniably a very pretty girl, but there was no charm in that somewhat rigid face, in the manner so constantly tensed. She hadn’t all evening said anything I could recall as either charming or witty. What she did have, apparently, was a sort of desperateness, which compelled another, and different, sort of appeal.
“Are you writing at one of the studios now?” she asked. She said it as though it were a happy occupation. I said I wasn’t, really; I was writhing. I was a member, I said, now, of the Screen Writhers Guild.
She looked at me with a certain hostility as I described, for what I thought was her amusement, my various colleagues whose muted typewriters could be heard in the soundproofed corridors. I recognized it as the hostility of those who had, or thought they had, serious issues at stake in the town. She thought I sounded snobbish, and I did, a little. If I hated the town, she said, and I was unhappy (a breach of protocol here, an act not far distant from treason), why didn’t I go back East?
Ah, the East.
But I hated New York too, that immense slum.
“No,” she said, “I’m serious,” as I tried to turn the conversation. Why, disliking the town, did I come here at all; disliking the work, why did I bother doing it? There was the money; that was a consideration, wasn’t it? Yes, she was quite right: it was a consideration. The fact that the money was made so easily, and in such impressive amounts, gave me the feeling that I’d been a sort of fool in the past about money, and made the long struggle to earn a respectable living slightly grotesque. But there was something odd about the money one made here. Didn’t she feel that? Didn’t she feel there was a phantasmal quality about it? I meant the whole queer business of being abruptly rich and yet being, oddly enough, not rich at all. For it didn’t seem, now, even with the money, which, as she said, was so considerable, that I had any larger sense of security; in some ways, I pointed out, my sense of being secure seemed to have diminished. It was something apparently in the nature of the work itself, this precariousness, this gift which seemed to leave me so ill at ease. Did she feel anything of that? Her dark eyes regarded me: I could see she didn’t quite understand; it was too moot a point for someone who had, at the moment, no money to feel complexly about. The town, and its rewards, had other meanings for her. I said, then, tentatively, that it seemed a bad life to me, the life of an actress in a town like this; I meant, of course, the way she lived, and the inevitable passes made in the inevitable offices; I’d have chosen another life if I were a pretty girl. Would I? she said; I’d have to be a pretty girl first, and then I’d have to choose among the possibilities open to a pretty girl. They weren’t so various; not really. They may have looked various, to someone who wasn’t, but there weren’t so many choices when you knew. As for the town: I needn’t tell her how rotten the town could be. She’d been here five years, and it was a long time, as time went in this town where if anything happened it happened most often quickly or not at all. There wasn’t much you didn’t learn in five years, from the bars in Balboa to the silent little photography dens. Ann O’Neil, did I know her? She’d had a horrible moment; in an office; wearing a low-cut dress; and one of the men (there were apparently several) put his hand casually, unsuspectingly, down the front of it. He’d bet someone they weren’t real.
“What did she do?”
“Cried.”
“Didn’t she spit in his face?”
“She needed the job.”
“Not that much.”
“How much is that much?”
So I needn’t tell her about the town. She’d circled the average number of desks; she’d dodged hands, ugly and insistent, and said no (the implication was she’d said no) to the insistent voices, and the dangled insistent promises.
Nevertheless, she wasn’t sure she’d have it different: the town. There was a defiant glint in the dark eyes, now, a touch of challenge. “I wouldn’t stay here, or any place, if I hated it,” and it struck me she wouldn’t: she wouldn’t tolerate, as I did, something I hated. Despite everything, the bare place she lived in, the look she had of injury and defeat, the life one of whose episodes was the thing at the beach, she did not despise or hate the town. I began to understand then that for her it was the best of all places she could be in, an arena perfectly suited for a play in which she was always the permanent heroine whether she succeeded or whether she failed. For even failure, here, would be for her more satisfying (as she explained later) than any life lived out, moderately happy, with a brand-new range and a child and a husband who went off every repetitious morning to work,
somewhere else. The town was necessary for her. It was the place she would have, finally, chosen. It wasn’t that she thought it glamorous or anything. That had worn off with the first timid step she had taken into a casting office. Nor even that inevitably someday the erratic and unpredictable spotlight which illuminated the chosen would wheel and illuminate her. She’d now (it was different a year ago, a year ago she’d been sick, a little mad, she’d tell me about it, someday, when we knew each other better) come to acknowledge that it was quite possible that she would never have the big career or enjoy the immense fame that luck or shrewdness or an accidental beauty made possible here. That her face, after all, wouldn’t be, despite all her ambitions, the face that the world would see so greatly magnified, there, in the darkened theatres. “Yes,” she said, passionately, with a sincerity that at last silenced me, “it may be rotten,” meaning the town, and the life in it, “but I like it and I wouldn’t have it any other way; it seems right to me that it should be rotten the way it is.” And it struck me that, yes, why not? Perhaps for what one wanted it was right that the town should be hard and cruel and cheap and bitchy and stupid: all the other words, too. Yes, I thought: this is perhaps exactly as it should be, and from that odd angle, hers, I could see why she might, after all, like it, and think of it even as something perfectly true to its own rhinestone self.
10
SHE EXCUSED herself now, and headed for the powder room. I watched her go: the skirt, to a little below the knee, trim, and the trim stockings, and the attractive figure. It was too bad, I thought: a pretty girl like that. At the door of the powder room there was a tall Negro standing. He looked at her when she went into the room.
I watched the trumpeter for a while, who closed his eyes, rapt, his cheeks bulging with wind, the black hands clawed delicately over the valves of his horn. He blew his way into the opening bars of “Melancholy Baby” and the people in the café all went ah. I turned back. The tall Negro was still standing there near the door. He watched the women come out. Evidently it was a sort of station for him. The door said “Chicks”; the other door said “Roosters.” He lounged there, waiting. He moved his head, easily, with an oiled movement, smiling when the door opened and a woman came out. They all had to pass him at least once during the evening. I noticed the smile was not indiscriminate: a choice, based on some knowledge, was involved. She emerged now, and I saw that the smile he gave her was one of the extra white ones, and he said something to her. She smiled back, and shook her head, declining whatever it was. He had been, evidently, mistaken. As she came back to the small table, I wondered what it was that determined his choice, what it was that he was waiting there to see in their faces, how he could distinguish between the customary lipstick and the usual mascara. Was there something in her face I did not see? On the bandstand, the trumpeter’s eyes were closed in a professional ecstasy.