Pasadena (52 page)

A man with a hothouse orchid pinned to his goatskin vest welcomed Linda and Willis. He introduced himself as Carlisle Waud, Willis’s cousin. He was slight in frame and heavy in limp—he’d been shoved into the path of a buggy by his sister, Greta, when he was six—and he walked with a sterling-silver cane. Carlisle took one of Linda’s arms and Willis hooked himself to the other, and they steered her through the pelts into the ballroom, where eyes lifted with curiosity.

Flimsy hands like calla lilies extended. “How d’you do?”

It didn’t take long for Linda to realize that her existence if not her reputation had preceded her: that the story had passed—as a flea hops from one hide to the next—that Willis Poore was escorting a stranger to the New Year’s ball. Linda heard a voice floating somewhere above the music: “Who is she?” Other voices wafted around the ballroom, coming from here and there and everywhere: from the women propped up in sturdy, fuzzy columns of silver fox, from the manicured men in their frontier coats, from the orchestra in white dinner jacket playing a Viennese waltz.

“They’ll jazz it up later on,” Willis said. “Then we’ll really cut into it.” Someone asked where Linda was from, and a little circle of silence fell upon them when she told them. Then Carlisle asked, “From Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea? Do you fish?”

“I trapped lobsters.” This caused eyelids to lift and necks to extend. “Lobster pots?” said a woman. “At the bottom of the ocean?” A man sputtered, “You mean to tell me you’d catch the lobsters yourself?” Another woman said, “I just love lobster. I bet you didn’t know that about me, did you, Gregory?” (But Gregory said that he did.) Someone asked, “Where does one go about buying a lobster pot?” And Linda said that she built them herself with a mallet and scrap wood and a knitting needle. Someone squealed, “All by yourself?” And one of the women exclaimed, “You actually swim down to the bottom of the ocean with all those
fish
around you,
nibbling
at you?” The woman pushed out her mouth curiously, and the others at the table—each rich and handsome
or rich and fat or rich and homely or rich and shy—propped their chins in their fists and leaned in as Linda told them about the blue shark.

“You didn’t!” screamed one woman. “You
did not
! Didn’t you look at him and just want to
die
!”

A petite, damp-eyed girl wearing a condor-feather cap twirled over to their table and landed herself in Willis’s lap. “Captain Poore, where’s Lolly tonight? You haven’t locked her up again, have you?” The young woman rose, her pleated skirt swirling so high that everyone could see her garters and her silver silk underwear. She said she was off to the pool house: “Ship ahoy!” Several others followed her, and soon Linda was alone at the table with Willis and Carlisle.

“Where’d you find old Willis, anyway?” said Carlisle.

“I didn’t,” she said. “He found me.”

Twenty minutes later, one of the men returned from the pool house, his cheeks and eyes glowing. He said, “Won’t you join us, Miss Stamp?” His girl, whose red hair was curled like sausages, slapped his hand and said, “Hugh, now cut it out.” Others returned to the table, a greasiness slicking their eyes. They spoke more slowly, as if their tongues had thickened in their mouths.

“Come on,” said Willis. “Let’s go outside.” He led Linda to the terrace. In the swimming pool, the moon of the underwater lamp glowed, and hundreds of magnolia blossoms floated on the surface like stars. One woman was standing on the ladder, her gold sandals dangling from her fingers and her river-otter coat wet at the hem, and she was leaning back over the water and her husband was begging her, “Millie, get off that thing,” and she was saying, “Oh, Jimmie, relax, would you? This old otter came from the water.” A fat young man had shed his jacket and was bouncing on the diving board, and back in the clubhouse Linda could see the members—for that was how she heard everyone refer to themselves throughout the night—dancing and smoking and slurping oysters and sucking the covert alcohol from gin-soaked celery sticks. About twenty of the club’s junior members were crowded in the pool house, where flasks passed from fist to fist and wrists emptied their contents into highballs of orange juice and tomato juice and even cups of coffee, and a few young men brought the silver-rimmed flasks to their chapped mouths, their furs wet with sloshed and drooled drink, and their young wives or girlfriends or sisters swatted them with their fans and then grabbed the flasks for themselves.

“Should we have something to drink?” asked Willis.

Linda agreed, and someone passed her a cup of orange bourbon distilled in a pair of six-foot Chinese vases at the hearth of a mansion just up the street; it smelled like petroleum so she swallowed it quickly, and it tasted even worse than that.

“Are you all right?” someone asked from behind her, but Linda wasn’t sure who it was. She turned around, and there was Connie Muffitt in a short leopard coat and an anaconda shawl, her blond hair pasted to her skull like a gold-glass Christmas ball. She waved with her pinkie and was coming toward Linda when a man in an elephant-skin top hat snatched her, pulling her to the dance floor.

The bear coat and the cramped pool house had left Linda hot and weary and thirsty, and she felt the perspiration dotting her face and collecting inside the silver dress, leaving stains on the silk. Linda looked around for Willis but saw only shiny faces and fur. He had left her, and the drink had scampered straight to her head and she felt dizzy and sticky and warm, and someone, a stranger, stopped her and said, “Oh, what a pretty dress!”

Another said, “What a pretty coat!”

Someone else said, “I was just hearing about your fascinating life!”

By now Linda was drunk, and she thought that perhaps these people weren’t so bad, and she relaxed and for a moment forgot that she was new to all this; for a blinking moment, it felt as familiar as her own life.

Linda returned to the pool deck, and the fat young man was still bouncing on the diving board, his suspenders hanging from his waistband, and there was a commotion among a cluster of old women, their faces powdered poodle-white, about this being
the last straw
. Members of the club’s steering committee arrived to try to talk the man off the board, but he continued to bounce and then flung himself, his lumpy back first, into the pool, resounding with a horrible slap to his fleshy flesh. At once, the night became too much for Linda: she longed to leave, but she couldn’t see Willis anywhere, and something in her decided not to return to the ballroom alone but to sit in the night on a cold bench and count the white stars. She walked out to the pavilion overlooking the tennis courts. It was quieter there, the music distant and the wind rustling the high palms, the ivy turning crisply. Linda leaned against the rail as the far-off orchestra played a song that caused nearly
everyone at the club, even those around the pool, to raise their arms and refrain in sloppy voices,
Yes-sir-ee! Yes, indeed! Yes-I-can, Ma-dame!

A hand fell on hers, and something caught in Linda’s throat.

“We’re not always like this,” said Willis.

She pulled her hand away.

“They’re just having a little New Year’s fun. Letting off some steam.” And then: “Linda—”

She turned, her shoulder shifting away. She felt the sudden need to bathe, to sit in a hot bath and let the steam rise around her. It was what she would do when she returned to the Pasadena, and just then Willis said, “I want you to like it here. I was hoping you’d want to stay.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Linda? Don’t you feel the same?”

The same?
, she said, but did the words emerge from her mouth? Had she managed to speak at all?

“You don’t really want to go back there, do you? To the little farm? To your old lobster pots?”

She said that she did, she said that she
had
to go back, she had her brother and her nephew and her father to look after, and they would expect her in the spring, and she couldn’t spend the rest of her life in a ranch-house kitchen, could she? It wasn’t what she wanted for herself. She wanted more, and she realized that Willis understood this—perhaps even more profoundly than she did.

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” said Willis. “I get the sense you like it in Pasadena.”

She didn’t know what to say, but the truth was that with every passing hour, with every ticking minute of New Year’s Eve, Condor’s Nest fell farther and farther away, and now it felt that her life had become a double life: Linda Stamp from Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea distantly bound to this young woman, who at midnight would turn twenty-two, her durable shoulders hoisting a grizzly skin and her throat singed from orange-based bootleg. They were two, like an oyster halved and flapping open on its fragile hinge, and if she were asked to, Linda wouldn’t be able to identify herself just then.

A man and a woman searching around for a private love nest climbed up onto the pavilion and peered into the dark. “Who’s there?” the man called. “Who are you?” whispered the girl. They saw the outlines
of Willis and Linda and they left, finding peace in the mattress of the ivy. The girl whispered again, “Did you see who she was?”

The pavilion’s rail was cold, and Willis rubbed Linda’s hand, and his misty breath hovered about his face and hers. The moon cast an icy glow across the tennis court’s baseline and through the net and upon the water cooler. It was bright enough for her to read the board displaying the club’s tennis ladder and the Wall of Champions: Men’s Singles Champion, Willis Poore, 1920–1922; Ladies’ Singles Champion, Miss Lolly Poore, 1919–1922; Mixed Doubles Champions, Willis and Lolly Poore, 1919–1924. Willis said, “She’s a damn good player. Don’t let all that frailty business fool you.”

Maybe Linda had been fooled, but not by Lolly.

Again Willis said, “Did you say something, Linda?”

She shook her head, and her chin was quivering when his fingers caught it and stroked the flank of her throat.

“Will you stay?”

“At the ball?”

“That’s not what I mean.”

She said that there wouldn’t be work for her after the season was over.

“We’ll find work for you.”

She said, “What?” And he said, “Stop it, Linda.”

In the distance, the waiters appeared on the terrace, ringing bells, and the members gathered in the ballroom and in the gentlemen’s bar and around the swimming pool and in the doorway of the pool house, and nearly five hundred of Pasadena’s finest citizens and the Irish waiters and the raven-haired girls in the kitchen and the angry-eyed valets in the parking lot on the other side of the fence began to count down to 1925
—ten-nine-eight
—and when it was twelve midnight the orchestra broke into “Auld Lang Syne” and the members peeled away their furs to reveal tuxedos and dinner jackets and gowns of crushed velvet and glass bead and gold thread. The fat young man, floating in the pool, called out, “Halfway to 1930!” And Willis unbuttoned his coat and let it drop, and he helped Linda out of the grizzly and he stared at the way the moist silk fell across her slick shoulders and her breasts. They were alone, the party a few hundred feet away, and he took her by the wrist and he kissed her. Linda felt his heat and the bright taste of bourbon on his lips, and his chest pressed into hers,
backing her up, until she was leaning over the pavilion’s rail, and his arms held her aloft and at once she wanted him both to let go and to never stop. He led her to a wicker bench behind the pavilion and laid the grizzly coat over it. He kissed her as the moon continued to throb, and his heat on her flesh surprised her, causing her to gasp, and Willis continued and Linda kissed him in return, as she imagined she should, and the dancing one-two’d on and on across the ballroom’s parquet, and Willis’s hand, smooth from years of avoiding work on the ranch, made its way down her neck and over the bodice of the dress he had bought for her, paid for, worth more money than she had ever earned, than she would ever earn, unless … unless … and he made his way with such assurance that it was as if he had the right, as if he owned the dress, and didn’t he? And Linda wanted him both to stop and to continue, and she didn’t know how to say either, how to say both at once. That’s what Willis did to her: stole the words from her throat. His hand went farther, and she pushed it away; and it was back, and she pushed it away; and Willis’s hand returned again to her breast, to her stomach, between her legs. “Willis, no,” she cried softly, but one arm clasped her and the free hand roamed and she wiggled playfully and then she writhed and his arm pinned her to him. She had let him fool her: the boy was a man; that’s all he was. The grizzly skin pricked her flesh, and Willis was wet with sweat, and his quick, greasy hands roamed over her, and she tried one last time, “Willis, what if someone comes?” but he wasn’t going to stop, couldn’t stop now; and the orchestra conductor introduced a trio called The Night-Men, and the crowd inside the ballroom roared and a sax and a trumpet bled into the cold New Year’s night. And Linda Stamp would remember the night like this: she didn’t have a choice. The fate she had held at bay for so long broke and crashed around her, and the New Year washed in and Linda hadn’t decided any of this for herself. Linda, so strong in spine, a spine that now trembled under Willis’s kneading hands, let the night pass over her and let Willis press himself into her and the hands worked the dress effortlessly, as if he had previously studied every hook and button, and he panted into her breast, “Oh, Lindy! Lindy!” And she wondered who he was calling after; that wasn’t her name. “You can have all this,” he said. “All
what
?” But Willis didn’t answer, and again:
Lindy!
And as he thrust on and the sweat poured from his brow into her eyes and her mouth, causing her to cough and gag, the distinction between
his heartbeat and hers blurred, she heard the name again and again
—Lindy Lindy Lindy
—and she felt something shift beneath her—the wicker sofa cracking, the silk ripping, the grizzly coat almost growling as if it were being buried alive—and a pair of fast, pink-palmed hands beat the bongos on the orchestra stage and Willis’s mouth was hot and wet on her throat, biting, nipping, and there was the salty ocean scent of blood, and his medal for heroism, still pinned to his breast, pressed into her flesh, imprinting her with its reverse image, stamping her like a sizzling brand, and Linda at last gave up and fell limp beneath him and let the New Year ring in and flood down upon her, and the band’s music ran like a river into the night, they would play until dawn, and Captain Willis Poore said again and again, whispering, now, almost tender, the two of them drenched as if emerging from the water, his voice soft, singing, nearly a song: