The Cocktail Waitress (30 page)

But unlike a mere sensationalist, Cain put this shocking material to work in the service of larger aims: showing us life as it is lived, language as it is spoken; the dreams and hungers and despairs of ordinary people in dire situations; the impact on the human soul of crisis and the ability of the human animal to give up its humanity under duress. Cain’s characters sweat, and have reason to. And when you read about them, he makes you sweat alongside them. You want to know what it feels like to be trapped in a loveless marriage, yearning hopelessly for something better and grabbing desperately at a way out even if it’s cruel and repellent and doomed? Read
The Postman Always Rings Twice.
If you feel you need a shower afterwards, that’s to its credit, not a criticism.

Cain did spend rather a lot of his time in the gutter and dealing with gutter matters, it’s true, but his books are great not in spite of this but because of it. As a consequence, unlike the work of many contemporaries that have since been forgotten, Cain’s books drew a powerful response, and continue to draw one. From ordinary readers, from critics, from other writers, from everyone who encounters them. In Cain’s day, that reaction was sometimes revulsion, abhorrence—
but make no mistake, that’s a reaction, and a worthwhile one. At the end of Albert Camus’ masterpiece,
L’Étranger
—a novel Camus said was inspired by Cain’s work—Meursault goes to his execution hoping that “there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.” Execration! Cain knew his share. But the greater punishment by far for an author is for his work to inspire indifference. And no one ever accused Cain of that.

Which brings us to
The Cocktail Waitress,
Cain’s final novel, and one that shows us that even at the end Cain still had the ability to disturb, to trouble, to shock.

In 1975, James M. Cain was 83 years old; in two more years he’d be dead. His star, which had risen so meteorically in the 30s and 40s had fallen just as meteorically. He’d moved back east from Hollywood to Hyattsville, Maryland, where he suffered from a painful and debilitating heart condition—angina. He was an old man and getting older, in failing health and aware of it. But he was still a writer, goddam it, and every day he put pen to paper and the words flowed.

Some of these late efforts were attempts to branch out into other areas of fiction—a historical novel, a children’s book. But at the very end, when he knew he most likely had only one more book in him, he decided to go back to his roots and write a James M. Cain novel again.

Clearly he put elements from his own life into the book—the Hyattsville setting, Earl K. White’s angina, the nitroglycerine pills White carries (Cain carried them, too). He also returned to themes from his earliest and most successful books. From
Postman
and
Double Indemnity
there’s the idea of a young, attractive woman, married to an unattractive but well-heeled older man, who meets a new man, young and handsome, who’s ultimately implicated in the husband’s death. From
Mildred Pierce
he took the premise of a female protagonist in severe economic straits, just getting out of a bad marriage, who has to take a degrading job as a waitress in order to provide for
her child. The result of combining these elements is a classic Cain
femme fatale
story that’s told for once from the
femme fatale’s
point of view.

Of course, no
femme fatale
thinks she is one, or admits it if she does. Which presents an interesting problem for a book told in the first person. In fact, Cain began writing
The Cocktail Waitress
in the third person, along the lines of
Mildred Pierce,
and got more than one hundred pages into the manuscript before abandoning the approach and rewriting the whole thing in his patented intimate first-person style. It was a good decision. The book springs to life when we see events through Joan Medford’s eyes and hear them in her voice. But putting the story into Joan’s voice means we hear only what Joan wants us to hear. And as she perceives things, or at least as she tells them, she’s innocent of any wrongdoing—a hapless victim of circumstance, surrounded by deaths she neither caused nor contributed to. It’s up to the reader to decide whether to believe this self-portrait or question it, and the resulting ambiguity makes
The Cocktail Waitress
one of Cain’s most unsettling, unstable books.

It’s the inherent contradiction in any work of fiction, the one we all conveniently ignore each time we sit down to enjoy a novel: Can we believe what this narrator is telling us? Well, no, of course not—it’s all lies, it’s all made up, that’s what fiction is. But
within
the fiction, you say, if we imagine ourselves inhabitants of the characters’ world instead of our own, can we believe what we’re being told then …? Most of the time you assume the answer is yes: You can trust what Huck Finn tells you; Ishmael isn’t lying to you about what went on between Ahab and Moby-Dick. But
why
do you believe that? How in the world do we know that Ishmael didn’t kill all his fellow seamen and then wreck the
Pequod
himself to cover his tracks? After all, he’s the only survivor; we’re dependent on his account to know what happened. In
The Cocktail Waitress
we’re just as dependent on Joan’s. Is she really an innocent or a multiple murderer? It’s up to you to decide.

Cain worked on
The Cocktail Waitress
pretty much up until his death. He never published it, though he did show drafts to his agent and his publisher. He wasn’t satisfied and kept tinkering; even his typed manuscripts contain corrections and changes in his nearly illegible handwriting. The book’s ending in particular bothered him, and after writing multiple versions he warned his publisher it might change again: as quoted in the biography
Cain,
he wrote to them, “If you’re dealing with me you may as well get used to it. I work on an ending ceaselessly.”

But no one works on anything ceaselessly. With Cain’s death, the unpublished manuscripts of
The Cocktail Waitress
disappeared among his voluminous papers like the crate into the warehouse at the end of
Raiders of the Lost Ark.

How did it get rediscovered? Well, there were passing references to the book’s existence here and there—in interviews Cain gave toward the end of his life, in which he mentioned he was working on it; in the biography, where its premise is briefly summarized; in some of Cain’s records and correspondence. In April 2002, back when Hard Case Crime was just a glimmer in the eyes of two writers with a crazy notion that old-fashioned pulp crime fiction needed to be revived, I began corresponding with Max Allan Collins, the award-winning author who has gone on to be one of our most prolific contributors. In addition to agreeing to write some books of his own for our line, he had suggestions for other authors, living and dead, we might consider publishing. Cain was a favorite of his, and as it happened, a favorite of mine, too. Since picking up a creased copy of
Double Indemnity
on a used book table while a freshman at Columbia, I’d hunted down copies of every book Cain had ever written and read them all—even the obscure ones, even the weaker ones, even the ones no one had read in decades. But Max had heard about one I never had:
The Cocktail Waitress.

I spent the next nine years tracking down the book and securing the right to publish it.

The first problem was locating the manuscript. As it turns out, certain drafts—some partial, some complete—were housed in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, where nearly one hundred boxes hold papers from all stages of Cain’s life. But I didn’t know that then (this was before the Internet made finding everything in the world so simple), and I spent the first couple of years canvassing friends and contacts in the publishing field, book collectors, academics, anyone I could think of who might have a lead. But no one did. Finally, when I learned that my Hollywood agent, Joel Gotler, had inherited the practice of an old-time agent named H.N. Swanson—“Swanie,” to his friends, colleagues and clients, one of whom was none other than James Mallahan Cain—I asked Joel if he might be willing to look through Swanie’s old files and see if anything turned up. Joel looked—and a few days later I got an envelope in the mail containing the manuscript of
The Cocktail Waitress.

Talking to the
New York Times
later, I described the moment of opening that envelope as feeling like a scene out of a Spielberg picture —to stick with
Raiders
as our touchstone, like opening a tomb sealed for centuries and seeing the Lost Ark peeking out at me. But this moment turned out to be just the start of the quest, not the end. Because it became apparent quickly that there was more than one
Cocktail Waitress
to be found.

Sometimes a writer dies with his current work in progress unfinished. Then the challenge a publisher faces is finding another author to complete the work, and the results are rarely any good. Plenty of people loved Robert B. Parker when he was writing his own fine detective novels, but almost no one had a kind word to say about the job he did completing Raymond Chandler’s unfinished final Philip Marlowe manuscript,
Poodle Springs.
Much the same can be said for
the various attempts to complete Charles Dickens’
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
(although at least the musical version was fun).

But the situation with
The Cocktail Waitress
was different. We not only had a complete and finished manuscript, we had several, as well as several partial manuscripts and fragments, some consisting of no more than a few lines on a single sheet of notepaper, others going for a dozen pages or a few dozen. None of the manuscripts were dated, making establishing their order difficult (though one—the third-person draft of 107 pages—was labeled “O R I G I N A L”). Many contained the same scenes, only arranged in a different order; some had the same scenes only written slightly differently, with the differences sometimes being purely stylistic and sometimes being of great import to the book. (Example: After her first conversation with Mr. White, in one draft the scene ends with Joan thinking, “I knew I’d made a strike that could be important to me, but what stuck in my mind was: I wished I liked him better”; in another, Cain penciled through “I wish I liked him better” and wrote in, “Pale or not, he was very good looking and I liked him.” Quite a difference!)

Cain liked to explore variations. He tried out different names for his characters. Earl K. White was, at various times, Earl P. White, Earle D. White, William Gilbert, and Leonard Gilbert. Joan Medford was Joan Keller. Liz Baumgarten was Liz Daniel and Lida Zorn. Ethel was Harriet. Interestingly, Jake the bartender was always Jake, the same name Cain used for the bartender in
Mildred Pierce
(also the one in his memorable short story “Mommy’s a Barfly”—I can’t help wondering if he actually knew a Jake who served him his drinks in his salad days). He tried out different titles for the book—at one point it was going to be called
American Beauty,
which in turn was going to be the name of the bar where Joan gets her job waitressing, rather than the Garden of Roses. And he tried out, endlessly, different versions of his opening scene—there must be a dozen, all
taking place at the funeral of Joan’s first husband, but some continuing with Joan meeting Tom there for the first time and others with Joan meeting Mr. White there instead:

That I was Miss Death, presiding at Ron’s funeral, was a fancy that crossed Bill’s mind that dreadful day at the cemetery, as he later confessed to me, and to prove to myself I’m not is why I’m taping this. I may as well admit. I wouldn’t be telling the truth if I didn’t say tragedy stalked us, morning, noon, and night, from the moment we met. From the beginning, the outcome was in the cards, as they say—it had to come, one way or the other. But did it? The answer to that tortures me, but for the moment I’ll try to stop talking about it and get into what actually happened—and believe me, plenty did …

I first met Leonard Gilbert at Ron’s funeral, or half met him, perhaps I should say, as neither of us saw what the other looked like, or had any idea of what the encounter would mean in our lives. Ron’s family, the Medfords, had gone ahead with the arrangements, as I couldn’t possibly do, being left penniless, and their original idea, apparently, was to do nothing about me at all, to leave me out altogether. It was the undertaker who balked…

I first met Leonard Gilbert at Ron’s funeral, or half met him, we could say, as neither of us could see what the other looked like, or had any idea what we’d mean to each other later. And how that came about was Ron’s family. The Medfords had taken charge of things, as I couldn’t possibly do, as I’d been left penniless, and their original idea, apparently, as they blamed me for Ron’s death, was to leave me out altogether. But at such treatment of a widow the undertaker balked…

I first met William Gilbert and he first met me at Ron’s funeral, though I didn’t know it and he didn’t know it until we’d got reacquainted after meeting again, differently. And how that came about was: I was standing a little apart while Dr. Weeks read the graveside service when I became aware of someone behind me, and when I looked it was a man who had apparently been visiting the next burial plot and was now ready to leave. I stood aside for him to pass but he gestured he would wait and I turned back to our service. And the reason I didn’t know him later and that he didn’t know me was: I was veiled, so I couldn’t see his face very well, and the reason he didn’t know me was that he couldn’t see mine at all …

“I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.”
*

The words held the thunders of Judgment Day, the voice quavered and shook, as its owner, gray locks thin and bare to the afternoon sun, stood by a casket atop an open grave, and read from an open prayer-book. Yet all heads suddenly bowed here in a flower-strewn cemetery: of two couples, one middle-aged, the other younger, making a group of four; eight or ten young men and girls, in wind-breakers and slacks; and a girl in her early twenties, on the other side of the grave from the others, in short charcoal-black dress, with two men, undertaker’s assistants apparently. She was medium in size and goodlooking, especially as to the tawny blonde hair in ringlets over her neck, and a strikingly beautiful figure …