An Inconvenient Woman

by Dominick Dunne

  As with many women of her position, much of Camilla Ebury’s time was taken up with good works and cultural activities. She worked long hours for the fashionable charities of the city, the Los Angeles Orphanage Guild, the Colleagues, and the Blue Ribbon Four Hundred, and her name was often listed on the committees of charitable events. She felt that it was the obligation of people born with money to devote a portion of their time to helping those less fortunate. She was also a splendid tennis player and a first-rate golfer and was often involved in tournaments. She had her own tennis court at her home in Bel Air, and she and Philip often played early in the morning before he went back to his room at the Chateau Marmont, where he worked on his screenplay. Several times a week she played golf at the Los Angeles Country Club on Wilshire Boulevard.

  “All you people look alike at this club,” Philip had said one Sunday evening, looking around the dining room.

  She knew what he meant. “Well, we all know each other,” she said. She had belonged to the Club all her life, as her father and her late husband had before her, and she knew the names of most of the members and most of the help. Every Sunday evening she and her daughter, Bunty, went to the Club for the buffet supper, just as she had gone with her father when she was a child, and Philip had started to accompany them.

  “No show folk.”

  “No.”

  “No ethnics.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Watkins, remember.”

  “Tokens.”

  “Well, that’s the way it is. That’s the way it always has been,” she said to Philip, with a shrug. She hated that kind of conversation. “They have clubs too that we can’t get into. Don’t forget that.”

  Philip laughed. It was not the first time he had heard her give this rationale.

  “Even the Mendelsons couldn’t get into the Los Angeles Country Club, and God knows, Pauline McAdoo comes from about as good a family as you get back east,” said Camilla.

  “I bet if you checked into it, you’d find the problem was Jules, not Pauline,” replied Philip.

  Camilla didn’t reply. “Here comes Bunty. Don’t continue this conversation in front of her.”

  Philip did not play golf, but on this particular day Camilla asked him to join her there for lunch in the Club grill, where all the golfers had lunch, after she had played. He liked the look of her in her visored cap and trim white shorts and pastel-colored sport shirts. Rose Cliveden made her first appearance at the Club since she broke her leg at the lunch she gave there following Hector Paradiso’s funeral. Rose was one for dramatic entrances, and she had herself pushed into the grill in a wheelchair by a nurse, although she was able by that time to navigate by herself on crutches.

  “I’m back,” she yelled as she came in, and all her friends in the room rushed over to greet her, and Bloody Marys were ordered for all. As always, wherever Rose was, a party began. From the arm pocket of her wheelchair, she pulled forth several gifts, handsomely wrapped. One was for Clint, the bartender, whom she had accused of making the Bloody Marys too strong on the day she fell over Astrid, and the other was for her dear friend Camilla Ebury, who was that day thirty-three years old.

  “You didn’t tell me it was your birthday,” said Philip, when he and Camilla had settled back at their own table.

  Camilla blushed. “I never tell anyone it’s my birthday. Trust Rose to make an announcement. She keeps one of those birthday books. I never know when anyone’s birthday is.”

  “What are you doing when we finish lunch?” asked Philip.

  “I have an Orphanage Guild meeting at four,” she said.

  “Between now and four?”

  “Take a shower. Change clothes. Why?”

  “You’re coming with me,” said Philip.

  “Where?”

  “To buy you a birthday present.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I know I don’t have to. But I want to.”

  A half hour later, Philip and Camilla walked hand in hand down Rodeo Drive looking in shop windows, both feeling carefree, as if they were playing hooky. Philip saw a very pretty young woman coming toward him from the other direction. He was surprised enough to stop in his tracks. The young woman, who had seen him before he saw her, was also surprised, and unnerved, by the unexpected meeting.

  “Hello,” said Philip.

  “Hello,” replied the young woman.

  Camilla, watching the exchange, dropped hold of Philip’s hand.

  “What an incredible surprise,” said Philip.

  “For me, too,” said the young woman.

  “Do you live here?” he asked.

  “No. Do you?”

  “No. I’m here working for a few months. Where do you live?”

  “I’m in San Francisco still. You’re in New York?”

  “Yes.” There was an awkward pause.

  Camilla said, “Philip, I think I’ll go back to the car.”

  “Oh, I beg your pardon,” said Philip. “This is Camilla Ebury. Terry—uh, what’s your last name these days?”

  The young woman laughed. “Still Sigourney,” she said.

  “Terry Sigourney, Camilla Ebury,” he said.

  The two women nodded to each other.

  “I read your book on that Wall Street guy,” said Terry to Philip.

  He nodded. There was another awkward pause.

  “Did he really break your legs? I read that.”

  “Oh, no. Only a threat that didn’t happen.”

  “Philip, I’m going to get a taxi across the street at the Beverly Wilshire,” said Camilla impatiently.

  “No, no, wait,” said Philip, reaching out for her hand.

  Camilla pulled her hand away from him.

  “Listen, I better be on my way,” said Terry. She turned to Camilla. “Does he still have that cute little tattoo, down there?”

  Camilla, angry, blushed.

  Terry looked at Philip. “Good-bye, Philip,” she said. “If you’re ever in San Francisco, I have a gallery. Bird prints. It’s in the book.” She walked on past them.

  Camilla and Philip looked at each other for an instant.

  “You behaved like a bitch,” said Philip.

  “I behaved like a bitch? What about her? What about that tattoo crack?”

  “You brought it on, you know.”

  “I was jealous.”

  “Well, where to next?” asked Philip. “Tiffany’s is across the street there in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, isn’t it?”

  “Why do I feel that Terry was something more than a casual acquaintance?” asked Camilla.

  Philip didn’t answer for a moment.

  “Who was she?”

  “A subplot,” answered Philip.

  “How sub?” asked Camilla.

  Philip paused. “I was once married to her,” he said.

  Camilla stopped. “Married to her? You never told me you’d been married.”

  “Because I’d almost forgotten I was.”

  “How could a marriage slip your mind?”

  “I was only eighteen at the time. An elopement to Mexico. There was always a question as to whether it was legal or not.”

  “Was it annulled?”

  “No, we were divorced.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “Under a year.”

  “Take me home, will you? I have the meeting at four, and I want to get my own car.”

  “I haven’t bought you a present.”

  “I don’t want a present.”

  They drove back to Camilla’s house in Bel Air in silence. When he pulled into the driveway, she picked up her bag so that by the time the car pulled in front of the house, she had already opened the door. As she was about to step out of the car, he reached over and put his hand on her arm.

  “Why are you being like this?” he asked.

  “I’ve been sleeping with you for how long now? Since the night Hector was killed, and I just realized I don’t know one damn thing about you. Nothing.”


  “I never thought credentials were required for a love affair,” said Philip.

  She ignored him. “I don’t know if you have a mother, father, brother, sister, or a child even.”

  “No to all of the above.”

  “Now I find out for the first time that you’ve been married.”

  “So have you.”

  “It’s not that you were married that I mind. It’s that you simply neglected to tell me an important bit of information about yourself.”

  “It was twelve years ago. I was married for seven months. What’s the big deal?”

  “There is no big deal.”

  “Look, I was different in those days than I am now. Wilder. Rebellious. My parents sent me away to boarding school when I was only eleven, because they were getting a divorce, and I spent the next seven or eight years wanting to get even with them. What better way than to elope to Mexico? I think of it as a youthful error, no more than that.”

  “What’s your secret, Philip?”

  “What secret?”

  “You have a secret. I feel it. I know it.”

  Philip looked away from her.

  “And you’re not going to tell me, are you?”

  Philip didn’t answer.

  “I don’t want to see you anymore, Philip.”

  “That’s quite childish, don’t you think?”

  She shook her head. “Let me tell you what a fool I’ve been. I was thinking that perhaps you were going to ask me to marry you. I even went to see my lawyers, just in case. My life is run by lawyers, part of an arrangement my father made. If we were even to think of marriage, I was told, they would draw up a prenuptial agreement for you to sign.”

  Philip, astonished, laughed. “I wouldn’t have signed it.”

  “They wouldn’t have let me marry you then.”

  “But I didn’t want to marry you.”

  Camilla, startled, blushed. “You didn’t?”

  “No. Men should never marry women who are richer than they are. It’s bound to fail. So tell your lawyers to flush their prenuptial agreement.”

  “You don’t have to be rude.”

  “I’m not being rude. I’m stating a fact. What’s wrong with a love affair? Just a plain and simple love affair. This has been a very pleasant time between us. Don’t just toss it out. I have never been one to believe every romance should end up in marriage.”

  “So long, Philip,” she said. “When you’re ready to tell me your secret, maybe we’ll meet for lunch sometime.” She stepped out of his car.

  Philip looked at her back. “I caused a girl to be paralyzed when I was driving too fast with too many beers in me. It changed my life forever,” he said. Without looking back at her, he drove out of her driveway.

  Philip Quennell had not made many friends in Los Angeles during the time he was there. He had met Camilla Ebury at the Mendelsons’ party on his first night in the city. The mysterious death of her uncle on that same night had intensified their love affair, and he had spent most of his free time with her since then, mixing in her life with her friends rather than creating a Los Angeles life of his own. The rupture that had been caused in that love affair by the unexpected appearance on the street of Terry Sigourney brought to an instant halt any further socializing with the people he had met through Camilla. He had no desire to call on Casper Stieglitz for companionship, as he had developed an intense dislike for the man. Nor did he have any desire to associate with Lonny Edge, even to gain further knowledge of Lonny’s friendship with the great author Basil Plant, whom Philip revered. He wanted only to finish the writing assignment he had undertaken for Casper Stieglitz, so that he could return to his life in New York.

  He was at work in his room at the Chateau Marmont that night, when there was a knock at his door. It was the policy of the hotel to announce all visitors, but no such announcement had been made. When he opened the door, he was surprised to see the pretty young woman he knew only as Flo M. standing there. She was dressed, as he had always seen her dressed, in a Chanel suit, but she appeared to be in an agitated state. The cool, withdrawn, and slightly mysterious manner that he had grown used to when he saw her most mornings at the AA meetings in the log cabin on Robertson Boulevard was not present.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me in?” she asked.

  “Oh, sure,” he said.

  He opened the door wider, and she walked past him into the room. He closed the door.

  “So this is where you live, huh?” she said. “I was never in here before. I used to be a waitress at the Viceroy Coffee Shop up the street on Sunset, and all the writers who stayed at the Chateau always came in for breakfast, so I was always hearing about the place. Nice, isn’t it?”

  “Why do I think that you haven’t come here at half-past ten at night to discuss the writers who live and work at the Chateau Marmont?” asked Philip.

  “Did I know you were a writer? You didn’t tell me that, did you? I think I must have just felt it. I mean, you look like a writer.” She walked around his room, looking at everything. His word processor was set up on a desk and his printer stood next to it on a card table. She leaned down and read the amber print on the monitor. “You’re writing a movie, I see,” she said.

  “Are you in some kind of trouble?” asked Philip.

  “Hell, no. Do you always work in a dressing gown? That’s nice, that blue-and-white-striped dressing gown. What was that, a gift from your girlfriend, I bet.”

  “If I didn’t know it wasn’t so, I’d think you were on speed,” said Philip. “You’re talking a mile a minute.”

  She opened the doors to his balcony and walked outside. “God, look at all that traffic on Sunset,” she called in.

  He followed her out to the balcony. She was leaning on the rail, looking down. She had taken a cigarette from her gold cigarette case with the name FLO printed on it in sapphires. She lit it with her gold lighter, and inhaled deeply.

  “What’s the matter, Flo?” he asked. He took the cigarette out of her mouth and threw it over the balcony.

  “You couldn’t put me up for the night, could you, Phil?”

  “Tight quarters here.”

  “I wouldn’t mind that,” she said.

  They looked at each other.

  “Are you still spoken for?” she asked.

  He smiled sadly. “As a matter of fact, I’m not. Why?”

  “I’m not spoken for anymore either.”

  When Ralph White came out of the men’s room in the steak house in the San Fernando Valley and got into the car the parking boy had brought around, the first thing Madge White said to him was, “Did you see Sims Lord in the men’s room?”

  “Sims? No. There was no one in the men’s room. It was empty except for me,” said Ralph. “Why?”

  “I can’t wait to tell you what just happened to me,” said Madge.

  Jules Mendelson had already left. He had driven his Bentley out of the restaurant parking lot with such speed that Madge thought he would surely have been arrested had a policeman been present to witness his driving. He turned off Ventura Boulevard onto Coldwater Canyon and raced up the mountain, blowing his horn relentlessly at any car not driving at the speed that he was driving, until they pulled over to the side and allowed him to pass. When he reached the top of Coldwater, he slowed down his pace because the Beverly Hills side of the canyon was more closely patrolled than the Valley side. Halfway down Coldwater, he turned left onto the street that led into Azelia Way.

  All the time he was driving, he planned what he would say to her. He had not wanted to go out in public. What he most feared had happened. The fault was hers, not his. He would make her see that. At the same time, he could not erase from his memory the sad and hurt look in her eyes when he had pretended he could not think of her name.

  He pulled into the secluded driveway of the house that he rented for her. He jumped from his car, leaving the car door open. He rang the bell. When there was no immediate answer, he took out his keys and o
pened the front door and walked in without closing the door behind him. The lights were on, as they had been left. The drinks that they’d had before going out were still on the coffee table.

  “Flo!” he called out. “Flo! Where are you, Flo?” He went into her bedroom, her bathroom, out onto her patio. There was no sign of her. He walked frantically from room to room. He could not imagine where she could have gone. He knew she had no friends, except the maid next door, and he knew she would never go to Faye Converse’s house to call on Faye’s maid.

  From behind the tall hedge that separated Flo’s house from the house of Faye Converse, the dog Astrid, hearing activity, came over to call on Flo. She came in by the open front door, knowing she would be received with great whoops of joy, as she always was when Flo spotted her, and then be spoiled with doggy treats, as Flo always spoiled her.

  Hearing the sounds of each other, each thought the other was Flo. Jules ran from the bedroom into the living room, where, instead, he encountered Astrid. They stared at each other, in the same way they had stared at each other in Hector Paradiso’s house on the early morning Hector’s body lay on the floor between them, with five bullets in it, and Jules removed the note that the dying Hector had left, before the police arrived. The little dog began to bark ferociously at Jules, as if she feared that harm had come to Flo as well.

  “Get out of here, you little piece of shit,” said Jules to the dog, menacingly.

  Astrid held her ground, barking without stop and moving in on Jules.

  From Flo’s mantelpiece, Jules picked up one of the two brass candlesticks with dragons crawling up their sides that Nellie Potts had charged Flo several thousand dollars for, claiming that they were antiques from the childhood palace of the last emperor of China. Jules swung the candlestick as if it were a broom, and the little dog, terrified, retreated.