Cheat and Charmer (53 page)

Jake and Dinah embraced, but as they did Dinah felt her body sag with fatigue. “So much for Veevi’s coming-out party,” she said with a sigh.

“I don’t want that horse’s ass in this house again,” Jake said.

She knew that he meant Saul Landau. “Don’t worry. He didn’t want to be here. Though what he said was right.”

“What do you mean, ‘right’?”

Jake was locking the front door, which had been imported from some ancestral English house when theirs had been built in the thirties. He unlocked the door to make sure the lock worked correctly, then locked it again.

“I mean, he was right about Irv. But Irv was right about what happened to Franklin Shaw. I was there for the two nights of the trial. Veevi told me to stay out of the living room, but I listened from the kitchen. Stefan came in and sat down and told me what was going on. He was depressed. Things weren’t going well for him at Marathon. And he said, ‘These robots. They have one idea, and they think this writer should obey this one idea. How is this different from Moscow, right now? Tell me, Dinah, should I stay here? Should I go? Where do I go if I don’t stay here?’ ”

She had never told this story to anyone, and she did not add the following: Stefan had taken her in his arms and said, “I make two mistakes: I come to America and I marry the wrong sister.” She believed the first but not the second, and broke free of his embrace, but she had never stopped wishing, with all her heart, that he had meant it.

She and Jake went into the kitchen, and while he stuffed himself with several pieces of strawberry meringue covered in strawberry syrup and drooping whipped cream, Dinah slipped into the darkened breakfast room and looked out the window. “They’re out there, by the pool,” she said, coming back into the kitchen. “He’s got his arms around her and they’re kissing. How could she possibly find him attractive? He looks,” she added, using an expression of her mother’s, “like Skygak from Mars.”

“She sure as hell blew it tonight,” Jake said.

“I know. It was a gamble, darling, wasn’t it?”

“You mean, for us?”

“No, for her. She’s not stupid. None of that was about principle. It was a test. In the past, she could say anything, and she was so beautiful she would be forgiven. She could have said, ‘
Heil
, Hitler!’ and it wouldn’t have made any difference. She was testing that old law of the universe, and it didn’t work. Her b-b-b-beauty isn’t a cosmic force anymore.”

“You can say that again.”

“And that’s why she’s out there necking with Saul Landau.”

“Well, he’s not the only single guy in the world. What about Mort Berman?”

“Christ no, honey.”

Jake turned next to the refrigerator, from which he withdrew a casserole with cold leftover beef Stroganoff and noodles, and asked Dinah for a bottle of beer. He belched happily and loosened his buckle. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Everything.”

“
Oy!
I suppose that rules out the guys I play golf with.”

“It does.”

“Then I suggest she marry that tweedy loser who at this very moment has probably got his hand up her dress.” He went back to the refrigerator, searching for more leftovers. “The problem with a guy like Saul is that he’s got nothing but principle, which is very useful if you don’t have any talent. But it’s of no use in the industry. You can be as principled as you want, but finally you might have to make a movie with Hitler’s grandmother. Then where does it get you? By the way, one thing was settled tonight. Your sister sure as hell isn’t going to get a nice inconspicuous little part in my picture or anybody else’s. Irv’s hardly going to look the other way after that contretemps.”

A sudden ecstasy flooded Jake’s entire being: he had always wanted to use the word
contretemps
. He took a forkful of cottage cheese and horseradish and bit into a stalk of celery. And he had discovered a jar of kosher pickles and a can of Hershey’s syrup with two triangle-shaped indentations in the top, and he knew exactly where in the deep freeze he could find a pint of Wil Wright’s Chocolate Burnt Almond ice cream.

But Dinah grabbed the pickle jar and the syrup and put them back into the refrigerator. “Stop eating, darling! You’re going to k-k-k-kill yourself, for Christ’s sake. Come on, let’s go to bed.”

On their way through the house toward the stairs, they heard an engine starting up, followed by the sound of a car taking off. They paused, waiting for Veevi to come through the breakfast-room door from the pool yard, or into the kitchen from the back door. But she didn’t.

“I better lock the other doors,” said Jake. “She’s not coming back tonight.”

“I’ll come with you, sweetheart,” Dinah said, accompanying him as he made the rounds of all the doors in the house, starting with the front door once again. Thus together they locked out danger, cold, and darkness—at least for tonight.

O
ne afternoon some weeks after the party, Dinah sat at the antique secretary in the corner of the bedroom signing checks and putting them into an envelope addressed to the business manager. The breeze drove the scent of eucalyptus through the windows, stirring the long panels of heavy silk drapes. The house was empty, and Dinah found the solitude delicious.

She took a sip of coffee and listened to the traffic on Sunset. In the years since she and Jake had moved into the house, the sound of speeding cars, even the shrieks of skidding tires on the snaking curves, had receded from her awareness. Unless she made an effort, she almost never noticed it anymore, and even now, when she tried to listen, it was distant and untroubling. Under her hand, she felt the bulky weight of the checkbook—not the kind that you put in your purse, but a large album with leather covers. In the thirties, at Sprague Paper and Claggett Oil, when she had owned two dresses and gone to work nine-to-five five days a week for eleven years, she hadn’t known about albums of checks or business managers. She hadn’t known how to dress, or dream up a menu for a party, or hire and fire household help, or cheat on receipts saved for itemized deductions. But the biggest shock had been that it wasn’t hard to sign checks, buy good clothes, and have a housekeeper, laundress, gardener, and pool man. It wasn’t painful to be a person who had a successful husband and a fine house and beautiful children. It wasn’t hard to have things.

Yet she had never forgotten what it was like to be poor. Every day, she saw the Negro maids on Sunset waiting in their street clothes for the bus (she couldn’t stand for Gussie to have to wait like that, and she and Jake
had given her his old red Mercury convertible when they bought the green Caddy) and felt a sharp sadness and resentment at the meanness and unfairness of things. That the world had remained a place of toil and futility for most people most of the time, she had no doubt. And in this darker mood, which often came upon her in even her most tranquil moments, she would remember her father, with his hard blue eyes and grim mouth, and she would shiver with the knowledge of his sour resentment and hard disapproval, his bigotry and selfishness, and feel how much he had never loved her but also what a lousy life he’d had, selling steel, drinking away his chances, and finally giving up and going to live in a trailer.

Then, in the very center of peace and solitude, she would be overcome by uneasiness—a sense that bad things were going to happen and that there was something fundamentally wrong with her life. A panic would seize her: Why did she and Jake have to have so much? Why did they need such a big house? Sell it, sell it, a voice would say. It’s too big, and Jake will kill himself working to keep it up. They were not Hollywood aristocrats; they were not, despite Jake’s success, free of worry. Why, then, did he need to live like a baron? Yet it was only by refusing to give in to this panic that she could escape from that picture of her father she carried with her—the harsh and lonely man in the garden chair in her backyard, smoking his pipe, taking the sun amid surroundings he hated. To hell with him, she would say to herself at the memory of his mirthless silence. The house stays. We stay. This is my life, and I’ll be damned if I’ll give it up.

A sound disturbed her reveries. Was it a car door being slammed shut, Jake’s perhaps, or Saul Landau letting Veevi out of his car and escorting her to the back door? She hoped not; she wanted her solitude to last a little longer. For a moment, she listened for Jake’s heavy tread on the stairs but heard nothing. She signed a few more checks and then put her pen down. Time for a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a Coke—and then she would read for the rest of the day, until the kids came home. It was Gussie’s weekend off and she would cook tonight, or they might all go down to Olvera Street for tacos and enchiladas.

She would get the book first and read while she ate. It was in the den, where she had left it the day before in her knitting bag. Her steps were
noiseless on the soft peridot-colored carpet. Absorbed in her small happy purpose, Dinah did not register that the heavy wooden doors of the den were wide open.

Then she saw something. The brown sofa, always the first thing anyone saw upon entering the den, was occupied. Stretched out full length on it was Veevi, her head resting on one of the big cushions. On the floor, Dinah observed, stopping dead in her tracks, knelt a man. His solid upper body was bending over Veevi’s, and his head was slowly descending toward hers in what would, inevitably, become a long kiss. It was Jake, and his face was a mask of concentrated, solemn tenderness such as Dinah had never seen in him before.

She turned around and tiptoed out of view, before either of them could see her, and lunged on tiptoe, with the stealthy rigidity of a silent-movie comedian, into the powder room, just to the left of the front door. Here she sat down in a blue velvet armchair, her heart pounding violently.

Two thoughts flamed up simultaneously: that this was, of course (how could she have failed to predict it?), fated to happen, and that she was going to stop it.
I’ll be goddamned if she’s going to get her hands on him
. But it’s happening right now. My God, he’s kissing her right now. They’re gonna do it right now.

My ass, she said to herself, looking for all the world exactly like the grim and hardened father whose image she had banished from her thoughts only moments ago. As he would have done, she slapped her knees with both hands. Then she stood up, took a deep breath, and slowly walked toward the den, singing out, “Yoo-hoo, anybody home? Yoo-hoo!” She gave them enough time to execute what she vividly imagined were the contorted disentanglings required to present a convincing picture of virtuous conversation.

It must have been Jake’s car she’d heard in the garage, while Saul had probably dropped Veevi off sometime earlier and very quietly. Or perhaps it was vice versa. She steadied herself with these musings and forged ahead. At the door to the den, she exclaimed in mock surprise, “Why, look who’s here …” to Veevi, and to Jake, “Honey! … I didn’t hear a sound.”

Jake was sitting in one corner of the sofa, the one where Veevi’s head had been, and Veevi was sitting in the other. Her legs were crossed, her arms folded, and she was lighting a cigarette with a heavy silver lighter. There was a slight flush in her cheeks, a feverish brightness to her eyes, but
her demeanor, which included the slightly cocked head and the mouth now eagerly dragging on the cigarette, was composed.