"Who are you? Somebody important?"
"He was Minna Davis's husband, he's a producer," said Edna, as if it were a rare joke, "--and this isn't at all what he just told me. I think he has a crush on you."
"Shut up, Edna," said Kathleen sharply.
As if suddenly realizing her offensiveness, Edna said, "Phone me, will you?" and stalked away toward the road. But she carried their secret with her--she had seen a spark pass between them in the darkness.
"I remember you," Kathleen said to Stahr. "You got us out of the flood."
Now what? The other woman was more missed in her absence. They were alone and on too slim a basis for what had passed already. They existed nowhere. His world seemed far away--she had no world at all except the idol's head, the half open door.
"You're Irish," he said, trying to build one for her.
She nodded.
"I've lived in London a long time--I didn't think you could tell."
The wild green eyes of a bus sped up the road in the darkness. They were silent until it went by.
"Your friend Edna didn't like me," he said. "I think it was the word Producer."
"She's just come out here, too. She's a silly creature who means no harm. I shouldn't be afraid of you."
She searched his face. She thought, like everyone, that he seemed tired--then she forgot it at the impression he gave of a brazier out of doors on a cool night.
"I suppose the girls are all after you to put them on the screen."
"They've given up," he said.
This was an understatement--they were all there, he knew, just over his threshold, but they had been there so long that their clamoring voices were no more than the sound of the traffic in the street. But his position remained more than royal: a king could make only one queen; Stahr, at least so they supposed, could make many.
"I'm thinking that it would turn you into a cynic," she said. "You didn't want to put me in the pictures?"
"No."
"That's good. I'm no actress. Once in London a man came up to me in the Carlton and asked me to make a test, but I thought awhile and finally I didn't go."
They had been standing nearly motionless, as if in a moment he would leave and she would go in. Stahr laughed suddenly.
"I feel as if I had my foot in the door--like a collector."
She laughed, too.
"I'm sorry I can't ask you in. Shall I get my reefer and sit outside?"
"No." He scarcely knew why he felt it was time to go. He might see her again--he might not. It was just as well this way.
"You'll come to the studio?" he said. "I can't promise to go around with you, but if you come, you must be sure to send word to my office."
A frown, the shadow of a hair in breadth, appeared between her eyes.
"I'm not sure," she said. "But I'm very much obliged."
He knew that, for some reason, she would not come--in an instant she had slipped away from him. They both sensed that the moment was played out. He must go, even though he went nowhere, and it left him with nothing. Practically, vulgarly, he did not have her telephone number--or even her name; but it seemed impossible to ask for them now.
She walked with him to the car, her glowing beauty and her unexplored novelty pressing up against him; but there was a foot of moonlight between them when they came out of the shadow.
"Is this all?" he said spontaneously.
He saw regret in her face--but there was a flick of the lip, also, a bending of the smile toward some indirection, a momentary dropping and lifting of a curtain over a forbidden passage.
"I do hope we'll meet again," she said almost formally.
"I'd be sorry if we didn't."
They were distant for a moment. But as he turned his car in the next drive and came back with her still waiting, and waved and drove on, he felt exalted and happy. He was glad that there was beauty in the world that would not be weighed in the scales of the casting department.
But at home he felt a curious loneliness as his butler made him tea in the samovar. It was the old hurt come back, heavy and delightful. When he took up the first of two scripts that were his evening stint, that presently he would visualize line by line on the screen, he waited a moment, thinking of Minna. He explained to her that it was really nothing, that no one could ever be like she was, that he was sorry.
That was substantially a day of Stahr's. I don't know about the illness, when it started, etc., because he was secretive, but I know he fainted a couple of times that month because Father told me. Prince Agge is my authority for the luncheon in the commissary where he told them he was going to make a picture that would lose money--which was something, considering the men he had to deal with and that he held a big block of stock and had a profit-sharing contract.
And Wylie White told me a lot, which I believed because he felt Stahr intensely with a mixture of jealousy and admiration. As for me, I was head over heels in love with him then, and you can take what I say for what it's worth.
Chapter V
Fresh as the morning, I went up to see him a week later. Or so I thought; when Wylie called for me, I had gotten into riding clothes to give the impression I'd been out in the dew since early morning.
"I'm going to throw myself under the wheel of Stahr's car, this morning," I said.
"How about this car?" he suggested. "It's one of the best cars Mort Fleishacker ever sold second-hand."
"Not on your flowing veil," I answered like a book. "You have a wife in the East."
"She's the past," he said. "You've got one great card, Celia--your valuation of yourself. Do you think anybody would look at you if you weren't Pat Brady's daughter?"
We don't take abuse like our mothers would have. Nothing--no remark from a contemporary means much. They tell you to be smart, they're marrying you for your money, or you tell them. Everything's simpler. Or is it? as we used to say.
But as I turned on the radio and the car raced up Laurel Canyon to The Thundering Beat of My Heart, I didn't believe he was right. I had good features except my face was too round, and a skin they seemed to love to touch, and good legs, and I didn't have to wear a brassiere. I haven't a sweet nature, but who was Wylie to reproach me for that?
"Don't you think I'm smart to go in the morning?" I asked.
"Yeah. To the busiest man in California. He'll appreciate it. Why didn't you wake him up at four?"
"That's just it. At night he's tired. He's been looking at people all day, and some of them not bad. I come in in the morning and start a train of thought."
"I don't like it. It's brazen."
"What have you got to offer? And don't be rough."
"I love you," he said, without much conviction, "I love you more than I love your money, and that's plenty. Maybe your father would make me a supervisor."
"I could marry the last man tapped for Bones this year and live in Southampton."
I turned the dial and got either Gone or Lost--there were good songs that year. The music was getting better again. When I was young during the depression, it wasn't so hot, and the best numbers were from the twenties, like Benny Goodman playing Blue Heaven or Paul Whiteman with When Day Is Done. There were only the bands to listen to. But now I liked almost everything except Father singing Little Girl, You've Had a Busy Day to try to create a sentimental father-and-daughter feeling.
Lost and Gone were the wrong mood, so I turned again and got Lovely to Look At, which was my kind of poetry. I looked back as we crossed the crest of the foothills--with the air so clear you could see the leaves on Sunset Mountain two miles away. It's startling to you sometimes--just air, unobstructed, uncomplicated air.
"Lovely to look at--de-lightful to know-w," I sang.
"Are you going to sing for Stahr?" Wylie said. "If you do, get in a line about my being a good supervisor."
"Oh, this'll be only Stahr and me," I said. "He's going to look at me and think, 'I've never really seen her before.'"
"We don't use that line this year,"
he said.
"--Then he'll say 'Little Cecilia,' like he did the night of the earthquake. He'll say he never noticed I have become a woman."
"You won't have to do a thing."
"I'll stand there and bloom. After he kisses me as you would a child---"
"That's all in my script," complained Wylie, "and I've got to show it to him tomorrow."
"--he'll sit down and put his face in his hands and say he never thought of me like that."
"You mean you get in a little fast work during the kiss?"
"I bloom, I told you. How often do I have to tell you I bloom."
"It's beginning to sound pretty randy to me," said Wylie. "How about laying off--I've got to work this morning."
"Then he says it seems as if he was always meant to be this way."
"Right in the industry. Producer's blood." He pretended to shiver. "I'd hate to have a transfusion of that."
"Then he says---"
"I know all his lines," said Wylie. "What I want to know is what you say."
"Somebody comes in," I went on.
"And you jump up quickly off the casting couch, smoothing your skirts."
"Do you want me to walk out and get home?"
We were in Beverly Hills, getting very beautiful now with the tall Hawaiian pines. Hollywood is a perfectly zoned city, so you know exactly what kind of people economically live in each section, from executives and directors, through technicians in their bungalows, right down to extras. This was the executive section and a very fancy lot of pastry. It wasn't as romantic as the dingiest village of Virginia or New Hampshire, but it looked nice this morning.
"They asked me how I knew," sang the radio, "--my true love was true."
My heart was fire, and smoke was in my eyes and everything, but I figured my chance at about fifty-fifty. I would walk right up to him as if I was either going to walk through him or kiss him on the mouth--and stop a bare foot away and say "Hello" with disarming understatement.
And I did--though of course it wasn't like I expected: Stahr's beautiful dark eyes looking back into mine, knowing, I am dead sure, everything I was thinking--and not a bit embarrassed. I stood there an hour, I think, without moving, and all he did was twitch the side of his mouth and put his hands in his pocket.
"Will you go with me to the ball tonight?" I asked.
"What ball?"
"The screen-writers' ball down at the Ambassador."
"Oh, yes." He considered. "I can't go with you. I might just come in late. We've got a sneak preview in Glendale."
How different it all was from what you'd planned. When he sat down, I went over and put my head among his telephones, like a sort of desk appendage, and looked at him; and his dark eyes looked back so kind and nothing. Men don't often know those times when a girl could be had for nothing. All I succeeded in putting into his head was: "Why don't you get married, Celia?"
Maybe he'd bring up Robby again, try to make a match there.
"What could I do to interest an interesting man?" I asked him.
"Tell him you're in love with him."
"Should I chase him?"
"Yes," he said smiling.
"I don't know. If it isn't there, it isn't there."
"I'd marry you," he said unexpectedly. "I'm lonesome as hell. But I'm too old and tired to undertake anything."
I went around the desk and stood beside him.
"Undertake me."
He looked up in surprise, understanding for the first time that I was in deadly earnest.
"Oh, no," he said. He looked almost miserable for a minute. "Pictures are my girl. I haven't got much time---" He corrected himself quickly, "I mean any time. It'd be like marrying a doctor."
"You couldn't love me."
"It's not that," he said and--right out of my dream but with a difference: "I never thought of you that way, Celia. I've known you so long. Somebody told me you were going to marry Wylie White."
"And you had--no reaction."
"Yes, I did. I was going to speak to you about it. Wait till he's been sober for two years."
"I'm not even considering it, Monroe."
We were way off the track, and just as in my day-dream somebody came in--only I was quite sure Stahr had pressed a concealed button.
I'll always think of that moment, when I felt Miss Doolan behind me with her pad, as the end of childhood, the end of the time when you cut out pictures. What I was looking at wasn't Stahr but a picture of him I cut out over and over: the eyes that flashed a sophisticated understanding at you and then darted up too soon into his wide brow with its ten thousand plots and plans; the face that was aging from within, so that there were no casual furrows of worry and vexation but a drawn asceticism as if from a silent self-set struggle--or a long illness. It was handsomer to me than all the rosy tan from Coronado to Del Monte. He was my picture, as sure as if he had been pasted on the inside of my old locker in school. That's what I told Wylie White, and when a girl tells the man she likes second best about the other one--then she's in love.
I noticed the girl long before Stahr arrived at the dance. Not a pretty girl, for there are none of those in Los Angeles--one girl can be pretty, but a dozen are only a chorus. Nor yet a professional beauty--they do all the breathing for everyone, and finally even the men have to go outside for air. Just a girl, with the skin of one of Raphael's corner angels and a style that made you look back twice to see if it were something she had on.
I noticed her and forgot her. She was sitting back behind the pillars at a table whose ornament was a faded semi-star, who, in hopes of being noticed and getting a bit, rose and danced regularly with some scarecrow males. It reminded me shamefully of my first party, where mother made me dance over and over with the same boy to keep in the spotlight. The semi-star spoke to several people at our table, but we were busy being Cafe Society and she got nowhere at all.
From our angle it appeared that they all wanted something.
"You're expected to fling it around," said Wylie, "--like in the old days. When they find out you're hanging on to it, they get discouraged. That's what all this brave gloom is about--the only way to keep their self-respect is to be Hemingway characters. But underneath they hate you in a mournful way, and you know it."
He was right--I knew that since 1933 the rich could only be happy alone together.
I saw Stahr come into the half-light at the top of the wide steps and stand there with his hands in his pockets, looking around. It was late and the lights seemed to have burned a little lower, though they were the same. The floor show was finished, except for a man who still wore a placard which said that at midnight in the Hollywood Bowl Sonja Henie was going to skate on hot soup. You could see the sign as he danced becoming less funny on his back. A few years before there would have been drunks around. The faded actress seemed to be looking for them hopefully over her partner's shoulder. I followed her with my eyes when she went back to her table---
--and there, to my surprise, was Stahr talking to the other girl. They were smiling at each other as if this was the beginning of the world.
*
Stahr had expected nothing like this when he stood at the head of the steps a few minutes earlier. The "sneak preview" had disappointed him, and afterwards he had had a scene with Jacques La Borwitz right in front of the theatre, for which he was now sorry. He had started toward the Brady party when he saw Kathleen sitting in the middle of a long white table alone.
Immediately things changed. As he walked toward her, the people shrank back against the walls till they were only murals; the white table lengthened and became an altar where the priestess sat alone. Vitality welled up in him, and he could have stood a long time across the table from her, looking and smiling.
The incumbents of the table were crawling back--Stahr and Kathleen danced.
When she came close, his several visions of her blurred; she was momentarily unreal. Usually a girl's skull made her real, but not this time--Stahr continued to be dazzled
as they danced out along the floor--to the last edge, where they stepped through a mirror into another dance with new dancers whose faces were familiar but nothing more. In this new region he talked, fast and urgently.
"What's your name?"
"Kathleen Moore."
"Kathleen Moore," he repeated.
"I have no telephone, if that's what you're thinking."
"When will you come to the studio?"
"It's not possible. Truly."
"Why isn't it? Are you married?"
"No."
"You're not married?"
"No, nor never have been. But then I may be."
"Someone there at the table."
"No." She laughed. "What curiosity!"
But she was deep in it with him, no matter what the words were. Her eyes invited him to a romantic communion of unbelievable intensity. As if she realized this, she said, frightened: "I must go back now. I promised this dance."
"I don't want to lose you. Couldn't we have lunch or dinner?"
"It's impossible." But her expression helplessly amended the words to, "It's just possible. The door is still open by a chink, if you could squeeze past. But quickly--so little time."
"I must go back," she repeated aloud. Then she dropped her arms, stopped dancing, and looked at him, a laughing wanton.
"When I'm with you, I don't breathe quite right," she said.
She turned, picked up her long dress, and stepped back through the mirror. Stahr followed until she stopped near her table.
"Thank you for the dance," she said, "and now really, good night."
Then she nearly ran.
Stahr went to the table where he was expected and sat down with the Cafe Society group--from Wall Street, Grand Street, Loudon County, Virginia, and Odessa, Russia. They were all talking with enthusiasm about a horse that had run very fast, and Mr. Marcus was the most enthusiastic of all. Stahr guessed that the Jews had taken over the worship of horses as a symbol--for years it had been the Cossacks mounted and the Jews on foot. Now the Jews had horses, and it gave them a sense of extraordinary well-being and power. Stahr sat pretending to listen and even nodding when something was referred to him, but all the time watching the table behind the pillars. If everything had not happened as it had, even to his connecting the silver belt with the wrong girl, he might have thought it was some elaborate frame-up. But the elusiveness was beyond suspicion. For there in a moment he saw that she was escaping again--the pantomime at the table indicated goodbye. She was leaving, she was gone.
The Love of the Last Tycoon Page 8