Cheat and Charmer (37 page)

“Tonight?”

“Tonight.”

“Geez, honey, I’m flying back to London tonight. Gotta be in Covent Garden at six tomorrow morning. Wynn has to knock over a couple of fruit-and-vegetable carts as he’s being chased by two trench-coated heavies. It’s going to be a long day.”

“Oh,” she said. Her face betrayed no disappointment, but it had a sharp brightness that hovered between warmth and mockery. “Well, come back and we’ll try again.”

“Love to.” He took her arm and they moved ahead. Delighted, his chest swelled with the triumph of having passed a difficult test. He wished he could stay in Paris, but it was impossible. It occurred to him that maybe he was no more to her than a convenient escort. But it didn’t matter. Now he had a Paris connection, and he was mindful of what she had done for him.

“Look, Veevi, you sure you want to be in that situation again?”

“What situation?”

“You know, running into Mike all the time. With the broad.”

“Oh, that,” she said. They came up to Géricault’s
Madwoman
, looked at each other, and flinched. “Look,” she said, “had enough art for a while? Let’s go have lunch.”

When they reached the car, the amorous couple was nowhere in sight, and Veevi took Jake to a brasserie on the Left Bank. The day was chilly. Sunbursts alternated with clouds, with swift changes from light to shadow. They ordered a roast chicken and a good white wine, and he began to feel the strong pull of friendship for Veevi, who ate and drank with robust appetite. He liked it that she didn’t judge her friends. It was gutsy of her to insist on remaining part of her group, even if it meant seeing Mike and the blonde night after night. She was fun. She listened to what he said, she asked questions, she seemed to find much of what he said amusing and interesting. Over strong black coffee, he finally handed her Dinah’s letter. When Veevi put it into her purse without opening it, he felt he had to say something.

“You can guess what this is about, Veevi. Look, she did it for me. She saved my ass. Without her, I wouldn’t be making this picture. I couldn’t be here, talking to you.”

“It must have been a tough decision for both of you,” she said, putting her hand over his. He saw that her fingernails were perfect: perfect ovals, perfect cuticles, perfect red enamel.

He hesitated for a moment, then put his own hand on hers. “And so, when we didn’t hear from you …” he trailed off. She looked right into his eyes, and it seemed to him that they understood each other perfectly.

“Let’s not talk about it, Uncle J. Let’s just have fun. Look—both of you, I mean—stop worrying about me. I’m okay. Mike and Odile—well, that’s something I have to sweat out right now. Tell Dinah for heaven’s sake not to feel guilty. Tell her to enjoy her life. God knows I was a pain in the ass for her until you came along. She’s earned everything she’s got.”

But suddenly, for the second time today, she had struck a note he didn’t like. He picked up her lighter and leaned forward to light her cigarette but he was taken aback by the automatic presumption that her very existence put Dinah at a disadvantage. It irked him, as had her remark about Dinah’s wearing Tabu (which she didn’t and, as far as he could remember, never had).

“Well, honey, if you ever need anything—money, help of any kind—” he said nevertheless.

“Thanks, Uncle J., but no. If I don’t write to Dinah, it’s not because I’m angry. It’s because I’d only whine and sound sorry for myself.” She laughed. “Why bore everybody with my dreary little story?”

That tone—that sense of the dreary and the boring as the measuring stick of life—he had to admit that he found it spectacular. Veevi held up her glass for him, then took a lingering sip. She was one hell of a flirt, he thought, watching her face. That’s where her acting had been, he remembered—not in her voice but in that face, which was never the same for more than an instant. You couldn’t take your eyes off it, because if you did you might miss some nuance, some way of looking at the world you’d never thought of before. She had a gift, a vocation, really, for savoring the moment and bringing you into it, the way some people had a gift for the violin or acrobatics. He saw it and felt it, this need to relish every instant, every taste, every experience, until it yielded up its jewel of pleasure. Nothing could get in its way, even heartbreak. Hence her self-mockery, which he liked, the clipped, barbed rapid-fire speech that he had to bend closer to her to hear.

“So, Uncle J.,” she said, blowing smoke and taking another sip of wine. “This is Paris. Still like it?”

“It’ll do.” And he said to himself in wonder, Who ever thought I’d end up sitting here as Veevi Milligan’s brother-in-law? He saw the possibilities:
what he had with her was unique. No one could ever know her—observe her—in exactly this way.

Her irritating remarks about Dinah slipped from his mind as he refilled his glass and they looked admiringly at each other for a comfortable interval. It seemed to him that neither of them could possibly wish to be anywhere else and that there was a vast reservoir of things for them to talk about. After they finished their coffee, they walked back arm in arm, across the Pont du Carrousel, and then drove along the quai Voltaire and the quai d’Anatole France, finishing up at her apartment on the rue des Acacias so that he could visit with Claire and see the baby, Coco, before going back to the hotel in time to catch his plane.

I
n Sun Valley one movie and fifteen months later, Dinah lay on a soft blanket spread out over the grass reading
The Tunnel of Love
, by Peter de Vries, while Jake stood thigh deep in a stream casting for trout. Dinah breathed in the scent of pines and felt glad in her very bones. At the Challenger Inn, she dozed on a chaise longue by the pool or held an aluminum sun reflector under her chin while Jake swam laps. Her skin turned bronze, then walnut brown. He took 16mm movies as she figure-skated, long-legged and firm, on the opaline surface of the Sun Valley ice rink or rode a bike along wooded paths or sat in their rented car, counting the sheep in the flocks tended by Basque shepherds until she pretended to fall asleep. She and Jake took drives, danced in the evenings, and made love with the tenderness, abandon, and ardor that had accompanied their previous efforts to conceive a child, and conceiving a third child was what they had come here to do.

After dinner and dancing at the Challenger Inn, a silent signal would be exchanged, and they would go back to their room and throw off their clothes. They took their time and did everything every possible way, and when Dinah lay beneath Jake she felt their bodies dissolving into each other. The most accidental form of touch—even his toenail scraping across her leg—felt good to her, and full of meaning, full of proof of their oneness. She didn’t think it was possible to be happier than they were. Here they were, in their forties, married for ten years, with two children, a new, successful movie out, and, despite big expenses and a consuming career, still they felt this bliss and connection with each other, this infinitely comfortable but undiminished passion.

Afterward, he did not fall into a heavy snoring sleep as he usually did at
home, but lightly and playfully stroked her shoulders, her arms, her legs as she held them up against the wall for half an hour. They talked and told stories and made each other laugh. Then he would drift off, his head nestled on her breast, his arm around her midriff. She had bought this for them by testifying. Well, so what? she would say to herself. Wasn’t it worth it? Isn’t this exactly why I did it?

Two weeks after they got back from vacation, when she was late and felt her breasts swell and noted the arrival of that familiar languorous fatigue, along with small cramplike twinges, Dinah said to herself,
Jackpot
. She waited for a long month, not wanting to hurry the visit to Dr. Zuckerman. She savored, as she had with her first two pregnancies, the imagined division of every growing cell. But then when the month passed and she could feel a swelling hardness in her lower abdomen that seemed to be blossoming sooner than it had in the past, she wondered if she had miscalculated and made the appointment.

Dr. Zuckerman was six-five, and about her age—perhaps a few years older. As she sat across from him in his office after the examination, she had to lift her eyes a little because of his height. The results of the test, she knew, wouldn’t be in for two days, but while examining her he had said, “After two kids together, I think you and I know your signals pretty well. If you say you’re pregnant, why then, you’re pregnant.” Then he winked. “Get dressed, honey, and meet me in my office.” She liked that wink, that “honey,” and she remembered the feeling of being on a team with him when her babies were born. “Come on, Dinah, push that baby out!” he would holler at her, like a football coach.

He performed some rapid calculations on a sheet of paper in her chart. “May twenty-first,” he said, more soberly than she would have expected, since he was usually generous with his rabbit-toothed smile when he figured due dates.

“W-W-W-Wonderful,” she said. “A spring baby. Jake will be so happy.”

“Now, Dinah,” the doctor said, looking straight at her. “I think we have a problem.” As she turned pale and began chewing the inside of her cheek, he explained that the hardness she had felt could mean they were way off and she was two months or more ahead of herself; but since she had been right on schedule up to her missed period, that seemed unlikely. So the
hardness was probably a fibroid tumor, he said, judging from its location and the way it felt. Fibroids—she thought it one of the ugliest words she had ever heard—weren’t dangerous in themselves but they often grew fast, especially when there was a lot of estrogen in the body, as there was during pregnancy. They tended to take up room the embryo needed. Dr. Zuckerman said all they could do was wait and hope that the pregnancy would continue in a normal way and that the tumor would shrink by itself. But he had to prepare her for the possibility that the tumor might—she saw that he wished he could spare her—crowd everything out and that the pregnancy would end spontaneously. If that happened, the only way to get rid of the tumor was with a hysterectomy.

“So it’s all or nothing,” she said. “If the baby doesn’t make it, I’m done having kids.”

“You need to prepare yourself,” he said. He walked over to her and put his hand on her shoulder, and suddenly he looked like a helpless giant in his white coat. “I want you to take it easy. Rest every day. Put your feet up. Send your housekeeper to the store. Don’t overdo and don’t let things get to you. If Jake wants to give me a call, you tell him I’m always available. Is he here?”

“He’s back in London doing publicity for the British release of the picture. I’ll call him or send a telegram, I guess.” She stood up and rested her head against Dr. Zuckerman’s chest. “Oh, Shelley,” she said. “This st-st-st-stinks.”

He squeezed her shoulders. “I know, honey. You’re in a tough spot. I’ll do my damnedest to keep this baby for you. Okay?” And he kissed her on the forehead. She had always felt that Dr. Zuckerman liked delivering her babies because he liked the kind of woman she was. The most important moments of her life, she thought, the births of her children, she had experienced with him—not Jake. It was odd, really.

Later that morning, Gussie told her that Mrs. Albrecht had called.

“From Paris?” Dinah asked.

“No, Mrs. Lasker. Mrs. Albrecht senior, in Westwood. She left her number.”

It was a long time since Dinah and Dorshka had last spoken—well over six months. Dinah was the one who usually phoned, so a call from Dorshka had to be important.

“I must speak with you, darling. Can you come today?” Dorshka said as soon as she heard Dinah’s voice.

The only thing Dinah wanted to do was go upstairs and cry, but five minutes later she was headed west on Sunset toward Westwood.