Second Generation

by Howard Fast

  “No, Danny, I want to go to bed, I want you to hold me.”

  “All right, if that’s what you want. I still can’t understand why you skinny Chinese broads are so insatiably sexy.”

  “We’re an old culture, Danny. We know what good is.”

  Later, lying in his arms, she said, “Danny, do you know what I want?”

  “Tell me.”

  “I want to go away with you, just the two of us. I want to go back to Hawaii, in a freighter, the way we did years ago. I want you to get a skiff and we’ll sail in the islands, and we’ll lie naked on the lonely beaches, and we’ll pretend we’re young again.”

  “Pretend hell! We are young.”

  “Will you do it, Danny? Will you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You’re not kidding, Danny? You will do it?”

  “It’s a promise. I never broke my word to you, did I?”

  ***

  Barbara was enchanted. For months, she had worked like a slave and lived like a nun; suddenly, she was like someone awakened from sleep, rested, alert, totally conscious of herself, of the simple beauty of her gown, of her firm, strong young body, and of her own beauty. When she first saw the yacht lying alongside the dock, lit up from stem to stern, strung with Japanese lanterns, spun in a nest of music and voices, she said, “Oh, Daddy, what a beautiful thing you built!” There was a note in her voice that Dan had not heard before, and she was smiling with delight when he glanced at her. When he led her into the wide well of the yacht, every eye turned toward her, and Dan told himself that even here, where beauty was the commodity bought and sold, no one could hold a candle to her.

  Now it was an hour since Dan had left her there, assured that any one of half a dozen men would vie for the privilege of taking her home. Alex Hargasey, the director, hovering over her like a butterfly over a flower, had taken on the function of introducing her to what he called “the exotic nobility of Hollywood.” The names fell from his lips like titles: Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, Lana Turner. The women dismissed her; she was a beautiful woman whose name was meaningless, but too disturbingly attractive. The men stared at her, sought her out, projected themselves into rather witless conversation. “Do you like yacht parties?” “But you must be in the theater, not the screen. I would have seen you on the screen.” “Top deck over there, but dump Hargasey. He’s a rotten old lecher. Five minutes.” “But I’m sure we’ve met. You couldn’t be here on the Coast without us having met.”

  “An actor,” Hargasey said to her, “is a little less than a man. An actress, my dear, is a little more than a woman.”

  “That’s very clever,” Barbara admitted, wondering whether he would acknowledge its origin.

  He merely nodded and shrugged. “You see, I have pleaded with your father to bring you for a screen test.”

  “He mentioned it. But I’m not an actress. I never could be. I have no talent whatsoever. And no ambition in that direction.”

  A voice behind her said, “As for talent, I suspect the statement is subterfuge. As for ambition, why not, lovely lady?”

  Barbara turned and faced a tall, broad-shouldered man who was disconcertingly handsome, his face tanned, his strong, fine features just rugged enough to save them from perfection, his blue eyes unreal in their brightness. “And you, my dear, where the devil have you been hiding?” he demanded of her.

  She was high enough on half a dozen glasses of champagne to giggle with pleasure at this apparition out of her adolescent dreams and to stare at him comfortably.

  “Our host,” Hargasey said. “Barbara, my dear, this is Richard Dyler.”

  “Barbara who?” Dyler demanded.

  “The daughter of the man who built this toy of yours—Barbara Lavette.”

  “Damnit, was Danny here? Where is he?”

  “He left. If you had come to your own party on time, you would have seen him.”

  “The hell with that,” Dyler said. “He left the best part of him here. My dear lady,” he said to Barbara, “what the devil are you staring at?”

  “You. You’re much more beautiful off the screen than on it.”

  “Beautiful, Barbara, is a term I reserve for women. You, my love, are beautiful.”

  “Am I your love?” Barbara asked him.

  “The possibility exists. Hargasey,” he said to the director, “will you get lost and leave us alone? I have much to discuss with this young woman.” He took two glasses of champagne from a passing waiter, handed one to Barbara, and said, “To knowledge of each other!”

  “So long as it is not in the Biblical sense,” Barbara agreed, thinking to herself, What a silly thing to say! Am I drunk? I haven’t been even a little drunk since Marcel died. But everything I say sounds clever when I say it and very foolish after it has been said. I think I am drunk, and I don’t want to think of Marcel, not tonight.

  “We shall see.” Dyler took Barbara’s arm and said to the director, “Hargasey, will you please get lost.”

  Hargasey sighed, spread his arms, and turned away. Dyler steered Barbara through the crowd of guests in the well.

  “And where are you taking me?”

  “High up,” Dyler said. “Top deck, where we can look down at this scum.”

  “I can’t drink when I’m walking, and that’s an awful thing to say.”

  He stopped and clicked glasses with her. “Drink up.” She stared at the amazing blue eyes and began to giggle again. “Drink up, Barbara, shipbuilder’s daughter.”

  She drained the rest of her champagne. “Better. I like that. Shipbuilder’s daughter.”

  They climbed up to the bridge. “Put to sea,” Barbara said. “All the way to China.”

  “Can’t do it. We’re tied up. Are you drunk, shipbuilder’s daughter?”

  “I suppose so. That was clever the first time you said it.”

  “The first time I said it was in The Viking’s Revenge. Did you see me? My name was Ruric.”

  “Do you remember all your lines?” Barbara asked in amazement.

  “Only the best. What do you do when you’re not going to parties?”

  “I don’t go to many parties. I’m a writer.”

  “What do you write?”

  “Do you read Manhattan Magazine?”

  “Only the cartoons. God damn it, woman, we’re in Los Angeles.” Then he took her in his arms and kissed her.

  She pulled away and stared at him. “You don’t waste any time, do you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You just decide to make love to someone?”

  “Not anyone, kid, not anyone.”

  “Well, doesn’t anyone ever say, ‘Hold on’? ‘Wait a minute’? ‘Let’s talk about the weather’?”

  “Who the hell wants to talk about the weather?” Dyler said. “I kissed you. You liked it, didn’t you?”

  “I guess so.” Barbara giggled at him. “I never kissed anyone who looked like you.”

  “What kind of a crack is that?”

  “You’re so pretty. I mean beautiful,” Barbara added hastily.

  “I told you before, beautiful is for dames.” He put an arm around her, cupped her breast in his hand, and kissed the curve of her neck. She began to giggle uncontrollably. “What gives with you?” he demanded.

  “Champagne?”

  “You know, you’re beautiful. You’re a beautiful dame. You do something to me.”

  “What?”

  “What do you mean, what?”

  “I mean, what do I do to you?”

  “You’re not for real. You’re absolutely not for real.”

  Barbara leaned over the rail and watched the men and women dancing in the well of the yacht. “Let’s dance, Dyler,” she said. “This is the most romantic sight I’ve ever seen, all those real movie stars da
ncing down there in the moonlight.”

  “Screw the movie stars,” he said. “There’s only one star, and that’s me. I don’t want to dance. I want to make love. Come on down to my cabin.”

  “And then we go to bed?”

  “That’s up to you, cookie.” He pulled her to him and kissed her again.

  “Doesn’t anyone ever say no?”

  “Well, two years ago—aw, shit, honey, you only remember my last name. I’m Richard Dyler.”

  Barbara burst out laughing.

  “What in hell is wrong with you?”

  “I want to dance. I want to dance with Richard Dyler. Come on.”

  “O.K., one dance.”

  They could hardly move in the crowded well of the yacht. He whispered into her ear, “Did you see The Last Gun? That was the first picture I did for Metro. Do you remember the way I died?”

  A blonde whose face was vaguely familiar to Barbara cut in between them, throwing her arms around Dyler. “Dicky,” she said, “where have you been? But where?”

  Barbara slipped away, leaving Dyler in the clutches of the blonde. Hargasey found her.

  “Dyler is an animal,” he said to her, drawing her out of the crowd.

  “Oh, no, he’s delightful. He’s very stupid but delightful. And he’s so beautiful.”

  “Beautiful, he’s not. So you listen to me. You’re an innocent kid.”

  “All he wanted was to go to bed with me. He’s very direct and honest. That’s flattering, with all these beautiful stars around.”

  “To bed he wants to go with everybody, and he does.”

  “How did he die in The Last Gun? I didn’t see it.”

  “The woman he went to bed with stuck a knife into his belly. It should only happen. I want you to meet Bogart. He keeps asking me who you are.”

  Bogart was charming and interested. He had actually read Barbara’s pieces in Manhattan, and they got into a discussion about Germany and the war in Europe. He led her out of the well into the lounge. Men joined him. A half a dozen of them gathered around Barbara. One of them said to Hargasey, “Who is she?”

  “The daughter of the man who built the yacht.”

  It was past two in the morning before Dyler emerged on deck again. Barbara was dancing. She waved at him. He stood staring at her glumly, and a little while later the party began to break up.

  “Richard,” Barbara said to Dyler as they were leaving, “I had the best time ever. It was divine. And you’re very beautiful.”

  Crowded into the front seat of his car, sitting next to a voluptuous dark-haired woman whose name was Cindy, Barbara was driven home by Hargasey. “Tonight,” he said to her, “you met some classy people, Barbara, but also some bums. Dyler is a bum. I got a responsibility to your father, so I must tell you that Dyler is a bum.”

  “It should happen to me,” Cindy said.

  “I had a wonderful time,” Barbara told him.

  She let herself into the house and crawled into bed, and lay there aching all over with desire. I would have gone to bed with him, she told herself. I would have. Christ, I’m so lonely and wretched. The effect of the champagne had worn off. She began to cry, and that way, weeping for herself, she finally fell asleep.

  ***

  May Ling’s mother, So-toy, died in June of 1940. She was only sixty-two years old. She had never recovered from the bronchial infection that had taken hold of her two months before. She grew weaker; it developed into pneumonia; and she died one night as she had lived, quietly, uncomplainingly, here in a strange land called California thousands of miles from a China she barely remembered. May Ling sat by the tiny, withered body, a meaningless death in a world gone mad with the making of death, and she wept for herself more than for her mother. They laid her to rest next to Feng Wo, her husband.

  She had been so silent, so unobtrusive, so gently eager to satisfy Barbara’s every want, that it was hard for Barbara to believe that she was no longer there. She had had an enormous respect for the act of writing, the strange mystery that is never so mysterious as to an illiterate, and during the day, when Barbara sat at her desk, struggling with a book that had become a monster that ruled her life, So-toy would enter silently and put down a pot of tea and a dish of small cakes. Now, working on the final pages of the novel, alone in the house, Barbara would look up expectantly and wait for the sound of the old woman’s shuffling steps. Other times, Barbara had gone into the kitchen and had sat with her. So-toy always welcomed her with a delicious, slow smile, her wrinkled face trying to express what she could not put into words. They never said much to each other, but there was communication between them.

  “I miss her so much,” Barbara said to May Ling.

  “I know.” May Ling was not given to tears. Her hurts were something she dealt with internally.

  Barbara finished the book in midsummer. The house in Westwood was silent and empty. Joe, having completed his second year of medical school, was working in a hospital in San Diego for the summer. May Ling was working at the library, and Dan spent longer and longer hours at the shipyard. For Barbara, the completion of the book seemed to bring a whole period of her life to a close. It had been an endless task of writing and rewriting, and still she was dissatisfìed with so much of what she had written. She decided to put the manuscript aside for a few weeks and then reread it. Suddenly at odds with herself, restless, filled with a strong sense of aimlessness, she decided to accept her mother’s invitation and go to San Francisco.

  She took the manuscript with her, planning to go over it carefully and do whatever rewriting she felt was necessary, but in the first weeks with Jean, she hardly glanced at it. “My dear, lovely Barbara,” Jean said to her, “you’re as pale as a ghost and from what you tell me, you’ve been living the life of a nun. Well, so have I. But I am old, and you are young. Why isn’t there a man in your life?”

  “Because I don’t meet any men. I had four dates with a movie star. That took away my appetite.”

  “Who?”

  “Richard Dyler.”

  “Well, he is certainly beautiful. Tell me all about it. But not right this minute. We’ll talk about that at lunch. We are going to lunch, and we are going to dinner—in all the very best places. We are going to the horse show at Menlo Park, and we are going sailing and we are going to the opera and to the theater, and I shall introduce you to fascinating and empty-headed young men, and we shall wander through every gallery in town and pretend we know more about paintings than anyone else—and we will have an absolutely wonderful, delicious time.”

  But there was no way Barbara could tell her mother all about her four dates with Richard Dyler. What does one do? she asked herself. Does one say, “Mother, I finally went to bed with him.” “Why?” would have to have an answer. “Mother, I just wanted to feel a man’s body next to me. It was just too long.”

  It had happened on their last date, when Barbara finally agreed to go to his purplish-pink Moorish mansion in Bel Air. This time she had only a single glass of wine to drink, so being tight was no part of her rationale, which in any case was not very much of a rationale. She was the only guest. They swam in the seventy-five-foot swimming pool, and then they dined outside on his terrace, in a controlled jungle of palms and cactus and roses. It was one of those warm, gentle evenings that come in the latter part of the Southern California summer and that are known locally as “the Santa Ana effect.”

  Sitting there, looking about her, Barbara decided that the place was either beautiful or horrible, depending upon one’s mood and how one reacted to fake Moorish architecture in Los Angeles.

  “Not bad for a kid from Gary, Indiana,” Dyler said. “It’s kind of pretty in a classy way.” Which was as much of a flight of poetic fancy as he was capable of.

  “Are you really from Gary?” Barbara asked, thinking that with his face and eyes, he should at least have originated
in someplace like Santa Fe or Tarpon Springs, neither of which she had ever been to, but at least they had names that went with the Dyler face.

  “You ever been there?”

  “Just on the New York train, passing through.”

  “Don’t ever get off. It’s a shithole.”

  “I suppose no one ever told you that your speech is colorful?”

  “I never dated a writer before. Are you sure you’re a writer? The writers I meet around the studio are creeps.”

  “I’m never sure I’m a writer.”

  “No? Well, that explains it.”

  After dinner, they went into his viewing room. It was a large room, with overstuffed chairs scattered around and a huge couch facing the screen. “I run pictures here,” he explained. “You ever been in one of these before?”

  “Never,” Barbara admitted. “I’m so innocent, I never realized that you could have a small theater in your own home.”

  “Everyone has them.”

  “Well, not really. I mean, we don’t.”

  “Well, what the hell. I mean, people in the industry.”

  The lights went down, and Barbara was watching the newest Richard Dyler film, called Moonlight Bridge. After about fifteen minutes, Barbara said, “I can’t watch the film and be manhandled at the same time. What on earth are you trying to do?”

  “You are absolutely the strangest broad I ever met in my life. Didn’t anyone ever make a pass at you before?”

  “Is that what you’re trying to do?”

  “I’m trying to make love to you. You’re the first broad I can’t get any closer to than the senior prom. I seen you four times. For Christ’s sake, I want to go to bed with you. Isn’t that plain enough?”

  “Not here with the projectionist watching.”

  “It’s dark.”

  “Richard, I’m sure you have a bedroom.”

  “Baby, eight of them.”

  “Well, let’s pick one.”

  “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  The bedroom was enormous, the ceiling set with mirrors, the bed covered with a spread of simulated leopardskin, the floor carpeted in white shag that gave underneath like a trampoline, the walls covered with glistening paper of shiny silver and dead black. Barbara had never seen anything like it before, and as she turned, staring at the room, Dyler asked eagerly, “You like it? Botticher designed it. It’s got a lot of class, hasn’t it?”