The Hollywood Trilogy (32 page)

“But she still calls home doesn't she? You could call her at work.”

“She's got a new boyfriend,” Jody said.

“Who,
Momma?
”

“Yeah. They go out and stay out until three or four in the morning. I hear Momma coming in sometimes.”

“Who is he? What's he like?”

“He's nice. Bald as an egg, practically. I don't much like him, but he doesn't try to be buddies with me, which helps. He's about fifty I guess, a slob. You know.”

“Has he got any gold?” Lindy wanted to know. “Maybe Momma can get out of the rut. She really blew it with the guy who owned the used car lot.”

“I don't think so. He drives around in a little old black car. It's no Cadillac. And he dresses like a slob. I think he's a college teacher.”

“Oh shit,” Lindy said. “I wonder what he looks like.”

Jody felt she had already answered that question, so she changed the subject, but when the news came on, Lindy got up and telephoned Eleanor at the supermarket. When she came back and sat down the cartoon was on. She leaned over and whispered to Jody, “I'm going to take you home. We'll have dinner with Momma.”

Jody was glad. She had not been looking forward to the long bus ride alone.

Lindy was very fond of her little sister, although she did not hold out too much hope for her future. Jody just did not seem the type who would get anywhere. She was not really ugly, Lindy thought, but her face had just too much animality in it, reminding Lindy of a picture she had seen in Life magazine, little Italian children wearing hand-me-down rags and smoking cigarettes. They looked so old. It had been all right for Jody to imitate her big sister's ambitions and want to become an actress when she was little, but she was now entering into her teenage years, and it was time to get serious. Lindy felt that if Jody applied herself she could probably get office work of some type, which would put her in a good position to meet men of the right
social level—not the kind of pukes and hustlers who hung around downtown nor the rich boys that go to college, but office workers, one of whom would marry Jody and provide her with a house to have babies in.

Lindy did not want a husband, even though at eighteen the dream of stardom was fading. She did not want to give her life over to anybody. What she really wanted was a lot of money so that she could travel, see things and meet people. Once in fact she and a friend named Nancy Lavery had planned to forge a lot of checks and run to San Francisco with the money, but when Nancy showed up at the drugstore flashing the book of checks she had stolen, Lindy cooled off on the whole idea. Nancy had gone ahead, with her boyfriend Frank Delaware and they had both been promptly caught, tried, sentenced and given probation, after which they disappeared. Crime was not the way. Lindy knew a lot of people mixed up in various kinds of crime, from the dark-eyed hook-nosed boy who would steal anything you wanted and used to walk into stores dressed in one suit and walk out wearing another, to people who worked for Faye Goman, the white-haired man with glasses who ran organized crime in the whole area and lived at the Benson Hotel. Lindy had only seen him once, talking to the mistress of the man who owned the Rialto, but she knew a few pimps who worked for him.

And of course that was no answer. Lindy knew at least five girls who had been turned out by the pimps, one of whom had married a vice squad cop, but they were all such stupid girls, either believing the line that they were the one and only true love of the pimp, or allowing themselves to pretend to believe it. Lindy just couldn't swallow the line; and even if she had, the first time a customer had asked for anything bizarre or behaved badly she would have spit in his eye and walked out.

Once, for twenty dollars, she had worked for one of the pimps, who had told her earnestly that the job required no actual sex at all. “Listen, all you got to do is walk into the dude's hotel room. He's in there layin in a coffin he's brought along with him. I don't know how the hell he gets it into the fucking room, probably used the freight elevator, but anyway, all you got to do is walk in there, he raises up, you scream like hell and run. That's it.” It had sounded creepy to Lindy but she wanted the money, and so at the appointed time she tapped at the right door in the best hotel in Portland, heard the muffled, “Come in!,” opened the door and entered.

There indeed was a coffin, on the floor of the living room of a beautiful
suite, and there lying in the coffin was an old man with white hair and pink cheeks, dressed in a dark business suit, pretending to be dead.

“Hello?” Lindy said. She hadn't realized it but she was very nervous. She kept one hand on the doorknob, ready to scream and run, but when the man sat up, popping open his eyes at her, she started laughing hysterically and could not stop. She laughed, tears running down her face, while the man looked at her angrily and motioned at her with his hand. Finally she understood the frantic gesture to mean that he wanted her to shut the door. She shut it and put her hand over her mouth to stop the laughter.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I just thought of something. Can we go back and start over again or something?”

“I'm outraged,” the man said. He looked it, like a stern parent with a wayward child, but it was so silly, this old man sitting there sternly in his coffin, that she started laughing again.

“It's just, I got to thinking,” she said. “What if the bellhop came in by mistake?”

“I don't think it's funny,” the man said gruffly. “You won't do. You won't do at all. You tell your associate that I'm not going to pay for this. I didn't pay for the last one, and I'm not going to pay for you.”

Lindy said, “Are you the gentleman who ordered the ice?” And with a scream of laughter left the room and the sex business forever.

Now that she was living with Eddie Dorkin she did not have any more money worries, but she knew that the situation with Eddie could not last. She did not want it to last. She had been fascinated by Eddie because he knew so well how to get his way, but the fascination was ending for her, and apparently increasing for Eddie. The sex between them was very bad these days, with Eddie more the worshipper than the lover, looking at her with big sheep's eyes and muttering about how he loved her—even though at other times he told her he did not love anybody—and so it was getting time for Lindy to move on. But she was not going to make any moves without having a place to land.

Maybe she could get a job. She was seeing girls she had known in school, working as waitresses, salesgirls, ticket takers at movie houses, even usherettes, although that job was usually reserved for high school girls. Times were tough, Lindy knew, and getting a good job would not be easy, and she saw what working had done to her mother, turning her from a pretty girl to a washed-out woman. One of the reasons she was taking Jody home was to try
to catch a glimpse of her mother's new boyfriend. Lindy wondered what kind of man would be available to a woman who worked in a supermarket. It gave Lindy an odd pang to think that the man, whoever he was, probably only took her mother out to screw her, and was probably filling her full of bullshit about loving her and leaving his own wife, etc. etc. Lindy was prepared to dislike the man, even though Jody had said he didn't seem so bad. What did Jody know about men? She was too young and too open.

SIX

THE GIRLS got out to Sellwood a little after seven. It was raining now, and most of the snow underfoot was turning to slush. They picked their way through the messy parking lot to the supermarket and bought hamburger and tomato sauce and spaghetti, said hello to their mother and went home to cook dinner for her. Eleanor got off work at eight-thirty, and when she came in, wet and tired, the house smelled delightfully of spaghetti and meatballs, and after Eleanor bawled Jody out for cutting school, they sat down to a happy dinner.

After dinner Jody took the telephone into her room and called her friend Patsy Wambaugh to tell her what she had been doing all day and to find out what she had missed at school, while Lindy and Eleanor did the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen. Then they went into the living room with coffee and cigarettes. Eleanor was glad Lindy had come home for dinner. She had long since given up trying to control her elder daughter's life, and now she was getting the feeling that it might be possible for the two of them to become friends. Eleanor was a quiet person who kept things to herself and did not have many friends. In fact there was no one with whom she was truly intimate.

“Jody says you have a boyfriend,” Lindy said. Eleanor looked sharply at her daughter to see if there was any hint of mockery in her expression, but Lindy just looked interested. Eleanor patted her hair and said, “Well, it's true enough, I guess. There is a man I go to dinner with from time to time. I haven't seen your father in a long time,” she added.

“You ought to divorce him,” Lindy said. “He's not much good to you.”

“You shouldn't talk about your father that way.”

“Why not? My father's the joke of Portland. But anyway, tell me all about your new boyfriend!”

In spite of Lindy's eagerness and this godsent opportunity to get close to her daughter, Eleanor could not bring herself to talk about Quentin. She felt her face reddening as she thought wildly about trying to tell Lindy about their motel visits. There wasn't any way in the world she could tell her about her own sexual awakening and her own eagerness to get through dinner or the movie or whatever pretense they had used to avoid the admission that all either of them wanted was to make love.

“He's a very nice man, a professor of humanities at Reed College,” she said, looking down at her coffee cup.

“Is he married?” Lindy wanted to know.

“He was. He's got a son living with him. I really don't know too much about him. We're just company for each other, you know.”

“Oh Mama,” Lindy said. She wanted to say, “Oh Mama, isn't he making love to you? Are you just letting yourself dry up?” but she could not, and a deep feeling of depression suddenly overcame her. She had a flash of herself in twenty years, worn out with some kind of drudgery, trying in her futile way to attract some middle-aged man. “Oh Mama,” she said again, and lapsed into silence.

From Jody's room came a rill of girlish laughter, and Eleanor used it as a chance to change the subject.

“Isn't she getting pretty?” she said.

Lindy agreed, although she did not believe it, and the conversation drifted inevitably into a mother-daughter argument over what Lindy was doing with her life. Eleanor, without wanting to or even really meaning it, insisted once again that Lindy stop living with the drug salesman and get a job. She did not insist that Lindy come home to live, although she pointed out the economic advantages, and even suggested that with Lindy's income from her job, they could move to a slightly bigger house in a better neighborhood. This made Lindy feel guilty, which in turn made her angry.

“I don't want a job, Mama!”

“Well, be practical. What do you want?”

“Not some crappy job,” was all Lindy would say. After an uncomfortable silence, they heard a car door slam outside, and Eleanor recognized the sound. Without thinking, she put a hand over her breast, and Lindy, looking at her, understood everything. Feet tramped up the wooden steps and a hand pressed the doorbell.

“I'll get it,” Eleanor said. She did not say, “Who on earth?”—which was what she always said when the doorbell or the telephone rang. Lindy stood up as her mother opened the door to Quentin Corby.

“Hi,” he said. “I was out at school for a meeting and I saw your lights on. Is it okay?” He stuck his rain-wet head in and grinned at Lindy. “You must be Rosalind,” he said. “I'm Tin Corby.”

The room suddenly did not seem big enough for all three of them, and with awkward embarrassment Quentin's raincoat was taken, he was offered coffee, and they sat down to a clumsy conversation that began with the curious coincidence that both Quentin and Lindy preferred the last halves of their first names. It served partially to break the ice until Eleanor said, “You never told me that, Quentin. I thought you went by your full name.”

“Actually,” he said, “I don't know why I introduced myself that way. I haven't been called Tin in years, since I came out to Portland.”

“Where are you from?” Lindy asked him, and while he explained the devious routes of a scholar in search of grants, she watched her mother. Yes, her mother was either in love with the man or totally infatuated. She was nervous, her skin looked bad, and her eyes darted from Lindy to Quentin and then back again as if she was expecting one of them to pull a gun. Lindy was amused. He was a nice-looking guy, all right, probably very good in bed, now that she saw his eyes and his big soft-looking hands, but he must have been at least forty years old, and a corny dresser. Lindy felt better. It looked like her mother was getting laid after all. Abruptly she laughed, and when the others asked her why she just said, “Just something,” and let it drop.

After a while Lindy said, “Well, I better get to the bus stop before they stop running.”

Eleanor said, “Why don't you spend the night?,” but Lindy didn't feel like sharing a bed with Jody. Her own bed had been dismantled and stored when she moved out of the house, and although Eleanor offered to make her a bed on the couch she said, “No, I have stuff to do in the morning,” and Quentin said, “Come on, El, let's drive her home. Where do you live? Downtown?” But Eleanor was too tired to go out this late, and so Quentin drove her home by himself.