Pasadena (21 page)

“What are they doing here?” whispered Linda.

“They’re drinking.”

“Who are all these girls?”

“They’re the girls who work for Herr Beck.”

“Why are they here at night?”

“To get paid. To earn a living.”

Linda and Charlotte scuttled over to a greasewood shrub near a window, the needles pressing into them. Charlotte warned Linda to be quiet as they parted the shreddy branches: “No matter what happens, be still!”

And from here Linda could see everything: the
banda
with their shirts sweat-pasted to their chests; men’s hands on the girls’ narrow hips; a huddle of girls in a corner, each with a rope of baby-clam shells around her throat; six boys in the opposite corner, their bangs slicked down and on their feet shiny new trench boots made for the war but never shipped over. “You see Margarita’s nephews over there?” Charlotte noted it in her pad. They were sucking whiskey from root-beer bottles and they swayed awkwardly, their arms around one another, propping themselves up.

The
banda
was playing a German maritime
Lied—Der Sturm ist da, die wilden Meere hupfen
—that Linda knew from Dieter’s violin. Many years ago, Dieter used to come to her and Edmund at bedtime. He’d stand between them and play his fiddle, singing more and more softly until at last his voice trailed off … 
Guten Nacht
. Linda would pretend she didn’t understand the lyrics, and after Dieter left she’d beg Edmund to translate the songs, and though now it seemed like another lifetime she could still recall how he would sit up proudly and recite the words like poetry and teach her how to sing. “No,” he’d say gently. “It goes like this …” And finally he too would say,
Guten Nacht, Sieglinde, Guten Nacht
.

Next, a woman joined the
banda
on the stage, her green velvet dress dragging across the mandolin player’s shoes. The sight of her caused all the men to stop, their hands falling from their dancing partners, and the hall fell silent except for gulps and pants and a whispered “There she is!” The woman moved to the center of the stage and raised her arms, presenting herself to the crowd: black hair oiled up in a swirl, glass earrings catching the light, a generous display of breast, a ring set with jade, a mouth like a small tomato. The mandolin player introduced Fraulein Carlotta to the crowd, and the men cheered and the girls applauded skeptically and Carlotta shifted her velvet-draped hips from one side to the other and began singing:

Through the window, Linda heard one of the men say to his pal, “She’s famous round San Diego, but one day every man in California will know her.” And his pal said, “You can know her tonight if you got the green.”

Carlotta clenched a fist as she brought her song to climax:

The green velvet shifted like a dirty stream passing over a rock. She was older than the other girls, powdered and plucked, waxy eyebrows drawn in place, and unlike any other woman Linda had ever seen, Fraulein Carlotta seemed entirely aware of the power she held over men. She possessed the voice of a sad but experienced woman, and her breasts rose and fell as she sang, and her hand with the ring—the jade cut into a rose—swabbed the base of her throat as the audience applauded and hollered and someone yelled, “Carlotta, will you marry me?”

Carlotta leaned from the lip of the stage and said, “How much money do you have?”

The men hooted even more, especially the men who had no money in the world and never would, and feet began to stomp and the Cocoonery ripened with a warm compost smell.
“Danke, danke,”
she said. “
Muchas gracias
, boys and girls.” The crowd clapped and whistled, and the boys sitting on the windowsills swung their feet and kicked the walls, and even the shy girls who were making promises to themselves to run away from Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea before the dawn applauded vigorously. And the more noise everyone made, the larger Carlotta appeared on the stage, and she seemingly towered over the members of the
banda
, and the spotlights transformed her stinky sweat to glitter. “How ’bout a little
mayate
?” she called. The crowd cheered, and the men took the girls’ wrists, and together the dancers formed a line. To whistles and howls, Carlotta left the stage, and the
banda
took up a
rumba
accented with tambourine. The music shook the glass walls and the dancers flapped their arms like wings, imitating a swarm of June bugs aflight in the night and drawn to the great electric bulbs hanging from the Cocoonery’s ceiling.

A carved figure of Miss Van Antwerp hung over the door like the wooden bust on the prow of a ship, and her stingy smile looked as if she were enjoying what her silkworm hall had become. The
mayate
was one of the favorite dances of the day, and Linda watched more men and girls pour into the Cocoonery beneath the oakwood face of the failed real-estate developer: railroad men too sooty to clean up properly; travelers with half-smoked cigars tucked beneath the bands of their hats; men in suit trousers and suspenders, with greedy spittle on their lips—these men looked like the developers who Charlotte had said planned to string electricity lines out into the open scrubland “on spec.” “They’re speculators,” Charlotte had said in a way that had made Linda envious that her friend knew so much. And now fans suspended from the ceiling pushed warm air around the dancers’ heads, and the great greenhouse ripened the spirits of all its revelers—or of the men, at least, for Linda saw the bloom in the girls’ faces fold tightly against the oncoming, pawing night.

“Here’s my story,” said Charlotte, busy taking notes. “It’s got all the goods: bootleg, debauchery, and girls bought for a price.”

Linda watched a fat man in a hat too small for his head pull a gold-eyed girl from the dance floor and out into the torch-lit night. She was pounding his doughy chest, but he was smiling and no one seemed to
notice that the girl didn’t want to go. A narrow-nosed girl struggled for breath in hairy arms. Another girl sniffled into a handkerchief embroidered with a violet as she slotted several coins up her sleeve. In a corner, a group of boys groped themselves as they surrounded a girl with an overbite and a frail tin crucifix about her throat.

“I want to go,” said Linda.

“I’m just beginning.”

Linda was climbing out of the greasewood when Charlotte took her by the shoulder and said, “Linda! Look in there.” Linda followed Charlotte’s pointing finger through the crowd, and she was just about to say “I’ve seen enough” when she saw the small thick frame of Edmund.

His hair was slicked behind his ears, and his collar was starched and erect, but more shocking than the very sight of him was who he was dancing with: he was in the arms of Carlotta, who had changed into a tuxedo and now wore a white rose behind her ear. Her hair was pasted to her skull with pomade that made it look like the skin of a black plum, and Edmund hung from her chest like a small boy clinging to his mother and his fingers gripped her lapel and her arms held his face to the cushion of her breast. Carlotta plucked Edmund’s eyeglasses from his face and tucked them deep within her blouse. They moved in a circle, and Edmund’s eyes were dreamy with blindness as his face rose and fell with her breath. The violinist was playing a waltz, and after a few bars Linda realized it was “The Leipzig Fancy,” one of Dieter’s favorite songs, and Edmund’s mouth was moving, as if he was singing to Carlotta.

Even more people were dancing now, the floor crowded and shoulders bumping, and the pulse of the music rose as shoes and boots shuffled and dress hems rippled against stockings that would shred before morning light. Ropes of wood-clack beads rattled, and all at once many of the girls handed themselves over to the night’s duty, and in pairs men and girls left the Cocoonery for the privacy of bushes or a backseat or a back-numbing felled oak or, for those who didn’t care, a firm bed of dirt. The lapel of Carlotta’s tuxedo was shiny and her large hand ran down Edmund’s back, and they danced and turned and then shifted toward the window by the greasewood shrub; and when the music lunged, Carlotta turned her hips and the white rose behind her ear came within a few feet of Linda, its heart stained red.

And there Edmund was on the other side of the glass, the grain of
his beard greasy, his shoulders spread in his church suit. His hand cupped one of Carlotta’s breasts through the tuxedo jacket, fondling it clumsily, and she smiled not out of pleasure but out of the satisfaction of a job completed, and Edmund’s face had gone blank and Linda knew there was nothing in the world that could pull him out of his reverie. In the Cocoonery’s warm damp air he had been transformed, and her brother was a man she no longer recognized.

“Just like the rest of them,” said Charlotte.

The dancers shifted, Edmund and Carlotta waltzed away, and Linda strained to find them through the crowd. But the Cocoonery was filled with the Ensenada girls and the men willing to pay, the strangers up from Ocean Beach and Leucadia and in from Riverside, and the country folk from the desert side of Mt. Palomar. Strangers here, their snapping diesel engines chasing the rabbits permanently from the fields, they insisted on pavement through the village and on the road leading to the pier, and hurled all sorts of things from their windows to the side of the road: only this morning, Linda had picked up a pie tin and a green seltzer bottle and a pickle dish painted with sprays of arbutus and an empty box of Dr. Rose’s Arsenous Tabules
“For the Treatment of Bad Complexion and Skin Diseases of Every Nature.”
All sorts of people coming to Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea or merely passing through, and one day the road had brought Carlotta to Edmund. Why hadn’t he told Linda about the Cocoonery? Disappointment overtook her as she clung to the greasewood branch. The music continued and Edmund and Carlotta were a pair in the sea of pairs and partners and lovers and buyers and sellers—“Quite a flower market,” said Charlotte—and Linda, who had assumed that she would keep secrets from the world, not the other way around, felt a catch in her chest and began to cry. She pushed herself out of the bush and began to run down the hill, past the heavy farmer’s boots and the cheap dresses cut from discount cloth. Linda ran with her arms extended, a sob lodged in her throat, and her outstretched hand hit someone who said, “Watch it, Miss,” and a girl snapped, “Don’t push me!” The heat within overtook Linda, a fever on the spine, the sweat collecting in the pit of her arms and between her legs, and she felt hot and sticky and trapped. The long painted finger of a woman she didn’t know caught in her hair, releasing its mass from her bow, and it felt heavy and moist on her nape and around her face, and Linda would run all the way home and return to her cottage and pray to Valencia’s
God to let her forget the night, to let her believe that all she had seen was a dream and not a glance into the future. She dashed through tequila picnics and over benches and past groups singing around pit fires, and she was crying now, aloud, “Stop! Stop!” and her arms were out as she ran down the hill, kicking paper boxes and abandoned newspapers and aluminum spoons so cheap that it was easier to toss them over one’s shoulder than to carry them home. She knew that people were staring at her, but they didn’t know her. Or maybe what they knew was that men and girls lived like this; maybe everyone knew it but Linda Stamp. She was prepared to sprint all the way back to Condor’s Nest, where the greatest noise was the call of the ocean and the only litter in the path was the chucked mussel shell; where she would find Bruder in his little house, waiting for her on his bed, his arms at last ready to take her in. The pitch of the hill steepened, and all at once, gravity’s pull overtook her and she was skipping out of control toward the bottom of the Cocoonery hill, and just as she was about to lose her balance and tumble forward, her hand hit a man who appeared from nowhere and her finger caught on the leather thong around his throat and the necklace snapped and the coral pendant broke free, and just before she fell to her face, Bruder caught her and held her and stroked her head and each said to the other, “What are you doing here?”

What did Edmund have
to offer Fraulein Carlotta that other men did not? Not a more handsome face or more experience with women, and certainly not dancing skills or eyes strong enough to peer into the future. No, she made the mistake that many women have made over time: she thought he was rich. If not filthy rich, at least in possession of tracts and tracts of land, acres that could be sliced off and sold. Why would she think this? Because Edmund, transfixed in the way every man is at least once in his life, had told her whatever it was he thought she wanted to hear: “Why, it’s just an old rancho out by the ocean,” he said of Condor’s Nest. “How big?” asked Carlotta. “How big? How big? I’m not really sure. Big enough. It’ll suit you just fine,” he said leadingly, and indeed his statement meant one thing to him and something entirely vaster to Carlotta. But as it turned out, his singular asset was precisely what Carlotta was in need of then: land or, in other words, a home. “I’ve been thinking about settling down, and I’ve always wanted an ocean view!” she cooed, fingers drumming the tightening skin of her belly. She held Edmund to her breast at the Cocoonery and didn’t let go for a week—a week spent in a flimsy tent pitched behind a series of illicit singing halls, on a canvas cot that creaked and sagged beneath their rocking weight. She released him just long enough for him to return, dizzy with her orange-oil perfume, to the farm to lay claim to its deed.

“Papa,” he pleaded with Dieter, “if you give me the farm now, she’ll become my wife!”

But the one thing Dieter would never forgive was betrayal, and he sent Edmund back down the dirt lane: “Back to your harlot, my son.
Fraulein Carlotta at Condor’s Nest, indeed.” It was a scene lit by the autumn moon, and Linda witnessed it from the window above her bed, and across the fields Bruder held a lamp close to his copy of Homer and ignored the yelling, but then it became too loud and he opened his door and saw Edmund’s silhouette slip by. It looked to Bruder like a ghost flying above the onion tops, but Bruder didn’t believe in ghosts—no, Bruder believed only in the horror of fate and reality.