Onyx

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

  “Organizing the studio,” Justin replied.

  “Right,” Mitch said. “We’re planning ways to get grips out to a mass meeting.”

  “I told you,” Elisse said. “Promise free love and free beer.” She opened a folding chair for herself.

  Justin leaned against the doorjamb. The talk made it clear that grips were stagehands. They’re working against the odds, Justin thought. It was nearly impossible to interest relatively well-paid, unskilled labor in a union, expecially when the boss, in this case Harry Cohn, was a tough customer, who worked hand in glove with the police. The group kept argumentatively reiterating the tactical problems. A physical pleasure, an excitement, wriggled through Justin each time Elisse injected one of her needle-edged comments into the planning.

  “Yes, Martha,” she snapped at the handsome woman with the coronet of braids. “A loudspeaker truck’s a real necessity when you expect a horde of a dozen grips or less.”

  “In Russia,” Martha jabbed back, “we’d have thousands, and the police would be on hand to protect the comrades.”

  “Like hell.” Justin spoke involuntarily.

  They twisted around to stare at him.

  “Of course you’d say that!” Martha barked. “I know who you are—I read the capitalist rags.”

  Mitch asked, “Have you been in the Soviets, then, Mr. Hutchinson?”

  “Justin. Yes, I worked there for seven months.”

  “A fact you never mentioned.” Though Elisse spoke crisply, her eyes were chagrined.

  “It never came up,” he said.

  Mitch put in, “There’s an Onyx plant in Gorki.”

  “Near Gorki,” Justin said. “I helped set it up.”

  “None of us has been there, to Russia,” Mitch said. “Mind telling us a little?”

  Justin ran a hand through his thick black hair, a compulsive habit that somehow unsnarled the mental processes below. Thoughtfully, he sketched the huge, unheated factory, the workers bundled in quilted rags or filthy, matted sheepskins. His large, solid presence and his deeply timbred voice controlled them. Even Martha, who licked at her roughed mouth as though ready with vehement protest, remained silent. He told them about Sergei, his Russian assistant, Sergei with large and capable chilblained hands, a prerevolutionary engineering degree, few words of English, and a tiny, birdlike wife. Sergei wrote three petitions, requesting stoves in the dormitories. Then one morning Sergei’s wife came alone to the bare-earth-floored dining hall, standing hunched into her thick clothes like a roosting sparrow. She tiptoed to a corner table, from which breakfasters departed as rapidly as if she carried plague virus rather than lentil porridge in her wooden bowl. By now Justin was accustomed to these sudden, unexplained disappearances, and with a shiver of sadness accepted that he would never again see the courageous, large-handed Sergei. The workers, he knew, weren’t cold-blooded or cruel, simply human. It was folly to loiter sympathetically near the families of dissidents. Justin took his food to Sergei’s wife’s table. Several times after that he made a point of eating with the tiny, red-eyed, trembling woman, of speaking to her in his broken Russian. Nobody else ventured near. It was less than a month before Tom ordered him back to Detroit. Hugh told him that the request for his removal had come from the Comintern itself.

  “Propaganda!” Martha shrilled with a near manic glare, leading the chorus of disbelief.

  “Forget that Party jargon!” cried Elisse, on her feet.

  “Your new friend’s a capitalist!”

  “So? That doesn’t make him a liar, does it?”

  Mitch Shapiro raised his hand, a silencing gesture. “We were talking about my yard for the meeting. Any better suggestions? Pablo? Germaine? Eric? Martha? Elisse?” With functional skill he drew each back into orderly discussion.

  At ten thirty, as if summoned by invisible bells, the foursome rose, gathering coats, leaving together.

  “Cellmates,” Elisse murmured as Justin helped her on with her jacket.

  “Can you two stay a bit?” Mitch asked.

  Justin glanced down at Elisse, and she nodded. Mitch went into the kitchenette, visible beyond an archway, while she puttered around smoothing the chenille spread, emptying the ashtrays, very much at home. Justin lit a cigarette, following her with his eyes.

  She sat at the card table next to him. Twiddling a charred match, she said, “A perfect speech for the occasion.”

  “It gave me a chance to see you spring to my defense.”

  “Not that you needed me. Now I understand that meteoric rise, Justin. In the movie game we call it star quality. You’re a star. You don’t have to say what people want to hear, you’re so big, sincere, and dependable they’ll listen to you regardless. My God—even Martha’s mouth turned to salt!”

  Her praise sent quivers of pleasure through him, and he touched the hand that held the match, tracing the thumb and forefinger. Her lips parted slightly and her eyelids lowered. His breath caught, and he felt a stirring in his groin. Flustered, he withdrew his hand.

  “Coffee’s hot,” Mitch called.

  They drank from chipped pottery mugs.

  “I didn’t mean to condemn Russia,” Justin said. “It’s a large order, dragging people out of serfdom. But why should we copy them? Whatever’s wrong here, we start out with more.”

  “Absolutely,” Mitch said. “I agree.”

  Surprised, Justin asked, “Then you aren’t a party member?”

  “No. But I work with them,” Mitch said. “I grew up in the labor movement. My father was an organizer, he went to jail with Samuel Gompers. We moved around a lot. When I was ten—we were in Youngstown—a mounted trooper billy-clubbed me and I lost partial hearing in my left ear. I’ve been beaten with a sand-filled sock, a pipe length, you name it. I’ve lost teeth and I’ve been locked up more times than I can count. And why? I’ll tell you why. I’m willing to fight for what I believe. That every man should have a share in deciding how he spends the days of his life. That nobody should be forced by hunger into unsafe mines or factories. That workers should get a pension if they become crippled, and when they get old.” There was a jarring, practiced depth to the rhetoric, yet sincerity shone through on the broad, punished face.

  Justin drank the sour, gritty coffee, aware of Elisse’s speculative hazel eyes upon him. “I’m on your side,” he said. “Onyx isn’t paradise—”

  “Wondrous fair of you to admit that,” she said.

  “—but let’s face it, Tom Bridger’s done more for his workers than any union. He pays well, he’s a fanatic about plant cleanliness and safety, good lighting. He runs schools to teach English to foreign workers, he hires people of every race and color, he has a savings program that pays higher interest than a bank.”

  “Rejoice, rejoice, the Messiah’s come,” Elisse murmured, adding, “Talk about hero worship.”

  Mitch said, “At least they don’t blacklist union members at Onyx.”

  “We have an open shop,” Justin said. “We have a union.”

  “I know about it.” Mitch said somberly. “A company union.”

  “Why not look on the bright side, Mitch?” Elisse said. “Onyx workers have a fine social club.”

  As they drove along Sunset Boulevard, Justin asked, “Where did you meet Mitch? At Columbia?”

  “No, he’s blacklisted by all the studios,” she said. “I met him at Berkeley, hotbed of anarchism and wild-eyed revolutionaries.”

  “He’s a lot older.”

  “He was my poli sci section leader.”

  Justin swerved around an ancient Model T: it had a rectangular black and brass tail lamp, making it a 1913 or 1914. “Did you go out with him?”

  “What if I did?”

  “Do you still?”

  “I haven’t taken the veil or anything, Justin.”

  “Do you?”

  “In my junior year I worked on a student strike committee with him. We had a few dates. He’s completely humorless, but he’s a good, moral person. Totally de
dicated. I admire that. Any more questions?”

  They were at a stop signal, and he jammed down the brake. “You two still seem very snug.”

  “Oh, Justin, stop the badgering.”

  “You throw me off-balance,” he confessed, sighing. “I’ve never been this way.”

  “What’s the point of being jealous? Los Angeles is only a short stop-off for you,” she said in a subdued voice. “Anyway, he’s just a friend.”

  V

  Saturday night Justin ducked a banquet for southern California Onyx dealers, taking Elisse to dinner and then to the Million Dollar Theater to see The Sheik. Afterward, over sodas at the Pig’n Whistle, she rolled her sparkling hazel eyes, miming Valentino’s smoky glances so accurately that Justin, laughing, snorted chocolate ice cream up his nasal passages.

  “Such appreciation should be rewarded,” she said. “Tomorrow I’ll treat you to a picnic lunch at the San Fernando Mission.”

  He touched the doorbell. She must have been waiting. His finger was still on the button when she opened the door, stepping out and closing it in one fluid motion. Bowing, she handed over the heavy basket. With her sleeveless white tennis dress belted at the hips, the red bandeau pressing against her curly bangs, her quizzical, happy smile and glowing apricot tan, she took his breath away—sweet baby was the expression in his mind—so that he ached to believe her hasty exit was not a slight. Yet he had never been able to warm himself with self-delusion. She doesn’t want her parents to see me, he thought. We’ve gone out every night and she’s never introduced me to them.

  She directed him to a winding road across the Santa Monica mountains and then through the orange groves of the San Fernando Valley. At the mission they picnicked on roast chicken, potato salad, fruit, and Vouvray that she had secured from the studio bootlegger. Antique bronze bells chimed as they explored the tumbledown adobe buildings and tangled gardens, but Justin’s happiness was marred by the memory of that swiftly closing door.

  On the drive home she pointed to a turnoff. “I’ll show you Los Angeles,” she said. In gear they jolted up hairpin twists to a weedy ledge with a panoramic view: the tawny flatness was dotted with townlets stretching all the way from the city to the Pacific.

  There were no houses here, no other cars. In the late afternoon torpor a pigeon crouped, an insect chittered hypnotically, and Elisse and Justin gazed, somnolent, at the scene below. He rested his head on green-striped upholstery—Fivers now came in forest green, drab blue, or maroon as well as gray. Light scintillated behind his closed eyelids and he saw his mother’s slender form, arms at her sides, as she sang in her vibrantly lovely soprano some wordless Puccini theme. The innumerable versions of this recurrent dream (Antonia invariably sang) plucked at him in the same way that a harpist draws long, rippled chords from strings: their strains reverberated through him, rousing nostalgic yearnings for a past when he had been engulfed in love, and had lived without loneliness or self-consciousness. The delicate sheen of perspiration on Antonia’s forehead brought her vividly alive. Her singing ceased, and her lips curved in that eager, expectant way, presaging some high happiness about to break. “Justin, who is that with you?” she asked, and the joy of her smile made the delicate tip of her nose wiggle. “She’s a most frightfully pretty girl.”

  His head jerked forward and he awoke.

  Elisse was watching him. The palm cupping her head stretched the skin around her eye.

  “I dozed off.”

  “A catnap,” she said softly.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.”

  He leaned toward her, and at the same moment they twined their arms around each other, smiling. When they kissed, a kiss that tasted of illegal French wine and California grapes, he felt an inevitability, a sense of having completed a circle and returned to where he belonged, a homecoming unhindered by the troubling restraints Elisse had placed on their relationship. His euphoria expanded to tumescence when her lips parted and his tongue touched hers. His fingers reached under the armhole of her tennis frock to trace the curve of her breast through the silk teddy. With a tremulous sigh she caressed the skin at his open shirt collar, a wandering, gentle touch as though—he thought in his swollen, near painful delight—another Elisse, as soft and tender as a baby chick, were emerging from the shell of clever wisecracks and immaculately groomed good looks.

  “Sweet,” he whispered against her ear.

  “Justin … darling …”

  In their little chamber of glass and steel, the mobile privacy granted unto them by the automotive age, she responded with quivers and sighing murmers as he explored the different textures of her, tasted the satin of her warm, moist skin. A delirium he had not believed possible blossomed when he touched the ultimate wet, slick heat.

  “Are you, sweet? Have you ever …?”

  “There has to be a first time. Ahh, darling …”

  In the midst of his heavy-breathed love and his boundless lust, he found himself recalling that speech she had made at Philippe’s: Two different worlds, Justin; and then, quite clearly, he heard the firm closing of her front door. God knows he ached with a frenzy for their joining, the rigid part of himself asserted that, yet there was another dimension to him, and he wanted to enter her with flags and banners and triumph, wanted to be part of her world. He shifted back, and the Fiver’s steering wheel jarred against his side as he held her face to examine her—he could smell the musky, infinitely tantalizing genital odor on his fingers.

  “Justin? What is it?”

  “Sweet, I’ve never met your parents.”

  Abruptly she moved away, straightening her rumpled tennis dress, then staring at the sun, a crimson disk burying itself in a rufous sea. “What have they to do with our necking?” she asked in a baiting tone.

  “Everything. Why don’t you want me to meet them?”

  “Immaterial, immaterial. You’re leaving on Tuesday.”

  “Are they very religious?”

  “Temple twice a year.”

  “Then why haven’t you introduced me to them?”

  “Oh, Justin, you don’t understand one darn thing.” In this dying light, her lipstick gone, her bobbed hair disheveled, she looked young, defenseless, cornered.

  Justin steeled himself to continue. “Do they know about me?”

  “What do you think I am, a sneak? I pointed out your name in Time magazine, and explained I’d met you in the flesh at Uncle’s, and was showing you around for the few days you were in Los Angeles.”

  “And they forbade it?”

  “That’s hardly their style. But Mother’s been sighing a lot and Daddy’s had chest pains. If you’re looking for approval, Justin, those aren’t the signs.”

  He felt a choking pressure against his windpipe. He was hurt, ludicrously so, at this sight-unseen rejection by two strangers, and into his consciousness welled all he had ever heard of the clannishness of Jews, of their outlandish diet and clothes and synagogues, of their eerie, alien desire to remain apart, the Chosen People. Yet he immediately rejected these stereotypes as not jibing with the Rosburgs’ London house and country place, or with this small, pretty, brown-haired girl whom he irrevocably loved. The only remark he could summon was a bitter, “That’s wonderful!”

  “They’re dears. Blame the world, not them.”

  “For their prejudice?” Justin stepped out of the car, turning from her as he undid his trouser button to straighten his shirt. His anger had faded when he got back in. She had not moved. It was too dark to make out her expression. As he peered at her, a foreboding recollection of that Jewish touchiness washed over him. “I never should have said that,” he mumbled. “I’m sorry.”

  “Best to have it out in the open, Justin,” she replied wearily. “I’m not about to apologize for my parents, or for what we are. If you want my honest opinion, we have less prejudice, and turn the other cheek more often than circumstances warrant. I’ve never heard you like that. Nasty. Clipped. Ugly. What do you think of Jews?�
��

  “I haven’t known many. Rosburg. Miller in my platoon. We were in the trench together when he lost his leg.”

  “Is that where you got the scar?”

  Shrapnel had wounded him in the shoulder. “Yes. At Belleau Wood.”

  They both looked down at the clusters of electric light twinkling through the brief California dusk.

  “Elisse, what you said shut me out, so I hit back,” he spoke with difficulty. “Usually I think things through before I blurt them out. But I’m not myself anymore. I’ve been lonely ever since Mother died, very lonely. And now—even with the obstacles you’ve set up—I’m not. It’s as if I’ve been let out of solitary.”

  “You sit across the street after you take me home.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Who else would leave a pile of Craven-A butts?”

  “I’m so crazy about you I don’t know if I’m coming or going. I don’t sleep, I don’t taste my food.”

  “I know what you mean.” Her voice sounded hollow, defeated. “I have the same symptoms.”

  He turned toward her. “You mean that?”

  “Oh, Justin. Do you think I offer my pure white self to all men?”

  “I haven’t ruined it?”

  “Would that you could. This is such a mess.” Sighing, she picked up his hand, kissing it. “You’re my beau ideal.”

  Through Justin’s mind darted crazed images of himself lifting her aboard a train in her white tennis dress and small, dusty sneakers, a justice of the peace in Yuma, endless hours of nonsectarianly legalized priapic bliss in a locked compartment, followed by uxoriously tender married life in the green land of happiness. Married? Was this Justin Hutchinson who weighed every decision, the man who circled every issue, peering into its stygian heart? What’s happened to my measured calm? Elopement?

  “Put on your lipstick,” he said. “We’re going to your house, and I’ll meet them.”

  “Daddy has a concert tonight, the Hollywood Bowl.”

  “Tomorrow, then.”

  “Justin, you have no idea—”

  “Tomorrow,” he said firmly.