The Deer Park (37 page)

“You got a disgusting imagination,” Teppis said hoarsely.

“I’m a realist. So are you, H.T. I know there’s not another studio in this town that could make a nickel handling Tony. But you can.”

“My digestion is upset,” Teppis said.

“I glimpse the kind of campaign you see for Tony. Tell me if I’m right.” He paused. “No, it’s a bad idea. It won’t work. It would be too hard to bring off.”

“You talk and I’ll tell you,” Teppis said.

“Well, now, this is off the top of my head, of course, but I was wondering if you were thinking of making Lulu keep this marriage quiet until we’re done shooting her film. Then, we can make the announcement. Maybe even work out a big wedding. The potential it gives us for building up Tony is tremendous. Tony Tanner,” Munshin announced, “the kid who stole Lulu Meyers right from under a big lover-type like Teddy Pope. People will say, ‘You’ve done it again, H.T.’ And they’ll be right.”

Teppis failed to respond. “Don’t give me compliments,” he said, “I’m too upset. Do you know how my stomach feels?”

Munshin lit a cigarette and smoked in silence for some seconds. “The doctor told me you ought to lower your nervous tension,” he said.

“You’re my son-in-law, and you’re a pimp,” Teppis burst out. Then he reached for the button under his desk and clicked it to the “off” position. “Did you hear what Charley Eitel said to me once? He said, ‘Mr. Teppis, we all got our peculiarities.’ I don’t like the sound of it. Carlyle, there’s word getting around.”

“H.T., believe me. It isn’t what you do or what you don’t do, people will still talk about you.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“That’s right.”

“I haven’t slept with a woman in ten years.”

“It’s the truth, H.T.”

Teppis looked at the ceiling. “What kind of girl do you have in mind?”

“A sweet kid, H.T.”

“I suppose you put her on the payroll.”

“To tell the truth, I did. A friend of mine introduced me to her in Desert D’Or. Chief, it’s better this way, believe me. The kid’ll keep her mouth shut because who knows, she might have a career here. She’s a cute little stock girl.”

“That’s what you always say, Collie.”

“I had a talk with her. She’ll button her lip tight as a virgin’s bun.”

“You’re a foul-mouthed individual,” Teppis told him.

“She’s really safe.”

“If it weren’t for Lottie, I’d fire you.”

“A genius like you needs relaxation,” Collie said. “It’s wrong, H.T., to miss the fruits of life.”

Teppis tapped one hand against the other. “All right, I want you to send her up.”

“I’ll have her here in five minutes.”

“You get the hell out, Collie. You think a man can break the laws of society? Those laws are there for a purpose. Every time you send up a girl, I don’t even want to see her again. I refuse to sleep with her.”

“Nobody can work the way you do, H.T.,” said Collie going out the door.

After a short interval, a girl in her early twenties with newly dyed honey-colored hair came in unannounced through a separate door to Teppis’ office. She was wearing a gray tailored
suit and very high heels, and her hair was caught in a snood. Her mouth was painted in the form of broad bowed lips to hide the thin mouth beneath the lipstick.

“Sit down, doll, sit down right here,” said Teppis pointing to a place on the couch beside him.

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Teppis,” said the girl.

“You can call me Herman.”

“Oh, I couldn’t.”

“I like you, you’re a nice-looking girl, you got class. Just tell me your first name because I don’t remember last names.”

“It’s Bobby, Mr. Teppis.”

He put a fatherly hand on her. “You work here, Collie tells me.”

“I’m an actress, Mr. Teppis. I’m a good actress.”

“Sweetie, there’s so many good actresses, it’s a shame.”

“Gee, I’m really good, Mr. Teppis,” Bobby said.

“Then you’ll get a chance. In this studio there’s opportunity for real talent-types. Talent is in its infancy. There’s a future for it.”

“I’m glad you think so, Mr. Teppis.”

“You married? You got a husband and kids?”

“I’m divorced. It didn’t work out. But I have two little girls.”

“That’s nice,” Teppis said. “You got to plan for their future. I want you to try to send them to college.”

“Mr. Teppis, they’re still babies.”

“You should always plan. I’ve given to charity all my life.” Teppis nodded. “I hope you got a career here, sweetie. You been here how long?”

“Just a couple of weeks.”

“An actress got to have patience. That’s my motto. I like you. You got problems. You’re a human girl.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Sweetie, move over, sit on my lap.”

Bobby sat on his lap. Neither spoke for a minute.

“You listen to me,” Teppis said in his hoarse thin voice, “what did Collie say to you?”

“He said I should do what you wanted, Mr. Teppis.”

“You’re not a blabbermouth?”

“No, Mr. Teppis.”

“You’re a good girl. You know, there’s nobody you can trust. Everybody tells everybody about everything. I can’t trust you. You’ll tell somebody. There’s no trust left in the world.”

“Mr. Teppis, you can trust me.”

“I’m the wrong man to cross.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t cross a swell man like you. Am I too heavy on your lap, Mr. Teppis?”

“You’re just right, sweetie.” Teppis’ breathing became more pronounced. “What did you say,” he asked, “when Collie said you should do what I wanted?”

“I said I would, Mr. Teppis.”

“That’s a smart girl.”

Tentatively, she reached out a hand to finger his hair, and at that moment Herman Teppis opened his legs and let Bobby fall to the floor. At the expression of surprise on her face, he began to laugh. “Don’t you worry, sweetie,” he said, and down he looked at that frightened female mouth, facsimile of all those smiling lips he had seen so ready to serve at the thumb of power, and with a cough, he started to talk. “That’s a good girlie, that’s a good girlie, that’s a good girlie,” he said in a mild little voice, “you’re an angel darling, and I like you, you’re my darling darling, oh that’s the ticket,” said Teppis.

Not two minutes later, he showed Bobby genially to the door. “I’ll call you when to see me again, sweetheart,” he said.

Alone in his office, he lit a cigar, and pressed the buzzer. “What time is the conference on
Song Of The Heart?
” he asked.

“In half an hour, sir.”

“Tell Nevins I want to see his rushes before then. I’ll be right down.”

“Yessir.”

Teppis ground out the cigar. “There’s a monster in the human heart,” he said aloud to the empty room. And to himself he whispered, like a bitter old woman, close to tears, “They deserve it, they deserve every last thing that they get.”

F
OR THE REST
of the time I stayed in Desert D’Or, I quit the house I had for so many months and took a furnished room at one of the few cheap places in the resort which rented by the week. Then I got a job. As if I wanted to make a prophet of Collie Munshin, the job was for washing dishes. It was in an expensive restaurant where I had eaten often enough with Lulu, and it had the merit of paying the wage of fifty-five dollars a week.

I could have had other jobs. I could have been a male car-hop as Munshin had warned, or a parking-lot attendant, or I could have gotten work of some sort in one hotel or another, but I chose to wash dishes as though my eight-hour stint in the steam and the grease and the heat, with my fingers burned by plates which came too hot from the machine and my eyes reddened by sweat, was a sort of poor man’s Turkish bath for me. And when I was done for the day, I would grab a meal in a drugstore, an expensive drugstore, but it was the cheapest I could find, for it would have been easier to come on a yacht
than a hash-house in that part of the desert, and the restaurant where I worked did not feed the help, except for what help I could get from a friendly waitress—the last of Munshin’s predictions—who would slip me a Caesar salad or a peach melba which I would eat with water-puckered fingers, hardly missing a beat on the plates as they erupted from that gargoyle of a machine which threw its shadow over me, while the most simple lesson of class, the dirge of the dishwasher, steamed furiously in my mind: did those hogs out there, those rich hogs, have to eat on so many plates?

At the other end of the machine, feeding me the gravy-rimmed crockery and the egg-crusted forks, was a fifty-year-old dishwasher with gray hair and lean shoulders, who did not say a hundred words in all the weeks we worked together. He worked in order to drink, and drank in order to die, and like all drunks persisted in living, his hangovers strung like morning wash under the pale sunlight of the neon tubes in the kitchen, so that he retched for the first four hours of work and nibbled remnants for the rest of his shift, a choice bit of filet here, a pure string bean there, the perfect sparrow choosing golden grains from a horse-ball feast, but nervously, waiting for the evening rain puddle when he could sop the thirst for which hunger is only a substitute. Watching his hands claw a prize into his mouth and wipe the rest down the slophole of his work table, I came to envy him more than I had envied anyone in Desert D’Or. His work had such advantages over mine. I did not grudge him the food, but it was blood to know that his end of the machine was ten degrees cooler, and his plates were cold when he scraped and stacked them into the racking boxes while they hissed at my end of the tunnel in boiling water, half-live lobsters making one last gasp to scratch their way out of the pot. I learned again the great anger of working at the bottom where the thought that you do not own a Cadillac is as far away as the infantryman’s knowledge that he will never get a General’s star, but what bites is that the man on the next
cot in the endless barracks at the bottom has the soft job, is on permanent latrine duty let us say, and therefore is given the benefit of missing morning inspection.

I had found the orphanage again and I was home; I might just as well never have left home. After work, after my meal in the expensive drugstore, I would go back to my furnished room and I would bathe—what luxuries have the poor—and lie naked and powdered on my bed, covered with heat rash, reading the newspaper until I fell asleep. That way I passed three or four weeks, my mind sleeping on pointless calculations. I would spend an hour going over my budget, deciding on any particular night that I could reduce my expenses to no less than thirty-four dollars a week, which meant after all the pieces were taken from my pay, that I could never bank more than fifty dollars a month. So it would be six hundred dollars saved in a year, and after six years and eight months of dodging lobsters, I would earn back what I had lost in twelve days with Lulu, and this thought gave me a sort of melancholy glee, allowing me to relish like a saint counting his sores, how hard the work would be tomorrow.

It was all my doing. I still had most of my three thousand dollars and I did not have to work, but with Lulu gone, there was no other choice than to sit down and begin the apprenticeship of learning to be a writer. Feeling the fear this ambition gave to me, I was ready to fly anywhere, to the Equator if necessary, but one can always find the Equator, and I did not have to take a step from Desert D’Or. Waiting for me was the stinkhole and the furnace at the back of my modern restaurant, and I buried myself for a week, and another week, and five weeks after that, mortifying my energy, whipping my spirit, preparing myself for that other work I looked on with religious awe, while all the time, romance being the hardiest of the weeds which grow in a home for orphans, I never could rid myself of the sweet idea that one day Lulu would come to the restaurant, she would blunder back to the kitchen, she would see me in
my dishwasher’s apron and begin to cry, she would love me as she never had before, and the essence of magic would be tasted: you dropped to the bottom only to gain momentum for the leap to the top.

It could not go on forever. My fairy tales began to dissolve in the gossip columns, and each night I tickled my prickly heat by forcing myself to read the film news from the capital. There were many reports of Lulu’s marriage, and columnists were fond of calling it “The Love Match of the Year.” Those fan magazines which had not been embarrassed by signed articles: “Why I Dream About Teddy Pope And Me—by—Lulu Meyers,” could afford to give space to the big piggy bank of Tony and Lulu Tanner. The story, gelded by the memorable prose of those magazines to the use of the word “kiss,” declared that every time Tony “kissed” Lulu, or Lulu “kissed” Tony, the winner of the bonanza would drop a coin in their piggy bank. “It fills up so quickly,” Lulu said or her press agent said, “that Tony and I are always running short of small change.”

How true it all was, or at least how partially true, I could not know, for once I took the job, I buried myself and never went to see Eitel or Faye or Dorothea or anyone I knew in the resort. The result was that I believed the gossip columns and the surprise was that it cured me of magic; I even began to think of quitting my job and starting to write, and finally one evening I went to see Eitel.

I had supposed that everything would be the same. Nothing had happened to me, and so I could not feel that anything had happened to anyone else. At most, when I thought of Eitel and Elena I saw them eating at a quiet table in my restaurant, or Dorothea and Pelley on a carouse, or Marion making a contact. More than that had happened, however. The night I visited Eitel, he was beginning the job of moving his belongings from Desert D’Or to the capital. He had broken up with Elena, he told me, and she was living now with Marion Faye.

In the hours we sat drinking, I got the story from him and
I hated to hear what he told me. There was nothing left of him nor anyone else, and I heard details which were very close. It was all his fault, he began by saying. After Dorothea’s party, he knew that he would have to make up his mind about the offer from Crane. He could not postpone a decision much longer and there were only two choices. He could stay in Desert D’Or and continue to be the black-market thoroughbred of Munshin’s secret stable, or he could go back to the capital. But to go back with Elena did not seem plausible; she was hardly the mate for a commercial man. So his thoughts without any hint of something new chased themselves around the old circle, and after the night Eitel wept in her arms, he lived in constant distrust of the tenderness he felt for her.