Things in Glocca Morra

by Peter Collier

  “Only a coward makes a bet he can’t lose,” she said curtly. “We must put something at risk in the things that are important to us.”

  I tried to help dig Jack out: “It wasn’t as bad in Italy as in other places?”

  “As bad?” She gave me a scalding look before relenting: “No, you are correct, I suppose. Killing people efficiently in large numbers is not in the nature of the Italian. It requires too much effort.

  “We have Jews in Rome since before Jesus Christ. In our time there seems to be not many only because most are married to Gentile people so no one really knows who are the Jews. Many of the Jews do not know themselves. I didn’t—even though people would sometimes say to me when I was growing up, ‘Moretti, this is a Jewish name, no?’”

  “Is it?” Jack asked.

  “Yes. I am always Catholic and my mother does not tell me about being part Jew—from her parents—until I am sixteen. It was not a moment of large drama. Finding this out merely seemed a little strange—like being mancina, a person of the left hand—but nothing more than that.”

  She lit another Chesterfield and gave Jack a grim look through a veil of smoke as if blaming him for the fact that she was revealing so much. “Every person is a mystery, no?”

  He nodded amiably.

  “Then why is it that you should try to solve the mystery of me within an hour of our first meeting?”

  She saw that he was wounded by the comment and immediately softened. “I told you that today was my mother’s birthday. This is why my heart is sad and I cannot be pleasant. You can understand this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps you understand too that I cherish the pain I feel because it is the only thing I have left of her.”

  He nodded again, and after a minute he looked at his watch: “It’s getting late. We should go.”

  The banquette was damp with seawater when Val stood up and Jack led her out of the restaurant, leaving me behind to pay the bill, as usual.

  A half moon hung in the night sky like a lemon wedge. Val studied it for a long while before climbing into the Zephyr.

  “Where now?” I started the engine.

  “I will direct you.” She spoke before Jack could say anything. “I’m expected somewhere. I should have been there long ago.”

  She told me to turn off the Coast Highway onto Sunset and was silent until we had passed through Beverly Hills into the center of Hollywood. There she directed me to go left on Gower and from there head up into Beachwood Canyon.

  When we got to the top of the hill and began to wind around to the Overlook, the Hollywoodland sign emerged on our right, a ghost of itself because the four thousand light bulbs that once made its fifty-foot letters visible for twenty miles had been stolen during the war. We looked at the downtown to our left, the lights glittering in the distance as we continued on to Arrowhead Drive, where Val told me to turn left.

  Midway down the cul-de-sac, she pointed at a ranch-style home at the top of a sloping lawn defined by three palm trees and said “There.”

  Fortunato was standing under a yellow porch light with a cloud of bugs circling his head while he stared out implacably at the night.

  I happened to glance in the rearview mirror just as Val slid toward Jack, put one hand on the back of his neck and nuzzled her face against his chest. He tried to grab hold of her, but she quickly retreated to the door, got out and ran toward the house.

  She stepped up onto the porch, said something to Fortunato, then tried to go around him, but he blocked her. She was still wearing Jack’s coat, and he picked up a lapel and then dropped it in a flamboyant gesture of disgust. She said something more emphatic, and he slapped her. Still defiant, she lowered a shoulder, forced her way past him and disappeared inside.

  Jack was reaching for his door handle, but I gunned the Zephyr, throwing him back against the seat as we peeled out.

  When we got back to the beach house, both of us were still caught up in the viscous aftermath of what had just happened. Jack went directly inside and sat at the kitchen table typing his notes of the interviews with Selkirk and Geist for an hour or so, while I worked at a week-old New York Times crossword. After he finished, he put “How Are Things in Glocca Morra” on the record player and stood at the bay window watching the whitecaps. Then he limped to the bathroom and began running a bath. As he stripped and lowered himself into the tub to soak his back, more painful than usual because of his exertions in the surf, I knew he was trying to figure out his next move with Valentina.

  Like all the Kennedys, he never hesitated to cast stones into the pond, and also like them, he never reckoned on how the waves they created might eventually lap on his own shores.

  Suddenly a glaring light swept around the walls of the living room; it came from the headlamps of a car turning around out front. I went to the window and saw a cab—the first of many that would come and go over the next few weeks—pull away as Val came up the walkway with Jack’s coat folded over her arm.

  “I brought it back, Billings.” She handed it to me when I opened the door. “I know the place to come from the envelope in the pocket.”

  She was vivid. Her cheeks had a hectic flush; the pigment of her dark eyes seemed to have ripened since we last saw her.

  I pointed down the hall where the door was cracked open enough to show a slice of Jack’s back in the tub. She looked at me, then shook her head slightly as if disagreeing with a caution I hadn’t given, and headed toward the bathroom, shedding her clothes as she went. Jack turned slightly when he heard her, and a look of wonder came over his face.

  “It is Val,” she said to him. “I have come to be with you.”

  Unable to force myself to look away, I saw the profile of an audacious breast as she removed her bra and then the tight rump when she slithered out of her panties, grabbed his shoulders to steady herself and stepped into the tub behind him. I could almost feel on my own skin the kiss of her pubic hair and then of the raspberry nipples traveling down his spine as she slowly lowered herself into the water, wrapped her arms around him, and rested her cheek on his back.

  SEVEN

  The next morning I woke at 6:15, just in time to see Val close the front door behind her. After hearing a cab pull away, I drifted back to sleep and didn’t get up until Jack did, around nine.

  I assumed he’d be happy that she was gone. Glad as he always was to be into a woman, he was always gladder yet to be out of her, free from the potential entanglements she signified and able to reunite with his male pack. But this morning he was filled with discontent and immediately began interrogating me.

  “What time did she leave?”

  “At dawn.”

  “Why didn’t you stop her?”

  “You mean physically restrain her?”

  “No,” he was petulant. “But you could have told her to wait for a minute and woke me up, or convinced her to stay and have breakfast or something.”

  “I assumed that she had an early morning call at the studio. Or that she wanted to get back to Fortunato before he called out the carabinieri.”

  He shot me a dirty look and stalked into the kitchen. After jamming a piece of bread into the toaster and loudly rattling the pages of the LA Times for a few minutes, he got Harry Warner’s secretary on the phone and, calling her “Toots,” sweet-talked her into giving us a pass to get on the set of Tomorrow Is Too Late. When he hung up, he snapped at me, “Come on, let’s get this show on the road!”

  Tomorrow was one of those low-budget noir films that were about to become Hollywood’s genre of the moment, as doubts about what lay ahead in the postwar world quickly undermined the euphoria of victory. It was based on a short story in the pulp magazine Black Mask by James M. Cain, whose work provided an endless supply of noir plots in the next few years, and was directed by Frank Talbert, a reliable second-stringer who was in high demand because he always brought his films in on time and under budget.

  The lead was John Payne, on loan from Fox and in th
e middle of his slow-motion transition from song-and-dance man to outcast hero. As Val later grudgingly summarized the klunky plot—“bad bolognese,” she called it—Payne played Glen Dobbs, a former LAPD detective who joins the Marines after Pearl Harbor and is badly wounded at Iwo Jima after fighting his way through the Pacific. He comes home to find that his old job has been given to someone else and that his fiancée, who works at the British consulate in Los Angeles, has not only become the mistress of the consul general, played by a wintry Adolph Menjou, but has joined his conspiracy to smuggle Japanese war criminals into Southern California, give them new identities in return for gold bullion, and help them emerge as genuine U.S. citizens by hiding them in plain sight for a time at Manzanar and other relocation centers where Japanese Americans had been interned since the beginning of the war.

  Dobbs’s cheating former lover was played by Veronica Lake, who seemed to appear in all of Talbert’s films, although Val told us that he sometimes rolled his eyes during her scenes and referred to her under his breath as “Moronica.”

  “Naturally because I am now Delphine, I play a French woman, Lily Fontaine,” Val added belligerently.

  Trapped in French Indochina when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurs, Lily makes her way to the Pacific Coast and gets a job at the British consulate. She accidentally discovers what the consul general and Lake’s character are doing, and is fired and threatened with death if she talks. Shunned and penniless, with nowhere to turn, she enters a social freefall and lands as a call girl. After Dobbs comes to her for information, Lily agrees to help his private investigations into the consul general’s scheme. Along the way, they begin a brief and doomy love affair, which ends when Lily takes a bullet intended for Dobbs.

  As Jack and I tiptoed onto the set, we were shushed histrionically by a young female production assistant. We saw Val standing in chiaroscuro lighting next to Payne at a street-corner façade. She was wearing a smart lavender suit and her lustrous black hair had been styled to look wild from exertion.

  Stage hands were dropping dry ice into huge vats to make the fog that will envelop the two characters when they try to escape the villains on their trail. It seemed to take a long time for the vapor to gain critical mass. When two giant fans started blowing it toward Val and Payne, the force made his tie flap around. Talbert yelled “Cut!” and ordered the fans turned down. But then the fog disappeared except for a few wisps scuttling over the floor.

  Val stood there in a zen of boredom, while Payne raged at the stage hands: “Come on, guys! We’re not trying to alter the nation’s weather patterns here!”

  Then he yelled at Talbert: “Why do we need fog anyhow? There isn’t any fog in LA. All we have is fucking smog! If you wanted fog you should have set the movie in San Francisco!”

  In the disruption that followed, Val saw Jack and her face came alive. She ran over to us and whispered, “Today I was forced to say the same thing nine times: ‘I don’t know about tomorrow. But I know that I love you today and that today is forever.’ To say this one time is an insult to the mind. To say it over and over because Mr. Payne can’t remember what he is supposed to say in return is idiota.”

  The stage hands were now yelling back at Payne, who continued to inflame them. Talbert finally slammed his copy of the script down on the floor, yelled “That’s it!” and stalked off the set.

  “Thanks be to the gods!” said Val. “This film does not have one true thing in it.” She headed for the exit and we followed.

  The sun hit like a death ray. With my hand as a visor, I saw that Val was once again trapped in her haughty loneliness. She and Jack looked past each other, neither of them sure if what had happened the previous night still had consequence.

  “Well, we might as well go home,” he said tentatively.

  “Home?” Val repeated the word as if she had never heard it before. She didn’t say no, but plodding to the car she was so remote that I wondered if each new encounter would feel like meeting her for the first time.

  She was silent as we retraced the previous day’s route, but smiled automatically at Jack whenever she saw that he was looking at her.

  “You smile, but you’re not happy,” he said.

  “People in this country believe that someone who is not always happy is not normal.”

  Her brooding formality terminated the discussion. I noticed that they were again sitting as far apart as possible and both were staring out their respective windows.

  After twenty minutes or so, as we were heading down through Topanga Canyon, Jack spoke. “I just thought of something.”

  Val didn’t respond, so I stepped up to the straight-man role: “What’s that?”

  “It makes absolutely no sense that sex organs should be in the middle of the body. It’s awkward and inconvenient.”

  It seemed out of character for people who didn’t know him well, but Jack sometimes said and did screwball ad-lib things—sending someone a telegram out of the blue that read, “Please disregard previous telegram,” for instance, or issuing a goofy non sequitur like this one. Close friends recognized these actions as signs that he was nervous or, more likely, bored.

  But his words caused Val to shrink deeper into her corner of the back seat. When I glanced at her face again a moment later, however, I saw a hint of sly intelligence poking up through her melancholy.

  “But where should the sex organs go, then?” she asked tentatively.

  “Hmm. Good question.” Jack pretended to ponder it. “Okay, I have it. Our sex organs should be in our feet. That’s the perfect place for them. Think of how easy it would make things. No pulling and tugging at the clothes. Just take off your shoes and socks and there you are. And think how wonderful it would be if you were wearing sandals or going barefoot.”

  “The feet.” Val looked down seriously at her own. “Perhaps this is a good thing if one is a dancer. But you can imagine the problem for a clumsy person whose feet do not perform gladly. Also, we could not help but look down at them as they were doing their work and that would cause red faces. Sex may be inconvenient now, but at least we don’t have to watch while it happens. Also, the feet become very sweaty from being inside shoes and often don’t smell good and the toenails are sometimes sharp. No, the feet cannot be the right place.”

  “Well, where do you think the sex organs should be?” Jack was grinning now, knowing he’d struck gold.

  Val pressed her index finger against her temple to indicate deep thought and then held it up as if struck by a revelation.

  “I have the answer. Our sex organs should be in our backs. Yes, our backs. There is no doubt.”

  “Now that’s an interesting idea,” Jack made a show of pondering it. “But why exactly the back?”

  Val surprised me by starting to giggle: “The back because then we would not have to put false looks of passion on our faces. We could allow the eyes to roll around in dismay while strange things were taking place in the back without worrying about offending the other person. We would also not see the looks that pass over each other’s face because of all the many little inconvenient things that happen in moments of sex—the strange sounds that are made and organs that refuse to obey commands and act as if they have their own minds. Because we were not looking at each other we would not have to ask—how to say in English?—Come stato per te? and other questions whose answers we don’t really want to hear. And if sex organs are on the back, then while they are doing their work we could also be doing other things like reading a book or having a cigarette or painting the fingernails. Or making a photo, or looking at birds. Or best of all, eating.”

  “Eating while having sex,” Jack tried to keep a straight face. “I have to admit that’s a very strong argument.”

  The two of them continued to riff on this and other subjects all the way back to Malibu, suddenly as much in synch as Abbott and Costello.

  When we arrived at the beach house, they raced for the front door like teenagers. I stayed behind, leaning back aga
inst the Zephyr’s hood to absorb its warmth for a minute before heading to the beach to watch the afternoon body surfers shooting toward the shore like torpedoes.

  When I returned an hour later, the house was filled with the meaty smell of sex. And they were not yet finished. Sitting on the couch, I could hear the squeaking mattress and the yum-yum murmurings through the walls of the bedroom. It seemed to take as long as Ravel’s Bolero, but eventually they found a culmination that left Jack audibly grinding his teeth and Val purring, “Arrivo, Gianni. Arrivo.”

  And then, after a short silence, she added thoughtfully, “E buono, Gianni. E buono.”

  They came out of the bedroom awhile later, so sated that they seemed comatose. Jack got out the bulky portable record player and put on Yip Harburg’s song for Val. She listened with a puzzled look as he sang along.

  “I have never heard such words as these before,” she said when it was over. “What is this Glocca Morra? What is Kilkerry? What actually is this woman singing about?”

  Jack explained that it was about Ireland’s neverland of dreams, which tugged especially hard at the heart because of the country’s reality of poverty and violence and blighted hope. She thought about this for a minute and then took his hand, “Yes, I understand now. A place where love can happen even when the world is against it.”

  “Something like that,” Jack said, holding her eyes with his.

  I made scrambled eggs and raisin toast. As we ate, Jack kept replaying the song, turning the volume down so that its romance could subliminally collaborate with him while he interrogated Val to keep her from leaving.

  He asked about her schooling, the neighborhoods where she’d lived in Naples and then Rome, and how she became an actress.

  “This all has to do with Jews,” she said, chewing a small forkful of egg for so long that it seemed stuck in her mouth.

  “Doesn’t everything?” Jack took a chance.

  She looked at him as if he were a naughty boy. “At first nothing happens to Jews in Italy. You know, don’t you, that Jews from all over Europe come here because it is one place Jews are not certain to be killed. For a while Mussolini ignores Hitler when he says get your Jews, just as many Italians ignore Mussolini when he makes his Manifesto on Race that says Jews cannot hire a non-Jew as a domestic, Jews cannot work in banks or put the death notice of a Jew in the newspaper. But then Mussolini falls and the Germans take over and things change.