A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (6 page)

“It must be tough to watch.”

“It is if you think about it. I stopped doing that my
third
week. These days I think of it as working in a hotel: They check in, they check out.”

“I notice you don’t call them by their first names.”

“I didn’t learn that here. My parents taught me. It’s called respect. Here we are.”

We’d stopped before a doorway without a door. The room inside was a little larger than the average living room, with armchairs and sofas upholstered in green and yellow and orange Naugahyde arranged in front of a cabinet TV set with a twenty-three-inch screen. A morning show was playing, with a fat comic in a chef’s hat showing the perky blonde hostess how to boil eggs, but the sound was off. A couple of the residents in the seats were watching the screen, but three or four others were looking at a woman who was even fatter than the comic, sitting on the end of the orange couch jingling the ice cubes in a tall glass of what looked like iced tea and talking with both hands. Her hair, teased, sprayed, and dyed cotton-candy pink, brought back memories of Carroll Baker, but her fat face and the massive arms jiggling out of the holes in her sleeveless yellow dress belonged more to Gertrude Stein. A pair of silver-framed glasses on a chain around her neck lay horizontal on her bosom. The long story she was telling about the time her girlfriend locked the keys in the car when they were crossing the Straits of Mackinac on the ferry amused her more than it did her listeners, but what should have been a foghorn bray of a laugh issuing from that flesh mountain was a tinkly little-girl giggle, hardly a bubble in the stream of her high breathy Marilyn Monroe speech. Coming down the hall overhearing her I’d thought a cartoon was playing.

I’d come into it in the middle, but it didn’t seem to be much of a story, and I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Those who joined in when she laughed missed a beat, reacting more to her glee than to the detail that had prompted it. The entertainment lay in watching her entertain herself.

I took advantage of a brief pause while Fleta Skir-rett sipped iced tea to murmur in Mrs. Milbocker’s ear. “I was told she was beginning to lose it.”

“This is one of her good days. Last Monday she walked all the way from her room at the end of the building to the front door stark naked. She’d have kept right on walking if I hadn’t happened to glance up as she passed the office.”

The fat woman finished her story on a high squealing note. While she was taking a breath and before she could start telling another, Mrs. Milbocker approached and put her hand on her shoulder. “Miss Skirrett, this is Mr. Walker. I told you he was coming to see you today?” There was hope in her tone.

“I remember.” It came out testy; evidence that the stories were true. She looked up at me with unfocused eyes, but would not put on her glasses in that company to see what I looked like. She smiled with wellfitting teeth. “Would you give an old fat woman a hand?” She offered one loaded with junk jewelry, with bright pink polish on the nails.

I took it and braced myself, but she rose with the kind of easy grace you only see in people who have been accustomed to moving around extra tonnage for a long time. She had on a perfume that put me in mind of a gift shop loaded with porcelain gnomes and pillows embroidered with hearts. She gave my hand a squeeze before letting go. Her palm was as moist and squishy as a shower cap.

I thanked Mrs. Milbocker. She smiled in response, cast a last considering glance at Miss Skirrett, and left us, checking vital signs on the way.

“My room’s just down the hall. Now, don’t you go getting any ideas about closing the door with just us two in there.” Fleta Skirrett’s voice twirled up into a hysterical titter. The other residents laughed at her laugh and redirected their attention to the cooking lesson on TV. No one bothered to turn up the sound.

I accompanied the woman in the yellow dress down the hallway to a purple door near the end. She wore her stockings rolled to mid-calf with flesh spilling over the tops like dough. On the way she waved at a woman shuffling along the rail with a hump and a frizzy permanent, and a man in a white belt and shoes and two kinds of plaid looking out a window at a hummingbird buzzing around a feeder on a squirrel-proof stand. Neither of them paid any attention to her.

The purple door led into a small bedroom. A pink-and-white crocheted coverlet dressed up a bed with plain head- and footboards and a tropical fish with red stripes and a big tail shaped like a scimitar circled the inside of an old-fashioned round bowl on the bureau. Color Polaroid shots of what might have been nieces and nephews in drugstore frames covered one wall along with older black-and-white snapshots of people in hats and overcoats standing next to automobiles with bulging fenders and bug-eye headlamps. A painting, done boldly in oils, occupied a gilded plaster frame on the wall opposite. The frame had been expensive when it was new, but now there were white chips on the corners and old dirt and grime caked black in the ridges and between the petals of the florets.

I wasn’t interested in the frame. An original painting is rare in such surroundings and I stepped up for a better look. The scene struck a bass chord I felt in my testicles. I saw again the broken-nosed profile of the rough customer in the trenchcoat in the foreground, the overdeveloped blonde in the red slip waving a broken bottle in the background center—the sweet spot—the bedroom strewn with books and clothing, and dark elongated figures running hunched over amid the flames burning outside the window; only this time everything was eight times larger and I could see the heavy combed brushstrokes in the thick paint. It was the original illustration from which the cover of
Paradise Valley
had been reproduced.

Like many seriously overweight people, Fleta Skirrett was light on her feet, tiny ones with painted nails in woven-leather sandals; I didn’t know she was standing right behind me until I smelled her gift-shop perfume. I felt her breathy whisper on the back of my neck.

“That’s me, all right,” she said. “I was a blonde then. We all were; Monroe was just getting big and we thought a bottle of peroxide was all that stood between us and Hollywood. God, I’d kill for a butt about now. Got any?”

6

Y
ou were a model?”

In the time it took me to reshape what she’d told me into a question, she’d flounced over to a platform rocker upholstered in flowered chintz and lowered herself into it with the same grace she had used getting up. She put on her glasses, smiled at what she saw, and said, “You might try not to look so surprised. Just because a girl turns sixty and puts on a few pounds doesn’t mean her feelings can’t be hurt. How about that cigarette?”

She was banging hard on seventy, but her fat filled in the wrinkles. I shook a Winston out of the pack and went over and held it out. “I’m out the window at the first siren.”

“I’m not a charity case. I’m paying rent on this dump and if I feel like smoking it up I’ll build a campfire on the rug.” She leaned forward to let me light it, then sat back and tilted her head to one side to blow smoke out the corner of her mouth. “You might close the door and open the window, though, just to avoid upsetting a nurse. They’re delicate creatures, poor dears.”

I saw it then, when she mentioned the nurses: the feral look of the woman wielding the broken bottle. You never outgrow enemies in this life. Near the end they all wear white and drape stethoscopes around their necks.

The window was one of those horizontal jobs that tilt out on pivots. I tilted it and walked over and shut the door and leaned back against the bureau and lit a cigarette for myself. I didn’t want one especially, but the generation she belonged to never let a lady smoke alone. We took turns tipping our ashes into a squat turquoise-painted Mexican pot that was supposed to contain a plant on a round some-assembly-required pedestal table beside the rocker. That made me an ash brother and someone to confide in. A fine gray powder coated the top of the black potting soil inside. No plant had grown there in a while, only butts.

“Edencrest seems like a nice place,” I said. “Modeling must have paid well even back then.”

She spat smoke. “It’s a rathole with a fresh coat of paint. My Social Security just covers the rent. I made more in tips waiting tables. But waiting tables won’t get you into the movies.”

“Did you get into the movies?”

“Plenty of times. All it cost me was the price of a ticket.”

“How’d you wind up posing for paperback covers?”

“ ‘Wind up’ is right. I came to the agency hoping to do magazine covers. That’s how Lauren Bacall and Audrey Hepburn started. I shot lingerie spreads for catalogues for almost a year. Eleven months into my career I was still parading around in my undies with my head cut off in every shot. When they told me the art director at Tiger Books had requested me for a cover I thought I was on my way. The address they gave me belonged to the Alamo Motel. You know the Alamo?”

“I know the Alamo.” I saw Eugene Booth’s typewritten note to Louise Starr on Alamo stationery. I took in a lungful of smoke to keep my body from vibrating.

“It ought to go on the National Register of historical fleatraps. The architect, if it ever had one, designed bus stations and none of the owners ever changed anything but the lightbulbs. ‘Fleta,’ I said, ‘you’re in the arts. Van Gogh worked out of an attic.’ So I go in and meet the artist and he hands me a slip two sizes too small to squeeze myself into. I’m coming up on my second year in the business and I’m still modeling underwear. I think that’s when I realized Lana Turner had nothing to fear from me.”

“That was the
Paradise Valley
cover?”

“Mm-mm.” She shook her head, sucking on the filter tip.
“Truck Stop.
You never heard of it. It was the first Tiger title not to go into a second printing. The guy that wrote it made a bigger noise when he threw himself out of a window at the Book-Cadillac. It didn’t help sales, though. I didn’t work for six months after that. The goddamn editor that bought the book blamed it on me. He said I scared away customers. I looked too intimidating. I wasn’t ladylike enough holding a forty-five automatic as big as a Frigidaire.”

“How’d you get back in?”

“Gene requested me. He liked the
Truck Stop
cover and he wanted one just like it for
Paradise Valley.”

“That’s Eugene Booth?” We were coming to it now.

The feral look returned. She took the cigarette out of her mouth, picked a shred of tobacco off her lower lip, and flicked it into the clay pot. “What’s your interest in Gene? Is he in trouble?”

“Just the opposite. I’m working for someone who wants to give him money.”

She managed to make a giggle sound like an arid chuckle. “Just because the catalogue hacks cut my head off doesn’t mean I never use it. I read some of the books I posed for; I still had hopes and I didn’t want to get myself tied up with pornography or commie propaganda. It was the fifties, remember. Decency still had a good reputation. Anyway, I read some of the books and in every one of them the detective claimed he wanted to give the guy he was looking for money. That was the magic word. It was a lie every time.”

“It usually is when I tell it. Not this time. A New York publisher wants to reprint
Paradise Valley.
The money’s good, but Booth gave it back without explaining why and pulled out of the trailer park. I’m supposed to find out where he went. If he still doesn’t want the money, that’s okay, but this is New York we’re talking about. They can’t understand why anyone would turn down hard cold cash. I’m supposed to ask.”

“Good luck, brother. Gene wouldn’t tell you his blood type if he was bleeding all over his shoes.”

“You must have done all the talking all those times he came over to visit you in your trailer.”

“Mobile home. Nobody wants to spend their golden years in a trailer.” She took one last drag that ate the cigarette up to its filter tip. “Got any more of those? One just wakes up my lungs. The second’s for nourishment and I need a third to put them back to sleep.”

“Enough of them could put them to sleep for good.” I gave her the pack. There were only a couple left.

“I heard that.” She lit one off the butt of the first and poked the butt out of sight in the potting soil like a plant stick. “That’s our government for you: Subsidize tobacco for two hundred years, then tell us it’s bad for us and we have to quit, but they don’t say how. I gave up coffee when they said it raised my blood pressure and drinking when they said it hurt my liver. Now they say coffee cures migraines and liquor unclogs the blood. If I smoke long enough they’ll tell me Camels cure rheumatism. Any chance you could steer some of that New York money my way? I’m thinking of writing my memoirs. You know I slept with Dali.”

“Really?”

“Well, he said he was Dali. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing painting Bulldog Drummond. Seriously, I could use some extra for smokes. My Social Security checks go direct to the cashier.”

“I got you from the new manager at the park for twenty. What will a carton get me?”

“Twenty’s as much as I got for a week of holding still in my unmentionables. Five of that went to the chiropractor. Bone-crackers aren’t so cheap anymore.”

I started to put a new fifty on the bureau. She told me to put it in the top drawer, what was she, a prostitute? I parked it on top of a stack of neatly folded blouses. She sure liked yellow.

“Gene got me into White Pine,” Fleta Skirrett said. “I had a real nice room at my niece’s, my own bath, but I couldn’t stand her husband. He was a TV pitchman, little bald twerp who kept waiting for L.A. to call. Never did anything around the house, Nancy even had to cut the grass when she came home from work. I stuck it out; no place else to go. Then I read in the paper where Gene was suing somebody and I remembered we used to get along okay when I was posing. The paper said he was managing at White Pine. I called him there. He was glad to hear from me, thought I might be able to help him out with his suit. I don’t know how. All I had to do with the book was what’s on that wall. I didn’t even finish reading it; too depressing. I was nine when the riot broke out and I remember my mother being too scared to let my brother and me outside to play. We lived clear up in St. Clair Shores, miles from the trouble.”