Cheat and Charmer (63 page)

Early on, she’d asked him point-blank what he did to Dinah to make her come. When he told her and agreed to demonstrate, she laughed and said triumphantly, “Nobody should have to work that hard! Not necessary with me.” She comes, she claims, while he’s inside her—and always before he does, silently, except for her quickened breathing. “Do you know what Dorshka told Mike, when he was sixteen years old and had started fucking?” she said once. “ ‘Never come first, and always remember the working class.’ ”

So he had always given her enough time, and she’d learned how to get what she wanted. Mortified, calling himself a schlepper and an amateur, he realized that he was in general not as scrupulously and fastidiously attentive to Dinah as Mike had been to Veevi. “Well,” he said, “unlike Mike, I never got instructions from my mother.” But he tried to do what he thought Mike had done, and when she hit her target fairly quickly, or so she said, that made him feel that he was up there in the major Parisian expatriate-novelist-educated-lover leagues.

He and Dinah do make love perhaps once a week now. It’s understood that because of his insomnia and his anxieties about the picture and the new project, this is a slow time for them. He likes to fall asleep in her bed, with her arm around him and his head on her shoulder. A moment comes when she gently unfastens her arm and rolls over into her own cave of sleep, and then he moves back to his own bed. When they do make love, they fall into their regular routine, so that every move is comfortable and predictable, but this is not a time of passion.

Veevi asks coolly about what she calls “beddy-bye” between him and Dinah. It irritates him, but he responds vaguely, thinking it just as well for her to believe that he and Dinah have an indifferent time in bed. Nor does he tell Veevi that when he makes love to Dinah he feels intensely that she is a good human being, whom he trusts and relies on—that he loves her, that she’s been a good wife. No longer able to make babies with her, he feels, nevertheless, that entering Dinah is like walking into a sanctuary at night after a long day at the studio. He cannot renew himself in her, because she’s too familiar, but there is refuge and warmth. When he makes love to Veevi, he can feel, despite the way she tears her pleasure out of him like a shark biting into a human limb, that there is no union between them. But that excites him. He tells her often that he loves her, that he’s in love with her, and he believes it.

He dozes for a while as they unclench and lie side by side in her bed. When he wakes, and rises, knowing he must go, he sees her sleeping on her back, with her hands resting one over the other. It is an unsettling sight, for she looks like a woman in a coffin, or like one of those stone effigies in a medieval tomb. At the same time, the effect is not so much of eerie remoteness as of a cold, imperious perfection that exudes censoriousness and the unspoken demand that he measure up to something which she has yet to name. He leans over and kisses her and tells her that he’s crazy about her. “That’s nice, Uncle J.,” she murmurs, turning on her side, and again he’s unsettled, for she has curled up the way Dinah does at night.

The moment he hits Sunset, he’s ravenous. The craving overwhelms him, so he turns right on Allenford and drives down to Olympic and over to Itzik’s. The owner, who has numbers tattooed on his left forearm, wipes his
hands on his apron and makes Jake a pastrami sandwich on rye. He takes the sandwich, wrapped in aluminum foil and dripping mustard, and a Cel-Ray Tonic, and sits in his car, watching the sky change from deepest indigo to a pearlescent gray, delirious with joy at the spice and tang of the food, and the fizzing scrape of the soda against the back of his throat. He has to go home, shower, and get to the studio. He has to fight with Izzie and Mel today, and he isn’t looking forward to it; he has to beg them one more time to bring in Milty Ostrow to fix the music, then he’s going to wash his hands of it. Previews are starting soon; then he’ll go back into the cutting room, fix the timing on jokes that don’t work, do whatever dubbing and voice-overs might be necessary, and that’ll be it. He’ll be able to work on the show, which he’s doping out in his head, during the long drives to and from Veevi’s.

He gets out of the car, throws the crumpled-up aluminum foil into a trash can, and waves good-bye to Itzik, who looks out the window and waves back. Jake has a talent for getting people to talk about themselves. He does it on airplanes and in doctors’ waiting rooms; he can get a hat-check girl’s life story in the time it takes her to give him his coat and help him on with it. But he has never been able to do this with Itzik. Often, he feels himself on the point of saying, “When did you come here? What year did you arrive?” But he can’t do it. He wants to say, “Auschwitz?” But he’s shy, afraid of causing Itzik pain. Instead, he brings him jokes—new jokes he’s heard at the studio or on the golf course—and he tells them, and since he’s usually the only person in the deli at three in the morning they have a good laugh together. When Itzik sees Jake’s eyes filling with tears, he thinks it’s from laughter. But Jake once sat in the car and stuffed his mouth with a pastrami sandwich and a kosher pickle and cried at the sight of Itzik standing in his rolled-up shirtsleeves and apron, churning a vat of coleslaw.

The long curves of Sunset Boulevard are bleak and tedious as he drives home. The night air is chilly, the ocean mist raw. He is so tired now that he could fall asleep on the road, and he yawns, over and over, and belches, and thinks, What the hell am I doing in this? I’ll see her a few more times, and then it’s got to end.

After the fight in Palm Springs, Dinah and the kids left within an hour. Jake gave Veevi a good long day to rest, then he picked her up at the hospital at
about eight o’clock. It was Veevi who drove, however, despite the bandaged cut on her head, insisting that nothing would relax or steady her nerves like being behind the wheel of a car. Jake hesitated at first but let her have her way. He was glad to be free of his family, and as he sat back in the passenger seat and let Veevi drive—something she did extremely well—he forgot Dinah’s rage and the sight of his son sitting on the sofa nestled against Dinah’s arm, expecting to be praised for a decision that filled Jake with such contempt that he’d had to fight the impulse to slap the boy across the face. He had never really liked Veevi before, but now, reminded of the day in Paris when they had visited the Louvre, he lost himself in the feeling that he and she were two self-sufficient, sane adults who understood each other perfectly and knew that families could be a bore. He was wishing he had never gotten married and had children, and he blamed Dinah for trapping him in a situation he’d known from the beginning he was never cut out for.

Veevi had tied a silk scarf under her chin, and the wind coming through the open windows whipped up wisps of thick brown hair that escaped from the scarf’s edges. Except for the bandage at her temple, no one would have known that she had drunk herself into a state of oblivion the night before, peed on a young boy, passed out in the bathroom, and hit her head. For a long time, they said nothing. She smoked, and struck him as completely in command of the car and the driving. Then they began to chat, and, discovering that it was difficult for them to hear each other because of the air whooshing by, they rolled up the windows. Veevi untied her scarf, so that her hair fell in waves along her shoulders.

“Poor Peter,” she said. “It must have been ghastly for him.”

“Oh, he’ll survive,” Jake replied. “Unless his mother turns him into a faggot, which I’m afraid she may well do.”

Veevi agreed. “Dinah’s afraid of strong men,” she said. “She’s going to break him if you don’t watch out. He’s much too sensitive for his own good.”

Jake had evidently never been around to hear Veevi telling Peter, as she often did, how wonderful it was that he was so sensitive.

“You know,” he said, enjoying her dig at Dinah, “she just doesn’t get anything.”

“She’s hopeless, I’m afraid. And, Jake, her taste! You’ve got to do something about it—her clothes, the things in your house!”

He heard how far she was trying to go, and he didn’t tell her that he
approved every item of clothing Dinah bought and made her take back anything he didn’t like, and that it was he who had supervised the furnishing of the house, the consultations with the interior decorator—everything. So he ignored this last remark and, instead, asked her if she remembered the times when Ed Milligan had gotten drunk when she and Dinah were kids. She did, she said. She remembered her mother holding her, and Dinah always being the one to put him in the bathtub and clean him up. Jake asked whether it was true that Pop had loved her more than Dinah, and Veevi answered that it was, but that Alice had loved Dinah more than her, so it had all come out even. “They were allies, Mom and Dinah. The responsible ones. The ones who always had to clean up after me or Pop. The virtuous, long-suffering ones. Domestic, dreary martyrs.”

There was a not-very-subtle web of implication that he was gladly allowing her to spin around him. The world was divided into those who lived interesting lives, broke the rules, and didn’t give a good goddamn about the consequences, and those who, because of inherent cowardice, self-pity, and lack of imagination, always chose safety over risk and then lorded it over the scapegrace others with their noble sufferings. It needn’t be said which group the two of them belonged to.

When they got back to the house in Los Angeles, the lights were out. Dinah, he guessed, had put the kids to bed and then probably taken a sleeping pill, which she did often to get through a night of his snoring. She was unlikely to wake up and surprise them, but his conscience was bothering him, as if he’d been drawn into a conspiracy. He thought he ought to go upstairs and check. When he came down to say that Dinah and the kids were sound asleep, he discovered that Veevi had made grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches—so like Dinah, he couldn’t help thinking!—and brought out a couple of bottles of ice-cold beer from the bar in the den, just for the two of them. As they ate and drank, Jake plied her with questions about her life in Europe; he couldn’t seem to get enough. When they had finished eating, she got up to put the dishes in the sink. Jake glanced up from the Sunday funnies he’d been skimming and saw that she was looking at him. A smirk played on her lips. Her eyes, which were the color of dark vinegar, danced with mischief.

“Uncle J.,” she said with an ironic laugh. She laughed again, and he understood what it meant: what, after all, could be funnier! He saw this recognition between them in the lambent mobility of her mouth, the sardonic
quickness of her laugh, and he stood up and went over to her, and she put his hands on her shoulders.

“What are you up to? Hmm?” he said.

“Uncle J.,” she said again.

They did it on the brown tweed sofa in the den. Jake kept his pants down around his ankles, and his socks on, which Veevi found hilarious.

H
e became familiar with the things in her house, even though he saw them mostly in the dark: the bookshelves filled with books she had collected during the Malibu days with Ventura; the long antique refectory table and benches in the dining room; the French landscapes; the pair of African masks with thin ridged geometric noses and mouths protruding like corks; the small framed photographs of her and Mike with everybody famous and literary in postwar Paris.