Till We Meet Again (41 page)

“If you please, Mademoiselle.”

“Just a second, LeMaitre,” Sette demanded. “What stage will you be working on?”

“Seven. In about an hour.”

“We’ll all meet you there.”

“I think,” said Delphine, “that I’d rather do the test without an audience of friends and family. Guy, be an angel and meet me outside when it’s over? Bruno, you really don’t have to wait, you know. I’ll be quite safe with Monsieur LeMaitre.”

“I’m sure you will. I’ll call tomorrow. Have fun.” Bruno kissed her cheek and walked quickly out of the commissary, followed by Guy Marchant, still gesticulating in vain protest. Jacques Sette signed the lunch check gloomily. Bluford was sure to hear of this, and no matter how the test turned out, it would all become his fault somehow.

The makeup lady was fat and friendly and a brilliant professional. She addressed Delphine in the familiar norm and admired her hat even as she took it off to rearrange Delphine’s hair, releasing it from its polished waves with a
brush so that it fell back from her face and almost clear down to her shoulders, dramatically revealing her widow’s peak. She performed undreamed-of tricks with mascara and rewrote Delphine’s cheeks, the bones of her jaw and the sockets of her eyes in dark shades of base, creating shadows that accentuated the natural contours of her face in a far bolder manner than Delphine would have believed possible or desirable. She explained to the protesting girl that on black-and-white film her work would look as natural as if Delphine wore only ordinary makeup. She crooned over the width of Delphine’s forehead, the largeness of her eyes, and the perfect small oval of her chin. “A real heart shape, this little one, a true heart,” she repeated, almost to herself.

At last Delphine’s lipstick was applied and she was free to leave the makeup room. Outside the door she found LeMaitre waiting patiently for her.

“Good. Very good. Now come and meet Monsieur Ambert.” He guided her in the twilight of Stage Seven toward the director’s chair. Nico Ambert stood up, and as he extended his hand, he measured her again, sweeping her from head to foot with his unrelentingly open assessment, but his voice was gentle.

“I’m glad you accepted my invitation, Mademoiselle. I hope you’re not nervous.”

“Should I be?” Delphine heard herself saying teasingly, as if he were a boy back home. She only wished that Margie were here to see this. Only that could make it real.

Ever since the casting director had approached her at lunch she had felt as if she were in a feverish but miraculous dream. Every atom of reality was heightened by the heady surroundings of the studio, where the most ordinary door could open unto a world of wonders. She had scarcely spared a thought for the mechanics of a screen test, so stirred had she been by the sights and smells of what she thought of, confusedly, as being backstage. She was trying to absorb and remember everything around her, to fuse herself with it, just as she had lost herself in the scene with Gabin and Michèle Morgan.

“Should you be?” Ambert repeated. “No, of course not. Sit down here, next to me, and I’ll show you what you will read. It’s very simple, you’ll just read the lines that are underlined in red, and I’ll read the others to you … a little
dialogue between us. You must not look at the camera, if you can manage that. Would you like to read it to yourself first?”

“I’m not an actress,” said Delphine. “So what good would that do?”

“To orient yourself, perhaps?”

“You orient me, Monsieur. I think that would be better.”

“Do you know the story of
Mayerling?”

“Not really.”

“Never mind. This scene is just a meeting between a young noblewoman and the heir to the Hapsburgs. It takes place at a ball … they are dancing together … and falling in love.”

“Well, that sounds familiar,” Delphine said, smiling. “Where do you want me?”

“Over there. Why don’t you leave your jacket here? It will be hot in the lights.”

Delphine shrugged off her red jacket and tossed it on the back of her chair, and wearing only the slender matching skirt and a simple white silk blouse, she walked fifteen feet to the high stool Ambert had indicated. As soon as she sat down the director gave an order and a bank of lights smashed on, making her throw an arm before her eyes with a cry of surprise.

“Tell me when you can see well enough to read,” he said, speaking, across the distance that separated them, so clearly that he could have been sitting next to her.

Delphine waited, truly aware, for the first time, of the weight of many male eyes sizing her up with an avid yet professional interest. Like the lights, it was a blow, and like the lights it was utterly welcome, a primeval attention. She had never felt so alive, so much herself, so much in control.

In the minutes that it took her to grow accustomed to the glare she felt something growing warmly and alarmingly inside of her. It was not the heat of the lights on her skin. It was a glow that started in her belly and spread rapidly and irresistibly until it reached down and gripped her between her legs and made her cross her thighs so that they wouldn’t reveal the involuntary and sudden fluttering of her lower lips. She sat pinned in the lights, holding on to the stool with both hands. The script fell to the floor as she was gripped by a powerful orgasm. She bit her lips, sat up as rigidly as she could, thrusting her breasts forward and her shoulders back, her legs pressed together with all her strength so that nothing
would be betrayed to the watching men. Nico Ambert felt his penis fill and rise in response to her excitement. This hadn’t happened to him in years.

There was utter silence on the set.

“Jules, give her the script,” Ambert muttered when he saw that Delphine had recovered some of her composure. He was too hard to move.

LeMaitre handed Delphine the script. Nico began reading, a long speech that he had deliberately chosen to put an actress at ease.

Delphine listened, her eyes seeing but not comprehending the words, her breath coming too quickly in the aftermath of her orgasm to permit her to say her lines. The glow was still there, hot and urgent, and she knew that it would take little to set her off again. It must be the lights, she thought, it must be the lights.

“Mademoiselle?”

“Yes,” she said faintly.

“Can you see to read?”

“I’ll try.” She took a deep breath and concentrated fiercely on the script. Soon the lines made sense and she read, unaware of the camera, unaware of the spectators, throwing all her being into the lines underlined in red, because only then could she control her body. Ambert’s voice responded to her lines. Who the hell, he wondered, had taught her how to fuck the camera? She continued to read, he answered, she replied, until
réplique
following
réplique
, in a dance of words, they had finished the short scene.

The director signaled for the lights to be turned off and in the sudden darkness he got up quickly and walked to where Delphine still sat, shocked by the abruptness of the ending. He took her by her arm, where it was bare beneath her short sleeve.

“You were splendid. I’m afraid it was difficult,” he said in a low voice, and it seemed to her that the scene had started again.

“It was so … bright.”

“I understand. You would like to sit down quietly somewhere before you join your friends.”

“Yes.”

“Come.” He led her quickly off the set, around a corner, around a forest of flats, and into his dressing room. He turned, with his back to the door, and pulled her toward him.
He kissed her on her open mouth, a barbarous kiss, a rapturous kiss. “Do you know … do you know?” he asked her, his voice brutal.

“What?” she gasped, knowing perfectly well.

“What you did to me? Feel it.” He pressed his body against hers so closely that the full, long, animal length of him etched itself on her belly. Men had tried to push themselves against Delphine dozens of times, but she had always eluded them. Now she almost fainted toward Ambert, her eyes closed, her mouth greedy for his brutal, necessary kisses. He carried her to his couch and lay her down, opening her blouse, hovering over her so that his lips never lost contact with her nipples while he flung off their clothes. Delphine had let men touch her nipples but never kiss them, much less see them, and now, naked, exposed, blissfully shamed, it was as if she were under the lights again. His relentless, experienced tongue made her madly liquid, but he knew too much about her already to allow her to have another orgasm. He pulled her hair painfully. “Not yet,” he whispered. “Not yet, you little bitch, not again without me.” As he opened her thighs he put down his head to inhale the scent of her readiness, but he was careful not to touch her anywhere near her pubic hair. She shoved herself upward, suddenly far, far beyond any modesty, but he just grunted in negation and knelt over her, taking his penis in his hand. He pushed it into her with the voluptuary slowness of a man who has been kept waiting for so long that he is cautious not to move too quickly. Slowly, slowly he entered her, with a vicious, selfish gourmandise that masqueraded as gentleness. She was so wet, so open and so wild to be taken, that he pierced the thin wall of her virginity before either of them knew it, and dug into her at full length. He still held her hair in his grip and only now did he release her so that she could concentrate on the voracious rod that filled her belly. Both of them scarcely breathed, feeling him grow bigger, impossibly bigger, inside of her. As he lay without moving he muttered, “Every man in that studio had his cock in his hand. And you knew it, you knew it, you little bitch.” Delphine cried, “I can’t wait, I can’t,” and she came in a great wilderness of exquisite tossing that touched a match to his own bucking, hurting, passionate explosion.

12

O
N September third, 1936, Los Angeles was on the eve of becoming, for four days, the center of international aviation. Spruced up and enlarged, Mines Field had been renamed the Municipal Airport. The local organizers of the sixteenth annual National Air Races, which were being held for the first time in the City of the Angels, had resolved that if anybody could show the world how to put on a spectacle, they could.

Freddy had all but memorized the flood of newspaper stories on the events that were about to take place. She knew that Harold Lloyd, as grand marshal, would lead a long motor parade of floats and bands out to the airport; she knew exactly at what time a bomb, bursting in the air over the field, would announce the arrival of the crack Army, Navy and Marine pursuit squadrons, who would demonstrate formation and stunt flying in aerial attack and defense; she knew when in the day the motorcycle-to-glider transfer stunts would take place, and when to expect the mass parachute jumping contest. She knew that Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Benita Hume were planning to have a picnic before the races from a canary yellow basket filled with yellow cups and yellow plates; that Adrienne Ames, in brown tweed, was expected with her former husband, Bruce Cabot, that Carole Lombard and Kay Francis would be among the guests of honor. She even knew the names and faces of the Beverly Hills society girls who had been chosen to greet the service fliers as junior hostesses at the military and naval ball that would end the first day of the National Races.

And she didn’t give a damn. It was all window dressing, fill, between the races.

Only three events commanded Freddy’s passionate attention: the Bendix transcontinental speed dash from the East Coast to L.A.; the Ruth Chatterton Derby, for “sportsmen pilots,” which had begun six days before in Cleveland, and was proceeding, in handicapped laps, on to Los Angeles; and
the Amelia Earhart Trophy, a closed circuit speed race around pylons, the only race of the schedule that was limited to women, in which eight contestants would take part.

Of those three races, it was the Chatterton that had taken possession of her imagination, to the point where she yearned toward it in her mind, as she had yearned for nothing since her solo. It was a race that she could have entered if she had a plane. Could have entered. Would have entered. Might even have won.
If
she had a plane of her own.

There were thirty-two contestants, male and female, flying every kind of aircraft in competition against their own best possible speeds. The papers had been full of the Chinese girl, Katharine Sui Fun Cheung, who was flying a small Cessna, and of Peggy Salaman, the London society girl whose mother had smilingly told a reporter, “You really can’t dance all day, can you? So Peggy took up aviation.” Damn, but she
hated
Peggy Salaman, Freddy thought in a storm of envy, Peggy Salaman
and
her damned generous mother!

The Chatterton was so painful to think about that she walked around in a trance, trying to concentrate on nothing but the obviously, mercifully, self-evidently unattainable Bendix, with its band of famous pilots who were, even now, doing the last minute tune-up of their ships at Floyd Bennett Field, after weeks of rumors and counter rumors, stories of super-streamlined machines never seen before; secret wind tunnel testing of high powered designs; new and more powerful motors than had ever been known; desperate efforts, going on all through the night, to add speed to each plane by any means possible; mysterious last minute entries and hysteria in the press.

The Bendix was a free-for-all race, its only rule that the pilots had to leave Floyd Bennett at dawn on the fourth of September and arrive in Los Angeles by 6:00 P.M. of the same day.
Aviation Magazine
, Freddy’s bible, had announced that the favorite was Benny Howard, who had won the annual race the year before in his famous ship, Mister Mulligan.
Aviation
had picked Amelia Earhart in her new Lockheed Electra as the best long shot, closely followed by Jacqueline Cochrane. Howard Hughes was cited by the magazine for the most sporting gesture; he had refused to enter the Bendix on the grounds that his own experimental aircraft was unbeatable by pilots with less money to spend.

Freddy, doggedly practicing Immelmans and Chandelles
the day before the race, in Mac’s Taylor Cub, which averaged ninety miles an hour at best, meditated on Howard Hughes and his hundred and twenty million dollars, and on Earhart in the plane on which Lockheed had lavished eighty thousand dollars. Decidedly she was in the minor leagues, she thought savagely, as she put the old reliable Taylor through its paces.