The Little Men (2 page)

“What story?”

The two men looked at each other.

Mr. Flant rotated his cup in his hand.

“There was a death,” he said softly. “A man
who lived there, a dear man. Lawrence was his
name. Larry. A talented bookseller. He died.”

“Oh.”

“Boy did he,” Benny said. “Gassed himself.”

“At the Canyon Arms?” she asked, feeling
sweat on her neck despite all the fans blowing
everywhere, lifting motes and old skin. That's
what dust really is, you know, one of her
roommates once told her, blowing it from her
fingertips. “Inside my bungalow?”

They both nodded gravely.

“They carried him out through the courtyard,”
Mr. Flant said, staring vaguely out the
window. “That great sheaf of blond hair of his.
Oh, my.”

“So it's a challenge for some people,” Benny
said. “Once they know.”

Penny remembered the neighbor boy who
fell from their tree and died from blood poisoning
two days later. No one would eat its
pears after that.

“Well,” she said, eyes drifting to the smudgy
window, “some people are superstitious.”

Soon, Penny began stopping by Number
Three a few mornings a week, before work.
Then, the occasional evening, too. They served
rye or applejack.

It helped with her sleep. She didn't remember
her dreams, but her eyes still stung
lightspots most nights.

Sometimes the spots took odd shapes and
she would press her fingers against her lids
trying to make them stop.

“You could come to my bungalow,” she offered
once. But they both shook their heads
slowly, and in unison.

Mostly, they spoke of Lawrence. Larry.
Who seemed like such a sensitive soul, delicately
formed and too fine for this town.

“When did it happen?” Penny asked, feeling
dizzy, wishing Benny had put more water
in the applejack. “When did he die?”

“Just before the war. A dozen years ago.”

“He was only thirty-five.”

“That's so sad,” Penny said, finding her eyes
misting, the liquor starting to tell on her.

“His bookstore is still on Cahuenga Boulevard,”
Benny told her. “He was so proud when
it opened.”

“Before that, he sold books for Stanley
Rose,” Mr. Flant added, sliding a handkerchief
from under the cuff of his fraying sleeve.
“Larry was very popular. Very attractive. An
accent soft as a Carolina pine.”

“He'd pronounce ‘bed' like ‘bay-ed.'” Benny
grinned, leaning against the window sill and
smiling that Gable smile. “And he said ‘bay-ed'
a lot.”

“I met him even before he got the job with
Stanley,” Mr. Flant said, voice speeding up.
“Long before Benny.”

Benny shrugged, topping off everyone's
drinks.

“He was selling books out of the trunk of
his old Ford,” Mr. Flant continued. “That's
where I first bought
Ulysses
.”

Benny grinned again. “He sold me my first
Tijuana Bible.
Dagwood Has a Family Party
.”

Mr. Flant nodded, laughed. “
Popeye in The
Art of Love.
It staggered me. He had an uncanny
sense. He knew just what you wanted.”

They explained that Mr. Rose, whose bookstore
once graced Hollywood Boulevard and
had attracted great talents, used to send young
Larry to the studios with a suitcase full of
books. His job was to trap and mount the big
shots. Show them the goods, sell them books
by the yard, art books they could show off in
their offices, dirty books they could hide in
their big gold safes.

Penny nodded. She was thinking about the
special books Mr. D. kept in his office, behind
the false encyclopedia fronts. The books had
pictures of girls doing things with long, fuzzy
fans and peacock feathers, a leather crop.

She wondered if Larry had sold them to
him.

“To get to those guys, he had to climb the
satin rope,” Benny said. “The studio secretaries,
the script girls, the publicity office, even
makeup girls like you. Hell, the grips. He loved
a sexy grip.”

“This town can make a whore out of anyone,”
Penny found herself blurting.

She covered her mouth, ashamed, but both
men just laughed.

Mr. Flant looked out the window into the
courtyard, the
flip-flipping
of banana leaves
against the shutter. “I think he loved the actresses
the most, famous or not.”

“He said he liked the feel of a woman's skin
in ‘bay-ed,' Benny said, rubbing his left arm,
his eyes turning dark, soft. “'Course, he'd slept
with his mammy until he was thirteen.”

As she walked back to her own bungalow, she
always had the strange feeling she might see
Larry. That he might emerge behind the rose
bushes or around the statue of Venus.

Once she looked down into the fountain
basin and thought she could see his face instead
of her own.

But she didn't even know what he looked
like.

Back in the bungalow, head fuzzy and the
canyon so quiet, she thought about him more.
The furniture, its fashion at least two decades
past, seemed surely the same furniture he'd
known. Her hands on the smooth bands of
the rattan sofa. Her feet, her toes on the banana
silk tassels of the rug. And the old mirror
in the bathroom, its tiny black pocks.

In the late hours, lying on the bed, the mattress too soft, with a vague smell of mildew,
she found herself waking again and again,
each time with a start.

It always began with her eyes stinging,
dreaming again of a doctor with the head
mirror, or a car careering toward her on the
highway, always lights in her face.

One night, she caught the lights moving,
her eyes landing on the far wall, the baseboards.

For several moments, she'd see the light
spots, fuzzed and floating, as if strung together
by the thinnest of threads.

The spots began to look like the darting
mice that sometimes snuck inside her childhood
home. She never knew mice could be
that fast. So fast that if she blinked, she'd miss
them, until more came. Was that what it was?

If she squinted hard, they even looked like
little men. Could it be mice on their hindfeet?

The next morning, she set traps.

“I'm sorry, he's unavailable,” the receptionist
said. Even over the phone, Penny knew which
one. The beauty marks and giraffe neck.

“But listen,” Penny said, “it's not like he
thinks. I'm just calling about the check he gave
me. The bank stopped payment on it.”

So much for Mr. D.'s parting gift for their
time together. She was going to use it to make
rent, to buy a new girdle, maybe even a television
set.

“I've passed along your messages, Miss
Smith. That's really all I can do.”

“Well, that's not all I can do,” Penny said,
her voice trembling. “You tell him that.”

Keeping busy was the only balm. At work, it
was easy, the crush of people, the noise and
personality of the crew.

Nights were when the bad thoughts came,
and she knew she shouldn't let them.

In the past, she'd had those greasy-skinned
roommates to drown out thinking. They all
had rashes from cheap studio makeup and
the clap from cheap studio men and beautiful
figures like Penny's own. And they never
stopped talking, twirling their hair in curlers
and licking their fingers to turn the magazine
pages. But their chatter-chatter-chatter muffled
all Penny's thoughts. And the whole atmosphere—
the thick muzz of Woolworth's
face powder and nylon nighties when they
even shared a bed—made everything seem
cheap and lively and dumb and easy and
light.

Here, in the bungalow, after leaving Mr.
Flant and Benny to drift off into their applejack dreams, Penny had only herself. And the
books.

Late into the night, waiting for the
lightspots to come, she found her eyes wouldn't
shut. They started twitching all the time,
and maybe it was the night jasmine, or the
beachburr.

But she had the books. All those books,
these beautiful, brittling books, books that
made her feel things, made her long to go
places and see things—the River Liffey and
Paris, France.

And then there were those in the wrappers,
the brown paper soft at the creases, the white
baker string slightly fraying.

Her favorite was about a detective recovering
stolen jewels from an unlikely hiding spot.

But there was one that frightened her.
About a farmer's daughter who fell asleep
each night on a bed of hay. And in the night,
the hay came alive, poking and stabbing at her.

It was supposed to be funny, but it gave
Penny bad dreams.

“Well, she was in love with Larry,” Mr. Flant
said. “But she was not Larry's kind.”

Penny had been telling them how Mrs.
Stahl had shown up at her door the night before, in worn satin pajamas and cold cream,
to scold her for moving furniture around.

“I don't even know how she saw,” Penny
said. “I just pushed the bed away from the
wall.”

She had lied, telling Mrs. Stahl she could
hear the oven damper popping at night. She
was afraid to tell her about the shadows and
lights and other things that made no sense in
daytime. Like the mice moving behind the
wall on hindfeet, so agile she'd come to think
of them as pixies, dwarves. Little men.

“It's not your place to move things,” Mrs.
Stahl had said, quite loudly, and for a moment
Penny thought the woman might cry.

“That's all his furniture, you know,” Benny
said. “Larry's. Down to the forks and spoons.”

Penny felt her teeth rattle slightly in her
mouth.

“He gave her books she liked,” Benny
added. “Stiff British stuff he teased her about.
Charmed himself out of the rent for months.”

“When he died she wailed around the
courtyard for weeks,” Mr. Flant recalled. “She
wanted to scatter the ashes into the canyon.”

“But his people came instead,” Benny said.
“Came on a train all the way from Carolina.
A man and woman with cardboard suitcases
packed with pimento sandwiches. They took
the body home.”

“They said Hollywood had killed him.”

Benny shook his head, smiled that tobaccotoothed
smile of his. “They always say that.”

“You're awfully pretty for a face-fixer,” one of
the actors told her, fingers wagging beneath
his long makeup bib.

Penny only smiled, and scooted before the
pinch came.

It was a Western, so it was mostly men,
whiskers, lip bristle, three-day beards filled
with dust.

Painting the girls' faces was harder. They
all had ideas of how they wanted it. They were
hard girls, striving to get to Paramount, to
MGM. Or started out there and hit the Republic
rung on the long slide down. To Allied,
AIP. Then studios no one ever heard of, operating
out of some slick guy's house in the
Valley.

They had bad teeth and head lice and some
had smells on them when they came to the
studio, like they hadn't washed properly. The
costume assistants always pinched their noses
behind their backs.

It was a rough town for pretty girls. The
only place it was.

Penny knew she had lost her shine long
ago. Many men had rubbed it off, shimmy by
shimmy.

But it was just as well, and she'd just as soon
be in the warpaint business. When it rubbed
off the girls, she could just get out her brushes,
her power puffs, and shine them up like new.

As she tapped the powder pots, though, her
mind would wander. She began thinking
about Larry bounding through the backlots.
Would he have come to Republic with his
wares? Maybe. Would he have soft-soaped her,
hoping her bosses might have a taste for T.S.
Eliot or a French deck?

By day, she imagined him as a charmer, a
cheery, silver-tongued roué.

But at night, back at the Canyon Arms, it
was different.

You see, sometimes she thought she could
see him moving, room to room, his face pale,
his trousers soiled. Drinking and crying over
someone, something, whatever he'd lost that
he was sure wasn't ever coming back.

There were sounds now. Sounds to go with
the two a.m. lights, or the mice or whatever
they were.

Tap-tap-tap.

At first, she thought she was only hearing
the banana trees, brushing against the side of
the bungalow. Peering out the window, the
moon-filled courtyard, she couldn't tell. The
air looked very still.

Maybe, she thought, it's the fan palms outside
the kitchen window, so much lush foliage
everywhere, just the thing she'd loved, but
now it seemed to be touching her constantly,
closing in.

And she didn't like to go into the kitchen
at night. The white tile glowed eerily, reminded
her of something. The wide expanse
of Mr. D.'s belly, his shirt pushed up, his watch
chain hanging. The coaster of milk she left for
the cat the morning she ran away from home.
For Hollywood.

The mouse traps never caught anything.
Every morning, after the rumpled sleep and
all the flits and flickers along the wall, she
moved them to different places. She looked
for signs.

She never saw any.

One night, three a.m., she knelt down on
the floor, running her fingers along the baseboards.
With her ear to the wall, she thought
the tapping might be coming from inside. A
tap-tap-tap
. Or was it a
tick-tick-tick
?

“I've never heard anything here,” Mr. Flant
told her the following day, “but I take sedatives.”

Benny wrinkled his brow. “Once, I saw
pink elephants,” he offered. “You think that
might be it?”

Penny shook her head. “It's making it hard
to sleep.”