Cheat and Charmer (74 page)

“ ‘Show me the way to go home,’ ” Veevi sang. It was a song the girls’ father had sung to them a thousand times. Their mother had sung harmony with him, in the Model T, on Sunday afternoon excursions along the Pacific Coast Highway, until Dinah and Veevi had been old enough to sing harmony with them, and then all four of their voices had harmonized. “ ‘I’m tired an’ I wanna go to bed.’ ”

“Stop singing, Veevi,” Dinah said. She heard a voice in the background—muffled, irritable, and male. There was a thick intake of breath, and the sound of ice clinking in a glass. Then laughter. “Is he there now?” Dinah asked.

“Mmm.”

“Oh shit, you’re f-f-f-fucking him again.”

“So? We’re having a lovely time together. Everything’s wonderful. Isn’t it, darling?” Veevi’s voice seemed faraway as she spoke to someone in the room.

“Christ, Veevi. Don’t d-d-d-do this to yourself!”

“Can’t talk about it now,” Veevi said, her voice gay and thick.

“Oh, fuck it, Veevi. Ask him what he was doing with Jill Trevor at the G-G-G-Golden Horn Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard on the morning of June 3rd. Because I saw him come out of a room with her and get into a car. Just ask him.”

“Jus’ a minute!” Veevi said. Dinah heard her slur out the question,
laughingly, and cringed—
Not now, idiot! Not now, not this minute, while I’m on the phone and you’re shit-faced
.

“What is this, Dinah?” a male voice suddenly asked.

She spoke firmly, though her legs wobbled beneath her.

“Veevi’s all set to go and s-s-s-sing for your supper, Michael. But I saw you, b-b-b-buster. I saw you with Jill Trevor at the motel near the Mormon Temple on Santa M-M-M-Monica Boulevard a whole week or two before you were supposed to get here. I know what you’re up to.”

“Stay out of it, Dinah. You’re way over your stupid little provincial head. Whatever you think you saw has nothing to do with Veevi and me. Stay out of our lives. You of all people, the stool pigeon of Holmby Hills, have no right to interfere. Leave Veevi alone. I’m taking care of her from now on.”

“The hell you are. If you l-l-l-loved her you wouldn’t l-l-l-let her do this, Mike.”

She heard a click. For a moment she sat motionless, blinking. Then, glancing at her watch, she reached for the phone again, dialed the operator, asked for a number in New York, and waited to be connected, poising her finger so that if she had to, she could cut off the call in a second.

Sitting up, her back so rigid that it ached, she waited as the phone rang. “Hello?” said a voice finally.

“Cl-Cl-Cl-Cl—”

“Dinah? Dinah Lasker?”

“How’d you guess?” she said with a deep laugh, relieved that his wife hadn’t answered the phone. “Can you talk?”

“More or less. If I start telling you I’ve already sent a check to the relief fund, you’ll know who’s entered the room.”

“Got it. Listen, Cliff, Vee’s in big trouble.”

She filled him in, including the exchange she had just had with Mike.

“When’s it supposed to happen, Dinah?”

“Soon. Middle of July.”

“But what can I do?”

“Call her, Cliff. Talk her out of it. Not now. She’s loaded, and he’s there. He may even be there when you call, but if you try tomorrow, late morning, she’ll be up by then. Maybe she’ll be sober, and maybe she’ll listen to you. You count, for her.”

“Not like Mike counts. I never did.”

“Not true, Cliff. She respects you more than anybody. She knows, somewhere, you l-l-l-love her.”

“Well, you know, I’m under surveillance here.”

“I know. I’ve heard. But doesn’t she ever go out of the house? Can’t you go somewhere?”

“I’ll do what I can.”

“Thanks, Cliff.”

“Don’t get your hopes up, Dinah.”

“Try, Cl-Cl—shit, you know your name.”

“Listen, if you don’t mind my asking, how come you’ve switched sides all of a sudden? I didn’t think you were in the business of saving souls, including your own.”

Dinah took a deep breath and laughed softly. “Well, as my sister always says, ‘Don’t be an idiot.’ ”

“Ah,” he said. “Dumb question.”

“Yeah. V-V-V-Very.”

She put the phone down and dialed another number. “Dorshka?” she said. “It’s me, Dinah. In Chicago, at Jake’s cousin’s. Do you know what’s going on with Vee and Mike?”

“Do I know?” Dorshka said. “Dinah, you cannot imagine. A real glass of worms, this is.”

“Can of worms,” Dinah said.

“Okay, okay. Worms, snakes. Nest of snakes is better.” She was in agony. “Listen, Dinah. It’s like this. Truly, I can’t
stand
it here anymore. I don’t want to die in this awful country, and if I can’t go back to Europe I
will
die.
I will!
But still, if she does this for me and for him, how can I live with myself? How? That lawyer you gave her, Unwin, says it’s a package deal. Two for one. If she clears Mike, and maybe gives them some names they don’t already have, she gets her passport back again, and I, too, get mine. Back to Paris we all can go. Mazel tov all around. All of us—me, the girls, the two of them. Dinah, listen to me. I lost everybody, Dinah. They killed my mother and father, my brother. Mike and the girls—they are all I have left. I cannot live without my family anymore. But God help me, I don’t want her to do it. I tell her not to do it and I mean it, but if she doesn’t do it I will die here. Dinah, did I tell her the right thing? I don’t know what is this right thing anymore.”

“You’ve got
me
,” Dinah almost said. But she knew it was no consolation.
“You said the right thing, Dorshka,” she murmured without satisfaction in either herself or Dorshka. After she said good-bye, she took a hot shower, changed her clothes, and waited for Jake to arrive.

She wanted to tell him right away about her phone call to Veevi, but she couldn’t find a way to do it. The second Hubie and Jake and the Lasker kids marched through the front door, Betty announced dinner. This was a long, cheerful affair, with Hubie and Jake telling stories about the old days: how they’d giggled hysterically at their Hungarian grandfather’s funeral and been picked up by the backs of their jackets and thrown out on the street; about Sunday dinners at this same grandfather’s, when their grandmother would speak only Hungarian to her sons and completely ignore their wives; and then how the sons—Jake’s father, Eli, and his brother, Sidney—would do comedy routines that had everyone peeing with laughter.

Although Jake considered Hubie one of the purest comedy talents he had ever known, Hubie had not gone out to Hollywood with him, despite Jake’s invitation, in the winter of 1937. He owned a very successful advertising agency, had a summer house in Michigan, and played golf every weekend with Betty, who, Dinah noted, did her own housework and cooking. Hubie and Jake looked like brothers. Their voices were alike, gravelly and warm, and their laughter and their facial expressions and ways of talking were not just similar but identical. They laughed at each other’s jokes with an instinctiveness funded by years of growing up together, though Hubie’s father had become rich in the furniture business and Jake’s father had stayed poor. Whenever Jake’s father managed to make a decent living, it was because he was working for Hubie’s father. Whenever he went into business on his own, he failed. Hubie was sent to private school, and his father dressed elegantly and belonged to good clubs. Jake’s father gambled and fooled around with women. And, Jake used to say, “If you just boiled his ties, you’d have a hell of a soup.”

In the living room, after dinner, Hubie played the piano and Jake sang, the two of them keeping up an endless patter. Dinah saw that Hubie could, just by looking at him in a certain cockeyed way and clearing his throat, cause Jake to dissolve into an eye-streaming, quivering lump of helpless laughing protoplasm. In the past, when the two families had gotten together for weeklong vacations in Palm Springs, or Hubie had come
over for dinner while on a business trip to L.A., Dinah had loved watching the cousins in action. Yet she was having difficulty concentrating on the moment. She laughed where she was supposed to, but she chain-smoked and she couldn’t find a comfortable position on the sofa. The fun continued until just past midnight, when Jake and Dinah finally went up to their room. It had twin beds, which Jake said a guy his size couldn’t possibly sleep in.

Wide awake, talking his head off about the show, Jake was happier than she had ever seen him. “If this thing goes,” he said as he took off his shoes and unbuckled his belt, “I’m never gonna make another picture. We’ll move to New York, get a great apartment, put the kids in private school, get a house in East Hampton, and I’ll do theater, nothing but theater, from here on in. I’ve never loved anything so much in my life.” On and on he went about rehearsals, auditions, actors, dancers, fights with the director, problems with the budget—all of which were dramatic without being catastrophic, all interesting and amusing. He was excited about everything, chucked her under the chin, and talked nonstop about showing the kids all the places where he’d lived as a kid. At the same time, he couldn’t wait to get back to New York and take her to rehearsals, which had now started in earnest.

Hearing
that
, of course, delighted her so much that she decided to wait until the next day to bring up her phone call to Veevi. It wouldn’t register with him, she argued with herself; he wouldn’t be able to take it in right now. That she must tell him, somehow, she felt sure; she didn’t exactly know why she had to, she reflected, only that she felt uncomfortable with his not knowing. But to do it now, as he stretched out on the bed to her right, wearing only his familiar boxer shorts and pajama top, seemed pointless. It was as if nothing existed for Jake except the magnificent present. That they had a house in Los Angeles, that the show could fail, even that he had a movie that was about to be released in time for the Fourth of July—and that her sister was scheduled to testify in closed session at Palomar Pictures in two weeks—never came up.

They had been separated for nearly a month. “Come here,” he said, lying back on the bed, displaying a ready, ripe erection.

“How’s your heart?” she said.

“We can run around the block and find out.”

“But that’s for a guy who’s been m-m-m-married for a hundred years. Don’t I qualify as new and exciting?”

“Just come here.”

Within moments she was astride him, trying to control the laughter that accompanied their attempts not to make noise. But that only heightened their pleasure, so that everything was over very fast—but happily, for both, and for each.

Soon he began to snore, and she went to her own bed, leaned against the headboard, and smoked a cigarette. She couldn’t sleep, not yet; she was too happy to go to sleep. She felt he loved her deeply, she was sure of it now, and nothing else mattered. His face had lit up when he saw her downstairs and he had been so hungry for her, just like the way it used to be. And his energy, his excitement about his work, and New York, and the future! She believed him, felt herself caught up in the fire of invincibility that burned so brightly within him now. She looked over at him, and drank in his physical nearness, his big shoulders and chest, the broad forehead: these were her protection and her safety.

She went into the bathroom to brush her teeth. All right then, she said, looking at herself in the mirror, if Veevi wants to testify that’s her business. Mike’s going to fail her, and it will go hard for her when that happens, but we’ll just keep taking care of her and life will go on. But when she got back to her own bed, in the room that wasn’t their bedroom at home, somehow she couldn’t get under the covers but sat down on the edge of the mattress, with her hands clasped on her thighs. She couldn’t just let it go—what was happening in Los Angeles. She couldn’t give up so easily. Jake had to know. He was the one who should call her up and tell her not to do it. It wasn’t right for her to keep him from knowing, not when Veevi listened to him and trusted him as her brother-in-law. I have to get him to see it my way, she thought.

She went over to his bed and, gently shaking him by the shoulder, woke him up out of his sleep and told him about her telephone call, earlier that day, to her sister.