The Song Is You by Megan Abbott
redness, feel the blood shooting through them.
He let her have it. “When did you work for Dr. Stillman?”
“Oh,” she said, twitching visibly. “How did you find out?” She
shook a packet of sugar into her coffee, then a second one.
“I better get a drink,” Hop decided.
“They only serve beer.”
“I’ll order a baker’s dozen,” he said, gesturing to the waitress.
“How’d you find out about Dr. Stillman?” Midge said after the
waitress left.
“Maybe you better start talking first.”
“I worked there. Before I met you. Before I got the job at Earl
Carroll’s. I had a lot of jobs back then. What’s the big idea?”
“Yeah, but he wasn’t just any doctor, was he?”
“You know even better than I do, Gil, that those kinds of doctors
keep this town going.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“I probably did. When we started up, if you remember, you weren’t
paying much attention to my sparkling conversational talents.”
“If I’d paid more attention to what you were saying, we’d probably never’ve gotten married in the first place,” he said, then added, without thinking, “But there was the way you walked into a room …” He could see her eyes lift in surprise. He’d surprised himself.
The waitress set his beer down. Half of it lapped over the rim and onto his folded hands.
“Gil,” she said, “what does Dr. Stillman have to do with anything? Does this have something to do with the reporter? With all that?”
Hop nodded.
“I see. So did you take her to bed, too?” she asked, but her heart wasn’t in it. She was thinking hard, staring at her coffee like a fortune-teller.
He didn’t respond. He knew something was happening. She was just barely holding on to the coldness, the hardness.
“Look, Midge,” he finally said, “maybe I don’t deserve the straight story. Maybe I’ve told too many tall tales myself to earn it. But I’m at the end of something here. Can’t you see? I’ve got one inch of rope left to hang myself with.”
“Yes, I can see that,” she said. “Oh hell, you’re such an awful SOB, but I’m a sucker and always was. A sucker for that ugly face of yours. And no, you don’t deserve it, but God, I can’t bear it all. I can’t bear it.”
Hop didn’t say a word, didn’t dare risk saying something to change her mind.
Squaring her shoulders, she began. “Listen, when that reporter called the other night, I didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t until Jerry told me that a girl came to see you about… about Jean Spangler that I started piecing things together. I started thinking. Maybe you had a hand in keeping things quiet—that’s what you do, after all— and now you had to watch your back. The other night, when I came to see you, I realized you were circling awfully close. I was trying to see if I could get up the nerve to tell you.”
“Tell me what?” Hop slumped in his chair, put one hot hand under his chin. “That you were kissing cousins to Jean Spangler? How well exactly did you know her, Midge, to give her access to a pirate’s cache of blackmail goodies?”
“You’re such a fool, Gil,” she said, shaking her head. “To you, it’s always simple. People want, they take, they make themselves sick about it. Then they do it all over again.”
‘You talking about me or yourself?”
“Yeah, well I don’t do that anymore,” she said. “The point is, things are messier. Do you want to know how messy or do you just want to cut me up?”
Hop looked at her, exhausted. “I don’t know,” he said honestly.
Midge met his eyes, then sat back in her chair, gazing off into some dark space in the corner of the room.
“She was so lovely,” her voice tugged out plaintively. “And when she first came to Dr. Stillman’s office, she was so calm, so cool. I was more nervous than she was. I’d only been working there a week or two. She’d had a miscarriage and my, was she relieved.”
Hop avoided Midge’s eyes, even though he could feel her still.
“She told me how she lost it before she even knew it was there— inside her. It happened in the powder room of the Florentine Gardens. She slid on the blood on the floor and cracked her head on the stall door. She had a little white bandage by the corner of her eye. Those dark, sparkly movie-star eyes.”
Midge paused a second. “She came again a month later and we talked for a long time and she ended up asking me to lunch. We were just casual friends for a short while a long time ago. She was just another girl on the make. I knew hundreds of them. Yeah, I was one of them, in my own way.”
She reached across the table and took Hop’s beer in her hands, leaning over it like a cup of steaming hot chocolate.
“When I read in the papers that she was missing, I figured she’d finally gotten too smart for her own good. And I felt sorry for her. And her family, her child.” Abruptly, Midge showed a whisper of a smile. “When I read about the note, though, I had to laugh. How they
were trying to find a Kirk and a Dr. Scott.”
“Why?”
“That wasn’t Jean’s note,” she said, then took a quick sip of Hop’s
beer and licked the foam off her lips. “I mean it wasn’t something she wrote.”
“Is this some kind of riddle?”
“One of the times Jean was there, a young girl was waiting. This girl was there for a … you know, a termination. She was so nervous and she had this little notebook in her hand and she kept starting to write on it and stopping. Finally, Jean put her hand on the girl’s arm and said, ‘Honey, unless that’s a Latin test, nothing should be so hard to write.’ The girl smiled, couldn’t have been a day over nineteen, with freckles and a shiny forehead and knobby knees. She said she’d been trying all day to write her beau—she called him her beau—and I remember she said, ‘His name is Aloysius Kirkland, but I call him Kirk, like the movie star.’ Anyway, she said she couldn’t get through with the letter. She rolled back the pages on the pad and showed us all these false starts. ‘Dear Kirk: I’m doing what’s best for us both. This cannot be.’ ‘My darling: I’m sorry for the burden I’ve placed on you …’ ‘Kirk: It is not in the stars, not for us.’ All straight out of a Saturday-matinee sudster. Then, the last one—what was it?”
“Kirk, can’t wait any longer, going to see Doctor Scott. It will work best this way while mother is away. Ending with a comma,” Hop recited. He knew it better than the Lord’s Prayer—much better—by now.
“My, my. That’s right. Anyway, the girl stopped at that point and laughed. Said she just realized she’d written the wrong doc name. Scott instead of Stillman. Scott was the name of her family doctor she saw back in Louisville or wherever.”
“Fuck me,” Hop said. Those are the kinds of things you can never think your way into or guess. The puzzle piece you’d never find on your own.
“Anyway, Jean and I tried to calm her down. She never did get the note finished before they took her in. I didn’t even realize Jean had taken the note until I read the newspapers.”
“But why…” But he’d figured it out, too, if slowly. The note reminded Jean of something. Reminded her of the Jean Spangler who stepped off the bus at the Greyhound City station downtown with all the other Jeans, Iolenes, Midges. Hell, he’d gotten off that bus, tipped his hat at the station agent, and dragged his hide-bound suitcase up Sixth Street. He knew what the note reminded her of. He knew those kinds of notes. Dear Gil, I look forward to the day you can wire me a ticket West. I miss you terribly. Love, Bemice.
Midge looked at Hop and her eyes seemed a thousand years old. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out. Unsnapping her purse, she pulled out a silvery tube of lipstick. After running magenta across her mouth, she said, “That young girl—she got through the operation. But she was back six months later. This time, no note.
“You know, Midge,” Hop said wearily. “Contrary to what you might read in True Confessions, this town isn’t just some platinum-studded meat grinder with fresh-faced virgins going in one end and coming out hard-bitten whores.”
She raised one perfect eyebrow. “It’s not?”
“Hey, honey, just because it happened that way to me.”
And she laughed and it was the first time he’d heard her laugh in a century or more and it was so fizzy and delicious, a hot toddy. It was hard to conceal his pleasure. And hard to feel anything in that moment but the memory of her small bewitching body under his hand, under warm sheets, her laugh in his ear, her mouth tickling his ear and laughing.
“The things you don’t know, Gil,” Midge said, leaning forward and curling her chin in her hand. “You think Jean was just another starlet gritting her way down. But she had whole other stories to tell. They all do.”
“Even you.” “You know my stories.” “I thought I did. Sugar daddies slipping you occasional twists of
cash for a slap and tickle. A night on the town. Was there more?”
“Only what you taught me,” she said with a blast of coldness. Then: “I wasn’t hungry enough to slide into what Jean slid into. But I also
wasn’t that… glorious.”
“Glorious?”
“You missed everything,” Midge sighed. “She may have been a tramp when she needed to be. Who isn’t? But she had something bright and shiny about her. You wanted to rub against it. Feel the shock.”
“So did you? Rub up against her?” Hop said, trying, unsuccessfully, to keep the nasty edge from his voice.
Midge shook her head. “I wish everything was as easy as you make it.”
“Me too. Why don’t you tell me just how hard it was? For Jean. For both of you,” Hop said, almost meaning it, although he wasn’t sure why. “She got you the job at Earl Carroll’s, huh?”
‘Yes,” Midge said. “She did.”
And then she told Hop. She reminded him that she herself had come a long way from the apple-cheeked, starry-eyed girl who traveled from Ada, Ohio, to Los Angeles, California, as Miss Jiffy Muffin 1942. There was a way that she wanted to live. She saw it in the movies, in the movie magazines. No more Saturday nights at the soda shop, killing time—months, years even— sipping on lime rickeys, reading Look magazine, rolling her eyes at the local boys with the slack jaws and bumpy skin. Myrna Loy, Claudette Colbert, Hedy Lamarr—they didn’t have to live this way. Their evenings were spent shimmering through nightclubs with Cary Grant on their arm, corks popping, band swaying— this is the way one lives.
Just shy of eighteen, she’d packed her bags with the same steely determination with which she’d spent the previous three years shaping her plain face and unremarkable body into a sweet-smelling package of dimples and flutters and perky curves. The stick-straight dishwater-brown hair became long honey locks that, after a few months in Hollywood, became a brilliant blonde to go with her puffy rosebud of a mouth. She knew when she left, even if her warm-faced, openhearted mother didn’t, that she wouldn’t be returning after the publicity events, the print and radio ads, and the three-week tour of the West Coast (Once here, I dug my heels in, Hop remembered her once saying to him, years before, centuries before).
Not that Midge wanted to be an actress. She’d always been much too much of a realist for that. She knew the odds and she also knew the limits of her own talents. Nah, she just wanted to live the good life out here, use her pretty face to get some things, enjoy herself, forever wash the dust of Ada off her.
She knocked around from job to job, and a girlfriend in a rooming house told her about Dr. Stillman. He needed a girl, a nice, smiling Midwesterny girl, to answer phones with kindness and keep the nervous patients in his waiting room calm and comfortable. And Midge thought okay. Shoveling popcorn at the West Hollywood Bijou wasn’t paying enough to keep her in stockings. And the other girls she knew, things sometimes got bad for them. One girl sold her hair. Another used candle wax to fill in the cavities in her mouth. Others, you know. That’s what they did.
And Dr. Stillman was nice and Midge had never been squeamish, nor had she carried with her from Ohio any judgments.
But one day the doc asked her into his office and his face was sterner than she’d ever seen it. He’d noticed files missing from his cabinet on two occasions, both times after her shift had ended. Was there something she wanted to tell him? She said no, and that she’d never taken any files ever. Why would she? He looked at her for a long minute and said okay. He believed her. But he would be watching.
It made Midge feel lousy. What did he think she would want with a bunch of medical files? Sure, some of the patients were actresses and a few were pretty big. Many more, however, were girls sent by actors, directors, producers, studio honchos, politicians—the list went on and on. Sure, there were secrets. But where would that get Midge Maberley from Ada, Ohio? And yet she felt the doctor’s eyes on her all the time now, determined to catch her. Who wanted to spend each day like that, amid that dreadful, awful smell of Mercurochrome?
So when her new pal Jean Spangler said, Honey, your figure is too fetching for these corridors. Come meet the manager at Earl Carroll’s, he owes me more favors than I can count, she gave her notice.
A week before her last day, Jean took her to meet a photographer she knew who could help Midge learn to use a camera. Then she took Midge shopping. As a shutter girl, she’d wear a uniform of emerald satin with gold flocking and shiny gold stockings. Jean helped her pick out flashing necklaces, earrings, evening gloves, even garter belts to catch the eye.
Then they went to the Roosevelt Hotel for drinks. And Midge was so grateful to Jean and asked if there was anything she could do for her. And Jean dismissed her with a wave of the hand.
Three Gibsons later, however, Jean whispered, “Midgie, you have to take your shot while you still can.”
“What shot is that?”
“The doc’s office is a treasure trove, honey.”
“He doesn’t keep any money—” “You know what I mean.” And then Midge remembered Jean sitting in the waiting room one
day, a week or two before, chattering away. Watching as Midge pulled patient folders and refiled them in quick order. “What secrets they could tell,” she’d said with a wink.
“That’s not for me, Jean,” she said now, with an Ohioan’s firmness still girded to her somewhere deep inside. And she knew then that it was Jean who had taken those files. She knew it, but hell, why should she care? She had a new job at Earl Carroll’s. She was going to take pictures of Errol Flynn and Gary Cooper. And she did. And Jean began getting more movie jobs, was around less and less. They rarely saw each other. And then Midge met a handsome young reporter without two nickels but with a head full of gleaming hair and eyes full of trouble.
“But Hop,” she said to him now, her voice turning low, forlorn. “They killed her, didn’t they? They killed Jean.”
“They?”
“I don’t know. The big ‘they.’”
“Yeah, I know about the big ‘they,’” Hop said, thinking of Iolene. Of Iolene hiding. Knowing her time was marked.
“Funny. Jean was always superstitious about all that,” Midge said, stirring her still-untouched coffee. “She said she’d never make old bones.”
Hop looked at Midge’s eyes and found something in there. Something he remembered, or thought he did. Something old and pure.
“That’s why she kept that doctor’s note. I’m sure. Some kind of lucky piece, reminding her of things she’d gotten through. She never stepped on sidewalk cracks or opened fortune cookies,” she went on. “She had a four-leaf clover she kep
Merry Lake, Hop thought to himself. Something was shuttling around in his head. Merry Lake. “So she ever go back?” he finally said.
Midge shrugged. “It was just one of those plans you mean with all your heart when you’re on your third sidecar.”
“I might know about those plans.”
“Me too. Isn’t that how we …” “Yeah.” “Gil, one last thing,” she said, sensing he was about to go, which
he was. Which he knew he had to.
“Yeah?”
“As bad as we were together,” she said, her voice delicate. “Why …” Her eyelashes lifted and she let those eyes quake through him. She was brutal.
“Because I knew he’d take care of you,” he said quickly, glad to have the chance to say it. He’d never said it before, even to himself. “I guess I knew that somehow. And I knew it would be right for both of you. It would be something for both of you.”
“How gracious,” she said tonelessly.
“I didn’t say it was gracious. I just wanted to make things better
for all of us.”
“The fixer. Always the fixer.”
“But I did, didn’t I, Midge? Didn’t I fix things?” he said, and,
mortified that his voice was almost turning into a sob, rose to his feet.
“I missed you my whole life,” she said, looking up at him helplessly.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said, because he knew it did.
Merry Lake
He could see the words before him, typewritten on an envelope: MISS MERRY LAKE.
Yes, the abandoned mail at Iolene’s hideout on Perdida Court. The old utility bills, the Shopping Bag circular.