Fade to Blonde

queen because her collar stuck up in back higher than her head. When she was upset, she did these interpretive dance moves. There was a lot of running through tunnels, and finally the walls were toppling in, the queen dancing around clutching her temples, and then you saw the palace burning, the little minarets toppling off, and a big THE END in the sky. I sat there for a few minutes watching cartoon squirrels whack each other with mallets, and then it started up again. The rocket came down on a column of fire. The men set out across a kind of meadow. Way off on the horizon, the palace appeared, shining and perfect. I got up out of my seat and went to see Rebecca.

The stairs still weren’t anything that would interest Busby Berkeley. At the top of them, I heard voices. They got louder as I neared Number 6. It sounded like I wasn’t the only one having a bad morning. I paused in front of the door, listening. Down the hall, the manager’s door was shut. Inside I heard Shade and Rebecca going at it pretty strong. I was coming at a bad time. Okay by me. The worse, the better. I knocked on the door, and when no one answered, I opened it.

Rebecca wore a pair of beige slacks and a brassiere. Her hair was uncombed and her feet were bare. Shade was dressed just as he’d been the previous Friday, except I couldn’t see his hat anywhere. His face was dark and ugly, and his enormous neck seemed to be swelling as I watched. When I came in, he slowly pivoted his entire body to look at me. It was like watching a gun turret turning. “Why, it’s Misser Carson,” he said.

“Ray,” Rebecca said, not looking at me. “Get out of here.”

I said, “Hello, Shade. Rebecca.”

“Why it’s Mister Carson. H’lo, Misser Carson. Nother one a Beggy’s frien’s. Nice t’know Beggy’s so many frien’s.”

“That’s enough now, Lorrie,” Rebecca said.

“Real good frien’s. Y’wamme t’run along now like a li’l bitty angel and run long now so you c’n talk a Mister Carson?”

“Good idea,” I said.

“Shut up, Ray. Lorrie, I want you to calm down now.”

“Beggy’s poplar gal. Yessir. Nother frien’. Nother frien’. Wamme run long? Be n’angel? No? No? Maybe’ll stay then. Stay’n wash. Learn some’n. Yessir, Beggy knows a few th—”

Shade wasn’t the only one who could move fast. I saw a white streak, and suddenly Shade’s face had snapped to the side and there were three red welts down his cheek.

“Shut up,” she whispered. “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”

He looked at her in horror — I was probably looking at her the same way — and his eyes slowly filled with tears. “I’m sorry, Becky. I didn’t mean it.”

“Get out of here. Go away.”

“I didn’t mean it, Becky,” he said, beginning to sob. “I didn’t mean nothing, Becky.”

“You miserable fat-faced lump of hillbilly cowboy feeble-minded — you’ll never mean anything. You’ll never mean anything. Go away.”

She began to swear at him then, one hard spurt after another of vile language. She didn’t use any words I didn’t know, and I guess I wasn’t surprised she knew them herself, but it was shocking to hear them in those clear, familiar, almost prissy tones — her diction hadn’t coarsened at all — and pouring out through a red distorted face I wouldn’t have recognized.

“Don’t, Becky,” Shade kept saying. “Becky, don’t.”

He pronounced it dawn.

Swearing furiously, she wrangled him through the door and slammed it.

“I’ll go crazy,” she said to no one special. “I’ll go right straight out of my goddamned mind. This is hell. This is hell.” She looked at me with hatred. “What do you want here with your big fat face?”

Then she went still. Her eyes, which she’d twisted small, grew huge, terrifyingly large, and she spun and yanked the door open again.

Shade was still standing there, weeping. “Becky,” he said.

The noise that came from her now wasn’t speech at all, just a sound like heavy chain being dragged over rock. She lunged forward at Shade and began driving him down the hall with her fists. I heard them shuffling slowly along the carpet, and her voice echoing. She was expressing herself, all right. He was getting it with the bark still on.

The moment they were out of sight, I went to the little desk. Nothing there or in the closet. The top drawer of the bureau was socks and undies. In the second drawer I found the powder-blue appointment book. I flipped through it. Mostly blank. The first three months were gone. In the back there was a string of phone numbers next to single initials, and I tried to commit the first two to memory. I looked in the pocket in the back cover, from which she’d taken the snapshot of Halliday. Inside was a letter on plain white stationery, with no envelope. It had been folded and refolded so often it was fragile along the creases. I read:

Dear Becky,

Well Kid it looks like the Movie Star idea is a bust as we thought it might be but I’m not down hearted and I don’t want you to be either. I got a number of other things working just at the moment and I think I’m doing O.K. or anyhow I could be if a few things would work out like I’m planning but my spirits are good and this is not as bad a Town as I was thinking. But I wish I had my girl with me. Because then I know everything would really go then. Honey there are more girls here then you could think of a million girls but there aren’t any of them like you, like a queen, and I think you should come out here because when they see you here they’ll know they really got something. I’m serious when I say that you could go big around here. Baby they think they’ve seen something but they haven’t seen athing till they’ve seen you. I’d like to see you up there getting treated like you deserve and I wouldn’t be a bit suprised to find you got that little something they seem to think I lack, and also I never think so clearly as when your here with me. If we were working this town together nothing could stop us. And even if they did I wouldn’t care anyway if you were here. I’m taking a little liberty and enclosing as you can see a ticket on the Western Zephiyr. I wish I was sending you an airplane ticket instead but that’ll come in time. Baby just come for a visit to lift my spirits and if you don’t like it I’ll get you home again someway but I know the way I really know things that this is your kind of Town.

All my love allways,

“Lance”

I heard a door slam down the hall, and footsteps approaching. She walked back into the room saying, “I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him.”

When she saw me holding the letter, she stopped.

She walked over to the straight chair by the closet. She sat herself down cautiously, as if she wasn’t sure the chair would hold.

We looked at each other.

“You met him a few months ago when he hired you to do a stag movie,” I said.

She didn’t say anything.

I said, “So you did a couple movies and then stole his money, because he wasn’t much of anything to you anyway, and now he wants to douse you with lye.”

“May I have that, please,” she whispered.

“Sure,” I said, and handed her the letter.

“May I have my book, please.”

I gave that to her, too, and she folded the letter carefully and tucked it away where it had been and zipped up the book.

She gripped the book in both hands.

“I know,” she said. “I know I’ve lied to you. But I haven’t lied about anything important, Ray. Not important to you. Only to me.”

“Uh huh.”

“If you’re going to hit me,” she said, “then go on and hit me, but please don’t just keep standing over me like this.”

I sat down on the bed.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Take it from ‘important,’z” I said.