An Inconvenient Woman

by Dominick Dunne

  “Whenever you are available in the morning,” replied Jules, watching her from below, “I will be here.”

  She turned halfway up the stairs and looked back at him. They both knew the time had come for them to talk. Then she said, quite arbitrarily, in the first of several arbitrary decisions she would make in the next year to assert her authority in her house, “I don’t want to lend these Monets to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh for their exhibit after all.”

  “But they’ve been promised,” said Jules. “I’m sure their catalog has been printed by now.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t want to lend them. I want them here when the garden club comes.”

  “All right,” said Jules, lifting his eyebrows. Her decision upset him, because he took his obligations in the art world very seriously, but he knew, being a dealmaker of renown, when to concede a point. While looking up at her, he made a mental note to think up an acceptable excuse before contacting the curator of the Carnegie Museum in the morning.

  Looking back at him, Pauline thought, for the first time, that her husband had started to look old.

  The few guests who had actually sat through the movie at Casper Stieglitz’s house were leaving. Casper, glad to be rid of them, had not come to the parking area to see them off but, instead, had made straight for the bedroom where Ina Rae and Darlene and Lonny were waiting for him.

  Philip Quennell opened the door of his rented car and was surprised to see a large manila envelope on the driver’s seat. He picked it up, saw that his name was misspelled on the front, and knew immediately what it was and who it was from.

  “Hey! Somebody put a dent in my car,” screamed out Hortense Madden, as she went to open the door of her Honda. “I bet it was that ass-kissing Cyril Rathbone. As soon as Pauline Mendelson left the projection room, he lost all interest in the evening and took off in a snit. He’s just the type who would back his car into yours and drive off into the night without leaving a note. I’m going to get that little prick tomorrow and make him pay through the nose.”

  Philip slammed the door of his car and went over to Hortense’s, with the envelope in his hands. “Nasty dent,” he said. “Will the door open?”

  “Let me see,” said Hortense. She tried her door and it opened.

  “Could be worse,” said Philip.

  “That fucking Cyril Rathbone,” said Hortense, seething with rage. “ ‘Pauline! How marvelous!’ ” she said, in an exact imitation of Cyril’s florid voice.

  “I don’t blame you for being in a bad mood, and this is probably the wrong moment, but this is the manuscript I was talking to you about at dinner,” he said.

  “What do you want me to do with it?” she asked.

  “Just read it,” he said. “And tell me who you think wrote it. I’m at the Chateau Marmont.”

  Flo’s Tape #14

  “A lot of people think I went to Pooky, the hairdresser, just because he was the hairdresser to Pauline Mendelson, but that is not the case. That’s not the kind of thing I would ever do. I knew Pooky from my days at the Viceroy Coffee Shop. He was a regular, every morning. Juice, whole wheat toast, tea. Never varied. One day he said to me, ‘Rhonda’—I was still called Rhonda then, before I became Flo—‘you’ve got really beautiful hair, but you’re wearing it in the wrong style. Come on in, and I’ll do it for you.’ I almost died. I mean, there were articles about Pooky in the paper, about all the famous ladies whose hair he did, like Faye Converse, Sylvia Lesky, and Pauline Mendelson. I said to him, ‘Are you kidding? I could no more afford you.’ He said, ‘On me.’

  “So, of course, I went. I’ve been wearing my hair this way ever since, and that was before I ever met Jules Mendelson. After I started seeing Jules, when I started wearing all the great clothes, and driving the Mercedes, and living in Beverly Hills, I began to pay the same price all the society ladies and the movie stars paid. I know he must have wondered where all the money was coming from, but he never asked any questions. I knew he was happy for me, though, that things had started to go my way.

  “He always did Pauline Mendelson’s hair at her house. I only saw that house once, and I never went upstairs, but I understand she had a whole, like, beauty shop of her own right off her dressing room, because she didn’t like going into Pooky’s shop. But one day when I was having my hair done, she walked in. I almost died. She was going back east to visit her father, unexpectedly I guess, and needed to get her hair done quickly. Wouldn’t you know, I was sitting there reading about her in Cyril Rathbone’s column at the time?

  “That was the first time I ever thought Pooky might have suspected about me and Jules, because he quickly pulled the curtain behind me, as if he didn’t want her to see me, and went outside the curtain to speak to her. When he came back in to finish me up, he never said a word.”

  15

  “Dudley, please throw out the peonies on the upstairs hall table. There’re petals everywhere,” called Pauline the next morning from the top of the stairs.

  “Yes, Mrs. Mendelson,” replied Dudley, running up the stairs.

  Dudley treasured his employment with the illustrious Mendelson family, and wished things to continue as they had always been. It was no secret among the help in the grander houses of the city that Dudley was recompensed for his services at a salary that far exceeded any of theirs, a knowledge that elevated him to a sort of celebrity status in domestic circles. On the numerous occasions throughout the years of the Mendelson parties, he knew that the guests attending were the greatest and grandest in the land, and it pleased him to be called by name by many of them, especially several of the former Presidents of the country who were regular visitors in the house. It was a measure of the high esteem with which Jules Mendelson held him that only he, and no one else, was allowed to dust van Gogh’s painting of the White Roses, which was the most favored possession in the art-filled house.

  When Pauline came down to meet Jules for breakfast, she was dressed for traveling in a tweed suit. Her mink coat, which she wore only in the east, had been placed on a gilded chair in the front hall. The size of her two bags, which had already been carried downstairs by Dudley, indicated that she planned only a brief trip. In her hand was a list of things to be attended to in her absence by her staff.

  “And Dudley, I forgot to tell Blondell that the Kleenex in Mr. Mendelson’s bathroom should be white, not pink ever. Make sure she changes it.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Mendelson,” replied Dudley.

  Jules, hearing Pauline descend the stairs, came out from the library, where he had been on the telephone with his various offices while waiting for her. In his hand he was carrying a coffee cup. “Where are you off to?” he asked, surprised, when he saw her bags and traveling clothes. He had expected to see her in one of her filmy negligees, which she favored for mornings in her house.

  “I’m going back east for a few days to see my father,” answered Pauline.

  “Is he ill?”

  “No more than he has been, but I haven’t seen him for months, and I thought this would be a perfect time.”

  He had heard of no such plan the night before. “When did you decide this?”

  “During the night.”

  He turned to go back to the library. “I’ll make arrangements for you to take the plane,” he said.

  “No, no, don’t bother. I’ve already made arrangements with Miss Maple,” said Pauline. “The plane’s going to fly me to Bangor and will turn around and fly right back so it can take you to Fort Worth for your meeting at the museum tonight.”

  “You’re very efficient, Pauline,” he said.

  “You told me that last night, Jules.”

  “Have you had breakfast?”

  “No, of course not. I thought we had a date for breakfast.”

  Her matter-of-factness bothered Jules. He was used to her in a different way, warm and compliant, and he was unsure of himself with her when her manner was so chilly. She preceded him down the hallway into their sunrise
room, which they had never used together before for breakfast, as their morning hours had turned out to be so different. Pauline appraised the table and nodded. Her written instructions for Blondell the night before had been carried out exactly. The table was set with a Porthault cloth and napkins. Freshly cut roses from the garden were arranged in a low vase in the center of the table. Her favorite Minton breakfast china in the morning glory pattern was set at the two places. The morning papers from New York and Los Angeles were placed one on top of another on a side table. Even with a life in the beginning of turmoil, no detail in the running of her house was unworthy of her attention.

  Jules watched her. “This looks very pretty,” he said.

  “It does, doesn’t it?” she replied.

  Dudley, whose instincts were keen, was aware of the unusualness of the breakfast. With proper solemnity, he entered the room with two silver pots on a tray and poured tea for Pauline and then coffee for Jules.

  “Thank you, Dudley,” said Pauline. “I will have only melon and one slice of toast. Tell Gertie to use the whole-grain bread. I’m sure you know what Mr. Mendelson will have.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Dudley.

  “Leave the coffee right here, Dudley,” said Jules, rapping his knuckles on the table by his coffee cup. “I like to pour myself.”

  “Do you still drink six cups of coffee with breakfast?” asked Pauline.

  “Something like that.”

  “Can’t be good for your heart.”

  “My heart. All that I’m hearing these days is about my heart,” said Jules.

  “From whom else?” asked Pauline.

  “Last night, from Arnie Zwillman.”

  “Oh,” she said, in disgust, and waved her hands at the mention of Arnie Zwillman’s name, as if a bad odor had suddenly permeated the room.

  Dudley came into the room with Jules’s scrambled eggs and bacon in a covered silver dish. Pauline lifted her delicate Minton cup with both hands and, elbows on the table, watched as Jules helped himself from the dish that Dudley held.

  When Dudley retreated from the room again, she said, “I’m giving you back these yellow diamond earrings, Jules.” She shook the diamonds in her hand as if they were dice and then shot them in his direction across the tablecloth.

  Jules, surprised, took them. “You didn’t like them?”

  “Oh, yes, they’re very beautiful, but I would never wear them.”

  “I thought you liked them last night.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like them. I said I wouldn’t wear them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there is guilt attached to them. You bought them for me because you had been found out, as a sort of atonement. Rose always says the more unfaithful the husband, the greater the jewel collection,” said Pauline.

  “That sounds like something Rose would say,” answered Jules. He put the earrings in his pocket. “I’ll keep them. I’ll put them in the safe. Maybe later.”

  “What do you mean? For Christmas? For my birthday? No, Jules. I don’t want them. Send them back to Boothby’s.”

  “All right,” he said, quietly.

  On the wall by her chair was a small painting of grapes and pears by Fantin-Latour. She stood up and straightened it by a fraction of an inch. “I’ve always loved this picture,” she said.

  “Do you remember when we bought it?” he asked.

  “Of course.” It seemed for a moment that she would recall the incident, but she chose not to. “Do you think we were ever happy, Jules, or was this all one big twenty-two-year show of a marriage?”

  “Oh, Pauline, don’t talk like that, please.”

  Dudley came in again, carrying the silver dish with the scrambled eggs and bacon, but Pauline waved him away, even though Jules would have taken more if they had been offered to him.

  “Imagine dividing all this up,” she said.

  “All what?” he asked.

  She made a gesture that indicated the whole of the contents of their house. “Everything,” she said, looking at him.

  A deeply troubled expression took over his face. At that instant his possessions and his position meant more to him than his obsession, and he was willing to abandon the latter.

  “Don’t even kid about something like that,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m not kidding, Jules. Not for an instant am I kidding.” Pauline had no fear of meeting her husband’s eye. She met it.

  “No, of course you’re not,” he said.

  “When you asked me to marry you all those years ago, my father advised me not to marry you, and now I’m going back to my father because I need to talk to someone I can trust to see whether I should stay married to you, or to end it.”

  “Listen to me, Pauline. I will do anything to keep from losing you.”

  “What about this woman with the red hair?”

  “What woman with the red hair?”

  “If you’re not going to be honest with me, even now, there is no point whatever in continuing this conversation. Months ago I was sent a clipping, anonymously of course, from a Paris paper about a fire in the Meurice Hotel, with a photograph of you in the background, behind a young woman carrying a jewel case. I knew you were staying at the Ritz at the time. I chose to ignore it. I chose to forget it even. But subsequent signs have made it impossible to ignore and forget.”

  “Like what?”

  “I smelled her on your fingers, Jules,” said Pauline.

  Jules’s face turned scarlet. His expression was as clear as a signed confession. “All right, it’s true, but it was nothing. It was meaningless. It will be over, I swear to you. I’ve never heard of anything so absurd in my whole life, that a marriage like ours must end because of an infidelity,” he said.

  “This hardly qualifies as an infidelity, Jules.”

  “It was an aberration, no more, I swear to you. I’m fifty-seven years old. Perhaps it was panic. I simply was carried away with an overwhelming feeling.”

  “Do you think I don’t occasionally have feelings like that for other people, Jules?” asked Pauline.

  Jules looked at her, as if the idea had never occurred to him.

  “I do,” she said. “Young Philip Quennell, for instance. I think he is very attractive. I even told him that last night at that terrible party.”

  At the mention of Philip Quennell’s name, Jules winced. He could not bear Philip Quennell.

  “I could visualize having an affair with him if I were the kind of woman who had affairs. But I didn’t have an affair with him, Jules.”

  Jules was aghast at the thought of his wife even thinking of having an affair. “Because of Camilla?” he asked.

  “That, yes. But also, Jules, because of you, because of our marriage, which is something I have taken very seriously.”

  “So have I.”

  “No. You want an ornamental wife, that’s all, and that’s not good enough for me.”

  There was a silence between them.

  “Philip Quennell, by the way, has made no such offer to me, nor has he shown the slightest interest of that sort in me.”

  “I have taken a dislike to your friend Quennell,” said Jules.

  “He doesn’t believe that Hector committed suicide,” replied Pauline. “Neither did the butler at Mr. Stieglitz’s last night.”

  Jules shook his head in impatience. “Who cares what people like that think?”

  “I don’t believe it either,” she said.

  “Believe it,” he said.

  “Are you ordering me to believe something I don’t believe?”

  “Yes.” There was a harshness in his voice.

  Puzzled, she looked at him.

  There was a knock on the door, and Dudley entered with an attitude of anxiety, interrupting what he knew to be an important private meeting between the two people he had served for many years. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said.

  “That’s all right,” said Pauline.

  “The car is here. The bags are
in,” he said.

  “Yes, I’ll be right there. Put these newspapers in the car, will you, Dudley?”

  When Dudley left, Jules said, “I’ll drive out to the airport with you.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly, Jules.” She took a final sip of her tea.

  “You don’t have to hurry, you know. Have another cup of tea. The nice thing about having your own plane is that it’s not going to leave without you,” said Jules.

  Pauline shook her head. His remark was one she had heard often before. When she got to the door of the room, she turned back. “This room is really quite pretty, don’t you think? Isn’t it too bad we never used it?” She walked out.

  Jules rose and followed Pauline out of the room, down the corridor to the hallway, and out the front door to the courtyard.

  “Have you put Mrs. Mendelson’s bags in the back?” he asked, even though he had just heard from Dudley that the bags were in the car already.

  The chauffeur stood holding the door. As she was about to get in, Pauline turned to the butler and said, “Dudley, there’s a crack in the windowpane of the lavatory off the library. Ask Joe to replace the pane, will you?” She stepped into the car. “Oh, and one more thing, Dudley. Will you check and see if one of the Flora Danica salad plates is missing? I counted only twenty-three yesterday.”

  Jules stepped up and nodded to the chauffeur that he would close the door. “Give my best to your father,” he said.

  “I will,” replied Pauline.

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “I don’t know exactly, Jules. Not long.”

  “When you’re ready to return, let me know, and I’ll arrange for the plane to fly to Bangor and pick you up,” he said. He did not want her to leave.

  Pauline pulled on her gloves. “Good-bye, Jules,” she said.

  “I’ll miss you,” he said.

  Pauline nodded. “All right, Jim, let’s go,” she said to the chauffeur.

  Jules stepped back and closed the rear door. As the car started to move forward, he raised his hand to wave to her. After the car pulled out of the courtyard and started down the driveway, Jules remained standing there, not moving.