“There was a little trouble last week, if you must know. Apparently, Tommy wouldn’t come out of his trailer when he was called for the scene and Billy got really, really mad.”
“And?” Clio looked up at the sky and closed her eyes.
Mimi sat up impatiently, forcefully tucking her red hair under the cap. “For someone nearly thirty years old, you can be pretty fucking dumb, Clio. Where have you been all these years?
“Where
have
I been all these years?”
“Tommy said he’d be right there, that he was watching the last minutes of a play-off game, you know how he is about sports, but Billy got furious and stormed into the trailer. There was a girl with Tommy, supposedly, and Billy just picked up the television, he’s really strong, and threw it out the trailer window. There was a big explosion when it landed.”
“How do you know this?”
“Billy told me.”
“Billy Michael?”
“I’ve been going out with him. Secretly.”
“There was a girl?”
“That’s Billy’s wife.”
“I mean in the trailer.”
“Oh. Yeah. That’s what I heard. She had her head in his lap or something.” Mimi sat up and poured coconut oil into her hand and rubbed it on her stomach and breasts.
The smell of the oil suddenly reminded Clio of Emma. Emma had taught her to make her own infusions in Mason jars, the transparent
pikake
petals floating in the heavy oil.
“You mean she was going down on him,” Clio said.
“Maybe. Maybe not. Probably not. Could you do my back?” She handed Clio the bottle of oil and turned her
back to her. “Is everything okay? I mean, between you guys?”
“That is the word I would use. Okay.”
“Do you, you know, still make love?”
“I’m not sure that Tommy’s so interested in that. Perhaps he just isn’t interested in me.”
“You probably need to take him to Dr. Snowie again.”
“Dr. Snowie?”
“You know. The gynecologist. I took him once. Oh, a long time ago. You know, when we were going out. He wanted to. He bugged me about it for months. I kept saying yeah, okay, it’s a definite maybe, but he kept nagging me. I thought he was jealous of Dr. Snowie, but he wasn’t. He just wanted to see what it looked like.”
“What what looked like?”
“You know. It. I asked Dr. Snowie and he saw no reason why Tommy shouldn’t, so he came in with me and I got up on the table and Snowie turned on the klieg lights and I shouted ‘Action!’ and he pointed things out to Tommy.” She looked around at Clio. “Clio, could you do the oil, please?”
“Tommy didn’t know?”
“Of course he knew! He just wanted to really see it.”
“To help with his acting, do you think?”
“It certainly didn’t help with much else, did it?” She laughed wistfully. “Oil, Clio.”
Clio rubbed the oil on Mimi’s back and shoulders.
Mimi stretched out on her stomach on a towel. She held her feet a few inches above the AstroTurf and moved her ankles in little circles.
“But why would you do it?” Clio asked after a few minutes.
“Do what?” Mimi’s eyes were closed.
“You could have given him one of those children’s books that make it look like an apple cut in half.”
“I couldn’t actually see him or Dr. Snowie, you know, with the sheet over my legs, just hear them. Snowie said, ‘Now this is the this, and this is the that,’ and Tommy said, ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh.’ ”
“It’s so actorish. All of you performing.”
“I don’t think so,” Mimi said. She was offended. “I wouldn’t have told you at all if I thought you’d get mad.”
“I’m not mad,” Clio said, astonished.
Mimi opened her eyes. “I won’t tell you anything anymore if you make it mean something.”
Clio’s conversation with Mimi did not convince her to take Tommy to the gynecologist and, if anything, it filled her with resolve not to go again to the set. Perhaps unwisely, she did ask Tommy if it were true that Billy Michael had thrown a television through his trailer window while he watched a play-off game and a girl held his penis in her mouth.
“Who told you that?” he shouted.
She was startled when he began to yell so suddenly, not even bothering to explain himself.
“That fucking Mimi! What a fucking troublemaker! She always was a liar.”
“What does it matter who told me?”
“Well, it’s not true, that’s what matters, and I want you on the set to see for yourself. Tomorrow.”
“Why would my coming to the set mean it wasn’t true?” she asked stubbornly.
“Be there, that’s all. I’m not interested in your fucking logic.”
• • •
Clio sat alone in Tommy’s trailer, looking out a window that had no glass in it. Mimi had told her that the actress in the movie, Tracy Bond, refused to use the foot pump to flush the toilet in her trailer. Every day after lunch, the teamster who drove and maintained the trailer would quit. Another teamster would be sent over by the union. He would last a few days until, infuriated by the humiliation of having to flush Miss Bond’s toilet, he, too, would quit. There had been twelve drivers in two weeks.
Clio watched the new driver. He sat in an aluminum beach chair just outside the circle of lights and read a newspaper.
Tommy jumped up the stairs and came inside the trailer. There was a new television on the kitchenette counter.
A man put his head through the open door. “Want anything, kid?”
“Want anything?” Tommy asked Clio.
She hesitated.
“He has anything you want. Soda, chewing gum, Hershey bars, rubbers.”
When she smiled, Tommy said, “That’s his job, babe.”
As she turned to thank the man, her hand slid between a seat cushion and the back of the couch. She gasped as she cut her finger on a thin piece of glass that had fallen behind the cushion.
“You sure? I have to go back to work in a sec,” Tommy said, studying a page of dialogue. “Come and watch this time.”
For a long time after, Clio wondered why she had not held out her hand, the second finger bleeding, instead of hiding it behind her back as if she were the one who should be ashamed.
She left during the next take.
• • •
She had gone down to the kitchen for a bottle of spring water, and when his voice came out of the darkness, she jumped in surprise. He walked slowly into the dining room. It was as if he’d been waiting for her.
“You held up the fucking shot.”
“I cut my finger.”
“Good reason. Real good. My own wife holds up the shot.”
There was an album cover lying on the dining table. She picked it up and skimmed it gracefully across the room at him. It hit him in the face.
“I couldn’t have done that if I’d tried,” she said.
He came quickly around the table, holding his forehead. “Don’t you ever do that again,” he said, jerking her arm into the air. “Do you hear me?” He was flushed and his breath came in small gasps.
He held her wrist tightly and the sleeve of her kimono slipped over her shoulder. Her wrist burned and her hand grew numb, but she gave no sign that he was hurting her. She wanted him to release her, but she feared that if she let him see that, he would only hold her more tightly. She might have asked politely, but she was wary. The years of guerrilla training she had undergone in her struggle with Burta had left her mistrustful of the possibility of fair treatment.
Her stillness infuriated and aroused him. He bent her wrist awkwardly behind her neck and brought her face to him. He pressed his teeth into her mouth, biting her lip. When she would not open her mouth, even in pain, he reached up and ripped the kimono from her shoulders.
She tried to turn away, to hide her face in her shoulder, but he held her tightly by the chin and forced her to look
at him. He put her finger, the one that had been cut, into his mouth.
He moved her wet finger across her bare stomach, following its path with his mouth. Her blood mixed with his saliva, until his mouth was at last on her own lost fingers, pushed inside of her, and she was moaning with fury.
Clio knew better after that night than to ask again whether Billy Michael had thrown a television set through the window of Tommy’s trailer. She knew the answer. That she had cut her finger on a piece of glass that had fallen from a broken window was not in itself proof that Tommy was lying, but she knew that the story about the girl was true.
She sat on the suede sofa and looked around at the stucco walls of Tommy’s house, at the paintings of cowboys and metal sculptures of sea gulls, and was at last surprised that she was there, surprised that her heedless flight had led her to Tommy Haywood and his house in the Malibu hills. I am no longer swimming out of the current, she thought. I am in it now. But, like my grandfather who drowned one winter evening of rapture of the deep, I am swimming in the wrong direction.
She jumped up to find Judy, to ask her to take a walk with her. Judy did not think a climb through dry fields was a very good way to spend her time and Clio could see that she did not want to go with her. “I’m doing this for you, Clio,” she said. She brought along her steno pad and pen.
As they walked up the steep macadam driveway, Judy said, “Lou Gordon’s new Rottweiler puppy got killed last week by coyotes. It just disappeared. He called to see if we’d seen any around the pool, looking for water.”
“How did he know coyotes killed the dog?”
Judy shrugged. “He was mad because the dog was so expensive. He said if he’d known that coyotes were going to eat a thousand-dollar dog, he’d have just gone to the pound.” She stopped to write something in her notebook and Clio waited patiently. When she finished, they turned onto a side road that led to a grove of pepper trees. There was a small camp of mobile homes near the trees. The trailers looked as if they’d been there for years, dried leaves and branches banked against the scalloped metal borders of each small plot. If they took the side road, they’d reach the pepper trees without having to go through the camp.
“Are there ever girls here when I’m away?” Clio asked. She looked at the flat ocean far below them, embarrassed by her question. There was a smell of salt, and wild mustard.
“Girls?”
“When I’m with Mimi. When I’m not here.”
“Sometimes there are girls here,” Judy said hesitantly, “but you know them—Jumbo’s girlfriend comes with him, and C.Z.’s wife.”
“Did you ever go out with Tommy?” Clio pulled a long stalk of mustard flowers through her fingers, and her hand was suddenly full of tiny yellow petals. “You know, like Mimi.” She ate some of the flowers. “You seem to know his ways. Much better than I do, I think.”
“He’s my brother,” Judy said.
Clio stopped in the road to gaze at the petals as thin as wet rice paper in her hand. The air smelled like hot tar. Waves of heat rose in oily streams around them. She tried to shake the petals from her palm.
“I never knew whether he told you or not.”
Clio’s palms were moist and the petals stuck to her skin. “Why do you do it?” she asked.
“He likes me to be nearby.”
“No. I don’t mean that.”
“If I’d stayed at home, I’d be working in a submarine shop.”
“Submarine shop?”
“Making those long sandwiches. At least here I get to meet people. It’s never cold. I get to go swimming in a pool whenever I want.”
“That is why people live in California.”
“It’s better than what they had.”
“Why is it a secret?”
“A secret?”
“Yes.”
“It isn’t a secret, really. He just doesn’t think about it. It doesn’t mean anything to him.” She hesitated. “Maybe you better not let on you know, if he didn’t tell you. Maybe he doesn’t want you to know. He might be mad.”
“I think that is called a secret.”
Judy pulled the top from the pen and ran it along the metal spiral of the steno pad. It made a bright clicking sound and the insects singing in the field suddenly fell silent.
“Do you think he’d fire me?”
“Oh,” Clio said, furious, “I don’t know.” She began to walk.
“I was surprised when he married you,” Judy said, catching up with her. “He never tells me these sort of things, but he said you were quiet. You knew how to behave. He’s not used to that. And it was time for him to get married. For his career, I mean. Everyone thought it was a good idea. You had class, he said. And you weren’t after him because of who he was. You were the first one who wasn’t. He didn’t know anyone like you before.” She was out of breath.
“I wasn’t after him,” Clio said, stopping to look at her. “I was trying to get away.”
“Away? Away from what?”
Clio saw the sudden glint of a satellite dish in the trailer camp and it was blinding for a moment. She put her hands to her eyes. “From home. Like you.” She turned and started down the mountain.
“Are you mad at me?” Judy asked, following her. “I don’t know anyone like you, either.”
“I think you should find another job. We both should.”
“You do?”
“No more Tucks boxes.”
“You know, I used to be embarrassed to buy them. In case the checkout girl thought they were for me! Can you imagine! I know it’s silly, but I was. And now she just pulls a box off the shelf every morning and puts it on the counter. I’m not embarrassed anymore. I’ve learned something in this job. I could ask for anything now.”
Clio told Tommy that she wanted to move into town.
“You must be joking, hon. What’s wrong with here?”
“I mean by myself.”
He exhaled in exasperation and rested a barbell heavily across his chest. He was lying on the blue carpet, a towel around his waist, working with a new set of weights. Clio noticed for the first time that the carpet was the same color as his eyes. She wondered if he had picked the carpet to match his eyes.
He grunted as he lifted the barbell from his chest. “This isn’t like you, babe.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”
“Call you what?” He did ten quick sit-ups.
“It wouldn’t make any difference to you whether I were here or not.”
“Come here.” He gestured to her to come to him.
“I don’t mind not making a difference,” she said. “I just don’t want to not make a difference with you.”