Outerbridge Reach (36 page)

“Sort of like the
Hindenburg.
”

“Why's that?”

Strickland shrugged. “The lines of force. The politics. The fact that it's New Jersey.”

“Will we crash and burn?”

“I don't know,” Strickland said. “Are you enjoying yourself?”

“I like the paintings,” she said. “You can't spoil the view. What politics?”

“Of course,” Strickland admitted. “There are no more politics.”

“My God,” Anne said, “does it bother you that these men own real estate? That the artist is a Lithuanian? You're really the last Bolshevik.”

“What are you doing later this afternoon?” Strickland asked her. “Are you busy?”

“I'm going home,” she said. “Aren't you finished?”

“Not quite,” he said. “There's a place down the road I want you to see.”

She looked at him curiously. “Really? What place?”

Harry Thorne disengaged himself from another group and came over. He looked at Strickland with what appeared, superficially, to be an affable expression.

“He's everywhere, this guy.”

“I'm everywhere,” Strickland agreed, “but you've been scarce, Mr. Thorne. Any word from Hylan?”

“According to the paper,” Thorne said, “Mr. Hylan is a fugitive. It may very well be true.”

“What do you think happened?” Strickland asked him.

“We may never know what happened,” Thorne said. “I can't answer for Matty Hylan. But everyone who has a deal with me still has a deal.”

“Funny,” Strickland said, “the way it all turned out.”

“It is funny,” Thorne said. “Another thing I notice is that your assistant was taking film of me earlier without notification or permission. I would like that not to happen.”

“O.K.,” Strickland said. “Sorry.”

“It was good to see the captain,” Thorne told Anne. He meant her father. “You know we're old friends.” Without looking at Strickland, he drew her aside. Strickland watched him address her earnestly at close quarters.

“My driver will take you home,” he heard Thorne tell her. “I'll call you. We'll have a conversation.”

Strickland brought her another wine when he had her back. “Thorne likes you.”

“He's a friend of Dad's.”

“He'd like to be a friend of yours.”

“He's favorably disposed to me,” she said. She was somewhat drunk. “I think that's good. He's a solid guy. A stand-up character, as Dad would say.”

“Look,” Strickland said, “I need to think about the project. Maybe we should talk. How about taking a ride with me?”

“I ought to get back.”

“What for?”

“There's always something.”

“C'mon. I brought my car. I want you to help me ponder.”

She gave him a brave, distant, troubled look as though she were coping cheerfully with problems that did not remotely concern him. “Where would we go?”

“Down the road a little.”

“Well,” she said, “I'll give you a ride in Harry's car if you like.”

Saying her goodbyes to the thick-necked executives and politicians assembled on the mezzanine, she offered rides right and left. To Strickland's relief, no one accepted. On the way out she stopped in the ladies' on the ground floor. As he waited for her to come out, he glanced up to the mezzanine floor where the party had taken place and saw two hard-faced men looking down the stairs at him.

The driver was the same man who had driven them in New York, his eyes still obscured behind dark glasses. He drove very fast, speeding them across the wastes of central Jersey.

“What's the latest from Owen?” Strickland asked.

“He's in the fifties, northeast of the South Sandwich Islands.”

“I hope he's using the equipment,” Strickland said.

They sat looking out at the pines and power lines.

“Are you afraid for your film? That it won't look good?”

“Sure,” Strickland said.

“Well,” she said, “the film is your problem. But I'm afraid too. That makes two of us.”

“You don't act afraid.”

She looked out the window without answering.

“Has your life changed?” Strickland asked.

“What a question.” She looked him in the eye, accepting, he hoped, a somewhat different level of discourse. “My life's all right.”

“You know what I wish?” Strickland asked her. “I wish I knew the things in your imagination. I wish I could get you to talk about them.”

Anne bent her head and put her hands over her eyes. “God,” she said, “you are a peculiar guy. Wherever did they find you?”

They drove for almost an hour before Strickland asked the driver to pull off the parkway. They followed a local road through the pines, toward the coast. At the beach they turned right and headed south toward the glass towers of Atlantic City.

“Ever down here?”

“Never,” Anne said.

“Not . . . your sort of place?”

“I have to admit,” she said, “it's really not my sort of place. I don't gamble. I don't like taffy.”

“We'll see,” said Strickland.

He had the driver take them through the streets of the decayed city, among ruined Victorian houses and cinderblock buildings with windowless saloons. There were very few people on the street and, except for the wind, the place lay under a strange silence. The dingy metal sea rolled in as though propelled by a machine. The gigantic casinos along the beachfront and the gray sky looked like painted stage flats.

A few blocks from the ocean they saw what appeared to be a plastic elephant three stories high. On a street called North Carolina Avenue, he had Anne get out of the car and walk with him. Harry Thorne's chauffeur followed them slowly in the Lincoln.

“The first time I ever saw anybody dancing was in that building,” he said, pointing to a squat turreted house with a broad veranda. “It was called the Chateau Dumaine. There was a line of little broads in top hats dancing to ‘The Beer Barrel Polka.' The girls were white. The band was black. In a back room there were craps tables and wheels.”

“That's the first dancing you ever saw?”

“I was very small,” Strickland explained. “My mother took me there.”

She laughed. “What for? The dancing?”

“The food,” Strickland said. “The food was out of sight. The best steak, the best Italian food you can imagine. We ate with the help.”

“I gather,” Anne said, “your mother was an entertainer.”

“At the time we dined at the Dumaine,” Strickland said, “my mother was selling lace. Or Meissen china. Or furniture—early American knockoffs. The place was owned by a friend of hers.”

“Oh,” Anne said, “but you said carnivals and hotels.”

“We lived in the Chalfonte on the Boardwalk then. Sometimes there were fashion shows there and my mother would deliver the commentaries. She always sounded very . . .” Strickland bore down on the word, trying not to blow it: “. . . High class. That was the term people used. Especially here. In this town.”

“So she was educated.”

“Skidmore, class of 1925. Or so she told me. Her father was a Methodist minister. Or so she told me. Sometimes she made things up. I never checked her out. I mean, she was Mom.”

Anne laughed, and for a moment Strickland was sure that she might take his arm. She didn't.

He showed her where the old Atlantic Club had been and the Sea Breeze and Clothilde Marsh's interracial brothel.

“My mother went there for bridge,” Strickland recounted. “Clothilde Marsh had a lesbian girlfriend called Ernie, her own Alice B. Toklas. With them in the place was a very light-skinned black man they called Doctor Leroy. God knows what he did there. Every week Mom and Clothilde and Ernie and Doctor Leroy played a couple of rubbers of bridge. She always had bridge games going.”

“And you went there too?”

“I made drinks for the bridge players.”

“And did you talk to the girls?”

“I hardly ever saw the girls. They weren't allowed near Clothilde's bridge game.”

“And then you grew up and made a movie about prostitutes.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Funny. Want a drink?”

She frowned. “Not around here.”

“We'll go to a casino. We'll have a quick one.”

At the entrance to Bally's no one made any trouble about the car when it parked to wait for them. Strickland led Anne across the spangled lobby toward the bar at the edge of the casino floor.

“About what you expected?” Strickland asked when they had their drinks.

“Let's have our drink and go,” she said. “I can take the carpet colors but not the cigarette smoke.”

“Have another drink,” Strickland said. “I want my snake-eyes bet.”

“I'll have one more and then I want to go.”

She stood up a little contentiously. Definitely an Irish relationship with alcohol, Strickland thought. Her intoxication had a rowdy, slightly dangerous quality that pleased him. At the same time he understood that the seductiveness he had thought to see might be an illusion. He led her down the steps to the casino.

The dice tables were nearest the bar and fairly uncrowded. Out among the slot machines, several thousand dull-eyed, emphysemic proletarians pumped away in a hereafter of mirrors. Strickland kept a lookout for someone he might know at the craps tables. A number of the people he had met making
Under the Life
came down to Atlantic City, although not usually on winter afternoons. The cocktail waitresses, the security, the pit bosses, took a fraction of a second to notice Anne Browne. She was agreeably out of place there.

At one table a broad-shouldered, short-necked man in a good suit was picking up the dice for a come-out roll. The man had a flushed, pushed-in face and looked like an ex-fighter or a crooked cop or an actor who played one. There were half a dozen other players at the table. Strickland put a fifty on the table and said, “Aces.” The dealer took his money.

“What are you doing?” Anne asked. No one answered her.

As they watched, the old pug rolled snake eyes. Strickland put his drink down in disbelief.

“Did you win?” she asked.

Everyone at the table looked at her, except the dealer and the man who had rolled.

“It pays thirty to one,” Strickland explained when they were in the car on the way out of town. “It's a dumb bet. Really irresponsible.”

“So you won fifteen hundred dollars?”

“I bet it for you,” he told her. “It's yours.”

She laughed that away. She seemed alert and sober.

“Really,” Strickland said. “I should buy you something. What would you like?”

“How wicked. What will you buy me?”

“Hey,” he said, “you name it.”

“Well,” she said, “how about a new waffle iron? How about a rowing machine? An inflatable boat?”

“You're not supposed to make fun of a winner,” Strickland told her.

On the drive along the Garden State, Anne asked him who his mother's friend had been.

“His name was Phil Hassler. He owned half of the Dumaine and he was a kind of movie producer.”

“What kind of movies?”

“It was a scam,” Strickland said. “It's a long story.”

But she persisted and he told her how Phil Hassler had done it. “He starts out with a flick. Some kind of crazy Dutch sex-education movie. A training film for Bulgarian midwives. Some artifact he's acquired. Remember, this is back in the forties and fifties. Has to have something to do with sex.”

Strickland paused, closed his eyes and drew breath.

“Then he drives into some shit town where there are lots of rednecks and Catholics. He finds a crummy falling-down theater. Tells the owner he's some kind of mogul. He was mogul-like, Phil.”

“I'll bet,” Anne said.

“Money's no object,” Strickland continued. “Only thing is he has to have the place for a couple of nights. To measure something or test something. Some rebop. The theater owner needs to believe this. Then Phil brings in his cruddy Dutch pregnancy picture. He blitzes the shit town with the horniest possible advertising and fake reviews: ‘Dirtiest foreign porno movie I ever saw!' ‘My eyes bugged out of my head!'”

“Didn't people object?”

“But of course,” Strickland said. “He makes sure all the preachers see the advertising, but too late to close him. Figures it close. By show time there are twenty thousand jerkoffs screaming to pay ten dollars to see the goddam thing. He runs it around the clock. He'd hold it two days if he could. By the second night the cops would close the theater but by then Phil had emptied the till and was on his way to the next shit town.”

“Didn't he ever get arrested?”

“Usually the theater owner got arrested. But occasionally Phil got picked up. Of course there was always an out for him. Remember that these things were not actual pornography. So the line would be: ‘Your honor, this movie instructs the young and prevents unhealthful practices! It's hygienic! It's educational!' This was known in the trade as ‘the square-up.'”

“And that's how you got into film making?”

“Not really,” Strickland said.

He thought that she might fall asleep on the drive back but she looked quite animated, lost in thoughts the nature of which he could not imagine. She kept a half-smile that might have been booziness or amusement at his tales or anything, for all he knew. Her hand was on the seat by her side and for the longest time he wanted to put his own on it, just touch her. But of course the excursion and the stories were not appropriate to such a move. Presently he felt foolish and bitter.

“The square-up,” she said at one point along the road. “I like that.”

When they got back to Craven's Point it had been dark for hours and the empty white buildings were ablaze with light. The high flat on which they stood was completely deserted.