Cheat and Charmer (66 page)

Jake drew himself up stiffly. “I’m not going to dignify that disgusting remark with an answer.”

“My poor brother used to say that she didn’t even like sex that much. Sex is, you know, messy, and she’s too fastidious. But power? That’s another story.”

“You’re licking the garbage can, Irv. Tell your secretary to get the Lysol and wash your mouth out with it.”

He slammed the door behind him and hurried back to his own office, where he announced to Gladys that they were moving right then and there, and that she should call home and tell Dinah to send Gussie down in the Pontiac to help with the boxes.

At two the next morning, he and Veevi were sitting across from each
other in her bedroom, and he was telling her what had happened. He expected praise.

“You shouldn’t have moved out of the studio,” she said. “So what if it comes out that I’m working for you? That should be open and public. The whole world should know. Now they’ve won.”

“They’ve won?” said Jake. “Naw. I’m just going to do things my way, that’s all. I haven’t broken any deals. They’ll still get another picture from me.”

“But you could simply have told them to make whatever fuss they were going to make and stayed put and let the waves crash over you. You need,” she said, “to exercise more sovereignty.”

“More what? Jesus, Veevi, what do you want from me?”

“I’ll tell you exactly what I want,” she said promptly. “I want you. And I want us to have our own life. I want what I deserve. You know, darling, that it’s just a question now of when, not if.”

He sat back and looked at her. She had just said the unsayable.

“Veevi, darling …” he said weakly. “What are you saying?”

“I just told you.”

“What you want is impossible.”

“Nonsense. You’re poised for the next step. New York. London. Paris. Where’s Dinah going to do her gardening? Where’s she going to prune her damned roses? What’s she going to do with herself? Who’s she going to talk to? She simply can’t keep up with the really interesting people you and I need to be around. Make the break now, darling, because then she’ll have a chance to meet someone out here—some nice fellow, some television director or something—and she can grow vegetables and drive a station wagon, which is all she wants out of life anyway.”

“My wife,” he said solemnly, “is a wonderful woman.”

“Yes. A Wonderful Woman. That’s what a man always calls a wife he’s fallen out of love with. The world is full of Wonderful Women, whom you’re terrified you might have to sit next to at a dinner party. And my sister is one of them. So virtuous! Paints her own rooms! Installs the redwood rounds herself for the garden path! Picks up the kids at school and schlepps them to music lessons! And wouldn’t know how to talk to Ben Knight if her life depended on it!”

He sat paralyzed in the armchair and touched the tips of his fingers together. He had to admit that what Veevi was saying made a lot of sense.
Who, after all, knew Dinah better than her sister? Dinah just didn’t have the dimensions that he and Veevi had. Of course, at first it would go hard for her. Dinah did, after all, truly love him. In fact, he had realized long ago that she loved him far more than he wanted to be loved; her love was a burden. She could love him considerably less and he would still have all the love he needed, he decided. Well, who knew him better? Dinah or he himself? And he hated that way she had of being lovey-dovey with him. It was the kind of thing you always saw in nightclubs—broads with their hands all over a guy—and it made him feel as if he were trapped in an elevator with the oxygen running out. He didn’t like it when she said she loved him. It made his throat close up, as if he had strep. Years ago, he had taken Dinah’s arms with his hands when she had put them around his shoulders and said to her gently, “Let me be the one to do that.” Stung, she had said, “Wh-Wh-Wh-Whatever you want.”

Night after night, when he made the long drive out to the Palisades and found Veevi waiting for him, he heard what he needed to hear. “I’ve got to get you to Villie Vile,” she said. “Engel’s strictly road show compared to him. Imagine being free to do exactly what you want to do—write and direct. Without any of the hassles you have to put up with in the studio system. Villie’s an independent’s independent. I know, because that’s what Hunt Crandell says about him. Hunt loves him. ‘I’ll be the prick and you’ll be the pet,’ he told Hunt.”

Jake didn’t tell her that Weil had said the same thing to him.

“I thought,” he said one night, “you were going to wait until Mike has had it with Odile. What if Mike wants to come back and I’m in the middle of divorcing Dinah. What then?”

“Jake, we’re not negotiating a treaty. Why should I wait for him when I have you?”

She looked at him, her eyes soft with promise, and touched his arm, and he said to himself,
I am equal to this. I want this
.

“A divorce won’t be easy, you know,” he went on with a light laugh. “We’d have to wait a long time before we got married. Leaving one woman to marry her sister? Guys have been boiled in oil for less.”

“Married? Who said anything about getting married? We’ll have two apartments, and then nobody can say anything. My friends won’t care, and most people, anyway, are too involved in their own affairs to pay attention for long. Once we’re back in Europe, it won’t be a problem.”

She had an answer for every question. So there it was, he thought: she who had had Ventura and Albrecht wanted him—the little knock-kneed, flat-footed, high-waisted, not-athletically-gifted Jewish comedy writer from Hyde Park—Hyde Park, Chicago, that is. Now what did that say about his talent and his future?

B
ut once he left Veevi’s bed and began the drive toward Itzik’s, he couldn’t stand the thought of losing Dinah. Didn’t it make more sense, he reasoned as he pulled into the parking lot next to the deli, to just have them both?

When he finished his sandwich and Cel-Ray Tonic and went north again along Sunset Boulevard, he knew that within minutes he would be getting into his own bed, across from Dinah’s, where he would find her curled-up, still, unsuspecting body, with its warm scent of sun-baked skin, and he did not know how he could ever leave her. It was inevitable, he knew, but how could he actually do it? How would he tell her, for instance? What words would he use? And where? Where would he tell her?

He also told himself that, at any rate, this wasn’t something he had to do right now.

Dinah and Dorshka joked about ladies’ lunches, but they were happy to be in each other’s company once again at the little open-air Brentwood Mart on San Vicente and Twenty-sixth Street. They ordered chicken enchiladas and sat as they had the last time at a large wooden table whose wide canvas umbrella shielded them from the sun and the wind. It was Dorshka who had invited Dinah, ostensibly to compare notes about Veevi, and they had quickly agreed that, despite the alarm they had each felt after the Palm Springs episode, Veevi had rallied and was looking well. She seemed to enjoy her job as Jake’s reader, and she appeared to have stopped grieving
over Mike. Dorshka, who cleaned the house, had found no empty gin bottles under the bed. Veevi, she said, was seeing old friends too, going out for dinner now and again, and to occasional parties as well.

This review of Veevi’s situation concluded, Dorshka displayed far greater interest in Dinah, who was startled and flattered by the attention. Dorshka had known the girls’ parents, and she asked Dinah many questions about their childhood. Dinah found it easy to talk. Dorshka was a good listener, with her mobile, intelligent face and ironic smile.

“You know we are both exiles, in a way,” reflected Dorshka. “Each of us started out somewhere else.”

“True. But, Dorshka—everybody comes to California because something didn’t work out somewhere else. They want a life they never had. You’re the opposite. How can life here ever be what it once was for you? Think of the things you’ve done! The adv-v-v-ventures you’ve had!”

“Well, you can have them, too, darling.” Dorshka leaned forward a little and smiled at Dinah in a way that she found puzzling.

“Me?”

“Yes, you. Now listen carefully.”

Dinah leaned forward.

“You are too involved with your children. You should spend more time with Jake. Go out more in the evenings. Have more—more romance with your husband.”

“Oh heavens, Dorshka,” she said. “Is that what you wanted to tell me? I’d love to, but Jake’s so involved with the show right now he doesn’t have time for fun. He never wants to go out when he’s writing like this. As it is, he has terrible insomnia and takes these long night drives and then comes home absolutely exhausted. We barely go out even to Chasen’s anymore.”

Dorshka slammed her fist down on the wooden table. “Don’t give in to it! Be the one he turns to for—for ‘refreshment’!” she said. “Make yourself alluring. Be, you know, an enchantress.”

“An en-ch-ch-chantress? Oh, Dorshka,” Dinah said, laughing. “I’m about as enchanting as a bowl of cornflakes.”

“It is very dangerous to think that way, darling. Very dangerous. You must seduce him! Away from his worries and his work.” Dorshka gripped her by the wrist and looked at her with a ferocious expression. “Down there. You must exercise those muscles.
Sqveeze
them! Fifty times a day! Otherwise, he will complain that it is like a football stadium! And this, my dear”—she wagged her finger at Dinah—“you do not want! You must put
cold cream in there. You must stay young! Juicy!” (She pronounced it
joozy
.)

Dinah laughed out loud. “Dorshka!” The older woman smiled tolerantly. “Tell me,” said Dinah, “where’d you learn all these female ‘secrets of the deep’?”

“Ah,” she said, her eyes lighting up. “In Vienna, when I was very young, I had a friend—she was an actress, and she was of ‘a certain age.’ She had learned them from Sarah Bernhardt herself, who had learned them from her mother—a great courtesan, you recall. There was a time when I thought I needed an education in these matters. Or, rather, my friend saw that I needed this education. I didn’t know I needed it, but I had taken a lover, and my friend knew that I knew nothing. And let me tell you, it works! It makes you like a girl of sixteen.”

“So have you got any special lore to imp-p-p-part?”

Dorshka smiled her mocking, good-natured smile. “Yes. As a matter of fact, I do.”

“And?”

“At your age a woman should have a lover. That, too, keeps you young. And it is very good for the circulation, the skin, and, most of all, the mind! With a lover you talk about many things, and you become more interesting to your husband. A woman like you, so bright and”—she searched for the word—“so full of zest! Yes, zest! … should have a lover.”

“Got anybody in mind?” Dinah said with a broad laugh. “I had a fling with poor old darling Art Squires in the old days before I married Jake, during one of those times when he’d tell me he loved me and then get so scared at the sound of those words that he’d take a powder the next day and I wouldn’t hear from him for months. Poor Art.” She had learned recently that Art had died suddenly of a heart attack. Refusing to name names had cost him his career.

“Well, perhaps I know someone for you.”

“Who?”

“There are some very attractive young men who come to me for acting lessons. I could arrange for you to come for tea someday when one of them is there.”

There was a pause, during which Dinah drank from her paper cup of Coke and lit a cigarette.

“What would a young actor want with a married woman with two children?”

“This young man—why, a thousand things he could want! You are attractive, Dinah, and witty, and you are now a woman with experience; you have much to tell him about the way things work in Hollywood. You could, you know, provide him with a ‘sentimental education’!”

They looked at each other and burst out laughing.

“Dorshka, don’t you know by now that I’m hopeless?”

“Indeed you are, Dinah. You are one of those impossible creatures who are actually in love with their husbands. What am I going to do with you?”

A serious, even sad expression came over Dinah’s face. “You know, Dorshka, ever since I’ve been with Jake I don’t think I’ve found anyone else attractive. I can’t imagine anyone out there who would interest me. I have everything I w-w-want with him.”