I Could Go on Singing (11 page)

For a moment Sid’s voice faded and then came back, “… try to keep him in the dark as long as you can, and I will try to stir up something at this end that will decoy him away from you people.”

“I hope you can. We’d all feel better about it.”

“The way you talk, Jase, you sound as if you were a member of that team over there. I would feel better if you sounded like a member of my team.”

“I am here trying to protect your interests.”

“Wholeheartedly, Jase.”

“Yes indeed.”

“Talk up the picture to Jenny, my boy. Tell her how well we will treat her. Tell her we are budgeting it at ten million.”

“If I can get her attention.”

“Speak of tax shelters, Jase. Some little things can be worked out.”

“She’s never been as interested in money as some of the others.”

“My boy, if you can keep the roof from falling in over there, you might well be assigned to that picture for the duration.”

“I would like that, Sid.”

“I’ll be in touch,” he said and hung up.

Jason thumped the pillow and tried to find a comfortable
position and go back to sleep. But within a few minutes he knew it was no good. He kept thinking of the odd quarrel he had with Lois just before leaving their hotel. Jenny had kept them up until after one-thirty. She wanted to share the way she felt. George had kept trying to calm her down but she had resisted him. Finally she had said, her eyes blazing, “Okay, okay, okay, George! I’m a star. I’m a smash. I gave away my baby. Sam Dean is here. Okay! I’ll be
careful!
I’ll wear sneakers. I’ll puff out my cheeks, paint myself blue and limp. But I am going to see my son again, Sam Dean or no Sam Dean, career or no career, scandal or no scandal. Now kindly shut up about it!”

“Jenny, baby, all I’m trying to do is …”

“All I want to be is happy,” she said. “All I ever wanted to be is happy.” And she began to cry. George signaled to Lois and Jason. They started toward the door. Lois paused and went over to Jenny and kissed her on the temple and whispered good night. They went out into the hall and Jason closed the door.

As Jason walked her down toward her room, Lois said, “What are we trying to do to her?”

“What does that mean?”

“George loves to wheel and deal. Ida has eighteen years of security and she’s used to it. I want to see the world. You want to protect that damned picture deal. Mr. Wegler wants his star unsullied. The doctor wants her off his neck. Sam Dean wants to smash her for good.” She leaned against the corridor wall beside her door and looked into his eyes, frowning. “What kind of a ride are we all trying to take at her expense, Jason?” she whispered.

“She made her choices a long time ago.”

“Does that excuse you?”

“Excuse me from what, for God’s sake?”

“Using her. Look how high she is? Doesn’t she
know
it has to swing the other way? Doesn’t she know that seeing the boy is only going to make it all worse for her?”

“Maybe she hasn’t got your sense of caution, Lois.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Jason shrugged. “If you gamble big, you win big or you lose big.”

“And I don’t gamble at all?” she asked in a strained voice.

“I didn’t mean it as a criti …”

“I gambled big as you call it. And it only takes one big
bet to find out all the wheels are fixed and all the dice are crooked. Only a fool would keep on making bets.”

“There’s an old joke, Lois. It’s the only game in town.”

“I’ve heard it. It’s about a compulsive gambler, isn’t it?”

“Like Jenny.”

“She loses, Jason. You can see that. She loses again.”

“Maybe she knows that. But, you see, she had this day, didn’t she?”

She looked down. “I can’t make that kind of a trade, Jason. I can’t trade little pieces of now for the misery of what comes after. I always see both ends of a bargain. Maybe that’s my trouble.” She raised her eyes slowly. “Let me alone, Jason.”

“Do you think I’m the bold trader, the big gambler? My God, Lois, I live with anxiety. I know the shape and the feel of it. I hedge all my bets, and my hand shakes. I want so badly for things to have meaning that somehow I don’t let them have meaning. You know, I
envy
Jenny. I get so busy worrying about what I’m doing with my life, I don’t do enough with it. My history is a big long list of the things I should have done. My God, I’d trade it for a list of remorses.”

“Just let me alone. Just please let me alone. Please.”

She unlocked her door and went in and closed it softly. He stood there for a little while, shutting his jaw so hard his teeth ached. And then he went down the stairs instead of ringing for the elevator, walked back to his hotel in the cold night with his shoulders hunched and his hands deep in his pockets.

As he dressed he thought of the odd talk. He wondered if it could be considered a quarrel. He wondered how he should act toward her when he saw her next. He wondered if she was wondering the same thing. Perhaps they would both wait, looking for a clue. That was, he thought, the difference between them and a person like Jenny Bowman. Jenny reacted immediately, instinctively, setting the tone.

(They had waited at Jenny’s hotel while Keppler viewed the last day’s rushes to decide whether any final takes were necessary. And then he phoned. Jenny answered. She thanked him and hung up. And then she ran to him and hugged him with forlorn strength and put her lips against his throat and said in a small fierce voice, “Just take me a long way the hell and gone a long way away from here, just
us alone and a long way, and the first plane leaving no matter where just so long as it’s a warm place in the sun alone.”)

He breakfasted early. There was a misty sun. He walked as far as St. James Park and sat and smoked a pipe and watched the early scurry of the civil servants heading for the complex of government buildings. He looked at the fresh young English girls and had complex fantasies born of loneliness and lust. ‘See here, I don’t know you and you don’t know me. I may be a bit long in the tooth for you, but you look tidy and healthy and I have a four-year-old daughter who needs brothers and sisters. And you would live in California, if that sounds attractive to you. I am quiet and reasonably neat. I would be sober and faithful, and try to bring you back to England once a year to see your people. You see, my dear, people who do know each other make such a ghastly botch of it that it might be interesting to begin as total strangers.’ And the young eyes would bulge and she would give him a truly frightful wallop across the chops and scream for a bobbie. He grinned. And if by any chance he did strike upon one desperate enough, heartsick enough, lonely enough to chance it, she would turn out to be slatternly and dismal, yearning for the damps of her native climate, the pubs and telly, the fish and chips, the comforting pageant of royalty. But it alarmed him to realize how vulnerable he was, that he should even entertain such a fantasy. Somehow, coming here had opened chinks in familiar armor. And a cold wind blew in.

He arrived at the Park Lane at a little after nine. When there was no answer when he phoned Lois’s room, he looked in the dining room and saw her eating alone, opening mail as she ate, scribbling marginal notes on the letters. He hesitated, and when the captain of waiters started toward him, he waved him away and went to her table. He sat without invitation and as she gave him a startled look, he said, “The part of London they call The City comprises about three hundred and thirty acres. It is the part that was originally enclosed by a stone wall after the Claudian Invasion of 43
A.D.
It became one of the largest and most prosperous of the Roman provincial cities. They anchored their slave galleys in the Walbrook that ran through it. The galley slaves and the enslaved inhabitants built the wall under the direction of the Roman artisans. Many parts of it are still standing, and if you have time, and if you want to get everything
back into a nice historical balance, I can take you to a place where you can rest your hand against one of those stones and think of the sweat and the strain and the agony of how it was lifted into place almost two thousand years ago. When I thought I was going to get myself killed in a contemporary war I went and touched one of those stones put there by conquered men who had been children when Jesus Christ was alive.”

Her gray eyes had grown wider as he spoke, her lips stretching into a smile that faded again as he finished. “Is the stone you touched still there?”

“We can go look. It was in Amen Court off Cheapside.”

“It brought you luck.”

“Or measles.”

She shook her head. “You are a very strange man, Jason Brown.”

“I wanted to tell you I don’t have any idea what either of us were talking about last night.”

“Thank you. And I don’t remember anything I said to you. But I am going to find time to go touch that stone. Because I need luck.”

“Do they make you work at breakfast?”

“A girl weeds the letters in New York and sends on batches of the ones she thinks Jenny might like to see. Then I weed them again. It has to be done sometime. And if you get too far behind, it can get very dense and nervous.”

“Do they all still get answered the way they used to?”

“All except the sick ones.” She looked at her watch and swooped up her coffee and finished it, scrawled her name and room number on the tab. “I’ve got to get up there.”

“Is she up?”

“Ida promised George she would be.”

“When does Sam Dean go to work?”

“We’re working him in from eleven thirty to twelve, a drink and a chat up in the suite. She has to leave at twelve for lunch at the Savoy.”

“Anything I can do? I feel like a fifth wheel around here.”

As they crossed the lobby she said, “Come on up and check in with George anyhow.”

She wore a gray cardigan, a dark skirt. There were slight shadows under her eyes. He stood next to her in the elevator, aware of her closeness and fragrance, of her tall, staunch and rounded body, and of a new flavor of closeness between them, complicated by new restraints. She would never be
easy to know. It would take a long long time to know her well. There were too many defenses in depth. Too many Roman walls.

As they left the elevator he stopped her and said, “I still have one thing I think I ought to do.”

“Yes?”

“She still doesn’t know why I’m here.”

“Don’t you think she’s guessed?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. But I have to tell her, I think. That’s the one lasting thing we had. Honesty.”

Lois looked thoughtful. “Now would be the time to tell her. While she’s up. But it’s a brutal day, really. Ten interviews, a lunch, a dinner, two tapes.”

“Any break at all?”

“From four to five. But she’ll want to change and get any rest she can.”

“Will you be with her all day?”

“I won’t be with her at all. I have a couple hours of work to do here, plus any new stuff that may come up.”

“And if I hang around?”

“I’ll ignore you until the work is done, my friend.”

As they walked toward the suite, George came out of his room in his shirt sleeves, a sheaf of papers in his hand. “Hey, there you are, pussycat. Morning, Jase. Add this crud to the backlog, dear. Jase, I want you in the suite at eleven twenty-five. And you too, Lois. We make it a group interview with Sam Dean.”

“I think that’s wise,” Lois said. “Is Jenny up?”

“Up and jolly. Dressing, eating and having Gabe do her hair all at one and the same time. Not a single objection to anything on the schedule. They’re all darling people. She’s going to love every one of them. Even Sam.”

“Well … good luck,” Lois said. “I better get started on my stuff.” She began to back away.

“Needle Harkness on that new plate. He promised to pull a proof and have it here by noon.”

She nodded and turned and went down the corridor, her stride quicker than usual, dark skirt swinging, strong shoulders straight, fair hair bright in the shadows of the corridor.

“Stop panting,” George said.

Jason turned and looked at George’s knowing grin. “I’m way ahead of the game, boss. I get to show her a hunk of Roman wall someday.”

“Get smart and she’ll push it over on you,” George said and went into his room. Jason followed him in.

“George,” he said, “I better tell Jenny exactly why I’m here.”

George started to tie his necktie. “How smart is that?”

“I’m not very smart about anything. If I was, I’d be rich. I know one thing about Jenny. She doesn’t like slick tricks. The sooner I tell her the better.”

“End of mission, maybe.”

“Then they should have sent another boy. That’s what I told Wegler in the beginning. Send another boy. I think I should tell her when she’s feeling good.”

George knotted the tie carefully, put his jacket on and buttoned it. “This whole thing may very probably go to hell in a bucket, pal.”

“I know.”

“And turn into a salvage operation. If there’s anything left to salvage.”

“I realize that too.”

George turned from the mirror and looked steadily at him. “If it does, I want you around. Not for the salvage job. Not for picking up pieces of the career of Jenny Bowman But for her. Can you understand that?”

“I think so. And I think you are a pretty good man, George.”

“Nobody else could have picked up the pieces seven years ago. Not the pieces of the career. That was safe and sound. The pieces of Jenny Bowman.” George’s face twisted and darkened. He beat his fist into his palm. “All along,” he said. “Right from the beginning of it all, she’s deserved more than she’s ever gotten. But don’t tell her I said so.”

“I won’t.”

“Four o’clock might be a good time to level with her, depending on how the day goes. Be around. I’ll tip you whether it’s okay.”

After they left in the limousine, Jason went to Lois’s room and read the
Times
while she worked. It didn’t bother her to have him there. He enjoyed being near her, being able to look over and see her. She worked steadily, swiftly, making and taking phone calls, typing, stapling, filing, sending out her own letters and memos, preparing others for George’s and Jenny’s signatures, entering the expenses in the ledger.