Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (352 page)

Her accent betrayed an effort at control. The emphatic “Geeze!” with all the wonder, horror, disgust or admiration she could put in it was gone, but there was no mild substitute, no “swell” or “grand.” If her mood required expletives outside her repertoire, she kept silent.

But at seventeen, months are years and Jacob perceived a change in her; in no sense was she a child any longer. There were fixed things in her mind--not distractions, for she was instinctively too polite for that, but simply things there. No longer was the studio a lark and a wonder and a divine accident; no longer “for a nickel I wouldn’t turn up tomorrow.” It was part of her life. Circumstances were stiffening into a career which went on independently of her casual hours.

“If this picture is as good as the other--I mean if I make a personal hit again, Hecksher’ll break the contract. Everybody that’s seen the rushes says it’s the first one I’ve had sex appeal in.”

“What are the rushes?”

“When they run off what they took the day before. They say it’s the first time I’ve had sex appeal.”

“I don’t notice it,” he teased her.

“You wouldn’t. But I have.”

“I know you have,” he said, and, moved by an ill-considered impulse, he took her hand.

She glanced quickly at him. He smiled--half a second too late. Then she smiled and her glowing warmth veiled his mistake.

“Jake,” she cried, “I could bawl, I’m so glad you’re here! I got you a room at the Ambassador. They were full, but they kicked out somebody because I said I had to have a room. I’ll send my car back for you in half an hour. It’s good you came on Sunday, because I got all day free.”

They had luncheon in the furnished apartment she had leased for the winter. It was 1920 Moorish, taken over complete from a favorite of yesterday. Someone had told her it was horrible, for she joked about it; but when he pursued the matter he found that she didn’t know why.

“I wish they had more nice men out here,” she said once during luncheon. “Of course there’s a lot of nice ones, but I mean--Oh, you know, like in New York--men that know even more than a girl does, like you.”

After luncheon he learned that they were going to tea. “Not today,” he objected. “I want to see you alone.”

“All right,” she agreed doubtfully. “I suppose I could telephone. I thought--It’s a lady that writes for a lot of newspapers and I’ve never been asked there before. Still, if you don’t want to--”

Her face had fallen a little and Jacob assured her that he couldn’t be more willing. Gradually he found that they were going not to one party but to three.

“In my position, it’s sort of the thing to do,” she explained. “Otherwise you don’t see anybody except the people on your own lot, and that’s narrow.” He smiled. “Well, anyhow,” she finished--”anyhow, you smart Aleck, that’s what everybody does on Sunday afternoon.”

At the first tea, Jacob noticed that there was an enormous preponderance of women over men, and of supernumeraries--lady journalists, cameramen’s daughters, cutters’ wives--over people of importance. A young Latin named Raffino appeared for a brief moment, spoke to Jenny and departed; several stars passed through, asking about children’s health with a domesticity that was somewhat overpowering. Another group of celebrities posed immobile, statue-like, in a corner. There was a somewhat inebriated and very much excited author apparently trying to make engagements with one girl after another. As the afternoon waned, more people were suddenly a little tight; the communal voice was higher in pitch and greater in volume as Jacob and Jenny went out the door.

At the second tea, young Raffino--he was an actor, one of innumerable hopeful Valentinos--appeared again for a minute, talked to Jenny a little longer, a little more attentively this time, and went out. Jacob gathered that this party was not considered to have quite the swagger of the other. There was a bigger crowd around the cocktail table. There was more sitting down.

Jenny, he saw, drank only lemonade. He was surprised and pleased at her distinction and good manners. She talked to one person, never to everyone within hearing; then she listened, without finding it necessary to shift her eyes about. Deliberate or not on her part, he noticed that at both teas she was sooner or later talking to the guest of most consequence. Her seriousness, her air of saying “This is my opportunity of learning something,” beckoned their egotism imperatively near.

When they left to drive to the last party, a buffet supper, it was dark and the electric legends of hopeful real-estate brokers were gleaming to some vague purpose on Beverly Hills. Outside Grauman’s Theater a crowd was already gathered in the thin, warm rain.

“Look! Look!” she cried. It was the picture she had finished a month before.

They slid out of the thin Rialto of Hollywood Boulevard and into the deep gloom of a side street; he put his arm about her and kissed her.

“Dear Jake.” She smiled up at him.

“Jenny, you’re so lovely; I didn’t know you were so lovely.”

She looked straight ahead, her face mild and quiet. A wave of annoyance passed over him and he pulled her toward him urgently, just as the car stopped at a lighted door.

They went into a bungalow crowded with people and smoke. The impetus of the formality which had begun the afternoon was long exhausted; everything had become at once vague and strident.

“This is Hollywood,” explained an alert talkative lady who had been in his vicinity all day. “No airs on Sunday afternoon.” She indicated the hostess. “Just a plain, simple, sweet girl.” She raised her voice: “Isn’t that so, darling--just a plain, simple, sweet girl?”

The hostess said, “Yeah. Who is?” And Jacob’s informant lowered her voice again: “But that little girl of yours is the wisest one of the lot.”

The totality of the cocktails Jacob had swallowed was affecting him pleasantly, but try as he might, the plot of the party--the key on which he could find ease and tranquillity--eluded him. There was something tense in the air--something competitive and insecure. Conversations with the men had a way of becoming empty and overjovial or else melting off into a sort of suspicion. The women were nicer. At eleven o’clock, in the pantry, he suddenly realized that he hadn’t seen Jenny for an hour. Returning to the living room, he saw her come in, evidently from outside, for she tossed a raincoat from her shoulders. She was with Raffino. When she came up, Jacob saw that she was out of breath and her eyes were very bright. Raffino smiled at Jacob pleasantly and negligently; a few moments later, as he turned to go, he bent and whispered in Jenny’s ear and she looked at him without smiling as she said good night.

“I got to be on the lot at eight o’clock,” she told Jacob presently. “I’ll look like an old umbrella unless I go home. Do you mind, dear?”

“Heavens, no!”

Their car drove over one of the interminable distances of the thin, stretched city.

“Jenny,” he said, “you’ve never looked like you were tonight. Put your head on my shoulder.”

“I’d like to. I’m tired.”

“I can’t tell you how radiant you’ve got to be.”

“I’m just the same.”

“No, you’re not.” His voice suddenly became a whisper, trembling with emotion. “Jenny, I’m in love with you.”

“Jacob, don’t be silly.”

“I’m in love with you. Isn’t it strange, Jenny? It happened just like that.”

“You’re not in love with me.”

“You mean the fact doesn’t interest you.” He was conscious of a faint twinge of fear.

She sat up out of the circle of his arm. “Of course it interests me; you know I care more about you than anything in the world.”

“More than about Mr. Raffino?”

“Oh--my--gosh!” she protested scornfully. “Raffino’s nothing but a baby.”

“I love you, Jenny.”

“No, you don’t.”

He tightened his arm. Was it his imagination or was there a small instinctive resistance in her body? But she came close to him and he kissed her.

“You know that’s crazy about Raffino.”

“I suppose I’m jealous.” Feeling insistent and unattractive, he released her. But the twinge of fear had become an ache. Though he knew that she was tired and that she felt strange at this new mood in him, he was unable to let the matter alone. “I didn’t realize how much a part of my life you were. I didn’t know what it was I missed--but I know now. I wanted you near.”

“Well, here I am.”

He took her words as an invitation, but this time she relaxed wearily in his arms. He held her thus for the rest of the way, her eyes closed, her short hair falling straight back, like a girl drowned.

“The car’ll take you to the hotel,” she said when they reached the apartment. “Remember, you’re having lunch with me at the studio tomorrow.”

Suddenly they were in a discussion that was almost an argument, as to whether it was too late for him to come in. Neither could yet appreciate the change that his declaration had made in the other. Abruptly they had become like different people, as Jacob tried desperately to turn back the clock to that night in New York six months before, and Jenny watched this mood, which was more than jealousy and less than love, snow under, one by one, the qualities of consideration and understanding which she knew in him and with which she felt at home.

“But I don’t love you like that,” she cried. “How can you come to me all at once and ask me to love you like that?”

“You love Raffino like that!”

“I swear I don’t! I never even kissed him--not really!”

“H’m!” He was a gruff white bird now. He could scarcely credit his own unpleasantness, but something illogical as love itself urged him on. “An actor!”

“Oh, Jake,” she cried, “please lemme go. I never felt so terrible and mixed up in my life.”

“I’ll go,” he said suddenly. “I don’t know what’s the matter, except that I’m so mad about you that I don’t know what I’m saying. I love you and you don’t love me. Once you did, or thought you did, but that’s evidently over.”

“But I do love you.” She thought for a moment; the red-and-green glow of a filling station on the corner lit up the struggle in her face. “If you love me that much, I’ll marry you tomorrow.”

“Marry me!” he exclaimed. She was so absorbed in what she had just said that she did not notice.

“I’ll marry you tomorrow,” she repeated. “I like you better than anybody in the world and I guess I’ll get to love you the way you want me to.” She uttered a single half-broken sob. “But--I didn’t know this was going to happen. Please let me alone tonight.”

Jacob didn’t sleep. There was music from the Ambassador grill till late and a fringe of working girls hung about the carriage entrance waiting for their favorites to come out. Then a long-protracted quarrel between a man and a woman began in the hall outside, moved into the next room and continued as a low two-toned mumble through the intervening door. He went to the window sometime toward three o’clock and stared out into the clear splendor of the California night. Her beauty rested outside on the grass, on the damp, gleaming roofs of the bungalows, all around him, borne up like music on the night. It was in the room, on the white pillow, it rustled ghostlike in the curtains. His desire recreated her until she lost all vestiges of the old Jenny, even of the girl who had met him at the train that morning. Silently, as the night hours went by, he molded her over into an image of love--an image that would endure as long as love itself, or even longer--not to perish till he could say, “I never really loved her.” Slowly he created it with this and that illusion from his youth, this and that sad old yearning, until she stood before him identical with her old self only by name.

Later, when he drifted off into a few hours’ sleep, the image he had made stood near him, lingering in the room, joined in mystic marriage to his heart.

V

“I won’t marry you unless you love me,” he said, driving back from the studio. She waited, her hands folded tranquilly in her lap. “Do you think I’d want you if you were unhappy and unresponsive, Jenny--knowing all the time you didn’t love me?”

“I do love you. But not that way.”

“What’s ‘that way’?”

She hesitated, her eyes were far off. “You don’t--thrill me, Jake. I don’t know--there have been some men that sort of thrilled me when they touched me, dancing or anything. I know it’s crazy, but--”

“Does Raffino thrill you?”

“Sort of, but not so much.”

“And I don’t at all?”

“I just feel comfortable and happy with you.”

He should have urged her that that was best, but he couldn’t say it, whether it was an old truth or an old lie.

“Anyhow, I told you I’ll marry you; perhaps you might thrill me later.”

He laughed, stopped suddenly. “If I didn’t thrill you, as you call it, why did you seem to care so much last summer?”

“I don’t know. I guess I was young. You never know how you once felt, do you?”

She had become elusive to him, with that elusiveness that gives a hidden significance to the least significant remarks. And with the clumsy tools of jealousy and desire, he was trying to create the spell that is ethereal and delicate as the dust on a moth’s wing.

“Listen, Jake,” she said suddenly. “That lawyer my sister had--that Scharnhorst--called up the studio this afternoon.”

“Your sister’s all right,” he said absently, and he added: “So a lot of men thrill you.”

“Well, if I’ve felt it with a lot of men, it couldn’t have anything to do with real love, could it?” she said hopefully.

“But your theory is that love couldn’t come without it.”

“I haven’t got any theories or anything. I just told you how I felt. You know more than me.”

“I don’t know anything at all.”

There was a man waiting in the lower hall of the apartment house. Jenny went up and spoke to him; then, turning back to Jake, said in a low voice: “It’s Scharnhorst. Would you mind waiting downstairs while he talks to me? He says it won’t take half an hour.”

He waited, smoking innumerable cigarettes. Ten minutes passed. Then the telephone operator beckoned him.

“Quick!” she said. “Miss Prince wants you on the telephone.”

Jenny’s voice was tense and frightened. “Don’t let Scharnhorst get out,” she said. “He’s on the stairs, maybe in the elevator. Make him come back here.”