“Deanna Durbin.”
“That’s right.” She was obviously proud of that. “And I sing like her, too, only my voice is lower.”
I didn’t suppose it had ever occurred to her that Hollywood already had a Deanna Durbin, name of Deanna Durbin.
Beth was saying, dreamily, “I’ve always known, deep down inside of me, that I was different… special… that I was going to be famous someday.”
How many pretty, ambitious, restless girls had thought that same thing? Every day of every month of every year, buxom babes like Beth left farms and small towns, forsaking family and friends and sweethearts for the lure of bright lights, boarding a bus or hitching, diamonds in their eyes and cardboard suitcases in their hands. It was one of the most standard, enduring, and little-realized American dreams.
And yet I said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you did become famous, Beth. You’re a lovely young woman, with a nice speaking voice, and a refined demeanor.”
“You really think so?”
“I really think so.”
She spent the night with me in my suite at the Morrison. We sat on my couch and talked and talked into the night, and I heard all about her hopes and dreams and enthusiasms. She went on and on about how much she loved music-Benny Goodman, the Andrews Sisters, Kate Smith, Glenn Miller, Jo Stafford, both Bing and Frankie-and when I told her I knew Sinatra personally and that maybe I could introduce her someday, she had given me a great big kiss.
And then we necked, like schoolkids, and for a change I was drunk not with rum but with a girl’s beauty and her perfume and those clear blue-green eyes that you wanted to dive into and splash around. We petted, and I caressed her perfect breasts-they were full and firm and more than a handful-and finally she let me undo the back of her dress and it folded down around her waist like flower petals and her skin was a remarkable alabaster, smooth and flawless, with a beauty mark on one shoulder. I kissed the buds of her breasts and she moaned with pleasure and I kissed them some more, buried my face in their soft firmness, but when my hand, stroking the suppleness of her thighs, tried to edge up between them, she took me by the wrist and drew my hand back, shaking her head, her expression almost sad, as she said, “No, no, not yet, it’s too early,” and I could understand that, since this was only our first night, so when her hand undid my zipper and her head dipped into my lap, that pile of curls bobbing up and down, working expertly, I was stunned, I was shocked, I was delighted…
I saw her three more times. Whether I picked her up at the hotel where she was freeloading off model friends, or simply met her at the Morrison, she would be dolled up in expensive clothes-either that leopard fur coat or a white fur, and black outfits with dark nylons, her white-powdered face glowing angelically in the night, red lips like a lovely scarlet wound-looking like a movie star, not a would-be actress waiting tables. She borrowed money from me every time we were together-as little as twenty, as much as a hundred-but she was not a hooker, at least she didn’t see herself that way, and I refused to see her that way.
We would talk about each other. She described herself as Black Irish-“lace curtain, not shanty!”-and wondered why a man with a Jewish last name looked so Irish, and I explained that my father had been an apostate Jew, a leftist bookseller on the West Side, and my Irish mother, who died when I was born, had given me my red hair and Mick mug. She said she barely knew her father, that he had been an entrepreneur who had had a small chain of miniature golf courses that failed in the early years of the Depression, and disappeared, only to turn up years later in California, where she had tried to get to know him, and failed.
Because she was so soft on servicemen, I found myself telling her how I’d been in the Marines and on Guadalcanal, since after all I had to compete with these kids in uniform she was writing her letters to; and she even wormed it out of me that I’d been awarded a Silver Star-something I never mentioned to anybody; I never talked about the war-but, what the hell, she could know anything, she could take anything, considering what she was giving.
And I told her about Peggy, and she told me about her late fiance, Matt, a major in the Flying Tigers who had been killed on his way home from India, in a plane crash, earlier that year.
“That’s why I haven’t… you know, gone all the way with you,” she explained on my couch, the second night we were together. “I didn’t date while Matt was away, keeping true to him… and now that he’s gone, I’m having to start all over again, just taking little tiny baby steps.”
No, she wasn’t going “all the way” with me; she was just putting her head in my lap-some little baby steps! Yet for some reason, I didn’t feel like pointing out this glaring, illogical inconsistency.
Anyway, there was more to her reluctance to perform intercourse than the memory of her dead pilot: on the third evening, she had requested a loan of one hundred dollars because she needed to see a “female-trouble doctor” in Gary.
“You’re not pregnant, are you?” I asked.
“No! It’s… something personal. Please don’t ask.”
Maybe it was V.D. of some kind, in which case I really wasn’t anxious to change our pattern of sexual activity.
Still, female trouble or not, I was becoming quite taken with Beth Short. She was filling the Peggy void quite nicely, and her enthusiasm for orally servicing me was-I am neither proud, nor particularly ashamed to say-intoxicating.
On the fourth and final night we were together (she had the evening off from the Oyster House), we dined out at Henrici’s and came back to my Morrison suite, where she announced that she had indeed decided to return to California.
“Why don’t you try staying on in Chicago, awhile?” I asked her, fixing her a Coke on ice and myself a rum and Coke on ice. “I talked to Patricia Stevens this morning-I can get you an interview.”
That was the number-one modeling agency in town.
“No, Nate, I appreciate it. I appreciate everything you’ve done… but just this morning, I spoke on the phone to a famous movie director, and he wants me to come to Hollywood, right away, to take a screen test.”
This sounded like a pipe dream if I ever heard one. I handed her the Coke and sat next to her on the couch. “What famous director?”
“I can’t say. He asked me not to.”
“That’s bullshit, Beth-he’s just another asshole who wants to get in your pants.”
“Don’t be crude, Nate-don’t be mean.”
I was a little owly at that, at the thought of having those exquisite “baby steps” vanish from my life. “I was kind of hoping… I mean, I thought we were getting along pretty well…”
“We are, we are,” she said, and she put her arms around me and we began kissing, and petting, and then her head was in my lap and I was giddy, I was in heaven.
Which made it a hell of thing to have to accept her leaving. So, as the evening progressed, I did my best to talk her into giving Chicago a go of it, and along the way I had another rum and Coke, and another, and another…
I don’t remember much more of the evening except Beth saying, “Let’s just forget our problems and enjoy this last night together… Live for today, I always say…”
At some point in the night I woke up, needing to use the bathroom, and noticed Beth in bed next to me. So-we had finally made it from the couch to the bed. A light was still on in the outer room, filtering in enough that I could lift the covers and have a peek at her busty little frame. She was nude, slumbering peacefully, though snoring a little, something bronchial stirring in her chest. She had washed the lipstick and white pancake away and her high-cheekboned beauty, framed by the mane of black, was even more striking unadorned.
I remember wondering-as I staggered in to take a pee-if I had finally fucked her, only to have forgotten in my drunkenness; and I remember thinking, if she did have the clap or something, I probably caught it-and deserved to.