Cheat and Charmer (85 page)

“I knew it, Jake. I swear, I knew that cunt was two-timing me. I knew she had some big motherfucking bigshot on the side. She gives me the brush-off in New York even before we get out here, see. Then somebody tells me the bigshot’s out here, too, but I’m such a dumb fuck I don’t believe it, see. Then out here she calls me. She says, ‘I’m lonely, Tony, come over and love me up, baby,’ in this crazy accent of hers, and I’m such a sucker for her. You know I’ve always been crazy about her, Jake. So I go and keep her warm at night, and I says, ‘Come on, move in with me,’ but she says she can’t, she’s got stuff going on with her career. Then here she comes tonight with this big fucking guy, and I’m in the pool and I says, ‘Who’s that?’ And Bobby Collins—you know Bobby? Right? He says, ‘Don’t you know who that is? That’s Duff Burgoyne, the writer—you know, plays his own character, Axel Duke the detective, in all the movies they make outta his books?’ Well, I says, ‘I’m gonna kill that son of a bitch,’ and I’m gonna do it, too, Jake. I’m gonna go downstairs right now and kill that motherfucker just as soon as you fix me up. And then I’m gonna strangle that cunt, I swear.”

“Hold still,” Lorna shouts. “You’re bleeding!” As he speaks, his breath permeates the confined space of the bathroom with the smell of booze. Lorna can’t stop blushing; she’s so crazy about this dancer.

Tony looks at her and grins. “Thank you, darlin’,” he says, still moving from one leg to the other. “You’re a doll, you know that? Hey, Jake, you don’t mind if I tell your daughter she’s a beautiful girl, do ya? You’re a nice girl, too, ain’t cha, not like that fucking cunt downstairs. Excuse me, sweetheart, for using them kind of words.”

Jake looks at Lorna as if to say, “You’re doing fine, you’re taking it in stride.”

But she’s so embarrassed that she’s afraid she’s going to cry as Peter leers at her. Oh, he’s going to tease her later; she’ll never hear the end of it.

Jake murmurs, “No kidding,” and “What do you know?” to everything the dancer says, but when the boy says yet again that he wants to go and
kill the guy, Jake tells Peter and Lorna to keep fixing him up while he runs downstairs.

He returns ten minutes later to say that Burgoyne has been a real gentleman, and agreed that it would be best for him and the young lady to leave.

“Byron, too?” says Lorna. “That ick.”

And Jake says Byron, too.

“Ah, she ain’t nothin but a whore,” Tony sobs, bringing his hands up to his face. Then he grins at Jake and the kids and hisses again, suddenly feeling the pain of his red, shredded back and noticing the cotton balls piling up in the sink, bloodied and stained with orange iodine. “Ooooh,” he hisses again. “That fuckin’ bastard.” He grins at Lorna. “Listen, beautiful, don’t go kissin’ nobody till youse is sixteen. Then call your friend Tony. ’Cause I’m gonna thank you then for bein’ so sweet to me tonight, darlin’. And hey,” he says to Jake. “Leave off with the Band-Aids on me. I’m goin’ back in the pool. Fuck
her
,” he adds. “I’m gonna have some more fun.” Then he turns away and calls out, “Thanks, Jake. Thanks, youse guys.” He runs out of the bathroom and downstairs.

Jake and his two kids are left standing at the sink with a dozen opened Band-Aids stuck to the porcelain edge, waiting to be applied, and a spreading pink puddle on the floor, where the dancer had dripped blood and water. Jake sees the pink flush on his daughter’s face and chucks her under the chin.

“Stay away from guys like that,” he says.

She blushes again. “Dad!”

Out by the pool, Jake finds Dinah talking to Tony, to whom she has given a cup of strong coffee. “Well, she’s very pretty,” he hears her say. “And very pretty girls can be very cr-cr-cr-cruel sometimes.”

“Ah, she ain’t worth it,” Tony says sadly.

She tells him what a good dancer he is and that she once danced in pictures.

“Oh, yeah? What pictures?” he says, and she describes a routine she did when she was just sixteen, in 1928, in
Bewitching Brunettes
. “Let’s see it,” he says.

So right there, Dinah does a tap routine, a cramp roll, a buck-and-wing, and an assortment of time steps. She is wearing a white sleeveless dress, and her arms are very brown and she looks good.

“Hey, Jake,” Tony says. “Your wife here’s a real hoofer. You shoulda fired that bitch and put your wife in the picture instead.”

“You can say that again,” says Jake. Then Tony gets up and begins dancing with Dinah, improvising with her to the music on the speakers. The guests gather around, shouting and clapping, while Peter and Lorna look at each other in mute disgust at their mother’s movements, which are gracefully but unmistakably sexual and therefore appalling to them, although they enchant everyone else.

“Did I tell you I met that Burgoyne fellow in Vegas? I didn’t like him one bit. Did Veevi reject a story of his or s-s-something? He said something about you not liking a treatment of his. What’s going on between him and the redhead?” Dinah asked later, after the party finally ended—at 4
A.M.
—and they had retreated, exhausted, to their bedroom.

“Oh, he’s got Vegas connections,” Jake answered vaguely. “I think he’s like an uncle to her or something. She must have known Tony would be here and wanted protection,” he added. “Anyway, it’s none of our business, and I don’t want to think too hard about the lives and loves of the Very Nebbish.”

But with her question he had himself become one of the Very Nervous.

She had slipped into her nightgown and was sitting cross-legged in bed. “Who? That girl? She doesn’t look so nebbish to me. Tell me about her. Isn’t she that dancer Grace something or other? The one Peter has such a crush on?”

“I didn’t know he had a crush on her,” said Jake. “What makes you think that?”

“Lorna told me. It’s not something he’s going to tell
you
, you know.” She shook her head. “I don’t like that B-B-B-Burgoyne. You know he’s a famous red-baiter, don’t you?”

“Is he?” Jake said. “I’ve never read a word the man has written.”

“Oh, yeah. He makes all these pronouncements all the time. In the junk magazines I read at the beauty parlor.”

Jake yawned. “I didn’t know that.”

“How come they showed up with Byron Cole?”

“Well, he’s the stills photographer on the picture, and I saw him taking
pictures of her the other day. So I guess they know each other or something. Who cares?”

He went over to her and led her to his bed, and they talked together about the party and the big changes that were about to take place in their lives. He’d been so proud of her, he said, when she danced with Tony—she still looked great and danced great. There was so much they were going to do together when they moved to London—take the kids skiing in Switzerland, go to museums, expose the kids to art and music. He’d been so worried about her, he said. She’d seemed so sad since Veevi died, and he wanted her to know how much he loved her and how completely the two of them were one and how much he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. Holding her, nuzzling her, making her laugh, he talked on and on, as the gray and pink California dawn spread its gradual light through the bedroom.

K
nowing that she would soon be leaving Los Angeles, Dinah continued to visit the cemetery in Westwood every day to stand alone for a few minutes, and cry. She kept a small bottle of Scotch in the glove compartment of her station wagon, and she always poured out two capfuls—never more—after she’d been to Veevi’s rosebush, and went on with the day. But Veevi was never out of her mind. Driving Jake’s mother back to her apartment on a Monday morning, she noticed the railroad tracks in Beverly Hills, long abandoned, and they reminded her of the big red streetcars she and Veevi had taken to school or the Santa Monica beach or downtown to the Hill Street Theater, with their mother, for eight acts of vaudeville and two movies plus a newsreel. You couldn’t grow up with your sister and then leave her where her ashes lay and move to an unknown city, could you? You couldn’t sleep in the same bed with her for years, pee while she took a bath, stretch out with your legs parallel on the old sofa reading library books, practice dance steps together on the sidewalks, wash the dishes together, and then leave her ashes behind just like that.

Then quickly clearing away the dry leaves from the rosebush, Dinah said to herself, No. This is not a reason to stay. I go where my husband goes. I belong with him.

She spent most of her days now packing Bekins cartons, wrapping plates and cups and saucers in newspaper, stacking pictures, lovingly filling boxes with books. The house had been sold in May. She was leaving her flowers, the children’s bedrooms she had painted, and the den where she had spent so many hours talking to her sister and hearing the sound of Peter’s clarinet as it drifted in from the living room. Jake spent every available
minute in the cutting room, even Saturdays, desperate to get the picture ready by the end of the month.

Gussie worked with Dinah, who had gradually given up trying to persuade her to move to London with them. Leaving Gussie behind was turning out to be the hardest part of all, but she had her sisters and her daughter and son-in-law in Los Angeles, her church and her friends, and she had decided to retire.

“The llama,” she announced, “is going out to pasture. I done toted all the laundry I’m ever going to tote.”

Jake had arranged a pension for her, and Dinah knew that her life would be comfortable. Nevertheless, it would be a hard parting.

“Jake’s going to miss talking to you about sports,” Dinah said. “And I’m going to miss talking to you about politics. You’ll be here when the convention starts. Will you write me all about it? You know, everyone we know is fighting with everyone else about who’s going to give the biggest party for this guy Kennedy.”

“My cousin Mamie,” who worked, as Dinah knew, for the movie star Robert Tipton and his wife, Jeanie, “says they’re going to give him a party with three hundred people. She even wants me to come and help out. She’s got to be kidding. ‘I’m retired as of August the first,’ I told her, ‘and I ain’t gonna hand round no trays of rumaki to nobody, even if he’s going to be the president of the United States.’ ”

Later that afternoon, at about three o’clock, Dinah was in the pantry, wrapping platters and serving dishes, when she heard the front doorbell ring. “Gus, can you get that?” she called out.

Gussie shouted back, “No, I can’t, Dinah, I’m peeling potatoes right now.”

So Dinah shouted back absently, “Never mind, Gus, I’ll get it myself.”

She decided it must be a real estate agent who was unaware that the house had been sold, but then she thought, How is that possible? There’s a sticker saying Sold on the For Sale sign stuck in the ivy beds near the street. She remembered, too, the day the doorbell had rung and the man in the gray suit had shoved the pink subpoena at her. Wondering if she was about to get hit with some new political catastrophe, Dinah went uneasily to the front door. Then she thought, This is nonsense. It has to be the moving company with extra cardboard cartons.

Opening the door, she saw a young woman, with great swirls of red hair, wearing a pink sundress with ruffles at the shoulders, high-heeled pink
sandals, and a large white straw hat. The girl took off her sunglasses, and Dinah scanned her face, trying to remember where she had seen her. “Mrs. Lasker?”

Dinah suddenly remembered. “The party! Of course. You were at the p-p-p-party. Did you forget your bathing suit?”

The big red mouth opened, and Dinah thought, The outfit and makeup are all wrong for this girl. God, what these girls do to themselves when they come out here. She smiled and waited for the girl to speak.

“May I come in?”

The girl had an accent, an English accent of some kind. Dinah suddenly recognized it: cockney. The girl had a cockney accent.

“Yes, of course. I can take you out to the pool house to look for it if you like.”

“Actually, Mrs. Lasker, I didn’t lose my bathing costume.” The girl’s mouth trembled. “May I talk to you, Mrs. Lasker?”

“Follow me.”

Dinah’s first thought was: She needs an abortion. Of course, she would help her out. Of course.