Third Girl from the Left Read online

  “You may call me Howard,” he said. “And may I say that you’re looking very lovely this evening?” Angela smiled again. It was kind of funny to have someone staring at her breasts without even pretending to look at her face. But it excited her too. He ushered her into his office, his hand on the small of her back.

  Laid out on a table in front of a grayish, formerly cream-colored leather couch was a plate with Ritz crackers and light orange cheese on them and next to that, a straw-covered bottle of wine, two wine glasses, and a joint. Angela had never smoked pot before. She hadn’t expected to have to do that too. She swallowed quickly and turned to look at him.

  “Do you smoke?”

  “I haven’t, but I been wanting to try.” Where’d that come from? she wondered. She had not been wanting to try. He looked pleased. “Good,” he said. He led her to the sofa, picked up the joint, and lit it, smiling in a slightly threatening way as he handed it to her. “You know, it’s a cliché, but you’re really very talented,” he said, his voice constricted as he tried not to exhale. “Here, you’ve got to hold it in your lungs or it won’t work. Don’t let it out. Yeah. That’s it.”

  Angela felt as if someone had lit a fire in her chest. She’d had cigarettes before but never anything like this. She held the smoke for a second, then, coughing madly, gestured for a drink. Kaufman got it for her, laughing. “Everybody has a little trouble the first time. Here, don’t give up. This is really good stuff.”

  She took the joint again, holding it the way he did, between his fingers, and inhaled. Easier this time. She passed it back and took a sip of her wine. She could taste each grape in it. Howard hit the joint again and then said, “So, where are you from, Angela?”

  “Oklahoma. Tulsa. Hope I don’t never go back there again.” Oh my God. She’d said “don’t never” in front of a Hollywood producer. She busied herself taking another hit, then noticed that he wasn’t shocked at all. In fact, he was looking at her gently, a small smile on his face. She bit her lip.

  “Tulsa, Oklahoma,” he said consideringly. “Tell me, Angela. What did you do there in Tulsa?”

  “Be bored mostly. I went to a lot of movies.”

  “Ah, yes. The movies.” He was sitting very close to her now, tracing small circles on her thigh with his finger. She could hardly sit still. She licked her lips. They were very dry. “Well. You’ll go far in the movies, Angela. I can see that already.” He was slowly unbuttoning her blouse. “And I’ll be proud”—now he was reaching around her back, undoing her bra—“to be the one who gave you your start.” He lowered his head to her breasts and she moaned. He smelled like the wine they’d been drinking and something else, something a little bitter. He paused for a minute, lifted his head, his lips wet, his gaze unfocused. “I can see that you’ll do what needs to be done. An actress’s most important job.” He slid her onto her knees in front of him, then took her hands and guided them to his pants, still smiling. She unzipped them and reached up to touch him. His penis was a kind of rosy pink. The color startled her. She moved her hand slightly, but then he pushed his hips forward a little and said, “In your mouth.”

  “What?”

  “In your mouth. Haven’t you ever done that?”

  She gulped. He was a white man and a movie producer. It was what he wanted. “No.” Her voice was small. She hoped it sounded sexy, not scared.

  His voice was soft and insinuating. “You’ll like it. It’s OK. Go ahead.”

  She opened her mouth, just a little at first, then wider. Would it fit? It did. It didn’t feel good, but it wasn’t so bad. It was OK. She had the part.

  Afterward, there were Ritz cracker crumbs on her knees. Some had made their way onto the floor. She reached down to brush them off, laughing a little, trying to act like she did this all the time. She was still stoned, so it was easier not to feel strange. Nothing mattered anyway. Kaufman helped her. Now that they were done, she felt how rough his hands were. If she hadn’t been so high, she might have noticed that he didn’t look at her. She ran her tongue around her teeth; not knowing what else to do, she swallowed when he came and now she was a little nauseated. They dressed in silence until she spoke.

  “I enjoyed that, Mr. . . . I mean, Howard.” She paused. “I hope you don’t think I do this kind of thing all the time. In fact . . . I’ve never done that before. I mean . . . that was really good.” She looked up, from under her eyelashes; a look she’d long practiced in the mirror at home. She didn’t feel as if she were lying. She was just saying what the man wanted to hear. He smiled at her wolfishly and said, “Well, I’m glad. You handled yourself like an old pro.” He reached out, hand under her chin. Squeezed just a little too hard. “You’ll hear from me tomorrow. I’m sure we can find something for you.” Angela could hear her heart pounding in her ears. Though she didn’t really want to, she turned her head slightly to kiss Kaufman’s hand. Then finished dressing and left without another word, making sure to switch a little from side to side so he’d think about her butt as she left. It was like Sheila said: it wasn’t that hard to do what you needed to do to get what you wanted. You just had to close your eyes. She didn’t think about anything but the road ahead as she drove home. It was already very late.

  Midmorning the next day, the script for Street Fighting Man arrived at her apartment with a note attached and some sections underlined—not Tasha, the big part, the part she wanted. But a secondary girl who was in the movie for about ten minutes. On the front was a note. “I had a lovely time, Angela. We’ve decided to go a different way for Tasha, but I’m pleased to offer you the part of Sandy. It will require some nudity. Remember, there are no small parts. Only small actors.”

  Well. She ran her hands over the script, thinking about Mr. Kaufman’s wet tongue moving over her breasts, the way she felt as he slid into her mouth. She took another sip of her coffee. Cold now. It wasn’t the worst place to start, she supposed. The next part would be bigger. Sheila came into the kitchen, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. Like Angela, she worked at the Playboy Club and rarely got to bed before 4:00 A.M. They often had the same shift, but Angela had traded with someone to make her date with Kaufman. “Mornin’. What’s that?” she said, gesturing toward the script.

  “A part,” Angela said, just beginning to smile.

  “Are you kidding?” Sheila’s voice went up in a squeak.

  “Nope. Says so right here.”

  “You mean you’re going to be the lead?”

  Angela’s face got hot. “Naw. I got a smaller part. But the producer says it’s a good one. And hey”—here she lifted her chin a little—“there are no small parts. Only small actors.” Sheila raised her eyebrows, then opened the small refrigerator for a pitcher of orange juice. “Did he say that to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mmm. Figures,” said Sheila. “It’s a part, though.” She walked over to the table where Angela sat, put the pitcher down, and placed her hands on Angela’s shoulders, rubbing slowly. “So when do you start shooting?”

  Angela stretched her neck, rolled her head a little as Sheila’s hands moved over her shoulders and down her back. She looked at the cover letter. “Day after tomorrow. Holy cow, they don’t waste no time out here, do they?”

  Sheila, who had lived in Los Angeles for five years to Angela’s one and a half, stilled her hands but didn’t remove them. She looked over Angela’s head at the yellowish wall in front of her. “No, they don’t. The sooner you learn that, the better off you’ll be.”

  “You know, Sheil, I think I’m getting the hang of it.” She thought of the look on Mr. Kaufman’s face as he unbuttoned her blouse. “I think I’m getting the hang of it.”

  Angela’s scene was set at night but was being shot during the day in an old gin mill in West Hollywood to save money. It smelled like hundreds of years of piss and beer and smoke. Every single surface in the place was chipped. The paint flaking off the walls, the neon sign flickering behind the bar, about to sputter out, the edge of the bar rubbed smo
oth by years of tired, drunk elbows. The crew was knocking even more paint off of every surface, trying to get each shot as fast as possible. The windows were covered with garbage bags to block out the light.

  Angela had been prepped, her breasts and belly powdered down by a make-up woman who smelled of vodka and perfume and blew smoke in a steady stream as she smoothed on the powder. Now Angela stood in a corner, uncertain what to do. This morning she had learned that her part had been further reduced, to just this wordless dance on the bar. She’d had to swallow hard to keep from crying after the script supervisor told her. The script supervisor, who had long ago stopped asking herself why they always believed the producers after they fucked them, looked tactfully past Angela to a spot on the ceiling. So now Angela stood wearing a thin robe, just beginning to feel cold. No one had told her where to go or what to do. No one rushing by even noticed her. It was, it seemed, unremarkable to have a half-naked girl standing around the set. Her fingers inched to the back of her hair. Suddenly she heard a deep voice saying, “Where are those goddamn girls? We need them on the set now!” And then an announcement through a bullhorn, not so angry: “All ladies for the bar scene. All ladies to the bar, please.” She saw another girl in a purple robe rushing toward the bar and she joined her, stepping carefully over the cables that snaked everywhere. She was freezing and sweating. Her nipples hardened under her robe.

  There was a stool in front of the bar and a series of Xs made with masking tape all along it. The girl who’d been hustling along in front of Angela hopped up onto the bar in two quick moves, taking her robe off at the same time. No one even looked. Angela climbed up behind her, a little more awkwardly, her butt sticking out as she hoisted herself. She stood there for a minute, still holding her robe closed. The other girl stood on her tape mark X, wearing nothing but a G-string, looking intently at her long, red nails. Angela let her robe drop, felt the cold air on her body. All around her voices called. There was the sound of a hammer and then somebody saying “Goddamnit,” then another bullhorn announcement. “We’re ready to shoot. Mr. Williamson on the set, please.”

  When he came out, he leaned on the bar right in front of her. He was wearing a buttery-soft tan leather coat and his skin looked polished, though his eyes were a little bit red. A white actor whom Angela didn’t recognize came and stood with him, made a joke and they both laughed. They never looked at the girls standing behind them. “All right, we’re rolling. Silence, please.” The men took their places and the first assistant director pointed at Angela, moving his finger in a slow circle. She started swiveling her hips and sticking her butt out. The refrain of that Delfonics song, “La-La Means I Love You,” kept going through her head. The other girl danced too, a bored look on her face. But Angela wasn’t bored. Cold and a little bit scared. But not bored.

  The girls danced without music for about twenty minutes as the actors went through the scene twice—one time the white guy messed up a line so they had to do it over—then the director said, “Cut and print.” And the first assistant director said, “That’s a wrap. Next scene in fifteen.” Angela hopped off the bar and so did the other girl. They were done. They still hadn’t said anything to each other. Mr. Kaufman, Howard, was on the set, standing just a little behind the director’s chair. He looked at Angela once with blank indifference. She tied her robe around her waist.

  Angela walked back to the corner of the room that had been marked off for the girls with makeshift sliding walls and a sheet on the floor. There were a couple of rickety steel stools in there and a clothes rack made of piping pounded sloppily together. A thick-painted, greenish radiator hissed in the corner. The other girl peeled off her G-string and picked up her underwear, which wasn’t much more generously cut, without a word. Angela finally got up the nerve to speak. “This right here is my first movie,” she said.

  “That’s nice,” the other girl said in a flat tone.

  “How about you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I’ve done a lot of them.” Now she was wiggling into her jeans. They were very tight. “It doesn’t get much better than this. But it’s a living, I guess.”

  Angela looked around. Not much better than this? “I’m going to have it better,” Angela said.

  The other girl laughed and rolled her eyes skyward. “Where have I heard that before?” She snapped her fingers. “Oh, yeah. That’s what every girl in this town thinks.” She sucked in her breath and buttoned her pants. “You go right on believing, kitten. See where it gets you.” She picked up her fake fur bag, took a final look at herself in the mirror, and shoved the cheap curtain aside, exposing Angela’s half-naked body to anyone passing by. “See ya ’round the cattle calls, baby.” And then she was gone.

  2

  TULSA, OKLAHOMA, IN THE EARLY 1960s was not a place that a smart black girl would want to linger. What the future held for such a girl was as circumscribed and prim as the dust and doilies on every surface. Greenwood, the section of town where most black families lived, felt as if it was about to go out of business. Life proceeded, but the pace was slow and uncertain. Angela Edwards of the Greenwood section was a smart black girl, though her mother never said that to her. What her mother said to her was this:

  Girl, ain’t you got sense to come in from out in the rain?

  I ain’t raisin’ no heathens.

  You bet’ come on in here and get that hair combed. You can’t be runnin’ around lookin’ like who-shot-john-what-for-and-don’t-do-it-again.

  My mama didn’t raise a fool. You better have finished washin’ every dish by the time I come in there.

  You best be careful around those boys.

  There was always this need to do things right, to be seen to be right, never to be too mussed or too loud or too worked up or too anything. When she was in kindergarten, Angela brought home a drawing she’d made. It was furious with red and pink and orange crayon. Smiling faces and suns. A green star in the corner. Mildred took one look at it and said, “Girl, what’s all them colors about? Can’t make head or tail of it.” And Angela brought home no more pictures. She didn’t know that her mother found that picture later and smoothed it out and kept it. Angela missed the bright fury of the colors, the pure concentration of making the work. She could never get that moment back, but sometimes that feeling was there, just around the comer. Sometimes she paused on the stair landing, feeling her hair ribbon coming untied and tickling her neck (again), holding a pile of neatly folded laundry, and she would hear this hum in the back of her neck, just below the threshold of audibility. It seemed to her that it was the hum of everything, of understanding. If she stood there long enough, stood still and quiet long enough, she might begin to understand what it was she was supposed to do, where exactly she had failed. Why her mother was so nervous about things being right. She could never be quiet long enough. But she stopped on the landing often, trying to hear that hum.

  She was pretty sure she was loved. She knew she was taken care of. Her mother’s rough hands pulling through her hair, lingering just a second longer than necessary to fix a bow. The softening in her eyes when she looked at Angela sometimes. Everybody knew the kids in town who never got that look, never got the hair bows or the smoothing hands. They were the ones with the dusty faces and ashy legs. They were the ones who always smelled of pee and soda and would ask you right out for a quarter if they saw you at the ice cream parlor. They hit one another a lot. Angela and her brothers and sisters had good home training. Their legs shone with Jergens, their faces gleamed with Vaseline. If they hit one another, they did it out of sight of their mother. Or their father. They didn’t hit much. They knew they had to act right. But Angela always wondered why. What would happen if she just stopped?

  She was seven, she was ten, she was fourteen going on fifteen. Her best friend was Louann Parsons from next door. Angela had long, honey brown legs with slightly knobby knees, small breasts that she spent a lot of time standing in front of the mirror examining, and a neck that, even as young as she w
as, made a man think about the hollow at the base of it. She and Louann loved to go down to deep Greenwood on a Saturday after their chores were done with nickels begged from their fathers and get ice cream. The best part, though Angela never said this aloud to anyone, was walking past the barbershop where the old men and the young bloods hung out, spitting into an brass pot put there for the purpose and talking what Angela’s mother called a lot of nonsense. Their rich voices wove together like a sweet bluesy tune, rising and cresting as the girls approached and then dropping to a croon as they went by. The older ones tipped their hats, the younger ones simply looked on steadily, their eyes heavy with appraisal, their teeth parted behind their lips with possibility. As Angela walked away she bit her own lip, her heart rattling at the thought of the eyes that watched her retreating form, the legs that shifted together, then apart as she left. She touched the back of her hair, lifting her arm so her breasts would be outlined under her dress. Louann looked at her as if she were crazy. “What you doing, Angie? You know they all looking at us.”

  “I know. I had an itch.”

  “Well, it makes your dress hitch up when you do that.”

  “Can I help it if I had an itch? Don’t be such a worrywart.”

  Louann sucked her teeth elaborately. “All right then, Miss Fast Thing. What kind of ice cream you want?”

  “I don’t know. Vanilla. What you gettin’?”

  “What I always get. Chocolate.”

  Old Mr. Evans who ran the ice cream shop had a picture up behind the counter of his former ice cream shop, which had stood in the very same spot (and had nicer stools to hear him tell it). The old shop, which had been his father’s before him, had been burned to the ground in the attack in 1921 and he never tired of telling any child who would listen—or anybody at all—of how he stood in the bell tower of the First Baptist Church, firing his gun until it was empty and then using his brother’s when his was depleted. “Them white folks went crazier’n mad dogs that day. Burned my daddy’s shop right to ashes. But I stood my ground. I wasn’t much older than you then. You girls are steppin’ tall. But you don’t know. You don’t never know when they gonna just turn on you.”