Cheat and Charmer (35 page)

Jake immediately envied everything about the guy—the hair, the rumpled jacket, the dark eyes that said he’d been everywhere, seen everything,
and fucked every woman he’d ever wanted. Of course women found him irresistible. Jake himself did; everyone did. The women at the table, already beautiful, already lovely for Knight, brightened even more in Nemeth’s presence. Jake reached for the little leather notebook he kept in his jacket pocket, placed it surreptitiously on his right knee, noted the date, the place, and Nemeth’s name, followed by the words “Use this someday: sees himself the way dames do. Knows why they want him. Excited by their desire for him.”

As he wrote, Felicity’s right hand squeezed his left thigh. “Get up,” she whispered.

Then he saw why he had to stand up: to greet the woman standing next to the handsome Hungarian photographer. She was in her early thirties, a clear-faced and decidedly American beauty, with champagne-colored hair pulled back and held by a black velvet bow. Sylvia Knight led the woman by the hand and stopped near Jake, who hurriedly stuck his notebook into his trouser pocket. Sylvia introduced her as Rue Melville. Later, he learned that she had grown up on a cattle ranch in Montana, married into an old New York family, and upon her divorce received a very nice settlement that allowed her to keep a house in New York and a flat in Paris. Thus she was always available to fly to Paris at a moment’s notice to join Bill Nemeth for the two and four days at a time he spent between months-long assignments for
Life
magazine, which regularly shipped him and his cameras off to whatever wars were being waged around the world—and of course there were always several to choose from.

Jake wondered whether Felicity had ever banged the guy. He hoped she hadn’t, but conceded for a disheartening moment that she probably had. After all, he said to himself, who wouldn’t?

He felt someone poking him in the shoulder. Before he could turn around, Felicity was almost shouting at him. “Jake!
Faites attention
. It’s your sister-in-law.” Jake, turning to the left, encountered Veevi’s faintly mocking eyes.

“Care to dance?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” he answered.

He understood at once that this particular display was for Mike’s benefit.

Once they moved onto the crowded dance floor, he felt a sensation as he held his wife’s sister’s body close to his own that he would only have described as eerie. He had never danced with Veevi before, but they moved
together smoothly, and that in itself made him feel uneasy, because it reminded him so much of Dinah. There was no doubt about it: the Milligan girls were born dancers. He led well, as always, and she followed easily. She was shorter than Dinah, by two or three inches, and light of foot. In a sense, she was Dinah without the leggy energy he liked so much. There was a scent, too, that reminded him of his wife in its warm, creaturely cleanliness, though the perfume was different from anything Dinah wore—headier, stronger, inescapable. Do people in families smell the same? he wondered.

He thought he should make his move. But how should he begin? There was something about Veevi that put him off—he couldn’t say what. But he had made a promise to Dinah.

“You look good,” he said. “Everything okay with you?”

“Everything’s swell. You like Paris?”

“Love it,” he said, “though the language drives me crazy. Tell me something. If a word in French ends with an
e
and a
t
, you don’t pronounce the
t
. Right? So why does everyone here call that place we met at tonight Fouquet’s?” (He sounded out the
t
.)

She laughed. “Haven’t the foggiest.”

“You’re not fluent?”

“Nope.
Je ne parle pas français
,” she said with an exaggerated American accent. “I have a bad ear, they say.”

“Really? After all these years?”

“Well, I can manage with a little grocery French.”

“As in, ‘May I squeeze that melon?’ as my mother used to say?”

“Haven’t a clue how to say that! God, it’s nerve-racking, because you don’t just go to one store here. It’s a daily pilgrimage, really. This is a one-store-for-each-thing sort of country. You go off in the morning with your little string bag and you stop at the bakery for bread and then you go to the butcher shop for meat and then there’s the vegetable guy and the fruit man. But they know me and I point to things and they say the word, and I nod, and everyone’s happy. You should see Felicity, though. She could hold philosophical conversations with them if she had to. So could Sylvia Knight. Not me.” Veevi said all of this with a light laugh so that it seemed amusing, but then Jake realized that she was still seeing herself as part of a set of three inseparable couples—the Knights, the Crandells, and the Albrechts.

They danced in silence until the music stopped. As he took her lightly
by the elbow and began to lead her off the floor, he paused and put his hand inside his jacket and pulled out an envelope. “I almost forgot to give this to you.”

“It can wait till tomorrow,” she said, pushing his hand and the envelope away. “If you have any time—want me to show you around?”

He brightened immediately. “Wonderful! I’d love it! I was just going to walk around on my own. You know, whistling ‘An American in Paris’ to myself.”

“Off-key, natch.”

“Can we go to the Louvre?” He heard the word
loove
come out of his mouth. I must sound like a talking elephant, he said to himself.

“Why not?” she said. “But only if you can say it with that
rh
at the end. Otherwise they don’t let you in.”

Relieved that he would now have a chance to give Veevi Dinah’s letter, he was anxious to get back to the table and Ben Knight, who interested him at the moment far more than his sister-in-law. So he steered her back. “Oh, Villie Vile,” he heard Felicity saying. “You dear old thing, what brings you to the metropolis?” She was embracing a short, stocky, barrel-chested man. The legendary producer looked as if he could have been Ben Knight’s father: both of them had the same tough, handsome streetwise face as Jake’s uncles in Chicago, with high cheekbones and elegant Semitic noses.

The impeccably tailored Willie Weil kissed Felicity and then, as Jake and Veevi neared him, reached for Veevi’s hand and brought it to his lips, pulling her to him in a courtly embrace that made Jake uneasy, packed as it was with sexual bravado, the kind that he himself, he liked to think, had as well, though in rather more self-mocking, and occasionally self-doubting, supply.

“Meet my brother-in-law, Jake Lasker,” said Veevi.

Jake and Willie Weil shook hands. My God, he’s got Uncle Max’s handshake too, Jake thought: knuckle-crushing. He felt himself being scrutinized by a pair of inquisitive blue eyes. “So you’re the talented Jake Lasker,” said Weil. “I’ve enjoyed your pictures. Tell me, how do you like working with my friend Wynn Tooling? Do you know he adores you? Do you like your suite at the Dorch? Because if you don’t, you know, just let me know and I’ll call the queen and arrange another.”

Once again tonight, Jake felt himself drawn into the net of a worldly, charismatic man. Weil’s accent made Jake think of a steamer trunk plastered with stickers from everywhere in Europe: Warsaw, Budapest, Prague,
Berlin, Paris, London, Rome. There were dozens of stories about Weil, and no one knew for sure where he’d come from, only that he’d ended up in Berlin in the twenties, where he’d worked with Dorshka Albrecht and Stefan Ventura, and gone to Paris with them in 1933. He was a gambler, a womanizer, very possibly a crook, and an astonishingly successful producer of big, good movies.

Weil took the table adjacent to the Knights’ and turned his full solar force on Jake. There was the offer of a large Monte Cristo, the ordering of another cognac. Talk flowed—of movies and movie deals, cities, bars, restaurants, hotels, gambling clubs, tailors, tobacconists, theaters, plays, writers, wars, cars, art, and horses. Weil put his arm around Jake and, with an innocent blink of his Tatar eyes, said, “Come now, Jake Lasker. Tell me the truth. Are you married to Irv Engel? Are you going to grow old and die at Marathon? Can you write only for America or for the rest of the world? I mean, can you write international funny? Don’t tell me it’s a medium only of words. You write physical comedy, so why don’t you bring laughter to a billion people? Have breakfast with me tomorrow morning at the Ritz, and we’ll talk about it.”

Jake glanced around, looking for Veevi. He wanted to change their plans. He’d meet her later. He could move their date up a couple of hours. But she had disappeared. He caught Felicity’s eyes and mouthed, “Where’s Veevi?”

She shrugged.

“Tomorrow morning’s kind of tough for me, Willie,” Jake said. “Any time later?”

“I’m flying to London at noon. But we’ll find each other—I just know it. I have a feeling about you. Do you feel it, too?” He smiled, a dazzling, flirtatious smile that promised everything. “I think we’re going to fall in love and get married and make babies together.”

Jake laughed. “Well, I’m crazy ’bout you too, but on my pictures I kind of like to be the guy in charge.”

“Oh, we can take care of that,” the older man said, letting the cigar smoke drift up to his half-closed blue eyes. Weil looked like a contented Siamese cat. “It’s easy. I take care of all the details and let you alone to be the genius.” He twinkled. “I’ll be the prick and you’ll be the pet.” Jake could have kissed him. Weil was the ticket to a dreamed-of life. “Ask Hunt. He’ll tell you what it’s like to work for me. Tell him, Hunt.”

“You want me to tell Jake what it’s like to work for you, Willie? Felicity, should I tell him?”

“Yes, darling,” said Felicity.

“Willie Weil is without doubt the most irritating, inconsiderate, selfish, tyrannical, insanity-producing human being I have ever known in my life. Take, for instance, what happened in the middle of
The August Wind
.” Weil chuckled, and then Hunt launched into one anecdote after another, and soon everyone was telling stories, and Felicity’s laugh rang out in peals of gaiety, and Jake was drinking more and more cognac and he was part of it, this delicious life, and nothing else existed.

He was drunk when he got back to the hotel and fell giddily onto his bed. Only by the most deliberate exertions did he manage to take off his shoes and trousers, but when he did, he crawled in under the crisp sheets and fell asleep at once in his T-shirt and boxer shorts. Yet even in Paris, his old insomnia woke him sometime after two. He had a raging thirst and a pounding headache. After drinking some bottled water and taking two Alka-Seltzers, he went to the window and looked out. The sight of streetwalkers in high heels and tight dresses, with large handbags dangling from their shoulders, filled him with sadness. He was homesick for London. Paris smelled better, but he loved London’s frumpish comforts. All those attractive young people tonight—what did he have in common with them? He staggered around the room in his shorts, trying to belch. I am a knock-kneed, balding, overweight Jewish comedy writer, he thought. What business do I have with these highfliers? They live as if they’re never going to die; I feel a heart attack stalking me around every corner.

Felicity had said to him in London, “I have a life of unearned felicity, no pun intended. I know everybody worth knowing, and Hunt and I are each other’s best friend, and every day I do something interesting and fun.” How could he possibly live that way, when he woke up every morning thinking only of the difficulty of his craft and the limits of his talent?

He paced the large, elegant room, sat down on the brocade sofa, got up again, and opened the windows. For a moment he was tempted to go downstairs and negotiate with one of those girls—a skillful blow job would relax him and send him right back to sleep. But too many failed encounters years ago had taught him not to trust himself with hookers. Should he call Dinah? He missed her but somehow wasn’t in the mood to talk to her, and that made him feel guilty and restless. He got up and drank more of the
bottled water, which fizzed in his mouth, and then he went to the window and again looked out.

Down on the street there was a prostitute wrapped in a white coat. She was walking slowly up and down on high heels, and looked like a moving flashlight. She checked her watch, as if the night had been long and she hadn’t yet made enough money to go home. Had she been standing out there all night or had she already serviced half a dozen men? he wondered. It had been years since he’d gone to a prostitute. The last time was at Queenie Boardman’s place in Beverly Hills, which looked like a sorority house and where the girls wore tennis skirts and tennis shoes, for which reason he’d found it impossible to do anything with them. That was just before he met Dinah, when he was working so hard on the Crystaldent show that he hadn’t taken anyone out in months.

To hell with it, he thought. I’ve proved I can say no. Now I can say yes. He slipped on his trousers and raincoat and took the elevator down to the street. He approached the girl he had watched from the window. Inside her white coat she looked small, and she had raccoon eyes from the black eyeliner she had drawn both across and under her lids.
“Combien?”
he asked. She rattled something off, and he shook his head. “No comprende,” he said, aware that the words sounded Spanish—or something not quite French.