Cheat and Charmer (12 page)

“Hush, Jake,” she said. “Stop the filibuster. I can’t l-l-l-listen anymore.”

Soon it would be time for dinner. Gussie would probably send up one of the kids to knock on their door. She was relaxed, finally. Her breathing slowed and she slipped into a half sleep. Jake had stopped talking, but only for a moment, and as he felt her drifting off he whispered: “Don’t you imagine for one second that I’m telling you I love you because of what you did for me today. I’ve always loved you. I’m not so good at all that romantic stuff—I know I could do a lot better in that department. But the girl I love is the girl who had it in her to go and face those guys. I know that girl, and I’ve loved her ever since I met her.”

She raised her head and, opening one eye, gave him a skeptical look. “Oh yeah? If that’s so, why’d I have to tell you ‘marry me or we’re through’? Huh? Just answer that one, b-b-b-buster.”

“I plead the Fifth.” He watched her for a moment, congratulating himself for his tact in not attempting to make love to her. Later would be better; he had to give her time.

After dinner with the children, they went for a long drive along the Pacific Coast Highway. Jake parked the car at the beach, and they took off their
shoes and walked together, arms around each other’s waists. “Remember when,” Jake said, “we tried to camp out here and we had the two sleeping bags and”—she took over—“you were so c-c-c-cold you put on three sweaters and your overcoat and a knit cap and gloves and got inside your sleeping bag and then said to me, ‘Let’s do it’?” “And all those nights we danced to Fats Waller,” he said, “and we’d do it on the floor and on the sofa and then again in the shower and after that at four in the morning and one more time at six and then you had to go home and get ready for work?”

The memories continued—memories of lovemaking in sleeping cars on the way to New York, hotels in Coronado and Acapulco, raftered lodges on salmon-fishing trips in Oregon. The secret fear they each harbored—that perhaps they’d been married too long and the passion had died—melted away as the memories kindled the sharpest desire they had felt in years.

And so, while the great cornball ocean served up a succession of crashing waves, they sank to their knees, and tumbled backward, trying to ignore the cold air and colder sand. They hugged and writhed and kissed, Dinah hiking up her dress while Jake tugged at her girdle and garters. Dinah reached out and groped for Jake’s fly, tugging and tugging. The zipper yielded, then stuck. In a lustful lunge, she tightened her grip on the metal pull and yanked hard. “Honoré de Balzac! Honoré de Balzac!” Jake cried out in alarm, and Dinah dissolved in a fusillade of wanton laughter.

“Oh, honey, your thing’s not c-c-c-caught, is it? Jesus, did I hurt you? Come on,” she whispered, pulling down her dress. “Let’s get the hell out of here and go home to our own bed.”

“Yours or mine?”

“I don’t care. As long as it doesn’t have sand in it!”

O
n the way downstairs the next morning, she felt moist and squishy between her legs, and as she moved she could smell, underneath her light bathrobe, the pungent scent of Jake’s semen now resident many hours within her. This was something women never discussed, she thought, the way the lingering semen, the fermenting smell of it, was proof that you belonged to your husband. It made you feel like a watered plant: you would live a few more days. She would wait until evening to shower, wanting to spend the day knowing it was there, washing away its traces only before bed, so that Jake might not meet with the smell and find offensively female that which, after all, had come from himself. Maybe last night they’d hit the jackpot. Maybe six weeks from now she would feel little spasms low in her belly, followed by barely perceptible flutters and fugitive cramps, always for her the signs of the nesting egg settling in for its nine-month sleep. She longed for the heavy tiredness and tender breasts, the headaches and nausea, which she had borne twice before and was eager to bear again.

On the table in the breakfast room, she found a note: “Darling, see front page Met. section, p. 4. I adore you. J.”

She poured herself a cup of coffee, drew the paper closer, and read:

“RED” INQUIRY TESTIMONY REVEALED
Westwood Housewife Tells of
Break with CP Unit

The article continued with excerpts from her testimony. Seeing her words in print surprised Dinah. She didn’t remember what exactly she had said, only the bad air, the sweat growing cold in her silk dress, Marlow picking at his neck, Kingman’s revolting handkerchief.

“Mrs. Lasker named as fellow Communists the screenwriters Norman Metzger, Anatole Klein, and Guy Bergman,” the article said, “as well as the well-known actors’ agent Renna Schlossberg. She referred to the possible Communist Party membership of former screenwriter Dorshka Albrecht and the late European director Stefan Ventura. However, she unequivocally affirmed that her sister, the actress Genevieve Milligan, was a member of the Communist Party in Los Angeles from 1936 until the departure for Europe of Miss Milligan and her then husband, Mr. Ventura, in early 1939. Miss Milligan, who has retired from the screen, currently lives in France and is married to the American writer Michael Albrecht. Said Congressman Kingman, ‘Mrs. Lasker’s willingness to testify about her past association with the Communist Party is an encouraging sign of loyalty and patriotism. We hope other former Communists will come forward and cooperate with us as fully as she has, and help us root out this blight on our American way of life.’ ”

Dinah grabbed the newspaper, her coffee cup and Camels, and raced up the back stairs to Jake’s office. There was something she had to do at once, and she had no time to lose.

She locked the door and sat down at Jake’s mahogany desk, with its worn, tooled-leather trim. A gray steel typing table was at a right angle to the desk, and held a big black Royal typewriter, the keys marked with gold letters. Feeling suddenly hesitant and frightened, Dinah forced herself to
go on. Opening a drawer, she saw a single sheet of paper with the typed heading “Random Notes.” She picked it up and read. It contained lines, some heard, some made up, that Jake had collected, thinking they might be useful someday in his work. There were names in front of some of the lines. After the name “Pop”—her father—her husband had written: “If you see a Jew or a Negro coming down the street, cross over to the other side, or you’ll lose ten percent.” Having heard her father say that repeatedly during her childhood, she was sixteen when she finally said to him, “Ten percent of
what
, Pop?”

“Who made me a judge?” Jake had typed out. “You’re askin’ me, and I’m the judge.” That was Gussie’s, from one of their conversations about baseball.

There were others:

Somewhere in a file cabinet there were dozens of these. At night, when he couldn’t sleep, Jake came in here and typed until all hours of the morning. Gussie was always finding little slips of paper with lines scribbled on them when she turned his pockets out before doing the laundry. She kept them in envelopes and would give them to him when he passed through the kitchen, saying “Here, Mr. Lasker, I got some more of them state secrets for you.”

Dinah hurriedly stuck the sheet back in the drawer, feeling a little
guilty for trespassing. Jake didn’t mind it when she used his office, but she shouldn’t be going through his things. Remembering that he kept the typing paper in the bottom drawer, she retrieved two sheets and fitted them together against the platen before rolling them through.

At first, she wrote easily. Her typing was still fast and accurate. Then she stopped. A fit of yawning overtook her, and she felt heavy-limbed and dull. She lit a cigarette and, chewing at the edge of her red manicured thumbnail, stared out at the fog. More stupefying yawns overcame her, but she forced herself to type as fast as she could. Her fingers flew—the old speed, developed over eleven years of office work, returned, and the typewriter rang with one little zing after another as she filled up the page.

She stopped, glanced over what she had written, and pulled the paper out, tearing it and dropping the pieces in the wastebasket. Then she inserted fresh paper and began typing again.

“It was you they wanted me to name
,” she wrote. The fresh ribbon made the letters clear and black, and the underlining nearly cut through the good bond paper, making her think back vividly to Maggie Reilly, the bitch supervisor at Sprague Paper, who used to run her hand along the back of each typed sheet and make the girls retype any pages on which her fingertips could detect the minuscule nubs of dotted
i
’s. Dinah remembered, too, in a flood of conjured-up odors and textures, the paper cuffs she used to put on to prevent carbon-paper stains, the Ediphone earphones that would muss her permanent, the rat droppings that would fall down into the ladies’ room sinks from nests in the dust and oil that accumulated from the printing presses on the floor above.

Hurriedly, she wrote: