Judith Krantz (52 page)

Jazz sat down on the floor while she considered what to do. Her face was level with the mattress, and she studied Casey as he slept. The covers were pulled all the way up to his chin so that only his face was visible. He looked like a little boy, she thought, a freckled boy of summer. His furrowed forehead was
smooth, as it so rarely was during the day, and his habitually intense expression was absent. He seemed almost to be smiling in his sleep. Perhaps he was dreaming the same dream she’d had?

Jazz’s eyes, so obsessed by the design of the human face, wandered slowly, judgmentally, from Casey’s chin to his hairline, from his nose to his eyelids, from his ears to his mouth, all of them colorless in the dim light. His red hair, with its occasional curls and cowlicks, could have been any dark color, yet each individual feature was agreeable to her, deeply agreeable, even the nose that was too broad at its base. Each of them was solid, each arranged in an excellent relationship to the others. His features were unquestionably blunt, but their bluntness was not that of insensitivity but that of strength.

Still, with his eyes closed he wasn’t at his best, Jazz decided. She missed the flashing brightness of his pupils, which were the interesting brown of a ripe hazelnut, and she missed the stubborn lion cub look that he had when he was speaking. Yes, he was better awake than asleep, no question about it, but had any man ever slept so deeply?

With an exasperated little noise, Jazz leaned forward and kissed Casey on his faintly smiling mouth. He showed no signs of waking up. She kissed him again, at length, the kind of a kiss no real, red-blooded man, in her opinion, should be able to sleep through, and all he did was try to move away from her lips. This was really getting annoying.

She could whistle piercingly right into his ear, Jazz thought. That would get his attention. But with Casey’s propensity for clumsiness, he’d probably punch her out before he realized who she was. Jazz considered for a minute and then held Casey’s nostrils together with her thumb and forefinger, so that he couldn’t breathe through his nose, and fastened her lips tightly to his lips, so that he couldn’t breathe through his mouth. Still asleep, he tried to twist away, but she had his nose so firmly in her fingers that he couldn’t move.

As he started to smother, Casey’s eyelids flew open and Jazz pulled away quickly.

“It’s just me,” she said.

“Huh? Huh?” He was utterly confused.

“It’s me, Jazz.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I … I wanted to tell you something.” Why had she come, Jazz wondered in a fluster. She’d had a very good and important reason for her presence in his room, but in the long interval between leaving her own room and waking Casey up, she’d lost her earlier train of thought.

“You wanted to
tell
me something?”

“Yes … something about a dream. I’m absolutely freezing. Can I get into bed with you?”

“What!”

“Just to get warm. Come on, let me in. I’ll catch something if you don’t.”

“I will not.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t wear pajamas.”

“Well, I’m fully dressed and I won’t look. Don’t be such a prude.” Jazz dove under his blanket.

“Ah. Better! It’s nice and warm in here.”

“Jesus, Jazz!”

“What’s the matter?”

“What have you got on? It feels like ice.”

“Pete gave it to me for Christmas. It’s gorgeous … a black satin robe with matching pajamas.”

“Pete gives you black satin underwear? I thought Pete was your business partner.”

“He is, and this isn’t really underwear, it’s lingerie. Anyway, Pete’s such a darling—he has this longtime fantasy about me … a kind of harmless, permanent yen that doesn’t mean anything … could you move over a little? I’m on the edge of the bed here.”

Casey slid into the far middle of the bed, and Jazz promptly rolled over so that she was lying as close to him as possible. He was very warm, very naked and very standoffish.

“Jazz, what the hell are you up to?” Casey asked sternly.

“Why are you so suspicious? I had something to tell you about a dream, but I can’t exactly put my finger on it now … you know how dreams are.”

“If I showed up in your room in the middle of the night and flung myself into your bed, what would you think?”

“That would be entirely different.”

“In what way?” Casey demanded.

“Well, you’d probably have … something else … in mind,” Jazz quavered. Now that he put it so crudely, without any understanding of the now-misty inner logic that had somehow brought her here, it probably would seem a little odd to him. She wished he’d shut up and be more … hospitable. Jazz put up her arms and locked them around Casey’s neck. “You could kiss me, at least,” she murmured.

“Great. Just great.” Casey captured her arms and held them firmly so that they didn’t touch him. “ ‘At least.’ What do you think I am, some sort of life-sized toy? You spent the whole evening ranting obsessively about a man you’d once been planning to marry, you’ve invited your latest lover, major movie star Sam Butler, here for a family Christmas, and now you want to do a little bit of cuddling with me to show off how cute you look in the pajamas darling old Pete, with his unquenchable yen, gave you.”

“Oh! You shit!” Jazz jerked away and sat up in the bed. “That’s the most unfair, unfounded accusation I’ve ever heard in my life.”

“Yeah? You say that I’d only want one thing from you, but all you want from me is a kiss. What are you doing in my bed, unless you want me to make love to you? Truly make love, seriously make love, for-keeps make love. But you don’t, do you?”

“What do you expect me to say?” God
damn
him, Jazz thought, that had been exactly what she wanted, the lousy bastard, but she’d burn in hell before she told him so. And she’d never, ever, in a million
billion years, tell him her dream. Didn’t the stupid schmuck know anything about women?

“You’re the damnedest tease I’ve ever come across. One more scalp for your collection, that’s what I’d be. Well, you can forget that. I won’t play. Just leave me alone and go back to tormenting lovely Sam and sweet Pete and unforgettable Gabe.”

“Go to hell!” Jazz cried, popping out of bed and scurrying across to the door. “You fascist pig!”

“Would you say that the words ‘painfully polite’ are appropriate?” Red asked Mike in a quick, low whisper, as they preceded Jazz and Casey into the restaurant in Laguna Beach on Saturday night.

“I think ‘the triumph of dignity’ is more like it,” he answered.

“It’s not as if they’re not speaking,” Red said, rolling her eyes.

“Not speaking,” Mike muttered, “would be an improvement. Who needs the younger generation?”

He was benignly amused by the way Casey and Jazz were behaving. He’d never seen his unpredictable daughter so blandly agreeable, so monotonously pleasant, so downright boring. As for Casey, he was as stiff as a career diplomat making his first visit to the protocol-crazed emperor of a foreign country.

As he pulled out her chair for Red to sit down, she leaned toward him and summed up her opinion. “Either they did and it was a bummer, or he wanted to and she wouldn’t.”

“Nothing else would explain it,” Mike Kilkullen agreed. “I wish they’d stayed home and taken another shot. They shouldn’t expect to get it right the first time … they’re too young.”

He had made reservations at L’Ambroise, one of the few expensive, elaborate and formal French restaurants in this casual beach community. Normally they would have dinner at the hacienda, but Mike wanted to give Susie extra time to get a jump on tomorrow’s cooking, when the rest of the family, ten
strong, would arrive. She had hired two of her local kitchen helpers and two waitresses to come in daily for the next week, but Susie, being Susie, was busy doing the major preparations herself.

The Saturday night before Christmas was no night to leave home, Mike Kilkullen reflected. They had had trouble finding a place to park in a crowded mall lot where many of the stores would still be open all evening, but at least this restaurant, with its resident pianist who knew all the great old standards, could be counted on to serve excellent food in an atmosphere that relentlessly excluded small, boisterous children.

“Let’s celebrate, darling,” Red said to him. “Caviar and vodka, don’t you think, and lots of it?”

“Good idea.” He pressed her hand tightly, divining her intention. If Red thought that food and alcohol might lighten the air between Casey and Jazz, what better, more rapid way to go than caviar and vodka? The combination must possess an invaluable quality that smoothed the edges of even the most hostile of adversaries, or the Russians wouldn’t always use it to break the ice on official occasions.

“What are we celebrating, Daddy?” Jazz asked, after Mike had ordered.

“Life in general, kid. Health and love and friends—all those good things.”

His daughter must be really pissed at Casey, he thought, for she had gone to considerable trouble to be at her most wickedly wonderful. She wore a very short dress that, in any other era, would barely even have been considered a teddy, much less a slip, an alluring wisp of spidery brown lace over nude chiffon, with only the thinnest of straps to hold it up over her breasts. She had, damned if he knew how, arranged her hair in the Veronica Lake style of the 1940s, so that its waves flopped over one side of her face, and when she sat down she managed to place herself so that she gave Casey not only her bare back and her cold shoulder, but also her blind eye.

A waiter brought them all footed crystal schnapps glasses and filled them from a carafe that had arrived
at the table encased in a block of ice. Mike Kilkullen listened carefully to the pianist playing a great song from 1936 before he raised his glass in a toast to Red.

“The night is young and you’re so beautiful,” he said, and swallowed the vodka in one, gulp.

“Sing it to me?” she suggested.

“Not me … I can’t carry a tune.”

Red raised her glass and drawled, “May I have the next romance with you—from that same year.” She downed her glass and held it up for more.

“Hey, let me in on this,” Jazz demanded, raising her glass to the two of them. “A lovely way to spend an evening—no, wait, I want another chance—my heart belongs to Daddy—and Red too.” Attentively the waiter refilled her empty glass.

“My turn,” Casey said. “All or nothing at all.”

Red gave Mike a self-congratulatory pinch under the table. She was never wrong about sex, and if she’d needed confirmation, she had it now.

It was Mike’s turn again, and they all turned to him. “The loveliness of you,” he announced, looking into Red’s beautiful face, enormously pleased with himself. Songwriters, those of long ago, were definitely on his side.

“When my dream boat comes home,” Red toasted him.

“I’ve got my love to keep me warm,” Jazz tossed off, blowing Mike a kiss.

“Fools rush in,” Casey offered. His choice was greeted by a chorus of boos from Red and Mike, and silence from Jazz. “Can I have another try? O.K.—for Red—there’s something nice about everyone, but there’s everything nice about you.”

“Now, where did that come from?” Red asked with a disbelieving laugh.

“Nineteen twenty-seven,” Casey answered, showing off his esoteric knowledge.

Mike Kilkullen held his glass up again. “Happy days are here again—for all of us.”

As he swallowed, he saw himself, year after year, for forty-five years, saddling his horse at sunrise and
riding out with his vaqueros to the upper pastures and the waiting cattle; he saw Sylvie, holding Jazz in her lap in the old rocking chair, singing her baby a Swedish lullaby. It hadn’t always been a happy life, or an easy one, but he wouldn’t trade it for the life of any other man on earth.

The waiter made the round of the table again. This time, Jazz was the first to raise her glass. “I want to marry a male quartet,” she announced with a wide, defiant grin.

“The lady is a tramp,” Casey countered.

“Just hold it a minute, you two,” Red objected. “We’re getting off the track here. A little respect, please. All right.” She turned to Mike, having restored order among the young. She lifted her glass. “More than you know.”

“With a song in my heart.” He grinned at her, clinking crystal on crystal before he poured the vodka down his throat.

“I had the craziest dream,” Jazz toasted the table with an enigmatic gesture.

“Not allowed, it doesn’t make sense,” Red, a self-appointed referee, spoke up.

“Does it have to make sense?”

“If you’re going to play, absolutely yes.”

“O.K. A lemon in the garden of love. No? Come on, it’s from 1906, honest. Ah, Red, you’re rough. Life is just a bowl of cherries—that suit you?”

“Much better,” Red approved.

“Not for all the tea in China,” Casey volunteered emphatically, tossing off his glass.

“Casey, you’re as out of line as Jazz. You get another chance,” Red said through her laughter.

“She wouldn’t do—what I asked her to.”

“You made that one up,” Mike said accusingly.

“Written in 1923, same year as that immortal song, ‘I won’t say I will but I won’t say I won’t’—from
Little Miss Bluebeard
, music by Gershwin. Must have been another prime year for confused females. Ask me anything, Mike, this is my field of real expertise. Cows are as nothing compared to this.”

“You have a gift for the unexpected.” Red made a toast to Casey, although there was no song to match her words.

“Let’s call the whole thing off.” Jazz drained her glass and slammed it down on the table with unnecessary force. “I need caviar,” she added. Her attention was still focused on Red and her father. She hadn’t favored Casey with so much as a toss of her head.

“We all need caviar,” Mike said. They had drained the carafe of vodka so quickly that the waiters were only now serving the caviar from the big blue tin nestled in a silver bowl of crushed ice, being careful not to bruise a single one of the large, fragile gray eggs.

Red had been wrong about the mellowing effect drink would have on Jazz and Casey, she reflected. It seemed to have had the opposite effect. In a minute they’d be passing the ammunition and forgetting to praise the Lord. Well, the adults had done as much to help the children as they decently could.