Cheat and Charmer (83 page)

“Goddamnit,” said Jake under his breath as he went off to look for Grace and Byron. As far as the latter was concerned, Jake considered his mitzvah quotient more than met. For a long time after Veevi’s death, nobody had heard from him. But once it was announced in the trades that Jake was directing the film version of
My Grandfather’s Saloon
, Byron had come to him at Marathon to ask for a job. Jake didn’t like him any more than Dinah did, but he felt a vague obligation, coupled with an equally vague intuition of menace. With Byron, dignity would never be an issue; he had none and pretended to none, though he had presumptions of importance. Jake would never forget his “Stefan, Michael, and Me,” his promotion of himself to the position of primus inter pares among Veevi’s musketeers—a delusion that Jake himself, he cringed to remember, had once entertained.

He glanced at his watch as he searched everywhere. He was losing time. Then he saw them on the dancers’ rehearsal floor: Grace with one long leg in high-heeled dancing shoes raised on the piano bench, the voluminous long hot-pink net petticoats of her costume fluffed out and her fishnet stockings revealing her calves and thighs. A long red false ponytail, also part of her costume, hung down her back. She was smiling, eyes huge with makeup and false lashes, into the lens of Byron’s Nikon. A spasm of pain constricted Jake’s chest, and he felt his pocket for the vial of nitroglycerin tablets he always carried with him and wondered whether the girl was going to kill him.

“Gracie, didn’t you hear the call? Chico’s waiting for you. I need a run-through, and we’ve been looking for you all over.”

“Sorry, guv,” she said. “I just wanted some stills, you know, for when the picture’s over. Got to fink of me future, you know.” She was flaunting her accent, the exaggerated one she used to caricature herself. Usually it made him laugh. But not now. She knows, he said to himself. She knows it’s coming.

“When the picture’s over, you can do anything you want. But you’ve just blown ten minutes of time, at roughly a thousand bucks a minute.”

“I said ‘Sorry,’ ” she snapped, hanging back familiarly nonetheless, as
heavy-lidded Byron smiled at him the way he always did—with an enigmatic seediness. Jake had been about to bawl him out, too, to remind him that he was the stills photographer for this picture and that he was not to have private clients on the set. But he thought better of it. Getting Grace set up for the future was precisely what had to be done.

“Send her a set of the ones you just shot,” said Jake. “And charge them to me.”

“Sure, guv,” Byron said. “Anyway, we’re finished,” he said, smiling intimately at Grace and pointedly moving away, as if to leave Jake and Grace alone.

Jake, not wanting to be observed lingering with her, moved decisively toward the set. Grace kept pace with him, brushing up against his arm and irritating him even more. They had been involved for more than three and a half years now, and she was provokingly careless, always finding ways of sidling up against him in front of others.

He paused for a moment, as if taken by a sudden thought, and she paused, too. “By the way,” he said, lowering his voice, “be home at seven.” She nodded. “Are you and the missus still having that cast party Saturday night?” she asked.

“If you don’t stop me from finishing the picture today.”

“I was just wondering if I could bring a date,” she said.

“Got someone in mind?” His half smile was ironic and edgy.

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

Chico was at his side. “Okay, boss, we’re ready. Grace, on the double.”

Watching her as she scampered over to the line, Chico scratched the back of his neck. So she had nice knockers. So what? Personally, he couldn’t understand why a classy guy like Jake would go and get himself mixed up with a pain-in-the-ass broad like that.

“Honey?” Jake said later into the cutting-room phone.

“How does it look?”

“Not bad. But this dance sequence is an absolute ballbreaker. Cutting in tempo is no picnic. I’m gonna be late again with Bill”—his cutter—“just to make sure I don’t have to reshoot anything. I’m sorry, darling. You’d better eat with the kids again. I don’t think I’ll be home till ten—maybe later.”

“It can’t be helped, honey. Did you have that m-m-m-meeting with Irv?”

“Yeah. Lunchtime.”

“And?”

“He said he hated to see me joining ‘the bandwagon of runaway production,’ but that I’d fulfilled my deal with them and if he couldn’t persuade me to stay I could leave with his blessing. Marathon is still available to me for distribution deals.”

“Golly, I remember him so well when he was home from college for the summer and smitten with Veevi. He used to tell her about the books he was reading. Like he wanted her approval. Sometimes we went to dinner at his parents’ house. It was a Renaissance palace above S-S-S-Sunset, with an indoor marble pool. His father was jealous of Hearst and wanted the place to look like San—”

“Gotta go, sweetie.” He knew that if he didn’t cut her off, she would go on like this forever.

Jake was worried about Dinah. Veevi had been dead for more than three years already, but Dinah went every day to the rosebush where they’d scattered her ashes. He had the feeling that she nipped a little. He had had to leave her alone a great deal while he was in New York, and when he came home for visits it seemed to him that whenever she came back from the cemetery he could smell booze on her breath. She eagerly looked forward to a drink or two—or three—before dinner. She never drank after dinner, but until Veevi’s death she had been strictly a one-drink-before-dinner girl. What bothered him most was the way she talked all the time now about the past. Anything would set her off—a remark about the weather, a phone call, hearing the mention of somebody from the old days. Again and again, she turned whatever they were talking about into something connected with her sister and their parents, life before they came to California, life after they came to California, days at Marathon and Malibu. Sometimes he felt that Dinah no longer lived in the present and that he and the kids were phantoms, and that she felt alive only when she was talking about the old days. Since coming home from New York and starting the picture, he’d been exhausted at night from shooting and simply fallen asleep when she started in, so she had turned the kids into a captive audience. Lorna had asked him why Mom told the same stories over and over. “Does she?” he’d asked. “Yeah, only about a million times.” And Lorna said that if she or Peter said anything about it their mother started crying.

He left the studio promptly at six and drove to Sunset and then up Crescent Heights over to Franklin, parking his ’57 Chevy Bel-Air convertible in front of an olive-green stucco apartment building, a stack of bald cantilevered rectangles overlooking a cluster of palm trees. The neighborhood both aroused and depressed him. You either lived here when you first came to L.A. or you ended up here if you failed. Loveless desire hung in the pale blue of the summer dusk, and memories of blinding pleasure, of heat and sweat. He had allowed it to go on far too long; it was time to end it. And it was dangerous here, with traffic coming down off the Ventura Freeway and the Cahuenga Pass. Had anyone he knew ever seen him getting out of the car?

He went up a flight of concrete steps to the second floor, then, clearly knowing the way, followed the path of a naked wraparound concrete porch, stopping in front of a rust-colored door with a peephole and a buzzer on the doorframe. Over the railing lay a mean little swimming pool, in which he had actually swum a number of times. He hadn’t found it satisfying, though—unheated, too shady, the drain clogged with leaves, the surface stippled with drowned insects, the bottom streaked with dirt. Once he retrieved what looked like the corpse of someone’s old red turned-inside-out bathing trunks and wondered who had worn them and why they had been taken off.

In recent months he had become afraid of having a heart attack in the pool, as well as in Grace’s bed, where, so often now, he would lie with his chest tightening with guilt and the urge just to get up and leave. Three times he had had to take nitroglycerin. It just proved that the whole business of setting her up out here in L.A. had been a mistake, and a bad one. She wasn’t like Bonnie, whom he often thought of with nostalgia. That had been an arrangement, convenient and easy; but Grace had become an addiction, a requirement, an obligation, and thus a yoke around his neck. Yet he couldn’t end it, though he had resolved to time and time again. When he needed her, he needed her. It was like a physical pain that couldn’t be relieved until he had plunged into the hot springs of her body. He paid for this in the hard cash that he gave her to cover everything from rent to clothes to food to television repairs to contraceptive jelly to car insurance.

He pushed the buzzer. Then he heard the dull ching of the brass chain being slid through its notch and saw, behind the opening door, the soft pale
round face, studio makeup and false eyelashes removed, her own thick red hair falling to her narrow shoulders, the by now completely familiar body hidden inside the also completely familiar green silk robe. She said nothing, but held the door open for him, giving him the look that told him she knew where to go and what to do. “Wait, honey,” he said, as she headed toward the bedroom. She stopped and raised her eyebrows. He motioned toward the ugly sleeper sofa that had come with the other cheap-looking pieces in the furnished apartment. Stacks of mysteries were piled on the coffee table, the end tables, and in the corners of the sofa lay a heaped-up assortment of dolls Grace had collected. She liked dolls that represented different countries and costumes, and in New York she once took Jake to a shop at the United Nations, where he had bought her a dozen dolls—Japanese, Dutch, Polish, each in a separate national costume. Bringing them out to L.A. with her made the apartment feel like home, she said.

They walked across the wall-to-wall synthetic ocher carpet and sat down. Then the phone rang and she ran into her room to answer it. “Yeah. Yeah. Right. Ta, love, talk to you later,” he heard her say. “That’s just Ninky,” she said, mentioning a friend who had been in the show and had also come out to California to be in the movie. Ordinarily Jake, always curious about everything, would have asked her why the friend had called. Not today, however.

“Listen, honey,” he began. “I’ve come to a decision.”

“Have you? Well, I know what you’re going to say.”

“You do?” Was it possible she was going to make it easy for him?

“You’re ending it. I’ve guessed it now for a while. And I knew it would be today.”

“You did? How’s that?”

“I just knew, that’s all.”

“I wish I didn’t have to.”

Her face reddened and her eyes filled with tears.

“Honey,” he went on, “we’ve sold the house and we’re moving.”

“
Moving?
Where?”

“To Europe.”

“Where in Europe?”

“We’re not sure yet. Paris or London.”

“London!”

“Well, maybe.”

“No. You can’t be. When?”

“Well, soon. We’re all going—me, Dinah, the kids.” He didn’t add that he would be back, after he got them settled, to finish cutting and scoring the picture, previewing it, and so on. The less she knew of his whereabouts, the better.

“You’re going to hate it. It’s a filthy, depressing, wet, cold, hateful place.”

“Honey, let me explain something to you.”

He made a speech: he had been thinking this over for a long time now, but had decided after a great deal of wrestling with himself that he had to go independent, be on his own, leave the studio system, and work as a writer-producer-director with the freedom to shop his stuff around himself and head his own production company. He’d go to studios for financing, marketing, and distribution, but he wanted to be in charge of his own material—what to make and how to make it. He was tired of making the same kind of picture; he wanted to try different things, make serious stuff. European countries subsidized their film industries; Americans making movies abroad got great tax breaks from the U.S. government. It was just too good to pass up, and he owed it to himself, his talent, and his family to take that next step and get out of Hollywood.