American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  “Of course I do. He’s a man of integrity,” said Houghton, unaware that at the same moment, ten stories below the suite, his daughter, Ramsey, still sitting on a sofa in the lobby except now by herself, still clutching a cigarette holder but without a cigarette, was approached by a man of similar integrity.

  A briefcase dangled at his side, its leather buffed to a high shine, brass locks clouded by a patina. The man wore a black suit rather than a tuxedo, which made him both stand out from and blend into the crowd, a sore thumb on a broken hand. Ramsey felt as though she’d seen him before tonight but couldn’t for her life recall where.

  “Mrs. Landau.”

  “Yes?”

  “Paul Easton.”

  The man reached into his briefcase and, with a cheerful clip to his voice, said, “I’m here to serve you divorce papers on behalf of Vantage Pictures.” He set a stack of documents on the table and pushed them toward her with his pinkie.

  Ramsey’s realization of where she had first seen this guy—at the Christmas party three years ago in Arthur’s office—caused a delay in registering what he had just told her. Then it came. Of course the studio president known for producing lavish musicals such as Catch a Tiger by the Toe would be so theatrical as to inform his wife that he was divorcing her on New Year’s Eve twelve minutes before midnight. The bastard did not even have the sand to give her the papers himself. Ramsey could have killed Arthur. God but she could have wrung his spineless little neck.

  She lit a cigarette just to see the fumes. To Paul Easton, still standing in front of her, Ramsey said, “You tell that no-good, chicken-shit, heartless son of a cunt—”

  “Mr. Landau said you might get colorful.”

  “—that he can take these goddamn papers and shove them up his dick hole.”

  During the few seconds of quiet following Ramsey’s outburst, Paul Easton stared at her down the bridge of his nose. “My but you’re good at revealing yourself as nothing more than country come to town,” he said at last.

  Ramsey clamped her jaw around her cigarette. Tou-fucking-ché. She blew smoke toward the skylights of the lobby. Over the years Ramsey had grown sensitive to intimations that she was some bumpkin from Mississippi who had married up. The origin of such vulnerability was the time her roommate at Miss Porter’s had asked if it felt odd to wear a uniform instead of overalls. This prick from the studio knew exactly where to squeeze. As Ramsey tried to think of a suitable retort, something eloquent, something vicious, she heard a familiar voice behind her say, “My but you’re good at revealing yourself as nothing more than a bagman for the flicker business who isn’t even worthy of kissing my granddaughter’s feet.”

  Fiona Forster, wearing a chinchilla stole in spite of the heat in the lobby and a necklace with an amethyst pendant big as a magnolia fruit, walked around the sofa, took a seat, and gently squeezed her granddaughter’s knee, never once letting her gaze stray from the man she had addressed. “You have my blessing to leave now.” She flicked her hand at Paul Easton as one would a speck of lint. He swallowed audibly, gripped his briefcase, and, without a word, walked away.

  Ramsey smiled at Fiona. Even in old age her grandmother from her father’s side of the family brooked no guff. She was eighty-four. All of her features except her eyes had shrunk over the years, so that she seemed the Owl of Minerva come to life in the lobby, wise and vigilant and never without a gin rickey.

  “How are you?” Ramsey asked.

  “Just a feeble old woman. Yourself?”

  “Fine. Gettin’ divorced.”

  Fiona shrugged. “Screw the bastard.”

  Despite the rage she had felt just a moment ago, Ramsey, thinking of the distance between apples and trees when one falls from the other, managed to enjoy the end of her cigarette. At least someone was on her side. While putting the butt into an ashtray Ramsey noticed her brother Harold standing by the marble fountain. He was doing that thing with his ear again. Every time Haddy became upset, whether because of something he had done or that had been done to him, his hand would latch onto his ear, tugging and pulling and twisting it raw. Look at him over there, thought Ramsey, about to yank it right off. What could be the matter?

  Light from the chandelier overhead flickered along the ripples in the water fountain, and from across the lobby drifted the chipper opening chords of “Baby, Buy Me a Teddy Bear.” Harold, tugging on his ear and rocking side to side, didn’t notice either of those things, because he was now a capital-M Murderer.

  The whole thing was his fault. If only he had minded his mother, none of this would have happened. She had told him not to touch the ducks. All he did was pet one of their feathery little heads, just a teensy bit with his finger, and five minutes later, after getting some cake from the dessert table, the poor thing was floating upside down.

  Harold’s hand clung to his ear and his lips were speckled with frosting as he paced in front of the fountain, trying to decide what to do with the body. Any minute someone would notice those lifeless feet splayed in the air. He was about to scoop out the duck with his dinner jacket when he was interrupted by the screams of a man nearby. “Oh dear God, no, it can’t be! No! Please God, no, it can’t be!” Still in his uniform, Edward Pembroke, the elevator operator, jumped into the fountain, soaking his maroon flannel pants trimmed in gold braid. He lifted the duck from the water, cradled it in his arms, and sat on the marble edge.

  “Everything’s fine,” Pembroke said, patting the duck’s head as one would to wake a sleeping child. “I’m here now.”

  Harold watched from a few yards away. He had not even had a chance to name that one. Can you get into heaven without a name? he wondered, tears making his vision go wobbly.

  On the edge of the fountain, with his back to the crowd so Harold could not see what he was doing, Pembroke searched for a cause of death. He used the skills from his time as a circus trainer, the same skills that would soon lead to a promotion. Nowhere on the duck could he find evidence of a puncture wound. Its keel was not distended. Its shanks were not discolored. At last, Pembroke checked the duck’s neck and noticed, close to its white ring, a small obstruction. He massaged the obstruction through the neck, like squeezing out one last brush’s worth of toothpaste from the tube, until it plopped into the palm of his hand.

  Due to the presence of Pembroke in the lobby, where he was currently holding something hard, wet, and round that he mistakenly thought was a cherry pit, Montgomery was alone in the elevator. It took him a moment to realize he was the only one there. He pressed a button on the grid panel and pulled the lever to the down position. With each floor of his descent from the suite Monty mentally recited his three favorite syllables. Ten, nine. Nicholas, Nicholas. Eight, seven. Nicholas, Nicholas. Six, five. Over the years that name had become a sort of mantra to calm him down at times of disappointment, with himself or others, times during which he was overwhelmed with the question, first asked during the war, of whether he was in hell or simply doomed to it.

  He reached his floor. Monty pulled back the lever, opened the gate, and walked out of the elevator. He had to stop thinking this way. He had to focus on something else. Monty knocked on the door to room 415.

  Slowly it opened to reveal a figure in silhouette. Montgomery stepped forward and kissed the bartender, who tasted like four parts gin and one part vermouth. The door closed behind them.

  A tightrope of spit connected the two as Montgomery briefly drew back from the bartender. “I don’t even know your name.”

  “Simon Spicer.”

  “Really?”

  “Stage name,” said Simon. “I’m moving to L.A.”

  Although Spicer’s memoir of “being out and going down” in Hollywood is no longer in print, the incendiary bestseller elicited, upon its release, devotion and litigation in equal measure. Activists for gay rights upheld the author as an iconoclast. Religious conservatives denounced his book as pornography. At the hotel that night, however, the man who hoped to have a career in acting had not yet
sold his secrets or himself. Simon wrapped his arms around Monty. They stumbled through the room toward the bed, tripping over a footstool and bumping into the dresser and knocking over a lamp, until they were interrupted by a rhythmic clanging sound.

  “The hell’s that?” Montgomery said. He looked into the moonlit room, trying to figure the source of the noise.

  Simon’s lips curled into a sly grin. He nodded at a pipe near the radiator and whispered, “Must be the heat.”

  He was correct in a sense. The pipe making the noise in room 415 ran vertically through the hotel, past the lending library and notary public on the mezzanine, past the cigar stands and phone booths around the lobby, past the drugstore and stenographer in the basement, all the way to the boiler room, where at that moment Lance was having sex with the cigarette girl. Each thrust caused the table on which she was positioned to ram against the pipe with a heavy clang.

  Lance stood with the girl’s legs straddling him. He found he preferred such a method, how it allowed for ease of access. Escape was also made easier. There in the boiler room, the girl was moaning just the right amount, not too loud and not too quiet, a Goldilocksian fit. The only problem was that she kept talking to him between moans.

  “But this is only a temporary job for me.” Pant. “I was thinking of maybe opening a hair salon.” Sigh. “Or nails.” Whimper. “I think there’s a lot of growth in nails.” Purr. “Ha-ha. Growth.” Trill. “I’m interested in anything involved with the beauty industry.” Gasp. “Mark my words. Beauty industry. It’s got a future.”

  Trying to keep the girl quiet, Lance slid his hand up her neck and let his thumb dip into her mouth, but the move brought little result.

  “You taste like cinnamon. Bet you get that a lot in your family.” The girl sucked on his thumb. “That you taste like cinnamon. Do you hear that a lot in your family?”

  The hell was she babbling about? Lance had heard his share of dirty talk that was actually the opposite—one time a woman he brought back to his place told him, “I’m as wet as a dog’s nose,” after which he sent her home with her tail between her legs—but something about this girl seemed more than awkward. Midthrust he realized why.

  “I should have known,” he said, their motion halted. “You’re a cola hunter.”

  The press had given them the name. Around the time PanCola first introduced its “secret ingredient” ad campaign, Houghton Forster mentioned in an interview that his children, all four of them, were the only people he would ever tell, come the right time, the truth of the ingredient. He said it was their birthright. He said the ingredient had been with him so long, ever since his own childhood, that it was a bond among his family as strong as blood. Due to those comments, “cola hunters” began traveling to the various locales of his youth, attempting to “pan” for Panola Cola’s secret ingredient. Some cola hunters avoided where the ingredient had begun and instead went searching for where the ingredient would end up.

  Lance felt himself not unsheathe so much as shrivel out of the girl. He watched her face turn into that of someone who gave neither hoot nor holler about the beauty industry. “I bet your father hasn’t even told you,” she said before standing from the table and resituating her dress. “Knew I should have gone with the important one.”

  “The what?”

  “Where is Montgomery anyway? Haven’t seen him all night.”

  “I,” Lance said, “uh.”

  “God, you really don’t know anything, do you?”

  Without waiting for a response the girl told him to never mind and wended her way out of the boiler room and back to the lobby. Lance stood by himself, his rib cage shrunk by her words. Should have gone with the important one. You really don’t know anything. I bet your father hasn’t even told you. Not only was he the ugliest Forster but he was also the most unnecessary. A drop of moisture trickled from Lance’s cheek all the way to his jawline. Sweat from the humidity, he thought, walking toward the exit. Whoever was in charge really should do something about the humidity.

  Back in the lobby, Lance tried to compose himself. He looked around the whole scene, at the women in evening gowns of mauve, saffron, vermilion, and carmine, some backless and some sleeveless and a few daringly both; at the men in obsidian-black and midnight-blue dinner jackets, their collars heavily starched and shirts as crisp as newsprint; at the waiters in uniforms the same shade of white as PanCola’s label, arms laden with trays of deviled eggs, oysters casino, angels on horseback, cucumber cups with pimento cheese, stuffed kumquat, crab rangoon, and boiled shrimp fresh from the Gulf.

  Lance could not find Ramsey. He needed his sister right now. She was the only person who would understand. They had too much history for her not to know the right thing to say.

  He could still remember the Whippet Roadster they had shared as teenagers. To their father’s chagrin, Lance and Ramsey had nicknamed the car “Volstead,” a nod to the congressman whose machinations inadvertently caused the increase in soda sales that helped pay for the car’s broadcloth upholstery, mechanical brakes, and pyroxylin finish. Both of them took pleasure in more than the irony whenever they drove the car to one of the speakeasies across town.

  Lance needed that Ramsey right now—Ramsey his friend, Ramsey his conspirator. Why had he needled her so much earlier in the night? It was petty to wound her simply for having a life of her own. The absolute truth was Lance cared about his sister. All he wanted was for her to be as safe as she had always made him feel. That was why he had recently paid a mayor’s ransom for the managing editor of the Daily Herald to kill an article on “Ramseyphine.” That was also why, after hearing from his investigator that Arthur had somehow learned about the affair, Lance had caught the earliest flight to L.A., hoping to convince his brother-in-law that a scandal, even just a divorce, would reflect poorly on all parties involved. The bastard had refused to meet with him.

  “How close are we?”

  The appearance of Montgomery at his side startled Lance from his thoughts. He had to repeat his brother’s question in order to sound out its meaning. After a slight pause, Lance looked at his watch and said to Montgomery, “Two minutes away.”

  With each second closer to midnight the crowd seemed to grow more effervescent. Men checked their pocket watches and then loosened their semibutterfly, rounded, pointed, or straight bat-wing bow ties, while the women who’d worn their hair up let it down, petals falling from their wrist corsages to the floor with the turbulence. After the Peabody Hotel jazz quartet ended its rendition of “What’s the Sweetest Thing Around? (Panola Cola, I’ve Found),” the screech of blowout horns erupted from distant corners of the lobby.

  “And how is my big brother this evening?” Lance asked, trying to appear as carefree as everyone else.

  Monty straightened his gig line, a habit since the war. He wondered how to respond. Oh, I’m doing fine. Just got back from almost sleeping with some bartender, he considered confessing, repercussions be damned. The poor guy was not happy when I told him I couldn’t go through with it. Called me a tease and a coward. The bartender may have been right about the first insult, Monty would admit, but he’d been completely wrong about the second one. His decision to leave the room was not an act of cowardice but rather one of fidelity. All the blame lay with that damn pipe. The clanging noise had reminded Monty of distant gunfire, rat-a-tat, pop-pop, pop-pop, rat-a-tat, which in turn had reminded him of Nicholas. That was why he’d told the bartender he couldn’t go through with it. “Just a little tired is all,” Monty said to Lance. “It’s been a very long night.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  Midnight was thirty seconds away. The two Forster brothers looked out at the assemblage of what would be described the next day as the bon ton of the American South. Both men fell quiet at the sight.

  In the St. Louis Dispatch, editorialist Rufus Terral once wrote, “Mississippians . . . are said to believe that when they die and go to heaven, it will be just like the Peabody lobby.” It seemed as t
hough everyone at the gala that night would have agreed. Near the elevator bank Lucien Sparks Sr. held his sleeping son, small head on large shoulder, thin arms around thick neck, a trickle of drool at the corner of the boy’s mouth garnished by a smudge of peanut butter, the result of a present he’d been given by the Knapp brothers of Knapp Family Snacks, each of whom had been intrigued when the boy, Lucien Sparks Jr., mentioned he liked to sprinkle salted peanuts into Panola Cola. At a table behind the bandstand Wilhelmina Johnson slapped her husband, an action brought about by what she had caught him doing with Florine Holt, whose sequined dress had made her exit with Delmore, known as “Hotcakes” for a reason, all too easy for everyone at the gala to notice. And on the mezzanine overlooking the lobby, Harold Forster, his cheeks traced by dried tears and his brow striated with thought, sat alone at a small table, oblivious to the screams of “Three! . . . Two! . . . One!” from below.

  He was playing solitaire. The game helped keep him from dwelling on the duck. Harold, who could never remember the actual rules, set down a queen, then a six and seven, then an eight and nine, and finally a king, to complete his favorite design. On the table lay the same mosaic of cards that, years later, he would have arranged before him when his heart, which had always beaten with furious pride at any slight to his family, stopped.

  That night at the Peabody Hotel, though, Harold’s pulse held a steady count. He looked over the handrail, studying the hourglass dresses and sharply tailored tuxedos, the various boutonnieres blending into a pointillist collage of gardenia-white, cornflower-blue, and carnation-red. What the hell was everybody hollering about? Why on earth was everyone kissing each other? Harold watched confetti rise like bubbles in the air and fall on the shoulders of his family. His siblings were dispersed throughout the crowd.

  Ramsey sat on a sofa near the fountain. She was reading a stack of paper, cigarette in hand, smoke leaking from her mouth. It must be a really great story, Harold figured, what with how little she blinked. Over by the bar, his brother Monty was drinking some kind of cocktail. He held the glass in one hand and tucked in his shirt with the other. If Harold had to guess he’d say the drink tasted good. Just look at the way Monty closed his eyes with each sip. In a corner near the bathrooms Harold’s brother Lance stood alone with a pack of cigarettes. He was staring at them. He’d quit a long time ago, Harold remembered, because they stained his teeth. Tonight had to be a very special occasion if he was tempted to pick up the habit again.