Judith Krantz (51 page)

“No! Never! How strange, it’s not even the same size as the others. Wait a minute, Casey—look at what’s written on it—‘Amilia Moncada y Rivera’—my great-grandmother! That was her maiden name. She must have owned it before she married Hugh Kilkullen. And look, it has a date on it—1883. He was born in 1864, so she must have been a very young woman then. Help me get this open, for Pete’s sake,” Jazz said excitedly, struggling with a ribbon that threatened to crumble as she tried to untie the complicated knot.

The ribbon yielded finally, and Jazz opened the portfolio with impatient fingers. It had four accordion-pleated compartments, and she saw immediately that although two of them contained photographs, the others held various kinds of papers, most of them brightly colored. “Some things never change,” Jazz sighed with pleasure, recognizing what they were as soon as she saw them. “Amilia kept her valentines. Look how beautiful they were. Have you ever seen valentines like these?” She lifted each elaborate, lacy, embossed card with the tips of her fingers, scanned their old-fashioned designs and opened them up to see the different names that had been signed to them. “Amilia has always had a reputation as the flirt of the family. Oh, and Casey, look, a bundle of letters. Maybe they’re love letters. I hope they’re all from Hugh Kilkullen, but I wouldn’t bet on it. This ribbon is just too pretty and too tightly wound to tackle now. I’d make a mess of it. What’s this?” She held up two sheets of
yellowed paper. “It’s in Spanish, but look at that complicated handwriting. It would take me a day to try to figure it out. I can speak ranch Spanish with the vaqueros, and I took traditional Spanish in school, but I don’t think I could translate this. It’s to Amilia from, oh, Casey, it’s signed Juanita Isabella—my great-great-grandmother! She was Valencia’s daughter, the girl Michael Kilkullen married when he bought this ranch. Now, why do you suppose Amilia kept a letter from her mother-in law?”

“Maybe it contained a list of suggestions for keeping Kilkullen men happy, from a Spanish woman’s point of view.”

Jazz lifted her eyebrows pityingly at him. “For some reason, that seems to be a typically unimaginative male remark.” She put the valentines and the letters scrupulously back inside the portfolio and pulled out the photographs that were in the other compartments, and laid them out on the table. There was a silence as she and Casey studied the pictures that were over a century old.

“It’s a good thing she labeled them,” Jazz finally remarked.

“What a large family,” Casey said.

“And what terrible pictures! My God, these people look as if they’d been electrocuted first and stuffed afterwards. And the lighting is so bad you can barely make out their faces. They’re almost all members of her own family. Look, here’s one of Hugh Kilkullen. I’ve never seen him look so young in any of his self-portraits. Amilia must have taken it before they were married. He looks dashing, from the little you can see of him.”

“He looks like your father would if he had dark hair and a mustache,” Casey said.

“Doesn’t he, though? Hugh Kilkullen’s own pictures make you realize how far ahead of his time he was. Well, even if these aren’t good pictures, it’s fascinating to have them. Look, here’s one of Amilia’s parents, my great-great-grandparents on the Spanish
side. I think the Irish genes dominated.” Jazz sighed. “It would have been great to discover a great-grandmother with talent.”

“That way you could say it came down from the female line.”

“Right. Well, let’s put everything back. I’ll show them to Dad when I get a chance.”

Jazz closed the portfolio, not daring to try to tie the ribbon. Casey put it back on the shelf with the larger, green portfolios from 1910.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired, Casey,” Jazz said. “I just realized that I’m still on New York time—my day started a dozen years ago. I’d better try to get some sleep.”

“Next time I go on a treasure hunt, I’ll take a girl who can stay awake later than eight o’clock,” Casey grumbled as he turned off the light of the archive room and locked the door.

How many points do you get for being a good sport, he asked himself. Jazz designed a weary good night in the air and started off to her room. Two hundred? No, dickhead,
minus
two hundred.

Although she had felt a wave of utterly draining fatigue in the archive room, Jazz realized that it was still only nine in the evening as she finished her bath and got ready for bed. She didn’t know whether to push herself to stay up until a reasonable hour and get back on California time, or to give in and go to sleep early. Absently she opened the Christmas present Pete had thrust into her tote bag as they talked in Mel’s studio during the party. Black satin pajamas and a matching robe, man-tailored and bound with an edging of white satin. Pleasure lit her face. In the language of lingerie, this ensemble made an open but nonaggressive declaration of desire. Good old Pete. He never stopped trying. She put them on, and they felt so delicious, slithering over her body, that she decided that nothing was more important than going to bed.

Jazz woke up with a bump three hours later, an abrupt surfacing into total consciousness that informed
her that there would be no easy return to sleep, not even in this bed, in which she usually slept better than anywhere else in the world. It was midnight on her alarm clock, so it was three in the morning in New York, and everyone knew that the worst possible time to wake up was three in the morning, an hour that had a way of distorting thoughts, of bringing up ideas that would never be given house room during the day. And yet, as she lay in bed, her eyes wide open, she was aware that she felt mysteriously and deeply happy, as if she’d had a marvelous dream that she couldn’t remember, which had colored her awakening.

Jazz reached down and picked up some of the patchwork pillows she had pushed onto the floor just before she dove into sleep, stuffed them behind her, and sat up in bed to check out her thoughts. Happiness like this, after her hellish morning, had to be accounted for. She probed gently at the whole mess of Gabe and Phoebe and their heist of the party shoot.

Of course, Susie was right; she just hadn’t been able to face the whole truth at dinner. Gabe must have known what he was doing. Almost the first words she’d said to him when he’d shown up at her apartment had concerned the Lakers. She’d even been wearing her Lakers T-shirt. Of course, Gabe would always behave in a Gabe-ish way, Phoebe in a Phoebeish way. The only method for dealing with people like those two was either to accept them with a shrug or stop having anything to do with them. Like bedbugs.

She had chosen the latter course. It had been a clean decision, instantly arrived at, and in a final way, Jazz realized that they were truly out of her life. The bruised, battered emotions she’d brought back to the ranch had vanished. She still yearned to see Magic’s housewarming surprise party, but that wish had been relegated to the never-never-land of unfulfilled wishes, the equivalent of owning good season tickets to the Forum. Wishes? Had she dreamed about wishes? The word had rung a tiny, maddening bell of dream memory as it came into her mind, Jazz thought, but she
couldn’t capture anything more, although her feeling of unaccounted-for happiness remained as strong as ever.

Jazz’s thoughts turned to Sam Butler. Perhaps she felt happy because he’d be coming down to the ranch for the first time on Monday. He’d been in a tormented state the last time she’d seen him. He’d agreed to do a comedy for Guber-Peters in which he’d play a male model who confounds expectations by becoming a real-estate tycoon, but he’d been overcome by contract-signer’s remorse.

“It was the worst career move I could have made,” he insisted miserably to Jazz. “I still don’t know how those brass assholes convinced me that it would be good for me to play against the typical thinking about male models, but I was bloody well had. Then I talked to this interviewer, and he told me that actors invariably expose their real selves, not in an interview, where they can hide, but in their choice of roles, which is, according to him, a
fatal
revelation of who they really are. So I had to ask myself if Redford would ever have agreed to play a male model, and I had to admit that he wouldn’t. In fact, no bugger of a producer would have had the bloody nerve to ask him.”

Jazz smiled at the thought of Sam and his career agonies. Oh, they were real, all right, as real as the agonies of any ordinary-looking man, and she tried to be as sympathetic as she would be to Mel or Pete, but he had a way of—was it just overdramatizing them? A way of making them seem not quite real. It wasn’t anything he could help, she thought pityingly, poor Sam, a very large, very normal Australian trapped in the face and body of a great beauty. Ancient Greece would have been the right time and place for him to have been born, she decided, although it would never do to tell him that. His sense of humor wouldn’t make the stretch.

No, thinking about Sam only made her queasy. The almost-unprecedented gathering of the whole family over Christmas had never promised to be a
feast of good feelings, and the addition of Sam, an unknown element, might prove a welcome distraction or it might prove a disaster. She wished that she hadn’t impulsively invited him when he’d told her so plaintively that he couldn’t go home for the holidays, home where he was treated just like everyone else. How would her father take to Sam? But why should she worry about that? He only had eyes for Red. Why not worry about something real, like whether or not Sam and Casey would be civil to each other?

Casey! Jazz sat bolt upright in her bed as a fragment of her dream came back to her. She’d been sitting on the piano bench with Casey, and he’d been singing “There’s a Small Hotel” and he’d just finished the second line, about the wishing well, and then—she couldn’t remember beyond Casey singing, “I wish that we were there, together.” Her chin had been leaning on his shoulder.

Jazz closed her eyes tightly and concentrated hard, but no additional image came into her mind. However, the feeling of happiness intensified and focused, as if she were looking into an emotional view-finder.
Casey
.

She had barely paid attention to him tonight. All through dinner he’d just been a suitably outraged audience, after dinner he’d been a kindly, warming, patient presence who would have followed any of her whims to distract her from her anger, and yet … and yet … what if he hadn’t been here tonight? Would she be wide awake at midnight, alive with an absolute understanding that if truth be told, Sam Butler was just a little bit—well, a little bit self-absorbed, that Gabe was nothing more than a hopeless Hungarian, that even Phoebe was basically a bad joke? Casey had a way of putting things into perspective, not by what he said, but by what he was.

Integrity. That was it. Casey had integrity, Jazz decided. On impulse, she got out of bed and put on her new robe. She wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep for hours now, she told herself, as she hesitated in front of the door to her room. Should she go into
the kitchen and make some warm milk? It was the classic remedy for insomnia, but it seemed like too much work. Should she turn on the light and read until she felt sleepy? No again.

It was so cold in her room. All of Southern California was having one of its classic fits of miserable winter weather, for which the natives were never prepared. She should go into the living room and see if the embers of the fire were still burning, add some logs and build up the fire, Jazz thought, as she realized that she was humming the tune of “A Small Hotel.” Hadn’t Mel and Pete once had a long discussion about how all they had to do was listen to what songs came unbidden to their lips, to know what was really on their unconscious minds? Mel had called it “tune therapy,” and for once Pete had agreed with him. If what they said was true, then it followed that what she needed to put her back to sleep was to hear Casey singing at the piano.

It sounded right. Yes, here was the ring of truth to the idea. A few verses of his barroom ballads, and she’d be yawning. The only problem was that Casey’s room was in the guest wing at the end of the long, covered veranda that ran along the hacienda, and she’d have to go outside, walk there and get him, possibly wake him up, explain the situation, invite him into the music room and let him sing.

Still, he had offered to do anything to cheer her up after dinner. Now that she had cheered up, in fact, cheered up remarkably, what was to prevent her from telling him that she was more upset than ever, and wanted to take up his offer to do Ella? Nothing, Jazz admitted, except a regard for his uninterrupted sleep and a minor question of telling the truth. If she looked at it another way, Casey would probably be so pleased to know she felt better that he’d be glad she had roused him to tell him, and the news would put him in the mood for singing. Yes, that was, in fact, the only considerate thing to do. For all she knew, he was still awake himself, worrying about her as if she were a sick cow.

This was truly thoughtful of her, Jazz thought, as she walked barefoot along the veranda where the winter-blooming jasmine perfumed the air with sweet nostalgia. There was an unhealthy, penetrating dampness in the night air, and a gusty wind, and here she was, risking catching a cold just to put Casey’s mind at rest. An angel of mercy, very properly clad in black satin. Of course, if she’d been wearing a lacy nightgown she would have changed to something less revealing, but in a robe like this she could go out dancing.

There was no light under Casey’s door. Obviously he hadn’t been concerned enough about her to keep him from sleeping, Jazz thought, as she shivered. She rapped on the door several times, but she didn’t hear him stir. She called his name but there was no answer. The wind blew nastily through the layers of satin, and her feet were freezing on the cold stone floor. Pneumonia weather. Jazz twisted the knob impatiently. The heavy old door opened with a creak of wood and she stepped quickly into the room and closed the door behind her. She waited a minute to get accustomed to the darkness, remembering her first painful encounter with Casey’s luggage.

There were lanterns that were always kept lit in the patio, and they cast enough light so that soon she could see fairly well. She went over to Casey’s deeply sleeping form and hovered over him, trying to decide on the best way to wake him up. She could pull on his big toe, which was the kindest way, because the toe was so far from the heart that it didn’t cause alarm, but Casey’s toes were covered by a blanket. She could stroke the back of his hand, but the hand nearest her was under the blanket too, and the other was flung so far on the other side of the bed that she’d have to lean far over him to reach it, and risk falling on top of him.