Cheat and Charmer (46 page)

Night after night, the light stayed on in Veevi’s room. When Jake and Dinah turned off their own light and closed the door connecting Jake’s office with the dressing corridor that led to their bedroom, Veevi’s light was always on, and at two or three in the morning, on the way downstairs for his insomniac’s snack, Jake often saw the flicker of the television Veevi had asked them to get for her when they bought her a car. If he knocked on her door, he told Dinah, and asked why she couldn’t sleep, or invited her downstairs for a snack of vanilla ice cream, Hershey’s chocolate syrup, and kosher pickles, she always said no thanks, complaining of pain in her shoulder, her neck, her arm. She had pain pills, she said, but she didn’t want to take more than she had to. She always added that she hated to take medicine of any kind, even an aspirin for a headache. There was still a bottle of gin under the bed, but Gussie had reported to Dinah that it was going down only a little every few days. All the same, Jake sometimes saw her quickly shove it under the covers when he knocked. At the same time, Veevi never seemed really drunk. At least not to him.

It was the smoking that terrified them both. Jake found her smoking in bed, watching television, and begged her to put out the cigarette. Veevi’s room was right next to Lorna’s; what if Veevi fell asleep or passed out with a lit cigarette in her hand? The thought was horrifying enough to wake Dinah out of her own sleep. Once Dinah crept down Jake’s dressing corridor toward Veevi’s room and, seeing a streak of light under the door, gently turned the doorknob. She found her sister sitting cross-legged in bed, her head bent forward and her once lustrous dark hair hanging by the sides of her face in great unbrushed clumps. With one hand holding a cigarette and the other clasping the bottle of gin, she sobbed and sobbed as the television flickered with a movie called
Little Boy Lost
.

“It’s Bing Crosby, in Paris,” Veevi said. “Trying to find a lost kid after the war.”

Dinah sat down beside her. Veevi didn’t look up. Dinah put her arms around her sister and held her, as she had often held a sobbing Lorna, or Peter. Veevi felt small and shrunken in her arms. Ugly sounds hemorrhaged from Veevi’s chest—horrible squeals and coughs, hoarse moans, and hiccups. Dinah felt pity and revulsion at Veevi’s late-night staleness—the smell of booze and smoke and sweat that steamed damply upward from her nightgown. “There, there,” she said, pressing her sister’s body to her own. “It’s all right. Just cry, honey. Just cry as much as you want. We’re going to fix you up, lovey.” She stroked Veevi’s hair and pushed it back from her damp forehead. “It’s going to get better.”

Neither of the sisters saw Jake standing behind the open door of the corridor. He had just come upstairs from the kitchen, where he had eaten half a salami and drunk a Cel-Ray Tonic. As he watched Dinah and Veevi, his eyes filled with tears and he said to himself, I’ve got to use this one day. My God, what a scene. He turned and crept back to his own bed, happy as a child who has just found a quarter in the crack of a sidewalk.

T
wo days later, the two sisters drove into Beverly Hills, past the Indian fountain, which spouted clear water by day and brilliant rainbow colors by night, and under the Santa Claus and reindeer that were suspended above traffic at the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica. Soon, they were strolling arm in arm down Rodeo Drive. The day was balmy and clear, and it pulled Dinah, as such days always did, back into the past and the Milligan family’s first years in California.

“Do you remember the way Mom used to say, ‘Smell the air, girls! Just smell the air’?” she said to Veevi.

They had stopped in front of Juel Park to admire a pink satin nightgown with hand-stitched lace trim.

“Mmm,” Veevi answered absently. “I
think
so. You know, your memory is incredible. I don’t remember half the things you do. You have total recall. I sure as hell don’t, though I do remember when I used to buy things here.”

“Well, that wasn’t so long ago. Jesus, the stuff you got. No Communist ever had fancier lingerie. What happened to all of them?”

“Oh, they lasted a long time. Very well made. I gave them to Madame Rochedieu and her daughters. God, it was so cold in the farmhouse that we had to wear them as layering under heavy wool sweaters.”

Dinah remembered that Veevi had spent hundreds of dollars on these gowns and that she herself had, on seeing them spread out on Veevi’s bed at the Malibu house, felt pure, naked envy, followed by self-disgust, because she despised envy—anyone’s, including her own. Once she had married Jake and could spend whatever she liked, and was even commanded
by Jake to dress well, she still couldn’t bring herself to buy handmade nightgowns as expensive as these.

“If I say to myself, ‘I was a Communist,’ ” Veevi remarked, laughing, “the words sound so
peculiar
. It just doesn’t seem like anything someone could
be
anymore. Yet I know I
was
one,” Veevi said. “Wasn’t I?”

She turned and looked at Dinah with an expression of mock puzzlement. “I still believe in the ideas. Who wouldn’t? But if I were to use all the old phrases, like ‘working class’ or ‘proletariat,’ I’d feel s-s-s-silly. Wouldn’t you?”

“We felt pretty silly using them even then. Remember how we used to laugh at the word ‘toilers’?”

Veevi squeezed her eyes shut and nodded her head, as she did whenever she found something particularly amusing.

“B-B-B-But I agree with you about the old ideas,” Dinah continued. “About haves and have-nots. Only now I’m a have and I never thought I would be.”

She realized that she had just said something tactless.

“Well, I never thought you would be, either,” said Veevi, taking Dinah’s arm. “But it’s nice that you are.” Dinah felt warmed to the core by Veevi’s gesture. She remembered how much she loved her sister, who, she had felt ever since she’d come home from the hospital, secretly despised her. “Mmm, that’s nice, isn’t it?” Veevi added, looking admiringly at the beige lace trim on the neckline of a pale green silk nightgown.

“Oh God, this is wicked, Vee,” Dinah began. “But remember June Palmer? Well, you know, she has a big hit television series now, and last year
Life
magazine sent a journalist and a photographer out to do a piece on her, and she and Reynaldo—”

“Who?”

“Reynaldo Perez. Bandleader? Cuban? Gosh, maybe you were in Europe when—”

“Anyway …” Veevi said expectantly.

“Well, anyway, June and Reynaldo are sitting in her ‘boudoir’ and she’s wearing a nightgown and robe, very elegant, and the interviewer, who’s a young woman—some Vassar girl or something—says how gorgeous the nightgown is, and Reynaldo says, ‘Yeah, but you don’t have to see the shit stains on it!’ ”

For the next two minutes, the sisters clung to each other, laughing until they cried. Then they stood in front of the window, admiring the nightgowns
and peignoirs, and laughing some more. Dinah felt all the old feelings come back—the old days of their childhood, when they were always together, played after school together, slept in the same bed together, thought the same thoughts at the same time, and found everything funny.

Dinah took Veevi’s hand, clasping the soft roll of flesh at the top of her palm as she had done when Veevi was six and she nine and in charge of walking the two of them home from school. They strolled down the street like this without embarrassment. A bleached blonde in her forties, wearing a yellow V-necked sweater set with elaborate sequin and bead flowers, passed them. The skin of her cleavage was freckled and wrinkled from the sun. Her breasts, well fortified with falsies, pointed outward like guided missiles. She had poured herself into skintight turquoise toreador pants. Her shoes were high wedgies in white-and-gold leather, and she was accompanied by a white toy poodle on a rhinestone leash attached to a rhinestone collar. The two sisters exchanged silent looks but waited until they reached the end of the block to burst once again into laughter.

“God, I had forgotten about those types!” said Veevi. “Jesus, the hair! The tits! Those colors! What a ridiculous place this is!”

Dinah felt herself draw back a little, and she let go of Veevi’s arm. “Well, it’s true,” Dinah said. “There
are
a lot of ridiculous-looking characters out here. But I like it. I like Beverly Hills on a w-w-w-weekday morning. It’s peaceful, and empty. It probably won’t stay this way forever. But right now it’s fine. I come here and go to the hardware store, the stationery store, get a ham sandwich and a Coke for lunch, then pick up whatever Gussie needs from the grocery store. Then I drive back and I’m ready for the kids to come home and t-t-tear into each other and for Jake and his worries. Otherwise,” she said with a laugh, “he’s too tough to live with. God, especially when he’s writing. I come here, and it’s kind of a refuge. I like the guys at the hardware store. I like saying hello to them and asking them how they are. Sure, there are silly-looking people, like that woman, but so what?”

“It’s just that …”

“Oh, Veevi, I know. This isn’t Paris. Or anyplace
you
would rather be. Come on,” Dinah said, pulling her ahead. “Let’s get you something to wear.”

In the dressing room at Jax, Dinah sat on a small settee and watched as Veevi, stripped to her underpants and bra, tried on slacks and shirts. Hoping to work her way back to that momentary idyll of unity with her sister,
Dinah reproached herself for getting miffed at Veevi’s comment. Of course, Veevi was right. Beverly Hills was a ridiculous place—where else in the world did women go around wearing outlandish outfits accompanied by poodles in rhinestones?

She and Veevi were doing what sisters were supposed to do—shopping, buying clothes—but neither of them was a particularly enthusiastic shopper or especially fond of spending money for its own sake. So, quite uncharacteristically, Dinah coaxed and urged.

“That one’s good,” she said now, nodding toward a pair of white toreador pants. “Let’s get two. They look great, and you can always use the other one.”

“Do you think so? But look,” Veevi said, taking off a pink shirt with a high neck and crossing her arms over her chest. “My tits are terrible.”

“Your t-t-t-tits are fine—you just need new brassieres,” Dinah said, eyeing the way Veevi’s small but high and once firm breasts now sagged inside the lace bra she was wearing. It, too, was from Paris and had once been a beautiful thing, Dinah saw, but it was dingy and worn. She looked at her sister’s body. Veevi’s abdomen had thickened. In the dull light of the dressing room, her nostrils seemed too wide, her mouth too large, though the white teeth, like Dinah’s, remained straight and perfect. But it was a thing of the past now, that beauty that had singled Veevi out for a remarkable destiny—at least as a phenomenon of nature, absolute and incontrovertible in itself—and Dinah, glancing briefly over at herself in the mirror, realized that for the first time in their lives her own looks were not unequal to Veevi’s. The discovery seemed not only sad, though, but somehow wrong. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

“I’ll tell you something very strange,” Veevi said, standing with her hands on her hips as she, too, took inventory of her body. “Do you know how I survived in France, during the war?”

“You mean at Madame Rochedieu’s? When you were doing R-R-R-Resistance things?”

“I mean, do you know how I managed not to be afraid? Not to be too afraid, that is?”

“How? All I know is how Mom and Pop and I were worried sick about you.”

“Ina, I thought I was so beautiful nothing could ever happen to me.”

Dinah nodded, understanding at once what she meant.

“I thought to myself, If the Nazis catch me, one of them—an officer
perhaps—will see that I’m beautiful. He won’t kill me; he won’t torture me.” She let her hands drop to her sides. Standing there in her panties and bra, she let her head fall to the side and continued looking at herself in the mirror, which also reflected Dinah, dressed in slacks and sandals, sitting cross-legged on the settee, holding clothes in her lap for Veevi to try on. “It had gotten me everything before. Everything. I never had to work at anything. It was my gift, you see, and I was smart enough to use it.”