Cheat and Charmer (62 page)

An airplane droned overhead. Outside, Peter could see that it was going to be a clear, hot day. “Pick up your foil, Peter,” Jake said. He got up and went to the sliding glass door, opened it, and took a deep breath. “Christ, it’s gorgeous outside. I hate like hell having to lose that eighteen holes with George. This is nuts, really. Why don’t you take Peter to see Vee in the hospital and let them have a little talk together, and I’ll go play golf and you’ll have the Easter egg hunt, and then we’ll all go back at the same time later today like we’d planned and stop in Redlands at the nineteen-cent hamburger place.”

He yawned like a great happy hippopotamus, and waited, without apparent concern, for her answer.

“Pete, honey,” she said finally. “Go get dressed and tell Lorna and Coco to come in and pack up. We’re going home. Right now.”

“You can do what you want, darling,” Jake said to Dinah. “But you’re making a big mistake. The whole thing should just blow over. We should just have a normal day here. All of us together.”

“C’mon, Pete,” Dinah said, ignoring her husband.

Peter picked up his foil and went into his room. Under his bed was a duffel bag, and he reached for it and took out a clean white T-shirt. Then he sat on the edge of the bed. He would get dressed to leave in a minute, he told himself, but for now he just wanted to sit and do nothing.

A
bove the garage, in her small, neat room, Mrs. Augusta Crittenden, known to her friends, family, and employers as Gussie, stirs in bed, awakened in the June night by the sound of the Cadillac starting up. She turns on the bedside light and picks up the clock: a little past two. Where he off to again? she wonders, but her body, needing sleep, pulls her back down into the warm sheets.

Dinah also stirs, looks across the bedroom, and sees that Jake’s bed is empty. He’s restless again, she thinks.

Anxious about the final cut of the picture—worried that it’s too long. He doesn’t like the score Mel and Izzie have commissioned, wishes they’d bring Milty Ostrow in to fix it, but they don’t want to spend the extra money; they won’t listen to him. But they’re the producers, he’s reminded her. He’s only being paid to direct it. Most of all, he’s wild to get it over with, wild to go back to the other project—the book for the Broadway musical he’s dreamed of doing for years.

For the past few weeks, ever since he began cutting the picture, every night, after about two hours of deep sleep, he starts awake with what he calls the restless heebie-jeebies—sizzling electric currents of intolerable restlessness running up and down his legs, making it unbearable for him to stay in bed. Until he began taking these night drives, his tossing and turning and gum cracking, not to mention his mooselike snoring when he did sleep, had been driving Dinah crazy. She would wake up in the middle of the night to find him sitting up in bed, noisily munching saltines and celery and swigging from a bottle of ice-cold root beer. Nothing seemed to work.

“Take a hot bath,” she would say to him. “Go for a swim, warm up a cup of milk, read a book. Or take a Seconal.”

“You know I can’t read unless I’m looking for material,” he would reply. “Either that or I get so caught up in the words, it takes me two hours to get through the first paragraph. If I take a Seconal, it doesn’t kick in until the middle of the next afternoon, and then it knocks me out.”

“Why don’t you stop at Finlandia on the way home from the studio?” she’d suggested. “What about taking night swims? We built the pool and now you don’t use it.”

Then one night he got up and dressed and went for a long drive and didn’t come back until it was almost light out. But the drive had soothed him, he told Dinah, and he had taken another drive, and another. Now it’s part of his routine. He likes to drive down to the beach or all the way out to Zuma, he tells her. There’s a twenty-four-hour Jewish deli in Santa Monica. The greatest pastrami sandwiches ever. He takes a drive and gets a sandwich, then he’s able to sleep for a while. But she can’t stop worrying about him. The fact is, he’s always tired.

As Dinah falls asleep again, she wonders whether what took place in Palm Springs has anything to do with Jake’s insomnia. That incident remains for her the worst thing that has ever happened between them. It passed, of course. For three days they hardly spoke, and then life just went back to normal. She’s happy to see him when he comes home at night from the studio, but she can’t forgive his harshness toward Peter. She’s still appalled by his cruelty and imperturbability. But then he wakes up and she hears him putting on his slippers. “Darling, is that you? Can’t sleep again?” she asks, and the anger melts away.

The day after the Palm Springs fight, as she calls it to herself, Veevi had come down to breakfast early. There was a bandage on her temple that didn’t quite cover the ugly cut at her hairline. Dinah looked up: Veevi was making a contrite bubby face. Dinah shook her head. “Oh, Vee,” she said.

Her sister sat down at the table and began to cry. “I’m so sorry,” she said through sobs.

It was a familiar scene, for Dinah and Veevi alike, and an ancient one. They both recognized that this was exactly what their father had done whenever he’d come home from a bender.

Dinah poured coffee for Veevi. Then, as she handed it to her, she looked at her sister and bit her lip. “Veevi,” she said. “I think it’s time—”

“I know,” Veevi said.

They went out together that afternoon and the next, taking Dorshka with them, and a few days later they found a house for Veevi in the Pacific Palisades. Dorshka agreed to move in with Veevi and Coco. Letters, telegrams, and phone calls were exchanged between Veevi’s attorney in L.A. and Mike’s attorney in Paris. Then everything was settled. In early May—a little more than a month after the Palm Springs fight—Dorshka, Veevi, and Coco moved into the new house. Claire remained at the Laskers’ because she would be closer to her school.

Jake drives west on Sunset Boulevard, going as fast as he can while keeping an eye out for the squad cars that sometimes lurk on the margins of the road. The window is rolled down, and he breathes in the heavy sweetness of night-blooming jasmine. Past Bel-Air, past Brentwood, out toward the Palisades, he notices that the big houses along the road are all dark, though now and then a fugitive light casts a pale glow on gardens and shrubs, warning thieves against trying their luck.

He thinks about Gussie and their conversation that morning at breakfast.

“Hey, Gus, didja catch the doubleheader yesterday?”

“Sure did, Mr. Lasker.”

“My Cubs finally beat Newcombe,” he said, putting aside the sports page as she poured his coffee.

“It done took ’em long enough. Ten in a row. But you’ll see. This is our year.”

“Naw, Gus. This is the beginning of the end.”

“Oh no it ain’t, Mr. Lasker.” She laughed and gave him a look, and then stood holding the coffeepot with her other hand on her hip. “Tell me something, Mr. Lasker,” she said. “Am I crazy or do I keep hearing someone starting up the Cadillac in the middle of the night?”

“I’m sorry if it’s waking you up, Gus. I can’t sleep, and I find that it soothes me to go out for a drive.”

“Well, the only thing about the driving is, you’re liable to fall asleep behind the wheel. And, Mr. Lasker, you got to stay away from that refrigerator.”

“Do you think you could put a lock on it for me?”

She and Jake were always trying to figure out ways for him to lose weight. “You got to put a lock on your stomach, Mr. Lasker.”

“You said it, Gus. But the driving doesn’t have any calories.”

“How old are you now, Mr. Lasker?”

“Forty-three, Gus.”

“That’s the age when gentlemen need to get some relaxation.”

She leaned over the lazy Susan in the breakfast room, the coffeepot still in her hand. Tall, with carefully coiffed straightened hair, crisp white uniform, maroon lipstick, and clear rimless glasses, Gussie was an imposing figure. Like Dinah, he adored her, and liked having her company all to himself early in the morning, before the kids came downstairs.

As she goes back and forth between the swinging doors, bringing him toast, half a grapefruit, and a soft-boiled egg, he wonders whether she’s figured it out by herself. Because she’s a Negro and was once, as a young woman, the head housekeeper in a Texas whorehouse—she’s told him enough stories to fill a book, and he’s written them down for future use—he likes to imagine that she has an all-encompassing wisdom about the sexual follies of men, and with it the tolerance and forbearance he believes such follies deserve. There are times when he wishes he could go to her and unbosom himself of his own. But he is her employer, and she his employee. More important, he knows that although she’s fond of him, it’s Dinah and the kids to whom she’s really devoted.

So he keeps his secrets to himself. Only now, taking the long, leisurely curves on Sunset, does he think about where he’s going and what will happen when he arrives. Finally, when he can smell the ocean, he makes a turn to the right just beyond Pacific Palisades village and parks on a street across from a two-story brown shingled house with green shutters. He is careful to mute the shutting of the car door, and when he crosses the street and walks up a brick path to the kitchen door, he clutches his keys in his pocket to keep them from jingling.

He turns the door handle and walks in, and she’s standing there, waiting for him, luminous in a white satin bathrobe. He follows her into the bedroom, which is situated on the first floor. She gives him a glass of root beer and ice and perches on the foot of the bed while he sits in an armchair across from her.

“Hello, Uncle J.,” she says.

That’s all he needs to hear: he rises and goes over to her. He leans down
and kisses her, and she puts her arms on his shoulders and pulls him down. Next to her bed there is an intercom; its faint red light glows in the dark. If Coco wakes in the night, Veevi will hear it, but it will be Dorshka who goes to her, for she occupies the room across from the child’s on the second floor. Since Jake’s visits began, the child has awakened only once. Like most children in Southern California, she plays outdoors all afternoon and therefore her sleep is long, deep, and undisturbed.

He unties the satin belt to the white robe. Their movements are quick and fierce—not so much with passion as with marksmanship, as if they were taking aim at each other. She pursues her own pleasure with a sharp, incandescent greed. Always, at the beginning, he can’t help being aware that she’s the same flesh and blood as Dinah. But desire heightens the differences, and the comparisons turn into contrasts. Dinah has more muscle, more suppleness, longer limbs. She is generous, warm, vocal. Veevi is compact and quick, but not as athletic as her sister, not as free with her movements, and she never makes a sound, never laughs with intimacy or lust. Dinah, who doesn’t use perfume on these hot, clear spring days when she works in the garden, and is often too tired to shower at night, smells of healthy sweat and sun. Veevi smells of soap; her body is exquisitely clean. He can’t help asking himself, every time, as he goes inside her, whether she feels different there from Dinah—is it just his imagination that Dinah seems roomier than her sister? He’s certain that Veevi is tighter.