Ask the Dust (7 page)

I turned and looked at the sea. Not fifty feet away Camilla waded toward the land in water to her waist. She was laughing, choking from it, this supreme joke she had played, and when I saw her dive ahead of the next breaker with all the grace and perfection of a seal, I didn't think it was funny at all. I walked out to her, felt my strength returning with every step, and when I got to her I picked her up bodily, over my shoulders, and I didn't mind her screaming, her fingers scratching my scalp and tearing my hair. I lifted her as high as my arms and threw her in a pool of water a few feet deep. She landed with a thud that knocked the breath out of her. I waded out, took her hair in both my hands, and rubbed her face and mouth in the muddy sand. I left her there, crawling on her hands and knees, crying and moaning, and I walked back to the car. She had mentioned blankets in the rumble seat. I pulled them out, wrapped myself up, and lay down on the warm sand.

In a little while she made her way through the deep sand and found me sitting under the blankets. Dripping and clean she stood before me, showing herself, proud of her nakedness, turning round and round.

“You still like me?”

I stole glances at her. I was speechless, and I nodded and grinned. She stepped upon the blankets and asked me to move over. I made a place and she slipped under, her body sleek and cold. She asked me to hold her, and I held her, and she kissed me, her lips wet and cool. We lay a long time, and I was worried and afraid and without passion. Something like a grey flower grew between us, a thought that took shape and spoke of the chasm that separated us. I didn't know what it was. I felt her waiting. I drew my hands over her belly and legs, felt my own desire, searched foolishly for my passion, strained for it while she waited, rolled and tore my hair and begged for it, but there was none, there was none at all, only the retreat to Hackmuth's letter and thoughts that remained to be written, but no lust, only fear of her, and shame and humiliation. Then I was blaming and cursing myself and I wanted to get up and walk into the sea. She felt my retreat. With a sneer she sat up and began drying her hair on the blanket.

“I thought you liked me,” she said.

I couldn't answer. I shrugged and stood up. We dressed and drove back to Los Angeles. We didn't speak. She lit a cigaret and looked at me strangely, her lips pursed. She blew smoke from her cigaret into my face. I took the cigaret out of her mouth and threw it into the street. She lit another and inhaled languidly, amused and contemptuous. I hated her then.

Dawn climbed the mountains in the east, gold bars of light cutting the sky like searchlights. I took out Hackmuth's letter and read it again. Back East in New York Hackmuth would just now be entering his office. Somewhere in that office was my manuscript
The Long Lost Hills
. Love wasn't everything. Women weren't everything. A writer had to conserve his energies.

We reached the city. I told her where I lived.

“Bunker Hill?” She laughed. “It's a good place for you.”

“It's perfect,” I said. “In my hotel they don't allow Mexicans.”

It sickened both of us. She drove to the hotel and killed the engine. I sat wondering if there was anything more to say, but there was nothing. I got out, nodded, and walked toward the hotel. Between my shoulder blades I felt her eyes like knives. As I got to the door she called me. I walked back to the car.

“Aren't you going to kiss me goodnight?”

I kissed her.

“Not that way.”

Her arms slipped around my neck. She pulled my face down and sank her teeth into my lower lip. It stung and I fought her until I was free. She sat with one arm over the seat, smiling and watching me enter the hotel. I took out my handkerchief and dabbed my lips. The handkerchief had a spot of blood on it. I walked down the grey hall to my room. As I closed the door all the desire that had not come a while before seized me. It pounded my skull and tingled in my fingers. I threw myself on the bed and tore the pillow with my hands.

All that day it was on my mind. I remembered her brown nakedness and her kiss, the flavor of her mouth as it came cold from the sea, and I saw myself white and virginal, pulling in the pudgy line of my stomach, standing in the sand and holding my hands over my loins. I walked up and down the room. Late in the afternoon I was exhausted and the sight of myself in the mirror was unbearable. I sat at the typewriter and wrote about it, poured it out the way it should have happened, hammered it out with such violence that the portable typewriter kept moving away from me and across the table. On paper I stalked her like a tiger and beat her to the earth and overpowered her with my invincible strength. It ended with her creeping after me in the sand, tears streaming from her eyes, beseeching me to have mercy upon her. Fine. Excellent. But when I read it over it was ugly and dull. I tore the pages and threw them away.

Hellfrick knocked on the door. He was pale and trembling, his skin like wet paper. He was off the booze; never would he touch another drop. He sat on the edge of my bed and wrung his bony fingers. Nostalgically he talked of meat, of the good old steaks you got back in Kansas City, of the wonderful T-bones and tender lamb chops. But not out here in this land of the eternal sun, where the cattle ate nothing but dead weeds and sunshine, where the meat was full of worms and they had to paint it to make it look bloody and red. And would I lend him fifty cents? I gave him the money and he went down to the butcher shop on Olive Street. In a little while he was back in his room and the lower floor of the hotel was fragrant with the tangy aroma of liver and onions. I walked into his room. He sat before a plate of the food, his mouth bloated, his thin jaws working hard. He shook his fork at me. “I'll make it good with
you, kid. I'll pay you back a thousand times.”

It made me hungry. I walked down to the restaurant near Angel's Flight and ordered the same thing. I took my time having dinner. But no matter how long I loitered over coffee I knew I would eventually walk down the Flight to the Columbia Buffet. I had only to touch the lump on my lip to grow angry, and then to feel passion.

When I got down to the buffet I was afraid to enter. I crossed the street and watched her through the windows. She was not wearing her white shoes, and she seemed the same, happy and busy with her beer tray.

I got an idea. I walked quickly, two blocks, to the telegraph office. I sat down before the telegraph blank, my heart pounding. The words writhed across the page. I love you Camilla I want to marry you Arturo Bandini. When I paid for it the clerk looked at the address and said it would be delivered in ten minutes. I hurried back to Spring Street and stood in the shadowed doorway waiting for the telegraph boy to appear.

The moment I saw him coming around the corner I knew the telegram was a blunder. I ran into the street and stopped him. I told him I wrote the telegram and didn't want it delivered. “A mistake,” I said. He wouldn't listen. He was tall with a pimply face. I offered him ten dollars. He shook his head and smiled emphatically. Twenty dollars, thirty.

“Not for ten million,” he said.

I walked back to the shadows and watched him deliver the telegram. She was amazed to get it. I saw her finger point at herself, her face dubious. Even after she signed for it she stood holding it in her hand, watching the telegraph boy disappear. As she tore it open I locked my eyes shut. When I opened them she was reading the telegram and laughing. She walked to the bar and handed the wire to the sallow-faced bartender, the one we had driven home the night before. He read it without expression. Then he handed it to the other bartender. He, too, was unimpressed. I felt a deep gratitude for them. When Camilla read it again, I was grateful for that, too, but when she took it to a table where a group of men sat
drinking my mouth opened slowly and I was sick. The laughter of the men floated across the street. I shuddered and walked away quickly.

At Sixth I turned the corner and walked down to Main. I wandered through the crowds of seedy, hungry derelicts without destination. At Second I stopped before a Filipino taxi-dancehall. The literature on the walls spoke eloquently of forty beautiful girls and the dreamy music of Lonny Killula and his Melodic Hawaiians. I climbed one flight of echoing stairs to a booth and bought a ticket. Inside were the forty women, lined against the opposite wall, sleek in tight evening dresses, most of them blondes. Nobody was dancing, not a soul. On the platform the five-piece orchestra banged out a tune with fury. A few customers like myself stood behind a short wicker fence, opposite the girls. They beckoned to us. I surveyed the group, found a blonde whose gown I liked, and bought a few dance tickets. Then I waved at the blonde. She fell into my arms like an old lover and we beat the oak for two dances.

She talked soothingly and called me honey, but I thought only of that girl two streets away, of myself lying with her in the sand and making a fool of myself. It was useless. I gave the cloying blonde my handful of tickets and walked out of the hall and into the streets again. I could feel myself waiting, and when I kept looking at street clocks I knew what was wrong with myself. I was waiting for eleven o'clock, when the Columbia closed.

I was there at a quarter to eleven. I was there in the parking lot, walking toward her car. I sat on the burst upholstery and waited. Off in one corner of the parking lot was a shed where the attendant kept his accounts. Over the shed was a neon clock in red. I kept my eye on the clock, watched the minute hand rush toward eleven. Then I was afraid to see her again and as I squirmed and writhed in the seat my hand touched something soft. It was a cap of hers, a tam-o-shanter, it was black with a tiny fluffy knob on the crown. I felt it with my fingers and smelled it with my nose. Its powder was like herself. It was what I wanted. I stuffed it into my pocket and walked out of the parking lot. Then I climbed the stairs of Angel's Flight to my hotel. When I got to my room I took it out and threw
it on the bed. I undressed, turned out the light, and held her hat in my arms.

 

Another day, poetry! Write her a poem, spill your heart to her in sweet cadences; but I didn't know how to write poetry. It was love and dove with me, bad rhymes, blundering sentiment. Oh Christ in Heaven, I'm no writer: I can't even put down a little quatrain. I'm no good in this world. I stood at the window and waved my hands at the sky; no good at all, just a cheap fake; neither writer nor lover; neither fish nor fowl.

Then what was the matter?

I had breakfast and went to a little Catholic Church at the edge of Bunker Hill. The rectory was in back of the frame church. I rang the bell and a woman in a nurse's apron answered. Her hands were covered with flour and dough.

“I want to see the pastor,” I said.

The woman had a square jaw and a hostile pair of sharp grey eyes. “Father Abbot is busy,” she said. “What do you want?”

“I have to see him,” I said.

“I tell you he's busy.”

The priest came to the door. He was stocky, powerful, smoking a cigar, a man in his fifties. “What is it?” he asked.

I told him I wanted to see him alone. I had some trouble on my mind. The woman sniffed contemptuously and disappeared through a hall. The priest opened the door and led me to his study. It was a small room crammed with books and magazines. My eyes bulged. There in one corner was a huge stack of Hackmuth's magazine. I walked to it at once and pulled out the issue containing
The Little Dog Laughed
. The priest had seated himself. “This is a great magazine,” I said. “The greatest of them all.”

The priest crossed his legs, shifted his cigar.

“It's rotten,” he said. “Rotten to the core.”

“I disagree,” I said. “I happen to be one of its leading contributors.”

“You?” the priest asked. “And what did you contribute?”

I spread
The Little Dog Laughed
before him on the desk. He
glanced at it, pushed it aside. “I read that story,” he said. “It's a piece of hogwash. And your reference to the Blessed Sacrament was a vile and contemptible lie. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

Leaning back in his chair, he made it very plain that he didn't like me, his angry eyes centered on my forehead, his cigar rolling from one side of his mouth to the other.

“Now,” he said. “What is it you wish to see me about?”

I didn't sit down. He made it very clear in his own way that I wasn't to use any of the furniture in the room. “It's about a girl,” I said.

“What have you done to her?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said. But I could speak no more. He had plucked out my heart. Hogwash! All those nuances, that superb dialogue, that brilliant lyricism—and he had called it hogwash. Better to close my ears and go away to some far off place where no words were spoken. Hogwash!

“I changed my mind,” I said. “I don't want to talk about it now.”

He stood up and walked toward the door.

“Very well,” he said. “Good day.”

I walked out, the hot sun blinding me. The finest short story in American Literature, and this person, this priest, had called it hogwash. Maybe that business about the Blessed Sacrament
wasn't
exactly true; maybe it didn't really happen. But my God, what psychological values! What prose! What sheer beauty!

As soon as I got to my room I sat down before my typewriter and planned my revenge. An article, a scathing attack upon the stupidity of the Church. I pecked out the title:
The Catholic Church Is Doomed
. I hammered it out furiously, one page after another, until there were six. Then I paused to read it. The stuff was awful, ludicrous. I tore it up and threw myself on the bed. I still hadn't written a poem to Camilla. As I lay there, inspiration came. I wrote it out from memory:

I sent it by telegraph, proud of it, watched the telegraph clerk read it, beautiful poem, my poem to Camilla, a bit of immortality from Arturo to Camilla, and I paid the telegraph man and walked down to my place in the dark doorway, and there I waited. The same boy floated by on his bicycle. I watched him deliver it, watched Camilla read it in the middle of the floor, watched her shrug and rip it to pieces, saw the pieces floating to the sawdust on the floor. I shook my head and walked away. Even the poetry of Ernest Dowson had no effect upon her, not even Dowson.

Ah well, the hell with you Camilla. I can forget you. I have money. These streets are full of things you cannot give me. So down to Main Street and to Fifth Street, to the long dark bars, to the King Edward Cellar, and there a girl with yellow hair and sickness in her smile. Her name was Jean, she was thin and tubercular, but she was hard too, so anxious to get my money, her languid mouth for my lips, her long fingers at my trousers, her sickly lovely eyes watching every dollar bill.

“So your name is Jean,” I said. “Well, well, well, a pretty name.” We'll dance, Jean. We'll swing around, and you don't know it, you beauty in a blue gown, but you're dancing with a freak, an outcast from the world of man, neither fish, fowl, nor good red herring. And we drank and we danced and we drank again. Good fellow Bandini, so Jean called the boss. “This is Mr. Bandini. This is Mr. Schwartz.” Very good, shake hands. “Nice place you got, Schwartz, nice girls.”

One drink, two drinks, three drinks. What's that you're drinking Jean? I tasted it, that brownish stuff, looked like whiskey, must have been whiskey, such a face she made, her sweet face so contorted. But it wasn't whiskey, it was tea, plain tea, forty cents a slug. Jean, a little liar, trying to fool a great author. Don't fool me,
Jean. Not Bandini, lover of man and beast alike. So take this, five dollars, put it away, don't drink Jean, just sit here, only sit and let my eyes search your face because your hair is blonde and not dark, you are not like her, you are sick and you are from down there in Texas and you have a crippled mother to support, and you don't make very much money, only twenty cents a drink, you've only made ten dollars from Arturo Bandini tonight, you poor little girl, poor little starving girl with the sweet eyes of a baby and the soul of a thief. Go to your sailor boys, honey. They don't have the ten dollars but they've got what I haven't got, me, Bandini, neither fish, fowl nor good red herring, goodnight Jean, goodnight.

And here was another place and another girl. Oh, how lonely she was, from away back in Minnesota. A good family too. Sure, honey. Tell my tired ears about your good family. They owned a lot of property, and then the depression came. Well, how sad, how tragic. And now you work down here in a Fifth Street dive, and your name is Evelyn, poor Evelyn, and the folks are out here too, and you have the cutest sister, not like the tramps you meet down here, a swell girl, and you ask me if I want to meet your sister. Why not? She got her sister. Innocent little Evelyn went across the room and dragged poor little sister Vivian away from those lousy sailors and brought her to our table. Hello Vivian, this is Arturo. Hello Arturo, this is Vivian. But what happened to your mouth, Vivian, who dug it out with a knife? And what happened to your bloodshot eyes, and your sweet breath smelling like a sewer, poor kids, all the way from glorious Minnesota. Oh no, they're not Swedish, where did I get that idea? Their last name was Mortensen, but it wasn't Swedish, why their family had been Americans for generations. To be sure. Just a couple of home girls.

Do you know something?—Evelyn talking—Poor little Vivian had worked down here for almost six months and not once had any of these bastards ever ordered her a bottle of champagne, and I there, Bandini, I looked like such a swell guy, and wasn't Vivian cute, and wasn't it a shame, she so innocent, and would I buy her a bottle of champagne? Dear little Vivian, all the way from the clean fields of Minnesota, and not a Swede either, and almost a virgin
too, just a few men short of being a virgin. Who could resist this tribute? So bring on the champagne, cheap champagne, just a pint size, we can all drink it, only eight dollars a bottle, and gee wasn't wine cheap out here? Why back in Duluth the champagne was twelve bucks a bottle.