Butterfly Man. Lew Levenson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ was fond of her. They would be very successful together, he had thought. They had dined together that night and he had tried to explain that he earnestly wanted to laugh and to play and to be gay with her. But how could he? His money was nearly gone. If they did not get an engagement soon, he would go home to Selma. And a return to Selma could destroy him utterly, now that he had tasted the joys of life in Hollywood.

      She had apparently misunderstood him. She had thought that he felt it was her duty to get an engagement and that she had failed.

      "We'll be working by the week after next," she had said harshly.

      How she had obtained the booking at San Bernardino, he did not know. She merely had told him that she had taken three days at the valley town, five dollars a day and bus fare.

      "We won't make a cent," she had added. "But you'll find out if you are a dancer or not. I'm betting you are."

      "I'm a dancer all right."

      "And not much more. Listen to me, youngster. I've ​taken more from you than I'm used to taking." She had stopped abruptly, had laughed and had said: "Well, never mind. It all falls under the heading of art."

      "I'm at a disadvantage," Ken had said.

      "How come?"

      "If you'd spent your whole life except for seventy-seven days in the middle of Texas—"

      "How do you know it's seventy-seven days," she had asked.

      "I counted 'em."

      "You would." She had brusquely patted his cheek. "Come on—on with the dance."

      Women, Ken told himself, were like that. They apparently expected a man to make a play for them. The trouble with him was that he didn't know where to begin with Anita. Back home in Selma, things were different. The girls were all someone's sister or daughter. At parties, with alkie and water added, things sometimes did happen. Tall tales were told in the abandoned frame house on Council Street about happenings after dances, football games and meetings of the Selma High Social Club. Ken had heard these stories. He did not always believe them. He had seen little with his own eyes. And an influence more powerful than his own will seemed to restrain him from participating in the more daring "binges" of the less restrained high school crowd.

      In Selma, he had met no one like Anita. Her complete independence, the carefree attitude she assumed, her not infrequent stories of her old life in various parts of the west, made it difficult for Ken to judge her. If she had been younger and simpler he might have wondered ​whether her interest in him was wholly that of the artist who chooses a dancing partner only because he is talented. That a woman of twenty-eight should care to be loved by a boy of seventeen was quite beyond Ken's comprehension.

      He thought her "nice." She was, he believed, "attractive." His own fastidious nature made him displeased with her occasional carelessness in dress. She would appear at Delaney's clad in mannish slacks and a rough khaki shirt, with hair tossing this way and that as she danced. Her figure was trim enough but her face was unevenly moulded, puffed here and there, the aftermath of bygone drinking bouts, hard lovemaking and sometimes very little food.

      Ken, of course, did not consciously criticize Anita's appearance. He thought her "nice."

      This morning he thought her especially "nice." She was animate, warm, helpful, part of the ever-moving panorama, more to be treasured than these unchanging trees and mountains and patches of sage-covered sand. Because of her, this was the morning of a great day—his first day as a professional dancer, his first step toward fame.

      He recalled the last time he had been driven over this foothill boulevard, Mr. Lowell beside him, Johnson's broad back curving above the pane of the glass separating chauffeur from passengers. He was much happier today. He had succeeded in surviving nearly four months of Hollywood, months of hard work, life between the drab walls of a furnished bedroom. The great and the near great had passed him by. He was not yet one of them. They had succeeded because they had worked hard, had defied their own weaknesses. He too—he thought this morning—would win in the same selfless way.

      ​She sat up.

      "What are you thinking about?" She smiled knowingly.

      "I don't know."

      "Me?"

      "No."

      "You look so serious. Relax, Ken, if you want to get anything out of this try-out."

      "I'm not nervous."

      "Then why so all-fired grim? Listen, buddy, we're not working in the Follies yet. We're not even playing the Orpheum in L.A."

      She took his hand. "Maybe," she said, "if you was a bit more human, you'd feel better."

      In the Mission House, they rented two rooms separated by an ell in the corridor of the shabby little hotel.

      "In my language this is a dump," Anita said as she unpacked her bag. "And I let you get away with this double room stuff because you looked too innocent for words downstairs at the desk; and I'm not going to San Quentin for corrupting the morals of a minor. But we coulda taken a twin bedroom and saved seventy-five cents a night. I won't bite you and if I do the marks won't show later than nine the next morning."

      They couldn't find the theatre. Its narrow lobby hid between a market and an automobile salesroom, "looking like nothing but a very old vacant lot," said Anita. They found their names on the house-board. They were one of three acts, "Mme. Blanco, the famed Swiss Sharpshooter; Prince Zarah, the International Mystic; and the Metropolitan Dance Team Par Excellence, Rogers and Gracey."

      ​"Gooda-goda," barked Anita, "we are next to closing."

      "Is that good?" Ken asked.

      "When the closing act is Cecil B. De Mille's 'King of Kings,' it couldn't be worse. I should have done a Salome routine and brought your head on-stage in a soup tureen." The box-office was not yet open. The office door was locked. Back stage they happened upon a wizened, wrinkled old gentleman who announced that he was Sam Anderson, father of Joe Anderson, the house manager.

      At last Ken penetrated the mysteries of the theatre. Sam Anderson pointed the way to their dressing-room.

      "One room enough?" he asked.

      "Plenty," said Anita.

      Ken followed her across the gloomy stage to a corridor. She unlocked the door of a narrow frigid cell. Two dressing tables, two chairs, a wardrobe, a barred window.

      "Looks like the jail house to me," she said, "but I s'pose it's heaven to you, Buster."

      "I like it."

      "The orchestra will be here at twelve o'clock," Sam Anderson said. "Got your contracts with you?"

      Ken nodded.

      "Ed Feinberg will be down, I think," said Anderson.

      Anita laughed. "To see us break in? Who told you?"

      "He wrote me when he sent Joe the contract."

      After the old man had left, Ken asked her who Ed Feinberg was.

      "The agent, silly. The man who made us СКАЧАТЬ