Don't Speak to Strange Girls

by Whittington, Harry

  “Why did you call this time?”

  “Well, I’m in your neighborhood this afternoon. What do you think of that?”

  Clay waited, feeling the quickening beat of his heart. What was the matter with him? Nobody in his right mind fell for a gimmick like this. There were hundreds of ways that women wrangled an unlisted number, and none of it ever led to anything good. But there was a quality of warmth and excitement in her voice. It projected itself across the wires. It caught at him, at his mind and his imagination. He had thought about her often since she’d called that first time. The biological reaction — and working across the phone lines like this. He was interested enough to want to see what she looked like. If he couldn’t handle himself at his age, what did it matter? Her voice was the first thing that had aroused his interest in months. He wanted to see what she looked like.

  “Aren’t you pleased?” she said.

  He waited again. She said, “Aren’t you? If you’re not, why I can hang up. I’m sorry I bothered you.”

  “You don’t bother me.”

  “I thought I might drop by for a cocktail. Do you like daiquiris …? I mean, if you weren’t doing anything?”

  Yes, he thought, my God yes. Why don’t you?

  “All right,” he said. “If you’d like to.”

  “Be about an hour,” she said, excitement in her voice.

  “I’ll bake a cake.” He wanted to laugh with her. He felt young again, no longer so cold. Funny how little it took. Then she said something that chilled him, stopped it all cold.

  “What’s your address, Mr. Stuart?”

  “What?”

  “Where do you live?”

  “I thought you were in the neighborhood.”

  “What do you care, Mr. S.? I can be. Like I said. In an hour. Less even.”

  “You got my phone number, why not my address?”

  “Just didn’t work that way. What’s the matter? Why are you suddenly so stuffy again? What have I done wrong? All I asked you for is your address.”

  “Hell,” he said, “you can get that from any one of the tour guides.”

  He replaced the receiver, stood staring at it. He felt an unaccountable emptiness, a feeling of insufficiency and loss. He felt as if he had lost something valuable and the odd part was that whatever it was he’d lost, he’d never had anyway.

  He stood there four or five minutes without moving until he finally admitted consciously that he was waiting for that phone to ring, waiting for her to call back. But she did not call back. The phone sat there, black and lifeless, silent and useless.

  He turned then and walked out of the room. He went out on the terrace. There was a wind gusting out of the canyon. Leaves swirled on the grass and skittered across the flagstones about his feet.

  chapter seven

  THE PHONE rang. Clay cursed himself when he had sprinted halfway into the library, and brought himself to a screeching halt. The phone stopped ringing anyhow, and after a moment McEsters came in walking so stiffly, so precisely, he looked like a comedy butler, and said Mr. Shatner was calling.

  Clay wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. What the hell, she wasn’t going to call back. Why should she call back? Besides, he had hung up on her, hadn’t he? It was the smart thing, and it was what he knew he had to do.

  Shatner wanted him to double date. He had a table for four at Ben Blue’s in Santa Monica. Should be passionate fun. Ben Blue was a lot of laughs but the girls he’d lined up were nothing to laugh about.

  “No,” Clay said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You going to spend the rest of your life walled up in that house? You think maybe you’re Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard?”

  “No. Her figure. Much better than mine.”

  “Look, Clay. These girls. Just imported from New York. Domestic, but good. All new. First run.”

  “Not this time, Marc.”

  “Stuff like this doesn’t keep.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry? Hell, it’s ruining my health just studding for your rejects.”

  Clay replaced the receiver. He was instantly sorry. Marc was right, of course. A man could not bury himself. Given a couple of drinks he would love the girls, enjoy the jokes, be anxious to dance. He glanced toward the phone. And this was ridiculous. He had never seen the Stark doll. She was not going to call back. He had ended that one with a sharp cut. It was better. It was sensible.

  Why did he despise himself for being so damn sensible?

  When you wait for something you wish would happen, and it does not happen, time crawls. One such hour is longer than some other weeks. Clay prowled the house, took a shower, drank three whiskeys on-the-rocks and decided they were cutting the liquor. He felt nothing.

  Finally he flopped down on the couch, lay staring at the ceiling. He decided he would call Shatner back; it wasn’t too late. He sighed, trying to remember the name of a girl who flashed in his mind, something in the association with Joanne’s throaty voice on that telephone. This girl had been a leading woman who had played opposite him at Paramount in an early 1930 movie. She made only a couple of pictures. She was the property of one of the producers. There had been electric charges between her and Clay Stuart from the first time she walked on the set. There was a tension about her that threw him off his feet. She was lovely as an angel with a hellish excitement in her eyes. The look in those eyes promised him hell and happiness, misery and torment. When they kissed for the camera, her mouth parted and her tongue was hot and her body was burning up. He had known then. It was between them. She felt everything that he felt for her — and in spades. Nights he went home to Ruth and concert music and friends in for bridge and once he had to stride out in the garden and vomit. His stomach was tied in knots that badly. During the day when he was near her, the smell of her tantalized him, made him ache across the bridge of his nose, made him remember that little girl in the outhouse and the way he needed to bury his face in her hair. He could remember the scent of that leading lady’s hair all these years later. He could not remember her name.

  Not being able to remember her name angered him because it made him seem old, touched with the first quaverings of senility. Maybe it was just that he had been in the movies too long.

  Abruptly he was remembering the old character star who’d once been a circus roustabout, the way the old fellow waved stock certificates worth hundreds of thousands of dollars around on the sets, yelling, “Look at these, you college sons of bitches. You own anything like this? Yeah. And I got boxes full of ‘em at home. Safety boxes stacked with them. Just like them.” The old boy loathed young actors and would do anything to louse them up, refuse to read a cue line, twist it, delay it, anything to throw the newcomer off-stride. Ask him why he did it, you always got the same answer: “Aw, I don’t like them, these new guys. Who needs ‘em?”

  Clay shook the thought from his mind. And the actresses they put in his pictures, all like children, and he kept comparing them to people he’d known in the past. Seeing a girl like Natalie Wood in the Green Room at Warner’s commissary he would find himself remembering Gloria Swanson because both were so tiny, so dark and so lovely — so damned far apart, in different eras, but in one you could see something of the other, and he belonged in the big moments of the careers of both. It confused the dimensions of time for him; today was yesterday, yesterday was today and today was forever lost — like the name of that lovely young actress he’d wanted above everything on earth, and had never had.

  “Mr. Stuart. Sir.”

  Clay jumped up guiltily as though his pants were unzipped. The sound of McEster’s voice had startled him, yanked him back to this moment, and it seemed his thoughts trailed after him unwillingly.

  Clay pushed his hands through his matted hair, blinking at McEsters in the wanly-lighted library.

  “I’m sorry sir. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  “What is it?”

  “The young lady, sir. I’m sorry. The one
who has called you so persistently — even when you were out of town. I tried to get rid of her. She insists you are expecting her.”

  Clay closed his fists, and his heart banged against his rib cage and he wondered expectantly what she looked like. She was here. She was out there beyond that door.

  “What was her name?” he said. He kept his voice level.

  “Miss Stark. Miss Joanne Stark. Shall I send her away, sir?”

  “No. I reckon not. I did say something to her about dropping in sometime. For cocktails. If she was ever up this way. You know? The kind of invitation you give out when you don’t mean it.” Even talking, Clay saw that he was trying to hide behind that flat exterior the way his raw emotions churned inside him. He’d been doing it all his life, since he was a kid on a Nebraska farm where you never cried no matter how badly you hurt. “The way you ask somebody how they are, and then hold your breath for fear they’ll tell you.”

  He was pushing his hands through his hair, batting at the wrinkles in his slacks.

  “I understand, sir. I can send her away if you like.”

  “No … I mean, she’s here. What the hell?” He remembered her asking if he liked daiquiris; he decided to have them made; it would be a touch. Anyhow, it would show he remembered what she’d said to him. “You might fix us a mixer of daiquiris and some light sandwiches. You know the amenities, McEsters, better than I do.”

  “Yes, sir. Shall I send the young woman in?”

  Clay stood up and shrugged his shirt up on his shoulders. He gave McEsters what he hoped would pass for a casual, bored smile.

  “No,” he said. “I’ll go out to her.”

  “Yes, sir. She’s in the foyer, sir.”

  • • •

  No matter what he had expected her to be, she was more than that, different. She was much, much more than he had permitted himself to anticipate. She was a tall girl, he saw that first, slender, the way the New York model agencies liked them. She was young, younger than hell, he thought bitterly, looking across a one-way gulf at her — that one expanse he could never recross to her. Of course she had to be young — when they called a star they were ever young, or they wanted something.

  She was standing with toes pointed in, looking at the house as if she’d never been surrounded by precisely Ruth’s brand of quiet elegance before. She tried to be casual, but her eyes were impressed and when she heard him and turned to face him, she looked at him in that same way, as if he were another fabulous appointment in this glamorous house.

  “I’ve seen you so often,” she said. “On the screen, I mean. I feel I know you.”

  He took her proffered hand and looked down at her. He thought that the look of her warned you, if you were smart enough to sense the warning. She could make you joyous or miserable for the rest of your life, but you were never going to relax completely as long as she was part of your existence. There would be no plateaus in the life of the man who got himself entangled with this one. The slender body bore full breasts like overripe fruit. A man could feel his eyes bleeding.

  She tossed her head in a way that shook her shoulder length red-gold hair back from her pale, high-planed face, and her green eyes were intrigued, entranced.

  “I’m Joanne Stark,” she said.

  “Sure you are. So here you are at last.”

  He was still holding her hand. He gave a wry smile and released it.

  “I know you must think I’m forward. Subtle as the front wheel of a bus. I wanted to meet you.”

  “If I’d known, I’d have given green stamps with my phone number.”

  “Do you want to know how I got it?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you how it is. Sometimes I go up in a plane and drop leaflets. Call — ”

  “I found one of them,” she said. “Will that do?”

  “Fine.”

  “Only I still don’t feel right about it. I feel I ought to tell you — now I’m here.”

  These were just words, Clay saw. It did not matter what she said. She was not giving any thought to her words, only to the fact she was talking, the way a kid might whistle in the dark.

  “Why don’t you come into the library?” he said. “Take off your shoes, or something.” He had entered the game with her now. The words didn’t matter. The chatter was to cover the awkward bridge between this first moment and that first drink.

  He nodded toward the library. She smiled and followed him.

  “I’m not intruding?” she said. “Not breaking into anything?”

  “I was waiting for you.” He said it flatly, truthfully.

  Her green eyes glittered. She smiled over her shoulder at him. “I’ve always wanted to meet you. For such a long time.”

  He smiled. She sat at one end of the divan and he flopped on the other, leaning against the arm rest, watching her. Her dress did not cover her knees. She tugged at it once. It was no use. She forgot it, a born philosopher. She turned at the far end of the couch, crossed one leg under the other. He caught his breath.

  “I suppose everybody says that to you?”

  “What?” he said.

  “Always wanted to meet you.” She appeared unconscious of the way she lay back, the way he had to look at her. “But with me, it’s true. I’ve wanted terribly to meet you. All my life.”

  “All your life,” he said. “All of it wouldn’t add up to very long.”

  She shrugged, tossing her red-gold hair back. “It seems a long time to me.”

  McEsters entered with the daiquiris and the sandwiches. He glanced at the girl lying back on the divan, ankle crossed under her knee, leg like a golden pillar polished to a sheen. Faint disapproval showed in his face. He left the room.

  “He looks like something somebody made up,” Joanne said.

  He poured a daiquiri for her, poured one for himself. “I hope daiquiris are all right. We’ve got a houseful of liquor if you want something else. You mentioned them — when you called.”

  She smiled, pleased that he remembered. “I love them.” She sighed. “Why, I love everything about this place. I’ve never been in a house like this. Not that I can remember, anyhow. Oh, I’ve been in some swank places. But there’s something about this one. It is the sort of place my mother would have had if she’d lived.”

  “Oh?” He held out the plate of sandwiches. She took two of them and placed them in a napkin, balanced on the swell of her thigh.

  “Yes.” Her eyes clouded. “She died when I was a little girl. Two years old. I don’t remember her, really. We had this place. It was lovely. Long Island. From what I’ve heard, it must have been like this — quiet elegance that doesn’t knock your brains out, you know — ”

  “What happened?”

  She looked as if the pain were still real for her. “It burned. One night. My father — got me, everything out of the house except mother. She wouldn’t leave.”

  Clay scowled. “Why not?”

  “That place. It was her whole life. Everything in her life was in that house — all her happiness, all her possessions… . You’d have to know how it was with her to understand.”

  Her voice was very low. She had her gaze fixed on something in the distance.

  Clay wanted to laugh. She was acting. He could not say if she were a good actress or not. It did not matter. She was doing what she wanted to do.

  She waited, but when he did not speak, she brought her gaze back to him and met his eyes levelly.

  “That isn’t true,” she said. “Not any of it.”

  “I know.”

  She finished off the daiquiri, held out the glass. She ate greedily for a moment while he refilled her glass.

  “Sometimes I think it’s true, though,” she said. “I’ve told it to myself, and so many people — but not to you. I could see you did not believe me. It made me realize I was lying, and there was no sense in it.” She smiled. “It wasn’t going to get me anywhere with you. You were too smart for me.”

  He watched her finish off her
second drink.

  “You could grow strawberries in that, too,” he said.

  She looked up. “What?”

  “In that stuff you’re spreading on me now. What is the truth about you, honey? Are you a pathological liar?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you lie because you can’t help it?”

  She registered as if the baby spot were fixed on her, trimmed and with halo light. Sadness. It was too bad there was no camera moving in for a close-up.

  “Sometimes,” she said. “I guess I’ve never had what I really wanted. Never been what I really wanted to be. It’s all right to admit it to myself. But I never could see why I had to tell it to other people.”

  “It’s none of their business?”

  “Sure. I mean, I make them happier by telling them lies. After all, why not? If you want to know the truth, Joanne Stark’s life is pretty depressing. Depresses me. When I tell them lies — it doesn’t hurt anything. I just tell them what they want to hear.”

  “And you thought I wanted to hear about an estate, and a fire?”

  “No. Not really. You see, I’ve wanted to get in pictures. All my life. I’ve read so many fan magazines. I know what they want, too. So what I told you is what you’ll read about me someday in the fan magazines. It won’t be the truth, but it’ll be a lot more fun.”

  He laughed. My God, he thought, how long since I’ve laughed like this?

  She laughed with him. “Why, I’ve had that story ready for two years. Ready for the publicity department of any studio that hired me.”

  “You’ve been out here two years?”

  “Almost.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He lay back against the arm rest. He stared at her. What did it mean? For one thing she looked too new, the gloss wasn’t off the merchandise. Even New York didn’t take off the gloss the same way Hollywood did. Two years in Hollywood, a girl either had to make it in the movies, or get out of town. Two years changed them.

  He could not say any of that to her. And he did not went to say it to her anyhow. But more than that, there was a diamond kind of hardness to her. He could not overlook this. A diamond could rub against fake glass for a long time without showing any scars. This girl looked as if she had held conferences with herself. There was an aura of enchantment about her, but she knew what she wanted. This was certainly true. You could not escape this. She knew about prices; she expected to pay them. But then there was the scrubbed look of freshness; she couldn’t lie about that, or fake it.