Cheat and Charmer (77 page)

I
t is deep in the mid-November night, and in West Los Angeles a relentless Santa Ana wind strips the eucalyptus trees of their dry and brittle leaves and flakes the bark peeling back from their swaying trunks. Below the star-encrusted sky, yucca, juniper, sagebrush, and thyme pour scent upon scent through the open window screens, while family dogs, chained outdoors for the night, smell coyotes in the canyons and howl in cascading echoes. Yet Veevi neither hears nor sees and, under the sheets thrown back from her shoulders, lies perfectly still, her knees tucked up almost to her breasts and her two hands placed virginally together underneath her cheek.

She has been yearning for this state of ecstatic oblivion. How hard she has worked to get there, fighting her way downward to the blackest darkness. She could not do it alone, but needed help from big gulps out of the bottle hidden underneath the bed, and from the red-and-orange jewels in the vial on the night table.

Each by itself could not do the job. With gin alone, she could still feel the body of the man lying beside her, feel its grossness and wrongness. She does not want to see and know this fat and hairy belly, these fleshy eyelids, these sensualist’s hands that lie only inches from her own. With gin alone, he cannot turn into the one she wants, the one with the beautiful boy’s face as it had been in 1938, his young beard dark and still rough after shaving, and his chest hot and sweating above hers on the beach in the middle of the night. With gin alone, she cannot go down into the velvet darkness with the boy lying full length above her. For that, she needs the red-and-orange jewels. When she washes them down with a big swig of gin, soon there is a curling wave that lifts and cups her as she falls again into the darkness,
and not a moment too soon, for it wraps its black cloak around her just as she sees the pornographic scene in all its perfect detail: the young French actress with her short blond hair and her long legs spread and Mike taking aim—one, two, three, he’s in! And oh, are they ever at it, hour after hour!

So she sinks to the dark place where dreams turn to nothing, and nothing turns to dreams. It’s so droll, really, that she wishes she could tell Dinah about it. She is floating in delicious oblivion but having the dream all the same, the way kids talk at night after the lights are out. But she’s honored, too, because inside this dream, which she’s laughing at while she’s having it, Sleeping Beauty is walking down the street—our Sleeping Beauty—side by side with the president.

Yes, the president of the United States of America! President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ramrod straight, with the bluest blue eyes you’ve ever seen. He is looking at her, with a sidelong glance of adoration and desire and eyes so blue they are the exact shade of the deep skies at Madame Rochedieu’s, in the late fall afternoons—the only time that it is safe to walk in the woods and look for firewood. They are the blue of Pop’s eyes, too, when he takes her out to the desert, just the two of them, to teach her to shoot. Propping up the .22 on her shoulder, he stands back, and when she fires, and the bullet hits the tin can set up on a rock, his blue eyes flash with pleasure. “Atta girl!” he says. They get into the Model T, and he strokes her hair, shyly, and they say delicious mean things about Mom and Dinah. “Don’t they ever shut up?” “Everything they like to do is boring, and everything we like to do is fun.” “They’re just stick-in-the-muds.” “You’re my favorite and you’re always gonna be my favorite.”

And now, in her sleep, she smiles, her lips twitch and blink with pleasure, for in her dream (sunk now so far below the murk of barbiturate and booze), President Dwight D. Eisenhower walks beside her but does not touch her. A parade is going by. They are part of the parade, and it’s—for him! People are throwing ticker tape into the air! Some of it falls on them like confetti, and he looks at her again, and she feels safer than she has ever felt with anyone in her life (though she is still laughing at herself having the dream, it is really too ridiculous that she’s with Dwight D. Eisenhower, and she laughs and tells him, “I never voted for you! I never would! I’m a Communist!”). But he finds it charming, and he lets her know with his eyes that there is no one in the world who is so beautiful, so wonderful. Yet he doesn’t touch her; his arms remain straight against his sides. His uniform fits him perfectly, and his medals glint in the sun. No one says it
out loud, but everyone in the parade knows that he cherishes her and loves her
more than anything on earth
, and that he has
chosen
her out of all the women in the world to be his, forever. That’s why he looks at her the way he does. The most important man in the world, the man who is the president of the United States of America and the world and the universe, loves her more than anyone he has ever loved, and more than any man has ever loved any woman. Everybody sees it; everybody knows it. And now, in front of the whole world, he puts his hands on her face and kisses her, and she feels happier than happiness itself. As the people in the parade roar by him, he leans over and whispers in her ear, “Oh, you darling Communist!” and smiles at her, his face blazing with adoration. And she says to him, with a smile that promises the most spectacular time in bed he will ever have in his life, “We think Stalin’s the cat’s meow, don’t we?” And she throws her head back, laughing, and he laughs, too; it’s their private joke, and in the whole world only the two of them have that special understanding. After all, everything is fine now. She is supposed to be with a great and important man. She is fulfilling her destiny, and she turns to him and says, “I should have been a king’s mistress, but I’m yours instead,” knowing that he will find this as funny as she does.

But suddenly he’s gone. It’s dark, and the parade has ended. The street is deserted. Everyone has gone home. Sleeping Beauty isn’t in a city anymore but lying in her actual, mussed-up bed, whose fetid sheets haven’t been changed in weeks. She turns on her stomach, and as she does so, a long thick groan escapes from her, because despite the flow of hot air streaming through the windows, she is cold and has goose bumps on her arms where the short sleeves of her nylon nightgown stop. The covers lie bunched around her feet. Dwight D. Eisenhower is nowhere in sight. Neither is the street. Sleeping Beauty is standing on a cold, deserted beach. Water widens toward infinity in a gray mist. Cold waves lap her feet and make her want to pee. Oh God, she has to pee; it’s such a bore, and she’s being dragged up out of sleep, dragged by the hand, by her sister, away from a chocolate soda, and all the good tastes of life, dragged away from the sprinkler she’s running through stark naked and that she wants to stand over with her legs spread so she can just pee, dragged up through the darkness and blackness and left stranded in her bed, on her stomach, with her eyes opening in the darkness and a heavy, keen pressure in her pelvis, because the one thing she won’t do (and her eyes open slowly in the dark room), the one thing she won’t do ever again, is pee the bed. No, she won’t
do that. She did that with Peter Lasker, and she is determined, no matter how bad things are, never to pee another bed. You crawled, sobbing, on all fours up to his knees when Mike said he was going back to Paris and Odile, she tells herself, but you will not pee that damn bed.

And so, in the darkness, where a man she despises lies insensate beside her, stinking of gin, Sleeping Beauty, awakened by her bladder, puts one bare foot and then the other on the carpet. She pushes the right foot under the bed and finds a bottle, because she badly needs something warm going down her throat. She bends down, slowly, unsteadily, almost keeling over, and reaches out for it. After a nice, warm slug, she puts it back under the bed. It helps right away; she feels much better, and she gropes for her cigarettes and matches. Oh, but she will want to go right back to sleep, to dreaming in the velvet darkness, when she gets back. It will be too, too dreary if she can’t go back to sleep, so although she is stuporous, she is nevertheless deft as she opens the amber vial and picks out two of the red-and-orange jewels, and takes another swallow from the bottle she again retrieves, laboriously, from under the bed and again laboriously puts back. Then she thrusts her hand out and pushes herself up from the bed, feeling for the hardness of the wall. The crinkle of the cellophane around the pack of Lucky Strikes in her left hand reassures her; she will have more pleasure soon. She gropes, walking with exaggerated care, leaning against the wall. Her eyes adjust to the darkness, she’s unsteady, her head lolls onto her shoulder, but there’s nothing surprising about this. She’s been drinking all day, and with the two she has just taken, that makes a total of eight lovely red-and-orange Seconals since nine o’clock tonight.

At last she moves into the bathroom, and there is enough moonlight coming through the window for her not to have to turn on the light. That is very good, because anything brighter would hurt her eyes. These days, she can’t stand bright light and always wants her room to be dark, with cool shadows. These days, she hardly ever leaves her room. With a long sigh of relief and happiness, she lowers her unsteady behind onto the toilet seat, pulling her nightgown up so that the hem rests along her thighs. With one hand pressed against the wall, she relieves herself and sighs again, and feels, in her lap, the pack of cigarettes and decides that she’s going to sit there and have a smoke. She places the pack of cigarettes on the counter by the sink, wipes herself, and reaches back to flush, hating it when people pee in the night and don’t flush. She gagged when the man now lying in her bed first spent the night and the next morning, when she came into
the bathroom and found the seat up, saw his dark yellow urine in the bowl. Then she reaches for the pack of cigarettes and holds it so that just one cigarette slides out. She places it artfully between her index and third fingers and holds it to her lips. With one hand, she bends a match over and strikes it, and it is at just this moment, this very instant, when she is lifting the flame to the tip of her cigarette, that a fresh gust of hot wind pours through the window. Perhaps it’s the gin and the pills alone roiling upward in a huge volcanic crescendo, or maybe it’s that bump on the head in Palm Springs, or all of them stomping on her together, an enraged mob—it’s anyone’s guess. But suddenly, in the bathroom, the tiles that gleamed only seconds earlier with moonlight now light up with a terrible red glow and the small figure on the toilet seat slumps to the floor as the flames eat her up like a sweetmeat.

Dinah didn’t need to set the alarm. She woke up at five to five, slipped on a pair of slacks and a sweater and her coat, and went down to the lobby, where the doorman directed her to a newsstand outside in the cold blue morning. The city was already alive with traffic; she liked being part of the hum and the roar. There was an open coffee shop on Lexington, and she went in, holding the papers under her arm, and ordered a coffee with cream to go. She was very tired, having slept so little, and wanted to brace herself for when Jake woke up, as he soon would, to see if the morning reviews were as bad as that first one last night. When she let herself into the apartment, she was surprised to find him already up. The light on the night table was on, and he was sitting on the edge of the bed, in his pajama top only, with the phone on his knees. What he was saying confused her. First he said, “It’s Dorshka,” and then he said, “It’s Veevi,” and she thought, Dorshka’s dead. Then he rasped through his sore throat, “Bad news,” as he handed her the phone, and she thought, Veevi’s dead.

Some thirteen hours later, Dinah put out her cigarette and fastened her seat belt as the DC-7 descended through an invisible stairway to the L.A. basin. The plane rocked, and she gripped the armrests with both hands. It must be the Santa Anas that Dorshka had told her about. Her palms were
sweating; her heart was not so much pounding as flittering, skittering—an animal in panic, but not from the turbulence. She did not know how she was going to do what she would have to do once the plane landed.

The first thing would be to conceal her loathing of Byron Cole. She detested him. When she described him to Jake over the phone, after Veevi brought him over to the house to swim one Sunday, she called him a “heavy, because he looks like the bad guys in movies—you know, a kind of sexual thug,” aware of something not quite right about her own response that only made her hate him more. Upon meeting him in September, when she and the kids had flown back from New York to L.A., she had figured him out and hated him at once. She knew exactly what he was up to with her sister, and impotently watched as he took over every aspect of Veevi’s life. But now he was picking Dinah up at the airport and taking her immediately to Cedars, and she would have to behave politely, although she blamed him for what had happened, blamed him almost as much as she blamed herself.