Cheat and Charmer (68 page)

P
acing back and forth in Veevi’s bedroom eight months later at two in the morning, he watched her face.

“So it’s done, finally?” she asked.

“Went off to New York today. Which means,” he said, “that I can finally tell you the story.”

“Yes, I know. You’ve been very good. So far, all I know is what I’ve picked up from the songs. So go ahead. I can see you’re dying to tell me.”

“Don’t you want to hear it?”

“By all means! Deliver yourself. You’re bursting!” She turned on her side, propping her head against her hand, and looked at him brightly, eyebrows raised in anticipation.

He paced again for a moment, then stopped and opened his arms, suddenly a master of ceremonies in blue boxer shorts, a white T-shirt, and black socks.

“Okay. It’s Chicago, 1918. The war has just ended. David and Dolly’s Budapest Café—my grandfather’s saloon. Dolly makes the goulash that’s killed more Jews than Hitler—”

Veevi let out a laugh.

“And David conducts his Royal Hungarian Orchestra on Friday and Saturday nights. Got the picture?”

She nodded and listened as he resumed pacing, and poured out the story of the Jewish immigrant family with its four sons, among them Munish, the baby, whom the other three are putting through medical school, and who falls in love with a Polish waitress. Prohibition hits, and the whole family, including the Polish waitress, make “sacramental wine”
in the cellar and turn the saloon into a speakeasy. But the cops find out and shut the place down. Whenever there was a musical number, Jake paused and sang the first eight bars, softly, so as not to disturb Coco and Dorshka, then went on with the story. When he reached the part where Munish dies of pneumonia, and with him the family’s American Dream, he sniffed and went over to the ottoman to retrieve a handkerchief from his jacket pocket. “Second Act curtain,” he said, wiping his eyes. Soon, as he brought together all the strands of the plot, which included Prohibition, gangsters, cops, and mayhem, tears began to stream down his face, and he made no effort to stop them. “Suddenly,” he said hoarsely, moving into the finale, “we’re at the big wedding scene, with David leading the Royal Hungarian Orchestra, the whole ensemble dancing and singing—and the stage goes dark except for a spot on Buddy, the grandson. He’s standing in front of the saloon. Only now it’s 1955, and it isn’t there anymore. And that’s the final number—his farewell to the family and his memories and that time in American life.”

He coughed and wiped his eyes. “I can’t help it,” he said. “I love it so much.”

He looked at her. “So?” he said. “What do you think?”

She paused and cocked her head a little to the side and smiled. “It’s fine, dear. Fine.”

“
Fine?
As in, ‘How are you today?’ ‘I’m fine’?”

“Jake. It is what it is.”

“ ‘It is what it is’? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means exactly that. It is what it is. Obviously it’s something you have to get out of your system before you can go on.”

“You don’t love it?”

“No, I don’t love it. Do I have to?”

“No, you don’t
have
to! But if you love me, as you’ve been telling me you do all year—”

“I have?”

“Yes, you have, though you seem to have developed a sudden and devastating case of amnesia. But if you love me, then you can’t fail to love this show. This show
is
me. This show is about everything I’ve come from. And you don’t love this show.”

“Jake, really. What can I tell you? It’s
corny
. It’s ‘too much of a muchness,’ as the English say. It’s—it’s
Broadway
. Not my sort of thing.”

“What
is
your sort of thing?” he said with fury. “Tell me that! Half-assed
Hemingway imitators like Ben Knight and Michael Albrecht? International literary snobs with very tiny talents and very large bar bills? Where’s the heart in their work? Where’s the laughter and the human struggle, huh? Who the hell are you to be snide and disdainful of something I’ve been pouring my absolute guts into? Huh?”

“I’ve told you all along: do your little show and then get to the real stuff you’ve got it in you to do.”

“ ‘Your little show’? Don’t you know what this means to me? Haven’t you seen me killing myself this last year? I’m staking everything I’ve got on this!”

“Jake, don’t be ridiculous. I said it’s fine.”

“ ‘Fine’ is the operative word you use when the proctologist asks you if he’s gone in too deep! And when Veevi Milligan Ventura Albrecht says it’s ‘fine,’ it means it stinks. It means she thinks it’s a piece of shit.”

“Oh, really—”

“You think I don’t know every tone of your voice by now? To think I stood here crying my eyes out, spilling my guts, while you sat there coolly laughing at the whole thing!”

“I wasn’t laughing.”

“You were laughing. You’re always laughing. You have that light little laugh that covers up the venom running in your veins. Jesus Christ, Veevi. What kind of person are you, anyway?”

“Until this moment, someone you’ve been ready to change your life for. Someone you’ve been ready to get out of your pathetic charade of a marriage for. Someone you’ve dreamed of sharing a life with. All I’ve said is that I don’t like your show. Suddenly that makes me Medusa—a monster with snakes in her hair!”

“Very apt, believe me! It was stupid of me to think you’d ever like anything I do!”

“That’s not true. I believe absolutely in you. More even than you do.”

“Bullshit! You believe in something you want to turn me into! Something I’ll never be in a million years. Meanwhile, this project, which I adore, which is more me than anything I’ve ever done, you dismiss with one word: ‘Fine.’ Tell me something, Veevi, what do you know about putting yourself on the line? Have you ever written one goddamn word? No! Oh, I know, every writer in Hollywood has been in love with you, and considered it a privilege for you to bite his balls off with a snotty remark and a snide look, but those guys are horses’ asses, and don’t I know it now!
You’ve got a stinger, baby, and you’re always trying to use it. You’re a goddamn Johnny one-note. You’re never
for
anyone or anything. You nourish yourself—excuse me, gorge yourself—on ridiculing others. At least Dinah knows what happens when you sweat out a project like this. She remembers what it’s like to sit down in front of the goddamn typewriter and try to think of ways to make people laugh and cry and feel something except the numbness of their lives. She’s my wife, goddamnit, and she was a damn good radio writer, and I can’t believe I’ve come
this
close to fucking up her whole life to hear your snotty snap judgments about the best thing I’ve ever done!”

“Then,” said Veevi, stubbing out her cigarette and turning out the light, “I suggest you go home to her and finish out your little tantrum there. Nighty-night.”

He made no rejoinder.

The room went completely silent. He knew what she was doing: lying there curled up in a ball. Did she think he was going to come to the bed and get in beside her? Did she think he was going to fit his body to hers and tell her she was right?

In the dark, he fumbled for his trousers and shoes and shirt and jacket, which lay in a heap on the ottoman. The keys jangled as they fell out of his pants pocket onto the carpet, and as he groped for them, he sensed the small body under the covers becoming so defiantly still that it seemed to have stopped breathing.

Upstairs, Dorshka sat up in bed. His angry voice had risen through the ceiling. Is it over? she thought. She listened at the window and detected the back door closing, steps crunching across the gravel in the driveway, the engine turning over, and the car driving off.

“You nincompoop, you horse’s ass, you all-time schmuck,” Jake fumed at himself. He was driving all over Brentwood, then down into Santa Monica, not sure where he was going, not noticing streets, not caring, just berating himself, cursing himself, exploding at her, shouting, repeating the same things over and over. The window was down, and the night air filled the car, and he began to feel cold. But just as he told himself he had better get home, he realized that he had driven across Santa Monica to Itzik’s delicatessen.

Soon he was sitting behind the wheel of his parked green Cadillac, ecstatically stuffing himself with a pastrami sandwich on rye, slathered with mustard, and guzzling Cel-Ray Tonic, feeling deliriously alive and rapturously free of Veevi—free of guilt, free of complications, practically reborn.
I’m out of it
, he said again.
It’s over!
I’ll do whatever Dinah wants, I’ll support that cunt of a sister of hers until the day she dies, but I’m out of it now.

He got out of the car and threw the mustard-streaked waxed paper and the empty soda bottle and the sliver that was left of the kosher pickle into a metal garbage can, and emitted a tremendous belch. He couldn’t wait to get home to Dinah, to get into bed beside her and snuggle up against her. To think he had planned to leave her! To think of the hours he and Veevi had spent describing to each other the apartment they would have in Paris! “You perfidious lout!” he fumed at himself. To his relief, no one else was around; the street was deserted, and there was no one to accuse him. He waved good-bye to Itzik, who, looking up, wiping his hand on his apron, and waving back from behind the counter, evoked in Jake an overwhelming tenderness for his fellow Jew. That’s the kind of love I feel, he said to himself, not that romantic crap Veevi wants. And the show—he felt tears rising again—that show would mean something to Itzik if he got a chance to see it; Jake made a note that if it ever came to L.A. he would arrange free tickets for Itzik and his wife. Who had ever put the Jewish immigrant struggle on Broadway before? With singing and dancing and joy and tragedy and heartache—the way he was going to do it? What did Veevi know of that? Dinah—now she understood it! No one had to explain it to her. Have I been crazy? he asked himself. To think of how close he had come to giving her up!

He leaned against the car for a moment; he thought he could hear the roar of the ocean six or seven blocks away. The blue Pacific, he said to himself. When I die, I want them to scatter my ashes there. I want them to be spread across the whole world. I want to be a part of everything, not rolled up into a tight little ball of cruel passion with Veevi. The very thought of her filled him with disgust.

He started the car and turned the radio on. June Christy’s husky voice flowed out: “I could cry salty tears / Where have I been all these years?” Oh Jesus, he thought. He had sung it so many times with Dinah, on car trips; held her close while dancing to it; crooned it in the shower. Driving slowly, carefully across Santa Monica, looking for Twenty-sixth Street, which he would take, as usual, to Sunset and home, he savored his warm belly, his
mouth glowing with a spicy aftertaste, and the way the song reminded him how much he loved his wife. He checked his watch: four. He had a meeting with Jimmy and Sammy at nine that he couldn’t cancel. That was okay. He wanted to work. He would get in three hours of sleep, and then take a nap in the afternoon. The night drives were over. He could get some rest now. The next time he saw Veevi, he would be friendly and businesslike, and make it very clear that she could keep her job. There would be no discussions; she would realize, just from his demeanor, that it was finished between them, but that family life would go on as before. Thank God, he repeated to himself, he hadn’t yet made a move. Dinah and the kids were still his; nothing at home was changed. Treat the whole thing, he said to himself, like a bad investment. Just put it behind you. Write it off.

He yawned, and stared ahead, and switched stations. He recognized piano music by Debussy and let it enfold him in its surges and vibrations. Then an elephant stepped on his chest, and he fell into a chasm of crushing pain, nausea, and blackness.

Gussie wakes again at about four-thirty, as she so often does, anticipating the sound of the Cadillac slowly easing itself into the garage downstairs.

Why ain’t he back yet? she wonders. Usually he’s back by now.