L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories (3 page)

“Suit yourself,” June said, louder than she meant, trying to talk herself into something. “I need a job.”

She said it hard, but it was an act. The look on the girl, her mouth open and pink, scared her. It reminded her of girls she knew back in Missouri, that family down the street. The Huffs. The girls were never allowed outside. The father hung a razor strop in their bedroom window so boys would stay away. One day, Sally Huff came to school with a red line down her face. In calisthenics, June saw it, the way the red line went all the way down to the top of Sally’s bloomers, and below. At the time, June wondered if any man would ever care about her so much.

Leaving the girl, who kept calling after her
(I don’t think you know, if only I could tell you)
, June weavingly made her way down the stairs.

Which only led her to another narrow hallway of curving stone, waxing candles strutted along the walls.

There were strange crooning chants coming from somewhere, a drumbeat like one of those jungle movies June always found herself in, except nothing like that.

Because there were smells she couldn’t name, sounds, the sense that the house changed as you moved through it, that you could keep walking and end up in places you never guessed, the house like one of those puzzle boxes, only you’re in it. And it’s in you.

Slowly, in the near-dark, she moved down the first long hallway.

It was a honeycomb, the wetness on everything seeming to cling to its cold walls like nectar.

Her arms quilling, she slid her mink back on, fingers clasped over the frog closure. It made her think of Guy and the things he was good for.

“June, is that you?” she heard the agent say, from somewhere, and soon enough he was at her side, his face a red flame under the torchères. “I’ve got to… I’ve got to…”

His lips were doing funny things and June couldn’t understand him.

“Is it John Huston? Can I talk to him about the part?”

“He ain’t here,” the agent said, shaking his head, his shirt open and wetly red. “I don’t know what kind of man the owner of this house is, but there’s things I don’t care to see. I have a sister. And a wife.”

“You also have a blonde stashed in a duplex on Sunset,” June said, telling herself he was just high, guilty. “How about George Tusk?”

“He ain’t for you,” the agent said, shaking his head harder, like an animal in a cartoon. “And you ain’t for him.”

“Some rainmaker, you,” June started, but the agent started leaning against her, rested his head in her hair and started whispering strange words, like a chant. She couldn’t understand them and she’d never seen him like this. She’d never seen one hair slip from its Vitalis pomp.

“I think we should go,” he said. “I think we should.”

But something made June pull from him.

“I don’t want to go yet,” June said. “I want to see what you’ve seen.”

When she had first landed in Hollywood, young June had twenty-seven dollars papering her powdered breasts under her swiss-dot blouse. She was an orphan, her mother lost five years before to spots on her lungs and her father knifed in the neck shooting dice behind the Southern Pacific roundhouse two months back. Three days after he died, she found he had left her a shoe tip full of small marked bills in her closet, in her white T-straps.

Written on one was a note to her: “Daddy loves you and your big gold dream.”

The first few years in Hollywood, times were hard and she shared apartments, rooms, even, with a hundred girls, their shared pillowcases flossy with their peroxided hair.

Working counter girl, working as an extra, working as a department-store model, a girl to look pretty at parties, she got by, barely. She even filled her teeth with white candle wax when they turned brown and died.

She said she would do things, and she wouldn’t suffer for them. She’d seen where suffering could get you, and it wasn’t her bag.

So she hustled and hustled and finally found the ways to get all those small roles at Republic, B-unit jobs at Fox. She never could be sure, though, if she was making headway or running on her last bit of garter-flashing luck.

Until she met Guy. He wasn’t very smart, or very nice, but he was crazy about her in the way men could be. The hard way she fronted her shoulders, her stupendous breasts, the way she could make him milk pudding and then tug down his pinstripes and show him what her mouth was for. It was all he needed to want to marry her. She was sad to learn what a relief it was. To find a man like this, who, before her, had lived with his mother his whole life, God rest her soul.

And, for the first year or so, she’d stopped the auditions, standing or lying down, kneeling. She didn’t even go to pictures anymore. She was content.

But that feeling had gone away, too, like everything did, always.

It felt like the basement was larger than the house, deeper than a tomb. She walked endlessly, until she seemed to wind up where she started again.

Finally, she saw two producers she’d auditioned for many times. They each had one leg of a limp girl, carrying her, her claw-tooth anklet clattering against the stone wall. They were laughing and the girl was, too, but her body was so limp and her dress had fallen open, her breasts skittering with each swinging move they made. Her laughter reminded June of her mother’s when her mother would go for days not eating, dancing around the living room, raving about her dead babies lost to pennyroyal tea and curling irons.

And that drink would still not go away. Her face felt hot and fluid, like if she touched it it would scald her.

Resting her hand against the wall, June felt it slide and there was a whole new passageway that, she realized, must be underneath the courtyard, because it had the same arcade of rooms, but different things happening in them. Or the same things, only very different.

June felt suddenly like a hard-rock miner who had at last struck gold.

These rooms had no doors, only beaded curtains, and June had to look in all of them.

White arms like spokes from under tangles of green satin—these were things June had seen many times, except it all felt different. Maybe it was the blank faces of the strange stone statues, the lacquered masks cusping from the walls, eyes of blue jade. Everything gleaming and lifeless.

The aura of lush jungle ruins, sweet and rotten.

There were strong smells and noises that started as pitchy squeals and thuds, but when you listened longer turned into odd scrapings and the keening of a sad cat.

She had been to many Hollywood parties since she first stepped off that Greyhound in downtown Los Angeles with those twenty-seven dollars. She had seen many things, sometimes across a party, sometimes across a room, a bathroom stall, sometimes right in her own hands, once shaking, now still, cold, professional.

But she had not seen this, not like this, not here.

There was something in these rooms June knew and was sorry she knew. She had not been in rooms like these but she felt she had. She felt suddenly like the rooms were inside of her.

And in the last room on the left she saw Georgie Tusk, naked, stomach billowing as he rested on a lacquered chaise. Eyes fogged, lashes wet, he was touching himself and some other body on the bed, some long limb—all while watching something happening at the foot of the chaise.

There, against a wide settee of spiky banana bark, kneeled a beautiful woman. Georgie Tusk’s wife.

June recognized her from when she was a girl, this shivery platinum star who tinkled through a series of Paramount society pictures, her skin ice-white, satin creaming across her hips, jewels dripping stalactites from her ear lobes, her neck. She was always the Wealthy Wife, the Long-Throated Mistress, the Rich Divorcée on a tear, her voice warbling like a mouth full of cold marbles but her face, glorious.

June always remembered her famous close-up in
Our Stolen Hours
.

Robert Taylor leaning over her, eyes lit with passion, mouth craning to reach her stemlike neck.

And her face, the eternal Ice Bitch’s face, finally releases itself. Her eyes blurring, expression going soft with desire. The most beautiful woman the world had ever seen.

Until you spot the mirror glinting behind Taylor. Until you see she is gazing at her reflection. The deepest longing ever, for one’s own miraculous visage.

Watching through the beads now, June could not see the actress’s face clearly because it had been buried under the stiff gingham skirt of a very young girl folded in that banana-bark settee.

A girl in a jumper, her face stitched with terror and elation. And the movie actress doing things, her hands hard on her, and everyone watching. And June felt herself tilt, reaching for the shuddering bead curtains, but they were too far, everything was.

The sound of the shimmying curtains drawing everyone’s eyes, the actress’s face untufting from the girl’s skirt and turning to face June.

That face, marble, calcite, ivory tusk.

And the actress smiled, cooingly.

And June knew the night had only begun for them.

Join us,
Mr. Tusk was shouting, his face frenzied, his hand tugging on the bare leg beside him. A leg June now saw belonged to a young boy, a stripling with a chipped tooth and a face flush with opioids. He was not moving but was sleeping deeply, like the schoolboy he was.

June stumbled backward.

Join us,
lulled the movie actress, mouth gleaming, wet.

Weaving down another long hall, breathless and eyes stinging, June could still hear them calling.

After a long time of walking in circles that seemed to knot tighter and tighter, she stopped and leaned against a wall.

Listening to her stertorous breaths, she knew that she had reached some kind of dropping-off point. That she had entered the maw of this great terrible house and now had sunk down its tawny gullet into something she could not name.

She had—one foot still hitched on the steps of that Greyhound—thought she wanted something, thought she’d do anything for that thing. Until now that the thing was here. And it surrounded her. Maybe it was her, had become her.

At that moment came the milky whisper on her shuddering neck.

Her heart clutching, June turned and saw nothing but the dark wall, its surface thick and shiny, like the shell of a beetle.

But then she realized something was hiding behind the wall. Like a scurrying rat.

The wall itself then moved, like a carapace clicking loose, and out came a young girl, long-limbed and sylphlike. A slipper of a girl in a pale-blue nightgown threaded with ribbon. With furring braids and eyes winsome as Margaret O’Brien’s.

“I’m Tinka,” she whispered, smiling. She had tiny front teeth, like a baby’s. “Who are you?”

“What are you doing here?” June said, surprised at the raggedness in her voice. “Honey, can you tell me what you’re doing here?”

“Where else would I be?” The girl grinned, twirling the string on her nightgown. “I live here.”

“You live here?” June said, not quite believing it. “How?”

“With my uncle,” she chirped. “He’s practically like a father.”

“I’ll bet he is,” June said.

Tinka nodded and smiled and some of the spritely glint dimmed. Just the faintest bit. Like she was touching some awareness she couldn’t quite reckon with yet.

“I guess everyone has an uncle,” the girl said, softly.

“Yeah,” said June. “Sometimes more than one.”

“Were you in one of the rooms?” Tinka asked, and June felt she could still hear the beaded curtains hissing, feel them pressed against her.

“No,” June said. “Not yet.”

She wanted to leave, but the girl reached out and curled her baby fingers around her wrist.

“Would you like to meet my friend?” she asked.

Tucking her tiny arms behind her, Tinka seemed to, as if by magic spell, pull another girl from a niche in the beetle-curled panel behind her. It was like a story, one in a dark house with secret chambers and bodies buried behind catacomb walls.

The girl was very pretty and had a red rash flushing up her face.

“I’m Edna,” the girl said, “but I’m changing my name.”

She had the clear blue eyes of a church girl and a spray of rosy pox scars by her braid-tight temple.

“What do you think of Rebecca?” she asked, her tongue lisping. “Or Jessica? I think I could be Jessica.”

June was sure the girl was not yet fourteen.

The three of them sat on a stone bench, Edna with one leg propped up, plucking her toes. Tinka got up and starting spinning.

“I’m just like Sonja Henie,” she said. “Aren’t I?”

June wondered what she was doing here, but she could not leave.

“You’re so pretty,” Edna said to June, her fingers reaching out and touching the silver pelts on June’s coat. “Are you in the pictures?”

“No,” June said. “Yes.” Both answers seemed true.

“My mother was a famous model,” Tinka said. “Before she got the Bright’s, she had jet-black hair and alabaster skin.”

“Now Tinka lives with her uncle.” Edna smiled, those jaws churning over her gum.

“He’s is very handsome,” Tinka said. “You should really meet him. When he picked me up this afternoon at the Chili Bowl, all the girls said he looked like Cornel Wilde. He always says I should invite my friends over whenever I like.”

Tinka reached out and touched Edna’s downy cheek. “But I could tell he liked her best.”

Watching her, June knew suddenly that Tinka, in her smocked nightgown and with ribbons in her hair, wasn’t a girl at all anymore but something else. She felt she could see sharp teeth poking from the corners of her mouth.

“There’s a man here,” Tinka said. “With white hair and spectacles.”

“He makes jungle pictures,” Edna chirped, lifting herself up, her palm pressing down on Tinka’s shoulder. “He saw us by the pool in our suits.”

“He said she had ants in her pants,” Tinka said, her eyes glittering as she surveyed the girl, the girl’s feather-softness. “He said he could tell by looking at her.”

Watching Tinka, June remembered a hundred introductions she herself had made, more and more of them as she was no longer the one being introduced. Everyone already knew her, the softest pair of very fine shoes. Now, at nightclubs, at parties, coming out of powder rooms at private homes, June was the one who made the introductions, facilitated the transaction, occasionally procured the goods. The girls.