Die a Little (9 page)

At the polished bar at the Roosevelt Hotel. Corner booth. Gimlets.

Mike Standish leans back and puts forth a long, rich smile.

"Everyone knew Alice. Everyone in Publicity especially. Most of the women in Costume were old ladies, pinch-faced old maids or pinch-faced young virgins. But Alice ... Hell, maybe they all seemed more pinch-faced because Alice was so ... unpinched."

He pulls a cigarette from his gleaming case, fat onyx in its center.

As he taps it leisurely, his smile grows wider. "She would be there at all hours, walking toward you, slow and twisty, a ball gown hanging off one arm, sometimes a cigarette tucked in those red lips. Jesus."

He lights his cigarette and blows a sleek stream upward.

"Of course, she wasn't really my type," he concedes with a half shrug. "Too much going on all the time. Made you really nervous.

Once you started talking to her, she made you feel like the threads in your suit were slowly unraveling.

"Still, she was awfully fun. We'd take her out, the fellows and I.

She'd bring along a few friends. We'd go out drinking, to the Hills or on the water, Laguna Beach. To Ensenada once. Once even to Tijuana. No, twice. That's right. Twice."

"Did you meet Lois Slattery?"

"Who's that?"

"A friend of Alice's."

"What's she look like?"

"Dark hair, short."

"That doesn't really narrow it down. Alice seemed to know a lot of girls."

"Very young-looking. And with slanty eyes, kind of crooked."

Die a Little -- 52 --

Mike grins suddenly, his hand curling around his face in sudden recollection.

"Oh, yeah. One eye higher than the other. That B-girl." He squints one eye and looks up. "Lois? Are you sure? I thought her name was Lisa--or Linda. She came out with us one night. Slumming in ...

Jesus, some bar in Rosecourt. Oh, yes. Lois, huh?"

He looks at me suddenly. "You've met her?"

"Yes."

"I can't picture that, angel." He hands me his cigarette. "Well, what do you know?"

I take a quick drag and hand it back. "What do you mean, 'B-girl'?"

"Oh, what the hell do I know?" he says, shrugging hand somely. "I even had her name wrong."

"Didn't you think it was strange that Alice would know a someone you'd call a B-girl?"

He looks at me, eyes dancing, revealing nothing. Then, he opens his mouth, pauses, and says, plain as that, "No."

Die a Little -- 53 --

[?]*[?]

Suddenly, it is commencement, and then begins a long, rich summer with no classes to teach and lately so much to occupy evenings. I see Mike Standish once or twice a week, but there are also the parties those in Bill and Alice's neighborhood circle hold, and especially Alice herself. These parties always include me, the married couples eager to invite a young single to play with, to engineer setups for, to pepper with questions, reminisce about being young and unattached, an entire life path still unwritten.

As for me, suddenly the world is so much larger than it had been before.

There are gin-drizzled evenings with a few neighbor couples, some of the other teachers and their spouses, a few of Bill's friends from work, along with their wives, everyone laughing and touching arms and elbows, and the bar cart creaking around the room and no kids yet, or the few there are, safely tucked away in gum-snapping babysitters' arms.

Almost every week there is one, usually on Saturday evening. They are cocktail parties, rarely dinner parties, yet they can stretch long into the dinner hour, sometimes beyond. Once in a while, arguments flare up, typically between couples, at times between Bill's friends from the D.A.'s office.

Sometimes there is intrigue spiraling out, whispered conversations by guests slipping into dens or rec rooms, the far corners of the darkened lawns, out by the hibiscus bushes beside the carport, on beds soft with piles of coats.

At first, I go to these parties with Archie Temple, the geology teacher, or Fred Cantor, the salesman, or some setup, usually an awkward one, given the high energy and heavy drinking of these parties.

But when I start seeing Mike Standish more frequently, he comes along, and then we go out afterward, to Rorrtanoff's or even Ciro's.

At all of these parties, Mike thinks everyone there is a hopeless square, except for Alice. But he likes to watch, seated amused on the sofa, sipping his Scotch and making sly comments to me.

Sometimes, a woman flirts with him and he strings her along, winking to me, flashing his gold cuff links, his sleek watch, his slick and slippery eyes. Later, he makes fun of her Mamie Eisenhower bangs or her twitchy eye or her flat accent or her off-the-rack decolletage. And I laugh and laugh no matter who it is or what kindnesses she's shown me. It doesn't matter. I laugh and laugh anyway and don't care.

Die a Little -- 54 --

Alice sometimes dances with the dashing school drama teacher.

They do Latin numbers, Cuban routines. She pulls the edge of her satin skirt to her side, tosses her head back, grins darkly, hotly, and everyone watches in admiration as he twirls her, as they twist and lean and then swing back upright and taut.

Bill claps most loudly of all. He watches her, transfixed, and shakes his head with a smile, and when she finishes he walks over to her, puts an arm around her tiny shoulders, looks down at her and marvels, just marvels. How did it happen, he seems to be wondering, that I married this person?

By the evening's third trip to the bathroom, a face caught in the mirror, a smear of what you were a few hours ago. You totter, you catch a smudgy glimpse, you see an eyelash hanging a bit, lipstick bleeding over the lip line. Heel catches on back hem, hand slips on towel rack, grabbing tightly for shell pink guest towel.

There are more than a few times Mike walks me out of the house and we end up back at his place before we head out for a nightclub or show.

The thing about Mike is he is always ready to go back out again.

He knows just how to rub a cold towel on his face and yours, how to fix you both hot coffee and dry toast, how to make a few calls, shift a few reservations, and you both, not a full hour after arriving at the Hillock Tower Apartments, find yourselves sitting straight-backed and freshly groomed in Mike's buttercup yellow roadster.

Die a Little -- 55 --

[?]*[?]

During the summer, during every past summer so why not this one, I go to the courthouse and have lunch with Bill a few days a week. If he is very busy, it is a quick lunch cart break, the two of us settling at his desk or in the Plaza Las Fuentes over liverwurst or a hot dog.

He leans across his desk, shirtsleeves up and suspenders, and tells me as much as he can about a case he is working on. Three times out of four it seems like he is looking for someone who is likely, he says, long gone.

When he first started, I remember always asking him if it was like in the movies, with finger men and stool pigeons and rats. He'd always laugh and say it both was and wasn't like that, but he could never really explain. When he spoke about his job, it was usually as if he were just a man shuffling papers and making phone calls and conducting interviews across desks and through doorways. This was the way he chose to talk about it.

These lunches seem more important now that Bill is married. They are nearly the only times I see him alone.

Soon, however, Alice begins to have, lunch with Bill too and there aren't enough lunches to go around, given Bill's schedule, which often means eating lunch on the job, driving around and doing his work, whatever it is that day. So, at first, Alice and I drive out together. This doesn't last too long, however, because it feels like a big production. Alice is always perfectly outfitted, with a new hat, silk flowers on her lapel, her hair done at the salon that morning. By the time we make it to the courthouse, it is late and we draw so much attention that Bill begins to feel as though it looks too "fancy."

So we start visiting on alternate weeks. Sometimes, at the last minute, Bill realizes he is going to be free for a quick tuna sandwich if I can come down, and sometimes we meet at Gus's, a diner halfway between work and home. This way, we can have our talks without trouble. We don't need to tell Alice.

These times remind me of how things were before, after Bill returned from the war and we moved to Pasadena together.

Everything had settled beautifully. He was so busy with his police training, and I was so busy with my classes and certification training and teaching. But it worked well because we helped each other, and we knew how to unwind at the end of the long days, listening to Molle Mystery Theatre, This Is Your FBI, and Inner Sanctum on the radio, playing Scrabble, Monopoly, Chinese checkers.

He told me some stories of overseas. He brought back a small stack of photos, and he would explain everything to me, saying, "This was Tom, he was from Virginia and he had a wife and new baby at Die a Little -- 56 --

home, he wrote letters every day," and "This one is of me and Popeye, that's what we called him because of the way his jaw stuck out to the side, he was from the Ozarks and he got shot in the neck by a sniper in Berlin, the first one I knew to get it."

He also had some souvenirs, which he kept in the top drawer of his sideboy. His army-issue pockefknife, a pewter stein, some medals and stripes, even a small, toylike pistol--a Walther PPK, he informed me, not letting me touch it--that he had been allowed to keep when he disarmed a German officer in a skirmish.

The war had been nearly over by the time Bill made it to Europe.

He was one of the last drafted, and most of his time overseas was spent in occupied Germany, supervising the rebuilding. He was shot at more than once, mostly in encounters with hostile civilians or stragglers. But he considered himself very lucky, and the experience was, he always said, fundamental to his decision to enter law enforcement. "Seeing what I saw, people driven to bad things. It made me want to ... I don't know how to put it, exactly. It's just, you realize, most people wouldn't go bad either if ... if the really bad people, the real animals could be stopped. You stop them and you can save all the rest, Lora. You really can."

So rare to hear him speak like this, to speak about himself and what he believed. He curled his fist and lightly punched his thigh with it as he sat beside me and spoke. Where did this come from, my brother feeling things so strongly, knowing things so fervently?

When we were children, a man ran over the bicycle of the little deaf girl next door to us. The man plowed over it, and crushed it to the quick. Nancy, that was her name, was only seven and didn't understand it at all, thought nothing could be so wretched as this.

She kept crying, and Bill, who'd seen the whole thing, seen the man take the corner of the road too quickly and swerve onto the shoulder and knock it down with a crunch, became so angry that he didn't know what to do. He kept pacing, kicking the dirt as Nancy cried and my grandmother comforted her. The next day he traded in his bicycle, only two months old, for a small girl's bicycle to replace Nancy's. When my grandparents and Nancy's, and Nancy herself, crying her big blue eyes out, tried to thank him, he wouldn't even look at them. It embarrassed him. That's how he was.

Die a Little -- 57 --

[?]*[?]

"I think you like Mike Standish a lot." Alice smiles, shaking crushed coconut into the bowl.

"Sure." I smile back, handing her a wooden spoon. I think"--she plucks two oranges from the glazed fruit bowl--"that you're falling for him."

A hot jolt sails through me.

"Don't be silly, Alice." I help her remove the pith, slicing the membrane from its glaring rind with a knife. "We're just friends. We enjoy each other's company."

She begins peeling the pineapple, her fingers heedlessly diving into the spikes. "It's something else. There's something there," she says, her hands now sticky with the juice, and my own stinging with the orange flesh. "Something you like."

Something about how you are with him.

She splashes some liqueur into the bowl. It drizzles over the sugar crystals, swirled in with the vanilla extract. Our hands are matted with pulp, with juice, with the soft skin of coconut beneath our fingernails. I turn my hand around and lick the heel, feeling the sweet sting. Why not?

Mike working a room, patting men on the back, running his softly used hands on the backs of women's necks. It is clear he will go further, rise higher than some of the other men in the publicity department because he never seems too eager. And because he never has the look of a man with something to sell. He is always on the make, but only in the most general, most genial way, a way that suggests he is enjoying the ride while it lasts and shouldn't we all, too?

He can play tennis with the actors, go hunting with the directors, golf with the producers, make the nightclub scene with the new talent. He is always willing to put an ingenue on his arm for the premiere, or walk in with the mistress while the big shot walks with his wife.

He can tell bawdy jokes and read racing forms. He knows the right restaurants to be at and the right times to be at them, he knows the drinks to order, the maitre d's to grease. He can tell the studio folk the best place to vacation; he has the steamer trunk company number on hand, the dealer to go to for the latest cars, the company from which to rent the yacht, the tailor to get just the right cut. He knows which lawyers to call and when, which reporters to leak to and which to throw off the scent. These are valuable things for a Die a Little -- 58 --