The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (52 page)

His two small daughters frequently came in from the country to spend weekends with him, always wearing fresh, bright clothes that were quick to wilt and get dirty in the damp and grime of his terrible home, and one day the younger girl announced in tears that she wouldn't take showers there anymore because of the cockroaches in the shower stall. At last, after he'd swatted and flushed away every cockroach in sight, and after a lot of coaxing, she said she guessed it would be okay if she kept her eyes shut—and the thought of her standing blind in there behind the mildewed plastic curtain, hurrying, trying not to shift her feet near the treacherously swarming drain as she soaped and rinsed herself, made him weak with remorse. He knew he ought to get out of here. He'd have had to be crazy not to know that—maybe he was crazy already, just for being here and continuing to inflict this squalor on the girls—but he didn't know how to begin the delicate, difficult task of putting his life back in order.

Then in the early spring of 1962, not long after his thirty-sixth birthday, there came a wholly unexpected break: he was assigned to write a screenplay based on a contemporary novel that he greatly admired. The producers would pay his way to Los Angeles to meet with the director, and it was recommended that he remain “out there” until he finished the script. It probably wouldn't take more than five months, and that first phase of the project alone, not to mention the dizzying prospect of subsequent earnings, would bring him more money than he'd made in any previous two or three years put together.

When he told his daughters about it, the older girl asked him to send her an inscribed photograph of Richard Chamberlain; the younger one had no requests.

In someone else's apartment a jolly, noisy party was held for him, closely attuned to the jaunty image of himself that he always hoped to convey to others, with a big hand-lettered banner across one wall:

And two nights later he sat locked alone and stiff with alcohol among strangers in the long, soft, murmurous tube of his very first jet plane. He slept most of the way across America and didn't wake up until they were floating low over the miles upon miles of lights in the darkness of outer Los Angeles. It occurred to him then, as he pressed his forehead against a small cold window and felt the fatigue and anxiety of the past few years beginning to fall away, that what lay ahead of him—good or bad—might easily turn out to be a significant adventure: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood.

For the first two or three weeks of his time in California, Jack lived as a guest in the sumptuous Malibu home of the director, Carl Oppenheimer, a dramatic, explosive, determinedly tough-talking man of thirty-two. Oppenheimer had gone straight from Yale into New York television during the years when there were still strictly disciplined “live” plays for the evening audience. When reviewers began to use the word “genius” in writing about his work on those shows he'd been summoned to Hollywood, where he'd turned down many more movie projects than he accepted, and where his pictures rapidly made a name for him as one of what somebody had decided to call The New Breed.

Like Jack Fields, Oppenheimer was a father of two and divorced, but he was never alone. A bright and pretty young actress named Ellis lived with him, prided herself on finding new ways to please him every day, often gave him long, rapturous looks that he seemed not to notice, and habitually called him “My love”—softly, with the stress on “my.” And she managed to be an attentive hostess too.

“Jack?” she inquired at sunset one afternoon as she handed their guest a drink in a heavy, costly glass. “Did you ever hear what Fitzgerald did when he lived out here at the beach? He put up a sign outside his house that said ‘Honi Soit Qui Malibu.'”

“Oh yeah? No, I'd never heard that.”

“Isn't that wonderful? God, wouldn't it have been fun to be around then, when all the real—”

“Ellie!” Carl Oppenheimer called from across the room, where he was bent over and slamming cabinet doors behind a long, well-stocked bar of rich blond wood and leather. “Ellie, can you check the kitchen and find out what the fuck's happened to all the bouillon?”

“Well, certainly, my love,” she said, “but I thought it was in the
mornings
that you liked bullshots.”

“Sometimes yes,” he told her, straightening up and smiling in a way that suggested exasperation and self-control. “Sometimes no. As it happens, I feel like making up a batch of them now. And the point is simply that I'd like to know how the fuck I can make bullshots without any fucking bouillon, you follow me?”

And as Ellis hurried obediently away, both men turned to watch the movement of firm, quivering buttocks in her skintight slacks.

By then Jack had grown eager to find a place of his own, and perhaps even a girl of his own, and so as soon as the screenplay was outlined—as soon as they'd agreed on what Oppenheimer called the thrust of it—he moved out.

A few miles down the coast highway, in the part of Malibu that looks from the road like nothing more than a long row of weather-beaten shacks pressed together, he rented the lower half of a very small two-story beach house. It had a modest picture window overlooking the ocean and a sandy little concrete porch, but that was practically all it had. He didn't realize until after moving in—and after paying the required three months' rent in advance—that the place was very nearly as dismal and damp as his cellar in New York. Then, in a long-familiar pattern, he began to worry about himself: maybe he was incapable of finding light and space in the world; maybe his nature would always seek darkness and confinement and decay. Maybe—and this was a phrase then popular in national magazines—he was a self-destructive personality.

To rid himself of those thoughts he came up with several good reasons why he ought to drive into town and see his agent right away; and once he was out in the afternoon sun, with his rented car purring along past masses of bright tropical foliage, he began to feel better.

The agent's name was Edgar Todd, and his office was near the top of a new high-rise building at the edge of Beverly Hills. Jack had been in to talk with him three or four times—the first time, when he asked how to go about getting the inscribed photograph of Richard Chamberlain, it had turned out to be a matter that Edgar Todd could settle with a single quick, casual phone call—and each time he'd grown more and more aware that Edgar's secretary, Sally Baldwin, was a strikingly attractive girl.

At first glance she might not quite have fallen into the “girl” category because her carefully coiffed hair was gray, with silver streaks, but the shape and texture of her face suggested she wasn't more than thirty-five, and so did the slender, supple, long-legged way she moved around. She had told him once that she “loved” his book and was certain it would make a wonderful movie some day; another time, as he was leaving the office, she'd said, “Why don't we see more of you? Come back and visit us.”

But today she wasn't there. She wasn't at her trim secretarial desk in the carpeted hall outside Edgar's office, nor was she anywhere else in sight. It was Friday afternoon; she had probably gone home early, and he felt a chill of disappointment until he saw that the door of Edgar's office was ajar. He knocked lightly, twice, then shoved it open and went inside—and there she was, lovelier than ever, seated at Edgar's enormous desk with the spines of at least a thousand shelved, bright-covered novels forming a backdrop to her sweet face. She was reading.

“Hello, Sally,” he said.

“Oh, hi. Nice to see you.”

“Edgar gone for the day?”

“Well, he said it was lunch, but I don't think we'll see him again till next week. It's nice to be interrupted though; I've been reading the worst novel of the year.”

“You do Edgar's reading for him?”

“Well, most. He doesn't have the time, and anyway he hates to read. So I type up little one- and two-page summaries of the books that come in, and he reads those.”

“Oh. Well, listen, Sally, how about coming out for a drink with me?”

“I'd love to,” she said, closing the book. “I was beginning to think you'd never ask.”

And in something less than two hours later, at a small shadowed table in the bar of a famous hotel, they were shyly but firmly holding hands because it was clear and settled that she would come home with him tonight—and, by implication, for the whole weekend. Looking at her, Jack Fields had begun to feel as calm and strong and full of blood as if the notion of his being a self-destructive personality had never occurred to him. He was all right. The world was still intact, and everybody knew what made it go around.

“Only, look, Jack,” she said. “Could we make another stop first? Here in Beverly? Because I'll have to pick up a few things, and anyway I'd like you to see where I live.”

And she directed his driving up the shallow grade that forms the first residential part of Beverly Hills, before the steeper slopes begin. He discovered that all the roads there were arranged in graceful curves, as if their designers had been unable to bear the thought of straight lines, and that there were very tall, elegantly slender palm trees at precisely measured intervals. Some of the big houses along those roads were handsome, some were plain, and some were ugly, but they all suggested wealth beyond the comprehension of an ordinary man.

“Now if you take your next left,” Sally said, “we're practically home. Good. . . . Here.”

“You live
here
?”

“Yup. I can explain everything.”

It was a vast white mansion of the Old South, with at least six columns rising from its porch to its lofty portico, with a great many sun-bright windows, with a long extension of itself in the form of a wing on one side, and, beyond a swimming pool, with several connected outbuildings of the same color and style.

“We always go in this way, past the pool,” Sally said. “Nobody ever uses the front door.”

And the ample room she led him into from the pool terrace was what he guessed would be called a den, though it might easily have been a library if she had somehow contrived to bring Edgar Todd's thousand novels home from the office. Its high walls were paneled in pleasingly dark wood, there were deep leather sofas and armchairs, and there was a fireplace with small flames fluttering in it, though the day was mild. An arrangement of leather-padded wrought-iron benches was built out around the hearth, and on one of the benches sat a pale, sad boy of about thirteen, facing away from the fire and holding his clasped hands between his thighs, looking as though he had come to sit here because there was nothing else to do.

“Hi, Kick,” Sally said to him. “Kicker, I'd like you to meet Jack Fields. This is Kicker Jarvis.”

“Hello, Kicker.”

“Hi.”

“You watch the Dodger game today?” Sally asked him.

“No.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“I don't know; didn't feel like it.”

“Where's your lovely mother?”

“I don't know. Getting dressed, I guess.”

“Kicker's lovely mother is an old friend of mine,” Sally explained. “She's the one who owns this tremendous place; I just live here.”

“Oh?”

And when the boy's mother came into the room a minute later, Jack thought she
was
lovely—as tall and graceful as Sally and even better looking, with long black hair and with blue eyes that lighted up in automatic flirtation at the sound of her name: Jill.

But he didn't really want to meet a woman more desirable than Sally tonight—Sally would be plenty for the time being, even in Hollywood—so he looked closely enough at Jill Jarvis to find something blank or stunned in her heart-shaped face, though he scarcely had time to inspect it before she turned away.

“Sally, look at this,” she said, and she thrust a heavy paperback book into Sally's hands. “Isn't it marvelous? I mean isn't it marvelous? I sent away for it weeks and weeks ago and I'd about given up, but it finally came in the mail today.” Courteously peering, Jack saw that its title was
The Giant Crossword Puzzle Solving Book.
“Look how
thick
it is,” Jill insisted. “I'll
never
get stuck in a puzzle again.”

“Wonderful,” Sally said, giving it back to her. Then she said, “Excuse me a couple of seconds, Jack, okay?” She hurried into the living room, which looked as wide as a lake, and he watched her pretty legs running up a soundless staircase in a shaft of pale afternoon light.

Jill Jarvis told him to sit down and went away somewhere to “get drinks,” leaving him alone with Kicker in what seemed an increasingly awkward silence.

“You go to school around here?” Jack inquired.

“Yeah.”

And that was the end of their talk. The funny-paper section from last Sunday's
Los Angeles Times
lay on the hearth bench and the boy turned sideways to hunch and stare at it, but Jack was fairly sure he wasn't reading or even looking at the pictures; he was only waiting for his mother to come back.

Above the fireplace, in a space plainly meant for some heavy old portrait or landscape, there hung instead a small painting on black velvet, in harshly bright colors, showing the face of a circus clown with a melancholy expression; the artist's signature, so prominently written in white that it might have been the title, read “Starr of Hollywood.” It was the kind of picture you can find on the walls of third-rate bars and lunch counters all over the United States, and in the airless waiting rooms of failing doctors and dentists; it looked so foolishly out of place in this room as to suggest that someone had stuck it there as a joke—but then, so did
The Giant Crossword Puzzle Solving Book
, which now lay displayed alone on a coffee table that must have cost two thousand dollars.