Bodies and Souls

by John Rechy

  “I am eating,” Tessa said. She dropped the car keys, and picked them up, held them up, put them on the table beside her plate. She realized she wasn't wearing shoes. She froze. She would have to remain at the table until everyone left, except Mark; she had to whisper to Mark to bring her her shoes, which she had left— … Where?

  So spooky, Linda thought. The other day she'd actually felt a chill when she had removed her sunglasses and turned to see her standing there staring at her, just standing there barefoot. True, she was already a little nervous from the night before. She'd taken off her top, and the fucking redneck bouncer or guard or whatever he was who had wanted to ball her, dragged her out and— …

  The world has to be put back in order, the judge thought, looking at his older daughter. And that was what he had done, for her own good, and for his world. The world. Soon she would be as she had always been—highly intelligent, perhaps too sensitive and— … yes, moody; she had always been moody, but she would not be— … not be— … He was looking at the dripping silver mercury! He would have Alana move it into her bedroom. But, he realized quickly, her bedroom adjoined his, and then he would have to be aware, when he woke at night, that it was in the next room—dripping, dripping, changing from ugly shape to uglier shape. He looked at Tessa again. He had won over them!

  “Is he going to die?” Mark's words severed the judge's relentless stare on Tessa.

  “Oh!” Alana's hands shot to her temples.

  “The black man,” Mark said softly.

  “Yes!” The judge pronounced sentence again.

  “There's going to be a protest,” Mark said. “And I'm going.”

  “If you— …! He deserves to die,” the judge said.

  “We all deserve to die,” Mark said.

  “Die,” Tessa whispered. As if a shock of electricity had charged through her body, she stood up, rigid, the car keys clutched in her hand. Her eyes closed. “Die?” she screamed the question. Then her words poured out in a torrent of gasps: “I want to thank you, father, for saving me from that evil sect I was foolish enough to be seduced by, and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for hiring Dr. Phillips to find me and turn me over to Dr. Emery to depro— … deprog— … save me, and for letting me stay with him and Mrs. Emery and their other wards until my mind healed and cleared, and I want to thank you for allowing me to come back, and for the stroganoff, my favorite dish, and for giving me everything anyone would be grateful for and teaching me so that I can now recognize that I did wrong to run away to those miserable misfits, and I want to apologize for all the heartbreak I caused you and mother and for not eating this delicious meat and for shouting, Fascists, fascists! at the police who were doing their duty, and you were right, father, always right, just and merciful, and you know what is right for the family unit, and I want to say how deeply and profoundly grateful I am to— …”

  The judge was looking at her with outrage.

  Alana felt depression weigh more heavily, crush her. She felt again the beginning of tears, but there was still no moisture. Was it because her skin had been pulled too tight? she thought crazily. While she was having her face purged of loose skin, Tessa had been having her brain purged of all that— … that— … What? What had it been?

  “And I want to say that I was wrong, was wrong, was wrong, was— …” Tessa's words garbled into sounds, her eyes remained shut.

  The judge had listened to his older daughter's words as if they were those of a defendant he would grant no mercy to. “Only order allows us to endure,” he said.

  “I know that!” Tessa shouted. “Certain things cannot be allowed!” Her hands covered her closed eyes.

  Mark stood up, next to his sister; she had backed away from the table, as if in horror of it. He held her by the shoulders, shaking her gently.

  “No, Mark!” she yelled. “Let me finish!”

  He kept shaking her, pulling her hands from her eyes.

  The telephone rang. Alana Stephens grasped her napkin tightly, wringing it, choking it.

  Tessa screamed, “Father! You have saved me! from becoming one of those people! who upset the order of everything good!—and I want you to know that I know that and that I will never run away again, and that I— … that I— …” She squeezed her eyes shut, words pushed out of her clenched lips. “I you thank doctor sect perfect order run right right did what thought come back come back back— …”

  Mark shook her strongly now. “Stop, Tessa, stop!”

  Tessa opened her eyes and looked at her brother in sudden recognition, recovering. She located the car keys, which had fallen to the floor. She touched Mark's arm, briefly, as if afraid to contaminate him. “I—want—to—go—for—a—drive—in—my—new—car.” She controlled each word.

  “No,” Mark said.

  “Let her go,” the judge ordered. “She needs to be in control of herself.”

  Mark took the keys from Tessa. She looked at her hands as she walked outside to the pool. The water reflected the angled sun. Silver rivulets lit up the beautiful dining room. A shaft of light shot into the melting-mercury piece.

  Mark faced his father. “How the hell does it feel to know that in one fucking month you affirmed the death of a man and had your own daughter brainwashed just so that she couldn't think the thoughts that threaten you and your fucking family unit?”

  Linda placed her hand lightly on her father's knee. It was that, that warmth, which kept him from getting up.

  Alana Stephens looked at her son, and she felt a new sensation, a new feeling sparked by Mark's rage. No, it wasn't new, it only felt new, each time. Pride at his rage. The telephone was ringing again. Why didn't somebody answer!

  Linda withdrew her hand, to reach for her wineglass.

  Feeling the absence of the warm hand, the judge's body bolted up. He stood rigidly facing his son. “Sit down!” he commanded.

  Mark did not. He looked out the window. Tessa still stood there desolately. The shimmering reflection of the pool seemed to envelop her in an aura of unreality, as if it were pulling her into a silvery hazy limbo, sucking her in, making her disappear.

  “Sit down, Mark!”

  Mark still did not.

  Alana looked at her husband. “I want to tell you, Stephen, that two weeks ago, on the high recommendation of one of the women we regularly have dinner with, I hired Jimmy Steed, and I may have an affair with a youngman half my age—a male stripper I met at one of those clubs for women only, on one of the nights you thought I was at one of my silly classes. He may turn out to be gay, but I don't care. Stephen, you are a tyrant, a bully—a cruel, cruel man. You've destroyed me, destroyed your daughters—yes, both of them. I kept it from you that Linda was pulled out of a club they call the West-Sky, and— … Oh, yes, and you're trying to destroy our son. And I'm proud of him, proud he stood up to you, Stephen—and that he looks like me! … You've kept me a child, Stephen, a silly child at times. Stephen, you're the criminal. I know I've come to seem ridiculous to you, and even to others, and so it will amaze you to know that I really care, I really do care about injustice. But— … But I've never been taught—I've never been allowed to learn!—what really to do about it!” She looked at her son's face, she looked at Linda, she saw the judge still standing. But they were not looking at her. Hadn't they heard her words? No—because again she had not spoken them, had screamed them, again, only in her mind.

  Hilde lunged in, carrying the silver dish of stroganoff. She had heard the angered voices. But this, her impeccable creation for Sunday dinner, would restore order—that, and her reassuring presence next to the judge.

  Unaware of her, the judge's hand jerked out in anger at Mark's refusal to sit down. His hand hit the silver serving spoon. Hilde clung to it in soundless horror, but it was too late. The creamy sauce splashed hideously on the judge, smears of it dripping, extending. Her own uniform was spattered.

  Instantly Linda was dabbing with a wet napkin at her father's tie, shirt, jacket. The judge
sank into his chair.

  Alana looked out in the direction of her lavender roses. Instead, she saw her first-born daughter staring into the shimmering pool. Mark was still standing. She glanced at the judge; he seemed surrounded by the hands of his daughter and that despised woman.

  The judge looked down and saw a tiny sliver of green cornichon clinging to his white shirt. In horror he thrust it away. His eyes were pulled to the dripping mercury piece. Like excrement, he thought, like silver excrement.

  Delicately, Alana Stephens brought her wineglass to her lips. She sipped from it as calmly as she could. And, Stephen—she added to the litany of loss she would never speak aloud—you aren't even capable of seeing the beauty—the rare, rare, exquisite beauty—of the lavender roses I've created.

  Lost Angels: 6

  Once it was Grauman's Chinese Theater—a Chino-Deco palace with gold-gilded curled edges like pagodas, Oriental-suited ushers, fountains gushing painted water, tiles shaping exotic birds. Premieres of annihilating tawdriness were held here. Searchlights carved a white cone into the astonished night. Within its circumference, dazzling film stars waved at the bleachers filled with shaggy, dreamless faces. Once, during the premiere of a film starring the great Norma Desmond—herself later pushed by scandal into madness—a child named Adore was trampled to death while fans surged, not in adulation at the stars but in empty rage against each other's drabness.

  Now a vast corporation has converted the famous theater into a triplex, its once proudly gaudy facade violated by harsh jutting extensions to accommodate two more theaters. Lines of people tangle confusedly along with constant bands of tourists identifying hand- and footprints, with carved signatures, in the cement blocks of its outdoor foyer, a courtyard boasting the imprint of more than 160 stars—a tradition begun, it is said, when Norma Talmadge stepped accidentally into a rectangle of fresh cement.

  “Gene Tierney!” Lisa gasped. She bent reverently to touch the outline of the star's hands. “Can you believe Gene Tierney actually bent down here and did this?” She placed her hands, exactly, on the grainy indentations. She hummed the tune from Laura. But the memory of what she'd driven away yesterday—what the star, or the character she had played, had done in Leave Her to Heaven—had been pursuing her since she had begun to mention it in the park, reminded of the star by the poisonous oleanders in another film. “She threw herself down the stairs and killed her unborn baby?” She tried to obliterate the nagging memory by thrusting it out.

  Orin who was reading a newspaper he had just bought from one of the metallic and plastic racks lining the streets of Hollywood, raised his eyes. He touched Lisa, just barely, on the hand.

  “You're always talking about dead babies,” Jesse James said. He was trying to contain his burgeoning excitement at the prints. He was looking for James Cagney's. Had to be here. Maybe his block of cement would be dated the year he was in White Heat—but what year was it?

  Lisa thought of Pearl Chavez, left in the closed heat of the indigo Cadillac. She tried to remember the name of the character Gene Tierney played in the film, but she couldn't now—overwhelmed by so many sensations; so she called her by its title. “Leave-her-to-heaven also scattered her beloved father's ashes to the four winds while she rode on a horse.” She tried to offer that in defense of her. The unsettling memory of Ellen Berent—Ellen Berent, that was her name!—making herself up carefully in order to look beautiful when they found her, and then throwing herself down the steps to kill the child inside her, was not assuaged by her narration of the ash-scattering scene. And then she realized why—really why—Leave-her-to-heaven had killed her baby. She loved her husband so much, so much—remember?—and he was the same actor who left Forever-Amber and took away her child—and no matter what he said, he couldn't have loved Leave-her-to-heaven—the way he took up with her sister, that mealymouth! “Ellen loved him so much,” she said aloud, satisfied with her discovery of Ellen's justifying wound, “and it was him who was so mean! … Lana Turner!” she sighed. “She sacrificed so much for her daughter, like Joan Crawford.” She caught herself addressing the milling tourists, who listened to her attentively. She walked away, joining Jesse.

  “I found Bogart, Robinson—but I can't find Cagney!” He was becoming anxious.

  “Well, you certainly know a lot about the old stars, for such young people,” a fat happy woman said to Lisa and Jesse. The woman was with her husband. When she spoke, her flesh jiggled in a jolly way; and she had a way of breathing twice, a normal breath then a short one.

  Lisa explained: “Oh, I saw all the great stars—in a theater which was going broke until the owner decided to show only the all-time greats; two each night; sometimes three, on weekends,” she collected the cherished memories.

  Orin leafed anxiously through the pages of the newspaper, his eyes raking the columns of each page.

  The elated woman said, “Well, it is certainly very nice to see young people interested in real culture.”

  “Those were the happiest times in my life,” Lisa said. “Until now.” She touched Orin, lightly the way he had touched her, and then Jesse. “I saw Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Jennifer Jones, beautiful, beautiful Hedy Lamarr, Lana Turner, Rita Hay worth, Vivien Leigh—you know, that is how you pronounce her name—Gene Tierney— …” She paused. “And Marilyn Monroe. When she died, they all died; that's when the all-times ended.”

  “James Cagney!” Jesse placed his booted feet to the side of the star's prints, straddling them, his stance wider than Cagney's. “Come and get me, coppers!” he mimed. It still didn't sound like Cody's last line.

  “Well, aren't they remarkable, for such young people?—so much respect for the past,” the woman said to her husband.

  The man agreed; he was staring at Lisa's body.

  Orin threw away the first section of the newspaper. Its leaves opened and sailed into the wind.

  “I would have been a movie star for sure if it would have stayed the way it used to be. But it's all changed.” The two strange movies they had seen the night Orin chose them haunted her—but not like the “all-times,” she told herself, not at all like that.

  “Well, you certainly should be congratulated for seeing that,” the woman said joyfully. She was about to move away with her husband, and then she turned back. “Well, now, haven't I seen you three before somewhere?” She pondered for a moment: “Well, I'm sure it was at one of the other many beautiful sights in this city!” she enthused. “Well, good-bye, Lord love you!” They moved away, along the petrified prints of dead stars.

  As Lisa, Jesse, and Orin walked farther along Hollywood Boulevard, they passed the inheritors of the street, the scraggly bands of dispossessed drifters and exiles, the banished young and old, but mostly young—like the tattered lurking souls of the faded stars, whose names—contained in the tarnished copper stars in the sidewalks—they walked on, dishonored tribute to buried glory.

  They sat on Sunset Boulevard in a real railroad car converted into a hamburger restaurant. Across from it, rose a beautiful Art Deco building with stone maidens mounted on layered pedestals; but it was all peeling; renovating machines surrounded it, giant tubes, hoses, wires buried into it like implements for critical transfusions.

  Orin shoved the newspaper away. He'd been moody since this morning, although once again he had paid the day's rent by himself. It did not alarm them—too much—this time when they woke to find him gone. “What you looking for in the paper?” Jesse tried to sound casual.

  As if in answer, Orin said, “We'll go to the park this afternoon!” Instantly his spirits seemed to rise.

  Jesse's thoughts bunched; he sorted them out. Did Orin see something—someone—in the park yesterday, when those kids scared everyone with their firecrackers? He remembered the area Orin had stared at, first through the telescope, later while everybody scurried. It had looked like a jungle—a forest and a jungle. When they heard the shots, everyone had thought it was that escaped veteran who— … The veteran! The veteran the new
s kept talking about, reporting sightings everywhere. Was it possible he was there? And Orin saw— …? Jesse's thoughts jumped: Would there be a reward? Would they be heroes? His smirched past—would it matter then? But whose side would Cody Jerrett be on! "That escaped veteran.” That's all Jesse said, and he said it aloud.

  “Oh, you!” Lisa teased Jesse. “You and those movies!”

  “You should talk,” Jesse threw at her. She had made his suspicions and deductions seem stupid to himself; she had also kept him from seeing Orin's reaction. But what was there to see when— …?

  “He's in the park; I saw him,” Orin said.

  “Saw him!” Jesse blurted out.

  “I even— …” Orin stopped. He seemed to study them.

  “Jesse!” Lisa reprimanded. “You actually believe everything Orin says; he's teasing you, can't you see that little-boy smile just about to burst on his face?” There was a beautiful aimless-ness in their life—a loose continuity disturbed only by the possible ghost of an old woman, and the distant presence of Sister Woman's glassy image. Orin's and Jesse's words had hinted of pulling in another invisible presence.

  Jesse did not see Orin's face break into the little-boy smile, but Lisa's words accusing him of gullibility stung, badly. “Shit,” he said—a word Orin didn't like. “It's not so, that I believe everything.” Cody didn't. Cody distrusted people, learned to—the hard way. “If I— …”

  “Awright, kid.” Orin actually did an imitation of Jesse imitating Cagney!

  All three laughed uncontrollably.

  Orin paid for their food.

  Outside, the wind pushed.

  The song on the country and Western station proclaimed the power of devotion; they drove down Franklin Boulevard in the commanding Cadillac. Everywhere, someone looked at it, pointed, admired.

  This spell of unseasonal heat was breaking records, the news interlude on the station announced as Lisa looked out at the lush vegetation.

  Confused, flowers that grow only in deepest summer were pushing out in despair in this time of heat, blooming lushly before the usual cool weather of this month returned to kill them.