Cheat and Charmer (44 page)

Dinah found Jake in bed with his half of the night-table lamp turned off. She thought he was asleep, but as soon as she returned from her dressing room he said, in a muffled voice, “Scratch my back?” She climbed into his bed, though her belly was still sore, and she found it uncomfortable to lie on her side and ply her nails underneath his cotton pajama top and across
the familiar fuzzy mesa that was her husband’s back. She felt him relax and expected to hear snores, but he turned suddenly and pushed up the black eyeshade he was wearing. “In case you haven’t guessed,” he said, “that sister of yours can be a real coozeburger.”

“Yeah,” Dinah answered. “She can. But please, honey, don’t hate her.”

“Who said anything about hating her? I thought she was nice. At least in Paris. I thought she was fun. I even thought she was bright and interesting. And, craziest of all, I thought we were friends. She talked to me very frankly about her life when I was in Paris. But who’s she kidding? That’s all I want to know. What gives her—she has no right to say what she did about Odets.” He reached for a stick of Doublemint gum from the pack he kept in the night table. “She just sits there waiting for you to say you like something,” he continued, angrily chomping on the gum, “and then she says something that’s supposed to make you drop dead or feel like an ass. To hell with that. In Paris she told me she hates monotony, can’t stand to be bored, but she has zero curiosity about anything, and no desire to find anything out. God forbid she should ever be at a loss for something barbed and stinging to say! Everything has to be ironic—snide and ironic. Since when has she ever tried to write a play or a screenplay? Since when has she read everything that’s ever been written? What the hell does she know about dramatic construction?”

To see him seething with hurt was a revelation to Dinah, who had never considered Jake thin-skinned. “Honey,” she said, “forget it.” And she reminded him that Veevi had been back from Europe for only a month or so, and that as soon as they got their lawyer to work out the details with Mike’s lawyer, she would be able to find a place of her own.

“I don’t like a person who has to belittle others,” he said. “Why doesn’t she ever say anything nice about anybody?”

“Turn around again,” Dinah said. “I’ll scratch your back some more.”

She pulled the little metal cord on the lamp and the room went dark. She wanted to calm him down. It would be a nightmare if they were all living in the same house and at one another’s throats. As she massaged his shoulders, it occurred to her that maybe there was another reason for Jake’s anger at her sister. They hadn’t made love since before she went into the hospital, and Dr. Zuckerman had told her that it would be another two or three weeks before they could, as he put it, “resume relations.” Neither she nor Jake had said anything to each other; she assumed that he understood
the necessity for delay and was waiting for a signal from her. But what surprised her—and hurt her a little—was that he hadn’t said anything about even wanting to. To her, the absence of sex was beginning to feel like an interrupted conversation—a conversation that had been going on since 1941, but had now come to a stop—and neither of them knew how to pick up again from where they’d left off.

So, bravely yet shyly, she reached down to the soft parts faintly tickling her thigh and clasped them in a warm squeeze. She found his instant tumescence reassuring.

“Is it really okay?” he asked.

“Well, this—not the other, yet.”

“But is that fair?”

“Fair?” she replied.

“I mean, what about you?” he said.

“Oh, me. It’s for you.”

“Oh, sweetie, I can wait. Let’s wait,” he said, putting his hand over hers.

But instead of thinking he was being considerate, Dinah felt rejected. In all the years they’d been together, he had never wanted to wait. Even right after the births of their children, he had required some sort of improvised ministrations. “Is there something wrong?” she asked, her lower lip quivering.

He raised his head and looked at her in the dark. “God
no
,” he said. “But I don’t want to be selfish, after what you’ve been through.”

“Why not?” she answered. “You always were before, and it was always kinda fun.” Her voice broke, and she started crying.

Jake turned on the light and took the gum out of his mouth. It was late, he said, and they were both tired. Only a selfish bastard would insist on his own pleasure at a time like this, and he knew she would tell him when everything was okay again. Of course he wanted her, he always wanted her, and he didn’t need a hand job to tide him over. In fact, as soon as the doctor gave her the green light they’d go to Palm Springs for the weekend, away from the kids and Veevi and Dorshka and the whole teeming swarm of people in the house, and he’d reserve a suite at Deep Well and bring his golf clubs and she could walk with him around the golf course and they’d go at it just the way they used to.

“Here, give us a kiss,” he said, and they kissed. He turned out the light and they settled in together—first on their backs, with his arm around her,
then nestled together on their sides, since she couldn’t sleep on her stomach. Soon he began to snore and she pushed him away gently and lay beside him with her arm over his belly.

Before long, his snores grew so loud and ragged that she knew she would have to take a Seconal. She slipped out of bed and went into her bathroom and swallowed a red-and-orange capsule and returned to her own bed. While she waited for the drug to sink her body with its leaden weights, she cried, silently. Instead of reassuring her, his words seemed to mark the beginning of a change between them—the loss of the one thing of which she had always been sure. Fortunately the sleeping pill soon did its work; otherwise, as his snores sawed the air, she would have wept through the night.

It would have shocked Jake to learn that Dinah believed he no longer felt desire for her. Of course he still wanted her. But so soon? When he felt her hand closing around him, instantly warm, familiar, knowing, he had thought her generous to a fault and told himself that to allow things to take their course would be tantamount to taking advantage of her. He had also been using the time since she came home from the hospital to adjust to the idea—where he had gotten it, he couldn’t have said—that his and Dinah’s sex life would invariably undergo a change. Any woman, he believed, who had lost her capacity to bear children would naturally have a reduced interest in sex—especially the wanton sex he and Dinah had always had. The simplest, least disruptive, and most convenient way for him to obtain basic satisfaction would be to just go and get it elsewhere.

He had, in fact, been splendidly laid that afternoon on his way home from the studio. Hortense Leavitt, a shapely costume designer at the studio, had invited him over for a drink after work and had capped the occasion with a lively, sporting fuck, and no questions asked. He hadn’t showered at Horty’s place, thinking he’d jump into the pool when he got home, but at home there had been no time, what with telephone calls from Irv Engel that had to be returned, Lorna’s asking him for help with long division, and, after dinner, that irritating exchange with Veevi. By the time he went to bed, he still hadn’t had a chance to shower. One of his cardinal rules was never to have sex with Dinah if he still had traces of another
woman on him, and that was another reason he had avoided Dinah’s overtures.

Soon, he was sure, he and Dinah would be back to their regular routine. He was saddened by the thought that they would never again have a child together; there truly was a special excitement in their coupling whenever he had tried to make her pregnant. But that part of their life was now over, and it seemed perfectly reasonable not to expect her to welcome his embraces with her former enthusiasm. Still, hadn’t they always had a great time together? That didn’t have to change.

O
ne morning Dinah looked up from the newspaper she was reading as Veevi came into the breakfast room. “Look at this, Vee,” she said. “V-V-V-V—oh shit, I can’t say it—Vishinsky’s dead.”

Veevi, still in her bathrobe, looked at her with a sleepy blankness. “Who? Vishinsky? Dead? God, I haven’t thought about him in years. Now he’s dead, Stalin’s dead. They’re all dead, those fellows.”

She poured herself a cup of coffee.

“We hung on his every word,” Dinah said. “Vishinsky’s, I mean. Norman Metzger made me pick up a copy of the
New York Times
every day after work and cut out articles about the tr-tr-trials so he could study them. That was one of my official assignments.”

“Hmm,” said Veevi. “What’s happened to Metzger?”

“Moved to England. He was one of the guys I named. Of course, he’d been named by God knows who else by the time the Committee got to me.”

“Ah,” said Veevi, getting up. “Do you think Gussie could make me some toast?”

Before Dinah could tell her to make it herself, Veevi disappeared behind the swinging door for a moment and came back. “Gussie wants to know if you want anything.” Dinah shook her head and looked at her sister. There were sleep creases on her face, but she no longer reeked of booze.

“So you’re not still in, Vee?”

“The Party?” She looked out the window. It was a gray, cold morning, and she pulled her bathrobe tightly around her.

“Yeah. The P-P-P-Party. In Paris.”

“Are you kidding? Not on your life. And you?”

“What do you think?”

“Well, obviously not.”

“Obviously.”

“When did you leave, Ina? Did you have a”—she smiled ironically—“ ‘formal break,’ as they say?”

“Well, not exactly. It was early ’44, just before we got married. Jake said get out or else no dice with the marriage. Actually, I was sort of out anyway by then, since I was spending all my t-t-t-time with him and wasn’t going to meetings anymore.”

Veevi nodded but didn’t ask more questions. The sisters stared out at the pool, and seemed hypnotized by the steamy mist rising from its surface. Gussie came in looking preoccupied, set down a plate with buttered toast for Veevi, and disappeared through the swinging door.

“When,” Dinah began carefully, “did you leave?”

Veevi bit into the toast as she gazed out the window. “It wasn’t a question of leaving or staying. I’m alive because Communists hid me, that’s for sure. Everyone we knew there was a Communist, I think. But when I went back to Paris after the war and heard about Stefan, I didn’t look up anyone he’d known. A lot of them had been killed, anyway. Everything had changed. Then Mike found me, and nothing else mattered.”

A picture of Mike and Veevi embracing somewhere in Paris flashed through Dinah’s mind—the happy ending to a war movie. Apparently, for Veevi, time had stopped at that moment. Or, rather, everything that had happened up to then was unimportant. Then Dinah remembered what her soggy nightgown had felt like that night on the beach in Malibu.

“You know,” she said, “I used to ask Stefan about the trials. They didn’t make sense to me, and they still don’t. You and Tola Klein and Norman Metzger, and everybody used to say the bourgeois press was slandering St-St-St-Stalin, and that he was heroic to stand up to the saboteurs and counter-r-r-r-r-revolutionaries. But I used to ask Stefan, ‘How can this be? Weren’t these old men Stalin’s friends?’ And Stefan said to me, ‘Stalin’s a monster, but history needs him.’ Christ,” she said, shaking her head, “I’ve thought about that for years, and I can’t figure it out. It means one thing if you wake up on a Tuesday morning and it’s f-f-f-foggy outside and you slept badly, and another if it’s Saturday and the sun is shining.”