The Princess Bride (3 page)

“Not important,” I said. Sandy Sterling was smiling. From the deep end. Straight at me. “Thanks though anyway. “ I was about to hang up, then I said, “Well, as long as you’ve gone this far, call Argosy on Fifty-ninth Street. They specialize in out-of-print stuff.”

“Argosy. Fifty-ninth. Got it. Talk to you at supper. “ She hung up.

Without saying “No starlets now.” Every call she ends with that and now she doesn’t. Could I have given it away by something in my tone? Helen’s very spooky about that, being a shrink and all. Guilt, like pudding, began bubbling on the back burner.

I went back to my lounge chair. Alone.

Sandy Sterling swam a few laps. I picked up my New York
Times
. A certain amount of sexual tension in the vicinity. “Done swimming?” she asks. I put my paper down. She was by the edge of the pool now, nearest my chair.

I nod. staring at her.

“Which Zanuck, Dick or Darryl?”

“It was my wife,” I said. Emphasis on the last word.

Didn’t faze her. She got out and lay down in the next chair. Top heavy but golden. If you like them that way, you had to like Sandy Sterling. I like them that way.

“You’re out here on the Levin, aren’t you?
Stepford Wives?
“

“I’m doing the screenplay.”

“I really loved that book. That’s, like, my favorite book in all the world. I’d really love to be in a picture like that. Written by you. I’d do anything for a shot at that.”

So there it was. She was putting it right out there, on the line.

Naturally I set her straight fast. “Listen,” I said, “I don’t do things like that. If I did, I would, because you’re gorgeous, that goes without saying, and I wish you joy, but life’s too complicated without that kind of thing going on.”

That’s what I
thought
I was going to say. But then I figured, Hey wait a minute, what law is there that says you have to be the token puritan of the movie business? I’ve worked with people who keep card files on this kind of thing. (True; ask Joyce Haber. ) “Have you acted a lot in features?” I heard myself asking. Now you know I was really passionate to know the answer to that one.

“Nothing that really enlarged my boundaries, y’ know what I mean?”

“Mr. Goldman?”

I looked up. It was the assistant lifeguard.

“For you again.” He handed me the phone.

“Willy?” Just the sound of my wife’s voice sent sheer blind misgivings through each and every bit of me.

“Yes, Helen?”

“You sound funny.”

“What is it, Helen?”

“Nothing, but—”

“It can’t be nothing or you wouldn’t have called me.”

“What’s the matter, Willy?”

“
Nothing
is the matter. I was trying to be logical. You did, after all, place the call. I was merely trying to ascertain why.” I can be pretty distant when I put my mind to it.

“You’re hiding something.”

Nothing drives me crazier than when Helen does that. Because, see, with this horrible psychiatrist background of hers, she only accuses me of hiding things from her when I’m hiding things from her.
”Helen, I’m in the middle of a story conference now; just get on with it.”

So there it was again. I was lying to my wife about another woman, and the other woman knew it.

Sandy Sterling, in the next chair, smiled dead into my eyes.

“Argosy doesn’t have the book, nobody has the book, good-by, Willy.” She hung up.

“Wife again?”

I nodded, put the phone on the table by my lounge chair.

“You sure talk to each other a lot.”

“I know,” I told her. “It’s murder trying to get any writing done.”

I guess she smiled.

There was no way I could stop my heart from pounding.

“Chapter One. The Bride,” my father said.

I must have jerked around or something because she said, “Huh?”

“My fa—” I began. “I thou—” I began. “Nothing,” I said finally.

“Easy,” she said, and she gave me a really sweet smile. She dropped her hand over mine for just a second, very gentle and reassuring. I wondered was it possible she was understanding too. Gorgeous
and
understanding? Was that legal? Helen wasn’t ever understanding. She was always saying she was—”I understand why you’re saying that, Willy”—but secretly she was ferreting out my neuroses. No, I guess she was understanding; what she wasn’t was sympathetic. And, of course, she wasn’t gorgeous too. Skinny, yes. Brilliant, yes.

“I met my wife in graduate school,” I said to Sandy Sterling. “She was getting her Ph. D.”

Sandy Sterling was having a little trouble with my train of thought.

“We were just kids. How old are you?”

“You want my real age or my baseball age?”

I really laughed then. Gorgeous
and
understanding
and
funny?

“Fencing. Fighting. Torture,” my father said. “Love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Truths. Passion. Miracles.”

It was 12: 35 and I said, “One phone call, okay?”

“Okay.”

“New York City information,” I said into the receiver, and when I was through I said, “Could you give me the names of some Fourth Avenue bookshops, please. There must be twenty of them. “ Fourth Avenue is the used and out-of-print book center of the English-speaking chapter of the civilized world. While the operator looked, I turned to the creature on the next lounge and said, “My kid’s ten today, I’d kind of like for him to have this book from me, a present, won’t take a sec.”

“Swing,” Sandy Sterling said.

“I list one bookstore called the Fourth Avenue Bookshop,” the operator said, and she gave me the number.

“Can’t you give me any of the others? They’re all down there in a clump.”

“If yew we-ill give mee they-re names, I can help you, “ the operator said, speaking Bell talk.

“This one’ll do,” I said, and I got the hotel operator to ring through for me. “Listen, I’m calling from Los Angeles, “ I said, “and I need
The Princess Bride
by S. Morgenstern.”

“Nope. Sorry,” the guy said, and before I could say, “Well, could you give me the names of the other stores down there, “ he hung up. “Get me that number back please,” I said to the hotel operator, and when the guy was on the line again, I said, “This is your Los Angeles correspondent; don’t hang up so fast this time.”

“I ain’t got it, mister.”

“I understand that. What I’d like is, since I’m in California, could you give me the names and numbers of some of the other stores down there. They might have it and there aren’t exactly an abundance of New York Yellow Pages drifting around out here.”

“They don’t help me, I don’t help them.” He hung up again.

I sat there with the receiver in my hand.

“What’s this special book?” Sandy Sterling asked.

“Not important,” I said, and hung up. Then I said, “Yes it is” and picked up the receiver again, eventually got my publishing house in New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and, after a few more
eventuallys
, my editor’s secretary read me off the names and numbers of every bookstore in the Fourth Avenue area.

“Hunters,” my father was saying now. “Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies.” He was camped in my cranium, hunched over, bald and squinting, trying to read, trying to please, trying to keep his son alive and the wolves away.

It was 1: 10 before I had the list completed and rang off from the secretary.

Then I started with the bookstores. “Listen, I’m calling from Los Angeles on the Morgenstern book,
The Princess Bride
, and . . .”

“ . . . sorry . . .”

“ . . . sorry . . .”

Busy signal.

“ . . . not for years . . .”

Another busy.

1: 35.

Sandy swimming. Getting a little angry too. She must have thought I was putting her on. I wasn’t, but it sure looked that way.

“ . . . sorry, had a copy in December . . .”

“ . . . no soap, sorry . . .”

“This is a recorded announcement. The number you have dialed is not in working order. Please hang up and . . .”

“ . . . nope . . .”

Sandy really upset now. Glaring, gathering debris.

“ . . . who reads Morgenstern today? . . .”

Sandy going, going, gorgeous, gone.

Bye, Sandy. Sorry, Sandy.

“ . . . sorry, we’re closing . . .”

1:55 now. 4:55 in New York.

Panic in Los Angeles.

Busy.

No answer.

No answer.

“Florinese I got I think. Somewhere in the back.”

I sat up in my lounge chair. His accent was thick. “I need the English translation.”

“You don’t get much call for Morgenstern nowadays. I don’t know any more what I got back there. You come in tomorrow, you look around.”

“I’m in California,” I said.

“Mashuganuh,” he said.

“It would mean just a great deal to me if you’d look.”

“You gonna hold on while I do it? I’m not gonna pay for this call.”

“Take your time,” I said.

He took seventeen minutes. I just hung on, listening. Every so often I’d hear a footstep or a crash of books or a grunt—”uch— uch”

Finally: “Well, I got the Florinese like I thought.”

So close. “But not the English,” I said.

And suddenly he’s yelling at me: “What, are you crazy? I break my back and he says I haven’t got it, yes I got it, I got it right here, and, believe me, it’s gonna cost a pretty penny.”

“Great—really, no kidding, now listen, here’s what you do, get yourself a cab and tell him to take the books straight up to Park and—”

“Mister California Mashuganuh,
you
listen now—it’s coming up a blizzard and I’m going no place and neither are these books without money—six fifty, on the barrel each, you want the English, you got to take the Florinese, and I close at 6:00. These books don’t leave my premises without thirteen dollars changing hands.”

“Don’t move,” I said, hanging up, and who do you call when it’s after hours and Christmas on the horizon? Only your lawyer. “Charley,” I said when I got him. “Please do me this. Go to Fourth Avenue, Abromowitz’s, give him thirteen dollars for two books, taxi up to my house and tell the doorman to take them to my apartment, and yes, I know it’s snowing, what do you say?”

“That is such a bizarre request I have to agree to do it.”

I called Abromowitz yet again. “My lawyer is hot on the trail.”

“No checks,” Abromowitz said.

“You’re all heart.” I hung up, and started figuring. More or less 120 minutes long distance at $1.35 per first three minutes plus thirteen for the books plus probably ten for Charley’s taxi plus probably sixty for his time came to . . . ? Two hundred fifty maybe. All for my Jason to have the Morgenstern. I leaned back and closed my eyes. Two hundred fifty not to mention two solid hours of torment and anguish and let’s not forget Sandy Sterling.

A steal.

They called me at half past seven. I was in my suite. “He loves the bike,” Helen said. “He’s practically out of control.”

“Fabbo,” I said.

“And your books came.”

“What books?” I said; Chevalier was never more casual.

“The Princess Bride
. In various languages, one of them, fortunately, English.”

“Well, that’s nice,” I said, still loose. “I practically forgot I asked to have ‘em sent.”

“How’d they get here?”

“I called my editor’s secretary and had her scrounge up a couple copies. Maybe they had them at Harcourt, who knows?” (They
did
have copies at Harcourt; can you buy that? I’ll get to why in the next pages, probably.) “Gimme the kid.”

“Hi,” he said a second later.

“Listen, Jason,” I told him. “We thought about giving you a bike for your birthday but we decided against it.”

“Boy, are you wrong, I got one already.”

Jason has inherited his mother’s total lack of humor. I don’t know; maybe he’s funny and I’m not. We just don’t laugh much together is all I can say for sure. My son Jason is this incredible-looking kid—paint him yellow, he’d mop up for the school sumo team. A blimp. All the time stuffing his face. I watch my weight and old Helen is only visible full front plus on top of which she is this leading child shrink in Manhattan and our kid can roll faster than he can walk. “He’s expressing himself through food,” Helen always says. “His anxieties. When he feels ready to cope, he’ll slim down.”

“Hey, Jason? Mom tells me this book arrived today. The Princess thing? I’d sure like it if maybe you’d give it a read while I’m gone. I loved it when I was a kid and I’m kind of interested in your reaction.”

“Do I have to love it too?” He was his mother’s son all right.

“Jason, no. Just the truth, exactly what you think. I miss you, big shot. And I’ll talk to you on your birthday.”

“Boy, are you wrong. Today
is
my birthday.”

We bantered a bit more, long past when there was much to say. Then I did the same with my spouse, and hung up, promising a return by the end of one week.

It took two.

Conferences dragged, producers got inspirations that had to carefully get shot down, directors needed their egos soothed. Anyway, I was longer than anticipated in sunny Cal. Finally, though, I was allowed to return to the care and safety of the family, so I quick buzzed to L.A. airport before anybody’s mind changed. I got there early, which I always do when I come back, because I had to load up my pockets with doodads and such for Jason. Every time I get home from a trip he runs (waddles) to me hollering, “Lemmesee, lemmesee the pockets” and then he goes through all my pockets taking out his graft, and once the loot is totaled, he gives me a nice hug. Isn’t it awful what we’ll do in this world to feel wanted?

“Lemmesee the pockets,” Jason shouted, moving to me across the foyer. It was a suppertime Thursday and, while he went through his ritual, Helen emerged from the library and kissed my cheek, going “what a dashing-looking fellow I have,” which is also ritual, and, laden with gifts, Jason kind of hugged me and belted off (waddled off) to his room. “Angelica’s just getting dinner on,” Helen said; “you couldn’t have timed it better.”