Marjorie Morningstar (39 page)

She put her hand on his shoulder. “Dear, he’s bored by this place, can’t you see that
much? He’s told me himself that his work has been much too routine. He’s delighted
with your skits because they’re fresh. You’re nineteen, Wally, South Wind is a challenge
to you—”

“But it’s beneath Noel Airman, eh? Okay. You’ll find an answer for everything. I might
have known better than to argue about him with you.” He jerked away from under her
hand. “I hope you realize that everyone on the staff except me is certain you’re sleeping
with him.”

“Yes, we’ve had plenty of laughs over that. I can’t help the kind of minds people
have.”

“You’ve given them no cause to think so, is that right?”

“I’ve been dancing a lot with Noel and—well, going with him, the way I have with several
other fellows in my time, but among my kind of people that doesn’t mean having an
affair—”

“It’s incredible.” He shook his head at the sky. “I’ll never forget this as long as
I live. The blindness, the complete loss of self-criticism—Marjorie, I know you. You’re
bright as the devil, you have a sense of humor, you’re alert to everything around
you. Don’t you realize that you’ve been acting like a wife, and a very bossy wife,
at rehearsals the past few weeks? Telling Noel how he should do this and that, criticizing
people’s performances to him while they’re standing on the stage listening, practically
directing some scenes, or trying to? Haven’t you noticed at all how he’s had to smooth
people’s feelings, how he’s diplomatically told you to shut up twenty times? You’ve
been impossible, in your charming little way. Mrs. Fixit herself, blooming overnight
out of an office girl. How dumb do you think people are? Or how obtuse are you, actually?”

This attack threw Marjorie into a muddy scared turmoil. “It’s untrue, absolutely untrue,
you’re just saying it to upset me, you’re a cruel little wretch.” But her mind was
racing across the past weeks, and Wally’s accusation shone out like a phosphorescent
thread connecting a number of puzzling incidents and remarks. “I’ve made some suggestions
about lighting, yes. I’m in charge of the lights. But—”

“Marjorie, I used to be in charge of the lights. Did you ever hear me open my face
at rehearsals? You haven’t just offered your opinion on lights, you’ve been moving
in on everything—”

Her eyes stinging and moistening, she said, “Well then, if I’ve made such an idiotic
spectacle of myself how is it you don’t think I’m having an affair with him? What’s
your doubt?”

“I’ll believe it when you tell me. Nothing else will ever make me believe it. As he
says, I’m starry-eyed. About you, anyway.”

She stamped her foot. “I don’t want you to be
anything
about me, do you hear? I hope you write your hit at twenty-five and make seven billion
dollars and win the Pulitzer Prize. I’m sure you’ll make some girl very happy. Don’t
talk to me about your colossal talents any more. And don’t come running down Noel
to me. Nothing you say matters. It isn’t because love has made me an imbecile, either.
It’s because you’re nineteen, and don’t know what anything’s about. You do have talent,
but you’re pitifully ignorant of the first principles of taste. My crime is simply
that I had the ghastly nerve to tell you to your face that you were being vulgar in
your writing, and so you were! I don’t take back a word of it, Wally. Some day you’ll
thank me. You may even apologize, if you grow up that much.”

He put his hands out to her, supplicating. “Margie, please,
please
believe that what you said about my work isn’t the reason I—”

“Let me tell you this, now!” She raised her voice. “Noel has always treated you wonderfully,
and you know it. He’s given you every encouragement. He’s praised you to the skies.
He’s given you new responsibilities as fast as you could take them on. He doesn’t
fear you or envy you—Nobody would be happier than Noel if you turned out to be his
successor at South Wind. But you—you can only see him through a fog of ambition and
jealousy. And you’re so unbalanced with your little success last night that a few
drinks brings it all out of you. Listen, Wally, I’m not as blind as you think. Noel
has been spoiled by his own good looks and charm. He’s sowed too damned many wild
oats. I’m perfectly aware of that. And yet, just offhand, with his fingertips, without
trying, he’s had hit songs, he’s put on wonderful South Wind shows, he’s mastered
everything he’s ever put his hand to. Even my mother, who has a mind like a bank manager
where I’m concerned, likes Noel. And she doesn’t know about
Princess Jones
. If
Princess Jones
isn’t a smash—and I think it’s going to be—the next one he writes will. Nothing can
stop Noel Airman, if he ever really tries to do what—”

Wally interrupted shakily, “Your mother—your mother likes Noel? Is that true?”

“I wouldn’t bother to lie to you, believe me.”

Wally lit another cigarette with his hunched-over furtive quick motion, like a boy
sneaking a smoke. He sank down on the rock; his shoulders curved and drooped; his
big head dropped forward on his chest, and the black hair fell over his forehead.
“God knows it could all be true, Margie—that I’m eaten alive by envy, that I’m a heavy-handed
vulgarian, that I start sneering at Noel, and bawling insults at you, because I’m
full of rum. Surest way to win your fair hand that I could devise, isn’t it? Oh, God.”
He dropped his head on his arms, resting them on his drawn-up knees.

She felt she owed him some gratitude. He had exaggerated her helpfulness at rehearsals
into a horrible false picture of herself as a domineering harpy; but the wagging tongues
of the staff, she knew, were quite good at such malicious caricature, and now she
was warned. “Wally, please don’t be so miserable. You have no idea what a day I’ve
had.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “You were pretty rough on me, you know. I
still like you, I admire your work—nothing’s changed.”

He put his hand on hers. “Margie—”

She bent, kissed him lightly on the mouth, and laughed. “There See? No lilacs. Well,
Mr. Frog Prince? Why don’t you change? You said you would.”

He stood wearily. “I lied to you, you see. I can’t change. I’m a frog, that’s all.
Never was, never will be, anything else.”

“That’s not so. You’re going to change slowly but surely, in about ten years, into
a fine prince—”

“I’ve got to go help put up the torches,” he said. “Thanks for the talking-to. I won’t
forget.”

At the torchlight supper, Samson-Aaron was himself again. He ate enormously of the
chile and rice and enchiladas, laughing at Marjorie’s objections. His hand rested
on the whiskey bottle, and he replenished his own glass and Noel’s the instant they
were empty. “Vot, little queen, you gonna be like Milton?” he roared, his face ruddy
and shining in the flaring yellow light, when she tried to move the bottle out of
his reach. “A fiesta is a fiesta, hey, Mr. Airman?” He kept Noel laughing with a stream
of Yiddish jokes and aphorisms—Marjorie was surprised at how well Noel understood
them—and laughed just as hard at them himself. He joined in the Mexican songs, shouting
“Da diddly da” instead of the words, showing a quick ear for the melodies. After a
while Marjorie stopped worrying, and gave herself over to enjoying the strange party
of three. Noel’s small table was placed near the fountain, at the highest point of
the sloping lawn, so that he could watch the progress of the supper. The loud splashing
of the multicolored streams of water made the air damp and fresh, and forced them
to raise their voices when they talked.

The feeling that she was in a dream now almost overwhelmed her. With rushing cataracts
of changing red, green, gold, blue, and white water on one side of her; with an array
of tables stretching away from her on the other side, lit by wobbling yellow flames;
eating queer-tasting food, under a black sky ablaze with stars; Noel at her left in
his sombrero, yellow suit, and brown paint, the Uncle at her right in his unbelievable
lavender drawers and purple pompon hat; with a queerly mingled aching and lightness
all through her body, and a recurrent tingling in her arms and ringing in her ears;
with a feeling of exhaustion, emotional and physical, and yet a defiant hilarious
sense of being ready to go on and on with ever madder nonsense; with all these feelings
and sensations whirling in her brain, Marjorie was nervously enjoying the phantasmagoria,
and wishing—at one and the same time—that it would continue for hours, and that she
were already awake tomorrow in a gray sensible Monday morning, with nothing seriously
gone wrong.

The bullfighting act fell flat. It was hard to see, despite the floodlights, and the
tables interfered with it, and most of the guests were lethargic in the backwash of
the day’s excitement and stuporous with food and drink; and anyway, it was the third
repetition of the same joke. The Uncle returned to the table panting, dripping, grinning
palely. “Vas good?” Marjorie and Noel urged him to go to the barracks to shower and
change, and rather to her surprise the Uncle agreed. “Vun drink. To keep varm.” He
swallowed a stiff shot of whiskey. Noel told him to be sure to come to the staff party
backstage after midnight. “Such an honor for a dishvasher?” he panted. “Thanks, Mr.
Airman, vy not? I come vit bells.” He disappeared into the gloom beyond the fountain.

Marjorie and Noel looked at each other. Noel said, “I guess we could have done without
it. But it did help. It really did.”

“Of course it did,” Marjorie said.

The fireworks began to bang and burst over the black lake, in colored showers.

In the black turtle-neck sweater, with the brown makeup gone, Noel looked extraordinarily
young, pale, and attractive at the piano. Marjorie, her arm around the Uncle’s waist,
a glass of champagne in her hand, swayed sentimentally to the music, enchanted with
this party amid stacks of painted scenery, cardboard rocks and trees, and all the
tangle of ropes, spotlights, and electric cables. It was two in the morning. The staff,
revived from the exhaustion of the fiesta by raw cheap California champagne supplied
by Greech, was clustered around the rehearsal piano, a decayed upright, with cigarette-scorched
keyboard, no front panel, and dirty hammers visible and creaking. The tinny tones
added somehow to the pleasant melancholy of Noel’s new waltz.

There were approving murmurs, and a little applause. “It’s lovely, Noel,” Adele said.

“It’s a cheap organ-grinderish kind of thing,” Noel said, rippling chords. “It’s the
Labor Day finale. I think it’ll bring a few tears, which is all it’s designed for.”
He played it again. The tinkling plaintive melody moved Marjorie deeply. She didn’t
think it was cheap. Some of the singers hummed with the piano, swaying their heads.

“Is sveet,” the Uncle said to Marjorie. “Is a little too sad. I like better happy
songs.” He had shaved in haste just before coming to the party, and the powder was
thick and streaked on his fat face.

“Tired, Uncle?”

“A little vile I stay, then I go, yes. Is nice, a party, young people—”

“Are you sure you won’t have more champagne?”

He smiled. “Excuse me, by me it’s yellow seltzer, it only makes me thirsty. Thanks.”

Adele, her head resting on the broad chest of her waiter lover, said dreamily, “Let’s
hear the words again, Noel. They’re pretty.”

The others joined in haltingly as Noel sang,

“Valtz,” Samson-Aaron said. “My vife, she vas the valtzer in the family. Your mama’s
sister. You vouldn’t believe, I was skinny like a toothpick then.” He crinkled his
eyes at Marjorie. “She looked like you, you know? Different hair, different-style
clothes, sure. She looked like you, a little bit.”

Marjorie turned to him and held out her arms. “Uncle, let’s waltz.”

“Vot?” he laughed wearily. “Vas thirty, forty years ago I valtzed.”

Greech, who was standing beside Marjorie, beating time with his flashlight against
his palm, said, “That’s a good idea. Come on, Sam. Go ahead, Marjorie.”

The others took it up: “Come on, the toreador! Sam, Marjorie! A waltz! Let’s go!”

Samson-Aaron looked around, his face showing something of his customary merriment.
“An old elephant like me? Anyway, in the old country is a different valtz, not like
here—” But Greech, with a little push of the flashlight in the small of Marjorie’s
back, sent her into her uncle’s arms. He clasped her waist. “So, all right, vunce
the Uncle has a dance vit you, Modgerie?” He held out her arm in formal awkward straightness,
took one dipping little hesitant hop, then launched out on the bare stage in a grave
rotating waltz.

The old fat man in the crumpled yellow Palm Beach suit and the girl in the bare-shouldered
blue frock moved in perfect time once around the stage. Applause and cries of approval
broke out. “Attaboy, Sam. Shake a leg, Sam.” As they twirled through the precise old-fashioned
steps, with the stage, the people, the piano going slowly around and around them,
Samson-Aaron was looking at his niece with forlorn gratitude and pleasure. She said,
“Why, you dance beautifully, Uncle. We should have waltzed together before.”

“Ve should have? Vot ve should do in life and vot ve do—My vife, she—vell, ve dance,
ve don’t talk.”