Cheat and Charmer (72 page)

Midway down the stairs, she collided with Lorna, who was stampeding toward her room. Tears streamed down her face, and a half-eaten Eskimo Pie dribbled down the front of her bathing suit.

“My God, what is it, honey?” Dinah asked, catching the child in her arms and sitting down with her on the carpeted steps.

“Veevi told me,” the little girl sobbed, “not to eat ice cream in front of her. She said I’m so fat it’s
disgusting
to watch me.”

The child’s wails rang through the house, bringing an alarmed Gussie from the kitchen. Together, Dinah and Gussie led Lorna upstairs, where Gussie wiped her face and tried to soothe her. Dinah went down to talk to Veevi.

She hadn’t heard the kids come home, and as she returned to the backyard she saw Peter already in the pool, wearing a mask and a snorkel, and pointedly ignoring Veevi, who was calling out to him to show her his best swan dive. Dinah hesitated. Ever since the Palm Springs incident Peter had stayed as far away from Veevi as possible, and it filled her with a wavering pity for her sister.

Nevertheless, Dinah pulled up a pool chair and sat down directly across from Veevi. “Goddamnit, Vee, how dare you speak to Lorna like that!” she said quietly and fiercely. “You’ve done it over and over, and I’m sick of it. If you ever d-d-d-do it again, you will not be welcome in this house. Do you understand?”

Dinah had never spoken to Veevi this way.

“Oh,” Veevi said, shaking her head and smiling, as if the topic were too ridiculous to be discussed. “Really. If she can’t take a little kidding—”

“Veevi,” Dinah said, now shaking with rage and yanking Veevi up by the hand. “Get the f-f-f-fuck out of here. Now. We need a v-v-v-vacation from each other. A big one. You’ve said one s-s-savage, vicious, cruel thing to Lorna after another, and God knows why, but I’ve let you get away with it every time. But you’re never going to do it again.” She pulled the scrap of
paper from her pocket and placed it in Veevi’s hand. “Here. Go testify, for all I care. Live your life, and stay the hell out of mine!”

Veevi made a bubby face.

“Put it away, Vee. I’ve had it with you.”

She picked up Veevi’s cigarette case and her lighter and put them in Veevi’s purse and snapped it shut. “Here,” she said, putting the purse over Veevi’s arm and leading her through the wooden gate that separated the yard from the driveway.

Veevi, unresisting, looked at Dinah as if she had lost her mind.

“You’re going home, right now,” Dinah said, opening the door to Veevi’s MG. “And if you ever hurt Lorna’s feelings again, I will fucking k-k-k-kill you.”

Dinah turned her back and walked toward the pool, not waiting for a reply.

Later that night, Jake called Dinah from New York and she poured out the whole story. When he put the phone down, he whooped out loud for joy. This calls for a celebration, he said to himself, pulling off his sleep mask and hurrying to the refrigerator in his Sixty-third Street apartment. Free of Veevi! he rejoiced, as he pulled out two pieces of rye bread and some smoked turkey. Free of that pain-in-the-ass snobbish, disdainful cooze! Thank God for Mike Albrecht! Thank God for Willie Weil and Seymour Mandlin and the Marlon Brando Committee! he said to himself as he twisted open the jar of mustard, slathered some on the bread, and uncapped a bottle of root beer.

Clearly, there was a god of timing, he thought to himself as he sat at the kitchen counter. Mike couldn’t have come back into Veevi’s life at a better time, as far as Jake was concerned, because, from the moment he’d set foot in the rehearsal studio and started auditioning actors and dancers for the show, he’d been in a state of utter bliss. Finally, after all these years of churning out one bitch of a movie after another, he was doing theater, he was doing it in New York with people who were brilliant talents, and he had the greatest faith that the show would be a hit. Even if it failed—if it died, if it stank—he would still have had a crack at doing what he now believed he’d been born to do. Furthermore, while he and Dinah were talking tonight, he realized that this state of utter bliss and absorption in the show
was the perfect antidote to the bilious nausea that overcame him whenever he thought about his affair with Veevi. His memories of himself in bed with her brought him nothing but cold-sweat shame toward himself and revulsion toward her. He wanted nothing to do with her, except the longest, most formal distance he could imagine between them. What an idiotic mistake the whole thing had been! And now, after Dinah’s call tonight, he felt like getting down on his knees and kissing Albrecht’s feet! Take her, she’s all yours! Just get her out of our hair!

Once Veevi testified, Mike could take them all back to Europe. Dorshka, too, with that phony European bonhomie of hers, that semi-superior
Gemütlichkeit
that let you know, as she handed you a piece of five-thousand-calorie cake with a lethal dose of schlag, that
any
novelist is better than the best screenwriter. The only thing that worried him was Dinah’s bawling Veevi out today. She should have handled that better—put it more diplomatically or just let it pass the way she always had. After all, Lorna did have a weight problem. Like him and his mother, she’d never met a calorie she didn’t like. But if Veevi were to get mad back at Dinah and tell her everything … The thought was too horrible to finish. Well, he’d deny it. There was no proof, no receipts—nothing on paper. He wasn’t a fucking amateur.

But, oh boy, had he ever learned his lesson. As for now, he wouldn’t rock the boat. He’d pretend nothing had happened, keep Veevi on the payroll until she’d had her session with the Committee, have her send the synopses to Gladys, who would send them to him to gather dust on his desk. As far as extracurricular fun went, from now on he was going to stick to tootsies. He figured he needed a little setup, a nice little arrangement like the one he’d had with Bonnie. That Bonnie. Now, that was a sweet kid. “Come and lay down,” she used to say. That’s what he wanted. A nice, sweet girl with lousy grammar and a great body. A girl who wouldn’t be a pain in the ass when it was over. Maybe somebody he could put in the show.

He took his plate over to the sink and washed it with a little sponge, feeling happy and virtuous to be washing his own dish, though he left the root beer bottle in the sink for the maid to throw away the next morning. As he turned off the kitchen light, he had a thought: What about the dancer he and the boys had auditioned yesterday afternoon? She was a friend of Jimmy O’Rourke’s, said she’d met Jake about a month ago when he’d flown to Vegas to talk to Victor Lewis about the part of David in the
show. The girl—a redhead from England, with a cockney accent—had been in Vic’s dressing room at the Flamingo. God, who was that guy she was with, the crime writer—Burgoyne, Duff Burgoyne? The guy mentioned something about sending him a treatment, but had been talking to Jake’s deaf ear, and Jake hadn’t caught all the man had said.

At first, he’d gotten the idea that she was Burgoyne’s girl. Then she’d said he was like an uncle to her, a friend to her brother and father, croupiers who’d come over to Vegas from London. Jake didn’t remember telling her to come to New York to audition, but apparently he had. She’d also called Jake’s friend Jimmy, and he’d told her to come, too. If she was a friend of Jimmy’s, that meant she knew the score—knew how to behave around a certain kind of guy. And Buzz Keegan liked her. The choreography in the show was going to be very athletic, robust, and sexy, and Buzz wanted well-trained dancers with energy to spare. Keegan had said after her routine that her tits were really too big for a dancer’s, but Jake had liked the way she looked onstage—the big smile, the good legs. He’d said to Keegan, “Take a chance. She looks kind of zaftig, like the immigrant broads I grew up with,” and had taken her number, impressed, too, that she’d come all the way to New York and staked everything on getting into the show. She looked like fun—like she knew how to handle herself. He’d be nice to her, and that part of life would be all squared away.

And if she wasn’t available, he’d find somebody else. He was seeing more gorgeous girls every morning than he’d seen in years on the Marathon lot. Dancers, with sensational bodies. He wasn’t worried.

He opened the window in the living room and looked out toward the river. Late-night city sounds flew up in a roar that he loved. He had had this feeling in London and Paris. If things worked out for him, he’d have a place in New York and a place in London. He’d go from picture to play to novel to picture to play to novel. The image of a sign saying We Never Close came into his head and made him laugh. His productivity would be staggering. He wanted to buy that house in Springs that he’d rented. Oh boy, was Dinah going to love it—and the kids, too. Not like that crappy little house in Palm Springs. What a mistake that had been. This one was small but not cramped, a charming, Dutch farmhouse next to a potato field. And this summer it would be just the four of them, and Gus; and if the show was a hit he’d buy the place in a minute. And see what he could do about buying a place here, too. He’d have to come back every two weeks or more, maybe even move the family to New York for the run of the show
if—and he used that “if” a thousand times a day—if it was a hit. And he would be doing this all on his own, without Irv Engel and Marathon, and without Veevi or some big romance that would be a complete drag on his time and energy.

Here it was two in the morning, and below him the cars were rushing by, thousands of them, on the FDR. What were they doing, all those cars? Where were people going? It was so different from L.A., where at night all you could hear was dogs barking and raccoons scurrying on your roof; if you couldn’t sleep and went out on the porch, you could hear the coyotes barking back at the dogs. He thought of Peter’s fear of snakes. The La Brea tar pits: now, that was the real L.A., he thought. Land of the saber-toothed tiger, snakes, earthquakes, and floods. A fucking inhuman place. He didn’t want nature and animals; he didn’t know one tree from the next, and flowers bored him. He wanted people, cities, human voices, people trying to accomplish things and succeeding or failing. How could you be a writer unless you could eavesdrop and snoop and overhear and look out windows? L.A. was nowheresville. All those big mansions with their secrets and their landscaping and no way to listen to any of it. He wanted to live on a river and stare out across the night into other people’s apartments and watch them while they scratched their asses or picked their toes. He wanted—well, he admitted to himself, he just wanted. And wanted.

A
ll journeys begin in exhilaration, and Dinah’s cross-country adventure was no exception. She and Peter rode up front; Gussie and Lorna commandeered the backseat, along with a cooler filled with ice, sodas, milk, and four huge grocery bags stuffed with potato chips, Fritos, pretzels, Ritz crackers, cheese, bananas, grapes, peanut butter, and Oreos. The kids sang, shouted good-bye to L.A., listened to the radio, talked about the sights they were going to see, and opened the windows to let the wind flap against their faces and whip their hair.

The four of them felt almost as if they were flying as Dinah skimmed along on the new freeway into the desert toward Nevada. It was so hot that the air in front of the car seemed to melt in shimmering waves above the road, empty except for trucks, which she passed at speeds well over eighty. Driving with her legs apart and her skirt hitched up over her thighs, Dinah smoked Camels, drank Coca-Cola, and pointed things out to the kids: crumbling, sand-abraded corrugated steel and wood shacks lone prospectors had once built for themselves and abandoned, tumbleweed rolling in the wind, giant green cacti rising up like cowboy hats, the rusting corpses of cars left to freeze at night and burn in the day. But these sights abruptly reminded her of her father and how lonely he had been when her mother finally left him, and then she thought of him coming over in the trailer and getting all dressed up in his pin-striped wool suit just to read Veevi’s letters, and she couldn’t stand it—she had to get him and Veevi out of her mind. She told Peter to read to her from the AAA guide to Nevada, which he did, as she tried to listen.