Cheat and Charmer (91 page)

A windy drizzle had begun to fall. She arranged her silk scarf on her head, with the knot just under her chin. A young solicitor, out for the afternoon by himself to take a break from a case concerning the sale of a hotel in Penzance, noticed her springy walk, her shapely ankles, and her slender figure. That’s an American walk, he thought to himself. He got up and hurriedly approached her, and when he asked her for a light she smiled. “Sure,” she said. He was right: American.

She held up her lighter and flicked it, and in the wind he cupped his hand around hers to protect the flame. Her hand was steady. He decided to take a chance. She was older than he, he saw that at once, but she had a marvelous smile.

“I say, care to go round to the pub for a drink?” he said.

She threw her head back and let out a mighty laugh.

“What’s the date today?” she said, speaking to him as if she had known him all her life.

“The date? Sunday, November 12, 1960. Why?”

“Young m-m-m-man,” she said, and he noticed at once that she had a stammer. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll gladly go and have a drink with you. In four years. Four years from today, to be exact. November 12, 1964. Maybe by that time I’ll have figured it all out. Maybe by that time I’ll have left my philandering husband, sent my kids off to college, and decided what to do with the rest of my life. Maybe by that time I’ll have the courage to go and have a drink with a nice young guy I meet on Hampstead Heath. But till then, if you ever want a drink, here”—she handed him the flask—“it’s yours.”

“Are you sure?” he said, taking the silver flask and grinning at her in wonder as she turned to go.

She didn’t answer, but only waved and smiled—the warmest, kindest
smile he had ever seen. She wasn’t a beauty, he saw, but comely, with something sweet and lively and disabused about her eyes. For an instant, he had thought her a bit mad. But he saw now, wanting to follow her and catch up with her, hoping that she would turn around, that she had meant it when she said no, that she had told him the truth. He watched through the gathering downpour as her step quickened, and he saw that she moved gracefully, like a dancer. My bloody luck, he thought. I meet someone smashing and she’s a heartbroken married American.

Once inside her car, she started up the engine and drove off along Spaniard’s Road. It was cold, and she turned on the heater. There was no rush to get home. Peter would be out until late. Lorna was spending the night with a school friend in Hammersmith. She could go anywhere she pleased. It might be nice, she thought, to drive down to the Embankment and have a cup of tea by the Thames. Or just stay in the car and drive around by herself. There was nowhere she had to be, and she had plenty of time.

I
t took me twenty-five years to write
Cheat and Charmer
. Actually, that number is somewhat arbitrary. The story had been on my mind for many years before I actually plunged in, and recently I found, in a journal I had kept in college, a note for a novel about two sisters caught up in the blacklist period in Hollywood. Clearly the story was germinating for many years. It wasn’t until 1978, however, that I received what I have since called “the summons.” I was living in New York and in the thick of writing a biography of the poet Louise Bogan; it had been many years since I had lived in Los Angeles, where I was born and had spent my childhood as the daughter of one half of the comedy writing–producing-and-directing team of Norman Panama and Melvin Frank. But I dreamed one night that I had lost a baseball in a dark and forbidding area behind our L.A. house my brothers and I called “the forest.” This was a no-man’s land: a small selvage of earth and trees standing between our house and the house next door, although “next door” suggests a comfortable and neighborly proximity that in no way fits the relationship of our house to the secluded mansion whose occupant was a never-glimpsed retired female movie star. The baseball is itself an odd detail, since as a child I was interested in neither baseball nor any other sport except swimming. Like any self-respecting future novelist, I played rapturously with dolls. But in this dream I was searching for a lost baseball in the “forest,” which still struck me with the nameless menace I remembered from the past. Suddenly, a tall, statuesque woman was standing beside me. “Look there!” she commanded, pointing downward to the soil, which was rich, moist, and black with the accumulated and undisturbed decay of countless fallen eucalyptus and laurel leaves, pine cones, and juniper branches.

I knew at once that she had uttered a command I had no choice but to obey. So, although I continued with the Bogan biography, I nevertheless began to write draft after draft of scenes, many of which made their way into the finished book, among them, the scene—which now launches the story—in which Jake and Dinah dance together at a big Hollywood party and Jake is unaware that Dinah is carrying a HUAC subpoena in her purse, as well as the one in which Veevi, Jake, and Dinah go through Veevi’s books, just brought out of storage, and Veevi ridicules Jake for admiring Clifford Odets. “Write what you know,” the saying goes. But I felt that I had to write about what I didn’t know about what I
thought
I already knew. I admired—and always will—those who had defied the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused to name names during the anti-Communist investigations into the motion picture industry. Although these had taken place when I was too small to understand them, I had later known people on both sides of the “naming names” question, and my moral certainties were in place. Yet I found myself wondering about “the bad guys.” What would have been the consequences for someone who had been subpoenaed and had agreed to testify? I thought about Dinah and Veevi and knew where I had to go.

Many drafts and rewrites later, in the mid-nineties, I reread
Anna Karenina
, which I had first devoured during a two-month period in London in the winter of 1964–65. The first time I read it, I had been enthralled by the detail and architecture of the book; now I was haunted by the way Tolstoy had embraced his sinner without necessarily accepting her sin. I began teaching a course on the novel, at Bard College, spending whole semesters on just this one book, exploring it chapter by chapter. Then, preparing classes, I discovered something outside the book that became, for me, as important as the story itself: that at first Tolstoy had conceived of Anna as a woman to be disliked and condemned, but that, as he moved deeper into the narrative, he became increasingly drawn to her, and saw what it was in her passionate and complicated nature that had brought her to her great transgression. Imagination had trumped moral certainty, and Anna Karenina as we know her emerged in all her dark magnificence from the struggle. I loved Dinah and Veevi and Jake, but I had been approaching them all with a pinch-mouthed censoriousness that kept my own imagination in check. Tolstoy changed all that.

Another problem that added years to the project was that I had, early on, written myself into a literary dead end. It is dangerous to be a literature
professor. You listen to yourself in the classroom when you shouldn’t. Somehow when I started the novel I felt compelled, as if by the members of some scowling tenure committee, to filter my story through an obligatory modernist lens. So I fixed on the sensitive child/observer. Wrong from the start. The book that would have resulted could have been called
What Maisie Didn’t Know and Couldn’t Possibly Have Found Out, Unless She Had Hidden Under the Bed
. I dabbled in Mrs. Dalloway, sticking Dinah behind the wheel of her Pontiac station wagon as she looped and circled the streets of Beverly Hills through arabesques of memory and time. Then I would switch to Peter Lasker, her son, and this time he’d be sitting beside her in the station wagon, richly endowed with an exquisite sensibility that kept him blathering on with his own endless interior monologue as well. What did I learn from this? That none of it was any good and all of it was necessary. That deep dark soil in the “forest” behind my childhood house was paydirt indeed, but it would only yield up its nuggets of precious ore under very specific conditions. I scrapped the Lit. 101 modernism, except for explicit shifts in point of view, primarily Jake’s and Dinah’s. I wanted drama, not its labyrinthine reflection, so, with the exception of one long and possibly unwieldy flashback, I junked memory and began again, this time going for a good-old-fashioned nineteenth-century novel told in master scenes from beginning to end, with a narration both driven and unobtrusive. Once I knew I was going for chronological broke, I then wrote the story of the sisters’ early lives, from their childhoods in the East through their father’s binges and failures, the family’s move to California in the early 1920s and the girls’ subsequent induction into the world of the movies. I adored this material but later saw that the book didn’t need it. So, heartbroken, I cut it all, ruthlessly, all three hundred and fifty pages of it, and never looked back. But again, the material, which was ultimately wrong for the book, was also right. It taught me everything I needed to know about the two girls, about their feelings for each other and about what they wanted from life, and thus, by the time I scrapped those pages, I nevertheless knew Dinah and Veevi inside and out.

The obligatory “modernist” phase of composition also brought me, I think, to the lost baseball itself: my remembered L.A., the Southern California baked into my bones. While
Cheat and Charmer
is not an autobiographical novel, nor a roman à clef, I freely admit that it is drenched in the world I knew as a child growing up in Los Angeles during the forties and fifties. Those pages and pages of meandering monologues and drifting
memories had taken me back not just to the dazzling parties and the wondrous movie stars and the cavernous sound stages at the movie studios, but to the heavy sweetness of night-blooming jasmine and the aromatic spice of eucalyptus trees, the corny crashing waves of the Pacific, the damp June fogs, the dragon breath of the Santa Ana winds, and the smell of chlorine and suntan lotion on wet, glistening skin. I was an infant in Los Angeles; I was put out to sunbathe in my baby carriage when I was six weeks old in a garden full of dappled sunshine and flowers, and I wanted the book to be pregnant with place and time, wreathed with an era now long past.

Nevertheless, there continued to be delays and deferrals: teaching, finishing my Louise Bogan biography, two short books—one on Jackson Pollock, another on the late artist Esteban Vicente. The best of all possible Persons from Porlock arrived, namely, my daughter, in 1987. But she is now a senior in high school, and
Cheat and Charmer
is done. Her childhood has passed too quickly, for my taste; the book’s, I thought, would never end. I cannot count the times I was disheartened, lost, consumed with doubt. Would I ever get it right? I could not let it go without its blessing me, and that did not happen for a very long time. Perhaps, too, I was reluctant to bid a final adieu to the turquoise swimming pools and the ocean twilights, though I have not lived in Los Angeles since 1960. But eventually I realized that to keep working on the book would only have meant setting out for a destination at which I had already arrived. It was done.

What kept me going all those years? I don’t know. All I can say is that at one point in this long journey, when I moaned to the late and wonderful William Maxwell, who had befriended me during the writing of the Bogan biography, that the book was taking forever, I received a one-line letter from him. “Dear Elizabeth,” he wrote. “Remember: novels grow in the dark.”

—Elizabeth Frank