Ask The Dust (11 page)

Then I heard a knock on my door. I didn't get a chance to say come in, because the door opened then and I turned around and there was a woman standing in the doorway, looking at me with a peculiar smile. She was not a large woman and she was not beautiful, but she seemed attractive and mature, and she had nervous black eyes. They were brilliant, the sort of eyes a woman gets from too much bourbon, very bright and glassy and extremely insolent. She stood in the door without moving or speaking. She was dressed intelligently: black coat with a furpiece, black shoes, black skirt, a white blouse and a small purse.

'Hello,' I said.

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'What are you doing?' she said. 'Just sitting here.'

I was scared. The sight and nearness of that woman rather paralysed me; maybe it was the shock of seeing her so suddenly, maybe it was my own misery at that moment, but the nearness of her and that crazy, glassy glitter of her eyes made me want to jump up and beat her, and I had to steady myself. The feeling lasted for only a moment, and then it was gone. She started across the room with those dark eyes insolently watching me, and I turned my face towards the window, not worried by her insolence but about that feeling which had gone through me like a bullet. Now there was the scent of perfume in the room, the perfume that floats after women in luxurious hotel lobbies, and the whole thing made me nervous and uncertain.

When she got close to me I didn't get up but sat still, took a long breath, and finally looked at her again. Her nose was pudgy at the end but it was not ugly and she had rather heavy lips without rouge, so that they were pinkish; but what got me were her eyes: their brilliance, their animalism and their recklessness.

She walked over to my desk and pulled a page out of the typewriter. I didn't know what was happening. I still said nothing, but I could smell liquor on her breath, and then the very peculiar but distinctive odour of decay, sweetish and cloying, the odour of oldness, the odour of this woman in the process of growing old.

She merely glanced at the script; it annoyed her and she flipped it over her shoulder and it zigzagged to the floor.

'It's no good,' she said. 'You can't write. You can't write at all.'

'Thanks very much,' I said.

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I started to ask her what she wanted, but she did not seem the kind who accepts questions. I jumped off the bed and offered her the only chair in the room. She didn't want it. She looked at the chair and then at me, thoughtfully, smiling her disinterestedness in merely sitting down. Then she went around the room reading some stuff I had pasted on the walls. They were some excerpts I had typed from Mencken and from Emerson and Whitman. She sneered at them all. Poof, poof, poof! Making gestures with her fingers, curling her lips. She sat on the bed, pulled off her coat jacket to the elbows, and put her hands on her hips and looked at me with insufferable contempt.

Slowly and dramatically she began to recite:

What should I be but a prophet and a liar,

Whose mother was a leprechaun, whose father was a friar?

Teethed on a crucifix and cradled under water,

What should I be but the fiend's god-daughter?

It was Millay, I recognized it at once, and she went on and on; she knew more Millay than Millay herself, and when she finally finished she lifted her face and looked at me and said, 'That's
literature!
You don't know anything about literature. You're a fool!' I had fallen into the spirit of the lines and when she broke off so suddenly to denounce me I was at sea again.

I tried to answer but she interrupted and went off in a Barrymore manner, speaking deeply and tragically; murmuring of the pity of it all, the stupidity of it all, the absurdity of a hopelessly bad writer like myself buried in a cheap hotel in Los Angeles, California, of all places, writing banal things the world would never read and never get a chance to forget.

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1

She lay back, laced her fingers under her head, and spoke dreamily to the ceiling: 'You will love me tonight, you fool of a writer; yes, tonight you will love me.'

I said, 'Say, what
is
this, anyway?'

She smiled.

'Does it matter? You are nobody, and I might have been somebody, and the road to each of us is love.'

The scent of her was pretty strong now, impregnating the whole room so that the room seemed to be hers and not mine, and I was a stranger in it, and I thought we had better go outside so she could get some of the night air. I asked her if she would like to walk around the block.

She sat up quickly. 'Look! I have money, money! We will go somewhere and drink!'

'Sure thing!' I said. 'A good idea.'

I pulled on my sweater. When I turned around she was standing beside me, and she put the tips of her fingers on my mouth. That mysterious saccharine odour was so strong on her fingers that I walked towards the door and held it open and waited for her to pass through.

We walked upstairs and through the lobby. When we reached the front desk I was glad the landlady was gone to bed; there was no reason for it, but I didn't want Mrs Hargraves to see me with this woman. I told her to tiptoe across the lobby, and she did it; she enjoyed it terribly, like an adventure in little things; it thrilled her and she tightened her fingers around my arm.

It was foggy on Bunker Hill, but not downtown. The streets were deserted, and the sound of her heels on the sidewalk echoed among the old buildings. She tugged my arm and I bent down to hear what she wanted to whisper.

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'You're going to be so marvellous!' she said. 'So wonderful!'

I said, 'Let's forget it now. Let's just walk."

She wanted a drink. She insisted upon it. She opened her purse and waved a ten dollar bill. 'Look. Money! I have lots of money!'

We walked down to Solomon's Bar on the corner, where I played the pin games. Nobody was there but Solomon, who stood with his chin in his hands, worried about business. We walked to a booth facing the front window, and I waited for her to sit down, but she insisted I get in first. Solomon walked over for our order.

'Whiskey!' she said. 'Lots of whiskey.'

Solomon frowned.

'A short beer for me,' I said.

Solomon was watching her sternly, searchingly, his bald spot crinkling from a frown. I could sense the consanguinity, and I knew then that she was Jewish too. Solomon went back for the drinks and she sat there with her eyes blazing, her hands folded on the table, her fingers twining and untwining. I sat trying to think of some way of dodging her.

'A drink'll fix you up fine,' I said.

Before I knew it she was at my throat, but not roughly, her long fingernails and short fingers against my flesh as she talked about my mouth, my wonderful mouth; oh God, what a mouth I had.

'Kiss me!' she said.

'Sure,' I said. 'Let's have a drink first.'

She clenched her teeth.

'Then you too know about me!' she said. 'You're like the rest of them. You know about my wounds, and that's why you won't kiss me. Because I disgust you!'

I thought, she
is
crazy; I've got to get out of here. She kissed me, her mouth tasting of liverwurst on rye. She sat back, breathing with relief. I took out my handkerchief and wiped the sweat from my forehead. Solomon returned with the drinks. I reached for some money, but she paid quickly. Solomon went back for the change, but I called him back and handed him a bill. She fussed and protested, pounding her heels and fists. Solomon lifted his hands in a gesture of hopelessness and took her money. The moment his back was turned I said,

'Lady, this is your party. I've got to go.' She pulled me down and her arms went around me and we fought until I thought it was absurd. I sat back and tried to think of

another escape.

Solomon brought back the change. I took a nickel from it and told her I'd like to play the pin game. Without a word she let me pass and I got up and walked over to the machine. She watched me like a prize dog, and Solomon watched her like a criminal. Then I won on the machine, and I called Solomon to come over and check the score.

I whispered, 'Who is that woman, Solomon?' He didn't know. She had been there earlier in the evening, drinking a great deal. I told him I wanted to go out the back way. 'It's the door on the right,' he said.

She finished her whiskey and hammered the table with the empty glass. I walked over, took a sip of beer, and told her to excuse me a minute. I jerked my thumb towards the men's room. She patted my arm. Solomon was watching me as I took the door opposite the men's room. It led to the storeroom, and the door to the alley was a few feet beyond. As soon as the fog smothered my face I felt better. I wanted to be as far away as possible. I wasn't hungry but I walked a mile to a hotdog stand on Eighth Street and had a cup of coffee to kill time.

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I knew she would go back to my room after she missed me. Something told me she was insane, it could have been that she had too much liquor, but it didn't matter, I didn't want to see her again.

I got back to my room at two in the morning. Her personality and that mysterious smell of old age still possessed it, and it was not my room at all. For the first time its wonderful solitude was spoiled. Every secret of that room seemed laid open. I threw open the two windows and watched the fog float through in sad tumbling lumps. When it got too cold I closed the windows and, though the room was wet from the fog and my papers and books were filmed with dampness, the perfume was still there unmistakably. I had Camilla's tam-o-shanter under my pillow. It too seemed drenched with the odour, and when I pressed it to my mouth it was like my mouth in that woman's black hair. I sat in front of the typewriter, idly tapping the keys.

As soon as I got started I heard steps in the hall and I knew she was coming back. I turned off the lights quickly and sat in the darkness, but I was too late, for she must have seen the light under the door. She knocked and I did not answer. She knocked again, but I sat still and puffed on a cigarette. Then she began to beat the door with her fists and she called out that she would start kicking it, and that she would kick it all night long, unless I opened it. Then she started kicking it, and it made a terrible noise through that rickety hotel, and I rushed over and opened the door.

'Darling!' she said, and she held out her arms.

'My God,' I said. 'Don't you think this has gone far enough? Can't you see I'm fed up?'

'Why did you leave me?' she asked. 'Why did you do that?'

'I had another engagement.'

'Darling,' she said. 'Why do you lie to me like that?'

'Oh nuts.'

She walked across the room and pulled the page from my typewriter again. It was full of all manner of nonsense, a few odd phrases, my name written many times, bits of poetry. But this time her face broke into a smile.

'How wonderful!' she said. 'You're a genius! My darling is so talented.'

'I'm awfully busy,' I said. 'Will you please get out?'

It was as though she hadn't heard me. She sat on the bed, unbuttoned her jacket, and dangled her feet. 'I love you,' she said. 'You're my darling, and you're going to love me.'

I said, 'Some other time. Not tonight. I'm tired.'

That saccharine odour came through.

'I'm not kidding,' I said. 'I think you'd better go. I don't want to throw you out.'

'I'm so lonely,' she said.

She meant that. Something was wrong with her, twisted, gushing from her with those words, and I felt ashamed for being so harsh.

'Alright,' I said. 'We'll just sit here and talk for a while.'

I pulled up the chair and straddled it, with my chin on the back, looking at her as she snuggled on the bed. She wasn't as drunk as I thought. Something was wrong with her and it was not alcohol and I wanted to find out what it was.

Her talk was madness. She told me her name, and it was Vera. She was a housekeeper for a rich Jewish family in Long Beach. But she was tired of being a housekeeper. She had come from Pennsylvania, fled across the country because

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her husband had been unfaithful to her. That day she had come down to Los Angeles from Long Beach. She had seen me in the restaurant on the corner of Olive Street and Second. She had followed me back to the hotel because my eyes 'had pierced her soul'. But I couldn't remember seeing her there. I was sure I had never seen her before. Having found out where I lived, she had gone to Solomon's and got drunk. All day she had been drinking, but it was only that she might become reckless and go to my room.

'I know how I revolt you,' she said. 'And that you know about my wounds and the horror my clothes conceal. But you must try to forget my ugly body, because I'm really good at heart, I'm so good, and I deserve more than your disgust.'

I was speechless.

'Forgive my body!' she said. She put her arms out to me, the tears flowing down her cheeks. 'Think of my soul!' she said. 'My soul is so beautiful, it can bring you so much! It is not ugly like my flesh!'

She was crying hysterically, lying on her face, her hands groping through her dark hair, and I was helpless, I didn't know what she was talking about; ah, dear lady, don't cry like that, you mustn't cry like that, and I took her hot hand and tried to tell her she was talking in circles; it was all so silly, her talk, it was self-persecution, it was a lot of silly things, and I talked like that, gesturing with my hands, pleading with my voice.

'Because you're such a fine woman, and your body is so beautiful, and all this talk is an obsession, a childish phobia, a hangover from the mumps. So you mustn't worry and you mustn't cry, because you'll get over it. I know you will.'

But I was clumsy, and making her suffer even more, because she was down in an inferno of her own creation, so

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far away from me that the sound of my voice made the hiatus seem worse.