Judith Krantz (47 page)

“I guess I never had a chance.” Pete looked at Jazz with the first signs of cheer on his face.

“What you need is a girl who doesn’t have any animals.”

“A girl who promises
never
to have any animals,” Pete agreed. “Like you.”

“Something like me,” Jazz agreed, reflecting that the amount of travel she did for her work effectively prevented her from keeping so much as a guppy.

“Why didn’t we have a great, mad, flaming romance when we first met?” Pete demanded. “I kept offering you my heart and my body, but you were never interested. Was it another guy?”

“No,” Jazz said dismissively. “You and I were meant to be friends, not lovers.”

“Bullshit. We would have been great together. We still would be. That invitation is permanent, honey. It must have been Gabe.”

“What are you, nuts?” Jazz sputtered.

“Ah, come on, kid, it’s the way he looks at you—angry, bitter, wistful,
hungry
, all that good stuff—and the way you went up in smoke when Phoebe wanted to bring him in, remember? Mel and I knew almost right away.”

“The two of you old gossips think you know everything!” Jazz said furiously. “You’re like a pair of ancient biddies sitting on a stoop somewhere, peeking through the neighbors’ curtains. Every man I know is a gossip! Don’t you have anything better to do?”

“It’s a necessity for us to exchange information,” Pete said calmly. “We have to know what the women in our lives are up to so they can’t surprise us. We have great respect for your power to disrupt our lives.”

“Well, you didn’t know shit about vets.”

“Unworthy of you, Jazz, but I’ll forgive you this once. How are you and Sam making out? Industry sources report a major passion.”

Jazz sighed with exasperation, but she couldn’t stay angry with Pete. He’d been a buddy for too long.

“Sam’s a good guy,” she answered. “I like him a lot.”

“But?”

“No ‘but.’ Simple statement of fact.”

“I heard a ‘but’ in your voice,” Pete insisted.

“Pete, there’s something you have to understand about Sam. He lives in a world other men will never live in, not you, not Mel, not anybody we know.”

“Huh? He just bought that Ferrari I advised him on—what are you talking about?”

“The world of beauty, Pete,” Jazz said patiently. “Sam is so beautiful that nobody can relate to him in a normal way. He says that it’s easier for a woman to almost get to understand him, but it’s just too tough to
ever explain to a man. He’d never get any sympathy from a guy, so how can he even complain?”

“Give me a break,” Pete said. “I relate to him fine. Of course, I’m gorgeous too.”

“Did you talk about anything except cars?”

“What else is there?”

“You might have tried to get to know Sam, but you didn’t, did you?”

“I will, next time I see him.”

“No you won’t, he’s too beautiful for any man to want to get to know him. It’s the unconscious, or conscious, envy factor.” Jazz sighed. “Sam says that all exchanges of small talk he has with other men are always stiff, or at best superficial, because they can’t look at him—I mean literally look at his face or into his eyes—the way they can with other guys … they’re afraid they’ll seem to be staring. And they can’t talk about girls with him because they assume that he’ll always have the edge on them with any woman. And they think he’s too beautiful to have any brains, so they don’t discuss serious things … only sports, cars, and the weather. The only man who talks to him semi-seriously is his agent, and then only about money. It’s a terrible thing to be that beautiful.”

“No shit,” Pete said kindly.

“It gets worse. Sam says that he didn’t ask to be born beautiful, that it’s a kind of curse, but that there’s nothing he can do about it except to accept the fact that no one outside of his family will ever,
ever
fully understand the real him. It’s like being some kind of freak, set apart from the rest of the human race. People sneak peeks at him as if he were an animal in a zoo. He intimidates most people, you know—too much beauty scares people—they flutter around him all flustered, as if he weren’t flesh and blood, but what can he do or say to reassure them without admitting that he knows
why
they’re acting that way? So it’s a double bind. God, I feel so sorry for him.”

“You two talk about this problem a lot?” Pete inquired.

“Naturally … it’s always on his mind, and with
all the massive publicity he’s been getting lately, it’s going to be worse and worse, with no end in sight.”

“But
you
understand him, don’t you? Isn’t that enough?”

“Sam says that even I can’t really, truly understand what it’s like. He thinks I’m so lucky just to be very, very pretty—because that’s on an understandable human scale—but that if I were really beautiful, like Michelle Pfeiffer, I’d
almost
be able to feel the reality of what he goes through, even though it’s much more culturally acceptable to be a beautiful woman than a beautiful man.”

“He
told
you that you weren’t as beautiful as Michelle Pfeiffer!”

“Pete, I appreciate the compliment, but face it, I’m not.”

“Look, honey, if I get to come back in another life, I want to be Michelle Pfeiffer, but to me you’re more beautiful than she is because I love you, and we don’t even fuck, so to a guy who—enjoys your favors—you should be much, much more beautiful.”

“Sam’s just being realistic. He’s an honest guy, and I don’t mind his being analytical, explaining it to me.”

“Yeah, over and over and over, it seems to me.”

“Not that often,” Jazz said with exasperation. “It’s not the only thing we talk about.”

“What else do you talk about?” Pete asked casually. He could hardly wait to tell Mel all this stuff.

“His work. The different scripts he turns down. What would be the next right career move for him—that’s critical when you’re so beautiful, because you don’t want to be cast
just
as a beauty—Sam has to do some serious decision-making. He’s thinking that maybe he should do a character part, even play a second banana in a serious political statement film with a major European director—like a Costa-Gavras—to try to break the mold. He’ll never get an Oscar if he isn’t accepted as an actor first, a beauty second.”

“Good thinking.”

“Yeah, but will anyone ever give him credit?
Look how people still talk about Paul Newman’s blue eyes before anything else, and they aren’t half as blue as Sam’s. Critics call Sam things like ‘painfully beautiful,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

“You going to bring him to Mel’s wedding?” Pete asked hopefully. This he had to see with his own eyes.

“It wouldn’t be fair—he’d upstage the bride.”

“I guess you’re right,” Pete said. He looked at Jazz sitting next to him, her bare legs drawn up so that her chin rested on her knees, her arms clasped around her calves. She had on white shorts, a navy camp shirt and bright red Keds. Her hair had been pushed back and tied in a knot of string, and her profile was grave and concerned. Now this girl, he thought, was painfully beautiful, if he’d ever seen that sight, because it gave him such a permanent and acute pain that he’d never had a decent shot at her. If only he’d met her when she wasn’t getting over another man, their lives would have been entirely different. Maybe he wasn’t right for Jazz, probably he wasn’t good enough for her, but, oh, how he wished she’d had a fair chance to find out before they became “just friends.”

Next chance he got, Pete thought, he was going to throw Gabe down a flight of stairs. Or run him over. Whichever was most likely to kill him. And hurt the most.

Jazz sat on a bench watching the shoppers stream into the South Coast Plaza at the entrance opposite I. Magnin’s, where a hillside of weeping ficus trees were planted, their festive leaves still as green as springtime in the early, still-slanting light of a cool December day.

Two days ago, Mike Kilkullen had driven up to Los Angeles to take Jazz out to dinner. Such an action Jazz had found uncharacteristic of her father, particularly since he expected her to come down to the ranch for the weekend. He had picked Le Chardon-nay, on Melrose Avenue, one of the best and most charming French restaurants in the city, ordered a particularly good bottle of wine, and, under her
amused, suspicious and loving eyes, proceeded to discuss nothing of importance for the next half hour. There was no way to rush him into whatever he wanted to talk about, Jazz decided, without seeming to be meddling in his private life.

When Mike Kilkullen gathered up his courage and announced to his daughter that he and Red Appleton were going to get married, Jazz felt a rush of unequivocal delight. She’d suspected that this development was in the wind for many weeks, but she hadn’t been sure how she’d feel when she heard the actual words. Now she was swept by joy for the two of them and something more: relief from a heavy responsibility she had accepted but never fully admitted to herself, a responsibility for shielding her father from his essential loneliness.

In the years following her mother’s death, Jazz had missed her desperately, but as she grew older, her emotions had grown less and less violent, until she had finally accepted and absorbed her loss. But Mike Kilkullen had never seemed to be able to let go of Sylvie, even after twenty years. There had always been an underlying melancholy, an ache of unresolved pain that Jazz was keenly aware of, a sadness no daughter could or should ever be dear enough to dispel.

But now, at last, there was Red and his almost boyish love for her, dear Red, so newly relaxed and radiant, Red with her growling, sweet-ass Texas drawl and her gift for salty wisecracks, Red who so visibly adored him; Red, sophisticated but essentially down-home, who would fill his life with unexpected, spontaneous fun and leave no room for him to grow into the hermit rancher that he might well have become without a wife. With Red, Mike Kilkullen would never again be all alone, except for a daughter who visited on weekends. He would rely infinitely less on Jazz for his happiness, and that, she thought, was a good and necessary thing, and yet it would never alter her own special relationship with him.

Jazz had immediately telephoned Red from the restaurant to tell her how happy the news had made her. As they talked, they realized that they hadn’t spent a minute alone together, without men around, and they decided to meet to do some Christmas shopping together this Friday.

Red must be late, Jazz told herself, and looked at her watch. No, she was just impatient to set her eyes on the new bride-to-be. This morning, with beds of freshly planted snapdragons all in bloom, with its scented air and cheerful crowds, felt like an unexpected school holiday, and Jazz was doubly glad that she’d been able to close the studio yesterday, on Thursday night. Next Monday she had to leave for New York and conferences with the Pepsi people.

Phoebe had insisted that Jazz go to New York now, instead of waiting until early January, when the Pepsi advertising agency’s creative team would come to California where most of the campaign would be shot. Phoebe had decreed, in her most knowing and impressive manner, that it was vital for Jazz to meet certain of the Pepsi executives on their home ground.

“You’ve got to get to know all the key players in advance, press the actual flesh, so that if you run into any trouble, you have personal relationships to fall back on in the client’s camp,” Phoebe had instructed Jazz, so emphatically that Jazz didn’t argue.

Her rep was a control freak, Jazz thought, but since it was just for this ability to see wheels within wheels that she paid her, and since Phoebe had negotiated the highest fee for commercial work that Jazz had ever been paid, she had reluctantly agreed.

As highly visible and expensive as the campaign would be, Jazz anticipated no problems on the creative side. She had done some trial shots, using her studio assistants as stand-ins for the celebrities, employing the new, seemingly off-the-cuff, casual, Peeping Tom technique that the agency and the client had loved for its innovative freshness. However, Phoebe had been adamant that she spend three days in New York, so depart she would.

“Jazz!” an excited voice called, and pulled her out of her thoughts. She jumped up and ran to meet Red, who had just turned her car over to the parking attendant. The two women embraced each other with that flustered mixture of complicated and not easily expressed emotions that affect a man’s grown daughter and the woman who is going to marry him, but whatever they saw in each other’s faces instantly assured them that their new relationship was going to be a heightened continuation of their old, easy friendship.

“Jazz, I can’t tell you what I was going through until you phoned the other night! I was sitting at home without a single fingernail left to gnaw on, imagining how you were going to take the news. Sweetie pie, I had some real scary Tennessee Williams scenarios going through my head.”

“I wish you’d been there to see Dad working himself up to it.” Jazz laughed at the memory of her sheepish father, who had suddenly turned grimly formal, almost Victorian. “He all but asked me for your hand in marriage. I wonder why he thought I’d be surprised or anything but thrilled?”

“Some daughters have been known not to be so generous with their daddies. Mike wanted to tell you without me there. Just the two of you.”

“But it’s been just the two of us for much,
much
too long. Oh Red darling Red, it feels so
right
to have you in the family! The Kilkullens need you. But look, we can’t just stand here, people are beginning to fall over us. We’d better walk as we talk.”

The two women strolled along the wide, tree-lined entrance to the vast shopping complex, an enclosed space that was far too grand to be called a mall, anchored by six large department stores, among which ran three levels of row upon row of world-famous boutiques; an Orange County version of all the streets of Beverly Hills’ Golden Triangle.

They stopped in front of Alfred Dunhill of London, struck immediately by the window display of handsome leather jackets. Red started to enter the store.

“Red, don’t move!” Jazz said in a voice of authority. “Remember, on the phone we promised each other that we’d get the bulk of our Christmas shopping done today, and if we go into a store before we know what we’re doing, chaos will follow. Now, I assume you have a list of the people you’re buying presents for, with the approximate amounts of what you want to spend alongside each name.”