Someone Is Bleeding

It was a pretty brisk day, as I recall. Sky a little overhung, the Palisades greyish behind the mist. I suppose that’s why the beach wasn’t too crowded. Then again, it was a weekday and school hadn’t let out yet. June. Put them together and what have you got?

A long stretch of beach with just her and me.

I’d been reading. But it got tiresome so I put the book down and sat there, arms around my knees, looking around.

She had on a one-piece bathing suit. Her figure was slight but well-placed. I guessed she was about five-five. She was gazing intently at the waves. Her short-chopped blonde hair was stirring slightly in the breeze.

“Pardon me but could . . .” I said.

She wasn’t turning. She kept looking at the shifting blue ocean. I looked over her figure again. Very well-placed. A model’s figure. The kind you see in
Mademoiselle.

“Have you the time?” I asked.

She turned then.

Eyes. That was my first impression. The biggest and the brownest eyes I’d ever seen, great big eyes seeming to search for something. A frank look, a bold one, meaning a bold curiosity. But no smile. Deadpan. Did you ever have a child watch you from the seat in front of you in a bus or a trolley car?

That’s what it was like.

Then she lifted her arm and looked at her watch. “One-thirty,” she said. “Thank you,” I answered.

She turned away. Her eyes moved to the sea again. I felt the uneasiness of the unconsolidated beachhead.

I rested on my elbows and looked at her profile. Delicately upturned nose. Lovely mouth. And those eyes.

After watching a while to catch her eyes again, I gave up. I was no professional at pickups. I got up slowly and walked down to the water. I felt her eyes following me.

I didn’t leap in like athletes do. I stalled, I edged, I shivered. I evolved quick arguments for forgetting the whole thing. Then I slid forward with a shudder and swam out a little way. Body heat took up the chills, my blood started moving.

On my back, looking up at the sky I wondered if I should speak to her. Whether it was worth it.

Then, when I came dripping back, she asked me if the water were cold.

I jumped at the opening.

“Pretty cold,” I said. “I’ll give you ten dollars if you go in.” She shook her head with a smile. “Not me,” she said. I dried myself.

“Does the weather get cold out here?” I asked her. Weather talk, I thought. Always an ample wedge. “It gets cold at night,” she said.

The eyes intent on me again. I almost felt restive. They
were
searching. But for what? I edged a little closer to her blanket.

“Well, I’ve just come from New York,” I said, “and I came to get warm.”

“Oh,” she said, “is it cold there?”

Weather talk. Enough to start on. We eased into other things. California. New York. People. Cars. Dogs. Children.

“Do you like good music?” she asked me.

“What’s good music?” I asked.

“Classical music.”

“Sure,” I said, “I love it.”

The eyes looking harder. Was that the basis of the search? “Gee,” she said.

She sat hugging her knees. The filtering sunlight touched her white shoulders. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen, I thought.

I was smiling. “Why gee?” I asked her.

“Because men never like good music,” she said. “My . . .”

She stopped. Her eyes lowered.

“What’s the Hollywood Bowl like?” I asked her, not wanting to let conversation run down.

She was looking again, shaking her head.

“I don’t know,” she said, “I sure wish I could go, though.”

Too easy, I thought. Where is the hedging, the sly evasions, the mental sparring of a he and she? The moxie? No moxie in Peggy. That was her name.

“What’s yours?” she asked.

“David,” I said, “David Newton.”

And so we talked. I’m trying to remember the significant things she said. They came out once in a while in between straight data about her mother, dead, her father, a retired navy man, her profession, none, and her spirit, obviously stepped on somewhere.

She saw my book and asked what it was. I told her, and we got started on the subject of historical novels.

“They’re dirt,” she said, “nothing but sex.”

Something in her eyes. A hardness. I said why read them if they offend her.

“I’m looking for a decent one,” she said.

“I’ll write one,” I said.

Obvious move. Impress the little girl. I am a writer, what do you think about that, young lady? She didn’t catch it.

We kept skating around with words. Talking about home and background, school and other things. I told her I’d graduated from the University of Missouri Journalism School three years before. She told me about traveling around with her mother, father and brother until her mother died, then she and Phillip, her brother, not being able to follow the old man from one base to another anymore. So they stayed in San Francisco with a friend of her mother’s.

“She was a swell woman,” Peggy Lister said. “But her husband . . .”

“What about him?”

“He was a pig,” she said.

A significant remark. Not to me at the time. But later I understood.

Now, though, I just listened halfway, devoting the other half of my attention to looking at her almost childlike face. At the way her hair was parted on the right, the boyish wave of blonde hair over the left part of her forehead. The full lips, delicately red. And those eyes.

How could a face like that give you premonitions? It just didn’t. And that was too bad. We were in the middle of a discussion on jazz when she stood up.

“I have to go,” she said.

I felt myself start. I’d almost forgotten we’d just met.

She began to put on her jeans and blouse.

”Well, I have to get back to my novel too,” I said standing up. Trying again.

“Oh, that,” she said, frowning.

“No, one I’m writing, not reading,” I said, giving up subtleties.

We scuffled across the warm sands.

“Gee,” she said, “you like good music and you write.” She shook her head. I got the impression she was confused. “Is it so strange?” I asked.

“Men aren’t sensitive enough to do things like that.”

We reached a corner on Arizona and she started to turn off. I fiddled around, asking for her phone number and she fiddled back, finally giving it to me with a brooding reluctance. I memorized the number.

We said good-bye and I watched her walking down toward Santa Monica Boulevard. She moved with a relaxed, effortless grace.

I turned away. I went home and worked on the book with a renewed vigor.

That afternoon I sent a card to a friend in New York.
Met me a cute gal,
it read.
Glad you aren’t here.

That evening I remembered something. I remembered that I’d forgotten to write down her telephone number and now it was gone from my mind.

I went to the beach every day for a week but I saw no Peggy Ann.

I gave up three days and wrote heavily. Then, on the fourth day, I got up late, couldn’t get up the fortitude to sit in front of my typewriter, ended up by putting on my bathing suit and leaving for the beach.

And, down there, happened to glance up while I was walking across the sands and saw her. My heart beat harder. I realized I’d been looking for her. Again.

She didn’t see me. She was sitting on her blanket rubbing cocoa butter over her legs when I came up with my blanket and clothes.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello, Davie,’’ she said.

It made me feel strange. No one since my mother had called me that, Davie. There was something about it.

“I was going to call you,” I said, “but I forgot your number and your name wasn’t in the directory.”

”Oh,” she said. “No, I live with another couple and the phone is under their name.”

She seemed a little evasive that day. She avoided my eyes, kept looking down at the sand. Then, when she tried, without success, to put the cocoa butter on her back, I offered my services.

She sat stiffly as I rubbed my hand over her sun-warmed back. I noticed how she kept biting her lower lip. Worriedly.

“I . . .” she started to say once and then stopped. She sat quietly. Finally she drew in a deep breath.

“I have something to tell you,” she said.

I felt myself tremble slightly. She sounded so serious.

“Go ahead,” I told her.

“I’m divorced,” she said.

I waited.

“Yes?” I said.

Her throat moved. “That’s all,” she said, “I . . . I just thought you might not want to go out with me when you knew . . . I . . .”

“Why not?”

She started to say something, then shrugged her shoulders helplessly.

“I don’t know,” she said, “I just thought.”

She looked so young, so timorous.

“Don’t be silly, Peggy,” I said, quietly.

She turned in surprise.

“What did you call me?” she asked.

“Peggy,” I said. “That’s your name isn’t it?”

“Yes, but . . .” She smiled at me. “I didn’t think you’d remember.”

She shook her head in wonder. “I’m so surprised,” she said.

It was one of those things about Peggy. The littlest thing could delight her. Like when I brought her an ice cream cone later that morning.

It might have been a diamond ring.

Peggy lived on Twenty-sixth Street off Wilshire.

It was Sunday night and I was walking up the quiet tree-lined block looking for her house. It was to be our first date.

I was thinking that it was amazing how quiet it got right off Wilshire. Like a country street. That’s what a lot of Los Angeles and suburbs are, I’d decided. A hick town with feathers. Gaudy but rustic.

There were two things in front of the house. An old Dodge. A man watering the lawn. The car was a 1936 model. The man about a 1910 model, pudgy and pasty-faced, wearing most unfetching shorts.

“Peggy Lister live here?” I asked him.

He looked at me with watery blue eyes. His expression was dead. He held the hose loosely in his hands. His head jerked a little. “She lives here,” he said.

I felt his eyes on me as I stood on the porch. Then Peggy opened the door.

With heels on she was tall, about five ten, I guess. She wore a sweater and skirt, a brown sport jacket. Her shoes were brown and white, carefully polished. Her hair had been set and combed out painstakingly. She looked wonderful.

“Hello, Davie,” she said. “Won’t you come in?”

I came in. Those big brown eyes surveyed me.

“You look nice, Davie,” she said.

“You look terrific.”

Again. Surprise. A half-quizzical smile which seemed to say—oh, you’re just fooling me.

Just then an older woman came out of an adjoining room.

“Mrs. Grady, this is David Newton,” Peggy said.

I smiled politely, said hello.

“Going out?” asked Mrs. Grady.

“We’re going to get acquainted,” Peggy said.

Mrs. Grady gave us a nod. Then she leaned over and called out the window.

“Supper’s on, Albert.”

We went to the front door and passed Albert. He gave me a sullen look. And her a look. A look that made me start. Because there was almost a possessiveness in it. It gave me an odd feeling.

“Who is that guy anyway?” I asked as we started down the street.

“Mr. Grady,” she said.

“That look he gave you,” I said.

“I know.”

That expression was on her face again. Not quite identifiable. Mostly disgust. But there was something else in it, too. I wasn’t sure but it might have been fear, I thought. The fear of a child who has come upon something it does not quite understand yet instinctively shrinks from.

I decided to change the subject.

“Where would you like to go?” I asked.

“I don’t care,” she said, brightening. “Where would you?”

“A movie?” I suggested, without really thinking.

“Well . . .” she said.

“What am I talking about?” I said. “I don’t want to go to a movie. I want to talk to you.” She smiled at me. “I’d like to talk, Davie,” she said.

We went down to Wilshire to the Red Coach Inn for a few drinks. It’s a cute little place, intimate, booths, a man playing casual organ music.

She ordered a Vodka Collins and I ordered a Tom. Then she turned to me and, casually, said.

“I think I should tell you I’m madly in love with you.”

I took it for a gag, of course.

“Splendid,” I said. “That’s grand.”

But her face wasn’t smiling. It made me feel a little restless. Sometimes you couldn’t tell what Peggy meant. We drank a little. It was quiet.

“Would you like to come to a party with me?” she said. On the spur of the moment it seemed.

“Why . . . sure,” I said.

“Good,” she said.

“Where is it?”

“At my lawyer’s house,” she said.

“You have a lawyer?”

“He handled my divorce,” she said.

I nodded. I asked her where the house was. She said Malibu.

“Oh,” I said, “how will we get there? I plan to get a car but I haven’t yet.”

“We can get a ride,” she said confidently.

Then the confidence seemed to slip. She fingered her glass nervously,

“Davie,” she said.

“What?”

“Will you . . . will you promise me something?”

I hesitated. Then I asked what.

“Well, I . . .”

She looked irritated at her own fluster. “These parties are so . . .”

Again she halted.

“You’re a gentleman,” she said.

I waited. “I am?” I said.

“I mean,” she went on, “you know how these parties are. Actors and actresses and . . . well, usually they get all drunk and the men start to . . .”

“You want me to promise not to touch you.”

“Yes.”

I didn’t like to say it. She looked delicious then, in that soft light. But I nodded.

“All right,” I said.

She smiled gratefully.

After a few drinks we started down Wilshire again, headed for the ocean.

“I wish I did have a car,” I said.

“It’s all right,” Peggy said.

We walked and talked. Peggy told me about her mother. Her mother had died when Peggy was twelve.