Die a Little Page 7

  He looks at me suddenly. “You’ve met her?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t picture that, angel.” He hands me his cigarette. “Well, what do you know?”

  I take a quick drag and hand it back. “What do you mean, ‘B-girl’?”

  “Oh, what the hell do I know?” he says, shrugging handsomely. “I even had her name wrong.”

  “Didn’t you think it was strange that Alice would know a . . . someone you’d call a B-girl?”

  He looks at me, eyes dancing, revealing nothing. Then, he opens his mouth, pauses, and says, plain as that, “No.”

  Suddenly, it is commencement, and then begins a long, rich summer with no classes to teach and lately so much to occupy evenings. I see Mike Standish once or twice a week, but there are also the parties those in Bill and Alice’s neighborhood circle hold, and especially Alice herself. These parties always include me, the married couples eager to invite a young single to play with, to engineer setups for, to pepper with questions, reminisce about being young and unattached, an entire life path still unwritten.

  As for me, suddenly the world is so much larger than it had been before.

  There are gin-drizzled evenings with a few neighbor couples, some of the other teachers and their spouses, a few of Bill’s friends from work, along with their wives, everyone laughing and touching arms and elbows, and the bar cart creaking around the room and no kids yet, or the few there are, safely tucked away in gum-snapping babysitters’ arms.

  Almost every week there is one, usually on Saturday evening. They are cocktail parties, rarely dinner parties, yet they can stretch long into the dinner hour, sometimes beyond. Once in a while, arguments flare up, typically between couples, at times between Bill’s friends from the D.A.’s office.

  Sometimes there is intrigue spiraling out, whispered conversations by guests slipping into dens or rec rooms, the far corners of the darkened lawns, out by the hibiscus bushes beside the carport, on beds soft with piles of coats.

  At first, I go to these parties with Archie Temple, the geology teacher, or Fred Cantor, the salesman, or some setup, usually an awkward one, given the high energy and heavy drinking of these parties.

  But when I start seeing Mike Standish more frequently, he comes along, and then we go out afterward, to Romanoff’s or even Ciro’s.

  At all of these parties, Mike thinks everyone there is a hopeless square, except for Alice. But he likes to watch, seated amused on the sofa, sipping his Scotch and making sly comments to me.

  Sometimes, a woman flirts with him and he strings her along, winking to me, flashing his gold cuff links, his sleek watch, his slick and slippery eyes. Later, he makes fun of her Mamie Eisenhower bangs or her twitchy eye or her flat accent or her off-the-rack décolletage. And I laugh and laugh no matter who it is or what kindnesses she’s shown me. It doesn’t matter. I laugh and laugh anyway and don’t care.

  Alice sometimes dances with the dashing school drama teacher. They do Latin numbers, Cuban routines. She pulls the edge of her satin skirt to her side, tosses her head back, grins darkly, hotly, and everyone watches in admiration as he twirls her, as they twist and lean and then swing back upright and taut.

  Bill claps most loudly of all. He watches her, transfixed, and shakes his head with a smile, and when she finishes he walks over to her, puts an arm around her tiny shoulders, looks down at her and marvels, just marvels. How did it happen, he seems to be wondering, that I married this person?

  By the evening’s third trip to the bathroom, a face caught in the mirror, a smear of what you were a few hours ago. You totter, you catch a smudgy glimpse, you see an eyelash hanging a bit, lipstick bleeding over the lip line. Heel catches on back hem, hand slips on towel rack, grabbing tightly for shell pink guest towel.

  There are more than a few times Mike walks me out of the house and we end up back at his place before we head out for a nightclub or show.

  The thing about Mike is he is always ready to go back out again. He knows just how to rub a cold towel on his face and yours, how to fix you both hot coffee and dry toast, how to make a few calls, shift a few reservations, and you both, not a full hour after arriving at the Hillock Tower Apartments, find yourselves sitting straight-backed and freshly groomed in Mike’s buttercup yellow roadster.

  During the summer, during every past summer so why not this one, I go to the courthouse and have lunch with Bill a few days a week. If he is very busy, it is a quick lunch cart break, the two of us settling at his desk or in the Plaza Las Fuentes over liverwurst or a hot dog. He leans across his desk, shirtsleeves up and suspenders, and tells me as much as he can about a case he is working on. Three times out of four it seems like he is looking for someone who is likely, he says, long gone.

  When he first started, I remember always asking him if it was like in the movies, with finger men and stool pigeons and rats. He’d always laugh and say it both was and wasn’t like that, but he could never really explain. When he spoke about his job, it was usually as if he were just a man shuffling papers and making phone calls and conducting interviews across desks and through doorways. This was the way he chose to talk about it.

  These lunches seem more important now that Bill is married. They are nearly the only times I see him alone.

  Soon, however, Alice begins to have lunch with Bill too and there aren’t enough lunches to go around, given Bill’s schedule, which often means eating lunch on the job, driving around and doing his work, whatever it is that day. So, at first, Alice and I drive out together. This doesn’t last too long, however, because it feels like a big production. Alice is always perfectly outfitted, with a new hat, silk flowers on her lapel, her hair done at the salon that morning. By the time we make it to the courthouse, it is late and we draw so much attention that Bill begins to feel as though it looks too “fancy.”

  So we start visiting on alternate weeks. Sometimes, at the last minute, Bill realizes he is going to be free for a quick tuna sandwich if I can come down, and sometimes we meet at Gus’s, a diner halfway between work and home. This way, we can have our talks without trouble. We don’t need to tell Alice.

  These times remind me of how things were before, after Bill returned from the war and we moved to Pasadena together. Everything had settled beautifully. He was so busy with his police training, and I was so busy with my classes and certification training and teaching. But it worked well because we helped each other, and we knew how to unwind at the end of the long days, listening to Molle Mystery Theatre, This Is Your FBI, and Inner Sanctum on the radio, playing Scrabble, Monopoly, Chinese checkers.

  He told me some stories of overseas. He brought back a small stack of photos, and he would explain everything to me, saying, “This was Tom, he was from Virginia and he had a wife and new baby at home, he wrote letters every day,” and “This one is of me and Popeye, that’s what we called him because of the way his jaw stuck out to the side, he was from the Ozarks and he got shot in the neck by a sniper in Berlin, the first one I knew to get it.”

  He also had some souvenirs, which he kept in the top drawer of his sideboy. His army-issue pocketknife, a pewter stein, some medals and stripes, even a small, toylike pistol—a Walther PPK, he informed me, not letting me touch it—that he had been allowed to keep when he disarmed a German officer in a skirmish.

  The war had been nearly over by the time Bill made it to Europe. He was one of the last drafted, and most of his time overseas was spent in occupied Germany, supervising the rebuilding. He was shot at more than once, mostly in encounters with hostile civilians or stragglers. But he considered himself very lucky, and the experience was, he always said, fundamental to his decision to enter law enforcement. “Seeing what I saw, people driven to bad things. It made me want to . . . I don’t know how to put it, exactly. It’s just, you realize, most people wouldn’t go bad either if . . . if the really bad people, the real animals could be stopped. You stop them and you can save all the rest, Lora. You really can.”

 
So rare to hear him speak like this, to speak about himself and what he believed. He curled his fist and lightly punched his thigh with it as he sat beside me and spoke. Where did this come from, my brother feeling things so strongly, knowing things so fervently?

  When we were children, a man ran over the bicycle of the little deaf girl next door to us. The man plowed over it, and crushed it to the quick. Nancy, that was her name, was only seven and didn’t understand it at all, thought nothing could be so wretched as this. She kept crying, and Bill, who’d seen the whole thing, seen the man take the corner of the road too quickly and swerve onto the shoulder and knock it down with a crunch, became so angry that he didn’t know what to do. He kept pacing, kicking the dirt as Nancy cried and my grandmother comforted her. The next day he traded in his bicycle, only two months old, for a small girl’s bicycle to replace Nancy’s. When my grandparents and Nancy’s, and Nancy herself, crying her big blue eyes out, tried to thank him, he wouldn’t even look at them. It embarrassed him. That’s how he was.

  “I think you like Mike Standish a lot.” Alice smiles, shaking crushed coconut into the bowl.

  “Sure.” I smile back, handing her a wooden spoon.

  “I think”—she plucks two oranges from the glazed fruit bowl—“that you’re falling for him.”

  A hot jolt sails through me.

  “Don’t be silly, Alice.” I help her remove the pith, slicing the membrane from its glaring rind with a knife. “We’re just friends. We enjoy each other’s company.”

  She begins peeling the pineapple, her fingers heedlessly diving into the spikes. “It’s something else. There’s something there,” she says, her hands now sticky with the juice, and my own stinging with the orange flesh. “Something you like.”

  Something about how you are with him.

  She splashes some liqueur into the bowl. It drizzles over the sugar crystals, swirled in with the vanilla extract. Our hands are matted with pulp, with juice, with the soft skin of coconut beneath our fingernails. I turn my hand around and lick the heel, feeling the sweet sting. Why not?

  • • •

  Mike working a room, patting men on the back, running his softly used hands on the backs of women’s necks. It is clear he will go further, rise higher than some of the other men in the publicity department because he never seems too eager. And because he never has the look of a man with something to sell. He is always on the make, but only in the most general, most genial way, a way that suggests he is enjoying the ride while it lasts and shouldn’t we all, too?

  He can play tennis with the actors, go hunting with the directors, golf with the producers, make the nightclub scene with the new talent. He is always willing to put an ingenue on his arm for the premiere, or walk in with the mistress while the big shot walks with his wife.

  He can tell bawdy jokes and read racing forms. He knows the right restaurants to be at and the right times to be at them, he knows the drinks to order, the maître d’s to grease. He can tell the studio folk the best place to vacation; he has the steamer trunk company number on hand, the dealer to go to for the latest cars, the company from which to rent the yacht, the tailor to get just the right cut. He knows which lawyers to call and when, which reporters to leak to and which to throw off the scent. These are valuable things for a thirty-two-year-old climber to know. And it always helps that he is from Connecticut and went to Columbia (and nearly graduated) and has the sheen of class and breeding everyone he works for lacks.

  There is something very easy about Mike, about being with Mike, about Mike’s whole existence. He never has a wrinkle on his suit. His hair is cut once a week, though one never need know how it happens, or where or when, because it occurs in the margins between when I see him and when I see him next. I never see a restaurant check, or worry about hailing a cab, or imagine how it happens that Mike pays his bills or his rent, or his cleaning lady. All the practicalities of his life seem to go on invisibly, effortlessly.

  How does he come to own the clothes he wears so immaculately—when does he shop? When does it happen that orange juice and Coca-Cola end up in his refrigerator or the plate of perfectly arranged Kentucky pralines on his kitchen table or the Seagram’s and soda water on his bar cart? Even if his cleaning lady purchases these things, or the stores deliver them on a regular order, when does Mike place the order or sit and think about what he wants? When does he deal with the mail on the table? I’ve seen him run through it, eyes darting at the return address names, and then toss it back down. When does it all happen? Where is all the offscreen time?

  It is barely possible to imagine Mike taking a shower. Isn’t he always perfectly groomed, crisply cologne-scented, freshly shaved and ready to go? What a disappointment it would be to become truly intimate with him, to stay over past the deliciously mechanical grope on the bed after the long string of martinis and have to see the behind-the-scenes efforts that produce such a clean and cool container of a man.

  Exactly when—in what order—these things happened, the structure, is hazy, muddled. The moments pop forward, spring out suddenly, and there I am, sometime early that summer, coming by to visit with Bill, maybe go for a drive together. Instead, I find Lois, whom I haven’t seen since that day five weeks before at the Locust Arms. She is making herself at home in the bedroom, wearing a lavender feather boa, parts of which are stuck to her face. It looks as though she’s been wearing it for days, some of it still fluffy and sleek, like an excited bird, other parts knotted and fraying.

  “Lois, each time I see you . . .”

  Lois, each time I see you, I think I’ve discovered the body.

  “Fuck a duck, Lora King, I got it bad,” she slurs, then as if just noticing it, she lifts the edge of the boa and examines it. “This belonged to Loretta Young until Wednesday.”

  As her arm stretches out, I see a footpath of bruises and welts.

  “Lois.”

  “These men I know . . . they wanted to have a party. I thought it’d just be booze. Sometimes you can’t tell. One of them had eyebrows that ran together,” she says, dragging a ragged fingernail across her forehead. “He looked like out of Dick Tracy, you know?”

  “Does Alice know you’re here?” I ask, remembering what Alice said about telling Lois to stop coming around.

  “She told me to come. We ran into each other last night at this place over on Central Avenue, before my date with Big Harry.”

  “Who?”

  She taps the flaccid skin of her blue-white arm as if in response.

  I want to confront her with what is an obvious lie. I want to say, There is no way in the world you saw Alice on Central Avenue. No white woman from Pasadena would— Instead, I say, “Let me put you in a bath and get some food in you.”

  “Bath sounds good. You got any chop suey joints around this neck? I go crazy for chop suey. I think the last thing I ate was a fried bologna sandwich around two o’clock yesterday.”

  Her eyes shining like clanging marbles, she laughs as I start to peel the boa from her face.

  “Honey, you must really wonder how the hell you got messed up with me.”

  Looking in Mike Standish’s mirror at 2:00 A.M., my face, neck, shoulders still sharp pink, my legs still shaking, I see something used and dissolute and unflinching. How did this all happen so quickly?

  And it has nothing to do with him at all. It is as if this girl in the mirror has slipped down into some dark, wet place all alone and is coming up each time battle-worn but otherwise untouched.

  A late dinner at Lido’s by the Sea, all cracking seafood, clamoring jazz, squirts of lemon in the air, the clatter of dozens of docked party ships on the water, long strings of lights stretched out into nothing.

  Now, back at Mike’s apartment, he uncharacteristically down for the count, dreaming heavily, stunned into sleep after a day-into-night of cocktails and courses, a director’s wedding, a premiere, a party, and finally dinner with me.

  I decide to phone for a taxi.

  Tiptoeing
into the impeccably tailored dark green and tan tones of the living room, I sit down at the desk, on which rests only a phone, a pad of paper, and a set of fountain pens. I slide open the desk’s sole drawer to find a phone book.

  As I pull it out, I see that I have inadvertently picked up, along with the phone book, a tidy pack of playing cards. The pack falls soundlessly into the deep carpet. Reaching down, I accidentally knock the cards, and they slide out of the pocket into a near perfect cardsharp’s fan.

  I kneel on the floor. As I collect the cards wearily, a few flutter again to the carpet, flipping over from the standard navy blue pattern to their reverse sides.

  There, instead of the mere jack or diamond, I see slightly grainy, hand-tinted black-and-white photographs.

  I bite my lip and faintly recall Bill’s army buddies joking about the decks they picked up in France, where, they’d laugh, “women understand men.”

  The cards are filled with naughty open-legged shots of women, and I avert my eyes, shoving them back into the box. As I do so, however, one catches my eye.

  It is two women, wearing only garters, kneeling, hands cupping each other’s breasts. Unlike what I had seen in the flash of the other cards, these women are facing not a man just out of frame or their own plump forms. Instead, they look openly into the lens, heavily made-up eyes gazing out.

  I stare for a hard thirty seconds before realizing I am looking at Lois Slattery and my sister-in-law.

  Lois’s unmistakable crooked face.

  Alice’s brooding eyes—eyes so intense that not even the thick layer of kohl could conceal them, a virtual fingerprint.

  They are kneeling on what looks like a cheap Mexican serape.

  Their fingernails are painted dark.

  They look younger, with a little of the roundness that especially Alice now lacks.