Cheat and Charmer (31 page)

Every day he woke up full of fight and promise, and every night he went to bed beaten and desolate. Sandy Litvak, his analyst, had often told him that he had an infantile personality, which was why, he said, “you have such a need for gratification. Happiness is beyond us; all any of us can obtain,
realistically, is gratification, though you seem to need it constantly in both oral and genital forms.” But now Jake was trying, he said in imaginary conversations with Litvak, to be a grown-up. He was trying to diet and to stay away from broads, and to withstand the overwhelming anxiety of finding a finish for his story. The pressure was almost unbearable, and yet he had decided to give up Bonnie. I’m trying to be a mensch, he reminded himself. The result was that he felt irritable and edgy.

That mood was now broken by a welcome sight: young Hunt Crandell walking toward the writers’ building, Irv beside him, his long arm draped around Hunt’s athletic shoulders in imprisoning affection.

“Hey, boychik!” shouted Jake, sticking his head out the window. “What’s a nice goyishe kid like you doing in a place like this?”

“Just lucky, I guess,” came the instant reply, which all three men recognized as the punch line to any one of a dozen jokes about girls found in compromising positions. “I was just on my way up to see you.” A man in his early thirties, with clean-cut classic American features, grinned up at Jake from under the window.

“So get your Parisian ass right up here this minute!” Jake shouted back at Hunt.

“Okay—but ship the lad right back to me after lunch,” Irv instructed, pointing to his watch.

“Over and out,” said Jake, and pulled his head in. Quickly, he rearranged the papers on his desk. He had a real talent for sitting at people’s desks and reading their correspondence upside down, and he assumed others did it too, so whenever he knew he had a visitor coming he scooped up all his papers and stuffed them into a drawer.

Hunt had also met Dinah in the old days, at the Engels’ beach house. They used to play volleyball and horse around together, like brother and sister. Later, Hunt became close friends with Mike Albrecht. Stefan had given him a job as a gofer on the disastrous Oedipus movie, and had brought him into the cutting room to learn the trade. After the war, the army had put him to work shooting and cutting documentary footage for the Nuremberg trials, and on a visit to Paris he had looked up his fellow OSS buddy Michael Albrecht, who said to him, “You’ll never guess who I’m marrying tomorrow,” which was how Hunt ended up serving as best man at Mike and Veevi’s wedding.

By that time he’d already been married for three years to Felicity Moore, an exuberant, leggy beauty who came from an old lumber family in
Tacoma. She was a bright and savvy ex-deb with leftist yearnings and a trust fund, and when she took off for New York at the age of nineteen it was with a clear understanding that destiny would provide her with a lifetime’s worth of interesting, clever, talented people. Knowing herself equal to the company she wished to keep, she was hardly surprised when writers fell for her, wrote stories about her, and couldn’t keep up with her on the tennis court. She dressed well and drank well, had perfect manners, enormous tact, and an infinite capacity for fun. She wasn’t a prude and she disliked making judgments, but when she did she was forthright and didn’t back down.

Felicity’s blue eyes were large and bright and she had a way of opening them wide when she told a story. Her laughter was high-pitched and explosive, and she was sharp—she understood nuances and got everything right away. She was well-read, not Jewish, and hated anti-Semitism. Dinah loved her, and Jake did, too, though of course he had kept his desire to sleep with her to himself, having become fascinated by her lithe and athletic body while he and Hunt were cutting Jake’s
Utopia, Incorporated
in 1947.

It was after Mike wrote Jake from Paris about Hunt that Jake gave him a job—his first as a cutter on a full-length feature. Afterward, he and Felicity began dividing their time between L.A. and Paris, where Mike had met the legendary producer Willie Weil and persuaded him to let Hunt direct the movie version of Mike’s short story “Heart’s Blood,” which Mike refused to let anyone in Hollywood make. It was about a married American woman in Paris who has a love affair with a young French jockey, a veteran of the Resistance. He is killed in a big race. She later learns that her husband, a major American importer of German cars, had paid her lover to fix the race, and she finds a way to take revenge on him. A small-budget (and French-subsidized) art-house success in the States and a moneymaker in Europe, the picture secured Hunt the interest of the Hollywood majors, especially Marathon, where his early friendship with Irv Engel had done him no harm at all. He was in L.A. with Willie Weil, he told Jake, to make a deal for a picture he wanted to direct in Africa.

That same night, after Jake and Hunt had met at the lot, they caught up over dinner at Chasen’s with Dinah and Felicity. Felicity told a story about Mike, though it was really a story about Ben Knight, the novelist whom both Mike and Hunt shared as a best friend. Mike had gone skiing
in Switzerland with Knight’s eight-year-old son, Stevie, and Stevie’s Swiss ski instructor, Kristl, a pretty young woman from the village, who probably had a crush on Mike. Always one to push himself, and everyone else, further than they could go, Mike insisted on leaving the trails and skiing in faraway untouched deep snow. He got separated from Kristl and Stevie, and there was an avalanche. Mike heard cries and raced to locate them, but by the time he spotted Stevie, covered to his cap in snow and clinging to a tree trunk, the girl had been swept away. Not knowing whether to search for the girl or take the terrified boy back to the village, he decided to stay and look for the girl and send the boy back on his own. Stevie was a good skier, and he found his way back to the village and went for his father, who called out the rescue teams to help look for Kristl.

After hours of searching, they found her, but she was dead, her body crushed, one arm sticking out of the snow. That night, Ben Knight knocked on Mike’s door at the lodge. “Look,” he said. “This was a local girl and she’s dead. The first thing you’re gonna want to do is slip out of here, any way you can. But since you can’t leave tonight, tomorrow morning I’m meeting you downstairs at eight and we’re going to walk together from one end of town to the other. Life will go on as usual. What happened was an act of God—very regrettable, but nothing to hide from.” And that was what they did, Felicity continued—they walked up and down the main street, greeting all the local people, saying good morning in Swiss-German. “Well, I can tell you one thing,” Felicity concluded. “Odile was none too happy about that. Wouldn’t even look at him over the fondue pot—not for a whole evening.”

“Who’s Odile?” Dinah asked.

“Fe-li-ci-ty,” said Hunt.

“Oh shit,” Felicity said, her eyes opening wide. “Have I stepped in it? Oh dear. Why don’t you tell them, darling,” she said to Hunt.

“No, baby
—you
tell them. You’re the one who had to open your big mouth.”

“You don’t know?” Felicity said weakly to Jake and Dinah.

“Know what?”

Looking up so suddenly that he spilled vanilla ice cream on his shirt, or would have, except that the super-athlete Hunt quickly stuck out his spoon and caught it in mid-drip, Jake said, “Haven’t a clue.”

“Is Veevi all right, Felicity?” asked Dinah.

“No, she isn’t,” Felicity answered.

“Jesus Christ, will one of you just t-t-t-tell me what’s going on?” pleaded Dinah, taking out a cigarette.

“Darlings,” said Felicity, “it just couldn’t be worse.”

Jake saw the color drain out of Dinah’s face. He leaned forward and cupped his deaf left ear.

“At the end of the summer—not
last
summer, but the summer
before
last, Mike told Veevi that he’d fallen in love with a French girl—Odile Boisvert. She’s an actress, not bad for her age, which is immensely young—twenty-one, if that. And so bloody beautiful you could cry. Not Veevi’s kind of beauty either, but cool, blond, elegant—very high-couture. She used to be a model, I think. Mike moved into the girl’s flat, and they spend a lot of time skiing in Klosters. So, for Genevieve that in itself has been tough enough. But there’s more.”

Dinah felt as if she had turned into a block of stone.

“Well, she was
pregnant
and was having a very hard time. The baby was in a peculiar position and she had to spend a lot of time in bed until the birth in late winter. Mike kept telling Genevieve that he loved her even if he was no longer
in
love with her, and said he’d be there for the birth. But he was working on a new novel and he was very sadistic—just awful. Somehow he let Veevi know that he had to have Odile with him—you know, just like he used to tell Genevieve how much he needed her to be there with him while he heroically, or maybe it’s existentially, faced the blank page and all that sort of thing.”

“This has been going on for over a year?” Dinah asked.

Felicity sighed. “What makes me so mad is how damn noble Genevieve is being about the whole thing. ‘It’s not his fault,’ she keeps saying. ‘You can’t choose the person you’re going to fall in love with—it’s not up to you.’ She’s convinced herself that if she just hangs on long enough he’ll come back. That it’s all a big reaction to the baby, which was an accident. Mike wanted her to get an abortion, but it was too late, or she didn’t tell him until it was too late. He’s fond enough of Claire, but he panicked, she says—thought that with another child they were going to have a regular family life, and if there’s one thing Mike Albrecht isn’t cut out for it’s family life and everything that goes with it.”

“I don’t know …” said Hunt. “You’re making it sound too tragic, sweetie. She meets us at Fouquet’s, on her own, and nobody lets her pay. She doesn’t look like a martyr to me.”

“Well, we figured something fishy’s been going on,” said Jake, stabbing his fork into Dinah’s banana shortcake. “By the way, we’ve also got something to tell you.”

“We know,” Felicity said. “Veevi told us.” She hesitated before adding, “If you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t have to.”

“Of course we want to talk about it!” Jake said, and then went on to tell the whole story of Dinah’s testimony. When he finished, Dinah mentioned the letter she’d received from Mike.

“What a sanctimonious schmuck,” said Jake, taking a spoon and mushing up the remaining streaks of whipped cream, hot fudge sauce, and bananas from Dinah’s plate. “I can’t stand guys like that.”

“Haven’t you ever been in love?” said Felicity.

“Not that way,” Jake answered.

“Gee, thanks a lot, b-b-b-buster,” said Dinah, looking across the table and grabbing the spoon away from him.

“Ah, honey, you know what I mean,” said Jake. “I’m talking about Mike’s way. That all-consuming fuck-what-people-think kind of thing.”

“No, dear,” said Dinah, patting him on the wrist. “That certainly ain’t you.” Then she looked at Felicity. “Has she said anything to you about wanting to come home?”

“Oh, Dinah, it’s hard to say. You ought to know by now that your sister isn’t a creature of intentions. Impulses, maybe. Instincts, perhaps. She’s blind, frightened. A couple of times she said something about leaving, that she couldn’t stand seeing Mike with Odile, but she just hangs on.”

“Why?” said Dinah. “It must be hell for her there.”

“She’s been insanely in love with Michael ever since they found each other in Paris, right after the war,” said Felicity.

It was long before that, Dinah almost said.

“She’s desperate,” Felicity continued. “By day she lies in bed crying. At night she goes to Fouquet’s and pretends that nothing’s wrong. All she thinks about is how to get Mike back. But it’s hopeless, Dinah. He’s
gone
. He told her he’s gone. I think he’s a perfect cad, myself.”

“Now look, Felicity,” Hunt said to her, “enough of that. Mike is my closest friend, and I won’t have you passing judgment on him. He’s suffering just as much as she is.”

“Nonsense, darling,” said Felicity. “He can’t be. He’s in love. Nobody just ran out on him. I don’t care if he’s God’s best friend, he’s a son of a bitch.”

“Does Dorshka know?” Dinah said.

“Yes. Genevieve says that she and Mike have written her separate letters.”

“Recently?”

“No. A while ago. Around Christmas, I think, or just before.”

Jake caught Dinah’s eye: “I told you so,” his look said. Dinah had come home after her lunch with Dorshka, and told Jake how “genuine” Dorshka was, and he had said, “There’s something full-of-shit about her.”

The check came, and Jake grabbed it. Then the four of them strolled out into the balmy winter evening. Dinah ached to go home, crawl under the covers, and brood about Veevi’s situation. As it turned out, the Crandells wanted to make it an early evening, so the two couples got into the Laskers’ Cadillac and headed toward Sunset and the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the Crandells were staying.

Hunt sat in front with Jake, while Dinah and Felicity sat in the back and listened to the two men talk. Was it true, Jake asked, that Willie Weil seemed willing to relieve writers and directors of every responsibility except that of actually coming up with a story and making a picture? Was he a son of a bitch? Did Hunt think Jake and Weil could get along? Dinah was astonished to hear Jake confess that he was getting restless at Marathon and that he’d been wondering if he and Dinah ought to move to Europe.

Felicity turned to Dinah. “True?” she said. “That would be great for us.”

“Who knows? Jake doesn’t know what he wants,” Dinah whispered to her. “Or, rather, he wants everything.” She hesitated, then added, “It’s exhausting.”

Before dropping the Crandells at the hotel, Jake made a date with Hunt to play golf on Sunday. Dinah and Felicity agreed to have lunch the following week. On Saturday, however, Felicity phoned. She had to fly back to Paris right away. The French nanny had called to say that both kids had come down with chicken pox and that she had never had it and was going to quit and leave them with the cook if Madame Crandell did not return “toot sweet,” as Felicity pronounced it. “Please tell Veevi I’ll do anything for her!” Dinah cried. “Tell her I’ll come over and I’ll pack her up and get her and Claire and the baby over here. I’ll deal with the embassy or the consulate or whatever the hell we’ve got over there—whatever she wants. Tell her she can hate me or not—it doesn’t matter. She’s my sister, my family, and I’ll take care of everything if she’ll let me.”