Don't Speak to Strange Girls

by Whittington, Harry

  “That’s right. That’s my boy said that. Off we go — scratching and gouging.”

  He drew the backs of his fingers across his mouth. “What do you think I should do?”

  “I think you ought to let her go back to school. Wish her well. She’s promised to stay in school until spring. Wish her well. Give her time. Give yourself time.”

  “Give that old lecher time … Jesus, Kay. The guy is thirty-six years old. Divorced.”

  “Yes,” she said mildly. “That’s what Sharon told me about him, too.”

  He stared at her. “He’s sixteen years older than she is.”

  “Listen to me, Clay. Sharon will always be attracted to older men. I’m no head-doctor, I admit, but it seems only common sense that it has to do with the way she tries to find you in any man she could care for deeply.”

  “But sixteen years difference in their ages … He’d be almost fifty when she was only thirty.”

  “You’re almost fifty,” she reminded him in an ironic tone.

  “I don’t lech after young girls.”

  “But you don’t feel older than God, either, do you?”

  He shrugged, glanced away. “I don’t want to waste time talking to you about it.”

  “I’d rather you talked to me about it than Sharon right now. You can wait until she comes home for the holidays — ”

  “Oh, is she coming home for the holidays?”

  “Don’t claw at me, Clay.”

  “She’s my daughter.”

  Kay smiled. “She’s Ruth’s daughter, too. Trust her a little.”

  He shrugged.

  Kay stood up and paused, looking down at him, angular arms clinging to the blue-covered script as if it were the flotsam that would save them both.

  “Read the script. Get back to work,” she said.

  Clay wriggled his feet inside his sneakers, sat watching them and didn’t speak.

  Kay stared down at him. “I don’t understand you,” she said.

  “I don’t understand myself.”

  “Yes. But I should be able to understand you. I’ve loved you for so many years — I never loved any other man.” She gave a short laugh. “Not even what’s-his-name … I should be able to understand.”

  He did not say anything. After a moment he heard her precise, knee-rubbing walk going away from him across the flagstones. He didn’t move except to turn his head, searching for the eucalyptus leaf on the pool surface.

  It was gone.

  chapter three

  WHEN KAY RINGLING stood up from the lounge chair beside the pool, Marc Shatner moved guiltily away from the gameroom window.

  He took a long pull at the highball. Through the panes he saw Kay approaching the French doors, and he became elaborately interested in a hangnail. She would resent it if she saw he had been watching her and Clay out on the terrace. He had long ago learned never to tangle with Kay Ringling. Whatever softness was in her she reserved for Clay Stuart exclusively.

  He leaned with studied casualness against the hunt table.

  “Here she comes,” he said to Hoff.

  Hoff glanced up, nodded without saying anything.

  Kay entered the gameroom, closed the door behind her. Her face was gray. She set the script she carried on the desk.

  “He hasn’t read it,” she said. “He’s not going to read it.”

  “What’s the matter with him?” Hoff said. He picked up an hors-d’oeuvre and plopped it into his mouth, chewing. “I’m not hungry. I’m on a diet. I eat. All the time lately, I eat. Why? Because I’m worried. I don’t have enough trouble at home with my wife and my girls. I have to come here to worry, too.”

  “I can tell you what’s the matter with you,” Shatner said. “But I can’t tell you what’s the matter with him.” He jerked his head toward the swimming pool.

  “Apathy,” Kay Ringling said, half to herself. “Even when I told him about Sharon — and her ivy-league divorcee — a male divorcee? — he got mad, but he didn’t really get mad. It hit at him, but it didn’t really reach him.”

  “He’s got to get working,” Hoff said.

  Shatner mixed himself another drink. “I don’t truly care if Clay takes this picture at Warners or not. Money? The government gets most of it. A hit picture? Who needs it?

  He’s never made a picture yet that wasn’t a top grosser, even that one about Texas that they saved money on by shooting out here with California mountains in the background. Even that turkey gobbled big dough.”

  “You,” Hoff said. “You’re a big help.”

  “It’s Clay himself I’m thinking about,” Shatner said. He was a small man, with compact, compressed mouth, delicate features, blue eyes and tight brown curls like a skull cap.

  “It’s Clay we’re all thinking about,” Hoff said. His feelings were injured. “He needs to work. As I told him from the first. He needs to get his thoughts away from himself.”

  Kay sat down on the divan. “Well, there’s no way we can force him to work. And he’s just not interested.”

  “Not interested?” Hoff plopped another round cracker into his mouth, chewed frantically. He thought, these people should have lived with me in Milwaukee on what my old man could bring home from his peddler’s cart. His father, God rest him, had dreamed only of his freedom in the United States, and he dreamed only of never being hungry again, and to insure this, a man had to work, no matter what he had.

  Kay shook her head, still speaking half to herself, “He’s not interested in anything. It’s as though he were cold inside … I’ve never seen him like this before.”

  “A man’s wife dies. His daughter is grown up. Gone. He sees himself alone. No young man any more.” Hoff shivered after he’d said this, glanced guiltily toward the French doors.

  Hoff stared at Shatner who was walking slowly about the room, prowling it, looking at the games and equipment without interest.

  “Some way we got to bring him out of it. You, Shatner. You been like his brother.” Hoff laughed. “God forgive you, you should have a goy for a brother.”

  Shatner shrugged, smiling. “What the hell? Some of my best friends are goyim.”

  Hoff watched him narrowly. “You’re the angle man, Marc. Can’t you think of something?”

  Shatner continued prowling, did not answer.

  “It breaks my heart,” Kay said, “to see him like this. No interest in anything. No warmth.”

  Hoff exhaled and reached toward the plate again. He stopped halfway, then reached out, took two small ham sandwiches.

  Shatner was turning the pages of a book. “Here’s something,” he said. “It’s in the Bible.”

  “What do you know about the Bible?” Kay said.

  “The Old Testament,” Shatner said. “My father sits all day reading it. He says. I don’t know what he does. He throws hot pennies to kids out the window. He reads the Bible. He finds faults with me … I was dragged through the old testament before I was thirteen. Shocking book. I remember how shocked I was at some of it. Later, I used to sneak it up to my room and read parts of it again — this was when I was older, of course.”

  “What has this talk got to do with him out there?” Hoff said.

  Shatner shrugged. “Maybe nothing. But we’ve got to do something. Now me, I never saw a man yet who wouldn’t respond to a woman — to a new woman.”

  “My God,” Kay said. “His wife is barely in the grave.”

  “The ground over her is not yet cold,” Hoff said. He stared at a ham sandwich, face pinched.

  “All right,” Shatner said. “Forget it.” He glanced at Kay Ringling. “You ever skip a chance getting in bed with him when Ruth was alive?”

  Her face flushed. “He never wanted me,” she said.

  “I didn’t say that. I suggested you wanted him, and your need used to get so urgent back there — in the early thirties — that it roused him enough — ”

  “You sneaking little spy,” she said.

  “I never spied. I never ca
red. I figured you were giving him your whole life, you deserved something — besides all the money you made. Bread is not everything, even pumpernickel — that’s my credo. I’m not finding fault. I’m merely suggesting you crossed Ruth when she was alive — why the sudden flush of conscience because she’s dead?”

  “I don’t know. She just died — ”

  “And it kills you to think of another woman with him, doesn’t it?”

  Kay did not answer. Shatner turned and looked at Hoff. “Do you deny, you fat Judas, that you never arranged to take along a blonde starlet or two for Clay on those hunting and fishing trips? Ruth was alive then. That never stopped you.”

  “God should forgive Himself listening to such talk from you.” Hoff sat forward. “Clay was working hard. I thought he needed relaxation. I knew — we all knew — there was no fire in Ruth’s feelings for him. She — always — she should forgive me — always seemed to be a kind of cold herring. I — thought he needed something.”

  “And it’s different now?”

  “Yes. If you put me on the defensive like this. It is. I tell you in all truth I never thought Clay Stuart gave a gentle damn for Ruth. He was always very polite toward her. They were most respectable. But now, when I see how hard he was hit by her death, it changes everything. It makes me think. All this time I’ve been wrong. Yes, it is different now.”

  Shatner shrugged. “All right. But it seems to me that he has to go on living, whether he wants to or not. And it would be up to the three of us to get him out of this … apathy. We care most about him.”

  “I would do anything for him,” Hoff said. He licked a speck of cheddar from his thumb.

  “Just going to let him sit out there and get old and cold?” Shatner asked.

  “Of course not,” Hoff said.

  “But what can we do?” Kay said. “He just sits there.”

  “This verse,” Shatner said, returning to the Bible. “You might be interested. From the First Book of Kings: ‘Now King David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat. Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin; and let her stand before the king a young virgin; and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat.’ ”

  He looked up, his wry mouth twisted into a grin. He waited for them to laugh, but they did not even smile. They didn’t move, they just sat there staring at him.

  • • •

  Clay rode beside Sharon to the International Airport in the rear seat of the Rolls Royce. As they drove across town, he stared at the back of the chauffeur’s neck. He had decided to use the chauffeured car because it would leave him and Sharon free to talk. They had so much they needed to say to each other in these hurried moments before flight time.

  Now he saw it was a mistake. Another mistake. They’d have been more at ease without the rigid presence of an outsider a few feet from them and ever in view, no matter how well-trained his ears were to hear nothing.

  “You’ll eat your vegetables, won’t you?” he said, trying to recapture the old warmth between them, but even his poor little joke had a sense of desperation in it. Clearly Sharon was no longer a child. He hated the idea of that damned old man making love to her and he could not say it. The story of his life. Bursting with the need to erupt with the tumult of emotions tamped down in him, but in constant conflict with the dread of showing his torments — males from his land didn’t cry, even in the presence of death.

  “Of course I will,” Sharon said, clinging to his hand. “Even the broccoli.”

  They smiled and then waited again in tension and silence.

  He waited for Sharon to mention Amory Darrow, but she did not. She’s absorbed Ruth’s training and taken Ringling’s counsel. Unless he could melt her reserve he would feel he had failed them both, by default. What was a promise to Ringling in such circumstances? Yet he’d always profited by accepting Ringling’s advice, and he dreaded alienating Sharon. Besides he couldn’t make himself believe a sensible girl like Sharon would fall in love with a man almost old enough to be her father, or even that she’d seriously consider forsaking California for that blue-bellied land where even the friendliest people were stiff-necked, quick-frozen.

  The moments and the miles raced past. They left the wondrous lighting of the city, climbed through a grove of oil derricks and sped past a rash of motels. He was losing his last opportunity to warn Sharon. A divorced man. Twice her age. He felt anger and concern reaching a boiling point inside him, and he envied Colonel Ben his safety valve — what a wonderful thing it must have been to snort your rage through your left nostril like that. He had no safety valves. He could only look at Sharon — a casting director’s ideal of a lovely and chaste girl, and feel the rages boiling in his stomach.

  He wanted to forbid her to get on that plane. Instead, he heard himself saying, “Your allowance? Is it all right? Should it be larger?”

  “I’m fine, Daddy. Stop worrying.”

  “I can’t help worrying.” There, he’d edged to the brink of the subject. He would plunge over, tell her it was all off, he was keeping her at home.

  Fred opened the door for them at the air terminal and they got out, and people whispered, staring. For a brief moment the blasé airport pulse hesitated and travelers forgot tickets, reservations and destinations.

  “Big Daddy Sex,” Sharon teased him, walking through the stunned mob, holding his arm.

  Somehow he walked the long tubular ramp to the loading gate and said nothing except the inconsequential vagaries people exchange at points of departure where there’s no continuity to anything except leave-taking.

  People stared.

  At the gate, he took a long look at her, and both spoke at the same instant: “Take care.”

  They laughed.

  Sharon clung to him and cried and he got the terrible feeling that he was never going to see her again and the guilt was his for letting her go at all.

  He exhaled, watching her hurrying across the runway to the jet, thinking in a ghoulish way that this blurring sense of loss was going to restrain him from doing anything about Sharon’s divorced lover. She was gone. Like Ruth, she was lost to him. Everything he cared about was lost to him, borne away on night flights, and walking down the ramp and in the weeks following, when he thought about Sharon, he found himself thinking she was lost to him.

  chapter four

  CLAY WAS pitching pennies alone on the flagstone terrace near the pool. The mid-morning sun was warm against his shoulders and he felt this was a good omen. It was the first time in the month since Ruth had died that he’d been conscious of the sun, of its warmth, of the fact that it was there at all.

  He heard the telephone ringing in the library, a sharp abrasive sound against his nerve ends. Except that it annoyed him, he paid no attention to it, and after a moment, it stopped ringing. Either McEsters or one of the maids had answered it, or whoever it was had given up.

  They hadn’t given up.

  McEsters crossed the flagstones, coming all the way to where Clay stood, back rigid, pace precise, voice modulated. Stuart had wondered if McEsters would go slack after Ruth was dead. He would not. Ruth had chosen her servants well.

  He smiled tautly, watching McEsters cross the flagstones to him now, hoping the call was long distance from Sharon; it was the only call he cared to accept. These past weeks when loneliness overwhelmed him, or worry nagged, he called Sharon and talked to her. He called her frequently, but the conversations were unsatisfactory, constrained and guarded on both sides, despite his best efforts.

  “Mr. Stuart,” McEsters said. “Telephone.”

  “Who is it?”

  “A young lady. From one of the studios. She did not give her name.”

  “You’re getting careless, McEsters.”

  “I’m very sorry. She sounded urgent. When she mentioned the studio — will you take the call out here, sir?”

  “It’s all
right.” Stuart spilled the pennies into his slacks pocket, crossed the flagstones, chilled when he walked into the shadowed house.

  Clay sat on the arm of a couch, lifted the receiver. He said, “Hello.”

  “Is this — ” She gave Stuart’s unlisted number.

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “Well, maybe you don’t remember me.”

  “Not your voice, I don’t. Let’s try your name?”

  “Stark. Joanne Stark. Now do you remember?”

  He scowled, thinking back. “No. I’m afraid not.”

  “What an uncomplimentary memory. We met — at the Purple Onion — on Sunset.”

  “Afraid not.” He had not been in any of the places along the Strip in years. Ruth disliked them.

  “Why, you gave me your unlisted number.”

  “Even the idea sounds fantastic.”

  She laughed. “That’s because you don’t remember what I look like.”

  “No matter what you look like, honey, I’m sure I didn’t give you this number.”

  “Oh? Why not? Don’t you give out your number?”

  “It would be easier to list it in the directory.”

  “You’re just being obtuse, love — ”

  “I’m being what?”

  Her laugh was warm and throaty. “Isn’t that the right word?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, wait just a sec. I’ve got a dictionary right here beside me. I’ll look it up … How about — abstruse?”

  “What’s that?”

  She laughed. “Some kind of sea food?”

  He sighed. “I’m sure this is all very pleasant. But I’m afraid you’re confused.”

  “Oh, it’s hardly noticeable. I walk so you can’t tell it — ”

  “I’ll bet you do.”

  “Well, now, honey. That’s much better. You sound real friendly.”

  “I’m hanging up now, Miss. It’s been fine. Bye.”

  “Why?”

  “So you can try again and get the right number.”

  “Aren’t you Andrew Clay Stuart?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then. What number could be righter than that?”