Die a Little

  “See how nice it can be staying home on a Saturday night.” He smiles peacefully, tucking her into his arms.

  “Until you get the call.” She sighs.

  “Not tonight. Promise.”

  “Your sister will have fun enough for us all.” She turns from inside the serge curl of my brother’s arm and looks to me.

  “Oh? Where are you going?” He straightens up suddenly and peeks out over Alice’s blue silk to see me.

  I pause.

  “Just to dinner, I think. And then dancing maybe.” I stare at my lipstick, then dab a bit more on for good measure.

  “Mike Standish shows a lady a good time.” Alice slides out from Bill’s arms and slinks over to me.

  “We can go out, too, Alice. I just thought—”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Alice says, curling up in front of me as I sit in the wing chair.

  “Maybe we can join them. I—”

  “No, no, no, darling.” She reaches out for my lipstick to add still more. Her face looms over me, and her eyes hang big as saucers. “Besides, they don’t want old marrieds along, believe me.”

  “I’m sure we’d be glad for the company,” I say, blotting with the handkerchief she holds out to me. “The more the merrier.”

  “I’d like to meet this Standish guy,” my brother says suddenly. “Have him in for a drink.”

  Alice shakes her head and slides back into his lap. “Easy, Judge Hardy. You’re not her father, after all. You’ll meet him soon enough. Besides, doesn’t Lora want some privacy? Some life separate from family.”

  She looks at me as she says it, and there is a wistfulness there, a kind wistfulness that, despite everything, I find myself warming to, and secretly thanking her for.

  • • •

  Two hours later, this:

  “I could tell you stories, honey.” Mike Standish smiles. “Stories to make Fatty Arbuckle blush. The four-o’clock-in-the-morning calls I’ve gotten, the places I’ve had to peel them off of the floor, the circus freaks I’ve had to pay off to keep these little indiscretions, these quaint peccadilloes out of the papers.”

  “You sound proud of yourself.”

  “As they say, life is too short to bother with Puritan hypocrisies. Besides, it’s not me racking up time in the booth with Father McConnell. I just clean up,” he says, still smiling, rubbing his hands together as if to wash them.

  “My grandmother would have called those devil’s dues,” I say noncommittally, removing the maraschino from the bottom of my drink.

  “Your grandmother didn’t know what she was missing.” He winks, cuff links flashing in the soft light, summoning the waiter over for another round.

  • • •

  A few days later, as I arrive to help Alice make cookies for the senior banquet, I see that Lois Slattery is back again. I take a chair as Alice fusses over the moon and star shapes. The cookie cutter, in her frustration, keeps slipping from her hand.

  “Lois, if you get one cigarette ash near these cookies, I’m going to tear your hair out.”

  “Better men than you have tried,” Lois slurs, unaccountably nodding to me before leaning back in her chair.

  “I just don’t have the patience today.” Alice sighs, wiping her face with the back of her hand.

  “Can’t the blue bird scouts or whoever manage with store-bought?”

  “No, no.” Alice’s crimson-tipped fingers steady themselves and she manages to get the first perfectly cut star safely onto the sheet.

  Lois turns and looks at me. “She gave up Tinseltown for this.”

  “What a sacrifice,” Alice says with a faint smile. “I saw enough of the business from my mother to know where it gets you. I didn’t even want to end up working for the studios, but who would turn down union wages?”

  I nod, as she seems to want affirmation.

  “Still,” she adds, “it was a rotten job, running measuring tape over starlets all day.”

  “That was how we met,” Lois says, eyeing me.

  Alice, intently at work, raises her hand to Lois to ensure silence as she lifts a pair of moonbeam cookies onto the sheet.

  Lois bends forward again with a deep red smile. “You know what that looks like?”

  Alice looks at Lois expressionlessly but with a firm lock of the eyes.

  Lois breaks the gaze and turns to me. “Do you recognize it, Loreli?”

  “I guess that’d be a moonbeam, no?”

  “Does it remind you of anything?”

  “No,” I say, feeling like the girl at school who was never let in on the game.

  “Relating to a certain brother darling?” Lois waves her cigarette over the cookie and then toward the kitchen door. Alice stares motionless.

  “Pardon?”

  “You know. I can’t say I’ve seen it myself, but . . . the scar, doll.”

  “Oh, the scar from his accident,” I say, trying not to picture the horrible night of the assault. The scar came from the sharp edge of the radiator when he fell after the baseball bat blows from the young suspect. It is right above his hip.

  “I haven’t seen it since the hospital,” I add. “I suppose I’ve never seen it as a scar. Only as a wound.” I feel my throat go a little dry. It seems strange to have us all sitting here, dwelling on this.

  “Lois,” Alice says with an edge, hands still, hovering over the cookies. Lois returns the tough gaze, bites her lip a bit, shrugs with effort, and looks down at her pointy, scuffed shoes.

  • • •

  Later that night, at the fabulous Alice-inspired cocktail party at the Beauvais house, Alice and I drink gimlets together, and the heat wilting us, the crowd pounding in, we draw closer and I’ve forgotten everything but how much, everything else aside, she only wants it all to be good, to be good and fine.

  “Lois, I told Lora to—I mean”—Alice giggles, correcting herself tipsily—“Lora, I told Lois to stop coming by.”

  “Oh,” I say, helping her steady her tilting drink.

  “Bill doesn’t really like her around. He thinks she’s bad news. Which, of course, she is.”

  “She is?”

  “Nothing serious, of course,” Alice assures. “I’m just trying to wean her off me, but it’s hard because we’ve known each other so long.”

  Then Alice tugs me closer to her, nearly pressing her mouth to my ear as we nestle on the Beauvaises’ sofa. It is then that she tells me how they met, years before, at the studio.

  Alice was fitting Lois, a young extra, into an Indian Girl costume, feathered headband, short tunic straight from a gladiator picture, pure Hollywood. When she was adjusting the hem, she saw the abrasions on the insides of Lois’s thighs, shallow like slightly large pockmarks.

  “So glamorous,” Lois had said, not even looking down at Alice, kneeling beside her, needles in her mouth. “I didn’t know the skirt would be so short.”

  “It won’t pick up on camera,” Alice had said.

  “I thought that once, and the next thing I knew, the camera was moving under my spread legs.”

  Alice hadn’t said anything but smiled just enough to keep the needle in her mouth as she pinned the hem.

  “You can never tell when a camera’s going to be between your spread legs,” Lois had continued, seeing Alice’s smile.

  “You sure can’t,” Alice said, dropping the pin too fast. “Oops! Did you get poked?”

  At that, Lois had let out a long, quiet, drawllike laugh, and Alice had laughed too.

  • • •

  “You have a lot of history,” I say.

  Alice sighs and raises her eyebrows. “That we do.” Then, suddenly, “I’m sorry about earlier, though. About what Lois said about the scar.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t want you to think I tell her all kinds of private things about Bill.”

  “I don’t,” I say, even as, for the first time, I wonder if she does exactly this.

  “Truth is, Lora . . .

  T
ruth is, Lora . . .

  Don’t think I’m trashy . . .

  Truth is, I think his scars are beautiful, Alice whispers, face red.

  I think they’re beautiful, she repeats. Don’t you?

  Then comes the first step from which there is no turning back.

  As the final bell rings for the day, Alice grabs my arm in the corridor.

  “I know we have a staff meeting, but can we miss just this one?”

  “You go on. I’ll make excuses and get a ride home with Janet,” I say, wondering what arch looks will fly at Alice missing yet another faculty meeting.

  “Actually, Lora, I was wondering if you could come with me.”

  “Come with you?”

  “I have to go see Lois. She’s sick and I want to check in on her.”

  “That’s fine, but why do you need me?”

  “Please, Lora? I’m worried. It would be such a relief to have you there.”

  I look over at her, fingers clasped tightly over the clipboard in her hand. There is such forceful concern that I can’t help but agree. I feel glad that Alice would go to such lengths for her friend, that the intensity with which she approaches being my brother’s wife is not the only force surging through her.

  It is a long drive that involves threading through a series of shaggy and ominous neighborhoods. Alice talks the entire time, almost as though trying to distract me from the gray-boxed bars and barred-window pawnshops that stud the roadways as we finally land on Rosecourt Boulevard. She sings along to the radio when she isn’t talking, mostly about the shopping she needs to do and how late she is going to be for dinner guests but that fortunately she has prepared everything in advance, from the cold potato soup to the slow-cooking roast.

  “What a horrible name for a place to live,” I murmur as I notice a thickly painted apartment complex to our right. Its large, red-lettered sign darts out from behind a heavy blur of swaying pepper trees, “Locust Arms Apartments.”

  Alice laughs loudly and suddenly, like a bark. Covering her mouth, she says, “That’s where Lois lives.”

  I feel my face redden but say nothing as Alice pulls the car into the small lot. We step out and begin walking toward the courtyard.

  Watching Alice three steps ahead of me, gliding serenely past each blistered door while I find myself sneaking only furtive glances, I wonder about the places she’s lived. Places even worse than the Bunker Hill rooming house.

  The place is run-down, but it isn’t that. It’s something else. Something I can’t quite name. The paper-thin doors, heavily curtained windows, the faint sound of someone chipping ice, relentlessly, the winding drone of a radio playing music without rises or falls, just a sporadic beat, the vague murmur of a neglected cat. Behind all these doors there is something finishing. Dead ends.

  Alice knocks pertly on the door marked 7.

  “Lucky seven,” she says to me unreadably.

  There is the sound of feet running anxiously, and the door flings open so quickly that Alice and I both jump back with a start.

  Lois’s white face pokes out of the dark interior with an energy I’ve never seen in her.

  “Get in, get in.” She half-stumbles backward, waving at us furiously.

  It is hardly larger than a hotel room: a small seating area with a chair and settee, both covered in thick, lime-colored bark cloth, a tiny kitchenette with a counter and two stools, a sagging bed. My eyes keep shifting from one detail to the next: the chipped, brown-ringed porcelain sink, the upturned liquor bottles in the corner, the two chalky glasses that seem, as far as I can tell, to be stuck to the shelf paper adhered to the counter.

  Alice, as if to shake me out of it, grabs my arms and sits me down beside her on the unforgiving couch.

  “How are you feeling?” she asks as Lois, wearing an expensive-looking appliquéd kimono, paces before us anxiously.

  “How do I look?” She turns to us, sweat streaked on her face and neck, raccoon eyes. I can hear the ice chipping again. And a long, low drip tapping from Lois’s bathroom.

  She turns to Alice. “Why did you bring her here?”

  I look at Alice embarrassedly.

  “You called and said you were running a hundred-and-four-degree fever. I thought she could help.” Alice seems eerily calm, even opening her purse and tapping out a cigarette.

  Lois’s eyes narrow. “I know why you brought her.”

  Alice lights her cigarette and shakes the match out, tossing it on the coffee table.

  Standing on the balls of her bright white feet, Lois waits for a response.

  Alice merely smiles and exhales a long curl of smoke.

  The silence becomes unbearable, and I venture, “Alice was worried about you.”

  Lois looks at me for a second, then fixes her gaze back on Alice, cool, implacable Alice.

  “That’s not why she brought you, Sis,” Lois says, as if turning something over in her mind. “She’s just calling a bluff.” She rubs the side of her face with the back of her hand, then adds, “You think you can leave us alone for a minute?”

  Although she doesn’t look away from Alice as she speaks, she seems still to be talking to me.

  Alice’s and Lois’s eyes are locked, Lois’s are working, Alice’s possessed of an unreachable calm.

  “Okay,” I say, dreading the thought of waiting in that courtyard. I rise and walk to the flimsy front door, shutting it behind me.

  I take a few cautious steps to the old concrete fountain in the courtyard’s center, bone dry. I have the vague sense that I’ll never approach an understanding of what I’ve just witnessed. Something between women who’ve known each other for centuries.

  Waiting, I watch a tiny, birdlike woman with one shoe in her hand and none on her feet make her quiet way from the parking lot, through the courtyard and to Number 4. Walking with purpose, her eyes focused on the ground, with the funny gait of the barefooted. She pushes on the door with the hand that holds the shoe, and it pops open like the top of a hatbox.

  I rise again and walk in slow circles back toward Number 7.

  I lean against the outer wall of the apartment, not intending to—but quickly realizing I can—hear Alice and Lois.

  It is only patches, fragments.

  “. . . not afraid to bring her . . .”

  “. . . bring him next time . . .”

  “. . . is the end of everything . . .”

  “. . . watching over me to keep me doing what you . . .”

  “. . . everything she says. You know what he’d do . . .”

  “. . . Don’t you see? . . . the end of ev-erything . . .”

  “. . . that what you want?”

  The words, their whispery, insinuating tones, their voices blending together—I can’t tell them apart, they seem the same, one long, slithery tail whipping back and forth. My head shakes with the sounds, the hard urgency, and my growing anxiety at being somehow involved in this, even if by accident, by gesture.

  The voice—as it seems only one now—becomes abruptly lower, inaudible, sliding from reach. The more I strain, the more I lose to the ambient sounds of the courtyard, the radio, a creaking chair, the cat, the vague clatter of someone knocking shoes together, a bottle rolling.

  Suddenly, the door bursts open and Alice is right in front of me.

  “All right, she’s fine. Let’s go.” Alice grasps my arm lightly and begins marching us both across the courtyard.

  Surprised and confused, I turn around to see Lois leaning against the doorframe.

  “Bye, Sis,” she murmurs, looking calmer and quite still, voice returning to its usual vague drawl.

  Alice moves me forward fast, and I keep looking back at Lois until Alice turns us around the corner and Lois disappears behind the faded yellow hacienda wall.

  In the car on the long ride home, Alice assures me everything is fine.

  “She needs my attention sometimes and will do a lot to get it. It’s hard for her to have me married and with my own commitments and not al
ways able to be there. Once I saw she wasn’t sick—not really sick—I knew she only wanted to see me concerned about her. It’s hard for her since I married. But, truth told”—Alice puffs away on a new cigarette—“she’s just going to have to get used to it.

  “Right?” She looks at me, waiting for a response.

  “Right.” I nod, without knowing to what I am agreeing. The more she speaks, the more I feel convinced that there is an entirely separate narrative at work here, one to which I might never have access. Nor should I want to.

  • • •

  At the polished bar at the Roosevelt Hotel. Corner booth. Gimlets.

  Mike Standish leans back and puts forth a long, rich smile.

  “Everyone knew Alice. Everyone in Publicity especially. Most of the women in Costume were old ladies, pinch-faced old maids or pinch-faced young virgins. But Alice . . . Hell, maybe they all seemed more pinch-faced because Alice was so . . . unpinched.”

  He pulls a cigarette from his gleaming case, fat onyx in its center. As he taps it leisurely, his smile grows wider. “She would be there at all hours, walking toward you, slow and twisty, a ball gown hanging off one arm, sometimes a cigarette tucked in those red lips. Jesus.”

  He lights his cigarette and blows a sleek stream upward.

  “Of course, she wasn’t really my type,” he concedes with a half shrug. “Too much going on all the time. Made you really nervous. Once you started talking to her, she made you feel like the threads in your suit were slowly unraveling.

  “Still, she was awfully fun. We’d take her out, the fellows and I. She’d bring along a few friends. We’d go out drinking, to the Hills or on the water, Laguna Beach. To Ensenada once. Once even to Tijuana. No, twice. That’s right. Twice.”

  “Did you meet Lois Slattery?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A friend of Alice’s.”

  “What’s she look like?”

  “Dark hair, short.”

  “That doesn’t really narrow it down. Alice seemed to know a lot of girls.”

  “Very young-looking. And with slanty eyes, kind of crooked.”

  Mike grins suddenly, his hand curling around his face in sudden recollection.

  “Oh, yeah. One eye higher than the other. That B-girl.” He squints one eye and looks up. “Lois? Are you sure? I thought her name was Lisa—or Linda. She came out with us one night. Slumming in . . . Jesus, some bar in Rosecourt. Oh, yes. Lois, huh?”