Cheat and Charmer (33 page)

An hour later, thoroughly refreshed, he stood before the mirror in full uniform: dark blue suit, light blue shirt, and tie, all from Dick Carroll; over his left arm a tan Burberry raincoat. He was hungry, happy, and counting on almost certain success with Felicity. The campaign had been going reasonably well. He had restrained himself earlier in the week. She had gone back to Shepperton with him to watch the dailies, and then they’d had a late dinner together at a bistro in Beauchamp Place. Exhausted, he had fallen asleep in the Rolls on the way back to the Connaught, where she was staying. Embarrassed when she gently jostled him to say good night, he had taken her up in the lift and kissed her at the door. She invited him in for a nightcap, and when they sat down at opposite ends of the sofa, she let her shoes drop to the floor and stretched her legs out across his lap. While they talked, he lightly stroked her feet and ankles. They necked. But by then it was past midnight and he had to be up at six for the next day’s shooting, so he left, with things unspoken between them. Last night, he had once again taken her out to dinner in Mayfair, and as they walked arm in arm afterward around Grosvenor Square he said, “Look, I think you’re sensational. You love Hunt and I love Dinah and we both know the code of the hills. I won’t be a pain in the ass and neither will you. So come back to my room with me. On Saturday, we’ll fly to Paris together just as we planned.”

“You’re very dear,” she said, looking at him with her intelligent blue eyes. “Can I think about it?”

“Of course. There’s always tomorrow night, too.”

Vaguely embarrassed by the Rolls-Royce slowly trailing him and Felicity, he dismissed the chauffeur for the night. He hadn’t felt this good in a long time. It was like the early days in Chicago, after college and before he had come out to Hollywood. He had hated his job selling advertising for the
Jewish Daily Messenger
, and lived for the nights, when he would work on his novel,
Beef
(which now lay untouched in an envelope in his attic). He was disgusted with his false starts and his constant failure to get down on paper what he had it in him to say, but he was desperate to grab on to the possibilities of life. At about ten every night, he’d go out for a walk, ravenous for success and money and women. And he had loved, in those days, left-wing Jewish girls, college girls, but sometimes also working girls—Polish and Catholic girls, with whom he could have unromantic companionable sex, who didn’t expect him to say “I love you” and would have laughed at him if he had.

“Of course you can think about it, baby,” he said to Felicity softly. “But
I really am crazy about you. We’re friends. Real friends. That doesn’t change one way or the other. And it’s about the friendliest thing two people can do.”

The line had come to him some weeks ago and he had jotted it down in the little memo book he kept in his jacket pocket, thinking it would make a good opening line in a song for the Broadway musical that was slowly simmering in his mind—a musical about his grandfather’s saloon, in Chicago, in the 1890s. This song would be the first line to be sung by the young medical student to the even younger Polish waitress who lived with his family and worked for them and whom he wished to sweet-talk into bed.

On Felicity’s instructions, he arrived at Fouquet’s ahead of the Crandells and ordered a Scotch on the rocks at the bar. Although he was apprehensive about seeing Veevi and running into Mike Albrecht, he couldn’t help being exhilarated. He was in Paris, and he could concentrate on his impressions without diluting them by having to share them with Dinah. He hardly had a chance to take in the place before Veevi came in, flanked by Hunt and Felicity, those two golden sentries, who issued convincing cries of surprise and joy at finding him there. He moved fast, not giving Veevi a chance to rebuff him, and leaned forward to kiss her on both cheeks, as Felicity had taught him. Veevi automatically raised her face to his, as if finding him there were the most natural thing in the world.

So she wasn’t going to cut him, he thought. Doubtless she had other, more pressing things weighing on her than Dinah’s testifying, so he could put his mind to rest about that. Clearly, she wasn’t going to make a scene, and, anyway, from everything he knew about her, that wasn’t her style.

To Jake, who often told Dinah what to wear and enjoyed supervising the wardrobes of actresses in his pictures, Veevi’s simple attire suggested a woman who wished to keep herself up and was determined to look subdued, chic, and, it seemed to him, very French. Whereas Felicity had clothed her lithe and athletic body in a sporty little navy blue sheath (the feeling of her tanned legs clamped against his lower back was still fresh in his memory from last night at the Connaught, where she’d told him that she’d considered his proposition and agreed that their friendship required nothing less), Veevi was in a black silk shirtwaist, a string of small pearls
around her neck and a pearl in each earlobe. This arrangement set off her face, still stunning, with its clear and regular features. She wore red lipstick on her wide mouth, mascara on her eyelashes; her thick brown shoulder-length hair was brushed back in a wave and to the side. When she looked at him, her face registered no sadness or heartbreak or surprise or annoyance. It seemed to say, “Oh, it’s you. Hmm.”

He felt himself floating through waves of people and then anchored at a table near the bar with his sister-in-law and the Crandells. A hand on his thigh caressed him; Felicity offered a stream of amusing prattle. What a terrific dame, he thought, knows just what to do. She told the Lady Peel story, and Veevi laughed, and then there was talk about the London stage, and comparisons with plays currently running in Paris, and Felicity pointed out an English actress who was standing at the bar with her third husband, Lord Hindlip. Then Hunt asked Jake about his picture and the English crews, exercising the tact—cultivated over the years—that well-bred moviemakers used with one another: they confined themselves to questions likely to receive cheerful answers and carefully avoided those sparked by rumor and malice.

Hunt and Jake agreed that going back to Hollywood was a depressing thought after shooting a picture in England, and Jake said he’d fallen in love with London and wanted to move there but was tied for the time being to Marathon; he made a face as if he had indigestion. Felicity and Veevi perked up their ears to the whispers and murmurs around them that meant serious gossip, and Hunt kept talking about all the problems he would have to face on the picture he was going to be shooting in Kenya. Somehow, tonight, Jake decided, he would try to give Dinah’s letter to Veevi. He would find a way to manage it; after all, he was in excellent company, and felt blissful and affectionate toward the whole world. Hunt was a decent fellow, charming and expert at putting everyone at ease. Did he have any idea, Jake wondered, of what had gone on between himself and Felicity? She had said, last night, of her husband, “He’s my best friend. We don’t ask each other questions we shouldn’t.” Now, why couldn’t he and Dinah have an arrangement like that?

It surprised him that he felt so good. Life didn’t get better than this—this blaze of good Scotch and attractive people, all of them in the prime of life, all of them singled out by destiny, it seemed, for lives of infinite pleasure. People stopped by their table, and in the space of about twenty minutes he met a bullfighter and his girlfriend, two writers for the Luce
magazines, the bureau chief for the
International Herald-Tribune
, an American working for the Paris branch of a big New York law firm, an English director and his wife, a prince from Saudi Arabia with a beautiful French model on his arm, an English colonel and his debutante daughter, an American jockey, and an Italian count who manufactured racing cars and was accompanied by his blond wife, who was a fashion designer, and taller than he. Some recognized Jake’s name, or pretended to, and asked about mutual friends in Hollywood—usually big-name stars who weren’t in the Laskers’ set, but none of it made any difference. He was accepted and that was that, and by people he had been nervous about meeting, expecting them to be standoffish, a little patronizing even, since he was only a comedy writer, and the corner of social Hollywood he and Dinah belonged to was hardly the most glamorous of the many worlds at that moment in glorious collision right before his eyes.

A couple joined them at the table. Jake recognized the man at once from dust jacket photos. He was the novelist Ben Knight, and he was with his pretty wife, Sylvia, who nodded curtly, did not extend her hand, and gave Jake a guarded smile that made him suspect that she knew all about Dinah’s testimony and had opinions about it. But Knight took Jake’s hand with both of his in an athlete’s crushing grip and inquired how his movie was going, and Jake just about levitated as he felt himself invisibly replaced inside his own skin by another version of himself—someone he had long desired to become but never quite dared to believe in.

To have Knight speak to him in this way—as a social if not an artistic equal—was the first stamp in a new passport. Jake, who read other people’s books very slowly and very competitively, had read Knight’s World War II novel,
The Innocent and the Beautiful
, and had been knocked out by it, thinking it better by far than Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, James Jones, and Mike Albrecht. But these days he found himself with less time and patience to read and hadn’t kept up with Knight’s career, except for an occasional story in
The New Yorker
. He was aware, of course, that it was Knight who spoke for this particular crowd, especially the American expatriates, and that their lives, including this little scene right now at the bar in Fouquet’s, were his meat.

Much later in the evening, after dinner at a bistro whose name he couldn’t remember, Jake found himself at a club. He had no idea where he was, but you had to go down a flight of steps to get in, and a more intimate group had migrated there from the restaurant and now huddled together at
a few small tables. It was then, remembering his errand, that Jake took a sip of cognac and asked Felicity to dance to a slow tune. The band—a sax, a bass, and a piano player—were American Negroes and wore dark glasses.

“Careful,” she said under her breath as they reached the floor. “Not too close.”

“Ne worry-ez pas,” he replied, having been instructed over dinner in the art of forming French negatives. He steadied her against his large chest and belly to maintain the pressure of his body against hers but held her hand and her back at a stiffly correct distance. “So what’s the story with Veevi? She looks fine to me. And not particularly interested in me one way or the other. You’d hardly know I’m her brother-in-law.”

“She’s like that with everyone. Rather cagey, really. Unless you bring things up, she won’t say a word. Has she asked you about Dinah and the kids?”

He withheld his answer, pressed her closer, and whispered, “Look, I know what I said about my same-city rule, but how about slipping away sometime tomorrow and coming over to my room?”

He had told her that he never took a woman to bed when she was in the same city as her husband.

“In two words:
im-possible
. By the way, who’s Hunt dancing with?”

“Veevi. They’re about four feet from your shoulder.”

“In that case I’ll bet you anything—Jake Lasker, get that hard thing of yours away from me right now; we’ve had our fun—the great Albrecht and the ever lovely Odile Boisvert have just shown up and Hunt is helping Veevi over the first of her nightly Stations of the Cross. He’s really such a gent, that husband of mine.”

Jake separated his body very slightly from Felicity’s and searched the room. “Yup, I see them. They’re at our table, with the Knights.”

“Are you prepared for that?”

“Mais oui, mademoiselle.”

“
Madame
, dearie.” Whispering into his ear, so that it looked almost as if they were dancing cheek to cheek, Felicity said, “I wish Veevi didn’t do this to herself. It happens almost every night. She has this uncanny instinct about showing up wherever they show up.”

Felicity disengaged one long bare tennis-firm forearm and waved. Mike Albrecht casually saluted Felicity and Jake but, like Veevi earlier in the evening, made no gesture of special recognition. “That’s the HUAC cold shoulder,” said Jake. “No outright incivility, but no warmth, either.”

“Well, what did you expect?”

“I expect nothing, but I’m interested in everything,” he replied, taking advantage of the crowded dance floor to push up against her.

“Well, essentially, he’s stuck. We’re sitting with the Knights, and he came here thinking he’d see Ben, which is what he does every night. They adore each other, these fellows—have to see each other every day or they get a headache. So you come with the dinner, so to speak.”

Jake took a good look at the young woman with Mike—very young, with short blond hair and a magnificent face. So the unthinkable had happened: Mike had found a girl with a face that trumped Veevi’s. The girl returned Jake’s look blankly and briefly, hardly lifting her eyes from Mike for a second.