Cheat and Charmer (29 page)

But after a few months Owen revealed another side of himself. By then, she was practically living at his apartment, on South Doheny. Gradually, she noticed that he drank beer from morning till night, and liked to play with himself while listening to the sexual vocalizations of a couple whose amorous encounters took place in the building across the way. Dinah would wake up in the middle of the night, hearing what sounded like the yelps of a chained puppy, and see him lurking near the window, holding a pair of binoculars with his left hand and sawing the air with a furious vibration of his right. His own efforts with her a few hours earlier had been aborted, seemingly owing to the effects of beer. He often told her that he loved her, but he said it with a look of contrition, as if he were forever making up for some sin he had committed.

At meetings, he continued to perform with his usual stern brilliance, and was treated respectfully by the Party people out at her sister’s. Then he handed in the script he was working on and no one liked it and his contract wasn’t renewed. When he wasn’t railing against the imperialist saboteurs,
exploiters, social parasites, lynchers, and union busters, he bitterly denounced every person in the industry more successful than himself—including Stefan, whom he called a sellout. The things that were strange about him got stranger, and she found that she could no longer explain them away by telling herself he was “creative.” For instance, when he wasn’t too drunk to make love, he demanded that she be just as vocal and uninhibited as the invisible female half of the couple across the way. This was extremely difficult for her: once, when trying to make the same yelping-puppy sounds as her neighbor, she burst into laughter, and Owen didn’t find it amusing at all. Yet whenever she put her arm around him or reached up to kiss him, he told her he couldn’t stand it and that he hated it when women were affectionate with him. Why? she wanted to know. Because he didn’t
deserve
it, he said, because he wanted her to be more
critical
of him.

Every so often after dinner, he would take down a worn edition of Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
, open it to a few dog-eared pages, read a passage or two out loud, and cry. Disconcerted at first, she tried to comfort him, but he seemed to enjoy these sessions of weeping and always chose the same passages. One was about Johnson’s standing out in the rain in some English town whose name she couldn’t remember. Even before Owen reached the end of the passage, his voice would quaver and the tears would roll down his cheeks. Sometimes he read a passage about Johnson’s vowing that his cat Hodge would not be shot, and this one dissolved him. He sobbed piteously. Dinah didn’t know what to say to him at these times, and just waited them out. She’d sit on the sofa, one leg tucked under her, and watch her cigarette ash grow longer.

As spring turned to summer, he began to find fault with her. She wasn’t womanly enough, he said. She didn’t cook enough, or sew. She countered that she was exhausted from typing all day, sewed when she had to but found it boring, and had never been all that interested in food. When she came for dinner he cooked, she pointed out, so he never gave her much of a chance to see what she could do. Then he said he didn’t think she was a real Communist at heart but was in the Party only because she felt sorry for people like her father. Well, what’s wrong with that? she wanted to know. Weren’t there lots of people like that in the Party, who felt terrible about what was happening to their families? If you join for personal reasons, you leave for personal reasons, he told her with a sternness that used to impress her but now struck her as tedious.

He received phone calls from people in other cities. At least once a week, there were evening visits from Metzger, Klein, Bergman, and others. Dinah was told to stay in the bedroom, but she knew that they were strategizing for the upcoming meeting and trying to figure out how the votes would go. Owen had explained to her that this was “democratic centralism” and the best possible way to get across to people the great decisions Comrade Stalin was making for the world, for which he needed the support of the rank and file. This seemed peculiar to Dinah, but she told herself that she was too dumb and uneducated to come up with a good reason to oppose this way of doing things. Besides, Owen always had an answer for everything.

One night she woke up and saw him standing at the open window, completely absorbed in the orchestrations next door (this time there were not only shrill yelps but frequent arpeggios, and a few outright howls), and ministering to his member. As she lay under the sheets observing him, Dinah suddenly saw a small bat fly into the room and begin to knock itself against the ceiling. The sight of Owen running naked in black socks around the moonlit bedroom trying to protect his dwindling erection with one hand and swat the bat with a broom in the other was too much for her: she was besieged by violent waves of laughter. Having succeeded in harrying the bat out the window, he turned to her and said, in an aggrieved voice, “I don’t see what’s so damned funny.”

“Once,” she said, beginning to laugh again so hard that she could barely speak, “Veevi and I were going to bed and a big m-m-m-moth flew into our room. We were scared of it and screamed for our father. He came in, wearing”—she said, her whole body shaking—“a long white nightgown and a nightcap. And while he was looking all around, trying to find the moth, it landed on his”—her eyes filled with tears, and she coughed—“
b-b-b-big t-t-t-toe
. The two of us burst out laughing. He looked at us as if we were completely crazy and said, ‘This is no time for jollification.’ ”

Owen stood there, stark naked, not laughing. This made everything worse: seeing Owen’s desolate face and shriveling penis, she simply rolled over on her side, her behind inadvertently exposed, and laughed again into the pillow on her side of his bed.

That night he went to sleep with his back to her. At about 4
A.M
. she got up, got dressed, and, as she had done with Everett, left a note, which she placed on the kitchen counter:
Even when the revolution comes, we still
won’t laugh at the same things. Good-bye. D
. She stopped going to the Potemkin Club meetings, and heard, some months later, that Owen’s agent hadn’t been able to interest anyone in his new screenplay and that he’d gone back to New York.

She went on to have casual affairs. Sex in itself became interesting, and she developed skills. She took men home to her apartment in Laurel Canyon, and gave herself easily to them, but there was no one she especially cared for. Some of the men had nothing to do with the movies or the Party. A few she picked up at the ice rink in Westwood, where she went skating with her Party friend Renna Goldman. But they were often broke or had dead-end jobs, and, worst of all, didn’t read books. One day she said to Renna, “I don’t care if I am a Communist. From now on, no more low-wage earners.”

Renna approved, and they agreed that this would require a new kind of “party” discipline. No more men from the skating rink or, in Dinah’s case, from work. No one without a college education. No one who didn’t read. No one without a sense of humor—this was the great problem with the fellows she met at Party meetings. No one outside the movie industry and no one who wasn’t being paid, and paid well, for his writing.

So Dinah started going back to Veevi’s, often with Renna in tow. At the Venturas’ there were always people who fascinated her, amused her, intimidated her. Veevi and Stefan let their house be used for all sorts of causes—Communist Party fund-raisers and art auctions for Spain, farmworker-strike fund-raisers, union fund-raisers, anti-segregation fund-raisers, Democratic Party fund-raisers. Famous European writers came and gave speeches about the Loyalists and the Nazis and the looming threat of war. There was a constant stream of new visitors.

One night a tall young man with a round open face, black curly hair, and glasses he continually pushed back along his nose wandered into the kitchen, picked up a fork, and began eating leftovers of Dorshka’s pot roast right off the used plates. “My God,” he exclaimed with his mouth full, “I haven’t eaten food like this since I left Chicago! Jesus, this is delicious.” Dinah was trying to think of something to say when he added, “Say, where’s the legendary beauty Veevi Ventura? Point her out to me, will ya?”

Dinah motioned for him to look out the kitchen window at the patio, which was lit up with bright lights and jammed with people. “She’s over there,” she said with a nod. “The one with the braids. Surrounded by
her usual crowd of ad-d-d-doring admirers.” Still eating leftovers, he looked out and watched Veevi for a while. “That is without doubt the single most sensational-looking woman I have ever seen in my
ganze leben
,” he said.

“Your what?”

“My entire life. I’m Jake Lasker, by the way. Who’re you?”

“I’m Mrs. Ventura’s sister. Why don’t you go out there and introduce yourself? There’s always room for one more sh-sh-sheep in the fl-fl-flock.” He gave her a funny look, which she returned. His seemed to say, “You mean you don’t think I’m charming?” And hers answered, “No, not in the least.” Then she untied the gingham apron she was wearing, hung it on the back of a chair, left the kitchen, and forgot him.

That night Stefan introduced the famous French writer André Malraux, who had come to Los Angeles to talk about the desperate need for medical supplies in Spain. After Stefan finished his introduction, Malraux warmly clasped his hands and startled Dinah by kissing him on both cheeks. Malraux had a dark, movie-star romantic look. He was wearing a rumpled suit, and Dinah thought him handsome in an exceedingly intelligent and troubled way. Then she silently scolded herself for finding so many European men attractive. By this time, she shouldn’t be so impressionable—a word she had picked up from Norma Levine. After his speech he was surrounded by people she had never seen before, people who had traveled all the way up the coast from Mexico who seemed to know Stefan as well. Dinah was sitting in a corner of the sofa, studying the group around Malraux, when she took a sip of coffee and immediately felt like throwing up. Rushing upstairs to the bathroom, she vomited, and realized that she wasn’t late, as she had imagined, but probably pregnant by one of the men she’d been sleeping with. Veevi had put her in touch with a Beverly Hills gynecologist and she had a diaphragm now, and used it, but supposed uneasily that she must have taken it out too soon one morning, wanting to put the night before and the man she had brought home with her behind her once and for all.

Through the gynecologist, Veevi found her an abortionist who had an office between Pico and Olympic, just west of La Cienega; Veevi said he took care of all the Marathon actresses who managed to get knocked up. He had dirty fingernails, smoked a cigar, and never took off his hat. The night before, her mother came over, asked no questions, slept in her bed with her as the sound of eucalyptus trees rustled outside, and held her until it was time to leave. For the rest of her life Dinah would remember that night and her mother’s dry, warm hand holding hers, and how it
had felt to try to sleep nestled against her mother’s firm plumpness, her body prematurely worn and thickened from the years of housework and worry. Alice waited for Dinah outside in the car. Afterward, she took Dinah home, made her tea and buttered toast, and pulled up a chair to the edge of the bed, where she kept watch while Dinah slept. Dinah called in sick for two days but dared not take a third.

There wasn’t anyone out there, she complained to her sister. She was going to die an old maid.

“Well, if you keep turning down people like Frank Herzog you will,” said Veevi. “How could you be so dumb? You passed that up. Frank Herzog! The greatest songwriter of the twentieth century, for Christ’s sake. You don’t just walk away from someone like that! Do you know the people you could have met through him?”

Dinah always answered that she didn’t want to be a married man’s mistress.

“You wouldn’t have ended up with him, you dope,” Veevi said. “You would have
started
with him and then, at the right time, met someone else in his league and made your move.”

“You mean I should have used him?” Dinah said.

“Well, why not? He would’ve been using you. That’s how it works. Haven’t you figured that out?”

“No,” Dinah answered. “I haven’t. By God I
am
d-d-d-dumb. That sort of thing never even occurred to me.”

The only relief from the feeling that her life was going nowhere was helping out with the exiles. There, at least, she thought, she was useful. Saturday and Sunday mornings she gave driving lessons, and chauffeured people around to do their errands. They condescended to her but were nonetheless kind, and were clearly grateful to her. She asked Stefan what their lives had been like, and he told her to read Proust, which she did in the park on her lunch hour and before turning off the light at night. She began to liken weekends at the Venturas’ to the world of the Guermantes, where she could imagine herself invisibly blending in. She watched and listened, all by herself, and felt she was learning things—indefinable things, things that were somehow important to know. She felt less shy about talking to the exiles. She was bringing coffee to a famous novelist with dark lines and puffy bags under his eyes and a little patch of a mustache when she heard him using the words
“Rosenbusche”
and
“Orangen und Oleander und Akazien.”
Then he said to the woman seated behind him,
“In der Nacht
ist der Duft schwer and suess. Das ist der Jasmin, der in der Nacht blueht,”
and Dinah caught his eye and said, “Night-blooming jasmine?” amazing even herself. He nodded, with a sharp bob of the head, and gave her a thin, formal smile.

Her interest in meeting new men, however, waned. Looking for someone seemed pointless—there wasn’t anyone, she kept telling herself. Renna was just beginning to go out with the man she would later marry, and she invited Dinah to go to the movies with them, but the more lovey-dovey the two of them got, the more uncomfortable she became. More refugees arrived, bringing horrible stories, but Dinah felt, nevertheless, through her pity and concern, that those things were happening a long way from her own life. The Party people always seemed to know what to say, and the articles she read in the
New Masses
and
Daily Worker
were all for Spain but opposed a war with Germany, and she didn’t know what to think. The Moscow trials confused her. Without Owen to direct her thinking, she couldn’t make sense of the reasons anymore.