James Chase: Eve

It was only after the red head had fallen asleep — the hundred dollar bill tucked safely in the top of her stocking — and I had gone on to the terrace and had turned over in my mind what she had told me that the story finally took shape. It was like solving a difficult jig-saw puzzle and some of the pieces only appeared after I had thought back and remembered certain things that Eve had said, certain things she had hinted at and certain things that she had denied.

I had known, of course, that the key to Eve’s extraordinary behaviour to me was her strong inferiority complex. I had guessed all along that this was the psychological pivot upon which her behaviour turned, but up to now, I did not realize why she should suffer from such a strong inferiority complex. When I learned that she had been illegitimate and, as a child, had had that fact continually brought home to her, I began to understand things that had previously puzzled me.

The stigma of illegitimacy can be most harmful to a child’s psychological make-up if the parents show in any way that the child is unwanted. No more crushing blow can be given to a child’s sensibilities if it is allowed to think that its birth is different from that of other children. Its companions — little savages that children are — are quick to seize upon any hint of illegitimacy and the child can suffer much misery by their brutal persecution.

Her parents — she was her father’s daughter by another woman — had no patience with her. Her foster mother hated her since she was a living sign of her father’s infidelity, and when she was young, she whipped her, and locked her in her room in the dark for long hours when she became too big to flog.

When Eve was twelve years of age, she was sent to a convent school where the Mother Superior believed that the rod exorcized evil spirits and Eve was mercilessly thrashed practically every day in the endeavour to break her rebellious spirit. But the Mother Superior was not only a sadist, she was also a bad psychologist. This treatment only brutalized Eve’s mentality where a kind word might easily have saved her.

When she was sixteen, she ran away from the convent and obtained employment as a waitress in an eating house in one of the Eastside streets in New York.

There is a blank in her story for the next four years but we pick up the threads again in a shady hotel in Brooklyn where she now worked as a receptionist. The past four years had been hard on Eve. She was utterly sick of being a drudge and when Charlie Gibbs came along, she married him.

Charlie Gibbs, an inoffensive, unambitious truck-driver, had no idea what he was marrying. Eve’s temper and hard little soul crushed him as effectively as if he had been fed through a wringer. She soon tired of keeping house for him and after a series of nightmare scenes which haunted Charlie for years after, she packed her bag and returned to the Brooklyn hotel.

It was not long before she became the mistress of a well-to- do business man who gave her a small apartment and visited her whenever he happened to be in the locality. He soon began to regret his choice. Eve was too much of a rebel to be at the beck and call of an elderly man who believed, quite wrongly, that he was still physically attractive. Her temper became ungovernable and the least little thing he did that annoyed her caused her to smash everything within reach. Finally the business man grew tired of her unreliable moods and giving her a generous sum of money, he got rid of her.

Having no background, no anchor, no idea of ethics, she naturally drifted to the bad. Prostitution was an antidote for her inferiority complex. So long as men came to her, she must have felt that she could not be as dull and stupid as she imagined she was. She still made a pretence to find work, but as time went on, she became more and more dependent on men for a living, until, finally, she took the little house in Laurel Canyon Drive and set up in business as a full time professional.

So much for the history of Eve which has no special point of interest with the exception of her inferiority complex. It is a story that any woman of the streets might tell you, only Eve makes it interesting because of her psychological reaction to life.

It is obvious that, in spite of the brutalizing effects of the beatings, convent life had instilled in Eve a streak of respectability which had never been entirely eradicated. She lived — and for all I know still lives — in two worlds: the sordid existence of her profession, and the make-believe existence that her secret urge to be respectable makes her wish were true.

Jack Hurst, whom she claimed to be her husband, was not a mining engineer. He was a professional gambler who lived by his wits and his skill at cards. Eve and he had met at a party and had been immediately attracted to each other. This had happened a year or so after she had set up in Laurel Canyon Drive. Hurst was married to a woman who had grown tired of his reckless gambling and his sadistic, domineering ways. She had left him a few months before he met Eve. He was not the type of man to bother with the complicated intricacies of divorce and even if he had taken the trouble to get rid of his wife legally, I do not believe that he would have married Eve. A man has to be very sure of himself to marry a prostitute and although he found her intriguing and associated with her for such a long time, he did not appear anxious to make her his wife.

Even now I do not quite understand why Hurst remained Eve’s lover for so long. He was, of course, a sadist. I knew he was that when Eve had told me of his behaviour when she had twisted her ankle. To have left her sitting on the curb and to have driven her from her bed the next morning when she could scarcely walk to get him coffee was obviously an act of a sadist.

There were other times, so the red head told me, when he treated Eve abominably, but the worse he treated her the more she seemed to admire him. There was nothing he could do that would turn her against him. She was his slave. It seems scarcely credible that Eve, in spite of her own ruthlessness and strength of character, should be a masochist beneath her wooden exterior. It is doubtful, however, whether any other man but Hurst could have roused in her this twisted heritage of a brutalized childhood. That he had done so explains why he continued the association.

Apart from Hurst, no other man stood a chance with Eve. She was simply an empty shell, devoid of any feeling, except for those twisted emotions inspired by Hurst. For ten years she had lived on men. She knew all their tricks, all their subterfuges and all their weaknesses. This existence killed her feminine instincts as surely as arsenic will kill weeds. It killed her instinct for love. I do not believe she even loved Hurst. She was drawn to him because he was the only man she had ever met who mastered her and I believe there were times when she actually hated him. The astonishing thing was that she did not show in her face the brutalizing life that she led, but there can be no doubt that it scarred her mind. She had nothing to look forward to, nothing to look back upon. Little wonder then that she tried to build around herself a world of illusion. She liked to believe that she was married to a professional man. She liked to believe that she did not live in two rooms but had a house in Los Angeles. She liked to believe that every Monday she went to the bank and put half her earnings away for the time when Hurst and she would buy their road-house. Although these fancies never materialized they made her existence possible and soothed the running sore of her inferiority complex.

I had no way of finding out whether she paraded these fancies before her other clients. No doubt she did. I now realized that the week-end we had spent together had been a week-end of lies. She had lied cleverly and I had not suspected for a moment that she was telling me anything but the truth. Perhaps the most artistic of her lies had been when she listed the number of luxury restaurants which she could not be seen in with me in case her ‘husband’s’ friends might tell him that she was going around with strange men.