by Paul Monette
She knew she must have tried a pizza. Everyone had them all the time. But she honestly couldn’t recall. She had no associations, to this or anything else, since the moment she started down the back side of the mountains. As she walked in now to a place that traded in nothing but, she shied at the blinding light reflecting off a dozen cuts of plastic. She’d figured on taking a hint from the people in line in front of her, but she saw she was quite alone. She tried to read a snatch of menu, painted in red on the upper wall, but the yellow-wigged woman in the turquoise smock did not appear to countenance indecision. Vivien stepped up to the counter.
“Pizza,” she said succinctly, the one word coming off her tongue like a minor breakthrough.
“Suits me fine,” said the waitress, giving a friendly crack of her gum by way of punctuation. She pulled a pencil out of her hair. “How do you like it?”
How will I know till I taste it? thought Vivien puckishly. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Surprise me.”
“Combination Florentine,” retorted the other, writing it down. “I wouldn’t warn you, honey, except you look so pretty in that red scarf—that’s with the anchovy. Makes some people gag. You want me to hold it?”
“No, no,” she said. The anchovy struck her as comforting.
“To drink?”
“Just coffee.”
The scarf in question was, in fact, the color of highly polished saddle leather—russet, perhaps, with perhaps a touch of the tile roofs of Siena. In any case, it would have given Pucci hives to hear that it was red. Yet Vivien couldn’t help but like this woman. The garish air about her hadn’t got her down. The country cheer that she gave off was tied up with an urban case of irony.
“I’m Kay, I’m here to help you” was how the Tower of Pizza put it, on her plastic pizza badge.
When was the last time someone told Vivien she looked pretty? The press was always quick to tick off what she wore, but the point they were usually trying to make was that no one deserved a change of clothes for every day of the year. The people she knew wouldn’t dream of liking a scarf out loud. It would have been unseemly, somehow, now that she was sainted in the Best-Dressed Hall of Fame. Of course it was a pretty scarf. Didn’t that go without saying?
She strolled about the room, uncertain how to pass the time. She supposed it would be unmannerly to watch Kay work from too close up, though she dearly would have loved to see a pizza made from scratch. She loitered at the jukebox long enough to read the listings, but made no move to play. She had no flair for plucking the theme of her present mood from the ranks of the top forty. Still less could she summon up the English for a proper go at pinball. Thus, she made her way around the room, rejecting all machines.
At last she reached the raft of attractions clustered around the register. Devon mints and Jersey City taffy. A rack of postcards variously depicting all the Southland’s flash points, Griffith Park to Disneyland. Whistles and jars of preserves and dry cigars. But what caught her eye was the newspaper stand. Especially an inky rag called Hollywood Midnite, splashed with a foot-high picture of herself. She sat there weeping, head in hand, and the headline, sixty-point or better, shouted out: I LOST MY HUSBAND TO A HUNDRED MEN!
It had to be a trick. When had she ever cried on camera? Her hair hadn’t been that straight in years, and the fur that wrapped her shoulders looked like housing insulation. God, she thought as she squinted close, where am I?
It came to her in a rush. This was the summer of her debut. Nineteen and totally out of it—here, at a ball in San Mateo, where someone had filled the living room with topiary shrubs. Well, she thought, at least there was visible proof that she could cry.
They took a line close to the bone, these scandal weeklies. The implication was that she let a man walk all over her. She’d ended up alone in bed, surrounded by an overload of things a normal person did without. Was any further proof required of what a rich girl came to? It seemed so oddly Puritan a view. But then, she probably wasn’t the one to ask, considering she was the moral of the story.
She’d been staring back at herself for as long as she could remember. At a newsstand sometimes, she felt as if she were in a hall of mirrors. And the more she saw, the more it made no sense to her. Wasn’t she dull? The whole thing should have petered out for want of real material. This part of her life they took pictures of was the dreary part. She wondered if she didn’t affect her famous vacant smile to prove to the world there was nothing there.
But even nothing was news, if she was in it. Hollywood Midnite and its ilk were always prepared to say that she had cancer. They swore she broke up this one’s marriage and aborted that one’s child—both in a single week, sometimes. Clearly, it was easier to make it up than tie it to what she was doing in fact. Oh, well, she thought, with no more urge than usual to turn to page three for the gory details. They certainly had the goods on Steepside now. Perhaps, after all, they were smart to stick so close to her all these years. It meant they were there at the scene, so to speak, when the mine at last hit paydirt.
“Three eighty-five with the tax,” said Kay.
Vivien looked up startled, to find they were barely a couple of feet apart. The pizza was boxed between them on the counter. Where was she supposed to eat it? In the car?
“All I have is a twenty,” she said apologetically.
As the register digested it, she wondered if she ought to leave a tip. She didn’t like to offend. She held the pizza cradled in one arm and brooded about it, as sixteen dollars and fifteen cents was counted out into her other hand.
“Listen, I wouldn’t worry about the papers. Not if I was you.”
“What?” asked Vivien vaguely. Just then, she was weighing the cash in the flat of her hand, undecided what to do. She came in a moment late. She saw that Kay was glancing down at Hollywood Midnite.
“Everyone knows it’s lies, what they say about you. It don’t matter. People don’t believe a thing they read.”
“They don’t?” she murmured quietly, gazing at her weeping face like a picture in an album. So as not to seem so spooked, she raised her voice. “You think it’s true, what they say about sticks and stones?”
“Listen, I’m real sorry about your husband. I lost somebody once.”
Vivien thought: Should I ask her who? But she didn’t really want to. It would only make her sad.
“It makes you numb for the longest time,” said Kay. “Nobody knows.”
Vivien looked her in the eye. There were no demands at all. She remembered the fans last week, on the boulevard by the gate. They were after a very specific thing—some single glimpse to take away, sharp as a Kodachrome snap. She shook her finger at me. She tried to grab my camera. She pleaded with us to go. They wanted a piece of her. This one didn’t.
“But I feel nothing,” Vivien said, with a hairline crack of irony. It came out like an answer to a question no one asked. But she had to give the acid test. Check this woman’s existential fingerprints. Just as she had the other day, on the mission set with Greg.
Kay nodded briefly and looked away, transported for a moment by a nothing of her own. In any case, she seemed to pass the test. When they said goodbye, it was unadorned with the hope they would meet again. They didn’t say anything cheery, not “Take care,” not “Have a nice night.” They left all that to the wheel of time. They stuck to the one word only. Just goodbye.
As Vivien walked away, she balled up the money and stuffed it in her bag. When she got to the car, she opened the box on the seat beside her. The suitcase served as her table. She sat and ate the pizza wedge by wedge, trying to distinguish what was what in the chaos of ingredients. Now and then, they glanced at each other through a double shield of windows. Never in phase, so they didn’t lock eyes. For a moment, Vivien had a spell of thinking she ought to do more. She could have a color TV sent out: “To Kay at the Tower, with all my thanks.” Maybe arrange to have her children put through college.
She let the moment pass. She downed her coffee
and licked her fingers and readied herself to go. They were doubtless right to stick to the rules of brief encounter. A beat-up Dodge pulled in beside her. The backfield of a football team came tumbling out. They barreled across to the restaurant and shouldered in with great hurrah. As soon as Kay was busy, bantering back and forth, Vivien took the chance and fled. So they wouldn’t have to endure that final glance—or worse, the first gleam of regret.
Once she was back on the boulevard, she turned again to the business at hand. As if she had film wound up in her head, she played it with Carl in the lead. He slipped them some kind of sleeping pill. Then he went round the tub, slitting one wrist after another. They probably didn’t feel a thing. But that, she thought, was just what they said about people who died of attacks in the dead of night. It always struck her as wishful thinking. Surely the dying woke up in time to know the jig was up. And they clutched their chest and groped in the dark for the someone they couldn’t bear to leave, lying there beside them in a dream.
Was it supposed to be some kind of comfort, to think that Jasper died easy? It seemed like a man had a right to a death that caught him at the pitch of conscious life. Jasper would have wanted to go out wide-eyed—feel it for all it was worth.
The thing about neon signs was this: The very thing you were looking for began to shine brighter than what was around it. Just as soon as you needed it, there it was. First it was food, and now it was places to sleep. She was on very tenuous ground, of course. She could say she’d had a pizza before, and assume it had slipped her mind. A motel was something else entirely. Perhaps it was only an accident that she’d never touched down in a place that lacked a good hotel. More likely, her life was programmed long ago to exclude all towns that were not equipped with suites of rooms in muted tones.
So how did a person choose? First, she cut out the names she knew, like Travelodge and Hojo’s, as too reminiscent of airports. She’d be much better hidden in one of a kind. She went at a midnight clip, scanning the signs on either side. The traffic was light to moderate. She followed the foot of the mountains, all the way into Studio City. It had to be soon. In a minute, she’d hit the Hollywood Freeway—the route that would take her over the mountains, tomorrow morning at seven.
She pulled the Rolls over and went in under a sign about ten feet high: THE VAGABOND. That’s me, she thought lightly, parking off in the dark end of the lot, so the car would not stick out. The name was scrawled in a bold blue hum of neon, meant to echo the script of a human hand. As she came across the gravel, it loomed above her, as if the god of the place had put out a lightning finger and penned it on the air. In smaller letters, stenciled on the office window, it said: Motor Inn of the Stars.
Because of who she was, she probably went in acting the way she did at the George V or the Royal Hawaiian. A bit high-pitched for the wall-to-wall industrial nylon, the kidney-shaped tables and maple-jug lamps. On the other hand, the blotchy man in green suspenders seemed to need all the help he could get. Fifty-five and fingerbitten, he wheezed his way from step to step, with a small amnesiac pause at every turn.
He filled in the name, Mrs. Gregory Cannon, and handed over the key to number 9. Yes, he would give her a wake-up call at a quarter after six. No, he didn’t know where she could send out for croissants.
“You got any bags?” he asked anxiously.
“Oh, I can handle them,” she said, quick to reassure him. “I travel very light. You think the traffic will keep me awake?”
“Soundproof,” he said—tapping the wall to his left with his pencil. “We don’t let anything bother the guests. Not even cops.”
“Well, that’s very thoughtful. I don’t think the cops’ll be asking for me.”
“Sometimes it’s cops. Sometimes it’s somebody won’t go away. Photographer, maybe.”
Did she only imagine it, or had the glassiness cleared in his eyes?
“I keep the whole lot of ’em out,” he said. “To me, it’s invasion of privacy.”
“I appreciate that,” she answered pleasantly. Should she give him a tip? “It’s all bullshit, right? You can’t believe what you read anymore.”
“It’s true,” he agreed with a magisterial nod. He seemed pleased to find her so savvy. “Promise me now. You need anything, you dial ‘O.’”
“Thanks,” she said.
And she picked up her key from the counter and turned away. She couldn’t recall a like degree of chivalry—not at the George V, anyway. It was all a good deal cooler way up there.
“Oh, Mrs. Cannon?”
The first thing she noticed, turning back, was that he’d managed to button his shirt. That, and he’d brushed the fall of dandruff from his shoulders.
“I saw every picture he ever made.”
She didn’t have to ask him who he meant. With his index finger, he pushed the bridge of his glasses further up his nose.
“To me,” he said, “they were all about doing the thing that was right. He was decent—you know what I mean?”
She nodded. There was a sermon, it seemed, in every stone she overturned. She saw that she wasn’t required to say a blessed thing in return. It was enough to hear these people out. Was that why she didn’t mind it? She didn’t mind it at all.
“Most of us disappear,” he said. “We don’t get to leave behind a record of what we believe in. He did.”
Imagine: a combination of Pauline Kael and Heidegger, right in the middle of Studio City. With, now that she took a closer look, a certain vivid glow about the eyes. He didn’t seem specially brilliant and doomed, so that you felt he ought to have been a doctor. Desk clerk suited him fine. He had twenty-eight units to oversee, full of people lost in transit. She could see that he’d come to perceive it as work that did the right thing. He was satisfied.
“I don’t think Jasper thought about what he accomplished,” she said. “Unless it was being a star. I suspect he was proud of that.”
“A man that big doesn’t dwell on what he’s done. He just keeps going.”
“Well,” she replied in a neutral way, and let her voice trail off. She couldn’t go as far as that. He made him sound like a hero, when all he was was a star. For a moment, she thought he was coming around the counter to take her hand. She could tell he felt none of the same mystique in her, since she’d never appeared in a movie. But he stopped himself and came no closer. He pulled in again like a turtle.
“I’ve talked out of turn,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“No, no,” she protested. “I’m glad you spoke up. It’s just that I feel—I don’t know—so many things at once.”
Nothing was what she meant to say.
He nodded and took off his glasses and smiled. “Go to sleep now, Mrs. Cannon,” he said. “You’ll see. You’ll sleep like a baby here.”
And the funny thing was, she did. Though she had to laugh when she let herself in. The traffic out in the street was loud enough to be a joke—like sound effects in a sitcom. Every surface all over the room was rubberized, so a reeling drunk wouldn’t get a concussion. The furniture was hodgepodge—knocked around and color-blind, full of fray and broken corners—but on the whole she found it pretty clean. The bed had sagged and softened to the point of no support. It cradled her like a cloud.
She turned the Aunt Jemima bedside lamp on low, and she read maybe fifteen pages. Thoreau introduced what he liked to call his “brute neighbors”—the mice, the phoebe, the woodcock, the loon. To her it was as otherworldly as the forest in Snow White. She knew no creatures herself. When she finally turned to go to sleep, with the susurrus of traffic in her ears, she thought of a weekend long ago, in the Florida keys with Jasper. He was shooting a two-bit thriller, on a salvage boat at Bahía Honda. He came home tired and sunburned every night, with a bucket of shrimp he bought in the harbor. They didn’t eat anything else for four days solid.
Outside the cabin, they had these walking catfish, walking across the lawn. Whenever they came, she averted her eyes. Scared to face them because t
hey were weird—too wild, somehow, too close to the edge. How stupid she’d been, she thought to herself, as she fell asleep in the Valley. She should have taken a good long look. There would be no second chance.
She woke up at 6:15 exactly, in the hair-trigger second before the phone rang. But she wasn’t the least bit jumpy. She opened her eyes with the sweetest pang of expectation. Her book was still open beside her. She answered before the first ring was quite rung, and the desk clerk told her the time in an upbeat way, announcing that she had a package, just outside her door.
It was a white waxed-paper bag, with half a dozen croissants packed inside. Still warm, in fact. She ate one while she brushed her hair and wondered how he figured out she needed all this many. They tasted rather more like Pepperidge Farm than Ma Maison, but what the hell. She went and got a ginger ale from the bright blue machine at the end of the hall. She ate her second croissant sitting at the desk, while she wrote a note to Artie.
I’ll be back. Don’t worry.
When at last she came downstairs, at ten to seven, she had a twenty-dollar bill all folded up in the pocket of her skirt—to pay for the rolls, et cetera. She would make him keep the change. Alas, like somebody met at a crossroads, he was gone. The cold-eyed European who’d taken his place explained that the shift was structured to change at 6:30 sharp. Was something wrong? When he’d ascertained it was only money, he put out his palm discreetly and promised to pass it along.
But something made her change her mind and pay for the room and go. She didn’t want to say goodbye in cash. Her night clerk must have felt the debt was paid, or he would have got through to her somehow. Goodbyes were maybe his weak suit. Same as hers.
She beat the rush hour over the pass. It was still quite early, not quite seven-thirty, when she pulled up in front of the Cherokee Nile. She hadn’t stopped to buy the rest of breakfast, but figured a bachelor must keep butter and jam and freeze-dried. If he didn’t, they could just go out on the terrace and eat them straight from the bag. And look out over the hush of the city, while all the shades of mist burned off the morning.
