What a shame! called Jimmy. Can I do something?
Her answer was incoherent or inaudible or both and a moment or two later she was gone from the terrace.
Angelina burst out of the white villa with a box of Kleenex, the excited butler screaming: Giii, giù, giù! The maid said something in terror, mixed with fury, and started in several directions before the butler seized her by her long skinny elbows and shot her in the right one.
The sun on Jimmy was beginning to daze and blind him. He got up and moved into shadow.
On the small serving table he suddenly noticed a fine white napkin covering something that made a slight mound on a plate. With guilty haste he picked it up to look under it and felt like crying when he saw that it was only a heap of crested silver teaspoons.
He had turned and started slowly away from the painfully brilliant white table when Mrs. Goforth’s voice, a little muffled by a bundle of disposable tissues held to her mouth and nostrils, called to him from the foot of the stairs to a lower terrace of the white villa: Come down here. We can talk in the library.
Jimmy had been about to vomit up his cup of black coffee. He held it down forcibly as he descended the stairs.
Mrs. Goforth was waiting on the lower terrace, and for the first time he observed her appearance and costume, being no longer distracted by the hope of a breakfast.
The upper part of her costume, a halter strap, seemed to be made of fish net dyed magenta with very wide interstices through which could be seen her terra cotta breasts, only the nipples being covered by little patches of magenta satin. This fish-net “bra” was tied behind her shoulders in a flirtatious bow knot with two long dangling tails. Her middle was bare and her Amazonian hips were confined by skin-tight shorts exactly the shade of the bougainvillea blossoms that overhung all the walls of Tre Amanti.
Come into the library, do hurry up! she called from the end of the terrace, and he tried hard to walk briskly but it seemed to take him an endless amount of time and he thanked God that she turned away just a second before he felt himself sway, so close to fainting that he had to rest the palm of his hand for a moment against the white stucco wall, bringing it away stained with the pink of bougainvillea that dripped everywhere.
The library seemed almost black as he felt his way in it.
Cool, huh? she called to him.
Oh, yes, very…
I love to move from a hot place to a cool place, she continued. It’s the great pleasure of summer…
He still waited for the room to come clear, however dimly, till she called him once more and then he started forward. His vision was just beginning to recover, when—
He seemed to trip over something, halfway across the room, but afterward he was not sure if he had actually tripped over something or had stumbled in terror.
Standing there all naked terra cotta in the deep gloom, quite motionless for the moment he caught sight of her, she seemed like one of those immense fountain figures in plazas of far northern countries, but travestied by a sculptor with evil wit.
I am, she said, a completely informal person. How about you?
I—
What?
I—
What’s the matter with you?
I—
Oh, for God’s sake, she blustered, are you going to pretend you’re shocked or something?
No, of—course not, but—
Silence followed, and continued.
She suddenly stooped to snatch up a small pink garment. The bus to Naples passes in half an hour, she snapped as she retreated behind a great table.
Mrs. Goforth?
Yes? What!
I—don’t have a penny…
Naturally not! But I pay for as far as Naples and never farther! Also I’d like you to know that I—
Mrs. Goforth!
What?
Don’t say anything more.
He covered his face with his hands.
The man was sobbing, my God, yes, he was bawling like a child!
Mrs. Goforth came back around the table. Some other person seemed to move into her body and take possession of her and she went to the sobbing young man and took him somewhat gingerly in her arms and pressed his head somewhat carefully to her bosom, as if it might break against her like a bird’s egg.
You made me angry, she murmured, when you made that sarcastic remark about kindness on the breakfast terrace.
Why do you think it was a sarcastic remark?
Because everybody who knows me knows that I am colder-hearted than the gods of old Egypt!
Why?
I have no choice.
Why?
I’ve never had any choice…
Give me a job, said Jimmy.
Doing what?
Proving that you are kinder than you think.
I know what you mean, she said.
I mean what I say, he pleaded.
Well, she murmured. Maybe if you stay here for dinner tonight—
I’d be delighted! he said, a little too quickly and loudly.
O.K., she murmured.
She had gotten back into her scanty garments. The interview was abruptly finished by the running approach of the maid, crying out before she came in: Telefono! Long deestance!
Then she threw the door open and Mrs. Goforth swept past her, marching out, and Jimmy said to the maid: Please bring some bread and cheese to my room. I’m in the pink villa.
The maid’s face showed no comprehension but it was at least an hour later, in his room in the pink villa, that he despaired of his request being honored.
At five o’clock the bedside phone tinkled and he lifted it to his ear and heard Mrs. Goforth saying all in one breath. My friend is coming back with a very large party. I’m very much afraid that every bed will be taken for the next week or two, it’s such a pity, we would have loved to keep you!
It was the voice of a young girl and the click interrupted it so abruptly he thought he ought to call back—at least for a moment he wondered if he could. He held the white enameled receiver weakly in his hand for a minute before it sank into him that he must move on again even though there was nowhere to move on to.
He rang the little electric bell by the bed but no one came, so after a while, giving up finally the idea of getting a bite to eat before his departure, he picked up his packed rucksack and went out of the pink villa into the sun, which was as hot and yellow as it had been at “breakfast,” perhaps even hotter and yellower, and started back down the same almost impassably steep path by which he had come.
In the white villa the gardener’s boy delivered a message to the chatelaine of Tre Amanti.
Man gone back down road.
Oh good, I hope so, she murmured, it being her habit or fate never quite to believe a piece of good news until her own observation had proved it true, and sometimes not even then.
1953 (Published 1959)
The Mattress by the Tomato Patch
My landlady, Olga Kedrova, has given me a bowl of ripe tomatoes from the patch that she lies next to, sunning herself in the great white and blue afternoons of California. These tomatoes are big as my fist, bloody red of color, and firm to the touch as a young swimmer’s pectoral muscles.
I said. Why, Olga, my God, it would take me a month to eat that many tomatoes, but she said. Don’t be a fool, you’ll eat them like grapes, and that was almost how I ate them. It is now five o’clock of this resurrected day in the summer of 1943, a day which I am recording in the present tense although it is ten years past. Now there are only a couple of the big ripe tomatoes left in the pale-blue china bowl, but their sweetness and pride are undimmed, for their heart is not in the bowl which is their graveyard but in the patch that Olga lies next to, and the patch seems to be inexhaustible. It remains out there in the sun and the loam and in the consanguine presence of big Olga Kedrova. She rests beside the patch all afternoon on a raggedy mattress retired from service in one of her hotel bedrooms.
This resurrected day is a Sa
turday and all afternoon pairs of young lovers have wandered the streets of Santa Monica, searching for rooms to make love in. Each uniformed boy holds a small zipper bag and the sun-pinked-or-gilded arm of a pretty girl, and they seem to be moving in pools of translucent water. The girl waits at the foot of steps which the boy bounds up, at first eagerly, then anxiously, then with desperation, for Santa Monica is literally flooded with licensed and unlicensed couples in this summer of 1943. The couples are endless and their search is unflagging. By sundown and long after, even as late as two or three in the morning, the boy will bound up steps and the girl wait below, sometimes primly pretending not to hear the four-letter word he mutters after each disappointment, sometimes saying it for him when he resumes his dogged hold on her arm. Even as daybreak comes they’ll still be searching and praying and cursing with bodies that ache from pent-up longing more than fatigue.
Terrible separations occur at daybreak. The docile girl finally loses faith or patience; she twists violently free of the hand that bruises her arm and dashes sobbing into an all-night café to phone for a cab. The boy hovers outside, gazing fiercely through fog and window, his now empty fist opening and closing on itself. She sits between two strangers, crouches over coffee, sobbing, sniffing, and maybe after a minute she goes back out to forgive him and rests in his arms without hope of anything private, or maybe she is relentless and waits for the cab to remove her from him forever, pretending not to see him outside the fogged window until he wanders away, drunk now, to look for more liquor, turning back now and then to glare at the hot yellow pane that shielded her from his fury. Son-of-a-bitch of a four-letter word for a part of her woman’s body is muttered again and again as he stumbles across the car tracks into Palisades Park, under royal palm trees as tall as five-story buildings and over the boom of white breakers and into mist. Long pencils of light still weave back and forth through the sky in search of enemy planes that never come over and nothing else seems to move. But you never can tell. Even at this white hour he might run into something that’s better than nothing before the paddy wagon picks him up or he falls onto one of those cots for service men only at some place like the Elks’ Lodge.
Olga knows all this, but what can she do about it? Build more rooms single-handed? To look at Olga you’d almost believe that she could. She is the kind of woman whose weight should be computed not in pounds but in stones, for she has the look of a massive primitive sculpture. Her origin is the Middle East of Europe. She subscribes to the Daily Worker, copies of which she sometimes thrusts under my door with paragraphs boxed in red pencil, and she keeps hopefully handing me works by Engels and Veblen and Marx which I hold for a respectful interval and then hand back to her with the sort of vague comment that doesn’t fool her a bit. She has now set me down as a hopelessly unregenerate prostitute of the capitalist class, but she calls me “Tennie” or “Villyums” with undiminished good humor and there is nothing at all that she doesn’t tell me about herself and nothing about myself that she doesn’t expect me to tell… When I first came to stay here, late in the spring, and it came out in our conversation that I was a writer at Metro’s, she said, Ha ha, I know you studio people! She says things like this with an air of genial complicity which a lingering reserve in my nature at first inclined me to pretend not to understand. But as the summer wore on, my reserve dropped off, and at present I don’t suppose we have one secret between us. Sometimes while we are talking, she will go in my bathroom and continue the conversation with the door wide open and her seated figure in full view, looking out at me with the cloudlessly candid eyes of a child who has not yet learned that some things are meant to be private.
This is a house full of beds and I strongly suspect that big Olga has lain in them all. These big old-fashioned brass or white iron beds are like the keyboard of a concert grand piano on which she is running up and down in a sort of continual arpeggio of lighthearted intrigues, and I can’t much blame her when I look at her husband. It is sentimental to think that all sick people deserve our sympathy. Ernie is sick but I can’t feel sorry for him. He is a thin, sour man whose chronic intestinal trouble was diagnosed eight years ago as a cancer, but whose condition today is neither much worse nor better than when the diagnosis was made, a fact that confirms the landlady’s contempt for all opinions that don’t come through “The Party.”
Ernie does the woman’s work around the apartment-hotel, while Olga soaks up the sun on the high front steps or from the mattress by the tomato patch out back. From those front steps her lively but unastonished look can comprehend the whole fantasy of Santa Monica Beach, as far north as the “Gone with the Wind” mansion of former film star Molly Delancey and as far south as the equally idiotic but somewhat gayer design of the roller coasters at Venice, California.
Somehow it seems to me, because I like to think so, that this is the summer hotel, magically transplanted from the Crimean seacoast, where Chekhov’s melancholy writer, Trigorin, first made the acquaintance of Madame Arcadina, and where they spent their first weekend together, sadly and wisely within the quiet sound of the sea, a pair of middle-aged lovers who turn the lights off before they undress together, who read plays aloud to each other on heaps of cool pillows and sometimes find that the pressure of a hand before falling asleep is all that they really need to be sure they are resting together.
The Palisades is a big white wooden structure with galleries and gables and plenty of space around it. It stands directly over a municipal playground known as “Muscle Beach.” It is here that the acrobats and tumblers work out in the afternoons, great powerful Narcissans who handle their weightless girls and daintier male partners with a sort of tender unconsciousness under the blare and activity of our wartime heavens.
While I am working at home, during my six-week lay-off-withoutpay from the studio (a punishment for intransigence that presages a short term of employment and forces me to push my play anxiously forward), it is a comfort now and then to notice Big Olga dreaming on the front steps or sprawled on that old mattress in back of the building.
I like to imagine how the mattress got out there…
This is how I see it.
On one of those diamond-bright mornings of early summer. Big Olga looms into an upstairs bedroom a soldier and his girl-friend have occupied for the weekend which has just passed. With nonchalant grunts, she looks at the cigarette stains and sniffs at the glasses on the bedside table. With only at token wrinkle or two of something too mild to be defined as disgust, she picks up the used contraceptives tossed under the bed, counts them and murmurs “My God” as she drops them into the toilet and comes back out of the bathroom without having bothered to wash her hands at the sink. The boy and the girl have plainly enjoyed themselves and Olga is not the kind to resent their pleasure and she is philosophical about little damages to beds and tables incurred in a storm of love-making. Some day one of them will fall asleep or pass out in bed with a lighted cigarette and her summer hotel will burn down. She knows this will happen some day but till it happens, oh, well, why worry about it.
She goes back to the bed and jerks off the crumpled sheets to expose the mattress.
My God, she cries out, the condition this mattress is in!
Bad? says Ernie.
Completely ruined, she tells him.
Pigs, says Ernie.
But Olga is not unhappy.
Pigs, pigs, pigs, says Ernie with almost squealing repugnance, but Olga says. Aw, shut up! A bed is meant to make love on, so why blow your stack about it?
This shuts Ernie up, but inwardly he boils and becomes short-winded.
Ernie, says Olga, you take that end of the mattress.
She picks up the other.
Where does it go? asks Ernie.
The little man backs toward the door but Olga thinks differently of it. She gives an emphatic tug toward the gallery entrance. This way, she says roughly, and Ernie, who rarely presumes anymore to ask her a question, tags along with his end of the mattress dragging the
carpet. She kicks the screen door open and with a joyous gasp she steps out into the morning above the ocean and beach. The white clocktower of downtown Santa Monica is looking out of the mist, and everything glistens. She sniffs like a dog at the morning, grins connivingly at it, and shouts. Around this way!
The mattress is lugged to the inland side of the gallery, and Ernie is still not aware of what she is up to.
Now let go, says Olga.
Ernie releases his end and staggers back to the scalloped white frame wall. He is broken and breathless, he sees pinwheels in the sky. But Olga is chuckling a little. While the pinwheels blinded him, Olga has somehow managed to gather both ends of the mattress into her arms and has rolled them together to make a great cylinder. Hmmm, she says to herself. She likes the feel of the mattress, exults in the weight of it on her. She stands there embracing the big inert thing in her arms and with the grip of her thighs. It leans against her, a big exhausted lover, a lover that she has pressed upon his back and straddled and belabored and richly survived. She leans back with the exhausted weight of the mattress resting on her, and she is chuckling and breathing deeply now that she feels her power no longer contested. Fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years are in her of life still, not depleted more than enough to make her calm and easy. Time is no problem to her. Hugging the mattress, she thinks of a wrestler named “Tiger” who comes and goes all summer, remembers a sailor named Ed who has spent some liberties with her, thinks of a Marine Sergeant, brought up in a Kansas orphanage, who calls her Mama, feels all the weight of them resting lightly on her as the weight of one bird with various hurrying wings, staying just long enough to satisfy her and not a moment longer. And so she grips the big mattress and loves the weight of it on her. Ah, she says to herself, ah, hmmm…
She sees royal palm trees and the white clocktower of downtown Santa Monica, and possibly says to herself. Well, I guess 111 have a hot barbecue and a cold beer for lunch at the Wop’s stand on Muscle Beach and I’ll see if Tiger is there, and if he isn’t. I’ll catch the five o’clock bus to L.A. and take in a good movie, and after that I’ll walk over to Olivera Street and have some tamales with chili and two or three bottles of Carta Blanca and come back out to the beach on the nine o’clock bus. That will be after sundown, and three miles east of the beach, they turn the lights out in the bus (because of the wartime blackout), and Olga will have chosen a good seat-companion near the back of the bus, a sailor who’s done two hitches and knows the scoop, so when the lights go out, her knees will divide and his will follow suit and the traveling dusk will hum with the gossamer wings of Eros. Shell nudge him when the bus slows toward the corner of Wilshire and Ocean. They’ll get off there and wander hand-in-hand into the booming shadows of Palisades Park, which Olga knows like a favorite book never tired of. All along that enormously tall cliff, under royal palms and over the Pacific, are little summer houses and trellised arbors with beaches where sudden acquaintances burst into prodigal flower.