by John Fante
“You try so hard to be an American,” I said. “Why do you do that? Take a look at yourself.”
She went to the mirror, studied herself gravely. “I’m tired,” she said. “We were busy tonight.”
“It’s those shoes,” I said. “You ought to wear what your feet were meant to wear—huaraches. And all that paint on your face. You look awful—a cheap imitation of an American. You look frowsy. If I were a Mexican I’d knock your head off. You’re a disgrace to your people.”
“Who are you to talk like that?” she said. “I’m just as much an American as you are. Why, you’re not an American at all. Look at your skin. You’re dark like Eyetalians. And your eyes, they’re black.”
“Brown,” I said.
“They’re not either. They’re black. Look at your hair. Black.”
“Brown,” I said.
She took off her coat, threw herself on the bed and stuck a cigaret in her mouth. She began to fumble and search for a match. There was a pack beside me on the desk. She waited for me to hand them to her.
“You’re not crippled,” I said. “Get them yourself.”
She lit her cigaret and smoked in silence, her stare at the ceiling, smoke tumbling from her nostrils in quiet agitation. It was foggy outside. Far away came the sound of a police siren.
“Thinking of Sammy?” I said.
“Maybe.”
“You don’t have to think of him here. You can always leave, you know.”
She snubbed out the cigaret, twisted and gutted it and her words had the same effect. “Jesus, you’re nasty,” she said. “You must be awfully unhappy.”
“You’re crazy.”
She lay with her legs crossed. The tops of her rolled stockings and an inch or two of dark flesh showed where the white smock ended. Her hair spilled over the pillow like a bottle of overturned ink. She lay on her side, watching me out of the depth of the pillow. She smiled. She lifted her hand and wagged her finger at me.
“Come here, Arturo,” she said. It was a warm voice.
I waved my hand.
“No thanks. I’m comfortable.”
For five minutes she watched me stare through the window. I might have touched her, held her in my arms; yes, Arturo, it was only a matter of getting out of the chair and stretching out beside her, but there was the night at the beach and the sonnet on the floor and the telegram of love and I remembered them like nightmares filling the room.
“Scared?” she said.
“Of you?” I laughed.
“You are,” she said.
“No I’m not.”
She opened her arms and all of her seemed to open to me, but it only closed me deeper into myself, carrying with me the image of her at that time, how lush and soft she was.
“Look,” I said. “I’m busy. Look.” I patted the pile of manuscript beside the typewriter.
“You’re afraid, too.”
“Of what?”
“Me.”
“Pooh.”
Silence.
“There’s something wrong with you,” she said.
“What?”
“You’re queer.”
I got up and stood over her.
“That’s a lie,” I said.
We lay there. She was forcing it with her scorn, the kiss she gave me, the hard curl of her lips, the mockery of her eyes, until I was like a man made of wood and there was no feeling within me except terror and a fear of her, a sense that her beauty was too much, that she was so much more beautiful than I, deeper rooted than I. She made me a stranger unto myself, she was all of those calm nights and tall eucalyptus trees, the desert stars, that land and sky, that fog outside, and I had come there with no purpose save to be a mere writer, to get money, to make a name for myself and all that piffle. She was so much finer than I, so much more honest, that I was sick of myself and I could not look at her warm eyes, I suppressed the shiver brought on by her brown arms around my neck and the long fingers in my hair. I did not kiss her. She kissed me, author of The Little Dog Laughed. Then she took my wrist with her two hands. She pressed her lips into the palm of my hand. She placed my hand upon her bosom between her breasts. She turned her lips toward my face and waited. And Arturo Bandini, the great author dipped deep into his colorful imagination, romantic Arturo Bandini, just chock-full of clever phrases, and he said, weakly, kittenishly, “Hello.”
“Hello?” she answered, making a question of it. “Hello?” And she laughed. “Well, how are you?”
Oh that Arturo! That spinner of tales.
“Swell,” he said.
And now what? Where was the desire and the passion? She would go away in a little while and then it would come. But my God, Arturo. You can’t do that! Recall your marvelous predecessors! Measure to your standards. I felt her groping hands, and I groped to discourage them, to hold them in passionate fear. Once more she kissed me. She might have given her lips to a cold boiled ham. I was miserable.
She pushed me away.
“Get away,” she said. “Let me go.”
The disgust, the terror and humiliation burned in me, and I would not let go. I clung to her, forced the cold of my mouth against her warmth, and she fought with me to break away, and I lay there holding her, my face in her shoulder, ashamed to show it. Then I felt her scorn grow to hatred as she struggled, and it was then that I wanted her, held her and pleaded with her, and with each wrench of her black rage my desire mounted and I was happy, saying hooray for Arturo, joy and strength, strength through joy, the delicious sense of it, the rapturous self-satisfaction, the delight to know that I could possess her now if I wished. But I did not wish it, for I had had my love. Dazzled I had been by the power and joy of Arturo Bandini. I released her, took my hand from her mouth, and jumped off the bed.
She sat there, the white of saliva at the ends of her mouth, her teeth gritted, her hands pulling at her long hair, her face fighting off a scream, but it didn’t matter; she could scream if she liked, for Arturo Bandini wasn’t queer, there was nothing at all wrong with Arturo Bandini; why, he had a passion like six men, that boy, he had felt it coming to the surface: some guy, mighty writer, mighty lover; right with the world, right with his prose.
I watched her straighten her dress, watched her stand up, panting and frightened, and go to the mirror and look at herself, as though to make sure it was really herself.
“You’re no good,” she said.
I sat down and chewed on a fingernail.
“I thought you were something else,” she said. “I hate rough stuff.”
Rough stuff: pooh. What did it matter what she thought? The big thing was proved: I could have had her, and whatever she thought was not important. I was something else besides a great writer: I was no longer afraid of her: I could look into her face as a man should look into the face of a woman. She left without speaking again. I sat in a dream of delight, an orgy of comfortable confidence: the world was so big, so full of things I could master. Ah, Los Angeles! Dust and fog of your lonely streets. I am no longer lonely. Just you wait, all of you ghosts of this room, just you wait, because it will happen yet, and that Camilla, she can have her Sammy in the desert, with his cheap short stories and stinking prose, but wait until she has a taste of me, because it will happen, as sure as there’s a God in heaven.
I don’t remember. Maybe a week passed, maybe two weeks. I knew she would return. I did not wait. I lived my life. I wrote a few pages. I read a few books. I was serene: she would come back. It would be at night. I never thought of her as a thing to be considered by daylight. The many times I had seen her, none had been in the day. I expected her like I expected the moon.
She did come. This time I heard pebbles plinking off my windowpane. I opened the window wide, and there she stood on the hillside, a sweater over her white apron. Her mouth was open slightly as she gazed up at me.
“What you doing?” she said.
“Just sitting here.”
“You mad at me?”
“No
. You mad at me?”
She laughed. “A little.”
“Why?”
“You’re mean.”
We went for a ride. She asked if I knew anything about guns. I didn’t. We drove to a shooting gallery on Main Street. She was an expert shot. She knew the proprietor, a kid in a leather jacket. I couldn’t hit anything, not even the big target in the middle. It was her money, and she was disgusted with me. She could hold a revolver under her armpit and hit the bull’s eye of the big target. I took about fifty shots, and missed every time. Then she tried to show me how to hold the gun. I jerked it away from her, flung the barrel recklessly in all directions. The kid in the leather jacket ducked under the counter. “Be careful!” he yelled. “Look out!”
Her disgust became humiliation. She dug a fifty cent piece out of her pocketful of tips. “Try again,” she said. “And this time, don’t miss, or I won’t pay for it.” I didn’t have any money with me. I put the gun down on the counter and refused to shoot again. “To hell with it,” I said.
“He’s a sissy, Tim,” she said. “All he can do is write poetry.”
Tim obviously liked only people who knew how to shoot a gun. He looked at me with distaste, saying nothing. I picked up a repeating Winchester rifle, took aim, and started pumping lead. The big target sixty feet away, three feet above the ground on a post, showed no sign of being hit. A bell was supposed to ring when the bull’s eye was hit. Not a sound. I emptied the gun, sniffed the tart stench of powder, and made a face. Tim and Camilla laughed at the sissy. By now a crowd had gathered on the sidewalk. They all shared Camilla’s disgust, for it was a contagious thing, and I felt it too. She turned, saw the crowd, and blushed. She was ashamed of me, annoyed and mortified. Out of the side of her mouth she whispered to me that we should leave. She broke through the crowd, walking fast, six feet ahead of me. I followed leisurely. Ho ho, and what did I care if I couldn’t shoot a damned gun, and what did I care if those mugs had laughed, and that she had laughed, for which one of them, the boobish swine, the lousy grinning Main Street dopes, which one of them could compose a story like The Long Lost Hills? Not a one of them! And so to hell with their scorn.
The car was parked in front of a cafe. When I reached it she had already started the engine. I got in but she did not wait for me to get seated. Still sneering, she looked at me quickly, and let out the clutch. I was thrown against the seat, then against the windshield. We were jammed between two other cars. She banged into one, and then into the other, her way of letting me know what a fool I had been. When we finally broke from the curb and swung into the street, I sighed and sat back.
“Thank God for that,” I said.
“You dry up!” she said.
“Look,” I said. “If you have to feel this way, why don’t you just let me out. I can walk.”
She immediately put her foot on the throttle. We raced through the downtown streets. I sat hanging on and thought of jumping. Then we reached a section where the traffic was sparse. We were two miles from Bunker Hill, in the east part of town, in the section of factories and breweries. She slowed the car down and pulled up to the curb. We were along side of a low black fence. Beyond it were stacks of steel pipe.
“Why here?” I said.
“You wanted to walk,” she said. “Get out and walk.”
“I feel like riding again.”
“Get out,” she said. “I mean it, too. Anybody that can’t shoot any better than that! Go on, get out!”
I reached for my cigarets, offered her one.
“Let’s talk this over,” I said.
She slapped the pack of cigarets out of my hand, knocked them to the floor, and glared at me defiantly. “I hate you,” she said. “God, how I hate you!”
As I picked up the cigarets the night and the deserted factory district quivered with her loathing. I understood it. She did not hate Arturo Bandini, not really. She hated the fact that he did not meet her standard. She wanted to love him, but she couldn’t. She wanted him like Sammy: quiet, taciturn, grim, a good shot with a rifle, a good bartender who accepted her as a waitress and nothing else. I got out of the car, grinning, because I knew that would hurt her.
“Good night,” I said. “It’s a fine night. I don’t mind walking.”
“I hope you never make it,” she said. “I hope they find you dead in the gutter in the morning.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.
As she drove away a sob came from her throat, a cry of pain. One thing was certain: Arturo Bandini was not good for Camilla Lopez.
Chapter Sixteen
The good days, the fat days, page upon page of manuscript; prosperous days, something to say, the story of Vera Rivken, and the pages mounted and I was happy. Fabulous days, the rent paid, still fifty dollars in my wallet, nothing to do all day and night but write and think of writing: ah, such sweet days, to see it grow, to worry for it, myself, my book, my words, maybe important, maybe timeless, but mine nevertheless, the indomitable. Arturo Bandini, already deep into his first novel.
So an evening comes, and what to do with it, my soul so cool from the bath of words, my feet so solid upon the earth, and what are the others doing, the rest of the people of the world? I will go sit and look at her, Camilla Lopez.
It was done. It was like old times, our eyes springing at one another. But she was changed, she was thinner, and her face was unhealthy, with two eruptions at each end of her mouth. Polite smiles. I tipped her and she thanked me. I fed the phonograph nickels, playing her favorite tunes. She wasn’t dancing at her work, and she didn’t look at me often the way she used to. Maybe it was Sammy: maybe she missed the guy.
I asked her, “How is he?”
A shrug: “Alright, I guess.”
“Don’t you see him?”
“Oh, sure.”
“You don’t look well.”
“I feel alright.”
I got up. “Well, I gotta go. Just dropped in to see how you were getting along.”
“It was nice of you.”
“Not at all. Why don’t you come and see me?”
She smiled. “I might, some night.”
Dear Camilla, you did come finally. You threw pebbles at the window, and I pulled you into the room, smelled the whiskey on your breath, and puzzled while you sat slightly drunk at my typewriter, giggling while you played with the keyboard. Then you turned to look at me, and I saw your face clearly under the light, the swollen lower lip, the purple and black smudge around your left eye.
“Who hit you?” I said. And you answered, “Automobile accident.” And I said, “Was Sammy driving the other car?” And you wept, drunk and heartbroken. I could touch you then and not fuss with desire. I could lie beside you on the bed and hold you in my arms and hear you say that Sammy hated you, that you drove out to the desert after work, and that he slugged you twice for waking him up at three in the morning.
I said, “But why see him?”
“Because I’m in love with him.”
You got a bottle from your purse and we drank it up; first your turn, then mine. When the bottle was empty I went down to the drugstore and bought another, a big bottle. All night we wept and we drank, and drunk I could say the things bubbling in my heart, all those swell words, all the clever similes, because you were crying for the other guy and you didn’t hear a word I said, but I heard them myself, and Arturo Bandini was pretty good that night, because he was talking to his true love, and it wasn’t you, and it wasn’t Vera Rivken either, it was just his true love. But I said some swell things that night, Camilla. Kneeling beside you on the bed, I held your hand and I said, “Ah Camilla, you lost girl! Open your long fingers and give me back my tired soul! Kiss me with your mouth because I hunger for the bread of a Mexican hill. Breathe the fragrance of lost cities into fevered nostrils, and let me die here, my hand upon the soft contour of your throat, so like the whiteness of some half-forgotten southern shore. Take the longing in these restless eyes and feed it to lonely swallows cr
uising an Autumn cornfield, because I love you Camilla, and your name is sacred like that of some brave princess who died with a smile for a love that was never returned.”
I was drunk that night, Camilla, drunk on seventy-eight cent whiskey, and you were drunk on whiskey and grief. I remember that after turning off the lights, naked except for one shoe that baffled me, I held you in my arms and slept, at peace in the midst of your sobs, yet annoyed when the hot tears from your eyes dripped upon my lips and I tasted their saltiness and thought about that Sammy and his hideous manuscript. That he should strike you! That fool. Even his punctuation was bad.
When we woke up it was morning and we were both nauseated, and your swollen lip was more grotesque than ever, and your black eye was now green. You got up, staggered to the wash-stand and washed your face. I heard you groan. I watched you dress. I felt your kiss on my forehead as you said goodbye, and that nauseated me too. Then you climbed out the window and I heard you stagger up the hillside, the grass swishing and little twigs breaking under your uncertain feet.
I am trying to remember it chronologically. Winter or Spring or Summer, they were days without change. Good for the night, thanks for the darkness, otherwise we would not have known that one day ended and another began. I had 240 pages done and the end was in sight. The rest was a cruise on smooth water. Then off to Hackmuth it would go, tra la, and the agony would begin.
It was about that time that we went to Terminal Island, Camilla and I. A man-made island, that place, a long finger of earth pointing at Catalina. Earth and canneries and the smell of fish, brown houses full of Japanese children, stretches of white sand with wide black pavements running up and down, and the Japanese kids playing football in the streets. She was irritable, she had been drinking too much, and her eyes had that stark old woman’s look of a chicken. We parked the car in the broad street and walked a hundred yards to the beach. There were rocks at the water’s edge, jagged stones swarming with crabs. The crabs were having a tough time of it, because the sea gulls were after them, and the sea gulls screeched and clawed and fought among themselves. We sat on the sand and watched them, and Camilla said they were so beautiful, those gulls.
