Beggarman, Thief (42 page)

Frances was a beautiful girl in a funny, wild way, freckled, her eyes wide and deep in her sharply angled, moody, youthful face, her body petite and deliciously rounded, her skin an invitation to the most extreme dreams. She was outspoken and occasionally foulmouthed. Occasionally, too, she liked to drink. More often she also liked to make love to him, which she had started early on in Port Philip, when she had come to his room in their hotel to run over the lines for the next day’s shooting and stayed the night. Wesley was dazzled by her beauty and by the idea that she had chosen him. He would never have dared make the first move himself. It had not yet occurred to him that he was an extraordinarily handsome young man. When strange young women stared at him he had the uneasy feeling that somehow he was doing something wrong or that they were disapproving of the way he was dressed. For a while, he had felt guilty, because he had thought that he was in love with Alice Larkin. But Alice Larkin still called him Cousin and he still slept on her couch in the living room when he was in New York. Besides, Frances made love with such happy abandon it was hard to feel guilty about anything in her presence.

Frances was married to a young actor who was in California where she ordinarily lived. Wesley tried to forget about the husband. As far as Wesley knew, nobody in the company had any inkling of what was going on between him and the leading lady. When they were in public she treated him as though he were in fact what he was in the movie—a younger brother.

His Aunt Gretchen had caught on, of course. He had discovered that she caught on to everything. She had had dinner alone with him one night and warned him that when the shooting was over Frances would go back to California and then on to a new picture and would almost certainly sleep with another young man in the new company who caught her fancy, because she was known to do things like that, and that he was not to take it too seriously. “I want this whole thing to be a wonderful experience for you,” Gretchen said. “I don’t want you to hate me for getting you into something you can’t handle.”

“I can handle it,” he said, although he wasn’t sure he could.

“Remember what I said about that girl,” Gretchen said. “She’s messed up the lives of older men than you before this.” What she didn’t say was that she knew Frances Miller had had an affair for six months with Evans Kinsella and that he had asked her to get a divorce and marry him. And that the day after the picture Frances was doing with him was finished, she stopped answering his calls. She also didn’t say that she, Gretchen, was still jealous of Frances and regretted that she was the girl she had thought would be wonderful in the part. You couldn’t cast or not cast a picture out of bedrooms, although many people had done so, to their sorrow. “Just remember,” Gretchen said.

“I’ll remember,” said Wesley.

“You’re dear and vulnerable, Old Toughie,” Gretchen said. She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Defend yourself. You’re in a much rougher racket than you know.”

That night he had made love to Frances almost the whole night long, brutally, until he had had to smother her face in a pillow so that the entire hotel wouldn’t be awakened by her screams. She was a girl who made no secret about whether she was enjoying herself.

As they both lay side by side, exhausted, he had thought, triumphantly, She’s not going back to anyone after tonight.

At dinner he and the other actors ate together as usual in the hotel dining room. Gretchen and Ida Cohen and Ida Cohen’s uncle, along with the scene designer and Uncle Rudolph, ate upstairs in the living room of Gretchen’s suite. After dinner, Wesley and Frances decided to go for a walk. It was a cool autumn night with a moon that was almost full and they walked arm in arm, like any young couple out on a date.

The main street was almost empty, neon-lit from forlorn store windows. Port Philip watched television and went to bed early. Frances looked idly at the displays in the windows as they passed. “There’s nothing here I’d ever buy,” she said. “Imagine living in a place like this. Ugh.”

“My family comes from here,” Wesley said.

“Oh, my God,” Frances said. “You poor boy.”

“I never lived here. My father, my grandfather …” He stopped himself before he said, my Aunt Gretchen. He hadn’t told Frances or any of the company that Gretchen was his aunt, and Gretchen was careful to treat him like any other novice actor in the company.

“Do you see any of them—” Frances asked. “I mean, your family, while you’re here?”

“There’re none left. They all moved away.”

“I can understand why,” Frances said. “This town must have gone downhill from the first day they put up the post office.”

“My grandmother told my father that when she first came here as a young girl, it was a beautiful place,” Wesley said. He was walking the streets of the town in which his father was born and which had formed him and he didn’t like the idea of its being thought of as a dreary backwater by a girl from California. Somewhere in the town, he thought, his father must have left a mark, a sign that he had been and gone. He had burned a cross here. Theodore Boylan, at least, remembered. He wondered what his father would have thought of his son walking the old same streets arm in arm with a beautiful, almost famous movie actress. And, more than that, making three thousand dollars for four weeks’ work, which was more play than any work his father had ever known. “There were trees everywhere, my grandmother told my father,” Wesley said, “and all those big houses were painted and clean and had big gardens. My father used to swim in the Hudson River—it was clean then—and the riverboats used to stop by and there was great fishing …” He stopped before telling the girl that aside from the boats and the fishing, his grandfather had used the river in which to drown himself.

“Things get worse, don’t they?” Frances said. “I’ll bet there was a lot of screwing in those big gardens then. Nothing else to do in the evening and no motels.”

“I suppose everybody got his share.”

“And her share,” Frances said, laughing. “Like now. It’s too bad you’re on this picture.”

“Why?” Wesley asked, hurt.

“If you weren’t,” she said, “I’d have gone through
War and Peace
by now, these long nights.”

“Sorry?”

“War and Peace
can wait,” she said. She hugged his arm. “By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask you—what drama school did you go to?”

“Me?” He hesitated. “None.”

“You act as though you’ve had years,” she said. “Incidentally, how old are you?”

“Twenty-one,” he said, without hesitation. He had made the mistake of telling Alice how old he was and she treated him as a child. He wasn’t about to make that mistake again.

“How is it you’re not in the army?”

“Football knee,” he said promptly. Since he had come back to America he had learned how to lie at a moment’s notice.

“I see.” She sounded suspicious. “Where’ve you acted before?”

“Me?” he said again, foolishly. “Well … noplace.” Frances was too knowing about things like that to take a chance on lying.

“Not even summer stock?”

“Not even summer stock.”

“How’d you get this job then?”

“Mrs. Burke …” It sounded funny in his ears to talk about his aunt as Mrs. Burke. “She saw me at a friend’s house and asked me if I wanted to test. What’re you asking all these questions for?”

“It’s natural for a girl to want to know a few facts about the man she’s having an affair with, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so.” He was pleased with the word “affair.” It gave him a new sense of maturity. Teenagers had dates or girlfriends, not affairs.

“There’s one thing about me,” Frances said, very definitely. “I can’t go to bed with a man whom I don’t respect.” It embarrassed Wesley when Frances spoke in that offhand, plural way about other men she had known. But, he told himself, she had been an actress since she was fourteen, what could he expect? Still, some day soon, he promised himself, he would tell her to keep her reflections on that particular subject to herself.

“You came as a surprise, I must admit,” she said cheerfully. “I took one look at the list of the cast and said this is going to be chastity-belt time for me.”

“What changed your mind?”

“You.” She laughed. “I knew just about all the others, but Wesley Jordan was a new name for me. I didn’t know you’d be the prize of the litter. By the way, is that your real name?”

“No,” Wesley said, after a pause.

“What is it?”

“It’s long and complicated,” he said evasively. “It would never look good over the title.”

She laughed again. “This is your first picture, but you’re learning fast.”

He grinned. “I’m a quick study.” He was enjoying being in the movies more and more and his vocabulary reflected it.

“What’re you going to do after this picture?”

“Don’t know.” He shrugged. “Go to Europe if I can.”

“You’re awfully good,” she said. “That isn’t only my opinion. Freddie Kahn, the cameraman, has seen all the rushes and he’s raving about you. You going to try Hollywood?”

“Maybe,” he said cautiously.

“Come on out,” she said. “I promise you a warm welcome.”

Wesley took in a big gulp of air. “I understand you’re married,” he said.

“Who told you that?” she asked sharply.

“I don’t remember. Someone. It just came up in the conversation.”

“I wish people would keep their goddamn mouths shut. That’s my business. Does that make any difference to you?”

“What would you say if I said it did?”

“I’d say you’re a fool.”

“Then I won’t say it.”

“That’s better,” she said. “Are you in love with me?”

“Why do you ask that question?”

“Because I like it more when people are in love with me,” she said. “That’s why I’m an actress.”

“All right,” he said, “I’m in love with you.”

“Let’s drink to that,” she said. “There’s a bar on the next block.”

“I’m on the wagon,” he said. He didn’t want to be asked in front of Frances for proof of his age by the bartender.

“I like to drink,” she said, “and I like men who don’t drink. Come on, I’ll buy you a Coke.”

When they went into the bar they saw Rudolph and the set designer, a red-bearded young man by the name of Donnelly, sitting at a booth, absorbed in conversation.

“What ho,” Frances whispered, “the brass.”

Everybody in the cast knew that Rudolph was on the financial end of the undertaking and had been instrumental with the authorities in Port Philip when difficulties had arisen about permits, shooting at night and the use of the town police to block off streets. The cast didn’t know, however, that he was Wesley’s uncle; on the few occasions that Wesley had spoken to Rudolph in public he had addressed him as Mr. Jor-dache, and Rudolph had replied, gravely and courteously, by addressing his nephew as Mr. Jordan.

Frances and Wesley had to pass the booth in which the two men sat. Rudolph looked up and smiled at them and stood up and said, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.”

Wesley mumbled a greeting, but Frances smiled her most winsome smile and said, “What new plot are you two gentlemen concocting against us poor actors in this noisome den now?”

Wesley winced at the false, girlish smile, the fancy language. Suddenly he realized that Frances had too many different ways of addressing different people.

“We were sitting here praising the performance of you two young people,” Rudolph said.

Frances giggled. “Aren’t you the polite man,” she said. “What a delightful lie.”

Donnelly grunted.

“Do sit down,” Frances said. “In Hollywood nobody ever stands up for the help.”

Again Wesley winced. At certain moments, aside from using her abundant charm, Frances managed to remind people whom she considered important of the bright career she had already put behind her.

The two men sat down, Donnelly staring morosely at the glass in front of him. No one had as yet seen him smile during the course of the shooting.

“Mr. Donnelly,” Frances said, her voice still girlish, “I haven’t dared to tell you this before, but now that the picture’s almost over, I’d like to say that it’s just wonderful what you’ve been doing with the sets. I haven’t seen any of the film yet—” she made a small grimace—“us poor actors aren’t let in on the decisions on who lives and who dies in the projection room, so I don’t know how they look on film, but I do have to tell you that as far as I’m concerned I’ve never been as comfortable moving around in front of the camera as I have in the acting space you’ve designed for us to work in.” She laughed, as though she were a little embarrassed at speaking so boldly.

Donnelly grunted again.

Wesley could see Frances’ jaw set then. “I won’t disturb you any longer while you two gentlemen arrange our fates,” she said. “Young Wesley and I—” Now she made it sound as though Wesley were ten years old—“have some problems in our scene tomorrow that we thought we’d do a little homework on.”

Wesley tugged at her arm, and with a last dazzling smile, she moved off with him. She made a move to sit in the next booth, but Wesley guided her firmly to the last booth in the rear of the bar, well out of earshot of Donnelly and his uncle.

“What a goddamn performance,” he said as they sat down.

“Honey catches more flies than vinegar, darling,” Frances said sweetly. “Who knows when those two nice men will do another picture and have the final say about who’s going to be in it and who’s going to be out on his or her ass?”

“You put on so many acts,” Wesley said, “I bet sometimes you have to call up your mother to find out who you really are.”

“That’s the art, dear,” Frances said coolly. “You’d better learn it if you want to get anyplace.”

“I don’t want to get anyplace at that price,” Wesley said.

“That’s what I used to say,” she said. “When I was fourteen years old. By the time I was fifteen, I changed my mind. You’re just a little retarded, dear.”

“Thank God for that,” Wesley said.

The waiter was standing over them now and Frances ordered for both of them, a gin and tonic for her and a Coke for him.

When the waiter had gone over to the bar Wesley said, “I wish you wouldn’t drink gin.”