Cheat and Charmer (48 page)

“Such as?”

“Nightclubs, races at Deauville, skiing in Klosters, fishing in St-Jean-de-Luz, bullfights in Pamplona. And, of course, they had the war between them. They’d all had an interesting war and never ran out of stories. Pretty soon we started doing everything with them. I liked their wives, Felicity—who’s great, as you know—and Sylvia, who’s a little middle-class about things, but nice. It got so that Mike, or I guess I should say we, couldn’t live without them and they couldn’t live without us. When we were all in Paris at the same time, which was pretty often, we saw one another every night. Until then, writing had been Mike’s whole life. He’d work, and we’d be together all day, and he didn’t need a reward. But once we hooked up with
them, being with them became a way of life. He lived only to be with them at night and would go to bed full of brotherly love.”

“And brotherly rivalry that would get him up in the morning and over to the t-t-t-typewriter?”

“Exactly.”

“And there was, of course, the added spur of his b-b-b-belief in the superiority of his own talent, alternating with the fear that maybe he
wasn’t
as good as Knight and had to beat him.”

“Of course he’s better than Ben, but he didn’t always know it. It’s one of the reasons he depended so much on me.”

“Mike has more talent than Ben Knight?”

“You bet.”

“No, Vee, he doesn’t,” Dinah said. “He had promise. But it hasn’t gone anywhere. He doesn’t have Knight’s power. Or warmth.”

“Since when are you a literary critic?”

Dinah let that pass.

“Listen, Vee, Mike’s only modest when someone t-t-t-tells him he’s a genius. He’s been rotten to you.”

“Anyway,” Veevi went on, “I told him to go and he went.”

“To Cap Ferrat?”

“Yeah, Cap Ferrat. There’s a great hotel there, right on the sea. You go down from the pool to these rocks and dive right into the bluest water in the world.”

“I thought you two were inseparable,” Dinah said, thinking in particular of one letter, written around Christmas of ’47 or ’48, in reply to one of her own, in which she had asked whether Veevi would consider a visit to California soon, to see Pop.
“I can’t leave now,”
Veevi had written.
“Mike wants me with him all the time. In the same room, all day. I sit and read, and then I go out for the lunch things and come back and make lunch. After lunch, he reads me the morning’s work and asks me what I think, and we take a nap for an hour and then he goes back to work. He can’t write without me. And, of course, Claire’s in school and has a regular routine. Please find some way to explain this to Pop.”

Veevi sighed. “Well, we were, for a long time. And then he found the Crandells and the Knights, and somehow the routine sort of fell apart. I did love it all those years, listening to him hunt and punch on the typewriter. Idiot that I was, I thought I was indispensable.” She paused, took a sip of coffee, and went on: “That was my first big mistake. Giving up that little
ritual. I should have stood my ground and not given in so easily to the”—she paused, searching for a word, and laughed a little—“ ‘collective’ life. Except that it was so much fun.”

She continued with her story. She and Mike agreed that he would go for two or three weeks and come back immediately if she needed him. So he went, and he sent her a postcard every day showing the hotel and the outdoor bistros in Beaulieu. He wrote to her all the time, telling her how much he missed her and how concerned he was about the pregnancy. He kept asking if she wanted him to come home, so of course she said she was fine and that he should stay. Then out of the blue he wrote and said that the only thing Hunt and Ben talked about was show business and that he was bored to death by it and was going to spend a week with Gastang if that was all right with her. She said of course it was. She knew Gastang and thought it would be fine.

From Veevi’s letters, Dinah knew that Gastang was a famous French sculptor—a Basque, actually—who lived just outside St-Jean-de-Luz. He had been a friend of Stefan’s, a member of the Ossau network in the war, and had hidden Stefan a couple of times in the mountains. That’s what Mike learned when he started investigating what had happened to Stefan. Mike had gone to visit him and they’d become friends, or, more precisely, Gastang had become a kind of father figure for Mike—
“with a lot of guzzling of red wine from goatskin flasks and throwing their arms around each other’s necks,”
Veevi had once written.

Now Veevi leaned forward on her elbows, and her eyes narrowed. “Whenever Ben Knight publishes a new story in
The New Yorker
, Mike worries that Ben’s getting ahead of him and goes off and visits Gastang,” she said. “Gastang tells Mike, ‘You aire ze real ting, you aire ze real artiste,’ and they go fishing, and Mike comes back as if he’s been blessed by the goddamn pope.”

If she hadn’t exiled herself from these people, she wouldn’t be saying these things, Dinah thought. She’s trying to find things to ridicule about them, because she can’t bear not having them anymore.

“K-K-K-Keep talking,” Dinah said.

Mike had said that he would stay at Gastang’s for about a week, no more. During that time, Veevi had another bleeding episode and was weighing whether to call him and tell him to come home, when he called her from St-Jean-de-Luz to say that he’d decided to write a book about the sculptor and needed to spend another week observing him in his studio. Of
course, watching Gastang had very little to do with seeing him make sculpture and everything to do with having fun: fishing in the choppy Atlantic off St-Jean-de-Luz, drinking with Gastang’s Basque smuggler pals in the mountains. The extra week became two, then three. Then he wrote to say that the Crandells and the Knights had driven up from Cap Ferrat. In another letter, he casually mentioned that there was a girl with them—a French girl named Odile Boisvert. She was an actress of about nineteen or twenty and the girlfriend of Jock de Maistre, the Paris chief of
Newsfront
. He had left her in Cap Ferrat with the Crandells when he went back to Paris to cover the American presidential campaigns.

“You know the kind of girl she is,” Veevi went on. “The kind that always makes friends with the wives first. Felicity told me that the girl zoomed in on her. Tried to turn her into her best friend—seeking motherly advice and all that rot. Felicity was contrite when she told me, but she bit at once. The girl had been in operation since she was fifteen and had already had a fair number of rather conspicuous boyfriends—a French duke who was also a racing car driver, an Iranian prince—and Felicity can’t resist the gossip that a girl like that brings with her—it’s like party favors. Felicity said Odile kept going on about how much in love she was with Jock, who had apparently delivered her from the unwanted attentions of Willie Weil, who had persuaded Hunt to put her in his last picture. So Felicity took her under her wing, supposedly. You know,” Veevi said, “Felicity eats at home with her own kids twice a year and decides she has to play mama with Odile.”

“What happened next?” Dinah asked, taking Veevi’s hand in anticipation of difficulty. Veevi withdrew it and lit a fresh cigarette.

“Well, the Crandells showed up at Gastang’s with Odile in tow. Gastang went nuts. He wants every woman he sees. He’s
priapic
.”

“You mean he’s got a p-p-p-permanent hard-on?”

“Beyond permanent.
Eternal
. And he’s sixty-seven years old, for Christ’s sake.”

“Okay, so he’s after her.”

“He wouldn’t leave the girl alone. But she wasn’t interested. I guess after you’ve had a French duke, an Iranian prince, and who knows how many counts and earls, a horny old artist who reeks of wine and tobacco that smells like horse manure isn’t all that exciting. Mike wrote and told me all about it, as if he were taking notes for a novel—a Ben Knight novel, by the way, not a Mike Albrecht novel.”

“He
wrote
to you about it?”

“Uh-huh. I heard all the details. The old man kept bothering her, kept grabbing her knee under the table, putting his hand on her ass. He asked her to sit for him in the studio, and then tried to tear her clothes off. It went completely bonkers when Mercedes got involved.”

“Mercedes?”

“Madame Gastang. Oh boy, is she ever
formidable
,” Veevi said, pronouncing the word in French. “She was getting sick and tired of Gastang’s foolishness with the girl. But when Mike told Gastang to lay off Odile, Mercedes blamed her, not Gastang, and ordered her and Mike to leave. That was fine with the girl, but the Crandells and the Knights had gone back to Cap Ferrat, so Odile asked Mike to drive her back to Paris because she had found the experience too nerve-racking to take the train alone.”

“Poor little thing,” said Dinah, who knew what was coming.

“The first phone call: ‘The car’s broken down—have to stay in this little town for two days. Bored out of my mind. Miss you terribly, darling.’ Next call: the car part from Paris still hasn’t arrived, and it’s raining. But he has the typewriter—he can work. About three days later—and he calls every day—I call Felicity to see if she’s back, ‘Come over,’ I say, ‘I’m stuck. Can’t go anywhere—doctor’s orders.’ An hour later, she waltzes in and says, ‘How do you like the Arpège?’ ‘What Arpège? I can’t stand Arpège.’ Well, the look on her face, I tell you. She asked me if I had a birthday coming up. No. Not a chance. She’s not the kind to tattle, and I know she must have been kicking herself mentally, but I’d caught her in something, and told her she
had
to tell me, whatever it was. Well, she’d run into Mike that morning at Lanvin. She’d just assumed the perfume was for me. So I told her she was crazy, it couldn’t possibly be Mike, because he wasn’t even in Paris. But she just shook her head and said, ‘I’m so sorry, baby. That fucking girl.’ Then I called Gastang’s and put Felicity on, since my French is so terrible, and the maid told her Monsieur Albrecht and Mademoiselle Boisvert had left together five days ago. Later, I found out they’d gone right back to Paris that day and were shacking up at her apartment, which wasn’t even ten blocks from me.”

“What’ja do when he came home? Hit him over the head with a f-f-f-frying pan?”

“Oh, come on. One has to have a
little
class.”

“For Christ’s sake, Vee, I didn’t mean it literally,” said Dinah testily. For a moment, she thought that her sister was both an idiot and a snob. “Anyway, what happened then?” she said, chewing the inside of her cheek.

“I sweated it out. He had to come home at some point. Two days later, to be precise. It was a Saturday morning. I’d decided not to say anything. He’d come and gone before, and I’d learned the hard way that you don’t ask questions. Felicity had taught me that. She told me you have to have perfect manners about these things if you don’t want to blow the marriage.”

“That’s her c-c-c-contribution to the fund of human wisdom?”

“Believe me, she’s right. But in this case it didn’t matter. He came home that morning, unshaved. He had tired, contented eyes and he smelled like someone—I can’t put it any other way—who’d been fucking his brains out all week. You know, sort of gamy. Fetid. Satiated.” She made a face. “He started to speak. ‘Take a shower first,’ I told him. That was hard, waiting for the shower to end. Finally, he comes in and sits down, pulls up a chair, and says, ‘This is going to be hard for you.’ I said, ‘Is it really necessary to tell me?’ I wanted to use my brave, civilized silence. ‘Yes,’ he said. And then he told me what I already knew, and he added, ‘I’m completely in love with her. I can’t live without her.’ There were several repetitions of ‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am.’ But not too many, of course, because that would mark the difference between
regret
, which he was feeling, and
apology
, which is a no-no as far as he’s concerned—not then, not before, not at any time.”

This was a distinction Dinah had never thought about, and as she listened to her sister she puzzled over it, as if she were trying to follow an algebra formula she couldn’t understand while the teacher has moved on to a new one. Her sister’s eyes glinted. Three-quarters of her sandwich lay uneaten on the plate. She was speaking so rapidly that Dinah had to lean in to follow her. “He told me he was more than willing to stay and get me through the birth. ‘I know it’s bad timing,’ he said. ‘With the baby coming.’ As if the whole thing were a muck-up in the timetable of the gods.”

“What horseshit,” Dinah said. She would have liked to add, “But that’s the way you guys live. I know. I’ve read Ben Knight’s novels. I know your world.”

“At any rate,” Veevi said, lighting a Lucky Strike, “that’s when I found out how much he loves himself. I hadn’t realized it before then. God, I’d been stupid. I’d always believed the main thing in his life was his work and me. I thought he’d love me forever. I was sure of it. He always had. Did you know he had a crush on me when we were living in Malibu?”

Was this the time? Dinah wondered. Swiftly, she had to make a decision.

“Yeah,” she said. “I did. Actually, Vee, I heard you two, you know—on the b-b-b-beach. One night.”

“You did?” Veevi made a mock-guilty “Oops!” kind of face and nodded, smiling dreamily. “It was strong between us right from the beginning.”

My God, Dinah thought. “And Stefan?”

“Dear Stefan.”

Dear Stefan?
That’s all she could say?
Dear Stefan?

Then Dinah saw that Veevi was looking at her with her mouth closed, except for a slow puff on her cigarette, and she knew that her face must have betrayed her feelings of shock and bafflement and that Veevi wouldn’t say another word if she was going to start being “dreary.” Just listen, Dinah commanded herself. That’s what you’re here for. Forget everything else.

“You were saying about Mike—”

“Mike fell for me the day he arrived from Paris. One look, and that was it. He was fifteen years old. He wrote me a letter.” She laughed lightly. “Put it between the covers of a book. Very sweet. But I was crazy about him, too. It was overpowering. But it was—”

“In two words, as Sam Goldwyn used to say,
im-possible
.”