Читать книгу Jericho's Daughters - Paul Iselin Wellman - Страница 9

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❧ The previous September, when Mary Agnes stopped at the Beverly Hills Hotel—as she usually did between planes on her way to Honolulu—Los Angeles was having one of its heat waves. Through her open window in the hotel she listened to the roar of traffic on Sunset Boulevard, and she knew that wide avenue, like every other roadway leading toward the sea, was jammed with cars filled with people rushing to the beaches and the cool ocean airs and waters.

Along the seashore, from Malibu to Laguna, the hot sands of the beaches stirred yeastily with a mass of scantily clad humanity, a froth of it wading out or even swimming into the blue-green waves, lifeguards watching from towers, young men bronzed and shouting and bounding and splashing, girls molded in skintight swimsuits screaming and laughing and running and being splashed, children dabbling at the wet surf’s edge or making sand castles, older people, some almost hideous with the deformation of age, but still conforming to the convention of the revealing beach garment, lolling on the sands or under umbrellas.

In the city’s expensive residential areas a thousand blue-tinted swimming pools surrounded by green grass and languorous flowers were gathering places for beautiful young people, also in the inevitable swimsuits, who poised and plunged from diving boards, rose and splashed, laughed and shouted, or stretched out on mats and towels on the concrete aprons to augment their fashionable tans.

Everywhere, on the clipped lawns and amidst the pruned shrubbery of those costly homes with the swimming pools, tens of thousands of sprinklers sprayed water, brought at infinite expense and labor through great concrete conduits across mountain ranges and deserts from sources hundreds of miles away; and the trucks of Japanese gardeners, laden with hoses, garden implements, and bags of trash, stood along the curbs as those patient urban peasants toiled to keep the beauty of grass and flower serene and unblasted by the heat.

Along Sunset Boulevard elderly women with sunglasses and battered wide straw hats flapped maps at passing cars, advertising “Home Addresses of 100 Movie Stars.” In Hollywood, now long degenerated from a city of glamour into a seamy town of second-class shops, tourists gazed reverently at cement footprints before Grauman’s Chinese Theater, or hung about the intersection of Hollywood and Vine in hope of catching sight of some celebrity, or crowded in sweltering lines at the entrances of television and radio studios.

Down in the poorer sections of Los Angeles husbands and wives yelled at each other over bottles of beer and dirty-faced kids swirled in and out. On Skid Row, where the eyes smarted with the smog and buildings wore a dirty coat of grime and soot, old forgotten men queued up in front of gospel missions, where they could get soup with their psalms. The old forgotten men made no pilgrimage to the ocean. Their one concession to the heat was to strip down to their gray, grimy undershirts.

This was Los Angeles on a heat-smitten, smog-ridden day; and Mary Agnes was glad that her plane left for Honolulu the following morning. Meantime she was waiting for Erskine de Lacey to come for her. They were going out for cocktails and she was willing to be amused.

At six he telephoned from the lobby, and she made him wait only fifteen minutes before she came down from her room in a wide-flaring cocktail dress of aquamarine and black that made her waist seem small, with a filmy scarf about her bare shoulders.

Erskine came over to her quickly. He was of medium height, slender and small-boned, with a preserved boyish look, his crew cut brown hair slightly graying; about her own age, she judged. She thought his face rather good-looking: tanned like all these sun worshipers, with wrinkles on his neck and jaw muscles strong as if he had been grinding his teeth for years. He wore a simple blue suit with a string tie, and his shoes were black, pointed, and narrow—a shade too narrow for a man, perhaps—and very well polished and elegant.

“Did I keep you waiting long?” was her stock feminine greeting.

“Oh, not at all!” was his stock masculine reply. “Shall we have a cocktail in the lounge before we go?”

“I suppose we’re a little late already——”

“It really doesn’t matter—those things go on forever. Still, my car’s at the porte-cochere. Mind a little wind?”

“No, I have my scarf.”

Erskine had escorted her before: they were, indeed, quite good friends. He always treated her with unvarying and almost exaggerated politeness, and this was one reason she sometimes preferred him as an evening companion.

She was not especially offended with a man if he grew ardent perhaps under the influence of a few drinks. She was not even above permitting a few kisses, if she felt like it: everybody kissed everyone these days. But there was a line she drew, and if her escort attempted to go beyond that she extricated herself, and in such a manner that she usually left him, if somewhat frustrated, at least accepting defeat with good humor and even with hope of better luck at some later time; for she managed usually to leave things with a half promise hanging in the air, as some women almost invariably do.

All this, however, required effort, and the summoning of tact and firmness and perhaps humor, for laughter is a great quencher of fire. It was much more restful to know that your man was not going to stop his car suddenly under the pepper trees and begin reaching for you. In the case of Erskine this not only was restful but a little puzzling to her. She wondered why he seemed to like her so well, yet only at a distance.

Erskine’s car was a small MG convertible, a fire-engine red. She never had liked the little foreign sports cars, preferring comfort; and she wondered if the MG was evidence of something or other in Erskine, perhaps juvenilism of mind. But she seated herself in it, wound the scarf about her head, and he swung out from the hotel drive into the rushing traffic of the boulevard.

“How long do you want to stay at this brawl?” he asked her.

“No particular length of time. Why?”

“You’ve never seen my studio.” He made a swoop with the diminutive car along the curb inside a truck, so that she held her breath when it seemed there was not room to pass without a collision. But the MG slipped through the narrow space, roared past the truck, and raced on.

She breathed normally again. “No, I haven’t,” she said.

Though she knew he was an artist she had never seen any of his work. In Hollywood he was considered an “advanced” painter, which probably meant that he was excessively modernistic.

“Isn’t it about time you did?” he asked. “Suppose we have dinner—after we pay our respects out here—and then perhaps take a peek at my workshop?”

She considered. Studios ... rather well-known devices of gentlemen with something on their minds besides art, or music, or whatever it is. But Erskine was different from most men she knew in this city, and besides, she had that complete confidence in herself.

“Let’s see how the cocktail party is,” she temporized.