Don't Speak to Strange Girls

by Whittington, Harry

  “Tell them no. All of them. I’m sorry about Zerenski, but it takes an effort to talk to her, and I don’t have the energy.”

  “What will they think?”

  “They’ll leave me alone.”

  “Why should they leave you alone? They’re your friends.”

  “They’re Ruth’s friends … Anyhow, why should they care about me? What do I have to offer? To them — you — anybody?”

  She regarded him with a faint smile, seeing he was in an evil state of self-doubt, inner guilt and uncertainty. Yet she knew better than anyone else he was by nature anything but a melancholy man, less self-centered than most actors. Fate had endowed him abundantly with charm, talent, a lean-and-hewn ugliness that had arresting beauty in it, and a resiliency that had never failed him before. Yet in the days since his wife’s death, he found himself troubled, numb, with inner lesions that not only didn’t heal but grew no scar tissue, and what had appeared to be a benign hurt was instead a deep and open wound. He needed patience and kindness and this was what she delivered now, smiling.

  “You’re in a low pit, doll, but you do matter. To me. To all of us. We love you — sixty million popcorn consumers look up at you on wide-screen and feel roused and uplifted because’s there’s good ole Clay Stuart — ”

  “Big Daddy Sex — ” he said.

  “ — brave, exciting, bigger and stronger than the man beside them, or those around them — ”

  “They feel that way about Rex the Wonder Horse… . What have I ever done for anybody?”

  “Honey, you made Ruth happy for twenty-five years, Sharon worships you. I — but I slop over — believe me, you’re a good kid or old Kay Ringling would never have hung around all these years to wipe your nose for you.”

  After a long time, he touched her arm a moment, attempted a smile. “I can’t go anywhere, Ringling. Not for a while. Please. Handle it for me. Beg off … I can’t do it.”

  “You leave it to mother.”

  • • •

  The Sunset Strip — and Restaurant Row on La Cienega — looked no better than Clay remembered from other days, just more crowded. He and Shatner had to wait for a table in a steak house; they entered the cocktail lounge for a drink while they waited.

  The horseshoe bar was dimly lighted. A few people were at the small tables, but in the early evening the lounge was almost deserted.

  Shatner led Clay to the bar and they perched on stools, ordering Martinis. Clay heard a sharp laugh that was like something thrown at him from around the curve of the bar. He glanced up, aware Shatner had grown tense beside him.

  A curly-haired man in his early thirties sat with a woman in a black evening dress. The man’s sport shirt was opened halfway down his hairy, muscular chest. He was darkly handsome, somehow looking lanolin dipped.

  He stared across the curve of bar at Stuart. His wide mouth pulled into a contemptuous smile. He did not speak to Stuart, but addressed the woman beside him, his voice loud.

  “There he is, baby.”

  The girl looked at Stuart. She was very drunk. Clay saw her recognize him — his face anyway. Then her eyes clouded over and she played along with Handsome, refusing to recognize him.

  “Who, sweetheart?”

  “The big movie star. Stuart. You’re looking at him. You know what? He don’t look like so much to me? You tell me, sweetie, what’s he got I haven’t got? I’m a hell of a lot better looking. God knows, I’m young enough to be his grandson.”

  “You’re loud,” Shatner said. “That’s what you are. Why don’t you shut your mouth? Bartender, tell this creep to cool it and keep it zipped.”

  The bartender gave Shatner a bland smile. “Nicky’s all right,” he said. “He don’t mean any harm.”

  “He’s drunk,” Shatner said. “You ought to throw him out.”

  “You hear that?” Nicky said in loud wounded tones to the woman. “They want me thrown out. He’s a big movie star. He’s in. And me — hell, I can’t pay for these drinks. Is that fair? Look at me. Goddamn it, look at him, what’s he got I haven’t got? Except a lot of crapping money.” Suddenly he pushed his drink-tab toward the bartender. “Here, Mac, let the great big rich movie star pay for our drinks. He can afford it. I can’t. Tell him I’ll pay him back when I’m a big star.”

  Shatner’s voice was shaking. He spoke to the bartender. “You going to throw your pal out, or am I going to call the manager?”

  “Come on,” Stuart said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  He got off the stool, walked out. Shatner followed after a moment. When they reached the check-booth, Shatner said, “Hell, what about our steaks? Why let a punk spoil our evening?”

  “I don’t want a steak.”

  Shatner followed him to the car in the parking area. “Hell, Clay, we’re just doing all this to help you snap out of it. We’re just trying to help.”

  “All right. Why don’t you try just letting me alone?”

  chapter six

  “I’VE BEEN talking to my psychiatrist about you, Clay,” Hoff said. These were the first words he spoke when he strode into the dimly lighted library a week later.

  “Isn’t there enough in your own life to shock him?” Clay was sprawled on a deep divan in the semi-darkness of the room.

  Hoff disliked darkness; his psychiatrist told him it had to do with his fear of the secret, dark festering places in his mind. Hoff didn’t know exactly what he meant, and feared there was only a symbolic meaning in it, but what he did like was the sound, and he remembered it — and it was true he disliked the dark.

  He snapped on lights, exhaling.

  Clay swung around, sitting up on the divan. He pushed his fingers through the bushed hair at his temples. He nodded toward a plate of sandwiches but Hoff shook his head.

  “Don’t you want to hear what he said?” Hoff asked.

  “No.”

  Hoff paced before him on the carpet. “It was a wonderful thing. Sometimes I lose faith in Royal. Sometimes it’s hard to believe with great faith in a man who opens his offices in Beverly Hills, you know? You wonder about them, whether you want to, or not. Something about Royal makes me say he is just another headshrinker, you know? And then he comes up with something really brilliant … and I realize he is a great man. It gives me my faith back. And that’s good, right there. I’ve got to tell you what he said about you, Clay.”

  “Why don’t you have a sandwich?”

  “Oh, no. My diet. Besides, gas. I suffer something fierce from sour stomach. When you’re my age — ”

  “Cut it out. I’m three years older than you.”

  Hoff paused, his face going gray. He glanced about to be certain they were alone. “It isn’t that, Clay. You’ve taken care. You’ve stayed young — your body. I’m shot to hell. My psychiatrist says it’s only my indomitable will to live that keeps me going at all … But about you, Clay. Let me tell you.”

  “I know what’s the matter with me.”

  “No. Nobody knows what’s the matter with himself, Clay. That’s an impossible thing. Our subconscious mind plays tricks on us. It would be impossible for anyone to really know or understand his own motives. As Royal said, he would have to study you — it would be involved and take a long time… . Oh, now, Clay, I told him you’d never stand still for any-think like that. But he said, from what I had told him, analysis would help you. Of course, you’d have to be careful who your analyst was. You remember that doctor who got in trouble on morals charges — sodomy? He was a psychiatrist, one of the biggest. I felt a terrible thing about that man. You know, I was the business manager of that young star — you remember, handsome boy that turned out to be a homosexual. We talked him — the people at the studio, but mostly me, because I felt what a terrible waste him throwing away his career — I talked him into going into analysis. And what doctor did I send him to? That fellow. Of course none of us knew then he was as queer as blue money. What must he have told that boy?”

  Clay smiled. “Probably they lai
d on the couch together.”

  Hoff wrung his hands. “That poor boy. He said he didn’t really want to be helped — if some of the people he knew were normal, the hell with it. What that doctor must have filled his mind with. Oh my God … well, it’s you that I’m thinking about now. And Royal is a fine man. Nothing queer about him. He said from what I told him about you — about, you will forgive me, the way you have acted since Ruth died — that you were suffering from a guilt complex. Now what do you think of that?”

  “I think it’s nuts.”

  “Now, Clay. Listen to me. He’s right. I can see it all. Just listen. He’s made it so clear in my head about you. He says that you appear to be punishing yourself because Ruth is dead. Inside your own mind you admit that you never loved her enough — maybe you never loved her at all — I mean, the way you think now that she’s dead that you should have loved her. You feel you neglected her, you got everything from your life — and you shortchanged her. Now you are suffering because of it. Suffering terribly, refusing to let yourself be interested in anyone or anything, refusing to go ahead with your career and be more successful.”

  Clay got up and walked to the window. He stared out across the empty lonely yard.

  Hoff followed him, trotting across the deep carpeting. Hoff was worried, fearing he had said too much. His trouble was he loved people too much — his psychiatrist told him — he worried about them, about their welfare, and it gave him sour stomach.

  Secretly, no matter what Royal told him, Hoff attributed part of his sour stomach to what happened from the minute he walked in that house he owned in Sherman Oaks.

  They pounced on him in that instant, a fat wife and three daughters. He envied no man in Hollywood his pretty slender second — or third wife. He was not a man who chased, or coveted. He would be happy to go home, a fat man himself, to a fat wife. But she was after him eternally, one note, one key, one mood. They had to move from that lovely place in Sherman Oaks — and it had cost him fifty-five grand, and it was finally paid off — for a house in Bel Air that his Sherman Oaks place would just cover the down payment. Oh God, no wonder his stomach was sour.

  He walked in and that was then they started on him: all the social advantages, the improvements for the girls — the youngest was now thirteen — time to give them all the opportunities he and Sylvia had never had.

  “What kind of parlay is this?” he would moan, holding his head in his pudgy hands, a fat little man wanting five minutes of peace somewhere. “Toluca Lake, Brentwood to Bel Air. What does such foolishness matter? Well, I like Sherman Oaks. I like it here. We have friends here. It suits me fine.”

  “Out of the high-rent district,” Sylvia said, laying on the accent in a thick, taunting way.

  Hoff would listen to her arguments but he kept going back in his mind to that evil time when he had owned nothing — not very little or something — but nothing at all. His father, God rest him, had the terror of flight and struggle to reach Milwaukee and bring home a little money with a push-cart so his own sons could have a better set of dreams.

  But it seemed to Hoff that all he ever had was the fight to exist at all. No matter what he owned, it wasn’t quite good enough, it didn’t conform, it was obsolete, passé, or didn’t fit any more. When he got one set of bills settled, another set had sprouted in their place, an inch higher, like weeds. Yet, to him what he possessed today was so much better — as a fresh pack of cigarettes is better than a butt found on the brink of a gutter — than what he had had all his early years that sometimes now he wakened at night in a cold sweat, afraid, not that he wouldn’t acquire something better, but that he would lose all he had accumulated. A lot of men he knew around him were chazers, but he was no pig. He did not have to gobble up everything he saw because he could feed on his memory, and sometimes diet with it, and sometimes because of it, lose his appetite.

  He tried to make his family realize the importance of the wonders they owned. He did not want his sons to rise so far from the realities of struggling to exist that they would lose touch with reality. The girls? Hoff shrugged. It was a different matter with them, here nowadays the goy and the Jewish girl were no longer very different. They’d been spoiled, taught to take, connive, devour, and still demand more. No wonder divorce courts were overcrowded. A girl no longer was taught the simple act of giving — and, God knew, when two people attempted to live together in this world, one could not give and one take, both must give, but no one bothered any more to remind young females of this basic truth. There were plenty of selfish men, but there were no unselfish women.

  Hoff felt that whatever he’d accomplished came because he still had an enthusiasm for money and possessions brought with him from the push-cart days in Milwaukee. Everything was worthy of his attention. But this wasn’t true with some of the biggest people out here. “No, it isn’t worth it.” These words summed up the history of ills, the tragedy of the movie business. Edison had said it first when his attorney had wanted him to shell out $150.00 to protect his kinetoscope patents abroad, and the words had been repeated countless times by myonic studio heads ever since: the new, the untried, the offbeat, the unusual — all damned.

  He chewed at his mouth, thinking it was like this with Clay and visiting a psychiatrist. He didn’t believe in them, he didn’t like the idea, somehow he believed a man had to be insane to be treated by a neurologist.

  Hoff said, “Don’t you believe this, Clay? You might feel guilt. A psychiatrist might help. Don’t you see how what Royal says must be true? It’s so simple. It covers everything.”

  “Even if it were true, what could I do about it?”

  “You won’t see my doctor — a marvelous person, Clay?”

  “You know better.”

  “Then get to work, Clay. Get interested in something. You see, the way it is in psychiatry, you learn to face your problem, and when you can face it, you can overcome it.”

  “I’m all right. Just let me alone.”

  Clay did not turn from the window. Hoff stood there a long time, his heavy shoulders sagged round. He stared at Clay and then padded back to the plate of sandwiches, took one and shoved it into his mouth, chewing loudly.

  “Clay, I brought somebody along to speak with you.”

  Clay turned from the window. “My God, not the headshrinker?”

  Hoff shook his head. “Oh no. The real estate man I told you about. Morrel. He’s interested in your valley acreage. I explained to him that you had accepted Ringling’s advice to hold it. He wants just less than five minutes. He wants to picture you what he has in mind for this property. A glowing picture, Clay. You could not help feeling better, hearing a man with his kind of sincere enthusiasm.”

  “I don’t want to talk to him.”

  “Clay. Five minutes. Can it hurt?”

  “Make the best deal possible. Sell the damn stuff. I don’t care. Do anything you like.”

  Hoff was reaching for another sandwich. His pudgy hand stopped in mid-air. He shook his head. He turned and faced Stuart. His mouth sagged and then quivered slightly.

  “Now, Clay, I’m not trying to pressure you — ”

  “I know. You think Ringling will knife you for this. So do I … That’s your problem.”

  Hoff looked as if he would cry. “I didn’t mean to pressure you. I didn’t mean you had to sell. Clay, I just wanted you to see this man — to listen to him.”

  The telephone rang loudly on the table beside the divan. Both of them looked at it. but neither moved.

  “Just listen to him,” Hoff said. “I told him you will not sell. I am not trying to make you sell.”

  The telephone rang again, shrill and insistent.

  “I don’t want to talk to him.” Clay lifted the receiver to escape Hoff. “Make the deal you think best. I’d rather sell it to him than listen to you. Now get out.”

  Hoff was trembling. He stayed where he was as if rooted to the floor.

  “Hello. Clay? Is this you, Clay?”

 
; He did not pretend he didn’t recognize the voice. He felt an odd quickening of his heart. What a fool thing.

  “Yes. This is Stuart,” he said. He tried to keep his pleasure out of his voice, the fact that he had wondered when she would call again. “Who is this?”

  “Why it’s Joanne, Mr. Stuart. Joanne Stark. My, you do have a terrible memory.”

  “Abstruse?” he said.

  She laughed. “Why, you are right friendly after all.”

  Clay covered the mouthpiece with his hand, jerked his head toward the foyer door. “Goodbye, Marty.”

  Joanne said, voice rising across the wires. “Are you there? Clay, you didn’t hang up?”

  “Not yet.” He watched Hoff go slowly across the room, close the door behind him.

  “Why, I’ve been calling you for perfect weeks, Mr. Stuart. Where’ve you been?”

  “I was out of town for a few days. Hunting.”

  “Hunting?” She laughed. “Why would you go out of town hunting when the best hunting in the world is right here in town?”

  He laughed with her. “They won’t let you shoot it in the city limits.”

  Her throaty voice became warmer. “Well, you sound so nice today. The other time you sounded so cold.”

  “Well, you were a stranger then.”

  “Don’t you speak to strange girls?”

  He did not answer and after a moment she said hurriedly, “I had a reason for calling you this time. Honestly.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes. You want to hear it?”

  “All right.”

  “No. You’ve got to be nicer than that. You’ve got to say you want to hear it. After all, you must think I’m terrible the way I chase you like this … I’ll bet girls follow you around and call you all the time … say it, you want to hear why I called you this time.”

  His voice was smiling. “Oh, I do.”

  “You know, something is wrong here. I think I’ve got the wrong connection this time. This doesn’t sound like the chilled, aloof Andrew Clay Stuart I know.”