Bird Read online

  ‘I didn’t mean…’ I thought I might cry.

  ‘I know what you meant. You meant the other. Well that is not his fault. He doesn’t remember. I shouldn’t have said anything to you. It is the drink that makes him like that. It is what happened to him in the war that made him like that.’ She was calming down.

  ‘So?’ I asked tentatively. ‘What happened to him?’

  Anna took a drag. ‘In the war millions of Russians died. Very bad things have happened to Russians this century. With Stalin. Very bad.’

  ‘Millions? That’s impossible.’

  Anna was right: I was ignorant. My imagination did not encompass such devastation. Fires in the mountains and snakes on Santa Monica beach were as bad as things ever got over my way.

  ‘Are you sure he’s not just trying to make you feel bad? Have you asked him what actually happened?’

  ‘Of course. He just says, “It is not what happened to me, Anna. It is what I have done you should ask.”’

  ‘So what has he done?’

  Anna shrugged. ‘He doesn’t say. But, for example, I can tell you this. When men are marched to the prison camps in Siberia they often fall and die as they are walking. They drop dead like that,’ she clicked her fingers. ‘Of disease, cold, hunger. It is a long way, thousands of miles. Anyway, the guards have pouches to carry things hanging off their bellies, and when the men fall down dead the guards cut off the tip of their little fingers and put them in their pouch. That way they know how many are dead.’

  I was silenced for a few seconds. ‘That’s terrible,’ I finally said, ‘but it doesn’t mean you have to put up with everything he does.’

  Anna went quiet. ‘But he is my father. You know, Ellie? It makes me very sad that when you look at Papa all you see is a drunk.’ But I think what really made Anna sad was that was what she saw as well.

  ‘We have picked our new apartment for two reasons,’ Anna said to André. ‘One, because it is close. And two, because I like the trees. They are Australian,’ Anna was trying to make André feel better. She was being upbeat in a forced kind of way. ‘You know? Australia? Everything in this city is from somewhere else, except for the cactus. Like the ones in your front yard. So, foreigners like us are not such freaks.’

  ‘You need an English lesson,’ André said. ‘Until the end of today it is still our front yard.’ Then he went and took the colourful canvas beach chair Anna had given him for Christmas (André never, not once in his American life, went to the beach) from where he’d stowed it in the hall closet and sat himself in the front yard as if he planned to sunbathe in the strange yellow-grey twilight produced by smoke-thickened air. When he was sure that Anna and I were watching him through the front window he opened his bottle of vodka and began to drink straight from the neck.

  In fact those trees had been a reason we almost didn’t take the apartment. It was how close the place was to Billy Berg’s new swing club on Hollywood Boulevard that actually swung the deal, no pun intended.

  ‘Think of all the money we’ll save on cabs,’ Anna said to me when we first went to check the apartment out.

  ‘Miriam doesn’t want me to live around here,’ I said. ‘She thinks I’ll become some kind of dope fiend. Or run away with a black guy who’s come up from South Central.’

  ‘Tell her that no sensible negro would light a joint around here. They know the police are always after them. Perhaps it will get her on your back.’

  ‘Off. The phrase is off my back.’

  ‘Okay,’ Anna shrugged. ‘Off.’

  The apartment was small but the building it was in was majestic. Its smooth stone walls were covered with ivy. There was a flame tree in the courtyard. A eucalypt. A sparse and fragrant frangipani stood next to the number: 6141.

  ‘Where is the tree?’ Anna asked, when we first saw the place.

  ‘Tree?’

  ‘The palm tree.’ She was right. This was one of the few apartment blocks around that did not have a palm tree out front. ‘When I first arrived I drove down Hollywood Boulevard where it is narrow, and there are big houses either side, and tall palms that…’ she raised her arms to indicate trees going up and up. ‘You feel like you are important just driving down such a street. Like you have arrived.’

  I took her hand. ‘Come here,’ I said. We walked half a block to Gower and looked towards the hills. ‘You see that?’ I pointed to the Hollywood sign. ‘That sign says you’ve arrived. You don’t need a palm tree to tell you that.’ Then we hugged and jumped up and down. At the time we thought we were so grown up—and most of the time Anna seemed a lot older than she was—but when I remember moments like that I see how young we were.

  The first night we slept in the apartment, we woke to the sounds of construction. It was the new freeway that was being built, inching north from Vine to Cahuenga. Anna was so happy she came into my room with a cup of coffee at seven in the morning, just in case the noise hadn’t already woken me up. ‘I love it here,’ she said. ‘Where I come from, the city is dead. This city is alive! It is an org-an-asm.’

  I tried not to laugh. ‘You’ve been going through the dictionary again, haven’t you?’ Anna loved new words. When we went to Bergs in the evening guys like Charlie Mingus and Buddy Collette would come up from South Central to play and Anna would lean against the bar and listen, repeating the words to the songs under her breath. ‘When I talk,’ she said to me, ‘the words are heavy. But here, the musicians make them light.’ She could stand for half an hour, even more, with her eyes closed.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ I asked her one night when she disappeared like that.

  ‘My mama,’ she smiled. ‘I would stand beside her on summer nights, looking at the swifts dive for insects. The music, it is like that. Did you know that these little birds don’t touch the ground for years after they leave the nest? They sleep high up, floating on the air.’

  Whenever Anna was at Bergs men approached her constantly. Some of them just wanted to dance. Others offered her ‘movie’ work but what that really meant was photographic work. Soon Anna David could be found on knitwear catalogues around the world; her breasts held firmly in place with cardigans buttoned tight across them. There she’d be, all wholesome in pink yarn licking a strawberry ice-cream cone, looking absolutely nothing like the girl who hung out at clubs. Mary was unhappy about the situation, as I found out one day when Anna and I answered the phone at the same time and I listened to the call. We both did that to each other all the time. We had no sense of privacy. It had not yet occurred to me that Anna was someone I needed to protect myself from.

  ‘Darling,’ Mary said, ‘I’ve just had a call from some chump called Austin. You’re flushing your career down the you-know-what with all this catalogue carry on.’

  ‘Movies are hard for me, Mary. With my accent. But photographs—no problem. Austin, he takes fashion shots. To make sure it’s all up front, that is why I get him to call you.’

  Mary sounded dubious. ‘He doesn’t want you to take off your clothes?’

  ‘Of course not! I wear very tight clothes, for sure,’ Anna said. ‘But technically speaking, they are still clothes.’ The situation she went on to describe sounded very compromising to me, but I couldn’t work out if she felt the same way. It was something about the photographer horsing around and asking her to pose with another man. Some cute guy in a sailor suit who’d had a few drinks sat on her back like he was riding a horse, then slapped her ass while the photographer snapped away.

  ‘Do you mean you had sex?’ Mary’s voice was flat. She’d heard stories like this far too often. ‘In front of the camera?’

  No, Anna said, not that. ‘It is just…actually, forget it.’ Anna got bored even thinking about it. ‘The money’s good. It’s no big deal.’

  The result of all this was that soon Anna could afford to buy herself a new car. A baby blue Chevrolet, just like the one Freddy had driven.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Anna said, the first time she tried to drag me int
o her grand new purchase. ‘We just drive down Santa Monica then follow Highway 1 all the way. It is very pretty, with the sea and everything.’

  ‘It’s a long way,’ I said. ‘Bergs is closer.’

  Anna did one of her shrugs. Long was no problem as far as Anna was concerned. She’d taken to driving to Pasadena at the weekends just for the hell of it. From Chavez Ravine north to Pasadena the freeway could be quite dangerous. There was no shoulder. The lanes were narrow and the turns were sharp. The exit ramps were so short they made it hard to get your speed down before you hit the streets. Anna had to really concentrate to keep safe. She found it soothing.

  ‘In fact I have had some keys cut for you,’ Anna pulled them out of her pocket. ‘So you can drive my car whenever you want to. What is mine, is yours.’

  Well, that won me over of course.

  ‘First, though, we must go past André’s.’

  ‘Come in, Bird,’ André said when we arrived. He didn’t address me directly, he never did. I think he hoped if I disappeared Anna would return to him. He walked past the living area straight into the kitchen and we followed him. The place smelled bad and the overgrown garden blocked out the light.

  André poured us both a vodka. ‘Sit here. It is better here.’ We searched around for a chair that wasn’t piled with newspapers. André, perhaps embarrassed by the mess, began to wash dishes. Anna went to join him.

  ‘I have earned enough money to buy a new car,’ Anna said. ‘A brand new one. Not just the old bomb I have been driving.’

  ‘A new car?’ André was impressed. He was still being picked up and dropped off by fellow workers.

  ‘Come outside and look.’ We walked him to the front door and Anna waved her arm towards the kerb with a flourish.

  ‘Bud’ ostorozhna, ladno?’ André said, looking anxious and slightly teary.

  ‘Papa, English. Yes, of course I’ll be careful.’

  She ran down the path ahead of him and opened the passenger door. ‘Let me drive you somewhere.’

  ‘Where will you drive?’ André stayed standing by the front door. He had no intention of moving. As he got older Anna found it increasingly difficult to get him out of the house.

  ‘There is a place I like to go on Hermosa Beach. It is maybe forty-five minutes from here. Down on the beach. An hour away even. It’s a jazz place. I could buy you a drink.’

  ‘You and your jazz,’ André said, to no particular end. He often made statements like that. Empty phrases to cover the fact he did not know what to say, or think, about most of the things his daughter chose to do in America. Anna walked back up the path.

  ‘In fact this is one of the things that confuses me about English,’ Anna said. ‘This place that is called the Lighthouse is nothing but a boring brown shack with a car park out front. Often it is the way here. The words do not match the things.’

  ‘Chert poberi! If that is the only thing that confuses you about English you are A-OK,’ André was already back down the hallway, heading for the vodka.

  ‘You and your jazz,’ he repeated. ‘Do you have a boyfriend yet? Someone respectable for me to meet? Do you meet any nice boys at these jazz clubs?’ Finally he acknowledged me. ‘Ellie, do you have a nice brother for Anna? You must help her meet nice boy.’

  Anna laughed. ‘No Papa. There is no one but you.’ André, of course, couldn’t help smiling at that.

  When we stepped into the Lighthouse at about nine that night, people turned to look at us. To look at Anna. I was used to it by now; even though Anna wasn’t famous she looked as if she might be, and people would try to figure out where they knew her from. But the important thing about that night was that it was down there at Hermosa, down by the broad bleak beach, among the low tatty bungalows, that we first heard Charlie Parker.

  ‘His notes rise up into…’ Anna was searching, as usual, for the right words, ‘like little fireworks. Like this,’ she lit her cigarette and blew smoke up into the air before her, air thick with the heat of people jammed together for hours. The smoke billowed, white, for a few moments as it found its way towards the ceiling. ‘Like that!’ a drunken Anna pointed, triumphant. ‘He plays exactly like that.’ Anna turned to the bar, allowed her breasts to fall towards the barman, and ordered two more drinks. She passed a martini to me as the band began their new set. ‘For this one I’d like to thank my friend, the great Miles Davis,’ the big man said. ‘“Darn that Dream”.’

  Anna put her drink down on the bar and took a deep breath. Before I knew it she was on the stage, whispering in the big man’s ear. The band broke off in surprise; the stage was off-limits, though there was no doubt this woman was gorgeous enough that exceptions could be made. ‘We are joined now,’ Parker was smooth as ever, ‘by the lovely…’

  ‘Anna.’ She breathed her name into the microphone in the sultry way she’d seen other singers do, then the band launched in and so did she: When I awake you’re out of sight / Darn that dream / Darn your lips / Darn your eyes / They lift me high above the starry skies / Then I tumble out of paradise…Then Bird joined in on his sax, dropping notes gentle in behind her, and Anna looked as if she was about to go into a swoon. It was for her: he was playing like this for her. After that first song was done Anna launched straight into ‘Summertime’. When she finally stepped off the stage she was breathless with excitement.

  ‘Your voice,’ I said, ‘it’s beautiful. I never knew.’

  ‘Darling, there is so very much you don’t know about me.’

  ‘I never hear you sing.’

  ‘I wait,’ she smiled at me, ‘until you are out of the house.’

  Soon after that the playing got really wild. Parker was shaking and sweating. He screamed. He dropped to his knees then threw his bulk on the ground and lay on his back for a while so it looked as if the sax was playing him rather than the other way around. When he got back up, graceful as a small man, he held onto a B for so long we all stopped breathing, it was like we were watching someone drown. Then—bang!—he flung his head back, his hat snapped clean off his head, and he was screaming up and down the scale all over again. He was shaking himself out all over the room, we were slick with his sweat and spit. Then he jumped off the stage and was playing in among the crowd. ‘Yes!’ Anna was screaming, I was yelling, everyone was shouting—Yes!

  At the end of the number Anna gave me a happy sweaty hug. ‘Can you get me a beer perhaps? I will just be a minute, darling. I want to thank Mr Parker.’

  I went to the bar, Anna went to the stage, and I didn’t see her again for three days.

  I searched the crowd, of course, then I waited till about five o’clock in the morning to see if she’d return from wherever she was. Then I left. I walked along the beach and listened to the surf. I felt the chill of morning. People looking exhausted, like me, sat huddled on the sand waiting for the sun to rise. I joined them.

  Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.

  Yes, that was us. It was 1953, we had left the war behind us, and everything was changing.

  A couple of days later I was sound asleep when I heard the phone ring. Perhaps it was Anna? I was starting to worry. I pulled myself together and staggered to the phone, tripping and almost falling over several piles of Anna’s clothes.

  ‘Anna?’

  ‘No, it’s Mary.’

  Mary. I imagined her at her desk, twirling her peroxide hair with the finger of one hand, smoking a cigarette with the other. I imagined Anna lying in a gutter somewhere.

  ‘Darling, I’ve got this wonderful role for you. For the two of you. Dancing in the new Monroe and Russell vehicle.’ She paused for a moment, expecting some response but I was leaning against the wall trying to wake up.

  ‘Darling, are you there?’

  ‘Yes. Yes Mary, I’m here. That is wonderful news. Thank you.’

  ‘And it gets better. No auditions! Marilyn specially asked for you girls, she was so taken with Anna last time.’ All About Eve
, it must have been—what?—three years ago now. ‘You need to be at the Fox Studios. Pico. First thing Monday morning.’

  ‘First thing,’ I promised. ‘We’ll be there first thing.’ After I hung up the phone I made myself a coffee and waited until it was late enough to call the Lighthouse.

  ‘I wonder,’ I said, ‘if you have seen my friend Anna. She’s tall, blonde…’

  ‘Oh,’ the barman interrupted me. ‘We seen her all right. She’s hard to miss.’

  ‘I must get in touch with her. It’s important. Could you give her a message for me?’

  ‘What am I, your personal secretary?’

  I hadn’t been Anna’s friend for four years without learning a trick or two. ‘No, darling,’ I said. ‘You are my barman. I am one of your regulars. A little respect, please. Tell her we have a part in the next Monroe film. Tell her she has to come home.’

  That job was one of the few times I had the advantage over Anna. I was darker, thinner, and shorter than her. Pretty, but not too pretty. That meant I got to be one of the group of girls who wore pink ball gowns and pink roses in our hair. Because Anna was blonde and Monroe didn’t let other blondes in her scenes—even ones who had been nice to her before she was famous—Anna was cast as a human candelabra and had to stand there dressed in a black bustier and headdress: a living statue.

  There wasn’t, in the end, much dancing to be done, so it was in our tiny living room that we really got down to it. We put our arms above our heads and laced our wrists together. We gyrated. Every now and then we would stand stock still, in a sexy pose, as if there was a camera in the room. Square-cut or pear-shape, we sang, These rocks don’t lose their shape / Diamonds are a girl’s best friend, before flinging our hips dramatically—to the left for Let’s—to the right for Rock!

  We danced around the apartment, tucked in behind Hollywood, only a few miles from the Pacific Ocean and the beaches that stretched south to Mexico and north to Canada; we danced together under the clear blue sky and dry air of this desert town. In my dreams we dance together still.