The Camera Always Lies

by Hugh Hood

  There was certainly a sexual aspect to the machines—whether sadistic or masochistic, or more probably both, she wasn’t equipped to say. In a recessed compartment elsewhere on this floor there lurked an affair of rollers, surrealistic in conception, straight out of Kafka’s penal colony, which was actually quite hurtful, and dangerous if misapplied. Rose had used it only twice. It marked her sides, Seth complained, and she gave it up.

  She decided to have a go at her stomach muscles, even though they were in better shape than the rest of her, firm and rock-ribbed. She lay across the rotating spindles, gripped the handles, and gave herself to the machine’s caress. It hurt slightly, there was no denying. She had eaten a piece of Melba toast and drunk some skim milk after leaving Madame Sylvie, and there could be no question of her stomach’s being overfull for this exercise. There was nothing in it; there almost never was. Nevertheless she felt slightly sore across the lower abdomen, as though faintly nauseated or bilious. She associated this feeling with sleeping pills and tranquilizers, suspecting that they deranged her normal body chemistry; but what could she do? She had to get some sleep somehow. She wondered how long it would be before she could get off the pills; they always left that taste in the mouth. Her doctor swore that they couldn’t possibly leave a taste in the mouth, but she knew they did, and then there was this faint abdominal distress.

  I should just lie awake, she thought. But when she tried this, it was awful. She lay sweating and tossing until dawn, and finally dozed for half an hour to jump awake, aware that sleep was impossible for another day. Stretched across the barrel, thinking of real sound sleep, she almost drowsed when all at once she felt a terribly painful pinch on her belly. It went through her like a knife wound, and she cried out loudly. She let go of the handles and was thrown forward on her face on the other side of the machine.

  She rolled onto her side and began to cry helplessly, feeling babyish. Her stomach hurt badly. She plucked at her leotard, but as it was all in one piece she couldn’t find the wound. She sat up with her legs askew and went on crying.

  One of the girls in attendance rushed up and yelled, “Did you hurt yourself, Miss Leclair?” Rose felt the united stare of a hundred eyes converge on her. Round pale blobs, the faces seemed, curious and unsympathetic.

  “The barrel pinched me,” she sniffied, “and it hurt like hell.” The attendant helped her up. “You ought to warn people about them; they bite,” she said, and went to the lavatory to examine her stomach. She stood in one of the cubicles and rolled her leotard down till she found the mark, an angry red welt an inch wide and four inches long. The machine had caught her with one hell of a pinch, just where the spindles moved in under the outer cylinder. Her flesh throbbed sadly, making her feel like giving way to helpless tears again. She stuck her arms back in the armholes of her leotard, shrugged the material into place, came out and stood in front of the mirror, looking despondently at herself.

  She wished that the convention about the man calling the girl didn’t inhibit her. She wanted more than anything to telephone Jean-Pierre. He was still in the city trying to arrange a distribution agreement for his films, and he had been awfully nice to her the night of the party and afterwards. He’d called the house several times, and taken her out for dinner. Despite her evident willingness to be agreeable, and despite their mutual attraction, there had been some constraint.

  “It sounds ridiculous,” he would say, “but I respect the marriage tie.”

  “Oh, so do I.”

  “It makes me uncomfortable to entertain somebody else’s wife.”

  “Even if he’s left her?”

  “Even then. The whole thing needs thinking out.”

  “Then think about it.”

  “I do. I am.”

  Perhaps his thought processes were very deliberate. He hadn’t reached any liberating conclusions, at least not yet, though she kept hoping that the phone would ring. God knows, she thought, I haven’t gone from one marriage to the next. She had been married only once, for fifteen years, to Seth. I haven’t been promiscuous. We were the idols of the fan magazines, the proof that happy marriages are made in Hollywood. But what do I do for an encore? She was glad that she hadn’t said or done anything undignified; she had filed for her decree just as asked, had been a real little gentleman.

  She had been widely quoted as saying, “If that’s what Seth wants, I hope he gets it.” When she had given the press that quote, she had been deliberately ambiguous, had implied right along that Charity Ryan could only be the requital of vice, not of virtue, that in getting her Seth would be getting exactly what he deserved; she’d been widely misunderstood.

  Fifteen years with Sir Grishkin, she thought, that’s what he turned out to be, just a dirty boy from the Upper West Side, not a knight in shining armour, and anyway I wasn’t looking for armour, just justice. She felt that the divorce was somehow her fault, but she couldn’t see how. What did I do? What didn’t I do? What was missing inside me?

  She looked sorrowfully at herself in the mirror, without the narcissism usually present in this act: fifteen years older, ten pounds heavier, lined. In her pictures she was still cast as a girl in her mid-twenties, but soon this would have to stop. “The woman of thirty” had been Madame Sylvie’s expression, and surely there was room in society for such people.

  She wet a hand towel, passed it over her face and around her eye sockets, and felt refreshed. Two women came into the lavatory, eyed her curiously, and whispered to each other, forgetting that she could observe them in the mirror.

  Bzzzz . . . bzzzz . . . bzzzz . . .

  Never offend a fan, she thought, and turned and smiled at them as warmly as she could.

  “Aren’t you Rose Leclair?” She could feel trailing behind this question some qualifying remark like “recently divorced from Seth Lincoln.” He was more important than she, Number Two last year, Number One the year before, always in the top five.

  “Yes,” she said.

  One of the women said, “I enjoyed Sailor Take Warning so much. You all seemed to be having such a good time.”

  “That Seth Lincoln,” sighed the other, but her companion nudged her and she shut up.

  “I haven’t seen Mr. Lincoln for quite some time,” said Rose, “but I’m sure he’d want to know that you liked the picture. Thank you very much for mentioning it.”

  They seemed surprised at her cordiality so she added something. “It’s always encouraging to hear what people think, you know. Making movies is solitary work; well, not exactly solitary, but isolated. You don’t know who you’re talking to, not like the stage.”

  “Have you been on the stage?”

  “No, I had no training for the stage. I was a model in California before I went into pictures, and I picked up what I know as I went along.”

  “Is the stage harder?”

  “Yes, I think so, but movies aren’t easy. What you need more than anything else in the movies is patience.”

  The two women said, “Patience?” together, looking at each other. They thought that this wasn’t very glamourous.

  “You never believe that you’ll actually finish the film. You have to wait and stop and try again, and go on trying. Very dull, just like trying to keep your figure.” She put her hands under her back hair, gave the heavy mass a toss, shook her head, smiled at the women, and went out on the floor to try again. She was scheduled for half an hour on a stationary bike, and so she walked to a row of them, almost all in use, and looked at the line of sweating, puffing women with detachment. An attendant went by and Rose asked, “Does this really do any good?”

  “I have no idea,” said the girl negligently.

  Feeling pleased to hear a truthful statement, Rose climbed on the nearest free bicycle and began to pedal, slowly and easily at first, and then with a more insistent rhythm. It wasn’t like a real bicycle: no resistance from the road. It was like ridi
ng a bicycle on the moon, or in some planet where the force of gravity was distinctly less than on earth. A good way to lose weight, she thought, move to Mars.

  Around Bristol, Connecticut, as a child, she had owned a bicycle on which she had nearly got herself killed plenty of times on Route 6, riding over to New Britain or even as far as Hartford. Her bike hadn’t been in the European style with thin tires and ten-speed gears, but a jazzy American model with fat, hard-to-push balloon tires, red paint, and much chrome. Her father, manager and part owner of a package store, and doing pretty well, had given it to her for her ninth birthday, and he had had to pull a few strings because at that time, during the war, bycles had been getting scarce.

  “If you can’t be a lawyer or a doctor, the liquor business isn’t bad at all,” he used to say when one of his more or less doubtful connections did him a favour. The Connecticut package stores were not the property of criminal interests but were not wholly detached from them. Mr. Leclair could remember, or said he could remember—her father had had a romantic imagination—when the highways between New York and Boston and Montreal had been crowded with armed convoys of illicit booze, traveling by night, under the ambiguous obscurity of a series of police payoffs.

  “Liquor money,” Mr. Leclair would sigh, “I can remember when even beer was against the law.” He seemed in some way to yearn after those more colourful years. She was always aware of a radical insecurity in her father; he often spoke of his wish to be entirely respectable. “I didn’t finish high school because of the Depression,” he would say, “so I don’t have a trade or profession. All I have is my connections in the business. Make friends, Rose, and be respectable.”

  Yet he had allowed her to enter a beauty contest and cross the country alone to look for work in California when she was still in her late teens, a gesture of irresponsibility, or perhaps magnanimity, which she had never clearly understood.

  “Maurice, you’re crazy. She’ll get into trouble, she’ll meet hustlers,” her mother said.

  “Rose is a good girl,” he answered, placidly, truthfully, and she had never forgotten that; she had gone on being a good girl in all the senses that lie within personal volition. She had been a faithful wife, if a dull one, had stayed out of the gossip columns until recently, and those recent appearances had not been her choice. It’s a good thing he’s dead, she thought, pedaling furiously, he would have been disappointed. He hadn’t liked Seth at all.

  “It isn’t that he’s a New York Jew, that I don’t care about. They’re good family men. But you should have got married in church. You’re a Catholic, aren’t you?” This shocked her. He was no churchgoer himself. “I’d like to have seen you married from church. I guess it doesn’t really matter.” He had died the next year, and her mother, a nondescript and colourlessly pretty woman, now lived quite happily with a sister in Providence.

  If her father had not had some vaguely discreditable associates in the liquor business, she’d have had to wait till after the war for her bicycle, when she’d have been a bit old for such a gift. It was one of the things she had in common with Peggi, early and independent bicycling, but Peggi had had to steal rides in the depressed back streets of Wheeling—her father had been chronically broke, a stationary migrant worker—he’d have been a migrant worker if he had taken any jobs, but he liked Wheeling and staying in one place, and refused to migrate.

  “I never stole bicycles, just rides,” Peggi said defensively, when they discussed their upbringing, “and I was only ever in night court the once.” That had been on account of a semi-orgy at midnight in a gas station, but her sentence had been suspended. Peggi had turned out all right, better than all right, because she had somehow learned to hang on to her dough, and she got parts, not too many, not great, but regular parts, and as long as Rose was in the business Peggi would get supporting parts in her pictures. She was a pretty, plump, good-natured woman who looked stupid, so that she was often cast as a brainless party girl. This vacuity of countenance had kept her from star parts, and from anyone’s taking her seriously who didn’t know her well. She knew how to be silent, and how to conceal her opinions behind a flow of dumb-blonde chatter. She saved her money. Nobody since Rose’s father had been a better friend to her, and like her father, Peggi had an unconcealed dislike of Seth. Years ago, oh, years and years before there was any question of a rift, she had said something.

  “I’m not knocking your husband, sweetie, but would you ask him to stop touching me?”

  “Touching you?”

  “Yeah, patting, pinching, nothing very sexy, he just treats me like a suitcase or something. I don’t know, he handles me.”

  “Seth does?”

  “You’ve only got one husband.”

  “He doesn’t pat me.”

  “Maybe he’s afraid of you. Forget I mentioned it.”

  “Yes.” She hadn’t forgotten it, but after years of observation had decided that Peggi had imagined it. Of course she had not imagined it.

  She took her feet off the pedals and let them spin. “Coasting,” she said to nobody, “just coasting.” Her thighs were aching; she decided that she’d had enough. There was still an hour in Goulmoujian’s gym to be gotten through, a peculiarly noxious series of calisthenics designed to diminish her rear end and consisting mostly of contortions requiring her to lie on her stomach, grasp her ankles, and rock back and forth with her belly acting as a bearing. It was a taxing regime to which she did not look forward. With a sigh she gave up her bike and her sisterly place in line and went to the dressing room. For an hour she must rock on her belly, and tomorrow she would be stiff. No recourse!

  . . . stiff . . . stiff . . . she lay in bed that Saturday morning with soft, lovely end-of-April light flickering through the curtains on her still face, stiff dry skin, aching eyes. Somewhere below Macha was operating the vacuum cleaner; the noise groaned and clanged in her eardrums like a dentist’s drill. She had that sore, almost feverish, feeling that comes of overexertion, and she didn’t want to get out of bed. She hadn’t slept.

  One good sleep, one good long rest, that’s what I need, she thought, eyeing the phone beside her bed and the other bed beyond it. I should move both beds out of here and get a nice big single with lots of room for me and none for anybody else. The vacuum cleaner shrieked; her eyes hurt; another day to get through. Bottles in the glove compartment. Sun in her eyes.

  She left her bed unwillingly and went to the big double window, threw back the doors, and looked down onto East-Sixty-first Street. Though it was close to ten o’clock there were few people along the block. They had bought the house in 1959, when their earnings were very high, and to maintain such a house, she now saw, required enormous earnings. It was costing her too much and she would have to do something about it, perhaps lease it to somebody who was really rich. She couldn’t afford to live in it. She couldn’t afford to live, period. But she didn’t want to leave this white elephant to her poor mother, who wouldn’t know what to do with it, and wouldn’t get the right price.

  Seth, she thought, Seth wanted a house in the city, and she was the one who was left to maintain it. She envied Peggi, who had some sense about real estate. She owned none, always leased, and let the landlord take the lumps. She had a two-and-a-half-room apartment on Bank Street near Hudson; there was no upkeep, she did her own dusting. When she was on the Coast she stayed in apartment courts, good but not extravagant, while Seth and Rose, bigger personalities, had to run an establishment on a grand scale wherever they went. “With all my worldly goods,” she thought, “I devise and bequeath all whereof I die possessed,” and then she saw that she’d telescoped phrases from the marriage service and the standard form of testament.

  She decided to give Peggi a call, but the phone rang and rang and Peggi didn’t answer. She had mentioned some weekend engagement. A personal appearance, a television interview, a Connecticut holiday? At the other end of the line the phone rang ra
ng rang, No answer. Rose imagined the instrument sounding and echoing in Peggi’s immaculate apartment, with the shades drawn and each loved possession in its proper place.

  “I’m a clown, it’s true,” Peggi would say, “but I’m a neat clown. You don’t see me leaving my stockings in the bathroom.”

  She was a strange woman, with a natural talent for self-control and contentment. They had met ten years ago on the set of a romantic comedy called Next December in which Rose had played a teen-ager of awesome and even slightly disgusting innocence, adrift in New York at Christmas. Peggi had had the second female lead, a none-too-bright clerk in a department store who takes in the bewildered waif. The dialogue in that picture had been radically banal, and the two young women had amused themselves for years by quoting key lines from Next December whenever they felt tired or depressed.

  “Golly socks,” Rose would say, batting her eyes, “this store is just like a whole world, I bet you.”

  “That’s right, little chum,” Peggi would answer with a straight face, “and there’s good and bad in it too, like everywhere else.”

  “Will you watch out for me, Casey?” That was Rose’s next line. For some reason a lot of the characters Peggi played had names of indeterminate sex, “Casey” or “Doc,” intended to suggest a camaraderie outside of serious sexual relationship.

  “You can be sure of that, honey,” Peggi would laugh. “The Joan Blondell part,” she would say, half angry. “I’m the one who wasn’t Joan Blondell.”

  “You’re complaining? I’m the one who wasn’t June Allyson. Isn’t that awful?” At least they could laugh about it.

  “What made me mad about Next December,” Peggi always said, “was the way everybody assumed that I was ten years older than you.” In fact she was four or five years younger than Rose, but their physical types made accurate literal casting impossible. “I mean, you’re older than me. And yet . . .”