by Alison Lurie
“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” Katherine said, as Bobi paused for breath. She tried to disengage her arm. “Miss ... Green ... isn’t ... here,” she repeated, speaking each work slowly and distinctly. “She probably won’t be back until quite late. I’m sure she won’t be able to see you today.”
“She hasta see me today.” Bobi Brentwood’s face, under the chalk-pink make-up, trembled between tears and determination. “She owes it to me. This is my big chance.”
“But it’s already late,” Katherine said, getting her arm free. “Nearly supper time. Miss Green may not be home for a long while. You might be waiting here all night. Now why don’t you go on home?” She would catch cold, too, Katherine thought, in those flimsy clothes, as soon as it got dark.
“Why don’t you mind your own business?” Bobi retorted, clumsily sarcastic. Turning her back on Katherine, she sat down deliberately on the top step and rested her chin on her fists, as if prepared to wait forever.
Katherine wondered if she ought to go back in and tell Glory that her house was still besieged. But that would look awfully suspicious to Bobi, and it would only upset Glory—if she answered the door at all, now. She would do better to hurry home and call from there.
So she made her way around the potential star, who sat gazing out in front of her—as oblivious now of Katherine as if she had dropped into a hole in the hillside—and down the steps to her car. She put the box of fan mail on the front seat (what if all these people, too, were suddenly to appear at Glory’s gate?) and turned to get in. As she did so, she noticed the star’s feet and legs, now on a level with her head. Bobi Brentwood wore cheap white patent-leather sandals smudged with dirt, and her feet (the toe-nails thickly painted violet) were badly soiled and bruised; one knee was scraped raw as if she had fallen. Katherine realized that in this huge diffuse city where no one went anywhere on foot, Bobi must have walked at least three steep miles uphill from Sunset Strip, possibly all the way from wherever she lived, to Glory’s house. And that would have been a long way, for Los Angeles is stratified socially as well as geographically, from the slums in the center of the valley where the smog is thickest to the pools and palaces on the hill-tops.
“Say, let me give you a lift home,” she called up. “Where do you live?”
No response. Then draggingly: “Huh?”
“I said, I’ll give you a ride home, if you like.”
“No, thanks.” Bobi gave her a cold, miserable look, completely void of trust. “I’m staying here.”
“Well, all right.” Katherine started to get into the car, then stopped. Though surprised at the way in which she was becoming involved in Glory’s world, she tried once more. “Oh, come on,” she said. “You can see Miss Green some other time.”
Bobi looked down from the top step, and tossed back her bird’s-nest of hair with a movie heroine’s gesture of scorn.
“Ah, why don’t you beat it?” she said. “I wouldn’t ride in a cheap heap like that if it was the last car in California.”
21
PAUL DROVE ACROSS LOS ANGELES under a sky for once swept clear of smog by the desert winds that occasionally, at this time of the year, blow over the mountains towards the sea. The city shimmered in the dry, warm air, every detail sharp, but all colors bleached out by the intensity of the light, like a mirage.
But if it were a mirage, he thought, it wasn’t the harmless decorative sort, but one of those false visions that hover just above the horizon of the desert, luring travelers on to exhaustion and despair. Only now he knew what was behind the mirage. Yesterday at Nutting he had made a final effort to get back one of the copies of his history of the company. Even if it were never published, the MS. would be something to show when he got back East; besides, he had written the book, and he wanted it. At the end of the afternoon, greatly exasperated, he went into Fred Skinner’s office to complain that whenever he asked for a copy of his own work, everyone in the place became vague and obstructive.
“Yeah,” Skinner replied. “I heard something about it. You sure did some goddamn fancy research for that book, didn’t you? You got everything into it.”
The implication was false. In fact, as Paul told Skinner, he had handled the classified material with extreme care, taking precautions not to give away any trade or government secrets. Most of what he had found out with such difficulty had to do with the early history of the company, anyhow, not with current military research.
“Boy, you found out too much.” Skinner gave his sardonic ape’s grin. “I heard you even got the name Pike from somewhere.”
“Pike? Oh, Nelson Pike. He was in on the first incorporation. I think he was the assistant treasurer.”
“Yeah, well, he was also one of the defense witnesses for Dave Hume, along with his glamourpuss wife. The papers were talking about a perjury charge before he left the state. They don’t mention that name around here now. And I heard that’s not the only thing. All that stuff about financing, union problems, what happened to the Kinsman Corporation back in ’56 when it tried to muscle in—I mean, shit, you should of known better, expecting them to print that.”
Stunned, Paul had only been able to say that Nutting itself had done nothing illegal, and that, after all, everything in the history had in fact happened. Skinner sighed, then frowned. He stood up, leaned against his desk, and spoke slowly, as if explaining something to a dull child.
“Look at it this way; what good can it do them to put out that kind of info? And it can sure do a hell of a lot of harm, to publicize the fact one of the guys started this company had those kind of associations, for example. They’d be out of their mind to publish a thing like that. Hell, anyhow, what does it matter? It’s all in the past.”
Olympic Boulevard, along which Paul was now driving, rose up between the two sections of the Twentieth Century Fox lot, where oil derricks and the plaster-and-lath towers of disused movie sets showed fleetingly above the trees. Ahead, Los Angeles was visible from Beverly Hills all the way to the pale violet mountains, looking like a set itself, or even a painted backdrop, in the flat light.
It was a beautiful landscape, in its way, but inhuman, like some artist’s vision of the future for the cover of Galaxy Science Fiction. People looked out of place here: they seemed much too small for the roads and buildings, and by contrast rather scrappily constructed, all small awkward limbs and shreds of cloth. However, very few people were visible. The automobiles outnumbered them ten to one. Paul imagined a tale in which it would be gradually revealed that these automobiles were the real inhabitants of the city, a secret master race, which only kept human beings for its own greater convenience, or as pets. ... Of course, if one of the humans were to realize the true state of things, it would give him limitless freedom and opportunity.
Freedom and opportunity; he smiled ironically. It was his old dream about Los Angeles, which he had given up, but still half believed. It wasn’t even his own; it had come to him straight out of American history: “Go West, Young Man.” Some time after he got here he had lost sight of his original stated intention, of visiting southern California as a detached historian. He had begun to play childishly with the fantasy of becoming a corporation executive here, or an intellectual beatnik, or—most naive and stupid of all—both at the same time.
So Mar Vista (that is, N.R.D.C.) had let him down; and Venice had let him down—though of course, from their points of view, he had let them down. Anyhow, he was disgusted with both places.
Still, Paul thought now, with Los Angeles spread out before him in the sun, that was no reason to condemn a whole city. Maybe it had been his own mistake, starting at the wrong end down in the shabby seaside towns and industrial waste areas—as if one were to go to Boston and visit only Revere Beach and Somerville.
“Well, he was making up for that now. He was on his way, this Saturday afternoon, to swim in a movie executive’s private pool in the plushest part of Beverly Hills. He wouldn’t see the owner, who was away, but (even better) he
was going to meet the movie actress to whom he had lent the pool—and for whom Katherine, of all people, was now working. That was Los Angeles for you—a place where you find a shy New England girl like his wife and a Hollywood starlet in the same pool.
Paul had turned off the freeway now, and as he drew nearer to his goal the houses grew larger, the lawns wider and greener, and the underground sprinklers rose into higher fountains, as if heralding his coming. In Los Angeles, water equalled money. He had noticed this before, driving past the dry, barren yards of the slums near the Nutting Corporation—and down in Venice Beach, where the taps in Ceci’s kitchen often gave only a brownish, brackish trickle, and no one could afford to water anything larger than a potted plant.
Across Wilshire Boulevard, and through the Beverly Hills shopping district. Now Paul drove along wide streets lined with palms and flowers, richly bathed in artificial rain, and the houses had swelled to castles—but castles reminiscent of the cottages on his street, in that each one was built in a different style. Here the grounds, too, had been made to conform to the owners’ whims, so that the Louisiana plantation house was hung with limp wisteria and climbing roses, while the Oriental temple next door had a Japanese garden and a monkey-puzzle tree.
The movie executive’s castle, when he located it, was glaringly Colonial—white, with gables, shutters, wrought iron, and a comic weathervane, behind an expanse of lush green lawn. A pink Thunderbird convertible stood in the driveway. Paul parked around the next corner, ashamed to leave his soiled, shabby Ford next to that vulgar beauty. It was the color that made it vulgar, mainly, he thought as he walked back; the lines were good, and everyone said the engineering was superb. With a car like that, you could count on getting service anywhere, too, not like with one of these foreign jobs. The idea occurred to Paul that he might buy a T-Bird. He would have to look into that.
Following Katherine’s directions, he went down a path at one side of the house, and pushed open a gate in the wall. He saw an expanse of sunlit white tile, a profusion of tropical flowers: purple bougainvillea, camellias, orange trees, tall lilies. The pool was all he could have wished: immense, oyster-shaped, deeply blue, and surrounded by white iron-and-glass furniture.
“Hello?” he called.
A girl in a pink fringed rubber bathing-cap, swimming at the far end of the pool, waved, swam towards him, and climbed out by the ladder.
“Hi ... Paul? I’m Glory. Happy to meet you. Your wife isn’t here: she asked me to tell you she had to go up to the university. She said she has a lot of scientific work to do for my husband.” Glory smiled, and spoke, sourly. Paul, taking this as an expression of scorn for science on Saturday afternoon, smiled back. “Yeah,” she went on. “So she said she’ll be here around five, if you could wait for her, okay?”
“Sure, okay,” Paul said, somewhat bemused. He had expected Glory to be good-looking, for Katherine had shown him some publicity photos, but had not expected to be much stirred by her. He did not like the chorus-girl type, as a rule. But Glory’s low, breathy voice, and the intense, melting way she had of looking up into his eyes as she spoke (automatic for her with all men, but he did not know this) took him by surprise. Then there was her incredible figure, and above all, the fantastic bathing suit she was wearing. Made of tight pink jersey, with a high neck and long sleeves, it was full of coin-shaped holes, ranging in size from ten to fifty cents. Not only were parts of her arms and back exposed, but random samples of her stomach, and a good deal of one breast. Particularly disturbing were some holes in the lower rear section of the bathing suit, through which that area of Glory gently bulged.
“You want to go in?”
“Oh yeah, sure.” Paul jerked himself into intellectual alertness, and became aware that Glory was smiling at him almost ironically, if chorus girls were capable of irony.
“Okay, you can change in the pool house; it’s open. Over here. ... The, uh, washroom’s in there.” Glory led Paul around the far end of the pool and opened a screen door. Then, turning her attention off as completely as if she had flicked a light switch (the silent kind), she walked away to the diving-board and did a neat jackknife dive into the water.
Paul looked after her, blinked, and went in. The interior of the pool house was expensively disguised as the deck of a yacht. A wooden railing trimmed with brass and life-preservers ran round the room, and above it the walls were painted in a lush Technicolor style to imitate ocean views, with fluffy white clouds, soaring gulls, and tropical islands on the horizon.
It was to be expected, he thought, beginning to change his clothes. Among the thousands of pretty girls in California who wanted to be in the movies, one would have to have something pretty special to succeed. But even if Glory were, as was likely, completely insensitive, stupid, and vulgar-minded, he now felt he had to make an impression on her, make her notice him. After all, he was more than just Katherine’s husband, another New England mouse.
The bathroom, in the cabin of the imaginary yacht, was nautically decorated. A glance at himself in one of the mirrors trimmed with rope and flags was somewhat reassuring: he didn’t look so bad, though pale for southern California. The blue plaid cotton bathing suit was pretty depressing, though. On an impulse, he took down one of two fancy yachting caps that hung on the pegs of a steering wheel, and placed it jauntily on his head. Then, carrying his towel, and whistling to show unconcern, he went out.
Glory was floating on her back at the far end of the pool; her eyes seemed to be shut.
“Is it cold?” Paul called. She did not reply. Perhaps she had not heard him; he repeated the question.
“Huh?” Glory opened her eyes, rolled over, and swam a few strokes nearer.
“I said, is it cold,” he repeated, now feeling stupid.
“So-so.” Glory raised her eyes to the hat, but made no comment.
Paul’s impulse was to test the water with his foot, but that would seem sissy. Trying to regain ground, he threw his towel towards a deck-chair and leapt on to the diving-board, testing its spring. But the hat. He snatched it off and sailed it towards the chair; what a fool he would really have looked, diving in with it on.
He was, luckily, an excellent diver, and his jackknife was as good as or better than Glory’s. Bubbles blew past him as he plunged down into an element much warmer than he had expected, clear and soft. He surfaced, feeling better, and shook the water out of his face.
“Great!” he exclaimed, and struck out for the other end of the pool in a fast splashing crawl. After nearly a year of struggling with the steep, treacherously churning ocean surf, he had forgotten what it was like to swim in a block of tamed fresh water, in which all the movement was one’s own—where one could float, dive, skim on one’s back under the sun or shoot down through blue-green depths as clear as Jell-O. He did all these things; he played with the passive water, sweeping it aside as he swam into shallow waves and kicking it up in fans of white spray; so delighted with the game that for a few moments he forgot where he was and in what company. Then, rising after a surface dive, he noticed Glory watching him from where she floated at the pool’s edge.
“Great,” he said again, but less spontaneously. “It’s just fine.” Glory smiled faintly.
It was certainly funny, he thought, that he should find himself alone in a pool in Beverly Hills with a movie starlet. From what Katherine had said, he had assumed there would be a crowd, or at least a large group, present. “Hey,” he said, swimming over. “Listen. Where is everybody?”
“They’re out of town. Baby, I mean Mr. Petersen, he’s the fellow that owns this joint, uh—home. He and his wife flew to Europe; he’s looking for some Scandinavian types for a new film.”
“Oh.” Paul hung on to the edge of the pool near Glory. The warm, soft water lapped between them like a live element.
“Yeah, he’s in Finland now, testing the Finland girls.”
“That must be hard work.”
Glory smiled, but only briefly, saying nothing. She rest
ed her elbows behind her on the white-tiled gutter, throwing her breasts into even greater prominence. Her lovely white, bare legs floated up through the chlorine-green water, only a few feet from Paul’s. He swallowed, and sought a topic of conversation.
“Katherine’s been telling me about this crazy kid that’s been giving you so much trouble. ... This teenager that’s been persecuting you,” he elaborated.
“Yeah.” A dark look came over Glory’s face. “Persecuting is right.”
“That’s too bad.” So angry was her expression that he wondered if she were angry with him for mentioning the topic.
“You want to hear the latest? Now I’ve got the kid’s mother after me.”
“Her mother? What does she want?”
“I d’know, the same thing I guess: wants me to get the kid a movie contract. What an asshole idea! I couldn’t get my best friend a movie contract, but that’s what they all think.” As Glory spoke her voice altered: the hesitation and over-refined accent was wiped off its surface, leaving only an angry, throaty whisper. “I didn’t see her; she only got me on the phone this one time; she started screaming and carrying on crazy, so I hung up. ... I mean it was too damn much. Christ knows how she got my private number: some dumb bastard at the studio must of given it out. Anyhow, the way it is now, I don’t dare pick up my own goddam phone when it rings.”
“Hell, that’s tough.”
“You’re telling me.”
“Being practically driven out of your own house that way.” Paul appreciated Glory’s misfortunes; they made her seem more human, more approachable. He swam slightly nearer.
“Aw well, if it had to happen, it could’ve happened at a worse time.” She shrugged and splashed water on her shoulders to prevent sunburn, though this part of the pool was mostly in shadow.
“How’s that?”
Glory explained that there wasn’t much percentage in her staying home weekends when she couldn’t use her pool. Though Katherine had already mentioned this, Paul listened with expressions of surprise and concern. That was very interesting, he said. It reminded him of a piece on the geology of Los Angeles he had read, which maintained that due to a fault in the rock structure, one section of the Santa Monica mountain range was gradually disintegrating. As he spoke, Glory’s deep brown eyes, ringed with water-proof lashes, widened in concern.
