West of Paradise (34 page)

“You, meaning me? Or you, meaning one, which includes you?”

“You,” he said. “What is that expression they have about men in America with no real persona? An empty shirt? You're an empty dress. Or, right now, an empty robe.”

“I could throw myself off the terrace for letting you touch me.”

“Not a bad idea.”

“Is that why you came here? To drive me to suicide?”

“Nobody drives anybody to suicide,” he said. “People commit suicide because they have no reason to live. What reason do you have?”

“How cruel you are.”

“Cruel? I would say accurate. You haven't a bit of talent, your looks, such as they are, are going, your education was stunted, and you didn't have much of a brain to begin with. As they say in the fairy tales…” His voice grew all mincy, “‘What's to become of me?'”

“That's it, isn't it?” Wendy got to her feet. “They've sent you to drive me mad.”

“Nobody drives anybody mad. People either have madness in them or they don't. From your comportment these past few months, I'd say it was probably in your genes. Actually being seen on the arm of a common tradesman. A kike in the bargain.”

“I see,” she said, coldly. “They heard about Morty.”

“Morty,” he said jeeringly. “You can actually speak of such a person with affection. Don't make an even bigger fool of yourself,” he said. “May I have another cup?”

“You may have the whole pot,” she said, and threw it at him.

*   *   *

After he'd gone, she lay on the bed. She felt queasy, the stickiness on the sheets a reminder that he'd been there, that she'd actually let him inside her. Bounder that he was, he was right about her. She was stupid. Stupid and unstable to let just anyone come into her life, into her body, because she was so desperate.

She'd started taking antidepressants to get through her ordeal, and they made her anxious. The anxiety was worse than the depression had been. She'd had to sneak to the psychiatrist to avoid the press as she'd had to sneak to see her lover. If he'd really been her lover. If he'd cared for her, how could he have disappeared after selling their story?

The doctor had prescribed a second pill to quell the anxiety. She went to the medicine cabinet, and opened it. Beside the two prescription bottles from her doctor was a bottle she hadn't seen before. She took it out of the cabinet and looked at it. It had her name on it, from a pharmacy she couldn't recollect ever visiting, from a doctor she didn't recall either. “Take 2 for sleep,” it said on the label. Could she have been to a doctor she didn't even remember, just as she'd gone to bed with a man it turned out she didn't really know? Maybe she
was
going crazy.

“I'd like to speak to the pharmacist, please,” she said into the phone.

“He's out to lunch,” the woman said.

“Then I'm not alone,” said Wendy.

She went to the mirror and looked at herself. It was true, what Binky had said. She was losing what looks she had. There were dark semicircles under her eyes, her hair hung limp and lifeless, her skin was mottled. The tabloids had made note of the fact that her thighs were going, and published a photo to prove it, taken by a hidden camera someone had at the gym. She'd had to start working out at home.

Home. It was no more home than the hole had been to Alice. Binky had asked her that day at the hotel where she'd like to go, and that was where she had told him. Into the hole, like Alice. Apparently she was already in it.

“Take me.” It might as well have been written on the bottle. She opened the bottle, lined the pills up on the edge of the sink, and counted them. Fifty. Enough, she knew from the accounts of Marilyn's death, the ones that hadn't suggested the secret service had shoved something up her arse to finish her off so she wouldn't make any more trouble. Enough to make sure a country wouldn't be victimized by a woman dumped. Or, as they would have said in England, a woman Civic Amenity Tipped. What a place was Great Britain, that no one ever said exactly what they meant, so busy were they saying what sounded civilized.

*   *   *

Kate had gotten into the habit of dropping in on Lila in the late afternoons, bringing with her herbal tea bags so the same thing wouldn't happen on the way home as had happened when she shared Lila's wine. As her affection for the woman deepened, which it did, she tried to get her, too, to change over to tea.

“I don't get great ideas from tea,” she said to Kate now, as the younger woman started to pour a second cup. “I'll stick to my Merlot.”

“You really think wine helps you get ideas?”

“I know it does. Or if it doesn't, at least I'm too drunk to notice. I'm not creative like you are, so I need all the help I can get. I have to come up with a real inspiration.”

“Maybe I can help,” Kate said.

Lila looked at her with narrowing eyes. “In order for you to help, I'd have to tell you the whole story.”

“I can handle that,” said Kate.

“You said you're going to
try
and write the book about him. I might as well give you the ammunition.”

With that, she began to recount the true life saga of Larry Drayco. Included was everything he had told her, more than he'd ever told anyone, including the guru he'd seen in India and the psychiatrist he'd been to as part of his rehabilitation. In addition was everything Lila had found out that he hadn't told her, stuff about the other wives, and Jason Stone and Tim McClure, and the other women, gotten from a long line of secretaries whom she'd made into phone friends.

As accepting as Larry thought she'd been of his wanderings, as cool and dismissive about his behavior as she'd sounded to Kate, the fact was she'd been crazy about him. Really crazy. Agonizing over almost every moment he hadn't been with her. Needing to fill them in in her mind, so even if he hadn't been present, she'd know what he had been doing.

That way she always had something to do at night, besides drinking wine and wondering. That way at least she could be with him, in a way, knowing his entire story, as in “Jack and the Beanstalk,” so she could follow him as he went out to seek what turned out to be not exactly his fortune.

Will the Real Larry Drayco Please Stand Up

It had not been just the Darshowitz that he changed. He had been born Laruschka, the son of Poles who had made it to this country just in time for his mother to spread her legs and deliver him to American citizenship. It made him proud for a while simply to be a Yankee Doodle Dandy. But he learned even as a boy that for him it was not enough.

To his parents, the streets had been paved with gold, just as the myths promised, at least in comparison to Warsaw. But Laruschka had been born with a silver spoon in his brain. Very early he started going to movies, where, in the dark, he could become anybody.
Little Lord Fauntleroy
was his particular favorite. Even as he came home from seeing it for the first time, he started to become uncomfortable with how common his parents were. “Laruschka, Laruschka!” his mother said, squeezing his cheeks between her big, calloused hands. She smelled of cabbage, the sweet and sour redolence that permeated their apartment on Fridays, penetrating the floor so it was even downstairs in his father's tailor shop. He loved cabbage. He loved her. But he already knew that the better life she'd come for and found wasn't as good as he could make it. He'd smelled the scent of lilacs on the blond girl who sold movie magazines, and it was preferable. “Larry,” he said, as his mother kissed him, full on the puckered lips.

“Vass?”

“Larry,” he said. “That's my name in English.” The name would be cited once he hit big in Hollywood as having been after Laurence Olivier, later Sir Larry, later Lord O to his intimates, one of which Drayco longed to be. Olivier was the only major actor of any nationality with whom new Larry wanted to make a picture that he didn't. In spite of Drayco's claim that he'd been named after him, Olivier had yet to emerge as an actor of note when Laruschka was born. Indeed, he was probably not long out of diapers himself. A minor inconsistency. There were much bigger and better lies to come. Or, as Lord O might have put it, with the help of his best scriptwriter, “O, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive,” which, to Larry Drayco, meant making movies.

The girl behind the counter at the drugstore who sold magazines was named Pegeen, clearly a shiksa. He started hanging around there after school, thumbing through magazines so he could smell her. The combination of her scent and the shiny pages under his fingers, with their pictures of his favorite stars and their stories of how dashing and happy it was to be Douglas Fairbanks or how mysterious it was to be the Lady in Black, gave rise to his first public show of sexual excitement. He tried very hard to cover it with a magazine.

“Can I do anything for you?” Pegeen said, mischief apparent in her light blue eyes.

She was at least seventeen, an older woman, Gentile in the bargain. But he knew that he loved her, and she knew it, too, from the strain on his pants.

“You like movies?” he asked her, looking for a common bond, besides what she was making happen.

“I
love
movies,” she said. “I go every Saturday.”

“With your boyfriend?”

“I don't have a boyfriend,” she said.

“That's crazy. You're so beautiful.”

“You think so?”

“I
know,
” he said. “I know what's beautiful.” It was a line he was to use thirty-two years later on Ingrid Bergman, in a dark cocktail lounge in New York City, when they met on a script he wanted her to do. “I know what's beautiful. And you're the most beautiful woman who's ever been onscreen.” “Isn't that lucky,” Bergman had answered disinterestedly. “That's a line from
Saratoga Trunk.
” By that time she had already had her fall from grace with the public, which was having trouble forgiving her for being a sexual woman. She had run off with Rossellini, had their children, been left by him, and had been grudgingly reaccepted by the American people, because she was unhappy. So the fact that she was cynical, even disappointed about what good her beauty had done her, and so detached as to quote Edna Ferber, instead of being flattered and original, as Larry hoped, was understandable. Still, she had dashed his expectations sufficiently that he cut in half what he intended to offer her to make the movie. He hated when people turned out to be less than what he imagined them to be. He knew he himself was less than he paraded, that his façades were true façades, with little behind them but hubris. But stars should have been better than that.

“You're pretty cute yourself,” Pegeen said to the boy, her warmth wafting over the coldness of the counter.

“You mean it?”

“Try me.”

“You want to go to the movies with me?”

“Sure,” she said, even as his mind furtively raged on how he would get the money to take her.

He ended up stealing it from his mother. Maybe she would have loaned it to him if he asked her. But then there would have been all kinds of questions, like what did he need it for. Eventually she'd worm it out of him that he was taking a girl out. Then it would be “What girl?” And then it would turn out to be the Polish inquisition, which had to be tougher than the Spanish one because Jews hadn't been in charge of that. When she got it out of him, which she would, that it was a blond, blue-eyed Irisher, there would be hell to pay. It was easier to just take the two quarters, and another fifty cents in case Pegeen wanted an ice cream soda.

It turned out to be one of the finest investments of his life. All he had expected was a chance to maybe get close to her in the dark, smell her, put his arm on the back of her seat as he'd seen some older boys do, and let his fingers fall casually down a little, accidentally touching the top of her breasts. As it was, she asked him to get a box of popcorn. He worried about running out of money, in case she was thirsty after.

Then they got into the dark. “Why don't you hold the box on your lap?” she asked him.

He did as she said. She started reaching for it and eating out of it. Every time she reached she would press the box against him, and sort of jiggle it around, till she had some in her hand. Then she'd move the popcorn slowly to her lips, and put it in her mouth a piece at a time, slowly, taking it onto her tongue. He watched her out of the side of his eyes. By the time the box was empty, he thought he would go crazy.

But then, in the dark, never taking her eyes from the screen, she undid the folds of the box, and reached straight through the bottom of it. She opened his pants and took him in her hand, right through the open box. With him inside it, all swollen and hard. She whipped him up and down, like she was still just reaching in there for popcorn.

“What's that on your pants?” his mother said when he came home.

“Butter,” he said very quickly. “I spilled some popcorn.”

They went every Saturday to the movie after that. They never discussed what Pegeen did. As time passed, she started holding the popcorn box on her lap when they were finished with his lap. She'd edge her skirt up in the darkness, and he'd reach through the box to her underpants. She'd move his hand down to the stickiness between her legs. And she'd move his hand to the hard little spot and he'd stroke it and rub round it with his middle finger till she convulsed and sighed. As he became more expert, he could sometimes coordinate her finale to the one in the picture, when the lovers embraced. It worked particularly well with Gilbert and Garbo.

And they never said a word about it outside the theater. They met underneath the marquee every Saturday night. She wouldn't even let him walk her home. Nor did she ever suggest they see each other more than once a week. Being as fortunate as he knew he was, he didn't push his luck.