Marcianna and the Natural Carpaine in Papaya

My Third Month in Hollywood was slowed and pleasant; I was still going to the studio but, my script being just about finished, I had nothing to do there. Most of the time I sat at my glass-topped executive desk in my leather and mahogany executive spring-back swivel chair, surrounded by prints of the hunt and the flare-nostriled stallions and setters used by hunters, and read magazine articles about anticholesterol diets and the merits of drinking milk fermented by bacteria of the species Lactobacillus acidophilus. I read, nostrils flaring.

Not knowing any better, I had worked at my scenario as on a novel, doing an average of ten pages a day, so that at the end of three weeks I had a 150-page scenario. Then the older and more strategy-conscious hands around the writers' building warned me that if I turned in my material this fast the studio people would be worried sick with the thought that since it was done in one sixth the usual time it must be one sixth what it could and should be: in their accountant minds, quantity of working time was somehow equated with quality of finished product. So I was now operating on the dole system, handing in my finished pages at the rate of five or ten each Friday and collecting two thousand fine-crinkling dollars for every lazy week; my producers were happy with my progress and full of compliments. I had plenty of time to read about the coronary-making cholesterol in meat fats and the therapeutic changes brought about in the intestinal flora by high colonies of the acidophilus bacterium. I read and read.

I would get to the studio about ten-thirty. I would have a sugar-iced French doughnut at the cafeteria counter, read in my office until twelve, return to the commissary for a two-hour communal lunch at the writers' table, retire to my office to read some more, visit this or that sound stage to see this or that movie or television show being shot, then drive home at four-thirty, exhausted. Time had developed a limp and a lisp for me – until at the beginning of my ninth week of doling out pages and raking in small fortunes I discovered in the closet of my office a stack of back issues of Let's Live, a monthly journal devoted to "Health in Mind and Body," no doubt left there by another writer for whom time had been losing tempo. I read. Vacantly, then with the browser's one fleet eye, in the end, wolfishly, slobberingly. There was something fascinating about a devotional prose dedicated to the pulp of the nectarine and the juice of the cabbage, and there arrived a time when this nutritional literature became importantly nutritive to me. I was stunned by the lecture of Dr. Ehrenfried E.Pfeiffer, "world-famous physician and soil scientist" and a charter member of the International College of Applied Nutrition, on the apple, its whys and wherefores. I took it to heart when a news item out of Wendell, Idaho, announced that there was an outbreak of cancer among Rocky Mountain trout due to a certain brand of fish food manufactured in Byhl,Idaho, and I was pleased to learn from Lorraine Justman Moffett that"I Made Addicts with 160 Pounds of Carrots."

One Thursday, just when I was getting into a report by B. Lytton-Bernard, D.Sc., D.O., under the heading For the Heart: Natural Carpaine in Papaya, my secretary buzzed to say that Farley Munters was on the phone.

Farley was an actor, a very good one, whom I had known in New York and whom I saw from time to time around Hollywood.

As soon as I answered he began to say with too many too-fast words, "Look, Gordon, if there's one thing you know about me it's that I'm devoted to my kids and a happy, a very happily married man."

I said, "I don't think that statement does any devastating violence to the facts, Farley," and settled back to wait for the large-size "but" that had to follow such an elaborate and totally unsolicited announcement of marital regularity.

"But," he went on, carefully avoiding any undue emphasis on the crucial word, and I held my breath, "I think you'll agree with me on this, I've never claimed I'm not human. I'm the last one in the world to put myself above other people, you'll vouch for that, Gordie. There's no way to control the situation when your wife is stuck with the kids back there in Kew Gardens and you've got to come out to the Coast for months at a time to make enough money to keep the wife and kids going back in Kew Gardens. You know better than anybody what a kick it would be for me and what I'd give if Shirley could be with me on these trips."

This was better than fifty percent true, so I felt free to say, "I'll put it in writing, Farley. If the matter comes to court I'll testify in your behalf. Now: what's her name?"

"Marcianna!" he said explosively, as though the mouthful of vowels had been too long on his tongue. "Marcianna Ruskin, she's a French comtesse or something, at least by her third marriage, although I'm not sure whether she was legally married to this count or just mixed up with him, and I tell you, Gordie, she's a beautiful special item! Made to the dream specifications and with the glory talents!"

"I'm pleased for you." I didn't see that I could take it much further than that.

"I want you to get the picture straight, I didn't go looking for this queen, what happened was, this producer in Paris, a fellow I've done a couple of pictures for, she was asking him about people she might look up if she ever got out to Hollywood, men, specifically, and my friend gave her my name, it was his own idea entirely. Now, this is nothing I can handle, Gordie, I took a taste but the full meal's too rich for my married blood, a man in my position has to be careful, so I'm turning her over to you, see? She was over here for a (continued on page 76)Marcianna(continued from page 44) few hours the other afternoon and she's something, she's the footnote to it all, she's the parentheses around the whole fat subject, but it's not for me, I gave her your number. She'll be calling you so remember, her name's Marcianna Ruskin, and you're one hell of a good-lucky fellow. Keep these magic syllables in mind. Mar-ci-an-na, you'll be hearing from the lady . . ."

She called the following Monday. "Gordon Rengs? This is Marcianna." That was all.

Voice a shade too modulated, too cultured, too precise, though with a nice huskiness to it: too many elocution lessons somewhere in the background, maybe self-inflicted. And she thought it was enough to identify herself to a total stranger by her first name and wait. She was used to telephoning men who she could assume had been thoroughly briefed about her.

Usually I didn't bother with girls who wanted money. But she was supposed to be the parentheses around the whole fat subject. Farley's sales talk had gotten to me. Besides, I wanted to see what was behind the elocution lessons.

I suggested she drop around to my place that night.

Dinner or just drinks?

We could have some pizza sent in from Tony Gidoni's or some pastrami sandwiches from the Gaiety Delicatessen.

Fine. Eight-thirtyish? Eight-thirtyish.

• • •

She was tall, almost five-ten in her high heels. A regal beauty, with rich-tumbling auburn hair and a body that was nothing less than statuesque, the chin and shoulders lofting, the breasts held in self-contained pride, the hips stunningly ample: you could see her as a showgirl on any Las Vegas stage, posing coolly with her lovely marble swell of stomach and long Praxiteles legs while the mere minor ponies worked for a living.

And she gave the full Hollywood treatment to her open hazel eyes, smears of bluing over the lids, slashes of black to continue the lash lines in rakish up angles.

Her lips were of the type classified as generous, but there was something programed, something close to school-teacherish, in the way they worked too hard and too elaborately to shape her words. She was determined to lay out and nail down each syllable, to give each vowel a maximum fatness, as though there was something shameful in the slurs and dips ordinary people allow themselves in ordinary talk. She said few-well for fuel and po-wetry for poetry, and in her gesticulative mouth the oblate pulpy berry known to most of us as a tuhmaydo became an awesome tow-mah-tow.

"If you're ordering pizzas, make it plain tow-mah-tow and cheese for me," she said. She apparently had me pegged for a literary-type fellow, and so she trotted out her best literary small talk: "Have you read much Tow-mas Mann? I've read every one of his novels and short stories and to my way of thinking they're the sheerest po-wetry of modern times. There are symbolisms in his things, I mean, levels of symbolism, that give you plenty of few-well, food for thought. Particularly the distinction he makes between the eloquent and the musical, the society of lawyers and the deeper, more silent folk community, that's a gas, that concept. Next to Mann, I'd say, most of today's writing seems awfully anemic and, well, malnursed." She stopped short and looked at me. "Mal-nour-ished, I mean. Malnourished, of course."

She had a habit of using a mock exclamation, a particular one over and over, to indicate various degrees of put-on exasperation, outrage, or disenchantment, or simply to turn aside questions.

"Choo, choo," she said when I asked where she had gone to school. "Choo, choo, Mr. Rengs," she said when I brought up the matter of what part of the country she had come from. And when I wanted to know what she thought of Hollywood men she gave me a "Choo, choo" again and added, "I mean, Mr. Rengs, sir, a trick is a treat and for the working girl it's always Halloween everywhere." My face told her that I had not understood one word of this. "I mean," she explained, "from the working girl's point of view all towns are the same, they're all full of tricks and in any town the working girl is supposed to give all the tricks the impression that they're the best treats of all time, and that goes for Hollywood as much as for any Bangkok you care to name. So choo, choo, Hollywood's another bum Bangkok."

As she lowered her sensationally blued lids and fluttered them humorously it came to me that in her lexicon, in the jargon of her occupation, the phrase "working girl" did not mean just any girl who had gainful employment, but was reserved for those who plied Marcianna's especially tricky trade. I did not question her about the references to Bangkok. It seemed a likely assumption that she had been in some Bangkok and lived through a fair number of Halloweens there, fast.

I liked her. She was witty, she had style, and under the too-zealed diction you could make out a rare thing, a sort of cosmopolitan's impishness, a world-traveler's so-what. If she had tripped around more than her fair share she wasn't knocking the general scene, just ribbing it lightly and with no obvious underscoring of self-pity. She was bright, too. She talked easily, with all sorts of obscure but accurate tidbits of information coming effortlessly to her fingertips, about Thomas Mann and the symbolic meaning of the lotus position in Yoga exercises. Thanks to a lot of men, she had been exposed to a lot of things and been wide open to them.

Sliding her long legs gracefully into the folded lotus position to show me how it was done, she said casually, "In Barcelona once for three days and three nights Errol Flynn lectured me on white wines."

And at the Cannes Film Festival one year she had been lectured to for an undefined number of days and nights by a famous American vocalist-actor who had given her an extended briefing on the technicalities of the Empire style in furniture, and once in Klosters during the skiing season a titled member of the British Commission on Atomic Energy had conducted a seminar for her exclusive benefit on the workings of nuclear fission.

When I came back from mixing drinks – she was an addict of vodka on the rocks – I saw that her large wicker carryall was lying open on the coffee table and that her checkbook was half out. I sat down on the sofa next to her and leaned over to read the name engraved in gold on the black plastic covering of the checkbook: Comtesse Maria de Lesseps, it actually said.

"Level with me," I said. "What's your real name?"

Without a choo-choo she said, "Marcianna Ruskin."

"Come on. Nobody's named Marcianna Ruskin."

"I am. In this room, on this sofa, with this trick who says he's Gordon Rengs, sir, I say I'm Marcianna Ruskin. How do I know you're Gordon Rengs?"

"In any Bangkok you care to name I wear the same face, so I'm known by the same name. As for you – –"

"Listen, Gordon Rengs." There was impressive spirit in her voice and for once she wasn't bothering to give all the syllables full weight. "There's only one face I wear when I go out to turn a trick, the face you see this minute, and the thing to call it is Marcianna Ruskin and don't try to investigate the other faces. That would cost you more money than you or anybody can pay. See, I'm Marcianna, that's my whole definition and all you need to get my attention. There are usually a couple other sounds expected after a first name, so for (continued on page 98)Marcianna(continued from page 76) conventional minds who think in terms of two names making a face I add a Ruskin to the Marcianna, and that's how come Marcianna Ruskin is in this room with you working up to a twenty-five-dollar trick that I can assure you in advance will be a treat, the greatest."

If she was needling me she was needling herself too.

"Tell me," I said, "are you really a countess?"

She gave me her choo-choo stare. "I didn't tell Farley that, I wasn't that drunk. He must have heard it from somebody."

"Well? Are you?"

Queenly: "That's for me to know and you to find out. You ask too many questions. Must be because you're a writer. I like writers, some of my best friends, you know, but cool it. Listen, writer, are we ordering the pizza or the pastrami sandwiches? I'm a little drunk because I've worked hard today with more damn tricks than I think I'll tell you about, all treats, every last mother of them, and I'm famished. Choo, Choo."

I ordered the pastrami sandwiches, cheesecake for dessert. Over coffee she remembered the time in Ischia she had been with the Iranian ambassador who told her all about the Eastern religions and hipped her to a valuable book, Robert Graves' The White Goddess, that laid out the matriarchal principle behind all religions and poetries. So she was partial to writers, that was the point, because she was always learning things from them.

Now did I want her to take her clothes off? It was nice here, I was nice, she'd like it fine if she could stay all night, she was partial to writers and she'd heard from Farley Munters what a special writer I was, but, choo-choo, another appointment at eleven, might as well get to it, no? Certainly. Why not?.

While I thought, mechanic, mime, whether she came with Farley's high endorsements or not, too programed, too though out, like her speech, too damn much lip service, all this while she was dictating in my ear that it was special, everything, the least part of it the greatest – voice perfectly controlled, modulations impeccable, the too-active fine lips bringing forth the too-shaped words in too-even metronomic measures, outrageous lids going like the traditional sixty, blue butterflies of gray passion, all the choo-choos understood.

• • •

Things eased along at the studio.

On Wednesday, as usual, I went over to the commissary a little after twelve to join my fellow toilers in the rhetoric vineyards. The writers' round table, positioned at the far end of this large and (continued on page 102)busy oval room, was cut off from humanity's general run by a magic shimmer of inner-circle snobbishness that repelled the unliterary as insecticide repels insects.

Ivan Masso called the meeting to order.

"We have a busy agenda today, gentlemen, so I suggest we get on with it. First item of business: will Brother Rengs tender us a brief report on the progress of his various projects, that is, a progress report, a projects report?"

"Brother Chairman," I said, "because of certain. spectacular developments in my work this week, certain major break-throughs, I am asking the studio for four thousand dollars this payday, four thousand irreproachable dollars, and I believe the Writers Guild will support me in this. This situation is as follows. Though it is only Wednesday noon, that is, though there may be still further openings-up and flowerings-out this dynamic week, already I can report that B.Lytton-Bernard, D.Sc., D.O., of Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mejico, has found a crystalline alkaloid through the length and breadth of the papaya plant, in the fruit, in the stem, in the leaf and in the roots, which turns out to be natural carpaine, an excellent and therapeutic enzyme. Dr. Lytton, whom I prefer to think of as Dr. Bernard, feeds natural carpaine to coronary cases and patients suffering from brain strokes instead of the usual adrenalin and digitalis, feeds it to them in the form of papaya juice, in dried papaya leaf for chewing, which also provides a salutary roughage, and in a papaya herb tea or infusion, and he reports that he has not yet lost a patient, though he has no doubt misplaced a couple. The docotor also reports that an open wound tends to heal twice as fast when a piece of papaya skin is placed over it, which may mean that in the very near future Hollywood writers will be going around covered with papaya skins. This is what I have turned up to date and I believe it more than supports my claim to a double salary this week, namely, four thousand ineluctable dollars."

"The chair will make the proper recommendations to the bursary," Ivan Masso said. "The chair feels obliged, however, to point out to Brother Rengs one ancillary matter to his stimulating report on papaya. It has come to the chair's attention that certain meat tenderizers derived from papaya were recently fed to a group of rabbits and these rabbits developed a definite flabbiness in their erectile tissues. For example, their ears, normally perked to attention, began to flop and droop, and in general it was very difficult to get any rise at all out of the furry animals. The chair suggests to Brother Rengs that before he recommends a papaya diet to his fellow scriveners he ascertain whether there is not a danger of erectile degeneration, because, brothers, and the chair cannot stress this point too strongly, a writer with lagging erectile tissues is no writer at all, at least not an upstanding one."

A voice came over the commissary loudspeaker: "Gordon Rengs on the telephone, Gordon Rengs wanted on the telephone."

It was the first time since I'd been at the studio that I had been paged in this dramatic way.

"How much does it cost to get your name blasted out like that?" Jamie Beheen, another scrivener in our group, said. "Ten dollars per call? I think it's money well spent."

"I can get you twenty percent off for quantity," I said, not at all happy.

I got up and made my way through the crowded room to the phone near the entrance.

"Hello, Gordon. Marcianna."

Just that, and the pregnant pause.

I knew it was a far reach for the light touch, but I was shaken and I couldn't help saying, "How's tricks?"

"Treaty, very treaty. Listen, Gordon, what are you doing tonight? I've got some free time and I could drop around."

Directly across the room Cary Grant was busy talking to a striking Hindu girl in a sari, and that heightened my sense of unreality.

"Do I understand you properly, Marcianna? Are you adding yourself to my entourage of faithful admirers?"

"I told you, I like writers. Besides, I feel like talking. Nine-thirtyish?"

Nine-thirtyish, I guessed, would do.

• • •

I had felt some kind of strain in her voice and I was not wrong. She was in a worked-up state from the minute she arrived; she paced and made quick gestures. This night she was wearing tight bold-patterned toreador pants and very high heels and she was, to put it conservatively, sensational, a gripping picture.

"I'm jumpy," she said, pacing. "I've been jumpy all day. It's about the furniture more than anything."

"What furniture?"

"Well, I've got all this furniture that I had shipped out from New York, it's in the Bekins storage place and they won't give it to me until I come up with two thousand dollars, and I have to pay a monthly storage charge besides. Naturally, having all that stuff right here but not being able to get it makes me nervous."

"I don't understand," I said. "Where did you get this collection of furniture?"

"Paris," she said vaguely, as though the question was an irrelevance. "I was sort of married to this fellow, you see, and we filled the house we had with wonderful pieces, all Empire. When I moved back to New York, naturally I had all this great stuff sent over. I busted up with this fellow, I forgot to say, and I took all the furniture, the house too, but I sold the house."

My eyes were wide with what I was sure was admiration. The reference to "this fellow" I thought was superb. I said, "Who was the man, the Count de Lesseps?"

"I guess he was a count," she said without interest. "Some said he took the name de Lesseps so people would think he was descended from somebody important, the man who built the Suez Canal or something."

"Or something" was close to superb too. I was finding out a good deal about her in high style.

"All right," I said, "let's forget the intermediate steps. They built the Suez Canal and now you've got all this Empire furniture at Bekins."

"It's this town! This cistern of a town!" she said suddenly, blazing. I saw now that she was as much drunk as not: her eyes were seething under the lids of blue, and the indignation level in her voice was way up. "I thought, an Errol Flynn was a hundred-dollar job, hundred for the evening, five hundred for the weekend, so why not come out to Hollywood where all the Errol Flynns are and get a taste of the big money. Only the Flynns, the ones who think big and spend big, are practically gone, and the few that're left, they can take their pick of a thousand working chicks, so you're lucky if you get one measly hundred-dollar trick a month and the rest of the time you're stuck with the ones who count pennies and never owned a yacht or chartered a plane for a weekend party in Acapulco, the twenty-five-dollar hotshots. How'm I going to get my furniture out of hock if I can't make any real loot, tell me? I shouldn't have come out to this cesspool of a town, this dungheap of a town, but the climate in New York wasn't good for mums and I thought she'd like it in a place where I could drive her around to the zoos and the mountains. Damn! Hell! I'm stuck, but good!"

This was the first I'd heard of any mums. It was also noteworthy that the exaggerated boarding-school precisions were gone from her voice and what she said came from the corner of the frozen mouth, flat, metallic, punchy.

"I'm sorry I'm not Errol Flynn," I said. "I'm sorry Farley Munters isn't Errol Flynn. You have my apologies for the absence of the grand manner in me and my colleagues. I know that the color of our money grows increasingly pallid."

I'd had a few drinks too, after my hours of exhaustive reading at the office. I was now one of the world's best-informed men on the subject of Dr. Lytton-Bernard and the natural carpaines.

"Oh, I'm not blaming you and Farley," she said with an undirected, cosmic disgust. "I'd a damn sight rather spend my time with men like you, you especially, but work comes first, then play. How do they expect me to keep my head above water when all I'm making is rent and food money? I've got expenses, I tell you! I've got to make a killing or it's no good! Damn! Damn it to hell!"

She was emphasizing her words by pounding a fist against the books in my bookcase. I was put out, but only a little, to note which volumes she had chosen for her unresistant sparring partners: the shelf she was pummeling was reserved for my own publications.

"What was the reference to your mother?" I said cautiously.

She never heard the question. She had stopped attacking the books wholesale and was running her index finger up and down the spine of one, delicately, almost caressingly. When she turned to me her mouth was open and her eyes were stretched wide with wide queries.

"What?" she said. "You? No. You wrote this?"

"If it's got my name on it I think you can safely say I wrote it. Which one are you pointing at?"

"Messages, Hints? You wrote this wild thing?"

I had written it, and I suppose it was wild, and people had managed to avoid reading it in droves, but it remained a thing I had a special fondness for, perhaps somewhat in the way the mother of a large brood has a particular soft spot for the spindly-legged and pumpkin-headed offspring who has shown no signs of being able to make his way in this rough world.

"That was my second novel," I said. "It sold exactly seventeen hundred copies, I think mostly to dope peddlers."

"My God, this is unbelievable," she breathed. "I put this book right up there with Tow-mas Mann and Robert Graves." It was a minority opinion, but I was not prepared to dispute it. "I've read it from cover to cover a dozen times, I've learned from this book, it's changed my whole life, but until this minute I never stopped to make sure who the author was. Gordon Rengs. You made this beautiful and wonderful thing."

"I didn't mean to make any trouble. I was just trying to pass the time." You try not to speak inanities when somebody says nice things, much too extravagant things, about one of your books, or even about the shape of your nose or the sculpting of your earlobe. Even a Marcianna.

She looked at me for a long moment in what I supposed was bemused awe. Then she came across the room, sat down on the sofa alongside me, reached for my head with both hands and planted the softest of kisses on my fore- head in a kind of chaste benediction.

You receive the murmurous blessings of a staggeringly-built lady, for work well done, without blushing. Even of a Marcianna.

"I consider that my twenty hunched years at the typewriter are now justified," I said, not snidely.

She paid no attention to my words. Something else was on her mind. She reached for her carryall, groped around in it, and pulled out a crumpled check.

"You listen to me, Gordon Rengs," she said seriously. "Listen good. This is the twenty-five-dollar check you gave me the other night for services rendered. You never gave me this check, you understand? No moneys ever passed from your hand to mine." With deliberate twists she tore the paper into small squares and let them fall to the ashtray. "There were no transactions of any kind between us. We never balled or even met before this minute, we're just now meeting, right now we're saying the how-dos. You've written a wonderful, singing book and I'm happy and proud to meet the author of those words and want to be your friend. How do, Mr. Gordon Rengs."

"Hello," I said. "I'm pleased to meet you." Then it occurred to me that I couldn't call her Marcianna Ruskin any more. "But I don't know what to call you. For God's sake, what's your real name?"

"Well," she said, "Comtesse Maria de Lesseps is quite a mouthful for most Americans, and titles are un-American anyhow, besides, I'm not with that fellow any more so there's no reason to keep the original name. I kind of Americanized it. You can call me Mary Dell Lessons."

"I can't call you any such thing. You've got to tell me the name you were born with or I won't believe you're my friend."

"All right, then." She took a deep breath. In a small, reined voice, but with a hint of defiance all the same, with a dare in it for me to make anything I wanted of this, she said: "Marcia Brown."

At this point, maybe because she felt stripped of her clothes, no, of more than her clothes, she was used to that, of her skin, of all her precious protective substances, her dramatic features came together, her azured lids clamped down tight, and she began to cry, her whole body shaking.

Then I heard an astounding story. It tore out of her in torrents of innermost, cherished lava.

"Gordie, I'm one-quarter Cherokee. I'm one-quarter goddamn Cherokee, you hear me? You go to Sioux City, where I was born, and you'll meet my grandfather on my mother's side, he's a full-blooded goddamn Cherokee. That's a bitch of a lot to fight against if you've got it in mind to better yourself, make something of yourself. My people were and are ignorant. Part of the time we lived on a reservation where there wasn't much schooling and what there was of it was bad, so I never got past the seventh grade. My mother, she's a good woman and I like my mums, do anything for her, but she's ignorant and she gets her words all twisted. I'm ashamed for her but she's a good soul, she really is. So Marcia Brown gets up off her pretty little keyster at age sixteen and marries this young fellow, this auto mechanic who talks about books a lot and figures on someday maybe owning his own garage. Only this was no kind of real marriage, I'm telling you. Amos didn't have the real ambition to make something of himself, he was all talk, to this day he's nothing but a goddamn factory hand in some goddamn bicycle factory out around Wichita. That was no kind of a marriage for hungry Marcia Brown off the drag-ass reservation and set on going places. I had no eyes for a life of washing diapers and counting pennies in two crowded rooms while this Amos read his dragass books and talked about the nice repair shop he was going to own someday. By this time Gloria was born and I had it set in my mind to make something of myself and her too. You understands what I'm telling you, Gordie?"

She wasn't talking about the inner meanings in Thomas Mann now, and the worked-at note of high culture was gone from her voice. Her tone was husked and rasping and she was going on sullenly, as though at a police line-up.

I said, "I understand, yes."

"So I took little Gloria and we traveled. I got married some more." Superb, nothing short of superb. "For a while I was married to this fellow in New York, he was a theatrical agent, he made out well and we lived in a ten-room apartment, we did a lot of entertaining, important people, I was one of the big hostesses in town. By this time mums was with me, the old man had passed away and she was down with arthritis, for years now she's been on crutches and I look out for her, I take her every-where with me. The reason I didn't stay with this agent was, he was a coarse man, no appreciation of finer things, besides, he used to get a skinful and beat me up, it was bad for mums to hear and Gloria too. Then we knocked around Europe and other places for a while." Oh, superb, "Never mind the details. For a while I was with this count in Paris, he called himself a count. Don't get the wrong idea, I'm not a real professional hustling chick, I only do it now and then, in between steady men, it's a now and then thing and I wish to hell I could get out of it, get into some business, maybe set up in a little business of my own and quit the balling around for good, but how am I going to get free and settled until I make a killing and how can you make a killing in this rathole of a Hollywood with the Errols long gone? I don't know why I'm telling you all this, Gordie. I feel bad for mums, real bad, because she's not too good with words and when she uses words she's not sure of she gets them twisted, she says malnursed for malnourished and impoverished for impoverished, but it's not her fault, it's all in the bringing up. It's a long job of work to make something of yourself when you got to start from way back and it's up-hill every inch. I've got my hands full, I'm telling you straight, Gordie. Now there's this drag-ass thing with Gloria."

She was crying in a more subdued way now, in little gasps and shudders, but her face was still in pieces under and around the active blue lids.

"What's the problem with Gloria?" I asked.

"It's, well, the bitch of it is she's had a too damn good education for her own goddamn good. See, wherever we were, I always sent her to the best private schools, wasn't anything too good for her, whether I had the loot for it or had to scrape and scuffle. For a long time in New York she went to the Ethical Culture School, then to another high-rated place called Walden, and in these fancy progressive schools she rubbed elbows with all kinds, Negroes, Jews, Chinese, all the races and colors. Only thing of it was, all the kids she was friends with, Jews, Negroes, all of them, were of all different kinds but they had this one thing in common, they were all from the moneyed class, they stank from money. So Gloria comes out of this fancy education without any of the snob feelings about other races and religions but she's got a big snob thing about money, she's only used to associating with kids who've got nothing but loot and she feels uneasy and unhappy around ordinary kids from ordinary families. Well. Now that we're settled more or less in this zero town, this nowhere Hollywood, why, I've got her enrolled over to the Hollywood High, you see, since we're living down the way just east of Doheny Drive and therefore this side of Beverly Hills we're under the jurisdiction of Holly-wood, West Hollywood. Well, lately Gloria's been staying home from school and just moping around the house, and when I finally pinned her down as to the reasons she told me, moms, she said, I can't go to that school, the kids there are too rough and go around in gangs and do wild and bad things, I don't understand these kids, they're not my kind. What she's saying, only not in so many words, is, these are poor kids, ordinary kids, and what she really wants, what she's got her heart set on, is shifting over to the Beverly Hills High because over there in Beverly all the kids are rich and she'd be going to school with the classy rich like she's used to. Only where in the hell, where in the dear God's name, is her moms going to get the loot to set up in a big fancy house in Beverly Hills with a heated swimming pool and all, me not being able even to get my goddamn furniture out of hock? You know what kind of an overhead I got right now, what my month by month nut is, and the furniture still tied up in the warehouse? My God, I made something out of that kid, all right, what I made out of her is a kid with her head full of rich-kid ideas, only her moms is flat busted and if I'm going to make her happy and surround her with the rich kids she's used to what's that going to make out of me, what's she want me to do, peddle myself around the clock and eight days a week? I want to be a good mother but they got to let me breathe, Gordie. They got to back off and ease up the pressures so I can catch my breath. They're pushing me too hard, Gordie, too damn hard. I've got nowhere to turn and I don't have the stamina to stick on the ratrace too many more years. Now do you see? I got problems, I wasn't putting you on, I got real, head-breaking, eye-bugging problems and I don't know which way to turn, I genuinely, for sure don't know. How'm I going to get out of this one, Mr. Writer? How do I goddamn breathe again?"

She looked up at me, smiled suddenly, though with some wanness, through her tears, and said, "Choo, choo, writer man, you don't have to give me any answers."

"Choo, choo, Marcia Brown," I said, not feeling up to the effort to smile, "you can have all the answers I've got. Only I'm low on answers today."

I have been worrying at the question of what tears mean for some twenty years and I can sum up my thinking in these words: tears are invariably the seepages of self-pity. When they are tears for yourself they are meant to say nakedly, without window dressing, look at the raw deal they give me, just look; and when they are tears for somebody else's plight they are really saying, under the guise of sympathy for another, if you look closely you'll see that I get a rawer deal than he does, if he's bad off I'm worse off. For that reason I am generally impatient with tears, including my own. But I felt a surge of sympathy for Marcia Brown. Nobody I knew or had heard of lately was being pushed around in this total, unremitting way. It didn't make any difference, at this moment, that the final source of all the shoving was herself, that she had been asking for it from age sixteen with her hunger for Empire furniture and well-bred diction and some sort of glory-road Culture that never existed in this world and shouldn't, her infernal itch to transform ordinary Marcia Brown into a high-style Comtesse Maria de Lesseps or Mary Dell Lessons, her inability to see that the only thing that could eventuate from such a drive toward total metamorphosis was a Marcianna Ruskin who couldn't make it, burdened with a rosy-checked Gloria who had to. The point was that she was now in this bind, and there was no way out, and that was the only point I cared to see. There are traps too damned irreversible for analysis.

"I'll tell you what's really bugging me," she said. "In a few days Gloria's having her Sweet Sixteen party and I know the one present she wants from me, the news that we're moving across Doheny into Richbitchville and all the swimming-pool glamor. And I know that the only present I can give her on this birthday of birthdays is to let her know once and for all that she's not a rich kid and can't live like a rich kid, and I know it's going to break her heart. Sweet Sixteen. A kid's crossing that big once-in-a-lifetime threshold and they hit her over the head."

"It won't break her for good," I said without too much force. "Some kids probably graduate from Hollywood High without being scarred for life."

"Be that as it may," she said, brightening a bit, "I can't give her what she wants, I can't, but there's somebody I can give something to, all I've got, you. You're a marvelous writer who teaches people things, you taught me a lot, even if you can't teach me what to do with my rich-kid daughter, and I want to give a whole lot back to you, right now, this minute, and keep your checkbook in your pocket. I feel better just talking to you and now I want to make you feel better, feel wonderful, I'm going to give you all the presents."

"Marcia Brown," I said almost heartily, "for two decades and more I've been hearing about the magic of the written word, the magic of literature, and never experienced it myself – to me it was just hard work. Now for the first time I see there can be an abracadabra in my words and that's a big present you've made me, you've given me plenty."

But she wanted to give me more and more. She thought my book was a once-in-a-century thing.

She still had the eroticism of a mechano set but this time it was with special vocal effects, she was whispering little carefully ardent things to me in French that I could not decipher, though my French was passable. (I've passed it many times.) Glottal colloquialisms of endearment, the language of the Seineside housewife or the Pigalle whore? Learned from whom, the esteemed Comte de Lesseps? Errol Flynn? The skiing fool of an Iranian ambassador? No, No, that wasn't the skier.The skier was the chap from the British Atomic Energy thing.

She wanted to know, was it good, she desired everything for me, good?

Treat of treats, ma petite, cherie, chère gosse, mon amour.

My checkbook stayed in my pocket.

• • •

I didn't see her for a week after that but she called me every day, sometimes two or three times a day. First she was busy, running her fool head off, with the arrangements for Gloria's Sweet Sixteen party. Then her time was taken up with an unidentified girlfriend who had had enough of this outhouse of a town and was getting her T-bird overhauled so she could drive cross-country back to New York where she was going into a fancy house and make some real, substantial, regular, easy-come loot. The friend was after Marcia to go with her and get her hands on some real gold again. Marcia didn't know. She was debating with herself. She'd give it more thought after Gloria's Sweet Sixteen party. It was a possibility.

Then on a Thursday morning, eight days after I'd last seen her, she called me at the studio. There was a note of iron in her voice.

"Gloria had her party yesterday," she said.

"How'd it go?"

"Great. She's the happiest girl in town."

"What? You did it? You promised her Beverly Hills and the pools and the year-round heated moon made of imported gourmet gruyère?"

"I had to do it, Gordie. I looked into her eyes and I couldn't tell her no, I couldn't. So the plan is, we're going to get a real nice house in Beverly, I'll get my furniture out of the warehouse and fix the place up real classy and she'll enroll in Beverly High and be able to have her friends over. As soon as I get back from New York, that is."

"You're going with your friend. In the T-bird." I said it as though reading stock-market quotations out loud.

"I've got to do it. There's no other way around this one. It won't be too bad, Gordie. Auntie Maud is supposed to be solid and give her girls a fair shake."

"You haven't told me about any Auntie Maud," I said helplessly.

"Didn't I mention her to you? She's this great white-haired old dame, she's about eighty, who has this fancy fifteen-room penthouse on the East Side, it's a hundred-dollar house and Maud splits the take fifty-fifty with her girls. You can imagine that when you're one of the girls in this established place and the Johns parade in all day and evening long, why, there's quite a few tricks in any given day and a girl can make maybe five, six, seven hundered by midnight. Maud's supposed to be a square shooter. The Johns like her, they sit and play chess with her."

"I don't care who plays chess with her!" I exploded, without being quite sure why or even whether I had any right to. Immediately I realized there was nothing to do but trail off, and I did: "You apparently didn't read Messages, Hints as carefully as you said you did. If there's one lesson to be learned from that book, from any of my books, it's that not all young girls have to go to Beverly Hills High and have pools. All my life I've been writing about one thing, one thing only, namely, that the secondary school system is just about the same in all the towns, in all the Bangkoks."

"I know what you're saying, Gordie. Be angry if you want to. This has got to be done and I'm going to do it. Listen, I'd like to see you. My friend and I are starting out at sundown, we're all packed and everything, so today's my last chance to say goodbye. It would be real kicky if you could meet me somewhere for lunch or something?"

As it happened, this was the first day in weeks that I had some genuine work to do: my producer had asked for some revisions in the early part of my scenario and I was trying to get them done before quitting time. I explained that my lunch period was limited and suggested the only thing I could suggest, that she come out to the studio for lunch. She agreed. Twelve-thirtyish.

• • •

When we entered the commissary I did my best to curve around the writers' corner to a smaller, more private table, but it was a lost cause. Marcia was wearing a flaming orange sheath cunningly designed to duplicate each last contour of her skin and my sharp-eyed colleagues were not going to let us slip past: to a man they stood up and smiled at me their determination to be introduced. I ticked their names off one by one, Jamie Beheen, Ivan Masso, the others, but when I began to say to them, "I'd like you to meet," not knowing exactly how I would finish the sentence, Marcia cut in calmly, saying, "Mary Lessons, Mary Dell Lessons, nice to meet you." They insisted we sit down, they wouldn't think of our sneaking off to another table. We sat down.

It was simply incredible, the subject they had chosen for their meandering forum that talky noon. It was one of the catastrophes of the century.

"Miss Lessons," Jamie said without preliminaries. "I think I ought to explain what our procedure is here. We are writers, wielders of the mighty pen that has largely, in this part of the world, supplanted the sword, and as such we devote our noon hours to giving each other works-progress reports and engaging in a general cultural communion. For example, Gordon here fills us in from time to time on his current researches into the beneficial enzymes of the papaya fruit, and our cultural horizons are widened. Today we have been exchanging notes on the various books and plays we have lately been exposed to, and our topic is, Resolved, that, just as she is portrayed in all the novels and plays of our time, the whore is our outstanding Lady Bountiful, a wakan rather than a witch, wakan, for your information, being the impersonal power which, according to the Sioux religion, makes the world real and palatable; in other words, that the lady of easy and price-tagged availability is a hot cornucopia rather than a Pandora's box, and that as such she is to be elevated to the highest pedestal and worshiped, as in the plays and novels of our time. Am I making myself clear?"

Marcia was taking it in beautiful stride. "As I understand it," she said coolly, "according to the Cherokees a whore is, when you come right down to it, a whore, and the difference between a ten-dollar whore and a twenty-five-dollar whore is exactly fifteen dollars. Of course, there are all kinds of religions."

"There are," Jamie said with full approval, "and I believe in all of them. Now I think that the chair, and I don't feel that I am being unduly egocentric when I identify myself as the chair, though a surprising amount of the time I feel rather more like a sofa, the chair, I say, will now throw the floor gapingly open for discussion. Does anyone wish the gaping floor? Mr. Rengs?"

"South Dakota abstains," I said. I was very careful not to look at Marcia.

"I would like to say a few chosen and perhaps even well-chosen words, Mr. Chairman," one of the other writers said. "I have just come back from New York where I saw The World of Suzie Wong, and on the basis of the evidence presented in that play I see no alternative but to agree that the whores of all nations are unfailingly kind, warm, giving, witty, and infinitely worth having, womankind in handy concentrated form, Instant Woman."

"I am just now reading Alberto Mo-ravia's Woman of Rome," somebody else said, "and I must report that if his Elena is everything Moravia says she is her name should be Pallas Athena. She is a flower in full bloom. She does not simply give, she hurls herself. Passion, it would seem, is not crushed by the cash nexus, it is liberated for the first time and allowed to come into its own. The place to look for a good and fulfilling woman, I have learned from Brother Moravia, is not in the classrooms of Vassar and Bryn Mawr but in the fleshpots and pleasure houses of the filthiest slums of Rome, where women don't merely give, in the sense of a token donation to charity, they geyser out, in the sense of your getting full value for your money. Whores, in short, are the most precious commodities on the market, and if department stores ever decide to carry a line of these articles I think I would like a job with one of them as comparison shopper."

"Mr. Chairman," Ivan Masso put in, "I would like at this time to make mention of Henry Miller's paeon to the French streetwalker entitled Claude. I believe it is worth noting that in this curbstone Aphrodite Brother Miller has located the fountainhead of all the womanly virtues, the furnaces from which waft all the warming human heats. I will make a confession. I have never married and the reason is that I could not find my own, my one and true Claude according to the Miller rule-book, though I wore out several pairs of stout English shoes hiking down the bylanes of Paris in the hope of falling into her cherished footsteps. I can only conclude that Brother Miller's incomparable Claude passed away, leaving no daughters and heirs to ply the family trade, and this is what is happening to all the traditional handicrafts in our mechanized time..."

It went on and on. This time I did not find it funny. I watched Marcia's composed sober face with its extravagantly decorated eyes and I thought, when will that great day come when there will be a natural carpaine in some papaya leaf that Dr. Lytton-Bernard can apply to her wounds, her open wound of a mother on crutches and full of malapropisms, her open wound of the reservation Cherokee in her hidden but not quite quarter, her open wound of needing two thousand irreducible dollars to liberate her needed period furniture, her open wound of being the parentheses around the whole fat subject to any number of Johns in any number of Bangkoks when all she really wanted to do was bone up on the symbolism in Thomas Mann and practice the lotus position some more, the open wound of having wanted to make something of herself so fiercely that she now was wagged from hellfire to straitjacket by a sixteen-year-old who believed she was made for everything, the open wound of being designed as an Errol Flynn plaything in a world from which the Errols had vanished?

"Might I have the floor?"

It was Marcia, her voice controlled, even, but sharp.

"The chair deems it a privilege to recognize Miss Lessons," Jamie said in a most gracious way.

"I've read Moravia's Woman of Rome and I've read Richard Mason's Suzie Wong and I've read Miller's Claude, too," Marcia said slowly. "I've read a couple other things on the subject as well, for example, all the case histories of whores in the recent psychoanalytic literature. Most of all, I've read Emile Zola's Nana, which is the only true thing ever written about whores and gives the straight goods on them seventy-five years before a couple of psychoanalysts set out to get a few facts. Now, let me tell you something. Zola was right, and moravia and Mason and Miller are wrong, wrong as hell, totally, abysmally wrong. You all may sit around here thinking you're just kidding this thing but the fact is, you're all pretty much in agreement with these nowhere myth-makers' novels and books and they're full of dirty lies, myths. Let me tell you what a whore is, according to Zola and according to me."

They were all sitting up straight and staring at her. Something was creeping into her voice, some knifing, smoking thing, that was not at all in keeping with the light tone of their luncheon game. And her face was set, fires were gathering in her eyes.

"A whore," she ground out, "as any man knows who can tell the difference between blue diamonds and cheap paste, is lazy, sloppy, slow-witted, ice to the fingertips, full of vicious thoughts about men that she never mentions except to the other working chicks, capable of nothing but contempt for the Johns who are so stupid as to pay her for nothing but well-learned gestures, a clod, a sloth, an IBM adding machine, a stinking, reeking mess under her sleazy perfumes and powders. A whore is, if you want to know, a lesbian through and through, and that's absolutely all she is. As the psychoanalysts are slowly beginning to find out. As Zola knew and had the courage to say a long time ago. As I know." Her eyes were hard on me, and unblinking. "As you would know, and Miller and Mason and Moravia, too, if any of you took the trouble to see the difference between a lousy performance and a true reaction. Whores make big sounds and give a lot of two-bit literature to the world, words, and get good dollars in return, because their Johns, and their pimps, too, are too soft in the head to know how they're getting short-changed emotionally. At least you writers ought to learn how to tell good literature from bad. Whores can't produce anything but bad literature because they're even too damn lazy to make up their own words, they borrow all their words from cheap, two-bit novels, which I hope none of you ever wrote, that you can leave to the Masons and Moravias."

Well, she had style. She had depth.

Across the room Cary Grant was engaged in earnest conversation with a beautiful Negress in a Seventeenth Century nun's habit.

"Whores!" she said. "What are they? I'll tell you, they're the only contraption on the market that the buyers will pay a hell of a lot more money for because they won't work, they're incapable of doing their assigned job. Give? Whores give? Don't make me laugh! How can they give to a man when they don't even know what a man is? They see men only two ways, as things to fool and get money from, as things to fall down in front of and give money to, men who give money and men who take money, Johns and pimps, the two kinds of men a whore needs, both of them together, to keep the money circulating, and those're the only needs she ever felt in her scrawny little pesthole of a soul!" I looked away from her shouting eyes to frown at my coffee cup. "Whores are cesspools. vacuums, behind their vacant eyes they're im, im, impovrich ––"

Her eyes were still on me, wide now and stricken.

"I know exactly what you're saying," I said hurriedly, to fill the agonized pause, "and I agree with you, Mary, I agree one-hundred-percent . . ."

"Im-pov-er-ished," she said slowly and deliberately. Her face relaxed. "Choo, choo, it's getting late, must go. Gentlemen, it's been a pleasure."

As she started to get up Jamie Beheen rose too and said, "No, really, must you. Miss Lessons? You're a remarkably well-read young woman. I was going to drop over to the set of The Spark and the Flame and I thought you might be interested in seeing them shoot some scenes. If you'd like, I can introduce you to Tony Reach, he's playing the lead, he's partial to well-read girls . . ."

"Ordinarily I'd take you up on that, Mr. Beheen," she said, all grace, "but I'm leaving for New York this afternoon. On business. Must run. Choo, choo."

As we walked toward the parking lot she linked her arm with mine and leaned very close to say, "You made a lasting thing in Messages, Hints. Work hard. Make more good things."

I felt proud. I felt positively proud, though she was getting into the T-bird and riding off to the Auntie Mauds who played chess.

When we got to her car I put my lips to her cheek and said. "You were magnificent in there. You're the best-read girl I know. Goodbye, Marcia Brown. Make the best literature you can, do those Cherokee ancestors proud."

She pressed my arm warmly, climbed into the car, lifted her dramatic face to me with the sky-blue lids going and the areas just beneath them shining wet; she drove off, waving.

For all I know she may be waving yet, as Bangkok after Bangkok dances by.