An Inconvenient Woman (30 page)

“I am a bit, yes,” answered Jules.

“You’re driving dangerously.”

“Would you like to drive?”

“Yes, I would.”

Jules pulled the Bentley over to the side of Mountain Drive and put the gearshift into neutral. He unstrapped his seat belt, opened the door of the car, and walked very slowly around to the other side. Pauline unstrapped her seat belt and slid across the leather seat to the driver’s side. Then they both strapped their seat belts again. Pauline put the gearshift into drive and pulled out onto Mountain Drive, heading toward Sunset Boulevard.

“Mr. Zwillman,” Jules said when the car stopped at the stoplight on Sunset Boulevard.

“What about him?”

“I never drink after dinner, ever, as you know, but he made me three drinks,” said Jules.

“You didn’t have to drink them.”

“I know, but I did.”

“Was Mr. Zwillman not the reason we went to that dreadful party in that dreadful house?” asked Pauline.

“Yes.”

“At some time in the future, if someone asks you, the police or the grand jury, for instance, ‘How did you get to know Arnie Zwillman?’ you can now say, ‘I was introduced to him at a party at the home of Casper Stieglitz, the film producer. My wife and I dined there. We saw a film there. Mr. Zwillman was also a guest, along with Marty and Sylvia Lesky, the head of Colossus Pictures, et cetera et cetera.’ Is that it?”

“You’re very perceptive, Pauline. Zwillman knew we wouldn’t go to his house, and nobody else but a cocaine sniffer like Casper Stieglitz, who is himself no longer invited anywhere, would have him to theirs. He’s a leper these days.”

“And yet you bring me there, to the house of a cocaine-sniffing leper, while you meet up with a gangster,” said Pauline. “It will all read wonderfully in Cyril Rathbone’s column. I wonder if he’ll include Ina Rae and Darlene and Lonny.”

“Who?” asked Jules.

“The late shift was arriving as I was leaving.”

“Jesus,” said Jules.

“What did Mr. Zwillman want? Some nonpublic information for his stock portfolio?” asked Pauline.

“It had to do with the statehood of Europe in 1992,” said Jules.

Pauline laughed. “What possible interest could Mr. Arnie Zwillman, who burned down the Vegas Seraglio for the insurance money, have in the statehood of Europe?”

“It is less the statehood of Europe than the role I am going to be playing in it, representing the United States,” said Jules slowly.

“Don’t make me pry this out of you, Jules, step by step. Keep talking until I get your point,” said Pauline. She turned the Bentley off Sunset Boulevard onto Benedict Canyon and drove to Angelo Drive, where she turned left and proceeded up the winding hillside with the hairpin curves, which strangers in the city found too frightening to drive at night. It was a rare occurrence for Pauline to drive Jules, and he, although slightly drunk, was impressed with her ability.

“Mr. Zwillman is apparently involved in drug trafficking, and has at his disposal immense sums of money, immense beyond description, that he assumed I could facilitate his operation with by putting into circulation through the European Common Market,” said Jules. He hiccuped.

“Why would he think you would be amenable to such a thing?”

“He threatened me.”

“With what?”

Jules looked out the window of the Bentley and did not answer.

Pauline looked over at him. “What did you tell him?” she asked.

“To go fuck himself.”

“It didn’t appear to me when I walked into the room that you had just told Mr. Zwillman to go fuck himself,” said Pauline. “That was not the impression I had at all.”

Jules didn’t reply.

“Are you going to report this to the police, or the FBI, or the CIA, or the President, or someone?” asked Pauline.

They looked at each other.

“No,” said Jules quietly.

“Years ago, when we were first married, you told me that something had happened in your past, when you were young.”

“I don’t want to talk about that,” said Jules quickly.

“You don’t trust me, Jules, after twenty-two years of marriage?” asked Pauline.

“I trust you implicitly, Pauline, but I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Then just tell me one thing. Does Arnie Zwillman know about whatever it was that happened that you don’t want to talk to me about?”

Jules stared out the window again.

“How do you know he wasn’t wired?” asked Pauline.

“I don’t,” replied Jules. “I never thought of that.”

They drove in silence for several minutes, as Pauline maneuvered a curve in the road. “Has it occurred to you that our lives, our so-called perfect lives, are unraveling, Jules?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Is it a matter of any concern to you?”

“Of course it is, Pauline. I don’t want this to happen,” said Jules. “What can we do?”

“I’m not the one who’s having the affair,” said Pauline. At the same moment she turned the Bentley sharply to the right, pulling up to the closed gates of Clouds. She pushed the button that lowered the window on the driver’s side and reached out and pressed a seven-digit code on the calculator buttons of a computerized lock in the red brick wall adjoining the gates. Slowly, the impressive gates opened.

Jules, watching her, said, “You’re an amazingly efficient woman, Pauline.” Farther up the hill toward the house, the frenzied sound of the watchdogs’ barking could be heard.

She looked at him. “I know,” she said. The car started up the hill, and the gates swung closed behind them. As they pulled into the cobblestone courtyard, the police dogs, barking ferociously, surrounded the car.

Jules opened the car door. “Okay, boys, okay, now down, down, down. Smitty? Are you there, Smitty?”

“Over here, Mr. Mendelson,” said the guard.

“Call the dogs off, will you?” said Jules.

“You boys calm down now, just calm down. I’ll open the door for you, Mrs. Mendelson,” said Smitty. “Hope you folks had a nice evening.”

“Thank you, Smitty. We did indeed,” said Pauline. Pauline’s father had taught his three daughters that no matter
what state their lives were in, it was important always to keep up appearances in front of the servants.

“You’ll put the car away, Smitty?” said Jules.

“Sure thing.”

Inside, in the hallway of their house, with the curved staircase and the six Monet paintings, Pauline started up the stairs with her hand on the railing.

Jules, following her into the house, reached out and covered her hand with his. “Perhaps we could have breakfast together in the morning,” he said. The invitation was an unusual one, as Jules was always gone from their home for several hours by the time Pauline rang to have her breakfast tray brought up by Blondell. They had never once used Pauline’s sunrise room for breakfast, as had been the plan when the sunrise and sunset rooms had been added on to the house.

“I had planned to sleep late,” Pauline replied, withdrawing her hand from beneath Jules’s hand on the banister. She continued up the stairs. The third of the six Monet paintings on the stairway wall appeared crooked to her, and she stopped to straighten it.

“Whenever you are available in the morning,” replied Jules, watching her from below, “I will be here.”

She turned halfway up the stairs and looked back at him. They both knew the time had come for them to talk. Then she said, quite arbitrarily, in the first of several arbitrary decisions she would make in the next year to assert her authority in her house, “I don’t want to lend these Monets to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh for their exhibit after all.”

“But they’ve been promised,” said Jules. “I’m sure their catalog has been printed by now.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t want to lend them. I want them here when the garden club comes.”

“All right,” said Jules, lifting his eyebrows. Her decision upset him, because he took his obligations in the art world very seriously, but he knew, being a dealmaker of renown, when to concede a point. While looking up at her, he made a mental note to think up an acceptable excuse before contacting the curator of the Carnegie Museum in the morning.

Looking back at him, Pauline thought, for the first time, that her husband had started to look old.

The few guests who had actually sat through the movie at Casper Stieglitz’s house were leaving. Casper, glad to be rid of
them, had not come to the parking area to see them off but, instead, had made straight for the bedroom where Ina Rae and Darlene and Lonny were waiting for him.

Philip Quennell opened the door of his rented car and was surprised to see a large manila envelope on the driver’s seat. He picked it up, saw that his name was misspelled on the front, and knew immediately what it was and who it was from.

“Hey! Somebody put a dent in my car,” screamed out Hortense Madden, as she went to open the door of her Honda. “I bet it was that ass-kissing Cyril Rathbone. As soon as Pauline Mendelson left the projection room, he lost all interest in the evening and took off in a snit. He’s just the type who would back his car into yours and drive off into the night without leaving a note. I’m going to get that little prick tomorrow and make him pay through the nose.”

Philip slammed the door of his car and went over to Hortense’s, with the envelope in his hands. “Nasty dent,” he said. “Will the door open?”

“Let me see,” said Hortense. She tried her door and it opened.

“Could be worse,” said Philip.

“That fucking Cyril Rathbone,” said Hortense, seething with rage. “ ‘Pauline! How marvelous!’ ” she said, in an exact imitation of Cyril’s florid voice.

“I don’t blame you for being in a bad mood, and this is probably the wrong moment, but this is the manuscript I was talking to you about at dinner,” he said.

“What do you want me to do with it?” she asked.

“Just read it,” he said. “And tell me who you think wrote it. I’m at the Chateau Marmont.”

Flo’s Tape #14

“A lot of people think I went to Pooky, the hairdresser, just because he was the hairdresser to Pauline Mendelson, but that is not the case. That’s not the kind of thing I would ever do. I knew Pooky from my days at the Viceroy Coffee Shop. He was a regular, every morning. Juice, whole wheat toast, tea. Never varied. One day he said to me, ‘Rhonda’—I was still called Rhonda then, before I became Flo—‘you’ve got really beautiful hair, but you’re wearing it in the wrong style. Come on in, and I’ll do it for you.’ I almost died. I mean, there were articles about Pooky in the paper, about all the famous ladies whose hair he did, like Faye Converse, Sylvia Lesky, and Pauline Mendelson. I said to him, ‘Are you kidding? I could no more afford you.’ He said, ‘On me.’

“So, of course, I went. I’ve been wearing my hair this way ever since, and that was before I ever met Jules Mendelson. After I started seeing Jules, when I started wearing all the great clothes, and driving the Mercedes, and living in Beverly Hills, I began to pay the same price all the society ladies and the movie stars paid. I know he must have wondered where all the money was coming from, but he never asked any questions. I knew he was happy for me, though, that things had started to go my way.

“He always did Pauline Mendelson’s hair at her house. I only saw that house once, and I never went upstairs, but I understand she had a whole, like, beauty shop of her own right off her dressing room, because she didn’t like going into Pooky’s shop. But one day when I was having my hair done, she walked in. I almost died. She was going back east to visit her father, unexpectedly I guess, and needed to get her hair done quickly. Wouldn’t you know, I was sitting there reading about her in Cyril Rathbone’s column at the time?

“That was the first time I ever thought Pooky might have suspected about me and Jules, because he quickly pulled the curtain behind me, as if he didn’t want her to see me, and went outside the curtain to speak to her. When he came back in to finish me up, he never said a word.”

“D
udley, please throw out the peonies on the upstairs hall table. There’re petals everywhere,” called Pauline the next morning from the top of the stairs.

“Yes, Mrs. Mendelson,” replied Dudley, running up the stairs.

Dudley treasured his employment with the illustrious Mendelson family, and wished things to continue as they had always been. It was no secret among the help in the grander houses of the city that Dudley was recompensed for his services at a salary that far exceeded any of theirs, a knowledge that elevated him to a sort of celebrity status in domestic circles. On the numerous occasions throughout the years of the Mendelson parties, he knew that the guests attending were the greatest and grandest in the land, and it pleased him to be called by name by many of them, especially several of the former Presidents of the country who were regular visitors in the house. It was a measure of the high esteem with which Jules Mendelson held him that only he, and no one else, was allowed to dust van Gogh’s painting of the
White Roses
, which was the most favored possession in the art-filled house.

When Pauline came down to meet Jules for breakfast, she was dressed for traveling in a tweed suit. Her mink coat, which she wore only in the east, had been placed on a gilded chair in the front hall. The size of her two bags, which had already been carried downstairs by Dudley, indicated that she planned only a brief trip. In her hand was a list of things to be attended to in her absence by her staff.