The Immigrant’s Daughter (31 page)

Barbara was never very good at putting together the contradictions of her existence, nor was she ever untroubled by what she did, no matter how carefully she brooded and tried to justify herself.

It was almost eight o'clock. She went back to her hotel room, noting, as she put her key into the door, that the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign was properly undisturbed. Carson emerged from the bathroom as she came in, drying his face and apologizing for using her razor.

“How do you feel?” she asked him.

“Pretty good, all things considered.” He regarded her curiously. “What happened last night?”

“Nothing much. We had a few drinks at the bar—”

“How many?”

“You had two double bourbons and then a single. They pour ample measure down there. Earlier, we split a bottle of wine at the restaurant. If you recall, you didn't eat much at dinner, and you never were a good drinker, Carson.”

“Totally blotto?”

“Not totally. You walked up here. You didn't throw up. I undressed you and put you to bed.”

“Oh.” Then he added, “Where did you sleep?”

“In bed with you.”

“Oh. Where's my tie. Did you see my tie?”

“In the closet. On one of the hooks.”

He started for the closet, and then he stopped and turned to her, for all the world, as Barbara saw it, like an actor doing a silly, contrived double-take in a movie. “You say we slept together — right there?” pointing to the bed.

“Yes.”

“Did — I mean — did we —?”

“Make love? No. I snuggled up to you for a bit, and that was nice, but you were too much out of it for anything to happen.”

“Wouldn't you know it,” he said bitterly.

Barbara put her arms around him and kissed him. “It's all right. We'll see each other again. Meanwhile, put your tie on and we'll have a good breakfast.”

“Where were you?” he wondered.

“Just walking. I had to clear my head. Beverly Hills at seven
A.M.
Empty. Full of good air and sunshine, like a Hopper paint-ing.”

“Barbara darling,” Carson said. “I can't go downstairs and have breakfast with you, not after spending the night in your room and in your bed.”

“Why not? No one knows you were here.”

“It's only eight-thirty. Everyone around here knows who I am. Good heavens!”

“Dear Carson, they'll see you eating with an elderly gray-haired lady who doesn't wear lipstick, and if you think that in this town anyone will imagine hanky-panky, you are out of your head. If an old buzzard like you fiddles around with anything over forty, he's thrown out of the club. You're seen here with me — obviously it's business. A writer in from out of town. Anyone comes by, I'm Barbara Smith.”

“You really feel that way?”

“Carson, look at me.”

“Barbara, I have an office and a newspaper and a home where there are servants, and if my wife calls—”

“Call home and explain. Call your office and explain. Carson, you own the damn newspaper. You can come in at six o'clock tonight, and no one will dare to say one word about it.”

He made the calls, and they went down not to the coffee shop — for, as Carson put it, anyone who saw him eating in a coffee shop would be instantly suspicious — but to the restaurant, and there the maître d' welcomed him expansively, telling him how delighted he was to see Mr. Devron again. In return, Carson said pointedly, “Mrs. Smith, here, and I would like a corner table where we can discuss what we have to discuss.”

“I love to go to a restaurant with you,” Barbara said, once they were seated.

“Why?” Carson asked suspiciously.

“Because you are the only man I know who can quietly give the impression that he owns the place and the head waiter is there by your leave.”

“That's nonsense.”

“You and my father. Only he always took me to an old Italian joint on Jones Street, where he could fill his belly with spaghetti and smoke one of his impossible cigars.”

“You miss him.”

“Every day of my life. Him and Marcel and Bernie and Boyd — all the stupid, beautiful men who only know how to die — and if you ever die on me, Carson Devron, I'll never forgive you, so help me. I'll stand at your grave and cuss you out instead of bringing flowers —”

“I'm to be cremated.”

“I'll work that out too. Let's eat. I'm starved.”

“You look twenty years younger than you have any right to look. Are you sure nothing happened last night?”

“Eggs, sausage and fried potatoes — home fried, not French fried. Croissant and coffee.”

“My God,” he whispered, “don't you gain weight?”

“No. I worry it off.”

After the order had been taken, Barbara said, “Last night — what did you decide?”

“Decide? I was too stupidly drunk to decide anything.”

“Before you took me here. Those men from the Salvador resistance asked you to send a correspondent down there. It's important. We're the most Hispanic part of America, out here in California. You used to talk about the need to develop a Mexican readership. This fits in, doesn't it? We should not have to depend on the wire services and gleanings from the
New York Times. “

“What's all this leading up to?”

“Last night, those three men asked you to send a correspondent to Salvador. Will you? Yes or no?”

“I don't like anyone telling me how to run my newspaper.”

“Oh, come on, Carson. This is Barbara.”

“Who always knew better how a newspaper should be run.”

“Carson, about the correspondent — yes or no?”

“I happen to have thought about it several weeks ago. I'll take it up at our meeting today.”

“Then your answer is yes?”

“I suppose so,” Carson agreed.

“Good. I want the job.”

He stared at her. The food came, and he continued to stare. She dipped a piece of potato into the yellow of a fried egg and swallowed it.

“So that's it,” Carson said finally. “That's why you trailed around and let me in —”

“Carson, for God's sake, I love you, I've always loved you, and one thing has nothing to do with the other. So get off that horse. I asked you something.”

“The answer is no.” He began to eat furiously, and then, mouth full, added, “I love you too. That's why the answer is no. No. No matter what you say, no!”

“You'll feel better after you've eaten something. I shouldn't have asked you to decide on an empty stomach.”

He stopped eating and pointed his fork at her. “Do you see? It's exactly that kind of thing that broke up our marriage. No matter what it is or where it is, you have to be so goddamn superior!”

“Oh, Carson, I'm trying to be nice. But suddenly there's a chance to do what I do best and to stop decaying and disintegrating, and I think that if I went to the
New York Times
and asked them to give me the assignment for that beautiful Sunday magazine section they publish, they'd give it to me. I have a very good reputation in New York. A prophet is always without honor in his own place, and I realize you can't afford a Sunday section like that. Nevertheless —”

“You're doing it again,” he interrupted. “You know, you're childish when you begin to plead and you think you can tease me into something. Not only are you totally transparent, but it comes off insulting.”

“Carson, come on, I couldn't be insulting to you —”

“And furthermore, we don't have to copy the
New York Times
, and that magazine of theirs is not too expensive for us, but I'm not a damn bit sure that what's right for New York is right for L.A. We're unique, a place of our own, and don't tell me that L.A. is a great place to live if you're an orange.”

“I like you when you're angry,” Barbara said. “I wouldn't like it if you were my boss, because your eyes get very cold and nasty, and that would frighten me. Your food's getting cold.”

“So is yours,” he growled.

“That's because I'm excited about this assignment.”

He continued to eat without further comment, and after a minute or two, Barbara said, “I did have an offer for an assignment from
Good Housekeeping
magazine.”

“Oh?”

“To do a story on Demel.”

“Who was Demel?”

“The father of Viennese pastry. Do you want that to happen to me?”

“I need more coffee,” Carson said. “I'm dry and my head is beginning to split.”

“Oh, no,” Barbara said. “That won't get you anywhere with me, because I remember very well all the times I had to telephone someone you didn't want to talk to and tell him —”

“O.K. Now look at it sanely for a moment, Barbara. Last night wasn't my introduction to that mess called El Salvador. I've been reading the dispatches for months. The army's death squads murdered reporters and photographers, as well as Catholic nuns, as well as maybe thirty thousand men, women and children in the past few years. You want me to send you into that? You want me to be your executioner?”

“Carson, I'm not a fool, and I'm not an amateur. I have something of a track record, in case you've forgotten.”

“I know your track record. Like mine, it was made a long time ago.”

“Carson, the place is full of reporters. They're not going to kill me, and you simply don't know what it is to vegetate and have your friends tell you to take up knitting. Carson, I'm in good health and strong and possibly with more brains than I ever had in the past. Oh, I admit I sort of connived when I heard who you were going to see last night. So what? I want this. I need it. There are better ways to go than to dry into nothingness and become what they so euphemistically call a senior citizen. To hell with that! I need work, because if I don't work, I'm going to die — the wrong way. And there is a right and a wrong way to die. Stop protecting me, and give me the one thing you can give me.”

He was silent for a while, and then he said, “You really want it that much?”

“Yes, I do.”

“All right, it's yours.” Then he added, “You know, Barbara, you don't need me or my paper. You could go down there on your own, and I couldn't do a thing about it.”

“I know that. I want a newspaper behind me. There was a time when I diddled lions and alligators, but that was stupidity, not courage. I was never anything to shout about where courage was concerned. I may have some store of moral courage, but when it comes to physical courage, I'm as barren as most people. It's the gross stupidity that I feel I've overcome, and I like to have a press card from a big, fat, influential L.A. newspaper in my purse.”

“You haven't asked about money.”

“The hell with money. I'll take whatever you offer. It's the job I want.”

“Not a job — assignment,” Carson said carefully. “I've turned away too many damn good newspaper people. You can have the assignment, not a job. Three weeks. That's long enough to measure your background and dig out the story. When do you leave?”

“I'll go home and put things together. Then I'm yours.”

Nine

C
arla and Freddie had planned to spend a week in New York before going off to Paris; and Freddie, trying desperately to make each moment better than it actually was, had engaged a suite at the St. Regis Hotel on East Fifty-fifth Street. But not the hotel nor carriages in the park nor dinners at the best restaurants in town managed to shake either of them out of themselves — two gloomy selves who watched their uneasy romance begin to crumble around the edges. This mood had taken hold of them while they were still on the plane coming east, beginning, as Freddie recalled, with discussion about marriage. It was the first time he had unfolded any specifics of the future to Carla, and as he laid them out they consisted of marriage, possibly in New York, to be followed in due time by at least three children, the first, perhaps, to be born in France, symbolically in the wine country.

Concerning this, Carla had said nothing until after two days in the overfurnished suite at the St. Regis; and then one morning, refusing to make love, leaping out of bed angrily as a sleep-fogged Freddie began to run his hands over her body, stalking around the bedroom, naked and beautiful and very angry, Carla shouted at him, “Everything
you
decided, everything — where we go, where we live, children I must have and how many, and everything else, even what dresses I buy — because to you here in New York, you have decided that I look like one of them Puerto Rican hookers, and in this stinking city, anyone who hasn't yellow-dyed hair and a pasty skin is a hooker or what they call a Hispanic, and I say fuck the lot of them in this stinking place with that Hispanic shit, because my people were here in this country before you goddamn Anglos even learned to sail a boat so that you could come and take away everything that belonged to someone else!”