Cheat and Charmer (76 page)

He looked at Jake, who winked at him.

“Ah,” said Hubie. “Lucky you. Some doll in New York?”

“L.A., actually. I’m kind of winding things down.”

“Nicely, nicely now. Good pickings in New York, huh?”

“Sensational. You know, dancers. You wouldn’t believe the muscles they’ve got. And the places they’ve got them.”

Hubie had taken Jake by the elbow and was leading him into his study, which had a piano loaded with music composition paper, a coffee cup filled with pencils, and a mantelpiece covered with golf trophies and advertising awards. Jake immediately felt at home in it. He was proud of his
cousin’s career, though he would never have wished it for himself, and toward which, in addition, he felt a certain superiority—the kind he felt toward television writers as well.

“You know, Betty and I have been married—let’s see now—nineteen years, and in all that time I’ve never once been unfaithful to her.” He waited for a moment. “In the same city.”

He laughed at his own line—a rapid, infectious laugh, in which Jake easily joined him, storing the line away for future use.

“Tell me something,” he said as he sat down behind Hubie’s desk and pulled the phone toward him. “Do you and Betty still do it?”

Hubie looked at him with a straight face.

“We sure do,” he replied as he headed toward the door. “Every single year.”

Twenty minutes later, Jake returned to the guest room, pulled out the book of his musical, and began going over one of the pages with a sharp pencil he had brought up from downstairs. He informed Dinah, who was putting on eye shadow and mascara for the evening ahead, that he had told Veevi exactly what she had wanted him to tell her.

He had, of course, done nothing of the kind. What he had told his wife’s sister was that he would always love her, and wanted her to be happy, and that nothing in the world should stand in the way of her finding happiness again with Mike. He said that if testifying would make it possible for the two of them to have a new life together, then she should go ahead and do it. “And God bless,” he added, using a phrase that Dinah loathed and considered the height of Hollywood phoniness.

D
inah pulled the thermometer out of Jake’s burning mouth: 102.4. He was shivering under the heap of extra blankets and looked like a balding child with glittering eyes. It was two-thirty in the morning, and outside a hard November wind pushed against the windows. He drew out a hot hand from under the covers and gestured for her to give him the newspaper again.

“No,” she said. “You’ve already read it a dozen times. Forget it. It doesn’t matter.” Then she relented and handed him a much-creased
New York Times
.

In a dry, cracking voice, Jake read: “Lasker’s tasteless one-liners will not go over well with those seeking a night of wholesome entertainment. While the raucous and lively streets of Chicago receive their due in O’Rourke’s lyrics and Hart’s tunes, the book’s endless family intrigues are unremittingly noisy and off-color. Buzz Keegan’s choreography, though exuberant and energetic, crosses the line from suggestive to salacious.”

“I don’t want to hear it again,” said Dinah, grabbing the newspaper out of his hand and throwing it on the floor. “You’re torturing yourself. This is just one guy’s opinion.”

“Two whole fucking years of my life,” he croaked. “What does that son of a bitch Quincy Bradford know about musical comedy?”

“GO TO SL-SL-SL-SLEEP.”

She was waiting for the Seconal she had given him twenty minutes earlier to take effect, but now, putting her hand on his forehead, she wondered whether the fever wasn’t giving him abnormal energy that would keep him ranting and raving for the rest of the night. “The audience loved
it,” she said. “Think of all those curtains calls. P-P-P-People were standing, and shouting. This is just one guy.”

“Doesn’t mean a thing if the critics hate it. And he’s the top critic in this town. I wish I were dead.”

“Shh.”

“We’ll have three more performances, and then we’ll close. I’ll be home next week. For good. Then what’ll I do? I don’t have a picture in me or on me right now. We’ve got a mortgage, a housekeeper, a laundress, a pool man, and two kids eating me alive. Not to mention—”

“Would you be quiet and go to sleep, please? Here. Your chest is tight, I can hear it.” She dipped her index and third fingers into a purple jar of Vicks VapoRub and spread the mentholated goo all over his chest. His eyes looked at her pleadingly, as if he wished she could change everything with a word.

“Do me a favor and go out at five for the papers, will you, honey?”

“Sure. Now, turn over and I’ll rub your back.”

Reaching under the covers, she glided her hand over his flat, almost shapeless behind, up along the broad shoulder blades, and began to press firmly against his flesh in broad, soothing circles. He turned to her suddenly. “Suck my dickie?”

She laughed and pushed his head back down on the pillow. “Forget it, Charlie. You’re b-b-b-burning up! Go to sleep.”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice murmurous and drooling. “What kind of a meshugana thinks he can bring a musical about a bunch of Hungarian Jews in Chicago to New York? You know what? This town is square. Deeply square. They think they invented life. They think they’re the standard for everything. I’ve never liked it here. Let’s pack and go back to Hollywood, right now. I wanna go home and see the kreebnabbers and get back on the golf course. Let’s go home tomorrow.”

“Shh.” She kept massaging his shoulders, his neck, waiting for the sleeping pill to work. The smell of VapoRub rose up to her own nostrils, clearing her head. He was hot, but she knew his fevers and felt certain that he would have a good sweat in the night and that the fever would break by morning.

The phone rang, and she picked it up, annoyed that anyone would call at this time of night. “Hello?”

There was no answer. “Hello? Hello?”

No response on the other end. She put the phone down. “Wrong n-n-n-number,” she said, and saw that in the seconds between the ringing of the phone and her putting it back on the receiver, Jake had fallen asleep. She turned off the light and sat on the edge of the bed for a while, just listening to him breathe, as she often did with her children.

Had he noticed, she wondered, when she eventually got into bed beside him, what happened when Thelma Ostrow, Milty’s ex-wife, and her new husband came up to them, pushing their way through the crowds of people in the foyer of the theater? There they all were, she and Jake, and Buzz Keegan and his wife, Lou, and Jimmy O’Rourke and a girl, and Sammy and Lois Hart, receiving congratulations (“It’s a hit, an absolute hit,” “It’s gonna run forever,” “Absolutely sensational,” she had heard over and over), when up come Thelma and this new husband of hers, Eugene Strong, a good, working New York actor, and still, she’d heard, a dedicated Party guy. Thelma seizes Jake’s hands and pulls him down and kisses him on both cheeks. “It’s sensational!” she says. “The best thing since
Guys and Dolls—
a classic, an absolute classic American musical.” And then she introduces the new husband, and he shakes hands with Jake and offers praise and congratulations, and then they cut Dinah dead, both of them. They turn their backs on her, after darting glances of icy hatred at her, and they move past her to Buzz Keegan, with whom they once again do the grabbing and kissing routine.

Two pure and incorruptible saints, Dinah said to herself, stretching herself out in the small cool space left unoccupied by her husband’s snoring hulk. Where did Thelma Ostrow suppose that Jake had gotten the wherewithal to keep working and do the show? Couldn’t she figure it out?

It wasn’t that Dinah minded being cut. Clearly, this was going to happen for the rest of her life, and she knew it could happen anytime, anywhere. But the way they left Jake out of the equation: now, that was funny. Kissing his ass because she thought he had a hit and might, just might, give her husband a job.

She laughed out loud and then turned on her side, facing Jake. She could feel the heat from his body and stretched her hand out to touch his arm and his upturned hand lying on the pillow. She closed her eyes, then opened them again. The wind was making a whining sound, but the nighttime
glow of the lit-up city flamed in through the windows. The bedroom was dry and stuffy from central heating, but Jake was a fervent believer in the pneumonia-causing properties of fresh air, especially in the East. And it was cold outside, colder than it ever got in L.A., cold with the menace of coming winter.

Once again, she was in the East. Last June, after Chicago, they had driven through Indiana and Ohio to Pennsylvania, back to Beaver Falls, and Pittsburgh, and then to Philadelphia, where she had taken out the AAA map and found a street, and told Jake to park the car in front of a house with a set of high front steps. Looking at it for a long time, she had said, finally, “Grandpa Milligan built that,” and pointed to a garage. “He took me down to the Baltimore docks and got the materials, just the two of us in his Model T, and built it himself, so that the garage would be toasty warm in the mornings and he could start up the car to get to work on time. God, it was cold in the mornings. We always had coughs and sniffles. The snot would freeze under our n-n-noses, and they’d be raw and sore.”

Gussie and the kids and Jake urged her to ring the doorbell. Maybe whoever lived there would let her in and show her the house. Her heart froze. “Should I?” All together they cried, “Yes! Yes!” And then maybe if the owner let her in, Dinah would be able to show them around, too.

So she walked up the steps where she had once tried to fly and broken her arm, next to the patch of grass where Veevi had sat in the sandbox holding out a little bag of brown sugar she had stolen from the kitchen—holding it out so that all of Dinah’s friends stopped watching the roller-skating race between Dinah and her rival, George Schmidt, and stood around Veevi in the sandbox, getting their faces and fingers sticky from licking the sugar.

She pressed the doorbell. The door opened and revealed a thin young woman in a housedress holding a baby in her arms. She wore no makeup, and a scarf was tied around her hair and knotted in the front. She looked at Dinah with caution. That could have been Mom forty-two years ago, opening the door with Veevi in her arms, Dinah thought, explaining why she was there. The woman said it was okay with her but her husband had told her never to let anyone in. She said she was sorry. Dinah asked her if the boiler was still in the garage, and the woman shook her head and said there was a boiler there but she honestly didn’t know whether it was old or new; she guessed it was new. As they spoke, Dinah looked beyond the woman and into the parlor, with its sofa and armchairs from Sears, and the
television in its “console,” and the open-topped cube of the baby’s playpen set on the vomit-green carpet. “Was there wallpaper here when you moved in?” The woman said there had been wallpaper, but it was old and faded, with big brown stains from leaks in the roof. “Do you remember the pattern?” Dinah asked. “Was it roses? Little bunches of roses? In f-f-f-festoons?”

“Honestly, ma’am, I don’t remember. I think so. But we had it all scraped off before we moved in. My husband said for the price we were paying the other owners should have scraped those walls themselves.”

It would have been so easy to say the next thing, to continue the conversation, to ask about the kitchen, the yard, the bedrooms, and the bathroom upstairs, where Dinah had undressed and washed her father so many decades ago when he came home staggering and reeking after yet another three-week binge. But she stopped herself cold. “Thank you, dear,” she said, the “dear” mixing warmth and gratitude with the condescension of a woman who now belonged to the upper middle class, and who would never stand in a doorway, as her mother had, in a shapeless housedress and a knotted kerchief, with the upright vacuum plugged in and waiting in the parlor.