“The minute you want out, you’re free to go.”
“I know you mean that, Roy,” he said, quieter again. “And every damn argument I put up makes me a bastard—but what about Paris? There you swore you wanted a hotshot fashion career. What happened to that idea? What happened to the talk of me just sharing expenses?”
“It’s worked out, hasn’t it?”
“Sure, swell, but—”
“You told me yourself you’ve done some good work here.”
“You’re a terrific kid, a real straightshooter, and if I were in the market, you’d be the one, but—”
“Gerry, I love you so much.” Her excruciating anxiety to convince him of the advantages of matrimony was an actual physical pressure crushing down on her. Arguments skittered through her brain, and she reached for his hand. “I want to tell everybody about us.” Her voice was high. “I told my old friend Althea Wimborne about us—she used to be Althea Cunningham when you knew her.”
Gerry pulled his hand out of her fervid grasp. There was a long silence. In the darkness she could see his hunched, bulky immobility, and somehow she knew he was tensely coiled.
As the silence stretched the pressure increased. Althea had warned her not to mention their meeting. Why? Have I wrecked everything?
An owl hooted, some creature rustled in the ivy. Roy knew she should wait, let Gerry speak first. Yet she blurted out, “She said you met at the art school.”
“When were you such hot buddies?” Gerry’s voice was a low, vindictive growl.
“At Beverly High we were inseparable.” Roy could hear the shrillness of desperation in her voice. “I haven’t seen her in ages.”
“Ages.” In a falsetto, he mimicked her. “Didn’t you just say you told her about us?”
“I ran into her a couple of weeks ago. She was shopping at Patricia’s and—”
“You blabber and blabber about every assy thing that happens to you there, every rich cunt who walks in. Why clam up about this?”
“I invited her up here. When she heard about you, she didn’t want to come. She made it pretty clear you two hadn’t hit it off.”
He gave an unpleasant chuckle. “It was worse for poor old Henry Lissauer. He really got it between the eyes.”
“Althea? I don’t understand—”
Gerry was on his feet.
A moment later the light went on in the kitchen. She followed him inside. He had dumped the contents of her straw bag on the table. As he fingered through her things, his skin seemed flattened across his face, and his eyes were narrow. He looked terrifying—and alive. She realized that until now she had seen a comatose, etiolated version of Gerry Horak. “Where the hell are the car keys?”
“On the nightstand—Gerry, where are you going?” She rested her shaking hand on his arm.
He jerked out of her hold. “Get the fuck out of my way!” he raged.
She backed away, frightened.
He charged into their room, and returned stuffing money into the back pocket of his Levi’s.
She followed him outside. “Gerry, please tell me where you’re going.”
“Can’t you ever the fuck quit blabbing?”
She stood on the step hugging her arms around herself while, below, the door of her Chevy slammed and the engine roared. At the wheel, Gerry often would brood about his work, forgetting the odometer, speeding recklessly. The sound of the Chevy faded into other traffic. With a shuddering sigh Roy moved across the grassy ledge to gather the supper dishes and leftover ribs.
As the hot, sweat-sodden dark hours passed, her anxiety swelled to near-lunatic proportions. She prayed continuously: Let him come back, let him come back. She had to have a chance to plead with him on her knees—no, plead with him while stretched prone next to his leather sandals. If only he would return, she would abide by whatever conditions he imposed.
Love had dwindled her into a beggar.
By three A.M. she was telephoning the police in a panic about accidents.
The bored voice reported that no 1949 Chevrolet, California license number 2D9863, had been involved in a collision.
Roy lay back down on the bed, her hands clenched as tight as her jaw. Wedged between her fears were questions of Gerry and Althea’s relationship. From their equally vehement responses, it was clear that they had loathed each other, and though Roy tended to view the passions of those near to her loyally, without parlor psychoanalysis, she could not block out the unthinkable plausibility that this vituperative hatred had once been its opposite, happier emotion, love.
Althea Cunningham and Gerry Horak?
Could two members of the human race be more dissimilar? The contrast went deeper than Gerry’s abysmally poor background which made Roy’s own impoverished, peripatetic early childhood seem the rearing of an Infanta. Gerry’s manners were rotten and Althea’s aristocratic, he was totally unconcerned by the reactions of others while Althea forever hid her thin skin—and avenged herself for any wounds inflicted. They were even wrong physically—Althea was way too tall for him.
The many-paned window grew light. Roy forced herself from the bed, standing dully under the shower, then applying powder base to tone down her lobster sunburn.
Hoping against hope he would return, she waited until the last minute to call a cab and arrived at Patricia’s late.
The cooling of temperatures had continued. Customers in sleeveless sheaths pushed their way through the glass doors.
Roy, with a set little smile, carried out fall wools and tweeds. Why force him into marriage? Why couldn’t I be content with my usual crumbs?
Unable to deal with anything so immense as losing Gerry, she fastened her anxieties on how to get home. In a shrill voice she discussed her transportation problem with the other employees, and Mrs. Thomas, the well-corseted blond saleslady who lived in Van Nuys, offered her a ride. Roy sat with the car window open, stifling her screams as la Thomas endlessly, mercilessly nattered on. Was this how Gerry heard her cheery tales of Patricia’s? She was too weary, too miserable to pursue the wretched thought.
The old Chevy was not in its niche. Though she had not expected it would be, she felt an oozing in her chest, as if her heart’s blood were draining. She dragged slowly up the fifty-three wooden steps.
The door was open. Her heart caught, her legs shook as she raced across the narrow, grassy ledge.
Gerry sat on the slipcovered sofa, his head buried in his hands. A ripe odor of liquor reached Roy’s nostrils.
“Hi,” she said quietly.
He looked up. The skin was stretched over his broad cheekbones, and his mouth was tight. “I wrecked your car,” he said in a subdued voice.
“Are you all right?” She, too, spoke quietly.
“Good shape,” he said. “But your car’s about totaled. I had it towed into the shop.”
“You look like you could use some coffee.”
“Sounds good.”
She went into the kitchen. When she brought in the steaming mug, he was still hunched on the sofa.
He took a long gulp of the black coffee. “Listen,” he said. “Barging out like that was a stinking thing to do, and I’m sorry as hell. I’ve been dead set against marriage for so long that I couldn’t separate it from how I feel about you. Roy, I need you, babe. And if you’ll still have me, I’m all for us being hitched.”
She should have been dancing in the clouds, but she sat opposite him in the stifling cottage, wanting to cry. Gerry’s eyes were sunk into deep, coal-dust marks. Slumped there with an abject, pleading expression, he reminded her of a tamed bear they had seen one day in the Place du Tertre, a poor bedraggled animal forced to perform acts unnatural to its kind.
Sympathy flooded through her, and briefly she thought that she should set him free. Then the imperious forces that had drawn her to him in the first place—love, the need to become part of him permanently, to bear his children—took over. I belong to him, she thought.
“Oh, darling,” she said. “I’ve
been so miserable without you. . . .”
46
A good night’s sleep cured Roy’s depression and Gerry’s hangover. Fixing his breakfast, she whistled “Where or When”; he cheerfully devoured four scrambled eggs, sausages, a huge pile of toast encrusted with Hero plum jam. When her taxi honked below, he gave her an exuberant hug, smearing her lipstick.
That day he spent the proceeds from his big triptych—his first important sale in nearly a year—to buy her the car of her dreams, a powder-blue, brand-new Thunderbird. (The old Chevy, engine rebuilt and body hammered out, would be his.)
Wednesday after work, Roy drove her snazzy new sports car the few blocks to her mother’s house on Crescent.
NolaBee opened the door, her sallow face working. She was incapable of bestowing the same endlessly preoccupied love on her younger daughter that she gave her exquisite masterpiece, but her maternal devotion ran deep. She had not cut Roy off out of brassbound moral compunctions but as a realistic method of bringing the child to her senses: marriage was every female’s desired goal, and Roy, with this one irrevocable blunder, was forever blighting her chances.
“Mama?”
NolaBee pulled her daughter into a cigarette-fumed embrace, a reconciliatory hug that dampened both pairs of eyes.
“Well, stranger, come on in,” she said, shifting a scrapbook and a large heap of red-penciled papers from Burrelle’s Press Clipping Bureau to clear a place on the couch for them.
She blew her nose on a rumpled Kleenex. “Tell me about that smart-lookin’ car.”
“Gerry gave it to me instead of a ring. Mama, we’re getting married.”
NolaBee gaped, dumbfounded. She had been utterly convinced “that man,” as she called Gerry, would never do the right thing by Roy.
Despite NolaBee’s near-visceral relief, mean, dark doubts were fraying her, unruly apprehensions that had nothing to do with artists’ well-known inability to earn a living—hadn’t she chosen dear, dead Chilton Wace over her other, more likely prospect?—but were wholly concerned with the personal. Gerry Horak came from poor trash and proved his lack of breeding by his brusque, sometimes downright coarse manners. The narrow-eyed, carnal way that he looked at Roy proved he had no respect for womankind. He would retreat into long silences, the sure sign of a loner. Gerry Horak was the worst possible choice for a husband.
Yet her Roy, pink-cheeked, was smiling a soft, joyous smile.
“Married?” NolaBee’s exclamation was loud. “My baby married? Both my girls—I declare, this makes me a success in life!”
“We’re doing it next week.”
NolaBee couldn’t repress a glance at Roy’s nicely indented waist.
“Oh, Mama, nothing like that. We just want everything simple. We thought maybe at the Beverly Hills City Hall.”
“Waces and Roys and Fairburns don’t get married in a poky old courthouse!” NolaBee cried. “Honey, listen, I was right upset about the sordid way you two set up housekeeping like that. What mother wouldn’t be? But that doesn’t mean I don’t love my little freckle-face. ’Course I’ll give you two a right nice sendoff.”
“I’ll have to ask Gerry. I don’t know how he’ll feel.”
“The wedding’s up to the girl. I’ll arrange for a minister—”
“Gerry said he preferred a judge.”
“A judge, then.” NolaBee blew out cigarette smoke. “Darlin’, we’ll ask your old friends—what a shame Althea isn’t here. The girls in the sorority you were friendly with, the people at your work. And there’s Joshua’s family, and BJ and her in-laws. I reckon we could ask a few of my closest friends, too. . . .” The pitted skin of NolaBee’s face took on color as her lively Southern voice planned on and on.
That night in bed, Roy timidly broached the idea of a wedding. Since the binge, Gerry had gone out of his way to be agreeable, while she, on her part, had been stepping on eggs to be what she considered his ideal woman, caring, tender, submissive, subservient to her man’s wants. An after-you-my-dear-Alphonse situation. She concluded, “Of course if you don’t want a fuss . . .”
“Why not?” he asked, patting her naked backside. “Why the hell not?”
They set the date for September 19, ten days hence.
There was no time to have invitations engraved, so NolaBee and Roy asked people whenever they saw them, and the guest list and wedding plans mushroomed haphazardly. The day before the wedding, NolaBee baked two hams, and her quartet of best friends—one of them the wife of a studio head—came in to help her fix washtubs of potato salad, chicken salad, and fruit salad with marshmallows in it. NolaBee had sent to Greenward for the recipe of her grandmother’s punch, but Joshua boomed, “Punch! This isn’t a finger-sandwich tea for Southern ladies, NolaBee, it’s a grand and glorious hymeneal party, a celebration of the eternal mating instincts in mankind. I’m handling the booze.”
Marylin promised to see to the flowers.
So the wedding ended up half-Wace, half-Beverly Hills. Two thin, nervous men perched tall, festively elegant arrangements of white chrysanthemums in every available cranny of the small house, then set about concealing the weedy carelessness of the backyard with a truckload of clay pots that overflowed with white blossoms—shasta daisies, marguerites, azaleas. Three bartenders in red jackets lined up rented glasses on the quilted leather bar that Abbey Rents had deposited on the patio. NolaBee, in her careless, vital way, crowded the sideboard and old round table that had come from down home with a conglomeration of dimestore bowls and cracked Haviland platters. By 2:30 the living room, dining room and garden were jammed with guests holding drinks.
Among the KayZee alums were all eleven of Roy’s pledge group with husbands and small children. BJ and Maury Morrison disgorged a station wagon full of their children and his parents: it turned out that the senior Morrisons knew the Finemans from some kind of Jewish organization. Montgomery Clift, who was in Marylin’s new movie, appeared briefly, sending ripples of excitement through the gathering, as did Susan Hayward. Roy was a favorite at Patricia’s, and the staff showed up en masse, the black father and son who worked in the stockroom wearing handsomely tailored dinner jackets. Old chums from Beverly High like Janet Schwarz Fetterman, Heidi Ronoletti Hanks, and Bitsy Bennet Kelly brought their spouses. A sculptor friend of Gerry’s lounged on the patio wall in his blue jeans. A gang of children led by Billy (hyperactive as if he had never hovered near the Great Divide) made constant forays on the buffet table.
The string trio that Joshua had commandeered from Paramount wove the disparate groups together with the sweet, tender ripples of “Ich Liebe Dich” and “Träumerei.”
Most eyes followed Marylin—Rain Fairburn—as she bent her lovely, luminous face to reassure her little daughter, Sari.
The honorary flower girl, Sari clutched her basket of white rosebuds as if for salvation. The mass of people terrified her. Except for her enormous, expressive brown eyes, Sari was a funny-looking little kid, all bones, sharp angles, and clouds of curly dark hair.
Sari’s emotional responses lay naked on the nerves of her skin. She was incapable of learning the evasions that even children her age, four, have inevitably taken on as protection against the painful pricks of life. This day, she clung too adoringly to her immediate family, backing off in frightened confusion from the other guests’ greetings and alcohol-scented kisses.
At this nontraditional wedding, the bride and groom circulated among the guests before the ceremony. Roy, her eyes incandescent below her smartly feathered little cocktail hat, her curves encased by pale turquoise peau de soie designed by Mollie Parnis that was the Finemans’ wedding gift—introduced Gerry to the mob. He had on the same checkered sport jacket that he had worn when Roy met him on the Île St. Louis—NolaBee had failed to convince him to buy a suit. Despite this lack of groomly modishness, he was going out of his way to be amenable, teasing NolaBee—he would, he insisted, have picked her over either of her girls if she’d given him a tumble—laughing at Billy’s bathroom h
umor, discussing art with the studio wives.
Roy kept patting his sleeve and gazing into his wide, smiling, satyr’s face. For the rest of our lives, she would think, catching her breath. For the rest of our lives. She loved every one of the guests—and felt immense pity for them. Not a person here—not a person on earth—could have experienced this exaltation.
At 4:30 Judge Dezanter showed up. Tall, round-shouldered, and seventy, he immediately stood Gerry and Roy in front of him.
Guests crowded around, and a fat, perspiring Paramount still photographer climbed on the low wall for a clear view. There was a chorus of shush, shush.
Judge Dezanter, displaying such white, straight teeth that they must be dentures, inquired of Gerry, “Do you, Gerrold, take Roy Elizabeth as your wife?”
“I do,” Gerry replied in a clear, quiet tone.
The big white smile turned on Roy. “Do you, Roy Elizabeth, agree to take Gerrold as your husband?”
The bodies surrounding Roy seemed to press inward, the faces were wiped blank of features—she could not recognize her mother or sister. I should let him off the hook, she thought in her sudden claustrophobic panic. Let him free.
The judge’s pale lips closed over his teeth. He gave her a questioning look.
“I do!” she cried. It was not her voice but a loud, frightened gabble. Gerry had to hold her spastic hand in order to slide on the narrow gold band.
By the power vested in him by the state of California, Judge Dezanter pronounced them man and wife.
Billy Fernauld applauded.
The newlyweds shared a glass of Mumm’s, the studio photographer recorded it, then snapped Roy Horak cutting the first slice of the many-tiered cake from Hansen’s.
It was time for Roy to get her short, matching jacket. Marylin, holding Sari, went with her sister into the bedroom. The quiet, cool air retained a faint hint of the Shalimar that Roy had spread on herself before the party.
Marylin set Sari down, and the child grasped her mother’s slender, shapely thigh through cream-colored silk. “Mommy, it’s nice in here. Can’t we just stay?”
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