Die a Little Read online

  These men weren’t like the men with whom I went to the pictures: Archie Temple, the chemistry teacher, who never got further than rubbing his rough lips halfheartedly against mine, or Fred Cantor, the insurance salesman who sold Bill his policy and took me to Little Bavaria once a month or so for long, cocktail-drenched dinners. While I seldom got past the first, small glass of sweet wine, Fred could go for hours, jollily imbibing and telling stories of his combat duty in the Pacific. Not always but often there would be an awkward, searching embrace in the front seat of Fred’s burgundy Buick. A few beery kisses and Fred would get ideas, and before I knew it, he was pressing my hair against the side door window as I tried to peel away from him.

  Where were the golden boys of my high school days, the boys with sweet breath and shy smiles, with proud gaits and long lashes, the boys who sat with you for hours in the booth at the local five-and-dime just hoping for a promise, a promise to go to a dance or listen to records with you at Dutton’s Hi Fi or to share a paper plate at the church social?

  Though I knew these boys, held their sweet, damp hands in mine only a handful of years ago, they were now like sketches in a yellowed paperback, a photo album from many generations past. When we moved to Los Angeles to live near our godparents, we were only sixteen and nineteen. What we left behind remained a half-imagined reverie of half-opened adolescence, caught now forever between curiosity and harsh awakening.

  The thing about Lois . . .

  Alice’s friend Lois Slattery has a kind of crooked face, one perpetually bloodshot eye just higher than the other, and that Pan-Cake makeup you often see on what Alice calls “girls on the make.” She begins periodically appearing at Bill and Alice’s, each time without warning. Somehow, I end up, over and over again, having conversations with her. Each time thinking, Poor Lois, in a few years, she’ll have a slattern look to match her name.

  Her clothes are sometimes very expensive but never look like her own, are either too big or too small, or are well-cut and well-made but someone has stepped on the hem, or the collar has a cigarette burn on it. These flaws aren’t, as I first thought, because Lois can only afford secondhand clothing. In fact, the garments are often new, bought that day and already with splatters on the lace edging, or the heel loose. It is as simple as this: she has a complicated life and her clothes can’t help but show it. It is all part of her unique disheveled glamour.

  As it turns out, Lois is less an actress than a professional extra and a sometime dancer. She takes acting classes in West Hollywood. But most of all she seems to go out dancing and drinking with girlfriends or enlisted men or publicity men.

  She is the kind of woman whose face you try to commit to memory because you feel something might happen to her at any minute and you’ll have to remember that left dimple, the burn mark from a curling iron on her temple, the beauty mark next to her eye, the small tear in her earlobe, from an earring tugged too far.

  “I hooked up with this fella lived in Hancock Park,” Lois says out of the corner of her mouth, cigarette dancing lazily. “Had a gold telephone, that was how high-hat he was.”

  I’ve never heard a real person talk like this.

  “How long did you date?”

  “We never dated,” she says matter-of-factly, unstrapping her high heels as ashes fly from her hanging cigarette. “But he was a swell guy. He used to take me dancing and to fine parties up in the Hills, and then, very late, we’d drive over to Musso’s for an omelet and one last martini. He once introduced me to Harry Cohn, the big studio guy. Oh my, was he a real blowhard. But it ended badly. With this fella, I mean.”

  “What happened?”

  “Let’s just say”—she flings her shoes onto the floor and props her feet up on the coffee table—“he had some bad habits.”

  “Other women?”

  “Even more pressing interests, honey. I’m an open-minded gal, God knows, but even I got my limits.”

  “Do you ever run into him?”

  “Nah. He moved to Mexico last I heard. I was looking for him to get back some of my clothes and a brand-new straw hat when I ran into Joe Avalon. He was staking out his place looking to collect on some debts owed. It got pretty complicated.”

  “I didn’t know you knew him, too.” Hearing her say his name gives me a start.

  Lois punches out her cigarette and begins to apply a bright lipstick without a mirror. “Everybody knows Joe, honeybunch. Ev-erybody.”

  “Did Alice introduce you?”

  “Oh, gosh, peach, it don’t work like that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She places her palms together and twists her wrists in opposite directions in a gesture that seems as though it is supposed to mean something to me.

  “Time, Lora, works different in your world.” She twists her wrists back again.

  “To me, I’ve always known Joe Avalon. He was the number-one cherry picker on my block. He changed all our diapers, tweaked our mamas’ teats. He was the glimmer in my papa’s eye. He lived on the rooftop of every house on our block, and could slither down the chimney at night. He was, is, and always will be your four-leaf clover and dangerous as hell. He’s always been here. This town will always have guys like him, as long as it keeps going.”

  This is the longest speech Lois has ever given me. I won’t forget it.

  As we hurtle toward the end of the school year, I see less of Alice on the weekends. Her teaching and her swelling social schedule fill every minute. Still, she seems unable to stop. It is around this time that she begins suffering from what she calls her “old affliction,” migraine headaches, hissing pain so severe she feels her own skull will crush her. These headaches send her into dark rooms with cool, oscillating fans for hours, even days on end. “It’s related to my cycles,” she confides nonchalantly. “So there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  The headaches are almost daily occurrences by the time Bill’s baseball league starts up its season. She makes most of the games, putting on a brave face, but I fill in when the pain becomes too much. It helps make Bill less worried. He never wants to leave Alice alone, but she insists, setting a cramped hand on his chest and swatting him away.

  Long hours in the bleachers, hands wrapped in knitting or spread out over McCall’s, the investigators’ wives sit, and often I sit with them. Tonight, it is with the blond and blunt-nosed Edie Beauvais.

  “Lora, I’m desperate. I’ve got to get pregnant. We’ve been waiting for so long now.”

  She runs her tiny hand up and down her arm, which is flecked with goose bumps from the chilling night air. “We had this fantasy of getting pregnant on our wedding night. That’s what I expected. But now . . . I just want it so bad, Lora.”

  Edie is the young wife of Charlie Beauvais, one of Bill’s coworkers at the investigators’ office. Although he was always willing to take a coworker who’d had a hard day out for a beer, and he’d always stop in at the local tavern when an after-work gathering was under way, Bill never had many friends. Besides, most of the men in his department are either heavy drinkers or gamblers or both, or are wrapped up in the politics of the office. But Charlie has been a kind of mentor to Bill, showing him the ropes when the other men resented Bill’s quick rise, which they attributed to luck or imagined connections.

  “But you’re so young, Edie,” I say, watching the action absentmindedly, watching Charlie waving his hat, waving a player in, laughing mightily, big white teeth against his stubble-creased face. “You’ve got plenty of time.”

  “I know,” she says. “I’ve got nothing but time.” She stifles a long sigh by dipping her chin and tucking her mouth into her collarbone.

  Edie is twenty-three, Charlie’s second wife. Born in Bakersfield, she was straight out of modeling school when they met four years before. She had talked her way out of a speeding ticket, claiming a “feminine emergency.”

  “Are you going to help out at the fund-raiser again?” I ask.

  “Sure, sure,” she says, eyelashes flutter
ing, trying gamely to focus on the action. “Where’s Alice?”

  “She wasn’t feeling well,” I say.

  Edie nods vaguely, watching Charlie bounding in from the infield, removing his hat and rubbing his crew cut vigorously.

  “Looking good, honeybunch,” she coos, waving and twisting in her seat. Charlie’s face bursts out into a grin. It seems to explode over his whole rubbery face as he turns to join his teammates on the bench.

  “When are you going to get yourself one of those? A husband, I mean,” Edie asks as we watch Bill take a few practice swings.

  “So you think I’m in danger of old maid status too?”

  She turns to me with a smile. “Don’t you want to have a house and kids and nice things?”

  I look at her with her blond lashes, eyebrows penciled with delicacy, face so fresh and flat and empty, as only California faces can be. “It’s hard to find a man like Charlie, though, isn’t it?”

  “Hmmm,” Edie says, eyes roaming dreamily back to the game, to the shoving match that seems about to unfold between Bix Carr and Tom Moran, who always fought, over sports, old debts, patrol assignments, cars.

  I am supposed to say these things, the things I should want. It is what you say. I look at Edie, looking at the other tired, careless faces on the bleachers, hair tucked in curlers under scarves, bodies straining or flaccid, pregnant or waiting to be.

  We watch as Bill and Charlie separate the men, and Bill talks them down, his hand on Bix’s shoulder, Bix nodding, cooling. Tom abashed, kicking the dirt.

  “I’m going home, sugar.” Edie sighs, stumbling forlornly down the bleachers.

  I wave good-bye.

  An hour later, the game finally over, Bill wanders over. “Where’s Edie? Charlie’s looking for her.”

  “She left,” I say.

  “Oh. Really? That’s funny. Charlie—”

  Tom Moran comes running up behind Bill, slapping him mightily on the back. “Billy, where’s that gorgeous wife tonight?”

  Bill extends a hand to help me descend the bleachers. “Under the weather.”

  “Too bad. Don’t mind gazing up at her.”

  Bill looks over at him for a second, as if caught between annoyance and good humor.

  “You know.” Tom shrugs, grinning at me anxiously. “She’s different than the others. Than the other wives. Ain’t she?”

  I smile faintly, and Bill tilts his head, unsure how to respond.

  I know this isn’t the first time he’s heard these comments. I’ve seen the way they look at her. They watch her when she comes to City Hall, they watch her at the social events, they watch the way she walks, hips rolling with no suggestion of provocation but with every sense that she knows more than any of the rest. A woman like that, they seem to be thinking, a woman like that has lived.

  Their wives come from Orange County, they come from Minnesota or Dallas or St. Louis. They come from places with families, with sagging mothers and fathers with dead eyes and heavy-hanging brows. They carry their own promise of future slackness and clipped lips and demands. They have sisters, sisters with more babies, babies with sweet saliva hanging and more appliances and with husbands with better salaries and two cars and club membership. They iron in housedresses in front of the television set or by the radio, steam rising, matting their faces, as the children with the damp necks cling to them, sticky-handed. They are this. And Alice . . . and Alice . . .

  Charlie Beauvais, he once said it. Said it to Bill in my earshot. He said, Don’t worry, pal, don’t worry. It’s not that they want her. It’s just they have this feeling—and they’re off, Billy, they’re way off—but they have this sense that, somehow behind that knockout face of hers, she’s more like the women they see on the job, on patrol, on a case, in the precinct house. Women with stories as long as their rap sheets, as their dangling legs . . .

  Struggling to sleep in the guest bedroom after helping clean up the damage from a late party, I can hear Bill and Alice talking on the back porch, talking soft and close.

  “How is it that Lora hasn’t been snatched up, anyhow?”

  “What?”

  “You know. I’m just surprised she isn’t married. I mean, you could say the same about me, until I met you. It’s just that she seems the type to be married.”

  “She is the type to be married. She’ll get married.”

  “I’m sure. I just wondered why she hasn’t yet, darling. Just curious. She’s so sweet and such a warm girl, and—”

  “She was almost married once. About three years ago.”

  I am listening as if it isn’t me somehow they are speaking about, as if it were someone else entirely. I hold my breath and pretend to sink into the very walls.

  “Oh? Did you scare him off, big brother?”

  “It wasn’t like that. He was a good friend of mine. A guy who used to be on the force when I first started.”

  “Did you play matchmaker?”

  “Sort of. It just kind of happened naturally. We’d all spend time together, go to movies. He was a good guy, and it made sense.”

  His tone is shifting, from cautious to grave, and she begins to respond accordingly.

  “So what happened?”

  “They began getting serious just as he had to leave the force. TB. It was rough, but she stood by him. You know, that’s how she is.”

  “Oh, dear. Did he—”

  “No, no. He eventually had to go to a sanatorium, way up by Sacramento or something. He didn’t want her to wait for him. He was a shell of the guy he’d once been. Down to a hundred and twenty pounds. He couldn’t bring himself to continue with her. He did the right thing. He said, ‘Bill, I can’t let her tie herself to me like a sash weight,’ he said. So he broke it off.”

  “He isn’t still up there—”

  “No. They wrote to each other for a while, but it wasn’t the same. Last I heard, he married one of the nurses there and they settled. He works for an insurance company or something.”

  It really wasn’t like this, was it? Was that how simple it was, so explicable in a few sentences, a few turns of phrase? Wasn’t it months of high drama, so wrenching, so unbearably romantic that I’d conveniently forgotten that I never really cared that deeply for the amiable, square-jawed Hugh Fowler to begin with?

  It had absorbed all the emotional energies of Bill and myself for a fall and winter and an early spring, and then, suddenly, it was as though he’d never been a part of our lives at all. His second month at River Run Rest Lodge and we couldn’t remember when we’d next be able to make the long drive up the coast.

  And then other things emerged, other things that left no room, no time, no space for that sweet-faced young man who, so ill, would shudder against me despite his height, his gun holster, his still-broad (but not for long) shoulders. Was that it?

  “How very tragic,” says Alice. “Like out of a movie. It could be a movie. Poor Lora.”

  “She’ll find someone and it’ll be right,” Bill says firmly. I feel my eye twitch against the pillow. I press my hand to it, hard.

  “Well, I’m going to help.”

  “Oh, Alice, I wouldn’t—”

  “I know lots of wonderful men. Men from the studios.”

  “I don’t think Lora would want to date anyone in the movie business. That’s not Lora.”

  “Oh, brothers don’t know,” Alice says. “And I can’t bear to see her with these sad sacks from school. These men with the saggy collars and shoes like potatoes. I’m going to get her with a real sharpshooter. If you had your way . . .”

  “Alice, you don’t know Lora. She won’t—”

  “Just watch me.”

  I can hear her smile even if I don’t see it. It doesn’t seem real, that this is me they are talking about. I look out the window, at the heavy jacaranda branches trembling gently against the pane. I think, for a moment, about the men Alice seems to know and it’s hard to believe they really exist. That they could enter my life, my small world. What would it
mean if they came crashing in the same way Alice has?

  As my cheek leans against the glass, I realize suddenly how hot my face is. I press my hand to it, surprised.

  It is a long time before I fall asleep.

  • • •

  With this forewarning, I am prepared when, after one of what Alice refers to as my “sad sack” dates, she phones me and announces she is ready to play matchmaker.

  “His name is Mike Standish. Can you believe it? I call him Stand Mannish.”

  “What does he do? He’s not an actor.”

  “No, no, of course not. He’s with the publicity department. He’s delicious, Lora. He’s a huge, strapping man. He’s like a tree, a redwood. He’s a lumberjack.”

  I am always surprised by what Alice thinks might make a man sound attractive to me.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Lora, he’s very smart and accomplished. For God’s sake, he went to Col-um-bia University.”

  “He doesn’t want to date a schoolteacher in Pasadena.”

  “He wants to date you. I set it all up. He’s taking you to Perino’s and then to the Cocoanut Grove. The only question is what you should wear.”

  “When is all this supposed to happen?”

  Why not, for God’s sake. Why not.

  “One thing, Lora, one thing,” she says, and it’s almost a whisper, a voice burrowing straight into my head. “This is what he does: first thing, he warns you that he’s going to charm you, and that warning becomes part of his charm.”

  “Hey, Shanghai Lil, come over here,” my brother says, waving his arm toward Alice.

  “I think that you no love me still.” She pouts, imitation geisha, as she pads over in her brand-new Anna May Wong–style silk pajamas.