"Muriel," he said, "how surprising. I expected Christ to come along before you. You've changed-- grown up-- but still the same eyes. Come in, come over here and let me have a proper look at--- you needn't shut the-- doesn't matter. Just the two of us, then. Come, come. How lovely you are and still so child-like in your graceful... No need for tears! All's forgiven. Stand here by the window. Isn't that your mother's dress? The one she was married in?"
"Grandmother's," said Muriel, blinking in the light from the curtainless window. "Mother borrowed it for the wedding."
He winced at seeing that those were not tears in her eyes. They were the gleam of some hard emotion. He didn't want to think about it.
"I was best man at the wedding," he said, just as though the marriage was yesterday and not twenty years ago. "I held you during the ceremony. Jane wanted everyone to see what a lovely thing her man could produce."
Arthur came around from behind his desk in the cramped little office, one hand fingering his tie, his tongue on his lower lip, his brows creased, all the mannerisms that Muriel remembered about him.
She didn't mean to give the impression of being frightened by his approach. She saw in his grey eyes that he believed she was. He stopped a few paces from her to make those familiar gestures of innocence misunderstood, as if he was puzzled and frustrated by the idea that anyone should be wary of him, especially women.
"I was very fond of your mother," he remarked, smiling now, his hands in the pockets of his grey flannel coat.
"I've come for Father's lamp."
Arthur opened his mouth to say something in response, but, as she expected, he only stared at her a moment, then closed his mouth and moved away. He went to the other window and peered down at the street. You could hear a tinny transistor radio playing the newest recording by Elvis Presley. He shook his head, but why he did Muriel wasn't sure.
She watched him suspiciously. He was going to change the subject; that much she was sure of.
He turned to give her a knowing smile. "Do people tell you that you look like Marilyn Monroe?"
She didn't really want to breathe a laugh, but she couldn't help it. "The silly ones do," she said.
He nodded. "I'm a silly old man, then."
He was fifty, but he had looked fifty fifteen years ago when Muriel was old enough to notice things like that. He was born old, she thought, and was ageless.
"You aren't an old man," she told him severely. "Now, about Father's lamp..."
It was the way he walked over to his desk and pretended to consult a schedule that warned her that not all had been forgiven.
Muriel took a pack of Chesterfields from her skirt pocket, a flounced skirt that accentuated her slim waist. Too aware of her allure she rather bashfully lit a cigarette, looking around for a place to sit. Sitting would root her to the office, emphasize her determination to stay until Arthur brought out the lamp. It was here, somewhere in this clutter. She was quite convinced of that.
She sat in a cushioned wooden chair with scrolled armrests. It was like sinking down into a room that had been stirred up and disordered. Everything seemed to be out of place, or just tossed aside and forgotten. The desk was the one thing that had kept its sanity, its bearing, like a life raft in a stormy sea. Arthur stood beside it as though clutching it with his spirit. If he let go he would drown.
"Your father," he began. Yes, he is going to start on Father, Muriel knew, and it irritated her. That hard emotion sat in her eyes like a steel ball too heavy to roll away. Arthur winced at it. He went behind the desk intending to sit in his swivel rocker, but he didn't. He picked up the schedule, fiddled with it, and put it in a drawer. Now there was nothing to do... except change the subject.
"If it's a job you need, I can use a sales manager's assistant. Mrs Ralston has given her two week notice. It isn't a bad salary. Four hundred a month. And there will be a bonus if--"
"I think Father would have wanted me to have the lamp," said Muriel, calmly. She reached out to flick ash in a metal seashell on a counter. Here there were stacks of magazines with half nude women on the covers. The stacks leaned in opposing directions, as if it were by chance that tossed away magazines just happened to land on top of one another.
"You act as if it were a family heirloom," Arthur said and smiled wonderingly. "It's not the sort of... It's just a Victorian lamp. Worth a little something to a collector, I suppose."
He straightened his shoulders and came back around to the front of the desk. "If you're just going to sell it, I'll give you a hundred dollars for it, right here today. Now, that bonus. If the sales exceed our quarterly projection..."
Muriel let him explain about the job that she wasn't the least interested in. She smoked self-consciously. She hoped he saw that she wasn't interested in selling the lamp either. She tried not to rudely radiate impatience, but she didn't like him changing the subject. She wasn't here to visit him. His sister didn't pretend that Muriel's appearance at the Santa Monica house where she-- Grendel-- and Arthur grew up was anything other than an inquiry into the whereabouts of the lamp. But Arthur wasn't like his sister.
Grendel never changed the subject. She would talk it to death. She wasn't afraid of things that put her on the spot. She wasn't afraid of implied accusations. And she had said that the lamp, the mysterious 'spirit lamp,' was in Arthur's office, "Probably hidden away," Grendel believed, smiling grimly as she brushed the mantelpiece with her feather duster. "Muriel, you look like Marilyn Monroe."
Staring at the old maid, Muriel herself changed the subject. 'Muriel Minkrose.' Even her name was similar to the actress. For a moment she was in Hollywood, in the popping glare of flashbulbs, holding an Oscar and thanking all the people who had helped to make her a star. In THAT situation, rich and famous, she wouldn't care a flip for Father's lamp. But she was a college dropout and a working girl tied to her deadend job, tied to it as securely as the gasoline hoses were tied to their pumps.
She liked the smell of gasoline and she liked flirting with the men who drove expensive cars, remembering at that moment the man with some grey in his hair who drove up to the gas pumps in a new $2000 Cadillac. She had felt his eyes on her bare legs and arms as she inserted the nozzle and went around cleaning his windshield and side mirrors. She dressed provocatively, like a carhop at a burger stand. In the summer she wore shorts and a halter top. Her boss encouraged it. It was certainly good for business. Too bad there was a child in the backseat of the Cadillac. Her hopes were dashed. But then, maybe he was the daring type who wanted a girl on the side.
"You know why Arthur was angry at your father," Grendel said and shook the feather duster on the back porch, the door wide open, looking back at her. "Rex took the best models with him when he left to start his own skin mag. The best. Those two blondes and the redhead. Well, it's a free country. But Arthur and Rex were pals since childhood. They had a business agreement. More than an agreement, really. They had trust in each other. A bond. Or at least that's how Arthur felt. He was so hurt when your father broke their friendship to pieces and became a competitor. An enemy, in a way. You see that, don't you?"
Muriel would go on walks with her father when she was a little girl, holding his hand as they strolled along the Sunset Strip in the exciting evenings.
Rex Minkrose was tall and handsome, nattily dressed, but with a careless go-to-hell look. The women who passed them smiled at him with their eyes devouring him. They all did. Muriel was jealous and wished she was grown up, wished she could convey to the women that Rex belonged to her, that not one of them could compare to her in his estimation. And now, how funny that she grew up to look like Marilyn Monroe. How sad, though, that he was sleeping forever in Rose Hills, under a marble gravestone: 1901-1954.
"Think about my offer," Arthur said, glancing at his watch. "There's no hurry."
Muriel shook her head. "No, it's not about a job, it's the lamp. Grendel says it's here in your office. I should like to see it. It still belongs to Father."
Arthur stared at the rug, lifting a leg and sitting on a corner of his desk, his brows creased, his tongue on his lower lip like a piece of bacon. It was an ugly expression. It particularly galled Muriel to see it now, knowing that he was going to change--
"I talked to Grendel earlier today," he said, "evidently before you visited her. She knew you were back and that according to your cousin Julia you're staying at a motel in Inglewood. I can get you in to the Goldstone Suites in West Hollywood. The first month is free."
He grinned at her. The grin made it plain that he really couldn't afford to proffer such a favor. Television had decreased magazine sales just enough to worry him.
Muriel got up to crush out her stub in the metal seashell. "My work is in San Pedro near the harbor and I've already put down the first and last months rent in an apartment just a block down from the gas-- from where I work. I'm moving in this afternoon and I should like to have Father's lamp. I even bought a little endtable for it."
She turned a bright cheerful face to him. She thought this might be effective. Her lie about the endtable was a clever touch, and she was thinking of other lies that might nudge Arthur into finally giving in, when he stood away from the desk. He looked resigned. It did appear that he would bring out the lamp from wherever it was.
Muriel widened her smile, stepping toward him. She came closer to him than she had ever voluntarily come before.
"I see you are quite determined--" he began in a laughing manner that meant he was too angry to show his true feelings. "--to separate me from the one thing left that connects me to my dear old friend Rex Minkrose. Well, he's your dad. Was--" He winced. "Was your dad, and a more likeable man I've never..."
Arthur looked war-wearied. He took out a set of keys from a pocket of his grey flannel trousers. Slowly he went around to the bottom desk drawer. With every indication of reluctance he unlocked it.
Muriel was going to hold the lamp in her hands for the first time in her life.
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