A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The Girl in the Moon

A big round moon leaped up, quivered a little, and then steadied itself, half of it bent flat on the boards, the other half upright against the backdrop. It glowed rose, tinted with yellow, perfect as a hot-house peach but more ideally round than any peach could ever have been. A girl came through the curtain.

It is impossible to characterize Zelda. To everyone in turn she represented something different. To that comfortable woman with the pearls in her ears sitting in the second row on the aisle, she was one of the lucky ones who weighed one hundred pounds and could climb stairs without seeing black spots in front of her eyes. To the woman’s husband she brought to mind that summer of 1923 when his wife had been away in Maine. He would have liked to meet her. He would also have liked to have his hair back and be President of the United States. To the wise gum-chewers up on the shelf, she was simply a good act, nothing more. To which their flour-faced friends retorted, not without acidity, that they had seen better. To the orchestra leader, she was someone who flew into rages at Monday morning rehearsals and who darted deadly looks at him under her long lashes if he began vamping an encore when she wasn’t in the mood for one. To the man in the wings, she symbolized drudgery, painting itself in bright colors and fooling the world for fifteen minutes each night but not fooling him.

Her method was not subtle. She had to score and score quickly, and she knew it. She began to sing something popular. She had all the mannerisms that went with it. Palms out in the direction of the audience as though pushing it away from her. She gave a sly little turn of the wrist, pointing with one finger, and the moon that had been following her about like a big cartwheel rolled glibly off the stage and perched obediently on one of the upper boxes.

There was only one person in the box. She had chosen it so there would be no division of interest on the part of the audience. He seemed turned to stone. In all that glare he never batted an eyelash. After a moment he let his chin sink forward until his jaw rested more comfortably on the back of his arm. He gave the absurd impression of taking the whole proceeding seriously. The audience by now was convinced he had been planted there for her act. They expected witty repartee, and when it failed to come, they could not understand why it was being withheld.

To cap the climax, when she remarked in a wheedling voice, “Darling, you do love me, don’t you?” (as part of the patter chorus) he nodded his head affirmatively, and the girl on the stage, more disconcerted than anyone guessed, almost forgot to gesture for a moment. She had expected almost anything but not this. Instead of wriggling adolescents stumbling over each other in a mad rush to get out of the light, or some jeering salesman sitting through it with an air of assumed bravado, she had unearthed an enigma.

She could efface him swiftly and at once. Lift her little finger and the moon would come floating back to her. But she didn’t. It wasn’t businesslike of her in the least. She knew that. She needed all the moon she could get in the short time she was out front, and yet she let it stay up there on him. Her nerves were crying for a well rounded performance, and she couldn’t get it. As intended comic relief he was no help at all, had simply ruined the number. A professional plant at least would have had a line of back talk ready to throw at her.

She began to work harder than ever, angrily determined. “Look at his eyes, folks. Aren’t they beautiful? Do you blame me, girls?”

She had to give in at last. With a limp gesture of farewell she finally called the moon off him and took her bows. It had gone over immensely if the smacking was any criterion, but she had that empty, that “all gone” feeling she had known she was going to get. She glared daggers at the leader and frightened him out of an encore. As it was, she had to feed them something about her gratitude.

She brushed by Jack in the wings on the way to the dressing-room. “Some fool up in one of the cages rattled me.”

“Maybe you’d like a screen around you,” he suggested uncharitably.

The next show she received a note in her dressing-room. This was no novelty, certainly. She put down the grease stick to look at it. Miss Zelda Grayson, care of Bandbox Theater. She opened it with a pair of manicure scissors.

“Sweet peas,” said Jack, sticking his head in at the door. “Going to open an undertaking parlor with them?”

“Yes,” she said crushingly. “Send your head around some time for embalming.”

After the show she thought it out. She would be very hard-boiled about this. That was the thing to do. And though she hated to admit it, she knew she wasn’t at all hard-boiled underneath and never would be. But she had acquired the manner to perfection and that helped some. She knew all the mean little stencils that could take the warmth and kindness out of things instantly like the cut of a whip.

She was smiling rather venomously as she bound a towel about her hair and put on a street make-up. Tamper with her act, would he? She’d see about that. Not that there had been anything disrespectful in the note or the gift of flowers (sweet peas, she admitted to herself, were not expensive enough to be very insinuating); it was simply that she intended to repay him in kind. Especially since he laid himself open this way. It was too good to miss.

Dressed and ready to leave, she selected two or three of the flowers and pinned them to her coat. She emerged into the obscurity of the alley backstage, with its single light in a wire basket throwing a pool of light downward over the cement, and reached the street at the end of it without meeting a soul. It was a little too early yet for them to be coming out.

There were not more than four people waiting in the lobby when she got around to the front of the house. Two of them were women and one was a colored man with a mop and pail, which made the task of identifying him much simpler. He was, if anyone, the individual peering through the oval panes at the end-numbers of the show. He turned around just then and she lowered her head to smell the flowers on her coat. He caught the signal they had agreed upon and came over to her at once. They studied each other for a split-second like a pair of prizefighters measuring distances at the stroke of the bell.

“Good evening,” he said.

“What makes you think you have the right to speak to me?” she asked, detachedly curious.

“I haven’t the right, only the wish.”

“Well, your wish has been granted.” She pretended to move away. “Good night,” she said. That, she knew, would bring him after her. It did.

“Wait!” he said. “You’re not going so soon?”

“Why not?” she answered. “Do you think I came out front here on purpose to meet you?”

“Yes,” he said gravely. “You’re wearing the flowers to identify yourself.”

She unpinned them and threw them away. He picked them up and put them in his wallet.

“I suppose now you’ll carry them around with you for the rest of your life,” she said mockingly. “Until you fall for somebody else.”

“I’m not that kind,” he said.

“What do you do?” she asked.

“When your partner goes in to buy a shirt,” he said, “why, I wait on him.”

“No, you don’t,” she corrected. “He’s only got one and the last time he changed it was when the boys came back from overseas. The other night the collar-band dropped off and started to walk away of its own accord — he just stepped on it in the nick of time.”

He laughed appreciatively.

She was finding it harder to dislike him as the minutes wore on. He made a good listener at any rate. The show was out now and the lobby was filling with people.

“It’s warm,” she said. “I’d like a Coca-Cola.”

They went to get one.

“Listen,” she said, “why did you crab my act last night? Don’t you know that wasn’t regular? You should have played up to me.”

“I wasn’t thinking of the act, I was thinking of you.”

“Now really,” she said, “isn’t that going a little too fast?”

“The first night I came, I bought one of your records in the lobby to take home with me. And when I put it on, it wasn’t you at all; it was someone else singing it.”

“Were you disappointed?”

“I never got to the end. I broke it right then and there.”

Who wouldn’t have been very gentle with him after hearing a thing like that? And she was not so hard-boiled inside herself after all. She knew that now. Through barely parted lips he heard her murmur, “Almost thou persuadest me.” As they walked out of the drugstore together, she was certain of only one thing — she would not do what she had planned to do to him. She stopped him at the door with a little gesture.

“You stay here, and don’t look which way I go. Tomorrow night if I am thirsty, I may drop by here for another Coca-Cola.”

Tomorrow night she was thirsty.

She did not have to pin flowers to her coat now, or identify him by eliminating everyone else nearby. In the taxi driving to the theater she had said to herself, “What is the matter with me?” and could find no explanation. She made one last feeble attempt to fight off this thing that she had sung about so often from the boards and was now meeting for the first time. “If you’re a dreamer,” she said, “you’d better get someone else for your dreams. I can’t see you any more.”

The next night she found that she needed a new lipstick and she stepped in to buy it. All he said was, “How lucky for me you needed that lipstick.” She refused to admit even to herself that she had just thrown a brand new one away in the alley in back of the theater. They were Marty and Zelda to each other now. And Coca-Cola no longer seemed a very commonplace drink.

At times she still stopped a moment and tried to understand what it was that had happened to her. “It seems that this is love,” she said. She wasn’t laughing at this the way she would have a little while ago.

A week from the night they had first met, they were married. They had their whole future planned in the fifteen minutes it took to drive to the theater, holding hands in a black-and-white cab.

“But you want me to, don’t you?”

The old story: “I want you all to myself. But are you sure you won’t regret it later?”

“I’m never sorry for what I’ve done,” she said. “I’m a good sport.”

She gave the stage manager notice. And then she had to tell Jack. She stopped him in the wings. Distant hand-clapping filled the air like hundreds of little firecrackers all going off at the same time.

“Listen!” he said. “Is that for you?”

“I suppose so,” she answered absent-mindedly.

“You’ve got them eating out of your hand!” he cried joyously. “Go on out there!”

“No,” she said. “This is my last show. I was married this afternoon.”

In the dim light his face was a cipher to her. “Now? You’re going to quit now? After all I’ve done for you? I didn’t think it was in you to act like this!”

She kissed him lightly on the cheek. “It’s love, Jack, love! Do you want to know why I went over so immense just now? He was out front. I wasn’t acting, I was living my number.”

“I give you a year of that,” he called after her. “They all come back.”

“Good night, Miss Grayson,” the doorman said.

She smiled and opened her purse. “It’s Mrs. Martin now, Dave, and it’s good-by.”

He watched her step out into the alley under the dim light and walk away on her husband’s arm.

The flat (Brooklyn because “Where else could you get it for fifty-five?”) had a shining white refrigerator that purred like a kitten and made little frozen dice in a pan. It had a radio that hissed and spit if anyone crossed the floor in front of it but at other times poured forth the sweetest music mortal ears had ever heard. Furthermore, it had a dumbwaiter that miraculously disgorged itself of cans of peaches and cartons of cigarettes while a voice hidden somewhere in the bowels of the earth called up “Four seventy-five, please!” Zelda, used to hotel rooms all her life, brought no caustic comment to bear on ten cent cups and saucers and a sofa secured by a five dollar deposit; found in them the essence of the ideal, and crowed delightedly at the implication of personal ownership in all this. The lily needed no gilding, but for ornament there were her own striking wrappers and the Chinese lanterns she conscientiously fastened to all the lights.

The first weeks went by in a flurry of excitement. There were things to be bought. There were things to be done, things to be learned. How to make coffee, for instance. The only way she had known was to pick up a telephone and say “Room service.” And over and above all this there was love, breathless and absorbing. Until weeks grew into months and the excitement was less. Love did not grow less, but the excitement did.

Hers was to be no busman’s holiday. She stayed away from the places she had known. No more midnight lunches in restaurants filled with shop-talk. No more of friends who called her “honey” but would have cut her throat professionally. Once her costumer called her. “It’s all of silver fish-scales and just the thing for you. Lily de Vrie is wild about it, but I thought I’d give you first chance at it.”

“Let her have it,” Zelda said. “Haven’t you heard that I’ve quit?”

She didn’t want gold or silver or anything shining any more. Her eyes were a little tired of glitter. Diversion was to sit in a room, her very own room, with him there, with a lamp and a book and a cigarette there, and not have to sing for people, not have to smile. And if one stocking slowly dropped below her knee, it was luxury; it was better than a diamond-studded garter. She took pride in demonstrating her newest accomplishment now, made a cup of coffee as a special treat just before they retired, while the announcer’s voice was signing off to soft far-away music. If they had drained the pitcher of cream between them, she would scrawl a little note, “Borden: Leave us a bottle of cream tomorrow,” and curl it up in the neck of a bottle outside the door.

A few of Marty’s friends came out from time to time. She wanted to like them, tried to make them feel at home, but they invariably asked her to sing, entertain them in some way.

“I have a headache,” she would say. “Not just tonight, some other time.” They seemed to feel they had been snubbed.

“Don’t let’s have them any more,” she pleaded. “They’re always asking me to perform.”

“I’m afraid you don’t like my friends,” he said.

“They keep an imaginary spotlight on me all the time. If I walk into the room to say hello to them, they make an ‘entrance’ out of it somehow. They stop being just callers and turn into an audience right away. They want a show.”

“But I thought you liked the stage—”

“The stage is just a habit, and now I’ve broken the habit. Think what it means, to stay in one place all the time, to forget there are things like trunks and trains and eight o’clock shows.” She raised her chin as though it hurt. “See these little lines here? I had them when I was seventeen. I’m not old, but I’m so tired—”

She was a little different now from what she had been when he first saw her. And soon she was a whole lot different. He couldn’t understand what had happened. Every evening, rushing home under the East River in a crowded train, he thought of her as she had been, in the heart of that electric moon, a two-dimensional being, a product of lights and music, a stage effect, but bringing beauty into his life and his heart, a warmth that would linger there for the rest of his days. And every evening, when he got there and opened the door, he saw her as she was. It was a little hard to fit the two together. He thought: “Did I marry this girl? What is this girl doing here?” He couldn’t think of her in a kimono, loose ends of hair straggling about her head, sitting, drinking coffee from a thick cup. Couldn’t think of her that way at all. And one Sunday morning, as though seeing her for the first time, he said: “Why, you’re no different from anyone else this way.”

She sighed and said: “Do I have to be different? Can’t you take me as I am?”

And at another, later time she said: “I know. You wouldn’t have married me if you had known I would turn into a washout like this.”

“It isn’t that—” he said. “It isn’t that—” She had no right to read his thoughts that way.

But it was that. He knew it and she knew it too.

She had a little plan then. She would look as he wanted her to. He would come home and find the glamorous thing he had married waiting for him. She spent the afternoon getting ready. Had a wave put in her hair. A little perfume but heavy enough to cut with a knife. New eyes, new lips, new lashes, out of little boxes. A baby chandelier dangling from each ear. She saw herself in the glass. “How cheap I look,” she said. Men were funny. Maybe she would have to do this once or twice a week. But after she had taken it all off again, there would always be the radio and coffee, each time.

She slipped her hand through one more sparkling paste bracelet for luck. Then the telephone rang. He wasn’t coming. They were taking an inventory of stock, get away as soon as he could. She sat down abruptly on a chair and laughed for a very long time. She sat there holding a hand to her head and laughing. They really did those things, then, in everyday life. Rang up home and said they were detained by business when they wanted to take someone else out to dinner. She hadn’t believed it until now, thought it just a married-life “gag.” One of those funny-paper jokes. Now it seemed it wasn’t. She understood, of course. She knew by his very voice. Probably one of the salesgirls. She shook her head tenderly, was not at all hard-boiled. “Poor Marty. Poor boy. Got to have someone to dream about.”

And what about all this she had on? Simply because she felt unequal to the bother of taking it all off again so soon, she got up after a while and languidly called her old theater.

“How’s the new show going these days, Jack? I have a hunch I’ll drop around tonight. Leave a pass for me in the box-office.” Then she boiled herself a cup of coffee and sighed lugubriously. Anyone that would want to leave a cozy flat like this even for an hour must be a fool.

“Dressed up, looking like a Christmas tree,” she added aloud. She turned out the lights lingeringly, almost caressingly, and left. The last thing she heard through the door was the purr of the mechanical ice-box. “The darling!” she crooned, as though it were a child.

She got there late. The show had started. And when the house lights went up between the acts, there was Marty sitting precisely one row in front of her, with a friend. Not a woman, though. But even so, he had lied to her.

She left her seat hurriedly, furtively, trailing her wrap across people’s knees after her. She wouldn’t go back to it again when the audience settled itself for the second half. She was afraid he might turn around and see her. She felt guilty herself somehow — she couldn’t quite understand why. Probably because she had caught him unaware. She had once said to him, “I’m a good sport.”

Instead of going home at once, she went backstage to talk to Jack. “I don’t think my husband cares about me any more,” she said, half laughing, half in earnest. “I saw him in the audience just now.”

And when she left, Jack was saying, “That’ll give you two weeks to rehearse. And the de Vrie woman leaves in ten days. They can put in an understudy till you’re set. Now don’t forget, tomorrow at eleven!”

“I’ll be seeing you,” she said wearily.

Marty of course was home before her and pretended to be absorbed in his newspaper. Finally though, because she was his wife and it was the least he could do in all decency, he put it down and looked at her. The way she was dressed and all. His expression never changed.

“What’re you all dressed up about?” he asked indifferently.

“I’m going back in the show business,” she said quietly. And wanted him to storm and forbid and shout “What, my wife? Never! You’ll do nothing of the sort! Your place is home!”

“S’funny, I’ve been thinking about it too, lately,” he drawled, “and wondering if you ever would or not.”

Well, she had done all she could.

A big round moon flamed up against the curtain, wavered a bit, and then steadied itself. It glowed radiantly, too perfect to be anything but a stage moon out of an electrician’s box of tricks. Whoever came under its rays bathed in the fountain of youth. The curtain lifted and a girl came through.

To everyone in turn she represented something different. To the man watching her from the wings, she symbolized drudgery, painting itself in bright colors but not fooling him and not fooling herself. To one alone in that entire house, she brought a gift of beauty and glamor.

She gave a little turn of the wrist, and again the moon flashed blindingly on one of the boxes. Marty was sitting in it. In all that glare he never once took his eyes off her. He gave the absurd impression of taking the whole proceeding seriously. “Sweetheart,” she sang, “do you love me? Do you want me? Am I in all your dreams?” as part of the patter chorus. And he nodded his head and sat there mutely adoring. The audience by now was convinced — well, you know the rest.

And every night after the show he was waiting for her to take her home, and there was an air about him of one who sees his dream come alive and walk about before his very eyes.