Short Stories: Five Decades (28 page)

“Now, Dutcher,” Machamer protested. “Eight o’clock Saturday night, Labor Day week end …”

“On a high moral plane,” Dutcher said. “I just want to have somebody to talk to.”

“You have plenty of girls,” Machamer said.

“I’m tired of them,” Dutcher said. “Tonight I’m tired of them. War,
Murder at Midnight
, the fickleness of the male character, I’m tired of them. Tonight I’m in the mood for a new face.” Dutcher waved his hands elaborately, embroidering on the theme, although already half-sorry that he’d said anything about a girl. “A face moody, passionate, with the eyes cynical and despairing, the mouth lost and contemptuous and stormy, the hair tossed and black …”

“He wants a character out of Thomas Wolfe,” Machamer said.

“A face for the week end,” Dutcher said, his tongue sliding joyfully in his mouth after the Rum Collins, “a face tragic and tortured by the guilt of a slaughtering and slaughtered world …”

Dolly jumped off her stool. “I’m going to call Maxine,” she said.

“Who’s Maxine?” Dutcher asked, warily.

“She’s very pretty,” Dolly said. “She’s an actress at Republic.”

“Oh, God,” Dutcher said.

“Don’t be such a snob,” said Dolly. “Give me a nickel.”

“What do you expect at eight o’clock Saturday night?” Machamer gave her a nickel. “Heddy LaMarr?”

“She’s very pretty,” Dolly repeated. “She just got in from New York and she may not be busy …” She started toward the phone.

“On a high moral plane!” Dutcher shouted after her. “Remember!”

Dolly strode out of sight toward the telephone booth. Dutcher watched her and then turned to Machamer. “When you read the papers,” he said, “and you read about airplanes bombing people and then being shot down, do you ever think about what it’s like up there, with the bullets coming at you and the plane bucking and all of a sudden just air below …?”

“All the time,” Machamer said soberly.

“During the Spanish War I used to dream about being machine-gunned by airplanes. I’d run and run along alleyways between garages and the planes would always come back and get me from an open side.” Dutcher finished his drink. “I wonder what garages had to do with it. The trouble with the human race is it’s too brave. You can get people to do anything—fly around and get shot at twenty thousand feet up, walk into hand grenades, fight naval battles. If the human race wasn’t so damn courageous, this would be a much better world to live in. That’s the sum total of my thinking in two months in Hollywood.”

“Einstein is resting easy,” Machamer said. “He’s still got a good lead.”

“I know,” said Dutcher. “But he doesn’t have to think in this climate.”

Dolly slipped in between them. “It’s all settled,” she said. “Maxine is dying to go. She’s heard about you.”

“Good or bad?” Dutcher asked.

“She’s just heard about you. She says you mustn’t get fresh.”

Dutcher wrinkled his nose. “Did she say ‘fresh’?”

“Yes,” Dolly said.

“I don’t like Maxine.”

“Nuts,” Machamer said, and pulled him away from the bar and out to his car.

* * *

The big car sped toward Mexico. Dutcher sprawled luxuriously on the back seat with his head in Maxine’s lap. Occasionally he moved his head lazily because Maxine was wearing a suit trimmed all the way down the front with red fox and the fur got into his nose and tickled him.

“He was an Italian,” Maxine was saying. “He had large estates in Italy and he had a good job in New York, fifteen thousand a year, but he didn’t like Mussolini.”

“A character,” Dutcher said softly. “A beautiful character.”

“We were engaged to be married,” Maxine said, speaking loudly, talking to Dolly, “but two weeks later he gave up his job. He relaxed; my little Wop relaxed.” She laughed a little sadly, stroked Dutcher’s head absently. “As soon as I meet a man he relaxes.”

Machamer turned on the radio, and a man in London said that Hitler had not as yet answered Chamberlain’s ultimatum and an orchestra played “I May Be Wrong, But I Think You’re Wonderful.”

Dutcher looked thoughtfully up at Maxine’s face. It was a round, full face, with a little full mouth that looked as though it had been created in God’s mind with a careful brilliant smear of lipstick already on it. “You’re very pretty,” he said seriously.

Maxine smiled. “I’m not so bad,” she patted him in appreciation. “I’m a little fat at the moment. I drank too much wine in New York. Dolly, I heard that Gladys is marrying Eddie Lane. Is that true?”

“In October,” Dolly said.

Maxine sighed. “That Gladys. Eddie Lane’s old man is good for five hundred thousand a year. She was in my class at high school. Oil. Old man Lane is up to his navel in oil. Eddie Lane chased me for two years like a kid after a fire truck. What a goddamn fool I was to go to New York.”

Dutcher laughed, looking up at her. “You have a nice, refreshing outlook on finance.”

Maxine laughed with him. “Money is money,” she said. “I’ll get a little fatter and even Republic won’t have me, and then where’ll I be?”

“I’ll write a play,” Machamer said, at the wheel, “and you can act in it in New York. They like them fat in New York.”

“I tried that, too,” Maxine said grimly. “I thought of another way out. I had my step-father insured …”

“Holy God!” Dutcher said. “For how much?”

“Fifty thousand.”

“We’re in the dough,” Dutcher said. “Stop and buy me a Lincoln.”

“Hah,” said Maxine. “I paid his insurance three years then he went and got married on me. A little Irish biddy he saw waiting on table in San Luis Obispo.”

They all laughed. “You’re wonderful,” Dutcher said. He pulled her down and kissed her. She kissed politely, with reserve, carefully, yet with a hint of vulgar accomplishment.

Unsatisfactory, Dutcher thought, letting his head fall back, yet … Reader of Spinoza, admirer of John Milton …

“This is Berlin,” a voice said on the radio. “The city is in total darkness. The Fuehrer has not replied as yet to the English ultimatum. There is constant troop movement at the Berlin railroad stations and trains are pouring toward the Polish frontier.”

A band played “Begin the Beguine,” and Maxine talked to Dolly about another friend of theirs who had married a seventy-year-old man with fourteen blocks of real estate in downtown Cleveland.

“The city is in total darkness,” Dutcher murmured. He lay back comfortably. This wasn’t so bad, racing through the night to a new country, with a new girl, even though it was only Tia Juana and only an ordinarily pretty girl, getting a little fat, and a little hard and not exactly the girl you’d pick to take with you on a visit to your old Professor of Ethics at Amherst. Still it was better than sitting at a bar all alone, thinking, “I’ll wait another ten minutes and then go out and buy another paper, see what
they
have to say.”

He turned and buried his face in the red fox. There was a heavy smell of perfume, which was pleasant over the old smell of leather and gasoline in the back of the car. “Prince Matchabelli,” Dutcher said. “This fox fell into a well of Prince Matchabelli and drowned. A beautiful death. Machamer, did I ever tell you about Cynthia Messmore, who was a classmate of mine at PS 99 and Miss Finch’s? She married old Shamus Goonan, from the eleventh assembly district …”

“No!” Machamer said, in tones of wonder.

“A brilliant match,” Dutcher said. “He was on the WPA three days a week and he was good for seven hundred and sixty dollars a year, as long as he stayed sober. Sewer construction, he was a sewer construction magnate, he was up to his navel in …”

“Are you making fun of me?” Maxine’s voice was hard, and Dutcher knew he ought to stop, but he couldn’t. He sat up.

“I never should’ve left PS 99,” he said sadly. “Sex is the opium of the people. Turn on the radio, Machamer.”

Dolly was shaking her head at him, but Dutcher made believe he was looking out the window. Mean, he thought, I’ve been mean. And I liked it. Tonight I want to be everything … mean, angry, noble, gracious, lordly, docile, everything. I want my emotions to be engaged. I can’t love her, I can’t make her love me, but I can make her angry at me and then win her over, then …

“This is Paris,” a voice said. “All the lights are out. The Cabinet has been in conference since seven o’clock this evening.”

Machamer turned the radio off.

Dutcher felt Maxine eyeing him. He turned and looked pleasantly at her. After all, he thought, regarding her, she
is
a pretty girl, with a fine figure and we
are
going to be together until tomorrow night …

“Is that how you’re going to the races tomorrow?” Maxine asked. “Without a tie?”

Dutcher felt at his collar. He was wearing a polo shirt, open at the throat. “I guess so,” he said. “It’s awfully hot.”

“I won’t go with you,” Maxine said, “unless you wear a tie.”

“I haven’t got a tie.”

“I won’t go with you,” Maxine said firmly.

“We live in a tropical climate,” Dutcher said. “We mustn’t ever forget that. I’m a Northern man, I sweat like …”

“I have an extra tie,” Machamer said. “You can wear that.”

Dutcher nodded. “If it’ll make Maxine happy …” He smiled at her.

“I wouldn’t be seen in front of all those people with a man who wasn’t wearing a tie.”

“You’re right,” Dutcher said, smiling pleasantly at her. “Now that I think of it, you’re absolutely right.”

Maxine smiled back at him. At least, he thought, I haven’t thought of
Murder at Midnight
since the trip began. At least, she’s done that.

They stopped in San Diego and drank at a bar among a lot of sailors from the naval base. Dolly took some of the pills she was always taking and for a moment gripped Machamer’s arm and leaned over and kissed his neck. It was nearly two o’clock and the bar was closing and the sailors were drunk.

“The United States will not get into any war,” a big blond farm boy jutting out of his flimsy blue uniform announced. “I have the guarantee of my congressman.”

“Where you from?” Dutcher asked.

“Arkansas.”

Dutcher nodded as though this convinced him. The sailor gulped down what was left of his beer.

“Let the Japs come over,” he called. “We’ll sweep ’em from the seas. I’d like to see the Japs just try and come over. I’d just like to see …”

Maxine was smiling at the sailor.

“I’m hungry,” Dutcher said, herding Maxine and Dolly toward the door. “I hate discussions of relative naval strength.”

“That was heartening,” Machamer said, as they walked toward the bright lights of a waffle shop down the street. “An official representative of the United States armed forces says we won’t get into a war.”

“He was a nice-looking boy,” Maxine said, as they entered the waffle shop. “If you took him out of that sailor suit.”

The waffle shop was crowded, and they sat at a table that had not been cleared. Maxine and Dolly went to the ladies’ room and Machamer and Dutcher were left at the table, looking at each other in the garish waffle-room light, across the dirty dishes and spilled coffee on the table.

“She’s all right,” Machamer said loudly, grinning at Dutcher. “Dolly did all right for you, didn’t she? She’s got a wonderful figure.”

“Machamer,” Dutcher said, “if I had a cement mixer and I wanted somebody to make a speech while it was going, I would pick you.”

Machamer looked around him apologetically. “Isn’t it funny, how loud I talk?”

“Everybody in the Square Deal Waffle Shop now knows you think Maxine has a wonderful figure.”

The waitress, very pale and harried-looking at two in the morning, rattled the dishes between them as she cleared the table.

“You’re having a good time, aren’t you?” Machamer asked. “She makes you laugh, doesn’t she?”

“She makes me laugh,” Dutcher said.

Dolly and Maxine came back. Dutcher watched Maxine walk down the aisle between the tables, her red fox shaking down the front of her suit and all the men in the place watching her. That suit, Dutcher thought, is one-half inch too tight, in all directions. Everything she wears, always, I bet, is one-half inch too tight. Even her nightgowns.

“You know what I’m thinking of?” Dutcher said to Maxine as she sat down.

“What?” Maxine asked, all newly powdered and rouged.

“Your nightgowns.”

Maxine frowned. “That’s not a nice thing to say.”

“Dutcher’s a very vulgar man,” Machamer said. “You ought to read his books.”

“The English,” Maxine said, “just declared war on the Germans. The woman in the ladies’ room told us.”

That’s how I found out, Dutcher thought. In the ladies’ room in a waffle shop in San Diego, a woman told an actress from Republic, who drank too much wine in New York, that the English declared war on Germany, and that’s how I found out.

“This fork is dirty,” Maxine said loudly to the waitress, who was putting their waffles down on the table. “You have some nerve giving us dirty forks.”

The waitress sighed and put down a clean fork.

“They’ll get away with murder,” Maxine said, “if you let them.”

All through the room, people knifed slabs of butter and poured syrup and ate waffles, Dutcher noted, as he started on his. There was no change, just the usual restaurant noise of voices and plates.

“This waffle stinks,” Maxine said. “That’s my honest opinion. And they make a specialty of them! San Diego!”

Dutcher put his hand gently on hers to calm her.

“You got the hand of a day-laborer,” Maxine said. “What do you do, hammer in nails with them at the studio?”

“It’s the disgraceful heritage of my wasted youth,” Dutcher said.

Maxine turned his hand over and carefully examined the palm. “You got a heart line that’s branched many times,” she said.

“Tell me more,” said Dutcher.

“You’re fickle, jealous, selfish.” Maxine leaned over his hand very seriously. “And in the long run, you’re not going to be very successful.”

“What a catch!” Dolly said.

“Tell me more,” said Dutcher.

“You’re moody,” Maxine ran her finger lightly over his palm. “You’re a very moody man.”

“They don’t come any moodier,” said Dutcher.