Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (159 page)

“How are you?” he asked me, just as if he hadn’t seen me that morning. “I got involved in a long conversation with a man.”

It was secret too — he cared that much about it.

“I took him to ride,” he went on innocently. “I didn’t realize how much this part of Hollywood had changed.”

“Has it changed?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “Changed completely. Unrecognizable. I couldn’t tell you exactly but it’s all changed — everything. It’s like a new city.” After a moment he amplified, “I had no idea how much it had changed.”

“Who was the man?” I ventured.

“An old friend,” he said vaguely. “Someone I knew a long time ago.”

I had made Wylie try to find out quietly who she was. He had gone over and the ex-star had asked him excitedly to sit down. No — she didn’t know who the girl was — a friend of a friend of someone — even the man who had brought her didn’t know.

So Stahr and I danced to the beautiful music of Glenn Miller playing “I’m on a See-saw.” It was good dancing now with plenty of room. But it was lonely — lonelier than before the girl had gone. For me, as well as for Stahr, she took the evening with her, took along the stabbing pain I had felt — left the great ball-room empty and without emotion. Now it was nothing and I was dancing with an absent minded man who told me how much Los Angeles had changed.

Section 14

They met, next afternoon, as strangers in an unfamiliar country. Last night was gone, the girl he had danced with was gone. A misty rose-and-blue hat with a trifling veil came along the terrace to him and paused, searching his face. Stahr was strange too in a brown suit and black tie that blocked him out more tangibly than a formal dinner coat, or when he was simply a face and voice in the darkness when they first met.

He was the first to be sure it was the same person as before — the upper half of the face that was Minna’s, luminous, with creamy temples and opalescent brow — the coco-colored curly hair. He could have put his arm around her and pulled her close with an almost family familiarity — already he knew the down on her neck, the very set of her backbone, the corners of her eyes and how she breathed — the very texture of the clothes that she would wear.

“Did you wait here all night?” she said, in a voice that was like a whisper.

“I didn’t move — didn’t stir.”

Still a problem remained, the same one — there was no special place to go.

“I’d like tea,” she suggested, “ — if it’s some place you’re not known.”

“That sounds as if one of us had a bad reputation.”

“Doesn’t it?” she laughed.

“We’ll go to the shore,” Stahr suggested. “There’s a place there where I got out once and was chased by a trained seal.”

“Do you think the seal could make tea?”

“Well — he’s trained. And I don’t think he’ll talk — I don’t think his training got that far. What in hell are you trying to hide?”

After a moment she said lightly, “Perhaps the future,” in a way that might mean anything or nothing at all.

As they drove away she pointed at her jalopy in the parking lot.

“Do you think it’s safe?”

“I doubt it. I noticed some black-bearded foreigners snooping around.”

Kathleen looked at him alarmed.

“Really?” She saw he was smiling. “I believe everything you say,” she said. “You’ve got such a gentle way about you that I don’t see why they’re all so afraid of you.” She examined him with approval — fretting a little about his pallor, which was accentuated by the bright afternoon. “Do you work very hard? Do you really always work on Sundays?”

He responded to her interest — impersonal yet not perfunctory.

“Not always. Once we had — we had a house with a pool and all — and people came on Sunday. I played tennis and swam. I don’t swim any more.”

“Why not? It’s good for you. I thought all Americans swam.”

“My legs got very thin — a few years ago and it embarrassed me. There were other things I used to do — lots of things. I used to play handball when I was a kid, and sometimes out here — I had a court that was washed away in a storm.”

“You have a good build,” she said in formal compliment, meaning only that he was made with thin grace.

He rejected this with a shake of his head.

“I enjoy working most,” he said. “My work is very congenial.”

“Did you always want to be in movies?”

“No. When I was young I wanted to be a chief clerk — the one who knew where everything was.”

She smiled.

“That’s odd. And now you’re much more than that.”

“No, I’m still a chief clerk,” Stahr said. “That’s my gift, if I have one. Only when I got to be it I found out that no one knew where anything was. And I found out that you had to know why it was where it was, and whether it should be left there. They began throwing it all at me and it was a very complex office. Pretty soon I had all the keys. And they wouldn’t have remembered what locks they fitted if I gave them back.”

They stopped for a red light and a newsboy bleated at them: “Mickey Mouse Murdered! Randolph Hearst declares war on China!”

“We’ll have to buy his paper,” she said.

As they drove on she straightened her hat and preened herself. Seeing him looking at her she smiled.

She was alert and calm — qualities that were currently at a premium. There was lassitude in plenty — California was filling up with weary desperadoes. And there were tense young men and women who lived back East in spirit while they carried on a losing battle against the climate. But it was everyone’s secret that sustained effort was difficult here — a secret that Stahr scarcely admitted to himself. But he knew that people from other places spurted a pure rill of new energy for a while.

They were very friendly now. She had not made a move or a gesture that was out of keeping with her beauty, that pressed it out of its contour one way or another. It was all proper to itself. He judged her as he would a shot in a picture. She was not trash, she was not confused but clear — in his special meaning of the word which implied balance, delicacy and proportion, she was “nice.”

They reached Santa Monica where there were the stately houses of a dozen picture stars, penned in the middle of a crawling Coney Island. They turned down hill into the wide blue sky and sea and went on along the sea till the beach slid out again from under the bathers in a widening and narrowing yellow strand.

“I’m building a house out here,” Stahr said. “Much further on. I don’t know why I’m building it.”

“Perhaps it’s for me,” she said.

“Maybe it is.”

“I think it’s splendid for you to build a big house for me without even knowing what I looked like.”

“It isn’t so big. And it hasn’t any roof. I didn’t know what kind of roof you wanted.”

“We don’t want a roof. They told me it never rained here. It — “

She stopped so suddenly that he knew she was reminded of something.

“Just something that’s past,” she said.

“What was it?” he demanded. “Another house without a roof?”

“Yes. Another house without a roof.”

“Were you happy there?”

“I lived with a man,” she said. “A long, long time — too long. It was one of those awful mistakes people make. I lived with him a long time after I wanted to get out but he couldn’t let me go. He’d try but he couldn’t. So finally I ran away.”

He was listening, weighing but not judging. Nothing changed under the rose-and-blue hat. She was twenty-five or so. It would have been a waste if she had not loved and been loved.

“We were too close,” she said. “We should probably have had children — to stand between us. But you can’t have children when there’s no roof to the house.”

All right, he knew something of her. It would not be like last night when something kept saying, as in a story conference: “We know nothing about the girl. We don’t have to know much — but we have to know something.” A vague background spread behind her, something more tangible than the head of Siva in the moonlight.

They came to the restaurant, forbidding with many Sunday automobiles. When they got out the trained seal growled reminiscently at Stahr. The man who owned it said that the seal would never ride in the back seat of his car but always climbed over the back and up in front. It was plain that the man was in bondage to the seal, though he had not yet acknowledged it to himself.

“I’d like to see the house you’re building,” said Kathleen. “I don’t want tea — tea is the past.”

Kathleen drank a Coke instead and they drove on ten miles into a sun so bright that he took out two pairs of cheaters from a compartment. Five miles further on they turned down a small promontory and came to the fuselage of Stahr’s house.

A headwind blowing out of the sun threw spray up the rocks and over the car. Concrete mixers, raw yellow wood and builders’ rubble waited, an open wound in the sea-scape, for Sunday to be over. They walked around front where great boulders rose to what would be the terrace.

She looked at the feeble hills behind and winced faintly at the barren glitter, and Stahr saw —

“No use looking for what’s not here,” he said cheerfully. “Think of it as if you were standing on one of those globes with a map on it — I always wanted one when I was a boy.”

“I understand,” she said after a minute. “When you do that you can feel the earth turn, can’t you.”

He nodded.

“Yes. Otherwise it’s all just manana — waiting for the morning or the moon.”

They went in under the scaffolding. One room, which was to be the chief salon, was completed even to the built-in book shelves and the curtain rods and the trap in the floor for the motion picture projection machine. And, to her surprise, this opened out to a porch with cushioned chairs in place and a ping-pong table. There was another ping-pong table on the newly laid turf beyond.

“Last week I gave a premature luncheon,” he admitted. “I had some props brought out — some grass and things. I wanted to see how the place felt.”

She laughed suddenly.

“Isn’t that real grass?”

“Oh yes — it’s grass.”

Beyond the strip of anticipatory lawn was the excavation for a swimming pool, patronized now by a crowd of seagulls who saw them and took flight.

“Are you going to live here all alone?” she asked him. “Not even dancing girls?”

“Probably. I used to make plans but not any more. I thought this would be a nice place to read scripts. The studio is really home.”

“That’s what I’ve heard about American business men.”

He caught a lilt of criticism in her voice.

“You do what you’re born to do,” he said gently. “About once a month somebody tries to reform me, tells me what a barren old age I’ll have when I can’t work any more. But it’s not so simple.”

The wind was rising. It was time to go and he had his car keys out of his pocket, absent mindedly jingling them in his hand. There was the silvery “Hey!” of a telephone, coming from somewhere across the sunshine.

It was not from the house and they hurried here and there around the garden like children playing warmer and colder — closing in finally on a tool shack by the tennis court. The phone, irked with delay, barked at them suspiciously from the wall. Stahr hesitated.

“Shall I let the damn thing ring?”

“I couldn’t. Unless I was sure who it was.”

“Either it’s for somebody else or they’ve made a wild guess.”

He picked up the receiver.

“Hello…. Long distance from where? Yes, this is Mr. Stahr.”

His manner changed perceptibly. She saw what few people had seen for a decade — Stahr impressed. It was not discordant because he often pretended to be impressed but it made him momentarily a little younger.

“It’s the President,” he said to her, almost stiffly.

“Of your company?”

“No, of the United States.”

He was trying to be casual for her benefit but his voice was eager.

“All right, I’ll wait,” he said into the phone, and then to Kathleen, “I’ve talked to him before.”

She watched. He smiled at her and winked as an evidence that while he must give this his best attention he had not forgotten her.

“Hello,” he said presently. He listened. Then he said “Hello” again. He frowned.

“Can you talk a little louder,” he said politely, and then “Who?… What’s that?”

She saw a disgusted look come into his face.

“I don’t want to talk to him,” he said. “No!”

He turned to Kathleen.

“Believe it or not, it’s an orang-outang.”

He waited while something was explained to him at length; then he repeated:

“I don’t want to talk to it, Lew. I haven’t got anything to say that would interest an orang-outang.”

He beckoned to Kathleen and when she came close to the phone he held the receiver so that she heard odd breathing and a gruff growl. Then a voice:

“This is no phoney, Monroe. It can talk and it’s a dead ringer for McKinley. Mr. Horace Wickersham is with me here with a picture of McKinley in his hand — “

Stahr listened patiently.

“We’ve got a chimp,” he said after a minute. “He bit a chunk out of John Gilbert last year…. All right, put him on again.”

He spoke formally as if to a child.

“Hello Orang-outang.”

His face changed and he turned to Kathleen.

“He said hello.”

“Ask him his name,” suggested Kathleen.

“Hello Orang-outang-God, what a thing to be! — Do you know your name?… He doesn’t seem to know his name…. Listen, Lew. We’re not making anything like ‘King Kong’ and there is no monkey in ‘The Hairy Ape.’… Of course I’m sure. I’m sorry, Lew, good bye.”

He was annoyed with Lew because he had thought it was the President and changed his manner acting as if it were. He felt a little ridiculous but Kathleen felt sorry and liked him better because it had been an orang-outang.

They started back along the shore with the sun behind them. The house seemed kindlier when they left it, as if warmed by their visit — the hard glitter of the place was more endurable if they were not bound there like people on the shiny surface of a moon. Looking back from a curve of the shore, they saw the sky growing pink behind the indecisive structure and the point of land seemed a friendly island, not without promise of fine hours on a further day.