by Gwen Davis
“I didn’t drop you,” Kate said good-naturedly, smiling. This was a more welcome interruption than Binky’s had been, funny as Wilton was, outrageous. She only hoped he wasn’t carrying any of his goods in the purse. “I’ve been really busy.”
“So I see.”
“Do you know … how do I introduce you?” she asked Wendy.
“Just Wendy.”
“Wendy. Wilton Spenser.”
“Chawmed,” he said deliberately, and kissed her hand. “Is that alright to do if I don’t drip sweat?”
“Behave yourself,” Kate said.
“Well, this is really nice,” Wilton noted. “All the royalty. Real royalty. Literary royalty…”
“Stop,” Kate said firmly. “Wendy and I were just finding out who each other really is.” She underlined the word with her diction, warning him with her eyes.
“I’m Binky Danforth-Smythe,” Binky said.
“I would have known that without your saying anything,” said Wilton.
“You’ve heard of me?” Binky asked, surprised.
“No. I just knew you had to have a hyphen. Oh, I’ve waited so long to meet a hyphenate, I thought the day might never come. And to think you’re also a Binky!” Wilton clapped his hands together.
Binky made no attempt to conceal his distaste. He turned towards Wendy. “May I phone you?” He took out a small black book from his pocket, with a tiny gold pencil in its leathered loop, and handed it to her. She took it and started to write.
“Beware of men with little black books,” Wilton said.
“Beware of men who carry purses,” said Binky.
“I have to make a delivery,” Wilton said, and kissed Kate’s cheek. “Call me when you return to the common people.”
“Is he some kind of grocery boy?” Binky asked condescendingly, watching him go.
“He’s an actor,” Kate said.
The three of them stayed on the terrace till people began to gather below, and the string quartet started to play. It was at the sound of Pachelbel that Wendy’s eyes grew moist again. “I have to go,” she said, getting up a little too quickly, all but running from the terrace restaurant, signing the check on her way towards the veranda, followed at a fevered clip by her security guard.
“She’s very fragile,” Kate noted, protectively.
“You needn’t tell me about her,” Binky said. “We’ve known each other since we were children.”
She looked at him and tried to imagine him as a child so she’d feel better about him. There would have been just as many freckles then. The nose might not have been so pointed, downturned at its tip. The thatch of red hair had probably had a cowlick: it was plastered down now, pomaded. Somehow she had the feeling he’d been a nasty little boy, the kind that pulled at girls’ braids, dipped them in inkwells. His eyes had likely always looked too close together, a signal to her of malevolence, as whites showing below the eye, as they did in Wendy, were a warning of doom. Marilyn Monroe had had eyes like that.
“She must have been a sweet little girl,” Kate said.
“Yes, rather. Spoilt, though. Self-indulgent. We didn’t like each other much as children. But she’s really grown.”
“In the physical or the California sense?”
“I have to go,” said Binky.
* * *
“Who was the queer?” Wilton said, when Kate got home and called him.
“You think he’s gay?”
“I’m gay,” said Wilton. “He’s queer.”
“You thought so, too? He made me uneasy.”
“What’s happening with your career?” he said. “I guess since you were having lunch with the fallen duchess, you’re pretty hot.”
“She needed a friend,” said Kate.
“We all need friends. But after the publicity you’re obviously into the higher echelons.”
Actually, Kate was amazed as well as appalled by the circles the hot air had lifted her into. She’d had a meeting with Victor Lippton himself to discuss the awful script. He’d been so impressed with her contempt for it he’d asked if there was anything else she wanted to do. She’d told him her idea about Larry Drayco. He’d dismissed it, holding out for the Fitzgerald story. “They all want Grandpa’s book,” she said.
“What you probably ought to do,” said Wilton, “is write the unpublished Fitzgerald. You know so much about him, you could probably do it.”
“That’s fraud,” Kate said.
“Linus was right. You are cute. ‘Fraud.’ What do you suppose this business is about? Who do you think started it? Short little men from Chicago who had to bring in people to show them what forks to use. Whose English was so bad all anyone had to do was talk with a British accent and they’d put him in charge. That was the way it was here in the twenties. And you think it’s come that far? Look at how everyone slobbers over the duchess.”
“She’s really very touching,” said Kate.
“You’re touching. Still trying to be sincere. Look through your files. Maybe you can find his manuscript.” There was a click on the line. “Oh, I hate that fucking call waiting. It’s so rude.”
“Then why do you have it?”
“I might miss something,” said Wilton. “Hold on.” He was gone from the line for a moment, came back. “I have to go. It’s a customer.”
“Aren’t you embarrassed?”
“What? In this town? I feel proud to be a dope dealer. I don’t hurt anybody. How many people here can say that? I wish I could hang out a shingle. I wish I had a son, so I could take him into the business. Spenser and Son. I’ll call you.”
* * *
“What I’d like to know is, how did that microphone get under your mattress?” Victor Lippton said. They were in Alexa’s house in Benedict Canyon, the one she’d bought to make it easier for him, so he could stop on his way to and from the studio on days when he couldn’t make it to the gym. She’d also taken a little pied-à-terre in Santa Monica, so if he got all heated up while doing his workout on the neighboring treadmill, they’d have someplace to go.
“It had to have been my maid,” Alexa said. “The bitch. After I brought her whole family up from Guatemala.”
“Rosa doesn’t even speak English,” Victor said, having gone through his own frustration with her on the telephone. He leaned towards that telephone now. It was a decorator French phone, ivory, old-fashioned, with a gold-surrounded dial and a gold cradle for the receiver. They had spent many fevered evenings with him on the other end, calling from his cell phone, with Alexa like an odalisque naked on this bronze satin sofa, as she’d described herself in minutest sexual detail to him, while she fingered her nipples and played with herself and drove him crazy. Even now, with his marriage on the line, and maybe his life if his father-in-law found out, just watching her undo the pearl buttons on her silk blouse to reveal a glimpse of the great pointed breasts in their lace embroidered sling clouded his mind, obscured the intelligence that had chaired a dozen boards, not all of them commandeered with his money.
“She knows enough to have gotten ambitious,” Alexa said. “That happens as soon as they cross the border.”
“But you’d have to be pretty sophisticated to know what to do with a tape.”
“Probably someone bribed her to set it up.”
“In order for someone to do that, they’d have to know you were involved with me. And you swore no one knew.”
“No one but my astrologer.”
“You told Serena?” Shock softened his erection.
“I didn’t have to tell her. She saw you, conjuncting my Venus. She saw you before you even appeared. A handsome, powerful Gemini, with a beautiful cock.” She started to unzip him.
“Never mind,” he said, and stopped her hand. “Maybe they’ve hidden a camera.”
“Oh, darling, no harm can come from the tape. All you have to do is give that Lila person what she asks.”
“It’s a travesty. To create a monument to the personification of what’s fou
l in the film business.”
“Maybe he wasn’t all that bad.”
“There’s this young woman who’s Fitzgerald’s granddaughter, and she wants to write a book about Drayco, find his inherent humanity. Unearth what was noble about him.”
“You see?”
“I’m trying to get her to write a screenplay instead,” Victor said, letting her hands move over him, having calmed himself sufficiently to want her again.
“You’re just such a mover and shaker,” Alexa said, her head moving down to where it, too, could move and shake.
* * *
Now that Norman Jessup had a real detective on the track of Tyler, he was free to resume what had brought him to New York. Not free, really. Fettered. Unable to breathe easily, he could hear the air roiling in his lungs every time he thought about Sarah Nash. He had a flunky posted down the hall from her room between her and the elevator. Before she could leave the hotel, Norman would be alerted.
He’d slept in his clothes, the clothes he’d gotten especially for shadowing her: a dark sweatsuit with a hood, in case she went out in the middle of the night. But apparently she was more relaxed about her bird-dogging than Norman was, not even leaving her room until after eleven in the morning.
His limo followed her cab. To his kind of sentimental horror, he found she was heading for his old neighborhood, the place where he had once lived in a brownstone with Paulo.
There was something nostalgic about it, heading into Turtle Bay, remembering how young he had been. It was a beautiful street, even with the third world city that much of New York had become, the garbage that littered the sidewalks in front of the best addresses happily absent here. Slender little trees in a line down to Second Avenue marshaled the pavement, standing erect, growing from well-tended patches of earth, curled iron gates protecting the bases. Even as early in the spring as it was, small buds of green pimpled their branches, not quite at the point of bursting into leaves. Paulo on the brink of his blossoming.
Nostalgia gave way to anxiety as Sarah’s cab stopped. She got out and looked at a piece of paper in her hand, checked it against the number of the house in front of her. What was she up to? The place he had lived with Paulo was almost down to the far corner, twenty or maybe thirty brownstones away. But she was starting with the first house on the block. Clearly she was checking out their old environs. Maybe she wasn’t sure exactly which building it was.
As though in confirmation of his suspicions, Sarah rang first the bell on the house in front of her, and then, after talking to a man who seemed to be the super, moved to the next. But how had she even found out the street where Paulo and Norman had lived? He’d never bought the apartment, only rented, and then under Paulo’s name. Not that many people had been invited to visit them, Norman having gone through a period of seclusion while in New York. Passion for and housekeeping with Paulo had been his main recreation while in Manhattan. He had saved all his bonhomie for California. Always he’d been a little fearful that someone might try and steal Paulo from him as he had done with Winsett. Over the boy’s assurances of loyalty and equal—even greater—love, Norman had still thought it circumspect to keep their household closely sealed.
Reaching for the car phone, he dialed Bunyan Reis. Bunyan was the one in town who knew more gossip than anybody, including Liz Smith.
“My lines of communication must be down,” Bunyan said. “I never even heard you were in town. You must have Draculaed your way in. Wearing a cape. Under cover of darkness. What brings you to our still in many ways fair city?”
“I’ve bought Pilgrims!” Norman said, as though success in the entertainment business were his primary motivation, which it no longer was. His principal goal had become revenge. But revenge flooded the head and the heart with heat, and he felt slightly chilled. Fear. What did she know? What was she finding out?
“Well, that’s very upbeat,” said Bunyan. “I was a little concerned that the wind might be out of your sails.”
“Why?”
“The lovely Sarah Nash, I’m afraid, knows what happened to Paulo.”
Panic gripped Jessup’s throat. “How could she possibly?”
“I can’t imagine. But she does.”
“Nobody knows but the ones who actually did it.” Norman could hardly breathe. “And you.”
“May I be hanged by the testicles if I breathed so much as a word. You could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather when she told me.”
“Told you?”
“She knows,” Bunyan said, darkly.
“What does she know, you silly queen?”
“My, my,” Bunyan said. “The pot calling the kettle African-American.”
“Cut the wit shit! What did she say?”
“She said…” And here Bunyan paused. “I’m trying to remember the exact words. Yes. I think this is they. Most people would say ‘this is them.’”
“Will you goddamn get to it?”
“She said, and I quote…” He waited.
“I don’t know how you’ve lived this long,” Norman fumed. “Why somebody hasn’t killed you.”
“She asked me if I wasn’t disturbed by what was done to Paulo.”
Norman listened to the pounding of his own blood in his ears. “When did she say that?”
“A few days ago. When we had lunch.”
“You had lunch with Sarah?”
“I did it for you,” Bunyan said. “I thought I could find out what exactly she was up to. It wasn’t as if I gave her any information.”
Norman slammed down the phone. It was a little hard to do with a car phone. The instrument fell from its holding niche on the side of the window to the floor.
“Norman?” Bunyan’s squeaky voice cried from the carpet. “Norman?”
Norman pressed the button that opened the soundproof window between himself and the driver. “How do I shut him up?” he asked.
“Press end,” the driver said.
“What a good idea,” Norman said. “Take me back to the hotel.”
* * *
He waited until he was in his room and the doors were closed and nobody could hear to call Perry Zemmis. It was only nine on the coast, but Zemmis was still hungry, pushy, after twenty-five years of success, so he was already in his office. He took Norman’s call immediately, like he’d been waiting for it, as he probably had for most of those twenty-five years.
“Well, I knew the day would come when you’d want to do business,” Zemmis said. “You want to partner with me on the Fitzgerald book?”
“No,” Norman said.
“You got my invitation to the garden party? I think he’s a shoo-in, but we could certainly use your support, and if I make ambassador—”
“That’s not why I’m calling,” said Norman.
“Oh,” Perry said.
“I know you’re a guy who can be trusted to take care of business,” Norman said.
“Well, considering the source, I am truly honored by that statement,” Perry said fatuously. “I only wondered why it was taking so long for you to come around.”
Norman waited a moment. “I want a contract.”
“I’ll have my lawyer write it up the minute we’re off the phone. What’s the contract for?”
“Not for. On.”
“On?” asked Zemmis.
“I want a contract on Sarah Nash.”
“Now just a minute. What makes you think I’m involved with anything like—”
“Don’t fuck with me, Perry. I already have someone fucking with me. You handle this, and I’ll get you whatever you need.”
“Can I have that in writing?”
“We don’t want anything in writing,” Norman said. “You have my word. Whatever you want. The minute Sarah Nash is out of the picture. Any picture.”
“Consider her on the cutting-room floor,” said Perry.
People Who Live in Glass Houses
The truth, of course, was that Sarah Nash knew little or nothing of what it was
Norman Jessup was trying to conceal. But as the truth set some people free, fear of it enchained others. And a hunger for scandal, even treachery on a criminal scale, kept some going.
As she canvased Jessup’s old neighborhood for the thread of information to weave into a rope to hang him, Sarah felt revitalized. Being feted or hated for what she had written, depending which coast she’d been on, had taken a great deal out of her. Once she had been a very attractive woman, fetching even, a British beau had said of her. But being disliked had toughened her expression, disliking had tightened her mouth, giving her a tendency to purse her lips as antipathy had pursed her spirit. Cocaine had coarsened her features, while the restoration of her nasal passages had left her nose slightly flattened. Champagne from celebrations in her honor when the book had been a hit broke blood vessels across her once-unblemished face. Now, there was a skeptical double line between her brows, a frown that was built in. Her dermatologist used collagen to fill it, but the pain of the needle, skilled as he was, had been so severe she thought it better to leave it alone.
Besides, other problems she had with her skin were more pressing than vanity. Vanity was for those whose lives and livelihoods depended on their looks. She had no conscious wish anymore to attract anyone who might consider her fetching. She was a writer now, contemptuous of those who felt imperiled by aging, even as she fretted and occasionally agonized over the eczema that had sprouted on her skin. No place that it really showed, like her face, but on her upper arms beside her breasts, and occasionally on them. No sooner would one small eruption be calmed by the salve that the doctor prescribed for her than another would come out someplace else.
Her masseuse, who was one of those New Age people, had given her a book called You Can Heal Your Life, by Louise Hay. Sarah didn’t know which of the two women was battier, although she would never breathe a word to her masseuse, as the woman was sensitive and had a great touch. Even as she disdained the book, she couldn’t help looking through its small encyclopedic listing of ailments and what caused them. Eczema, it read, was “breathtaking antagonisms.” No shit.
Well, she would not go so far as to murmur any of the mantras that were supposed to counter the affliction. Her skin would clear up as soon as she put Norman Jessup away.