I Could Go on Singing (18 page)

“I just want to get to know him a little. That’s all.”

“And then what?” Ida asked.

Jenny moved across the room to where hatboxes were stacked. “Oh, they brought the hats,” she said with forced animation. She took one out, turned to the mirror and tried it on.

“Let him go home, Jenny,” Jason said.

“Tomorrow.”

“Why don’t you quit while you’re ahead?” Ida asked.

Jenny did not answer. She continued to stare at herself in the mirror. Jason saw her reflection. Her eyes looked vast and her mouth trembled.

Ida went to her and put her arm around her. “Sure, you
just want to get to know him. With you, Jenny, it starts the same way and it ends the same way. You wanted to see him? Great. Fine. You saw him.
Now say good-by!
But you don’t want that. You got to have a situation. Big feelings. And in the end, what are you going to have? Another pain in your heart. Why do you do it?”

Jenny gently turned out of Ida’s clasp. She took off the hat and threw it aside. She looked expressionlessly at Ida. “I have to keep him with me as long as I possibly can. I have to. What else do you want to know?”

Ida bit her lip and turned away and went into her own room.

Jenny stood still for a moment, then fled blindly to Jason, piled herself into his lap and ground her face into his throat. “I hurt everybody,” she whispered in her misery.

“We can get over it. We don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

“I hurt already, Brownie. I hurt bad. But not when my son is with me. Then it stops.”

In one of her abrupt changes of mood she scrambled to her feet and grinned down at him. “Why are we all getting so sour, for God’s sake? Life is a ball. We running a morgue around here? Rise and shine, Brownie. Are you good to my Lois? Be very good and sweet to her. She could be good for you. You know, Brownie, you’ve been settling into a rut. You know that, don’t you? Getting more rumply and quiet and benign all the time. Sitting around watching life. You got to get into the middle of it and swing, dear. You can’t sit it out. You and Lois can’t sit it out. I built you up big.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong, did I?”

“No, Jenny. You couldn’t possibly do anything wrong.”

She stamped her foot. “Dammit, when I try to be a little bit happy, everybody else goes sour on me. What’s wrong with everybody? Is this tour jinxed? Get out of here. Find Gabe and get him in here. My hair looks like a dog’s bed.”

That night, at the performance, Jason Brown—without plan or intent—caught himself and Lois Marney off guard. He was standing in the wings with Lois, watching Jenny on stage. The boy was nearby, his face rapt. George was standing with Ida. Jenny had begun her arrangement of “What Is This Thing Called Love.” She began it with a slow, moody, quiet opening, with a pin spot on the guitarist
who was the only accompaniment in the beginning. Later it would build and build as the band came in, section by section. But in the beginning it was very quiet, her voice and phrasing giving the worn lyrics a special intensity. He looked at Jenny and at the boy. He looked at Ida and George. He was aware of Lois beside him in the darkness. All of them were trapped in the spell Jenny was weaving, and the huge audience was as silent as though the theater were empty. He thought of the relationships of all of them to Jenny and to each other and he leaned toward Lois, and with a feeling of wryness, he whispered, “It’s a very good question.”

She gasped and turned toward him, her oval face a pallor in the shadows, and he knew he had read her mood without meaning to, and had startled her. For an instant she seemed warm and vulnerable in the darkness, seeming to sway toward him, and then she turned and was gone. He stood alone, pulling down the corners of his mouth. It was still an excellent question, one that Miss Marney might give some thought to. As the sections of the band began to come in, Jenny’s voice expanded, and it took on that dark and smoky quality of the yearning and the despair she could put into that tired old song and make it new every time she did it.

After the show a score of old friends jammed the dressing room and corridor, good friends from all the years of the songs and the shows, the wildness and the heartbreaks, the raves and disasters. Hugs and kisses, and all the in-talk and the jokes and gossip, and the little edges of jealousy and need, padded and concealed by the cosmetic habit of gayety. Here was all the warmth of a special business, a special breed, and Jenny was totally responsive to it, funny, glittering, loving, spreading herself among all of them, merging it all into party and holiday, making of it, as she so often could, the best of all possible times for everyone.

Jason saw, beyond the tailored shoulders and the creamy bare ones, beyond the jewels and champagne glasses, the Donne boy in a corner, watchful and awed and uncomprehending, so he worked his way through the crush to Jenny and, when he had a chance, said to her that it looked as if it was shaping up into the kind of evening the boy might not enjoy.

She frowned at him. “But I want him with me!”

Jason indicated a couple of the more emotionally unstable
personalities of the industry. “To further his education?” he asked.

She pursed her lips. “Then we’ll both go home.”

“The kid is hungry and sleepy, and you’ll want to rejoin the group as soon as he falls asleep.”

She hesitated and then nodded and kissed his cheek. “Old Brownie, always taking good care.”

She went and said good night to the boy and sent him back to the hotel with Lois. Jason wanted to go along with them, but at the time they left he could not conveniently disentangle himself from the attentions of a tiny redhead who had suddenly remembered a debt of gratitude. After she had been professionally dead for several years as a result of several nothings in a row, he had tailored a television script for her and battled the producer-director to get her cast in it, and she had done so well, so superbly well, that it had re-established her, complete with Emmy nomination and subsequent meaty roles in reasonably successful moving pictures. He knew she was well into her forties, but she was still an effective and magical twenty-eight, even at closest range—the result of a good five hours a day of working at it, plus the device of the sub-coiffure braids to pull her face firm in lieu of any telltale uplift incisions. So she pranced elfin and slightly stoned among the bigger folk, erect to enhance the pointy little breasts, agile to flaunt the perky little rump, batting the great sea-green eyes at him, telling him how truly and dearly and forever she loved and worshipped and adored darling Jason Brown, who was only just a little ol’ writer, but had gotten her into just the right spot in spite of all the other people clamoring for her at the time. By the time she was momentarily distracted, the chance to leave with Lois was gone.

George Kogan made some skilled telephone calls, and the impromptu party moved to a private dining room in a famous restaurant, and picked up some more recruits. From there it fragmented slightly, but the nucleus moved on to the large flat of a suave, elderly, corseted British actor, and at something after two o’clock, the grateful tiny little redhead shucked her ex-husband escort and her agent-manager and went back to her borrowed apartment with Jason Brown, who, despite a certain vagueness induced by Scotch and champagne, was not at all convinced that this was one of his better ideas.

The interlude in the apartment quite cruelly confirmed his
uneasiness. Faced with the responsibility of such an intimate expression of gratitude, the tiny redhead was sobered by the fear that such intemperance might undo some of the benefits of the five dedicated hours per day. She was nervous about it, but convinced that she was affording this poor humble man one of the greatest moments of his life. She set the scene with the greatest care, adjusting the bedroom lighting, turbanning her hair in such a way it could not possibly become mussed, swathing her little breasts in a protective night-bra, and ensconcing herself in the big canopied bed like a fragile little bonbon in a lace candy box. Her nervous instructions covered not bruising her mouth, no pummeling, no crushing, no scratching or biting or anything like that of course, and don’t take long.

Jason embraced her with due care, and listened to her sweet dutiful little manufactured sighs, and was suddenly and quite unfortunately reminded of a game of jackstraws, where the object was to remove one straw with such guile and delicacy the rest of the stack remained undisturbed. And with that image his last chance of consummation was lost. She offered false sympathy but no assistance. Her relief at being so unexpectedly freed of the obligation was complete and transparent. She donned a sheer little hip-length nightie that matched her eyes, sat joyously on the edge of the bed and gulped a glass of brandy so large it effectively removed any chance of cooperation in the immediate future. Moments after she finished it, she gave him a wide and glassy smile and toppled back into sleep, the empty glass bouncing and rolling across the thick carpeting. He slid her into the bed, covered her over, turned out the lights and let himself out. The ex-husband was waiting on the street. From ten feet away he snarled, drew his fist back and took three running steps at Jason and swung. Jason side-stepped and the man fell over a low hedge into a narrow area of grass. Jason looked over the hedge. The man lay on his back glaring up at him.

“That’ll teach you not to mess with her!” the man said.

“It sure will,” Jason said, and went off in search of a taxi. When he got to bed he could not go to sleep. It was after four in the morning. His male pride felt slightly damaged but there was an ironic amusement and a feeling of relief that far outweighed the small feeling of inadequacy. He wondered if the relief was due to a recognition of the absence of guilt that unfaithfulness to Lois would have
caused. Yet the guilt, in any rational anaysis, should be as great as if he had accepted the gesture of gratitude. A weakness of the flesh should not cancel out the willingness of the spirit. But the spirit had not been very willing. It was more comforting to believe that it had been a reluctance of the spirit which had caused the weakness of the flesh.

Faithfulness to Lois was a rather frail theorem. It implied emotional dependence and obligation, which she stolidly refused to accept.

And at last he accepted the truth he was trying to avoid. He was a creature of staunchly middle-class morality, forever stuck with the concept that the gratifications of the body without emotional involvement are not only markedly grubby—they are even silly. And that tiny nervous woman, so convinced that she was making a gift beyond price, was the very stuff of comedy.

One day, he thought as he was sinking into sleep, he would tell Lois about it and they would laugh. The thought woke him up again. From whence came this confidence that he would ever be able to confide such things to Lois? She was a cripple. She had warmth, intelligence, humor, subtlety, but it all came to an abrupt stop at the lip of the chasm that flawed her—and beyond that point there was no humor, no warmth, no understanding at all. If she could ever be mended, she would be one of the rare ones, one of those who could fill your life from rim to rim and give every day a meaning beyond what words could express.

His only hope was his feeling that Lois was subjectively aware of that flaw, and though she did not dare admit it, wanted to be whole.

Jason arrived at the suite at twenty minutes before noon. The boy was sitting with the air of someone who has waited a long long time, and he got to his feet as Jason came in. He was alone.

“Good morning, sir.”

“Good morning, Matt. What’s the word on Jenny?”

The boy sat down again. His smile was slightly wan. “Miss Ida says she’s out. That’s French, she says, for not up yet.”

“Last night got a little congested.”

“She does have a great many friends, doesn’t she?”

Jason sat on the couch. “Some of them are Jenny’s friends. And a lot of them are friends of Jenny Bowman.”

“I see what you mean, sir. I suspect I might be both.” There was a glint of solemn humor in his dark eyes. Jenny’s eyes, Jason thought.

“Nobody could blame you for that.”

“I recognized so many of them, Mr. Brown. You know, they all seem rather smaller than I imagined, smaller people physically.”

“The camera tends to inflate everything, Matt. I guess you’ve had a dull morning.”

“I don’t mind, really. I shall have another chance. But I thought she might find it interesting. Perhaps, with the way she works, sleep is more important for her. Earlier this morning, Mr. Kogan said Miss Marney might go with me, but I thought Jenny might wake up at any time …” The boy frowned. “Of course, I have missed another train by now. I seem to have missed a great many trains lately.”

“How did you like being backstage?”

“Most interesting. It wasn’t as I imagined. I rather expected everyone would be … matter of fact. But everyone seemed so excited and happy, even the ones who do things with the lights and curtains.”

“It’s like that when she works. It might not be the same with other performers.”

“She’s really very special, isn’t she?”

“There’s only one.”

“I imagine she makes a great deal of money at it.” The boy flushed. “I’m sorry. That was a rude thing to say.”

“Not at all, Matt. She doesn’t really make very much. The tour is set up so that she gets a guarantee and a percentage of the house over that guarantee. All the payroll and tour expenses, transportation, music, musicians and so on come out of that. What’s left over goes to her agent. He takes his percentage and sends what’s left to her financial manager. He also gets the income from her records, movie contracts and so on. He pays the bills, sets money aside for taxes, makes investments if there is any left over to invest, and deposits her allowance in her personal account. If the whole tour is booked absolutely solid and they don’t run into any unexpected expenses, there may be three or four thousand dollars left over for investment at the end of it. But while the tour is going on, she is living first class, traveling first class. If she should break even, the tour does indirectly improve record sales and movie box office. She could cut the payroll way down and make a lot more by taking extended club dates. But this tour thing is part of her image. It is what Jenny Bowman does. Do you understand that?”