Cheat and Charmer (30 page)

Then, one night late in the year—and as she sat now in her big Pontiac station wagon at the top of Rabbit Hill some fourteen years later her limbs stiffened and she gnawed the inside of her cheek with the memory—she went downstairs from her room in Veevi’s house, restless, unable to sleep, wondering what to do about her life, wakeful because she knew she had to get up early in the morning and go back to her job, which she loathed. I’ll just go down to the water’s edge for a while and smell the ocean air, she thought. That’ll make me drowsy.

She was careful to open and close the screen door quietly, not wanting to make any noise. The house was full of people—mostly couples, sharing beds, and it made her miserable to think of them when she was so alone. Veevi and Stefan’s bedroom was just upstairs. Dorshka and her lover, Bernhard, had the maid’s apartment at the back of the house, and there was a newly arrived couple from Hungary in the second guest bedroom next to her own. Tomorrow night she would come back after work and drive them to an apartment in Santa Monica that Dorshka had rented for them. Her son, Mike, as everyone now called him, also had a room upstairs. He too had to get up early for school. He drove there in the old Chevy his mother had bought him to keep him from running away and joining the Abraham Lincoln Brigade—which he had threatened to do many times. Mike cherished that car, Dinah thought fondly, with all his teenage heart.

Near the water’s edge, however, in the darkness, she froze. The sounds
were unmistakable. A young male voice cried, “Darling!” There was a woman’s laugh, then, “Shh,” and more laughter. Then the first voice, in lightly accented English: “You told me yourself he snores like a moose!” Dinah felt her stomach turn. Her heart pounded and she gasped for breath, horrified at what she was hearing and at the thought that she herself might be heard. Slithering backward, like an amphibious creature returning to the sea, wishing she were unconscious, numb, unable to see or hear, she began to feel a cold damp grittiness—wet sand—seeping into her nightgown, which quickly grew sloshy and heavy. She shivered as she felt the wind on her skin. Her vision sharpened, and she could make out the pale muscular back of Michael Albrecht as he leaned over a body that she knew was her sister’s, whose wide-open, ocean-wet kneecaps threw off a pale luster.

Dinah made out the two glistening bodies moving together in the night. Moreover, she realized that for them it wasn’t the first time: they were too intent, too slow, too purposeful. They know what they’re doing, she said to herself. They’ve got a routine already.

She stuck her sandy fingers in her ears, as if she were at a movie listening to the cries of men being shot or killed, but she was becoming so cold she needed to cross her arms under her head and somehow try to curl up within herself. At last she heard what was unmistakably the end. Fine, she thought, they’ll go in now. But then she saw the red glow of burning cigarettes in the darkness, and heard low laughter.

“For me it’s not so bad. I can sleep as late as I want,” Veevi was saying. “But
you
, you poor thing, have to get up and go to
school
tomorrow morning.”

“Yeah,” Mike said. “First period’s chemistry and second period’s geometry. Through those I will sleep. Then I have English.
The Red Badge of Courage
. For that one I wake up.”

Dinah was relieved to hear them getting up, but then she heard “Shh! Get down! The cigarettes! Put them out!” from Michael, and she froze again: without doubt, she had been discovered. But there was only more quiet laughter and, looking up, she saw what they were seeing: Dorshka and her lover Bernhard, bundled up in lumpy terry-cloth bathrobes, standing at the kitchen sink, eating big slabs of cake with their fingers, sharing milk from the bottle. “Hey, darling, look! It’s Mutti and Bernhard. They’ve been doing what we’ve been doing and now they are having a little snack!”

“How dear,” Veevi said drily. “How very dear.”

“He’s the best lover she’s ever had. Imagine that, the old guy.”

“Who told you that?”

“She did.”

“Dorshka told you? She talks about that sort of thing with you? My mother always made a terrible face if we asked her about it. My father warned us about white slavers, but he would have shot himself rather than talk to us about sex.”

“Your father would rather shoot anything, period. By the way, you know, don’t you, that Stefan is probably my father?”

“I’d forgotten that,” she said gaily. “Then we’re committing incest and not just adultery?”

“Two for the price of one, as you Americans say.”

There was a silence. Then Dinah heard sighs, whispers, murmurs. Oh, Jesus Christ, they’re at it again. Please don’t, she silently pleaded with them. But they only became quiet again. She could hear the waves, and feel them reaching up to her feet.

The kitchen went dark and time passed and Veevi and Michael had another cigarette. Finally, they rose from the sand and walked slowly back to the house, but not together: Veevi, who from the rustling sound Dinah heard must have put her short, filmy, expensive handmade silk nightgown back on, went first, and Michael followed a good five minutes later.

Once they had disappeared into the house, Dinah made her way back along the path. Her body was stiff and sore and wobbly from lying in the cold sand. There was sand in her teeth and in her ears. The lower half of her nightgown was soaked. Her eyes burned from wind and salt. Hearing them make love had aroused her, against her will, and she felt disgusted with herself and ashamed. She was beside herself thinking of Stefan—heartsick for him, revolted, appalled, furious.

It must have been only a few weeks later that Western Union couriers started showing up at Malibu at all hours, bringing cables from Mexico and France. Veevi told Dinah that no matter how early she woke in the morning, Stefan had already been up for hours. There was talk of his moving to another studio, of their moving to New York—or to Mexico. At one point Stefan and Veevi actually drove down to Mexico City, where, they said vaguely, they saw some old friends of his, the ones who had driven north that time to hear Malraux. Dinah suspected they were Party friends, but when she asked Veevi who they were, Veevi just shrugged and said, “Oh, I don’t know, people from Stefan’s UFA days—you know, movie people
from Berlin. I can’t keep track of them all.” When they came back, Veevi got Dorshka to start teaching her French. They sat out on the veranda and Dorshka drilled her and corrected her pronunciation. Unlike Stefan, Dorshka was still working, on assignment for Marathon. She felt awful about it since things had gone bad there for Stefan, she told Dinah, but what could she do? She needed money to get people out.

Then Veevi called Dinah at home one night in Laurel Canyon. An old and respected French production company had offered to back Stefan in anything he wanted to do and he had said yes. They were taking the train to New York in two days; could Dinah take a couple of sick days and help her pack things for storage and then drive them to Union Station?

“How can you go to Europe right n-n-n-now?” Dinah exclaimed. “Are you out of your minds? Everybody’s trying to get out!”

“Don’t worry,” Veevi said mysteriously. “Stefan has friends over there who need him and they’ll look after us.”

At the station, Dinah and Dorshka kept looking at each other. It was January 1939, and they understood that they might never see Veevi and Stefan again. Veevi wrote from New York that Michael had come down from the boarding school in Connecticut to which he had just been sent to see them at their hotel, and that Stefan had taken him out in a bitter wind for a long walk through Central Park, but she didn’t say what they had talked about. “Don’t worry about us,” she wrote on the hotel stationery. “Hollywood is finished with Stefan, and Stefan is finished with Hollywood. And thank God for that. Of course I will miss you and Dorshka, but as far as I’m concerned I’m putting America behind me for good. For the first time in my life I’m going to a place where I belong. I owe everything to Stefan, and if he wishes to go into the lion’s den, I’ll go with him.”

I don’t get it, Dinah kept saying to herself as she read and reread the letter at work. Had she hallucinated that scene on the beach? “I didn’t want anyone to know this before we left, because it would have caused too much fuss, but I’m pregnant,” Veevi had added. With whose child? Dinah wondered.

In March, Veevi wrote from Paris to say that she and Stefan were fine. They were living in a friend’s apartment until they found a place of their own. Dinah had her own news to report: their mother was divorcing Pop and planning to marry her high school sweetheart, Lloyd Muir. Mom had run into him one day last year on the Marathon lot when she was visiting Veevi. A widower with grown children, he had been living in Los Angeles
for years and played first violin in the studio orchestra. Pop was devastated, she told Veevi, and she was giving him as much as she could from her savings to help him buy a trailer; if she and Stefan had any money at all, perhaps they could wire some to him. Veevi wrote that they needed all they had for themselves.

In July, Veevi gave birth to a daughter, Claire. All along Dinah had been wondering if going to France with Stefan had been, for Veevi, a kind of alibi. Mike, of course, was still in high school, and who knows if Veevi and Stefan had been having sex during his last awful weeks at Marathon. But it had nothing to do with her, Dinah told herself, so she let the questions fade along with the memory of that terrible night on the beach. Meanwhile, she found herself alone for the first time in her life, her family scattered hither and yon. Alice and Lloyd moved into the Venturas’ house, keeping watch over it until it was sold. Dorshka moved to an apartment on Landfair, in Westwood. Ed Milligan, unable, Dinah knew, to find pleasure or comfort in her company and grieving far more over Veevi than his wife, took off for the Sierras. Then came the Pact, and Poland.

Only Dinah’s life stood still.

She sat up now, with a start. Shadows were falling on Rabbit Hill, and in a sudden panic she checked her watch and saw that it was close to four. She should have been home long ago. Jake would be furious if she wasn’t there to greet their guests. What was the point of dredging up those old days, anyway? she asked herself as she tore down the road toward Sunset, a cloud of dust rising behind the car. It was only self-indulgence to wallow in unanswerable questions. Would things have been any different for her if she’d never joined the Party? Would it have been better for her if she’d gone back to men like Everett, whose idea of a great time was a DeMolay dance or a state picnic every year? Not on your life, buster, she murmured to herself, turning left onto Westwood Boulevard. Then she remembered one sad phone call at the beginning of the war. Tal Engel had called to ask if she’d had any news of her sister. They got to talking—by that time, she was working in radio—and Tal invited her out to dinner. But he didn’t show up or even call to apologize. A few days later, Renna told Dinah he had died the night before of pneumonia. L.J. was retiring, and Irv was taking over as head of Marathon Pictures.

Things might have been different, but so what? In a few minutes she would load up the car with extra bottles of ginger ale and tonic and then rush home to her husband and kids and guests. She had what she wanted, and wanted what she had. She’d tell Groucho the story about Mom and the guy with the big nose. He’d like it, she was sure. When Groucho loved a story, he didn’t laugh; his mouth, with the broad mustache, twitched very faintly and he had a concentrated look, as if he were focusing on a delicious taste. “It’s too funny to laugh,” he would say. That story and ten minutes of watching her dance the Charleston—she always did that for him whenever he came over—and he was a happy man.

L
ooking up from his yellow legal pad, Jake sighed and swiveled his chair, landing, like a chip on a roulette wheel, in front of his office window. He hated writing at the studio, and could take little pleasure in the scene he had just mapped out, knowing that until he worked out a finish for the story, there was no satisfaction in what he had already done. He was restless, too, feeling that he ought to be more patient with Dinah. Despite her avowals to the contrary, she seemed to have put her life in limbo as she waited to hear from Veevi. The HUAC episode was lingering in their lives, like a bad smell. There had to be something he could do to get her to put the whole thing behind her. He didn’t approve of her writing to Veevi or visiting Dorshka or involving herself in anybody’s life but his and the children’s. I don’t give a fuck about Veevi, he had told her, and I wish to hell you didn’t, either. Another thing that bothered him was that she went to sleep right away in her own bed, not coming into his, not giving him back rubs, and seemed uninterested in sex. She still wanted another baby, but these past few weeks, what with Pop Milligan dying and all the worrying over Veevi, she hadn’t shown the slightest interest; yet here he was thinking that he really ought to stay away from girls—in other words, make a real sacrifice of his comfort and pleasure and put his energies into making Dinah pregnant. He’d seen Bonnie last week, and promised himself it was for the last time. So rejection from his own wife was the last thing he needed.