Make Believe

by Ed Ifkovic

  “Good ni—” I stopped. Those were the only two words left in my lexicon, starved as it now seemed to be.

  Frank bit his lip and watched Ava through half-shut eyes. “Hedda Hopper called me a Hoboken has-been. On the way out of this miserable town.” He swiveled around to face me. “You’re a savvy old broad, Edna. Tell me, do you think I’m a Hoboken has-been?”

  I waited, steamed. He shouldn’t rile this admittedly savvy old broad. “Frank, I didn’t know you were from Hoboken.”

  The line hung in the air, bloody, cruel.

  Ava burst out laughing. “Edna, I love you.”

  “Well, I don’t.” Frank pulled at the goofy red bow tie and backed away. “Good night, Edna.” He sneered my name, drawing it out.

  “Francis,” Ava started in. “This is all your fault. You drag these sorry failures to my house.”

  “Maybe I’m one, too.”

  “Maybe you are,” she stressed. Then she spoke in a hollow, wispy voice. “I don’t know why everybody has to be…enemies.”

  Frank turned his baleful eye on her. It was preparatory, I sensed, to an evening of battlers’ rage, broken cocktail glasses, upturned tables, shoving, tears, perhaps even a Degas print smashed to the floor.

  “Christ Almighty,” he hissed with a sickening grimace, “You gotta have enemies, Ava. You know that. How the hell else do you know you’re alive?”

  Chapter Five

  Frank Sinatra was not in a good mood. I knew that because, though I’d not seen his face yet, the back of his neck was crimson, his shoulders were hunched, and he was tapping his right foot nervously on the floor. Ava faced him, unsmiling. As the maitre d’ escorted me to their table, she looked past him toward me and attempted a welcoming smile. The tapping of the right foot stopped suddenly.

  The taxi had just dropped me off at Don the Beachcomber on North McCadden Place, and I imagined myself deposited, reluctantly, onto a movie set for some Busby Berkeley pineapple-and-luau extravaganza. Garish spotlights, some revolving from the rooftop, illuminated massive palm trees silhouetted against an ocean-blue backdrop touted as the “island of Mahuukona.” Worse, the maitre d’ who grasped my elbow, an obsequious gentleman who was obviously expecting me, was dressed in a flowing Hawaiian shirt so ostentatiously decorated with blood-red hibiscus blooms that it brought to mind ancient blood-letting and savage sacrifice. Maidens hurled willy-nilly into the mouth of a seething volcano, lava steaming. Yet he spoke in a flat Brooklyn accent and smelled of cheap cigars.

  Ava rushed to embrace me but held on too long, whispering something in my ear I didn’t catch. Frank stood, turned, that enormous toothy grin switched on; he extended his hand, performed a half-bow. He pulled a chair out for me.

  “Edna, I was worried you’d abandon us,” Ava said.

  “Not a chance. I’m certain to be featured in some gossip sheet by morning.”

  Only Ava laughed. “And Alice and Max are late. After all, it’s his birthday dinner.”

  They’d been drinking, I could tell, and two ashtrays already held snubbed-out cigarette butts, though a passing waiter seamlessly made both disappear, each replaced with a sparkling clean one. Frank immediately started talking of an encounter earlier with a pesky photographer as they’d pulled up in his Cadillac convertible. “You see, Miss Ferber, he was hiding behind that trellis of bougainvillea, like a night prowler, and jumped out, scaring us to death.” Still seething, he sputtered to a stop.

  Ava added, “Francis yelled, ‘Beat it, you crumbs,’ and knocked the camera out of his hand, and they…tussled. Francis scraped a knuckle.” Frank held out his hand to prove she wasn’t lying. Ava glanced at him. “I don’t know why you have to grapple with them. It only makes it worse, you know.”

  Spitfire words, furious. “They’re bums. All of them.”

  “Still…”

  “Ava, not now, doll.”

  She shrugged. “Quite the place, no, Edna?”

  My eyes swept the cavernous room. Plastic palm trees, a virtual forest of green disaster. Bizarrely, there were stuffed pudgy monkeys hidden among the lacy fronds. “Beautiful.”

  “They have the best rum zombies here,” Ava told me.

  “Zombies? Like the living dead? Why am I not surprised? That’s all of Hollywood, no?”

  Frank shot me a look as though I’d lapsed into dialectical Farsi. He downed his drink and brusquely signaled the waiter for another. When the waiter neared, Frank stuck a cigarette between his lips and demanded, “Match me.” The waiter hurriedly lit the cigarette.

  He was rubbing his bruised knuckle. I saw a trace of blood there, broken skin.

  “I should sue that damn photographer hack. My knuckle’s gonna swell up tomorrow, you know…”

  Ava ignored him. “Edna, what are you drinking? A zombie? They got this drink they invented called the mai tai. Rum is king here.”

  “So I gather from the garish placards outside. I’ll have a glass of red wine.”

  Ava insisted. “The zombies are…”

  Frank rapped his good knuckle on the table. “You and those goddamned zombies. The woman can choose her own drink, Ava. Christ.”

  “I’m only suggesting…”

  “Leave her alone.”

  I ordered a glass of wine.

  Ava smiled at me. “We do love each other, Edna. You have to believe that.”

  “Thank God for that. No one else would have either one of you.”

  Both Ava and Frank stared at me, though Ava smiled. “Christ,” Frank muttered. And I swear he mouthed something about old crazy broads.

  “All right, Francis dear, let’s have a pleasant evening.”

  “Yes,” I added, “dining with stuffed monkeys watching me will be a sobering experience.”

  Frank seemed to notice the monkeys populating the plastic palms for the first time. “This place is a dump.”

  “I like the booze here,” Ava said.

  “You like the booze everywhere.”

  Somehow, through some sleight of hand I’d missed, my glass of wine appeared before me. “Cheers,” Ava toasted. “To Show Boat.”

  Frank smiled. “Life on the wicked stage.”

  Ava checked the entrance. “Where are they?”

  I bristled, ready to leave this boorish young man—and, I suppose, boorish young woman—both wreathed in noxious clouds of cigarette smoke, their voices strangled with whiskey. All a bit wearying, if familiar. Old ladies should be spared the sight of the next generation sinking into a quagmire of dissolution. Sort of saps one’s faith in the progress of humankind.

  Ava, I quietly concluded, was a tantalizing dish best savored away from the whiskey chaser that was her smarmy boyfriend.

  Frank excused himself. “Call of Hoboken nature.”

  Ava began apologizing. “We bring out the worst in each other, Edna. But, trust me, also the best. We’re so much alike—wild, jealous, craving the nightlife. Hot-headed fools, you know. We’re two insomniacs, lonely night animals wandering the desert. But I didn’t want you to see this. It’s just that…that photographer set Francis off, and that set me off and…”

  I sipped my wine. “It’s all right, Ava. Years back I weathered the besotted members of the Algonquin Club in New York. After that experience—can you imagine Dottie Parker inebriated, her mouth running in top gear?—anything is bearable.” I batted my eyes. “Even you…and Francis.”

  Frank returned, stopping to light a cigarette from one of the blazing tiki torches that speckled the room.

  “Miss me?”

  “We never stopped talking about you,” I noted.

  “I’ll bet.” He narrowed his eyes.

  For a while the squabble subsided, a sticky truce in which both drank too much, smoking incessantly, voices subdued but edgy. Unhappy, I snatched a Chesterfield from Ava, and Frank gallantly lit it. His fingertips were stained yellow. In the flickering candlelight of the table, I noted scars on his neck and cheek. A scrapper, I concluded. The Hoboken one-hundred pound runt
bullied in the schoolyard who learned the most effective offense is cruelty and crooning.

  “You look gorgeous,” Ava told me.

  With a rose-colored shawl draped over my shoulders, accenting a polka dot black-and-white dress, I felt like someone’s visiting aunt.

  But of course she was the gorgeous one, dressed in a slinky cocktail dress of lavender-toned marquisette with a strapless top of shimmering green taffeta, an oversized turquoise brooch pinned on the bodice, drop earrings that went on and on, cut emeralds mounted in filigreed silver cascades that caught the glint and flash of overhead lights. Frank wore a powder blue Norfolk suit with a scarlet bow tie; his hair was slicked back, oiled.

  Max and Alice bustled in, apologizing. Max was waving what he announced was a clipping from the morning’s Examiner. “The paper has a photo of me and Ava and you having lunch yesterday. They mentioned you by name, Edna.”

  “What does it say?”

  “No article, just a photo with a long caption. You, readers are informed, won the Pulitzer Prize for So Big back in 1924. I am identified as a ‘Hollywood insider currently under a cloud.’” His face animated and yet ashen, he kept tapping the torn sheet.

  Ava broke in. “Happy birthday, Max.” She stood and approached him, enveloping him in a bear hug. “Let’s be happy tonight.”

  He grinned back at her, but I noticed he didn’t put the clipping away. He simply laid it on the table, face up, next to an ashtray.

  We ordered a tableful of grotesque dishes no one seemed eager to eat, plates of Cantonese specialties that had migrated too far from the Chinese homeland: Bo Lo Gai Kew with sweet and sour sauce, chicken chow mein with water chestnuts, sesame beef with bell peppers, almond duck. Column A and column B. And everything garnished or disguised or simply destroyed with chunks of pineapple, for me the least interesting of tropical fruits.

  Frank skewered a chunk of pineapple at the end of a knife, and then dropped it. It plopped onto the carpet and, again, by some magical sleight of hand, when I glanced down at the spot, the offending fruit had disappeared. Tiki voodoo, I supposed. Frank retreated into his own thoughts, his eyes scanning the room, and I noticed Ava sometimes followed his hazy gaze. If his eyes rested too long on some fluttery young beauty batting her kohl-rimmed eyelids—and they seemed to be generously positioned throughout the room like opening-night spotlights—Ava bit her lip and groaned.

  I’d heard stories.

  Ava moved her chair closer to mine and smiled. “Max, if you’ll forgive me, I want Edna to see one more…omen.”

  Dramatically, she reached under her chair and brought up a small black velvet box. For a second she cradled it against her chest, lovingly. She opened it as though it were a Christmas present. In her palm she displayed a pair of green satin shoes, worn, tattered, the heels blackened.

  “Edna, my sister Bappie won these at a charity auction in New York years ago. When she visited back home, she gave them to me. ‘These will take you to Hollywood.’ Her exact words. Irene Dunne wore them when she played Magnolia in the 1936 Show Boat.” She thrust them at me, but I didn’t take them: two scuffed, dirty shoes, doubtless a wonderful talisman for her, but, to me, nothing more than someone’s old and bacterial slippers.

  “Beautiful.” I figured that would be the operative word for this doomed evening. Beautiful. Just plain beautiful.

  Ava was going on about Bappie’s husband, a Manhattan photographer who’d taken the first photo of her, displaying it in his Fifth Avenue window where it was spotted by some scout. Ava as virginal country girl, with sunbonnet and a faraway look in her eyes. MGM offices, located in Times Square, called for a screen test and…and a Hollywood contract. Fifty dollars a week, Ava and Bappie traveling west by bus. The dream began.

  Suddenly Frank’s hand swept across the table and sent the shoes flying. They landed at the foot of a blazing tiki torch.

  Ava screamed. “Damn you.” Leaning across the table, she slapped Frank’s face, and he recoiled, rubbing the scarlet patch on his cheek. Immediately Ava crumbled. “Oh, Max, this is not the evening I planned for you.”

  I said nothing.

  Welcome to Hollywood.

  Frank was unrepentant. “Ava, for Christ’s sake, do I gotta listen to that story again? You drag out those…those moldy shoes in a restaurant…like…I don’t know. It’s…boring. Remember that night you babbled about showboats and tobacco fields and your mama’s cooking to Louis B. Mayer? Christ, his eyes glazed over.” He inhaled his cigarette. “I wanna get you on a showboat to China.” He must have thought the line uproariously witty because he guffawed—and then sang it out, trilling the cadences. I wanna get you on a showboat to China. He rubbed his cheek.

  Everyone in the restaurant was staring. Quietly, a waiter returned her shoes, and Ava tucked them away.

  “Edna understands my…omens.”

  “The past is over.”

  “As good a definition of ‘past’ as I’ve heard,” I sniped. He glared at me.

  “Omens, my ass.” He was still staring at me. “You think some old lady cares a damn for this claptrap.”

  I sat up, spine erect. “I certainly do, young man. I make my living going into the past.”

  Frank ignored me, though his look suggested I was a foolish old ninny, out to final pasture.

  Silence, uncomfortable, the room settling back to normal, glasses clinking, laughter across the room, sporadic tinkling ukulele music suddenly piped in and obviously amplified. Tiki magic, again.

  ***

  Over coffee Max picked up the clipping from the Examiner, but now he was smiling. “I don’t like being photographed from this angle. Did you know that Hedda Hopper recently called me a nervous ferret?”

  I could tell he wanted to discuss the violation. His fingers drummed the sheet.

  “Perhaps we shouldn’t discuss it now.” Alice tapped his sleeve affectionately.

  Ava smiled thinly and half-waved at me, shrugging her shoulders. It was a gesture suggesting fatalism, the price you paid for living out here; but in the next moment she reached across the table and gently touched Max on the cheek. Immediately he quieted, grinned sheepishly, and closed his eyes dreamily. Lord, I thought: Circe and her exquisite charms. The ravishing Lorelei leading men to rapturous shipwreck.

  The last time I touched a man’s cheek it was, unfortunately, a crackerjack slap. The offending cheek was Aleck Woollcott’s chubby one, just after he informed the dinner guests that one needn’t call a dog a bitch when Edna Ferber was in town. Of course, I’d begun the conflagration by calling him, this three-hundred-pound mountain of sarcasm and salt-water taffy, a New Jersey Nero who mistook his pinafore for a toga. Ah, the old days at the Algonquin when our frivolous battles and repartee were chronicled in F.P.A.’s “The Conning Tower.” Now my name appeared in Hollywood gossip sheets as an East Coast busybody. And Commie sympathizer, at that.

  Ava’s sensual touch was something I’d never acquired—nor, frankly, wanted.

  “This is all getting to Max,” Alice said. “I’ve suggested we go to New York for a visit. See friends. Some theater.”

  I stared into Max’s beaten face, his eyes red-rimmed and tired.

  “Well, I’m here another week. Fly back with me, you two. We can do theater…”

  Max spoke quickly. “No. I can’t leave my friends.”

  Frank sneered. “Why not? They’ve all left you.”

  Ava pointed her cigarette at him. “Francis, be nice.”

  He gave her a sickly-sweet grin and actually winked, some conspiratorial gesture that elicited a groan from her.

  “I could care less about any of this nonsense in the gossip columns, especially Hedda Hopper’s twaddle,” I began. “The woman is trying to sell newspapers, having already surrendered her soul. What alarmed me was today’s front-page article in the Los Angeles Times that discussed the ratcheting up going on in Washington now. Did you read that? And now this Joseph McCarthy yammering about Red infiltration in government offices. I
feel as though the country I love—know to my marrow—is in danger of irreparable transgression. More transgression. Lord, we weathered that madman Hitler and the concentration camps and the A-bomb and now…” I waved a hand in the air, helpless.

  “Does anyone really care about Hollywood?” Alice asked.

  “I don’t,” Ava announced, midway through lighting a cigarette.

  I reached for a cigarette and Frank cavalierly lit it for me. As he leaned in, I smelled musky cologne that reminded me of wood shavings. The blue-gray smoke oddly calmed me as I went on. “According to the article, when the Hollywood Ten went to Washington in 1947, they left L.A. with a crowd cheering them on at the airport but, arrived there, they realized how alone they were in Washington, once removed from this…this celluloid cocoon out here. The rest of America—all those Saturday Evening Post and Coronet readers in the heartland—think Hollywood and imagine scandal, deception, intrigue, unbridled sex, infiltration, Commie this, pinko that.”

  “If you want to know what I think…” Ava started.

  But I wasn’t finished and raised my voice. “But it’s a contradiction, don’t you see? Hollywood is, perversely, America itself. The studios invent an America for the world to look at. Not a real place but a movie hall oasis—The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, John Wayne’s Rio Grande, the Busby Berkeley dance spectaculars. Cinderella. Even Show Boat, a fantastic portrait of an America that’s sugar-coated and inviting.” I stopped. “The capital of the United States is not Washington D.C. In some bizarre sense it’s Hollywood.” I crushed out my cigarette and sat back.

  Listening to me, Frank sat back, a cigarette bobbing between his lips. He had a wise-guy smirk on that skinny face, and those marble-blue eyes twinkled. Suddenly, mockingly, he began a slow handclap: one two three four. Space between each resounding clap.

  Ava squirmed. “Francis, for God’s sake.”

  “I think it’s a bang-up speech,” he protested. “Worthy of that bastard Louis B. Mayer. Jack Warner couldn’t have topped it—better than that weepy apology he delivered before the HUAC, in fact.”