Cheat and Charmer (54 page)

“Well, hello, hello,” she said in a mock-British accent.

Jake, completely at ease, didn’t look particularly disheveled in his golf slacks. “Where’ve you been, honey?” he asked, and smiled at her, as if delighted to see her. “Come and give us a kiss.”

But Dinah could see only what might have happened if she hadn’t wandered in: Veevi’s legs wrapped around his back, Jake pumping away, white behind in the air.

“I’ve been upstairs writing checks,” she said smoothly.

She ignored his request for a kiss and settled down in one of the armchairs.

“Did the kids get off to their various rendezvous?”

“Mmm. How was your g-g-g-game?”

“The goddamn gout started up a little while ago, and it hurt like hell to walk across the golf course. Otherwise, it was fine. A beautiful day.” He delicately pointed to his knee and grimaced, and she refrained from saying, “If it hurt so goddamn much, how come you were able to rest your substantially overweight self on it while swooning over my sister?”

“Did you take your Benemid?” Dinah asked.

He shook his head and again squeezed his eyes and his lips shut in pain. “Honey, would you mind getting it for me? It’s in the top drawer of the dresser.”

She flew out of the den and upstairs. Were they even now falling back into an embrace? Was he bending over her again, grotesquely lowering himself for a kiss—or more? Was his knee really acting up? Had he sent her upstairs just to be alone with Veevi? She couldn’t get out of her mind the look she had seen on his face, the completely unfamiliar look of a man playing a part in which he would never ordinarily have been cast: the solemn, unsmiling lover, bending over as if into a baptismal font, to bestow a kiss that would inaugurate—what? A slow-motion pornographic movie so harrowing it took her breath away: his body and hers entwined, doing, in a tumult of images, everything—everything a man and a woman can do together.

Perhaps she hadn’t seen anything. Perhaps she had made it all up. Suddenly, she wasn’t sure.

She opened the dresser drawer and stared into the clutter. There was
no time to sift through it all and find an incriminating note. In a flurry of disappointed suspicion, she shook a pill from a little brown vial, slammed the drawer shut, and raced back downstairs to the den, where she found her husband and her sister once again in changed positions. To Dinah’s relief, Veevi was completely vertical, standing at the bar getting Jake a root beer, though Dinah felt like snatching the bottle out of her sister’s hand. This time, he was the one stretched out on the sofa, with a cushion under his raised knee. His eyes were squeezed shut, his jaw clenched in pain. Good, Dinah thought, I hope it hurts like hell.

“Here’s your p-p-p-pill,” she said, too quickly, as she walked into the den. Dinah took the full mug of root beer from Veevi and gave it to Jake, who grimaced as he swallowed the white tablet.

“Tell Gussie not to cook any red meat for a couple of weeks,” he said. “Chicken’s okay. Veal, too. Christ, how’m I ever going to go to New York in a month with my knee this way?”

“Best stay off it,” Veevi said. Dinah thought, You perfect bitch, having a private joke with him thinking I don’t get it.

“Have you been
on
it recently, d-d-d-dear?” said Dinah.

“You mean, like getting down to measure the angle on a putting green? I did do that today. Big mistake,” said Jake.

Nice alibi, Dinah thought. She looked at her sister, and then at her husband, and then at her sister, and at her husband again. She told herself point-blank that it was impossible that she should have seen what she surely had. Slowly, she began to feel safe again. If she saw what she thought she had seen, there would have to be a reasonable explanation. Since she didn’t want to ask, the best conclusion was that she hadn’t seen anything at all.

At dinnertime, Jake’s knee began to throb again, so he went upstairs to lie in bed and watch TV. Only the two of them were in the house, Veevi having gone out with some old friends Dinah remembered from the Malibu days—people whom she went outside to wait for in the driveway, since, Dinah assumed, they had refused to set foot inside the house of a stool pigeon. Jake’s knee made it impossible for him to come down to dinner, so on a tray she brought up what she called one of her “white trash” meals; that is, the kind of food her father loved—corn bread, macaroni and cheese,
pineapple slices with cottage cheese, and lima beans with plenty of salt and pepper and butter. He winced as he sat up in bed, but ate, as he always did, with gusto, his eyes glued to the baseball game.

Dinah sat on the edge of his bed with her arms folded, chewing the inside of her cheek. For a while, she watched the game with him, and then she went over to her own bed. She thumbed through the
Saturday Review
, irritated by the gray roar of the baseball crowd, which sometimes surged and sometimes diminished but never changed pitch. It accompanied every athletic event on television, and Jake watched them all.

Eventually, she lit a cigarette. “Jake, I have to talk to you about something,” she said. And she got up and turned off the television.

“Honey!” he objected.

“You didn’t hear me. I have to t-t-t-talk to you.” She sat down on the nubby candlewick bedspread, facing him.

“What about?” His eyes drifted back yearningly to the television.

“Your knee.”

“My knee?”

“I’m not surprised it’s hurting you so much, though I wonder why the other one isn’t just as sore.”

He looked at her, mystified. “What’s eating you?”

“Just when I was coming into the den this afternoon, I looked in and saw you on your g-g-g-gouty old knees, leaning over my sister, like you were just about to kiss her. Or crawl on top of her or G-G-G-God knows what. So I turned around and hollered out to you and came back and made a completely f-f-fake entrance.”

Jake took a sizable square of buttered corn bread and slowly bit into it. “Well, you should have walked right in the first time,” he said with his mouth full. “You could have gotten me out of a real jam.”

“Oh? How’s that?” She folded her arms across her chest.

“When I came home from golf, I found Veevi in the kitchen. She was crying, and I think she was hungover—she smelled kind of boozy. It seems that Saul proposed to her last night—said he wants to marry her as soon as she gets the divorce from Mike. And I said, ‘So what’s the problem?’ ‘I don’t want to marry him,’ she said. ‘Then don’t,’ I said. ‘No one’s holding a gun to your head.’ She said, ‘I’m such a burden to all of you.’ And then I said, ‘Come into the den, we’ll talk about it.’ I felt sorry for her, but I thought this was a good time to discuss her plans. So we went into the den, and then, Jesus, we sat there, and she said she had a terrible headache, so she
stretched out and put a pillow under her head. Meanwhile, my knee is killing me and I’m wondering where you are. But she keeps talking. Says it’s all her fault that she and Mike split up. That he’d had affairs from the beginning but expected her not to, and she was jealous because he fooled around and she didn’t, so she had an affair with that artist Gas Bag, or whatever his name is—”

“Just c-c-c-c-cut to the bending-over part. You haven’t explained that yet.”

“That’s true. I won’t lie about it. She asked me if I found her attractive, and asked me to kiss her. Just that once. As a favor.”

“I see. What if she had asked you to put your th-th-th-thing in her mouth? As a favor.”

Dinah kept furiously chewing the inside of her cheek, while smoke from her cigarette drifted upward into her hair.

“Oh, honey, please,” he said, showing a sudden prudish distaste for the vulgarity he normally loved in her. He had consumed the hot buttered corn bread and pushed the tray to the side, and now, his hand on his knee, his face again grimaced with pain.

“Well, do you find her attractive? Are you in l-l-l-love with her?”

“Hon-ey! For Christ’s sake,
no
.”

“You said, in her kitchen in 1938—or was it ’37—that she was the most gorgeous creature you had ever laid eyes on.”

“I didn’t know you then.” He smiled.

“Okay, but you were talking to me! I never forget a face. It was you all right. Goddamn drooling over her.”

“I will make a sworn statement and have it notarized: I am not personally attracted to your sister. Moreover, I didn’t want to kiss her, and if I had actually gone ahead and done it I would’ve told you.”

“She’s after you. Just like she was after you the night you guys got back from Paris. You took her out to Chasen’s! You didn’t even stay and have dinner with me in the hospital!”

He put his hand on his sore knee and winced. “Sweetheart, I can’t tell you how wrong you are. If I’d known you didn’t want me to go to Chasen’s that night, I would have stayed with you. Honest. And your sister isn’t after me—not by a long shot. It’s a grotesque thought, by the way. She wants what she had, and there’s nobody out here who’s going to give her that. Anyway, how could I possibly want anyone but you? Huh? She was just testing the waters and wanted to find out—she just wanted me to tell her,
or show her, that she doesn’t have to be stuck with a rebarbative bore like Saul Landau. She’s never had to face the future without a man, and she’s scared. It was pitiful, actually. That Veevi Milligan Ventura Albrecht should have to ask a guy to kiss her is just pathetic.”

Dinah sat back, chewed her thumb, and stared at him.

“I feel sorry for her,” he said. “I know she was a legend all those years ago, and had every writer in Hollywood at her feet, but Jesus, those days are over and that stunning young woman is gone. She knows it, too. She’s drowning in self-pity, and I’m dying for her to get out of this house and into a place of her own. If giving her some kind of kiss is going to jump-start her on a new life, it’s a small price to pay. Problem is even then it won’t do any good. If you’re not part of that Paris world she’s fled, then you don’t exist for her. And don’t think I haven’t noticed the way she treats you, either—like a slave. You love her, I can see it, and maybe she loves you, too, if she still has the capacity to love anyone, but it’s not a very kind or thoughtful sort of love. It’s, you know, family love—the kind you take for granted, the kind everybody takes for granted.”

“So now you’re a philosopher of love. Well, ‘home is where you hang,’ as my father used to say.”

“Exactly. I’ve put that in my notes, too.”

“Do you put everything in your notes, like ‘Today I humiliated my w-w-w-wife’?”

“Come here, baby,” Jake said, beckoning to her with his arm. “I’m sorry you had to play that undignified little charade this afternoon.”

He patted a place beside him on the bed, and she went over to him, lifted the tray onto the floor, and sat down. She felt limp, and ashamed. He put his arm around her and she melted against him. “You didn’t make it up,” he said huskily. “I was leaning over her, and I was going to kiss her. But only because she asked me to. I would’ve given anything not to do it. It wouldn’t have been for real.”

He kissed her, softly at first, then harder. “Like this,” he said.

But Dinah drew back. “You never tell me I’m b-b-b-beautiful.”

He laughed a little. “I don’t?”

“No. Never once.”

“Well, the word I would use is
handsome
.”

Again, she pulled away and made a face. “What’s wrong with
beautiful
? What would it cost you, huh?”

“Oh, honey, you’re my wife. I love you. But you know the kind of guy I
am. It’s hard for me to say things like that. I love the way you look. You’re better than beautiful.
Beautiful
is a fucking cliché. There are thousands of girls out here who are beautiful. I see them every day at the studio, and let me tell you, honey, they’re boring as hell—boring to look at, boring to talk to. I can’t remember one face from the other. But handsome? Classy? Elegant? Interesting? Intriguing? Sexy? That’s you.” Pulling her toward him, he squeezed her and nuzzled her neck. His hands felt warm on her skin. “We’re one person, you and I. When I’m not with you, I’m only half alive. You’re my wife. It’s you I want. Always.”

She swallowed. There was a sudden heat in her throat and eyes, a sprouting of tears. He pressed his large warm hand around her cheek again. “There’s nobody in the world for me but you.” She groaned a little, and the tears rolled and splashed. She knew that he had now seen her naked need for love, and her fear of losing it. She pressed her face into his T-shirt with shame. And as she clung to him, allowing herself to be held, a different heat stole over her—the heat of safety, of completeness, of belonging, and desire.

She tore off her clothes and, naked, lay on her side, straining to fit her body to his. “Will you do something for me?” he asked suddenly. “Something I’ve never asked you to do?”

“What? Stand on my head? Do s-s-s-somersaults? What?”

His eyes were bright, as if he were taken with his own ingenuity.

“Go into your dressing room and put on something sexy.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Stockings, maybe. One of those things you put on, you know, to hold up the stockings.”