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The Actor
by Niven Busch
Chapter One
Let people deny a woman's intuition. She wouldn't argue with them, she could only speak for herself. She always knew! Little things would fall together, what he'd done, the way he'd looked, how much money (most important) he'd in his pocket: she might be as happy as a clam, not giving him a thought, then suddenly the brightest day would turn black, misery would squeeze her heart, her breath stop. God! She would know, she would take her oath on her hope of heaven that Dan was out catting and she would always be right, she hadn't been wrong yet.
She quickened her pace, half-run, half-walk, dragging behind her the little cart she'd made herself out of a Sunkist crate and two wheels off a coaster wagon. She'd found the wheels in the garage after they'd moved back into the house on Lefferts Drive: the rest of the wagon (bright red it had been with golden letters on the side) was long gone and Harold himself, to whom she and Dan had given it one Christmas or birthday, now a grown man. But she liked things put to use. It had been only a few whacks with the hammer to knock on the axle and a handle with a strong crosspiece to hold to.
"Now I don't have to shop at Bond's, that robber," she'd told Dan, her small face gleaming with the pride of craftsmanship. "With this I can go over to the Farmers' Market. They have such things there, but carrying the damn big paper sacks will break your back. With this I can pop down there in a minute and no weight at all. It will be as good as having another car almost, when you're away. See what I mean? You see?" she demanded, poking her big husband with a stubby, none-too-clean forefinger. It was always good to stir him up with such pokes when she wanted his opinion on some new project.
He had looked down at the crate on wheels from his great height and said slowly and practically, "It's a mile and a quarter each way minimum to Farmers'; it's only a block to Bond's."
"It's my feet and it's my wagon," Jill had said sharply. "What are you crabbing about? You'll eat the food if I tote it home, won't you?"
She looked up at him with her keen birdlike eyes, her head on one side and her nerves jumping with love and irritation.
"Sure, Ma, I'll eat it. I'll eat it all right," Dan said, and went slowly back into the house. Just like him, to crab about the stinking wagon instead of telling her that she'd been smart to use the wheels. She felt what was in his mind: he didn't want the neighbors to see his wife running to the market with a crate on wheels when she'd once let the servants do the shopping and sat back, when she went out, in a custom-built European car with a pair of steer's horns as long as your arm on the radiator. Who cared? Living in the past wouldn't get the bills paid.
The coaster bounced off a curb: Jill crossed Laurel Drive, then carefully pulled up the loaded wagon on the opposite sidewalk: the pang of pain that gripped her had made her forget where she was going. Why, why had he picked today, when she was so happy bringing home the things he liked: the tiny, glistening Olympia oysters from Puget Sound, ice cold in their gray juice, locked up in a fresh paper carton, the jelly doughnuts, the fresh-ground hamburger, the French bread and the rest: today of all days when she had been planning a feast, celebrating the turn in their fortunes! He had been working at Columbia Studio — and the check would be a big one: just how much he had refused to say — nor would she spoil his pleasure by demanding to know.
The check! Like the second phase of a cerebral stroke, a new realization came to her: beyond doubt he had picked it up, false hearted devil that he was, without saying a word to her. He'd picked it up, then gone to blow the whole of it on some floozie. Oh, Sacred Heart of Jesus Who died on the Cross! The shame of it! The uselessness of it, to have a husband like that! Why had the dear Lord in His mercy cursed her with a fickle-hearted thing who would go down the line for any dandiprat who wiggled her butt at him? The stretches of trotting in Jill's walk had now become longer: sweat trickled out of the bandanna she had wrapped around her hair, a few red strands of which poked damply down above her penciled eyebrows; the legs of her silk slacks flapped around her ankles and her sandals beat a refrain on the sidewalk: clickety-clack. She was a small woman, delicately and yet fiercely made, wiry and strong. She was at this time forty-eight years old and could look thirty-five or ninety, depending on her mood, the way she was dressed, and the slant of the light. Her body had not lost its shape: her breasts were round and tough, her flanks hard and her teeth the same that nature gave her: only in her small, quick, gray-brown eyes, so full of giving, were the anger, the strain of the years, the yearning and the bafflement. She was a fighter. Her face at certain times — as when she had caught Dan in some transgression — was a fighter's face, formidable, unconquerable, in spite of its fragility, its femininity: a squarish pugface of the sort usually described as Irish (as indeed she was) although such faces are not necessarily Irish at all. Her skin was lightly freckled. In addition to the slacks, bandanna, and low shoes, she wore a silk blouse with green dolphins on it and a gold wrist watch which Dan had given her ten years earlier, on the occasion of their nineteenth anniversary. God damn him, she thought, as the watch, its band now much too big for her, kept sliding down over the hand that dragged the cart. I'll take it off and hock it, then I'll buy a ticket and I'll go away somewhere. I will for sure.
She had now crossed Crescent and Havenhurst, reached Lefferts Drive: she turned north, slowing down somewhat. Here the houses were set back on small dabs of lawn, some shoddy, but most neatly kept. The warm spring day was cooling into evening. Sprinklers sent rainbows of water spinning into the still air and a boy on a bicycle, riding "no hands," threw folded copies of the Hollywood Citizen-News into porches, patios, and doorways — and also, alas! into hedges and rain gutters. This was her street. Because of the keenness of her perceptions — like the perpetual radar contact with Dan — she would have known it was her street without looking, known by the smells and busy sounds, by the pulse and the hum of it. The street belonged to her and she to it: she would have fitted so well nowhere else on earth. It was a street largely inhabited by workers in the studios located round about: people whose knowledge of certain handicrafts made possible the immense illusion of motion pictures. The citizens of Crescent, Laurel, Havenhurst, Fairfax, Orange, Snell and other nearby streets made pictures with their hands. They were stage carpenters, grips, juicers, musical arrangers, draftsmen, greensmen, first and second assistants, extras, camera operators, animators and heaven knows what all: some masqueraders, some plain Sunday stay-at-homers, family raisers, TV lookers. There was a deaf man who had spent his days for twenty years drawing eyelashes on a mouse; there was a comedian whose granite, deadpale features stamped with the image of mankind's mournful and abused innocence had convulsed the whole world and earned him large sums of money and who had put all such foolishness behind him and settled down to live contentedly on charity; there was an acrobat who had taken to drugs and a retired studio librarian who fed a lame quail on her front porch twice a day, also some beautiful young women who went out on call, and other artisans too numerous to mention. Fantasy lived in the flesh of Lefferts Drive, but like all streets it was a place of struggle. Each house, whether neat or dowdy, was the outpost of a secret war: in the perpetual deceptive California summer the same things happened as in streets of far-off cities where the wind howled and the snow piled in drifts: there were sirens, yells in the night, payments missed, wives missed; the meter-reader came, the doctor came, the years went up and down the street with a dusty broom. In only two respects was fantasy supreme, namely the architecture and the clothing — two manifestations of the human spirit which, as scholars would have it, are closely connected. For just as the inhabitants of the street assumed fancy dress each morning, their choice of costume prescribed not by the uses of a craft or by convention but solely by their own dreams, so the bungalows of the street echoed the architectural traditions of the world's romantic places: the Casbah, the C•te d'Azur, and Stratford-on-Avon, cheek to cheek: in one block you might see a Moorish castle, a Normandy chateau, and a villa designed to overlook a South Sea lagoon, all constructed in miniature of materials so flimsy it seemed impossible they could have lasted six months let alone the twenty-five or thirty years that some of them had brazened out.
For instance, take the house occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Dan Prader. The windows were all high and pointed, the doors narrow; the roof rolled down in a candy-like curve like the roof of the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel. Its material was stucco, its color buffalo-chip brindle, its tradition what one wag described as Early Nothing. The only excuse anyone could possibly find for living in such a house would be that he had picked it up at a bank auction, at a colossal saving — yet the incredible fact was that Dan and Jill had built the bungalow to their order, going to special expense to obtain its unique effects, all this in the late twenties, when building costs were high!
Jill ran the cart up the bumpy concrete driveway. The garage, of course, was empty, though by this time (almost six) Dan should have been home for at least an hour. Dumping her groceries on the porch she ran into the kitchen as if to perform some decisive act, but unable to think what act this was to be, she sat down at the table. She put her arms on the table and lowered her face onto them. All the vitality that had sustained her on the trip home from the market had drained away; her will seemed dead, her mind clouded.
"Lord, Lord," she moaned, turning her head from side to side, grinding her forehead against her arms. She doubted her own intuition; she tried hopelessly to escape from its conviction.
"Maybe I'm wrong," she thought. "Maybe he'll be home yet . . . What's the sense of getting all riled up?"
But even as this thought brushed through her she knew better, felt again the pull of her knowledge of Dan.
"No, no, he's at it. He's out on the town!"
She raised her head. Her eyes were wet. These were no tears of love or softness but simply a fluid squeezed out of her by the tension she was suffering.
"Out on the town!" she cried aloud in the small dim room.
Conscious that it was getting dark, she switched the lights on. She walked to the stove and back, twisting her head to watch the telephone even when her back was turned to it. Where to call, to check on him? He subscribed to a phone exchange run by a woman named Bobbi; everyone in pictures had to have an exchange number if he didn't have a house with servants or the use of a hotel switchboard. But Jill couldn't bear to call Bobbi: the minute she said "has Dan checked?" Bobbi would know her shame. Bobbi would sympathize and make a show of trying to locate him — (hopeless, of course, since he never checked with Bobbi when out on a tear). If she could get a car she might go out and look for him in The Corral, Coyote's, Bellyful of Blues, or other bars frequented by him and his cronies: that might be best. But who would lend the car? Markis Dakropolis, a kindly, middle-aged Greek who lived on Lefferts not too far away might help her out: he was a friend of Dan's, came over sometimes with the boys to play red-dog or poker, losing gladly and invariably for the sake of being with picture people, his idols. But Markis . . . no, she couldn't explain to Markis either, couldn't expose herself: by a freakish contradiction of logic she felt as if to do so would be letting Dan down, betraying her loyalty to him.
There was one chance left. Firmly now, confident as an assistant director passing on an order, she dialed the number of a drugstore on the corner of Gower and Sunset.
"Harry, this is Jill."
"Harry's in the back," the clerk said. "Who is calling?"
"Mrs. Dan Prader. Who is this?"
"It's Melvyn, Mrs. Prader."
"Have you seen Dan, Melvyn? I'm expecting him home and . . . there's an important message for him."
"He's not here, Mrs. Prader. I haven't seen him all day."
"I see. Well, look, Melvyn, would you do me a great favor? Just take a look out front — see if he's out there talking to somebody. He might just be standing there and — "
The drugstore, in an area known as Gower Gulch, was a favorite with Dan and his friends: it occupied the site once adorned by a saddle store and though the latter establishment had been gone for some years its tradition remained vivid: cowhands fresh from the range and others whose only contacts with a horse were booked through Central Casting used the soda fountain and the sidewalk outside as a combined club and job exchange. At almost any hour of the day or evening a few hard-bitten refugees from distant frontiers could be seen there rocking gently on heeled boots, apparently deriving the same reassurance from window displays of douches, vitamins, and heating pads that they had formerly found in guns and tooled leather and a glimpse, through the plateglass, of a saddlemaker working at his bench.
Jill could tell from the cessation of offstage noises at the other end, horns of cars going past and voices in the store, that Melvyn had put his hand over the mouthpiece.
"He's not here, Mrs. Prader," he reported. "Shotgun Emmet's sitting at the counter now having some coffee. He ain't seen him either. I got to go, Mrs. Prader . . ." Melvyn added in a tone of some impatience, as Jill showed no sign of getting off the line, "I got to wait on the customers . . ." "All right, damn you," Jill said, her rage breaking. "But don't expect any more trade from me if you can't even walk as far as the door to look for a . . ."
Realizing she was talking into a dead instrument she slowly hung up and resumed her pacing of the floor.
There was only one thing to do.
Jill opened the grocery sack. She jammed a few sweets in her mouth, then put the oysters, milk and eggs in the icebox. She turned out the kitchen lights, locked up the house and hurried down the street to Mrs. Arden's.
"Dan's loose," she said.
Mrs. Arden was watering her flowerbed.
"What if he is?" she demanded unfeelingly. "He'll come home."
"He went to Columbia to get his check. I've got to get to him before he spends it. He'll be in one of those bars out Melrose or Western, there's only a few he'll go to."
Mrs. Arden nodded. She turned off the hose-bib and began to coil the hose with powerful flexing motions of her large sunburned arms. "You better come in and have a cup of tea," she said more warmly.
"To hell with tea," Jill said. "I haven't got much time."
Mrs. Arden laughed — not in a derisive but a sympathetic fashion as if Jill's rudeness had revealed for the first time the true nature of the emergency. She now led the way into the house — a miniature Swiss chalet in extremely bad repair — her large body, one undented pour of flesh from thighs to neck, wobbling in a manner which expressed cooperation.
"Jake's dinner is on the stove, pot roast," she said. "When he gets here I'll give it to him, then we'll take the car. We'll get the son of a bitch together."
