he: A Novel(62)

I want Ruth to move in with me, he tells Babe.

– That’s kind of sudden, isn’t it?

– I find it hard to be alone.

– It’s the season. It’ll pass.

– No, I don’t believe it will.

Thelma Todd comes by to say hello. They exchange kisses. Thelma Todd is involved with a director named Roland West, with whom she plans to set up a café in Pacific Palisades, as Thelma Todd can see her acting career petering out. Thelma Todd also sometimes fucks Ted Healy, who manages a slapstick act called Ted Healy & His Stooges, which is signed to MGM. Ted Healy & His Stooges perform violent knockabout material, and have made a feature and a few shorts, none of which he likes. Ted Healy is a mean drunk, and Thelma Todd is too good for him, but Thelma Todd’s choice in men is generally poor. Thelma Todd is also still married to Pat DiCicco, who is nominally a producer but mostly acts as Lucky Luciano’s eyes and ears in Hollywood, and who once hit Thelma Todd so hard that her appendix burst, which means that anyone else who fucks Thelma Todd is either brave or stupid – or, in the case of Ted Healy, just too drunk to care.

Don’t get me wrong, Babe continues, after Thelma Todd has gone on her way. I think Ruth is a lovely woman, but how much do you know about her?

He knows that her maiden name is Handsberger. He knows that Mr Rogers, her husband, didn’t last the pace, and is now safely dead. They had been living apart for some time, but Ruth held on to the Rogers name, as one would if one’s own name was Handsberger. He knows that she is pretty and funny, and not dumb.

He knows that he does not wish to be alone.

The problem, he tells Babe, is that I can’t live openly with her until my divorce is final. I mean, I suppose I could, but she won’t agree to it anyway.

And Hal wouldn’t like it, says Babe. Being square with you, I wouldn’t be too happy about it either. Now that Roscoe Arbuckle is dead, there’s a vacancy for a disgraced comic, and two will fit the bill as nicely as one.

Babe never refers to Roscoe Arbuckle as Fatty, not even posthumously. Babe tries never to allude to anyone’s appearance in a way that might prove hurtful.

So what am I supposed to do, he asks, rattle around in my rooms like an old maid?

– It’s a big place. Why not have someone move in with you, someone nobody could take issue with, and then ask Ruth to join you?

This, he admits, is not a bad idea, although if it were a story for one of their pictures, it would have to go horribly wrong.

They bat around some names.

You like Baldy Cooke, offers Babe, and I know Baldy and his wife are hurting for money. They live in a dump.

He has known Baldy and Alice Cooke since vaudeville. They toured together back then, and he has always done his best to secure Baldy roles in his pictures. Baldy and Alice Cooke are respectable people, and not just by the standards of this town.

I’ll ask Baldy, he says.

He spends the holidays drinking, apart from a brief, unhappy reunion with his daughter. He hosts visitors at South Palm on Christmas Day. He informs his guests that they are celebrating the release of Sons of the Desert, and the first Christmas since the end of Prohibition, while also raising a glass to his deceased brother, who would want to be remembered in this way. Like newspaper reports about chop suey and heated kennels, no one cares if any of this is true.

Baldy and Alice Cooke are invited to attend. He gives Baldy and Alice Cooke a tour of the apartment, and suggests that they might find this preferable to their current lodgings. All they need do in return is act as chaperones for Ruth and him, by which all involved take it to mean that Baldy and Alice Cooke should mind their own business while enjoying the comforts of their new accommodations. An agreement is reached. They shake hands on it.

The next day, he takes Ruth to the High Sierras to break the good news. The resort cabin is heated by a wood stove, and smells of fir. He moves inside her on the bed, his head buried against her breasts. She tugs at his hair, enjoining him to look at her, but he kisses her nipples to distract her so that he may keep his eyes closed. He stops breathing through his nose because her scent is wrong, and he keeps his tongue in his mouth because the taste of her skin is wrong, and he shuts his ears to the sound of her because her cries are wrong, and the weight of her on him is wrong, and when he comes it is as though the last of all that is good in him has been expelled from his body into the wrong woman and he is guilty of another act of betrayal, one more in a sequence that stretches back to Mae and will continue onward through women named and yet to be named unless he can find a way to be with Lois again.

He considers leaving the cabin to call Lois, but the resort has only a single public telephone, and one never knows who might be listening. Ruth, already preparing to sleep, is lying beside him, one leg stretched over his thighs, one arm against his chest, and though he should be able to lift her with ease, the burden of her now holds him down, and as she puts out the light the darkness conspires to add its density to hers.

And in the corner, the last embers in the stove glow redly like the splinters of his sundered being.





121


He is sick.

Sick of Hal Roach.

Sick of Ruth.

Sick of alimony.

Oliver the Eighth is finished, Babes in Toyland awaits, and meanwhile he has too much time on his hands. He fucks Ruth by night. After Ruth leaves for work each morning, he writes letters to Lois asking her to take him back. When he is not writing, or drinking, or fucking Ruth, he pesters Ben Shipman about renegotiating his alimony payments.