We'll Always Have Paris Page 14

  ‘We’re lucky we found this! Don’t talk about it!’

  ‘Or maybe this is Ohio. Maybe we never went west, years ago.’

  ‘This,’ he said, ‘is California.’

  ‘What’s the name of this place?’

  ‘Coldwater.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘On a hot day like this? Coldwater.’

  ‘You sure this isn’t Mellow Glen? Or Breezeway Falls?’

  ‘At high noon, those all sound good.’

  ‘Maybe it’s Inclement, Nebraska.’ She smiled. ‘Or Devil’s Prong, Idaho. Or Boiling Sands, Montana.’

  ‘Go back to the icehouse names,’ he said.

  ‘Mint Willow, Illinois.’

  ‘Ahh.’ He closed his eyes.

  ‘Snow Mountain, Missouri.’

  ‘Yes.’ He stirred the swing and they swung back and forth.

  ‘But I know the best,’ she said. ‘Remembrance. That’s where we are. Remembrance, Ohio.’

  And by his smiling silence, eyes shut as they glided, she knew that indeed was were they were.

  ‘Will they find us here?’ she asked, suddenly apprehensive.

  ‘Not if we’re careful, not if we hide.’

  ‘Oh!’ she said.

  Because at the far end of the street, in the glare of bright sun, a group of men appeared suddenly, fanning out in the dust.

  ‘There they are! Oh, what’ve we done that they chase us this way? Are we robbers, Tom, or thieves, did we kill someone?’

  ‘No, but they followed us here to Ohio, anyway.’

  ‘I thought you said this was California.’

  He lolled his head back and stared into the blazing sky. ‘God, I don’t know anymore. Maybe they put the town on rollers.’

  The strangers, a short way off in their own world of dust, were pausing now. You could hear their voices barking under the trees.

  ‘We’ve got to run, Tom! Let’s move!’ She tugged at his elbow, tried to pull him to his feet.

  ‘Yeah, but look. All the little things that’re wrong. The town…’ He glided, loose-mouthed, loose-eyed, in the swing. ‘This house. Something about the porch. Used to be three steps coming up. Now it’s four.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I felt the change, with my feet. And those stained-glass panes around the door window, they’re blue and red. Used to be orange and milk white.’

  He gestured with a tired hand.

  ‘And the sidewalks, trees, houses. Whole damn town. I can’t figure it.’

  She stared and it began to come clear what it was. Someone with a big hand had scooped up the entire known familiar town of her childhood–the churches, garages, windows, porches, attics, bushes, lawns, lampposts–and poured it into a glass oven, there to know a fever so intense that everything melted and warped. Houses expanded a little too large or shrunk too small from their old size, sidewalks tilted, steeples grew. Whoever had glued the town back together had lost the blueprint. It was beautiful but strange.

  ‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘Yes, you’re right. I used to know every crack in the sidewalk with my roller skates. It’s not the same.’

  The strangers came running and turned off at an alley.

  ‘They’re going around the block,’ she said. ‘Then they’ll find us here.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe, maybe not.’

  They sat, not moving, listening to the hot green silence.

  ‘I know what I want,’ she said. ‘I want to go in the house and open the icebox door and drink some cold milk and go in the pantry and smell the bananas hung on a string from the ceiling, and eat a powdered doughnut out of the bin.’

  ‘Don’t try to go into the house,’ he said, eyes shut. ‘You’ll be sorry.’

  She leaned over to look into his drawn face.

  ‘You’re scared.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘To do a simple thing like open the front door!’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, finally. ‘I’m scared. We can’t run any further. They’ll catch us and take us back to that place.’

  She laughed suddenly. ‘Weren’t they funny people? Wouldn’t take money from us for staying there. I liked the women’s costumes, all white and starched.’

  ‘I didn’t like the windows,’ he said. ‘The metal grating. Remember when I made a noise like a hacksaw and the men came running?’

  ‘Yes. Why do they always run?’

  ‘Because we know too much, that’s why.’

  ‘I don’t know anything,’ she said.

  ‘They hate you for being you and me for being me.’

  They heard voices in the distance.

  The woman took a mirror from a wadded handkerchief in her pocket, breathed on it, and smiled in welcome. ‘I’m alive. Sometimes, in that place, I lay on the floor and said I was dead and they couldn’t bother me anymore. But they threw water on me and made me stand up.’

  Shouting, six men turned the corner fifty yards away and started toward the house where the man and woman sat in the swing, fanning their faces with their hands.

  ‘What did we do to be hunted like this?’ said the woman. ‘Will they kill us?’

  ‘No, they’ll talk soft and kind and walk us back out of town.’

  He jumped up, suddenly.

  ‘Now what?’ she cried.

  ‘I’m going inside and wake your mother from her nap,’ he said. ‘And we’ll sit at the round table in the living room and have peach shortcake with whipped cream, and when those men knock on the door, your mother’ll just tell them to go away. We’ll eat with the silverware your mother got from the Chicago Tribune in 1928 with those pictures of Thomas Meighan and Mary Pickford on the handles.’

  She smiled. ‘We’ll play the phonograph. We’ll play the record “The Three Trees, There, There, and–There!”’

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We have to go!’

  The six men spied the man and woman on the dim front porch, shouted, and ran forward.

  ‘Hurry!’ screamed the woman. ‘Get inside, call Mother and Sister, oh, hurry, here they come!’

  He flung the front door wide.

  She rushed in after him, slammed the door, and turned.

  There was nothing behind the front wall of the house except strutworks, canvas, boards, a small meadow, and a creek. A few arc-lights stood to each side. Stenciled on one papier-mâché inner wall was STUDIO #12.

  Footsteps thundered on the front porch.

  The door banged open. The men piled in.

  ‘Oh!’ the woman screamed. ‘The least you could do is knock!’

  If Paths Must Cross Again

  It was almost unbelievable when they found out. Dave Lacey couldn’t believe it, and Theda didn’t dare. It shocked them gently, stunned them, then turned them a bit cold, and they were sad and wondrous all at once.

  ‘No, it can’t be,’ insisted Theda, clenching his hand. ‘It just can’t. I went to Central School, the eighth grade, and that was in 1933, and you—’

  ‘Sure,’ said Dave, delightedly out of breath. ‘I came to town in 1933, right there to Brentwood, Illinois, I swear it, and I roomed in the YMCA right across the street from Central School for six months. My parents had divorce troubles in Chicago and packed me off up there from April to September!’

  ‘Oh, Lord.’ She sighed. ‘What floor did you live on?’

  ‘The fifth,’ said he. He lit a cigarette, gave it to her, lit another, and leaned back against the leather wall of the La Bomba cocktail lounge. Soft music played somewhere in dimness; both paid it no heed. He snapped his fingers. ‘I used to eat at Mick’s, half a block down the street from the Y.’

  ‘Mick’s!’ cried Theda. ‘I ate there, too. Mother said it was a horrid greasy sort of place, so I ate there on the sly. Oh, Lordy, David, all those years ago, and we didn’t even know it!’

  His eyes were distant, thinking back quietly. He nodded gently. ‘Why, I ate at Mick’s every noon. Sat down at the end where I could watch girls from school walk by in
bright dresses.’

  ‘And here we are in Los Angeles, two thousand miles away and ten years removed from it, and I’m twenty-four,’ said Theda, ‘and you’re twenty-nine, and it took us all these years to meet!’

  He shook his head uncomprehendingly. ‘Why didn’t I find you then?’

  ‘Maybe we weren’t supposed to meet then.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘I was scared. That’s probably it. I was a frightened sort. Girls had to waylay me. I wore horn-rims and carried thick books under my arm instead of muscles. Lord, Lord, Theda, darling, I ate more hamburgers at Mike’s.’

  ‘With big hunks of onion,’ said Theda. ‘And hotcakes with syrup. Remember?’ She began to think and it was hard, looking at him. ‘I don’t remember you, Dave. I send my mind back, searching frantically, back a decade, and I never saw you then. At least not the way you are now.’

  ‘Perhaps you snubbed me.’

  ‘I did if you flirted.’

  ‘No. I only remember looking at a blond girl.’

  ‘A blond girl in Brentwood in the year 1933,’ said Theda. ‘In Mike’s at twelve o’clock on a spring day.’ Theda thought back. ‘How was she dressed?’

  ‘All I remember is a blue ribbon in her hair, tied in a large bow, and I have an impression of a blue polka-dot dress and young breasts just beginning to rise. Oh, she was pretty.’

  ‘Do you remember her face, Dave?’

  ‘Only that she was beautiful. You don’t remember single faces out of a crowd after so much time’s passed. Think of all the people you meet on the street every day, Theda.’

  She closed her eyes. ‘If I’d only known then that I’d meet you later in life, I would have looked for you.’

  He laughed ironically. ‘But you never know those things. You see too many people every week, every year, and most of them are destined for obscurity. All you can do, later, is look back at the dim movements of the years and see where your life briefly touched, flickered against another’s. The same town, the same restaurant, the same food, the same air, but two different paths and ways of living, oblivious one of the other.’ He kissed her fingers. ‘I should have kept my eyes open for you, too. But the only girl I noticed was that blond girl with the ribbon hair.’

  It irritated her. ‘We rubbed elbows, we actually passed on the street. Why, on summer nights, I bet you were down at the carnival at the lake.’

  ‘Yes, I went down. I looked at the colored lights reflected in the water and heard the merry-go-round music jangling at the stars!’

  ‘I remember, I remember,’ she said eagerly. ‘And maybe some nights you went to the Academy Theatre?’

  ‘I saw Harold Lloyd’s picture Welcome Danger there that summer.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I was there. I remember. And they had a short feature with Ruth Etting singing “Shine On, Harvest Moon.” Follow the bouncing ball.’

  ‘You’ve got a memory,’ he said.

  ‘Darling, so near and yet so far. Do you realize we practically knocked each other down going by for six months. It’s murderous! Those brief months together and then ten years until this year. It happens all the time. We live a block from people in New York, never see them, go to Milwaukee and meet them at a party. And tomorrow night—’

  She stopped talking. Her face paled and she held his strong tanned fingers. Dim lights played off his lieutenant’s bars, winking them strangely, hypnotically.

  He had to finish it for her, slowly. ‘Tomorrow night I go away again. Overseas. So damn soon, oh, so damn soon.’ He made a fist and beat the table slowly, with no noise. After a while he looked at his wristwatch and exhaled. ‘We’d better go, darling. It’s late.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Please, Dave, just a moment more.’ She looked at him. ‘I’ve got the awfulest feeling. I’m scared stiff. I’m sorry.’

  He closed his eyes, opened them, looked around, and saw the faces. Theda did likewise. Perhaps they both thought the same strange thoughts.

  ‘Look around, Theda,’ he said. ‘Remember all these faces. Maybe, if I don’t come back, you may meet someone else again and you’ll go with them six months and suddenly discover that your paths crossed before–on a July night 1944 at a cocktail place called La Bomba on the Sunset Strip. And, oh yeah, you were with a young lieutenant named David Lacey that night, whatever happened to him? Oh, he went to war and didn’t come back–and well, by gosh, you’ll discover that one of these faces in the room right now was here seeing this, seeing me talk to you now, noting your beauty and hearing me say “I love you, I love you.” Remember these faces, Theda, and maybe they’ll remember us, and—’

  Her fingers went upon his lips, sealing in any other words. She was crying and afraid and her eyes blinked a wet film through which she saw the many faces of people looking her way, and she thought of all the paths and patterns, and it was awful, the future, David—She looked at him again, holding him so tightly, and she said that she loved him over and over.

  And all the rest of the evening he was a boy in horn-rims with books under his arm, and she was a golden-haired girl with a very blue ribbon tied in her long bright hair…

  Miss Appletree and I

  No one remembered how it began with Miss Appletree. It seemed Miss Appletree had been around for years. Every time Nora made a bad biscuit or didn’t put on her lipstick when she came to the breakfast table, George would laughingly say, ‘Watch out! I’ll run off with Miss Appletree!’

  Or when George had his night out with the boys and came home slightly eroded and worn away by the sands of time, Nora would say, ‘Well, how was Miss Appletree?’

  ‘Fine, fine,’ George would say. ‘But I love only you, Nora. It’s good to be home.’

  As you can see, Miss Appletree was around the house for years, invisible as the smell of grass in April, or the scent of chestnut leaves falling in October.

  George even described her: ‘She’s tall.’

  ‘I’m five feet seven in my stocking feet,’ said Nora.

  ‘She’s willowy,’ said George.

  ‘I’m spreading a bit with the years,’ said Nora.

  ‘And she’s fairy yellow in the hair.’

  ‘My hair is turning mousy,’ said Nora. ‘It used to shine like the sun.’

  ‘She’s a quiet sort,’ said George.

  ‘I gossip far too much,’ said Nora.

  ‘And she loves me blindly, passionately, with not a doubt in her mind or soul, wildly, insanely,’ said George, ‘as no woman with brains could ever love a shameful bumbling old drone like me.’

  ‘She sounds like an avalanche,’ said Nora.

  ‘But do you know,’ said George, ‘when the avalanche rolls away and life must go on, I always turn to you, Nora. Miss Appletree is quite impossible. I always come back to my one and only love, the woman who doubts I am a God after all, the woman who knows I put my right foot into my left shoe and is diplomatic enough to give me two right shoes at a time like that, the woman who realizes that I’m a weather vane in every wind yet never tries to tell me that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, so why am I lost? Nora, you know every pore in my face, every hair in my ear, every cavity in my teeth; but I love you.’

  ‘Fare thee well, Miss Appletree!’ said Nora.

  And so the years went by.

  ‘Hand me the hammer and some nails,’ said George one day.

  ‘Why?’ said his wife.

  ‘This calendar,’ he said. ‘I’m going to nail it down. The leaves fall off it like a deck of cards somebody dropped. Good Lord, I’m fifty years old today! Hand me that hammer quick!’

  She came and kissed his cheek. ‘You don’t mind terribly, do you?’

  ‘I didn’t mind yesterday,’ he said. ‘But today I mind. What is there about units of ten that so frightens a man? When a man’s twenty-nine years old and nine months it doesn’t faze him. But on his thirtieth birthday, O Fates and Furies, life is over, love is done and dead, the career is up the flue or down the chute, either way. And a man goes
along the next ten, twenty years, through thirty, past forty, on toward fifty, reasonably keeping his hands off Time, not trying to hold on to the days too hard, letting the wind blow and the river run. But Good Lord, all of a sudden you’re fifty years old, that nice round total, that grand sum and–bang! Depression and horror. Where have the years gone? What has one done with one’s life?’