Judith Krantz

by Till We Meet Again

  “Should you be?” Ambert repeated. “No, of course not. Sit down here, next to me, and I’ll show you what you will read. It’s very simple, you’ll just read the lines that are underlined in red, and I’ll read the others to you … a little dialogue between us. You must not look at the camera, if you can manage that. Would you like to read it to yourself first?”

  “I’m not an actress,” said Delphine. “So what good would that do?”

  “To orient yourself, perhaps?”

  “You orient me, Monsieur. I think that would be better.”

  “Do you know the story of Mayerling?”

  “Not really.”

  “Never mind. This scene is just a meeting between a young noblewoman and the heir to the Hapsburgs. It takes place at a ball … they are dancing together … and falling in love.”

  “Well, that sounds familiar,” Delphine said, smiling. “Where do you want me?”

  “Over there. Why don’t you leave your jacket here? It will be hot in the lights.”

  Delphine shrugged off her red jacket and tossed it on the back of her chair, and wearing only the slender matching skirt and a simple white silk blouse, she walked fifteen feet to the high stool Ambert had indicated. As soon as she sat down the director gave an order and a bank of lights smashed on, making her throw an arm before her eyes with a cry of surprise.

  “Tell me when you can see well enough to read,” he said, speaking, across the distance that separated them, so clearly that he could have been sitting next to her.

  Delphine waited, truly aware, for the first time, of the weight of many male eyes sizing her up with an avid yet professional interest. Like the lights, it was a blow, and like the lights it was utterly welcome, a primeval attention. She had never felt so alive, so much herself, so much in control.

  In the minutes that it took her to grow accustomed to the glare she felt something growing warmly and alarmingly inside of her. It was not the heat of the lights on her skin. It was a glow that started in her belly and spread rapidly and irresistibly until it reached down and gripped her between her legs and made her cross her thighs so that they wouldn’t reveal the involuntary and sudden fluttering of her lower lips. She sat pinned in the lights, holding on to the stool with both hands. The script fell to the floor as she was gripped by a powerful orgasm. She bit her lips, sat up as rigidly as she could, thrusting her breasts forward and her shoulders back, her legs pressed together with all her strength so that nothing would be betrayed to the watching men. Nico Ambert felt his penis fill and rise in response to her excitement. This hadn’t happened to him in years.

  There was utter silence on the set.

  “Jules, give her the script,” Ambert muttered when he saw that Delphine had recovered some of her composure. He was too hard to move.

  LeMaitre handed Delphine the script. Nico began reading, a long speech that he had deliberately chosen to put an actress at ease.

  Delphine listened, her eyes seeing but not comprehending the words, her breath coming too quickly in the aftermath of her orgasm to permit her to say her lines. The glow was still there, hot and urgent, and she knew that it would take little to set her off again. It must be the lights, she thought, it must be the lights.

  “Mademoiselle?”

  “Yes,” she said faintly.

  “Can you see to read?”

  “I’ll try.” She took a deep breath and concentrated fiercely on the script. Soon the lines made sense and she read, unaware of the camera, unaware of the spectators, throwing all her being into the lines underlined in red, because only then could she control her body. Ambert’s voice responded to her lines. Who the hell, he wondered, had taught her how to fuck the camera? She continued to read, he answered, she replied, until réplique following réplique, in a dance of words, they had finished the short scene.

  The director signaled for the lights to be turned off and in the sudden darkness he got up quickly and walked to where Delphine still sat, shocked by the abruptness of the ending. He took her by her arm, where it was bare beneath her short sleeve.

  “You were splendid. I’m afraid it was difficult,” he said in a low voice, and it seemed to her that the scene had started again.

  “It was so … bright.”

  “I understand. You would like to sit down quietly somewhere before you join your friends.”

  “Yes.”

  “Come.” He led her quickly off the set, around a corner, around a forest of flats, and into his dressing room. He turned, with his back to the door, and pulled her toward him. He kissed her on her open mouth, a barbarous kiss, a rapturous kiss. “Do you know … do you know?” he asked her, his voice brutal.

  “What?” she gasped, knowing perfectly well.

  “What you did to me? Feel it.” He pressed his body against hers so closely that the full, long, animal length of him etched itself on her belly. Men had tried to push themselves against Delphine dozens of times, but she had always eluded them. Now she almost fainted toward Ambert, her eyes closed, her mouth greedy for his brutal, necessary kisses. He carried her to his couch and lay her down, opening her blouse, hovering over her so that his lips never lost contact with her nipples while he flung off their clothes. Delphine had let men touch her nipples but never kiss them, much less see them, and now, naked, exposed, blissfully shamed, it was as if she were under the lights again. His relentless, experienced tongue made her madly liquid, but he knew too much about her already to allow her to have another orgasm. He pulled her hair painfully. “Not yet,” he whispered. “Not yet, you little bitch, not again without me.” As he opened her thighs he put down his head to inhale the scent of her readiness, but he was careful not to touch her anywhere near her pubic hair. She shoved herself upward, suddenly far, far beyond any modesty, but he just grunted in negation and knelt over her, taking his penis in his hand. He pushed it into her with the voluptuary slowness of a man who has been kept waiting for so long that he is cautious not to move too quickly. Slowly, slowly he entered her, with a vicious, selfish gourmandise that masqueraded as gentleness. She was so wet, so open and so wild to be taken, that he pierced the thin wall of her virginity before either of them knew it, and dug into her at full length. He still held her hair in his grip and only now did he release her so that she could concentrate on the voracious rod that filled her belly. Both of them scarcely breathed, feeling him grow bigger, impossibly bigger, inside of her. As he lay without moving he muttered, “Every man in that studio had his cock in his hand. And you knew it, you knew it, you little bitch.” Delphine cried, “I can’t wait, I can’t,” and she came in a great wilderness of exquisite tossing that touched a match to his own bucking, hurting, passionate explosion.

  12

  ON September third, 1936, Los Angeles was on the eve of becoming, for four days, the center of international aviation. Spruced up and enlarged, Mines Field had been renamed the Municipal Airport. The local organizers of the sixteenth annual National Air Races, which were being held for the first time in the City of the Angels, had resolved that if anybody could show the world how to put on a spectacle, they could.

  Freddy had all but memorized the flood of newspaper stories on the events that were about to take place. She knew that Harold Lloyd, as grand marshal, would lead a long motor parade of floats and bands out to the airport; she knew exactly at what time a bomb, bursting in the air over the field, would announce the arrival of the crack Army, Navy and Marine pursuit squadrons, who would demonstrate formation and stunt flying in aerial attack and defense; she knew when in the day the motorcycle-to-glider transfer stunts would take place, and when to expect the mass parachute jumping contest. She knew that Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Benita Hume were planning to have a picnic before the races from a canary yellow basket filled with yellow cups and yellow plates; that Adrienne Ames, in brown tweed, was expected with her former husband, Bruce Cabot, that Carole Lombard and Kay Francis would be among the guests of honor. She even knew the names and faces of the Be
verly Hills society girls who had been chosen to greet the service fliers as junior hostesses at the military and naval ball that would end the first day of the National Races.

  And she didn’t give a damn. It was all window dressing, fill, between the races.

  Only three events commanded Freddy’s passionate attention: the Bendix transcontinental speed dash from the East Coast to L.A.; the Ruth Chatterton Derby, for “sportsmen pilots,” which had begun six days before in Cleveland, and was proceeding, in handicapped laps, on to Los Angeles; and the Amelia Earhart Trophy, a closed circuit speed race around pylons, the only race of the schedule that was limited to women, in which eight contestants would take part.

  Of those three races, it was the Chatterton that had taken possession of her imagination, to the point where she yearned toward it in her mind, as she had yearned for nothing since her solo. It was a race that she could have entered if she had a plane. Could have entered. Would have entered. Might even have won. If she had a plane of her own.

  There were thirty-two contestants, male and female, flying every kind of aircraft in competition against their own best possible speeds. The papers had been full of the Chinese girl, Katharine Sui Fun Cheung, who was flying a small Cessna, and of Peggy Salaman, the London society girl whose mother had smilingly told a reporter, “You really can’t dance all day, can you? So Peggy took up aviation.” Damn, but she hated Peggy Salaman, Freddy thought in a storm of envy, Peggy Salaman and her damned generous mother!

  The Chatterton was so painful to think about that she walked around in a trance, trying to concentrate on nothing but the obviously, mercifully, self-evidently unattainable Bendix, with its band of famous pilots who were, even now, doing the last minute tune-up of their ships at Floyd Bennett Field, after weeks of rumors and counter rumors, stories of super-streamlined machines never seen before; secret wind tunnel testing of high powered designs; new and more powerful motors than had ever been known; desperate efforts, going on all through the night, to add speed to each plane by any means possible; mysterious last minute entries and hysteria in the press.

  The Bendix was a free-for-all race, its only rule that the pilots had to leave Floyd Bennett at dawn on the fourth of September and arrive in Los Angeles by 6:00 P.M. of the same day. Aviation Magazine, Freddy’s bible, had announced that the favorite was Benny Howard, who had won the annual race the year before in his famous ship, Mister Mulligan. Aviation had picked Amelia Earhart in her new Lockheed Electra as the best long shot, closely followed by Jacqueline Cochrane. Howard Hughes was cited by the magazine for the most sporting gesture; he had refused to enter the Bendix on the grounds that his own experimental aircraft was unbeatable by pilots with less money to spend.

  Freddy, doggedly practicing Immelmans and Chandelles the day before the race, in Mac’s Taylor Cub, which averaged ninety miles an hour at best, meditated on Howard Hughes and his hundred and twenty million dollars, and on Earhart in the plane on which Lockheed had lavished eighty thousand dollars. Decidedly she was in the minor leagues, she thought savagely, as she put the old reliable Taylor through its paces.

  Most of her free afternoons of June, July and August had been spent mastering the basics of stunt flying. Eventually, with Mac sitting by her side, she had progressed to complicated stunts: the Oregon Sea Serpent, the Cuban Roll, the Cuban Eight, the Frank Clark Reversement Roll, and the Rankin Roller Coaster. All well and good, Freddy thought, but today she was no closer to her aim of saving money for a plane of her own than she had been before, since she hadn’t been able to resist spending every penny she’d earned on her aerobatic lessons.

  In two weeks her freshman year at UCLA would begin, Freddy thought glumly. She’d already received a copy of her class schedule. Her mother had taken her shopping for college clothes. When would she be able to fly except on weekends? It had been essential to make the most of the summer, even though it had taken all her salary.

  Freshman year, she reminded herself in misery, would mean taking those required courses that were designed by a well-meaning university to give her a well-rounded education in the liberal arts. “Damn it to hell, I don’t want to be well rounded!” Freddy raged out loud to the unimpressed altimeter, to the hapless airspeed indicator, to the stick that existed only to obey her.

  Yet what else was there to do? Join the Navy and see the world? The Foreign Legion? Run away with the circus? Shit, any of them would take a boy, but a not-quite-seventeen-year-old girl? Fat chance. Her destiny led straight to a stuffy college classroom and English 101.

  If Freddy could have taken her feet off the rudder pedals she would have stamped in such frustration that she might have kicked a hole through the floor of the plane. Instead she executed one last, flawless Chandelle, a steep, climbing turn of 180 degrees, and came in to land at Dry Springs.

  Mac and Swede Castelli, who had come to the airport to talk more stunting business with McGuire, were both outside the hangar, watching her land. She jumped out of the plane, pulled her goggles off, unbuckled her parachute, slung it over one arm, and approached them, hair caught into a copper lariat by the wind, a rakish, slender figure with her Robin Hood walk, that slight, unconscious swagger which was accentuated by the jodhpurs and low boots she had bought when her Levi’s wore out. She had rolled up the sleeves of the boy’s shirt she always wore for flying.

  “Hi there, little lady. That was a mighty pretty Chandelle up there,” Swede Castelli said, in what she instantly decided was a patronizing tone. All old stunt pilots, she thought, were convinced that no one could ever fly as well as they had. Well, maybe not all, maybe not Mac. And she loathed being called “little lady.”

  “Purely decorative, Mr. Castelli,” Freddy answered shortly. “A bagatelle.”

  “You looked O.K., kid,” McGuire said.

  “Gee, Mac, I just don’t think I can handle all your lavish admiration. I may blush,” she said acidly, and disappeared into the office. Mac too. They were all the same, she told herself bitterly.

  “What’s biting her?” Castelli inquired.

  “She wants to be Amelia Earhart,” Mac explained.

  “Well, so do I. Doesn’t everybody?”

  “She’s an emotional kid,” Mac shrugged.

  “Kid? Listen, Mac, that girl isn’t a kid anymore. She’s a dish, a dream, a—”

  “She’s a kid, Swede. And you’re a dirty old man.” Mac’s voice was unexpectedly angry.

  “It’s not a bad way to go, don’t knock it, McGuire,” Castelli said, good-humored as ever, as Freddy reappeared on her way to her car. He waved at Mac and turned to leave. “Sure you won’t reconsider?” he called back to Mac as he walked with Freddy toward their cars.

  “Positive,” Mac answered.

  “It’s good money,” he shouted, visibly without hope that he could change Mac’s refusal.

  “No can do, Buddy. I told you, I’m out of that business.”

  “Ahh,” Castelli said to Freddy in mild disgust, “he’d do it for me, I know he would, except he always had this thing against wearing wigs. But it was worth a shot.”

  “What was it?” Freddy asked indifferently. Mac was still turning down jobs that hopeful stunt coordinators continued to offer him, not believing that he could have finally retired from the business.

  “A film called Tail Spin. I offered him his choice: Alice Faye, Constance Bennett or Nancy Kelly … he could have stunt-doubled any one of them. Roy Del Ruth, the director, asked for Mac specially. He never forgot how believable he was, doing Jean Harlow in Hell’s Angels.”

  “But that was a silent movie—I remember it from seven years ago.”

  “They don’t want him to speak, little lady, they just want him to put on a wig and fly. Is that too much to hope for? Is that an insult?”

  “No,” Freddy giggled, tickled out of her vile mood by the vision of Mac in a platinum blond wig.

  “Well, Im off to try to find three other guys. I’d do it myself, but I’ve lost my girlish figure. You going to th
e Air Races?”

  “Every day,” she said, suddenly remembering.

  “Listen, little lady, maybe next year, or the year after, you’ll be in them. You never know,” he said kindly, as he looked at the cloud that had fallen over her face.

  “Thanks, Mr. Castelli. But I don’t think so.”

  “Say, wait a minute. What about you? You could be a stunt-double easy—Mac’s told me how much you’ve learned—there isn’t anything we’ve planned you couldn’t handle. What about it?”

  “Now that’s impossible,” Freddy said, laughing at his eagerness, “much more impossible than my being in the Air Races next year.”

  “Why? Just tell me what’s stopping you?”

  Freddy approached Eve’s glossy LaSalle convertible. She reached inside, pulled out a pale blue cashmere cardigan and threw it around her neck. The sleeves, knotted hastily under her chin, caught her wind-whipped hair and tamed it into a flaming frame for her earnest face.

  “I have to start college in two weeks, for one thing,” she said, leaning on the door of the car. “I have a firm rendezvous with Beowulf, Mr. Castelli. In addition, my father, a very conservative man, would kill me, then my mother would kill me and if there was anything left of me, Mac would finish off the job.” Freddy’s positive stance, even more than the smart, expensive car, convinced Swede Castelli that he was barking up the wrong tree. This particular little lady was a society girl with an unusual hobby.

  “I get it. No harm in asking, right?”

  “Right, Mr. Castelli.”

  “So say hello to Beowulf. He’s a lucky guy.”

  By the time the Air Races ended, on the ninth of September, on the day of Eve’s big reception for Lieutenant Michel Detroyat, the only French flier at the races, Freddy was smoldering with so many emotions that she didn’t recognize herself.

  She had watched with a pounding heart as Louise Thaden flew over the finish line of the Bendix, at the wrong end of the field, so modestly convinced that she’d come in last that she’d taxied her ship almost off the field before a running, screaming mob of thousands was able to reach her and make her understand that she’d won. She had crossed the country in less than fifteen hours, leaving behind all the field of experimental, supercharged new racers. And she had won in a Beechcraft, thought Freddy, tormenting herself, torn between admiration and new waves of the most poisonous envy, an ordinary little Beech Staggerwing, a plane anybody could fly, a plane anybody with a couple of thousand dollars could buy.