by Irwin Shaw
He put his arms around her and kissed her. As he held her he felt the dog sniffing inquisitively at his legs. He remembered their other kisses, on the set, under the lights and cameras and the eyes of the other actors and hairdressers and sound men and electricians. Well, at least we’re reducing the audience, he thought cynically, it’s down to one dog. The thought took the pleasure from the embrace. As though she had guessed something of what he was thinking, Carlotta pushed away from him and touched the button on the wall. There was a whirring sound, but no light.
“What’s that?” she asked, startled.
“You turned on the heat,” he said. He switched on a lamp on the desk near the window and he saw, with surprise, that she still had her make-up on from the night’s shooting. He had forgotten that they had both come directly from the studio. He looked at himself in a mirror. His face looked ageless, waxlike and unreal. When he turned away from the mirror, she had seated herself on the heavy, mission-style couch with her legs up. “You promised me a drink,” she said.
He went into the kitchen and brought out a bottle of whisky and two glasses and a pitcher of water. Carlotta was looking around her with a grimace of displeasure, and he realized that he had forgotten how ugly and bare the rented, garishly furnished room actually was.
“When people first come out here,” Carlotta said, “they always pick places like this to live in. I call them anti-homes.” She accepted the glass and took a long swallow. “We both look ghastly,” she said, touching her make-up. “Don’t we, Buster?”
The dog was lying in the middle of the floor, watching her, and he wagged his tail, thumping it on the bare tile floor, on hearing his name.
“People’re afraid to put down roots here,” she said, speaking rapidly. It was the first time since he had been introduced to her that Jack felt that she had seemed nervous and ill-at-ease. “They have the feeling that the ground beneath all this bright green grass is unhealthy and that the swimming pools are poisoned.” She waved her glass at the dark carved furniture, at the greenish stucco walls. “What this place needs is a woman’s touch, as they say in the pitchers.” She looked up at him uncertainly, inquisitively, her blond hair falling loosely over the shoulders of the sweater she was wearing. “There hasn’t been a woman’s touch at all, has there?”
“No,” Jack said, sitting on the edge of the desk, facing her, being careful to keep his distance from her.
“So they tell me,” she said, “so they tell me. They also tell me you’re married. Is that true?”
“Yes,” he said.
“They’re catching ’em younger and younger these days,” Carlotta said. She stretched out her legs on the couch, her toes touching in a little V. She rested her back against the high arm of the couch, cradling the drink in her two hands. “Where is she—your wife?”
“In New York.”
“How is it she turned you loose like this?”
“She wouldn’t come with me. She’s working.”
“At what?”
“She’s in a play. She’s an actress.”
“Oh, God,” Carlotta said, “will it never stop? Did you ask her to come out with you?”
“Yes,” said Jack.
“And she wouldn’t?”
“No.”
“What’s her name—I mean her stage name?”
“You never heard of her,” Jack said. “Nobody ever heard of her. It’s a tiny part.”
“And even so, she wouldn’t come…?”
“No. She’s very serious.”
“Oh—is she good?”
“No,” Jack said, “she’s awful.”
“Does she know that?”
Jack shook his head. “No,” he said, “she thinks she’s the American answer to Sarah Bernhardt.”
Carlotta chuckled maliciously. “Have you told her?”
“Told her what?”
“That she’s awful?”
“Yes,” Jack said.
“What did she say to that?”
Jack grinned painfully. “She said that I was jealous of her talent, that I didn’t have much of my own, that I didn’t know what it was like to be devoted to my art, and that all I was good for was Hollywood, anyway.”
“Happy days in the New York theatre,” Carlotta said. She finished her drink and put it down on the floor beside her and the dog got up and came over and sniffed hopefully at it.
“How much longer,” Carlotta asked, stretching back lazily on the couch, her arms above her head, “do you think your marriage is going to last?”
“Two days,” Jack said.
“When did you decide that?”
“Tonight.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
She stood up then and came over and stood in front of him, touching his shoulder lightly with her hand, the big, green eyes alive and somber in the mask of make-up. “I didn’t come here only for a drink, you know,” she said.
“I know. Come on, I’m going to take you home now.”
She stepped back and looked at him, frowning, trying to understand. “You’re the godamndest boy,” she said.
“Listen to me,” he said. “I’m going to take you home now and I’m going to fly to New York tomorrow and I’m going to tell my wife I’m in love with you and that I want a divorce and that I’m going to marry you as soon as I can.”
Carlotta held his face in her hands, staring into his eyes, as if to make sure that he wasn’t joking. “I’m a poor, simple, corrupt little girl who came to Hollywood at a tender age, Jack,” she said, smiling crookedly. “I don’t know if I can cope with all this purity…”
He kissed her, gently, putting a seal upon his words.
“And me,” she said harshly. “What do I do while all this is going on?”
“You get the Cadillacs out of your driveway,” Jack said. “Once and for all.”
Carlotta moved back a step, touched her lips uncertainly. “Well,” she whispered, “that sounds fair enough.”
When they went out and got into the Ford with the dog, the man in the suspenders was still watering his midnight lawn. He stared at them from across the street, surprised, Jack was sure, that they had come out so soon.
“Tell me, how many times have you been married?”
“Three times.”
“Good God.”
“That’s it. Good God.”
“Is that normal in America?”
“Not exactly.”
“You’re ruthless,” Julia said, standing in the middle of the living room, with her legs apart, in the ingénue’s pose, her face contorted and full of hatred. The apartment was on West Twelfth Street. It was in an old building with high ceilings and flaking walls and Julia had put up orange burlap curtains since he had been there last and had bought unpleasant-looking tubular furniture. In the next room, the child was crying, but nobody was paying any attention to him. “You keep saying how honestly you want to live your life,” she said loudly. “Don’t kid yourself. It isn’t honesty. It’s vanity and hardness of heart. You’ll trample on anyone to get what you want. Your wife. Your child. Why couldn’t you go out and have your affair in Hollywood with that old tart and keep quiet about it and come home to your wife like everybody else? Oh, no, not you. You even have to tell me in advance. Good God, what sort of a man are you? The Sir Galahad of the bedroom.” Her voice was harsh and sarcastic, but even in her own home, fighting for what she considered her conjugal rights, she sounded like a bad actress in a bad play pretending to be harsh and sarcastic. At that moment, it was impossible to remember that he had ever thought he loved her, that he had thought she was beautiful, that they had ever lain warmly together in the same bed and stretched out their arms to each other in desire and affection.
“There’s no use talking about it, Julia,” he said, trying to keep his voice soothing and reasonable. “This is the only way I can do it. I’ll take care of you and the baby and…”
“You don’t have to take care of anybody,�
� she said. She was weeping now and he was surprised that he felt no pity, only irritation, at the sound of that false, sobbing voice, at the sight of those young, almost authentically sorrowful tears. “I’m not going to give you a divorce,” she wept. “I’m going to stay right here and I’ll take care of the baby and when you come to your senses I’ll be waiting for you. And I’ll do better without you, too. You won’t be here cutting away my confidence in myself, sneering at me, telling me I’m no good, that I’ll never be any good. When you come back I’ll be on the top, they’ll be offering me every woman’s part on Broadway…When you come back, I’ll take care of you!”
Jack sighed. He didn’t want to get into that again. She had the same stubbornness and drive as Carlotta, but because in Carlotta it was allied with talent, it made Carlotta admirable. Julia’s ambition, her capacity for work, her faith in herself, only made her foolish.
“Julia,” he said, unable to keep from uttering the warning, “if you had any sense, you’d quit. You’d quit before it was too late and you’d find a nice man and marry him and devote yourself to being a decent wife and mother.”
“Get out,” she screamed. “Get out of my house.” He went into the bedroom and looked down at his son, crying in his crib. I’ll ask your forgiveness when you’re a little older, he thought. Right now all he could feel was regret that the child had been born. He didn’t kiss the wet little red face on the frilly pillow, and he left the apartment with relief. He was on the plane back to California two hours later.
“Volare, oh, oh…cantare, oh, oh, oh, oh…”
Summer morning in the garden of the white house at the top of the winding canyon road. The table laid for breakfast under the striped umbrella. The mail neatly placed in two bundles beside the large glasses of orange juice, playscripts, scenarios, envelopes from the clipping service, letters, for Mr. James Royal and Miss Carlotta Lee, like the first act of a play, just after the curtain has risen, the actors waiting to come on, waiting just long enough for the applause for the pretty set to die down. The blue sky of California, in those days still free of smog, a brilliant backdrop for the grove of avocado trees with their formal shiny leaves and their heavy round fruit, like a child’s drawing of an orchard. The smell of oranges and lemons in the ten-o’clock-in-the-morning sun.
Now the two of them were seated across from each other, Carlotta in slacks and a man’s blue shirt, with the sleeves rolled up at the elbow, and Jack in sandals, slacks, and a soft wool sweater, facing each other across the flowers in the middle of the table, across the neatly piled correspondence from the unimportant, insignificant outside world.
Jack sat watching Carlotta open an envelope, her movements quick and precise, her skin glowing in the rosy light under the striped umbrella. She looked across at him. “What’re you thinking?” she asked.
“I am thinking,” he said, “of last night, and other nights and of how glorious you are and of how I am entwined, enlaced, captivated, enraptured, immersed, joyously sodden with sinful sex, and of how smart it was of you to get out of your father’s oil camps and of how brilliant it was of me to get away from my father’s prune-dryers.”
Carlotta laughed. “Don’t tell me,” she said, “that that’s spontaneous.”
“Of course not,” Jack said. “I composed it while shaving, as a kind of pre-breakfast plain-chant. Do you dislike it?”
“Go on,” she said.
“Tomorrow morning,” he said. “My powers of composition are exhausted for the day. Oh, murder, here’s the godamn dog.”
Buster came bounding in from his morning tour in the canyon brush. He danced around the table, barking in hysterical salute.
“Oh, shut up, Buster,” Carlotta said and gave him a piece of honeyed toast to keep him quiet.
Buster had been the occasion of dispute when Jack had just moved in. “He’s got to get out of the room,” Jack had said, “while we’re making love.”
“He’s very quiet,” Carlotta had said.
“I don’t care how quiet he is,” Jack said. “He lies there, breathing and watching. I never can get over the feeling that he’s either going to bite me in the ass or sell the story to the newspapers.”
“He’s a very discreet dog,” Carlotta said. “He’ll feel that we’re unfriendly if we lock him out.”
“I will wind up impotent,” Jack said.
“In that case, out he goes. But he’ll bark,” Carlotta said.
“Let him bark.”
Buster had barked for two nights, but had finally, glumly, given in. Now he lay just outside the door, breathing, as Jack put it.
“It’s a beautiful day,” Carlotta said, looking up at the cloudless sky. “You know what would be nice to do? Get in the car and go out to the beach and swim and have lunch out there, just us two, and…”
The telephone, which was on a long cord that ran from the house to the table, began to ring. “Your turn,” Carlotta said, making a grimace.
Jack picked up the phone. “Hello,” he said.
“Did you read the new stuff?” It was Delaney, as usual wasting no time on preliminaries.
“I read the new stuff,” Jack said.
“Well?”
“It’s terribly original, dear boy,” Jack said, drawling.
“You bastard,” Delaney said, without heat. “What the hell do you know? You never went past Freshman English. You have the literary taste of a butcher. You’re a coarse athlete who doesn’t know the difference between Henry James and Ladies’ Night in a Turkish Bath. Your idea of the best movie ever made is Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. If your father hadn’t been so godamn stingy he’d have sent you out for ten years to a course in remedial reading for backward children.” Jack settled comfortably in his chair, smiling. “Have you withered to dust yet, you prune farmer?” Delaney asked.
“I am leaning back and drinking my orange juice in the presence of the most beautiful woman in the world,” Jack said.
“Uninterrupted sex has robbed you of your powers of reason,” Delaney said. “Tell that to the lady.”
“I will do that very thing,” Jack said, grinning.
“Tell me,” Delaney said, “not that it makes the slightest bit of difference what a poor, illiterate actor thinks, but is it terribly original, or terribly, terribly original?”
“It wavers,” Jack said amiably. “Sometimes it’s one, sometimes it’s the other.”
“I am thinking an unmentionable thing about your mother,” Delaney said. Then he sighed. “I’m afraid you’re right, Jack. Meet me at noon and we’ll drive down to the beach and have lunch and see if we can flog out some ideas to hand on to that pea-brain Myers for the rewrite.”
“I shall be there,” Jack said, and hung up. Carlotta was looking at him quizzically.
“No beach today,” she said.
“Not with you,” he said. “I’m going down with Delaney.”
“If I were a real woman,” Carlotta said, “I’d be jealous.”
“If you were that kind of a real woman,” Jack said, “I wouldn’t be sitting here.”
“You know,” Carlotta said, “I think you’re the first man Maurice Delaney has ever listened to in his whole life.”
“I listen to him.”
“He’s used to that,” she said.
“We’ll go to the beach tomorrow,” Jack said, “if it’s a nice day.”
“If it’s a nice day and Delaney doesn’t need you.”
“If Delaney doesn’t need me.”
“Well,” Carlotta said, biting into her toast, “it’s a lucky thing I have my charities and my opium pipes for the long, lonely afternoons.”
Jack chuckled and began to look through his mail. There was a letter from Julia. It was the first one since he had left her four months before. He nearly put it aside, to read in privacy, but he felt that that would be cowardly, so he opened it immediately.
“Dear Jack,” he read, in the elegant, almost printlike, artificial handwriting, “I have been to see a law
yer and I will shortly file suit for divorce. I’m not asking for any money, as I have met a man with whom I have fallen in love, and I am going to marry him as soon as I am free. I am arranging for custody of the child, of course. Since I don’t want to sue in New York, where I would have to use adultery as the grounds for divorce, which would be unpleasant for the child when he grew old enough to ask questions, I am going to Reno. Naturally, I expect you to pay whatever expenses this will entail.
Julia.”
Why does she keep saying, the child? Jack thought, irritated. I know his name. Then his irritation vanished as the meaning of the letter sunk in.
“Where do you want to get married?” he said to Carlotta, who was impatiently flipping through her own mail.
“What’s that?” she asked.
He gave her the letter. She read it without expression. “Where did she learn to write letters?” Carlotta asked, when she had finished. “In business school?”
“Personally,” Jack said, “I think it’s the nicest letter I ever received in my whole life.”
“You were right to leave her,” Carlotta said. “She’s an idiot.”
“How can you tell from one letter?” Jack asked.
“Not asking for money,” Carlotta said, biting on her toast. “She could have bled you white.”
“Will you ask for money when we divorce?” Jack said, grinning.
“An arm and a leg,” Carlotta said.
“In that case,” Jack said, “I suppose we’d better stay married.”
“I suppose,” Carlotta said. She came over and kissed the top of his head, and ruffled his hair with her fingers.
“In California, I find,” Jack said, “they have wonderful California mornings in the morning. Don’t you find?”
“I find, too,” she said. She kissed him again and went back to her place to finish her breakfast.
“What about that woman in the movie?…Weren’t you married to her?”