Cheat and Charmer (26 page)

“I know you’ll both be very happy,” Dinah said, capitulating at once, looking back and forth from her sister’s eyes to Ventura’s face, which revealed nothing—not so much as a flicker of memory to acknowledge what had happened between them.

“I hope you come and see us often,” said Ventura. “Our house is your house.”

“Oh,” she said, “I have a job, and I help my husband at the restaurant on w-w-w-weekends, and it’s an awfully long ride from Hollywood out to Malibu. But th-th-th-thanks.” She didn’t understand why he seemed to like her so much, yet his kind eyes lingered on her face, and she felt that he genuinely wanted to be friends. It was more than she could stand for the moment. “Well, I’m going to find M-M-M-Mom and Pop and see if they’re ready to go home. Mom’s probably trying to wash all the dishes, and Pop’s wishing he were somewhere in the Sierras. Have you met him yet?” she said pointedly to Ventura.

“For only a moment. I don’t think he likes me,” Ventura said, grinning.

“You have to remember that my sister is the love of his life. That and the fact that he’s a real, one-hundred-percent red-blooded American b-b-b-bigot. Very d-d-d-democratic—hates everyone equally. If you keep those things in mind, you and he will do just fine. Oh,” she added. “I almost forgot. Stefan, I have your Pushkin. May I keep it? You won’t mind, will you? I gather the picture’s already been made!”

He laughed. “Would you like to see it?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Ah, then you come to a preview. Right, darling?” he said to Veevi. “When we know where, we tell you and you come.”

“Of course,” said Veevi. “But I’m warning you: Dinah has a sharp tongue and strong opinions.”

For a moment Dinah felt embraced by both of them, and she began to feel that she might enjoy coming again. Then she wandered off and went back out to the veranda, where she stared at the ocean—immense, blue, free of people.
I thought you said doing it with him would be like doing it with a gorilla
, pounded through her head.
I thought you said he was a lecher
. He must have taken one look at Veevi and just about died, she thought.

Still, she couldn’t deny that she wanted to know him better. He wanted to be friends? Fine. They would be like brother and sister. She would make him laugh. Perhaps next time he would even remember her name.

It took her almost two more years, but one Saturday morning she got up at five and on the table in the breakfast nook she placed a note she had typed at the office:
Dear Everett, It’s over. Good-bye, Dinah
. Taking the suitcase she had packed and hidden away the night before, she went noiselessly out to her car and drove into the fading dark toward Malibu. Veevi had met her one day after work in the park across from the Beverly Hills Hotel and given her a key, so she was able to let herself in. She knew which guest bedroom to go to, and she had already left some of her things there.

The next day she slept late, and didn’t wake until after noon. When she came downstairs, she met Veevi and Stefan, who were grinning up at her. “Look outside,” Veevi said, laughing and holding out a cup of hot coffee. When Dinah went outside, she saw that Everett had evidently found a truck and, in a rage, filled it with things Dinah had left behind and driven it all the way out to Malibu and dumped their belongings on the ground. She could see where the broken plates and old clothes and the lamp he had tossed into the pale green ice plant were bobbing in the wind, and for a few seconds she realized that she had hurt him terribly and thought she was going to cry. Then she and Veevi and Stefan had a good laugh together, and she knew at once that one part of her life was over. “I have left the p-p-p-petit b-b-b-b—oh shit, you know what I mean,”
she added, smiling happily. “I am now an official cadre in the vanguard of the div-v-v-vorciat.”

Stefan came up to her and touched her elbow.

“Come have breakfast, comrade,” Veevi said.

For the moment Dinah felt at home. She didn’t move in permanently, however. To drive all the way from Malibu to her job in downtown Los Angeles took too long and used up too much gas. So she took her meager savings and rented a small apartment—an “in-law” attached to a house—in Laurel Canyon. It was the first apartment she had ever had to herself. Nevertheless, Veevi assured her that the room in Malibu was permanently hers, and Dinah began spending weekends there, driving back either very late Sunday evening or very early Monday morning. Ventura and Veevi’s first movie together,
Queen of Spades
, set in antebellum Richmond, had come out the year before and done well, though not spectacularly, and they had just finished another movie, a Western whose box-office prospects were uncertain. Stefan wanted to do something serious, another Western, but in the vein of the pictures he had made in the twenties and early thirties in Berlin and Paris, only with an American flavor. He’d convinced L. J. Engel—with Irv’s support, now that Tal had left Hollywood and moved to Vermont to write novels—to let him come up with a screenplay based on the story of Oedipus. But, as he now explained to Dinah, just that week he’d had a series of big meetings, big discussions, and big arguments about the story—with L.J. and Irv and then with Irv alone, who had to explain why his father was insisting that every mention of the mother-son incest theme had to go or the picture wouldn’t be made. Yes on the father-son murder story, no on the blinding. Of course there had to be a girl’s part for Veevi and the Oedipus character has to end up with her. So Jocasta was Johanna—gorgeous, young, “and not some old bag with sagging tits,” Irv had told Stefan. Ed, the town sheriff, is in love with her. Fine on Ed as a mysterious gunslinger who wandered into town years earlier and got rid of all the local bad guys, became sheriff, but still wants to solve the mystery of why all the cattle are dying. And okay, okay—maybe for just a little while there can be this horrible question of Johanna and Ed being brother and sister, but it’s got to be a big mistake. Fine, let the Indians be the ones who straighten it all out, but nix on the hermaphrodite business, just make him a nice normal blind Indian, no half-man, half-woman freak—and Dorshka will have to work out the details. Let there be a lot of Indian hocus-pocus for the oracles—that’s fine, but no mother-son hanky-panky (or, as L.J. pronounced
it, “henky-penky”). This is America—no dirty stuff. Mainly, make the ending happy. Johanna and Ed have to end up together even if Ed decides he can’t show his face to the world for a while—let him go off and be a rancher with her at his side. Fine, there’s plenty of ways for a person to get lost in the Wild West.

Stefan wanted to keep as much Sophocles as he could, wanted to have Ed discover that Johanna was his sister after he marries her, but L.J.’s response was to repeat “Over my dead body” until he was hoarse.

Stefan now looked at Dinah across the breakfast table. “Do you think that Americans will like this story?”

“I dunno, Stefan,” she said. She had never read the Sophocles, never even heard of it. “It sounds kind of d-d-depressing. Things are still awfully tough here. Maybe people just want to be entertained.”

She saw that Veevi was watching her with a bright, inquisitive expression, as if testing her, and she could feel that she had somehow failed.

“Is good for people to forget their troubles and feel maybe something for the other guy’s troubles, no?” he said. “But maybe this is not so for Americans?”

“I don’t think people want to feel any worse than they already d-d-d-do,” Dinah said. “But what do I know? I’ve never even heard of S-S-S-Sophocles. Is this where the Oedipus complex comes from?”

Stefan didn’t answer her, and Dinah saw for the first time how troubled and anxious he had become.

All the same, the house was always swarming with people. On Saturdays and Sundays nearly everyone Dinah used to see at the Engels’ was now at the Venturas’. Dinah had been getting to know a few of the same people at Party meetings in Westwood on weekday evenings, when she attended workers’ classes and fulfilled her assignment. She had to type endless letters from screenwriters and Party big shots like Anatole Klein, Norman Metzger, and Guy Bergman on the subject of fund-raising for the Loyalists in Spain. Like everyone else, she was in a fever about Spain and glad to feel useful, and through the workers’ classes she was beginning to see her whole life in a different way. She viewed her father now as a proletarian who nursed petit-bourgeois dreams and was doomed to failure. Through the theory of surplus value she saw how Claggett Oil sucked the blood out of everyone who worked there, including herself. Booms and depressions she now understood as the cogs and wheels of a carefully manipulated system guaranteed to grind down the human beings who oiled
and turned it. Why didn’t I ever realize this before? she often said to herself. It’s so simple. It’s so obvious. The situation of Negroes could be seen as class warfare between petit bourgeois elements, like Everett and his family, and the dark-skinned landless proletariat they hated and feared. Even Roosevelt, whom she loved, wasn’t going to change things that much, and neither was the New Deal. She had become a believer. She feared the fascists, and hated Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini. Everyone said that Stalin was great and Trotsky terrible, and she supposed this must be true, but all she really wanted was to fall in love, get married, and have children.

Some months before she left Everett, she drove out to Malibu for a weekend and found, in the kitchen, a striking woman with short flyaway red hair, broad football player’s shoulders, a great shelf of a bosom, and a forthright expression. “I am Dorshka Albrecht. Who are you?” the woman said, extending her hand.

Later that day, as they took a walk on the beach, Veevi explained to Dinah that years ago, when he had directed her in the theater in Berlin, Stefan had had a passionate affair with Dorshka, and this had eventually become a friendship and they had subsequently collaborated on screenplays. Dorshka had followed him to Paris after he left Berlin in ’33, and now he’d finally persuaded L.J. to bring her over from Paris to work with him. So here she was just off the boat and already under contract to Marathon. As Dinah and Veevi returned from their walk, they paused to watch Stefan wrestling at the water’s edge with a boy—a beautiful boy, about fourteen or fifteen, slender and muscular—who grabbed Stefan tightly around the waist and lifted him up. Staggering momentarily under the weight of the older, heavier man, who was laughing out loud, the boy dug his legs into the shifting sand and seemed to be on the verge of collapsing backward in a heap when he turned sharply and in an instant flipped the older man on his back. Stefan laughed again. Picking himself up and shaking the sand from his hair, he rushed the boy and repeated the boy’s movements—so that this time it was the boy who landed on his back in the sand. They were smiling, growling, shouting, and laughing together in German. “Who’s that handsome k-k-k-kid?” Dinah asked Veevi, who explained that it was Michael Albrecht, Dorshka’s son by the Austrian poet Joachim Albrecht, who had died some years ago, but to whom she had been married for many years. Stefan had known him forever, and had become a father to Michael. “Stefan’s so happy now,” Veevi said. “He adores Michael, and they’re always wrestling
and talking about sports together. Michael wants to learn American football, and,” she added, “how to drive.” Dinah, who found herself envying Veevi for having yet another new person in her life—a handsome stepson, someone she could talk about in an indulgent and parental tone—immediately offered to give the boy driving lessons. “He’ll love it,” Veevi said. “But he’s so beautiful to look at, make sure you keep your eyes on the road.”

Veevi seemed relieved to have Dorshka living in her home. “She’s very domestic,” Veevi said. “She wants to do all the cooking, which is great for me, since all I want to do is read.” Dorshka in fact immediately took over the management of the household, bought a big convertible, and put everyone who met her at ease. She was kind and warm to Dinah, who loved her. In a matter of weeks, Dorshka was able to get her lover, the playwright Bernhard Mendelsohn, out of Germany. A short taciturn man with a great sprouting head of salt-and-pepper hair, he seemed pleasantly bewildered to have ended up in Southern California and became, like Dorshka and Michael, a permanent member of the Malibu household.

But the Venturas’ was also the gathering place for the American-born set—in their twenties and thirties, always diving headlong into the biggest waves as capitalism breathed its last. They adored Veevi, and they respected Stefan so much that they didn’t quite know what to say to him when he talked about sustained close-ups, his good friends Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau, and the films of his beloved countryman Zlatan Dudov. And they were in awe of the refugees and exiles who also reclined on the veranda, usually fully clothed, with just their shoes and socks off, speaking German, Hungarian, Russian, and Polish to one another. From time to time one of the Americans spoke Yiddish with a refugee, but the refugees were startled, even nonplussed, by the Americans’ exuberant warmth and familiarity. They walked with slow, heavy steps along the beach, stopped to gather shells, and seemed older, to Dinah, by a full generation—older, careworn, and tired. A number of them were angry, too, and hostile. Dinah remembered now, as the sun-warmed wheel of her Pontiac station wagon became hot to the touch, how Dorshka had laughed in exasperation when Cliff Boatwright had cracked (in an accent) about a dachshund belonging to a newly arrived and decidedly imperious refugee couple, “In Germany, I was a Great Dane.”