Cheat and Charmer (81 page)

She hadn’t heard him, and she didn’t look up.

“Mom?”

He went over to her and leaned against the edge of the table. “Mom?”

Her head turned slightly, and she looked at him. “Veevi d-d-d-died a little while ago.”

“Died?” He was aware that he had never used the word
died
before in reference to anyone he had ever known, and it felt strange to say it. Then he thought, Mom’ll be home today when school’s over.

He reached out and, awkwardly, softly, put his hand on his mother’s shoulder, and at his touch she gave a deep sigh. He braced himself, expecting her to cry, but she didn’t. “Dr. Epstein called a little while ago,” she said. “And I called Daddy in New York. He’s coming home later today.”

“I thought she was going to be okay. I thought you were going to do that skin thing today so you could give it to her.”

“I was, honey. But now I can’t. You know what’s strange?”

“What?” He moved backward and sat down at the place where his father usually sat.

“She didn’t die of the burns. It was a blood clot—an embolism. From lying so still for so long. It formed, maybe in her legs, and traveled through her blood and finally it hit her heart or her lungs. Anyway, she was gone like
that
.” She snapped her fingers.

He felt immensely privileged and awed; except for his father, he was the first one to know. “She was asleep,” Dinah continued. “Never knew what hit her.”

“Is that good?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“I’ll stay here with you, Mom,” he said, and he reached for the phone. “I’ll tell Joelly not to come.”

“No,” she said. “Go to practice and school.” Then she thought for a moment. “But go upstairs and knock on Gussie’s door and tell her, honey. Tell her I need her to come down a little early.”

Many years later, he remembered how grateful he was that morning that she had given him something to do.

S
he came over at about eleven-thirty, her red hair pulled back in a ponytail. As usual, he was struck by the look of softness and sweetness about her. Another thing he couldn’t get over was her accent.

“You really are a cockney?” he often asked her.

She laughed. “I’m as cockney as you can be and still be Jewish.” Although she was only twenty-two, she had been working since she was fifteen, starting out in the chorus line of imported American musicals in London and living at home in Poplar. Then, after her father found jobs at the tables in Vegas for both himself and her brother, she’d gone out there with her mother to join them, and gotten hired right away in the line at the Flamingo. Duff, yeah, well he was like a second father to her. He’d even given her the money to come to New York when Jimmy O’Rourke said she should audition for the show.

Jake liked to listen to her tell stories about her family. He had no doubt whatsoever that her father and brother were well-connected criminals; he had a hunch that there was a picture in it somewhere, if he could just get her to talk about them. He couldn’t get enough of the Jewish-cockney angle. She told him that the family name in Poland had been Sidlowski. It fascinated him, too, that a cockney should be named Rivka Sidlowski, although she had changed it to Grace Siddons.

Why “Grace”? he asked her.

“Mum and I, we put hours into it. We went through Ginger, for Ginger Rogers, but with my ginger hair, it didn’t sound right, and besides, she’s a has-been now. Then I thought of Rhonda, after Rhonda Fleming. There was the hair connection, but on the other hand, you know, it’s kind of an
unusual name, so everybody would know I’d pinched it. We tried out Vivien, for Vivien Leigh, but you know, everybody wants to be like her; Joan and Bette—well, they’re finished, aren’t they? I thought of Cyd, after Cyd Charisse, ’cause I’m a dancer, too. But then my name would have been Cyd Siddons.”

“Sounds like a dentist I know at my country club.”

“Then Mum said, ‘I’ve got it, Shayna’—she always called me Shayna, for
shayna punim
—‘you’re Grace. For Grace Kelly. That’s it.’ And I said, Righto. I’m Grace. Even though I look like Kim Novak. She’s Polish too, by the way. Did you know that? But Grace it was. Before we left for Vegas, my dad got our name changed. Legally. Sidlowski to Siddons. I said, ‘Right you are, no more bloody Rivka Sidlowski for me. I’m Grace. Grace Siddons. But you’re the only one who knows I’m Jewish, guv. Keep it to yourself, okay?”

“Who’m I gonna tell?”

She snuggled up to him. “Oh,” she said with a light laugh, “you never know. There are anti-Semites everywhere.”

“You can say that again,” he said, drawing her closer to himself. With her high cheekbones and broad face, she
did
look like Kim Novak. Suddenly, thay had a lot to talk about. His family, her family. Jokes. Food. Itzik’s Deli in Santa Monica. He had always avoided Jewish girls, hearing, in the back of his mind, his parents yammering at him, “It’s just as easy to marry a rich girl as a poor girl.” And maybe Sandy Litvak had been right. Maybe he’d always been afraid of waking up one day and finding himself in the sack with his mother. But this doll, he found himself explaining in an imaginary conversation with his former analyst, didn’t look anything like his mother!

The day after she auditioned, it had been so simple, really, so natural to give her a call and invite her over to his apartment. He had said to her on the phone, with an almost British gentility to his voice, “Would you mind terribly if I met you at the door in my slippers and robe?” and she’d said, “Oh, Mr. Lasker, of course not. Just be as comfortable as you like.” And from the beginning, everything
had
been very comfortable between them, just as it used to be with Bonnie. She was, in fact, about as close to Bonnie, he believed, as he would ever find again, and he felt very lucky. She was useful to him, telling him all the backstage gossip, including the things people said about the director and the stars of the show, so he was always up on the latest scandals and sleeping arrangements.

She was, he had to admit it, a wonderful companion. Naturally, he had
become aware of how much he needed to have someone that terrible day after the show opened, when he’d been left all alone. God, what a day that had been, he explained early on to Grace. He would remember it for the rest of his life: going to bed with a high fever, afraid he was developing pneumonia, absolutely certain, because of the review in the
Times
, that the show was a disaster. Then the next morning the phone ringing with the horrible news of his sister-in-law’s accident (which he described to Grace in detail), and Dinah having to leave, and the indescribable irony of putting his wife in the car to Idyllwild, then going back to the hotel room and reading one great review after another.

Jake established ground rules with Grace: he loved his wife and would never leave her. There was to be no talking to anyone about him—no one in the show, no one she knew. Nor was he going to ask the director to fix her up with a speaking role. The show had certain casting requirements, and a role for someone with a cockney accent wasn’t one of them. But later, when the show closed—and he didn’t know when that would be, since the projections were for an indefinite run—or if she decided to leave the show and look for something else, he would do what he could for her. And that was a promise—a cross-my-heart-hope-to-die-stick-a-needle-in-my-eye promise (backed up, not long afterward, by a real contract he had Harvey Lefkowitz, his lawyer in L.A., draw up for her—in absolute secrecy, by the way, but putting her on his payroll, as he had done for Veevi).

Jake told himself that while he would have preferred to have Dinah with him, even without Veevi’s horrible situation, he was sure that she would have been unwilling to leave the children for more than two or three weeks at a time, and it was impractical to uproot them in the middle of the school year and move everyone to New York. But most of all, the Veevi situation left her no time or energy for anything else, and he, of course, understood that. So by taking care of his needs in New York, he reasoned, he was in effect protecting Dinah, leaving her free to devote every available ounce of energy to her sister.

When he went home in December for five days, he made no attempts to make love to Dinah, and it seemed to him that she neither noticed nor cared, exhausted as she was by her daily vigils at the hospital. From his perspective, he was behaving with exemplary thoughtfulness, even nobility. After all, here he was having the most exciting, most successful time of his professional life, and he would have loved to have Dinah in on it at all
times, but he understood that right now she couldn’t think of anything except Veevi.

He was relieved to have Grace Siddons around. She took such an interest in everything that concerned him, and was fun to talk to, and a remarkably mature listener, and damn good in the sack. Everything about her body was trim and fit, for she had a trained dancer’s lean muscles, and the combination of hard muscle, soft curves, and buttery bosoms delighted him. Though he flew home to Los Angeles every couple of weeks for three or four days, when he was back in town he managed to see her two or three times a week, and when he was in Los Angeles he called her often from his office at home. There really was no danger, because Dinah was always at the hospital, so she was unlikely to pick up the phone in mid-conversation.

When he told her about visiting his wife’s sister in the hospital, she sucked in her breath and screwed up her eyes. “Oooh, painful, idn’it, being all burnt up like that.” Then she said, “Must’ve been bloody difficult for you to go and see her.” And he said, “More difficult than you can imagine,” although he stopped short of telling her why. But she did have the nicest way of taking an interest in him, and he could listen endlessly to her stories. Her father was born in a village in Poland and had gone to London when he was only sixteen. He had learned English and been a street gambler until Georgie Higginbotham, the criminal from Liverpool, who co-owned a club in London called the Snow Leopard, discovered his talents. Her mother was Jewish too, but her family had come to England from Latvia at about the turn of the century. Her grandfather on her mum’s side had been a tailor who made bespoke clothes for people in the West End. She used the word
fantastic
a lot. She would say, “Aren’t you fantastic, a man your age having it off with a young girl like me three times a night!” And that would make him laugh.

That first night, when he greeted her at the door in his pajamas and bathrobe, she had delighted him with her soft girlish face and her matter-of-fact brazenness. As if sensing that he was tired, too tired for romantic ceremony, she had leaned across the sofa, untied his bathrobe and pajamas, and buried her head in his crotch. Sometimes, he told himself, as he gave in to the pleasure, you just had to follow your hunches about people.

On this February morning, however, they were both still asleep, after a very busy and gratifying night together. It was she, stark naked, who shook
his shoulder and called out to him: “Jake, the phone! The phone! Wake up!” He sat up, pushed his black sleeping mask up on his forehead, and glanced rapidly at the clock as he reached for the receiver. It was a little past eight. Grace lay on her side and watched his face. “This is he,” she heard him say in a sleepy voice. He was wearing his pajama top only, but it was unbuttoned. Immediately alert, he scratched his chest.

“Honey?” Ah, then it was his wife calling. She had heard him talk on the phone to her before. He always called her Honey or Darling or Sweetheart and almost never by her Christian name. But it was so early out there! Why was she calling?

He frowned and his head dropped, and so did his voice. “When?” His voice was so low that Grace could barely hear him, and she moved closer and put her head on the sheet covering his thigh. She wanted him to stroke her hair, and she picked up his hand and put it on her hair, but it lay there, inert. “I’m so sorry, darling,” he said.

Grace didn’t have to be told. The burnt-up sister must have croaked. It had to be for the best, really, when you thought about it. Who’d want to go through life being all scarred and all? Specially if you’d once been a beauty, like Jake had said about her.

Only when he put the phone down did he begin to stroke her hair. “Your wife’s sister?”

He nodded.

“Is she dead?”

“This morning.”

“Your face dropped right down. Like this.” She imitated him.

He smiled. “You’re some little actress, aren’t you? Listen, honey, I’m afraid I have to fly out to the Coast today.”

“Yeah, well of course you do.”

He sighed. “It’s a tragedy, her story. A real one. It would make a hell of a novel. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.”

He made an airline reservation and ordered a car for later that morning. It was too early to call his secretary, however, and he didn’t need to pack, since he kept a complete supply of clothes in both New York and L.A. There was nothing he had to do except be ready to leave in an hour and a half, and this left plenty of time to explore the possibilities, which struck him as delightful, of a shower with Grace.