An Inconvenient Woman (4 page)

“I take it the Latino twirling you around was the place-card mover Hector Paradiso?” asked Philip, as he allowed himself to be led out to the dance floor.

“Yes, that’s Hector. He’s one of those men who’s never off the dance floor,” answered Camilla.

“All the ladies seem smitten with Hector,” said Philip.

“Yes, in a way, I suppose,” said Camilla. “He and Rose aren’t speaking at the moment, but they’re best friends at heart.”

“I gather. She has a broken toe.”

“Rose always has a broken something. She falls a lot.”

“What do they all see in Hector?” Philip asked.

“He’s really Pauline’s pet. Pauline adores him. He makes her laugh and tells her all the gossip. They say Hector’s in love with Pauline, but I don’t see it like that. Just very close friends,” said Camilla.

“Why do I think that under all that Latin charm and cha-cha-cha, he leads a very complicated life.”

“I think it’s only fair to tell you that Hector Paradiso is my uncle.”

“Oh, God. That’s the second time in fifteen minutes I’ve put my foot in it. Want me to take you back to the table?”

“No, but I wouldn’t mind if you danced a little closer. There, that’s better. I was supposed to go home with Rose, but I wouldn’t dream of driving down the mountain with her in the condition she’s in.”

“Not to worry. She’s staying here for the night. Blondell has already turned down the bed in the guest room.”

“You certainly know a lot for a stranger in these parts.”

“True.”

“You’re a pretty good dancer too,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“I asked my uncle Hector to drive me home, but he said he wanted to stay until the bitter end and talk over the party with Pauline,” said Camilla.

“Just between us, I think Pauline and Jules are going to want to be alone when the party ends,” said Philip. “Kippie is back in town.”

“Kippie? He is? How in the world do you know that?”

“I just know.”

Camilla nodded, looking at him, but did not miss a beat of her dance step. “Maybe Hector just had a late date and didn’t want to tell me. It wouldn’t be the first time. God knows where Hector ends up when the parties are over.”

“Tell me about Kippie.”

“Handsome. Hair too long, or was, the last time I saw him. Always in trouble. He got Madge White’s daughter pregnant when they were both only fourteen. Oh, what a to-do about that! Takes drugs. Or did, I don’t know about now. He’s been in a rehab, somewhere in France,” said Camilla.

It was the sort of answer Philip liked. “Succinct,” he said.

“What?”

“Your answer.”

“Thanks.”

“How old?”

“Kippie?”

“Yes.”

“I think he was three, or maybe four, when Pauline married Jules.”

“So, twenty-five or twenty-six now,” he said.

“Why this sudden fascination with Kippie?”

“You know what? I don’t know,” he said, and they both laughed.

They continued to dance. Behind them Jules and several friends were helping Rose, who was loudly singing the lyrics to “Camelot,” to make as graceful an exit as possible. Blondell, Pauline’s maid, stood waiting at the entrance of the room for her. Then Philip remembered that it was his birthday.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Midnight,” she answered. “Don’t tell me you have jet lag, and it’s really three o’clock in the morning your time, and you have to go home. I hate jet-lag stories.”

Philip laughed. “I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say something entirely different.”

“Like what?” asked Camilla.

“Like how about a club soda at your house?”

“Oh, the wickedness of it.”

“Well?”

“I do need a ride home,” she said, pulling back her head from his cheek and looking at him.

“I was hoping you’d say that,” said Philip.

Flo’s Tape #1

“
I was perfectly content to be his mistress. The guy had a wife. I understood that. I couldn’t have done the things his wife did, all those parties, all that swank. He needed that kind of wife for his kind of life. But I could do things his wife couldn’t do. I mean, the guy had a dick like a mule’s. Not many girls could handle that. I could. I mean, you know, we’re all good at something. That’s what I’m good at
.”

J
ules Mendelson always arose at five o’clock to be shaved by a barber called Willi, who came to his home every morning at five-thirty, when it was still dark. It was a practice that Willi had been performing for Jules for twenty-five years, and for which he was handsomely recompensed with a small and very successful barber shop on Sunset Boulevard that was backed by Jules’s money. It was understood that Willi would not speak unless spoken to, as Jules liked to think about the business affairs of the day ahead during that time, except on the mornings when a haircut took place as well as the shave, and then the two men exchanged baseball and football scores, for both were passionately interested in spectator sports.

Jules was in the habit of leaving Clouds for his office by six o’clock, in order to receive telephone calls from his associates in New York when the stock market opened and to talk with his partners in London. Invariably, with a private sign to Pauline, he slipped away from their parties at eleven, without saying good night to anyone, so as not to break up the evening, and Pauline carried on until the last guest left. The last guest was always Hector Paradiso. Hector liked to wander through the rooms with Pauline, helping her blow out candles and making sure the butler and maids had emptied all the ashtrays. Then it was their habit to settle down in the library with a last glass of champagne, beneath the van Gogh picture of the
White Roses
, and discuss every detail of the evening. It was a ritual they both enjoyed and looked forward to as the perfect denouement of the party. So it was a surprise to Hector, who had something urgent to say to Pauline, when Pauline, after she had blown out the candles, told him that she had a killing headache, “simply killing, darling,” and was going directly to bed without their usual postparty chat and
glass of champagne. She did not tell him that Kippie had returned to town.

Hector Paradiso loved Pauline Mendelson without ever having to play the role of lover, a relationship understood by them both, without its ever having been verbalized by either. Never was Hector happier than on those evenings, which had become increasingly frequent, when Jules was busy working, or away from the city, and he was pressed into service as Pauline’s escort at a charity benefit, or a museum or ballet or opera opening. The photographers always went mad over Pauline Mendelson, who had achieved celebrity status in the social and fashion press, and Hector stood by her side smiling widely, sometimes even waving, as if the media acknowledgment were equally for him and his family’s place in the history of the city.

Driving down the mountain from Clouds after the Mendelsons’ party, Hector marveled at Pauline, at the utter perfection of her. Hector was a gossip. It was a thing about him everyone knew, and no one knew better than Pauline, but one of the people he never gossiped about was Pauline Mendelson. For Hector never to have mentioned to a single soul in the whole world what he knew about Jules Mendelson and Flo March was a measure of his utter devotion to Pauline.

Hector led a compartmentalized existence; people who were intimate with him in certain areas of his life knew nothing of the other areas, and it had always been so with him. Tall, dashing, bald, and fit, he looked younger than his forty-eight years. He was that rare sort of man whose looks had improved with the loss of his hair. Dancing, he always said, kept his waistline as slim, or almost as slim, as it had been at twenty-five, although tennis, which he played on Rose Cliveden’s court every weekend, also helped. He was often described as being a descendant of one of the Spanish Land Grant families, like the Sepulvedas and the Figueroas, who had major boulevards named after them, in recognition of their involvement in the founding of the city; and he never did not enjoy the moment when a new person heard his surname, Paradiso, and asked, “As in Paradiso Boulevard, on the way to the airport?”

The fortune his family once possessed had long since evaporated, but he lived more than comfortably, for a person who didn’t work, on a trust fund left by his sister, Thelma Worthington, the mother of Camilla Ebury, who had killed
herself a dozen years ago after an unhappy love affair. His small but perfect house on Humming Bird Way, between Oriole and Thrush, in the Hollywood Hills, had been photographed for a house magazine and had been the scene for many a cocktail party through the years. He often said that his was one of the few houses where the many diversified groups of the city overlapped. They did, but not at the same time.

Anyone who wanted to know anything about Los Angeles society always called Hector. He knew the answers because he knew everyone, and those he didn’t know, he knew about. “We may not all know each other, but we all know who each other is,” he was fond of saying. He was able to interconnect the old families of the city for generations back. Like old Bronwyn Doheny, Caroline Phillips’s mother, age ninety-one, whose funeral was to be held the next day at All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills. “Bronwyn was born a Parkhurst,” he said to his friend, Cyril Rathbone, who wrote a social column for
Mulholland
, explaining it all in a nutshell. “She was Judge Parkhurst’s second daughter. Her grandfather built that enormous French house on West Adams Boulevard, which is now the Center for the Church of the Heavenly Light. That whole neighborhood has gone black, you know. When I was just a child, I used to go to Caroline’s birthday parties in that house before they moved to Hancock Park. Now, Bronwyn’s first husband—who was
not
, I repeat not, Caroline’s real father, that’s another story entirely—was Monroe Whittier, and then when Monroe died, she married Justin Mulholland, who embezzled the money, do you remember that story? Now Justin Mulholland, who died in jail, was the first cousin of Rose Cliveden.” When Hector Paradiso wasn’t dancing, that was the sort of conversation he could carry on for hours, and did, when he was spending the evening with the kind of people he had grown up with, or, at least, the first part of the evenings, the part that preceded midnight. He was, furthermore, and had been for many years, the man who led the cotillion and taught the debutantes how to curtsy to the ground at the Las Madrinas Ball, where the daughters of the Los Angeles elite made their bow to society.

After midnight, Hector Paradiso’s life took on a very different aspect, one that might have shocked some of his Angeleno friends. Even as sophisticated a couple as Pauline and Jules Mendelson could not have guessed the extent of his
late-night adventures, looking for strangers to pay to kiss. Although they might have suspected there was another element to Hector’s life—he had, after all, never married—it was not a subject ever voiced, even by people like Rose Cliveden, who often fought with Hector, but who fully intended to leave him the life use of one of her trust funds, should she die before him. Earlier, in his youth, there had been women in his life, like Astrid Vartan, the late ice skating star to whom he had once been engaged, and even, briefly, Rose Cliveden herself. Rose, who was never at a loss for words, reported that his equipment, as she called it, was minimal—“a rosebud, darling, no more”—but that he was marvelously adroit with his tongue. After midnight, Hector visited places that his friends in high society had never heard of, much less visited. One of these, more reputable than some he frequented, was Miss Garbo’s.

Miss Garbo’s was a late-night cabaret club located on a short street in West Hollywood called Astopovo, between Santa Monica Boulevard and Melrose Avenue. Hector, ever mindful of his own importance, even in an area where it was highly unlikely that he would run into any of the kind of people he knew from the main part of his life, pulled his small Mercedes into the rear of the parking lot himself, rather than give it to a parking boy in front of the club, so that, when he left, he would not have to stand in front of the club, possibly with a companion in questionable dress, and wait for his car to be brought around for him. A stickler for appearances, Hector always thought of things like that. He wished there were a rear door that he could enter, and it occurred to him to speak to Manning Einsdorf, the owner of Miss Garbo’s, to put one in so that people like himself, who didn’t like to be talked about, could enter and leave the club in complete anonymity, especially when wearing a dinner jacket like he was that night, having come directly down the mountain from the Mendelsons’ party.

“Hi, Hector,” a loud voice called out from the crowded bar, and he turned to see Joel Zircon, a Hollywood agent who was also a regular in the place, standing at the bar with a friend.

“Hello, Joel,” replied Hector, not matching the familiar tone of Joel’s voice.

“Say hi to Willard Parker,” said Joel, introducing his friend. “Willard’s Casper Stieglitz’s butler.”

“Hello, Hector,” said Willard, putting out his hand. Willard already knew who Hector Paradiso was, and was anxious to make his acquaintance so as to be able to claim the social figure as a friend.