The car crunched to a stop before the white stucco apartment house, and I turned to her in the darkness, trying to make out what was wrong with her face. I touched it with my hand and it was wet. “Ah, baby, come on now …” I sighed. It was wet and I kissed it suddenly. I kissed the wet cheeks and the trembling lips and I murmured gently, “Honey … baby … don’t,” feeling the ache inside of me.
“Harry,’ she breathed, with her head on my shoulder. “Oh, Harry … why did I ever have to meet you?”
“What a lousy bit of casting,” I said softly.
“And why did you have to say Italian salami?”
“You love it too?”
“Terribly,” she cried.
“The dry salami with all the garlic?”
“Yes,” she wept, laughing.
“Ah, baby,” I shook my head, “what a shame, what a shame.”
“What’ll we do, Harry?”
I took her face in my hands and looked into her eyes, her wet shining eyes, and there was so much that I might have said, but all I could say, “You know what you want, kid.”
She stared back at me.
“Well, don’t you?” I said. “You’re almost there. You don’t want to throw it away. …”
She twisted her face away from me with a little cry.
I opened the door for her. “Good night, baby.”
“Don’t worry.” Her voice broke as she scrambled out. “I won’t get any lipstick on your career, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”
Suddenly my hand shot out and grabbed her arm and I yanked her back into the car. “Whose career?” I snarled. And then my mouth was pressing cruelly on her lips so hard that she moaned with pain and the pain was what I wanted to hear and I dug my fingers into her back even harder as she fought to free herself. “Come on … say it … whose career?”
“Harry, don’t—” she choked. “Please, Harry. … I’m sorry. …”
I let go of her. “That’s all I wanted to hear.”
She got out, sobbing, and ran up the steps, and I didn’t even wait for the door to slam shut to drive away with a screech of tires, and I couldn’t even think of going home. I had to stop at a bar on the Strip first. And I stayed there until the only pain I could feel was the ache in my head, and when I woke up in the morning it wasn’t even morning any more, and when I got to the office the copy of weekly Variety was already there on my desk … the one that said: “L.A. to N.Y.— Mrs. Finn Wildbeck.”
The call came from upstairs right after lunch.
“You can go right in, Mr. Bliss.” Mrs. Samuels gave me the knowing smile.
“Well now, Harry. …” Wildbeck looked up at me with an expansive smile. “I haven’t seen you in many days. You have been a busy man— a very busy man.”
I ran my tongue over my dry lips and said nothing.
“Two things I have on my mind—both pleasant.” He brought a flame to the tip of the dying cigar and I waited while he sucked it to life.
“Number one, it now appears as though we are not going to be able to get Elizabeth Taylor from Metro for The Distant Years, and the thought struck me, what a grand spot it would be to introduce this young girl, what is her name again?”
“Rosemary Cobb,” I said, feeling the coldness growing in the pit of my stomach.
“Yes, yes, that’s the one,” he looked at me. “Of course, all this is still in the think stage. I would first have to decide that she is right for the role—naturally.”
“Yes, Mr. Wildbeck,” I said.
“Number two, I have spoken to Lerner Sprague, and I have convinced him that there is no reason why this studio cannot develop new writing talent much in the same manner as we develop fledgling stars. All of which means, the first opportunity comes along, in you go. Does that make you happy?”
I swallowed. “Yes, Mr. Wildbeck,” I said.
I braced myself.
“Tell me, Harry, do you have any important social engagements the next few days or nights?”
I nodded hopelessly.
“Miss Cobb?”
“Yes,” I said, in a hollow voice.
“That’s too bad,” he said. “Too bad. Now that I am, so to speak, alone for a while, I thought perhaps you might like to go to Palm Springs with me. We all of us here at the studio work too hard anyway, eh, Harry? But of course I wouldn’t want you to break any important engagements. Too bad.” He blew two perfect smoke rings at me. “Unless you would like to have her join us?”
I didn’t answer him. What was the use of answering him?
“As a matter of fact,” he drew cigar smoke into his mouth noisily, “it might give me a fine opportunity to evaluate the girl’s personality at close range. Tomorrow—” he sighed. “It would be nice if you could arrange it for tomorrow. …”
I could arrange anything. I could arrange the second coming of Christ.
“We won’t stay at the Racquet Club,” he was murmuring. “Too crowded. So many picture people. There’s a little place a few miles east of the Springs. La Jollita. You take your car and I’ll take mine. Then we won’t all have to go back in case you—or I—should get a hurry-up call from the studio. Neither of us is exempt from the urgent call of duty, eh, Harry?” His face cracked into a smile. “It could just be your good luck—or bad—that Lerner Sprague decides he wants to break you in on scripting the very day after you reach the Springs. Then where would we be—you and me and the girl—with only one car?”
I moved for the door. I had to get out into the air.
“Harry,” his voice hardened, “I want you to arrange it, do you hear me? I want you to call the girl. Come back here.”
I returned to the desk.
“You can use my phone.” He pointed to the private phone on his desk. “Call her,” he said. “Do it now.”
Dumbly I stared at the phone.
“Go on, Harry.”
“Yes, Mr. Wildbeck.”
I picked up the phone, and slowly I dialed the number. In a few days I was going to become a writer, and a girl who was only a beautiful kid was going to be started on her way to stardom, but I dialed the phone slowly, be cause in Hollywood good news never travels fast. And then I heard her voice.
“Hello, baby,” I said. I stared down at the little man behind the desk, and somewhere inside of me I was crying.
“Oh, Harry, I was so afraid you’d never call again.”
“Start packing, honey,” I said to her. “We’re going on a trip.”
“Tell her not to forget the bathing suit,” Wildbeck whispered, grinning.
“Where to?” She sounded far away.
“A little trip—” I faltered, looking at the face. I was looking at the grinning face and seeing everything there had ever been between us. I was seeing the years that lay in the past and the years that lay ahead for me, and maybe it was what I saw in that face. Maybe it was the sound of her voice saying again, “Where to, Harry?” Maybe it was a lot of things. Because suddenly I heard myself answering, “We’re going where the snow flies, baby, and the Italian salami grows. Just you and me. Does that make any sense to you?”
“Oh, darling, yes, yes, what sense!” she was laughing and crying. “What beautiful, wonderful sense!”
“I’ll pick you up in an hour.”
I hung up and stood before the desk, feeling the wild happy pounding of my heart.
“What kind of double talk is that?” Wildbeck stared at me in bewilderment.
“She isn’t going,” I said, with a crazy little laugh.
The cigar stood still in his mouth. “What do you mean, she isn’t going? Why not?”
“Because I told her not to,” I said quietly.
He sprang to his feet, and his cheeks were mottled with rage. “Do you know what you’re saying, Harry?”
I looked at the face and I knew then how badly I wanted no door left open. I did not want to be able to come back—not ever.
“I don’t think she would have enjoyed herself in Palm Springs,
Mr. Wildbeck, and I don’t think she wants a future with a studio like this one. I’ve decided that I don’t like the kind of pictures you make here, Mr. Wildbeck. They are without taste—like you, Mr. Wildbeck.” He came around the desk swiftly, fists clenched.
“Why … you …”
“Yes, Mr. Wildbeck?” I stood before him, waiting.
His hands fell to his sides. “After all I’ve done for you,” he muttered harshly. “You were hungry … going nowhere … and I took you on …” He turned away. “I had such plans for you. The things I was going to do for you. Not just a writer. Big things.” He sat down in the chair behind his desk and his voice became weary. “Sit down, Harry. I want to have a talk with you. You were always such a fool. I cannot bear to see you throw away everything for … for a girl … a nothing.” He looked up at me. “That is it, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” I said. “A girl … a nothing.”
“Now listen to me,” he said softly.
I looked down at him and smelled forgiveness in the air, and suddenly I realized that he needed me, even now. All at once I saw that he had always needed me, that I had been, in a way, just as responsible for Finn Wildbeck as he had been for me. And knowing that would have to be part of the penance in the years to come, penance for a guilt that had been mutually shared.
“Sit down, Harry.”
“I haven’t time,” I said. “I’m leaving, Mr. Wildbeck. Quitting.”
His cheek began to twitch. “When?”
“Right now. As of this moment.”
“You’re fired,” he said.
“I never liked the job,” I said. “I want to find something clean … like spreading fertilizer.”
“Get out,” he said quietly.
“And I never liked the company I had to keep.”
He jumped to his feet. “I said get out!”
“Quick, Mr. Wildbeck, look what I’m doing.” I reached suddenly across the desk and ripped the cigar from his lips, leaving shreds of tobacco hanging from his stunned, open mouth. “Look!” I took the cigar and broke it in two. “Symbolism, Mr. Wildbeck, the way you do it in pictures. I have just shown you, in a traditionally artistic manner, the end of a beautiful friendship.”
I tossed the broken pieces of cigar on the desk and headed for the door.
“Harry, you’re through!” The voice came after me hoarsely. “You and the girl!” he screamed. “I swear before God that you and the girl will never get another job in pictures as long as I live! Do you understand what that means?”
I stopped at the door and turned to him, and I did not mind the words that came to my lips now, because I knew that they were there for the very last time.
I smiled.
“Yes, Mr. Wildbeck,” I said.
The Way Men Are
THE FARAWAY NOISES OF MIDTOWN Manhattan getting ready for another Saturday night drifted up the twenty stories and intruded in the half-dark, paper-littered office like muted jazz music in a morgue.
Al sat slumped at his desk for the last time, a slim, dark-haired man in his early thirties, with his desk drawers picked clean and five years of hopes and dreams and memories piled high in the wastebasket at his feet.
He looked up as Kennedy walked in briskly and stuck out his hand.
“Well … all the luck in the world, Al,” Kennedy said. “Keep in touch, will you?”
“Thanks,” Al said, taking the hand. “I sure will.”
The hell he would.
Kennedy avoided his eyes. “And I want you to feel that if the new job doesn’t pan out, your old desk will always be waiting for you.”
“Thanks,” Al said. Kennedy didn’t mean a word of it, and he knew that Al knew it, but that was all right. It was part of the ritual.
Kennedy’s heels clicked down the hall to the elevator, and then Al was alone with the distant music of the streets, and his crowding thoughts—and Hilda.
He could hear her puttering around in Kennedy’s office, doing all the unnecessary little things that were so necessary to her because they delayed her inevitable journey uptown to a lonely dinner—and the gay, romantic evening that happened only to other girls.
“Hey, Hilda,” Al stared vacantly out of the window at the lights in the tall buildings. “Don’t you ever go home? It’s twenty after six.”
“Don’t be silly,” she sang out. “I love it here. I pay Mr. Kennedy to let me work overtime. You poor thing. I’ll bet you’re sorry you’re leaving.”
“Yeah,” he said, hurling a paper clip hard against the wall. “You said it.”
He was thinking about the first meeting with Kennedy, and the first meetings with all the bosses he had ever worked for. The love at first sight, like it is with a woman. The enthusiasm and the striving and the feeling that this is going to be the real thing. And then the gradual falling out of love, the slow melting of work into monotony into discontent and the desperate search for a new romance, always winding up one Saturday night with him in front of an empty desk and a full wastebasket, wondering if the next one was going to be any different. He was thinking about a lot of things and, perhaps because he could hear her behind the partition and be cause so much of his life on the twentieth floor of this office building had been part of her life, and hers part of his, and it was all ending now, he kept thinking of Hilda.
He thought of Hilda with her slip always showing. He thought of the limp hair and the thick ankles and the shapeless lump of a body and the querulous voice and the myopic eyes peering hopefully through rimless glasses at a world that would always come into focus a little beyond her reach. And he wondered, as he had wondered so many times, whether being ugly on the outside was any worse than being like he was, and whether he too would some day discover a fantasy that helped. …
He recalled the first time she had complained to him about being forever annoyed by men. That one had been a man standing next to her on a crowded subway. Al had been with the firm only a few days, so he hadn’t said any thing. And then one rainy day when they had sent down for lunch and she had told him all about the fellow who kept calling her for a date, who claimed he’d noticed her in the elevator, Al had been on the verge of making a crack. But he had caught the look on her face, and something—he didn’t know what it was—had kept him from doing it then, or ever after
“It’s awful the way men are,” she always said, visiting at his desk when things got slow.
“Why, what happened?” Al would ask, as though he didn’t know, approximately.
“Oh, last night I was at the movies and there was a man sitting next to me—a nice-looking man, too—and he started to work his arm around the back of my chair and before the picture was over he had his hand on my shoulder and he was talking to me and trying to make a date. The nerve.”
And when she told it to a girlfriend over the phone, the man had even kissed her.
Al had heard plenty from Hilda in five years, and so had others. He had heard about the man who followed her home from the subway one night and how she had had to call a cop. He had heard about the letters she was getting from a fellow on the ninth floor she hardly knew, letters so “awful” she threw them away (of course). He had heard about all the men who had bothered her on the beaches and street corners and trolleys and subways and busses and in the elevators and movie houses and by mail and telephone, and always it had been in the same outraged, indignant voice, and when he was unable to look her in the face as she told these things to him, he never knew whether it was because he was afraid of laughing or afraid of crying. …
Somewhere in another world an impatient cab driver was leaning on his horn, and at the other end of the hall a girl was laughing a Saturday night laugh, and a voice was calling to him.
“I’m going now, Al.” It was Hilda. “Will you turn out the lights when you leave?”
He got up from the desk and stood in the doorway, watching her primping hopelessly before the mirror in the anteroom. Her whole body seemed to sag in weary, dispirit
ed surrender to the glass.
She glanced at him. “You won’t forget an old friend, will you? Be sure to phone us once in a while.”
“Of course I will,” he said, knowing that he’d never even see her again because she’d always be just a terribly homely girl whose heartbreak he had once known.
“I guess it’s good-by, Al.” She smiled her crooked little smile and opened the door.
He stepped across the room quickly. “Wait a minute.” He took her hand and closed the door and pulled her close.
“Al,” she said breathlessly. For a fleeting moment, her eyes searched his face eagerly, and then she drew back bewildered at what she saw there.
“Give us a kiss, honey, come on.” He put a hand on her shoulder and his arm around her waist. “I’ve always wanted to—”
“Please, Al.” She was backing into the corner, her face pale and frightened. “Al.”
“Come on, Hilda. Stay here. You don’t have to go yet. We’re all alone.” He grappled with her, and her handbag dropped to the floor. “One little kiss, come on.”
“Leave … me … alone!” She tore at his chest and twisted in his arms, but he was too strong for her, and he had her backed into the corner and her head grasped tightly in his hands and he could feel her whole body recoil as he pressed his lips hard on hers.
“Don’t!” she choked. With a sudden surge of desperation she broke away and snatched up her bag, but he was moving toward her again.
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