The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  So she stood in the lobby of the Paramount, alone, watching the snow falling outside, while the ticket taker tried not to stare at her. When Eddie came up behind her and said, “Boo!,” she did not jump but only turned around, bored to death, and let him take her to dinner.

  FOUR

  LINDY DID not want to be a bitch, but Eddie made it so easy for her she could not resist. He did not love her—he did not love anybody or anything—but he worshipped her beauty and paid no attention to the sarcastic cut of her voice or the limits of her interests. He gave her a gold wristwatch on a gold chain, charge accounts at Meier & Frank and Lipman Wolfe, all the drugs she wanted, his total attention when they were together, and all he asked in return was that she accompany him up and down the coast on his selling trips. She refused. Eddie could not stand to be alone for very long and he hated the emptiness of the road life, but he could not think of a better way to make lots of money legally, and so for most of his life he drove the highways between little towns, slept in motels and salesman’s hotels, and learned the inside of every poolhall and bowling alley between Seattle and Crescent City. It would have been wonderful for him if, after a hard day jollying medical men, he could come home to the motel room and find this extravagantly beautiful eighteen-year-old girl. They could go to dinner, take in a movie perhaps, and then spend the night curled in each other’s arms. On the long drives between towns they could talk to each other, sing, make up stories or just sit quietly together and watch the countryside roll by. But Lindy was goddamned if she was going to spend her precious life hanging around motel rooms all day while he was out selling. He was incredibly lucky that she would even live in his apartment alone for the three weeks out of four he was on the road, keeping things nice, feeding the goldfish and more or less waiting for him to get back.

  The apartment was a godsend for Lindy, because it not only got her out of the tiny ramshackle house her mother and sister lived in, it gave her a place downtown where she could retreat from everybody if she wanted to. She never brought anybody there, although when she first started living with Eddie she expected to bring boyfriends to the apartment when Eddie was on the road. She did not remain anything like faithful to him, and he did not really expect her to. He never stopped asking her to come on trips with him, and she never stopped refusing. She loved her new-found privacy so much that for the first couple of days he would be gone, she might just stay home, listening to records, smoking his marijuana and lying around naked. All her life she had been surrounded by people, and this aloneness was the true luxury. She could not understand why Eddie was so intensely lonesome on the road.

  But then she failed to understand much about Eddie. It was beyond her why he allowed her to treat him like dirt when he even admitted that he was not in love with her, and did not expect her to be in love with him. People were strange.

  It was about this time that Jody cut school one day and took the big Sellwood trolley bus downtown to look for her sister. The weather had been unusually bad. Dirty snow was caked high along the streets and sidewalks, forming a thin grey sheet over the pavement, so that the bus made a cracking crunching sound along with the high whine of the overhead trolley. Jody was almost alone on the bus, with only a couple of bundled-up women on their way to town with umbrellas and shopping bags, sitting on the sideways seats up front, eyeing her with disapproval. Jody paid no attention to them. They were old. She was dressed in her cherry-red cap, checkered muffler and navy-blue coat. She had awakened early that morning and lay in bed thinking about the future. She wanted to become an actress. Lindy had told her to join the drama club and to study books about acting, but Lindy herself had never done any of these things, and for that matter had not even bothered to finish high school, although she was always telling Jody to get good grades so that she could win a scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse, or go to college locally and get a degree in acting. But Jody was halfway through her first year in high school and already bored.

  They were putting on two plays at Commercial High, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and Jody had not been given a part in either one, although she had been the first to arrive at the auditions for the Shakespeare and nearly the first for the Wilde. They told her that freshman girls did not get parts right away and that she would have to paint flats, do makeup, scrounge props and all that sort of crap before she could win a role. But Jody noticed that Carole Spatz, who was also a freshman, had been offered both Olivia in the Shakespeare and Cecily Cardew in the Wilde and had to choose between them, and Carole Spatz couldn’t act her way out of a charade, as far as Jody was concerned. But Spatz was very blonde and very beautiful, with cornflower-blue eyes and a thin clear voice and a way of walking with her pelvis thrust forward that seemed to drive the men on the teaching staff out of their minds. Jody did not actually mind that Spatz was getting good treatment because she was beautiful, she only minded that the faculty and the senior advisers were such a mealymouthed pack of hypocrites about it, and instead of telling Jody, “Listen, sister, you’re too goddamn ugly to be on the stage,” they went into that routine about apprenticeship and could not look Jody in the eye. That was the only good part.

  Anyway, lying in bed at six in the morning, needing to pee but unwilling to be the first one out of bed and have to skip across the icy floor to the heater and get it going, lying there under her quilt with only her nose sticking out, Jody gave serious thought to quitting school. Facing facts, she was not the most popular girl in Commercial, and next year when she became eligible for a private girl’s club she knew she would not be asked to join (along with eighty percent of the girls in school) and therefore any possible social career was blasted. Jody did not care about it except that if she had been popular she probably would not be thinking of quitting. Jody envied the popular girls because they seemed to lead trouble-free lives and always had plenty of cashmere sweaters and boyfriends. Not that Jody cared about boyfriends. Even though she was nearly fifteen she had not yet started bleeding, and she assumed that she would get interested in boys after the bleeding started. Her older sister certainly had.

  But there were more reasons for quitting. Jody was not good in class. She had gotten a four in algebra, threes in PE, English and biology, and a five in art—probably the only five the art teacher had ever given out, so actually it was something to be proud of. Jody not only did not turn in any assignments, she created so much disturbance in her corner of the classroom that several other students’ grades slipped, and Jody was sent to the vice-principal’s office three times. She could not help it if she had a good sense of humor and made people laugh. Lots of things struck her funny, that was all, and the teacher, Mr. Sanders, tried to run the art class on an open free-form basis, letting the kids sit where they wanted and carry on conversations.

  She was getting off to a bad start, there was no question about it. The vice-principal gave her plenty of excuses, telling her that it was difficult for a girl to move around as much as Jody had and have any friends in the class, and all that, but Jody did not need excuses for doing bad work, and she did not need a bunch of chums from grade school to support her morale. What she wanted was an even break in the drama club, and that seemed impossible. In fact, the only happy moment she had had in the drama club came after the meeting to announce the casting and crew assignments for Earnest, when she stupified the drama teacher, Mr. Quince, by the fact that she had read My Life in Art, by Stanislavsky.

  Mr. Quince was a tall heavy apple-cheeked man whose sandy hair stood straight up.

  “You’ve read Stanislavsky?” he said to her. She could tell he could not remember her name.

  “Yes,” she said. “Most of it.”

  “And, tell me, what did you think of it?”

  Jody let that one pass. “I was fascinated,” she said, and the center of attention drifted away. But at least now Quince knew the monkey-faced freshman girl he was not giving parts to was no ignoramus.

  As far
as Stanislavsky was concerned she could not see what all the fuss was about. It was perfectly natural to Jody that if you were going to be a good actress you would have to actually believe you were the person you were playing, and that seemed to be the message. She had read a lot of books about acting and the theater, and the one thing she really wanted to know—how do you get them to pick you?—was never discussed. So the books were pretty useless after all.

  Of course Jody knew one way to get picked: be the picker. Choose a play and talk a bunch of kids into putting it on, with you as director. But if you were the director and you picked yourself for the juicy parts, you would be exactly the kind of phony Jody disliked the most, so that was out too.

  The Sellwood bus was almost half full by the time it crossed the Willamette River, and with the people came the muggy smells of wet wool and suddenly perspiring bodies.

  It was actually hot inside the bus, because nobody would open a window and let in a nice cool blast of frozen air. Jody snickered to herself, wondering what the people behind her on the bus would do if she worked open her window. But she didn’t bother. Instead she leaned her cheek against the icy glass of the window, which magically cooled the rest of her.

  Jody got off the bus at Fifth and Stark, all the way down in the midst of the big buildings. Down here too the streets were caked with ice, and cars went by, silent except for the thumming sounds of their motors, which echoed off the buildings eerily. Jody walked up to Broadway and caught a streetcar up the hill. There was a drugstore at the corner of Broadway and Yamhill that Lindy was supposed to hang around in, but standing outside with her hands in her coat pockets, Jody could see the row of stools along the counter empty except for a blond boy hunched over a cup of coffee. Jody was instantly depressed. For some reason she had allowed herself to think that Lindy would actually be in the drugstore. She had believed this from the moment she decided to cut school and come downtown. She entered the store, feeling the billowing warmth gratefully, and made her way through the crowded aisles to the counter, where she sat down four stools away from the blond boy. He looked up at her when she sat and then went back to his coffee, obviously uninterested. That was all right with Jody; he had thin lips and pimples around his mouth. But it was possible, he was about the right age, he might know Lindy.

  A drab-looking woman of about twenty in a starched uniform that reminded Jody of her mother came over to her and said, “You have to go.”

  Jody was instantly embarrassed and could feel her face heating up, which always made her lose her temper. “Why?” she asked. She stood up, still looking at the waitress.

  “They been rousting this place for kids during school hours,” the waitress said. She smiled, and Jody saw a row of crooked teeth. She turned and left the drugstore, wondering where she would go and what she would do. She had eighty cents. She could go to a cheap movie later on, but for now it was only ten o’clock in the morning. She stood on the corner, the weight of empty time heavy on her. The only other place she could think of that her sister had mentioned was the Rialto poolhall, and Jody did not even know where it was. Anyway, she would have been afraid to go in. Maybe her father would be there; he hung around the poolhalls. But she definitely did not want to see her father. Lindy had told her about running into him a couple of times, once at the Rialto and once at Jolly Joan’s, the all-night restaurant down Broadway. The time at the Rialto had been all right, Burt had been sober and playing snooker with a regular group of men, and he nodded and winked at his daughter and otherwise left her alone, but at Jolly Joan’s it had been different, late at night and Burt drunk and with a woman (described by Lindy only as “an old hag”), which must have embarrassed Burt, because he came over to the booth where Lindy was sitting with a couple of friends and tried to get chummy, leaning over so that everybody could smell his rotten breath and telling Lindy how glad he was to see her and wanting to be introduced to her friends, while his own companion sat alone in her booth across the way, as embarrassed as Lindy and showing it. “I felt sorry for her,” Lindy said, “and I finally had to tell Daddy to go away.” Burt stopped what he was saying, straightened up, turned, and went to his own booth, and throughout his coffee and pie did not even look over toward Lindy, or speak to the woman he was with. That had been the last time any of them had seen him, a few months back.

  As Jody drifted down Broadway, looking in store windows and theater display windows, she eventually came to Jolly Joan’s. The place was packed with coffeebreakers, and Jody wondered if she would be thrown out if she went in, decided it was cold enough to risk it and went in anyway, and the first person she saw was her sister, seated at the curved counter by herself, drinking coffee and reading a newspaper. There was an empty stool next to Lindy and Jody took it.

  “Do you think they’ll throw me out?” she asked, and Lindy looked over at her with the irritated keep-off expression Jody knew so well, then did a double-take, or at least looked surprised, at seeing Jody’s grinning monkey face.

  FIVE

  THE TWO sisters spent a happy day together. First they went up to Eddie Dorkin’s apartment, which Jody was surprised to see was not as big as their house in Sellwood and even gloomier, with two windows looking out on the park blocks and the bedroom windows overlooking a light shaft. The furniture was massive and obviously came with the apartment, and the kitchen was only an alcove, now filled with dirty dishes and garbage bulging up out of a dark green metal wastebasket. Lindy said, “Oh Christ, I have to do those goddamn dishes one of these days,” and Jody said, “I’ll help. We could do them right now,” and Lindy laughed and said, “I’ll wait till Eddie gets back. Then he’ll flip his lid and I’ll look hurt and he’ll do the dishes.” But later she said Eddie wasn’t due back for over a week, and so Jody wondered what her sister would eat from. Maybe that was why she was down at Jolly Joan’s for breakfast. It would be fantastic, she thought, to eat all your meals in restaurants and never have to do another dish.

  But the reason Lindy brought Jody back to the apartment was to show her all her clothes, and to see if there was anything that fitted Jody. They spent a good hour playing with the clothes, and Jody ended up one cardigan cashmere richer, a forest-green sweater that Lindy said didn’t go with any of her other things. “I don’t wear sweaters much anymore,” she said, and then, still hanging things up, continued: “How’s school? Do you like it?”

  “It’s a pain in the ass,” Jody said. She sat down on the bed and explained to her sister in a not too roundabout way that she was thinking of quitting. By now the thought that she might be able to stay here in the apartment with Lindy had occurred to her, but Lindy was quick to insist that Jody finish school. “Listen,” she said seriously, “you have to keep going, even if it makes you sick. It’s all you have.”

  “You’re doing okay without it.”

  “I am not. And besides, don’t use me as your example. I don’t want you living your life the way I live mine. God forbid, honey.”

  “What’s the matter with your life? You spend half the day telling me how nice things are.”

  “That’s me, not you. We’re a lot more different than you think.”

  “You mean because you’re beautiful?”

  Lindy laughed. “That’s right. You’re going to drive men crazy, but nobody’s ever going to call you beautiful.”

  Jody wanted to hear more about how she was going to drive men crazy, skinny and ugly as she was, but Lindy went on with the lecture about how Jody should stick to her studies and ignore the example set by herself. Jody was not bored or impatient only because it was Lindy giving the lecture.

  Afterward they had lunch at the Pig ’n Whistle and then they went to a movie. In the break between the first and second features, Lindy said, “Don’t you think you should call Momma and tell her where you are?” Jody squirmed around in her seat and looked up at the gigantic chandelier and the acres of gold leaf on the ceiling of the movie palace. “She’s at work by now,” she said.

  “But
she still calls home doesn’t she? You could call her at work.”

  “She’s got a new boyfriend,” Jody said.

  “Who, Momma?”

  “Yeah. They go out and stay out until three or four in the morning. I hear Momma coming in sometimes.”

  “Who is he? What’s he like?”

  “He’s nice. Bald as an egg, practically. I don’t much like him, but he doesn’t try to be buddies with me, which helps. He’s about fifty I guess, a slob. You know.”

  “Has he got any gold?” Lindy wanted to know. “Maybe Momma can get out of the rut. She really blew it with the guy who owned the used car lot.”

  “I don’t think so. He drives around in a little old black car. It’s no Cadillac. And he dresses like a slob. I think he’s a college teacher.”

  “Oh shit,” Lindy said. “I wonder what he looks like.”

  Jody felt she had already answered that question, so she changed the subject, but when the news came on, Lindy got up and telephoned Eleanor at the supermarket. When she came back and sat down the cartoon was on. She leaned over and whispered to Jody, “I’m going to take you home. We’ll have dinner with Momma.”

  Jody was glad. She had not been looking forward to the long bus ride alone.

  Lindy was very fond of her little sister, although she did not hold out too much hope for her future. Jody just did not seem the type who would get anywhere. She was not really ugly, Lindy thought, but her face had just too much animality in it, reminding Lindy of a picture she had seen in Life magazine, little Italian children wearing hand-me-down rags and smoking cigarettes. They looked so old. It had been all right for Jody to imitate her big sister’s ambitions and want to become an actress when she was little, but she was now entering into her teenage years, and it was time to get serious. Lindy felt that if Jody applied herself she could probably get office work of some type, which would put her in a good position to meet men of the right social level—not the kind of pukes and hustlers who hung around downtown nor the rich boys that go to college, but office workers, one of whom would marry Jody and provide her with a house to have babies in.