It was as big as three rooms put together, and the ceiling was uncommonly high. The walls were a subtle shade of pale blue that the professional decorator must have considered “right” for Sally, though much of the wall space was given over to glass: huge gilt-framed mirrors on one side and an L-shaped display of French windows along two others, with heavy curtains poised to glide and sweep across their panes. There were two double beds, which Jack thought a little excessive even by professional-decorator standards, and on various chests or end tables around the expanse of deep white carpet stood big pottery lamps whose fabric shades were three or four feet tall. In one corner, at the far end of the room, was a very low, round, black-lacquered table with a floral centerpiece, and with cushions placed at intervals on the floor around it as if in readiness for a Japanese meal; in another, near the entrance, a ceramic umbrella stand held a bouquet of giant peacock feathers.
“Yeah,” Jack murmured, turning around and squinting slightly in an effort to take it all in. “Yeah, this is really nice, honey. I can see why you like it.”
“Go in and look at the bathroom,” she commanded. “You’ve never seen such a bathroom in your life.”
And after inspecting the flawless gleam and splendor of the bathroom, he came back and said, “No, that’s really true. You’re right. I never have.”
He stood peering down at the Japanese table for a moment; then he said, “You ever use this?”
“‘Use’ it?”
“Oh, well, I just thought you might call up five or six very close friends once in a while, get ’em all up here in their socks and sit ’em cross-legged around this thing, turn down the lights and break out the chopsticks and have yourselves a swell little evening in Tokyo.”
There was a silence. “You’re making fun of me, Jack,” she said, “and I think you’re going to find that’s not a very good idea.”
“Aw, baby, come on. I was only—”
“The decorator put it there,” she said. “I wasn’t consulted on anything he did because Jill wanted the whole apartment to be a surprise for me. Besides, I’ve never thought it was funny at all. I think it makes a very nice decoration.”
And they hadn’t yet recovered from that unpleasantness when they went back downstairs and found that a new guest had come to join in the cocktail hour. He was a short, stocky, faintly Oriental-looking young man named Ralph who gathered Sally close in a hug to which she responded with rapture, though she had to stoop for it, and who then held out a stubby hand and told Jack it was nice to meet him.
Ralph was an engineer, Jill Jarvis explained, pronouncing the word as if it were a title of rare distinction, and he’d just been telling of how he’d gone to work for a “marvelous” firm—still a small firm, but growing fast because they were bringing in “wonderful” new contracts. Wasn’t that exciting?
“Well, it’s my boss who makes it exciting,” Ralph said, going back to his chair and his drink. “Cliff Myers. He’s a dynamo. Founded the company eight years ago when he was fresh out of the Navy after the Korean war. Began with a couple of routine little Navy contracts, started branching out, and since then there’s been no stopping him. Remarkable man. Oh, he drives his people hard, no question about that, but he drives himself harder than any man I’ve ever known. Give him two or three more years and he’ll be the most prominent engineering executive in L.A., if not in all of California.”
“Wonderful,” Jill said. “And he’s still young?”
“Well, thirty-eight; that’s pretty young in this business.”
“I always love to see that,” Jill said fervently, narrowing her eyes. “I love to see a man go out and get what he’s after.”
And Woody Starr gazed down at his drink with a little smile of self-deprecation, suggesting that he knew perfectly well he hadn’t ever gone out after much, or gotten much, except a dumb little souvenir shop on Hollywood Boulevard.
“Is he married?” Jill inquired discreetly.
“Oh yeah, very nice wife; no kids. They have a very nice home out in Pacific Palisades.”
“Why don’t you bring them over sometime, Ralph? You think they’d enjoy that? Because really, I’d love to meet them.”
“Well, sure, Jill,” Ralph said, though his face betrayed a flicker of embarrassment. “I’m sure they’d like that a lot.”
The talk went on to other things, then—or rather it sank for at least an hour into joshing and banter about nothing at all, or insiders’ references to hilarious old times that Jack was unable to follow. He kept looking for opportunities to get Sally up and out of there, but she was so clearly enjoying herself, going along with the laughs, that he could only set his bite and smile to prove his patience.
“Hey, Jill?” Kicker said from the dining-room doorway, and that was the first time Jack noticed that the boy called his mother by her first name. “We ever gonna eat?”
“You go ahead, Kick,” she told him. “Ask Nippy to fix you a plate. We’ll be along in a while.”
“. . . And they go through that same dopey routine about dinner every night,” Sally said later, when she and Jack were alone in his car on the way out to the beach. “Kicker always says, We ever gonna eat?’ and she always gives him that exact same answer, as if they’re both trying to pretend it doesn’t happen all the time. Sometimes it’s ten-thirty or eleven before she feels like eating, and all the food’s ruined, but by then everybody’s so smashed they don’t care. If you could see the beautiful cuts of meat that go to waste in that kitchen. Ah, God, if only she could have a little more—I don’t know. It’s just that I wish—well, never mind. I wish a lot of things.”
“I know you do,” he said, and reached over with one hand to hold her tense thigh. “So do I.”
They rode in silence for what seemed a long time; then she said, “No, but did you like Ralph, Jack?”
“I don’t know; hardly had a chance to talk to him.”
“Well, I hope you’ll get to know him better. Ralph and I’ve been friends for years. He’s a very—a very dear person.”
And Jack winced in the darkness. He hadn’t heard her use that phrase before, or any of its fudgy little show-business equivalents—“a very sweet man”; “a very gutsy lady.” Still, she had been born and raised on the fringes of Hollywood; she had worked for years in a Hollywood agency, hearing Hollywood people talk all day. Was it any wonder that some of their language had seeped into her own?
“Ralph’s a Hawaiian,” she was saying. “He was a college friend of the other boy I told you about, the one Jill was living with when I moved in. And I think Jill felt sorry for him, this painfully shy Hawaiian kid who never seemed to have any fun. Then it turned out he needed a place to live, so she let him have the big ground-floor apartment in the main outbuilding—you know the one with all the French doors? Facing the pool? Well, wow, talk about having fun. It changed his life. He told me once—this was years later, after he’d moved away—he said, ‘Oh, it’d usually be like pulling teeth to get girls to go out with me, because I guess that’s what you have to expect if you’re a funny-looking little guy with the wrong kind of clothes, but once they saw where I lived, once they saw that place, it was magic.’ He said, ‘Get two or three drinks into a girl and she’d be out skinny-dipping in the pool with me every time. And after that,’ he said, ‘after that, all the rest of it was a piece of cake.’” And Sally’s voice dissolved in a rich little peal of lewd laughter.
“Yeah, well, that’s nice,” Jack said. “That’s a nice story.”
“And then,” Sally went on, “then he told me, he said, ‘Oh, I always knew it was phony. I knew that whole setup at Jill’s was phony. But I used to say to myself, Ralph, if you’re gonna be a phony, you might as well be a real phony.’ Isn’t that sweet? I mean in its own kind of awkward, funny way, isn’t that sweet?”
“Yeah. Sure is.”
But later that night, lying awake while Sally slept, listening to the heavy gathering and pound and rumble and hiss of each wave on t
he beach, time and again, he wondered if Sheilah Graham had ever referred to someone as being “a very dear person.” Well, maybe, or maybe she had used whatever other Hollywood jargon was current in her time, and Fitzgerald probably hadn’t minded at all. He knew she would never be Zelda; that was one of the ways he knew he loved her. Holding himself together every day for her, dying for a drink but staying away from it, putting what little energy he had into those sketchy opening chapters of The Last Tycoon, he must have been humbly grateful just to have her there.
For weeks they were as domestic as a married couple. Except during her hours in the office they were always together at his place. They took long walks on the beach, finding new beachside places to have a drink when they were tired. They talked for hours—“You could never bore me,” she said, making his lungs feel deeper than they’d felt in years—and he found he was making much better progress on the screenplay. He could look up from his manuscript after dinner and see her curled on the plastic sofa in the lamplight, knitting—she was making a heavy sweater for Kicker’s birthday—and that vision never failed to please his sense of order and peace.
But it didn’t last. Before the summer was half over, he was startled one evening to find her watching him in a keen, sad, bright-eyed way.
“What’s the matter?”
“I can’t stay here anymore, Jack, that’s all. I mean it. It’s gotten so I absolutely can’t bear this place. It’s cramped and dark and damp—Jesus, it’s not damp, it’s wet.”
“This room’s always dry,” he said defensively, “and it’s always light too, in the daytime. Sometimes it gets so bright I have to close the—”
“Well, but this room’s only about five feet square,” she said, standing up for emphasis, “and the rest of it’s a rotten old tomb. You know what I found on the floor of the shower stall this morning? I found this terrible little pale, transparent worm, sort of like a snail only without any shell, and I accidentally stepped on it about four times before I realized what the hell I was doing. Jesus!” She gave a profound shudder, letting the ragged gray clump of her knitting fall to the floor as she clasped and held herself with both arms, and Jack was reminded of his daughter in that other loathsome shower stall, back in New York.
“And the bedroom!” Sally said. “That mattress is about a hundred years old and it’s all sour and it reeks of mildew. And no matter where I hang my clothes they’re always clammy when I put them on in the morning. So I’ve had it, Jack, that’s all. I’m never going into the office again wearing wet clothes and having to squirm around and scratch myself all day, and that’s final.”
And from the way she bustled around getting her things together after that speech, packing the Mexican bag and a small suitcase too, it was clear that she didn’t even plan to stay for the night. Jack sat biting his lip, trying to think of something to say; then he got to his feet because that seemed better than sitting.
“I’m going home, Jack,” she said. “You’re perfectly welcome to come with me, and in fact I’d really like you to, but that part of it’s entirely up to you.”
It didn’t take him long to make up his mind. He argued with her a little and feigned exasperation, for the sake of his rapidly diminishing pride, but in less than half an hour he was riding tense at the wheel of his car and following the taillights of hers at a respectful distance. He had even brought along the stacked pages of his screenplay and a supply of fresh paper and pencils, because she’d assured him there were any number of big, clean, well-appointed rooms in Jill’s house where he could work all day in total privacy, if that was what he might decide he wanted to do. “And I mean really, wouldn’t it be better to spend the rest of our time together at my place?” she’d said. “Come on. You know it would. And how much time do we have left anyway? Seven weeks or something? Six?”
So it happened that Jack Fields became, briefly, a resident of that Greek Revival mansion in Beverly Hills. Giving more thanks than he felt, he accepted the use of an upstairs room to work in—it even had a bathroom that was nearly as opulent as Sally’s—and their nights together were spent in her “apartment,” where neither of them ever mentioned the Japanese dinner table again.
During the cocktail hour each day it was necessary to associate with Jill Jarvis and to be drawn, however reluctantly, into her world, but at first, after a drink or two and an exchange of winks, they would manage to escape to a restaurant and an evening of their own. Later, though, more and more often and to Jack’s increasing annoyance, Sally would go on drinking and talking with whatever guests of Jill’s were there until they’d find themselves caught up in the ritual of the late, late dinner at home—until the plump uniformed Negro maid named Nippy appeared in the doorway saying, “Miz Jarvis? There isn’t gonna be nothing left of this meat at all unless you folks come and eat it pretty soon.”
Stiff and swaying, their eyes barely able to focus on their plates, the party would pick at blackened steak and shrunken, wrinkled vegetables until, as if in acknowledgment of a common revulsion, they would leave most of their dinner untouched and go back to the den to drink again. And the worst part was that Jack too, by this time, would find he wanted nothing more than more to drink. He and Sally, on some of those nights, were too drunk for anything but sleep as they climbed the reeling stairs; he would crawl alone into her bed and pass out, waking many hours later to lie listening to the slow rasp of her breath, discovering more than once that it came from the other double bed.
He had learned that he didn’t much like Sally when she drank. Her eyes would grow startlingly bright, her upper lip would loosen and bloat, and she’d laugh as stridently as an unpopular schoolgirl over things he didn’t think were funny at all.
Late one afternoon the young Hawaiian, Ralph, dropped in again, but this time, despite happy cries of greeting and welcome from the girls, he was a solemn bearer of terrible news as he eased himself into a leather chair.
“You know the head of my firm I was telling you about?” he said. “Cliff Myers? His wife died this morning. Heart attack. Collapsed in the bathroom. Thirty-five years old.” And lowering his eyes he took a hesitant sip of scotch as if it were a funereal sacrament.
Jill and Sally came urgently forward in their cushions to stare at him, their eyes round and their mouths instantly shaped for the syllable “Oh!” that burst from them in unison. Then Sally said, “My God!” and Jill, slumping weakly with one wrist against her lovely forehead, said, “Thirty-five years old. Oh, the poor man. The poor man.”
Neither Jack nor Woody Starr had yet joined in the grief, but after quick self-conscious glances at each other they were able to murmur appropriate things.
“Was there any history of heart trouble at all?” Sally demanded.
“None at all,” Ralph assured her. “None at all.”
And for once, in these endless cocktail times, they had something substantial to talk about. Cliff Myers was a man of iron, Ralph told them. If he hadn’t proved that in his professional career—and God knew he certainly had—then he’d proved it this morning. First he had tried and failed to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the bathroom floor; then he’d wrapped his wife in a blanket, carried her out to the car and driven her to the hospital, knowing she was probably dead all the way. The doctors there wanted to give him a sedative after they’d broken the news, but you didn’t just go around giving sedatives to a man like Cliff Myers. He had driven home alone, and by nine-fifteen—nine-fifteen!—he had called the office to explain why he wouldn’t be in for work today.
“Oh!” Sally cried. “Oh, God, I can’t bear this. I can’t bear this”—and she got up and ran from the room in tears.
Jack followed her quickly into the living room but she wouldn’t let him put his arms around her, and he realized at once that he didn’t really mind the refusal.
“Hey, come on, Sally,” he said, standing several feet apart from her with his hands in his pockets while she wept, or seemed to weep. “Come on. Take it easy.”<
br />
“Well, but things like this upset me, that’s all; I can’t help it. I’m sensitive, that’s all.”
“Yeah, well, okay; okay.”
“A girl with everything to live for,” she said in a quavering voice, “and her whole life going out like that—click—and then whump on the bathroom floor; oh, God. Oh, God.”
“Well, but look,” he said. “Don’t you think you’re overdoing this a little? I mean you didn’t even know the girl and you don’t know the man either, so it’s really like something you’ve read in the paper, right? And the point is you can read stuff like this in the paper every day, over your chicken-salad sandwich, and it doesn’t necessarily make you—”
“Oh, Jesus, chicken-salad sandwich,” she said with loathing, looking him harshly up and down as she backed away. “You really are a cold bastard, aren’t you. You know something? You know what I’ve just begun to figure out about you? You’re a cold, unfeeling son of a bitch and you don’t care about anything in the world but yourself and your rotten self-indulgent scribbling and no wonder your wife couldn’t stand the sight of you.”
And she was halfway up the stairs before he decided that his best reply was to make no reply at all. He went back into the den to finish his drink and try to figure things out, and he was doing that when Kicker came in with a lumpy, badly rolled sleeping bag on his shoulder.
“Hey, Woody?” the boy said. “You ready?”
“Sure, Kick.” Woody got quickly to his feet and knocked back his whiskey, and they left the house together. Jill, huddled with Ralph in an intense discussion of Cliff Myers’s tragedy, barely glanced up to wish them good night.
After awhile Jack went upstairs, walked on mincing tiptoe past Sally’s closed door and struck off down an adjoining hall to gather up the screenplay and the other personal stuff that had accumulated in “his” room; then he went back downstairs and made a nervous departure past Jill and Ralph, who paid him no attention.
The Collected Stories Page 41