West of Sunset

by Stewart O'Nan

  “Hello, Eddie,” she said, as if amused by his presence.

  “Evening,” Eddie said, then tagged along after them to the car.

  Scott opened the door for her and handed her up. The awkward formality of the situation appealed to the gallant in him, whose sense of etiquette harkened back to Miss Van Arnum’s and the ice cream socials of Buffalo.

  “Why, thank you, kind sir,” she said, tucking in her skirt so he could close the door.

  His manners were learned, hers innate. Her every look, her every gesture was meant to put him at ease. He intuited that she’d grown up around money.

  “Is this your car?” she asked.

  “It is.”

  “It has character.”

  “It has the indispensable quality of being paid for.”

  “I thought perhaps your Rolls was in the shop.”

  “So you’ve had one then,” he said.

  “I can’t say I’ve had the pleasure.” Cahn’t.

  “What do you have in your garage?”

  “You’ll laugh.”

  “I promise not to.”

  “A Ford.”

  “With character.”

  “I’m working on it.”

  They’d reached the foot of her street and were idling at the stop sign, waiting to take a left on Sunset. “You have to stick your nose out, otherwise you’ll never get across. That’s it. Go quickly. They’ll stop.”

  As he pulled out, another car almost broadsided them, honking as it shot past. Scott refrained from giving him a Roman fig.

  “Are you always such a cautious driver?” she asked when they were safe.

  In back Eddie laughed, and Scott found him in the mirror. “Around here you have to be.”

  “It’s true,” she said. “The drivers here are a menace.”

  Widely known to be mob-owned, the Clover Club was only a couple of blocks down Sunset, a prisonlike edifice built into the hillside. Save a strip of windows on the third floor, the front was blank to keep the police from raiding the place too easily. A ramp of a driveway circled around back, where two bouncers in suits guarded a canopied entrance. The cars in the lot reflected the club’s clientele, gangsters and show people. The first open spot he saw was next to a forest-green Rolls. He pulled in beside it to keep the joke going.

  “Not in the shop,” she noted.

  “Not my color.”

  “Nor mine.”

  She waited for him to come around and let her out. He offered his hand, and again she gave him hers, a wordless gesture intimate as a kiss, even with Eddie rolling his eyes behind her. She moved like a dancer, a loose-limbed precision that snapped the bouncers to attention. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d spent a season with the ballet, perhaps as a teen, before she’d bloomed. Zelda had never had the height or the upright carriage. He could see it in Sheilah, and remembered his own boyhood poise lessons, balancing the city directory on his head as he tightroped across the parlor.

  “Evenin’, Miss Graham,” one of the torpedoes said, holding the door for her.

  “Good evening, Billy,” she nodded. “Tommy.”

  He’d forgotten, this was her world. He was the greenhorn.

  At the bar they ran into Bogart and Mayo. “Well, well, what a surprise.” Bogie broke into a smile and rose, offering his stool to Sheilah. “You kids have time for a drink? I’ve been telling Mayo what a swell writer you are—not you, Eddie, I mean Fitz here. Better’n Hemingway, and I mean that. What’ll you all have?”

  While the banter was improvised, Scott asking for a Coke was scripted, as was making Eddie’s rye a double. Sheilah sipped her sherry, pinching the stem of her glass as if she were at charm school. As always, they talked shop. Rumor was, Metro was bringing in Mervyn LeRoy for The Wizard of Oz. Sheilah knew that Bogie had worked with him on Broadway.

  “Smart cookie. Knows his way around a big number.”

  “Scott says you’re gonna be a duchess,” Mayo said wetly. “Wha’zat like?”

  Above her permanent smirk, her eyes swam, unfocused, and he flashed on a frightening thought. He could not recall ever seeing her sober.

  “A marchioness,” Sheilah said. “It’s intimidating for a lifelong commoner like myself.”

  “A marionette? Doesn’t sound that fun to me.”

  “Easy, Sluggy,” Bogie said.

  “What? ’m asking a question. You’re no Prince Charming yourself.”

  “And that,” Bogie said, taking her arm, “is our cue. You kids have fun now.”

  “That was interesting,” Sheilah said upstairs as they waited for a table.

  “She’s always like that,” Eddie said.

  “I mean Bogart. He must like you.”

  “He’s an old friend,” Scott said.

  “Doing you a favor.”

  He saw that he would lose more by not admitting it. “Yes.”

  She laughed. “Better than Hemingway. That is truly desperate.”

  “I didn’t tell him to say that.”

  “He’s a great reader,” Eddie said.

  “It was the timing I found suspect. Are you better than Hemingway?”

  “I’m a better dancer.”

  He would have a chance to prove it. Their table was in a dim corner opposite the bandstand. Candlelit, with a fresh lily in a crystal vase, it would have been romantic if they were alone. After they ordered, he led her out onto the dance floor, leaving Eddie to nurse his rye. They fit nicely. She was just his height, and when she leaned in he could smell the perfume of her skin, a warm mix of lavender and vanilla. It was an old song, a lively two-step, once a bright novelty. I’m making hay in the moonlight, right in my baby’s arms. A little harvest or two is just bound to come through. Her palm resting lightly on his shoulder, she followed his lead, gliding, perfectly upright, all the time meeting his eyes. The ease with which she matched him demolished his boast.

  “I could tell you were a dancer,” he said.

  “How so?”

  “The way you carry yourself.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Dramatically.” He threw his shoulders back.

  “I don’t know if I should be flattered or insulted. You look rather like a chicken.”

  “Proudly,” he amended. “For a lifelong commoner.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t joke about that. I can’t bear it.”

  It was their first dance, yet he wanted to ask her flat out if she loved this marquis. He was holding the hand with the ridiculous ring, and he imagined kneeling at the end of the tune and sliding it off her finger. Like the fool he was, married and penniless, he was ready to declare himself.

  “I don’t mean to make fun,” he said. “You make me nervous, and I don’t know—”

  “Let’s not talk,” she said. “Let’s just dance. You said you were better than Hemingway.”

  “I am.”

  “Shh,” she said.

  They danced a foxtrot and a rhumba and a tango, their shared silence a challenge and then, once he surrendered to it, a closeness—as if, again, there were an unspoken bond or secret between them. They moved together, absorbed, borne along on the orchestra’s sinuous rhythm. Between songs he noticed their waiter had arrived with their dinner. So did she, but the new song that swelled up was a sad ballad, and as a lonely oboe purled she laid her cheek against his shoulder and held him close and he didn’t dare say a word.

  “Our food’s getting cold,” she said when the music ended.

  “Eddie can have it.”

  “We shouldn’t leave him alone. It’s not polite.”

  “I didn’t invite him.”

  “You didn’t invite me either—he did.”

  “I know,” he relented. “Next time, can it be just t
he two of us?”

  “Next time.”

  “Dinner, Tuesday?”

  He was being abject, asking too much too soon. He still wasn’t sure what she was doing here. In contrast, his own motives seemed obvious, and tawdry.

  “You can’t tell anyone,” she said.

  “I won’t.”

  “Don’t look so pleased with yourself.”

  “Why not?”

  “You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”

  “I could say the same thing.”

  “But why would you?” she said.

  “How old are you?”

  “How old are you?”

  “Forty.”

  “Twenty-seven.” If it was a lie, it wasn’t a big one. Thirty was still young. You couldn’t see it around her eyes.

  They returned to the table, where Eddie was finishing his steak. By prior agreement, Scott was paying for everything, and the number of empty glasses dismayed him. Now that he was happy, he could be unhappy again.

  The food, as Bogie said, was swell, though neither of them ate much. They ordered coffee and dessert and danced again, fretting about Eddie as if he were a child bored by the grown-ups’ conversation, and though Scott wanted the night to go on and on, they decided out of fairness to leave after a last slow song. He closed his eyes and moved with her, thinking how it all might be a dream, like his recurring one of walking through a thawing St. Paul finding piles of silver coins on the sidewalks. He might wake up and find himself in bed, bereft, but no, he was holding her, she was humming in his ear. The promise of Tuesday made the poignancy of their last dance even sweeter, and when the song finished he clapped for the band with gratitude.

  Outside, the night was warm and scented with eucalyptus. The Rolls was gone, and he thought of its owner, a producer returned to his dark mansion, still haunted by the vision of the lovely English girl at the club. She would be the image of his dead wife, a star of the silent age lost to some wasting disease. Fast as a reflex, the notion carried him to a world he half knew, a future patched together from the past, peopled by shades, constructed of unwritten scenes like empty rooms. Later he would remember the feeling as much as the idea, the urge to both leave and discover himself again in this man who had everything yet nothing—the opposite of him, now, thanks to her.

  They climbed into the hills above Sunset, his lights sweeping across windows and hedges. In the dark he didn’t recognize anything, and she had to direct him, pointing out her mailbox. After a half-dozen doubles, Eddie’s effectiveness as a chaperone was limited. They left him dozing in the backseat and walked toward the yellow light.

  He waited while she dug in her clutch purse for her keys. She opened the door and stepped inside before turning to him. As he took her hands he felt the ring, as he was sure she felt his.

  “Can I tell you a secret?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I like you better than Hemingway.”

  “Can I tell you a secret?” she said. “I like you better than Hemingway too.”

  “He won’t like that.”

  “Too bad. Eddie was sweet to come.”

  “He was,” he said, drawing closer, hoping for a kiss, wondering, acutely, what his producer would be feeling at this moment.

  She held him off. “Tuesday.”

  “Tuesday,” he agreed, because his man would be patient and unsure too, and waved as she closed the door.

  He played chauffeur to Eddie, then valet back at the Garden, helping him to his bungalow and putting him to bed. Bogie and Mayo’s lights were on, and Benchley was in the middle of some commotion by the pool. Rather than break the spell, he climbed the stairs to his place and locked the door behind him. Even with the pills, he couldn’t sleep, and for a while he sat in front of the picture window, watching the balcony of the main house, imagining his hero, like Alla, looking out over the lights of the city, dreaming of his girl, as if this last, fey love might redeem the irretrievable past.

  The next morning he got up at five and wrote.

  THE SWEETEST PIE IN HISTORY

  Though as a family they’d never lived anywhere for more than a few years, and then unhappily, one of his deepest regrets was that Scottie no longer had a home. Since she’d been away at school, the Obers’ in Scarsdale served as a base for holiday breaks, her summers split between camp and visiting her mother at the clinic, her grandmother Sayre in Montgomery and him, wherever he might be.

  He’d never gotten along with the southern branch of the family, and Zelda’s illness only widened that rift. Her father had been a judge, and making plans with her mother was like trying to seat a jury. For every proposed schedule, she had a list of objections, as if her calendar were full of anything more pressing than her weekly bridge club. Scottie also disliked Montgomery, with its stifling heat and antebellum pretensions, so that often he felt neither of them actually desired this visit, but, out of loyalty to Zelda and some ideal of family, he persevered, a diplomat hashing out a peace treaty, the conditions of which were that Scottie would spend two weeks there, followed by a month in Hollywood.

  He didn’t have room in his bungalow, so he arranged for her to stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel with old Broadway friends Helen Hayes and Charlie MacArthur, who’d known her since she was a toddler. The plan had been for her to arrive Sunday via the Argonaut, but the telegram the Western Union courier mistakenly delivered to the main house so that it sat there for two days before Don Stewart found it changed all that. Because her grandmother Sayre had fallen and broken her wrist, now Scottie would be arriving late Tuesday morning. By his calculations, she was already on the train.

  When he called Sheilah to cancel their date, she thought he was ducking her.

  “I’d like to meet her,” she said. “Why can’t the three of us have dinner?”

  The reasons seemed large and obvious to him, but he could feel the edge of complaint in her voice, and though he knew he would dread every second of it, he called the Trocadero and changed their reservation. Instead of a quiet table in back, he asked for one with a view.

  Tuesday he took off work to meet Scottie’s train at the station. It was late, and as he waited, one of a slowly accumulating crowd, he pictured his empty office and the hot boulevard outside. He was rewriting A Yank at Oxford again, with no end in sight. Eddie said he loved what he’d done with the girl, but wanted him to bring the rivalry story line forward, since the last third turned on that. Scott wanted to say if that was the case, the movie wouldn’t be any good. When he tried making the girl the Brit’s to begin with, the jealousy played too shrill. Maybe if she was his sister, though that was just as old hat. He was so used to coming up with solutions that to have nothing panicked him, and the harder he worked on it, the more hopeless it seemed. To get a credit, he had to make the script his, not just polish the dialogue. So far all he’d really added was the fencing scene.

  The station presented no answers, and the rest of his day was dedicated to Scottie. As ungenerous as the thought was, it was a bad time for her to visit, with everything unsettled. Once he was more established he’d be better able to entertain her, though he’d fallen back on the same flimsy excuse in Tryon and Asheville and all his other interim stops. Since Zelda had been away, he’d done his best to give Scottie something resembling a regular life, even when it meant insulating her from his own itinerant existence. His success only deepened the contradiction. Even as he sacrificed to pay for her boarding school, he held himself as a cautionary figure, the father as absent drudge, a role he’d learned from his own father, a bankrupt and drunkard rescued and then forever reminded of it by his mother’s side of the family. He recalled playing ball with his friends in the backyard of the townhouse they rented in St. Paul, and his father, having come home stinking from the bars, taking the bat from another boy’s hands and flailing wildly at Scott’s pitches, whiffing again and again un
til he wished he would stop. “Come on, try that one more time,” his father taunted, laughing, and Scott, no older than ten, had been tempted to whip the ball at his face. He promised himself he would not be that kind of father to Scottie, and yet at times he was afraid he had been. At nine she’d gone back to Gstaad with him, skiing away the blinding white days, nights writing to her mother in the clinic while he tippled gin. After her bedtime story, he drank with angry purpose, and woke to broken glass and skinned knuckles. They’d been thrown out of their old chalet, and then the hotel, finally landing in a pension frequented by college students and prostitutes. It was the end of the season, and she wanted to leave. “Where do you think we should go?” he asked, because the lease had run out on their Montparnasse walk-up, and Zelda still wasn’t well. The decision to come home was the beginning of their wandering.

  As if they could sense the engine approaching, a squad of redcaps rolled their clattering baggage carts up the platform. Above, pigeons roosting in the beams flapped and circled the rotunda, the rails sang like a knife sharpener’s wheel and the station filled with noise. Pullman after Pullman shrieked by, losing speed. He searched the windows as they passed, bristling with the smiling faces and frantic hands of arrivals, impatient after the long haul. The train slowed so porters could hop off and walk alongside, greeting the redcaps like old friends. He was afraid he’d missed her, but no, there she was, in the very last car, framed by the window. It was closed, and unlike most of the passengers she was seated and facing straight ahead, her chin tipped down, solemnly concentrating, and he saw with a doubletake that she was reading.

  She was not beautiful, a fact that saddened him, since it was his fault. She had her mother’s strawberry hair and slight build but his features, the moony Irish eyes and sharp nose and dimpled chin growing more prominent now that her baby fat was melting away. In five or six years, if she was careful, she might be handsome, but at fifteen she was still unfinished, a chubby-cheeked girl with freckles, an indiscriminate love of animals, and, like himself at that age, an ear for absurd lyrics. He gazed on her fondly, wishing, as always, that he could shield her from life’s unhappiness, including his own. He had done a poor job of it so far. Just then she looked up and smiled at him, and once more he resolved to be a better father.