Moving On (109 page)

“Will the movie you made with Sonny ever be released?” she asked.

“Nope,” Joe said. “If it was ready now, it could be, but they’re still screwing around with it. Now that he’s dead and forgotten it would bomb. It makes a good tax write-off.”

“He’s not entirely forgotten,” Patsy said. “I remember him.”

“Me too,” Joe said. “For a nut he was a good poker player.”

The Boulevard was warm and sunny when they went outside, and they walked a bit. “I want to go to Altadena,” Patsy said.

“Sucker.”

“I know.”

“IBM is just over on Wilshire. It’s a lot closer.”

“No, Altadena.”

He got her a cab and went back to work, and Patsy rode with a silent Latin cabbie down the Hollywood freeway, out the Pasadena freeway, beneath slopes and tall brown palms, and then north up a long street almost to the foot of a mountain. When the mountain was very close the driver turned off and parked beside a vast apartment building. The apartments were terraced and spread over a whole block, sunk into the gentle slope that spread back toward Los Angeles. She didn’t want to be stranded in Altadena and asked the driver to wait. There were no cars at all in the empty street, and it was strange that it should be so empty. All the cars were back where she had come from, in L.A. The sidewalks that ran into the maze of apartments were just as deserted as the streets. It was almost frightening. She encountered an old lady in shorts and sneakers walking a poodle. The old lady was taken aback. “We don’t live here,” she said. “We’re just walking through.”

“It seems nice,” Patsy said, for the old lady was a bit belligerent and seemed to expect a reply.

“It’s not fit to live in, if you’re lookin’,” she said. “They won’t take you if you’re over fifty, and they won’t take no children and they won’t take no pets. We live down the street. Homosexuals everywhere too.” With that she went on, tugging the poodle away from a faucet he was licking.

Patsy went on too, and almost immediately encountered two well-tanned young men. They were having a lovers’ quarrel by one of the swimming pools and they looked up as she passed and for a moment both focused their hostility on her. They didn’t speak, but it frightened her. She had seldom run into faces that said so clearly that they disliked her and resented not only her presence near their swimming pool but her very existence as well. She felt they might have grabbed her and drowned her if she had dared to speak.

When she found Jim’s apartment all she did was stand in front of it a few minutes feeling silly. It was curtained, and though she peeped as best she could all she could see was the end of a sofa with some newspapers piled on it. The curtains were off-white and the sofa brown. Very quietly, as if she were a spy, she tried the door, but it was locked. The apartment, like all the others, was done in a rough unpainted shingle, vaguely English. There was really nothing more to do. She could not imagine what kind of lives Jim and Clara led, inside the door, and she found that she had little curiosity and even less possessiveness in regard to Jim. She had just wanted to see the place, and was not sure she would have rung the doorbell even if she had known he was there and alone. She walked back through the winding sidewalks, among the heavy glossy shrubs, not even bothering to avoid the pool. The young men had settled their quarrel and were stretched out side by side, both on their backs, both in heavy sunglasses, taking the sun. Neither moved a muscle when she walked by; the only sound was the sound of her heels. She would not have supposed it could be so silent anywhere in L.A. The cab driver was listening to Mexican music on his radio and seemed displeased that she was back. She told him to take her to the IBM building on Wilshire Boulevard.

The one thing she felt certain about was that she no longer had any inclination for a big scene about Clara Clark. Too much time had passed. The issues had grown vague, and her feelings had grown vague also. All she wanted in that regard was to avoid Clara completely. But Jim was different. Avoiding him completely did not seem right. The best plan that came to mind was to wait outside his office building and surprise him when he got off work. Once she got to Wilshire and scrutinized the building, curiosity began to nibble at her. Perhaps, as Joe suggested, she wasn’t very interested in Jim, but she was nonetheless curious to see what he looked like and who he had become. She tried to project the man she had known who had sat around for two years fiddling with cameras and scholarship into the IBM building, and it was hard. She walked down Wilshire for almost a mile and sat for a while in an Orange Julius bar. The men there were talking about the Lakers, all except two hippies. The hippies of L.A. had fantastic hair; it made her realize what an inferior breed of hippie she had been exposed to in Texas.

The elevators were busy when Patsy went in, but soon they became even busier. Every time one reached the ground floor a score of young men and women stepped out and hurried toward the street. The building began to empty itself of its hundreds, of its thousands. At first Patsy watched each elevator load intensely, expecting Jim to be in each one. She was very nervous. But by the time twenty elevator loads of people had poured out before her eyes her nervousness had changed to confusion and then to a kind of light discouragement that was akin to her feeling of silliness as she stood in front of the apartment in Altadena. She felt like she didn’t know what she was doing. It was hard to believe that Jim, any Jim she knew, would come out of one of the elevators. All the young men looked rather alike, their suits gray or blue or brown. Almost in unison, when the elevators opened, they began to fish sunglasses from their pockets and put them on. Those who didn’t already had them on. And the elevators kept coming, emptying hundreds of nice-looking young men, some with their hair short, some with their hair longish; and girls with their hair longish, in short skirts and colored stockings, all heading for the street. After ten or fifteen minutes Patsy’s discouragement deepened. It occurred to her that in such a throng she might not notice Jim, or might not recognize him. His face could be turned the wrong way. Several times she had thought she had seen him, only to find that it was merely someone who resembled him slightly. It occurred to her that she might have missed him already. He might have passed within twenty feet, wearing sunglasses and a suit she wouldn’t recognize. Finally she simply let go of it, the whole plan, the whole pursuit, stepped into the departing rush and was back on Wilshire Boulevard, no more enlightened than when she went in. With some difficulty she got a cab and went to Joe Percy’s. He was there having a martini. Patsy took some sherry and listened meekly as Joe told her she was going about things in a very silly way.

“This is the age of appointments,” he said. “You use the phone. Doctors, lawyers, ex-husbands, it doesn’t matter. Wait an hour and a half and call him.”

“Okay,” she said listlessly.

“Look,” he said. “Make up your mind. Are you here to rescue your sister or to get your husband back. If it’s your sister, I can help you. I’ve got the whole weekend, and I know San Francisco. Jim probably doesn’t.”

She shook her head, genuinely uncertain. “I don’t much want him back. It’s just so messy, being married in absentia. I guess I think
he
ought to do something about it, if he wants us to be together again.”

She dialed Altadena, but no one was there. “Let’s do something wild to take my mind off it,” she said. “Why don’t you take me dancing? We could go to the Whiskey Au Go-Go or someplace extremely wild and I could wear that dress you bought me.”

Joe frowned. “Aren’t I supposed to wear it?” she asked.

“I was frowning at the thought of the Whiskey Au Go-Go,” he said. “I think it’s sort of had its hour. But we can go see.”

The dress was absolutely backless and she had no bra she could wear with it, which made her feel both shy and very daring. She smiled at the thought of what her mother would think if she knew that, instead of rescuing Miri, she was going off to a night club wearing no bra. Joe praised her lavishly and she blushed.

“My goodness, I feel odd,” she said. “I’m not sure I could wear it if I were going with anyone but you.”

Joe, seeing her blush, was all the more delighted with his purchase. She looked a girl again, looked like she had in Phoenix the night they met—only something had been added.

“Look, it’s six hours too early to do anything,” he said. “Why don’t I show you a little of the town.”

He did, and Patsy loved it. They went in the Morgan and her hair blew wildly. They went to Santa Monica and drove along the beach. Then he took her up the Miracle Mile and then to the Beverly Hills shopping center, where they got out and walked awhile. As they were passing a drugstore a dark beautiful woman came out adjusting her sunglasses. She was dressed in white, and she said hello to Joe, who said hello in return. “Who was that?” Patsy asked, feeling she ought to remember.

“Dolores Del Rio,” Joe said, taking her arm. She was still shy about her dress, though no one seemed to pay her the slightest mind.

As it grew dark he drove her into the hills and gave her a view of the lights of Los Angeles. Still early, they went to the Go-Go and danced amid a thin motley crowd of youngsters. Though colorfully dressed, most of them looked stoned, and the looks on their faces didn’t fit with the frenetic music. Patsy had never danced without a bra and could not get over being self-conscious about the movement of her breasts. A young man in a red shirt open to the navel, with a black armband on one arm, kept ogling her, though he was with a tall lovely girl who looked part Indian and part Negro. Patsy felt constrained and they soon left.

“That guy was an American Nazi,” Joe said. “Thus the armband.”

“Goodness. I supposed someone in his family was dead.”

They went back to Joe’s place and he fixed them a great, exotic omelet, with Patsy helping and advising. Between them they made short work of it and then sat in Joe’s living room having coffee. His living-room window did not look out on all L.A., but it did have a nice view of the Hollywood hills, with enough lights to make the night lovelier. It was an intimate vista, very different from the dazzling one he had shown her in Beverly Hills.

Patsy felt quiet and relaxed, as if her head had just cleared after a long stretch of fogginess. She felt as if she had gone through some kind of crisis, of a sort she did not understand; all she knew was that she felt she was through it. In such moods it was possible for her to notice other people in ways that she didn’t when her mind was hazed with her own problems. She noticed once again that her host looked melancholy.

“You make a good omelet, Joe,” she said. “Why are you depressed?”

“Me?” he said.

“Don’t kid me. I’ve seen you depressed before.”

“Oh, yes, the night Dixie raped me. How is she, by the way?”

“Fine. I remember you telling me she would always be fine, and why.”

“I was talking through my hat. Dixie could take a tumble any time.”

“Don’t beat around the bush,” she said. “I tell you my troubles constantly. Why are you depressed?”

“I’m trying to keep from falling in love inappropriately,” he said. “That’s the sum of it. It’s very hard not to let yourself love when you see someone lovable, you know.”

“Who is she?”

“The wife of an English screenwriter. Married about a year. She’s something like you, only a little younger. As lovely a woman as I’ve seen in years.”

“Uh-oh,” Patsy said. “What about her husband?”

“He’s queer and she doesn’t realize it. She knows something’s wrong but it’ll be a long while before she realizes it’s that simple. On the surface he’s the opposite of queer. I shudder to think how much she’ll have to take before she figures out that he really doesn’t like her at all.

“I see a lot of them socially, and she likes me,” he added. “That makes it tricky. It would shock her out of her mind if she thought I was in love with her, and I almost already am.”

“You already am,” Patsy said. “No almost about it. What endless messes. I’m going to call Jim while I feel sensible.”

She dialed, and Clara Clark answered. “Could I speak to Jim, please,” Patsy said.

“Uh, who’s calling?”

“Mrs. Carpenter,” Patsy said very matter-of-factly.

“Oh.”

“Hi,” Jim said cautiously, after a moment. “Where are you?”

“In Hollywood.”

There was a silence and Patsy could picture the two of them making startled faces at each other and trying to figure out what it meant. Despite her matter-of-factness the sound of Clara’s voice had irked her.

“What brings you?” he asked. “Are you going into pictures?”

He sounded defensive—as if her proximity made it necessary for him to maneuver in some way. It irked her more.

“Don’t get in a panic,” she said. “I’m not here to make trouble for you. I’m here to do something about Miri. She’s pregnant.”

“In L.A.?”

“In San Francisco. I stopped here thinking we might ought to see one another and straighten some things out. Since your companion is there I guess it would put you on the spot to ask if you wanted to see me?”

“I guess it would,” Jim said, sounding very conscious of the spot he was on. “Where are you?”

“At Joe’s.”

“Why are you staying with
him
?” he asked, as if it irked him.

“Why not? He’s the only friend I’ve got in this part of the world.”

“You pick strange friends.”

Patsy sighed. Nothing much had changed. “Okay,” she said. “Don’t let’s go into that. I was thinking you might want to go help me with Miri. I hate to be blunt but what else can I be. Do you want to or not?”

Jim was silent.

“I realize this is probably a bad time to call,” she said. “I’ve called before and missed you. Several times. Roger Wagonner died the other day. I went to the funeral and then came right out here.”

“Goodness,” Jim said. “I wish you’d got me. What did he die of?”

In telling about Roger they grew a little friendlier and less edgy, but when the subject was exhausted they were left with the same question: Did he want to go, or not?