Cheat and Charmer (58 page)

Peter put his book down, took up his foil, and headed for the sliding screen doors. He thought he might as well go out to the patio and practice lunges. Veevi got up and followed, leaning against the glass door, with a
drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, watching as he stood sideways, in profile. Holding up his left arm in a stiff curl, he lunged forward until his left calf nearly touched the ground and the foil in his extended right arm tipped forward into the empty air.

“En garde!” Veevi cried out, to his embarrassment.

He advanced and advanced, lunging and thrusting, then retreating, his left arm still held up in a half-moon curve above his head.

“God, you’re getting so good at this,” said Veevi. “It’s so great for your muscles. I wish Mike could see this. He’d go crazy for it.”

He knew that Mike was her husband, or used to be her husband, and that they were getting divorced. But he had no memory of a face to match with the name.

Suddenly he saw his mother sliding the screen door open. She came up to Veevi and stood beside her, wearing her soft blue wool bathrobe, with the belt tied around her waist and one satin-edged lapel folded over the other to keep out the early-evening chill. She rubbed her tanned forearms and yawned.

“Who’re you slicing up out there, darling? Anyone I know?” she called out to Peter.

“You know, Dinah, he’s really very good,” Veevi said.

“Yes, I
do
know, actually. Even in Los Angeles we hicks are able to recognize gr-gr-gr-grace and agility.” She was surprised at her sarcasm. The words had just slid out, and she wished they hadn’t. She was irritated that Veevi had refused to come to the party tonight. How was she ever going to meet someone single and available if she didn’t make an effort? Why did she insist, Dinah wondered, on isolating and removing herself from any chance of a new start, especially since the Boatwright affair was clearly a fizzle?

“Come on, give your muddoo a hug,” she said to Peter, using his old baby word for mother. Peter came over to her, placing the foil tip backward under his arm, and threw his arm around her, kissing her and letting her tousle his hair. He didn’t often let her do this anymore; he usually shrank from kisses and caresses. But at the moment the nearness of his mother’s body pleased him. She was deeply tanned after a week in the desert. She smelled like warm toast, and her voice sounded like the notes of a piano.

About twenty minutes later, Dinah called everyone to the round Formica table in the eat-in kitchen. Supper consisted of Dinah’s tried-and-true macaroni and cheese, heated baked beans from a can, saltines, cottage cheese, and pineapple cubes. Lorna pestered her with one question after another about the party: What time was it going to start? Which famous people were going to be there?

Jake strode into the kitchen, pulled open the refrigerator door, pulled off a leg from a broiled chicken wrapped in foil, and tore into it.

“Here’s old Dads,” Dinah said, “curing himself of malnutrition.” She shook her head but smiled up at him, an especially intimate smile. “Honey,” she said, “Lorna wants to know who’s going to be at George’s tonight.”

“You mean name-type folk?” His mouth was full. “I’m not sure. He knows a lot of non-movie people. Magnates, industrialists, big Republican goniffs of various stripes. He owns almost half of California himself.”

“Dad! Tell me about the movie stars. Not boring people—movie stars.”

“Darling,” he said to Lorna, knowing Veevi was listening, “actually there probably won’t be that many movie stars. George likes songwriters and comedy writers. And rich reactionaries. But if I see any movie stars I’ll be sure to tell them about my beautiful daughter.”

He smiled at her and finished the chicken leg, and then he returned to the refrigerator for a breast. “Why don’t you come, Vee,” he said. “We can still get a sitter.”

She shook her head and smiled. “I want a nice, quiet evening with the kids. And a book.”

Dinah, not listening, watched as Jake now stripped hunks of white meat from the breast of the chicken. “Stop eating!” she burst out. “For Christ’s sake—you eat in the middle of the night, you eat before we go out to dinner, you eat on the set, in the commissary, before parties, after parties. You’re going to weigh five thousand pounds.”

“Well, what’s the difference?” he said mildly, searching the vegetable crisper for something else. He grabbed some celery stalks, which he shoved into his mouth. Loud crunching sounds filled the kitchen.

“Jesus,” said Dinah, “you sound like an army of t-t-t-termites.”

“You know, a lot of people you think you can’t stand might actually turn out to be nice, and very interested in
you
,” he said to Veevi.

“It’s not the people, honestly. I just want to stay home tonight. In fact,
I can’t tell you how glad I am to be going absolutely nowhere.” She put her arm around Coco and stroked her hair.

“I’m going to get dressed,” Dinah announced. “You kids clear the table and wash the dishes.” Ignoring this command, Lorna followed Dinah out of the kitchen to watch her and talk to her while she dressed for the party. If Veevi wasn’t going out, she wouldn’t be getting dressed up and Lorna could have her mother and their beloved ritual to herself again.

Satisfied that he had left nothing untasted, Jake closed the refrigerator door. “Why don’t you and Veevi go out for a walk right now?” he said to Peter. “This is a great time of day to explore the desert. The air smells great and it’s not too cold, and you can still see where you’re going.”

“Want to?” Veevi said, smiling at Peter.

“Dad!”
He felt his face flushing.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Jake exploded. “Don’t tell me you won’t go out there because you’re afraid you might see a lizard.”

“There
could
be one, Dad.”

“Come on, Pete. You’ve got to get over this thing. You’re nine and a half. You’ve been to sleepaway camp. How can you still be afraid of lizards?”

“I just am,” he said simply. He didn’t care whether Veevi witnessed his humiliation. It was too frightening even to consider—going out in the desert at twilight. He ran out of the kitchen, hating his father, and threw himself down on his bed. He wished he were at home, in his own bed, with his Benny Goodman records; he couldn’t stand this poky house where you could see and hear what everyone was doing and where you couldn’t get away from them. If this was how regular people lived, he hated it.

Soon he heard his father go into the bathroom; the shower roared up, and then, after a while, he could hear his father singing a song and snapping his fingers and clapping. That was his father, all right: exploding in anger one minute, honking out some dumb song the next. Peter turned on his back and lay very still. Something about his father often made his mind go blank.

Veevi came into the room and sat down on the edge of his bed. “I’m going to take that walk now,” she said. “Why don’t you come? The desert’s just across the street, and we’ll walk along the edge. We can come home any time you like.”

She reached out and clamped her hand on his calf; it was something his mother might do, and in just the same way, yet he liked it when his mother
did it but not when Veevi did. “You know, when I was little and went out to the desert with Papa Milligan, he would tell me marvelous things. How the desert used to be the bottom of the ocean. How you can go out there and find seashells that are millions and millions of years old and rocks with fossil fishes in them.”

Did she want him to go looking for rocks with fossil fishes in them now? he wondered. Right now? In the growing darkness?

“You saw lizards and snakes and Gila monsters out there?” he asked.

“Sometimes. But never at night. Come on, it’s beautiful out.”

She jumped up and held her hand out to him. She was smiling; he saw her perfect white teeth, her red mouth, her shoulder-length brown hair, the warm hazel eyes with black stuff on the lashes. “Sorry, Veevi,” he said miserably. “I just don’t want to go out there.”

He picked up one of his Freddy the Pig books off the floor and opened it.

She waited, briefly, and watched him becoming absorbed in the book. “Well … all right then,” she said quietly, and she went back to the living-room sofa and her
New Yorker
.

During the next hour, the light in the desert darkened to a deep blue, and the thin air, which had been hot and dry in the daytime, became sharp with cold. Peter could feel it coming through the screen door, which he got up to close. He was absently aware of Coco’s and Veevi’s voices, of the bright light just beyond the bedroom door illuminating the small passageway that connected the room he shared with Veevi to his parents’ bedroom. Then his mother came out, and in her wake Lorna, with all the self-importance of a lady-in-waiting. “Where’s Pete?” he heard his mother say, and he got up and went into the living room.

Dinah was wearing a tangerine-colored strapless chiffon evening gown with crystal bugle beads sewn on the breast and the bodice. When she moved, the dress rustled and wafted the smell of perfume throughout the whole house.

“You look really pretty, Mom,” he said. He saw Veevi’s head jerk sharply as she appraised his mother. But she said nothing.

“She’s not pretty. She’s beautiful,” Lorna corrected him.

His sister was right, he thought, but it was embarrassing to tell your mother she was beautiful. “Pretty” would have to do.

Jake came out. His head seemed very large and round to Peter, who
couldn’t imagine a time, ever, when he would be big enough to look the way his father did tonight in the dark blue suit. Jake cleared his throat conspicuously and held his white handkerchief to his mouth, sickening Peter, who hated the way his father was always coughing up gobs of phlegm in front of everybody. If his father sniffled, he wanted to throw up; anything physical his father did—cough, sneeze, belch, fart—revolted him. Yet, as he watched his father help his mother wrap around her shoulders a long shawl made of the same tangerine-colored stuff as her dress, he felt that Veevi was looking at him, and he glanced at her. There was a strange expression on her face, and it was directed at him—something mean, a faint smirk that, he felt, was supposed to be a secret between them. Her eyes darted back and forth between him and his mother and father, as if she were inviting him to make fun of them in a private understanding of something about which he hadn’t the faintest clue; he knew only that it had something to do with his parents, and the way they were dressed up tonight, as if she wanted him to make fun of them with her.

“Doesn’t Mom look great?” Jake said.

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“Can’t you do better than that?”

“He already told me he thinks so, honey,” Dinah interjected.

“It’s time for him to learn how to give his mother a compliment,” Jake said.

“I think Peter is very gallant,” Veevi said. “At least with me.”

“C-C-Cut it out, both of you,” Dinah said. “He’s nine years old, for heaven’s sake.”

“But he’s very smart, and sensitive,” Veevi continued, undeterred. “And he sure knows how to be nice to girls. Don’t you, Pete?”

He smiled bashfully at her and went back to his book.

After kissing Lorna and Coco, Dinah came over to where he lay on the carpet and bent over to kiss the top of his head again. Peter could smell the perfume in the gauzy folds of her dress. Jake bellowed that they would be late, and she hurried to join him, her high heels skittering across the kitchen floor. A door slammed shut, and the Cadillac coughed and started up. He had gone back to his book when suddenly there was a flash of orange before his eyes, and a manicured hand thrusting a slip of paper toward Veevi: “George Joy’s number, just in case. Don’t lose it. He’s unl-l-l-listed.”

Veevi took the scrap of paper, stuck it in her shirt pocket, and returned to her magazine. He heard the car pull out of the driveway and take off down the street. Then he felt the desolation that always came over him when his parents went out for the evening—the feeling of filled space suddenly emptied out, leaving a vacuum in the heart.

Lorna must have felt it, too. She called out to him, a plea in her voice: “Watch TV with us?” She and Coco were lying on their stomachs, their faces in their hands and their legs hinged upward and waving from the knee. On the television screen, there was a choir of women in white robes singing at the top of their lungs. Lorna sang along, imitating their high, operatic range.

Peter and Coco giggled. Peter got up from the sofa and crouched on his knees, reaching over to the television set to change channels.

“There’s nothing else on. There’s only about three stations, and they all have Easter junk,” Lorna declared.

“There’s got to be something better,” said Veevi. “Go ahead, Peter. If anyone can find something, it’s you.”

He flipped the channels, passing another program with a preacher, until an old western flickered on the screen.

“There, that one!” Lorna cried.

The movie had nobody they recognized, just the familiar sights and sounds—thunderous hooves, gunfire, a stagecoach teetering on the dusty plain. The children happily settled in to watch, and Veevi watched too, putting her magazine aside. Outside, it was completely dark. At some point, she was supposed to tell them to come into the kitchen and dye Easter eggs. She had to get up and boil the eggs first. But she would do it later.