Third Girl from the Left (8 page)

“No.” He turned her to face him, started unbuttoning her silky blouse. “But I'm always willing to try new things. I think a person ought to be willing.” He had her shirt off now. “To try new things,” he said.

“Right.”

His mouth closed on her breast. She stopped thinking. Her favorite part was when her mind went off altogether. The bed moved beneath them. She was unbearably excited by Sheila's moans, by the bed waving and swirling beneath them, by the knowledge that this man was a stranger to her, by the mouth on her breasts, by how far away it was from Tulsa, from anything anybody ever thought of in Tulsa, by knowing that her mother would never understand this in a thousand years. She pulled him—what was his name? oh yeah, Rafe—inside her. She cried out, just after Sheila. Everything seemed very clear. And then it was over.

 

The next thing she knew, she was home in her own bed. She had no idea how she'd gotten there, where Sheila was, what had transpired after the events in Wilt's playroom. Her mind turned gray at just that point, covering a harder-edged truth. She looked at her yellowing shade, could feel that her hair was totally flattened, her mascara smeared all over her eyes, lipstick a pathetic reddish memory. She was still wearing her jeans. She skinned her hand into her pocket, drew out a small piece of paper. “In case you want to get to know me better . . . 555–8976. You something else, girl. Rafe.” Rafe. Hmm. They usually didn't give her a number. It might be worth calling.

While she was considering this, Sheila came to the door and leaned in the doorway. Her hair was matted on one side and bushed out on the other. Her eyes were reddened and her mouth looked bruised. Angela looked at her, smiled slightly, and said, “Girl, you look a mess.”

“Well, you ain't exactly ready for your close-up either, girl.” She pulled absently on the flattened side of her hair, then came and lay down next to Angela. “Some night last night, huh?”

“Who you telling?”

They were silent. “Think Wilt's gonna call you?”

“Nah.” She went quiet again, looking at the ceiling. “He was something, though. I never been with somebody so tall. Hadda keep scooting up and down. Felt like a damn fireman on a pole.” Angela laughed and took her hand. The sun suggested itself, warm and inviting, outside her window. Living in a way nobody in Tulsa could ever even have dreamed of, she felt not the least bit dirty. Not this morning. She didn't even mind that Sheila had been with someone else. They were just two girls doing what a girl's got to do. They'd always have each other. She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth. It tasted as though a desert resided there, hot grit and sand and the rot of dead things. She sat up, told Sheila she was going for a shower, walked to the bathroom. Once she got there, she looked at herself for a long, long while, her face out of focus from time and sex and cigarette smoke. She had a sudden moment, just a moment, where everything fell away, where she knew that her mother was right, this was never going to work out. But she pushed that thought away, drew a deep breath, turned on the shower. Another day begun. Another day begun.

H
ERE WAS THE THING ABOUT LOS ANGELES THAT
year: it was hot. Not just hot: the Santa Anas blowing 100 degrees so that you could barely breathe half the time. Not just hot: the air like sandpaper on the skin, the sun like a weapon. Not just hot: you had to spread newspaper on the seat of the fanciest car in order to have any hope of sitting there. But it wasn't just hot with the weather. It was hot with change, with happening, with beautiful black girls pulling up from every little dogtown and holler and city and shouting, “We want to be in pictures.” Rafe Madigan could have any girl he wanted. He could have them any way he wanted: doggie-style, ass-backward, all happy to go down on him (black girls—happy to go down on him!), two at a time. No matter what he asked, he found some beautiful young woman willing to do it. Sometimes he'd try asking for the freakiest thing he could think of just to see if they'd refuse. But they never said no. Never. He was born and raised in Los Angeles and he'd been a good-looking, smooth-talking, heart-stealing black man all his life, yet he had never seen anything like it. Got kind of boring sometime. Just waiting to see if he could find somebody different. Somebody who might make him feel different. It was a great warm, wet sea of flesh after a while. Couldn't tell one from the other. A few sweet words, a mention of the movie business, and he was in. One more fuck.

That's what it was like when he met Angela. He was acting a lot. He'd been on the fringes of the business since '68 but somewhere around '71 after
Sweetback
and after Sam Arkoff and Roger Corman figured they could make some goddamn money fast off this game, he couldn't stop working. He just had to show up at an audition and the part was his. Never the lead, though. He was handsome, but he wasn't quite
something
enough for that. So he played his share of cops and bouncers and sweet kid brothers of the leading lady. He kept busy. And he was called in a lot to read with people—the audition traffic had never been heavier.

When Angela came in for her audition, Rafe wasn't thinking about anything in particular. He'd been idly checking out the girls as they came in—that one had a nice ass, this one pretty lips—but he didn't think much beyond that. Until she came in. There was something so sweet about her, that little bit of a southern accent that she was trying unsuccessfully to hide, the long, pliable neck with a hollow at the base that he couldn't help but think of kissing, breasts that looked as though they'd fit right into his hands. She was something else. Thing was, the producer saw it too. Rafe saw the whole thing happen—the card, the look between them, the hardness that came into her eyes. And he knew he'd have to wait until Kaufman was done with her to make his move. She walked right out past him without another word after the audition. No rap, no phone number, no nothing. He was out in the cold. He didn't worry about it long. There was always someone else. But she did have an elegant throat.

That's actually how he remembered her a year later when he saw her at Wilt's—that long neck. He came right up behind her and put his hand on the length of it and she still didn't remember him. She was pretty fucked up but still beautiful. She must have been smoking all night. More than that, she was getting that look people get when it's not happening. Rafe had seen it before. The parts don't come and the change doesn't come and the moment you moved out here for doesn't come and there you are. Your blood starts to turn to ice. He could see it in her eyes. He came with the rap anyway. Might as well get some.

But it was that last moment of softness he saw in her that made him give her his phone number. After they'd finished, when they were lying together on the bed, the last ripples dying beneath them, Wilt and that girl she knew just a few feet away, he could see her eyes in the half-light of the room. There were tears there. She looked about fifteen, just a girl. That touched him somehow, made him want to know her. So he slipped his number into her pants pocket after she fell asleep.

He didn't think about the fact that he'd left her there. These girls didn't ask anything of you. Except maybe that you help get them a part. They didn't seem to need to be courted or treated well, they didn't ask questions, they didn't mind if you didn't take them to dinner, or if you didn't know their names. They just wanted to be in those movies. They didn't know there wasn't a damn thing he could do about that.

It was a Sunday afternoon when she called him. Sundays were hard. You spent the morning getting over Saturday, either regretting or celebrating or trying to remember what you'd done and hoping it wasn't too fucked up. Then maybe you'd go out to lunch, but then there was the afternoon. Maybe a movie in Westwood, but that didn't last all day. Maybe somebody you knew from a picture was home, trying to decide what to do with himself too. Maybe you'd have to face the day alone, but that was to be avoided at all costs. He was grateful when the phone rang. He didn't care who it was.

“Hi, is this Rafe?” A girl's voice, southern.

“Sure is. Who's this?”

A pause. “We met the other day, well, night really. At Wilt's house?” She trailed off, silence yawning. He smiled. “Sure. I remember. We had a pretty good time. Angela, right?”

“Right.”

He could hear the easing in her voice. What could she have said to further identify herself: that was me you were fucking at that party? “Well, Angela, how you been?”

“I been all right. Took me a couple of days to get over that party. You know.”

“How well I do. It was some party.” They fell into an awkward silence. “Well, Angela, can I ask why you called?”

“It's Sunday. My roommate's out. The light was making me sad.”

“What?”

“The light was making me sad. Doesn't that ever happen to you? It comes in all orange and soft and it just feels sad. Like you gotta talk to somebody? I found your number.” She stopped.

His heart tightened oddly at her words. “What are you doing now?” he said.

“Nothing. That's why I called,” she said.

“Well, why don't you meet me at the Santa Monica Pier in about half an hour. We can do nothing together.”

“OK.” He could hear the relief in her voice. That made him feel a little sad too.

There had been a break in the heat—the sun was on his back was friendly, not a hammer, as he waited not far from the Ferris wheel. The distant shouts of children in the surf made a counterpoint to the music from the merry-go-rounds and Scramblers and everything else behind him. It made him think of how he loved coming here with his old man, the few times he'd managed to do it before his father died. The music made him feel hopeful. He was just listening and staring out at the water so intently that he didn't even hear her come up behind him. She put her hands over his eyes, laughing. He turned around, caught her wrists. “Girl, you don't know me that well yet.” But he was laughing too.

“I don't know,” she said, poking him gently in the belly. “I think I know you pretty well. Rafe, right? Don't like to waste any time with a girl.”

“No, I don't. And my last name's Madigan. Just so you know.”

“Mine's Edwards. Angela Edwards.” She laughed. “Seen you naked and I still didn't know that. That is really something,” she said. She leaned on the railing next to him and looked out at the sea. “Really something.”

He felt, for the first time in months, a little uncomfortable about . . . well, about that. About balling a girl before you even knew her last name. This girl anyway. “So,” he said after a while. “How long you been out here?” They both kept looking at the sea.

“Me? Mmm, I don't know. Two years, I think.” She laughed again. “That's how you know it's getting to be too long. When you lose track. Where'd you come here from?”

“Me? Over in Watts.”

“Really?”

“Really. You lookin' at a natchel-born colored man from Los Angeles.”

She laughed. “I don't know if I've ever met one of those.”

“Now you know one pretty well.” He paused. “Well. He'd like to get to know you pretty well anyway.” What the hell? He never said stuff like that. “Want an ice cream?”

She looked at him, her eyes never wavering. “I'd like that a lot.”

“OK, then.”

They each got vanilla and stood, meditatively licking them, not talking. Sometimes he shot little looks at her, watching her tongue play around the edges of the cone. She was totally unselfconscious, licking her arm when the ice cream melted down the side. He didn't know what to say. He remembered the sounds while they made love; the memory made his stomach tighten, heat moving across his belly. But now, as they stood here clothed, he didn't know what to say.

“So you're an actor too, huh?”

“Try to be.”

“What you been in?”

“Oh, you know. Lotta Corman's stuff. Had a couple of lines in
Blacula
, was a bartender in
Cool Breeze
. I'm around.”

“How'd you get into it?”

“How's anybody get into it? People told me I'm good-looking. I'm good at memorizing. I like the sets. I thought I'd get famous. All my troubles would be over. Now I'm used to it. You never know when something might break for you either.”

She looked at him intently. “You don't, do you. That's what I always say to people. It could happen any time. You don't even have to be the lead. Somebody might see you, and then everything could change.”

“Right.” He was smiling a little. But it was easy to believe her. For a moment, it seemed not only possible but likely that they'd both make more of this than they had so far.

It was easier to talk after that. He found out that she was from Tulsa and that her parents thought she worked for a dentist until very recently. “The way they found out I'm acting is that my mother saw me dancing almost naked on a bar in
Street Fighting Man
. I swear, she don't even like that kind of movie. Somebody told her I was in it. That didn't go over too good.”

“No?”

Her eyes closed briefly as though it hurt her to remember, then she looked straight at him. “No.” He didn't ask any more; her look told him what he needed to know. So he went along when she changed the subject. She told him how much she loved LA, the drive of it and the smell of the drying flowers in the overheated air. Her skin made him think of the way paint looks as it's poured from a can. She used her hands constantly as she talked, touching the railing, knotting them together. As he listened to her, he realized that it had been some time since he'd talked to a woman. Fucked 'em all the time. But talked to one? It had been awhile.

Sundays were funny that way—made you think about stuff you hadn't done before, or hadn't done in a while. Back home, up until the riots in '65, Sunday was car wash day. Every family on the block that had a man to speak of—an uncle, a dad, a brother—would pull their ride out into the street, get the radio going so that all the songs became one song, one cry of loss and love and sweet soulful torment, and start washing. The washing had a very particular rhythm. You started with the body of the car, a slow, slow series of circles, kind of like you might make on a woman's body if you wanted to get her really hot. Then down to the rims, shining them so good that you could see your face in them, all weird and curvy but still recognizably yours. Then you did the outside of the tires—a little wax to make the black gleam. Then the buffing, the kids' favorite part, the car's true metallic color emerging, each its own shade, like a face. And then the best part, the ice cream truck coming down the street, the men all sitting with beers on the porches, their voices ping-ponging back and forth, the edges of their voices rough, sweat running down their faces, music lofting overhead. After his daddy died, Rafe always went over to his friend Joe's for car wash day. It wasn't the same, but it was better than nothing. Better than sitting in the house with the women, fussing with a chicken or a ham, listening to the sounds of complaint on their lips.