The Golden Gizmo

Toddy liked nice things. He liked to live in good places. He found that it paid off. In the swank apartment hotel where he resided, he was believed to be the scion of a Texas oil millionaire. No one would have thought of associating the tanned, exquisitely tailored young man with anything off-color.

He was sitting in the bar of his hotel the day he met Elaine. Apparently she had followed him in from the street, although he had not seen her. The first he saw of her was when she slid onto the stool next to his and looked up at him with that funny, open-toothed smile.

'Order yet, darling?' she said. 'I believe I'll have a double rye, water on the side.'

He looked at the bartender, who was giving Elaine a doubtful but chilly eye. 'That sounds good enough for me,' he said. 'Two double ryes, water on the side.'

In the few seemingly casual glances he gave her, while she drank that drink and three others, he checked off her points and added them up to zero. She was scrawny. Her clothes, except for her hat-she was always careful with her hats-looked like they had been thrown on her. The wide-spaced teeth gave her mouth an almost ugly look. When she crinkled her face as she did incessantly, talking, laughing, smiling, she looked astonishingly like a monkey.

Yet, dammit, and yet there was something about her that got him. Something warm and golden that reached out and enveloped him, and drew him closer and closer, yet never close enough. Something that even infected the bartender, making him solicitous with napkins and ice and matches held for cigarettes-that held him there wanting to do things that were paid for by the doing.

Toddy glanced at his watch and slid off the stool. 'Getting late,' he remarked. 'Think we'd better be getting on to dinner, don't you?'

'No,' said Elaine promptly, crinkling her face at him. 'Not hungry. Gonna stay right here. Jus' me an' you an' nice bartender.'

The bartender beamed foolishly and frowned at Toddy. Toddy gave him an appraising stare.

'I think,' he said, 'the nice bartender is in danger of losing his nice license. Which is worth a nice twenty-five thousand for a nice place like this. It isn't considered nice, it seems, to provide liquor to obviously intoxicated people.'

'Not 'tox-toxshi-conshtipated! Ver' reg'lar-'

But now the bartender had become even more urgent than Toddy. And Elaine was holding herself in a little; she wasn't ready to open all the stops. Toddy got her out of there and into the Cadillac, and she passed out immediately.

He opened her purse, looking for something that would give him her address. Its sole contents, aside from compact and lipstick, was a wadded-up letter. He read it with a growing feeling of gladness.

Of course, he'd been sure from the beginning that she wasn't peddling, another b-girl, but he was glad to see the letter nonetheless. Any girl might blow her top if something like this happened to her-having a studio contract canceled before she ever started to work. Hell, he might have gone out hitting up strangers himself. Now, with the letter in his hand, he saw why he had felt that he had known her.

He had seen her several years before in a picture. It had been a lousy picture, but one player-a harried, scatter-witted clerk in a dime store-had almost saved it. She had only to fan the straggling hair from her eyes or hitch the skirt about her scrawny hips to set the audience to howling. They roared with laughter-laughter that was with her, not at her. Laughter with tears in it.

Toddy drove her around until she awakened, and then he drove to a drive-in and fed her tomato soup and coffee. She took these attentions matter-of-factly, trustingly, either not wanting to ask questions or not needing to. He took her to her home, a court apartment in North Hollywood.

He went in with her, steered her through the disarray of dropped clothes and empty bottles and overturned ashtrays to a daybed. She collapsed on it, and was instantly asleep again.

Toddy stared at her, perplexed, wondering what to do, feeling a strange obligation to take care of her. The court door opened unceremoniously and a woman stepped in.

She had a bust on her like a cemetery angel and her face looked just about as stony. But even she looked at Elaine and spoke with a note of regret.

So this was Mr. Ives-the brother Elaine had insisted would arrive. And just when she was beginning to believe there wasn't any brother! Well. She knew how perturbed he must be, she was fond of Elaine herself, and-and such a great talent, Mr. Ives! But it just couldn't go on any longer. She simply could not put up with it. So if Mr. Ives would find her another place immediately, absolutely no later than tomorrow-And since he'd want to get started early, the back rent-six weeks, it was…

Toddy paid it. He stayed the night there, sprawled out on two chairs. In the morning, he helped Elaine pack. Or, rather, he packed, stopping frequently to hold her over the toilet while she retched, and washing her face afterward.

He found and paid for another apartment. He put her to bed. Not until then, when she was looking up at him from the pillows-a bottle of whiskey on the reading stand, just as 'medicine'-did she seem to take any note of what he had done.

'Sit down here,' she said, patting the bed. And he sat down. 'And maybe you'd better hold my hand,' she said. And he held it. 'Now,' she said, her face crinkling into a frown, 'what am I going to do about you?'

'Do?' Toddy grinned.

'Now, you know what I mean,' she said severely. 'I'm broke. I'm not working and I don't know when I will be. I guess I should ask you to sleep with me, but I've never done anything like that, and anyway it probably wouldn't be much fun for you, would it? I mean I'm so skinny I'd probably stick you with a bone.'

'Y-yes,' nodded Toddy. He had the goddamnedest feeling that he was going to bawl!

'Maybe I could wash some clothes for you,' said Elaine. 'That's an awfully pretty suit you have on. I could wash it real nice for you and hang it out the window, and it… would that be worth fifty cents?'

Toddy shook his head. He couldn't speak.

'Well'-her voice was humble-'a quarter, then?'

'D-don't,' said Toddy. 'Oh, for Christ's sake…'

Toddy hadn't cried since the night he ran away from home. He'd half-killed his stepfather with a two-by-four, bashed him over the head as he came into the barn. He'd tried to make it look like an accident, like one of the rafters had broken. But he was shaking with fear, with that and the bitter coldness of the night. He'd huddled down in a corner of the boxcar, and sometime during the night a tramp had crawled into the car also. Observing the proprieties of the road, the tramp had gone into a corner, that corner, to relieve himself. And Toddy had been soaked, along with his thin parcel of sandwiches. The stuff had frozen on him. He'd cried then, for the last time.

Up to now.

He was down on his knees at the side of the bed, and her arms clutched him in an awkward, foolishly sweet embrace, and she was talking to him like a child, as one child to another, and there had never been another moment like this in the history of man and woman. They cried together, two lost children who found comfort and warmth in each other. And then they started to laugh. For somehow in the extravagant and puppyish outpouring of her caresses, she had hooked the armhole of her nightgown around his neck.

While she shrilled gleefully that he was tickling her, and while her small breast pounded his face with merriment, he lifted and stood her on the bed. Then, since there was no other way, he slid off the other shoulder strap and drew the gown off her body, lowering his head with it.

He shucked out of it and turned around. She was still standing upright, examining herself in the wall mirror.

She twisted her neck and gazed at her childish buttocks. She faced the mirror and bowed her back and legs. She raised one leg in the air and looked.