Cheat and Charmer (16 page)

Another yelp. Then, softly, “Do you hate me, Dinah?”

Bingo
. “For naming me? N-N-N-Not a chance, Renna. It’s over, that’s all. I don’t want to think about it.”

Renna tugged at the hem of her black sheath, trying to cover her plump knees. “Well, anyway,” she went on, searching Dinah’s face, “Joe showed me the article and I wanted to call, but I wasn’t sure you’d want to talk.”

“Well, what’s there to s-s-s-say? We both did it, and now it’s done.”

“You know, honey, I’m not a bit sorry,” Renna said. “Those days are a
joke. When I think of myself as a
Communist
”—she uttered the word with another squeal—“it’s like trying to remember a time when I was a
virgin
. I mean, was it ever
possible
? It’s so absurd, really. The thought of it
today
. I mean, anybody with a brain in their head got out. I left, you left, everybody who wasn’t a schmuck got out. We outgrew it. When they subpoenaed me, I said to Joe, ‘Joe, it’s just like they want to get me for having been a Girl Scout. For a minute and a half of my life.’ ”

Dinah reached into her black clutch for a cigarette. “How’s the baby?”

The pom-pom face sobered. “Funny you should ask. Do you want to know the real reason I testified? I’ll tell you. The adoption agency wouldn’t let us have the baby unless I did.”

“But who told them? How did they even know?”

“The agency checks your background. They go to the FBI, and these days they go way back, too. If they come up with something hot, they tell the Committee. That’s how come they can ask all those questions. ‘Did you or did you not picket Warner Brothers every Saturday morning during the labor strike of 19-blah-blah-blah?’ I had to clear myself before they’d let me have Debby. Christ, Dinah, what’s more important—giving a baby a home or sparing certain people you and I both know from being identified as deluded schmucks? And tell me something. Why did the Party have to be so damn secretive? None of this would have happened if from the beginning everyone had just said, ‘Yeah, we’re Communists. So what?’ ”

“Of course,” Dinah said. “But how’s the baby?” She was staring at Renna’s jewelry: a large square-cut diamond ring, a diamond bracelet, diamond-and-ruby earrings. She remembered when Renna was a reader at Paramount and, like her, owned exactly two dresses plus one ice-skating outfit and a bathing suit. She was the one friend Dinah had made at Veevi and Stefan’s all-day-all-night Saturdays. And it was Renna who’d started taking Dinah to meetings in town, during the week, when it was too far to drive to the ones over in Malibu.

“Dinah, I shit you not: she’s sensational, the love of my life.” Renna’s pink cheeks glowed. “I wasn’t going to live without a child.”

“No, no, of course not. I’m very happy for you. But just tell me, Renna, why
did
you name me?”

The doll-like face, flushing under the two rosettes of rouge, seemed to give off a pink steam. The Kewpie mouth went still, then the lips pursed. Dinah heard a sharp intake of breath. “I told you—because we couldn’t
adopt Debby unless I did, and I wasn’t going to lose my chance at getting a kid.”

“No, I don’t mean why did you testify. I asked why
me
? Why did you name
me
?”

“Because, I swear on my client list,” said Renna, squeezing Dinah’s forearm, “I never thought they’d bother you. I thought they might go after some of the big names I named, though they’d grabbed most of them already. But never you. I mean, what are you today? You’re just a
housewife
.” She threw her head back and laughed. “You’re not in the industry anymore. You haven’t written a word since you married Jake. And, well …” she said with a gulp, “I thought you’d understand. And maybe I’m not the only one who named you. Have you thought of that?”

“Renna dear, I’m just curious. I’m not ang-g-g-g …”

“Tell me something,” Renna broke in, her voice quavering. “How many paragons of virtue do you know? This is show business, for heaven’s sake. Show me one person in this town who hasn’t gotten into bed with someone they hate because they wanted a deal. I mean, really, fuck ’em all. And fuck you, too.”

Dinah took her arm. “Come on, darlin’, it’s over. Let’s eat!” But Renna squeezed Dinah’s hand again and gazed into her face, and Dinah couldn’t look away. The pom-pom cheeks and Betty Boop mouth begged absolution.

“Okay, Renna,” Dinah said. “I forgive you. Okay? F-F-Forgive me, too.”

“I’m so sorry, Dinah. I guess if it hadn’t been for me—”

“Oh, Renna,” Dinah said, putting her arms around her old friend. “Forget it, honey. If it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t have met Jake. I wouldn’t have had my kids. I wouldn’t have had
anything
.”

Renna took a rumpled handkerchief from her bag and daintily wiped her eyes. “I still remember the day Jake called me at the studio and said, ‘Do you know any nice girls? I want to meet a nice girl.’ And I said, ‘I know this girl who ice-skates with me. She has brown eyes and brown hair and she’s five-five and the nicest person I know.’ ” Then she batted her eyes and gave a brief squealing laugh, and Dinah felt with a stab of nostalgia Renna’s old warmth toward her.

“Now, listen,” Renna said. “Do me a favor and tell Jake I think he should kick that limey faggot Reggie Pertwee right in the ass and let Joe and me make the two of you really rich. Like you deserve to be. Like we all deserve to be!”

A peck on Dinah’s cheek, a tug at the hem of her dress, plump knees in motion, and Renna was off to zero in on a new target, Kermit Strauss. A flushed and fluffy homing pigeon, she stage-whispered his name before making her way toward the New York playwright, who had a smash on Broadway, and whose ears stuck out at a ninety-degree angle.

Deserted as abruptly as she’d been kidnapped, Dinah steadied herself by looking for Jake, whom she soon discovered talking to a tall, slim girl in a white dress, her dark hair pulled back very tight from her “gamine” face, as the magazines would have said. Dinah studied her for a moment. This must be Charm School Posture Number 35: the girl was holding a drink in her right hand, resting her elbow on her left, and listening with worshipful attention to something Jake was saying. Dinah had seen the girl in a picture recently, and liked her, but couldn’t remember the name of either the picture or the girl. Light-headed from hunger, Scotch, and cigarettes, she started toward the buffet table. Leslie something? Brill? Or was it a French name? Bridou? Britain? A real show-biz name, made up, too euphonious. She hoped she wouldn’t have to be introduced to her.
How do you do, Miss Br-Br-Br
—
?
The stuttering would throw the girl into a panic.
Hello, dear
, Dinah sometimes said to these girls, of whom she had met countless specimens at countless parties. But it made her feel matronly. She was far from ready to take that tone.

This young beauty made her think of Veevi, the fairest of them all, and plunged her back into the dread in which she now lived, day after day. Her sister hadn’t written back.

She saw Sid Plotkin, balancing a plate piled high with shrimp and pineapple chunks, looking for someone to latch on to, and she realized that if she didn’t join Jake and the girl, Sid was likely to sidle right up to her. So she struggled to remember the girl’s name—not that it mattered. There were thousands of these girls in Hollywood, and they all had pretty names she couldn’t remember. But she had to remember this girl’s name to keep back the cold wave of terror that threatened to engulf her each time she thought of her sister. And she thought of Veevi many times a day, and all night; she was never not thinking about Veevi. Yet right now she had to find out the girl’s name or nothing would ever be right again. She stamped out her cigarette on the terra-cotta deck and scanned the crowd for Nelly Steiner. Nelly, she figured, would know that girl’s name. Nelly always knew who was who in the current crop of starlets. She found Nelly perched on the diving board, next to a woman Dinah recognized, by her perfectly
turned-under pageboy, as Evelyn Morocco, the wife of Mel Gordon’s partner, Izzie Morocco.

So she started for Nelly, feeling that everything would soon be fine again. When she was within a few feet of the diving board, Dinah noticed Nelly suddenly raise a hand and cut it through the air. She’s been here since 1939, Dinah thought affectionately, and she’s still so
German
. She’s still got that rigid, almost military way of waving hello. Still, Dinah rejoiced in the sight of the one friend in Hollywood whom she genuinely loved. She was about to call out,
I see you, I see you, I’m on my way over
. But there was no need; she was there. “Does anyone know the name of that girl who finds my husband so f-f-f-fascinating?” she sang out. “Leslie something or other?”

“Well, you oughtta know!” hissed Evelyn Morocco. “You’re the one who knows everybody’s name around here!” She glared at Dinah before stalking off on her dyed-to-match open-toed black satin high heels.

Dinah recoiled, but Nelly pulled her down beside her on the diving board. “Are you blind? I tried to warn you! My God, didn’t you see me holding up my hand?”

“I thought you were just waving hello.”

“Waving hello? You dummy! I was telling you to stay away!”

Dinah looked around to see if anyone was watching. Evelyn had disappeared—probably, Dinah thought, to reapply lipstick and fix her hair, which she had mussed with the violence of her movements.

“So Evelyn Morocco’s s-s-s-sore at me.”

“Very.”

Dinah looked at Nelly, whom, despite their friendship, she had not called in the six or seven weeks since her testimony. “And you? Are you sore at me, too?”

“What do you think?”

“Well, you’re talking to me. Oh, God!” Dinah felt a wave of panic overtake her. “Where’s Izzie? Where’s Jake?”

“Don’t bother about them right now. Look, you’re shaking!”

And she was. She barely managed to take a cigarette out of her purse and light it. “What did she say to you?”

“Oh, come on, Dinah, you don’t really want to hear it, do you?”

“Of course I want to hear it.” Dinah slid her shoes off and, moving down slightly on the diving board, dangled her feet over the shimmering water. She felt weak-kneed and out of breath.

“She said if she’d known you were going to be here tonight she wouldn’t have come,” said Nelly in her distinct, slightly lisping accent. “And that Mort obviously didn’t know you had testified, because if he had, he wouldn’t have invited you. She said she’s going to write a letter to the big Democrats here requesting that you and Renna and anybody else who testified be removed from lists of volunteers and donors and I don’t know what else.”

Dinah let out a loud volley of laughter. “That’s rich. Izzie’s agent is Renna Schlossberg! And Izzie and Jake have worked together, and they might work together again! Is she really going to make Izzie break with all these people, and give up her two yearly trips to Bergdorf’s? Miss ‘My-hair-needs-New York,’ as she’s famous for s-s-s-saying.”

“ ‘I don’t expect integrity from people like Renna, but from Dinah Lasker it’s a different story.’ Those were Evelyn’s exact words,” said Nelly.

“ ‘Integrity’? Since when has that word even been in Evelyn Morocco’s v-v-v-vocabulary?”

On the diving board next to Dinah was a glass somebody had abandoned. The ice had dissolved into a warm puddle of Scotch. Dinah picked it up and finished it off, and, swinging her legs over to the firm ground, planted her feet squarely on the pool deck, facing Nelly. She looked, despite her black cocktail dress, like an old Appalachian farmer in overalls. “So I’m Miss Lost Int-t-tegrity of 1951,” she said. “That’s a good one. Do you want to know the last conversation I had with Evelyn M-M-M-Morocco?” she said to Nelly. “I was p-p-p-p-picking my kids up at school, and she was there, waiting for hers. So I got out of the car to stretch my legs and say hello, and she looked at whatever it was I was wearing—a shirt and pants from J-J-Jax or something—and she said, ‘Now, that’s the way you should dress all the time.’ ” Dinah snorted. “She’s the kind of dame that if your purse and shoes don’t match, you’re in big tr-tr-tr-trouble.”

She leaned down and extinguished her cigarette in the pool, then flicked it into the azalea bushes nearby. “Yikes! I better find J-J-Jake. God only knows what she might say to him.”

Dinah felt Nelly’s hand on her wrist, restraining her. “He’s a big boy, Dinah,” she said. “Let him take care of himself. Now, sit down. I’m going to get us some food.”

Dinah didn’t hear her; she was falling into a reverie. One Sunday afternoon a few summers ago, she and Jake had taken the kids swimming up at the Steiners’ house, in Stone Canyon. The usual crowd was there—the
Weiskopfs, the Breitners, the Katzenbachs, the Gordons, and the Moroccos. They all had the same standing invitation for every Sunday, and the backyard of the Steiners’ Bel-Air colonial, which looked out from a mountaintop of thyme, yucca, and wild mustard across the descending foothills to the Pacific, rang with the sounds of children splashing and shouting, as the adults talked and told stories and laughed. Except for Marv Weiskopf, who had a hit TV show, the husbands were all high-priced screenwriters. Mel and Izzie had been a writing team since the late thirties. They’d started out in radio, then moved into movies, and both occasionally worked with other guys they had known from the George Joy Crystaldent show. All the wives had been in the industry, too. Dinah, of course, had been a radio writer, briefly. And Bea Katzenbach, the only wife who still worked, wrote with her husband, Irwin. Even though they had all known one another for years, Evelyn had always rubbed Dinah the wrong way. Some of it, Dinah was willing to admit, was outright envy. Evelyn came from a rich family in New York, had gone to Fieldston and Bennington (the year it opened), and flew back to New York every spring and fall to buy expensive clothes. On weekends in Palm Springs with the Engels, she would whisper with Anya about art and ballet and become silent whenever Dinah tried to join in, as if there were nothing the three of them could possibly have in common. She and Anya took private art lessons in a studio built onto her garage, where the teacher instructed them in painting semiabstract murals of mythological figures doing peculiar ritualistic things in inexplicable postures.