Girl of My Dreams (50 page)

“Is there a difference?” Hurd Dawn piped up, wanting to participate from his new and unfamiliar posture of outcast.

“There are plenty of differences,” Bruno said, “but in this fight there are no distinctions. Big business and big fascism are in bed together, and we know what happens when people who like each other get into bed.”

Appreciative titters from women and guffaws from the men who hoped to sleep with them later.

“No, they can't play softball with the hostility of the fascist and capitalist systems surrounding them, with fifth columnists swarming among their own population. Uncle Joe Stalin gives a choice to the peasants—we're trying something new here. If you join our collectives, stop fighting each other, great, welcome to the new Russia, but if you won't we can't help you, sorry. Progressives understand most countries and their institutions are against us. Read the Chandlers'
Los Angeles Times
dispatches making the Soviet Union look like a giant slave colony. The whole world will someday soon be divided between the U.S. and the S.U., and we have to be ready, folks, we have to be ready to make our stand, we have to arm ourselves first with revolutionary ideas and ideals, and then with a plan to undermine the capitalist bosses and their sycophants.”

“But it's not only idiots,” Tutor Beedleman interrupted, “who say labor in the USSR
is
the equivalent of slave labor, not just the Hearst and Chandler newspapers. Are their any real choices of leaders there or even of the kind of work you go into?” Tutor was silenced by catcalls. I couldn't tell if his question was a plant or genuine skepticism.

“No, don't boo,” Bruno Leonard went on from his humidor at the front of the lanai. “It's a good question. There is no Jeffersonovich in Russian history, no Voltairovich. All they had were czars running a police state with savage pogroms and suppressions of any uprising where people tried for a more equitable arrangement between rulers and the ruled. We here have our traditional Bill of Rights liberties, the ideal of equality even if we're far from living up to it. We have democracy at the ballot box, but it's been taken over by parasites to the powerful. In the South colored people aren't even allowed the dubious privilege of voting for parasites. But our revolution will bring no dictator to America, not even a benign representative of the proletariat. It will not be easy. We can never be dictated to here even by the proletariat. Marx himself said the revolution will be toughest here, the hardest to implement, because capitalism is so cemented into our way of living and thinking. It will take enormous effort to break up the reinforced concrete of American capitalism. That's why the Party needs not only money but ideas and work, work, work!”

“Yea Bruno!” shouted Poor Jim Bicker. Whether he was being mocked or admired, Bruno accepted the cheer as flattery. He was contradicting the doctrinaire Greta Kimple and Mort Leech, who said they'd suppress freedom in favor of revealed truth, but he was challenging his audience to take up the socialist project with fervor.

“Wait!” Bruno said. “I can assure you socialism here will have a human face. Make no mistake, there will be a workers' party worthy of the name. We intellectuals must form a durable and lasting alliance with labor unions. This is happening in Europe already and we must make it happen here. We must not fail anymore. Failure is guilt's brother, and we have no time for either. We cannot feel guilty or apologetic about doing what must be done to establish a people's socialism in America with the great Russian Revolution itself as our guide!”

Interrupted by cheers, Bruno Leonard nodded his agreement with the audience. That is, he was agreeing he'd just said something wonderful and that the audience's approval was precisely what he himself approved of. He was giving a B plus to a group of bright but not wholly informed undergraduates who were readying themselves to repeat on a midterm what he'd just said. Bruno was overdoing his case, of course. That's what we did; we overdid.

“Joe Stalin asks us to prepare for a great undertaking,” Bruno said, leaning on his humidor. “Exploitation in this country is as American as apple pie and Mom. You have plenty of apple pie and Mom in your pictures, why not exploitation too?”

Cheers for Bruno were blended with the no-count actor Gates Billings bawling, “Yeah, let's show America to the Americans the way it really is!” Did he really think he could get a part this way?

“What are we to make,” Bruno asked rhetorically, “of what I call the crisis of simultaneity? If Rockefeller rakes in millions while a hobo starves while FDR grins propping up the capitalists while they curse him while Hitler plots death while Stalin builds collectives—can we say all this simultaneity adds up to an alarm bell for action?”

An assistant director, wishing he were on a set, yelled, “Camera, speed, action!”

Gates Billings bleated, “Act now!” Others chimed in but Bruno quieted the room.

I, however, was stuck, lost in the crisis of simultaneity. If everything Bruno Leonard had rattled off—Rockefeller, FDR, Hitler, Stalin—was happening at the same time, time itself being an artificial construct for measuring existence and experience, why couldn't we bring the past forward and shrink the future backward, thereby having everything present in the present? No time like this time.

“Are you taking all this in?” Sylvia, at my elbow, nudged me to her own present.

“Sure am,” I said.

Stout, impassioned, declamatory Bruno Leonard, doubts vanquished, shed all traces of academic restraint now and wound himself up to hortatory incitement.

“What do you do with all the contending information that cascades upon you? I'll tell you what: you let thought become words and words lead to deeds. For once in our lives we do not criticize, we do not complain, we ACT! We don't let the top dogs treat us like trees to lift their legs on. We don't let intellectuals spray perfume on the dung heap of capitalism, we intellectuals and artists for once in our lives ACT. Don't just think, DO. Don't make your peace with the fascists. OVERTHROW THEM!”

Bruno let the shouts and cheers break over him. He held up both hands.

“Those of you who took the advice of Horace Greeley and came west know you didn't find the promised land. But you did find a land of promise, of possibility. We're in the welcoming West, not the hidebound East. Then let us begin tonight, in Santa Monica, on La Mesa Drive in the home of Gloriana Onslow Flower, and let us begin with resolve, determination, open hearts, and, lest we forget, open wallets. This way to the revolution!”

During the extended applause Bertrand the butler reappeared to pass the silver tray around again. Still respectful, but was he also a trifle jaunty? No caviar on his tray now. It was empty until people began placing checks and cash on it. When the tray filled up and there was the threat of money spilling off it, Katinka the Red was right behind Bertrand with a canvas sack she raked the contributions into. Many people were already standing since there hadn't been nearly enough chairs, milling their goodnights to each other, as the tray made its way around the lanai and on into the living room to which most of the conversational revolutionists had adjourned.

I found myself next to Yeatsman, who was writing a check for a thousand dollars, and Mitch Altschuler, who bellowed across the entire house, “Get low, everyone, down where the sharecroppers and factory hands are, get low into your pockets and write high—write the highest check you can afford and then double that!”

Bertrand Munson shoveled his silver tray among the guests with the same combination of propriety and coercion that an elder uses passing a collection plate through the pews after a sermon. So we were led, led ourselves really, into a new kind of sacramental servitude to an institution as insistent on doctrine as the medieval church and no less inquisitorial toward its dissenters. Whoever was naïve enough not to have brought a check, or canny enough not to want to be traced, threw cash onto the tray, usually hundred dollar bills.

As the tray approached me, Mitch Altschuler again solicited the butler, plucking him by his starched white sleeve. “Are you with us, Bertrand?”

“Sir?”

“The Negro is at the heart of our program, Bertrand.”

“Good to hear that, sir.”

“I know Gloriana will be tickled to give you the night off when we have our meetings. We need you, sure, but you need us, too. Can we count on your coming to our unit membership meeting next Thursday?”

“Thursday is my day off, sir.”

“Oh, ah, yes, of course. Good. And no more sir stuff, Bertrand. I'm Mitch. You won't even have to ask Gloriana for the night off. See you Thursday then.” Mitch Altschuler, as the saying went, had bagged his first Negro. He smiled but he was really smiling at himself. His whole unit would be thrilled, proud, envious. “Good to know we can count on you, Bertrand.”

“Thank you, Mr. Mitch,” Bertrand Munson said. “Seeing that there's still going to be a few people who tell the others what to do and all the others will still have to do it, I expect I'll be taking my chances with Mr. Franklin D.” Mitch gaped. To everyone's surprise, Bertrand Munson was declining the honor of joining the chattering insurgency. “Excuse me, Mr. Mitch,” he said. With that, leaving the abruptly crestfallen and bewildered Mitch Altschuler, who might have just seen his chances of doing important P work diminished ever so slightly, the insouciant butler thrust his tray in my direction.

I placed a fifty dollar check on the tray, aware I was at the extreme low end of eleemosynary zeal, but then I was also only a rookie writer. Sylvia wrote a check for ten times that, made out to the Scottsboro Defense Committee as we'd been instructed. I was told later that Gloriana's party had raised just over $62,000, all for the ostensible defense of the Scottsboro Boys—boys, not men, not even young men—who were never mentioned at the Party party. With Sylvia's check at the top of the pile on his silver tray, Bertrand nodded—a hieroglyph of amusement, reserve, bitterness and hauteur—and tilted his head sideways as he made for the next clutch of cheerful contributors.

“I believe we are,
enfin,
excused,” Sylvia said.

Outside, she tried to hand me a dollar from her purse for the still-running Mexican valet who brought around her Chrysler, but I motioned away the bill and pulled out my own. To my chagrin, I had only a ten in my wallet, so that's what the valet got. I hoped Sylvia hadn't seen the ten though we both saw the valet's broad smile revealing his gold front tooth shining in the Chrysler's headlights. “
Muchas muchas gracias, señor
!” annihilated any confidentiality he and I had.

Awkwardly, Sylvia asked me if I'd like to come in when we reached her house. Awkwardly, I accepted. Quickly, she made us two stiff gins and tonic. Quickly, we drank them. The talking was the easy part because there had been so much at the party to gossip about—the people, the cause, what we'd heard. Sylvia seemed to know both who the studio spies were and who was sleeping with whom. “Not that it matters,” she said, taking my hand as she finished her drink.

In her bed, we were unfamiliar, then familiar.

24

Pogo Regnant

After she invited me to stay the night, I could tell Sylvia was grateful when I said I needed to go.

At my Royal the next morning, staring wordblocked at the platen and then at the blank page I rolled onto it, I mooned not about Sylvia but Pammy. I'd be faithful to the shadow that had no substance. Disdainful of others, I'd been impotent in a venture the previous week with a reader from Paramount. Sylvia, bless her, banished that demon.

The night after the night of Gloriana's party, I dreamed a whole row of dreams. In one I'm kicking a rat. I'm on a dark sidewalk and the rat, huge, runs toward me. I kick it like a soccer ball. It flies through the air, lands, runs around and pitches itself toward us again. Us? I don't recognize who I'm with but it's a woman. I kick at the rat and miss. It passes us and turns around to run at us three more times, and then I connect again with a kick that hurls it away and the dream ends. In another dream I say a chaste goodbye to Esther Leah Zangwill and arrive at Pammy's house in the dawn. Then I see the sunrise, but I'm not with Pammy. I ring her doorbell to tell her about the blossoming sunrise. I'm told by Millie her mother's still asleep, don't bother her. I show the sunrise to Millie.

In a third dream I'm having lunch on a train with Sylvia and no less than Franklin D. Roosevelt. I can't believe I'm with FDR himself. I call him Mr. President but Sylvia is more familiar and calls him Franklin, which he appreciates. We talk about strikes, and he says he doesn't like them even though he knows the laboring classes have a point. I think: Laboring Classes? Why is he being so British? The waiter, a black man in a white jacket, brings the bill and FDR reaches into his coat pocket. I say No let me pay for it, Franklin. Oh, now it's Franklin, is it? he says. I say, Well, I mean Mr. President. He reaches again for his wallet, now in a pants pocket below the table. I reach for mine as well.

A rash of staccato dreams follows, images like flash frames, of sunrises. I see Pammy's honey-gold hair with the rising sun backlighting it. I am not with her but see her from a distance. In another flash, I telephone to alert Pammy to the sun. I ask the maid, whose name cornily is Rose, to tell Miss Millevoix the sun is rising. Rose quickly says she won't wake Miss Palmyra, and that flash ends miserably. On its heels is a vision of the two of us on the beach in front of her house, which actually is nowhere near the beach, and we see the sun peek through the dawn and come up a glowing disk over the ocean. Pammy wears a long white robe and holds a flower; the flower has wilted petals. I am wearing a turtleneck sweater over bathing trunks. We walk into the water toward the sunrise, and she vanishes in the waves still holding the flower with the wilted petals.