Beggarman, Thief (26 page)

“Well,” Rudolph said, “I’ve always dreamed of riding across the desert on a horse.”

“It’s not desert,” Johnny said testily. “It’s ranchland. And it’s at the foot of the mountains. There’s a trout stream on the property.”

“I can take a couple of days off this week,” Rudolph said, “while Enid’s with Jean. Can you get away?”

“I’ll buy the tickets,” Johnny said.

While they drove swiftly past the endless graveyards of Long Island, where the generations of New Yorkers had hidden their dead, Rudolph closed his eyes and dreamed of the mesas and mountains of the silver state of Nevada.

Usually, Gretchen liked to work on Saturdays, just she and her assistant, Ida Cohen, alone in the cutting room in the deserted, silent building. But today Ida could tell Gretchen wasn’t enjoying herself at all as she shuttled the moviola back and forth, running the film irritably through her white-gloved hands, pushing the slicing lever down with sharp little snaps and whistling mournfully, when she wasn’t sighing in despair. Ida knew why Gretchen was in a bad mood this morning. The director, Evans Kinsella, was up to his old tricks, shooting lazily, incoherently, fighting a hangover, letting the actors get away with murder, trusting that somehow Gretchen would make sense out of the wasteful miles of film he was throwing at her. And Ida had been in the room the day before when Kinsella had phoned to say that he couldn’t take Gretchen to dinner as he had promised.

By now, Ida, whose loyalty to the woman she worked with was absolute, loathed Kinsella with an intensity of feeling that she otherwise reserved for the cause of Women’s Liberation, a movement whose meetings she attended religiously and at which she made passionate and somewhat demented speeches. Fat and short, she had even gone so far as to renounce wearing a brassiere, until Gretchen had scowled at her and said, “Christ, Ida, with udders like yours, you’re putting the movement back a century.”

Ida, forty-five years old and plain, with no man in her private life to bully her, believed that Gretchen, beautiful and talented, allowed herself to be taken advantage of by men. She had persuaded Gretchen to accompany her to two of the meetings, but Gretchen had been bored and annoyed by the shrillness of some of the orators and had left early, saying, “When you go to the barricades you can count on me. Not before.”

“But we need women just like you,” Ida had pleaded.

“Maybe,” Gretchen had said, “but I don’t need
them.”

Ida had sighed hopelessly at what she told Gretchen was sinful political abdication.

Gretchen had more to bother her that morning than the quality of the film she was working on. During the week, Kinsella had tossed a screenplay at her and asked her to read it. It was by a young writer, unknown to either of them, but whose agent had been insistent that Kinsella look at it.

Gretchen had read it and thought it was brilliant, and when Kinsella had called the afternoon before to break their date for dinner had told him so. “Brilliant?” he had said over the phone. “I think it’s a load of shit. Give it to my secretary and tell her to send it back.” He had hung up before she could argue with him. Instead, she had stayed up until two in the morning re-reading it. Although it was written by a young man, the central role was that of a strong-minded, young, working-class woman, sunk in the drabness and hopelessness of the people around her, a girl who, of all her generation in the small, dreary town in which she lived, had the wit and courage to break out, live up to her dream of herself.

It could be a bracing corrective, Gretchen believed, to the recent spate of films which, overcorrecting for the happy-ending fairy tales that Hollywood had been sending out for so long, now had all their characters aimlessly drifting, reacting with a poor little flicker of revolt against their fates, and then sinking hopelessly back into apathy, leaving the viewer with a taste of mud in his mouth. If the old Hollywood pictures, with their manufactured sugar-candy optimism, were false, Gretchen thought, these new listless dirges were equally false. Heroes emerged daily. If it was true that they did not rise with their class, it wasn’t true that they all
sank
with their class.

When she had finished reading, she was more convinced than ever that her first impression had been correct and that if Kinsella could be pulled up again to the level of his earlier work, he would finish with a dazzling movie. She had even called his hotel at two-thirty in the morning to tell him so, but his phone hadn’t answered. All this was going through her mind, like a looped piece of film in which the action of a scene is repeated over and over again, as she worked on the shoddy results of Kinsella’s last week of shooting.

Suddenly, she turned the machine off. “Ida,” she said, “I have something I want you to do for me.”

“Yes?” Ida looked up from her filing and registration of film clips.

Gretchen had the script with her in the big shoulder bag she always wore to work. She went over to where it was hanging and took it out. “I’m going to a museum for an hour or so,” she said. “Meanwhile I want you to drop that trash you’re fiddling with and read this for me.” She handed the script to Ida. “When I get back, we’ll go out to a girly lunch, just you and me, and I’d like to discuss it with you.”

Ida looked at her doubtfully as she took the script. It wasn’t like Gretchen to break off in the middle of work for anything more than a container of coffee. “Of course,” she said. She adjusted her glasses and looked down at the script in her hands as though afraid it might contain an explosive device.

Gretchen put on her coat and went downstairs and into the bustle of Seventh Avenue, where the building was located. She walked swiftly crosstown and went into the Museum of Modern Art, to soothe her nerves, she told herself, wrongly, with honest works of art. When she came out, she was no more soothed than when she went in. She couldn’t bear the thought of going back to the moviola after more than an hour of Picasso and Renoir and Henry Moore, so she telephoned the cutting room and asked Ida to meet her at a restaurant nearby. “And put some makeup on and straighten your stockings,” she told Ida cruelly. “The restaurant is French and fancy, but fancy-fancy. I’m treating—because I’m in trouble.”

Waiting for Ida in the restaurant, she had a Scotch at the bar. She never drank during the day, but, she told herself defiantly, there’s no law against it. It’s Saturday.

When Ida came in and saw Gretchen at the bar, she asked, suspiciously, “What’re you drinking?”

“Scotch.”

“You
are
in trouble.” Philosophically in the vanguard of modern thought, as she believed she was, in her daily life Ida was grimly puritanical.

“Two Scotches, please,” Gretchen said to the bartender.

“I can’t work after I’ve had anything to drink,” Ida said plaintively. “You know that.”

“You’re not going to work this afternoon,” Gretchen said. “Nobody’s going to work this afternoon. I thought you were against sweated female labor. Especially on Saturdays. Aren’t you always telling me that what this country needs is the twenty-hour week?”

“That’s just the theory,” Ida said defensively, eyeing the glass that the bartender set down in front of her with repugnance. “Personally I
choose
to work.”

“Not today,” Gretchen said firmly. She waved to the maitre d’hôtel. “A table for two, please. And send over the drinks.” She left two dollars, grandly, as a tip for the bartender.

“That’s an awful big tip for just three drinks,” Ida whispered as they followed the maitre d’hôtel toward the rear of the restaurant.

“One of the things that will make us women equal to men,” Gretchen said, “is the size of our tips.”

The maitre d’hôtel pulled out the two chairs at one of the tables just next to the kitchen.

“You see”—Ida glared around her. “The restaurant’s almost empty and he puts us next to the kitchen. Just because there isn’t a man along.”

“Drink your whiskey,” Gretchen said. “We’ll get our revenge in heaven.”

Ida sipped at her drink and made a face. “While you were at it,” she said, “you might have ordered something sweet.”

“On to the barricades, where there are no sweet drinks,” Gretchen said. “And now tell me what you think of the script.”

Ida’s face lit up. A well-done scene in a movie, a passage she admired in a book, could make her euphoric. “It’s wonderful,” she said. “God, what a picture it’s going to make.”

“Except it looks as though no one is going to make it,” Gretchen said. “I think it’s been around and our beloved Evans Kinsella was the agent’s last gasp.”

“Has he read it yet—Evans?”

“Yes,” Gretchen said. “He thinks it’s a load of shit. His words. He told me to give the script to his secretary to send back.”

“Vulgarian,” Ida said hotly. “And to think what a big shot he is. How much is the picture we’re on going to cost?”

“Three and a half million.”

“There’s something goddamn wrong with the business, with the world, for that matter,” Ida said, “if they give a fool like that three and a half million dollars to play around with.”

“He’s had two big hits in the last three years,” Gretchen said.

“Luck,” Ida said, “that’s all—luck.”

“I’m not so sure it’s only that,” Gretchen said. “He has his moments.”

“Not three and a half million dollars’ worth,” Ida said stubbornly. “And I don’t know why you stick up for him. The way he treats you. And I’m not talking about only in the office, either.”

“Oh,” Gretchen said with a lightness that she didn’t feel, “a little touch of masochism never hurt a girl.”

“Sometimes, Gretchen,” Ida said primly, “you drive me crazy, you really do.”

The waiter was standing over them now, his pad and pencil ready.

“Time to order,” Gretchen said. She looked at the menu. “They have roast duck with olives. That’s for two. Do you want to share it with me?”

“All right,” Ida said. “I don’t like olives. You can have them all.”

Gretchen ordered the duck and a bottle of Pouilly Fumeé.

“Not a whole bottle,” Ida said. “Please. I won’t drink more than half a glass.”

“A whole bottle,” Gretchen said to the waiter, ignoring her.

“You’ll be drunk,” Ida warned her.

“Good,” said Gretchen, “I have some big decisions to make and maybe I won’t make them dead sober.”

“You have a funny look in your eye today,” Ida said.

“You bet your liberated brassiere I have,” said Gretchen. She finished her second whiskey in one long gulp.

“What are you planning on doing?” Ida said. “Now don’t be reckless. You’re angry and you’ve got all that alcohol in you …”

“I’m angry,” Gretchen said, “and I have a wee bit of whiskey in me and part of what I’m planning to do is drink most of the bottle of wine all by my little self, if you won’t help me. And after that …” She stopped.

“After that, what?”

“After that,” Gretchen said, “I’m not quite sure.” She laughed. The laughter sounded so strange that Ida was convinced that Gretchen was in the first stages of descending alcoholism. “After that I’m going to have a little talk with Evans Kinsella. If I can find him, which I doubt.”

“What are you going to say to him?” Ida asked anxiously.

“Some impolite home truths,” Gretchen said. “For starters.”

“Be sensible,” Ida said, worriedly. “After all, no matter what else he is to you, he’s still your boss.”

“Ida,” Gretchen said, “has anyone ever told you that you have a sick respect for authority?”

“I wouldn’t say sick.” Ida was hurt.

“What would you say then? Exorbitant, slavish, adoring?”

“I’d say normal, if you must know. Anyway, let’s get off me for a while. Just what are you going to tell him?”

“I’m going to tell him that the picture we’re working on stinks. That’ll be the overture,” Gretchen said.

“Oh, please, Gretchen …” Ida put her hands up as though to stop her physically.

“Somebody ought to buy you some rings,” Gretchen said. “You have pretty hands and rings would set them off nicely. Maybe we’ll spend the afternoon looking for rings for you if we can’t find that bastard, Kinsella.”

Ida looked around worriedly. The restaurant had filled by now and there were two men sitting near them. “People can hear you.”

“Let them hear,” Gretchen said. “I want to spread the good word around.”

The waiter was at the table and expertly carving their duck. The wine was in a cooler. “No olives for me, please,” Ida said. “Give them all to the lady.”

Gretchen watched admiringly as the waiter deftly sectioned the duck. “I bet
he
doesn’t drink during working hours,” she said. Kinsella had been known to do that, too, from time to time.

“Ssh,” Ida said. She smiled at the waiter, apologizing for her eccentric friend.

“Do you?” Gretchen asked the waiter.

“No, ma’am,” he said. He grinned. “But I would if it was offered.”

“I’ll send around a bottle the first thing in the morning,” Gretchen said.

“Gretchen,” said Ida, “I’ve never seen you like this before. What’s come over you?”

“Fury,” Gretchen said. “Just plain old healthy fury.” She tasted the duck, “Mmm,” she said and drank heartily of the wine.

“If I were you,” Ida said, nibbling at her food, “I’d wait until after the weekend before you did anything.”

“Never postpone fury. That’s an old family motto in my family,” Gretchen said. “Especially over the weekend. It’s hard to be furious on Monday morning. It takes a whole week to get into the proper frame of mind for fury.”

“Kinsella will never forgive you if you go on at him like this,” Ida said.

“After the overture,” Gretchen said, disregarding Ida’s interruption, “we go into the full performance. About how I only consented to work on the piece of junk he’s making because I wanted to continue to enjoy the favors of his pure white body.”

“Gretchen,” Ida said reproachfully, “you once told me you loved him.” In her spinster heart romance held a prominent place.

“Once,” Gretchen said.

“You’ll infuriate him.”

“That’s exactly my intention,” said Gretchen. “To continue—I will tell him that I’ve read the script he told me to send back to the agent and I find it original, witty and too good for the likes of him. However, since he’s the only director I happen to be half living with at the moment, and certainly the only director I’m intimate with who can raise money for a picture on the strength of his name, I will tell him that if he has the brains he was born with he’ll buy it tomorrow, even if he’s doing it only because I’m asking him to.”