by Alfred Hayes
And I mustn’t look like that, really I mustn’t. A man, what was another man? Everything disappeared: down the drain it went. With the baby fat; with the buttocks admired once by a photographer; with the first strapless dress. My God, men: men were only something women needed in addition to clothes. She couldn’t even remember now, and it was only a few weeks, what making love to me was like. Poor darling. I’d thought she would remember, didn’t I? But really, it was only vanity to expect her to: to think that what I’d done with my hands or my mouth was one particle different than any other lover had done who’d grunted on the pillow beside her. Down, down it went: kisses and hands and lovers: gurgling down the drain.
She looked up now as though rediscovering where we were. It was after ten; and the bar was crowded. The man with the concertina no longer played; it was the jukebox now, noisier but somehow less artificial than the concertina, and the dingy tuxedo, had been. She wanted to dance now.
All right.
“Not with you,” she said. “I’m going to dance with that boy there. At the bar. He looks so lonely.”
I didn’t mind, did I?
“Why should I?”
I sat there at the table and watched her get up and cross through the people dancing to the bar. The boy wore a badly-fitting sports jacket. He had a blue-eyed vacancy. He’d combed his hair and that was his best jacket. There was a highball glass in his hand, and it had been there, obviously, a long time, because later he’d have to buy somebody a drink and I supposed he was saving his money for that important moment. She came across the floor toward him, smiling; the blue eyes, startled, lost their sad vacancy. Her purse and her stole, the white woolen one I’d bought her, remained on the table beside me. I saw her, at the bar now, talking to the boy. The boy could hardly believe it; he looked uncertainly about the room. She must have been apparitional to him. He put the drink down carefully, on the bar, and she took his hand to reassure him, and drew him out on the floor. The boy didn’t rumba badly; I guessed she’d have liked him to be somewhat clumsier. It would have added to the charity. She was being very animated with the boy, and smiling a great deal, with her lips very close to him. She was exuding charm. All of her, the animated eyes, the intimate hips, the arm about the boy’s neck, flattered him. The boy was, I could see, a little frightened by the unexpectedness of it, and then, as they danced, I could see he tried rising to the occasion. He attempted something witty. She laughed, appreciatively. Watching her, I could see the grocery boy hadn’t been something she’d entirely made up. The jukebox swirled into silence. They went back to the bar, and I saw the boy offer her a drink. That would be the reserved money. She smiled, patted his arm, declined; her moment as the apparitional beauty was over: she was about to vanish in the glass coach. I watched her cross toward the powder room. The boy turned, deflated, to his solitary highball.
I waited at the table. Fifteen minutes later she still hadn’t appeared. I called the waitress.
“Yes?”
“Will you do me a favor? The girl I was with, will you see if she’s in the ladies’ room, please?”
“Certainly.”
The boy was hunched over the bar nursing the highball glass. In the jukebox, the sick colors flowed. On the table were her handbag and the white stole. It was difficult to believe she had gone leaving behind the purse and the stole.
The waitress returned.
There was no lady in the ladies’ room. She looked sympathetically at me. She saw the handbag and the stole. It was very close in the restaurant, and maybe the lady had a headache, and she’d gone, perhaps, for a little air. She was sure the lady would be back.
“I’m not going to wait,” I said. “May I have the check, please?”
The waitress was a tall woman, with a light complexion and a nice smile. I supposed the people who owned the place made her wear a skirt like that. She shook her head now, counting out my change. The duck, uneaten; and the lady gone. She assumed the lady was someone I was in love with, and I didn’t bother to disabuse her. The sympathetic smile accompanied me to the door. When I went outside, carrying with a certain awkwardness the stole and her handbag, the boy in the badly-fitting sports jacket was standing on the restaurant steps. He was watching the cars go by. I looked at him, that face bleached and young, and the tie knotted for the big date that hadn’t materialized, and I said: “You didn’t see the girl I was with come out, did you?”
“No.”
Well, she’d disappeared.
Disappeared?
She’d gone off; disappeared; I spelt it out for him.
“Gee. Why?”
Thinking, perhaps, it was because she’d danced with him, and I’d been jealous, and we’d quarreled. I said yes, we’d had an argument, she’d gone into the john and not come out, and the boy said well gee he hadn’t seen her, he’d been standing here, she hadn’t come out. I said that one of the reasons we’d argued was because she’d thought him so attractive.
“Gee,” the boy said. “I didn’t say nothing to her. We were just dancing.”
He was awed.
“She came over to me,” he said. “She asked me to dance. I thought that was kinda funny.”
“Don’t girls usually come over and ask you to dance?”
“Gee, no.”
“Well, if she comes back, you tell her that I’ve taken her handbag and her stole. She’ll probably come back here later looking for you.”
“For me?”
“Sure. I’d wait.”
“Gee,” the boy said. “A girl like that.”
“Like what?”
“I mean, so well dressed. What is she, in the movies or something?”
“Is that what she told you?”
“She said something about being in the movies.”
“Yes,” I said. “She’s a big star.”
“Yeah? Gee.”
“I’d wait.”
“You don’t mind, do you?” the boy asked anxiously. He wasn’t sure about me. But he’d read in the fan magazines what life was like in the movies. Crazy, that’s what life was like in the movies. “She was with you, I mean,” the boy said.
I said it was perfectly all right. “Just be careful,” I said. “She’s got a big future, and you have to be a little careful about the scandal.” I went down the steps. He’d wait. The little bastard would probably wait all night out there on the steps. That goddamn coat; and that bowtie; and that cowlick. In the movies, I said as I got into the car: he knows what it’s like in the movies.
28
I AWOKE, hearing a sound. The bedroom was dark; then, past the white muslin curtains, I saw her eyes at the window, with a dark furious light in them. She was scratching at the window screen. I looked at the clock; a little after midnight: I’d slept an hour. There was nothing to do, I supposed, but to let her into the house. In my pajamas, I opened the front door.
She’d been somewhere, drinking. She came into the apartment with the violence of the very drunk. She’d been somewhere and she’d been steadily drinking. I didn’t really care where she had gone or what had happened to her; what street she’d disappeared down, what folly she’d committed. I cared only that when she came into the house the silence was destroyed. She turned on me, her mouth dryly working. “You didn’t even look for me,” she said. “I could have been murdered in an alley. You wouldn’t care.” She was in the living room now. “You went to sleep,” she said. It was unforgivable. I’d gone to sleep; I hadn’t cared whether a truck had run over her or she’d been murdered; I’d gone to sleep. She was talking, loudly. There were the neighbors: upstairs, the balalaika man and his wife; the airplane girls; my publicity man: she’d wake them. “Let me make you some black coffee,” I said; I might have been suggesting strychnine. She ignored me. She wove, in the air, some intricate gesture.
“I could have been a beautiful dancer,” she said. “A dancer should have a long body and no hips and I could have been a beautiful dancer. I could have been so many things,” she sa
id.
She smiled; the dry lips smiled at some memory. “The lower part of my back is perfect,” she said. She arched it. “A photographer told me. He said the lower part of my back is perfect. He wanted to photograph it. Every girl has something perfect and I have the lower part of my back,” she said.
She stumbled. “Mother,” she said, “I’m so sick.”
She saw me coming toward her.
“Don’t touch me,” she said. “Don’t touch me, you son of a bitch,” she said.
She got to her feet. It was incredible that she could get to her feet. I was afraid if I touched her she’d scream. She mustn’t scream. Not at this hour. Not here, now.
“Lie down,” she said. She was mimicking me. I’d suggested she lie down on the couch. “Lie down,” she said. All she knew was (weaving there, blindly, on the rug) that I’d gone to sleep and she might be lying murdered now in some alley and I didn’t care. All I’d ever wanted was to drag her into bed. I, and all the others. She unbuttoned her blouse. She wore a black brassière; it would be one of the fancier, the special brassières. She looked down at her breasts. She was admiring them. Weren’t they beautiful?
I said yes.
Because she mustn’t scream.
She closed her hands over them. Her poor breasts. Kissed, fondled. Pity was in her face: her poor betrayed breasts. She remembered the cat now: I’d killed it. Because she’d slept here, in this house. She didn’t want me to get dressed; she didn’t want me to take her home. The cat was dead. Everything (a gesture, vague and pitiable) was being taken away from her. She was talking continuously now. She was crying and talking and gesturing and her voice carried in the night and I could see through the window the lights go on in the apartment on the other side of the driveway. There was that, too, to worry about. Somebody would inevitably call the police. I didn’t want the police coming and finding her here, drunk, in the apartment. I had to get her out of the house. She seemed to have forgotten I was there. She wept, out of some vast desolation. She murmured at someone invisible; an animal, a man, I couldn’t tell which. She wove, in the air again, that mysterious gesture, as though she were again dancing. Or she’d be cold, and shiver. Or she’d draw back, her palms distended, as though something threatened her. I would think she could not possibly continue, and she would sink, her skirt huddled about her, exhausted to the rug, and I would think that it was at last over, but when I went toward her or spoke to her, she’d revive, some incredible energy returned, and she would begin again, a broken recitation, or some dance, or some incoherent monologue. She wavered, now, pale, in a corner of the room. She was staring at something. It was across the room, whatever it was.
She cried out: Mother.
Then: He’s throwing the cigar, Mother!
She broke off. She was weeping. She had her hands clasped to her neck.
He burned me, Mother, she said. Daddy burned me. He threw the cigar and burned me. Why do you fight with him? Why do you fight and fight and fight? You made him throw the cigar and now he burned me. I hate you. I hate you and I hate Daddy and I hate everybody.
She was sobbing, in pain, where, once, a cigar had burned her.
She looked up.
Again, her face was transfigured. Something, or somebody, was approaching her. She spoke in a tense whisper.
Go away, she said. I told you to go away. This isn’t your garage. It’s my grandmother’s garage. You go away or I’ll scream.
She did.
I knew that in the silent and tree-dark street her scream sounded. It would not sound like anything but a girl somewhere screaming. I knew that now in the apartments upstairs or across the driveway somebody started awake and lay in the darkness, listening. I saw all the telephones, so close to all the beds.
The scream was abruptly cut off and she was in the corner, behind the armchair, whimpering, her body curiously broken.
I went to her, lifted her. I put her on the couch in the room where the Chianti bottles were. She clung to me. I was somebody to cling to now, who was protecting her. I was whoever had come and taken her out of the garage. She cried. Dry and racked and convulsive tears.
Then she said: “Marsha.”
“Marsha,” she said again, distinctly.
I waited.
“My cat thinks I’m beautiful,” she said. “My cat loves me. It’s so stupid,” she said.
I whispered: “What?”
She said: “Everything. They just don’t know how stupid it is. The cat’s jumping up on the bed, Marsha,” she said. “This is where I live. I don’t like where I live,” she said. “I’d love a piano stool for Christmas, Daddy. But you sold our piano. I want our piano back. You sold it to Sally Mulligan. She has my piano in the parlor and she takes lessons. I want my piano back. Sally doesn’t have any right to have my piano.”
“I’m going to telephone her house right now,” she said. “It’s my piano. I was studying. I want it back. I’m going to telephone and make Sally give me my piano.”
She was struggling to get up from the couch. I was now somebody preventing her from getting something that somebody had taken away from her. She wanted the telephone. She was going to call San Diego.
“Why should Sally Mulligan keep my piano? I can play the piano better than she can. It was my piano.”
She struggled in my arms.
“You’ll call Sally Mulligan later,” I said. “She’s asleep now. You can’t wake her up.”
She said, crying: “It’s mine, Daddy. It’s my piano.”
I said, her father now: “I know, dear. We’ll get it back.”
She said: “I want everything back. My piano and the ribbon Georgia Holmes borrowed from me and when I get a bicycle I’m not going to lend it to anybody.”
I said, comforting her, crouched over, holding her heavily in my arms: “No, you won’t, darling. You’ll keep everything. I won’t let them take anything away from you.”
Silence.
In a diminished voice, then, a child’s: “I’m so sleepy. I’m so tired.”
Hopefully, she’d sleep now I thought, at last she’d sleep, it would end in sleep, I said softly, almost crooning: “Yes, go to sleep, darling. It’s late.”
“Is it very late?”
“Yes it’s very late.”
“Is it twelve o’clock?”
“It’s later than twelve o’clock.”
Then she said: “I can’t. I can’t sleep. There’s somebody in the bedroom.”
“He’ll go away.”
She said: “Make him go away. He’s been in there so long. I don’t like him.”
“I’ll make him go away.”
“Poor Daddy.”
“Daddy’s all right,” I said.
“It hurts.”
“What?”
“Here. It hurts here.”
“Shhh.”
“But it hurts, Marsha. Here. Put your hand here. He hit me.”
“Who?”
“Phillip. Phillip hit me. Phillip came home on leave and hit me. He followed me around and around the room and he hit me.”
“Phillip?”
“Phillip hates me too. They all want to hit me. They all want to hit me or break something. They break the furniture and hit me. They all hit me.”
She started up, angrily.
“Don’t be stupid, Marsha,” she said. “Get away from that window. I told you I have to go to Hollywood. I told you I have to go. Stop threatening me. I told you he’s taking me to Hollywood.”
“Marsha,” she said, “don’t go near that window.”
She stared at me. I had become somebody else. Somebody near a window.
“Don’t,” she said. “Marsha.”
She twisted under me and sprang from the bed.
“Marsha!”
I caught her in my arms.
Her look collapsed. She scurried, with a small animal movement, away from me and to the wall. The wall was as far as she could go. She was looking past me again.
“Don’t open the door,” she said. “It’s the police. Don’t open the door.”
She whimpered.
“Marsha?” she said.
“Yes,” she said, nodding: “she’s Russian.” “Yes,” she said to somebody, “she worked at the store I used to work in. Yes,” she said to whoever was questioning her, “I was an elevator operator.”