Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (16 page)

“Of course you are, my love. But with a welcome hint of the supernatural that rocks my agnostic bent to its shoes. Talent knows its limits. Well, actually it doesn’t if it’s talent, but it knows its strengths. Five years ago next month, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sweet man. Do you think enough time’s gone by that we could show our faces on the Great White Way again?”

Addison frowned in mock calculation. “Not quite, but I’m fairly sure enough magazine covers have. Why, d’you want to go?”

But Gerson wanted a flashback, which socially was very un-Gersonish of him. He spent enough time dragging conversations back to his menu at work; as a host, he was a devoted audience. “My God, Jake. Jerusalem. When were you there?”

“Early ’49, not too long after the armistice. The CIA had just blackballed me, so the passport was a bit of a problem. It may have been the only time being Jewish made my life easier.”

Gerson winced. “How so?”

“It’s a topsy-turvy world we live in, Noah. I only got one by swearing under the table I wouldn’t need it long. In other words, I wasn’t visiting—I was planning to emigrate. Once the most junior Israeli consular officer hears the magic word
Aliyah
,
the State Department turns on the spot into the walls of Jericho.”

Eve laughed. “Why didn’t Arthur Miller think of that?” she wondered prettily.

“Ah!” Addison said. “He only wanted to go to London. Bit hard to frame a desire to see your own play staged by my former countrymen as a religious imperative unless you’re mad as a hatter. Not that they shouldn’t have given him the damn thing, of course.”

“Hell, why didn’t he just lie?” a well-brandied Pam bandied on her way to the decanter. “The SOB does call himself a playwright, after all.”

“I did. And I only call myself a professor,” Jake said as my husband looked perturbed. I hadn’t had a chance to ask him how their final meeting with Gene Rickey had gone. “Of course it was a leedle embarrassing at the other end when I had to put down me shovel, dust off me American hands, and tell them Jake Cohnstein had changed his mind. Which I never had, but they didn’t know that.”

“You weren’t tempted at all?” Gerson asked.

“No, not for a minute, Noah! Israel was David’s dream, not mine. Fulfilling our fathers’ dreams is a dove disguised as an eagle, but fulfilling a son’s is a vulture disguised as a phoenix. Of course he never knew they’d call it Israel. To him it was Palestine.”

“We were going to have a child,” Gerson said unexpectedly. “My first wife and I, I mean. But they died.” I decided to dawdle a bit over replugging the decanter.

“What did the Israelis do anyhow—” that was Eve calling, oblivious and grinningly ginned—“toss a coin?”

“I imagine it was a mite more fraught than that. Naming a child is responsibility enough,” said Addison steadily. “Naming a book is my limit. I wouldn’t want the burden of naming a country if it were only bloody Monaco. And it wasn’t.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Jake agreed. “I will say going there did give me something I’d always wanted to see. Certainly not in my Bolshie days, even though we pretended. Noah here probably won’t want to admit it was pretending even now, but it was.”

“Oh, no! Oh, no,” I said, swooping back in between them. “You two aren’t going to have
that
conversation again.”

“No, Pam. We aren’t.” By Gerson’s Smirnoff-again-on-again standards, that was downright brusque.

“What was it you’d wanted to see, Jake?” Addison asked.

“A beginning.” If any of us had ever wondered what he’d looked like at twelve, that grin was our clue. Then it matured into his familiar one: “Then again, that was why I took it into my head to hope the CIA had room for the likes of Jake Cohnstein too, so clearly I’m not choosy. You always want—just once!—to be present at the creation.”

“Oh, the
tree!
”
said Eve. “Ad, are you sure you don’t want to have children?”

“Not the tree.” That was Gerson. “The country.”

“Yes. Imagine watching
Oedipus Rex
without knowing she’s his mother, Addison! That’s one trick this show of yours for Gene Rickey can’t manage, Noah. Well, I saw it. There were still burnt-out supply trucks on the road to Jerusalem.”

“I envy you!” Gerson said with a stare at the walls. “Look at this crap and pity me. No matter how often I read the British band played ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ at Yorktown, I’ll never
hear
it. I’ve got it on an LP, of course. But I’ll never be there. I can only imagine that one drummer boy on the left in tears.”

“Noah! You surprise me, I must say.”

“I’m not picturing him naked, you son of a bitch,” said Gerson in the closest he’d ever come to acknowledging Jake’s sexuality to his face. “Just in tears, in tears.”

“I’m picturing him both.” That was Eve. “Yummy. Naught but a drum.”

“Why, you bloody bitch! We
aren’t
having children. Even pets.” That was Addison. “I won’t risk it. God help the servants.”

“All right with me! I’m a plant. I’m random. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Screw you.”

“Jake, I do envy you,” Gerson said with new formality. “I know that’s why I keep trying to go back in the time machine. I used to read all this”—he nodded at Winken, Blinken, and Nod—“and tell myself, ‘Well, it’s belief disguised as escapism!’ Now I worry it’s just escapism disguised as belief.”

“You’ll prosper in TV, m’boy,” Addison muttered, crotchety with Scotch.

“Ad, I simply can’t accept that,” Gerson said promptly. “Not yet.”

I’m no great fan of
Never
,
Panama. Not even with your great-grandfather’s gun in my lap. Drunk as I was and we all were by then, Gerson taught me two of the noblest words in our language:
Not yet.

“Well, it’s not really such a privileged experience as all that,” said Jake. “Why don’t you just go yourself?”

“To Israel? Don’t tease me, Jake. Even if I didn’t have—obligations, I’m much too old to start over that way.”

“I meant on your next vacation, Noah,” Jake explained after a moment. “Come back and tell me how tall David’s tree is.”

“Oh a visit! Oh of course. No reason not to at all,” Gerson fumbled. “I just got confused. Forgive me, Pammie.”

“So are we all, I think,” Addison said after another moment. “I’m quite comfortable with that myself, but someone’s got to drive. Eve?”

“I’m pretty trinked too.”

“Yes, dear. But there isn’t a police officer in this city who’d write you a ticket. I have an accent, an unknown face, and a helplessly supercilious manner even I loathe. I’d be in the hoosegow before you’d finished redoing your lipstick for the nice patrolman.”

After they’d all gone home—even Gerson, if home meant upstairs; even Jake, if home meant our guest wing—I lingered on in Stella Negroponte’s room, pretending I cared about the scummed glasses, miniature Boot Hills of full ashtrays, and mostly virginal, incipiently spinsterish coffee cups. Luz’s job in the morning, but I thought I’d at least make a start after my nightcap. And spot the mistake there, since some minutes later I was blurrily realizing that now at some point I’d have to get up and collect those scattered clothes too: that quadruple-cupped bra, that zigzag-buttoned blouse, that repeatedly pleated skirt, and those four-legged undies. All four of Stella’s eyes were watching but neither of the bitch’s mouths moved.

Stupid, but I’d never before heard my husband express erotic longing for any other entity but me. He was as incapable of infidelity even with the dead as any man on hell’s green earth. Any marriage made of more than toothpicks can survive an adultery, and in hindsight I knew I’d committed more figurative ones in the last year of mine to Murphy than Bran had the literal-minded kind. Not for lack of trying, but even he couldn’t take on four hundred sixty-six marching women at once.

Glimpses of each other’s unlived lives are the real abyss: the ones that imagine you a stranger or dead as Stella Negroponte or someone who never existed. We’ve all got them and yet spotting our spouse’s is intolerable. I’d just found out about Gerson’s Great Unknown, which unlike mine had a name and location. At least I’d had the goddam decency to keep Pam’s to myself instead of blurting it out in my cups.

“Look, Gerson,” I giggle-gurgled on the rug. “Here’s my cunt. You never call it that. Cunt, cunt, cunt! Stella’s watching and she’s naked too.”

But since he was asleep upstairs in European striped pajamas, he didn’t answer. At one level I’d have given a lot to see the look on his face if he were awake.

“Gerson, did you ever find out your first wife’s anus is just a
leedle
hairy? Not that I’m complaining. Do you want to know what Dachau smelled like? Do you want to know what Dachau tastes like? Sharon, stick your tits in her! Punish her. Fuck her. Cram your mompricks up her.”

“Oh, God! Oh, Pam. I thought you’d never ask. God, I’m naked too! I’m so shy and old now. Here’s my kitchenized fat deadboy twat. Shove a burning B-17 up it please, why don’t you? It’s all I ever think about anymore.”

“The hell with that! Let me suck dead Stella’s smell off your nipples. What do I care, I’m drunk and I have nightmares and I haven’t written a word in five years.”

Posted by: A Pamographer

Not quite true, by the way. Even if you don’t count letters—to Cath Charters, to Brother Nicholas, to Jake himself—I’d done two or three pieces for
Regent’s
on the voluptuous allure of Hollywood. Roy had liked them well enough to wonder if I’d be interested in turning movie reviewer, but even if I’d felt qualified (I didn’t), it was obviously impractical with Gerson at Metro. By the time he moved to Rik-Kuk, someone else’s byline was handling the faint praise and beheadings.

Anyhow, if you’re still with me, bikini girl, you may as well know your Gramela’s first venture into cyberporn is a drastic abridgment of what really poured out. So it may surprise you that I came downstairs the next morning able to return Stella Negroponte’s gaze without flinching. Then I glanced around Gerson’s library.

“Oh, all right then!” I said. “
À nous deux.
I’m going to prove him wrong if it kills me.”

Shades of Peg Kimball in
The Gal I Left Behind Me
.
But you see, if we aren’t Jewish, we don’t have an Israel. We’re stuck here in the crap we’ve got around us. By now even the Israelis know the feeling.

“Sorry, Pam?” It was Jake, preposterously showered. I’d clean forgotten our guest wing was right off the den, but his face didn’t hint he’d witnessed or overheard anything out of the ordinary. I remembered from Sergeant Kowalski days that he was a deep sleeper.

I got us both coffee, a ritual best understood—in the
Nine-
teen
Fif
-ties, Panama—as a necessary binge of quick slurps and mild “Ows!” while avoiding contemplation of last night’s harlequinade of glassware. “Hungry?” I asked.

“Starving.” Lips stung by the cup’s rim, he smiled. Then asked in turn, “Hung?”

“Oh, maybe a leedle.” I could’ve strangled myself, but he didn’t react. Pam had the unnervingly alluring thought that being caught would’ve been more permissible if I’d been the guest and not the miscast host.

“Yes, me too. Hope I can get some sleep on the plane.” Not bothering to put hand to mouth, he showed me his fillings. “Tenure interview tomorrow.”

He wanted me to catch that, so I did. “You’re turning Rik-Kuk down, aren’t you?”

“Uh-huh. I didn’t much like myself last night, Pammie. Or anyone on hand, to be honest. I know they say Hollywood does strange things to people, but I didn’t think Jake Cohnstein would succumb in under, what’s it been? A week. For one thing, I’m not used to hearing Jake Cohnstein assertively call Jake Cohnstein Jake Cohnstein in conversation. Are you?”

“No, but—” I decided not to explain that I’d thought I knew the reason. “But you have to remember we aren’t like that when we’re working.”

An irrational “we,” I agree, for Pam to include herself in. Yet the Hollywood “we” isn’t functional: it’s tribal.

“It’s not just that. Ah!” His coffee had cooled enough for a nonstinging mouthful, the reward for all those burnt sips. You’re frightened it’ll stay that hot unless you demonstrate you’re willing to suffer for its sake. “I think Noah’s a dreamer. Pam, you’ve met Gene Rickey.”

“Sure. But Fran’s the horror.”

“Lord help you if she’s worse. I’m not used to people who call Shakespeare Willy. Or to hearing myself called, variously, Jack, Jerry, and Joe.”

Out before I thought, it broke one of our rules. “What, Gerson didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“Odds are you’d have to give up being Jake Cohnstein, at least in the credits. Gene was trying things out. Jack Clamstone, Jerry Cumberland.”

“Why couldn’t I have been? Gerson’s Gerson. I couldn’t watch much of
That’s My Fran
,
but I did get that far.”

“Oh, well. Noah Gerson is only going to sound Jewish if you live here. In Minnesota it goes right by. But Jake Cohnstein just sounds”—I felt helpless, but it was awfully early—“Jewisher.”

“Hear that, Noah?” Jake said. “Nah, nah. The game is done—I’ve won, I’ve won. I’m Jewisher.”

My bathrobed husband reached for his mug. “Are we still talking about Jerusalem? Good. I wanted to hear more.”

“No, Hollywood. But I don’t think we’ve met.” Jake put out his hand. “I’m Jack Cornhole.”

“No, that would never—” Gerson’s face sagged. “That’s a no, I take it.”

“Afraid so. I was planning to tell you on the way to the airport.”

“We couldn’t—”

“Really, no. But I do thank you for the offer, Noah, and the trip. God knows I saw a lot.”

Posted by: Pam

Assuming you’ve read it, something Amazon says isn’t likely, you may be baffled by my insistence that rapturous
Glory Be
—forgotten now, scorned in the groves of academe, but in the
Nine-
teen
Fif
-ties,  Panama,
by Pamela Buchanan
’s second and last bestseller—came out of solo squalor under Stella’s gaze, self-sick and she-sick and seasick from those towering waves of suddenly inadequate Winken, Blinken
,
and Nod. Don’t be. Up until Cath Charters placed it at Random House, the full title was
Glory Be: A Beginning
.

My original plan was to end with a verbal closeup of a British drummer boy—sorry, Eve, fully clothed—beating “The World Turned Upside Down” at Yorktown. It didn’t work out that way because I realized I wanted to end with a beginning, leaving the outcome in now notional but once real suspense. I brought the curtain down instead with the Shot Heard ’Round the World. The book didn’t call it that because they didn’t yet.

Since I soon learned that nobody then or now knew whether a redcoat or a militiaman fired the war’s literal first shot at Lexington, I left my nameless final protagonist’s allegiance ambiguous while tempting the reader to guess he was an American rebel: shades of the unidentified “hands” I’d described a decade earlier pac
king dynamite in “To the Ends of the Earth.” Also a classic example of why academia’s tenured ninepins revile my kind of history. My final image was a verbal closeup of a finger tightening on a trigger: by a coincidence I was conscious of long before sharing it with you, just how my life and daisysdaughter.com
will end 231 years later if Pink wins her battle with Kirsten. Closing line? “They say he pulled it soon after eight in the morning on April 19, 1775.”