Don't Speak to Strange Girls (13 page)

“You can’t pay me. I told you. I won’t let you. It makes me feel like a whore. I don’t mind being a whore. But I hate to feel like one.”

“You want me to hit you?”

“No.”

“Then don’t ever say that again. Don’t ever say it around me. You want a job? Okay … you can read to me. There’s a book I can’t stand. You can read it to me.”

She smiled, thinking about this, accepting it. “How do you know I can read?”

“Oh, Lord. Stop thinking up obstacles.”

She laughed and covered his mouth with hers. “I’ll read to you all the time.”

“I’m damned if you will. You’re working for me. You’ll read when I want you to. I’ll tell Hoff in the morning. He’ll put you on the payroll.”

“Hoff. He’ll go through the ceiling.”

His voice was chilled. “He’ll go through the window if he opens his damned mouth.”

• • •

When Hoff and Shatner arrived in the library two days later, Joanne was standing perfectly straight in the center of the room. Clay stood before her, gaze fixed on hers. His voice was pitched so low they could not hear him, but they could feel the tension in it. He waved at them to keep quiet.

“Hypnotism,” Shatner said with a wry glance at Hoff. “His great love. Thirty years an actor, all the time what he wanted was to be a hypnotist.”

“He used to try to get me to let him hypnotize me,” Hoff said. “Hell with that noise.”

“She’s not being hypnotized, either,” Shatner said, voice tinged with anger. “She’s just going along with the gag.”

“She goes along with all the gags,” Hoff said. He made a downward gesture. “Wouldn’t you? If you had found a good think like this? Wouldn’t you?”

“You want to get us thrown out of here?”

“Again?” Hoff lifted his shoulders. “I wouldn’t lift my voice against her if she set the place on fire.”

“I’d hold the torch for her.”

They watched Stuart hold Joanne’s left arm extended out from her body. They moved nearer, listening. He was telling her it was locked tightly at the elbow, that all her strength had flowed into her left arm and it was so strong that nobody could move her arm, that she could not move it no matter how hard she tried.

Suddenly Joanne’s lips moved, her face pulled. She cried out, “I can’t move it!”

Amazed, Hoff and Shatner inched forward. They stared into Joanne’s face. There was no doubt she was in at least a light stage of hypnosis. Her arm remained rigid, out from her body.

Clay laughed, pleased. He spoke to Joanne. “Your arm will relax now, and you will wake up, feeling fine, feeling better than you’ve ever felt in your life.”

After a moment, Joanne’s arm fell to her side and her eyes cleared. She saw Hoff and Shatner for the first time. She threw her arms around Stuart.

“You’re wonderful,” she told him.

“He’s wonderful,” Shatner said to Hoff.

“This makes headlines?” Hoff asked.

She ignored them. There was pleasure and excitement in her voice. “I didn’t really believe you could do it. It was just a game, and I was going along with you, and suddenly — my arm — I couldn’t move my arm.”

Clay laughed, holding her. “That’s where a hypnotist always gets you,” he said. “You think, he’s a nice guy, I’ll go along with him — and by the time you find out he’s not a nice guy — it’s too late.”

“All of a sudden I realized I’d do what you told me.”

“Sure.”

“Now I’m afraid of you.”

“Why?”

“I’ll be in your power — have to do what you tell me.”

“Oh, no. No hypnotist can make you do anything you truly don’t want to do.”

She laughed. “But that’s it, how do I know what I truly don’t want to do?”

“That’s a good question,” Shatner said, clapping a folded newspaper across his hand. “Could we talk to you a moment, Clay?”

“Go ahead.”

Shatner glanced at Stuart. He moved his gaze meaningfully toward Joanne.

“Don’t start that again,” Stuart warned him.

Shatner shrugged. “Louella’s column,” he said. “You made it. I quote: ‘Good to see Clay Stuart out again. At the Pantages première last night, old long and lanky was there, and the fans gave him a huge welcome. First time anyone has seen him in public since his lovely Ruth died. And who in the world is the lovely red-head with him?’ Unquote.”

“So?” Stuart stared at them, daring them to speak. “Joanne wanted to go. So we went.”

The première? For hell’s sake, why not? He had thought it would amuse her. Maybe you’ll be amused, he’d said. Amused? She’d been chilled with enchantment, hands cold and eyes starry. He thought about the way it had been with Joanne, the way he’d hoped to be infected by her entrancement, and the way he had not been. He’d tried to see it with her eyes; her eyes had glowed. There was for her more than the intoxication of being present, there was the elation of suddenly finding herself part of the glamour, part of the elite going along the plush carpeting, photographed and interviewed and stared at. Suddenly she was on the inside of the ropes. But it had been impossible to contract her fever even when she clung to his arm: he’d seen too many of these carneys — if they’d ever held any thrill for him, it was long dead. It seemed to him, and he cursed himself for this sign of senility: looking backward — it seemed to him the old time première had magic no longer possible. Those early spectators had been truly enchanted, wide-eyed and expectant, as if they were on a carnival midway back home in Iowa believing everything the barkers said because they wanted to believe, deceiving themselves because it was such pleasurable self-deception. Nowadays — and last night — it was all phony and contrived, even the bleacherites recognized this phoniness. Producers had advertised each new product as colossal until the word meant no more than darling, and out here everyone was darling, even those you hated, especially those you hated, and everything new was colossal, especially the dog. There was no longer any sense of glory, everybody was hep to the phony atmosphere, everybody had become sophisticated, cynical; they were all in the know, and even if they experienced an honest emotion they’d have concealed it as they would a communicable disease. He supposed for a few minutes last night there had been a sense of actual, electric excitement. This was when the remaining few super-stars arrived, the glamorous, the notorious, the odd. The onlookers forgot themselves enough to press forward, staring at the super-stars, remembering them, cataloguing them. wondering where they’d been before they arrived here, where they’d go afterwards. They had stared at these few faces with peeping-tom intensity, looking for a secret there, secret happiness, hidden despair, signs of deterioration and decay.

Shatner looked ill. He glanced at Hoff, but he shrugged. Shatner tossed the newspaper on the table. “All right, Clay. I — got to get back to the office. I’ll see you. Okay?”

“Sure,” Clay said. “Any time.”

He let them get to the door. “Shatner?”

They paused. Shatner turned, but Hoff remained with his back to the room, poised. “Yeah?”

“Do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“Call Dick Creek at Warners.”

Hoff spun around. His face was pulled into a hopeful smile. “You’re going to star in Creek’s production of
Man of the Desert?”

“That’s not why I want you to call him,” Clay said. “I want him to set up a screen test for Joanne.”

Neither Shatner nor Hoff spoke for a moment. When Shatner spoke, he sounded as if he were going to cry.

“Okay, Clay. I’ll ask him.”

Clay said, “Tell him she’s pretty good. I’ve been teaching her what I know — but tell Dick he can undo that in a few hours.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. Tell Dick I’d consider it a real earthy favor if he directed the test himself.”

• • •

Kay Ringling drove slowly up the hill. She could hear the party when she was two blocks from the house, but she could not believe it until she found a place to park in the drive and entered the wide-open front door.

Most of the cars parked in Stuart’s drive were foreign models, either shining with care, or studiously neglected.

She walked across the veranda. Several couples were dancing out here and she could hear others swimming and diving in the pool. No one paid any attention to her and she stood a long time in the doorway, looking for Clay. Young people brushed past her with a glance, but none spoke to her. She was afraid she wouldn’t have understood their language if they had. Looking at them made her feel very old, like something that had gone out of style.

She saw that McEsters was nowhere in sight. A Hollywood caterer and his employees were handling the service. Through the open door to the sun parlor she could see a young man playing the piano, quite oblivious to the blaring music of the ensemble in the foyer. A young woman in a wet bathing suit was sitting on the piano, watching him.

A youth in sweat shirt and slacks, backing through the door way carrying a nude statue from the garden, bumped Kay.

“I beg your pardon,” Kay said.

He gave her a brief glance. “Shove off, witch. You hit the wrong landing strip. Nobody here but human beings.” He strode on out of the house to one of the sports cars, giggling at his own humor.

A girl moved by Kay, simpering. “Where’s Bunny?” the girl kept calling. “I want to dance with Bunny.”

Walking slowly, Kay followed the girl into the foyer and beyond into the library. Several couples were dancing in there with the lights lowered. After a moment her gaze grew accustomed to the shadowy lighting. She saw Stuart standing alone at the windows, staring into the darkness.

She felt a terrible sadness and at the same time a rage she felt would have matched Ruth’s if she’d walked in and found creeps making a shambles of her home. She wanted to slap Clay’s face, slap it until reason returned to his head. But at the same time she felt the way an indulgent parent feels toward a spoiled child. She would rather let him ruin everything than alienate him.

Kay sighed. With her it was different from the way it was with anyone else. She knew Clay Stuart better, had known him longer, understood him. He’d denied himself a lot during the past thirty years; he was a mixture of his early environment, his own inner emotions and the later years of self-denial. She hated to see him let them wreck his home, but he deserved a good time, even this late, even if it took such destructive turns.

She owed him too much ever to deny him anything. She had been one sort of person before she met him — a thin girl in glasses and stringy hair and a passion for the theatre. She became a set designer — props, costumes and hot coffee for the principals — as near as she ever came to the stage. She gravitated toward Hollywood for no good reason, became the secretary of an artist’s agent, and one day in that agent’s office she met Clay Stuart.

Clay Stuart walked in, and from that moment she was a different woman. She quit her job in the agent’s office, took Clay Stuart over. He had great potential, but he needed a plan, a direction, someone to keep him moving on it. This she did. In the silent pictures his walk, manner of speaking, way he did whatever they told him, came out on the screen with vigor and excitement. When the talkies came his voice suited the image the silent screen had created and he was greater than ever, a lonely, emotional young man with a flat, handsome Nebraska exterior.

In those years the legend grew that Stuart owed everything to Kay Ringling. Only she knew better; the debt was hers — a terrible debt, one she had to repay, no matter what it cost. From the moment he walked into her life, and later when he took her to bed with him, he made a complete human being out of her — and she would never love anyone else, never need anyone else. She owed the direction, the only good in her whole life to him — she wanted to repay him.

And right now was the time to be gentle with him, understanding and patient, no matter how urgently she longed to jerk him back to reality.

“Clay,” she said.

Clay Stuart turned, smiling, a stranger in an alien land finding a familiar face.

“Hello, there. God, am I glad to see you.”

“Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” Kay said.

“What are you doing here?”

“Several people have already asked me that.”

He took both her hands. She said, “I might even ask what you’re doing here?”

“I live here.”

“This is living?” She moved her head, looking the place over.

His voice remained flat. “We can’t have everything, Kay. One of the first facts of life I learned. We can’t ever have everything … I’m an elderly gent … I’ve learned to compromise … Hell, I’ve been compromising all my life. Now I’m doing it because I want to.”

“How nice for you.” She watched a drunken couple dance for a moment near the divan and then topple on it. They did not move. “Isn’t there some place we might talk?” she asked.

“Sure. There must be one room in this place that isn’t occupied.” He touched her arm, guided her through the dancers. Some glanced at Kay and Stuart, grinning crookedly at Clay. “Swell party, baby. Really a blast.”

“Where’d you round up so many juvenile delinquents?” Kay said as they climbed the stairs. “Looks like the parking lot outside Schwab’s.”

He did not answer. Kay paused before the room that had been Ruth’s, glanced questioningly at Clay. He shrugged. “Meenie’s as good as minie,” he said. “Try it.”

She pushed open the door, snapped on the light. She stood in the doorway, her mouth forming a startled o. Clothes were thrown about, cosmetics littered the vanity, most of them open, some cartons sprouting kleenex like tufts.

“Good heavens!” Kay said.

“Joanne’s using this room.”

“She raising rabbits in here, or hamsters?”

“Ruth was never tidy.”

“Oh, Clay. For hell’s sake. There was breeding in Ruth’s kind of disarray. You could make the place immaculate in three minutes. You’re going to have to call in exterminators and repair contractors.”

“All right.”

She turned and closed the door, studying him. “What are you trying to do, Clay?”

“Let’s talk about you,” he said in irony. “Why’d you want to see me?”

“I need a reason?”

“You’ve become a stranger around here.”