The Road to Los Angeles by John Fante

forgot to lock your 'study,'" she sneered.

    "I know what I'm about, if you please. And I'll lock that door whenever I damn well feel like it."

    "But what about Nietzsche, or whatever you call him?"

    "Never mind Nietzsche, you Comstock trull."

    The tub was ready. I undressed and sat in it. The pictures lay face down on the bath mat, within range of my hand.

    I reached down and picked off the top picture.

    For some reason I knew it was going to be Helen. A faint instinct told me so. And Helen it was. Helen, dear Helen! Helen with her light brown hair! I had not seen her for a long time, almost three weeks. A strange thing about Helen, that strangest of women: the only reason I cared for her was because of her long fingernails. They were so pink, such breath-taking fingernails, so sharp and exquisitely alive. But for the rest of her I cared nothing, beautiful though she was throughout. She sat naked in the picture, holding a soft veil about her shoulders, every bit a marvelous sight, yet not interesting to me, except for those beautiful fingernails.

    "Goodbye, Helen," I said. "Goodbye, dear heart. I shall never forget you. Until the day I die I shall always remember the many times we went to the deep cornfields of Anderson's book and I went to sleep with your fingers in my mouth. How delicious they were! How sweetly I slept! But now we part, dear Helen, sweet Helen. Goodbye, goodbye."

    I tore the picture to pieces and floated them on the water.

    Then I reached down again. It was Hazel. I had named her so because of her eyes in a picture of natural colors. Yet I didn't care for Hazel either. It was her hips I cared about - they were so pillowy and so white. What times we had had, Hazel and I! How beautiful she really was! Before I destroyed her I lay back in the water and thought of the many times we had met in a mysterious room pierced with dazzling sunlight, a very white room, with only a green carpet on the floor, a room that existed only because of her. In the corner, leaning against the wall, and for no good reason, but always there, a long slender cane with a silver tip flashing diamonds in the sunlight. And from behind a curtain that I never quite saw because of the mistiness, and yet could never quite deny, Hazel would walk in such a melancholy way to the middle of the room, and I would be there admiring the globed beauty of her hips, on my knees before her, my fingers melting for the touch of her, and yet I never spoke to darling Hazel but to her hips, addressing them as though they were living souls, telling them how wonderful they were, how useless life was without them, the while taking them in my hands and drawing them near me. And I tore that picture to pieces too, and watched the pieces absorb the water. Dear Hazel . . .

    Then there was Tanya. I used to meet Tanya at night in a cave we kids built one summer a long time ago along the Palos Verdes Cliffs near San Pedro. It was near the sea, and you could smell the ecstasy of lime trees growing there. The cave was always strewn with old magazines and newspapers. In one corner lay a frying pan I had stolen from my mother's kitchen, and in another corner a candle burned and made hissing noises. It was really a filthy little cave after you had been there a little while, and very cold, for water dripped from the sides. And there I met Tanya. But it was not Tanya I loved. It was the way she wore a black shawl in the picture. And it wasn't the shawl either. One was incomplete without the other, and only Tanya could wear it that way. Always when I met her I found myself crawling through the opening of the cave to the center of the cave and pulling the shawl away as Tanya's long hair fell loosely about her, and then I would hold the shawl to my face and bury my lips in it, admiring its black brilliance, and thanking Tanya over and over for having worn it again for me. And Tanya would always answer, "But it's nothing, you silly. I do it gladly. You're so silly." And I