A Beauty (9 page)

It’s time for Clark Gable to establish some male superiority. He’ll cook and he’ll press her clothes, but in return she has to do what he says. She’s fine with that. It’s give and take, isn’t it? And right then three detectives barge in, searching every room in the world, apparently, and why not, when money is no object? And now Clark and Claudette (a.k.a. Peter and Ellie) start acting a parody of a lower-class couple, haranguing one another in a lower-class way. That fools the dicks. Everyone knows an heiress wouldn’t have such a shrill, unpleasant voice, or fight with her man in public.

Her father offers a $10,000 reward. Her picture appears on all the front pages. The whole bus sings “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.”

“I know who she looks like. Betty Boop,” Bill whispers. Elena doesn’t know who Betty Boop is. He squeezes her. He has his arm around her. “Is this the first movie you’ve seen?” he asks. Somebody behind them leans forward and says, “Shhh!”

Now they’re walking by a stream. Moonlight on water, you’ve never seen a stream sparkle like this, and he picks her up like baggage and carries her over his shoulder across the sparkling stream, the sound of wading beautiful under their banter. She’s such a brat, he gives her a spank on the bum. Bill laughs so hard he has to take his arm back for a bit. All the men in the audience are laughing with him. They’ve all been thinking she’s just too sassy for her own good, this little gal.

Then it’s morning and he tells her they’ll have to hitch and she asks when the hitching comes in. Just like a woman, thinking of marriage because they’ve spent the night together, even if
it
hasn’t happened. She started out the movie on a hunger strike and now she knows what it is to be hungry. After a day without food, she’s so hungry she’s finally eating a raw carrot, which she turned her pretty nose up at before.

It’s another night and up go the walls of Jericho again. “It’s not everybody who travels with rope,” Bill says and Elena laughs. Even the woman behind them laughs.

Through the woollen wall, he tells her what he wants is someone who’s real, who’s alive, a girl who loves the moon and the stars and water. She says she loves him. But
it
can’t happen yet. Her father arrives with a police escort, sirens wailing, and takes her away. Hobos wave from a train, happy to be poor. The front pages say “Love Triumphs,” and after a while it does. In the nick of time, she bolts from the wrong man to the arms of the right one, her white veil flying out behind her.

The walls of Jericho tumble, the trumpet blares. Bill squeezes her again.

Walking back to the hotel afterwards, going over the movie’s highlights in his mind, Bill said, “We’ll have to get you a slip, sweetheart.”

She just smiled, the way she did automatically, to get out of talking.

“Funny old Peg didn’t sell you one today.” He waited. “I said, ‘Funny she didn’t sell you one today.’ ”

“Oh,” she said. “Yes.”

She might be walking alongside him, but she was in her own world, that was clear. He slipped his arm around her. When he
thought about it, he was glad she was quiet; he had time to imagine the kind of conversation he’d like the two of them to have, him talking to her the way Clark Gable talked about the moon and stars and water and the kind of woman – yeah, the kind of woman – he wanted to share all that with him. Love-talk, the likes of which he could only imagine saying in a dream.

Sometimes a terrible depression fell on Peg. Albert had seen it before. There she sat, on her sofa, not even pretending she could go on. He’d passed her shop after work and saw that she’d closed up early, so he’d stopped in at the house instead of going to his mother’s to collect the girls. On the way up the path to her door, he’d considered picking one of her own petunias and presenting it to her, hoping to make her smile. He was too much of a coward to do it. Someone might have seen him, and Peg herself might have thought it foolish.

He sat beside her, smoothing her springy hair back from her forehead, and she didn’t shake him off. Then he took one of her hands in both of his. She nestled her head against him.

She found herself thinking of telling him what she was going to do, but in the past tense, as if she had already done it, saying “I thought I’d put the kettle on and make a pot of tea,” imagining she’d already stood up and moved to the kitchen. But she hadn’t moved, she wasn’t moving; her head still rested on his shoulder. And she wasn’t standing at the counter with a can opener saying he must be hungry, because he had to go home and get supper for his kids.

“You need to go. You need to pick up the girls at your mother’s,” she said.

“She won’t mind if I’m late once in a while.”

“No, go.” It sounded brusque, rude. She didn’t care. He had a mother, the kids. She stood up, a formality, the only way to make him go now that she’d decided she wanted to be alone. She could already hear herself telling him, the next evening, “I went straight to bed after you left.” Saw him nod his head. Thought about banging hers against the bedroom wall.

“It’s not enough,” she said aloud. It just slipped out. She was starting down the hall towards her bedroom, thinking he’d already gone. He hadn’t gone; he was standing by the sofa, watching her, but she turned away.

B
ill said she didn’t understand motion pictures. And there was nothing wrong with being rich.

She said, “Well, there’s nothing so good about being poor, that’s for sure.”

“Nothing interesting about it, either. That’s why nobody wants to see it when they go out for an evening.”

“I don’t know why not. It’s a challenge just getting through the day when you have no money,” she said in her deliberate way, as if she’d figured it out like an arithmetic problem, and this was the solution. “And people have to co-operate, not just look out for themselves.”

He didn’t bother pointing out that co-operation wasn’t exactly the engine of high drama. He wondered if she was going to turn out to have a great many opinions, and decided to try her trick and not bother answering at all. Just enjoy driving along with her beside him. That was what he liked, just having her beside him like she was, lolling back in the soft leather seat, her bare feet up on the dashboard. She was wearing his fedora to keep the sun off
her face. With her tawny blonde hair she fit perfectly inside the gold Lincoln.

“Liberty Hall, for example,” she went on, “would not have been built if everybody in the district had not pitched in.”

“It was in their interest, that’s why,” he said. “And you can bet your bottom dollar somebody made some cash on the side, in the Liberty Hall deal and in every other instance you could name. Sweetheart, people are born selfish and they die selfish and in between they want what’s best for themselves.”

“If people have what they need, they don’t have to take from others.”

“Don’t you believe it. Say, is your old man a Commie? That’s Commie stuff you’re spouting. You can get yourself arrested for that. Don’t be talking like that in public, or we’ll have the Mounties tailing us.” He patted her knee. “Stick with me, kid,” he said. He smiled to himself. She’d liked that shopping, yesterday. She was happy stepping out of the shop wearing her new high-heeled dancing shoes and her new togs. Funny dress to pick, though; brown, and it practically covered up all her assets. He’d teased her a bit about it and told her he’d have to help her out when they shopped again in the city.

“What’s your old man like?” she asked.

“Oh, hell, I don’t want to talk about him.” He scowled down the length of the hood, at the chrome ornament at the end, a greyhound pawing the air. The greyhound was supposed to look fast, he supposed, but what it really looked was eager, and it wasn’t ever a good idea to look too eager, especially with a girl. He put his foot down and the roadster responded right away. He wondered what she’d think if she knew his father had bought the car for him, had sent him on this road trip, a present for passing his final exams, getting his degree – or that was the official version. It was only
coincidental that his father had planned to go away, himself, for the summer, and had taken his secretary with him.

There was a fair amount of prejudice against the rich, Bill knew, and especially when a lot more people than usual were poor. He didn’t buy that gab in the picture show about values and what was important in life, but he wasn’t going to advertise his situation, either. On the other hand, he was feeling a bit guilty over Peg – but he had thought Elena would be impressed. Every time he thought about trying to impress her, he found himself shaking his head. He couldn’t figure her out. But he knew the thing to do was not let on you were ruffled, let it look like you were amused, put nonchalance on your face, like Clark Gable did. Whistle a little tune. He wondered if he might go into the newspaper business. He didn’t have a clue what to do when he got back home in the fall, and he was getting good at telling lies.

A yellow wagon popped into his mind. He’d seen a Rawleigh salesman with a yellow wagon a few miles out of Rosseton and it came to him he could use the man for his father. “Now, there was a salesman for you,” he said, liking the sound of that past tense, making it seem, even to himself, that his father was dead. No one he had to think about. No one who had any influence over him. “He sold Rawleigh, hawked Rawleigh products in a boxed-in, horse-drawn wagon. Painted yellow, for God’s sake. Yellow, so the farmwives could see it coming and get excited.” She was listening, her head tilted attentively. He knew she could see it, too, parked on the country road. “That damn yellow box. That’s all I can think of when I think of him. The poor bugger. Bright yellow, colour of a kid’s crayon. Yup, every couple years he’d slap on another coat, keep it looking fresh. Spent his life with his head in that damn yellow box. No kidding. I’ve seen him lean into it, looking for some tincture of something or other, and damn-near
disappear inside it, tip right in so his feet went up in the air. Legs sticking out like some kind of frog being tortured.”

“Tortured?”

Whoa, he’d got carried away. “Kids. You know they do that,” he explained. “I don’t know how I got started on all this.” And he thought: Truer words were never spoken.

“It’s not how you want to be, like him,” she said.

“It’s not how I am, sweetheart.”

“That’s true, Bill,” she said.

“My head’s in no box. It’s not in the clouds, either. No sir, my head’s square on these two shoulders.” She was looking at him as if he was bleeding or something. “Christ,” he said, “I need a drink. You go along, there’s a goddamn town every seven goddamn miles, and when you need one, where is it?”

“Is your father dead?” she asked.

It was kind of shocking to have her say it like that, right out. “Ah, yeah,” he said.

She said, “My father is also dead.”

“I’m sorry.” He was going to say more, he was going to say both of them having dead fathers gave them something in common, but he was glad he hadn’t when she said, “No need to apologize. There is nothing at all to be sorry about.” She sounded more cross about it than sad and since he was already mad at himself for going on and on about a yellow wagon he’d seen once on a road in the middle of nowhere, he let the subject drop.

She was quiet after that, too. She sat up straight and leaned forward, watching the road ahead. Forward-looking. Sometimes he didn’t know if she was the most frustrating person he’d ever met, or if there was something wrong with him that he couldn’t make it easy between them. He was used to easiness; it came naturally to him to find the right thing to say, the right attitude to
fit a person and a situation. He hardly ever encountered an awkwardness that needed smoothing over – until with her.

It was a few miles later that she said, almost as if she was thinking aloud, “You know, I thought that movie was about what kind of man makes a good husband, but now I wonder if it was also about who makes a good father.”

“Oh, who cares?” Bill said.

She looked at him as if she was going to say, “You do.” But she didn’t.

Virginia Valley had two hotels. Bill drove past them both so they could read their signs. The Balmoral advertised itself as “A Home Away from Home, Home Cooking, We Employ White Help Only.”

“It means the other place is run by Chinamen,” Bill said. “And it won’t have a bar. They don’t license chinks to sell liquor.”

“Well, we can stay there and you can go to this one for a drink. I can’t go into the bar with you anyway. And I’ve never seen a Chinaman.”

He grinned at her. “You’re gonna see a whole lot you’ve never seen before this trip is over,” he told her.

The Windsor Hotel was cleaner than the norm. Somebody had laid wet cloths along all the windowsills to keep out the dust that was constantly blowing ever since spring thaw, even down in the valley. Bill moseyed over to the Balmoral for a few drinks and got his flask filled while Elena washed up, and then they had supper in the hotel restaurant, where she was able to observe two Chinamen taking orders, filling coffee cups, and distributing heaping platters of greasy food. She was disappointed neither of them had pigtails, which somewhere along the way she’d been told they would. And she was surprised they were dressed like
other people. They talked like Chinamen, though. As Bill pointed out, they murdered the English language, if you could call their lingo English at all.