Girl of My Dreams (62 page)

I called Pammy's room again. Still busy. More accounts of the confrontation between strikers and police described the union members as attackers and rioters, the police as embattled peacekeepers. Once more I tried her line. Busy. I was sick of reading what other people wrote about where I'd been all day, and since she was on the phone I wouldn't be waking her up by knocking on her door. Should I put my suit jacket on and be formal? Or would that be like an invitation to come back out again for a walk or drink? An invitation she'd be sure to turn down before I even issued it, humiliating me. I left my jacket off and put on a sweater. Trying to look relaxed.

The door swung open before I finished knocking. She was wearing a kimono, China red with blue flowers on it, that came to her knees. “Sorry,” I said, “your line was busy”—and now I began stammering—“I only came up to see what, I mean if you'd like tomorrow, in the morning I mean.”

“
Enfin!
” she said. “I thought I'd have to call you myself as soon as I'd said goodnight to Millie. What are you doing standing out there?”

My legs had gone into her suite and my arms had found their way to her shoulders, more or less by themselves. I was aware of no volition. She pulled me to her and faced me not with a smile but a look of necessity, inevitability. The kiss was warm, hungry. More—a new kiss, heart-stopping for me, heart-racing, heart-full. We were then on the couch. Then then then. Her kimono was coming off, her arms and shoulders, bare, appeared to radiate desire. Perhaps it was only desirability. I was clumsy but it didn't matter. She was active, then she waited, pausing for me to take the lead, unaccustomed as I was. I took the lead, somehow I did that. Then she was aggressive, yet paused again as I went forward. I tore at the sweater I'd put on minutes earlier in my room, all unknowing. Always unknowing. I was thrusting. She was thrusting. We rolled off the couch, acrobatically, without becoming disengaged, and she laughed. We pumped and wrapped ourselves around each other until I forgot there were two of us.

Back on the couch, she said, “
Finalement
, one and one make one.”

“That's my line,” I said.

“I was reading your mind.”

“I guess it's a little too legible, isn't it?”

“Around us the city is burning, and here we are fiddling.”

I was elated, helpless, guilty. Pammy put her head on my chest and breathed easily. How I envied, treasured, that breathing. I couldn't think yet, but when I did I was thinking how could two people, not insensitive to their surroundings, have seen the terror, violence and pain of this day and then combine with passion so complete they were transformed into a new being with its own will and urgency and force?

“It happened in the war like this, too,” she said, and as I exhaled she quickly amended. “I mean not like
this
this, my Owen, but an elation of survival. You have been through a day when you feared, you expected really, to die and then you didn't die, someone else died instead, like a sacrifice, and when the sun goes down you're all of a sudden more alive, alert, and awake to the possibilities than you've ever been. Whether you're sharing an apple stolen from an officer, a dark joke or a bed almost doesn't matter. You're connecting again with life, with the fact you didn't die.”

“We should be with the wounded, or at least I should,” I said.

“There's not much we can do. In France when I was at the blood bank, I knew what I was supposed to do, but there's not that need here. The hospitals have the help they want, and not so many people are wounded as in war, in their bodies anyway.”

“I remember the blood bank, your mention of it. That must have been gruesome.”

“Less gruesome than San Francisco, actually. The poor damaged boys would be carried into our field hospital, gaping wounds, eyes full of fright, legs, arms and flesh torn, and we'd reassure them as much as possible while we transfused them, then we'd send them to real hospitals in the rear. A girl who worked with me kissed them all goodbye as we packed them off to safer places, so I started doing that too, usually a mother's kiss on the forehead. They seemed to like that. San Francisco is worse in a way because even though it's like a war only one side has an army.”

“It's more serious now than when I was here a few weeks ago. The pickets then seemed to be letting off steam, and the owners were responding with violence but also jockeying for position. Now it's war, civil war, class war, I don't know.”

“No one would make a movie of this,” she said, “because the strikers would be heroes, the owners bad guys like the stripe suit in the lobby who wanted more workers killed. Any film would be too Red. The day can't be shown to anyone who wasn't here.”

This lighted moment was a release for me after the day of terror, after so much longing for her. Yet I thought or hoped it was a release for her too, revisiting the front to discharge it forever, where French boys, and then English ones, had been borne to her with blown off limbs, peeled away faces, geysering forth their life's fluid as fast as she could replace it with transfusion.

We went to bed naturally, unspokenly, without my saying I wanted to spend the night in her room, without her inviting me. Without my willing it to happen, the circumference of my perception compressed to the room I was in. The only thing in my universe, I was thinking, is what Palmyra Millevoix and I together are, what we do, make, murmur, have. Nothing is between us, neither space nor time. Outside the world is falling apart. Inside, my world has shrunk to a point, a dot, where I have no thoughts or opinions or feelings beyond the sensation of light, and lightness.

This began a weekend I'll remember after I'm dead. We made love again, and again, and somewhere fell asleep. We were beyond meaning, having entered the realm of being. I dreamed I was where I was.

In the morning I was more eager than ever, a terrible thirst beginning at last to be slaked. Yet it was Pammy who awoke to pounce on me, throbbing gaily, avidly, ardently with her thighs. She made cloudy sighs three or four times. She sank down on me. “Oh my,” she finally said.

“I'm trying hard not to say I love you,” I said.

“Keep trying,” she said, and when I looked forlorn, she added, “But so am I.” She gave a little laugh. “How many people, the world over, are, you know, unionizing at any one time?”

That struck me as a somewhat impersonal way of putting it. Were we, then, part of the labor movement? But then what struck me much harder was the recollection of the dream in which she had asked me this same question, only she'd said fucking instead of unionizing. I became dizzy with the thought that I was now living my dream.

We made some absurd calculations, national habits and frequency of sex, where it was night and where day, and where in between so people were waking up or not yet asleep. Deductions for night watchmen and workers on the lobster shift. The total was close to one hundred and fifty million who might be unionizing. “Then we're not so special,” Pammy said, “since at any given moment oceans of people are doing this.”

Oceans! The same word she had used in my dream. Oceans of fucking couples.

“Uh huh,” I said as casually as possible, but what I was thinking was, ah, at long last part of the ocean.

“A first kiss lasts forever, doesn't it?” she said. “Would you go so far as to say I'm really good in bed?”

Not wanting her to know how skimpy were my possibilities for comparison, I said, “If you insist, I guess I might admit that.”

“I'm spirited, cheerful, responsive, brisk, varied, and humorous.”

“I'm passionate,” I said, “and that's all I can claim.”

“We're working on that.”

I got up first while she hugged the pillow where I'd lain and closed her eyes.

The question of desire and desirability, which men jumble so enthusiastically, seized me. It is the way of most female stars that their desirability runs ahead of their desire. They look like they want you, are schooled to look that way, when most of the time they want to be left alone or to read a book or check their nail polish or play with their cat or curl up with a warm, but not hot and writhing, body. In this charged moment, I was the beneficiary of a lover whose desire equaled her desirability. Or appeared to.

I noticed now, for the first time, Pammy's imperfections. She had a little notch at the top of her left ear, one eyebrow was lower than the other, her jaw—no getting around it—was too leonine. A tiny mole beneath her chin could be called a beauty mark, but it could also be called a flaw. I gazed at her and understood that in another woman to whom I'd made love, these observations could be the start of my stepping off the boat. How had I not seen these defects before, either when I sat next to her in her dressing room at the studio or at dinner, or when she swam in her pool, or on any of the limited, prized occasions when I'd been in her presence? Or, for God's sake, when her face was twenty feet high in a close-up on the screen? Where were her ear, her overhanging upper lip, the little mark between her eyes then? Makeup, a great cameraman, my own blindness? Yet no one else, no executive or reviewer or reporter, had ever made a critical observation about her face that I knew of. Had she bewitched us all?

And—you will have guessed—I loved her more for these imperfections, if that's what they were.

My eye and my heart pitched their own battle. My eye said it admired her the most and was the most discerning; my heart argued that it was the center and source of all feeling, and my eye would simply have to be quiet and follow my heart's lead. To which my eye said you'd know nothing if I didn't show all this to you. With that the two organs made peace, the one supplying sight, the other vision. I wished only for more flaws, anything to make the world think less of her so I could have her entirely to myself.

When, a little later, she came out of the shower, a towel around her hair and another sheathing her body, her face could have been her daughter's, at most that of an older sister of Millie's. She was still wet, girlish, smooth-cheeked, with unjaded sparkling eyes, curious. All there was was in front of her, of us.

I looked at her and turned away. I felt fright and hope. What about our predicament in San Francisco? She could be a target, or even I might be. Beyond that, what if I was just a fling for La Millevoix? That was something to be afraid of more than getting shot at the strike. But then hope—this is the beginning of the love of my life—filled me like a deep breath. My brain refused to let me relax.

She sang to me. A sad song relieved with a little folky cheer. It had been turned down by her publishers as well as the studio for a kind of archaism—hymnal affectation her recording company called it—and her dip into incest. They refused to let her record it and wouldn't even allow it to be released as sheet music. But she sang it to me.

When I was young, so young and green

I lost my loves ere I was weaned,

My Pa to war, my Mum to drink,

My brother shut up in the county clink.

(and the refrain:)

All my life

I've seen strife

Strife and tears

Through all the years.

An uncle made his ward and then

Made me his woman when I was four and ten,

Four and ten no matter when,

I flew away from other men.

(the refrain again)

But then at length of twenty seasons

One love came who gave me reasons

To trust again, to soar aloft

On caresses and kisses that are so soft.

Now at last I've finally found

The love that makes my world go 'round.

With a child of joy we soon are blessed,

We give thanks for our treasure, for our gentle guest.

(a changed refrain:)

All my life

No more strife,

Strife and tears

Disappear from our years.

I had just a flyspeck of enough sense not to ask if there was anything autobiographical in what she had sung to me. A maudlin version of “Born Blue.”

Pammy received a message that Harry Bridges hoped she could appear at a rally Saturday and go to church on Sunday with Howard Sperry's widow. The memorial parade for the two dead men, Sperry and Nick Bordoise, would be Monday morning. San Francisco was buzzing with talk that the port was indeed open—like an open wound, Pammy said. There were stirrings that the united labor movement was planning a general strike to shut down not merely the waterfront but the entire city.

What mattered to me was that except for Pammy's brief services to the union and a couple of excursions I took with Mike Quin to deliver food to the longshoremen, she and I were left to ourselves. Quin scoffed at me, “If you can't get a screen story out of what's taken place here you can't count your fingers.” I told him politics is death in Hollywood movies. “So it's a love story between a striker and the daughter of a big shipowner. Romeo and Juliet still sells, no?” I said I'd already tried something like that. I did not add that it was a different love story that utterly consumed me.

It was not that I forgot the seriousness of the moment outside Pammy and me. I continued to have blasts of conscience all weekend at the pleasure I was taking while the city and the longshoremen suffered. My own turbulence, though, was that of selfish passion, unaccustomed passion that turned me into a fountain.

When I took food to the union men, I was surprised to see they were in a moment of what I can only recall as revolutionary joy. A sufficiently large number of them were galvanized by the shape their lives had been given not only by their own cause but also by the opposition itself. Even as they mourned the two dead men they were gaining force. I had no place among them. When I took a basket of food and supplies to Julia Bordoise, who lived in a rundown apartment, the widow was surrounded by her friends and neighbors. She was weeping softly, and two women had their arms around her. I left almost immediately, an unbidden outsider. When Pammy returned from the small missions the union leadership asked of her, she said anything happening in terms of negotiating or planning was happening very privately. “Anger is there,” she said, “but profound exhilaration is also there. Everyone now knows his part.”