The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (16 page)

"Did you?" he said, rubbing.

"No," I moaned.

"Liar." He took his hand away. "Admit you thought of me."

"Don't stop," I said, sounding just like one of my neighbors in the lodging house.

"Admit it," he said, "or I'll take you back to the racket."

I pushed my face against his shoulder. "I think of things all the time," I said. "I think about how my clothing falls." Taking his hand, I pulled it back to my drawers. "Here."

"That's no answer," he said, but then he found the narrow cotton tie and busied himself as Jack would never have done. Jack would have preferred to stand and argue. I helped Pete push the garment to the ground. He groaned, picked me up, and laid me down on the sharp ivy. I did not think beyond the pleasure, though I grunted like a sailor. Later that would embarrass me. Later I would reflect on the ways Pete was unlike anything I had known. Later would come time for everything.

When we finished, Pete said, "Is it your first time?"

I drew him closer. "Does it always go like that?" He bit my neck, and I said, "I didn't think I'd like biting." That made him laugh out loud.

Through the hot fall months and into the dim, faintly lavender-colored winter, we found every opportunity to fall on each other. To my relief, he didn't ask any more about my experience, but his attentions could not have felt more new, more strange to me and sweet. Never before had merely thinking of someone brought on a sheen of sweat. Never had my body felt fluid; standing behind the brightly lit counter at Carter's, where I showed handkerchief after handkerchief to a clientele not quite as fine as the floorwalker had suggested, I thought of Pete and felt the movement of my clothes against my skin. For the first time I understood Mabel's low remarks about swoons and hunger. The coupling that Jack and I had done had been dutiful, something we both forgot the second we were finished. I could not have imagined the thoughts I now had, thoughts that made my very hands ravenous. I reached out to stroke whatever was near—the glass-topped counter, the varnished wood beneath it, my taffeta skirt. Some days, the dampness on my hands wore shiny spots onto my waist that I had to wash out.

After our first several bouts in the ivy left me with welts on my back and stains on my chemise, Pete came to visit me in my lodging house—gentleman callers in that place being easy enough, God knows, to arrange. My life divided into two unequal parts: the long days standing behind Carter's personal linens counter, followed by long nights sewing, and the fevered weekends, so swift, when I imprinted myself against Pete's slight body, his muscles all arranged in slim lines down his legs and back. Between the two of us, there couldn't have been an ounce of extra flesh. "We would have a baby the size of an elf," he said one day, then glanced at me. "I assume you're doing what you need?"

Licking my way across his shoulder, I nodded. I wasn't doing a thing. No child was going to be made in a womb that had been pried apart by prairie forceps as big as frying pans. Sometimes nannies with babies came into Carter's, and only with difficulty could I hold my position behind the handkerchiefs. At those times I remembered with freezing clarity the chalky, sweet smell of a baby's head, or the way the cry of a very young baby sounds so oddly like a question. I put all these thoughts out of my mind by pulling Pete to me, which he liked.

When we were outside of bed, to my discomfort, he enjoyed talking about babies. He was pleased by the idea of a future crammed with rosy tots, and he did not have to tell me that he expected the mother of those tots to be a virtuous woman, devoted to her children. It was left undiscussed whether he imagined me in the role of that mother, which was both discomfiting and a relief. Pete had no category in his mind for a mother who left children behind—and indeed, I did not either.

While we strolled, he would imagine out loud the children he would someday have. He bequeathed them his easy nature and long legs. "I hope no child will ever get these jug handles, though," he said, flicking his ears. "What do you want your children to have?"

"You leave those alone." I touched his earlobe.

"Now, Nell—they aren't my most comely feature. But what would you like to see on your daughter or son? Your delicate wrists? They are quite fine."

"You need to properly appreciate your attributes. Your ears make you look distinguished." He was about to contradict me when I leaned in to whisper, "They give me something to hang onto." He raised his eyebrows, flicked my chin, and we turned back toward home.

I became skilled at responding to him without answering, coasting away from the topic that mesmerized him. If we were alone, I would caress him. On our walks, I pointed out motorcars and gazebos or the E. D. Goode home. Distraction is not lying. I simply sidled to a different conversation, also true.

Respecting an impulse I felt more than understood, I did not talk to him about my seamstressing or about Madame Annelle. I did not wish to criticize, but as our first heat gave way to habit, I could not help noticing his lack of interest in investments and opportunities, the self-improvement written about in newspaper articles. Week after week, I read the articles: the opportunities presented by Los Angeles were boundless! No city had ever offered such prosperity, available to any man with pluck enough to reach out and grasp it. "Civic growth is not just our possibility, it is our obligation. Here in this land of sunshine and natural wealth, no man is poor but the one who desires to be so. Wealth is on every street corner, waiting only to be seized," ran one article under the headline the man of tomorrow has arrived today. I put the article aside and commended it to Pete, praising the author's insight and phraseology, but Pete left the newspaper in my room. He had shown such ardor in pursing me that I was slow in recognizing his disinclination otherwise to bestir himself.

He grew restless when I described the haughty customers at Carter's and did not appreciate my descriptions of their merchandise preferences, so often bad. The day I chattered heedlessly about the newly open position in bed linens, a more prestigious counter than handkerchiefs, he heard me out by staring over my shoulder. When I asked him about his own days at the accounting machine, he said, "I'll let you know the day that three times nine doesn't equal twenty-seven."

"Let's walk to the square. Maybe the Studebaker will be there again," I said, chastened.

Only once was I foolish enough to rehearse on him the line I hoped to murmur to the right client: "If madame likes, I could make an even finer dress than this." I was proud of the sentence, which seemed just the thing Madame Annelle would say.

His laugh was short. "That should end your days at Carter's."

"I don't plan to let the floor manager overhear."

"So you will secretly set up a new source of income?"

"Yes." Perhaps Pete thought every shop girl's room featured a sewing machine and stacks of garments. Perhaps he noticed nothing beyond my breasts. They barely made a bump beneath the coverlet, he said.

"And then what do you think you will be, Nell, all by yourself? A businesswoman?"

"There is nothing wrong with being a seamstress."

He picked up my hand as if weighing it. "You're the one who plans not to be overheard."

"I won't imperil my position. I'm not foolish."

"Not at all. You are a businesswoman." His tone was hard to read, though the angry amusement on his face was not.

When we reached my lodgings, Pete watched me work the key into the loose lock. "Does anyone here bother you?" he said.

"As much as they feel the need to."

"Ought I to worry?"

"No." So far I had managed to keep my address a secret from nearly everyone, particularly employers and other girls who would rightly fear association with such a place. Pete was paying closer attention than I realized, though. He started giving me two dollars a week: one for the landlord, and one for the policeman who visited regularly. "I don't like this," I said when he pulled out his wallet. No telling how many other men had stood in this room, handing money into a waiting palm.

"Make me a four-in-hand," Pete said. "I'll give you three dollars for it."

"At that price, it should be made of gold."

"It will be a very special four-in-hand. Every fellow will desire it, but it will be mine alone."

"What if a fellow comes along and offers me five dollars?"

"You'll go to the highest bidder?"

"Only for neckwear," I said, angry with myself for letting the conversation take this turn. Pete was not usually so acute.

"I'll be forced to kill him," Pete said lightly, pulling me back down to the thin mattress. The iron springs on the bed frame shrieked, so we kept the mattress on the floor, even though it left us no room to walk. "Him and you, both."

"You're no murderer."

"You don't especially know, now do you? I could be Jack the Ripper."

I couldn't help but laugh—that limp mustache of his. "Do you think Jack the Ripper would go to a racket?"

"You don't know who's in that dance hall. You got lucky with me."

"La. Don't think much of yourself, do you?"

He pressed his lips together and his eyes tightened, making him look like a boy acting the role of a grown man—a soldier, for instance—in a school play. "I am a fellow with prospects."

"Do tell."

"You should pay attention, Nell. In a company like First Conservative, the only direction is up."

I was still angry, or else I would have sensibly held my tongue. "There are other directions. There's sideways. Or standing still. What about that fellow you told me about, who's been running the same accounting machine as you for twenty years?"

"People move ahead," he said, and pulled himself onto me roughly. I kept my mouth shut, but as he pushed—hard, he was intending to teach me something—I thought of old shoppies. When the lucky ones married, we gave them parties. More often we would come to work and find that the aging girl who had been standing behind the counter at hats or fancy trim was gone, replaced with a girl fifteen years old and trembling in her eagerness to please.

Pete was right—I should have paid attention. When I told him about a new land development opening to the north that the
Times
said represented the future of Los Angeles, he pinched the flesh over my elbow and said, "My Sphinx. You're quite a scholar, aren't you?" He put on a harsh smile when I asked him to accompany me to a lecture about investing for the future. "No telling what kind of wealthy widow I might meet there," he said. He liked the game we used to play, pretending I was jealous of other girls. By now I well understood that there were no other girls.

As sweetly as I knew how, I told him when I read of openings for young men with accounting skills at firms as far to the west as Wilshire Boulevard. "Why would I leave First Conservative?" he said.

"Opportunities."

"A solid company like First Conservative rewards loyalty," he said.

Close to ten years there, and he was still working at the same accounting machine, threatening to topple the same rickety desk, in the same unventilated room, with the same five other workers. I knew because I'd asked, early on, and he told me. He wouldn't tell me such things now.

"You think a job like this is available all the time?" he said. "It's not." Kindly, he stopped short of pointing out that he wasn't like a shoppie, taking up and leaving employment as if caught in a revolving door.

After staying at Carter's six months, I quietly found new employment at Gout's Fashion Emporium, then at Frenech's Fine Fashions, moving toward Pasadena one storefront at a time. The closer I got, the more impatient I was to arrive, and the less I could reveal my impatience. The shoppies I worked with and sewed for now did not go to rackets. They had steady beaus, and those beaus had prospects. Or else they had wives. The shoppies who stepped out with married men dressed better than the rest of us, and one had a diamond hair clip. She sometimes carried it in her handbag and let us see. "Make sure your fellow gives you something once a week," she said. "Otherwise he gets lazy." I thought of the dollar bills I carried in my handbag—the dollar bills Pete gave me. The shoppie smiled. "Make sure he gives you something
nice.
"

Everything at Frenech's was
nice.
The fabrics I handed to customers were either so heavy they made my arms ache or so light that a person could read the newspaper through them, as we sometimes demonstrated with the
Examiner.
The leather gloves were as soft as velvet, the silk ones fastened with a genuine, tiny pearl, and the silk motoring toque with its long gray gauze veil actually made me blink back tears. Every day I gazed at the world I meant to inhabit, then rode a streetcar and walked ten blocks from the streetcar stop, past unpainted stucco storefronts and empty lots where thin dogs with broken teeth growled at me. Often I had to chase away a dog or a few cats to walk up the steps to my lodging house. Its splintered siding and the broken windows patched with curls of cardboard had long since ceased to concern me—the building's shabbiness was a badge of my thrift, like the iron bed frame now packed with rolled-up bills. Every one of those bills brought closer the day that I would be in front of the counter at Frenech's, not behind it, carrying in my handbag money identical to that paid by Pasadena ladies.

Still, it chafed my patience to enter the squalid house and find Pete loitering in the parlor where no lamp worked, his collar loose and grubby, his hands already reaching to take my clothes off. "I've been waiting," he would say, a comment that did not improve my disposition. An accountant at First Conservative did not work such late hours as a shop girl; anyone knew that. But a fellow who wanted to get ahead would find profitable ways to put those hours to use.

"Let's go out," I said one Sunday morning. Having promised a Frenech shoppie a new corset out of pretty sprigged cotton, I had no business leaving my room, but this morning the sight of Pete swaggering around the tiny space as if for his two dollars he owned it, as if he might want to own it, made my irritation leap like a match flame. Abruptly, I wanted to see something other than this little room and this little man.