An Inconvenient Woman (17 page)

“Do you have a mistress, Jules?” Pauline had asked him once, more than a year before Cyril Rathbone had seen the picture of Flo March, with Jules in the background, in the Paris press. She waited until Dudley had set up the drinks tray and left the room before asking her surprising question, a question that surprised even her when she asked it. Although she was not an overly passionate woman, Pauline was feeling worshiped but untouched, and a certain feminine instinct brought forth the question more than any knowledge of such a fact. The conversation took place in the sunset room, where the Mendelsons met each twilight to have a glass of wine together and talk over the business of the day before they dressed for dinner.

“What does that mean?” asked Jules, astonished, turning away from the red and orange sunset to give her his full attention.

“Just asking,” said Pauline, holding up her hands in a defensive gesture.

“But what does such a question mean?” Jules asked again.

“You keep repeating yourself, Jules. ‘What does that mean? What does such a question mean?’ Surely you can think up a better answer than that, you, a man used to handling hundreds of millions of dollars.” For Pauline, usually so serene, she had become slightly shrill.

“Why are you being like this, Pauline?” he asked, with the attitude of a man who had nothing to hide.

“More questions. You answer me with questions. That might work in your business life, Jules—intimidation, putting
people on the defensive—but it doesn’t work with me. I’m probably one of the few people you’ve ever met who isn’t afraid of you.”

Jules smiled. “I know that, Pauline,” he said. “I’ve always known that, from the time I saw you throw the prenuptial agreement at Marcus Stromm and splash black ink all over his shirt. That’s one of the many things I love about you.”

“You have a peculiar way of showing your love,” she said.

“I can only answer you with a question again. What does that mean?”

“I am considered to be a beautiful woman. At least people tell me that I am beautiful, and magazines and newspapers write me up as a beautiful woman. I say this with no braggadocio. It is something I have been told about myself since I was a child. It is something I work on. It is the reason I swim forty laps in the pool every day, rain or shine. It is the reason I spend part of each day with Pooky for my hair and Blanchette for my nails. It is the reason I go to Paris twice a year for my clothes.”

“I know all that,” said Jules.

“Oh, yes, I know you do. I also know that you like to have me by your side when you enter those endless dinners you have to attend. I know you like and even need the way I am able to entertain and attract interesting people to your parties when you want to impress men you have business dealings with.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“It’s not enough for me anymore, Jules. I might as well be married to Hector for all the love you show me.”

“I do love you.”

“You do understand that I am talking about love in the lovemaking sense of the word
love
. I am more than a mannequin. I am more than a hostess.”

Of course, he understood. He worshiped his wife. He could not imagine life without her. His marriage was a contract as binding as any business contract he had ever signed. Forestalling further suspicion, he became attentive again to the obligations of his marriage, at least for a while, but a complication had set in, a sexual complication, that he had never imagined could happen to him.

•   •   •

Her name had been Houlihan, Fleurette Houlihan, and she could not bear the sound of it. “You don’t think I look Irish enough, without having a name like Fleurette Houlihan?” she often asked, shaking her red hair at the same time. When she thought she might become an actress, and worked as a waitress at the Viceroy Coffee Shop on Sunset Strip, she renamed herself Rhonda March, after Rhonda Fleming, a red-haired film star her mother had admired. The Viceroy was said to serve the best coffee in West Hollywood, and that was where she had met Jules Mendelson, who was a coffee drinker, ten cups a day. He had walked into the Viceroy Coffee Shop on a day when the coffee machine in his office was not working. She was wearing a nameplate with
RHONDA
on it.

Jules Mendelson was not the type of man who spoke to waitresses in coffee shops, but that day, for a reason he did not understand, he had said to the red-haired girl wearing the name tag with
RHONDA
on it, “I suppose they call you Red.”

“No, they don’t,” she answered quite emphatically. She was a pretty girl who was used to dealing with lascivious older men. “I don’t like being called Red, as a matter of fact.”

“What do they call you?” he asked.

There was in his tone a genuine interest in her answer, and she felt she had mistaken him for lascivious. “Do you mean what is my name?”

“Yes.”

“Rhonda,” she said, tapping a red fingernail against her nameplate.

When he looked up from his
London Financial Times
and watched her wipe off the table with a turquoise-colored sponge, he said to her, “You don’t look like a Rhonda.”

“I was thinking of changing it to Rondelle,” she said.

“Oh, no,” he said, “not Rondelle.”

“You want coffee?” she asked. “We got the best coffee in West Hollywood here.”

“Yes.”

When she put the cup down in front of him, he asked, “What was your name before you changed it?”

“You don’t want to hear,” she said.

“Yes, I do,” he said.

“Fleurette Houlihan,” she said, almost whispering. “It makes me cringe. Imagine that up on the screen.”

He laughed.

“I kind of like the Fleurette part,” said Jules.

“You don’t!”

“Kind of.”

“You’re nuts.” She liked talking about herself, though.

“How about Flossie?”

“Sounds cheaper than Fleurette.”

“Flo?”

“Hmmm.” She gave it some thought.

“I once knew a Flo,” said Jules. He hadn’t meant to get so deeply mired in such a conversation. “She was a very pretty girl too.”

So she became Flo.

Flo March was then twenty-four years old, perhaps not the smartest girl in town but one of the nicest and, certainly, one of the prettiest, if red hair, blue eyes, and creamy-colored skin were an appealing combination for her beholder. She sometimes dated minor agents she poured coffee for in the morning, but they never took her to screenings or to dinners in restaurants, which were the sorts of things she yearned to do. They took her to dinner in other coffee shops and were after one thing and one thing only, and she usually gave it to them, because it was easier to say yes than to say no and have to deal with all that hassle. Hector Paradiso, who lived in the Hollywood Hills above the Viceroy, had breakfast there every morning, and often told Flo stories of where he had been the night before: at Faye Converse’s party, or Rose Cliveden’s, or, best of all, Pauline Mendelson’s. Flo loved hearing about parties, especially Pauline Mendelson’s parties. She read every word about Pauline Mendelson in the society columns and in the fashion magazines that Hector sometimes brought by for her after he had finished with them. Flo, no fool, knew all about the other part of Hector’s life too, the part no one ever talked about. All the hustlers from the Strip came into the Viceroy too, and they told her about their adventures with the rich guys who stopped their Mercedes-Benzes and Rolls-Royces, made their deals, and took them to their houses.

Jules had returned to the Viceroy Coffee Shop every day since the first day, always carrying a financial newspaper, and sat at the same table, though the management frowned on a single person tying up a booth for four customers and only ordering coffee. But there was something about Jules—although the manager, whose name was Curly, had no idea who Jules was—that kept him from asking Jules to sit at the
counter instead of the booth, especially after Rhonda, who now wanted to be called Flo, told the manager that the big man always left a ten-dollar tip, even though he only had coffee.

“I don’t want you to think for a single instant that this is what I intend to do for the rest of my life,” said Flo, a few days later, pouring Jules a second cup of coffee with one hand and wiping off the Formica top of the table with her turquoise-colored sponge with the other. “
This
,” continued Flo, referring to her job as a waitress in a coffee shop, “is only a means to an end.”

“And the end, of course, is stardom,” said Jules, watching her over the top of the
Wall Street Journal
.

“I’d settle for less than stardom,” said Flo, quite seriously.

“What would you settle for?”

“I’d like to be the second lead in a TV series, best friend of the star, where the whole show wouldn’t rest on my shoulders, and when it gets canceled after thirteen weeks, I wouldn’t be blamed and would just go on to another series, again as a secondary lead. Or even just a running part would do.”

Jules laughed.

Flo blushed. “What are you laughin’ at? I’m serious,” she said, defensively.

“It is a laugh of enchantment, not derision,” he said.

“A laugh of enchantment, not derision,” she repeated slowly, as if she were memorizing it so that she could repeat it in conversation. “Hey, that’s really nice,” she said.

“Are you doing anything about it?” asked Jules.

“What do you mean?”

“Studying, getting an agent, going on calls, or whatever it is actresses do to get ahead. You’re not waiting to be discovered at the coffee counter, are you?”

“You have to have pictures,” said Flo. “Or they don’t want to see you.”

“Then get pictures,” said Jules, simply.

“ ‘Get pictures,’ he says.” She rolled her eyes, as if Jules Mendelson had said something stupid. “Do you have any idea what pictures cost?”

“You seem to be defeated without even starting,” he said. “Let me tell you something. If you can visualize what you want to be, you’ll make it, believe me.”

She looked at him earnestly. It was not the sort of flirtatious conversation she was used to with her customers. “The thing is, I have this great desire to become famous, but I don’t know whether I’m good enough at anything to become famous.”

“You look very well today,” Jules had said another day, noting the fresh pink uniform that she was wearing.

“My mother used to say that Maureen O’Hara was the first redhead in movies who had the courage to wear pink on the screen,” said Flo.

Jules, bewildered, nodded. He didn’t understand most of what Flo said, but he had grown to like listening to her talk. She had opinions on everything. His secretary, Miss Maple, whom he had had for years, couldn’t understand why Jules left his office every morning around ten o’clock to go and have coffee at the Viceroy Coffee Shop, when Beth, her assistant, made perfectly good coffee right there in the office; but Jules said he liked to get the fresh air and to be able to read the
Wall Street Journal
and the
London Financial Times
in peace. Miss Maple didn’t ask any more questions.

Flo looked out the window of the coffee shop. There, parked by the curb on Sunset Boulevard, was a dark blue Bentley.

“That your car out there?” she asked.

Jules looked out the window at the car, as if it were not his, and then looked back at her.

“Why would you think that was my car?” he asked.

Flo shrugged. “You kinda match each other,” she said. Jules did not reply.

“And nobody else in this joint looks like they could afford a car like that. Do you have that on a lease, or do you own it?”

Jules, embarrassed, muttered, “It’s mine.” He wanted to terminate the subject.

“Sure, I’ll go for a ride with you,” she said, and then roared with laughter, blushing at the same time. “Hey, I’m only kidding. All my life I wanted to go for a ride in a Rolls-Royce.”

“It’s not a Rolls,” said Jules.

“What is it?”

“A Bentley.”

“A Bentley. What’s a Bentley? Never heard of a Bentley.” There was great disappointment in her voice.

“Well, it’s like a Rolls, made by the same company,” said Jules, as if defending his car. He knew it was an absurd conversation, unworthy of him.

“Like a cheaper model sort of thing?” Flo asked.

“Yes, I suppose it is, but not by much,” he said. Looking at the next booth, he wondered if the people were listening, or if they knew who he was. He wanted to leave the orange Naugahyde booth where he was sitting. He visualized himself rising, leaving a large bill on the table to cover cost and tip, and walking out, but he did not. Instead, he pushed his coffee cup toward her to indicate that he wished another cup of coffee.

Like a moth drawn to a flame, Jules began to visit the Viceroy Coffee Shop more frequently. Outside the window of the booth where he always sat could be seen a tall building. The golden letters on the side of the building proclaimed it as the Jules Mendelson Building, which was where his office was, although so far no one in the Viceroy had connected him with that name, or that building.

One morning Flo kept him waiting while she joked with a young man at the counter, whom Jules recognized from previous visits. He saw that the young man was handsome, dressed in black jeans that were far too tight, and it surprised him how much anger and jealousy he felt. When, finally, Flo approached his table, he was cool and distant with her.

“Cat got your tongue?” she asked. She frequently used expressions that he could not bear.

“Who’s that guy you’re talking to at the counter?” he asked after she had brought him his coffee.

“What guy?”

“With the blond hair.”

“Oh, him. That’s Lonny.” She made a thumbs-down gesture.

“You looked quite friendly with him.”

“Oh, please!”

“What’s he always hanging around for?”

“Drinking coffee, like you. Hey, you’re not jealous of Lonny, are you?”

“Jealous. Of course not. Why should I be jealous? I just wanted to know who he is.”

“Let me fill you in on Lonny. Lonny is
not
, repeat
not
, interested in pretty young girls, like me, believe me. Lonny is interested in rich old guys like you, who drive the kind of car you drive.”