She confessed she saw me watching her in the bus station.
"I thought you was a nice college boy."
"Oh, I'm a college boy!" I assured her.
The bus arrived in Hollywood.
In the gray, dirty dawn, like the dawn when Joel McCrea met Veronica Lake in a diner, in the picture Sullivan's Travels, she slept in my lap.
I looked greedily out tine window: stucco houses and palms and drive-ins, the whole mad thing, the ragged promised land, the fantastic end of America.
We got off the bus at Main Street, which was no different from where you get off a bus in Kansas City or Chicago or Boston – red brick, dirty, characters drifting by, trolleys grating in the hopeless dawn, the whorey smell of a big city.
And here my mind went haywire, I don't know why.
I began getting the foolish paranoiac visions that Teresa, or Terry – her name – was a common little hustler who worked the buses for a guy's bucks by making appointments like ours in LA where she brought the sucker first to a breakfast place, where her pimp waited, and then to a certain hotel to which he had access with his gun or his whatever.
I never confessed this to her.
We ate breakfast and a pimp kept watching us; I fancied Terry was making secret eyes at him.
I was tired and felt strange and lost in a faraway, disgusting place.
The goof of terror took over my thoughts and made me act petty and cheap.
"Do you know that guy?" I said.
"What guy you mean, honey?"
I let it drop.
She was slow and hung-up about everything she did; it took her a long time to eat; she chewed slowly and stared into space, and smoked a cigarette, and kept talking, and I was like a haggard ghost, suspicioning every move she made, thinking she was stalling for time.
This was all a fit of sickness.
I was sweating as we went down the street hand in hand.
The first hotel we hit had a room, and before I knew it I was locking the door behind me and she was sitting on the bed taking off her shoes.
I kissed her meekly.
Better she'd never know.
To relax our nerves I knew we needed whisky, especially me.
I ran out and fiddled all over twelve blocks, hurrying till I found a pint of whisky for sale at a newsstand. I ran back, all energy.
Terry was in the bathroom, fixing her face.
I poured one big drink in a water glass, and we had slugs.
Oh, it was sweet and delicious and worth my whole lugubrious voyage.
I stood behind her at the mirror, and we danced in the bathroom that way.
I began talking about my friends back east.
I said, "You ought to meet a great girl I know called Doric.
She's a six-foot redhead.
If you came to New York she'd show you where to get work."
"Who is this six-foot redhead?" she demanded suspiciously.
"Why do you tell me about her?"
In her simple soul she couldn't fathom my kind of glad, nervous talk.
I let it drop.
She began to get drunk in the bathroom.
"Come on to bed!" I kept saying.
"Six-foot redhead, hey?
And I thought you was a nice college boy, I saw you in your lovely sweater and I said to myself, Hmm, ain't he nice?
No!
And no!
And no!
You have to be a goddam pimp like all of them!"
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"Don't stand there and tell me that six-foot redhead ain't a madame, 'cause I know a madame when I hear about one, and you, you're just a pimp like all the rest I meet, everybody's a pimp."
"Listen, Terry, I am not a pimp.
I swear to you on the Bible I am not a pimp.
Why should I be a pimp?
My only interest is you."