‘I don’t care, Sid. It’s a vice. Like booze, or stuffing your kisser or beating your kids. It’s not relaxation, it’s not entertainment, how can you call it a game with those stakes?’
Bernice had planted herself in the curved adobe archway that divided the living room from the den in the small apartment on Roxbury. Her hands were on her hips, her tongue moved as if it had a demon of its own, her green eyes were flashing fire. No mistaking it, Bernice was furious. Why? Because Sid was setting up the card table for the Wednesday night poker game. The men took turns having it: Toots Bauer, Freddie DeCastro, Maxie Kearns, Hank Devine. Tonight it was Sid’s. And if she could only just tolerate him gambling in other houses, she found it unbearable in her own. She had not always been so opposed. Once she had found Sid’s connections and preoccupations fascinating, they were so refreshingly different, she had thought, from her own. But now that difference was hurting.
‘It’s crazy, Sid. A long drawn-out convoluted form of larceny. They’d throw every one of you in jail if you robbed each other in the street!’
Sid had unfolded the card table and was snapping out the legs. With a final flourish he turned it upright and checked to see if it was stable. Then he dragged it directly under the shade of a lamp that hung from the ceiling. He adjusted the height of the lamp by pulling on its cord.
‘At least in jail there’s no rent!’
After checking again that the table was steady Sid brushed down the baize with several short swipes of his hand and then, bending closer, blew away any fluff with his breath. The light from the lamp with its wide, conical shade, softened his features, flattening them somewhat, so that his thin, pointed face seemed more rounded, more innocent and benign. Whereas Bernice, in shadow, was as dark as her mood.
‘We can’t go on living on credit. What are we supposed to do when it runs out? Move to Boyle Heights? Your buddies would really love that! And you know what? It would serve them right. We’d have just enough room to hold the games in the bathroom. You hear me Sid? It’s meshugga, absolutely, totally, to even contemplate the risk.’
She knew as the words spurted out that she was taking risks of her own, but the demon had hold of her and she couldn’t stop. Though on the surface Sid was a mild, good-humoured man, it was dangerous to push too hard. There was a point at which he could change, quite suddenly, and plunge into a recklessness that would beggar anything that had gone before. But her demon possessed a logic that was too compelling, too irrefutable. She tried a new tack.
‘You’re not sleeping, Sid—soon you’ll be giving it up altogether.’
On a small rectangular server on wheels, to the side of the green baize card table, Sid had piled plates with sandwiches (corned beef and dill pickle, pastrami and dill pickle), a bowl of chopped chicken liver with a small tray of melba toast, and some glasses and an ice bucket and a packet of paper napkins. He moved this closer to where he’d be sitting and began setting out the chairs.
This absorption of his was infuriating. Her voice was rising again, shrill, infused with all the power of her profession: ‘So what if you lose this time? What are we going to pay for it with? We can hardly afford the cold cuts. I’m getting embarrassed to walk into Nate n’ Al’s in case they ask about the account.’
Out of his trousers pocket Sid pulled the brand new deck, still in its glossy wrapper; he patted it and put it on the table, near the edge. ‘Don’t go to Nate n’ Al’s. Go to the guy at the market.’ He started whistling as he began setting out the chips.
How could he be so maddeningly cheerful? She hadn’t paid the bill, and neither had he, and they weren’t making any money, either one of them, that she could see.
He lifted the bottle out of a bag and set it on the server beside the ice bucket. ‘You can’t be serious. Sid! Johnny Walker Black!’
‘The guys don’t drink that much, Bernice. Freddie’s got an ulcer, Toots has to watch his heart …’
With a mob like Toots Bauer, Hank Devine, Maxie Kearns and Freddie DeCastro on the premises, who would have thought Paul Hazelwood, a young rugby five-eight from Queenscliff, was the wild card? He looked mild enough for a gathering force that could blow events either way. He looked puzzled, even a bit cowed. He stood on the steps leading to the Cowans’ front door, one foot on one step, the other on the step lower down, his shiny new chinos straining on his muscular thighs, and ran a hand over the short stiff curls on his head. Across the lintel hung a band of crepe paper, one blue streamer twisted around a white streamer, dangling from which was a cardboard H-A-P-P-Y-H-A-N-U-K-K-A-H in gold. And just below, on the door itself, pinned underneath the knocker, was a large Star of David, again in blue and white: the top, inverted triangle in blue, the bottom, intersecting it, in white. There was a yellow harvest moon ballooning over the roofs of the Spanish Mission apartment blocks, though it was late December, and the sky to go with it was a gaudy blue, a backdrop blue, flat and electric as if it might have been painted. All this seemed strange yet not entirely strange to Hazelwood—it was as warm here as it was in Australia at Christmas—but the not-quite-real-sky and the decorations especially bewildered him. He heard the rumble of male voices inside and who knows? perhaps this is all that he needed to restore his mettle, although he hesitated again before lifting the brass knocker and letting it drop with a thud against the Star.
‘Evelyn! Your date!’
‘She’s always late,’ Bernice said with a grimace to Paul. ‘Come sit down.’
He followed her to the den where the television set emitted a cool blue light not unlike the glow from an ice cube. When he sat down she turned the set off, and he watched the cube melt to a drop then disappear. He heard the men’s voices more distinctly then.
‘Would you like a drink? May as well.’
Bernice went to a cabinet and opened the door. A light came on and Paul realised it was a fridge. He looked around at the rest of the room, at the pictures of circles and triangles and little stick figures on the walls, and at the lamps recessed into boxes cantilevered just below the ceiling, noting that they were made from the same sort of mellow wood as the cabinet with the fridge. Evelyn’s mother poured Budweiser from a can into a glass. She was small like Evelyn, and there was a youthfulness about her—not what Paul would have expected from a girl’s mother—but there were also lines around her mouth, deep ones that ran from her nose to the corners of her lips in a kind of disappointed pout. She wore a pair of old slacks with paint or something on them, a green jumper unravelling at the waistband and cuffs, and her hair was matted down under a scarf.
As she was handing him his glass one of the men came in from the other room, started for the fridge, but stopped on seeing Bernice. ‘Hiya, Bernie,’ he said with a sheepish smile. ‘Got any sarse?’ He was a short, rather delicate man, with regular features and acne-scarred skin and a spotted bow tie. ‘The quack says I should go easy on the booze.’
Evelyn’s mother went back to the fridge and peered inside. ‘We’ve got root beer. Will that do?’
‘Sarse, root beer. Same diff. Either one’s gonna pickle my insides quicker than any booze would, but doc’s rules.’
‘Freddie, this is Paul. Paul …’
‘Hazlewood.’
‘From Sydney.’
Freddie took Paul’s hand and gave it a light shake. ‘Freddie DeCastro.’
‘Sydney, Australia,’ Bernice said.
‘Wooo. That’s a long way. What are you here for kid?’
‘I’ll go see what’s holding Evelyn up,’ said Bernice.
A guy in the fraternity house where Paul had been staying had lent Paul his Chevrolet, a convertible; they had the top down. A breeze blew off the ocean, stirring up the slipstream from the car. Paul had taken Evelyn to a bowling alley downtown, and her ears were still ringing from the crack of the balls against the pins. In the short time he’d been in Los Angeles Paul had become a regular; he got on better with the patrons of the bowling alley than with the guys at the fraternity, a group of them even let him play occasionally in their band, and he liked the cheap beer. Because he had drunk so much of it Evelyn was driving, and she was driving without purpose, or rather, with the purpose of staying in Paul’s company as long as she could. As they rode down Olympic towards Santa Monica, right past the grassy park opposite the apartment on Roxbury, she told him (only because he asked) the story of Hanukkah, of how Judah the Maccabee led his band of Jewish guerrillas against the Seleucid tyrant Antiochus, who had desecrated the temple in Jerusalem by staging orgies there in honour of Zeus. She made it sound like five hundred skinny Mort Sahls brandishing sticks, holding off the mighty Seleucids against all odds. ‘When they got to the temple they found it burned and sacked but Judah rededicated it, lighting the lamps of the great menorah—you know those candlesticks? Only then they used oil. Anyway, there was only enough oil to last one night, but God kept the lamps alight for eight. It’s what we have instead of Christmas.’
‘I’m not religious myself.’
Evelyn’s hair flapped round her face and now and then into her mouth. She had to brush it aside. ‘Things have been going badly for Mom and Sid. I think she’s got it in her head that she’s done the wrong thing or something. That maybe she’s being punished. We’ve never gone in for much of that palaver before. But there’s a game you play, with a draydel—a kind of top. We used to play for pennies, my cousins and I, when we were kids. It’s symbolic I guess.’
Paul recalled the tattered green jumper and the paint-spattered slacks. ‘What happened?’
‘Happened? Oh, I don’t know. They got crushed.’
‘With your mother … and Sid.’
‘With them?’ Evelyn sighed. ‘Nothing. That’s just the point.’ Evelyn raised her eyebrows, in the knowing way people do when speaking about their parents. ‘It’s been going on for a while. Sid can’t get work, but he doesn’t want Mom to. Mom thinks it’s her fault, so she goes ahead and tries to get jobs anyway, but she hasn’t been able to land anything either. Well, maybe the odd commercial.’
‘Why can’t they work?’
‘Ever heard of McCarthy?
‘You mean the jockey?’
‘The jockey?’
‘Darby McCarthy. Okay, he’s only an apprentice. But he’s run some bloody good races.’
Evelyn laughed. How good it was to be with someone who didn’t even know. ‘There’s a senator here.’ She took a small swallow before going on. ‘You see, back in the thirties, forties—whenever—Mom was a communist.’
Paul blinked at the picture in his mind of the lady in the scarf and slacks. ‘For long?’
‘She says like twenty minutes. But it was long enough.’
It was Maxie’s deal. Maxie was a burly man, with big beefy hands and a round red face and a round fleshy nose. In other places and other times he might have been a butcher, a ritual slaughterer, but in the Los Angeles of 1957 he made a living in public relations.
The cards flipped out of Maxie’s sweating hands. So far Sid had a pair of sixes and the jack of spades in the hole. When the jack of hearts came flopping towards him he saw he had a chance for a full house—three juicy jacks and a pair—but glancing around the table told him that the chance was slim. Maxie had a jack face up, so did Toots. So that meant one left in the deck, if it wasn’t somebody’s hole card. Sid thought maybe he should fold. If he had any sense he’d get out, cut his losses then and there. But he still might do well with a pair, or three of a kind, if he got dealt another six …
‘I’m raising,’ said Toots, in a haze of cigar smoke. They’d set a limit but Sid hadn’t wanted it low and now Toots was raising again. Toots was back at Universal and could afford to. He was so small he had to jump out of his chair to push in his chips but two months on a salary and he was throwing his weight around. Did something for a guy, getting a job back after all that time. Things were loosening up a bit at the studios. Some they take back, some still forced to diversify. With the small fry, who’s to know? And now Hank was following. Was he kidding?
Sid felt almost dizzy watching the piles of chips slide across the baize, charging towards the pot in the centre of the table like battleships, destroyers, funnels glittering in the glare, or slipping off in the moonlight out of some distant island harbour. There was that story about the Pacific theatre I’d always wanted to do. Great material. Pity Stanley Roberts and everybody’s uncle beat me to it.
He was conscious of the others waiting; a restlessness crackled around the table.
His chance was slim but the pot was looking good.
‘You hear Fox’s taken up the option on that Roth book, what is it? Call it, something or other. You ought to look into it, Sid.’
‘Don’t bamboozle me, Hank.’
‘Call it Sleep? They’ll never make a picture out of that. Just look at the title. It doesn’t move. Fox has had the option for years.’
‘So what does Sid care? They’ll be more likely to take a script of his if they think it won’t hit the screen. Then they won’t have to worry about the credits.’
Sid took another moment to study the table then looked up at Hank. As a player, Hank was so-so. Cunning but less than cool. The very fact that he was introducing the subject of work meant he had a lousy hand. Anyone else it could be bluffing but not with Hank. There he was, a tall gangling schlemiel with hollow cheeks and a bony nose and an adam’s apple that couldn’t stop bobbing, and he didn’t have the savvy to wipe that smirk off his face.
Sid pushed his chips into the pot. He was staying in.
There were two favourite spots for lovers in Los Angeles: Mulholland Drive at the crest of the Santa Monicas with a view of the sparkle in the brown velvet night below, or the ocean. There was a joke about submarine races, to be spied from the top of Mulholland, but the ocean didn’t seem to need an excuse, ironic or otherwise. The ocean was a rich lode for lovers, a vast swelling volume of possibilities, with auras and fragrances redolent of other possibilities, echoing patterns devised a long time ago. Pelicans with wobbly beaks plucked anchovies from the brine, anemones opened and closed to its sluicing, shrimp floated down through its shadows, tuna and bass and barracuda flashed beneath the glassy rhythms of its waves. Evelyn, out of some instinct perhaps, was heading seaward. In spring, she remembered, the grunion flared like torches on the sand. The long supple drive along Sunset and down the canyon, with the smells of cypress and fresh, sea-salt air, was intoxicating enough in itself; and when they reached the highway and the concrete parking lot facing the breakers, joining the line of other cars poised as if waiting for the movie to come on at a drive-in, they might have switched off the engine and stayed in their car like the other couples did and necked.
But Paul, a foreigner to this custom, opened the door on the passenger side and jumped out. He clasped his arms behind his head and inhaled. The night was balmy in spite of the breeze, the moonlight on the tumbling water enticing. Yet something checked him, primed with beer and the ozone as he was, from doing what he would have done without thinking at Curl Curl or Bilgola. So instead of stripping down to his briefs and racing headlong into the surf, he walked with Evelyn along the littered beach, the soft wind tingling round his jaw, his shoes filling up with gum wrappers and sand, until they both got tired or thought it might be nicer just to sit and watch the splash and foam and spray. They sat with their arms around their knees, in full view of the couples petting in their cars, if any of them had been interested enough to see what might be going on ahead.
But Paul and Evelyn sat chastely, absurd perhaps for both of them, certainly for this spot, and why? Maybe it was because of that ocean shivering and swelling before them, such a huge, prodigious expanse. So they talked; talked about things they thought they understood, grabbing them like rafts to carry them through the waves. They talked about jazz, and about America, about their courses at the university where they had, most improbably, met.
‘Primitive Lit. What the hell? I reckoned it would be nursery rhymes, that sort of thing. An easy cop.’
‘Beowulf? Gilgamesh? They’re adventures, quests.’
‘You know them?’
‘A little.’
‘Then you could help.’
‘Like I did with Ancient History? No thanks.’
‘But I passed!’
Evelyn scooped up a handful of sand, waited a moment, and tossed it.
Ducking, Paul laughed. ‘But you’re such an excellent teacher,’ he grinned.
‘Don’t you think it’s horrible that you can pick my brains an hour before the final and walk in and take it without ever once looking at the text? What do you learn by that?’
‘Look,’ he said, tapping her on the knee. ‘I’m having a bloody good time. That’s what I’m here for. To play football and have a good time.’
‘It’s horrible.’
‘Why is it horrible? What are you going to do with Gilga- whatever it is. You’ll get married, have kids …’
‘You make it sound like a sentence.’
‘It’s the way it is.’
‘Don’t you have any dreams? Something you want to do with your life? Besides knocking around bowling alleys and bars?’
‘Sure. I’d like to play for Australia. Get the goal-kicking record and play for Australia.’
‘That’s all?’
‘That’s all? It’s not that easy.’
‘Yeah, but what are you going to do then? You can’t play rugby union forever. Besides, it doesn’t pay.’
‘You play for the love of it. It’s an art. Money doesn’t come into it.’
‘Money comes into all art, unfortunately.’
‘It shouldn’t.’
‘But it does. Money, and politics. I’d always wanted to be a writer until I saw what happened to Sid.’
‘A rough patch. He’ll come good.’
Evelyn shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. I think it’s knocked it all out of him. I’ve seen him, sitting in front of a typewriter day after day, with nothing to show at the end of it but a blank piece of paper in the carriage. The thing is, it’s so unfair. It wasn’t even him who was the communist.’
Bernice mixed her colours on the breadboard on the kitchen table. The problem was keeping them from getting muddy. A picture was taking shape on the easel but of what? It was green, it was brown. She forced herself to imagine a tree in a leafy wood, a man with an indistinct face. But no. What she admired was the whimsy of the Klees in the den: his arrows and wheels and delicate little machine birds suspended in colour-washed clouds. And what did she get? This soup.
Hobbies. They were something that actors accumulated, time-killers, and, if they were good enough, second strings to their bows. The trouble was, she simply wasn’t good enough. Bernice, you’re an amateur, the paint on your canvas is too hopelessly, hopelessly mired.
Her nose twitched from the reek of the paint, the turps, the rag soaked in linseed oil. She bit her lip. She took the palette knife, mixed a bit more prussian blue with the green, and slapped a gob of this onto the canvas. Then she spread it, as she would butter, down the right side, taking care to keep her hand steady and the paint thick and ridged. But the new paint was sucked up in the old, and the whole thing was so dispiriting that she felt like flinging the breadboard at the canvas. And the house was so deathly quiet, which wasn’t good; the game must be getting serious. She sighed, and wiped the knife clean on her rag, and peeked out the door.
The men formed a grotesque tableau under the dusty cone of light, the coarseness of their features accentuated by the strength of the colour all around them: the green of the baize, the red and the black on the clean white shine of the cards, the red, white and blue of the chips. And there was Sid sitting like some mesmerised chimp as if nothing at all were happening and those other ghouls weren’t about to gobble him up for another snack. Two writers there’d been in her life, and she had to end up with the one who had no sense. She couldn’t stand it; seeing him sitting there actually hurt her eyes. She squinted, and the whole scene changed. Tattered clouds drifted across the face of a bright moon, and moonlight cascaded onto the dark green bay. Tall ships were floating into port, their masts and sails smudges against the silvery pastels of the sky. But she opened her eyes again and all she could see was the spittle on Toots’s cigar.
She let the door swing close again and stared disconsolately at the canvas. Then, after a moment or so, in a sudden fizzy spurt of inspiration, she turned around quickly and squirted a gob of titanium white onto the lump of green on the breadboard.
Evelyn got a shock to see all the lights still on. ‘What time is it?’ she whispered. Paul checked his watch. ‘After three.’ They stood there looking at each other. A kiss seemed, well, inadequate. They had told each other too much. She is too like a sister—a mate—thought Paul. He will never know me, thought Evelyn. How long did they stand there, pondering the next move? Did they hear the noises of the poker party breaking up? The door with its Hanukkah regalia opened, apparently without their noticing, and there was Hank Devine with his jacket collar turned up and a white silk cravat at his neck. His foot was poised to step out but his head was turned inside. ‘Wait till next week, Sid you bastard. And you better get on to Fox about that script. You’re not on this run for long.’
‘I’ll call Ed Gottleib in the morning,’ Sid’s voice rang out from the foyer.
‘That a promise? Gotta go for it while you’re hot.’
With Paul on one side and Evelyn on the other, Hank Devine passed through the door. And Maxie Kearns and Freddie DeCastro and itsy bitsy Toots Bauer. It was Toots who first noticed Evelyn in the semi-dark. He reached across and tweaked her on the cheek. ‘Waddya getting up to, Evie? Somebody spike your Shirley Temple?’ He gave out a squeaky laugh and snapped down the brim of his hat.
When they all had ambled down the path to their cars there was only Sid at the door. A splendid grin lit up his face, as if in an access of grace. The big moon shone on his receding forehead.
‘Evie,’ he said when he saw her. ‘It’s late.’
‘Sid, this is Paul. Paul, this is my stepfather, Sid.’
‘Well, what are you standing out here for? Come inside.’
Evelyn gave a silent groan when they entered the living room, the scene of a deserted battle. The ashtrays were full and still smoking, there were plates with the chewed crusts of sandwiches at the feet of the chairs, the cards were strewn like bodies over the baize, and the great piles of chips in front of Sid’s place were wobbly, uneven, as if dented with shells. A bottle of scotch stood on the table but Sid had gathered up the glasses on a tray.
‘Cup of coffee?’
‘Thanks, that’d be great.’
‘How about it Evie? Bernice’s gone to bed.’
Was Evelyn conscious of her grimace, or that it was so like her mother’s? In any case, as she picked up the tray with the glasses and slipped through the swinging door to the kitchen, Sid threw himself down on a couch and spread his arms wide. ‘Been a big night, sonny. A big night.’
‘I take it you did well,’ Paul said.
‘Cleaned them up.’ He lifted his arm and tapped the side of his head with his forefinger. ‘Brains, sonny. Genuine bona fide grey matter. Sachel. That’s what it takes.’
‘What about luck?’
‘Yeah, you’ve got to have some of that. But luck on its own will get you nowhere. Hey, do I detect an accent there? You from England?’
‘No, Australia.’
‘Australia? Go on. Evie didn’t tell us. What brings you here?’
Reddening slightly, Paul told Sid about the rugby scholarship, about the rivalry between UCLA and Cal, and how the coach at UCLA set up this scheme to import players from Australia, to show the Yanks how rugby should be played.
‘I’ve seen a couple of those games—no pads, no helmets. They’re rough. Crazy to me.’
‘Well, it’s passing and kicking, not tackling. More of an art, I think, than gridiron. I can’t work out how anyone can move around a field with all that ironware. It seems to be more about contact than the ball.’
‘Nope. You’ve got it wrong, football’s a science. It’s all in the formations. Though since they’ve changed the old single-wing for the T the game’s lost a bit in my opinion.’
‘Sid used to be a sportswriter for the New York Evening Post before he went into movies. He covered the Giants,’ Evelyn explained, returning with the tray that held the glasses and now rattled with coffee cups, the percolator, a bowl of sugar and a small jug of cream.
‘The Giants. They’re from San Francisco.’
Sid shook his head. ‘Started in New York. After the war some of the teams moved out west. Baseball too. The Dodgers? They were from Brooklyn. You been to a game?’
‘That’s Sid’s real love—baseball.’
‘I wouldn’t say that, exactly. Football, baseball, the races. I like them all. Australia—now there’s a racing country.’
‘Everyone loves the ponies at home. It’s the betting. We’d bet on two flies crawling up a wall. There’s this game—two-up. Blokes bet on the flip of a coin. It’s illegal but no one can stop it.’
‘Excellent odds.’
‘That’s what they say. It’s never worked for me but, or my old man.’
‘So what’s the problem? You’ve got to have a fifty per cent chance in any throw …’
‘But there’s the averages.’
‘Forget the average—it’s a myth.’
‘Sid’s a real gambler,’ Evelyn said.
‘Sure. And why not? Now Evelyn’s mother, she’s a different story.’
At the open door again, next to the Hanukkah decorations, Paul took courage and kissed Evelyn goodnight. A warmth spread through her that she had never experienced before. Oh, she had kissed other boys—and more. She was what in those pre-pill times was called a demi-vierge, had indulged in practices touted as safe sex today. But this was different. Delicious but hard—as hard as the muscles in his athlete’s body. It felt as though she was on the brink of a journey, at the start of her own private quest. Perhaps she had never savoured male beauty before, or recognised it as beauty, so much of being female as she had understood it was feeling herself desired. She liked the spring of his gold-flecked hair, the outward curve of his nose, and the inward curve of his cheek below the bone. So what did this mean? How far might she go? There would come a time, she supposed, when she would never see him again, so would this make her bold? When the kiss ended he touched her gently on the tip of her nose. She nodded and closed the door.
The light in the tiny parqueted foyer seemed to shine with a special intensity. The living room, though, was a pool of darkness—she was glad to see that Sid had gone to bed. She tiptoed down the passage so as not to wake him or Bernice, to keep the night to herself. But as she neared the bathroom she saw the thin strip of light under the door and heard the watery gulp of the toilet and before she could get any further her stepfather had emerged. He was wearing his grey towelling dressing-gown and with the greying stubble on his chin and the dust of silver in his hair he looked ethereal, insubstantial, a little like a ghost. A happy ghost, with a kind of cockeyed beneficent luminosity. ‘Night, Sid,’ she whispered, and he responded with a vague, misty smile. She was on her way to her room again, her breath still exquisitely shallow, when he called her back. ‘I like your young man,’ he said. ‘Better than those other pishers.’ And maybe she gazed back at him with an expression on her face that he recognised because he said, ‘Do you want to talk? I think I’m going to have a hard time getting to sleep.’
‘You lose this time, Sid?’
‘No, not at all. But I’m feeling wound up, too excited.’
He flicked the master switch in the living room and the lights came on again, one after another, like a medley. The lamp over the card table threw a spire of light over the stacks of chips and the dusty baize and the tawny bottle of scotch. Sid lifted it off the table and held it closer to the light so that it shone like a hunk of topaz. ‘Your mother was in a state when I bought it and look at it, hardly touched.’ He put it back down on the table. ‘So who was going to drink it? Hank Devine. The rest? They couldn’t be bothered. The Irish drink, but gambling is the Jewish vice. Except, of course, for your mother.’
Evelyn stared at the man in the lamplight as she thought of her mother. No, she wasn’t at all sure.
‘What do you say, Evie? This time it’s love?’
‘Sid.’
‘This is such a crazy question?’
Evelyn’s blush deepened and she waved her hands in helpless denial in front of her chest.
‘As I said, he’s a helluva lot better than those other pishers.’
‘But he’s … Australian.’
‘So, is this the moon? I knew some guys who went there, during the war. According to them, it wasn’t such a bad place. I’m sorry I missed out. Great jocks. The islands … Bali Hai will call you … Me, I never got further than boot camp. Dreaming up quiz shows and crime shows for other troops.’
‘It was safe.’
‘Safe? What’s safe? Security is an illusion, Evie girl. Life is a precarious business, don’t you know? For us maybe more than most. And in my book the best approach is to learn to like it that way.’
Noon light the following day: bouncing in hard clear shafts on the kitchen tiles. It was a late lazy stretch of time for Evelyn. She walked in her nightdress into a dreamy silence. Bernice must have gone out shopping; it seemed she had the apartment to herself. Then she thought she heard the tip-tip-tip of Sid’s typewriter faintly through the walls, and she stopped to listen, but as soon as her attention focused it was gone. She opened the refrigerator and the interior light beating against the white metal was even more blinding than the sun had been, belting through the western window. Blueberry muffins, waffle mix, orange juice: none appealed. She grabbed the carton of cream for her coffee and closed the door. There was coffee in the percolator to heat up on the stove.
She sat at the table with her hands around the cup and the smells of Bernice’s paints wafting about her head. Oily, pungent, dark, not unpleasant; they drifted through her thoughts. There was a musty astringency to them that she might have felt had accompanied her all through her years had she been sufficiently aware of them. Yet Bernice had only taken up painting recently, after the trouble began. Then, as the steam rising from her coffee cup prompted her to sip, she grew conscious of the swirls and dabs of colour on the breadboard, the streaks of green on the palette knife, and her eye lifted, with the fumes or the steam it’s hard to tell, to Bernice’s canvas propped up on the easel, and the limp smelly rag on the ledge below. She smiled; well, it was more a wince than a smile, for what daughter is in a position to assess her mother’s accomplishments? She sighed. At least this looked more like a picture than the ones that had gone before. Abstract, but a picture. She could make out a greenish-blue, rather luminous background and, in the centre, a white triangular shape, slightly skewed, a kind of cone, like the lopsided bottom of the Star on the front door, or one of the dotty geometrical shapes that cropped up here and there in the prints Bernice had hanging in the den. Evelyn bent her head to the side, to level in her line of vision whatever it was that this white thing was meant to be. Then she brought her head up, yawned, stretched her arms, drained her cup, and, after scraping her chair back, walked over to the sink to rinse it.
The next time Paul and Evelyn went to the ocean they took Bernice’s car—an ancient Studebaker whose paint had become frosted from the salt in the air—and they slipped out and walked over to the galvanised iron railing that marked off the parking lot from the sand. They rested their elbows against the cold metal and were lulled by the long twinkling rolls of brine as if they were already at sea. They stayed there a while before climbing down the worn granite steps towards the beach. Flecks of quartz twinkled in the granite like the glances of sunlight on the surf. They had reached a stage where silence was as appropriate as words, and Evelyn was certain that her thoughts were flowing with his, and she felt exhilarated and brave. The air was sharp with the smell of kelp. She watched the wide foamy tongues of the ocean roll out and remembered the grunion, those long silver fish the tide brought every spring—hundreds of them, like silvery comets streaking through the waves, then wriggling across and burrowing into the moonlit sand—and then she thought of more ancient amphibious creatures. A teacher had told her about them once, when she and Bernice were living in New York and Bernice had plenty of work. Bernice, and her sad green paint. But she swam around that black rock in her mind, swam strong and fanciful and free. Those brave fish, her teacher had said, and strange, she could smell even then, as though it had never left her, the moss-green moistness of that classroom. They were her ancestors, she had said, and the ancestors of all the creatures of the land: the reptiles, the mammals, the birds. What a wonderful thing was the sea, Evelyn thought, inhaling it deep into her lungs, and doing this she could imagine that first fish, the very first one, and what it felt as it dragged its body over the cold wet sand, and how it breathed, and what it ate, and where it lay its eggs, and what were the odds.