Don't Speak to Strange Girls (7 page)

Hoff felt that whatever he’d accomplished came because he still had an enthusiasm for money and possessions brought with him from the push-cart days in Milwaukee. Everything was worthy of his attention. But this wasn’t true with some of the biggest people out here. “No, it isn’t worth it.” These words summed up the history of ills, the tragedy of the movie business. Edison had said it first when his attorney had wanted him to shell out $150.00 to protect his kinetoscope patents abroad, and the words had been repeated countless times by myonic studio heads ever since: the new, the untried, the offbeat, the unusual — all damned.

He chewed at his mouth, thinking it was like this with Clay and visiting a psychiatrist. He didn’t believe in them, he didn’t like the idea, somehow he believed a man had to be insane to be treated by a neurologist.

Hoff said, “Don’t you believe this, Clay? You might feel guilt. A psychiatrist might help. Don’t you see how what Royal says must be true? It’s so simple. It covers everything.”

“Even if it were true, what could I do about it?”

“You won’t see my doctor — a marvelous person, Clay?”

“You know better.”

“Then get to work, Clay. Get interested in something. You see, the way it is in psychiatry, you learn to face your problem, and when you can face it, you can overcome it.”

“I’m all right. Just let me alone.”

Clay did not turn from the window. Hoff stood there a long time, his heavy shoulders sagged round. He stared at Clay and then padded back to the plate of sandwiches, took one and shoved it into his mouth, chewing loudly.

“Clay, I brought somebody along to speak with you.”

Clay turned from the window. “My God, not the headshrinker?”

Hoff shook his head. “Oh no. The real estate man I told you about. Morrel. He’s interested in your valley acreage. I explained to him that you had accepted Ringling’s advice to hold it. He wants just less than five minutes. He wants to picture you what he has in mind for this property. A glowing picture, Clay. You could not help feeling better, hearing a man with his kind of sincere enthusiasm.”

“I don’t want to talk to him.”

“Clay. Five minutes. Can it hurt?”

“Make the best deal possible. Sell the damn stuff. I don’t care. Do anything you like.”

Hoff was reaching for another sandwich. His pudgy hand stopped in mid-air. He shook his head. He turned and faced Stuart. His mouth sagged and then quivered slightly.

“Now, Clay, I’m not trying to pressure you — ”

“I know. You think Ringling will knife you for this. So do I … That’s your problem.”

Hoff looked as if he would cry. “I didn’t mean to pressure you. I didn’t mean you had to sell. Clay, I just wanted you to see this man — to listen to him.”

The telephone rang loudly on the table beside the divan. Both of them looked at it. but neither moved.

“Just listen to him,” Hoff said. “I told him you will not sell. I am not trying to make you sell.”

The telephone rang again, shrill and insistent.

“I don’t want to talk to him.” Clay lifted the receiver to escape Hoff. “Make the deal you think best. I’d rather sell it to him than listen to you. Now get out.”

Hoff was trembling. He stayed where he was as if rooted to the floor.

“Hello. Clay? Is this you, Clay?”

He did not pretend he didn’t recognize the voice. He felt an odd quickening of his heart. What a fool thing.

“Yes. This is Stuart,” he said. He tried to keep his pleasure out of his voice, the fact that he had wondered when she would call again. “Who is this?”

“Why it’s Joanne, Mr. Stuart. Joanne Stark. My, you do have a terrible memory.”

“Abstruse?” he said.

She laughed. “Why, you are right friendly after all.”

Clay covered the mouthpiece with his hand, jerked his head toward the foyer door. “Goodbye, Marty.”

Joanne said, voice rising across the wires. “Are you there? Clay, you didn’t hang up?”

“Not yet.” He watched Hoff go slowly across the room, close the door behind him.

“Why, I’ve been calling you for perfect weeks, Mr. Stuart. Where’ve you been?”

“I was out of town for a few days. Hunting.”

“Hunting?” She laughed. “Why would you go out of town hunting when the best hunting in the world is right here in town?”

He laughed with her. “They won’t let you shoot it in the city limits.”

Her throaty voice became warmer. “Well, you sound so nice today. The other time you sounded so cold.”

“Well, you were a stranger then.”

“Don’t you speak to strange girls?”

He did not answer and after a moment she said hurriedly, “I had a reason for calling you this time. Honestly.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. You want to hear it?”

“All right.”

“No. You’ve got to be nicer than that. You’ve got to say you want to hear it. After all, you must think I’m terrible the way I chase you like this … I’ll bet girls follow you around and call you all the time … say it, you want to hear why I called you this time.”

His voice was smiling. “Oh, I do.”

“You know, something is wrong here. I think I’ve got the wrong connection this time. This doesn’t sound like the chilled, aloof Andrew Clay Stuart I know.”

“Why did you call this time?”

“Well, I’m in your neighborhood this afternoon. What do you think of that?”

Clay waited, feeling the quickening beat of his heart. What was the matter with him? Nobody in his right mind fell for a gimmick like this. There were hundreds of ways that women wrangled an unlisted number, and none of it ever led to anything good. But there was a quality of warmth and excitement in her voice. It projected itself across the wires. It caught at him, at his mind and his imagination. He had thought about her often since she’d called that first time. The biological reaction — and working across the phone lines like this. He was interested enough to want to see what she looked like. If he couldn’t handle himself at his age, what did it matter? Her voice was the first thing that had aroused his interest in months. He wanted to see what she looked like.

“Aren’t you pleased?” she said.

He waited again. She said, “Aren’t you? If you’re not, why I can hang up. I’m sorry I bothered you.”

“You don’t bother me.”

“I thought I might drop by for a cocktail. Do you like
daiquiris …? I mean, if you weren’t doing anything?”

Yes, he thought, my God yes. Why don’t you?

“All right,” he said. “If you’d like to.”

“Be about an hour,” she said, excitement in her voice.

“I’ll bake a cake.” He wanted to laugh with her. He felt young again, no longer so cold. Funny how little it took. Then she said something that chilled him, stopped it all cold.

“What’s your address, Mr. Stuart?”

“What?”

“Where do you live?”

“I thought you were in the neighborhood.”

“What do you care, Mr. S.? I can be. Like I said. In an hour. Less even.”

“You got my phone number, why not my address?”

“Just didn’t work that way. What’s the matter? Why are you suddenly so stuffy again? What have I done wrong? All I asked you for is your address.”

“Hell,” he said, “you can get that from any one of the tour guides.”

He replaced the receiver, stood staring at it. He felt an unaccountable emptiness, a feeling of insufficiency and loss. He felt as if he had lost something valuable and the odd part was that whatever it was he’d lost, he’d never had anyway.

He stood there four or five minutes without moving until he finally admitted consciously that he was waiting for that phone to ring, waiting for her to call back. But she did not call back. The phone sat there, black and lifeless, silent and useless.

He turned then and walked out of the room. He went out on the terrace. There was a wind gusting out of the canyon. Leaves swirled on the grass and skittered across the flagstones about his feet.

chapter seven

T
HE PHONE
rang. Clay cursed himself when he had sprinted halfway into the library, and brought himself to a screeching halt. The phone stopped ringing anyhow, and after a moment McEsters came in walking so stiffly, so precisely, he looked like a comedy butler, and said Mr. Shatner was calling.

Clay wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. What the hell, she wasn’t going to call back. Why should she call back? Besides, he had hung up on her, hadn’t he? It was the smart thing, and it was what he knew he had to do.

Shatner wanted him to double date. He had a table for four at Ben Blue’s in Santa Monica. Should be passionate fun. Ben Blue was a lot of laughs but the girls he’d lined up were nothing to laugh about.

“No,” Clay said. “I’m sorry.”

“You going to spend the rest of your life walled up in that house? You think maybe you’re Gloria Swanson in
Sunset Boulevard
?”

“No. Her figure. Much better than mine.”

“Look, Clay. These girls. Just imported from New York. Domestic, but good. All new. First run.”

“Not this time, Marc.”

“Stuff like this doesn’t keep.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? Hell, it’s ruining my health just studding for your rejects.”

Clay replaced the receiver. He was instantly sorry. Marc was right, of course. A man could not bury himself. Given a couple of drinks he would love the girls, enjoy the jokes, be anxious to dance. He glanced toward the phone. And this was ridiculous. He had never seen the Stark doll. She was not going to call back. He had ended that one with a sharp cut. It was better. It was sensible.

Why did he despise himself for being so damn sensible?

When you wait for something you wish would happen, and it does not happen, time crawls. One such hour is longer than some other weeks. Clay prowled the house, took a shower, drank three whiskeys on-the-rocks and decided they were cutting the liquor. He felt nothing.

Finally he flopped down on the couch, lay staring at the ceiling. He decided he would call Shatner back; it wasn’t too late. He sighed, trying to remember the name of a girl who flashed in his mind, something in the association with Joanne’s throaty voice on that telephone. This girl had been a leading woman who had played opposite him at Paramount in an early 1930 movie. She made only a couple of pictures. She was the property of one of the producers. There had been electric charges between her and Clay Stuart from the first time she walked on the set. There was a tension about her that threw him off his feet. She was lovely as an angel with a hellish excitement in her eyes. The look in those eyes promised him hell and happiness, misery and torment. When they kissed for the camera, her mouth parted and her tongue was hot and her body was burning up. He had known then. It was between them. She felt everything that he felt for her — and in spades. Nights he went home to Ruth and concert music and friends in for bridge and once he had to stride out in the garden and vomit. His stomach was tied in knots that badly. During the day when he was near her, the smell of her tantalized him, made him ache across the bridge of his nose, made him remember that little girl in the outhouse and the way he needed to bury his face in her hair. He could remember the scent of that leading lady’s hair all these years later. He could not remember her name.

Not being able to remember her name angered him because it made him seem old, touched with the first quaverings of senility. Maybe it was just that he had been in the movies too long.

Abruptly he was remembering the old character star who’d once been a circus roustabout, the way the old fellow waved stock certificates worth hundreds of thousands of dollars around on the sets, yelling, “Look at these, you college sons of bitches. You own anything like this? Yeah. And I got boxes full of ‘em at home. Safety boxes stacked with them. Just like them.” The old boy loathed young actors and would do anything to louse them up, refuse to read a cue line, twist it, delay it, anything to throw the newcomer off-stride. Ask him why he did it, you always got the same answer: “Aw, I don’t like them, these new guys. Who needs ‘em?”

Clay shook the thought from his mind. And the actresses they put in his pictures, all like children, and he kept comparing them to people he’d known in the past. Seeing a girl like Natalie Wood in the Green Room at Warner’s commissary he would find himself remembering Gloria Swanson because both were so tiny, so dark and so lovely — so damned far apart, in different eras, but in one you could see something of the other, and he belonged in the big moments of the careers of both. It confused the dimensions of time for him; today was yesterday, yesterday was today and today was forever lost — like the name of that lovely young actress he’d wanted above everything on earth, and had never had.

“Mr. Stuart. Sir.”

Clay jumped up guiltily as though his pants were unzipped. The sound of McEster’s voice had startled him, yanked him back to this moment, and it seemed his thoughts trailed after him unwillingly.

Clay pushed his hands through his matted hair, blinking at McEsters in the wanly-lighted library.

“I’m sorry sir. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“What is it?”

“The young lady, sir. I’m sorry. The one who has called you so persistently — even when you were out of town. I tried to get rid of her. She insists you are expecting her.”

Clay closed his fists, and his heart banged against his rib cage and he wondered expectantly what she looked like. She was here. She was out there beyond that door.

“What was her name?” he said. He kept his voice level.

“Miss Stark. Miss Joanne Stark. Shall I send her away, sir?”

“No. I reckon not. I did say something to her about dropping in sometime. For cocktails. If she was ever up this way. You know? The kind of invitation you give out when you don’t mean it.” Even talking, Clay saw that he was trying to hide behind that flat exterior the way his raw emotions churned inside him. He’d been doing it all his life, since he was a kid on a Nebraska farm where you never cried no matter how badly you hurt. “The way you ask somebody how they are, and then hold your breath for fear they’ll tell you.”

He was pushing his hands through his hair, batting at the wrinkles in his slacks.