“I like you enormously,” he said; “better than almost anyone I know. I mean that about drinking though. You mustn’t drink.”
“I’ll do anything you want,” she said; and she repeated, looking at him directly, “Anything.”
The car drew up in front of her flat and he kissed her good night.
He rode away in a mood of exultation, living more deeply in her youth and future than he had lived in himself for years. Thus, leaning forward a little on his cane, rich, young and happy, he was borne along dark streets and light toward a future of his own which he could not foretell.
III
A month later, climbing into a taxicab with Farrelly one night, he gave the latter’s address to the driver. “So you’re in love with this baby,” said Farrelly pleasantly. “Very well, I’ll get out of your way.”
Jacob experienced a vast displeasure. “I’m not in love with her,” he said slowly. “Billy, I want you to leave her alone.”
“Sure! I’ll leave her alone,” agreed Farrelly readily. “I didn’t know you were interested--she told me she couldn’t make you.”
“The point is you’re not interested either,” said Jacob. “If I thought that you two really cared about each other, do you think I’d be fool enough to try to stand in the way? But you don’t give a darn about her, and she’s impressed and a little fascinated.”
“Sure,” agreed Farrelly, bored. “I wouldn’t touch her for anything.”
Jacob laughed. “Yes, you would. Just for something to do. That’s what I object to--anything--anything casual happening to her.”
“I see what you mean. I’ll let her alone.”
Jacob was forced to be content with that. He had no faith in Billy Farrelly, but he guessed that Farrelly liked him and wouldn’t offend him unless stronger feelings were involved. But the holding hands under the table tonight had annoyed him. Jenny lied about it when he reproached her; she offered to let him take her home immediately, offered not to speak to Farrelly again all evening. Then he had seemed silly and pointless to himself. It would have been easier, when Farrelly said “So you’re in love with this baby,” to have been able to answer simply, “I am.”
But he wasn’t. He valued her now more than he had ever thought possible. He watched in her the awakening of a sharply individual temperament. She liked quiet and simple things. She was developing the capacity to discriminate and shut the trivial and the unessential out of her life. He tried giving her books; then wisely he gave up that and brought her into contact with a variety of men. He made situations and then explained them to her, and he was pleased, as appreciation and politeness began to blossom before his eyes. He valued, too, her utter trust in him and the fact that she used him as a standard for judgments on other men.
Before the Farrelly picture was released, she was offered a two-year contract on the strength of her work in it--four hundred a week for six months and an increase on a sliding scale. But she would have to go to the Coast.
“Wouldn’t you rather have me wait?” she said, as they drove in from the country one afternoon. “Wouldn’t you rather have me stay here in New York--near you?”
“You’ve got to go where your work takes you. You ought to be able to look out for yourself. You’re seventeen.”
Seventeen--she was as old as he; she was ageless. Her dark eyes under a yellow straw hat were as full of destiny as though she had not just offered to toss destiny away.
“I wonder if you hadn’t come along, someone else would of,” she said--”to make me do things, I mean.”
“You’d have done them yourself. Get it out of your head that you’re dependent on me.”
“I am. Everything is, thanks to you.”
“It isn’t, though,” he said emphatically, but he brought no reasons; he liked her to think that.
“I don’t know what I’ll do without you. You’re my only friend”--and she added--”that I care about. You see? You understand what I mean?”
He laughed at her, enjoying the birth of her egotism implied in her right to be understood. She was lovelier that afternoon than he had ever seen her, delicate, resonant and, for him, undesirable. But sometimes he wondered if that sexlessness wasn’t for him alone, wasn’t a side that, perhaps purposely, she turned toward him. She was happiest of all with younger men, though she pretended to despise them. Billy Farrelly, obligingly and somewhat to her mild chagrin, had left her alone.
“When will you come out to Hollywood?”
“Soon,” he promised. “And you’ll be coming back to New York.”
She began to cry. “Oh, I’ll miss you so much! I’ll miss you so much!” Large tears of distress ran down her warm ivory cheeks. “Oh, geeze!” she cried softly. “You been good to me! Where’s your hand? Where’s your hand? You been the best friend anybody ever had. Where am I ever going to find a friend like you?”
She was acting now, but a lump arose in his throat and for a moment a wild idea ran back and forth in his mind, like a blind man, knocking over its solid furniture--to marry her. He had only to make the suggestion, he knew, and she would become close to him and know no one else, because he would understand her forever.
Next day, in the station, she was pleased with her flowers, her compartment, with the prospect of a longer trip than she had ever taken before. When she kissed him good-by her deep eyes came close to his again and she pressed against him as if in protest against the separation. Again she cried, but he knew that behind her tears lay the happiness of adventure in new fields. As he walked out of the station, New York was curiously empty. Through her eyes he had seen old colors once more; now they had faded back into the gray tapestry of the past. The next day he went to an office high in a building on Park Avenue and talked to a famous specialist he had not visited for a decade.
“I want you to examine the larynx again,” he said. “There’s not much hope, but something might have changed the situation.”
He swallowed a complicated system of mirrors. He breathed in and out, made high and low sounds, coughed at a word of command. The specialist fussed and touched. Then he sat back and took out his eyeglass. “There’s no change,” he said. “The cords are not diseased--they’re simply worn out. It isn’t anything that can be treated.”
“I thought so,” said Jacob, humbly, as if he had been guilty of an impertinence. “That’s practically what you told me before. I wasn’t sure how permanent it was.”
He had lost something when he came out of the building on Park Avenue--a half hope, the love child of a wish, that some day--
“New York desolate,” he wired her. “The night clubs all closed. Black wreaths on the Statue of Civic Virtue. Please work hard and be remarkably happy.”
“Dear Jacob,” she wired back, “miss you so. You are the nicest man that ever lived and I mean it, dear. Please don’t forget me. Love from Jenny.”
Winter came. The picture Jenny had made in the East was released, together with preliminary interviews and articles in the fan magazines. Jacob sat in his apartment, playing the Kreutzer Sonata over and over on his new phonograph, and read her meager and stilted but affectionate letters and the articles which said she was a discovery of Billy Farrelly’s. In February he became engaged to an old friend, now a widow.
They went to Florida and were suddenly snarling at each other in hotel corridors and over bridge games, so they decided not to go through with it after all. In the spring he took a stateroom on the Paris, but three days before sailing he disposed of it and went to California.
IV
Jenny met him at the station, kissed him and clung to his arm in the car all the way to the Ambassador Hotel. “Well, the man came,” she cried. “I never thought I’d get him to come. I never did.”
Her accent betrayed an effort at control. The emphatic “Geeze!” with all the wonder, horror, disgust or admiration she could put in it was gone, but there was no mild substitute, no “swell” or “grand.” If her mood required expletives outside her repertoire
, she kept silent.
But at seventeen, months are years and Jacob perceived a change in her; in no sense was she a child any longer. There were fixed things in her mind--not distractions, for she was instinctively too polite for that, but simply things there. No longer was the studio a lark and a wonder and a divine accident; no longer “for a nickel I wouldn’t turn up tomorrow.” It was part of her life. Circumstances were stiffening into a career which went on independently of her casual hours.
“If this picture is as good as the other--I mean if I make a personal hit again, Hecksher’ll break the contract. Everybody that’s seen the rushes says it’s the first one I’ve had sex appeal in.”
“What are the rushes?”
“When they run off what they took the day before. They say it’s the first time I’ve had sex appeal.”
“I don’t notice it,” he teased her.
“You wouldn’t. But I have.”
“I know you have,” he said, and, moved by an ill-considered impulse, he took her hand.
She glanced quickly at him. He smiled--half a second too late. Then she smiled and her glowing warmth veiled his mistake.
“Jake,” she cried, “I could bawl, I’m so glad you’re here! I got you a room at the Ambassador. They were full, but they kicked out somebody because I said I had to have a room. I’ll send my car back for you in half an hour. It’s good you came on Sunday, because I got all day free.”
They had luncheon in the furnished apartment she had leased for the winter. It was 1920 Moorish, taken over complete from a favorite of yesterday. Someone had told her it was horrible, for she joked about it; but when he pursued the matter he found that she didn’t know why.
“I wish they had more nice men out here,” she said once during luncheon. “Of course there’s a lot of nice ones, but I mean--Oh, you know, like in New York--men that know even more than a girl does, like you.”
After luncheon he learned that they were going to tea. “Not today,” he objected. “I want to see you alone.”
“All right,” she agreed doubtfully. “I suppose I could telephone. I thought--It’s a lady that writes for a lot of newspapers and I’ve never been asked there before. Still, if you don’t want to--”
Her face had fallen a little and Jacob assured her that he couldn’t be more willing. Gradually he found that they were going not to one party but to three.
“In my position, it’s sort of the thing to do,” she explained. “Otherwise you don’t see anybody except the people on your own lot, and that’s narrow.” He smiled. “Well, anyhow,” she finished--”anyhow, you smart Aleck, that’s what everybody does on Sunday afternoon.”
At the first tea, Jacob noticed that there was an enormous preponderance of women over men, and of supernumeraries--lady journalists, cameramen’s daughters, cutters’ wives--over people of importance. A young Latin named Raffino appeared for a brief moment, spoke to Jenny and departed; several stars passed through, asking about children’s health with a domesticity that was somewhat overpowering. Another group of celebrities posed immobile, statue-like, in a corner. There was a somewhat inebriated and very much excited author apparently trying to make engagements with one girl after another. As the afternoon waned, more people were suddenly a little tight; the communal voice was higher in pitch and greater in volume as Jacob and Jenny went out the door.
At the second tea, young Raffino--he was an actor, one of innumerable hopeful Valentinos--appeared again for a minute, talked to Jenny a little longer, a little more attentively this time, and went out. Jacob gathered that this party was not considered to have quite the swagger of the other. There was a bigger crowd around the cocktail table. There was more sitting down.
Jenny, he saw, drank only lemonade. He was surprised and pleased at her distinction and good manners. She talked to one person, never to everyone within hearing; then she listened, without finding it necessary to shift her eyes about. Deliberate or not on her part, he noticed that at both teas she was sooner or later talking to the guest of most consequence. Her seriousness, her air of saying “This is my opportunity of learning something,” beckoned their egotism imperatively near.
When they left to drive to the last party, a buffet supper, it was dark and the electric legends of hopeful real-estate brokers were gleaming to some vague purpose on Beverly Hills. Outside Grauman’s Theater a crowd was already gathered in the thin, warm rain.
“Look! Look!” she cried. It was the picture she had finished a month before.
They slid out of the thin Rialto of Hollywood Boulevard and into the deep gloom of a side street; he put his arm about her and kissed her.
“Dear Jake.” She smiled up at him.
“Jenny, you’re so lovely; I didn’t know you were so lovely.”
She looked straight ahead, her face mild and quiet. A wave of annoyance passed over him and he pulled her toward him urgently, just as the car stopped at a lighted door.
They went into a bungalow crowded with people and smoke. The impetus of the formality which had begun the afternoon was long exhausted; everything had become at once vague and strident.
“This is Hollywood,” explained an alert talkative lady who had been in his vicinity all day. “No airs on Sunday afternoon.” She indicated the hostess. “Just a plain, simple, sweet girl.” She raised her voice: “Isn’t that so, darling--just a plain, simple, sweet girl?”
The hostess said, “Yeah. Who is?” And Jacob’s informant lowered her voice again: “But that little girl of yours is the wisest one of the lot.”
The totality of the cocktails Jacob had swallowed was affecting him pleasantly, but try as he might, the plot of the party--the key on which he could find ease and tranquillity--eluded him. There was something tense in the air--something competitive and insecure. Conversations with the men had a way of becoming empty and overjovial or else melting off into a sort of suspicion. The women were nicer. At eleven o’clock, in the pantry, he suddenly realized that he hadn’t seen Jenny for an hour. Returning to the living room, he saw her come in, evidently from outside, for she tossed a raincoat from her shoulders. She was with Raffino. When she came up, Jacob saw that she was out of breath and her eyes were very bright. Raffino smiled at Jacob pleasantly and negligently; a few moments later, as he turned to go, he bent and whispered in Jenny’s ear and she looked at him without smiling as she said good night.
“I got to be on the lot at eight o’clock,” she told Jacob presently. “I’ll look like an old umbrella unless I go home. Do you mind, dear?”
“Heavens, no!”
Their car drove over one of the interminable distances of the thin, stretched city.
“Jenny,” he said, “you’ve never looked like you were tonight. Put your head on my shoulder.”
“I’d like to. I’m tired.”
“I can’t tell you how radiant you’ve got to be.”
“I’m just the same.”
“No, you’re not.” His voice suddenly became a whisper, trembling with emotion. “Jenny, I’m in love with you.”
“Jacob, don’t be silly.”
“I’m in love with you. Isn’t it strange, Jenny? It happened just like that.”
“You’re not in love with me.”
“You mean the fact doesn’t interest you.” He was conscious of a faint twinge of fear.
She sat up out of the circle of his arm. “Of course it interests me; you know I care more about you than anything in the world.”
“More than about Mr. Raffino?”
“Oh--my--gosh!” she protested scornfully. “Raffino’s nothing but a baby.”
“I love you, Jenny.”
“No, you don’t.”
He tightened his arm. Was it his imagination or was there a small instinctive resistance in her body? But she came close to him and he kissed her.
“You know that’s crazy about Raffino.”
“I suppose I’m jealous.” Feeling insistent and unattractive, he released her. But the twinge of fear h
ad become an ache. Though he knew that she was tired and that she felt strange at this new mood in him, he was unable to let the matter alone. “I didn’t realize how much a part of my life you were. I didn’t know what it was I missed--but I know now. I wanted you near.”
“Well, here I am.”
He took her words as an invitation, but this time she relaxed wearily in his arms. He held her thus for the rest of the way, her eyes closed, her short hair falling straight back, like a girl drowned.
“The car’ll take you to the hotel,” she said when they reached the apartment. “Remember, you’re having lunch with me at the studio tomorrow.”
Suddenly they were in a discussion that was almost an argument, as to whether it was too late for him to come in. Neither could yet appreciate the change that his declaration had made in the other. Abruptly they had become like different people, as Jacob tried desperately to turn back the clock to that night in New York six months before, and Jenny watched this mood, which was more than jealousy and less than love, snow under, one by one, the qualities of consideration and understanding which she knew in him and with which she felt at home.
“But I don’t love you like that,” she cried. “How can you come to me all at once and ask me to love you like that?”
“You love Raffino like that!”
“I swear I don’t! I never even kissed him--not really!”
“H’m!” He was a gruff white bird now. He could scarcely credit his own unpleasantness, but something illogical as love itself urged him on. “An actor!”
“Oh, Jake,” she cried, “please lemme go. I never felt so terrible and mixed up in my life.”
“I’ll go,” he said suddenly. “I don’t know what’s the matter, except that I’m so mad about you that I don’t know what I’m saying. I love you and you don’t love me. Once you did, or thought you did, but that’s evidently over.”
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 278