Ask the Dust (13 page)

The good days, the fat days, page upon page of manuscript; prosperous days, something to say, the story of Vera Rivken, and the pages mounted and I was happy. Fabulous days, the rent paid, still fifty dollars in my wallet, nothing to do all day and night but write and think of writing: ah, such sweet days, to see it grow, to worry for it, myself, my book, my words, maybe important, maybe timeless, but mine nevertheless, the indomitable. Arturo Bandini, already deep into his first novel.

So an evening comes, and what to do with it, my soul so cool from the bath of words, my feet so solid upon the earth, and what are the others doing, the rest of the people of the world? I will go sit and look at her, Camilla Lopez.

It was done. It was like old times, our eyes springing at one another. But she was changed, she was thinner, and her face was unhealthy, with two eruptions at each end of her mouth. Polite smiles. I tipped her and she thanked me. I fed the phonograph nickels, playing her favorite tunes. She wasn't dancing at her work, and she didn't look at me often the way she used to. Maybe it was Sammy: maybe she missed the guy.

I asked her, “How is he?”

A shrug: “Alright, I guess.”

“Don't you see him?”

“Oh, sure.”

“You don't look well.”

“I feel alright.”

I got up. “Well, I gotta go. Just dropped in to see how you were getting along.”

“It was nice of you.”

“Not at all. Why don't you come and see me?”

She smiled. “I might, some night.”

 

Dear Camilla, you did come finally. You threw pebbles at the window, and I pulled you into the room, smelled the whiskey on your breath, and puzzled while you sat slightly drunk at my typewriter, giggling while you played with the keyboard. Then you turned to look at me, and I saw your face clearly under the light, the swollen lower lip, the purple and black smudge around your left eye.

“Who hit you?” I said. And you answered, “Automobile accident.” And I said, “Was Sammy driving the other car?” And you wept, drunk and heartbroken. I could touch you then and not fuss with desire. I could lie beside you on the bed and hold you in my arms and hear you say that Sammy hated you, that you drove out to the desert after work, and that he slugged you twice for waking him up at three in the morning.

I said, “But why see him?”

“Because I'm in love with him.”

You got a bottle from your purse and we drank it up; first your turn, then mine. When the bottle was empty I went down to the drugstore and bought another, a big bottle. All night we wept and we drank, and drunk I could say the things bubbling in my heart, all those swell words, all the clever similes, because you were crying for the other guy and you didn't hear a word I said, but I heard them myself, and Arturo Bandini was pretty good that night, because he was talking to his true love, and it wasn't you, and it wasn't Vera Rivken either, it was just his true love. But I said some swell things that night, Camilla. Kneeling beside you on the bed, I held your hand and I said, “Ah Camilla, you lost girl! Open your long fingers and give me back my tired soul! Kiss me with your mouth because I hunger for the bread of a Mexican hill. Breathe the fragrance of lost cities into fevered nostrils, and let me die here, my hand upon the soft contour of your throat, so like the whiteness of some half-forgotten southern shore. Take the longing in these restless eyes and feed it to lonely swallows cruising an Autumn cornfield, because I love you Camilla, and your name is
sacred like that of some brave princess who died with a smile for a love that was never returned.”

I was drunk that night, Camilla, drunk on seventy-eight cent whiskey, and you were drunk on whiskey and grief. I remember that after turning off the lights, naked except for one shoe that baffled me, I held you in my arms and slept, at peace in the midst of your sobs, yet annoyed when the hot tears from your eyes dripped upon my lips and I tasted their saltiness and thought about that Sammy and his hideous manuscript. That
he
should strike you! That fool. Even his punctuation was bad.

When we woke up it was morning and we were both nauseated, and your swollen lip was more grotesque than ever, and your black eye was now green. You got up, staggered to the wash-stand and washed your face. I heard you groan. I watched you dress. I felt your kiss on my forehead as you said goodbye, and that nauseated me too. Then you climbed out the window and I heard you stagger up the hillside, the grass swishing and little twigs breaking under your uncertain feet.

 

I am trying to remember it chronologically. Winter or Spring or Summer, they were days without change. Good for the night, thanks for the darkness, otherwise we would not have known that one day ended and another began. I had 240 pages done and the end was in sight. The rest was a cruise on smooth water. Then off to Hackmuth it would go, tra la, and the agony would begin.

It was about that time that we went to Terminal Island, Camilla and I. A man-made island, that place, a long finger of earth pointing at Catalina. Earth and canneries and the smell of fish, brown houses full of Japanese children, stretches of white sand with wide black pavements running up and down, and the Japanese kids playing football in the streets. She was irritable, she had been drinking too much, and her eyes had that stark old woman's look of a chicken. We parked the car in the broad street and walked a hundred yards to the beach. There were rocks at the water's edge, jagged stones swarming with crabs. The crabs were having a tough time of it, because the sea gulls were after them, and the sea gulls
screeched and clawed and fought among themselves. We sat on the sand and watched them, and Camilla said they were so beautiful, those gulls.

“I hate them,” I said.

“You!” she said. “You hate everything.”

“Look at them,” I said. “Why do they pick on those poor crabs? The crabs ain't doing anything. Then why in the hell do they mob them like that?”

“Crabs,” she said. “Ugh.”

“I hate a sea gull,” I said. “They'll eat anything, the deader the better.”

“For God's sake shut up for a change. You always spoil everything. What do I care what they eat?”

In the street the little Japanese kids were having a big football game. They were all youngsters under twelve. One of them was a pretty good passer. I turned my back on the sea and watched the game. The good passer had flung another into the arms of one of his teammates. I got interested and sat up.

“Watch the sea,” Camilla said. “You're supposed to admire beautiful things, you writer.”

“He throws a beautiful pass,” I said.

The swelling had gone from her lips, but her eye was still discolored. “I used to come here all the time,” she said. “Almost every night.”

“With that other writer,” I said. “That really great writer, that Sammy the genius.”

“He liked it here.”

“He's a great writer, alright. That story he wrote over your left eye is a masterpiece.”

“He doesn't talk his guts out like you. He knows when to be quiet.”

“The stupe.”

A fight was brewing between us. I decided to avoid it. I got up and walked toward the kids in the street. She asked where I was going. “I'm going to get in the game,” I said. She was outraged. “With them?” she said. “Those Japs?” I plowed through the sand.

“Remember what happened the other night!” she said.

I turned around. “What?”

“Remember how you walked home?”

“That suits me,” I said. “The bus is safer.”

The kids wouldn't let me play because the sides were evenly numbered, but they let me referee for a while. Then the good passer's team got so far ahead that a change was necessary, so I played on the opposite team. Everybody on our team wanted to be quarterback, and great confusion resulted. They made me play center, and I hated it because I was ineligible to receive passes. Finally the captain of our team asked me if I knew how to pass, and he gave me a chance in the tailback spot. I completed the pass. It was fun after that. Camilla left almost immediately. We played until darkness, and they beat us, but it was close. I took the bus back to Los Angeles.

 

Making resolutions not to see her again was useless. I didn't know from one day to the next. There was the night two days after she left me stranded at Terminal Island. I had been to a picture show. It was after midnight when I went down the old stairway to my room. The door was locked, and from the inside. As I turned the knob I heard her call. “Just a minute. It's me, Arturo.”

It was a long minute, five times as long as usual. I could hear her scurrying about within the room. I heard the closet door slam, heard the window being thrown open. I fumbled with the doorknob once more. She opened the door and stood there, breathless, her bosom rising and falling. Her eyes were points of black flame, her cheeks were full of blood, and she seemed alive with intense joy. I stood in a kind of fear at the change, the sudden widening and closing of her lashes, the quick wet smile, the teeth so alive and stringy with bubbled saliva.

I said, “What's the idea?”

She threw her arms around me. She kissed me with a passion I knew was not genuine. She barred my entrance by a flourish of affection. She was hiding something from me, keeping me out of my own room as long as she could. Over her shoulder I looked
around. I saw the bed with the mark of a head's indentation upon the pillow. Her coat was flung over the chair, and the dresser was strewn with small combs and bobby pins. That was alright. Everything seemed in order except the two small red mats at the bedside. They had been moved, that was plain to me, because I liked them in their regular place, where my feet could touch them when I got out of bed in the morning.

I pulled her arms away and looked toward the closet door. Suddenly she began to pant excitedly as she backed to the door, standing against it, her arms spread to protect it. “Don't open it, Arturo,” she pleaded. “Please!”

“What the hell is all this?” I said.

She shivered. She wet her lips and swallowed, her eyes filled with tears and she both smiled and wept. “I'll tell you sometime,” she said. “But please don't go in there now, Arturo. You mustn't. Oh, you mustn't. Please!”

“Who's in there?”

“Nobody,” she almost shouted. “Not a soul. That isn't it, Arturo. Nobody's been here. But please! Please don't open it now. Oh please!”

She came toward me, almost stalking, her arms out in an embrace that was yet a protection against my attack on the closet door. She opened her lips and kissed me with peculiar fervor, a passionate coldness, a voluptuous indifference. I didn't like it. Some part of her was betraying some other part, but I could not find it. I sat on the bed and watched her as she stood between me and that closet door. She was trying so hard to conceal a cynical elation. She was like one who is forced to hide his drunkenness, but the elation was there, impossible to conceal.

“You're drunk, Camilla. You shouldn't drink so much.”

The eagerness with which she acknowledged that indeed she was drunk made me immediately suspicious. There she stood, nodding her head like a spoiled child, a coy smiling admission, the pouted lips, the look out of downcast eyes. I got up and kissed her. She was drunk, but she was not drunk on whiskey or alcohol because her breath was too sweet for that. I pulled her down on the bed beside
me. Her ecstasy swept across her eyes, wave after wave of it, the passionate languor of her arms and fingers searched my throat. She crooned into my hair, her lips against my head.

“If you were only him,” she whispered. Suddenly she screamed, a piercing shriek that clawed the walls of the room. “Why can't you be him! Oh Jesus Christ, why can't you?” She began to beat me with her fists, pounding my head with rights and lefts, screaming and scratching in an outburst of madness against the destiny that did not make me her Sammy. I grabbed her wrists, yelled at her to be quiet. I pinned her arms and clamped my hand over her shrieking mouth. She looked out at me with bloated, protruding eyes, struggling for breath. “Not until you promise to keep quiet,” I said. She nodded and I let go. I went to the door and listened for footsteps. She lay on the bed, face down, weeping. I tiptoed toward the closet door. Instinct must have warned her. She swung around on the bed, her face soggy with tears, her eyes like crushed grapes.

“You open that door and I'll scream,” she said. “I'll scream and scream.”

I didn't want that. I shrugged. She resumed her face down position and wept again. In a little while she would cry it off; then I could send her home. But it didn't happen that way. After a half hour she was still crying. I bent over and touched her hair. “What is it you want, Camilla?”

“Him,” she sobbed. “I want to go see him.”

“Tonight?” I said. “My God, it's a hundred and fifty miles.”

She didn't care if it was a thousand miles, a million, she wanted to see him tonight. I told her to go ahead; that was her affair; she had a car, she could drive there in five hours.

“I want you to come with me,” she sobbed. “He doesn't like me. He likes you, though.”

“Not me,” I said. “I'm going to bed.”

She pleaded with me. She fell on her knees before me, clung to my legs and looked up at me. She loved him so much, surely a great writer like myself understood what it was to love like that; surely I knew why she couldn't go out there alone; and she touched
the injured eye. Sammy wouldn't drive her off if I were to come with her. He'd be grateful that she had brought me, and then Sammy and I could talk, because there was so much I could show him about writing, and he would be so grateful to me, and to her. I looked down at her, gritted my teeth, and tried to resist her arguments; but when she put it that way it was too much for me, and when I agreed to go I was crying with her. I helped her to her feet, dried her eyes, smoothed the hair from her face, and felt responsible for her. We tiptoed up the stairs and through the lobby to the street, where her car was parked.