Beautiful Kate (9 page)

“We could all go in The Baby Factory,” she said. “Or don’t the Tit Sisters associate with gentiles?”

Anyway, to shorten this particular story, Kate had Mother cut one of her best dresses down to provocative proportions. And she had her hair done and put on lipstick and went to the affair, where she proceeded to I draw all the attention she could, not only dancing “fast” but letting Waldo dip her to the floor over and over, with her skirt riding up to her garter belt. Cliff and I might as well have been dating each other for all the attention we paid the Mandelbaum girls, so mesmerized were we by our sister’s performance. During slow numbers, she kept steering Waldo toward us like a bumper car at a carnival.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, after one collision. “I guess it’s all the booze we had earlier—right, Waldo? A whole
jug
of it. Tell me, twin, are you interested in
jugs?
”

By then I was already spinning my startled date away from her, slamming into other couples in my haste to be free. But minutes later I would see her going through the same routine with Cliff and
his
Mandelbaum, saying something that turned my fair-skinned brother’s face crimson as he too wheeled his date to safer ground. Once she and Waldo came upon the four of us between dances, as we stood under the gym backboard daintily drinking punch.

“My, what a good-looking foursome y’all make,” she bubbled, suddenly a southern belle. “Why don’t we all do something together afterwards? Waldo and I are thinking of the Bide-a-Wee Motel. Y’all want to join us there?”

By then her date had the look of a smiling ox, even when I told Kate to shut up and get lost.

“Well, I declare!” she said, smiling brightly. “If that isn’t the meanest thing you ever said to me—you adolescent, perverted little shit.”

She gave us a smart bow of the head and walked off, leading Waldo as if by a nose-ring.

Joan Mandelbaum shook her head. “My, your sister’s different,” she said.

“Yeah, isn’t she?” A slow dance had begun and I took her in my strong right arm again, holding her just close enough so I could feel her glorious jugs rubbing against my chest, even through my suit jacket. I was still surprised that they weren’t at all like kneecaps.

“It’s an act,” I reassured her. “Kate didn’t mean that about the motel. Because she’s a virgin. In fact, she’s just about as virgin as you can get.”

Joan put her face against mine and whispered silkily. “You shouldn’t talk like that. It’s embarrassing.”

“Well, we’re not little kids anymore,” I intoned—just as Kate and Waldo blindsided us again.

“Careful,” Kate advised my partner. “You might get terminal acne.”

And so it went. Cliff and I and the Tit Sisters drove to the Eskimo for sundaes after the dance. And later, try as I might, all I got were a few kisses, a slapped hand, and the expected colossal stone-ache. Kate was already home and in bed by the time we came in, so we could only assume that she’d had no trouble handling the redoubtable Waldo, which he confirmed the following Monday at school, black eye and all, complaining to Cliff that our sister ought to be committed.

“Look at this eye,” he whined. “And all I tried for was a kiss. What a jerk that girl is. What a pricktease.”

Normally Cliff would have taken a poke at anybody who called Kate such a name. But I guess he felt that Waldo had some justice on his side, so he did nothing. And the Sadie Hawkins Day dance faded into memory.

I realize that I have treated it here like some typical anecdote in a casual comic memoir. And I really don’t know why I’ve done this, since I do recognize, as surely as you must, the fanatic character of Kate’s possessiveness. I know now that her problem wasn’t any simple case of jealousy, for she had to know even then that the Tit Sisters were not in her long-legged All-American league. No, I’m afraid that, once I had mentioned my quest for “bare jug,” she would have gone on the same sort of rampage no matter whom Cliff or I invited to the dance.

In any case, she did not come down off her high horse for at least two weeks after the dance. And I think she did then only because Waldo’s black eye had become something of a family joke. Jason kept calling her his little Rocky (for Marciano, not Balboa) and I guess she took sufficient pride in the appellation to allow her to forgive her twin brother for his grossness. And finally she even deigned to speak with me again, one late afternoon as we finished feeding the Holsteins’ milk to our pampered Angus calves. Once fed, the little buggers could not stop gamboling about and butting their mothers’ inadequate udders to bring down even more milk. Leaning on the corral fence, Kate and I were watching the show.

“It’s not fair,” she said. “Something so cute shouldn’t grow up into just another ugly old cow.”

“Bulls don’t think they’re ugly.”

“But they’re still ugly. Old is ugly.”

I looked at her. “You getting old, Kate?”

She didn’t even smile. “We all are. Every day we get older.”

“Yeah, and ain’t it great?”

She reached out to pet one of the calves, but it jumped back from her. “What’s so great about it? I liked it before. The way it used to be.”

Genius that I am, I had no idea what she was talking about; and I said so. But she did not explain. Instead she looked over at me—down at me actually—with flecks of mica in her fine green eyes.

“Tell me, Greg—did it work out for you? Did you get your precious
bare jug?
”

“Naaw. Just a kiss or two. That Joan’s a real nun.”

“Oh really? I didn’t know the chosen people went in for nuns.”

“You know what I mean.”

She looked back at the calves. “Yeah, I guess I do. But that doesn’t mean I understand. I can’t figure why you’re
all
like that. Like my pal Waldo. You’d have thought he needed it to live, like food or water. Me, I wouldn’t care if I never kissed a boy. And I’d rather die than have one of the creeps touch me.”

“We used to touch,” I said.

For a few moments she looked as if she didn’t understand what I meant, or maybe didn’t even remember. Then she made a face.

“Oh,
that
. That doesn’t count. We were just little kids.”

It was then I asked her something I always had wanted to, but for some reason never had. “Did you and Cliff ever—you know?”

She gave me a look of withering disgust and turned away, heading for the house.

“Of course not, stupid,” I heard.

Since there are no cooks among us, we don’t have meals anymore, only snacks, most of which we prepare for ourselves. This evening, however, I thought I would try to set an example for Toni and Junior by whipping up a repast consisting of hamburgers, potato chips, and canned peaches, none of which elicited the slightest word of praise from anybody. Jason took only a bite or two out of his burger and barely touched the rest, turning instead to a bowl of cornflakes, which he got for himself, shuffling about the kitchen, banging doors and muttering. Toni sighed and looked to the ceiling for sustenance.

“What’s the matter, young lady?” Jason asked. “You aren’t enjoying yourself here?”

“You could say that.”

The old man wagged his head in mock consternation. “Well, I can’t figure that. You’d think being the mistress of a rich and successful playwright would satisfy you. Travel and good food like this and lots of clothes—I thought that’s what every woman wanted.”

Wheezing and choking and slurping, he barely got through the speech, and I imagine it was this that Toni found offensive, the style more than the content. Just by the way she looked at me, I had a pretty good idea what was coming.

“If I were you, I’d tell the old fart to stick it up his ass,” she said.

While Junior whooped with laughter, Jason began to choke in earnest, coughing and sputtering and spraying the table with soggy cornflakes. I patted him on the back and helped him over to the sink, where he slowly rattled down to silence, to the point finally where I was able to get a glass of water down him. Unexpectedly, he returned to the table instead of shuffling off to his room, muttering and pouting. And once again he started on his cornflakes. Finding them insufficiently sweet, he sprinkled on a few more tablespoons of sugar. Then he was ready again for Toni.

“Never thought the day would come when I’d be abused at my own table by a trollop.”

Not quite sure of the word, Toni gave me a quizzical look. But before I could say anything, Junior jumped in, the soul of helpfulness.

“Trollop as in whore,” he said. “A woman who sells herself.”

Toni was still confused. “Well, what’s that got to do with me? Who the hell’s paying me for anything?”

“What do you do for your keep?” Jason asked. “Besides sleep with a man?”

Again Toni turned to me. “Do we have to take this kind of crap? Aren’t you gonna say anything?”

Jason laughed contentedly, rattling his phlegm. “What can he say? He’s being kept too. Which means you’re a kept man’s kept woman.”

In a quarrel Toni is like a ten-year-old boy, all fight and no style. So I was not surprised as she leaned across the table now, practically snarling at the old man.

“Yeah, well at least we don’t stink! And we don’t spit all over everybody else!”

Chuckling and winking at me, Junior was having a fine time. But he apparently felt that my discomfort was not sufficiently acute.

“This reminds me a little of Mama’s funeral, when Greg came back here with his heiress wife. You two didn’t exactly hit if off either, did you, Jason?”

The old man made a face. “What a pretentious woman that one was!” he snorted. “They fly here in a chartered jet and rent a limousine. And no room in this house was good enough for her, no sir. She and her kept man here had to stay in that new motel near Aurora.”

“My kind of woman,” Toni said.

But Jason was not listening. “Why, every little thing she did, she had to have a special outfit for. When I chided her about it, she said it was her duty, that it was the duty of the rich to spend a lot of money to keep the peasants employed.”

“You don’t think she was kidding you?” I asked.

“Kidding!
That woman didn’t have any sense of humor at all. If she did, she wouldn’t have married you, a penniless ‘writer’ of movies.”

And so on,
ad nauseam
. I really don’t know why I bother to record these pleasant little family gatherings, since they are all so much alike. By now I imagine you are only too well aware what meager love and understanding are lost between Jason and me. And I see no prospect of it ever changing. I do find it interesting, though, how hung up he still remains on the subject of Ellen Brubaker, my “Santa Barbara millionairess.” One would think that my first wife, Janet, and our two daughters, Susan and Tracy—Jason’s own grandkids—did not even exist for all the interest he shows in them, and this despite the tale I told him about my being sued for their nonsupport. In point of fact, Janet remarried almost a decade ago, bagging a prosperous Orange County realtor, and the girls have grown up secure and comfortable, happy with their lot as future USC coeds and Young Republican homemakers. For all that, they are truly lovely and I miss them more than I care to admit. But let me just mention them to Jason and a few seconds later he is off and running on the subject of my “millionairess.” I guess it’s simply the idea of all that money that fascinates him, money I married and shared for almost five years—and money very like that which he himself grew up with in Chicago, and then lost, thanks to my grandfather’s improvidence.

For the most part, though, all he can do is speculate on the character of my marriage to Ellen, probably because I never have told him much about that relationship, figuring that his dour imagination already gave him enough ammunition without my giving him any more. But I do wonder how he would react if he knew that in the last years of our marriage I received an allowance from Ellen; or that I once fell fully dressed into the Biltmore pool while taking a drunken poke at her; or that she was forever kicking me out and changing all the door locks, only to come traipsing down to Hollywood later, checkbook in hand. And especially I wonder how the old man would take the news that this least favorite son not only received a forty-two-foot Chris-Craft as part of the divorce settlement, but compounded his guilt by failing to keep up the insurance on the thing, and finally by renting it (dearly) to a Malibu coke dealer who thought to expand his operation by importing a few tons of Colombian marijuana, and then who was so foolish as to keep running while under fire from the U.S. Coast Guard, which had been tipped off to the whole enterprise. My boat, the dealer, his crew of three, and probably a ton of grass all went up in a horrendous explosion of gasoline, leaving the authorities with nothing except me, the yacht owner of record, who fortunately happened to be listening to the radio in his girl friend’s Venice apartment on the night of the explosion.

And so we came here, as I guess I’ve already said. Let me say further, then, that if the insurance still had been in effect, and collectible, I probably would have stayed and faced the music,
that
music instead of Jason’s. But then, just imagine, these pages and these words most likely would not exist, except perhaps as some dormant electrochemical potential slumbering inside this suddenly aching head. Enough.