Rich Friends (20 page)

“Philip's hardly that kind of guy.”

“It's not a gamble I can take.”

“Maybe he would have after, well, after. That's understandable. He was hurt. But not now. He wouldn't take Alix away from you.” He's not that interested, Gene thought, the cold, handsome sonovabitch, he and Caroline having opposing views of Beverly's husbands. “He wouldn't do anything.”

She stood. “Gene, that portrait, such as it is, was promised for this afternoon.”

Gene knew a dismissal when he heard one. He started out of the kitchenette. And was confronted by the huge, despairing canvas. He thought of Dan's bloodshot wink. Gene had much quiet persistence. His face assumed that downward-lined, dogged expression.

“At least talk to him.”

“I've tried to call. I never get through.”

Gene digested this. “Then go see him.”

“I can't.”

“Why not?”

“I just can't.”

“Beverly, maybe you aren't aware of this, but Dan went into that mall for you. I was in his office the day Raymond Earle got him the property. Dan was all keyed up. He said you couldn't take the entertainment end of his business. He needed income, a lot of income. So the mall. He was changing his life to fit yours. If you blame him—”

“Yes, I blame him,” she interrupted in a low, trapped voice. “Gene, does Caroline still call you Clean Gene? You are. So you won't understand this. Not in a million years.” She swallowed with difficulty. “Dan's aggressive, he's full of drive, he moves his hands when he talks, he has that wry shrug. He's so very Jewish. That's why I blame him.”

To Gene's recollection, this was the first time Beverly, in his presence, had mentioned Jews or Judaism. She shied away from the subject. He knew it was sentimentality to think of this avoidance in terms of an unbearable psychic wound, yet he, too, had grown up in Glendale. Her confession was against every one of Gene's beliefs, yet he knew she was incapable of willfully inflicting hurt. He absolved her.

“You're alone too much,” he said. “Thinking.”

“No doubt about that.” She leaned against the old-fashioned archway. “My favorite pastime. If Dan weren't so very Jewish, would Jamie be alive?”

“Raymond Earle,” Gene said, “is a psychopath.”

“There's plenty of them around.”

“Does Dan know how you feel?”

“He's very shrewd about people. And he knows me. Gene, I'm the original anti-Semitic Jew.” She sounded like a child about to weep. Her voice shook.

And then he saw that her body, too, was shaking.

“Honey, what is it?”

“Nothing. I've got these magic pills,” she said, running from the room.

He heard a sharp sound.

“Beverly,” he called, following her. In a shabby bathroom, she stood over broken glass.

“Can you realize,” she whispered, “how very much I hate me?”

The shaking was worse.

He ran the few steps to the kitchen. “It's the way you were raised,” he called, snatching the glass she'd used for her coffee. “The time, the place. Everything's more open now.” He was back in the bathroom, dropping shrunken ice cubes in the sink, running the faucet. “Here.”

She took the glass between both hands, convulsively attempting to swallow. In order not to embarrass her, he looked away.

Over the bathtub hung three narrow, unstretched canvases, a triptych of the same man wearing the same murky red clothing. In each, the frail body was knotted differently. Yet the three paintings had the shattering impact of a single pose: a man twisting and jerking as if he were being flayed alive. No pity. No sentiment. It was as if Beverly had recorded the sadism she saw.

And then Gene understood what he should have understood from the large canvas, what he surely would have understood if Beverly hadn't been a friend so many years. However, it requires huge mental acrobatics to revisualize old friends. And Beverly, in this particular, was no longer Beverly.

The slender woman grasping a dime-store tumbler in shaky hands, this woman Gene had known almost half a lifetime, had become, by whatever tragic route, all that he ever hoped and dreamed of becoming.

She was an artist.

It was entirely probable, a great artist, he thought, absorbed in the triptych. She's done it, he thought, turning to her with pathological awe.

“What is it?” she asked.

Confused, he said the first words that came. “Your work, that's all that matters.”

“I do want to see him.”

“You're an artist.”

The pills, evidently, worked fast. She was shivering, but less. “Is Beverly Hills out of your way, Gene?”

“He's hurt. He'll hit out. Look, I was wrong. Honey, I don't want him hurting you.”

“Give me five minutes.”

“The portrait—”

“I'll get to it afterward,” she said, and stepped around him.

5

VICTORY ENTERPRISES

LAND DEVELOPMENT

Dan R. Grossblatt

raised gold lettering spelled. Tucking her purse under her elbow, she used both hands to turn the oversize knob. Georgia looked up. A slow flush rose from tight pink sweater to pale bangs. She resembled an agitated angora.

“Hi, Georgia.” Pretty bunny.

“Mrs. Grossblatt.”

“How is everything?”

“Very fine.”

“Is Mr. Grossblatt around?”

“He's in conference. He asked not to be disturbed.” Disturbed, three syllables. “For anything.”

Beverly backed out of the office. Trembling, she stared for several minutes at

VICTORY ENTERPRISES

LAND DEVELOPMENT

Dan R. Grossblatt

before taking a deep breath and going back in.

“I'll wait,” she said, sitting on one of the couches.

“He's very tied up.”

“How long?”

“Very.
What do you want
?”

“To talk, but—”

But Georgia had clicked a button, saying crisply, “Mrs. Grossblatt's here. She says she must see you now.”

And Dan's voice clanked through the intercom. “Be right there, DeeDee.”

Georgia's eyes glittered in twin wedges of triumph. The door opened. Dan blinked, startled. A greenish bruise under his left eye, horizontal plaster above the right. Accident, Gene had said. Beverly glimpsed a man seated in the inner office.

“DeeDee's coming to talk over the boys' school. I'm tied up! You'll have to wait!”

He slammed the door. Hard. Water sprang to Beverly's eyes. Lately, any loud noise dis-turb-ed her. Not wanting Georgia to see, she picked up a magazine, opening it, worrying suddenly that one wasn't enough. What if she got the shakes again? But already she felt as if her blood corpuscles were weighted. Two would have knocked her out. She thought of Gene's face when it started. Nice face, kind, the hair going. Slight, stoop-shouldered now, yet not weak-looking. Always she had liked Gene. Tolerance. Clean Gene. He'd been nice, but oh, how he must despise her. Beverly's fingers clenched the slick paper. What time is it? She wouldn't ask Georgia, wouldn't ask—

“Georgia.” She heard her shrill anxiety. “What time is it?”

“One thirty.”

She had asked, unwillingly, twice before Dan emerged from his office with a fat, tanned little man. Bart Cogan, Dan introduced, of Carmel Cogan in Phoenix. Through an over-white smile, Mr. Cogan said he was pleased to meet her, truly pleased, and he hoped he hadn't kept her husband too long. Dan said he was sorry as all hell about the interruption, Bart, but hahahaha, you know how these things are. Mr. Cogan kept smiling, obviously embarrassed by how these things are. The door closed on him. Both Dan and Georgia were staring at her.

“He flew in to write up the lease,” Dan said, drumming impatiently on his door. “Come in.”

“Dan, about your calls?” asked Georgia.

“Don't put them through.”

“None, Dan?”

“None.”

Beverly moved past him, smelling cigar and Scotch. She sat in the deep chair opposite his ebony-topped desk. He searched through a turmoil of scattered papers, finding a legal-looking form to read. She stared at his wrist. She could see only the white of French cuff.

“What's the time?”

He cocked his arm. “Quarter to two. Am I keeping you? I am sorry.” He crumpled the form, tossing it, missing the wastebasket.

“So?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Aren't you in a hot sweat to talk?”

“Dan, please don't shout.”

“I'm not!” he shouted. “Two thirty I have another appointment!”

“For the mall? It must be almost up. Is it filled?”

“What's it to you?”

“Just interested.”

“Balls!”

“How're the boys?”

“With DeeDee.”

“Did Vic's teeth come in?”

“Crooked. Look. You're here. Fine. Let's get the meat on the rug.”

If I cry I die. Cry and die. Weep and leap. “Please don't.”

“What're you muttering about?”

She motioned downward with her hand.

“We'll play it your way, then. How,” he mimicked her low voice, “are your dear parents?”

You know, she thought, that it's never been right between me and them since I left Philip. She said, “I haven't seen them much.”

“Delighted they're doing so well. And that prize horse's ass, Schorer?”

“Listen, Dan—”

“Terrific he's so great. And you, anyone can see, are blooming.”

“Have you moved?” she asked.

“To the Beverly Wilshire. Why?”

“I called the house.”

“If you couldn't get me there, didn't it enter your brilliant, artistic head to try here?”

“A lot of times. Didn't Georgia tell you?”

His mouth opened, his eyelids quivered. It was as if she had slid a knife through the summer-weight jacket and into his ribs. Georgia had called him Dan once too often. Georgia and Dan. Dan and Georgia. So. She smiled. So. What once would have torn her apart, now didn't mean a thing. Why was she lying to herself? The smile cost her. Oh Dan, she thought, remembering. A mourning dove fluttered to the ledge, stretching its wings and raising its slender neck. Dan went to the window, lifting his fingers to rap.

“Don't,” she said sharply. “It's tired.”

He turned to her. “So I've been getting laid,” he said, his voice drained of the anger that had ridden it, drained of vitality.

The dove had settled its head under one speckled wing, throat pulsing, ruby eyes turned into the office.

“Do they live on the ledge?”

“It's not my idea of marriage, alone in a hotel.”

“They probably nest nearby,” she said.

“We don't have much community property, but you'll be better off than in that dump I hear you're hiding out in.”

“Across Wilshire there's trees.”

“Get yourself a lawyer.”

“Or maybe it doesn't live around here.”

“You've gotten a divorce before.”

“They fly long distances.”

“Look, I'm trying to discuss something important.”

What is important? Where a mourning dove nests? If a sparrow falls? If one twelve-year-old boy dies? Does it matter to Anyone? She had put the question to Rabbi Jacobson and he had replied,
Is it up to Gott to explain His vays to us? Vy lay vaste to yourself demanding explanations
? He smelled of mothballs and had married her to Dan and so knew the whole story more or less. At first he had smiled kindly with stubs of yellow teeth, but as she had grown more insistent that the Lord our God, the Lord is One, is also a runaway Father, he'd become stern.

“I don't remember doves around here.”

Dan shouted, “Who has time for all this bird shit?”

She tried to block his loudness.

Couldn't.

She heard water pouring. Cool glass was put into her hand. “Drink,” he said quietly.

She drank. “It's any loud noise,” she explained. “Dan, what's the time?”

“Why the worry about time?”

“Alix,” she said, thinking about the bus schedule. She had committed to memory those routes needed for her brief forays. The Hollywood bus left at two thirty-five.

“What's with Alix?”

“Nothing. She's out, and I like to be home when she's there. What is it?”

“Two, about,” he said.

“There's time to talk.” Her voice faded, then returned. “Dan, do you think it was some kind of punishment?”

He understood. Jamie. “No,” he said. “But you do.”

“More than that.” She glanced at the resting bird. “All my life I've been looking for a meaning, a pattern. I think that's really why I started to paint. Painters and writers are searching for some kind of order. They always have been. Take the writers of the Bible. People always're being punished unto the third and fourth generation. The cruelties of life made some sort of sense if they were punishment by Him, even if for a very remote crime.”

“Take it easy,” he said.

“I'm not coherent? I never am, am I? But think about it, Dan.” And she went on, as incoherently, that she didn't believe life is meaningless, she did believe that certain people, certain families, certain groups are pursued by tragedy. She cited the Greeks, and paused, taking a deep breath. “Groups pursued by tragedy.”

Her fingers pressed down until the nails were purple shells. “Would it have happened if we weren't Jewish?”

A gagging noise came from Dan's throat. “Why I ever made such a half-ass remark.”

“You meant it.”

“Like hell.”

“If I were Caroline and you were Gene, would he have killed Cricket?”

“Look, why don't we knock this off? Raymond Earle is a certified lunatic.”