The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  “I don’t know anything,” she said. “Shit, I quit high school in the second year.”

  “School’s got nothing to do with intelligence, only with learning. And you said ‘shit’ to make me think you’re vulgar. Listen, I could show you some speeches in Shakespeare that would make even your ears burn.”

  He brought some tests over to the apartment, and Lindy found out to her delight and surprise that she really was pretty smart—a lot smarter than she had expected, anyway. “I’d like to get you a reading on the Stanford-Binet IQ test,” he told her once, “but it’s so damned expensive. I’m certain your IQ is up around a hundred-twenty, maybe a hundred-thirty.”

  “Is that good?” she asked.

  “Mine is a hundred-forty-three,” he said with a smile. “The average guy is around a hundred.”

  So for the first time in a while, Lindy was excited about her prospects for the future, and for the first time in her life she began to see the need for education.

  “I don’t blame you for being bored with all that crap they throw at you in high school,” he told her one night as they lay in Eddie Dorkin’s bed, “but when you get to night school you’ll see that it’s all cut down to the bone. They teach you what you have to know for that piece of paper, and that’s that. You can handle it. When that bored feeling hits you in the gut, just say to yourself, “I’m doing this for me!”

  Of course Lindy wanted to plan for a career right away. But Quentin said, “Don’t think about things like that yet. You won’t finish college for about five years, and things will be different then than they are now. And anyway, education’s not just a way to get a job, it’s an education. You learn to know.”

  This concept puzzled her, but Quentin seemed dead certain about it, and she was sure Quentin knew everything. He even knew what was the matter with Eddie.

  According to Quentin, Eddie was suffering from world-pain. “He’ll get over it. It’s just that every once in a while a man sees through the facades of life, the shields we deliberately put up to keep from going crazy. It’s happened to me a couple of times. Suddenly you realize that all around you people are starving, dying, being beaten, deprived of love, tortured, torn to pieces by insanity, all the horrors of the world. Then you see that it’s all useless as well as horrible, because at the end of the road there’s nothing at all. Just death. Get an image in your mind of a drunken father beating a child bloody because the child wet his bed or something. The kid doesn’t know what’s going on except he’s fucked up again and Daddy’s half killing him, and the poor father beats and crushes his child in a futile effort to ease the pain and terrors in his own heart, and of course it doesn’t work, it just adds to the pile of guilt; and then remember that in a few years, a pitiful few years, both will be dead and gone, and all that pain and misery and sorrow was for nothing, got nobody anywhere, just perpetuated itself generation after generation without meaning or function.”

  “Jesus, you’re a gloomy bastard,” Lindy told him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But that’s probably what’s eating your friend Eddie. Really, though, it’s you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you’re the only beauty in his life, aren’t you? Really? And he knows you don’t love him.”

  “How would he know that?” Lindy asked, feeling a twist of guilt in her stomach.

  “Come on, don’t lie to yourself. You know and he knows. People can’t live together without knowing. Eddie feels useless, that’s all. Locked up in solitary for the rest of his days, and so what? It’s a hell of a feeling.”

  “Well, I hope I never feel that way.”

  “Baby, as much as I love you and want to protect you, you’re going to feel that way some day. Everybody with half a brain does.”

  “Maybe not,” she said.

  But Eddie wasn’t their big problem as lovers; in fact he was a convenience, gone most of the month and leaving them his apartment to conduct their affair in, even supporting Lindy while it lasted, just so long as he did not find out what was going on. Lindy was surprised at herself for not feeling guilty about this, but she reasoned that she actually loved Quentin, she could not help herself, he made her dizzy when she thought about him, and she did not love Eddie and she knew he didn’t really love her, and so he got what he paid for, a pretty thing to fuck and show around. No, the big problem for them was Eleanor. But even that smoothed out as soon as Quentin explained things.

  Quentin taught on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, with student conferences scheduled all day Thursday, so he was free on Tuesdays and weekends, and he spent all or as much of that time as possible with Lindy, and yet continued to see Eleanor two nights a week. He told Lindy, “You have to understand that my feelings toward Eleanor are different from the way I feel about you. You make me sick with love sometimes, and sometimes I hate you; but Eleanor is like a wife and a sister all in one; I love her too, but in a tender sort of way. You know, your mother’s never had much in her life. I couldn’t hurt her. I wouldn’t hurt her for anything.” They were naked in bed and it was morning, the setting for many of their long conversations.

  “It would kill me if she found out about us,” Lindy said.

  “Of course it would, and it should. But she’ll never find out because we’ll never tell her, and we’ll never do anything indiscreet that would let her know.”

  “But God, I feel awful about taking you away from her. It’s so unfair.”

  “Don’t worry about that. You didn’t take me away from her at all. I’m still with her, for one thing. For another, I’m really beginning to think that my love for both of you is actually one thing—that you’re both part of the same idea, so to speak. Do you know what I mean? To me, you’re one woman.”

  “But we’re not,” Lindy said. “I feel so bad about it.”

  Quentin put one of his big soft hands on her naked shoulder. “Do you want to stop seeing me?” he asked her gently.

  “You know I don’t,” she said. “Oh God, I love you!”

  With a chuckle he pulled her toward him and they began to make love again.

  The first time Eddie Dorkin came home after Quentin and Lindy had become lovers he knew something was up, because she was simply a changed person, brighter, cooler somehow, less inclined to petulance and boredom. Eddie himself had been having a horrible time on the road, trying to break himself of barbiturates and consequently being unable to sleep at all. He had not slept in five days when he got home. He could not eat either, and so he had lost a lot of weight and he looked horrible. Horrible-looking salesmen do not do well in the medical field, and so his sales were off too. Lindy suggested that he take a couple of weeks’ vacation and check into a hospital.

  “They can fix you up,” she told him. She did not mention his problem with death and neither did he, but she did not think he was over it, and she could imagine the horror of endless nights in motel rooms with the ghost of death sitting on the bedside.

  But Eddie wanted no more sleepless nights, and went back on the pills. In a couple of days he was his old self again, and they even made love. Afterward she held him in her arms tightly until he fell asleep. His poor little body was so thin and his skin was so bad-looking she felt an almost overwhelming sorrow for him, as if Eddie actually were dying. But she was very glad when he went back out on the road and she could call Quentin at the college.

  ELEVEN

  THE FIRST thing Jody noticed was that her sister never came home anymore and had not even telephoned once since Jody had cut school and gone to visit her. Thanksgiving went past without any celebration, which was just exactly the way Jody liked it, but her mother seemed upset by the fact that they could not get hold of Lindy. “She’s probably having dinner with that boyfriend of hers,” Eleanor said, but her lips were thin and she looked almost angry. Her own boyfriend the professor from Reed College didn’t show up either, and when Jody asked about it Eleanor said that he was involved in some kind of thing with his students. That w
as fine with Jody.

  But when the Christmas vacation started and Jody still had not heard from her sister, she got worried and decided to go downtown once more and find out for herself. The apartment was messier than it had been the last time, with every ashtray filled and the kitchen smelling sour. Lindy’s skin looked bad too, scratchy and grey. Jody stayed an hour and got Lindy’s promise to at least come out Christmas Eve and relieve the boredom for Jody. The girls hugged each other at the door, something they almost never did, and Jody wondered why they had done it this time. It was almost like a farewell hug, she thought. And another thing worried her, although it really shouldn’t have: Lindy smoked Herbert Taryton cigarettes, puffing nervously halfway through the cigarette and then crushing it out, so that her ashtrays were usually filled with half-cigarettes, lipstick-stained, bent and often broken. Jody’s mother smoked Camels, taking a full puff and opening her mouth so that the smoke hung there for a moment before being sucked down her throat. When Eleanor put out her cigarettes they were usually about an inch long, and she put them out by tapping them gently until the coal was crushed. Eleanor’s boyfriend, Professor Corby, sm

  oked Lucky Strikes right down to the last fragment, and when he had been to visit the ashtrays around Jody’s house would be full of the tiny stained butts. There were butts like that in Lindy’s ashtrays too, and although Jody thought maybe that was the way men smoked and the butts belonged to Lindy’s absent boyfriend, it still created a little tickle in the back of her mind that did not go away, and did not make her like Professor Corby very much more, either.

  But she admitted to herself that she might be jealous of Quentin, or maybe jealous of her mother for having a boyfriend when Jody did not. Jody had gone to a couple of school dances in the gym, dragged along by her friend Patsy, who was very interested in boys, but by the time Jody would get to the dances she was so nervous and upset that all she could do was stand to one side and glower at everybody. When boys asked her to dance she would move out on the floor with them, put her arms up and go through the motions, sometimes not even speaking to the boy. The right ones never asked her to dance anyway, just the clods, boys who seemed all teeth and pimples. Most of them had erections when they danced with her, but Jody did not take it as a compliment, just as something else to be avoided, like hands that moved too low or cheeks that moved in too close. She assumed that most boys had erections most of the time.

  The boys Jody wanted were unreachable. They were all juniors or seniors, all fraternity boys or athletes, the “wheels” of the school, who all dressed alike and all drove cars and went out with the beauties who were in sororities. These were the boys who were in control of everything, the celebrities, who would go on to college at the University of Oregon or Oregon State, get married, have children and live in the quiet dignified houses of the wealthy districts that Jody only saw from the window of the bus. There was one boy especially, far beyond Jody, but she daydreamed about him anyway, and then laughed at herself. He was the captain of the football team, of all things, a big dark surly boy with blue jaws and small dark eyes. He was All-State and expected to make a stir when he got to college. Jody had heard, as everyone around school had, that he had been offered sixty-seven scholarships, including Stanford and Cal.

  His name was Jim Wintergreen and he was at all the dances with his steady girl. As far as Jody knew he had never looked at her and probably never would, but still she dreamed of a chance encounter, followed by a whirlwind romance, followed by Jody’s possession of his fraternity pin and letterman sweater. Jody even admitted to herself that the best part of the fantasy was when she would come into class with the pin and sweater on, everybody—even the teacher—gaping at her. She wasn’t really interested in Jim Wintergreen at all, just his loot, but he continued to serve as the focus for most of her daydreams about boys.

  Jody had by now given up on the drama department and the drama club, and was just putting in her time until she finished formulating her plans to run away to New York City and become an actress. She had spent one day in the auditorium, painting flats with the other freshman and sophomore drama kids and it had driven her crazy with boredom. For one thing, all the other drama kids talked in British accents; kidding, but kidding on the square; as far as Jody could tell. And the worst part was she did it too when she was around them. You couldn’t help yourself. And the smell of the waterpaints made her sick. Even though it was cold in the auditorium Jody sweated the whole time she was there, and was bitter about the fact that the students chosen for speaking roles were excused from working as stagehands, and were at that moment in a classroom rehearsing, having fun, while Jody sweated. She was sure that the Broadway theater did not put young actors and actresses through such paces. If you had the talent, you got the job. And Jody was sure she had the talent, even though she had never been on stage in her life, unless you counted those little kid pageants and things from grade school, and she didn’t. She knew she had the talent. She had to have it, because she wanted it so much.

  Jody did not go to movies very much, although she loved them, because she was usually so caught up in the story, the color, the glamour and the romance, that coming out of the theater she would be exhausted and spend hours wandering around depressed, fragments of the movie echoing in her mind. When she went to the school plays she would get so excited that she could hardly keep her seat, but not for the same reason. At the school plays it was frustration that agitated her, not romance or passion. She hated the kid actors for their terrible amateurishness. They had no right to get up there on stage before they knew what they were doing, and they especially had no business taking parts that Jody could have done beautifully and screwing them up so totally. But she could no more stay away from the plays than she could fly.

  Patsy Wambaugh took a different view of things. She was a slender pretty blonde girl who lived only a few blocks from Jody and whose parents were divorced. Patsy lived with her mother, who worked downtown at Meier & Franks department store, so they had that much in common. Patsy too was a member of the drama club, and shared in the painting of flats. But she was also chosen as a super, who got to wear a beautiful costume in the Shakespeare. She was on stage in two scenes, and Jody hated her for it.

  The Christmas holidays went by without incident for Jody, except that her sister did come home on Christmas Eve and sat very quietly in a corner drinking eggnog. The other guest was Quentin Corby, who entertained them with a long story about his experiences in London during the war, and left small, elegantly wrapped presents for all of them when he went home to spend the rest of the evening with his son. Jody’s opinion that Quentin was a bizarre and dangerous person was reinforced when she opened her package to find a really thick sterling silver identification bracelet that must have weighed at least half a pound and was just exactly what Jody had wanted with such a passion that she had not even mentioned it to anyone. It was as if he had reached into her mind to discover her most secret desires. He had even had the good sense not to have the thing engraved. Jody jiggled it in the palm of her hand, loving its weight, and watched her sister open her package. It was a gold Dunhill cigarette lighter, really classy, but Lindy did not seem as delighted as she might have, and it was only the next morning that Jody wondered why he was giving such an expensive gift to a person he barely knew. The present for Eleanor was a pair of identification bracelets, both gold, one for the ankle and one for the wrist, and when Jody examined them she saw engraved on the wrist bracelet “Eleanor” on one side and “Quentin” on the other. The anklet was engraved “E” and “Q,” and her mother seemed pleased with them. Possibly, Jody thought, he had reached into her mind too, for an old unsatisfied secret desire.

  The holidays did not go quite so well for Lindy. Eddie chose to spend two whole weeks in Portland with her, and it was all she could do to keep him from coming over to her mother’s house with her on Christmas Eve. “Holidays drive me crazy,” he told her, and she was expected to nurse him through the season, insomni
a, dreams of death and all.

  Lindy was not sure she was up to it. She and Quentin had counted on his school holiday to give them at least three days together, but not only did Eddie decide to stay home but Quentin’s son, who was supposed to visit a friend’s family farm, decided not to go at the last minute, and so they actually saw less of each other instead of more, and Lindy was at the point now where she only felt alive when she was with Quentin.

  Either she had never been in love before or this was something larger than love. But no matter what it was, it was destroying her. It was logical and rational for her to continue living with Eddie, because after all she couldn’t exactly move back in with her mother, and she didn’t have a job and couldn’t have a place of her own, and she couldn’t ask Quentin to support her. Things were best, he told her, at status quo, and she knew him well enough now to know that he probably did not love her half as much as she loved him. But she did believe he loved her, and she did believe that he loved her mother too, and so it was hopeless. She kept telling herself that sooner or later she would fall out of love with him and everything would be okay, but for right now she was being driven slightly mad by the crossfire of hypocrisy she found herself in most of the time. Eddie needed her love and support even though they never made love together anymore, and it was all she could do to keep from screaming at him sometimes.

  And to top it off she got pregnant. There was no question about who was the father. She and Quentin had made love in a motel room out on 82nd Avenue one Tuesday afternoon during the holidays, and by that night she had known she was pregnant, although she pretended to herself for days that she was not. She had been wearing her diaphragm, but apparently it hadn’t worked this one time. When she missed her period, she locked herself in the bathroom and cried (Eddie was on the bed, reading the papers) and then made an excuse and went across to the telephone booth and called Quentin. But as soon as she heard his slightly irritated voice she knew she could not tell him, at least not yet. Quentin said hello again, and she hung up without speaking and went back to Eddie.