The Celebrity (30 page)

A strawberry couldn’t have been fitted in anywhere.

Suddenly Abby wheeled, took the watermelon in both hands, and hurled it at the sink. Her aim was bad. The pink fruit splattered all over the wall. Whereupon Abby did something she had not done in ten years. She ran to her bed, threw herself down upon it, and sobbed.

When Gregory came, she tried to joke about being an actress in a B production, with B production sobs, but she only wept the harder. Gregory had heard the squashy thump, and in a moment he left her to investigate. The watermelon had rolled halfway across the floor, leaving a slippery wet track; a good deal of its flesh clung to the rough plaster wall. He found a pancake turner, scraped off the wall, retrieved the watermelon, and dampened a kitchen towel, which he used indiscriminately on plaster and linoleum. Then he returned to his wife.

“Three weeks at the Cape or in Canada in August always was a silly idea,” he said. “I want to go somewhere that’s too far away for mail, the telephone, the Sunday papers
and
visits from Patrick King. Let’s go out to Gwen and Howie.”

Abby sat up. This time she did behave like the traditional wife. “You mean drive all the way out to Wyoming?”

“And take Hat. If she won’t come, just make her come.”

“She’d kill herself rather than miss
another
big trip. But I wrote Gwen and Howie we couldn’t possibly get anywhere this summer for more than a couple of weeks.”

“We can write Gwen and Howie and say we can.”

“But all that way in three weeks?”

“We’ll make it six weeks.”

“We just were out West.”

The telephone rang and Gregory left her. He said, “Hello,” and then nothing for several minutes. “I’ll talk it over with your mother and we’ll see.” He listened once more, and finally said, “Of course you can; he’s always welcome here.”

Gregory returned and sat on the edge of the bed. “A perfectly respectable weekend at Fire Island,” he said, “staying with somebody named Mike Kellerton, a best friend of Pat’s; Mike Kellerton is having a girl out too, so nobody could be alone very much.”

Abby rose. “I think I’ll take a deep cool tub for a while.”

“How soon could we pack, Abby? I’d like to have Hat back for a while, in old clothes, and no dates, and no Mr. King.”

“Oh, Gregory, so would I.”

“Let’s write Gwen and Howie now.”

“Oh, darling, let’s be like Thorn and call them.”

In the candle-pierced darkness of the outdoor dining-room near the Sound, Thorn thought Diana more beautiful than ever. Driving out, when he had told her about his lecturing contract, she had looked almost happy, but now her eyes were dark and veiled. He wanted to stop talking about himself, but she made that difficult. She couldn’t abandon her new vision of him as a country-wide lecturer.

“That’s off in the future,” he said. “For the rest of this year, I’ll be too tied to Gregory’s work to accept any big-time tour.”

“There are plenty of places just overnight from New York.”

“But it’s the national swings Zoring goes for. He says a real draw can get to clear ten, maybe twenty, thousand dollars on a three or four months’ tour. If I make good, why, maybe by this time next year when our
second
movie hits the screen, I’ll be trying out the big stuff.” He hadn’t told her a word about the Hathaway-Johns possibility; the time hadn’t come for that, any more than the time had come to tell Zoring Smith about it. Nor to tell Hathaway about Zoring Smith.

Diana looked at the tablecloth. “Even this year, you’ll be gone from the office so much.”

Here it is, Thornton Johns thought, the perfect opening, and I’m as tongue-tied as a kid. No light turn of phrase came to him; it never did any more with Diana. But he couldn’t go mawkish and heavy either. “You’re not pretending you’d miss me?”

“Oh, I did miss you when you were on the Coast.”

“You might have missed having a proper boss; you didn’t miss
me.
” She looked up at him and then away. “You’ve probably got some handsome young man in your life who keeps you from missing anybody. For all I know, you’ll be getting married one of these days.”

“Oh, no, I’m not marrying anybody, ever.”

“Di,” he said, and covered her hand with his. “You’re unhappy—you’ve been unhappy so long.”

“Yes, I have.” She drew her hand back, and clasped it with her other.

“Can’t you tell me? We’re friends, we’ve
been
friends.”

She shook her head, and fumbled for a cigarette. She never smoked in the office; only when they had dined together or gone driving in the car had he ever seen her smoking. A dread of next week suddenly came into his heart; Jill was brilliant, glorious, a triumph of a woman, but she was spoiled, imperious. Diana was a girl, a soft lovely girl, who demanded nothing, who suffered in secret, a girl he could make happy.

“There’s nothing wrong about confiding in a friend, Diana,” he said. “I can’t go on, day after day, seeing you so sad, trying to guess what it is.”

“Seeing me?” She turned to him. “You’ve known it all along?”

For answer he took her hand into both of his. “Of course. And now you’re going to tell me about it.” He hesitated. “I think I have the right to know.”

She glanced down and her lips parted. She was wearing green silk, so dark it was nearly black. It was cut into a deep V, closely fitted, discreet. Her throat was beautiful and suddenly Thorn wanted to be kissing it—he had never felt this about Diana before; for months and months he hadn’t felt this about anybody.

“I
am
unhappy,” she said slowly, “and why wouldn’t I be?”

He waited. In the flickering light from the hurricane lamp, shadows moved across her lips. They seemed to be trembling. He wanted to kiss them too. His heart began to pound.

“Wouldn’t
you
be unhappy,” she went on, “if you were—”

“Were?”

“Were hopelessly in love with somebody who’s married and isn’t the kind to get a divorce?”

Thorn’s breath caught. Hopelessly in love. Hopelessly, steadily, unchangingly in love, tormented by the secret of that love, brave with the secret, unwilling to reveal it until he had forced the revelation from her. A wild longing came, to be young, free, not to have the boys, not to have Cindy.

“How long,” he said gently, “have you felt this way, Diana?”

“Oh, forever.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Perhaps, for a while, she could be content with his love alone; perhaps for a year or two more, until the boys were out of school, Diana and he could find in each other—“Why didn’t you tell me?” he repeated.

“It
seems
like ‘forever,’ anyway,” she said. “Ever since the first day I met him in the office.”

“Met him?”

“Since before I met him,” she whispered. “When you told me he was a client, I nearly died. I’d always been in love with him, just listening to him on the air, and when he came in that day and. you said, ‘Diana, this is Roy Tribble—’ ” She squeezed her eyelids shut and tore her handkerchief out of her bag.

For this brief respite from observation, Thornton Johns thanked God.

During the next hour, Thorn found it all too easy to stop talking about himself; Diana scarcely allotted him time for a syllable. In her low voice, still the caressing voice that had for so long assured him he was her one concern, she began her story all the way back at the precise moment when a pivoting needle swept around a radio dial and stopped over a voice singing a love song. For a while Thorn listened intently, but as she proceeded unhurriedly through her growing conviction that the unseen, still unmet Roy Tribble was addressing himself directly to her, Thorn began to discover within himself an ability he had heretofore suspected only with his wife. He could listen intently to each word and pay no attention.

His mind was on more speculative matters. He had never been egotist enough to ascribe Diana’s sadness to his absence, but he should have known long ago that it was abnormal for a girl to remain so cool, so aloof. So free of guile was he that even when he had seen her go all shiny at his first mention of Tribble, he had done nothing but accept, humbly accept, the dictum that girls like Diana wanted a man more glamorous than a salesman in a city of salesmen. Not once had it occurred to him that she merely wanted Roy Tribble.

Diana the Unreachable, he had called her. Diana the Un-huntress. Her pride in his first successes, her wide eyes looking up at him in awe—she had been playing The Perfect Secretary all the while. Her readiness to go out to dinner with him whenever he asked her was a secretarial readiness too, or a marking-time readiness. He had always been square with Diana while she—

He had to get away alone as soon as possible, to cope with , this debacle. Cindy wasn’t expecting him this weekend, but now his farsighted alibis for remaining in town jeered at him. In her discreet haunting dress, Diana shifted position and he looked directly at her. She was assuring him that hers was a virtuous love still, unspoiled by yielding to. what could only corrode its inner purity. Quite suddenly Thorn prayed God to speed the day when Diana Bates would bitterly regret having thrown away, for a minor celebrity like Roy Tribble, her one chance at somebody
really
famous.

“Thank you for telling me,” he said, “for trusting me enough.” He slipped his hand over hers and this time, as if accepting the open expression of a sympathy she had sensed in secret all along, Diana curled her fingers inside his. Thorn spoke to her of courage and the long view; he praised her for her strength and wisdom in eschewing compromise.
Eschewing
struck the membrane of his ear with a dull archaic thud but he ignored it.

“I’m going to take you home now,” he said at last, “and then drive out to the beach tonight.”

“Oh, Mr. Johns.” She spoke in the same gentle astonishment he had heard when she had first seen his name in print.

“Not all that way tonight? You’ll never get there before two or three in the morning.”

“I know it.” He met her glance, but only briefly. “Seeing you so unhappy, realizing there’s no easy out for you and Roy—it’s just flattened me, Diana. I’ll feel better after a quiet weekend with my family.”

Like the new self-sealing inner tubes on the latest cars, Thornton Johns’ nervous system was usually able to heal its own wounds almost instantaneously. This time, however, there had been no sharp clean puncture but an untidy sprawling rawness, and it took longer for large protective layers to form over it.

Nevertheless, aided by sun and wind and many neighborly martinis, as well as by Cindy’s, young Thorn’s, and Fred’s obvious delight at his sudden availability, Thorn’s unscheduled visit to Quogue gradually restored most of his self-confidence and by Sunday morning he was glad he had come. He had tried not to think about Diana, and when he failed, he found his thoughts had at last veered to a larger, more philosophical plane. What Diana did not yet know, in her poor dreams that a Roy Tribble could one day make her happy, was that in this day and age, a minor celebrity was almost as dismal as an absolute nobody. Once you were a cut above the mob, you wanted to be several cuts above, and after that there was no satisfying you until you got clear to the top.

He suddenly remembered a painting he had seen years ago; since he hadn’t been to a museum since college, he must have seen it in
Life.
Perhaps it was an etching or drawing; anyway it was by Breughel and though there were people in it, what he remembered most vividly were all sorts of swimming fish, curving, swooping, mouths open, eyes as uncovered as marbles. It was called “The Big Fish Eat the Little Fish,” and it was so ugly you could scarcely call it a masterpiece, but it had certainly stayed with him for a long time though he couldn’t explain why he had thought of it now.

As always, on those rare occasions when Thornton Johns discovered the joys of reflective thought, particularly if these were coupled with the joys of artistic appreciation, he was reluctant to sip them too briefly. But at this moment guests began to arrive for lunch; he rose to greet them, and the rest of the weekend sped by. Whenever his pain threatened to throb again, Thorn made himself think either of his Zoring Smith future or his date to meet Jill Goodwyn at the airport tomorrow night. Had all gone well with Diana, his appearance at the airport would have had to be a perfunctory gesture of helpful friendliness. Now it might be anything.

Back at the office on Monday morning, Diana’s greetings were flustered and her glance uncertain. Obscurely this pleased Thornton Johns, helped him achieve his habitual manner with her, and seemed to release an effervescence of energy within him. This pleased him too; it always meant new action was in the offing, in what direction, toward what specific goal, he did not yet know. Obeying an impulse without examining it, he dialed Roy Tribble, found him free for lunch, and promptly invited him to the Premium Club.

There, though he would never betray Diana’s confidences, Thorn was so persuasive in his argument that everybody’s future was unpredictable, and so eloquent in his defense of a periodic re-examination of one’s long-view savings program, that Roy Tribble was deeply impressed. “Give me the dope again, Thorn,” he said eagerly, “on an extra twenty-year endowment policy.” A pencil was immediately forthcoming from Thorn’s breast pocket, and a Premium Club tablecloth, from which scribbled premiums and maturity dates were scoured out at each laundering, forthwith acquired its new batch.

That evening, with Jill Goodwyn not due at La Guardia Airport until nearly midnight, Thorn dined, with Jim Hathaway and Maude Denkin, going to Le Persiflage, a small French restaurant Miss Denkin had specified and of which Thorn had never heard.

This dinner was one of a series Jim had arranged with all of his three-thousand-dollar clients, to sound them out, one by one, on the subject of Hathaway-Johns, Incorporated. Thorn was automatically invited each time and he admired the way Jim kept everything perfectly hypothetical, perfectly candid, and absolutely confidential from the members of his old firm. All he was doing, Jim made it clear, was canvassing the exciting possibilities with his own clients—would they be interested in making a change, as soon as any existing contract with other literary agencies expired or was otherwise disposed of? Gregory Johns, for instance, was only too eager to come along, actually regretful that he had to wait until October or November for such unified service. “Hathaway-Johns,” Jim would say to each of them, “is not going to be any weak little premature infant, I promise you, with clients like that already signed up. We wanted to see how
you
feel about our new baby.”