Authors: Alison Lurie
“Hey! Are you all right?” Wading across the rug to Glory, he helped her up, damp, dripping, and half-stunned. The warm wet flesh of her body pressed against his arm.
“I guess so,” she said, blinking and still leaning on him. Her bathing suit had been pulled round somehow so that the wet pink tip of one full breast pointed out through a small neat hole, as if it had been designed that way. Without stopping to think, Paul put his free hand over it, whether out of modesty or lust he could not have said. Instead of jerking away, Glory swayed towards him. He pulled her nearer; for an instant she looked into his eyes from a distance of about four inches; then they were involved in a sudden, dripping kiss. The circular samples of Glory were pressed against him in a juxtaposition so openly sensual that he was giddy for a moment; she spoke, but he had to ask her to repeat it.
“I said, better turn off the water.”
“Oh yeah, okay.” Through the bathroom door Paul could see a gilt faucet running into the marbled basin in a thin, steady trickle—much too small, it seemed, to have caused all this.
He shut it off and turned round; Glory was sitting on the bed, a huge vulgar expanse of shiny pale-blue satin, now streaked dark with water.
“I—You’re really—” he began as he moved towards her, not knowing what he was going to say, but determined to say, and do, something.
“C’mere.” If Glory’s ordinary speaking voice had a taste of sexuality, that she now used was like dark jam. Paul felt as if he had got into a dream, or more likely one of those surrealist movies that imitate dreams, but he was too aroused now to care. In a moment, with Glory’s help, he was peeling off her wet, very tight bathing suit, which left faint red circles on pale skin. He released first breasts of a size and pneumatic roundness that he had seen only in
Playboy
magazine, then a sculptured, almost concave stomach, and finally a patch of curly hair colored a vivid silver pink, which completed the unreal perfection of the whole. He knelt back from it, dazed.
“Jesus—You’re—”
“Don’t tell me, huh.” Glory pulled Paul hard towards her; her breath warmed him. As they kissed and clung, he began to notice little imperfections, visible only close up, that reassured him with their proof of her humanity: a freckled roughness in her skin, a smudge of mascara by one eye, the pucker of an appendicitis scar on her belly.
“Come on.” With strong, pink-nailed fingers, Glory dragged Paul’s wet bathing suit down off his hips, down his legs, and flung it, like a damp rag, into a corner.
“Ah,” she began to murmur. “Aw, that’s it. ... Come on. ... Do it do it do it. Do it to me.” In the flooded room, like an actor in a surrealist—no, a pornographic—film, he dug his toes into the satin bedspread and drove into her again and again.
“Aw.” Glory sighed, and pulled one of the satin pillows towards her, propping it under her head—which, as she had never taken off her bathing cap, was still covered with fringed rubber hair. “Don’t get up. ... Hey, that was good.”
“You liked it?” Paul felt as if he had received some film award. “So did I.”
“Yeah. That’ll show them, huh?” She laughed.
“Mm.” Show whom? Paul wondered; probably the whole world.
“Hey, y’know, this room.” She laughed again.
“It’s pretty weird, isn’t it?” he agreed, surprised however that Glory’s taste would condemn this luxurious set.
“Weird? Yeah: all that water.” She gestured towards the soaked carpet. Somewhere below, Paul could still hear a residual dripping. “No, what I meant was, I was thinking, how many times Baby Petersen’s tried to get me onto this bed, and he never made it.”
“Poor guy,” Paul said, smiling, so pleased at this evidence of his competitive success that he could be magnanimous. He had gone to bed with a movie starlet; he, Paul Cattleman, had actually done and was doing this.
“Ah, don’t feel sorry for him. Baby’s a shit from the word go. His whole life is dedicated to the proposition the way to get ahead at Superb is by putting out for Baby Petersen. Which is a big lie because he just doesn’t pull that much weight around the studio. He’s a nothing, but by the time you find that out, it’s too late.” Glory noticed Paul looking at her. “Not me. I’m too old to fall for that kind of line.”
“How old are you?” Paul realized he did not know the first thing about this beautiful girl with whom he had just been intimate: not even her real name or the true color of her hair, though she lay there naked beside him, one leg thrown over his.
Glory was silent. Paul thought she was angry at the question. But the truth was that she had trouble herself remembering her age, so many lies had been told about it. Before Glory was out of diapers her mother, who had been divorced rather too long before the birth, had begun to add months to Glory’s age to forestall suspicions of illegitimacy. She had never officially corrected this error; but a little later, when Glory became a child actor, she had subtracted a year or two, or three—nobody really knew how many. Later, professional exigencies had dictated a change in the opposite direction, for you had to be sixteen to get a working permit for a job as a night-club dancer. As time went on, Glory took matters into her own hands, and often became older or younger in order to flatter a man or sign a contract; she had come to feel that her age, like the color of her hair, was a matter of choice.
“I’m twenty-six,” she said now, adding two years to her studio age.
“I’m thirty-one.” This produced no comment. To re-establish communication, Paul went back to the last topic. “You said this guy who lives here is married, though. What’s his wife like?”
“Oh, she’s okay. Only she’s been kicked around so much she’s kind of slap-happy, you know. She cries all the time. Well, she’s actually kind of a lush, but you can’t hold it against her, what she has to live with.”
“Why doesn’t she divorce him?”
“I d’know; I guess she doesn’t want to. She’s still kind of sweet on him. I think she keeps hoping he’ll stop screwing around and come back to her. And he plays up to it, see. He uses her as a front with his other girls, if they get too serious or they start wanting to marry him, then he always has an out: he tells them how basically he really loves his wife, only she has serious problems. I think in a way he believes his own line, cause he’s just as screwed up as everybody else in the business.”
An uncomfortable feeling, which he did not analyze, passed through Paul. “Are they all screwed up in your business?”
“Christ, yeah. They really are, you know.” Glory turned on her side towards Paul. “Maybe it’s the dumb climate. A friend of mine says that once you get out here, and get into the sun, you kind of gradually go soft, if you’re not used to it. ... I don’t like the sun. I always try to stay out of it myself. ... How long since you moved to California?”
“About nine months. But we haven’t come for good. We’re just here temporarily.”
“Oh yeah, really?” Her voice was intimate, as usual, but somehow casual. Paul realized that no words of love or even liking had been spoken between him and Glory; there had been no explanation of what had happened. Physical desire had simply been turned on and flooded them, like the house. Was this going to be an affair, or was it only an incident? He didn’t know what she thought, and that was perhaps one reason the whole thing seemed so unreal.
“When’re you leaving?” Glory asked.
“I don’t know exactly. Probably sometime this year.” A week ago Paul had had a very promising letter from his thesis director telling him about a job at Convers College; he was waiting now to hear from them directly. “I’m kind of sorry, now.” He accompanied this avowal with a warm but gentle kiss, intended to convey gratitude and affection. Glory met it at a higher temperature.
“Mmm. And where’re you going to?” she stroked his leg with her knee.
“Well, probably to Convers. It’s sort of north of Boston.”
“That’s in New England. Y’know, I’ve never been in New England.” Glory rubbed his leg higher up, expertly.
“I wish I could take you with me.”
“Yeah? I’d like to go. I’ve always had a kind of kooky dream to see that part of the country. All those old-fashioned towns and historical places: I really think I would go for them. There’s a New England set out on the back lot at the studio, with these neat little white wooden houses and big barns and fences and tall trees, y’know. When I was first working at Superb I used to walk through it on the way to where we were shooting
Mexican Mamba
—what a bomb that turned out to be—and I d’know, it sort of picked me up.”
“You ought to see the real thing.” The educational impulse stirred in Paul again, along with other impulses. The idea of Glory walking alone through an imaginary village had something pathetic about it, too. “Seriously. Why don’t you take a trip and visit New England?”
“Maybe I will. I’m so goddamned fed up with all the creeps and phonies in this town. ... Hey! You know what I’ll do?” Taken with her idea, Glory left off rubbing against Paul. “Soon’s we finish making this picture, that’s probably only a couple months, I’ll go East. ... I’d love to walk out on this screwy dump right now, only I couldn’t let Rory and the kids down.”
“New England is good in the summer,” Paul said. “Not too hot. Cape Cod—”
“Yeah. That’s what I’ll really do. I’ll take a couple weeks off, Maxie can fix it—”
“That’s a fine idea.”
“—and I’ll come and stay with you. Maybe in September, huh? What did you say that place was called?”
A new image appeared in Paul’s head: a New England college town. Mr. Cattleman, the junior instructor in history, has scarcely arrived, when he is visited by his mistress, a Hollywood starlet with pink hair.
“Uh—Convers. But it’s a fairly small town, you know. There wouldn’t be much for you to see there.”
“Aw, I don’t care about that. As long as there’s a lot of nature and scenery. Y’know I really go for the country. I love to get out in the open spaces and run around and look at all the trees growing and grass and flowers. That’s one reason this town makes me so sick.”
“Yeah, but what I meant was, I’m afraid the people won’t interest you much. Convers is pretty much a college town, mostly students and professors.”
“But that’s what I’d like most.” In her enthusiasm, Glory sat up. “Shit, you don’t know how much I want to meet some real, serious, intellectual people, professors and thinkers, that you can learn something from. People that don’t spend all their time getting loaded or screwing somebody or pulling a deal over the next guy. I want to go to the kind of parties where everybody is talking about serious things, like art and philosophy and history and those kind of things.” Visions of some academic gatherings he had attended passed across Paul’s mind. In imagination, he added Glory to them, dressed in her pink bathing suit.
“Uh, well,” he said.
“Maybe you think I wouldn’t know how to act right with people like that. Listen, I wouldn’t say anything or do anything funny; I wouldn’t want to. All I’d want to do is just sit quietly in a corner and listen to their conversations, and nobody would even notice me.”
“That’s what you think,” Paul said. Glory turned her face towards his, frowning.
“I get it,” she said. “You mean you don’t want me to come. You think I would embarrass you or something, because I’m so uneducated and dumb.” Glory’s voice was hostile and hurt; she turned her face away.
“No; I mean you’re a very beautiful girl, and people are going to notice you wherever you go.” No response. Paul sat up and put his arms round Glory, like a child with an expensive new toy, which he suddenly fears will be taken away from him again. He stroked her neck, her shoulders. “You’re really incredibly beautiful.” No response. “I think it’d be just great to have you visit me in New England.”
“Is that straight?” Sulkily, Glory turned towards him.
“Yes.” Calling up the resources of his experience, he pulled her nipples towards him, twisting and squeezing them gently.
“Ah. ... Yeah, do that. ... Really?”
“Really.”
“Listen though,” Paul said a moment later. “I mean, what time is it? Shouldn’t we do something about the house, telephone somebody or something?” He raised his head from her lap; Glory pushed it down again.
“Sure,” she agreed. “Later.”
S
ATURDAY NOON. AN ANONYMOUS
crowd of sightseers loitered and drifted along Hollywood Boulevard west of Vine Street. They stopped to gawk at the photos in front of second-story night clubs and dance halls, at the windows of discount dress and hat and shoe stores, at stand-up lunch counters where red, rubbery hot dogs fried and orange drink bubbled perpetually. They entered souvenir shops and bought accordion strings of colored postcards, dummy books titled
Los Angeles Confidential
(which opened to reveal a toy privy or a naughty plastic doll), pink china vases, and rayon panties with “Hollywood, California” printed on them.
They were of every age, or no age. The little girls had permanents and nailpolish, sometimes even lipstick and high-heeled sandals, while the mothers or grandmothers who dragged them whining along the sidewalk wore ruffled baby dresses and curled, tinted hair—as if they had changed into each other’s clothes for a joke. Elderly men and women, some at the far edge of their lives, shuffled by, muttering to themselves and fingering their handbags or the parcels they carried. There were plenty of young people too: watchful delinquent boys slouching by in leather jackets, and clusters of teenage girls giggling stupidly and clinging to each other as they swept up the sidewalk. There were family groups of tourists, noisily crude, or silent, because they had known one another too long; and pickup couples blinking as they emerged from five-dollar hotels, noisily crude or silent.
All these people had something in common: a look of being cheaply made—put together, like the clothes they wore, out of shoddy materials, and colored with harsh chemical dyes. Their faces wore a common expression—that of people anxiously searching for something: for success, for adventure, for love. Or if they had given up these ends, they were at least searching for some excitement; for a scene, a spectacle, a hero to watch. Above all, they were looking, with the intensity of castaways on a desert island, for the beautiful and the famous—looking for stars. Whom, of course, they never found—except for their footsteps in cement in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater.