Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (30 page)

When Harry finally realized what he was supposed to do and leaned down to meet Laura’s face, she slapped him quickly on the cheek.

“That was for Irving,” she said, already pulling Harry close again, wanting her heartbeat to speed up so fast that her chest would crack in half, turning her inside out. Laura slid backward until Harry was on top of her, undoing his buttons as fast as he could, his cigarette abandoned in the car’s ashtray. Laura watched the smoke continue to curl out the open window as Harry began to push her dress up to her waist. She wanted to pretend that her body belonged to someone else, someone ravenous and carefree, someone whom loss had never touched. Harry began to make noises, soft little moans, and Laura wrapped her arms around his back. “Sssh,” she said, “sshh.” When he was through, Laura told him to wait in the car as she called him a taxi from inside the house. She tiptoed in, her shoes in her hand, and
leaned against the back of the door like the world’s oldest teenager, her wishes and regrets all pooled together into one soggy mess. She might have cried if she didn’t think it would wake the children.

P
arty invitations began to arrive more frequently—or maybe they’d always been offered, but Laura had never cared enough to take note. Now that she knew there was relief to be found in the world outside her body—or rather, by moving her body through the outside world—Laura said yes to nearly every invitation.

Junior, who had always been an introverted child, seemed to take his mother’s sudden interest in nightlife to heart, and had stopped sleeping.

“Sweetie,” Laura said, sitting on his bed one night. “Is everything okay at school?” Junior was in the third grade, and the smallest, weediest boy in his class. He wore glasses with small round frames, and Laura often thought that he looked like a nervous owl, his eyes wide and unblinking behind the lenses.

“I guess so,” Junior said. He was sitting up in bed, his legs covered by a thin quilt. Irving had tried so hard to make Junior’s room a proper boyish space, with Brooklyn Dodgers baseball pennants hung on the wall, but the room had never shaken the feeling of his older sisters, as if their whispered conversations had clung to the walls, even through the coat of blue paint. “It’s the same as always.” He stared at her, his back starkly straight against the wall.

“Aren’t you sleepy?” Laura ran her hand back and forth over his shins. Junior shook his head. “Do you have a book?”

Junior produced a flimsy paperback from under the covers—he loved books, and was proficient enough to read books that Clara hadn’t read until she was twelve.

“Mommy has to go out for a little while, so why don’t you read your book until you’re tired enough to fall asleep, okay?” Laura leaned down and kissed Junior on the forehead.

“What if I’m still awake when you get home?” he asked, as Laura began to back out of his room.

“Then I’ll kiss you again,” Laura said. She flicked off the overhead light, so that the only area illuminated was a small yellow circle around Junior’s pillow.

“Okay,” Junior said, dubious. He watched her shut the door, and Laura was sure as she walked to her car that he was watching her still.

H
arry Ryman was friends with Joe, who was friends with Dotty, who had the best parties. Dotty lived in Villa Valentino, an apartment complex off Sunset with lots of other actors, some of them young and all of them broke. Her apartment was on the ground floor, at the back of the building, and in order to get to it, one had to walk through a gate and then around the neglected swimming pool. Laura stayed close behind Harry, though when he tried to hold her hand, she swatted it away. She still wasn’t sure whether she liked to be around him, but she knew that she didn’t like spending her nights alone.

A crowd of partygoers stood outside the entrance, making the narrow doorway nearly impassable. The smell of reefer wafted through the air, sweet and sour as a skunk. Harry turned sideways in order to squeeze through the people and get into the apartment, and Laura reluctantly followed. At every step, she considered that she was too old and sad to be at the party, though she was not nearly the oldest in attendance, and that she ought to be home with her children. Something wasn’t right with Junior; a mother could tell. The problem was
that Laura and Junior were fighting off the same disease: loneliness. How could she rescue her son from the depths when she herself was sure they hadn’t yet hit the bottom? Harry was several steps ahead, and Laura hurried to catch up.

They made their way into the small kitchen, a glorified corner of the main room, which was empty except for two ratty sofas and some milk crates that men were using as ottomans. Young women in various stages of undress pretended not to recognize Laura, and went back to necking with their gentlemen friends along the walls. The tile floor was dirty, and the open cabinets were largely empty. Laura felt overdressed in her silk dress, and didn’t want to lean against the lip of the stove, the only available spot, so she leaned against Harry for a moment, was surprised by his sturdiness, and then stood up straight, floating in space.

“Who lives here?” Laura whispered backward, toward Harry.

“Dotty. You’ll like her, you’ll see,” he said, but Laura wasn’t convinced.

“Which one is Dotty?”

Harry gently pushed Laura aside and checked the refrigerator, where he found two cold bottles of beer. He opened them both and handed one to her. “In the pink.”

There was a young woman wearing a pink blouse in the far corner of the room. She had her hair tied up in a scarf, as if she were in the passenger seat of a convertible, already sixty miles out of town and headed for Big Sur. Dotty, Harry told Laura, was a poet. Laura had never met a poet before. She watched Dotty adjust a lamp shade, tilting it one way and then the other, so that the dim spotlight moved back and forth across the floor. It seemed like a poetic thing to do.

To her dismay, Laura had to use the bathroom, which Harry escorted her to, promising to wait just outside the door. She felt sick to her stomach, treating this man she barely knew like her boyfriend,
but the idea of going back to nights spent curled up on the rug alone was too awful to bear. Laura flushed the toilet and looked at her reflection in the small mirror. The glass was dingy, and the room was dingier, with a tub that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in years. Laura washed her hands and slowly pushed the door open.

More people started streaming in from the courtyard, packing into the apartment like sardines. Two young women—hardly older than Clara—came up to Laura and clasped her by the hand, each on one side.

“Miss Lamont, you’re the reason I became an actress,” one said.

“Miss Lamont, you’re the reason I came to Hollywood,” said the other.

“Are you twins?” Laura asked. She wanted to ask them where they lived, and whether they wanted her to take them home to their parents’ houses, but then they were off, giggling and blushing and tickling each other’s waists. Laura felt silly for even trying to talk to them, or anyone.

“Harry,” she started, and looked around to see that Harry had disappeared. Laura scanned the room and saw him sitting beside Dotty on the sofa. Excusing herself as she went, Laura stepped carefully across the tacky hardwood, keeping her face turned toward the floor so as to avoid any more errant compliments.

“Harry,” she said again, now standing in front of the sofa he was sitting on. Dotty sat beside him, her scarf knotted under her chin. She held a cigarette between her fingers and picked the loose tobacco off her tongue with her other hand.

Even in the dark, Laura could see that Harry’s eyes had glazed over, and were struggling to stay open. “Mmm?” he said.

Laura crouched down beside him and took his chin in her hand. “Harry, what’s wrong? Are you all right?”

Dotty laughed. Up close, she looked older, her skin covered by
too much makeup. Dotty’s eyebrows were a penciled-in fiction, arching skyward, though her eyes themselves were only half-open, which gave her the disconcerting look of a clown whose circus had left him behind.

“Excuse me?” Laura turned her attention away from Harry, who seemed to have fallen asleep.

“He’s fiiiiiiine,” Dotty said. She pitched herself forward so that her elbows rested on her knees, just inches from Laura’s face. “He’s just hiiiiiiiiigh, movie star.”

The room was too warm, like the air just before a thunderstorm, thick with moisture. Laura had been around drugs before—she’d taken a little blue pill before leaving the house, and would take another before she fell asleep—but that was different, she told herself, different. Harry’s eyes were open, but he was asleep—or something like asleep. It wasn’t like any kind of high Laura had ever seen, and it frightened her.

“He’ll be all right?” she asked Dotty, knowing that the question would be met with more derision. Sure enough, Dotty laughed again, opening her little mouth wide enough that Laura could see her bad teeth, browning all the way to the molars. She pushed herself back up to stand and squeezed through the crowd until she was in the courtyard again. The air in Los Angeles never felt like the air in Door County, but that night Laura was so grateful to be outside that she hardly noticed the difference. The water in the swimming pool was speckled by moonlit beer bottles floating on the surface, and Laura wished that she were already home in bed. She wished that Irving would be there when she got home, and that he would tell her how to proceed, and how to get their son to sleep through the night. Laura wrapped her arms around her own waist and leaned her face toward the moon, a half circle, clean as an apple cut in half. Other people from the party were standing nearby, starting to stare. Laura walked
out without turning around, wishing Harry luck under her breath, knowing that he would need it as much as she did.

H
arriet usually did the grocery shopping at Sale’s Fulton Market on Mondays. On busy days, she would just phone it in, and the delivery truck would bring Junior’s Jell-O and Laura’s milk and sugar and Florence’s fruit in syrup, but it wasn’t such a far drive, and Harriet liked to go herself.

Laura stood by the door with her gloves and hat already on.

“I’ll go with you,” she said.

Harriet nodded and put on her hat. “All right,” she said.

The women walked out in the sun and Harriet locked the door behind them. Junior and Florence would be fine on their own for an hour or two, and Clara’s purse was sitting by the door, so she was home too. Laura took a deep breath, a momentary satisfaction filling her lungs—a full house. They rounded the corner and turned toward the garage. When they’d made the turn, Laura noticed two things: Someone had dropped off a bouquet of flowers in front of the garage door, where they were currently freezing to death, the large white blooms wobbling in the breeze, and beside the flowers, there was a man who seemed to be asleep, with his head pressed against the garage wall. Harriet stuck her hand out, as if to wave Laura back toward the house, but they both kept walking forward, taking smaller and smaller steps. The sleeping figure didn’t start up as soon as the women approached, but roused himself languidly, as though he were in his own bed, with nowhere in particular he had to be. It was only when he sat up and shifted his hat to the back of his head that Laura realized she was looking at Gordon Pitts.