Chocolates for Breakfast (5 page)

Chapter 5

C
ourtney was glad that she could tell Scaisbrooke to go to hell. Although she experienced a pang of remorse when Mrs. Reese told her that she was being seriously considered for editor of the
Lit Review
for next year, she felt good about finally leaving. She didn't like to be a malcontent, and she felt that it was only fair if you didn't like a place to get out of it. Besides, Janet was being kicked out, and Courtney wouldn't have had anyone to room with.

She felt even more excited than usual when she got on the plane at LaGuardia, because she knew that this time she was leaving boarding school for good. Although Courtney had been flying since she was a year and a half old, and flying alone since she was seven, she still got a feeling of exhilaration when the motors revved before the take-off. When they had been out of New York for about an hour, and that view of the city that she loved so much had given way to the confining denseness of night clouds, she took out her mother's letter to read it again.

Courtney Darling,

The other day I received a letter from your housemother which upset me a great deal, but I hesitated to answer it until I could offer a solution for the problems so clearly indicated. Your housemother told me about the session with Dr. Reismann. The school is very worried about you. I don't know what stories you made up to give the doctor the idea that you had suicidal tendencies—although we know that is nonsense, the school does not, and you mustn't play games with this sort of thing. But enough of chastisement.

I was very glad to hear that you ended your dependence on that English teacher. I know how difficult it is for you to make friends of your own age, but you make life even lonelier for yourself by forming an attachment to an older person—such things can't help but alienate you from your contemporaries. Your housemother said that you seemed to be seeing more of the other girls, and she mentioned a couple—Alberts and somebody—that you seemed to have struck up a friendship with, which I was happy about.

I gathered, reading between the lines of Mrs. Forrest's letter, that you are even more dissatisfied with Scaisbrooke since spring vacation. At any rate, it is clear that your excessive sleeping means something is bothering you. I don't know what you want to escape from, but it seems to me that it is about time I gave you a real home. For one thing, you should be having dates and parties, and you should be free to raid the icebox at night if you want to—the things that most children take for granted. I know I can never be the little gray-haired mother, nor can I give you the stability that you find at boarding school. But you know all this. The choice is up to you.

I talked this over with your father on the telephone yesterday, and he thinks that you should come out here—that is, if you want to. He is, of course, always delighted to have his responsibilities on the other coast. If you do decide to leave, tell me as soon as possible so that I can enroll you in Beverly Hills High School, and let your father know so that he can talk to Mrs. Reese. Don't feel we are putting pressure on you, though—if you want to stay at school we will understand that, too.

By the way, Al Leone sends his love and the entire Garden is alerted for your arrival. Do well in your exams, darling, and I look forward anxiously to seeing you. We'll have champagne for breakfast and I promise you'll have a ball this summer.

I
love
you,

Mummy

There hadn't been much question in Courtney's mind, and as she got off the plane in Burbank she was even more confirmed in her decision. The Garden had been alerted; Al Leone and assorted actors were waiting in the bar, and they did have Champagne for breakfast. There was an actor there that Courtney had not met before, Barry Cabot. He was a little loaded but rather charming, and he greeted her with the expected embrace and the expected comment on her eyes, which were very dark in the dimness of the bar. He had an arrogance that interested her; it seemed like her own. As he turned his head, he posed as though he did not want the camera to record the fullness under his chin which, despite his lean body and his twenty-eight years, was the inevitable result of countless martinis. In this pose he reminded Courtney of the picture of Rupert Brooke in the front of her well-worn copy of Brooke's poetry. Barry Cabot stayed in her mind as she fell asleep that night.

The next morning Courtney awoke with a vague sense that she was late, and had missed breakfast and chapel. The soft morning sunlight fell on her bed and she looked around her. She saw a palm tree brushing against the window and lay back in bed, reassured. Scaisbrooke was far behind her. Courtney dressed and went into the living room, which was cluttered with empty glasses and full ash trays. This reassured her further; cocktail parties were one of the few constants in her life. All her life she would associate liquor with her childhood. When she was alone and did not wish to be, a drink would reassure her as the smell of dinner cooking or the sound of a hose spraying a summer lawn would another.

On the couch, wrapped in a blanket against the cold California night, Barry Cabot slept soundly as a small boy. She looked at Barry, his head buried in his arms and his face relaxed and boyish in sleep. She sat across from him. She did not know why she liked to watch him in sleep. His skin was pale and clear, like a woman's or a child's, and a shock of reddish brown hair fell across his high forehead. His mouth was finely and delicately formed, with a petulant fullness to the lower lip.

She looked up as her mother came into the living room, very tan in her white satin bathrobe.

“Good morning, darling, did you sleep well?”

“Very well, thank you, Mummy.” She looked over at the couch. “Our guest is sleeping well, too.”

“Oh, yes. The party broke up late last night— I made the mistake of having a ham sent in, and I don't think they had eaten in days. Barry was afraid to go home—you know these Peter Pans who are frightened to be alone with themselves in the dark—so I told him he could sleep on the couch.”

There was a sudden and demanding knock on the door. Courtney got up to answer it. Framed against the late morning brightness stood Patrick Cavanaugh, a
New Yorker
writer and one of the guests of the evening before. In his hands was a silver tray with four Bloody Marys. Courtney grinned and took the tray.

“Patrick, you
darling
!” Sondra Farrell rushed to him and threw her arms about him.

“Wake up that freeloader Cabot,” he said.

Barry put his face into the couch and muttered something incoherent.

“We've got a Bloody Mary for you, Cabot,” said Patrick.

Reluctantly awake, he sat up.

“May I have one, too, Mummy?”

“I brought one for you,” said Patrick.

“No, Courtney, not vodka at eleven in the morning. If your father knew, he would have an asthma attack.”

“Let the kid have a drink,” said Barry.

“Well, you may have a quarter of a glass,” her mother relented.

Patrick raised his glass solemnly.

“To Courtney,” he said. “May she always rise late to find a drink awaiting her.”

“And amusing men around her,” her mother added.

“Daddy would flip,” Courtney said, but she liked the toast, and she was pleased to find that the Bloody Mary tasted like tomato juice with tabasco.

Her mother ordered breakfast brought for all of them in the villa, with more Bloody Marys and a great deal of black coffee. Courtney wasn't allowed to have another Bloody Mary, but she was hungry anyway and she wanted to finish breakfast and go for a swim.

She put on her black strapless bathing suit, and looked at herself in the mirror while they talked in the living room. She had a good body, and she was very aware of it. Her legs were firmly muscled, like a dancer's from years of athletics. She was slim and athletic, her shoulders were broad and the collarbone and the molding of her upper body was smoothly distinct beneath her warmly tanned skin. Her breasts were firm and full, even at fifteen. She had a woman's body, curved, firm and sensual, and this did not pass without notice. The ease and assurance with which she used her body even in such simple actions as walking, her perpetual consciousness of her body, the vitality and challenge in her green eyes—all these things spoke clearly of passion. She was not yet sixteen, but she was ready for love. Men were aware of it, although her mother could not be and Courtney sensed it only vaguely. She had never kissed a man, she had never indulged in any of the byplay of love-making as Janet had, but her passions ran high and her need for love was great.

When she came to the pool, she was surprised to see three young boys there, about her age. Somehow the couples that lived at the Garden seemed incapable of breeding children, and the youthful laughter as the boys ducked one another in the pool seemed to startle the sun bathers and disturb the haze of fantasy and self-delusion that hung about the lotus-shaped pool. She was not pleased to see the boys there; they were intruders from the harshly bright, barbarian world of youth invading the soft untrodden sands of disappointment.

Al Leone, mahogany-tanned, had come over from his apartment across the street and was doing push-ups on his deck chair.

“Hi, doll,” he greeted her amiably. “What time did you go to bed?”

“About two, I guess.”

“Where's your mother?”

“Some people came by the villa and they're all drinking Bloody Marys. So I left, because I wanted to swim.”

“Barry Cabot there?”

“Yes, he slept on the couch.”

“I thought so. What do you think of him?”

“I like him. He kind of interests me.”

“Christ, I was afraid of that. Look, baby doll, watch out for that faggot. He is worth exactly nothing.”

“What do you mean, watch out for him?”

“He is the sort of guy you would like, being an artist type with intellectual pretensions and also having some charm for women. Also, he is around your villa a great deal as your mother provides him with occasional drinks and dinners and finds him amusing. So don't you start to get interested, because he is a real shit-heel guy.”

“Al, I'm not interested in anybody—and not anybody of Barry Cabot's age,” she said patiently. “I'm just a kid, you know.”

“I don't know. You are a woman, and an attractive one. There are some guys around here who would take advantage of that.”

“Who are these kids in the pool?” she said, changing the subject.

“Two of them are the sons of a television producer, and the third is the son of a director. They're here for the summer. Want to meet them?”

“Not particularly. They're making a lot of noise.”

“I'll introduce you to them. They're kind of young for you, but they're nice kids. A couple of years older than you.”

“I'll meet them when they get out of the pool,” she said without enthusiasm.

Al lay for a few minutes in the sun.

“Sweetie, I want to talk to you about your mother,” Al said in a confidential tone. He looked around him, but no one was nearby. “She would be the last one to tell you this, but I figure you ought to know,” he said in a low tone. “She is about to go into bankruptcy, unless some break comes along awfully fast.”

Courtney frowned, puzzled. “But her contract . . .”

“The studio is not taking up her option. There's a chance that she might get the lead in Nick Russell's new picture, and that's about the only hope she has. You know, she isn't the draw that she was a year ago. They've been tightening up, as you probably know, and actors are being let out of their contracts by carloads. She's very much in debt, and unless she gets this assignment I don't see anything for her to do but declare bankruptcy. Those last two pictures were really bombs, and everybody's so frightened they're not able to take a chance on her now.”

“But what about the Plaza, and the Garden, and the house she's going to get in Beverly Hills this fall?”

“Baby, you know your mother as well as I do. She's a screwball, and she thinks that money will always be provided for her by some invisible power. She can't believe that she is broke, so she just goes more and more in debt, figuring that at the last minute something will come along.”

“Mr. Micawber,” Courtney mused.

“Huh?”

“Nothing.”

“So, kid, that's how things stand. I thought I'd better tell you, because you're the only sensible member of the family, and maybe you can keep her from crazy shopping binges and all that. Also, I didn't want all this to hit you like a bomb. I wanted you to be prepared, because you're old enough to handle these things.”

Courtney was reminded of what had been said to her all her childhood as she was handed responsibility that a child should never have, and as she was made aware of realities that a child should ignore until the child himself chooses to step down from his tower of fantasies to the plain of Babel. She sighed inaudibly.

“I'm glad you told me, Al. Maybe you and I together can make her act a little sensibly, but I doubt it. Anyhow, I'll try, and I'll try not to ask for money or clothes or things, so she won't be tempted to go more into debt.”

She saw the house in the hills above Beverly Hills become indistinct in the sunlight, merging with the pastels of this most unreal of real worlds. What the hell, she thought, I didn't base my decision to come out here on money. Though money always helps, she added. How grubby! she thought suddenly, angrily. How grubby and obscene to be facing bankruptcy! But then, that was the price that had to be paid for living in a world of fantasy and illusion, a charming world. Maybe. She didn't know.

As Courtney lay in the sun beside Al Leone, she found herself thinking about Barry Cabot. She would like to know him, she would like to talk with him. It would be nice to sit beside him in the evening, during the hour that she usually walked along The Strip by herself. She was sick of solitude, she was a little frightened of it, though she did not know why. Suddenly, irrelevantly, she wondered what it would be like to kiss Barry Cabot. But that was a foolish thought; she was still a kid, and a man like Barry Cabot wouldn't pay any attention to her. She dismissed the thought.