West of Sunset (6 page)

“I mean Bogart. He must like you.”

“He's an old friend,” Scott said.

“Doing you a favor.”

He saw that he would lose more by not admitting it. “Yes.”

She laughed. “Better than Hemingway. That is truly desperate.”

“I didn't tell him to say that.”

“He's a great reader,” Eddie said.

“It was the timing I found suspect.
Are
you better than Hemingway?”

“I'm a better dancer.”

He would have a chance to prove it. Their table was in a dim corner opposite the bandstand. Candlelit, with a fresh lily in a crystal vase, it would have been romantic if they were alone. After they ordered, he led her out onto the dance floor, leaving Eddie to nurse his rye. They fit nicely. She was just his height, and when she leaned in he could smell the perfume of her skin, a warm mix of lavender and vanilla. It was an old song, a lively two-step, once a bright novelty.
I'm making hay in the moonlight, right in my baby's arms. A little harvest or two is just bound to come through.
Her palm resting lightly on his shoulder, she followed his lead, gliding, perfectly upright, all the time meeting his eyes. The ease with which she matched him demolished his boast.

“I could tell you were a dancer,” he said.

“How so?”

“The way you carry yourself.”

“How's that?”

“Dramatically.” He threw his shoulders back.

“I don't know if I should be flattered or insulted. You look rather like a chicken.”

“Proudly,” he amended. “For a lifelong commoner.”

“Please don't.”

“What?”

“Don't joke about that. I can't bear it.”

It was their first dance, yet he wanted to ask her flat out if she loved this marquis. He was holding the hand with the ridiculous ring, and he imagined kneeling at the end of the tune and sliding it off her finger. Like the fool he was, married and penniless, he was ready to declare himself.

“I don't mean to make fun,” he said. “You make me nervous, and I don't know—”

“Let's not talk,” she said. “Let's just dance. You said you were better than Hemingway.”

“I am.”

“Shh,” she said.

They danced a foxtrot and a rhumba and a tango, their shared silence a challenge and then, once he surrendered to it, a closeness—as if, again, there were an unspoken bond or secret between them. They moved together, absorbed, borne along on the orchestra's sinuous rhythm. Between songs he noticed their waiter had arrived with their dinner. So did she, but the new song that swelled up was a sad ballad, and as a lonely oboe purled she laid her cheek against his shoulder and held him close and he didn't dare say a word.

“Our food's getting cold,” she said when the music ended.

“Eddie can have it.”

“We shouldn't leave him alone. It's not polite.”

“I didn't invite him.”

“You didn't invite me either—he did.”

“I know,” he relented. “Next time, can it be just the two of us?”

“Next time.”

“Dinner, Tuesday?”

He was being abject, asking too much too soon. He still wasn't sure what she was doing here. In contrast, his own motives seemed obvious, and tawdry.

“You can't tell anyone,” she said.

“I won't.”

“Don't look so pleased with yourself.”

“Why not?”

“You have no idea what you're getting yourself into.”

“I could say the same thing.”

“But why would you?” she said.

“How old are you?”

“How old are you?”

“Forty.”

“Twenty-seven.” If it was a lie, it wasn't a big one. Thirty was still young. You couldn't see it around her eyes.

They returned to the table, where Eddie was finishing his steak. By prior agreement, Scott was paying for everything, and the number of empty glasses dismayed him. Now that he was happy, he could be unhappy again.

The food, as Bogie said, was swell, though neither of them ate much. They ordered coffee and dessert and danced again, fretting about Eddie as if he were a child bored by the grown-ups' conversation, and though Scott wanted the night to go on and on, they decided out of fairness to leave after a last slow song. He closed his eyes and moved with her, thinking how it all might be a dream, like his recurring one of walking through a thawing St. Paul finding piles of silver coins on the sidewalks. He might wake up and find himself in bed, bereft, but no, he was holding her, she was humming in his ear. The promise of Tuesday made the poignancy of their last dance even sweeter, and when the song finished he clapped for the band with gratitude.

Outside, the night was warm and scented with eucalyptus. The Rolls was gone, and he thought of its owner, a producer returned to his dark mansion, still haunted by the vision of the lovely English girl at the club. She would be the image of his dead wife, a star of the silent age lost to some wasting disease. Fast as a reflex, the notion carried him to a world he half knew, a future patched together from the past, peopled by shades, constructed of unwritten scenes like empty rooms. Later he would remember the feeling as much as the idea, the urge to both leave and discover himself again in this man who had everything yet nothing—the opposite of him, now, thanks to her.

They climbed into the hills above Sunset, his lights sweeping across windows and hedges. In the dark he didn't recognize anything, and she had to direct him, pointing out her mailbox. After a half-dozen doubles, Eddie's effectiveness as a chaperone was limited. They left him dozing in the backseat and walked toward the yellow light.

He waited while she dug in her clutch purse for her keys. She opened the door and stepped inside before turning to him. As he took her hands he felt the ring, as he was sure she felt his.

“Can I tell you a secret?” he said.

“Yes.”

“I like you better than Hemingway.”

“Can I tell you a secret?” she said. “I like you better than Hemingway too.”

“He won't like that.”

“Too bad. Eddie was sweet to come.”

“He was,” he said, drawing closer, hoping for a kiss, wondering, acutely, what his producer would be feeling at this moment.

She held him off. “Tuesday.”

“Tuesday,” he agreed, because his man would be patient and unsure too, and waved as she closed the door.

He played chauffeur to Eddie, then valet back at the Garden, helping him to his bungalow and putting him to bed. Bogie and Mayo's lights were on, and Benchley was in the middle of some commotion by the pool. Rather than break the spell, he climbed the stairs to his place and locked the door behind him. Even with the pills, he couldn't sleep, and for a while he sat in front of the picture window, watching the balcony of the main house, imagining his hero, like Alla, looking out over the lights of the city, dreaming of his girl, as if this last, fey love might redeem the irretrievable past.

The next morning he got up at five and wrote.

T
hough as a family they'd never lived anywhere for more than a few years, and then unhappily, one of his deepest regrets was that Scottie no longer had a home. Since she'd been away at school, the Obers' in Scarsdale served as a base for holiday breaks, her summers split between camp and visiting her mother at the clinic, her grandmother Sayre in Montgomery and him, wherever he might be.

He'd never gotten along with the southern branch of the family, and Zelda's illness only widened that rift. Her father had been a judge, and making plans with her mother was like trying to seat a jury. For every proposed schedule, she had a list of objections, as if her calendar were full of anything more pressing than her weekly bridge club. Scottie also disliked Montgomery, with its stifling heat and antebellum pretensions, so that often he felt neither of them actually desired this visit, but, out of loyalty to Zelda and some ideal of family, he persevered, a diplomat hashing out a peace treaty, the conditions of which were that Scottie would spend two weeks there, followed by a month in Hollywood.

He didn't have room in his bungalow, so he arranged for her to stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel with old Broadway friends Helen Hayes and Charlie MacArthur, who'd known her since she was a toddler. The plan had been for her to arrive Sunday via the Argonaut, but the telegram the Western Union courier mistakenly delivered to the main house so that it sat there for two days before Don Stewart found it changed all that. Because her grandmother Sayre had fallen and broken her wrist, now Scottie would be arriving late Tuesday morning. By his calculations, she was already on the train.

When he called Sheilah to cancel their date, she thought he was ducking her.

“I'd like to meet her,” she said. “Why can't the three of us have dinner?”

The reasons seemed large and obvious to him, but he could feel the edge of complaint in her voice, and though he knew he would dread every second of it, he called the Trocadero and changed their reservation. Instead of a quiet table in back, he asked for one with a view.

Tuesday he took off work to meet Scottie's train at the station. It was late, and as he waited, one of a slowly accumulating crowd, he pictured his empty office and the hot boulevard outside. He was rewriting
A Yank at Oxford
again, with no end in sight. Eddie said he loved what he'd done with the girl, but wanted him to bring the rivalry story line forward, since the last third turned on that. Scott wanted to say if that was the case, the movie wouldn't be any good. When he tried making the girl the Brit's to begin with, the jealousy played too shrill. Maybe if she was his sister, though that was just as old hat. He was so used to coming up with solutions that to have nothing panicked him, and the harder he worked on it, the more hopeless it seemed. To get a credit, he had to make the script his, not just polish the dialogue. So far all he'd really added was the fencing scene.

The station presented no answers, and the rest of his day was dedicated to Scottie. As ungenerous as the thought was, it was a bad time for her to visit, with everything unsettled. Once he was more established he'd be better able to entertain her, though he'd fallen back on the same flimsy excuse in Tryon and Asheville and all his other interim stops. Since Zelda had been away, he'd done his best to give Scottie something resembling a regular life, even when it meant insulating her from his own itinerant existence. His success only deepened the contradiction. Even as he sacrificed to pay for her boarding school, he held himself as a cautionary figure, the father as absent drudge, a role he'd learned from his own father, a bankrupt and drunkard rescued and then forever reminded of it by his mother's side of the family. He recalled playing ball with his friends in the backyard of the townhouse they rented in St. Paul, and his father, having come home stinking from the bars, taking the bat from another boy's hands and flailing wildly at Scott's pitches, whiffing again and again until he wished he would stop. “Come on, try that one more time,” his father taunted, laughing, and Scott, no older than ten, had been tempted to whip the ball at his face. He promised himself he would not be that kind of father to Scottie, and yet at times he was afraid he had been. At nine she'd gone back to Gstaad with him, skiing away the blinding white days, nights writing to her mother in the clinic while he tippled gin. After her bedtime story, he drank with angry purpose, and woke to broken glass and skinned knuckles. They'd been thrown out of their old chalet, and then the hotel, finally landing in a pension frequented by college students and prostitutes. It was the end of the season, and she wanted to leave. “Where do you think we should go?” he asked, because the lease had run out on their Montparnasse walk-up, and Zelda still wasn't well. The decision to come home was the beginning of their wandering.

As if they could sense the engine approaching, a squad of redcaps rolled their clattering baggage carts up the platform. Above, pigeons roosting in the beams flapped and circled the rotunda, the rails sang like a knife sharpener's wheel and the station filled with noise. Pullman after Pullman shrieked by, losing speed. He searched the windows as they passed, bristling with the smiling faces and frantic hands of arrivals, impatient after the long haul. The train slowed so porters could hop off and walk alongside, greeting the redcaps like old friends. He was afraid he'd missed her, but no, there she was, in the very last car, framed by the window. It was closed, and unlike most of the passengers she was seated and facing straight ahead, her chin tipped down, solemnly concentrating, and he saw with a doubletake that she was reading.

She was not beautiful, a fact that saddened him, since it was his fault. She had her mother's strawberry hair and slight build but his features, the moony Irish eyes and sharp nose and dimpled chin growing more prominent now that her baby fat was melting away. In five or six years, if she was careful, she might be handsome, but at fifteen she was still unfinished, a chubby-cheeked girl with freckles, an indiscriminate love of animals, and, like himself at that age, an ear for absurd lyrics. He gazed on her fondly, wishing, as always, that he could shield her from life's unhappiness, including his own. He had done a poor job of it so far. Just then she looked up and smiled at him, and once more he resolved to be a better father.

She leapt on him from the steps, squeezing him like a child. “Daddy.”

“How's my Pie?”

“Tired.”

The book was Aeschylus,
The Persians
.

“I hope that isn't for my benefit.”

“Summer reading. We have to do one each of the Greeks.”

“Have you done Euripides?”

“Medea.”

“I was going to suggest
Orestes
. It's fascinating how he uses the chorus to anticipate the action.”

“Too late.”

“You should read it anyway. I think mine's in storage.”

“Rats,” she said, snapping her fingers.

He didn't broach the more awkward topics until they were in the car, starting with Montgomery. Mrs. Sayre had tried to step over the dog, who she thought was sleeping. Sensing her, the dog raised its head, catching her toe, and down she went, taking a candy dish with her. It was her right wrist. She had a cast and a sling and sat in her rocker ordering Aunt Sara around. Scottie tried to help but didn't know how to do anything right. She hated that every time her grandmother scolded her, she called her “young lady.”

“How was your mother? Glad to see you, I imagine.”

“Oh, you know. She was good the first day. We rode bikes and played badminton and she was fine. She asked how camp was. The second day she was okay. After that it was hard.”

“I'm sorry. Thank you for seeing her.”

“Do you know anyone named Reynolds?”

“I don't think so.”

“We were on the lawn having a picnic and she stopped talking for a long time the way she does. Then out of nowhere she starting talking about Reynolds and all these things he supposedly told her. Stuff about the planets and the solar system and music coming from another universe.” She shook her head, gritting her teeth and popping her eyes in comic alarm.

“I'm sure it doesn't mean anything, it's just one of her delusions.”

“It was actually kind of interesting. She said Reynolds lives inside the sun and travels on rays of light. I was thinking of writing a story about him.”

“It's probably better you didn't. Did you tell Dr. Carroll?”

“I did.”

“Good. They need to know if they're going to help her.”

“She didn't seem any better.”

“Did she seem worse?”

“She seemed the same,” she said.

“Does she seem well enough to go home?”

He didn't ask this rhetorically. In all the world she was the only person he trusted to tell him the truth about Zelda.

“No,” she said, and though he gave her room to qualify her answer, watching the road, she left it at that.

Outside the entrance of the Beverly Hills, a great old Stutz landaulet sat like an emblem of bygone glamour. Elegance herself, Helen was waiting for them in the lobby. A slender, wide-eyed beauty, she headlined on Broadway and now for Paramount by projecting the innocence of the convent school novitiate she'd been. Scottie said she remembered her, but might have been starstruck.

“We used to call you Scottina,” Helen said, taking her in hand like an aunt.

“We still do,” Scott said.

She and Charlie had an extra room in their bungalow. To reach it, they had to walk past the pool, surrounded by a trucked-in beach of dazzling white sand, then through a jungle of banana trees. Like so much of the city, it was hokum, a kind of open set, yet he could see it enchanted Scottie. All he wanted was for her to be comfortable, and yet, after the last few years, he had to admit he would welcome it if she attributed at least some of that magic to him.

The plan was to let her get situated and maybe take a nap.

“We're having dinner with a friend of mine,” he warned, as if that might prepare her, and then it was he who was surprised, a few hours later, when she called and said two boys she knew from Hotchkiss were in town. Could they join them for dinner?

“Why oh why are you such a pie?”

“Please, Daddy?”

“Of course,” he said, already regretting it.

Sheilah was understanding over the phone, and at the Troc seemed not to mind this further intrusion. She'd dressed not for him but for Scottie, in a simple black sheath, seed pearls and silver sandals for dancing. No matter how demure her outfit, she couldn't disguise her figure, the equal of the stars who were her daily company, and the boys, rather than vying for Scottie's attention, naturally doted on her.

Fitch and Neddy. Ostensibly he'd met the two before, and recently, in Baltimore, at the dance he'd thrown for Scottie before Christmas, but he'd been tight that night and had no recollection of them. Tall, blond and bronzed from a summer crewing an uncle's yacht out of Catalina, they seemed interchangeable to him—brash and garrulous in a familiar Episcopalian way, regaling them with overlapping tales of seasick Angelenos. They were both from Chicago, and he imagined the homes they'd come from, the Gold Coast mansions with terraced gardens sweeping down to the lake in earnest midwestern imitation of Newport, the gleaming catboats and runabouts waiting at the dock paid for by the charnel products of feedlots and slaughterhouses. From Hotchkiss they would process to one of the lesser Ivies, Cornell or Dartmouth or Brown, and from there back into the family business of adding and subtracting, incurious as cash registers, all the while maintaining that sportsman's idle optimism, depending, of course, on how old and well-insulated their money was. He knew several classmates from Princeton who used to summer at White Bear Lake and Harbor Springs who'd had to sell their cottages after the Crash, but these two were far from any decision harder than which of his girls they should ask to dance.

The orchestra struck up “Lovely to Look At.”

“Miss Graham?” they both offered as Scottie looked on.

Neddy deferred to Fitch.

“Miss Graham, may I have the honor?”

“I'm afraid my first dance is spoken for,” she said, taking Scott's hand.

For a moment both boys were mum, trumped, and then, belatedly, as if just remembering she'd invited them, Neddy asked Scottie.

“Don't fight over me now.”

“Be nice,” Scott admonished, earning him a dirty look which he parried, unwilling to play the oblivious father.

“I feel badly,” Sheilah said when they were dancing.

“Don't. She's a big girl.”

“She's just a baby.”

“A very charming baby,” he said, because across the floor Neddy was laughing at something she'd said. As Sheilah watched, Scottie peered over his shoulder and gave them a mocking, false smile.

“I don't know why she's acting like this,” Scott said.

“I don't think she likes me.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I don't know, it's just the feeling I get.”

“A little jealousy's healthy, but there's no excuse for being rude.”

“I don't want her to be jealous.”

“You can't help the way you look, which is divine, by the way.”

“I mean jealous of me being with you.”

“Are you with me then?” She was still wearing her obscene bauble of a ring.

“I'm not against you.”

He pulled her close. “Now you are.”

Lovely to look at, heaven to touch . . .

“Why do you confuse me so?”

“Me? You're the one engaged to a duke.”

“You're the one married to a wife.”

“Yet here we are.”

“Here we are,” she said.

In the milling crowd Scottie and Neddy had found them. As if this were the Nassau prom, Neddy half bowed, asking permission to cut in. A gentleman, Scott couldn't refuse, handing Sheilah off and taking Scottie from him. The new couples spun away in different orbits.