Cheat and Charmer (49 page)

Veevi nodded. “Of course, that’s the main reason I went to Europe with Stefan. I tried to fight it.”

“And you were pregnant?”

“Yes. I thought I’d never see Mike again. Or Mom and Pop and you, for that matter.”

Not that you gave a good goddamn, Dinah thought.

“When the war ended, he looked for me in Paris. He was wild when he found me. I was sure we’d be together forever.” She blew smoke and stubbed out the cigarette. “So much for romantic wartime stories.”

She took a bite of her sandwich, a sip of Coke, and lit another cigarette. “Where was I?”

“After the war? In Paris? Undying love?”

Veevi laughed. “No, I mean with the girl.”

“Well, he’s in the shower and then he comes out and tells you everything.”

“Oh, yes. True Confessions. Yes. He’d been wild about me? Well, now he was wild about her. But now I saw something different. You see, he was so kind. So fucking kind. And I saw that he approved of himself for being kind. He loved himself for being that way. ‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’ he said. He’d never ever gotten me a cup of tea! He’d never needed to! I
thought about it later and figured it out. He felt sorry for
me
for losing him. He was putting himself in
my
place, imagining what it was like for someone to lose
him
. Trying to soften the blow. He was in love with himself the way he thought I was in love with him.”

Dinah shook her head in enormous sympathy.

“He held me while I cried. He was so
understanding
. His manners were perfect. If I could reproach him for the large things, he wanted to make sure I couldn’t do it for the small things. So he
thanked
me for our years together. Imagine being
thanked
, for Christ’s sake. Imagine receiving his gratitude, when for the last fifteen years you’d had endless love—or thought you did.”

“That’s a t-t-t-tough one.”

“What he said was,” Veevi continued, “ ‘It’s better for us to break up while we still care for each other than wait and tear each other apart.’ ‘Care’! Can you imagine?
‘Care’!
This way, we would always be ‘friends,’ always be ‘on each other’s side.’ And then a few days later, when he came back to pack up his things, he said, ‘Be strong, baby. Who knows, maybe this’ll pass. Think of it as ‘a spell of rough weather.’ ”

“Isn’t that the title of a Ben Knight story?”

Veevi nodded.

“I could kill him,” Dinah said. “The phrase-making, lying son of a bitch. He was t-t-t-torturing you.”

“But, you see, he wasn’t really sure what he wanted. He still isn’t. He loves me. I just know it. Remember that letter he sent, after you testified? Well, he wrote that after I had the baby—after he left. He made a carbon copy and sent it to me.”

“And you think that means he loves you? That the letter is some kind of pr-pr-pr-proof?”

“Why else would he have written it?”

“Are you kidding? There he is, guilty as all hell, and suddenly he has a chance to make himself smell good again, in your eyes and his own. Jesus Christ, Veevi. Can’t you see that?”

“He’s suffering, Dinah.”

“Veevi, I think this guy knows exactly what he wants: a divorce.”

“Well,” Veevi said, “that’s what he said. But I think it’ll just run its course, and it’s better if I’m here and he’s there until it does.”

Dinah’s heart sank.

“And your passport?”

“This HUAC craziness can’t last forever, can it?”

Dinah got it now. She understood that, far from being reconciled to a divorce from Mike, Veevi was determined to wait it out. Even if there was an actual divorce, she wasn’t going to let go of Mike. Over the uneaten ham-and-cheese sandwich on her plate, Veevi’s face was sad and resigned—but not to final loss, only to a limbo of waiting.

“You love talking about him, don’t you?” Dinah said.

Tears welled in Veevi’s eyes. “Is it boring?” she asked.

“No,” Dinah answered, instinctively opening her purse and handing her a tissue. “Not at all. You can talk about him all you want. You just have to put up with my editorials. Because I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to think of him as anything other than a lousy two-bit r-r-r-road-show imitation of some jerk in one of his novels. Or, rather, one of Hemingway’s or even Ben Knight’s, of which Mike’s are but p-p-p-pale imitations.”

Veevi frowned. “That’s not fair,” she said. “And it isn’t true.”

“Okay, fine, what do I know about literature? But let me tell you something, Veevi. You married a man and not his talent, and so far the man has turned out to be a louse. What are you holding on to, anyway? What’s this crap about having ‘perfect manners’? Is that your idea of how to act when someone leaves you when you’re sick and pregnant? I couldn’t do it. I’d tear his eyes out.”

Veevi rested her chin in her hand and didn’t answer. Then Dinah asked practical questions: Well, what about the divorce? How much alimony could she get? Child support? Did it include Claire? Then she slipped in: was Claire Mike’s child?

“I don’t know,” Veevi said. “She looks like him. But, well, she might be Stefan’s.”

“And Mike might be Stefan’s as well. What are you guys, the Hatfields and the McCoys? Jesus Christ, Veevi!”

Suddenly, in a flash of memory, Dinah saw Stefan and Mike wrestling on the beach, Stefan lifting Mike and throwing him on the ground, Mike grunting as he lifted all 185 pounds of Stefan and did the same to him, both of them gasping, concentrating, shouting. A big grin on Stefan’s face, his solid grown man’s body clasping the boy’s with its tight new muscles, its washboard rib cage and hairless chest. A fierce burst of love for Stefan exploded within her.

“If Dorshka could do it, why couldn’t I?” Veevi said.

Dinah suddenly got it: Dorshka was the model; Dorshka was the
influence—and the rival. But she went on, not wanting to appear shocked and naïve. She returned to the question of alimony. It seemed to Dinah that Veevi was entitled to a great deal, and she said so, her voice full of cheerleading spirit.

But Veevi took a deep breath and glanced away. “Well, I’m not ready for that yet.” She pressed her lips together, as if hesitating about something. She had decided that it was beneath her to ask for alimony, then, Dinah surmised. It was unstated, but nevertheless clear: she and Jake would have to support Veevi for the rest of her life. Dinah saw that her sister wasn’t going to finish her sandwich, and she called for the check.

A
t night, after long days of listening to Veevi telling stories, Dinah would get into bed next to Jake and rub his back and share the day’s catch, telling the same stories, word for word, although her own recounting of them was even more animated than her sister’s. Despite her essentially unsophisticated distaste for the erotic shenanigans that ruled Veevi’s world, she wanted to appear, both to herself and to Jake, capable of taking the measure of that world, and to seem unperturbed by its terms and assumptions. It was one way of fighting back against the feeling she got, whenever she contemplated Veevi’s Paris life, that she herself was a “real square,” as she put it. Moreover, it helped to stanch her old envy that, like a leakage of black blood, rose up in her whenever she talked with Veevi or discussed her with Jake—reminding her of all that her sister had once been, and all that she herself was not. She throbbed with sudden desire for evenings in cafés and bistros—wherever you got to dance with handsome strangers who had had “good” wars, written books you’d liked, lived for the moment, and said charming, sexy things to you in French. Why, Veevi knew enough French to speak it badly! Dinah’s high school French was like a storefront dummy—frozen and stiff, unable to move a single limb on its own.

But these surges of wanting whatever it was she thought she was supposed to want passed quickly. Rubbing her warm feet against Jake’s, pressing her torso against his back and shoulders, she wanted no life other than the one she had. Were routine and habit, a comfortable house, eating dinner with your kids, enjoying your husband’s triumphs and helping him with his worries, something to be sneered at?

Nevertheless, it seemed to Dinah that Veevi’s stories of a life of restless
joys, with its changes of place and partners, its rhythm of arrivals and departures, were meant to diminish her own. And Veevi’s contempt for Hollywood was so grating. Whenever Veevi spoke of friends who had put aside their difficult novels to make a fast buck “tossing off” screenplays, Dinah’s jaw stiffened. As if screenplays could be “tossed off”! As if the long, grinding months Jake put into his own made him a hack.

“Well, Jake is a joke writer,” Veevi said once, explaining why Mike would never return to Hollywood. “He belongs here, this is his element. But Mike is an artist.”

The remark had riled Jake, too, when Dinah reported it to him. “About screenwriting, she doesn’t know her ass from a hole in the ground,” he’d snorted. “You know, I like your sister. I really do, honey. She’s kind of an interesting broad. But Jesus, she’s got that coozeburger side, and I do think for everybody’s sake she ought to get a job and find a place of her own, and soon.”

But every time Jake said this or made some damning remark about her sister, Dinah simply could not forget the realities of Veevi’s life. Where could she go? Dinah was all the family she had. So, as she kneaded her husband’s muscles and felt them slacken into sleep, she would say, not so much to him as to the air and the night, “Don’t be hard on her. Give her a chance, that’s all.”

Jake came home from the studio early one afternoon. Finding Dinah and Veevi sitting in the den together with the kids, he patted his chest, coughed slightly, announced that he had “a little throat” coming on, and asked Dinah to go with him upstairs and take his temperature.

Once they were inside their room, he closed the door and told her to sit down. “What about your throat? Do you want me to get the thermometer?”

“No.” She felt a sudden dread. Was there bad news? He had a glittery look in his eyes; it came from exhilaration—the exhilaration with which he always confronted crisis or disaster, as if there were, for him, a keen pleasure in coming up against adversity.

“We’ve got a problem,” he said. “A very definite problem.”

“Well?”

“I decided to call Reggie Pertwee and see if I couldn’t ‘utz’ him a little about Veevi. I don’t mind being the ’employer of last resort’ if that’s what I
have to be, but what if there’s some way she could get back into acting? And what he said was, and these are his exact words, ‘I’ve been calling all over town to find something for her, but the fact is, your sister-in-law’s unemployable. It seems that half of Hollywood named her during the investigations.’ ”

“Oh, Christ,” said Dinah. “My G-G-G-God, what did I do to her?”

“
Darling
, that’s just the point,” Jake barked at her, and now he really did sound hoarse. “
You
didn’t do anything that lots of other people hadn’t already done. She was a lodestar, for Christ’s sake. The fucking queen of the Stalinist Left out here. Everyone knew her and knew who she was. All that trouble with her passport would have happened even if you hadn’t named her. Even if nobody had ever subpoenaed you, she would have been blacklisted. This whole situation she’s in is all her choice and isn’t your fault. You and I both know goddamn well that she could call up that son of a bitch Marlow today and clear herself and find a job. And that’s where you can help. Tell her to go and testify and get it over with, for Christ’s sake. It would just be a formality. She wouldn’t be naming anybody who hasn’t been named a thousand times already. Whoever she would hurt has already been hurt. And it would get her off our backs. I don’t know if you can admit it, but you have to be blind not to see she that hasn’t the slightest intention of moving out of here and getting on her own. Didn’t you have to tell her to stop asking Gussie to bring her orange juice on a tray in the mornings? Some fucking Communist!”

Dinah sat forward in her chair, her whole body stiffening. “Now, just a minute, Jake. I have never for one moment told myself that going down there and t-t-talking to those two cr-cr-creeps was anything other than degr-gr-gr-grading and humiliating. But I did it for you, and for us, and I would do it again for you and for us. But don’t ever tell me to tell Veevi to do it, and don’t tell me to throw her out of this house. I don’t care how many other people named her. Maybe my testimony was the one they nailed her with, and maybe it wasn’t.
It doesn’t make any difference
. I named her. She’s my sister. I love her. She’s lost her husband and her passport and now Reg Pertwee says she’s been blacklisted, as if that’s some b-b-b-big s-s-s-s-surprise. She’s up shit creek, honey. She can’t work in pictures, she has no future, no prospects, she’s damn near forty years old, and her beauty’s fading fast. As far as I’m concerned,
I
named her, and that means that
I’m
going to take care of her.”