Don't Speak to Strange Girls (2 page)

He opened a closet door, found a ribbon-nylon shirt and slacks. He zipped the trousers, buttoned them but did not put on a belt. He left his shirt open half-way down his chest.

He went through the connecting bath to Ruth’s room, not knowing why he went in there, what he was looking for — in here was the quiet elegance dear to Ruth’s heart. She had expended a lot of passion on this part of her existence.

He paused beside the Angel Bed Ruth had had crated and carted home from France when they’d been on their honeymoon. He hadn’t spent much time in here. Sex hadn’t been the most urgent force of Ruth’s life.

The sliding doors of the wide closets loomed vacantly. The place had been cleared of Ruth’s dresses, shoes, under-things. Hoff had ordered this done — not realizing every bit of furniture in this house screamed her name. Hoff believed if you ordered your mind to discard grief, it would do it. All a matter of discipline. God how he envied a man like Hoff.

He saw a stocking that looked like something spun over the lower rung of a chair from eighteenth century France. He picked up the stocking, closing his fist on it. Funny, the way it had been left there, carelessly. That was the way it was with Ruth. The time they’d toured Europe, she’d left bits of her wardrobe in every hotel from London to Antwerp. And now she was dead and still she left part of herself in this room. Money and social position and someone to wait on her, the story of her life.

It had angered Ruth when he’d been tidy on their honeymoon, putting away his own clothes. What would the servants think? “The surest way to let them know you’re nobody,” Ruth said, “is to be neat and put away your clothes … and I don’t like you to do it anyway, Stu … It’s so common.”

A long time, Ruth, he thought. The girl who had everything all her life and the guy from a Nebraska farm — publicity releases called it a ranch. They’d had a good life, he saw now when it was lost and over, even if he’d always felt it lacking in spice and excitement. In those first years his friends made bets how long he and Ruth would last. Sometimes he made bets with himself. Ruth had disliked much in his life, hated hunting and fishing, and she had gone to his Nebraska home only once. Damned if she would tolerate the inconveniences.

He turned slowly, as if looking at this room for the last time. He thought, I’m sorry, Ruth, if I hurt you, and I know I did, if I failed you, and God only knows how many times I did that.

The knob on the hall door turned and he spun around guiltily.

Sharon opened the door and stood on the threshold. “I was looking for you,” she said.

Sharon had come into her twenties as if it were a fine and unexpected legacy, and there were all the pleasant touches of his lost little girl about her, face untarnished by shadow and arrestingly clear. There was an ingrained reticence in her that came from her mother, a faint questioning of everything, an innate appreciation of quality and mistrust of the phony.

Clay shoved the stocking into his pocket, tried to smile.

Sharon came forward slowly. “Don’t be ashamed, darling,” she said. “Of course you loved her. Don’t worry about it. Mother knew.”

Clay drew the back of his hand across his mouth, wondering how Ruth could have known.

He hadn’t even known himself.

• • •

Clay walked with Sharon along the hallway to the enclosed veranda across the north wing of the house.

He kept his arm about her, feeling the solid warmth of her body against him. Suddenly he never wanted to let her out of his sight again.

Sharon took a deep breath, thinking the best way to approach her father was with a burst of words. She didn’t want to hurt him but she had to be honest with him. It would have been so easy to tell her mother. It was everything her mother would approve and understand.

She moved away from Clay and walked across the bright parquet floors to the tall windows, forming the words on her mouth. But as she turned, he spoke: “I did love her, Sharon.”

“Oh, I know you did.”

“Sometimes I didn’t show it.”

She gave a soft laugh. “Well, you were never half the lover around here that you were on Grauman’s screen.”

“No.”

There was a brief empty silence. She was thinking that Amory Darrow was almost as tall as her father, slender and athletic. There would never be the strength and character in Amory’s face that was in her father’s, but she had seen only a few men who had that, so it was no discredit to Amory that he was a lesser human being, even in her eyes. She wanted to tell her father about Amory, but there was Amory’s age — he was thirty-six — and his divorce. She shivered involuntarily.

Clay saw something was troubling Sharon, something imposed over the grief about her mother. “Are you all right? I mean at school? Is everything all right?”

“Of course it is. I love it.”

“Oh? Do you? Wouldn’t you like a vacation? Stay around here. Take the rest of the year off. Look after me.”

She swallowed back the ache in her throat. “Daddy, I never knew a man who needed less concern than you. You’re the most self-sufficient man I know. The only one.”

He shook his head. “You know, that was the idea I had about myself? Until — you see, until your mother died. I’ve done a lot of thinking. Ruth was everything I needed, Sharon… . I began to realize it when she was in the hospital … I know it now.”

“She wanted to take care of you. She treated you just about the way she treated me — wanted you always washed behind your ears, shaved, looking your best, most successful, with everything you wanted. That’s the way she’s treated me all these years.”

“Have you been happy, Sharon? Not lonely … I mean, not needing anything?”

“Oh no.” She came to him, sat on the lounge chair beside him. “I’ve had a wonderful life. You’ll never know the thrill to sit in a theatre at the college and see you on the screen, and hear the girls sigh and whisper that Big Daddy Sex is
my father.
Sharon Stuart’s father … I’m not the prettiest girl at school, not nearly the most brilliant — but what I am is the most envied girl on campus. Because of you.”

“I’d — like to keep you around here if I could,” he said. “What if you did miss the rest of the year? You could make it up.”

She averted her face, spoke quickly. “I’m too much my mother’s daughter to believe that … I’m about to get — my degree … I can’t stop now.”

His voice was self-deprecating. “Maybe it’s just that I don’t hold much with degrees for women.”

“Your cowboy background,” she teased. “Now I sound like mother.”

“There are worse things.” He got up, walked to the windows. “I hoped maybe we could get away … You and I. We could go — I don’t care … Mexico, Europe … I wouldn’t drag you fishing or anything like that. We’d go where you wanted to go, Sharon. Wouldn’t you like that?”

“I’d love it. But — ”

He heeled around. “Then let’s do it. Just you and I.”

“Daddy, you don’t have to disrupt your life to drag me around on a trip you’d hate in a week.”

“But — I wouldn’t — ”

“You’re a much better actor on the screen. I’m not depressed. Mother was ill so long — I’ve been learning to accept it all this time. I’ll be all right. Don’t worry about me.” She could not bring herself to tell him yet about Amory. This wasn’t the right time, yet she had to do it before she returned East to school. She thought emptily maybe she’d talk to Kay Ringling about it. Wasn’t this what everybody did who wanted to reach Clay Stuart? Didn’t they talk to Kay Ringling first?

Clay felt his shoulders sag and he stared at Sharon. He could not tell her he was worried about himself, he needed her. He needed the smooth flow of life he’d had with Ruth. He was lost and lonely and he needed her, but he saw he could not say this to Sharon.

And she wouldn’t have believed him even if he’d said it.

chapter two

C
LAY
S
TUART
lay back in a lounge chair beside his swimming pool. He watched a eucalyptus leaf float on the wind-rifled water. He made a bet with himself as to how long the leaf would float, and when it continued to ride the surface after the time limit he’d set, he removed a fifty-cent piece from his right pocket and put it in his left. Otherwise he did not move.

An empty highball tumbler sweated on the glass table-top at his elbow. His feet hung over the end of the chair. He wore unlaced sneakers and had kicked loose his headache.

He was not really thinking anything; there was nothing he wanted to think about, and when any thought intruded in on his conscious mind, he shoved it aside with the memories of his father which had been roused to life again at Ruth’s graveside in Forest Lawn. He’d run away in his thoughts that day to a less complicated time, and he found himself doing it again in the days since Ruth’s funeral. The present offered nothing but accumulated griefs, and his thoughts returned to Colonel Ben because, after forty years, they were less urgent, less painful.

At thirteen he’d thought the land stark, the life arid, but now he let his mind dwell on Colonel Ben, the quarter-horse the colonel had given him, the .410 gauge shotgun on his tenth birthday, and the time the colonel had caught him with the little girl from the neighboring farm on the outhouse floor, doing it the only way they knew — the way they’d seen the horses and cattle and hunting dogs doing it. He still remembered hunching over her, putting all the strength and sick sweet urgency of his hands on her shoulders, trying to draw her head back to him so he could inhale the fragrance of her hair. They hadn’t even known Colonel Ben was in the world until they heard the colonel’s burst of prideful laughter just before he brought his belt down across Clav’s back.

For many years every decision Clay Stuart made, every direction he turned was motivated by the compelling need to escape that raw land. Out there a man kissed infrequently — his bride only while she was still his bride, and then they lived together until they died, or killed one another, and seldom kissed again. A man might buss his mother’s cheek in a shamed way if she were absent from the house for more than a year, and kiss his grandchildren if they were small and no one was looking. A quick handshake was about as emotional as those people ever got.

Clay watched the leaf bobble across the water. It seemed to him he’d always been a wad of emotion, crying when his pet chicken was killed for Sunday dinner, holding on to things he loved.

He had the sudden memory of the day Colonel Ben assaulted the drummer on Main Street. The salesman rented a Stuart horse, rode it to death and then called young Clay a liar when he accused him.

Maybe a twelve-year-old kid should have kept his mouth shut, but a blind man could see what the drummer had done, and Clay felt ill watching that suffering animal die.

The Stuart women talked long and urgently to Colonel Ben and he finally agreed he would not speak of the matter with the drummer; the horse was dead, nothing could restore it, the colonel’s temper was violent and impossible to curb once roused.

And the colonel kept his word, would have kept it forever if only the drummer had been smart enough to keep his mouth shut. Clay walked at his father’s side on Main Street, heard the colonel suddenly sniffing, blowing hard through his left nostril the way he always did when agitated.

Clay hadn’t known what was the matter until he saw the drummer approaching them on the same side of the street. Colonel Ben kept his face straight, sniffing and blowing, but determined to keep his pledge and pass the drummer without speaking.

But the drummer called Colonel Ben’s name, an arrogant man, an arrogant voice alien to the plains. Colonel Ben sniffed, swung as he turned, clouting the drummer on the side of the head. The drummer staggered, stumbling ten feet before he fell. Colonel Ben pounced on him, saying nobody called his son a liar. He never mentioned the dead horse, seemed not to care. And even then Clay saw how violent his father’s emotions were, and how hard the colonel worked to keep anyone from seeing how different he was inside from his hewn-faced neighbors.

Clay smiled, remembering the way his father had fought the drummer in the dust of Main Street. It took five men to pull the colonel off. All this happened in 1921. There were less than a dozen automobiles in the whole county.

• • •

Now Clay heard a door close behind him and he stiffened rigidly in his chair, as though setting himself for some mortal combat instead of a casual encounter fixed and secured by old habit and long association. He listened to the precise steps on the flagstones and spoke without moving.

“Hello, Kay.”

“You always know when I’m near, don’t you?”

“Don’t forget, you’ve been walking up on me for over thirty years.”

She stood beside his lounge chair and he glanced up at her. “Don’t say that so loudly,” she said. “I don’t mind getting old, but I hate for you to.”

She was a tall woman, almost as tall as he, almost as lean. She could have played Cassius without make-up. He seldom looked at her now, though thirty years ago he’d been violent in bed with her, and he seemed to have forgotten, but Kay never had. He’d employed Kay Ringling as his personal manager, and she’d tossed aside everything else and had yet to regret it, except infrequently over a fourth martini — and everybody regretted something with more than three martinis in them. That early violence had simmered into something unusual, even in Hollywood. She stood between Clay Stuart and anything that might harm, annoy or deplete him.

“Old? I’m not old, Kay, you are,” his low voice teased. “You were an elderly lady the first time I set eyes on you.”

She stared down at him, remembering his ferocity in that faraway bed. He’d been so wildly needing, you’d have thought it would last forever, but it hadn’t. Something had happened to end all this between them, and she supposed he’d forgotten all about it. Now she put an edge into her voice.

“I hate to say this, but I was several years younger than you — even then. I still am.” She tightened her arms across the blue-covered script. “Don’t get up,” she added in irony.

Clay laughed, gesturing toward a lounge chair, catching it and drawing it nearer his.