Die a Little

  I can barely stand it. I honestly feel my knees buckle. There he is, this cold, rather limited man with—is it?—a distinct look of kindness in his eyes.

  “How did you get those pictures?” I manage, recovering.

  “Lora . . .” He sighs and sinks back into the bed.

  “Tell me where you got those pictures.”

  “Listen . . . listen, we live differently, in different worlds. Truly, Lora, your world, your world is kind of beautiful. Why bring my world into it? Why—”

  “Tell me, Mike. You’d better tell me.” I look down at him.

  “She gave them to me,” he says, firmly, deliberately, but unable to look me in the eye for long. “To show me. She wanted me to see, Lora. She wanted me to see.”

  • • •

  Later that night I lie in bed and think about what he said and how far I was able to push him and the point at which I couldn’t ask any more questions. Wanted you to see what? I wanted to ask, but didn’t. And did you? Did you see what she wanted to show you? Somehow I knew he had and now I had, too.

  As the days pass, there is nothing else I can think about. I’m not sure when my suspicions about Alice slipped from the ambiguous to this, to an instinctive desire to know, to know what had found its way into our family, our life. But it happened, and not a few days later, I am back at Joe Avalon’s neighborhood and then at his house.

  I sit in the car, with Photoplay, Look, anything they had at the drugstore, knowing it could be hours before I see anything, if I see anything at all. I feel like Girl Detective from the serials, my Scotch plaid thermos filled with black coffee, a scarf over my head. Am I close enough? Am I far enough away? What if I do see something? Would I know what to do? Could I follow another car, if I needed to? What if I were spotted, what then?

  It doesn’t take hours, only forty-five minutes. The door to Avalon’s bungalow opens, and I am watching as it happens. I see the pine green door open and see the woman come out with Joe Avalon’s hand delicately on her back. With a quick verbal exchange, he disappears back into the house. The woman walks down the small path to the street, down the sidewalk, and on. Her gait is slow, strange, dreamy.

  Although she is on the other side of the street, she is moving hazily in my direction, and I duck quickly as she walks past. Then, I turn around and get a better look as she continues her slow way down the street. She wears a navy and white suit, and a white hat with a large brim. Her handbag swings neatly, a fine circle of white patent leather hanging from her arm. A purchase from Bullock’s that ran her nearly forty dollars.

  I know because she told me soon after she bought it. I know because it is Edie Beauvais sashaying out of Joe Avalon’s house and down Flower Street.

  At a safe distance, I start the car and turn it around, moving slowly. Inching along, I watch her reach her own car, parked three blocks away.

  I wonder how in the world Edie Beauvais could come to know Joe Avalon. Edie Beauvais, whom everyone knew was still suffering from “the blues” after her summer miscarriage, Edie Beauvais, cop’s wife. I don’t wonder for long: the only possible link between this Pasadena housewife and this Los Angeles shark is Alice.

  As she drives away, I follow her as discreetly as I know how for several miles, until it becomes clear to me that she has no destination. She takes me high into the hills and then down again, and finally straight to the ocean. As I drive, I consider whether Joe Avalon is Alice’s lover or Edie’s. Or how it came to be that Alice introduced the two.

  I keep telling myself that she must notice me. There are too few cars on the road, it has gone on too long. But I can’t stop myself. I follow until she finally pulls into the lot of a stucco establishment with a sign twice as big as the place itself: “Recovery Room Inn.” Apparently so named because a run-down charity hospital is across the street.

  I know I can’t follow her inside. The place is too small. So I wait. This time for two hours.

  It is nearly eight o’clock when she emerges, hat in hand, hair blowing in the breeze, pink smile wide as she chats with a tall man in a gray suit and a dark woman with the kind of high-topped veiled hat popular ten years ago. Well past tipsy, Edie and the man laugh heartily, hands to bellies. The veiled woman lights a cigarette and throws the empty pack into the street, tapping her shoe as if ready to go.

  They wind their way to Edie’s car, and the man gets in the backseat, and the woman sits beside Edie, who keeps laughing, hands on the steering wheel. At last, as the woman smokes long, slow, flat clouds, Edie starts the car.

  It is getting dark, and I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to follow, but I figure I’ll try. It requires all my attention as Edie’s car weaves and meanders and keeps accelerating and then slowing unexpectedly.

  Finally, Edie stops at a bungalow court on Pico Boulevard. The lot is too small for me to enter unnoticed, but by parking on the street out front I can see into the courtyard through its overhanging arch. All three suddenly appear underneath it and then seem to turn into one of the apartments.

  I wait a moment and get out of my car. Walking over to the floored patio, I step under the arch and see a dozen apartments laid out in a rectangle. Along one side there are a series of mailboxes. I look over in the direction the trio walked and guess they entered either Apartment 3 or Apartment 5.

  Then I move over to the mailboxes for a closer look. Apartment 3 has the name Chambers listed and Apartment 5 has the name Porter written in unconfident pencil.

  Suddenly, the door marked 5 begins to open. Frantic for some excuse for my loitering, I remember in a flash that I have Alice’s cigarettes still with me from a few weeks before, when her clutch was too small to hold them. Plucking the pack out, I fumble one to my mouth. Swiveling a little, I make large gestures of trying to look further into my purse.

  The man from the car emerges from the apartment. He wears a tan suit, and his skin is very pale and looks clammy. He stands a moment and wipes his cheeks with a handkerchief.

  Still stalling, I nearly shake the contents of my purse to the ground, pretending to be looking for a lighter or matches. This is a mistake.

  “You need a light?”

  I turn to him. He looks about thirty years old, with hair prematurely steel-edged. I try to fix his face in my mind, but there is little to hold on to: pencil-thin mustache, weak chin, twitching, blinking eyes.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  We move toward each other, he with an extended hand. He holds a gold-colored lighter under my nose and flicks it. I puff anxiously, having smoked perhaps a dozen cigarettes in my life.

  “You live here?” he asks.

  I begin walking away. “I was just visiting a friend.”

  The thought that Edie might, at any minute, step outside, keeps flashing through my head.

  He nods. “Me, too. I just needed some air. These apartments are sweatboxes.”

  “Thanks for the light,” I say, backing away a bit.

  “We’re having a party in that apartment,” he says, waving his handkerchief at the door. “You know?”

  He looks at me levelly. “Maybe you’d like to join us.”

  “No, no.” I back myself nearly to the mailboxes, my elbow hitting one metal box hard.

  “Sorry,” he says evenly, with a shrug. “I thought you were . . . someone else.”

  “Someone else?”

  “Never mind.” He shakes his head. “I got it wrong.”

  He offers a tilted head and a grin, and then I watch as he opens the door, disappearing inside.

  It is at this moment that I realize I am smoking so deeply my throat feels raw, thick with tar. By the time I get to my car, I have finished the cigarette and feel my stomach turn. There is this sense that the closer I come the more things slip away.

  I sit in front of the wheel for maybe fifteen minutes, trying to explain things to myself. Edie. Joe Avalon. Alice. What kind of sticky web connects these three? I drive around the block a half dozen times. Then I park back in the lot and g
et out of the car again, not sure what I am going to do.

  I find myself approaching Apartment 5 again with a sick feeling in my stomach.

  I decide to walk behind the building into the wide alley. Overcome by the mingling smells of ripe garbage and heavy jasmine, I put my hand over my nose. There is a white apartment number painted on each overflowing trash can, and I quickly locate Number 5. There is one small window facing the alley. I walk over to it, conscious of every small tap and scuffle my shoes make.

  I peer in between the shutter slats, seemingly drunk on my own sense of invisibility.

  I can’t see much, but I can see this.

  I can see Edie, her whipped cream hair piled high on top of her head, sitting on the edge of a bathtub wearing a half-slip and stockings. Her hands cover her face, but I know it is her.

  At first I think she has a scarf tied jauntily around her upper arm.

  And then, feeling foolish, I realize.

  This, of course, is what could bring together a vulnerable Pasadena housewife and a Los Angeles shark. If nothing else, this.

  If there’s a way to describe it, it’s like the world, once sealed so tight and exact, has fallen open—no, been cracked open, and inside, inside . . .

  I am ready to tell him, to tell Bill. To tell him at least what I have seen, if not the lengths I’ve gone to see it.

  Even if I don’t know what the clues point to, the clues themselves are troubling enough. Joe Avalon in his home, his bedroom. Edie Beauvais. God, does Charlie know? Shouldn’t Charlie know? I tell myself it is Bill’s job to string clues like this together. I can, as tenderly as possible, give him the clues, and he can see what they add up to. As hard as it will be for him to hear, I have to tell.

  That night, Alice suggests an evening out at a dark-walled Latin dance club.

  At first, I decline her invitation. But, knowing how hard it is to get Bill alone anymore and knowing Alice will be the one dancing while Bill will mostly sit and watch, nursing one watery drink for the entire evening, I decide to go.

  As I sit there with him in the curved booth, however, I am frozen. How do I say these things to him? I try to imagine how he would tell me.

  “Sis,” he says, head turned, hand lightly on my forearm. I can’t look into those eyes. I look down instead at the slightly dented knuckles on his cop hands. When he was on the beat, they’d often be grated raw across the joints from rough arrests, from holding men down while his partner cuffed them, from climbing fire escapes and breaking up bar fights and dragging drunks through cracked doorways.

  His hands are smoother now but still studded with small, healed-over tears, flecks of white from old scars, old stories mapped onto him, some stories he won’t tell even me.

  His hand rests on my arm. “Sis.”

  “Yes.” I manage a sidelong glance at his sharp, focused eyes.

  “How are things?”

  “Fine, Bill.”

  “You like this Standish guy, huh?” The familiar strain to sound casual. Even after all these months, Bill still turns away, teeth clenched, when he sees Mike with his hand on me.

  “He’s fine. That’s all. You know.” This is what we do.

  He shrugs a little, softening. “Well, Alice says he’s okay, so.”

  “She should know,” I say. I have to do it now. Now.

  As if on cue, Alice flits by on the dance floor, bottle green dress throbbing, a man with a pencil-thin mustache leading, but just barely.

  “Doesn’t that bother you?” I say. “Her dancing with other men?”

  “No, I like it,” he blurts out, eyes fixed on her until she slips out of sight. “I mean, she enjoys it,” he quickly adds with a shy smile. “I’m no match. I can’t keep up with her.”

  His eyes tracing her, sparking with energy. No I like it. This is my wife. Look at her. Christ would you look.

  Is there no end to the devotion? What dark corners would it furrow around and where would it end? What are its limits?

  “You know what Charlie said to me,” Bill says. “He said, Billy, you couldn’t have dreamed up a wife like that.”

  “Yes, Bill.” I steal another look, and I see he’s glowing. He’s nearly red-faced with—what is it? Pride.

  “She’s very special, Bill,” I add. A sharp pain, my own nails into the heel of my own hand. What am I waiting for?

  “I remember, on our honeymoon . . .”

  He can’t possibly—

  “Sis, she was so beautiful it hurt to look. On the beach, hand over her eyes, looking out on the water and talking gentle and low, dizzy from the sun, talking about how I’d changed everything for her.”

  “You did.” I nod.

  “I must be going soft from that last drink,” he apologizes with a grin, tapping his fingers lightly on my arm.

  “No, I know.” I’m ready. I am.

  Lost in his own thoughts, he turns his face away from me suddenly. Then, “Lora, I do know she’s not like the other girls. Like Margie, Kathleen . . . I know she’s not like them. But . . .”

  He knows. He knows she’s something foreign. Something not us. He tilts his head thoughtfully. “She’s been knocked around a little. And I’ve seen, from the job, what that can do. I know what that can do to a girl. Even the best girls.”

  He looks at me, his face lit by the candle on the table. His eyes darken a little. I see it.

  Then, decisively, he thrums two fingers on the table. “But it hasn’t done it to her. She fought it off. And, really, isn’t that something?”

  He smiles, waiting for me. For my reassurance.

  “Bill.” I can’t bear it. I put my other hand on his. “I want—”

  Then, just as he is about to lean toward me, to hear what I am saying, he spots Alice again on the dance floor.

  I can see his eyes catch, lock. I can see a change sweep hard over his face.

  She is looking at him. She’s dancing with some man, any man, and looking at my brother. Her eyes like black flowers. She places one white hand across her collarbone, her mouth blood red. It’s so open, so bare, I can’t look.

  How could she know? But she does. She knows and she’s watching, waiting, marking time, seeing what I will do. And then Bill . . .

  He is rapt. He is mesmerized.

  It’s like this: she’s on the dance floor, eyes tunneling into him, and then she’s in front of him, right next to me, crushed satin skirt skimming my own legs as she presses toward him, leans down with that great gash of a mouth, and with one long finger under his upright, always upright chin, she kisses him with her whole charged little body. So close I can feel my brother shudder.

  And then, before he—or I—can take a breath, she has disappeared back onto the swarming dance floor.

  One hand on my stomach, I feel strangely sick.

  This is when I realize there are some things you can’t tell.

  This is when I realize:

  He wouldn’t tell me at all. He’d just make it go away.

  I know what I have to do.

  That night, desperate to forget for a while, I call Mike. I don’t tell him about anything that has happened, especially not about seeing Edie Beauvais. But something in my voice, he hears something in my voice that makes him know he should say: “Tonight I’m taking you out of this burg.”

  When I get in his car, he smiles. “Hey, kid. We’re going to the Magic Lamp.”

  And before I know it we are on Route 66, and we keep going and we pass the Derby and the Magic Lamp and suddenly we are deep in the desert.

  Light breaking up in the clouds as dusk gives over, and we’re driving and we’re driving and it seems we’ll never get anywhere, but with my hands resting in the creamy folds of my dress and with the sound of Mike faintly tapping fingers on the leather steering wheel as the music burns off us both, as the radio sounds not tinny but like a movie score streaming over us, like in a movie, like a movie where they’re driving and the red dusk envelops them in gorgeously fake rear screen projection, the c
ar jumping not like real cars but like movie cars, carrying you away with the lush romanticism of the night, the sharp jawline of the leading man, the soft curls of the ingenue who has all the promise of turning siren or vamp by the night’s end.

  • • •

  It is that evening that he tells me, after rounds and rounds of drinks in a far-off roadhouse, leaning over and whispering into my ear, the thing he couldn’t bring himself to tell me before. I know, even as my own head is swirling, that he will regret telling me this. Even Mike Standish sometimes slips. But he does tell me. And the whole ride home, I feel sick with it.

  He tells me this:

  Time was, a few months back, he couldn’t believe what he’d gotten himself into. Yes, he’d had a few jaunty turns on his mattress with costume girl Alice Steele, he’d admit it. But who’d have guessed a year or so later she’d ask him to take out the schoolteacher sister of her new cop husband?

  Truth was, he’d done it as a favor, but he’d never liked Alice all that much. She spooked him with her heavy eyes and the strange stories he’d heard.

  He remembers seeing her once in a colored nightclub on Central Avenue. He knew why he was there. A fast detour, giving a dark-meat-loving matinee idol a guided tour of the city’s murkier regions. But Alice, she was in the middle of everything, her stark white face looming out from a crowd of colored jazz musicians and one slick-faced white man puffing hard on reefer. She wore a low-cut velvet dress hanging by two long strings off her shoulders, and her mouth was like one gorgeous scar across her face. He remembers thinking she looked as though she might slide out of that dress and slither across the floor, and caught by the image, he found himself inexplicably terrified. Then, feeling embarrassed and foolish, he recovered. He waved over at her, he sent her a drink.

  She stared at him with eyes like bullet holes, stared at him like she’d never seen him before, and he felt his blood pulsing, the vein in his neck singing. She wasn’t just a B-girl, she was carrying the whole ugly world in her eyes.