An Inconvenient Woman (65 page)

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She was awakened by a sound. She knew there was someone in her house. At first she thought it might be Lonny, returning for her when he discovered she wasn’t at the bungalow on Cahuenga Boulevard, as she had promised him she would be. But the sounds she heard were not the Lonny sounds she had become accustomed to during the month they had been living together on Azelia Way, the sounds of slammed refrigerator doors, belches, and the television set turned on far too loud. She lay where she was on the gray satin sofa without moving, as if she were still asleep. From behind her she heard a breathing sound and realized that the person in her house was in the same room, by the fireplace. Very slowly she sat up on her sofa and turned her head to see the figure of a man rifling through the packing boxes on the floor. The definition of his face was obliterated by a woman’s stocking pulled over it.

“Lonny, is that you?” she asked, even though she knew it wasn’t Lonny. Her voice was tinny and high-pitched. She could feel the frightened beating of her heart pounding against her chest. Her fingers stiffened. Her lips, her nose, even the follicles of her hair began to tingle with fear. “What are you doing in my house? Why are you ripping those cartons and bags apart? Who are you? What are you looking for?”

The man did not reply. Very quietly, he stood up. She saw in his hand one of the brass candlesticks from China with the dragon crawling up the side, and a red tag on it to identify it as one of the pieces to go into the moving van for storage the next morning.

“That’s Chinese,” said Flo. She was breathing very heavily. “That’s an antique. One of the dynasties, Jules told me. Ming, maybe. I could never get it straight. What are you doing with it? Why are you coming toward me like that? Please. Don’t. Is it the tapes? Is that what you want? Those damn tapes. Is that it? Take the tapes. They’re in the other room. Oh, no.”

She watched the brass candlestick descend to bash in the side of her head. “Oh, dear God,” she said. She raised her hands to cover her face. “No, not my face. Please don’t hit me in the face, please, mister. Not my face, please.” The sapphire in the diamond-and-sapphire ring that Jules had given her, which she told Cyril Rathbone would be on her finger when she died, smashed from the force of the next blow. Her lip-sticked lips moved again, but her attacker knew that she was only saying a prayer. “Oh, dear God, help me, help me” were
her last audible words. The sounds that came from her mouth through the next eight blows were prayers, “HailM​aryfu​llofg​racet​helor​diswi​ththee,” indecipherable to her attacker, asking God to forgive her sins, asking her mother for help, asking Jules to let her die before she was hit again, because she knew, before the first blow landed, that there was no rescue for her.

Flo’s Tape #28

“I know I should be thinking about this damn book, but all that I can think of these days is what’s going to happen to me. It’s a terrible feeling to think that the best things that have happened to me have already happened, and everything else is going to be downhill from here. But no matter how hard I try to visualize what my life will be like from here on, I can’t seem to come up with a picture. What the hell does that mean?”

“P
hilip. Once you said to me that you had caused a girl to be paralyzed and that it had changed your life forever,” said Camilla.

Philip Quennell’s romance with Camilla Ebury had lasted the better part of a year. During that time she had given thoughts to marriage, but he consistently made it clear that he resisted permanence in love. In his past there was a nameless girl whose life he had thwarted, for whom he felt a responsibility that precluded such thoughts, and Camilla learned to accept what she had for as long as it lasted. They had loved and fought and parted and made up and loved again, and the arrangement, finally understood by each of them, brought pleasure to both.

On their last night together before Philip returned to New York, they dined alone in Camilla’s house and then made love with the same ferocity and frequency as they had on their first night, following their meeting at Jules and Pauline Mendelson’s party on the evening of his arrival in the city.

Philip got up from the bed. Camilla watched him as he opened the door of her closet and took out his blue-and-white-striped dressing gown and put it on. He walked over to her dressing table and pulled the chair from its place so that the back of it was facing the bed. Then he straddled it and looked at her as he started to speak.

“Her name was Sophie Bushnell. Her name
is
Sophie Bushnell, I should say. She is alive, but alive in a wheelchair because of me.”

“I want to hear, Philip,” said Camilla.

With his finger he traced the design on the back of the chair as he talked, looking at it. “We were in her car, but I was driving, too fast, over a causeway that separated the part of
town where she lived from the part of town where I lived. We had been drinking. I hit an abutment. She broke her neck.”

He raised his eyes and looked at Camilla.

“Is there more?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“I was trouserless at the time.” He rose from his seat and walked into her bathroom.

“Is that why you’re so afraid to commit?” she asked when he came out.

“Pretty good reason, don’t you think?”

“I’ll miss you,” she said later, laying her head against his chest.

“Me too,” he answered. He placed both his arms around her.

“You’ve turned me into a wanton woman.”

“It’s what you were born to be.”

“It won’t really be over, will it?”

“You know it won’t.”

“There’ll be other times.”

“Of course.”

“You’ll come out?”

“Sure.”

Philip could not bear leave-takings. It was arranged between them that there would be no morning farewells. When he kissed her good night, he told her he would be gone before she awoke in the morning. Philip was always up before six to attend his AA meeting at the log cabin on Robertson Boulevard, and Camilla, more often than not, slept late; so the morning of his leaving was no different from their usual routine, except that she did get up and make him a cup of coffee while he was shaving and showering. Their last kiss was just a peck, as if he were off to the office for the day or, with his packed bags, off on a business trip, although he would not have honked his horn twice at the end of the driveway if he were just off for the day or for a business trip.

He planned to see Flo March at the meeting and take her out for a cup of coffee afterward, before he left for the airport.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” Flo had said to him at the meeting the day before, when they made their coffee date.

“I do worry. You’re the most fragile tough girl I ever knew,” he answered.

“Is that good?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He had an urge to kiss her.

“How’s Camilla?” she asked, understanding his urge.

He laughed.

“You don’t think my life is complicated enough?” she asked. “I’ll give you a nice AA hug, though.”

They both laughed.

“Listen, there’s something I want to talk to you about before you go,” she said. “Of a business nature.”

Driving toward West Hollywood, he imagined that what she wanted to talk about had to do with the book that she had been writing with Cyril Rathbone before his death. His plan was to advise her to leave Los Angeles and start anew someplace else, where her name was less well known.

He saved a seat for her by putting his car keys on the chair next to his, but Flo March did not appear at the meeting. When the room became crowded, and there were not enough seats for all, he picked up the keys and relinquished the chair. Every time a latecomer entered the room, he looked anxiously toward the door. A feeling of unrest came over him. He tried to focus his attention on the talk being given by a former surgeon who told of operating on a patient while he was drunk, but he could not concentrate on the man’s pain. Halfway through the talk, he rose and went outside. There was a public telephone on the corner of the street. He dialed Flo’s number. The ring had a peculiar tone, and then the recorded voice of an operator came on and said that the number he was dialing was no longer in service. He wondered if the telephone company had disconnected her phone for nonpayment of her bill, or if she had ordered it to be disconnected because she was moving. His feelings of unease about Flo returned.

When he got into his car, he found that it was blocked by the cars in front of him and behind him, both of which had parked too closely, and he could not get out. He knew he would have to wait for the end of the meeting for the occupants to come and move their vehicles. Just then a yellow cab turned the corner to drop off a latecomer in front of the log cabin. Philip recognized that it was Rose Cliveden, hiding behind dark glasses and a head scarf that were meant to disguise her, although no one at the meeting would have known
who she was, even if she announced her name and bank balance.

He ducked down into his car, not wanting to be waylaid by Rose. In her sobriety, she talked as much as she had talked when she was drinking. Turning, she saw him and waved as she approached his car.

“I need your advice, Philip,” she said. “I’m scheduled to speak tomorrow on my three-month anniversary, and I have the most awful confession to make.”

“Rose, I’m in rather a hurry this morning,” answered Philip.

“You see, I never heard the word grandiosity until I came into the program, and I’m afraid I’ve been very guilty of it,” she said, as if Philip had not spoken. “For years, almost thirty, I’ve always told people I had an affair with Jack Kennedy, in the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House. I think I even discussed it with you on the first night we met. Do you remember? You said to me, ‘What kind of a fuck was Jack Kennedy?’ And I told you he was a marvelous lover until he came, and then he couldn’t stand to be touched, because of all that Irish Catholic guilt. Do you remember all that?”

“Yes, Rose, I remember, but—”

“Well, I just made it all up.”

“Rose, please, I must go,” he said, but there was no getting rid of Rose Cliveden when Rose was discussing herself.

“It wasn’t true. I never went to bed with Jack Kennedy. But I told it so many times I began to believe it. I thought it made me a more interesting woman. How do you think that would sound when I speak on my anniversary tomorrow? Is that the sort of thing they like to hear?”

Philip looked outside the car as the taxi that Rose had gotten out of began backing up in order to turn around. He began to talk very quickly. “That’s not really the point, Rose, whether they would like to hear it or not. You see, it’s not an entertainment when you speak. You only have to say that you made up stories to enhance your importance during the years you were drinking,” said Philip. “But I really must go, Rose. I have to be somewhere.”

“Do you think I should write Jackie and apologize for telling that awful story?”

“No. Good-bye, Rose. I’m going to try and grab your taxi. I can’t get my car out of here.”

As Rose disappeared inside the log cabin, he opened the
door of his car and ran after the cab, waving his arms to attract the attention of the driver.

“Please,” he said, when he got to the cab. “Can you take me to Azelia Way? It’s halfway up Coldwater Canyon.”

“Can’t, fella. I’m a Beverly Hills cab in West Hollywood. I’m not supposed to pick up customers off the streets out of my own district, or I could get a fine. Sorry.”

“This is important,” said Philip. He didn’t understand why he felt a sense of urgency. He took a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket and handed it to the driver. “Nobody’s looking. Nobody’s going to report you. It’s only twenty minutes past seven. The streets are still empty.”

“Does the fare come out of the twenty?”

“No. The twenty’s on top of the fare.”

“Hop in.”

When they turned off Coldwater Canyon onto Azelia Way, the taxi driver said, “Oh, Azelia Way. That’s where Faye Converse lives.”

“The house I’m going to is the first house past Faye Converse’s house,” said Philip.

“I know her maid,” said the driver.

“Uh-huh,” said Philip.

“Glyceria.”

“What?”

“Her maid’s name is Glyceria. I drive her to the bus station every night. Faye pays.”

“It’s right here,” said Philip. “Turn here.”

“Oh, no, fella. That driveway’s too steep. I’ll never be able to turn around up there. You can get out here.”

Philip paid the driver. He hopped out of the cab and ran up the hill. The grass had turned brown and had not been cut. The shrubbery along the path to the front door looked ragged, in need of clipping. When he got to the door, he rang the bell. There was no answer. Then he rang again. He tried the front door, and it was unlocked. When he opened it, he called out, “Flo?” He waited a moment. Then he called again. “Flo? Are you here, Flo? It’s Philip. Can I come in?”

There was no answer. He peered inside. There were cartons and packing cases and shopping bags along the walls of the hallway, in preparation for moving, but they had been torn apart, and the contents were scattered. He wondered if there had been a robbery, or if vandals had gotten into the house. As he walked in, he saw that the living room was in
shambles. He walked down the hallway to the bedroom. The bed had not been slept in, and there were half-packed bags on it. The door to the elaborate dressing room that Flo had had built was open. All the drawers were pulled out, and blouses and sweaters and stockings and belts and lingerie were hanging out of them, as if the place had been ransacked.