Jonathan Santlofer - L.A. Noire - The Collected Stories

Things were starting to turn, and there seemed no life to anything suddenly, not even the bodies pressed close. The girls had hooded eyes, stone faces, lacquered bodies, hard and merciless. The men didn’t seem to have faces at all, only smears of antic pleasure, over as quickly as it began.

Maybe there was more, June thought.

But she and the girl were sunk deep into a low velvet couch and it was very hard for her to get up. Finally, she did, and the girl followed.

It had been years since she’d fallen for slugged booze. When a different man came, this time with a gold-flecked decanter, June refused and the girl did, too, her eyes already like X s.

“In three weeks, it’ll be 1947,” the girl whispered, then turned and seemed to look at her, blankly. “Did you ever think you’d be so old?”

June, her head a greening fuzz, felt certain the girl meant you, you, you.

She felt something rancid rise up in her and that she might say something very cruel, but then she started to wonder if the girl had meant it that way, or had said anything at all. Had she?

There was music coming from the far end of the courtyard and it drew them, beguiled them.

Trawling, hypnotized, across the courtyard, through the low thicket of agaves, their crimson-tipped leaves a woman’s nails, razored to crimson points, they couldn’t stop.

There was a narrow hall that emptied down into some stone-stepped subterranean keep. From within, they heard laughter, keening.

“I wonder what’s down there?” June asked, the girl’s fingers prickling on her.

“Is that you, Junie?” a voice shouted from below, the talent agent. “Guess who’s down here.”

“Huston?” June whispered into to the black, the drink still telling on her, her fingers seeming to slide down the stone wall, which felt wet and private.

“Come down,” he said, his voice manic and unwholesome.

Before she could do anything, the girl grabbed onto June so fast and hard June felt herself nearly fall.

“I don’t think I can go down there,” the girl said. “I think I’ve been down there before.”

June looked at this frailing girl, a girl like so many she had known. A girl to whom things just happened. June was not that girl and hadn’t been for some time. It had cost her.

“Suit yourself,” June said, louder than she meant, trying to talk herself into something. “I need a job.”

She said it hard, but it was an act. The look on the girl, her mouth open and pink, scared her. It reminded her of girls she knew back in Missouri, that family down the street. The Huffs. The girls were never allowed outside. The father hung a razor strop in their bedroom window so boys would stay away. One day, Sally Huff came to school with a red line down her face. In calisthenics, June saw it, the way the red line went all the way down to the top of Sally’s bloomers, and below. At the time, June wondered if any man would ever care about her so much.

Leaving the girl, who kept calling after her (I don’t think you know, if only I could tell you) , June weavingly made her way down the stairs.

Which only led her to another narrow hallway of curving stone, waxing candles strutted along the walls.

There were strange crooning chants coming from somewhere, a drumbeat like one of those jungle movies June always found herself in, except nothing like that.

Because there were smells she couldn’t name, sounds, the sense that the house changed as you moved through it, that you could keep walking and end up in places you never guessed, the house like one of those puzzle boxes, only you’re in it. And it’s in you.

Slowly, in the near-dark, she moved down the first long hallway.

It was a honeycomb, the wetness on everything seeming to cling to its cold walls like nectar.

Her arms quilling, she slid her mink back on, fingers clasped over the frog closure. It made her think of Guy and the things he was good for.

“June, is that you?” she heard the agent say, from somewhere, and soon enough he was at her side, his face a red flame under the torchères. “I’ve got to… I’ve got to…”

His lips were doing funny things and June couldn’t understand him.

“Is it John Huston? Can I talk to him about the part?”

“He ain’t here,” the agent said, shaking his head, his shirt open and wetly red. “I don’t know what kind of man the owner of this house is, but there’s things I don’t care to see. I have a sister. And a wife.”

“You also have a blonde stashed in a duplex on Sunset,” June said, telling herself he was just high, guilty. “How about George Tusk?”

“He ain’t for you,” the agent said, shaking his head harder, like an animal in a cartoon. “And you ain’t for him.”

“Some rainmaker, you,” June started, but the agent started leaning against her, rested his head in her hair and started whispering strange words, like a chant. She couldn’t understand them and she’d never seen him like this. She’d never seen one hair slip from its Vitalis pomp.

“I think we should go,” he said. “I think we should.”

But something made June pull from him.

“I don’t want to go yet,” June said. “I want to see what you’ve seen.”

When she had first landed in Hollywood, young June had twenty-seven dollars papering her powdered breasts under her swiss-dot blouse. She was an orphan, her mother lost five years before to spots on her lungs and her father knifed in the neck shooting dice behind the Southern Pacific roundhouse two months back. Three days after he died, she found he had left her a shoe tip full of small marked bills in her closet, in her white T-straps.

Written on one was a note to her: “Daddy loves you and your big gold dream.”

The first few years in Hollywood, times were hard and she shared apartments, rooms, even, with a hundred girls, their shared pillowcases flossy with their peroxided hair.

Working counter girl, working as an extra, working as a department-store model, a girl to look pretty at parties, she got by, barely. She even filled her teeth with white candle wax when they turned brown and died.

She said she would do things, and she wouldn’t suffer for them. She’d seen where suffering could get you, and it wasn’t her bag.

So she hustled and hustled and finally found the ways to get all those small roles at Republic, B-unit jobs at Fox. She never could be sure, though, if she was making headway or running on her last bit of garter-flashing luck.

Until she met Guy. He wasn’t very smart, or very nice, but he was crazy about her in the way men could be. The hard way she fronted her shoulders, her stupendous breasts, the way she could make him milk pudding and then tug down his pinstripes and show him what her mouth was for. It was all he needed to want to marry her. She was sad to learn what a relief it was. To find a man like this, who, before her, had lived with his mother his whole life, God rest her soul.

And, for the first year or so, she’d stopped the auditions, standing or lying down, kneeling. She didn’t even go to pictures anymore. She was content.

But that feeling had gone away, too, like everything did, always.

It felt like the basement was larger than the house, deeper than a tomb. She walked endlessly, until she seemed to wind up where she started again.

Finally, she saw two producers she’d auditioned for many times. They each had one leg of a limp girl, carrying her, her claw-tooth anklet clattering against the stone wall. They were laughing and the girl was, too, but her body was so limp and her dress had fallen open, her breasts skittering with each swinging move they made. Her laughter reminded June of her mother’s when her mother would go for days not eating, dancing around the living room, raving about her dead babies lost to pennyroyal tea and curling irons.