Cheat and Charmer (65 page)

Once, out at her house in the middle of the night, Jake called this her “you’ll-never-be-better smile.”

“ ‘You’ll-never-be-better smile’?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he explained. “You know, when you go backstage and you say to an actor whose performance stank, only you don’t want to say so, so you say, ‘You’ll never be better.’ ”

“Oh, don’t be silly, Uncle J.”

But he pressed her.

“All right, then, since you keep asking,” she said, joining him in the shower. “Broadway musicals are all very well. Lots of fun, big stories, people who ‘belt out’ songs that audiences go home and sing in the shower. But for God’s sake, get it out of your system and move on. What about that novel you want to write?”

“Right now, I love what I’m doing.”

“So love it. And move on.”

“What would I do without you?” said Jake, soaping her all over.

“Have to shower by yourself.”

They stood together, under the hot spray, arms locked around each other.

“I love you,” he said. “I’m crazy about you. I’ve never loved anyone in my life the way I love you. I’ve never talked to anyone this way in my life. Do you love me?”

“What a question.”

“Come on. Do you?”

“Oh, Jake, don’t be such a bore!”

Dorshka Albrecht, too, wakes in the night. She craves something delicious to eat—some black bread with a slab of cheese schmeared with plum preserves. Across from her room lies her granddaughter Coco, asleep with one leg jutting out from under the covers. She walks over to the child and gently adjusts the bedclothes. Her legs are a little stiff and her hips ache, so she clutches the banister as she begins a gingerly descent down the carpeted stairs. She is amused by the jiggling of her pendulous old breasts, which hang down nearly to her waist, like collapsed hot-water bottles. The lacy nightgown—a Christmas present from the Laskers (she remembers with disdain that they had given one very much like it to Jake’s mother, Rose)—is so long that she must be careful not to trip on it. Taking each step slowly and cautiously, she listens to her own breathing, appalled at the effort it takes her merely to go down a flight of stairs. So many lives she’s had! And now here she is, an old woman with creaky joints hobbling downstairs for a stolen treat.

Suddenly she pauses: she sees fields of rye in back of her father’s house, Malka the kitchen maid plucking feathers from a goose, Wojcek the peasant boy who had kissed her under a linden tree, the theater in Warsaw where Papa took her to see Sarah Bernhardt’s Phèdre. If Mama and Papa had not died before the war, they, too, would have been ashes in the Auschwitz mud, like her cousins and her aunts and uncles. And Ziggy, her brother the violinist, who had stayed in Berlin after she left for Paris, and had then, in 1939, gone with his wife to St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat—to safety, they said—only to be put on a bus and then a train back to Poland. Better not to think of that. Better not think of him and Stefan.…

Not a day passes that she does not think of them.

Reaching the bottom of the stairs, she takes slow steps, her bare feet sinking into the luxurious plush of the carpet (all these American houses have carpets from one end of the room to the next—never a beautiful rug), turns right into a narrow hallway that leads past the dining room to the kitchen, and stops. She hears something. It is coming from Genevieve’s bedroom. She concentrates. These sounds cannot be mistaken for anything else. She shrugs, almost involuntarily: so, she tells herself, there is someone who comes to Genevieve’s bed in the middle of the night. What else is new? Genevieve is still a young woman—why shouldn’t she have a man in her bed?

But who? she wonders, making her way undaunted to the kitchen.
Who? Who would come in the night? Is it that dullard Saul Landau? Probably not. He hasn’t been around for a while. Dorshka knows that the affair with Clifford Boatwright—whom she is fond of and respects—is kaput. She quickly reviews the men who have come to the house. There’s Mort Berman, that writer fellow the Laskers introduced Veevi to, who takes her out to dinner from time to time. Veevi isn’t interested in him. “He’s just a gag man, a joke writer,” she says of him. There is Irwin Shoemaker, that blacklisted fellow who writes TV scripts behind a pseudonym and likes to call up old friends who held out for only so long but who have finally testified and are now working again under their own names, invite them to breakfast at Nate ’n Al’s on the pretext of reconciling, and then screams at them loudly and walks out, leaving them with the check. He takes Veevi to the movies once in a while. “A tiny talent,” she says of him. “Very tiny,” she adds, winking. But there has been no one interesting, no one exceptional. No one remotely able to compete with Mike.

Usually the snack does what it is supposed to do and lulls Dorshka with a pleasant fullness in her belly, but she’s awake and astir, wildly curious about whoever it is who is now so energetically providing her daughter-in-law with the pleasure she herself has not had in years and remembers almost as an abstraction. Her steps on the climb upstairs are labored; she is afraid of making noise. Back in her room, she goes quietly to her bed, where she props herself on her elbows and gazes out the window. Whoever it is must leave before dawn, she reasons.

So she waits and waits. The moon pours cold light down on the trees, and she can even see, with the help of the street lamp, the skeins of black asphalt baked into the pavement. Her eye discerns a large humpbacked car parked on the opposite curb. It must belong to the lover, for in this neighborhood all the cars are parked overnight in garages. The car looks vaguely familiar, but since she pays no attention to the make and model of American cars she can’t identify it properly.

Eventually, her ear catches the sound of a screen door quietly shutting. Next, she hears steps, and then, incongruously, a low whistle. A man emerges into view, walking with an awkward, lumbering gait toward the street and reaching into his right trouser pocket for what seem to be car keys. She follows him with her eyes and sees that she was right about the car parked across the street: it does indeed belong to him. She has heard the toneless whistle before, too, and suddenly recognizes the walk and the
large, broad body and the round, well-formed head. And she wonders, too, why she waited up, because as he gets into the car she realizes that she has known all along whose car it was and could have had a couple of hours of much needed sleep. She just hadn’t wanted to believe it.

It is only the next day, between sessions with acting students in the downstairs study, that she contemplates what she now knows, sighing with disapproval and foreboding. And, to be truthful, she feels envy, too. But she is not envious of the man, whom she would never have chosen for herself, or of the woman, whom she loves but about whose character she has no illusions. It is herself she envies, her long-lost self; or rather, her long-past self, since she has never stopped being the person she is. There have been times when she’s been relieved that it’s all over for her—desire, intrigue, passion, lust, danger. All the same, she tells herself as she lights a cigarette or drinks the good coffee that she makes herself when she eats a big piece of cake at four in the afternoon, she always treated love as an art that had to be respected. She was skillful and clever at it, and, despite any number of thrilling escapades (the assignations made onstage with the wink of an eye, with no one in the audience being any the wiser), she never compromised the peace and safety of those she truly loved. These Americans—so naïve, so unpracticed, so ignorant, so unsatisfied with their lives—how could they possibly carry this off without disaster? Even her own son: how stupidly he has handled this business with Genevieve, causing such needless pain. Amateurs, she says to herself. Absolute amateurs.

Shortly before Jake started working at home on the show, Gladys told him Irv Engel had called and wanted him to come in.

“When?” Jake said, as he glanced at some memos Gladys had placed on his desk.

“Pronto,” said Gladys.

“Do you have everything ready to bring out to the house?” he asked her.

“Everything. My brother’s coming on Friday with his car, and with mine and his we’ll shlepp it all out and be set up and ready to go by Monday morning. You want me to sharpen the pencils while you’re with Irv or can I go to lunch?”

He nodded and headed toward the door. “If I’m not back in fifteen minutes,
go ahead. I don’t think this’ll take very long,” he said. “Probably just one of his little checkups.”

A few minutes later, he was shown into Irv’s office and took his familiar place across from the studio head’s desk. He was eager to get back to work. The sooner the Gordon-Morocco job was done, the sooner he could get back to his own project. “What’s up, Irv?”

“Oh, you know, I like to have these little chats once in a while. See how everything’s going. We’re very happy with the numbers on this last picture, by the way.”

But Jake knew this, and said so. “What am I here for, Irv? Something must be up.”

“Well,” Irv said calmly. “I don’t think there’s anything to get really upset about, but there’s been some talk.”

“About?”

“Veevi—that she’s working for you.”

“Oh? Since when is that common knowledge?”

“Well, someone—I don’t know who—managed to spill the beans to V. Z. Aldrich, who called me, and wants you to let her go. I know, you’re paying her out of your own pocket, but we’re paying you out of ours, and as my father would put it, it don’t look so good, if you know what I mean. It’s just a matter of time before somebody calls Louella, Hedda, Winchell, the trades, you name it, and gets the studio’s name plastered all over the goddamn gossip columns. The whole thing will cost us at the box office. So better just nip it in the bud and let her go.”

“How can I do that, Irv? The divorce is being held up because Mike’s claiming he has to pay too much alimony since she can’t work, and she can’t work because Dinah named her.”

“She can’t work because she won’t clear herself,” Irv said. “She could turn this around in a minute if she’d just call up Burt Unwin and have him arrange a nice little private session with the boys.”

“We’re not talking Dinah here, Irv. We’re talking about Veevi. Veevi’s different.”

Irv looked up at Jake and seemed about to say something but changed his mind.

“Irv,” Jake said, “roughly speaking, how much money have I made for this studio in, say, the last five years?”

“I know, my boy, I know. It’s idiotic. But I’m just telling you the situation.”

Jake stood up. “Listen, Irv. I haven’t got time for this shit anymore. I threw my wife to your fucking lions and I’m not throwing Veevi. If you can’t stand up to those bastards, I can. I’m onto something hot right now. I’ve got one hell of a property cooking, and when I’m ready to show it to you it’s gonna knock your socks off. But it has to go to Broadway first—”

“Broadway? Since when are you writing for Broadway and not us?”

“I
am
writing for you. But it’ll go to Broadway first.”

“Then come back to us? Okay, okay, we’ll talk about it. But you gotta solve this other thing first.”

“No, Irv, I’m not solving anything. You solve it. And, by the way, I’m packing up my office here and moving it home. I’ve had it here, Irv. From now on, I write at home. I’m working with Hart and O’Rourke and we need a piano. I can’t bring Veevi on the lot. I can’t even put her on my payroll without some anonymous red-baiting loser calling the New York office. I’ve proved what a valuable asset I am, and I’m gonna work the way I want to work and hire the people I want to hire, blacklist or no blacklist. If you don’t like it, that’s your problem.”

“Are you threatening me, Jake? You gonna break your contract?”

“I owe you one more picture. And you’ll get it after I go to Broadway. That’s it.”

“You keep Veevi on your payroll and we’ll go right back to the loyalty oath.”

“Do it, Irv. Go ahead, call my lawyer, call my agent, and then fucking do it.” He stood up, put his hands in his pockets, and turned to leave.

“Well, Jake, I see you’re a man of mettle, after all. Tell me,” he said, as Jake headed toward the door. “What’s she got that Dinah hasn’t?”