Cheat and Charmer (64 page)

They had a ritual before they went to bed. He would talk, and she would listen and smoke. Always, it was the same thing: what did he want? To stay in Hollywood and keep making well-constructed romantic comedies at Marathon or to uproot Dinah and the kids and move to Europe? Of course, the answers were complicated by the new project, which he was dying to get to and which, he believed, offered the greatest possibilities of anything he had ever done. If everything worked out with the show, he would be spending a lot of time in New York, and that would be exciting.

As he paced the carpet in her bedroom, they played the game of “Ifs” so common to people in the movie business: if the show was a hit, they would all move to New York—Veevi and the girls, too. Or maybe he’d just have an apartment in Manhattan and she could fly there and spend a week or two at a time with him. If the show died, maybe they’d move to Europe—all of them.

“What about my passport?” she asked him.

“This situation won’t last forever,” he told her. “Look at your friend Boatwright. It’s just a matter of time until he’s working again under his own name. The whole stupid blacklist will collapse. Just hang on. I’m putting at
least two years into this show, and a lot can happen in that time; maybe it’ll all be over by then.”

But he had to get out of Hollywood, and she agreed. He couldn’t stand being attached to a studio anymore. It made him feel like a horse in a stable. He wanted to go independent, in Europe.

“Where, in Europe?” she asked him. “Paris?”

Paris was great, he said, but he had to go where he could make pictures. He didn’t think he could do that in France. “Sure you can,” she told him. “The French love American-type comedies.”

“I don’t know—I write jokes, I need the English language,” he said uncertainly.

“Talk to Willie Weil. He’ll tell you—you can make any kind of picture you want in France. Ask Hunt Crandell, too.”

They went over every point again and again. There was something about Paris that made him nervous, he said. “Look at Ben Knight—look at Mike. Paris is great for weekends, but I don’t want café life.”

“Why not?” she said. “They work during the day. Why shouldn’t they have fun at night?”

“It isn’t me,” he answered.

“Of course it’s you. Look how much fun you had there.”

“Veevi,” he said, “I get up every day and I go to work. I don’t need that much fun. If I wake up and just find my glasses in the morning, that’s enough fun for one day.”

There were endless variations on these themes. For instance, there was his novel. He wanted to take out the novel he’d written in college—the one about his uncles in the meat business in Chicago—and rewrite it.

“A Jewish
Studs Lonigan
?” she asked.

“Kind of,” he said, admiring her sharpness but uncomfortable at the ease with which she’d pigeonholed the project.

“After your show,” she said, “you’ll write your novel. In Paris. We’ll get a flat there. And a country place, small and cheap—a farmhouse in Brittany, maybe. Or an Irish fishing village. A chalet in the Swiss Alps. A villa with a vineyard in Italy.”

“With the size of this family, I’ll need a goddamn château.”

“By then,” she said, “perhaps you won’t be so encumbered.”

She caught his eye with a bright glance of conscious wickedness. He could take it any way he liked. He wasn’t ready to say out loud what they
were both thinking. Meanwhile, he was grateful to her, because she listened so well, and knew people he wanted to know, and had lived the life he sometimes wanted, and sometimes didn’t. In any case, he believed she could teach him how to live, one way or the other. It was good for him that he was having this affair, he decided. It forced him to think things over, take stock, get ready for the next move.

One night he asked Veevi, “What happened with Boatwright?” He felt sure that what happened in Palm Springs had something to do with that affair.

“Things were going swimmingly,” she said. “He said he’d waited all these years for me, hoping I’d come back from Europe, and he wasn’t going to lose me now. Wanted me to move East. Said he’d get out from the stranglehold of wife, mother, the barbarian horde of kids.”

But she wasn’t so sure she wanted that, she said. Cliff was fun, bright, witty, and he adored her. But if he made his move, it was going to be messy and drawn-out. Then one night his wife walked in. They were in bed at the Château Marmont when Veevi heard the key in the door. She jabbed him with her elbow. “ ‘Cliff, Cliff,’ I said. ‘Stop, for God’s sake, somebody’s here.’ And by God somebody
was
there. It was Eve, just off the plane from New York. Marches right up to me,” Veevi said, “pulls off her white gloves, and slaps me across the face. Then she picks up my clothes, throws them at me, and starts taking off hers. Suddenly I’m dressed and she’s starkers. She gets into bed with him, glaring at me, and says, ‘You know what I’m gonna do right now, you home wrecker! I’m gonna fuck him to death.’ ” Veevi squeezes her eyes shut and laughs. “ ‘You’re too late, dear,’ I say. ‘I just called the undertaker.’ Cliff peeks out from under the covers, sits up, and bursts out laughing. ‘What’s so funny, hotshot?’ the wife says. God, was I ever out of there fast!”

“Jesus Christ,” said Jake, stroking her leg. Dinah had told him that Veevi was devastated by what had happened and had really believed Boatwright would leave his wife for her. That’s why she’d gotten drunk in Palm Springs. “Just p-p-p-pure despair,” Dinah had said a few weeks later, when she’d had time to think it over. Pure despair over the feeling that she’d never find anyone again. But Jake thought Dinah’d got it all wrong. Veevi never wanted Boatwright. She’d set her sights on
himself
.

“Well, you’ve been awfully sporting about it,” he said, adopting a phrase she often used.

“Haven’t I?” she said, laughing again, beautiful in her pajamas, her eyes lively with promise.

He looked at her. “Tell me, Genevieve, what do
you
want?”

She shrugged. “Let’s put it this way. My sister wants
things
. I
want
things.”

He nods. She’s being unfair to Dinah, but he gets it now—that quality in her that attracted all those men in the past, that sense that nothing mattered so much as living up to what she wanted you to be and what she made you think you had it in you to be. If you met that standard, if you could get her to love you, it meant you were someone, someone she would choose over all the others. How could Mike Albrecht give that up? How would Boatwright survive without it? He himself, Jake thinks, has to have it forever.

Thus two or three nights a week, for the past few months, he’s been the man he believes she wants him to be. She sits back against the headboard with her legs stretched out on the bed, sometimes tucking her pedicured feet underneath her and running her fingers through the rich brown waves of her hair. Night after night, she says the same thing, and he can’t get enough of it: “Jake, darling, don’t you see? All these doubts and worries you have? They’re ridiculous. You’re too damn good for this town. You’ve got to think of yourself in an entirely new way. You don’t belong here anymore.”

He’s complained to her about his deal at Marathon. Irv loves him as long as he keeps to the same old formula: bumbling schlemiel outsmarts the city slickers and turns out to be an American hero. He wants to make pictures that have some sex in them, some truth. He wants to write, for instance, about infidelity, but to do it as comedy. He’s told her about how he’s had girls on the side ever since Dinah was pregnant with Lorna, and that he wants to write about that, too. He wants to do a picture about Stefan Ventura in Hollywood.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” she said. “Nobody here is going to touch it. You need France for that—somebody like Willie Weil to produce it. He likes you, you know.”

Despite the time they spend in conversation, it amazes him how little has to be said. There always comes a point in the talking when she murmurs, almost inaudibly, “Uncle J.,” and gives him that look. Then he reaches for her as she turns off the light.

It’s afterward that he finds her puzzling. The way she immediately moves away from him and lights a cigarette seems strange and unfeminine.
Don’t all women want to be held after sex? Why doesn’t she? He wonders what Stefan had thought of it, and Mike, and Boatwright. He knows there have been others, but they don’t count—only those other three, and himself, of course, in what he likes to think of as an ascending order of talent. Well, take that back, he says to himself. Let Ventura be first. After all, he’s dead.

A
s soon as Jake delivered the picture to Izzie Morocco and Mel Gordon, his work was essentially done, and he moved swiftly to his Broadway project,
My Grandfather’s Saloon
. Now that Veevi was living in a house of her own, he had his upstairs office at home again. Gladys, his secretary, came early every morning, had coffee with Gussie, pinched the kids’ cheeks while they waited for the bus to take them to summer day camp, and then went upstairs where, chewing endless sticks of Juicy Fruit and smoking Kools, she typed up last night’s pages while Jake sat in bed until noon and wrote in his nearly illegible longhand on yellow legal pads.

Lunch was now a big production at the house. Jake, Dinah, Gladys, and the songwriters Johnny O’Rourke and Sammy Hart came to the table in the breakfast room every day at twelve-thirty. After a leisurely hour the men disappeared into the living room, where they worked all afternoon on the music and lyrics for the show. O’Rourke, when he wasn’t supplying his pals with his own ex-girlfriends, was a hard-drinking piano player from Georgia who’d started working in speakeasies at the age of fourteen and was renowned for both the words and the music to dozens of American standards. Hart had gone to Carnegie Tech to study engineering, but the lyrics he wrote for fraternity reviews were so good that he’d quit school and gone back to New York, where he immediately began playing in nightclubs and peddling his songs to top performers. Both men had come to Hollywood in the thirties. Later, they teamed up to write songs for Jake’s George Joy movies, so Jake had known them for a long time and had set his heart on hiring them for the project.

With O’Rourke at the piano, and Hart and Jake stretched out on the
sofas, there issued, on these afternoons, what anyone who listened in (and both Gladys and Dinah frequently did) might have called a ceaseless stream of musical babbling: the sound of the piano resonating with chords and phrases, single and blended male voices echoing through the house. Both O’Rourke and Hart were marvelous singers—O’Rourke’s voice a thin, reedy warble with a honky-tonk intonation, Hart’s robust and smooth—and as experienced collaborators each knew how to build on what was best in the other. Jake’s was the only voice occasionally off-key, but he brought appetite and invention to the work. These afternoons induced in him such a state of concentrated bliss that he forgot everything else: Veevi, Dinah, the kids, the house, moving to Europe, and the obsession that afflicted him and everyone else in the movie business: what was going to happen next. He jotted down phrases, strung rhymes together, listened, interrupted, shouted, got up, sang out loud, and danced. Watching him, Dinah adored him; he seemed like a dolphin leaping into the sky—alive, on fire, ecstatic.

As Dinah and Gladys hovered at the entrance to the living room, Jake often waved them in and asked them what they thought. What about this, for instance, for the opening number, which had to introduce the audience to the world of the show: “All the Harolds / all the Sidneys / Max and Jack with ailing kidneys / South Shore Temple, Temple Sholem / Contraceptives when we stole ’em”? “ ‘Contraceptives’! You can’t use that,” Gladys said. “You’ll lose the Catholic audience on the out-of-town tryouts.”

“She’s right, Jake,” Dinah said. “You can just forget the c-c-c-contraceptives.”

Jake’s face fell. Hart and O’Rourke were laughing: we told you so.

“How about ‘Grandma’s kreplach / When we stole ’em’?” Gladys said. Jake looked at Hart and O’Rourke, who nodded “Okay.” Dinah smiled at Gladys, radiant, and formed her fingers into an “okay” sign.

It was Dinah, however, and not Gladys, who asked hard questions late at night, as she and Jake talked in their room. Jake would think for a while, and pace, and hit golf balls with his electric putter, and try to answer out loud the problems she brought up, and she would feel appreciated and indispensable and a very serious part of his work. And he would say to himself, Am I fucking crazy? What would I do without her? And then he would think, as he watched the clock, and knew that he would be getting up in the night before long: But we’d always be friends. I could come to her for help any time I wanted to. You don’t have to be married to your wife to get her advice on a project.

Three or four times a week, Veevi would show up at about four o’clock, bringing Dorshka and Coco over for a swim and dinner. While Coco ran into the kitchen to get a cookie from Gussie, Veevi and Dorshka would go into the living room and listen as the three men brought the day’s work to a close. Jake was always scrupulously careful about avoiding anything—a look, a tone of voice, a gesture—that would betray the connection between him and Veevi. Even so, having her there in the room, watching him work, made the hairs on the back of his neck bristle. He always had the feeling that she and Dorshka were exchanging private glances, and this unnerved him. Dorshka was effusive in her praises, though, and this elicited a tight, approving smile from Veevi.