The Anatomy of Violence (2 page)

Someone yelled, “Take it off!” The boys on the truck roared, and I felt cold anger splash over me. I wouldn’t go back now.

I laid the script on the table and poured a glass of water. It was hot and flat, like lukewarm lemonade. I drank slowly as the crowd mumbled. With the glass to my mouth I read Ann’s script and groped for the character of the little girl, trying to understand her puzzled grief on learning her dog was dead. The script was ridiculous and the dog meant nothing to me.
To know grief, I must remember grief.

I remembered and turned back to the audience.

Silence roared in my ears when I finished. I had nearly reached my seat when it was broken by applause like hail on a shingle roof.

But Ann was gone. I glimpsed her as she pushed through the gate with her head down, shoulders hunched forward. I dropped into my chair, feeling like a limp washrag. Maybe Ann had just made a mistake in the scripts, then couldn’t face the audience cold. I hated to think otherwise.

Then the last girl returned to her seat and the contest ended. The judges huddled and hummed while fifteen minutes droned by.

Finally the junior-high band formed up and six convertibles rolled in with a flutter of crepe. I read
MISS STELLA
on the lead car.

“Laurie?” I looked up to see Jules holding out his hand. “Mort didn’t hear your performance, but we convinced him you were best. I’ve got the crowning job. You ready?”

I let him pull me to my feet, then my knees went watery. “Lord, did I
win?”

“You did.” His smile sparkled. “You’re Miss Stella.”

N
OW THE AFTERNOON
seemed to have happened to another girl.

The car creaked without pause; a monotonous rhythm that sounded as though it would never end. I wished I had some idea of how long it would take them to finish.

The sound of the car quickened and grew louder. And finally it was strangely quiet. After a minute, I heard a weak female voice: “Yawn a see ‘er wet?”

“Mmmmm,” a male voice mumbled. “Wade’ll turn ‘em alight.”

Light shone through my eyelids and I held my breath to halt the movement of my bosom. Then the light went out. I smelled cigaret smoke and understood the muffled words. “You want a cigaret?” she’d asked.

Now!
I tensed my right arm.

Suddenly footsteps grated beneath the bleachers where the man waited. They came near and I could hear his breathing; felt him looking down at me. I lay taut. If he touched me I’d lose my mind.

His steps moved away and I breathed again. I heard his shoes scrape on the concrete sidewalk outside the park and I began picking at the tape on my left hand. It came free as a car door clicked. An engine caught and tires squalled.

Hate curdled deep inside me.
Someday I’ll know who you are. And I’ll kill you. Oh, damn you.

My stomach heaved. I clawed the tape from my mouth and rolled onto my side. Warm, bitter liquid spewed out. Pain hooked deep into my throat where his thumbs had gouged my windpipe.

Someone mumbled in the parked car. The engine started and the car rolled without lights a hundred feet down the road. They thought I was a drunk, lost. Fine. I didn’t need them now.

I pushed myself to my feet, shook out the satin slip, and stepped into it. Then the formal. I felt on the ground and found the wad of cloth that had been my strapless brassiere. The clasp was torn from the fabric but it could be fixed. Carrying it, I walked toward the gate.

Something caught on my heel. My panties. I picked them up, then threw then down in revulsion.
Oh, damn you, whoever you are.
I wished I’d had a disease to give him.

Nausea came again as I stepped through the gate. I clutched the board fence and arched my back in a minute of dry retching. When it was over I started walking. Through the mist in my eyes I could see the road stretching along the broad river bottom and light shining in the window of the first house beyond the river. Daddy was waiting up.

I walked faster. My teeth grated and my mouth tasted like the inside of an old champagne bucket. Champagne …

I’d tasted it for the first time that evening, and I’d drunk a lot of it, I remembered. Had I passed out and then been found somewhere by the wrong kind of man? Surely not. Hadn’t I been with friends? As I walked, I went over the evening in my mind, looking for a hint of the man’s identity. So many things, so many people …

There’d been the parade, then I’d picked up Richard and we’d gone to the Barn. After nearly two hours in an open convertible, my face had felt like an old sun-baked shoe. I’d sat at a table slightly larger than a dinner plate and watched Richard pour champagne.

His blunt, thick hands were a rugged contrast to the fragile glass he set in front of me. “Why did you come by for me tonight?” he asked.

“Why? Three reasons.” I sipped, and the stuff bubbled intangibly in my mouth. Fatigue was an undertow ready to drown me, but I felt at ease with Richard. I’d known him since he’d pulled his peeling plywood house trailer into town two years ago and started doing features for the Curtright City
Clarion.
There was nothing serious between us; I’d told him at the beginning it had to be that way. So he saved his endearments for his golden retriever.

“In the first place,” I went on, “daddy loaned me the car, and your front seat always has dog hair on it.”

He wrinkled his nose at the champagne and bit the plastic seal from a bottle of Scotch. Richard had the scrubbed, battered look of a prize fighter just out of the shower. A white scar split his left eyebrow into blond parallel lines, but his blue eyes lacked a fighter’s birdlike alertness. They were too languid, too thoughtful, and they seemed too old for a man of twenty-six.

“I have a point in asking, Laurie. What are the other reasons?” He poured Scotch over an ice cube and swallowed.

“Second reason. You asked me before the contest. The others didn’t.”

He shrugged heavy shoulders, and the white shirt stretched between the flat planes of his chest. “I thought you might lose and want some discreet sympathy. I didn’t think you’d pass up the banquet for this.”

He flipped a hand at the barnlike club. The building had once been used as an exhibition hall, attached to the park. Now, with tables jammed into a quarter-acre floor, it was a club where you bought setups and brought your own liquor. It was nine o’clock, still cool inside with less than half the tables filled. Later the place would steam.

I thought of the banquet at the hotel where they relived the boom days in long, rambling reminiscence. “Old men and old speeches,” I told Richard, “I have the strength to sacrifice.”

“Jules Curtright always escorts Miss Stella to the banquet and afterwards. I guess you know that?” His deep voice was faintly mocking when he mentioned Jules.

“Yes. He told me.” I pushed my glass forward. “More.”

He filled it, half-smiling. “How did I beat out Jules Curtright?”

I twisted my glass and wondered what he was leading up to. He seemed to be fishing for a hint of how I felt about him. I wasn’t sure.

Once he told me he was planning a book, but every time he started writing, some new complication changed his philosophy of life. He suspected that somewhere the trend would turn toward simplicity and he’d be able to sum up the whole mess in a single querulous epigram.

He didn’t try to be handsome. He kept his blond hair short because it was less trouble, left his broken nose unstraightened because he said it would just get broken again.

“Rich, today it’s been like walking barefoot on hot sand. I wanted to relax, and I couldn’t with Jules.”

“Why? Does he excite you?”

“Don’t question a royal whim, Rich.”

All right.” He seemed disappointed. “If a commoner may presume, when does the royal coach bug out for New York?”

“Next Saturday.”

“I’ll drive you.”

“A five-day trip?”

“Make it seven. That’s time for a honeymoon.”

I lifted my glass to cover my surprise. His expression suggested he’d just told a joke I hadn’t yet caught. I laughed uncertainly. “Richard, are you
proposing?”

He rubbed his index finger over his eyebrow. “I can work. I’ve had so many jobs the social security people don’t even bother to put away my file anymore. I’ve got talent and I can write upside down and backwards.”

“Rich, are you serious?”

“Sure.” He lifted his glass and drained it in a swallow, then poured another. He seemed nervous. “I’ve never tried to make money, Laurie. If that’s what you want, I’ll make it. Don’t worry.”

How could I turn down a proposal I wasn’t sure was real without looking ridiculous? I made my voice serious, with no hint of flippancy. “Rich, I’ve only got two years, and that’ll take all the energy I have with nothing to spare. You remember Eileen who won last year? She was going to wait until this year and we’d go to New York together.”

“Eileen is dead,” he said.

“She wouldn’t have wanted me to give it up.”

Rich raised an eyebrow. “Now I know why you didn’t enter the contest last year. Eileen was nineteen and you were eighteen. It was her last chance; you’d have another. So you divided it up, like slicing a cake. Right?”

It sounded too smug, but it was nearly true. “Maybe I just didn’t want to compete with Eileen.” I twirled my glass between my fingers and changed the subject. “Which sounds best for a stage name, Rich? Eileen or Clara?”

“Who’s Clara?”

“My mother.”

“It depends, then.” Rich drank again. He was drinking it straight. “Whose life do you want to fulfill, your mother’s or Eileen’s?”

I stiffened. “My own, naturally.”

He shrugged. “All right. Use your own name. Just so you know what you want. I gather it isn’t marriage.”

“I told you, I’ve got two years. Then, if I wash out …”

“Don’t make any promises.” A sullen, brooding expression flashed across his face, then the half-smile returned. “Maybe I’d go to New York and get on as a drama critic, and pan the hell out of your performances so you’d fail. So you’d better not promise me anything.” He poured another drink and laughed.

Chairs scraped and a couple took the table behind us. The man was short and round-faced with a mustache like a black postage stamp. The woman was tall with half moons of pallor below her eyes.

The guitar-trumpet-piano combo opened up in one corner. A few couples rose and began floating around the floor. The man with the mustache spoke to the woman; she shook her head. He shrugged and turned his back to watch the dance floor.

“Dance with me,” said Rich.

“If you’ll stop worrying about Jules Curtright.”

“All right.”

Rich handled his bulk well on the floor; a strong leader. I felt the strength in his arms and wished I hadn’t had to turn down his proposal.

Back at the table, I noticed the club was full. Several people stood around the walls and set their bottles on window ledges. Conversation rose, the combo played louder, people talked still louder. The noise would spiral upward indefinitely, feeding on itself.

Rich caught my arm. “Brace yourself. You’re about to receive a great honor.”

I turned to see three people threading toward our table. First was Jules Curtright, his white teeth showing in a smile. He wore a tuxedo instead of the sports outfit he’d worn to the contest.

Next came the girl with the red-gold hair who’d displayed herself in the contest. She walked in a way that thrust her pelvis against the metallic sheath dress which somehow clung to the inner side of her legs. I suddenly felt drab and mousy. She carried a champagne bottle trailing a streamer which read:
MISS STELLA.

The third person was the owner of the club. A short man with a long, sad face, he carried two padded chairs.

“May we join you?” asked Jules. He took the woman’s arm. “You remember Simone. She took second this afternoon.”

“Hi!” She flourished the bottle and set it on the table. They had this for you at the banquet and I insisted they let us deliver it.”

“Well …” I had a feeling of going in debt to someone I might dislike. “That’s nice of you, Simone.”

“Listen, you call me Sam.” She snapped her fingers. “Come on, shorty, give me a place to park it.”

The short man shoved the chairs up to the table, leaving Rich and me sitting opposite each other. I tried to catch his eye, but he was looking into his drink, a half-smile on his face.

Simone jerked her chair forward and whispered in my ear. “Congratulations on the contest. Jules promised it to me, but now that I’ve met you I forgive him, the bastard.”

So the girls
did
go to Jules; I was glad I hadn’t, and wondered how Simone had persuaded him to promise. She began gushing forth a description of the banquet. It had all been fabulous, she said. She hung a cigaret in her mouth and turned it toward Jules without taking her eyes off me. He lit it with a smooth, precise gesture, his gray eyes amused. He winked at me.

I stopped feeling drab. Beneath the bright animation of Simone’s face was a hard calculating set that never quite disappeared. She was talking to me with the quick, powder-room intimacy that made me wary and uncomfortable. I interrupted her narrative of events in Chicago night clubs to tell her I’d never been in the city.

“Really?” She looked sympathetic. “I used to dance in all those places.”

Rich spoke for the first time. “I bet you done real good.”

I looked at him sharply. He’d spoken with an exaggerated country drawl, but Simone didn’t realize he was teasing. She leaned toward him and the square neck of her dress fell outward. “Don’t take my word. Ask me to dance and I’ll show you.”

“Aw, I don’t know if I can dance them fast ones.”

“This isn’t fast.” She took his hand and pulled him up. “Come on, mountain man.”

Rich let her lead him to the dance floor, throwing out his feet as though kicking mud off his shoes. Then he stopped and waited until she put his arms in place.

“We can leave if you’re bothered,” said Jules.

I smoothed off my frown and felt my neck grow warm. “I’m not bothered.”

Jules smiled and made watery circles on the table with his glass. “I know a quiet place on the state line.”

He waited, tugging his ear lobe. I met his eyes and thought again of oil smoke, this time with tiny flickers of fire.
I can’t trust myself with him,
I thought.

“I came with Richard,” I said finally. My palms were sweating again.

“That’s no pain.” He jerked his head toward the dance floor. “He and Simone will get together.”

I turned to watch their slow, halting movement. She curved against Richard like a drawn bow, her dress creased above and below her buttocks. “They couldn’t be more together. Is that why you brought her?”

He moved a shoulder. “She wasn’t my first choice. I’m never satisfied with second.”

“Jules, I can’t just walk out. And you’re mistaken about Richard.”

The two returned before the dance ended. Simone flopped and whispered: “I’ve met some hayseeds, but oh, brother!” She pulled a foot into her lap and rubbed the arch.

“Simmanny,” said Richard in his exaggerated drawl. “How about you coming to my place and I’ll cook up a mess of mountain chicken.”

“Sounds wonderful,” she said with strained enthusiasm. “What is it?”

“It ain’t rilly chicken. You take this kittle of boiling water and you drop in a big live toad—”

“Oh, God!” She jumped to her feet and started tugging on her shoe. “That’s enough for me.” She looked down at Jules and her voice grew plaintive. “Can’t we go? I’m getting a terrible headache laughing at this funny man.”

Jules smiled and rose. “Of course. Keep the champagne, Laurie. It’s yours.” His smile slid over to me as though we shared a secret, then he followed Simone out.