Cheat and Charmer (6 page)

Calling her up, seeing if she was free, he had repeatedly told Litvak during the weeks when he was finishing up five expensive years of analysis—which had come to a successful end last July, in time for the analyst’s August vacation—always made him feel as if he were seventeen years old and back in Chicago, trying to score with girls on Seventy-first Street and South Shore Drive. He liked the gamble of it, the footloose feeling. Most of all, he liked that kind of sex. “What kind?” Litvak had always pressed him. “Oh, you know goddamn well what kind, Sandy,” Jake had said. “We’ve been over this before.”

“Yes,” said Litvak. “So I will tell you once again: the kind where there’s absolutely no chance whatsoever that you’ve just been fucking Mommy.”

“Oh, Sandy, forget the old whore-madonna thing just once, for Christ’s sake. All I mean is I like and need that easy, uncomplicated kind where you don’t have to romance them and spend an hour and a half working on them. Tell me something, Sandy, why does it take my wife such a long time to hit a home run?”

“Could it be,” said Litvak, with the little giggle that Jake found so endearing, “that she senses your impatience?”

“I’m not impatient,” said Jake. “In my opinion, and according to some very satisfied ladies I’ve known, I’m a very generous, considerate guy in the sack. But Christ, I’m exhausted.” It was so different with Bonnie. She seemed to have a nice time, at least she told him so, and it didn’t take all day. After visiting her, he said, he always felt healthy, renewed, and hygienic—and very deserving, too, especially when he considered, as he often did on the drive home, how hard he worked to provide for his family. And another good thing, he told Litvak, was that spending an hour or two with Bonnie always made him eager to get home to Dinah and the kids. “I
mean, this is something that you, as my analyst, ought to write me a prescription for. She’s probably done me more good than you and vitamins and a weekly golf game all rolled together!”

There was something else he couldn’t kid himself about, he told Litvak. If he ever had to go without other women, he would die. As far as Jake Lasker was concerned, faithful husbands were fools. Women were one of the great pleasures, and any man who denied himself that particular cup of bliss was missing out on life. He couldn’t think of even one friend who was faithful to his wife. Of course, some guys handled these things like complete amateurs and risked real trouble at home. But Jake made sure he wasn’t one of them. To his way of thinking, either you did things with a touch of class or you were a schmuck.

“I bet you do it, too,” he said to Litvak. “With a psychiatric nurse, maybe? I can imagine the possibilities.”

“Oh?” said the analyst. “Tell me, did your father have other women?”

“Of course he did. You know that already. In fact, everything we’re talking about we’ve talked about before. A million times.”

“Yes?” said Litvak. “So you tell me what it means.”

“It means that I see you as my father and if it’s okay for you, then it’s okay for me.”

“Exactly.”

“But, Sandy,” Jake said, laughing, “the problem is, you treat all the comedy writers in Hollywood, and one of them—I won’t say who—happened to see you not so long ago with a broad at a restaurant in Malibu.”

Silence.

“Necking,” Jake added. Expecting the doctor’s giggle, he heard, again, only silence. “Well?” said Jake.

“And how does that make you feel?” said Litvak.

“How does that make me feel? It makes me feel, one, that you’re human, two, that there’s nothing wrong with me that isn’t wrong with you, and three, why the hell do I keep coming here when I could spend my dough on putting in a pool? I’m sick of pretending I’ve got something to work out when we both know I’m never going to change and that I’m the same charming, lovable, incredibly talented, and incorrigibly infantile guy I was when I started coming here five years and ten thousand bucks ago. I could put two kids through college on what I’ve paid you and they would know more about anything than I’ve ever learned about myself on this couch. That’s how it makes me feel.”

“Yes?” said Litvak. “Anything else?”

“Yeah,” said Jake. “I’m just curious about something. Was it a lady analyst?”

He sat at Bonnie’s kitchen table talking about his script, but he wished he could tell her about the subpoena, because she listened so well. He really couldn’t, though. She had girlfriends on the lot who were banging guys who couldn’t be trusted with this information. Nevertheless, since he had finished his analysis and stopped seeing Sandy Litvak four times a week, he missed having someone to talk to, and realized just now how much he wanted not just a girl on the side but a confidante, someone to whom he could tell everything.

Still, Bonnie was just so nice to be around. She was from New Mexico—she said she was half Indian and half Irish, and she had great cheekbones and a quietness about her that calmed him. She never initiated anything and she never held back. She came over now and put a glass of ice-cold root beer on the table, and he grabbed her by the waist and stuck his head right between her breasts. The silk of her kimono was cool against his hands.

“Oh,” she said mildly, “you wanna lay down for a while.”

She always used this phrase, and it always crossed his mind that Dinah would have winced at her grammar.

She picked up his glass and walked ahead of him into the bedroom. Her matter-of-factness aroused him powerfully.
Immediate gratification
, he said to himself, echoing Sandy Litvak’s phrase.
The powerful pleasure of immediate gratification
. He stretched out with his arms behind his head and she began to fiddle with him, unzipping him, sticking her hand inside the boxer shorts ironed to a crisp yesterday by Miss Fanny in the laundry room at home and freeing what Jake himself noticed was an uncommonly splendid erection, stopping to unbutton his shirt, unbuckle his belt. She pulled the shorts down to his ankles, and then whisked them completely off, pausing to unlace his shoes and pull them off, too, along with his socks, leaving him only his T-shirt. Yet, when she lay down beside him and sought his erection, she discovered that it had drooped, and nothing she did, with hand or mouth, seemed able to revive its former architectural magnificence.
“Hey, what’s the matter?” she said, glancing up at him with gentle concern.

“Gee, honey,” he murmured drowsily, “I don’t know. I seem to be awfully tired all of a sudden. Didn’t sleep much last night.”

“Why’s that?”

“Just the usual. The script,” he murmured.

“Well, take a nap. I’ll be next door learning some lines.” She began to sit up.

“Don’t go,” he said, pulling her back down. She nestled in beside him on the left side. “Right side, honey,” he said, and she simply climbed over him, so that he caught a whiff of the Maja soap she showered with. Jake was deaf in his left ear, from a case of childhood mumps, and some gymnastic ingenuity was required from the women in his life.

“You got a job?” he asked lazily.

“Sure do. Lady-in-waiting in
Ferdinand and Isabella
.”

“Good for you. Did I have anything to do with it?”

“Hey you, don’t you remember? You sent me over to Jimmy McRoberts and he liked me.”

“Oh geez, honey, yes,” he said sleepily. “That’s great. I’m sorry I forgot. You know I’ve got so much on my mind.” He could hardly keep his eyes open.

“Oh, go to sleep,” she said with a laugh, getting up and going back into the living room. “I’m just gonna get the script.”

He slept the sleep he could never have at home—the sleep of pure escape from his screenplay, from the day’s writing, from his kids, wife, house, and mortgage. From insurance premiums, college savings, guild dues, agent’s percentages, business manager’s percentages, club fees, private school bus fees, summer camp fees, dentist and doctor bills, car repairs, maid’s, laundress’s, gardener’s, and pool man’s salaries. His mother’s monthly rent and support checks. The checks he sent to help his sister. From the relentless, ever-present worry over whether he was any good and how long his luck would hold out. And today, above everything else, from the subpoena, coming, as it had, at the worst possible time, just when he had reached the top of his game.

With Bonnie there was no talk about the house and the cars. No discussions about whom to invite to a party or whom they owed. No arguments about his habit of leaving Dinah to play golf on Sundays just when
his sister was coming over with their mother. Bonnie had skin like silk. She was nice to him and didn’t ask for anything. She was good in the sack. It was that simple.

When he woke up half an hour later, she was lying naked beside him, sideways with her rear end resting against his thighs. It was as easy as breathing to slide into her tight wet heat. She made no sound, and moved up against him; whatever was happening to her seemed to be taking place at a great distance, so lost was he in his own pleasure, which soon tore up his spine like a lit fuse.

A little less than an hour later, having slept some more, showered, and dressed, he kissed her lightly at the door. As always, she didn’t ask him whether or when he would call again. “Thanks, honey,” he said. “That was great.”

She smiled and smoothed back her hair.

“You okay for dough?”

“Yeah, fine,” she said, noticing his hand going to his pocket.

“Well, go have some fun. Go down to the beach and have dinner somewhere with a friend,” he said, putting a fifty-dollar bill in her hand, which softly closed around it. He was grateful to her, he felt wonderful, and for just that instant he loved her very much.

Nevertheless, as he started down the red-and-green-carpeted stairs, she ceased to exist for him, and she would wait in a limbo of nonbeing, like a reel of film in a metal can, until the next time he thought of her. What worried him now was how to hold on to a life where he could have her and other girls like her. If Dinah refused to testify, if he had to leave Hollywood, if he no longer had serious dough and a big name, girls like Bonnie wouldn’t waste two minutes on him.

Downstairs at his mother’s, in an identically laid-out apartment, he stuffed a handful of stale peppermints and calcified green and orange gumdrops into his mouth. His mother kept cut-crystal jars next to every slipcovered piece of furniture, and you couldn’t move without catching your eye on rainbow-colored candies or foil-wrapped Hershey’s Kisses. Rose Lasker came in from the kitchen, carrying a small tray with a large piece of pound cake and a steaming cup of fresh coffee, with cream and sugar. She limped a little from the arthritis in her knee. “I said ‘No thanks, Ma,’ ” he yelled at
her, accepting the plate nonetheless and digging in. “Are you trying to kill me? One of these days I’m gonna have a heart attack and it’ll be because of you.” Within seconds he had devoured the cake. His mother, joyously watching him eat, asked him if he wanted another piece. “Just bring the rest of it,” he answered in self-disgust. “The whole goddamn thing.”

He wanted to tell her about the subpoena, too, but he couldn’t risk it. She would drive him crazy with her what’s-going-to-happen-to-me? worry and fear. So he listened to her latest reports about Chicagoans she kept in touch with, those who were still there as well as those who were now living in Los Angeles, uprooted and transplanted by their grown-up, guilt-ridden, successful children. As she reeled off her usual mix of gossip and chitchat, along with her favorite subjects—strokes, heart attacks, prostate, uterine, and bladder troubles, gout, cancer, deafness, blindness, diabetes, Parkinson’s, senility, operations, and good and bad deaths—he was plunged into deep gloom. If Dinah testified … If he couldn’t find work … If they lost the house … If he couldn’t afford his mother’s rent … Then, oh dear God, she’d have to move in with them. Every hypothetical spelled loss and suffocation, and seemed to stop his digestion cold. And each time his mother got up and went into the kitchen to get him some other high-calorie, artery-clogging treat, he could hear the familiar, sickening swish of her nylon stockings rubbing together between her fat thighs. It was the one sound in the universe he could not stand.