Free All That Glitters by Thomas Tryon

remember?”
    “Lotsa bozos pinch me. It’s muh type. How’m I s’posed to remember some kid with merit badges? Get serious. Time’s up, so long. Tell her we’ll call you.”
    “But don’t call us,” I said, the old show-biz kiss-off.
    She summoned Sluggo, who quickly showed himself. “This number’s leavin’. Show him the door.” I waited for her to put out her hand, which she did not do.
    “Well? What happened?” Beata was steaming because she’d been excluded; an agent should be allowed to stay with the client.
    I shrugged. I didn’t want to tell her I’d blown it with the Hartford Pinch. “She’ll call us,” was all I said.
    Beata owned some street verbiage and used it. “What’d she do? Unzip you in there? Give you some head?”
    “Jesus, Beata, can it.”
    I found out later that Sluggo had overheard her crude remark and it went straight back to Babe. Babe didn’t like it, not at all. And they never called about the show. I read in Variety that another guy—tall, dark—had the part. I thought, Screw it. It was two more months of Tallulah showing her crotch.
    But as things turned out, I did get a summer in the country—of sorts. The guy Babe hired came down with mononucleosis and took to his bed, and I got this hurry-up call from Max saying I was to go right over to the producers’ office and sign a contract, then I was to go down to a Second Avenue rehearsal hall.
    “Should I put on my blue suit?” I cracked; Beata used her vocabulary again.
    As I mentioned, the interview in her hotel suite wasn’t the second time I’d met Babe Austrian but the third. By now I’d begun to count. If she hadn’t remembered the first time, I wondered if she’d remember the second, the time on the Super Chief, heading west at the end of the war. I was a navy signalman and had been granted liberty. While I was visiting home the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and it seemed the war in the Pacific would quickly end. But before this could happen I found myself stuck in a coach seat all the way from Chicago to the Coast. It promised to be a tedious and uncomfortable trip until I chose to visit the club car.
    So there I am all duded up in my best pressed whites downing my rye-and-ginger-ale. I’m feeling hot and sharp and all man, and who do I see sitting across the aisle from me reading Look , with these itty-bitty shoes and a silver fox chubby over the shoulders, but this movie blonde. I counted back the years; only seven had passed, but though I was now grown up, she hadn’t changed at all. As I sat debating whether it was appropriate to refresh her memory, she kept flipping the Look pages and absently tugging the hem of her skirt over her kneecaps. Every time she bent forward she showed her cleavage and I knew she knew I was looking at her.
    She got up, dropped the magazine in her chair, and ankled on out of there without a look left or right, up or down. That evening, after dinner, I went back to the club car. It was around ten-thirty and there were few drinkers on tap. But there she was, this time reading Photoplay. The car was swaying and I sort of let it throw me into a seat, not right next to her but one chair away.
    “Yeah,” she says to me, “take a load off.” Then she asked me my name and I told her. Then I said, “I guess I don’t have to ask yours.”
    Heh heh. Oh, really? Who did I think she was? Her name, she said, was Gladys Lillie, “but just call me ‘Glad.’” She came from Battle “Crick” and was the Popped Rice heiress—“you know, exploded out of cannons?” Where was I going? What was my ship? What did I do? Like that. She could have been Axis Sally, but she wasn’t. Neither was she “Gladys Lillie.” But I called her “Glad” anyway. I told her my life story, she told me hers, part, anyway, but longer than mine. She kept crossing and uncrossing her legs. She had real nylons on, or maybe it was her underwear that made slicky sounds, and she was wearing