The Son of Someone Famous (10 page)

I'd been trying to get my grandfather to talk that way around Billie Kay, so she could see how interesting he was. I'd throw him some cues, but he wouldn't pick up on them. For days, he'd been clammed up.

“Tell Billie Kay about the fine for celebrating Christmas,” I tried again while we were waiting for her taxi.

My grandfather just shrugged.

“Has the liquor bottle got your tongue?” Billie Kay asked him.

“No one's got yours,” he said.

Billie Kay had bet him he couldn't go a whole week without something to drink. He'd bet her she couldn't go a whole week without picking up Janice. Janice was living with us temporarily. When Billie Kay was around, Janice hid under my grandfather's bed. Nights she came out and sat on his lap.

Our party was to be sort of an open-house type. Young
and old were invited. Billie Kay had called Mrs. Blossom to spread the word, and Brenda Belle herself had been calling kids from school.

“No tasting the punch, either,” Billie Kay told my grandfather. “I'll oversee the punch myself.”

When the telephone rang, Billie Kay said, “A.J., I bet that's your father. He'll probably want to say hello to me, too, since he didn't get the chance Christmas day.”

My grandfather went to answer the phone. I didn't tell Billie Kay that when my father had called Christmas day, he'd said he had nothing to say to her. (“What the hell is she bothering you for?” he'd said. I'd said, “She's visiting. It's Christmas.” He'd said, “Can't she find anyplace else to go?”)

My father was in Los Angeles by then. We'd read in the newspapers that he was dating some new starlet the gossip columnists had nicknamed “Electric Socket,” because her real name was Electra. I'd seen a picture of her. She was like a lot of girls my father was interested in: barely out of her teens, blonde, gigantic bust. It was hard to imagine him taking her to meet all the important people he knew—governors and senators and past presidential candidates, plus the whole Hollywood crowd my father hung around with. Billie Kay said Electric Socket was just “dressing.” Billie Kay said that at the gatherings my father attended, the less a woman knew, the better.

It was not my father calling.

“If he's not eating,” my grandfather was telling someone, “don't try and force him to eat. Have you taken his temperature?”

Billie Kay marched herself into the kitchen and took the phone right out of his hands. “We do not give free advice on animal care here,” she said into it. “If your animal is ill, take your animal to Dr. Cutler and pay the fee.” Then she put down the receiver.

“What'd you do that for?” my grandfather snarled at her.

“For your self-respect,” said Billie Kay. “I'm tired of these freeloaders who call up here every time one of their pets gets the sniffles or the runs!”

My grandfather shook his head from side to side.

“I'd forgotten what it was like having a woman around,” he said. “I'd forgotten what meddlers they all are.”

“You've also forgotten how to talk to a woman,” Billie Kay said. “You've hardly said two words to me since I got here this morning.”

“The two words I'd choose to say would be ‘go away,'” said my grandfather.

“I'm going away in about five minutes, but I'm coming back!”

“We won't be on pins and needles waiting,” he said.

After she left in the taxi, my grandfather sat in the living room for a while, pretending to watch an old movie on television. I felt sorry for him. He was fidgeting and sighing and rubbing his chin with his fingers.

“If you want to sneak a beer,” I said, “I won't tell her.”

“A bargain's a bargain,” he said. “A bet's a bet.”

“I'm sorry she's so bossy,” I said. “She wasn't bossy
toward my father.”

“She wasn't herself with your father. She was trying to be a girl again.”

“Don't let it get you down,” I said. “She'll be gone in a few days.”

“That sport coat she bought me,” said my grandfather. “I once owned just such a coat. It's too good for me now.”

“Why is it too good for you?”

“I mean I don't have any place to wear it!” he grumbled.

“You can wear a coat like that anywhere,” I said.

“Around here they'll think I'm putting on the dog.”

“What do you care what they think around here?”

“I happen to live here, A.J.!” he shouted.

There wasn't anything I could say to that. It was strange. He didn't seem to care that the local bartender threw him into a cab after a drinking bout, but he cared if people thought he was putting on the dog.

“I'm sorry, A.J.,” he said. “It's just that I am what I am, as Popeye the Sailor would say. I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam.”

“I get you,” I said.

“I'm too old to change,” he said.

“You don't have to change, Grandpa.”

“What do
you
know?” he said softly. “What do you know about it, A.J.?”

He didn't expect an answer, and I didn't have one.

We worked all afternoon cleaning up the place. We washed out a dozen old jelly jars for extra glasses.

(I had to hand it to Billie Kay. She wasn't the snob I'd
thought she might be about my grandfather's hospitality. She didn't act at all uncomfortable eating off plates that didn't match, or drinking coffee from cracked mugs, and she'd actually raved over our tree.) By the time Brenda Belle telephoned around five o'clock, the place was really shipshape. If it wasn't fancy, it was clean and orderly.

“I've got great news,” she said. “Ty Hardin is coming, darling.”

I still had trouble getting used to her calling me “darling” and “sweetheart.” It was hard for me to use words like that, too.

“Fine, honey bunch,” I said to her, trying not to sound too interested in the news Ty Hardin was coming. I'd been hoping Christine would come.

Brenda Belle immediately put a pin in that balloon. “He's not bringing Christine. They've had another big fight, and he's just ditching her on New Year's Eve. . . . Don't call me ‘honey bunch,' darling. It's icky.”

“Didn't you invite her anyway?” I said.

“Of course not! She's really a rotten person inside.”

“I thought you liked her at one time.”

“Christine Cutler?” she said. “You've got to be kidding, sweetheart. She's really this big phony, darling. I hate a phony!”

While she rattled off the names of the other people coming, I thought of Christine being without a date on New Year's Eve. I felt badly for her, even though she had tried to keep me from attending her Christmas Eve party.

“Listen, love,” I managed. “What about Nothing
Power? A girl who's ditched on New Year's Eve certainly qualifies for Nothing Power.”

“People who are Something to begin with don't deserve Nothing Power,” said Brenda Belle. “Ty is a real character, sweetheart. When I called him he asked me if anyone ever mistook me for a boy over the telephone. You want to know what I said back?”

“What?”

“I said, ‘No, has anyone ever mistaken you for one?' We both just howled then.”

“I thought you were sensitive on that subject,” I said.

“Not with Ty,” she said, “because I know he really likes girls. I mean, he's had a lot of experience. He's the passionate type.”

“I see,” I said, but I didn't.

“Not that I care, but you're not exactly that type,” Brenda Belle said. “You're younger . . . not just in years, but in a lot of ways.”

I didn't argue with that. I'd driven down to Tijuana with my father that past summer, over a weekend. He'd insisted it was time for me to become a man. I'd become one, I suppose, at least in his eyes. Afterward, I'd paid this young girl with the money he'd given me, and for some reason I'd said to her, “I'm sorry.” My father heard about it from the woman who ran the place. She'd laughed when she told him, but my father didn't think it was funny. On the way back he'd bawled me out. “You have no game in you, A.J.! You have no adventure! That little bimbo was taking you for twenty bucks, and
you
apologized to
her
! Grow up, A.J.!
Don't be so naive!”

Brenda Belle said, “Before you hang up, sweetheart, there's one other thing. We're supposed to go into a clinch at the dot of midnight. People will expect that. I mean, we are going steady, darling.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Promise me you'll remember that, or I'll be humiliated,” she said.

“I'll remember,” I said. “I would have done it anyway.”

“I can't disappoint my fans,” she said. “And speaking of fans, lover, is it still a secret about Billie Kay?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then don't turn on the late show,” she said. “One of her old movies with Bing Crosby is scheduled.”

“Who'd turn on television in the middle of a party?” I answered.

Who'd turn on television in the middle of a party? Billie Kay Case would. Billie Kay Case did, promptly at eleven thirty.

It was then that I realized something I should have guessed from past experience with celebrities. They can stand being anonymous for just so long. They can go through the sunglasses bit and the false name bit for just so long, and then they get an itch for a little more attention than an ordinary person gets.

My father is the same way. One of his tricks used to be to get me to telephone a tip to the press that he was dining at a certain restaurant. Then when the photographers would show up, he'd make this big scene. He'd blame the
maitre d', and he'd pretend he was escaping through a back door, and for good measure sometimes he'd break one of the photographers' cameras.

Billie Kay had her own sly approach that night. “Hey,” she said, “don't we want to see the big Times Square scene, and the old red ball that drops at midnight?”

Then she turned on the set and switched to the channel where her old movie was showing.

“That's a Billie Kay Case movie coming on!” Brenda Belle's aunt cried out.

“Surprise! Surprise!” said Billie Kay. She had been dipping into the punch bowl, and she was feeling no pain.

“I think you really
are
Billie Kay Case,” said Brenda Belle's mother.

“Surprise, surprise,” Billie Kay answered, performing a small curtsy.

“I just knew it!” Brenda Belle's aunt squealed. She grabbed Billie Kay and hugged her, and then she called out, “Folks, we have a celebrity in our midst!”

I was standing by the Christmas tree with Brenda Belle and Ty Hardin. Brenda Belle had been paying more attention to Ty Hardin than to anyone, all the while calling me “darling” and “sweetheart” in these asides, but never taking her eyes from Ty.

Up until this point, Ty had been making fun of the tree and the jelly glasses we were serving the punch in. He was whispering his wisecracks to Brenda Belle, and she was giggling encouragement. I was really angry with her for not sticking up for my grandfather and me, and for not at least
admitting that the tree was original, as she had when she first saw it. She was certainly spitting in the eye of Nothing Power.

When Ty heard the announcement that Billie Kay Case was present, he turned to me and said, “She's joking, right?”

Brenda Belle said, “It happens to be true, Ty. Billie Kay's a friend of ours, isn't she, darling?”

I gave her a dirty look. The tree and the jelly glasses weren't “ours,” but Billie Kay Case
was
“ours.”

“Why the sour look, sweetheart?” she asked.

Ty made it unnecessary for me to answer. He said, “Wait until Christine finds out what she missed!”

“That's what she gets for being such a rotten person inside,” said Brenda Belle.

Everyone began circling around Billie Kay, including Ty and Brenda Belle. There were about twenty people at the party, kids from school and some of their parents, none of them particular friends of mine or my grandfather's.

Billie Kay was in her glory. Rufus Kerin asked her for her autograph, which started the ball rolling. Everyone was getting out pieces of paper and pens and pencils.

I looked around for my grandfather, but he wasn't anywhere in view. I went back into the kitchen to see if he was there, and he wasn't. I paused in front of the telephone. I was thinking of Christine and Nothing Power. I picked up the Storm telephone directory and began running my finger down the column of C's. Then I dialed.

A man answered and I asked to speak to her.

“Who's calling?” he said.

“Adam,” I said.

“Adam?” he said.