by Jon Cleary
“Well played,” said Claudine. “You’re not afraid to take risks.” IV
Cleo slept well, convinced now that she had passed her test with Claudine. Someone tapped on her door during the night and whispered her name; but she came only half-awake, didn’t respond and went back to sleep immediately. She had locked her door, against whom she was not sure (Alain? Roger? Stephen Jensen, who admired younger women?), and she knew it was a strong, thick door, making her safe against seducers and rapists. She woke refreshed and lay for a while listening to the birds in the tree outside her window. I’d like a house in the country some day, she thought, somewhere quiet and peaceful to retreat to. Another ambition: but it reminded her too much of Jack and St. Aidan’s House and she put it out of her mind.
She showered, dressed in slacks and shirt and went downstairs to breakfast, though Claudine had told everyone they could have breakfast served in their rooms if they wished. She wished at once that she had accepted the suggestion.
Roger Brisson was sitting alone at the large round table in the sun-drenched room where two servants, both black, one a young girl, the other a grey-haired man, were serving breakfast. Roger stood up and pulled out a chair right beside him.
“I think breakfast conversation should be quiet and intimate. I hate hearty breakfast tables. I always avoided breakfast in the mess for that reason. You look splendid this morning, a real champion.”
“I’m sure your sister looks just as good, if not better. She let me win last night.”
“You still had to risk that last shot. It’s always the last shot or two that counts.”
“What about in a duel? I should think it would be the first shot that would count there.”
“If it’s a good first shot, it should also be the last. I can recommend the home-made sausages. Cyrus’s wife makes them herself. Cyrus has been with the family since—how long?”
“Nineteen twenty-nine I come here, sir. As a gardener’s boy.”
“Ellie is his granddaughter.” The girl smiled shyly at Cleo. Then she and her grandfather went out of the room and Roger said, “Old family retainers. There aren’t many of them left.”
“Claudine must be a good mistress or they wouldn’t stay.”
He buttered her with a smile. “You’ll find out. I gather you’re going to work for the Courier.”
“Nothing is decided yet. I still have to be okayed by Mr. Lintas, the editor.”
“It’s been decided without Mr. Lintas. I talked to Claudine last night.”
Do I adopt the blunt approach or do I wait patiently until he tells me? She chose the first approach, remembering how blunt he had been with his invitation for her to go to bed with him in Saigon.
“General—”
“Roger. I’m out of uniform or hadn’t you noticed?”
She had noticed; but his mufti dress was as elegant as his uniform. Even casually dressed, he looked as uncreased as a New Yorker ad. “Roger—why are you interesting yourself so much in me? And don’t give me any flirtatious bull. I hate that worse than even hearty breakfast conversation.”
Louise had asked him the same question in bed last night. He had not given an answer then and he was not going to give one now, at least not a direct one. When he had entered the house last night and seen Cleo, he had realized at once that she was far too close to home for comfort; indeed she was in the home, which gave him a great deal of discomfort. He still felt a raw guilt about what had happened at An Bai six years ago and, since his own memory of it was so vivid, he assumed Cleo’s was just as indelible. He knew he would never have to go back to Vietnam; though nobody admitted it, he knew the war there was lost. He could not turn his back on Cleo; so he had adopted the only other approach he knew, to court her. An enemy in sight is less dangerous than one that can’t be seen: that had been a major lesson in Vietnam. Clausewitz may not have written such a dictum, but Clausewitz had never fought in the jungle and had fought few, if any, women.
“Don’t get me wrong. I have no influence with my sister when it comes to running the paper. Her paper. But if you are going to be—in the family, as it were—”
“I’m just a friend of Alain’s, I’m not in the family.”
“Well, let’s say you’re more in the family than Mr. Lintas. He’s never been invited to Souillac. So if you are going to be coming here, isn’t it better I greet you as a friend of the family than as a newspaperwoman?”
“That’s what I’ll be when I next come here. That is, if I’m invited after I go to work for the Courier.”
“I’m sure Alain will see that you are. He’s very smitten with you.”
Smitten: it was a word she thought had gone out with the Victorian novels. Roger was going too far in his effort to be on his best behaviour. “We’re just friends.”
“So let’s you and I be friends, too.” He put no double meaning behind the words and, reluctantly, she accepted them at their face value. But she felt uneasy and knew she would have to watch him, not be smitten by him.
Later, when the morning grew hot, she changed into a bikini and went out to the large pool at the side of the house. Some of the other guests were already there, the women soaking up the sun, the men trying to find some of the lost grace of their youth in the water. She took off the towelling robe she had found in her room and, even behind their dark glasses, saw the women’s eyes swivel towards her. She always had mixed feelings about her figure; she liked men to admire it, but she did not like women to be envious of it or resent it. She pulled on her bathing cap, walked quickly to the side of the pool and dived in.
She swam two lengths of the pool, with the easy graceful stroke that had always come naturally to her, even as a child. When she paused, holding on to the tiled edge of the pool, Alain surfaced beside her.
“Did you sleep well? I came along during the night to see how you were, but got no answer.”
“I heard your knock.” She was glad it had been he and not one of the other men. “What did you have in mind if I hadn’t been sleeping well? Never mind, don’t answer.”
Then Stephen Jensen swam up beside them. Immersion in water likens older men to the ape: it does not improve their looks. Last night Jensen’s grey hair had looked sleek and thick; now it hung down in long strands about his ears and his scalp on top was clearly visible. When he lifted an arm out of the water to grasp the side of the pool Cleo could see the loose skin on his under arm. His moustache hung down from his upper lip like a sprig of wet Spanish moss and his eyes were red from the chlorine in the water. There is no one with less romantic potential than a water-soaked roué.
“You will have to watch her, Alain. Any girl who swims like Cleo will be welcome at any pool from Newport to Palm Beach.”
“In future,” said Alain, “I’m only going to invite her out here in the winter.”
They were discussing her like judges at some beauty contest. She was about to say something sharp, when a shadow loomed over them and Claudine said, “Cleo, may we have a few words together? No, you stay there, Alain. I want to talk to Cleo alone.”
Cleo pulled herself out of the water, feeling Alain pat her hip comfortingly as she did so. She was glad he had not patted her bottom, not in front of his mother. She picked up her towel, quickly wiped the water from herself, then went to don the robe.
“Leave it off if you want to sunbathe. I don’t mind.” Claudine wore a long-sleeved shirt, slacks and a large straw hat. She led the way to a table and chairs under a sun-umbrella and gestured to Cleo to lie down on a lounge in the sun. “I soaked up the sun when I was young, but at thirty-five I decided I did not want to look like an over-baked croissant in my old age. When I am old,” she said, stopping any suggestion that she might already be that, “I hope I shan’t look much worse than I do now.”
“You look beautiful now,” said Cleo sincerely.
“I know, but thank you for the compliment. You look beautiful, too. You have a certain animal beauty, an intelligent animal. Well, that’s enou
gh mutual admiration. So you want to come and work for my newspaper?”
“Yes. I gather Alain has explained my visa situation.” Cleo smeared herself with lotion, put on her dark glasses. “I’ll be frank, Mrs. Roux. I want to do as well in America as I did in England.”
“You sound as ambitious as Richard Nixon must have been.”
“Possibly. But I don’t want to find myself owing debts to anyone. In the end that was why I left Lord Cruze.” That wasn’t strictly true, but it seemed to be the best way of getting Jack into the conversation and out of it quickly. Claudine was sure to raise his name sooner or later.
“I wondered what had happened there.” Claudine seemed satisfied with the explanation. “What is your relationship with Alain?”
Cleo smiled. “You mean what are my intentions? Honourable.”
Claudine smiled in return, but behind her dark glasses her eyes were serious. “He is my only child, all I have. He has had enough disappointment in life, with that leg of his. Don’t encourage him if you then intend disappointing him.”
Cleo wondered if all American mothers were as protective of their sons as soon as they brought home a girl. Or had Alain told his mother more than he had told her? “I came to America for a career, not to look for a lover or a husband.” That, too, wasn’t strictly true. She had come looking for Tom, though she had not admitted it to herself till after she had arrived in New York. “I don’t think Alain has any ideas about marrying me.”
“I should not try to stop him if he did, he’s old enough to make his own mistakes. I just don’t think it would work.”
“Why not?” Even a girl with no ambition to marry doesn’t like to be dismissed offhand.
“Cleo, you want to go further than the altar and motherhood. I think you and I are very much alike. If I hadn’t been born to what I am, I’d have found some other way of getting to the top. I don’t think I’d have settled for marriage as the way.” She stood up. “I’ll see that you get a visa. We’ll ask for one for two years. Will that be long enough?”
“To sink or swim? Yes, I think so. Thank you, Mrs. Roux.”
Cleo stayed in the sun for another hour. From the nearby tennis court she could hear shouts and laughter; Polly Jensen was there working on her backhand. Alain had got out of the pool and wandered across to watch the tennis; then he looked back and saw that his mother had left Cleo. He limped across and sat down in a chair beside Cleo. She looked once at his crippled leg, the first time she had seen it exposed, then she ignored it and looked at the rest of him. She could feel the sun insinuating itself into her, warming the juices, as Jack used to say. Claudine had called her a beautiful animal and she let the image float through her lazy mind; with a job and visa assured, the tension had gone out of her. She had had no sex in too long; she had relieved her hunger with masturbation, but she had never found that a sufficient substitute for a man; she had never been her own best friend in bed. She looked at Alain from behind her dark glasses and saw that, apart from his leg, he too was a beautiful animal. He had muscular shoulders and arms, a slim waist and a promising bulge in his swim trunks. Drugged by the sun, she found her intentions towards him were strictly dishonourable.
“What did you tell your mother about you and me?”
“Nothing. Well, yes—I told her I liked you as much as any girl I’ve met. Is she holding that against you?”
“No, I’m getting on much better with her than I’d expected. But don’t let’s get serious, Alain. I have a long way to go before I find out if I’ve done the right thing coming to America.” She was sure she had done the right thing, but to say so might give him more encouragement than she wanted.
“We’ll play it day by day,” he said. “And maybe the occasional night by night.”
He still had his college boy repartee. He would be very different from Jack.
That evening after dinner there was a movie instead of billiards. No silent film with Rudolph Valentino fluttering his eyelids at Agnes Ayres; Cleo knew she would have had to walk out on such a reminder of other, best forgotten evenings. Instead they all sat and watched Yves Montand and Romy Schneider in a French film with sub-titles. Claudine and Alain and the Brissons and some of the other guests laughed at jokes in the dialogue that hadn’t been translated, and once again Cleo lamented her lack of languages. But she was pleased to see that Polly Jensen, who had given her cool stares and nary a word all day, had put on glasses to read the subtitles. There is a certain joy in malice that makes it one of the more pleasurable sins.
The movie was sentimental, but the French always lace their sentiment with astringency, which makes foreigners think the French are hard-headed and above the saccharine. Alain reached for Cleo’s hand in the dark and she let him hold it, silently promising him more later. The sun had gone down, mostly to her loins.
He came to her room that night after everyone had gone to bed. Her room was at the end of a corridor, with no one occupying the room next to her. It occurred to her then that Alain had, somehow, engineered her location; but when he came, she was glad of the near-isolation. She remembered something Tom had said: there’s no humpin’ without bumpin’. Then she put Tom out of her mind and, only stopping short of screaming aloud when her climax came, enjoyed the love-making without restraint. Alain was a practised lover, but if he was proud of his talent he had the modesty not to mention it. He made love to her twice, she made love to him once: which wasn’t a bad night’s pleasure, she thought, for a girl out of practice. He went back to his own room, limping as much from exhaustion as from his leg, and she went to sleep. Her last thought, lost and forgotten as soon as she fell asleep, was that she had been given another visa to a country of one, Alain.
13
I
OVER THE past year or more things had not gone as well as Tom Border had expected. Hollywood had turned out to be less than he and Simone had hoped for. Like so many novelists he had thought writing for the screen would be easy. He had filled pages of yellow paper with what he thought was witty, well-turned dialogue, only to have the producer and the director blue-pencil it as no newsroom copy editor had ever worked on his stuff.
“Half of today’s movie audiences are deaf from listening to rock music, so they never hear any of the dialogue.” The producer had been forty years in the movie business, which he insisted was a business and none of your film-is-an-art crap. “Ninety-five per cent of the other half wouldn’t know Oscar Wilde from Oscar Fishbein, who’s my bookie. So wit is wasted on ‘em.”
“That leaves two and a half per cent. What about them?”
“They go to Woody Allen pictures. We’re not making this movie for them. I dunno what you had in mind when you wrote your book, Tom, but it’s basically a thriller and that’s what we bought. You can’t thrill people outa their pants with witty dialogue. Try again, will you, Tom?”
Tom knew he was probably being given more chances than most writers. He had learned that novelists still had a certain standing with most producers, as if writing novels was more difficult than writing films, though he was finding the opposite true. He had been given his own bungalow, small though it was, and not a room in the writers’ building. The studio had a vast parking lot where everyone below a certain executive level had to park and pay for the privilege; but Tom had his own parking space, free, outside his bungalow. He was pampered, but it didn’t help his writing the screenplay.
At the end of six weeks the producer, with best wishes for the future, patted him on the back and let him go; as Tom moved out of his bungalow, the associate producer was already moving in. When Tom went out to get into his rented car, a studio sign-writer was painting out his name and had a stencil ready to substitute the new occupant’s name.
“You don’t waste any time,” said Tom, not feeling in the least witty today.
“That’s life, buddy.” The man was old enough to have grown up with buddy and, Tom imagined, even twenty-three skidoo. His coveralls creaked with years of paint. “You come, you
go. The only writers permanent around here are us guys that paint the names.” He wiped his brush over the last r of Border. That’s all I am now, thought Tom, a blank space. “So long, buddy. Try TV. They don’t put your name on a sign if you’re a TV writer, they put a meter there.”
The wit of studio sign-writers: did he go to see Woody Allen movies? “Watch out. I’d hate to run over your brush.”
“Up yours, buddy,” said the man.
Tom went home to the apartment he and Simone had rented on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. It had once belonged to Rita Hayworth and Simone said she could still feel the essence of glamour in the place. But not today. She threw her arms round Tom and let fly a stream of French abuse about Hollywood producers that would have earned her Cahiers du Cinema’s critic-of-the-year award. Tom was glad of her comfort and even the mere fact that she was there; he would have hated to come back to an empty apartment, even one full of the essence of Rita Hayworth. He might still be a drifter, but he had become less of a loner. Simone’s attention and devotion to him had spoiled him, had brought home to him the disadvantages of being self-reliant, especially in cooking a meal, doing one’s laundry and shopping for groceries. He loved her, but still felt guilty, since he sometimes felt he loved her only for her services. He would never love her as he had loved Cleo.
Simone gave up abusing Hollywood producers, which is as self-defeating as trying to flatter certain movie stars, and became practical. “Chéri, we have a six months’ lease on the apartment. It will cost us money to break it.”
“Thrifty. How did French girls ever get a reputation for being sexy?”
“We’re thrifty in bed, too. Haven’t you ever noticed how long I make our love-making last? No, chéri, I’m being serious. We have money, lots of it, but I am not going to see it wasted. We shall stay on here till the lease is up and you will write.”