End of the Tiger and Other Stories

The Loveliest Girl in the World

She was a chrysanthemum girl, slender by all sane standards, yet not gaunted to the thinness of a high-fashion model. But very useful for the consumer items. You called the agency and you booked this Lya Shawnessy, which was what the agency had named her for obscure reasons of its own, and what they sent you was this Jean Anne Burch, basically from Canton, Ohio, one and the same girl.

And useful. More useful now in the late part of spring than she had been back in the winter, because now her understanding of what Joe Kardell wanted of her was more instantaneous. Also, when he would go dry on a special problem, and Ritchie couldn’t come up with anything either, she sometimes would have a shy idea that would work. It was a good product face, the bone structure so good it could even take flat lighting. And if the deal was to enchant the people with the idea of gobbling Yum-Bars, there she was, staring out of the color advertisement, all a glowing, textured innocence of delight in the masticatory wonders of Yum-Bars. Yet in all that innocence there was a subtle additive — something in the fullness of upper lids, in the modeling of the mouth — expressing a sweet sensuous innocent pleasure in everything, symbolic of the ideal consumer.

She took color beautifully, and direction well, and had few bad angles even in black and white. Joe Kardell had started using her in the winter, using her for things exactly right for her, and he wondered at what subtle and self-deceiving point he had begun using her for jobs not exactly right, jobs where another face would have been better, jobs where he could overcome that small discrepancy through his total mastery of his tools.

At least he had avoided location work, preferring as always the big bare studio on East 35th, where he had total control, Ben on props and lights and scut work, Ritchie loading the cameras, keeping the running record of the shots, music holding the mood, the three of them and the model working with the swift minimum of confusion of a good surgical team.

She had checked in at one on this drizzly spring afternoon, and been ready at ten after. It was one of the jobs suited to her, a college fashion thing for fall, a sort of hood and parka thing, and he was at the point where he knew he should not use her again for anything, no matter how right she was. And he knew that Ben knew it, and Ritchie knew it. All that awareness. How could they miss it?

“You beat your buddies up the hill,” he said. “You’re out of breath, waiting, smiling a little on account of you beat them, and the sun has got you squinting a little bit. Good. Now chin an inch up and an inch toward me. Good. Now you’re alone. They’ve turned back. Smile sad. Good. Now look up into the pretty trees at the pretty leaves. Good. Push the hood back a little. Little more. Good.”

It went swiftly. He made his small professional adjustments in depth of field, composition, lighting, nailing her in her beauty into the emulsion, until near the end when he knew he had it and thought himself safely lost in work, she was turned toward him and suddenly his eyes filled and he could not see her in the ground glass. There was the music and the three of them waiting, and he could not see and he could not look up. He took the shot and turned away.

“That does it,” he said.

Ritchie said, “That’s only eleven on...”

“I told you that does it!”

The rudeness shocked them. Ben cut the music. Out of the corner of his eye, Joe Kardell saw Ritchie shrug, saw Jean Anne head for the dressing room. He did not look directly at any of them.

Ritchie took the rolls out to be marked for the color lab pickup and came back and said quietly, “We got the little kids here for the candy thing, Joe. Any ideas how we should set it up?”

“You do it,” Joe said.

Ritchie looked blankly at him. “But you were going to...”

“Do I get arguments, or do you take pictures?”

Ritchie’s face was white. “I’m not going to take this kind of...”

“I’m sorry. I’m very sorry, Ritchie. I... don’t mean any of this. I’ve just got to get out of here. I’m taking off. You’ll do a good job on it.”

“You taking off with her?”

“Don’t push it, Ritchie.”

“Okay. I work for you. But I thought I was your friend. Am I?”

“I’m not keeping track lately,” he said and walked away. He got his hat and topcoat and waited in the corridor. She came out in her rain cape, carrying her kit, and stopped when she saw him, her look startled, glad, apprehensive.

“Joe?” she said, her voice soft and tentative.

“We’ll drive around,” he said.

“All right.” Maybe she was supposed to be somewhere else. But it couldn’t matter to her. Not even enough to mention it or phone in about it. That was the way it took you. It pushed everything else out of focus, like a long lens that brought the clarity to just here and now and the dear beloved face.

They walked down the street to the parking garage and stood silent in the grubby gloom while they brought his car down. All the years of scrupulousness and he could not feel any sense of holiday out of walking away from his work in the middle of the day. He felt heavy, troubled, yet so glad to be with her.

They got into the car, and he turned the wipers on when they turned out into the slow soft rain. He went up to 42nd and west, and then up onto the highway and north, past the piers and the ships and the yellow-gray look of the river. He remembered how it was a thousand years ago, a brassy kid with a used Rollei, the first decent camera he had ever owned, taking that winter essay on the tramp ships and the men, working in the cold pearl light of dawns until his hands were too numb to set the lens. Then all the labor in the borrowed darkroom — cropping, editing, dodging, bringing it all down to fifteen pure, savage prints. Nothing sentimental. Just the hard flavor of how it was to be working on the ships in the winter.

“Jean Anne,” he said, “we have to...”

“I know, darling,” she said. “But not here. Not like this. Where I can see you. Driving along, it’s like talking on the phone, sort of.”

“How did it start? Can we talk about that part while riding?”

“The day you had the headache, Joe. That’s when it started making bad jokes, all trying to make you feel better, and we all got laughing. And when the job was done, there wasn’t anything else scheduled and we did that crazy ad.”

“Forlorn little match girl selling matches outside the Zippo factory.”

“Was it then for you?”

“Sooner. Two weeks earlier. On that eye thing.”

“I wondered about that. I wasn’t right for it. Joe... was it very specific that early?”

“No. I just wanted you there. The jobs I used you on, they seemed more fun for everybody. I told myself that’s all there was to it.”

“Like I did. That’s what people tell themselves, I guess. It’s just this much and nothing more. When they know it can’t be anything more. I didn’t want it to be more.”

“Do you think I did?”

“Now we’re getting into the what-do-we-do part of it, darling, and I have to look at you when we talk about that.”

“Did you know we would talk today?”

“I knew we had to. Soon. I knew you knew it. I knew one of us would... make it possible.”

He took the Cross County over to the Thruway. Traffic was light. He had fifty dollars on him, blank checks, credit cards. She did not ask him where he was going. She had all that quality of trust, of gentle compliance. He wondered how it would be to just keep going. He knew he could not. But he wondered.

He exited at Suffern and drove to the motel road that went up the mountain, turned up that road and, out of some obscure impulse of cruelty, said no word of explanation. He glanced at her. She sat with that blind acceptance of all of it, and there were no tears. But her face was set for tears.

Atop the mountain, he drove past the motel office and on to the restaurant. The parking attendant was not on duty. He drove into the lot, parked, started to open the door to get out. She put her hand on his arm. He looked back at her, and she said his name with her mouth without making a whisper of sound.

As he took her in his arms to kiss her he realized this was the third kiss for them. Such a weight of guilt. Three kisses. In his despair, he made it too rough a kiss. When he realized it was too rough, he made it more cruel, hurting her mouth. The kiss said, at first, this is a man. Not some game. It was pride, and then it shamed him and he released her, got out of the car, and walked around to let her out.

They went to the big restaurant. Quarter to four. The lounge was empty.

“Drink?” he said.

“I don’t think so. Tea, maybe.”

So they went to the restaurant part. It was big and nearly empty. They took a table for two by the windows where they could look far into the gray misty distance, down at a half-seen cloverleaf, a few cars crawling. The waiter brought tea and cakes. She looked at him and then looked down, her face pale.

He made a professional measurement of the quality of the light against the left side of her face and thought, I would use the Nikon with the 105 mm lens, a Plus-X load, go back six feet about, and take this angle, probably a thirtieth at f/2. Portrait of a girl who thinks her heart is breaking, taken by a man who knows his is.

“Mostly it’s how much you are,” he said.

Her eyes lifted. “I think I know what I am.”

“Do you?”

“I’m not fluff, Joe. I’m of consequence. I have value. I take pride. I’m twenty-three.”

“A very old party.”

She took a little cake, bit a corner off of it, then put it down. “Not a pretty baby, or a pretty child, or a pretty little girl. So that they always said, ‘Ah, darling.’ Nobody started saying ‘Ah’ until I was nineteen. Now a pretty woman. Yes, indeed. Pictures to prove it. But it came along late enough so I know what it is. So I don’t give it the wrong value. Do you understand that?”

“I think so.”

“Strong, too.”

“Are you strong, Jean Anne?”

“There was the polio. I told you about that, didn’t I? But not how it was those years of bringing those nerves and muscles back. A lot of hurting, Joe. And pride. But strong for loving, too. I’m sure of that about me. A lot to give. But is there enough strength for us? That’s what I don’t know.”

He rubbed his palm slowly across his forehead. “It’s how much you are. Like I said. And funny to have it focused on me. I mean what the hell. I’m Joe Kardell. Going bald. Thick in the middle. Two teen-age kids. Young Joe is teen-age. The girl is only twelve.”

“But why me?” he demanded.

She shook her head. “Your word is wrong. Why us? I love you. I can’t tell you why I was vulnerable. I can tell you about you. You are a good man. You are kind and wise and sensitive and funny. But I don’t love you because. I just love you.”

He stared at his fist. “All the choices are lousy.”

“I know, darling.”

He did not dare look into her eyes. “Take Ruthie. Fifteen years married. She’s a good woman. My God, that sounds patronizing. Some of my best friends are good women. It’s more than that. I love Ruthie. We’ve got a good thing going. We always have had.” He looked cautiously at the girl.

“I accept that,” she said.

“But I keep thinking I could do it a lousy way. I could just sort of... turn myself off. You know? Stop all communication. And she would get frantic. Her nerves would go bad. Then I could turn it into fights. And I could turn it into a big enough fight after four or five months so that I could give a very plausible imitation of a guy walking out on a shrew. Now wouldn’t that be nice?”

“To even hear you say it makes me feel sick. If I turned you into that kind of a man, Joe, then neither of us would be very much.”

“I know. What do we want? We want an affair? Just like that?”

“If... if you...”

“Shut up! Don’t you know what you’d be doing to yourself?”

She tried to smile. “Run along, girlie, and find some nice young man. I don’t want some nice young man. I want Joe Kardell.”

“Do me the honor of allowing that maybe I do love you, Jean Anne. I mean maybe I’ve been caught in what you could call an occupational hazard, but you did come along, and neither of us were trying to start anything. Right?”

“Right, darling.”

“So I love you, and I don’t want Jean Anne in an emotional mess with an older man, even if it’s me. In a deal like that I get one of the loveliest girls in the world on a very selfish basis, and you get a bruised heart.”

Still trying to smile, she said, “Falling in love is supposed to be such fun.” But the tears came and ran out of blue eyes, one tracking down to the corner of her mouth where her tongue nipped quickly out and licked it away — a very young and very childish and brutally touching gesture.

“So what we talk about,” he said, “what we have to talk about is knocking it off before it gets a fair start.”

“A fair start,” she said, her eyes going around. “What would a fair start be? I think of you every waking moment, and I’ve never been so wretched in my whole life. How could there be any more of a start than this?”

“You’ll get over it quick.”

She raised a cool eyebrow. “And you too?”

“Real quick. In eighty-eight more years I won’t remember a thing.”

“I wish we had...”

“Don’t start sentences that way. Please, girl. I’ve got sixty of them I can start that way and none of them do any good, because the wishing doesn’t do any good. There’s just one thing clear. We get out now or we get in deeper. There’s no such thing as holding it right where it is. You know that.”

“Of course I know that.”

The tea was gone, the cakes untouched except for one. He sat in silence for a little while and then said, “We better head on back to town.” The lounge was beginning to fill up. Some people had come into the dining room.

“You run along,” she said.

He stared at her. “I can’t just leave you way the hell and gone out here.”

“You have to, Joe. I have only so much strength, and I’m right at the end of it. You just have to walk out right now, and never never ask for me again, because if you do, it will be more than I can take. I have money in my purse and I am used to finding my way from here to there, so just stand up and walk out. Now!”

He stood up slowly. “You’ll be all right?”

She turned her head and stared fixedly out at the gray light of the gathering dusk. They had turned the inside lights on. Her fist rested on the edge of the table, her knuckles white with the strength of her clasp. It was a small wrist and hand, as vulnerable-looking as the hand of his daughter. He picked up the check for the tea and walked away.

When he was out by his car, as he opened the door he looked down toward the motel office. It was a cheap and plausible solution, and, of course, no solution at all. But he thought of all the people he knew who seemed to thrive on such deadening compromises. The irony and impossibility of it bit into him deeply. The deadened people were never loved by such a one as Jean Anne. He gave the roof of his car a mighty smack with his fist, got in, and drove away from there.

He drove back into the city and parked on the street and unlocked the studio and went in. He pawed around in the office and found the test Polaroids of the candy job. They looked all right. He sat at the desk and checked the scheduled jobs. He breathed a deep sigh of mingled regret and relief when he saw that there was nothing within the next week on which he could conceivably use Lya Shawnessy.

She had made it totally clear. Phone me and I come running. But he was safe for a week. And, maybe, at the end of the week, he could endure another week. And then another.

He sat quite still for a little while, a stocky man with dark quick eyes and a blue shadow of beard. He took his hat off and leaned forward onto the desk, his head in his arms. He made a snorting sound that startled him. He sat up, snuffled once, looked at his watch, and phoned Ruthie. He said he was sorry, but he had been too busy to let her know he would be a little late. He told his wife he would be home by twenty past eight.

As he turned out the light he thought it was probably a very ordinary thing. If you could look at it sort of from the outside. And that was the trick from now on. Keep it ordinary. Keep everything very very ordinary.