by Carson, Tom
“I’m going to be starting a TV series soon,” I said.
“Oh, yeah?” Suzannah snorted. “What’s it called—My Sister the Mattress?”
“What makes you think it’s about you?” I said.
“I wouldn’t fit on TV,” she said. “Takes a flat-chested lil’ hunk a’ itsy-bitsy nothin’ like you to even get inside the box.”
That seemed to have gotten us about as caught up as we cared to be. I turned to Slowy, who still wore the look of a candy lover who had woken up between two giant bonbons. “Where are we going, anyway?” I said.
“Palm Springs.” He giggled again. “But I really can’t tell you anything more than that.”
Silence fell, and did not pick itself up by its own bootstraps afterwards. Lit within by beaded lights that put me in mind of an airplane somehow carrying its own portable runway, the limo sped on. Slowy fixed us all drinks, which added a gently syncopated clinking to the humming-birdaciousness of whooshing tires and distant throb of engine. We had left the city behind and now glided across trackless wastes—well, trackless but for the highway we were on—whose burning sands were being cooled in a vast fridge of cobalt darkness.
After the perpetual phosphorescent glow that hangs above L.A. at night fell away in our rear window, more stars than there were at M-G-M appeared and glimmered white in the dark blue above. Through the front windshield, the tail-lights of the cars ahead of us and the headlights of oncoming ones drew alternating stripes of red and white across the desert. With nothing better to do, I began to count the stars, and had reached fifty when they all evaporated in another, smaller civic glow. We had just slid into Palm Springs.
I had never been there before. And deep down, I had always privately wondered if the people everybody else in America so desperately wanted to be actually existed, that is in the form we imagined them. Even in the joyous days when I felt thrilled to espy my own reflection in the mirror above the circular bedspread at the nerve center of Mr. Willingham’s sumptuous Hollywood Hills abode, I had never been under any illusion of having attained or even being in sight of the ultimate height of heights, where the gods of celebrity played, in my fear that they would prove chimerical, and turn out to be more folks who wanted to be someone else too, I had sometimes supposed that their twinkling role in our lives was simply what Santy Claus did the other three-hundred-sixty-four days of the year. Now, as the limo prowled along quiet streets whose expensive-looking bungalows and ranch houses sprawled dimly well beyond an intervening no-fan’s-land of lawns made complex and barbizoned by bladed splays of exotic desert plants, I suddenly guessed that I was closer than I had ever been, physically closer, to finding out if Santy Claus was real.
We pulled up in front of one of the estates. With a finger that quivered noticeably, Slowy mashed the button underneath the gate’s speaker grille, with which he had an indistinct conversation. Then we were in the garden, a jumpy Slowy leading the way down a flagstoned path while I engaged in a small war of hips with Suzannah—the black-gowned Lilith to my white-gowned Eve—over which of us would take precedence in his wake.
At the house, light poured through a door left ajar. Pushing it gently, Slowy led us into a vast living room, the midpoint of whose vaulted ceiling was delineated by a balcony that ran around three of its four walls, with doors and hallways dimly discernible behind the rails. From an expensive-looking hi-fi by the bar, music played. The furnishings were elegant, although a few of the paintings struck even my indifferent eye as surprisingly undistinguished, albeit competent.
Unless the daubed clowns in those pictures counted, we were alone, and somewhat bemused. But then a voice I had been hearing my whole life, one so familiar that it seemed to be emanating from within my very brain, indeed the same voice that was on the hi-fi, spoke from above us. It called to Slowy by his proper name: “Adam, my man! Is that you down there? It just better be, buddy, that’s all Γ m going to say.”
It was Sinatra. Behind him, as he slowly descended to received us, came a gentleman with face unknown to me, his grin strikingly if oddly reminiscent of autumn leaves with a pack of Chiclets at the center. “I was just showing Jack around the joint,” said our host casually. “Hello, girls,” more casually still.
“Well! Um, great seeing you, um, Frank,” Slowy said unexpectedly. “I’m sorry I can’t stay—something I can’t get out of.”
“Someone you’d like to get inio, more likely,” Frank said, slapping him on the back; at which touch Slowy gulped as if swallowing the wafer at his first communion. “Come on, kid—I’ve got something I want to ask you on the way out.” And off they strolled, leaving Suzannah and I to swap a glance of silent, instantaneous recognition that we had just been macked. This irked us both, as we had never needed any help before.
Frank came back from showing Slowy out. A man who needed no introduction himself, he introduced his beaming tagalong instead, who turned out to be a politician: Senator Jawn F. Knowbody, I didn’t quite catch the name. Nor did I care, as I had small patience with either government or Yankees, and even less when they were conjoined—that particular combination, needless to say, having produced our sainted Dixie’s Gotterdangeroong. And while his voice was pleasant, with nice wry bits around the edges, this crinkly son of a bitch’s accent was Yankee enough to affect my ears as if my coiffure were Georgia and Sherman was coming through. He was genial as he greeted us, and just as genial when he turned to Frank and said, precisely as if my sister and I hadn’t been standing thirty-six inches from his nose, “Angie couldn’t make it, huh?” Not only was I miffed on my own behalf; I was miffed for my and Suzannah’s whole, too, with a sisterly solidarity such as I hadn’t felt since our shared girlhood in Jolene.
“No such luck, my friend. She’s making a movie with Howard Hawks. Duke Wayne’s in it too. So’s Dean,” Frank said, and was asking us what we’d care to drink when a sliding door’s distinctive snicker-slither sounded behind us. Turning, I saw an apparently headless Negro, clad in swimming trunks and dark skin beaded with moisture, step into the room out of the night, one bright parallelogram of which behind him was dancing. Then the white towel in his hands came down off his face, and I found myself staring directly into the deep brown eyes—one real and the other, as I knew without being able to remember or guess which, glass—of Sammy Davis, Jr.
“Hello,” he said, just as Frank turned to Senator Knowbody and muttered, “Sammy’s been out looking for a land of the blind again. Wants to be its king, I think.”
“As in Martin Luther, is the next knee-slapper,” Sammy told me fairly dryly, the towel having done its job. “That’s so you’ll be prepared. What about Dean?” he asked.
“That Western for Hawks. They’re on location now.”
“I’m surprised they talked him into hauling his ass down there,” Sammy said. “He’s a religious man.”
“I didn’t think that was, ah, a drawback in show business, too,” Senator Knowbody said drolly. “That’s always been much more my own, ah, crucifix to bear. But what’s being Catholic got to do with making a Western?”
“Who said anything about being Catholic? Not caring about anything, that’s all Dean believes in. But he believes in it the way Gandhi believes in non-violence—or the way Sammy Cahn believes in Frank, here. But Catholicism? Forget it.”
“So speaks the Jew of that which he ignores,” Frank mock-rumbled, jabbing a blunt-nailed finger Sammy’s way. “When you’re raised in the Church, you never forget it, buddy of mine, and can you believe,” he said to Senator Knowbody, “that this undersized black bastard I call my buddy decided to make life simpler for himself by converting to Judaism? That’s like shooting craps with someone else’s dice and complaining because both of them aren’t loaded, sweet Jesus Mary mother of God. He’s one-stop shopping for the Ku Klux Klan.”
“Ah, Sammy,” Senator Knowbody said, grinning broadly, “I want you know how important your people’s support is to me. And I think my position on, ah, Israel will gratify you.�
��
“Israel? Who’s she?” Sammy said. “Try any position you like. I’m going to go get dressed.”
This whole time, ignored by all three of them, Suzannah and I had been standing rooted to the spot, swiveling our coiffures from speaker to speaker like over-bebaubled spectators at a tennis match. As soon as Sammy trotted up the stairs, however, the other two men grew instantly aware of us, as if their intimacy was in fact a rivalry whose expression always had to be deflected to third parties if they didn’t want to abruptly find themselves pinwheeling in the whirl and churn of an exaggerated cartoon fistfight. So Frank took my arm, and Senator Knowbody took Suzannah’s—she looking distinctly nettled, at least to a sister’s expert eyes, at getting second best—and with over-compensatory, genial solicitude they took us to the bar. There, Frank got busy mixing us a couple of highballs, and Senator Knowbody, seemingly to give himself some sort of presence and demonstrate that he too had the use of his hands, lit a cigar.
“Um, Mr. Sinatra?” Clearly, Suzannah was still hoping that she wasn’t irretrievably destined for Senator Jawn Fucking Knowbody. But she also sounded something I had never heard her sound in all our lives together, namely nervous—and I could not avoid taking a certain malicious pleasure in this.
“Frank,” he corrected her, pouring. “What is it, doll?”
Suzannah dipped her wild brunette mane at the hi-fi. “Well, I know that’s you—but I’ve never heard these songs before, leastways not with you singing them. So I wondered…”
“It’s the first acetate pressing of a new long-player we got done recording this week,” he told her. “Normally, I don’t listen to myself at home. I like to think that I’m a proud man but not a vain one, and it wouldn’t be showing much class even if I did feel like it—you see that, don’t you, doll. But right after we finish a record, I wear out the acetate making sure that everything’s Α-OK. Because it’s got to b e perfect, right down to the fourth son-of-a-bitching violin on track nine, or back to the studio we go.”
“Well, how often do you have to go back?” I asked, largely because I had begun to miss the sound of my own voice. “Frank,” I added, to irritate my sister.
“Not often.” He handed me my drink, and then Suzannah hers. With a jerk of his head, he indicated that we were all going to move now to the facing couches out in the middle of the room. I ended up on the same one as him, at which Suzannah both indicated her displeasure and put in a bid for a shift in the arrangement by sticking out one hip more than she needed to as she turned to sit down, thereby letting any interested parties on our couch observe the mimetic fervor with which her black gown delineated the precise contours of her rump, and note in addition that she probably didn’t have panties on underneath, not even of the sheerest, flimsiest sort—down, Sprout, hold on; we’ve got a ways to go here. Not that my sister’s little let’s-put-the-dumb-back-in-dumb-show mattered much, because as soon as we were all settled in, the men went right back to ignoring us.
Holding his highball in both hands, Frank counted the ice cubes. “Should I think anything special about Israel, Jack?” he asked unexpectedly, having kept that in his head the whole time.
“Oh, I don’t think the, ah, Arabs are going to be taking another crack at them anytime soon, if that’s what you mean,” Senator Knowbody said affably, as interested in his cigar as Frank was in his drink. He grinned. “After all, they’ll have to get their ordnance replaced first. But there’s always plenty going on there. You know, the Israelis do us a lot of little favors in, ah, that part of the world, in exchange for our backup on the big thing of survival.”
“Cloak-and-dagger stuff, you mean,” Frank said. “CIA.”
“Yes.”
“So tell me: what should I think of them?” Frank asked. “Sometimes it sounds like a bunch of nonsense to me. Boys’ games. Comic books.”
“Don’t you believe it,” Senator Knowbody said. “They’re good, Frank, really good. If I get in—when I get in—they are the bunch I’m going to go to whenever I need something in a hurry, because they’re smart and fast and they don’t dillydally about on-the-other-hand-what-if-the-Queen-gets-her-tits-in-an-uproar the way State does. And they don’t miss a trick. I forget who said it first or what about, but it fits them: the CIA is in the details.”
“Give me a for instance,” Frank said. Apparently, he was just interested; or considered it one of the duties of being Frank to collect knowledge that would make him omniscient about anything of potential consequence. As for Suzannah and me, in another temporary suspension of sibling hostilities, we kept on exchanging incredulous looks, unable to believe that we were in Frank Sinatra’s house—and bored. It would have been so much more fun if this Baastin jackass wasn’t here! We even wished that Sammy would come back; Momma wouldn’t have approved, but at least he was entertaining.
Senator Knowbody had shut his eyes in thought for a second. “All right,” he said. “Right after they overthrew Arbenz in Guatemala, I called over there and asked for a briefing—mostly because,” he laughed, “I was curious to hear how staging a coup works, if only so my father will have some sort of backup plan ready if things don’t work out in ‘60. Well, they’re good with the Hill, and even though I was still in my first term and had no particular importance then, they sent over a fellow who’d been there on the ground—Akin, Egan, something like that. As I remember it, he made me feel old, because for all that it was only a Central American one, he’d helped depose a government at the age of all of twenty-six, and I—well, I wasn’t twenty-six, all of a sudden. He was only supposed to brief me about Guatemala, but since I wasn’t bored and there’s a very nice nameplate on my desk that says ‘Senator,’ he told me about some other little things he’d been involved with.”
“Iran?” Frank asked, with a shrewd expression. Some years later, I found out this was a country.
“No—not that I’d have minded hearing about that one, believe me. Even if the Shah was royalty the way I’m monogamous, putting in a hereditary ruler is one trick that the Russians, for ideological reasons, can’t go tit for tat on us with, and I’ll remember that if the opportunity ever comes up. But there was one small operation this Egan fellow told me about that stuck in my mind, just because it showed the infinite pains they can take.”
“Well?”
“I’m trying to remember it exactly—oh yes. It seemed there was some company in Belgium whose business was supplying safety equipment to small regional airports—windsocks, backup generators for runway lights, things like that. Well, without even bothering to consult his superiors, it occurs to our man Egan that this could be a useful company for the Agency to have a hand in. So he checked out the owner, who turned out to be a fairly sad case; back before the war, he’d found his wife in the bathtub with her wrists slashed one day, and apparently he hadn’t had much heart for anything from then on. In other words, it wouldn’t take too big a nudge to move him out. So friend Egan arranges for the company to experience a few modest difficulties—nothing majorjust enough to put the owner in a mood to sell. Well! Guess who bought it—and now it’s one of their most reliable ways of moving some fairly nasty things around without much risk of customs people putting a finger in. What do you think of that?”
“Not too bad,” said Frank, shaking his head. “That Egan sounds like a guy I wouldn’t mind having around to listen to my acetate. What’s happened to him since?”
“Oh, he’s stationed in … Paris now, I think. We’re not in touch, but I keep tabs.”
“Sounds like he’ll have an interesting future if you get in,” Frank mused.
“When I get in—and yes, he may, along with everybody else in his shop. Sooner or later, we’re obviously going to have to do something about Castro, unless he’s gone away of his own volition by then—which I doubt, don’t you? And that mess in Indochina could start heating up again anytime. So-”
But Frank—whose own enthusiasm appeared to be flagging, and not a moment too soon if you asked the Gumst
ump sisters—was glancing toward the stairs. “Hey, who put the lights out?” he called, in a considerably rougher tone than the one he’d used to quiz Senator Knowbody. “It just got dark in here. And what’s with the shirt—you been trying to make wine from a watermelon again?”
“It’s going to get a lot darker after I slug you,” said Sammy, now nattily attired in slacks, pink silk shirt, and gold necklace from which dangled a six-pointed star. Dropping his Jack Johnson pose, he sat down in an armchair between the two couches. “What does a guy have to do to get a drink around here?” he asked, looking directly at me. I still couldn’t figure out which eye was the glass one.
I glanced over at Frank for his dispensation to use his bar and got a flick of a nod in reply. “Scotch, baby, and right up to the top of the glass,” Sammy called after me. “I’m not one of these bourbon drinkers—my throat and I have an understanding about that.”
While I was fixing it for him, the last song ended, and the needle lifted off the hi-fi turntable. “Mr…. Frank?” I called, making the “Frank” louder so as to make the “Mister” retrospectively inaudible. “Should I turn it over?”
“If you wouldn’t mind, doll,” he called back. “But be careful, huh? You’ve probably never picked up an acetate before, but they’re a little heavier than vinyl—and that’s about three fucking grand worth of record player you’re fooling with, baby-cakes.”
As the beauty of his other voice filled the room again, and I came back to the couches and handed Sammy his drink, Senator Knowbody stood up, having stubbed out his cigar half-smoked. “You know,” he remarked to no one in particular, “Frank’s shown me the house. But I haven’t really seen the grounds, and I’d like to while it’s, ah, still dark yet. Not to insult your singing, Frank, but I’ve heard this about six times tonight—and anyway, I think my ear for music is the one van Gogh cut off. Runs in the family—we can’t even remember what comes after ‘Give me your answer do.’ “