Judith Krantz (72 page)

“What, since you’re going to tell me anyway.”

“I’ve changed the way I used to feel about Jazz. I … I like her. I like her a lot.”

“So do I. You
have
to like someone who can persuade you that you should turn your back on a quick billion and make you feel good about doing it,” Valerie said, tartness mixed with an amused warmth.

“Not a
whole
billion,” Fernanda said comfortingly, “not after taxes.”

“Why quibble? I intend to get all the credit for having the taste and wisdom to turn down a billion, not a penny less.”

“Valerie Kilkullen Malvern, Our Lady of Ecological Balance, Preservation of Traditional Values and Slow Growth; Blue-Blooded Queen of Conservation-ism, New Heroine of Land Use.”

“Bravo, Fernie. I couldn’t put it better myself. About Jazz … I never honestly knew her before today. I’m proud that she’s my sister, I’m thrilled that we’ll all be building a new urban village together … you and I have been acting like children, still thinking about her as an enemy, a rival—thanks to Mother again. Don’t you feel bad about how we used to tease her? God, we were mean. Remember calling her an ‘orphink’? … What a pair of little bitches we were.”

“You’re only saying that because now we’re or-phinks too,” Fernanda said sadly.

“Isn’t that enough of a reason?”

“Shouldn’t we tell her—let her know exactly how we feel? Tell her we’re sorry or something?”

“Oh, Fernie, couldn’t you see? I mean, for heaven’s sake, didn’t you realize? Jazz knows it already.”

“Oh, you’re right, but still … well, someday I want to say something. I’ll find the right moment. Oh, Val, isn’t it wonderful news about Jazz and Casey? I knew it all along, of course—you could tell, right from the beginning, that she’d never let him get away. But you know what it means, don’t you? We’re going to
have to turn around and fly back here for the wedding just a few weeks after we finally get home.”

“Fernie, for heaven’s sake, stop complaining. It’ll be wonderful. I have a weird sentimental thing about weddings, and after all, don’t forget, we’re the only family she has.”

A
s soon as Valerie’s car left the hacienda, Jazz went looking for Casey. Joe Winter told her that he’d driven up to Los Angeles on business while she was out riding, and wasn’t expected back until after dinner.

“Don’t you know where I could try to reach him?” Jazz pleaded, bursting with her miraculous news.

“Not a clue. He could be anywhere.”

Ferociously frustrated, not wanting to say anything to Joe before she told Casey, Jazz returned to the hacienda and telephoned Red. She’d neglected her friend as badly as she’d neglected everyone else in her life, but Red let Jazz talk her into meeting her for an early dinner in Newport Beach.

Jazz poured out the whole story, so exultant that all Red could do was sit back and eat while she listened, nodding and gasping, gasping and nodding at all the appropriate places. As they reached the end ol dinner, Jazz’s talking jag ground slowly to a halt.

“Tell me. what you’ve been up to, Red,” she asked, at last.

“Who, me? Little old me?”

“You must have been doing something while I was busy ignoring my best friend.”

“I’ve been reading books I’ve always meant to read, thinking more or less noble thoughts, taking long walks, going religiously to exercise class, listening to music, potting up pansies, putting up pickles—”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s all true except the pickles. I’ve been slowly getting used to being without Mike. It’s not as if I have a choice, is it? Life has to go on. I’ve been all right, Jazz, not great, but not helplessly miserable, and it’s getting a little bit easier week by week. Sometimes I go out for dinner with friends, sometimes I invite them over—I had a nice lunch with Gregory this week when he was here …”

“Gregory who?”

“Oh, Jazz, you’re certifiable. Gregory Nelson, your future father-in-law.”

“Casey’s father was out here this week?”

“Jazz, where have you been?”

“I … I … honestly don’t know. On a quest, I guess. I feel like one of those medieval knights who goes tearing off after some Grail or other, and when he comes home at last, a hundred years later, everybody he ever knew has disappeared, and nobody even remembers him or why he went away.”

“It’s only been a month or so. And believe me, you haven’t been forgotten,” Red said teasingly.

“But I never even knew Casey’s father was here!”

“He flew out on business for a day or so, and he happened to call.”

“Just exactly how did he know your number?”

“I assume Casey must have told him. Jazz, it was merely a friendly lunch. We have you and Casey in common, after all.”

“Lunch
. Why is it that lunch sounds so much
more meaningful than dinner?” Jazz was deeply interested.

“Just don’t start,” Red warned her. “Forget what I said! It’s much too soon to even be thinking that way.”

“Much,” Red agreed severely.

“I don’t know what came over me.”

“I accept your apology.”

“Where’d he take you? What’d you talk about? Is he as nice as I think? Are you going to see him again?”

“Jazz!”

“Just curious—I don’t know him yet, I’ve only met him once. Anyway, Red, why would there be anything wrong in your making a new friend? You said it yourself, life goes on …”

“Go home before I give you a good pinch.”

“Right. Right! I’m on my way.”

Jazz returned to the hacienda at nine in the evening. She darted immediately into the kitchen, to find only one light on over the stove, and a pot of chili with a brief, pointed note from Susie saying that she’d left it there, just in case, before leaving for the night, although no one seemed to eat at home anymore. There was no message from Casey, no sound of life came from any room of the great, rambling adobe; no vases of flowers, no fire brightened the dark living room, where the massive Spanish furniture brooded in the gloom. She opened a door to the veranda, and even the night with its secret sounds, the sighing of leaves, the cathedral of the starry sky, seemed remote, not unfriendly, but as if it had no connection to her.

Jazz sat down in a kitchen chair and considered a constellation of suddenly ominous facts. Casey’s father had been here, right here in California, and Casey hadn’t said a word to her about it. Casey had been away all day on business in Los Angeles several times in the last week, and she hadn’t noticed it until now. Today he had disappeared without leaving any explanation without saying good-bye. He’d been sleeping
in one of the guest rooms for a number of nights, how many she wasn’t sure. She hadn’t cared.

Casey
. He’d been with her every step of the way in the search for the map and the Sentinel Rocks. His reward was that she’d trampled all over him. She’d taken out her impotent fury at her lawyers’ verdict on Casey. She’d behaved toward him as if, in some obscure but unmistakable way, it was
his
fault that she didn’t have a case. She hadn’t shared her defeat with him, only her triumph. Casey must have known that you can celebrate a victory with anyone, even a stranger, but when you lose, you turn only to someone who loves you.

Why had she cut Casey out of her life when she needed him the most? Jazz sat in the dim kitchen, abrupt tears running down her face, and tried to understand herself. Slowly, with much hesitation, with much denial, with much unwillingness and pain, she realized that she was, in spite of being grown up, still terrified of letting herself go and trusting anyone as much as she needed to trust Casey. He hadn’t disappointed her—not yet—but what if she was wrong? What if Casey ultimately abandoned her? Others had. Wouldn’t it be safer to drive him away before it happened?

But, Jazz asked herself, could she survive if she withheld her complete trust from everyone, now that her father was gone? Wasn’t it better to take a chance—even if she lost—than to face a life in which she dared to count only on herself? Was she going to allow the possibility of abandonment to rule her future as it had shadowed her past?

Jazz stood up resolutely. She’d asked herself a lot of questions and she’d glimpsed some necessary answers, but she was finished with soul-searching for tonight. There was only one immediate answer available to one vitally important matter. Where was Casey’s fax?

An hour later, when Casey finally walked in the front door, the only light in the hacienda came from the
bright kitchen. He went in and found Jazz at the stove, stirring a pot.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked, startled.

“Heating up this chili. I thought you might want some when you got in.”

“I had dinner hours ago,” he replied automatically.

“Aren’t you always hungry before you go to bed? lam.”

Jazz whirled quickly away from the stove, a maddening figure of concentrated, bewitchingly distilled romance in her finely pleated, long, white dress. Dozens of yards of chiffon swirled swiftly about her as if she were dancing; one bare, polished shoulder gleamed, and from the other a wide panel of the airborne fabric fluttered like the wing of a hovering angel.

“What the hell …?”

Jazz’s golden eyes widened at his surprise, and she shook the tawny treasure of her hair so reprovingly that it rippled from her scalp to its burnished tips.

“It’s my dress from Madame Grès, can’t you tell? The one you almost ruined. It’s perfect again. I had to send it to Paris after the Fiesta, because there are only four people left alive in the world who know how to clean a dress like this, and they all live there. It took them months of careful work, not on a par with restoring the Mona Lisa, but still …”

“Am I supposed to understand why you’re wearing it for cooking?”

“You could hazard a guess. No? Oh, all right, then I’ll have to tell you. When you spill chili all over it again, as you will,
as you won’t be able to avoid doing
, I’m going to smile graciously, the way a lady should, and I’m going to say, ‘Oh, it’s nothing at all, darling, don’t give it another thought, it’s not as if it were a new dress.’ ” She turned back to the pot and busily continued stirring.

Casey moved in a streak across the kitchen, and grabbed her shoulders in his big hands.

“Put … down … that … spoon,” he commanded, “and do it very carefully.”

As soon as Jazz had obeyed, he turned her around and walked backwards, never relaxing his firm grip until they stood far from the stove.

“All right, what’s this all about?” he asked gently. She’d cracked under the strain, he thought wildly, he should never have left her alone, how had he not seen this coming?

“I decided that the only way to get things straight with you was to start out all over again, from the very beginning,” Jazz said in a perfectly rational tone of voice, although her eyes betrayed her nervousness. “And there was all that good chili going to waste, and a priceless dress I hardly ever wear, so I thought, ‘Why not show Casey that I’m truly a better person than he thinks I am?’ Actions speak louder than words, I said to myself, and when he spills the chili, or even throws it at me, the way he did the first time we met, to capture my attention, I’ll rise above it—and you don’t have to look at me as if I’ve gone mad, I’m perfectly sane.”

“I didn’t throw it at you!”

“Oh, I believe you. Rather I believe that
you
believe it, which amounts to the same thing. Let’s just say that there will always be two versions of that one particular episode, both of which are true.”

“Please, God, don’t let this woman drive me out of my mind,” Casey pleaded, addressing the ceiling.

“But, darling, I have to do something special to make you believe that I’m a better person,” Jazz insisted stubbornly.

“I don’t want a better person, a better person would be different, I want the old, unimproved version, the impossible one.”

“But you
do
want me, you’re absolutely sure? I haven’t made you wonder if it wouldn’t be wiser to change your mind, the way I’ve been acting? Oh, Casey, I know how horrible I’ve been to you, how cold, how unfair, how indifferent—I was terrified that I might have driven you away. If I hadn’t found your
fax still plugged in, I would have been sure that you’d had enough of all my blowing hot and blowing cold, and had gone away.” All of Jazz’s fears were in her voice.

Casey shook his head in bewilderment. She really was a fruitcake. He hoped it wasn’t catching. One in a family was enough.

“Jazz, remember back to when we got engaged?” he said, as patiently as someone talking to a small child. “That wasn’t so long ago, now was it? Say ‘No, Casey, it wasn’t.’ ”

“No, Casey, it wasn’t,” Jazz repeated with a sense of overwhelming relief that made her voice tremble.

“Good girl. Now, didn’t I tell you I wanted to live with you for the rest of my life? Didn’t I say that I never wanted to let you go? If you think that when you get abstracted and distant it’s going to make a difference to how much I love you, well, think again and again. It never will.”

“ ‘It never will.’ ” Jazz clutched him around the neck, heedless of hundreds of crumpled chiffon pleats that no one in California knew how to press. She could stay this way for hours, she thought, with all of her weight completely entrusted to the support of his body. So safe … so safe.

“That’s even better,” he said.

“That’s even better.”

“You can stop doing that now.”

“What if I don’t want to?” She spoke with delight, seeing new ways to torment him.

“Don’t even consider it.” There was a resolute undertone of serious warning in his voice.

“You’re the boss,” Jazz assured him hastily, and pulled herself away, remembering the fire under the pot of chili. He really did love her, she reflected as she turned off the burner, but she was getting the distinct impression that he had her number.

“I’m going to get a fire going in this dark house, and you’re coming with me,” Casey said, “and you’re
not getting away until you demonstrate whatever complicated system releases you from that dress.” Gingerly he propelled her into the living room, placed her firmly on a chair, and bent to light the fire.