Twilight Girl (11 page)

Mavis said nothing and another fear penetrated Sassy; the spectre that she rarely permitted to haunt her mind. It was the benumbing dread of a night when Ruggio's bar would be crowded with unfamiliar faces. The police might pick him up or the man might disappear into that gulping abyss that swallows pusher and pushed alike. If Mavis was gone and the man whose name she did not know was gone... what would she do then? "Don't leave me, Mavis. Promise you won't ever leave me. Oh, God, honey—you've got to promise!"

The other's breath came steady and even. And as Mavis rose from the bed, there was no doubt in Sassy's mind about the identities of victor and vanquished. "Now, now, Miz Gregg," Mavis drawled, "whut make yo' think I evah gonna go way from yo'?"

There followed one of those rare Saturdays when Warren Gregg had no golf game lined up—when his wife, Katherine, was not hung over from the night before. And Sassy was in neither the mood nor the condition to escape them.

On Saturdays like this one, weather permitting, they would have lunch on the cantilevered terrace outside the family room; a captive affair that substituted weakly for family tradition.
Grim,
Sassy summed it up in her mind.
literally grim.
For apart from their physical resemblance to each other—the impressive height, the sun-bleached blond hair and physiques that a geneticist would have selected for the launching of a Super-race—the Greggs brought to the glass-topped luncheon table no similarities except their separate, engrossed silences. And just as their outward appearances were distinguished, in addition to the obvious diversities of sex and age, by Warren's sagging pot, Katherine's expensively preserved youth and Sassy's economical handsomeness, their silences, too, were unique.

Of the three, Sassy was certain that only she could probe the mental processes behind their respective facades of silence.

Her father's sphere revolved in an orbit of sub-contractors, available acreage for subdivision and the reassuring symbols of his rocketing post-war success: the house in which he spent little time, the forty-foot ketch that rarely moved from its slip at Balboa, the startingly youthful wife whose impeccable tastes in clothes and liquor he could afford to satisfy.
And me,
Sassy thought.
Me.
For her mounting allowance demands were, she knew, his deepest source of satisfaction. Writing a check for his "spoiled baby-doll," with no questions asked, was the ultimate signpost of his success in life.

Her mother's private universe was more complex. Money had separated Katherine from her early-day beauty shop confidantes, but had not purchased (not
yet,
not
yet,
Katherine kept reminding herself) the social prestige for which she yearned. She loathed the more daring building tradesmen for whom shoestring gambles had paid off, despised their
gauche
wives, writhed in the quick-success social circle wherein her choice of escapes was so limited. For each affair produced, once the ego was satisfied, only another Warren Gregg. A lesser or a greater, an ascending or descending image of the ambitious carpenter whose vision and gambling instinct had coincided so accommodatingly with the post-war need for housing. Then, too, there was Sassy…

Sassy could almost feel a sympathy for her mother's hatred of her. For it was the engagement to Durham Saunders that represented, to Katherine Gregg, a step in the right direction. How transparent the woman was. How thinly she disguised her resentment of the fact that so many hopes were dependent on a daughter (a
behemoth
of a daughter; Katherine would think this way) whose size alone dispelled the illusion of youth the older woman strived devotedly to maintain.
What else does she hate about me,
Sassy wondered.
She knows I'm too aware of her restlessness. I see through her bored tolerance of Daddy, through her psychological need for other men, through the reasons for her lushing.
Reasons enough, Sassy thought with a charitable malice.

Seen so nakedly by her child, Katherine Gregg alternated between pretending that Sassy didn't exist and scheming to keep Sassy's "peculiarities" under control. At least until the marriage to Durham Saunders was assured. A hint at another postponement of the wedding was enough to start her on a week-long martini jag. This weak dependence amused Sassy almost as much as it turned her stomach. Though sometimes she would speculate on which of Durham's divorced parents her mother would cultivate first: Mrs. Saunders, whose nod could fling open innumerable, selective doors in Beverly Hills—or that terribly lonely, equally distinguished grass-widower in La Jolla. Whatever course Sassy's mother selected, a wedding would free her of six feet of "spoiled brat." Her life, Sassy mused, will begin in earnest the day Dur starts sleeping with me legally.

But these were aged, hackneyed introspections. And Sassy had come to the luncheon table with more potent ingredients brewing in her private cauldron. She was conscious of Mavis in the living room, inventing a musical message game as she cleaned the piano keys.
Home Sweet Home
unrhythmically plunked, with the wrong notes accented. What made her so sadistic? And Sassy was aware of Mrs. Knippel’s stern Prussian countenance as the meal was served. More intensely, of the strain between her parents, resulting from Knips' dutiful report to her mother after having seen Daddy press the requested check surreptitiously into Sassy's waiting hand. God damn them all… It was because of them, because of Durham, because of Mavis and now, because of that half-baked butch at The 28%, that she, Sassy, needed the money, needed the surcease and oblivion it would buy.

As if this business of being Durham's dearly beloved bride-to-be wasn't enough to wrack the nerves. Now even the necessary existence with Mavis was threatened. Not that L.A. wasn't crowded with girls who would give God knows what for the chance to shack up with Sassy. But when had any girl at all been necessary to her after she, herself, had become necessary to that girl? Damn them all, and Mavis especially. And that butch especially. What was her name? Lon.

The two hundred dollars—the check in her pocket—was good for at least three cures and some left over. She would be careful to spread the binges through the month, timing each speedball fix to the moments when living in the same world with all of them—her mother, Knips, Mavis, Durham—would reach that unendurable apex she had learned to recognize. It was a meticulously controlled therapeutic program, Sassy assured herself. Not at all like being hooked. She had caught a few glimpses of the weak-willed, miserable addicts who hadn't known when to stop. Hers would continue to be shrewdly engineered lifts, during which all of her tormentors could be scanned through impersonal, uninvolved, unemotional eyes. Projections on a screen, powerless to touch her. She would observe them, but remain apart from them, unhurt, invincible, not succumbing as at other times to remorse, guilt, the draining anger of which she was the ultimate victim while the target went untouched.

Not tonight, though. Not tonight,
she cautioned herself. She would manage to get through the date with Durham without any soporific but her knowledge that he was a future convenience, not an immediate necessity.
But the next time I make a pass at Mavis,
she thought,
I
won't really need her.
For the pacifying mixture of heroin and cocaine possessed a crowning attribute; it rendered her indifferent to sex.
I'll leave her needing me. Do to her what she's done to me and then leave her begging.
And Sassy thought of final retribution:
I'll make her wish she'd never looked at Lon!

From the living room, three descending notes, repeated twice in the process of cleaning ivory keys, reversed themselves to form the opening bars of
You'll Never Walk Alone.
Mavis at her most vitriolic, playing the square, the way she mangled the language just to be irritating.

"Warren, how long are we going to put up with that?" Sassy heard her mother asking. "There's something insolent and unnatural about that girl. Mrs. Knippel's already given me an ultimatum. Either that jig goes or Knips goes."

"When," said Warren, "did we start taking orders from that battle-axe?"

"The day Sassy started hiring the help. Warren, I don't mind you indulging her with money, but foisting that—that thing on us!"

They argued as though Sassy were not present, as they always did, and Sassy retaliated by ignoring them.

"What's the difference between Sassy hiring a maid and you doing it? Explain to me."

"I'm only telling you what Mrs. Knippel reports. The girl is inexperienced, point one. I don't like her high-handed attitude, point two. Warren, she's made a nervous wreck out of Knips. Ignores her completely, she does."

"Good for her. I wish I could ignore the old bitch."

The whispered warning. "Warren, Mrs. Knippel is in the kitchen." Then, meaningfully, "You might be interested in knowing that the two of us are concerned—about—about the time that girl spends with Sassy."

It was time to withdraw from the neutral position. "Exactly what is that supposed to mean?" Mutual hatred crackled across the table as Sassy threw defiance into her mother's face.

"Just that you haven't been yourself, darling." And in that familiar blend of arsenic and syrup: "You're pale, you aren't swimming or playing tennis. A few times you've actually looked at me glassy-eyed. I'm worried about you, lovey. Naturally!"

"You were looking in a mirror, Mums." Sassy could sheath her claws and purr, too. "A morning-after mirror, angel."

Pained indignation. "Warren, listen to the way she talks to me. Did you hear what she just said?"

"Well, what the hell do you expect? You do the boozing, then you tell the kid it's she who's glassy-eyed."

Her mother's tone grew menacing to counter the rebuff. "That's not all I'm telling, Warren. Knips informed me that last night…"

Sassy watched her father slam his fork into the chicken salad then push himself away from the table. "I gave in last week. Goddamit, I swallowed all that crap you picked up from that filthy-mouth…"

Horrified whisper
. "Warren, she's in the kitchen."

And he was on his feet. "Let her get an earful! Fine if she hears what I've got to say." Sassy glowed with inner warmth, righteously accepting the vindication which, somehow, seemed just. Of course her father's face would be crimson with rage under the sparse yellow hair. Why wouldn't he reach over to shake an angry fist in the hateful face? "You—you repeating all her dirty lies. Telling me your own kid is carrying on like a goddam queer with a black maid." He turned his wrath to the glass-walled kitchen and bellowed.

"Come on out here, you evil-minded bitch! Come out here and tell that to me—damn it, me—"

"Warren, for God's sake, she'll hear you."

Sassy nibbled on the Melba toast, gratified by the spectacle of Katherine Gregg backing down. Knips might even tear out of the house; he would put them both in their place—yes.

"Well, I've got news for you, Kitsie. By God, I've got news for you, for your goddam Mrs. Knippel, too. Sic-ing that crooked headshrinker on your own kid. By God, that burned me up!" He sat down, pausing significantly. Then, confident—as though assured that his next statement would obviate anything his wife could say—"You're so worried about Sassy putting off the wedding, you'd accuse her of anything filthy that comes to your mind. Well, I've got proof she's no dirty pervert. Proof enough to throw that lying female out on her fanny—sue her for libel, or whatever." He turned to Sassy, with a look half-apologetic, half-proud. Sassy lowered her eyes and he addressed her mother once more, enunciating each word with caustic precision. "I ran into Patsy Williamson at the bank yesterday. Just about the same goddamn time you had Sassy lowering herself in front of some phony doctor. You remember Patsy?"

"Williamson. Oh, they had their boat next to yours at Carey's Marina. I don't really know her, Warren"—hesitant, sounding as though she might drown the argument in tears. "I never liked going there, Warren. You know how seasick I get—and that fishy smell—"

And Sassy's pleasure in seeing her mother squelched gave way to a shocked suspicion of what would come next.

"Patsy's another goddam story-peddler for you. But at least what she told me proves your Mrs. Knippel is a liar. Listen! Sassy and Durham have been using our boat. And not to sail in! You follow me? Using the goddam cabin. Almost every Saturday night—that's what she said."

And, oh, God, the triumph in his voice. The pride in her exoneration.

"Now
tell me some more of those dirty stories, Kitsie. The kid's just as normal—as you or me." Then he returned to his chicken salad with the nervous joy of exculpation. Sassy's honor had been redeemed in fornication. He could complete his meal with the smugness, having avenged the wrongly accused.

God, what a medal to pin on me, Sassy thought. And, revoltingly, her mother was not crushed, but suddenly elated. "Is that really true, lovey? Darling,
don't
be ashamed to admit it. We're your parents, Sassy, and we understand these things. Truly we do."

Sassy ignored her. The snub was mistaken for embarrassment and the enthusiasm soared. "Don't be upset, lovey. It's so much better than what we were afraid of. Don't you see, darling? We jumped to a dreadful conclusion, and under the circumstances... Well, since you're going to marry Durham anyway, we're terribly relieved. As a matter of fact, you may not even understand why I was concerned or why I wanted you to see Dr. Friedman."

"I haven't the foggiest notion," Sassy said, wide-eyed, pleased with the uncomprehending sound of innocence that came from her.

"Of course she doesn't know, goddamit! It's that dirty-minded fat-fanny in the kitchen that knows about crap like that."

"Warren, don't bellow."

"It was her idea, wasn't it? Trying to run a man's family instead of his house..."

"I thought of it, too. After all, you hear about what happens at some of those girls' schools. And between roommates at college."

"And whose idea was girls' schools?"

"Darling, I was only..."