Cheat and Charmer (25 page)

By this time the sun had dipped below the horizon and the air was getting cooler. People were packing up picnic baskets, shaking sand out of towels, ordering kids to pick up their pails and shovels and carry beach balls to the car. Ventura took off his shoes and socks, and Dinah took off hers. After tucking them into the sand, they began to walk north. The sight of his white feet gave her a heart-squeeze of pity and embarrassment—they seemed so tender and European, not like the rough brown extremities of the California boys she knew.

Ventura took her elbow. “I am going to make great American movies,” he said in his resonant bass. “I take old stories from Europe and make them American. The old man, Engel—they call him L.J.,” he said, laughing, “was born in Odessa. Is not so far from Razgrad, and I am Jew and he is Jew, and he say to me, ‘We are landsmen, almost.’ I hope he still think so after I make a movie.”

Dinah told him that someone (it was Veevi) had recently gotten her a job as L.J.’s secretary. The first day, she noticed how overstuffed his filing cabinets were, so she offered to go through them and throw out the old, unnecessary files. Fine, he said, but make copies of them first. Then, a few days later, he heard her talking on the phone, realized she had a stutter, and fired her. He had no idea that she came to his beach house on Sundays. And it made no difference that she was Veevi’s sister. She had quit her job at the paper company, there were no other secretarial jobs at the studio, and she had panicked. She had to have a job, she told Ventura. Her father hadn’t worked in years; her mother made a few dollars altering people’s clothes, but mostly she just looked after her father. At the unemployment office they’d told her that there was an opening at Claggett Oil, where she had been working for the past several months. “I don’t know why I’m t-t-t-telling you all this,” she said finally.

“Because,” he said, stopping, turning her around, and putting his big hands on her shoulders, “you are a very nice girl.”

For a moment she thought he was going to give her a grandfatherly pinch on the cheek, but then he embraced her and kissed her, holding her so tightly she felt the breath squeezed out of her. The stubble from his afternoon shadow was so rough it scraped against her chin. Nothing in her life had prepared her for such an embrace, such a kiss, but she didn’t resist.

This is
it
: I am going to love him for the rest of my life, she thought. He let go of her, and they walked some more, grazing each other’s arms and shoulders. It was dusk, and the beach was deserted. As they walked large waves broke, rushing and foaming up toward their ankles. “Look,” she said. “The tide is coming in.” He took her hand and for a while they stood facing the ocean, watching the waves. He let go of her hand and took her arm. “We go back now?” They turned around and headed back, their feet lightly splashing in the cold water that kept returning and swirling upward to the edges of the packed wet sand. Then he stopped and took her in his arms and kissed her again. “Will you come to my house tonight?” he said, his voice deep and tender.

She turned her face away and put her head on his shoulder. “I c-c-can’t. I’m married,” she said. And she explained that her husband was a bigot who thought everyone at the Engels’ was a Jew and a Communist. But she had to go home to him.

“Why you marry such an imbecile?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. She almost said, “I didn’t know any Jews at the time!”

He crushed her to him. “You are a nice, sweet girl. Not a movie girl. You smell like California. This anti-Semite imbecile husband—does he tell you that?”

“No.” The sound came out muffled as she pressed her face to his chest.

Awkwardly, they slid down to the sand and he lowered himself onto her. From his throat came deep murmurs. He called her “Bebcho” again and again, and she loved the way the word sounded, like a bubble of thick honey. Kissing her, he scraped his face along her cheek, her neck. Her chin stung with the scraping, and she didn’t care.

Still, when he finally plunged inside her and seemed to devour her, she felt that it was not her he wanted but something else—release from loneliness, perhaps, and from uncertainty and worries he hadn’t even begun to mention.

Afterward, as they drove back in silence toward Santa Monica, she kept her eyes on the road and chewed the inside of her cheek. He reached over to squeeze her hand, and her thigh, but his touch seemed kind, not passionate, and she knew at once that she had made a mistake.

When they walked back into the Engels’ house, everyone had already eaten. They were having coffee in the living room, which had enough chintz-covered sofas to accommodate at least thirty people. Thus, there was an audience for Ventura, who, accepting a cognac, explained to Lionel and Edy Engel and their guests that he had just had his first driving lesson. With various physical gestures, he began to caricature himself. Realizing that his story was also meant to protect her, Dinah slipped away to the powder room, where, almost immediately, Veevi barged in.

“Great whisker burn,” she said, her eyes glittering. “You can only see it about a mile away.”

Dinah was putting on fresh lipstick and observed her sister’s face behind her in the mirror. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I got t-t-t-too much sun.”

“Oh, come on. That’s a whisker burn. Besides, the sun went down a long time ago.”

“Okay, so it’s a wh-wh-wh-whisker burn. So what?”

“Well, don’t get any ideas. He’s supposedly a great lecher. He’s bedded every great European actress in the world, including Dietrich. God only knows what kind of pain in the ass he’ll be with
me
once we start shooting the picture. You did it with him, didn’t you?”

“You can’t be serious,” Dinah said, using one of Veevi’s pet phrases. “Why would I do something d-d-d-dumb like that?”

“You’ve got that look. I know you, Ina,” Veevi said, using Dinah’s nickname.

Dinah looked at herself in the mirror. She did have that look. “You’re doing a picture with him?” she said.

“That’s what they tell me,” Veevi said, and shrugged. “Some Russian thing he wants to do American. The thing is, I haven’t actually met him yet. How on earth could you even neck with him, Dinah? He’s so old. And hairy. It would be like necking with a gorilla.” She made a face.

“Listen, Vee. I’ve got to get home to Everett.”

“When are you going to wise up and leave that creep?” Veevi said.

Not answering, Dinah told her sister to thank the Engels for her and was out of the house in seconds.

In the car, she found Ventura’s book and put it in the bag with her beach things. Then, in a storm of blind will, she drove back to town. What had happened with him that afternoon felt like a jagged wooden splinter in her heart, and it had to be brutally yanked out at once. By the time she pulled into the garage, everything she had felt and done that afternoon had been utterly erased, along with her hopes for a great love and an existence somehow larger than the one she had now.

Everett was lying in bed in his pajamas listening to the radio, and she told him that the day had been boring and that she wasn’t going out to the Engels’ again.

“It’s about time you came to your senses,” he said. But when he wanted to make love, she said she had gotten scraped by sand while bodysurfing and was just too sore all over to do anything. He looked at her chin and went to get some iodine, which burned as he applied it on a raw patch of skin. The next night, however, she couldn’t find an excuse.

She stopped phoning her sister, and when Veevi called to ask about her, Dinah said she was tired from work. On Sundays, she helped out at the restaurant, thrusting her hands into mounds of raw hamburger meat and listening to the conversations between Everett and his father. They used the same words her father did:
Jewboy, kike, nigger, wop, chink
. They said
things like “The world is going to hell in a handbasket” and “That Adolf Hitler has some good ideas. They ought to pay more attention to him over here.” On Saturdays she went to the library, trying to remember the names of writers whose names she had heard at the Engels’. In this way she found Hemingway and Saroyan, Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis. But she was careful to cover them in the jackets from the Christian Science books Everett’s mother liked to lend her. For Christmas that year, she gave Dinah Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s
North to the Orient
, the jacket of which was soon used for camouflage while the book itself remained unread. Out at the Engels’, Dinah had heard that Lindbergh was a big pal of Hitler’s.

And then four months later her mother called to announce that Veevi and Ventura had eloped to Mexico City and that they had just wired to say they were coming home. The next time Dinah saw her sister and the director, it was on a Sunday at the beach house in Malibu the suddenly famous couple had just bought, where they were having a reception. Dinah went with her mother and father. Everett, always indifferent to Veevi, had insisted on going to work at the restaurant.

Dinah’s breath came in shallow gasps, and she was afraid her knees would buckle. Her hands were damp, and her heart was racing. A large crowd had gathered in the broad sun-filled living room, all its windows open to the ocean air, and Dinah recognized many faces. Tal Engel’s brother, Irv, was sitting on a sofa between two women. On his right was Norma Levine; to his left sat a small blonde with shy, intelligent eyes. He was holding hands with her, but seemed preoccupied. She was appraising the house and scrutinizing faces as if she were trying to decide whom she ought to be afraid of, whom she should try to meet, and whom she could safely ignore. A college girl from the East, thought Dinah, noticing the girl’s very correct beige outfit and cloche. At the sight of the diamond on the girl’s left hand, Dinah’s heart sank. They’re all getting married, she thought.

She looked around for Tal Engel, but he was nowhere in sight, though she saw L.J. and Edy holding glasses of champagne and talking with various people who, at least up till now, had been regulars at their house on weekends. How, Dinah wondered, had Veevi broken things off with Tal, and when? How soon after Dinah’s own little episode with Ventura had he met Veevi and fallen in love with her? That same night, after she had gone home, when he had finished regaling the crowd with the story of his driving lesson? Perhaps even before she turned off the Pacific Coast Highway onto Sunset!

But what was she doing here? She ought to be with her husband, living the life she had chosen—the life, she reminded herself, of the ignorant, bigoted, small-minded petit-bourgeois drudge. If only she could find a way to get out of it, she thought, sipping her champagne, which gave her, instantly, a headache. There had to be some way out. But it wasn’t going to happen here, in her newly married and famous sister’s beachfront living room with the Early American antiques and big braided rugs.

Hoping to postpone the moment when she would have to face the happy couple and offer her congratulations, she made her way out to the veranda. It was a terrible mistake to have come, but she was stuck, because of her parents. They were sitting in silence side by side on a sofa, eating large slices of wedding cake. She felt sorry for them. No one was interested in them, and they had long ago ceased to be interested in each other.

She felt like going for a walk along the water, but there was the problem of her stockings. She couldn’t very well take them off here. She stood hesitating near the wooden steps leading down to the sand when she felt a large, heavy hand clamp down on her shoulder and pivot her around.

“Ah, it
is
you!
Tseluvki
,
tseluvki
, kisses, kisses,” said a deep voice that could only be Ventura’s. He caught her in a tight hug and kissed her on both cheeks. “I see you and I think, Ah, I find you again!” he said. “And where is the imbecile husband?”

She shook her head.

“He not come this time, too? No?” He grabbed her hand. “It’s …”

“Dinah,” she said.

“Dinah! Yes, Dinah! Such an American name! Come, Dinah, and meet my beautiful young wife. You will be great friends, I know.”

He had forgotten her name. Do not cry, she commanded herself. You are now Sarah Bernhardt. Hold yourself erect. Do not falter!

He took her by the elbow and steered her over to her sister, who was stunning in a simple red crepe dress. Veevi leaned forward to be kissed, hardly a gesture Dinah was used to. But she kissed her sister and embraced her. The muscles in her face were sagging and twitching with the need to cry, but she forced herself to smile.

“Veevi,” said Dinah to Ventura, “is my sister. Congr-gr-gr-gratulations to you both.”

If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. “Then you are my sister, too. And you still teach me to drive?”

“If you l-l-l-like,” Dinah said a little stiffly.

“Darling,” said Veevi, taking Ventura’s arm. “I told you I had a sister. Dinah’s the best driver I know. You can feel completely safe with her.” She glanced up at him with a look Dinah would have called adoring, except that she didn’t for a moment believe that Veevi adored him, any more than she had adored, or even loved, Tal Engel. Then Veevi caught Dinah’s eye, and in her look Dinah saw her sister saying, “You didn’t honestly think you had a chance, did you?” It was a look that demanded acknowledgment of a fait accompli, not so much a triumph but merely the simple fact of what was Veevi’s due, and therefore in the cosmic order of things. Veevi was going to take whatever life gave her. Her look said, “I’m out of it now, out of that lower-middle-class hell that you, with your hopeless lack of style and your awful stutter and your loser husband, are doomed to stay in for the rest of your life. You want to be there? Fine. But me? I’m out of it, forever.”