The Celebrity (21 page)

I wonder if he’s ever blown
her
a kiss. What do I mean “blown”?

It wouldn’t be a Diana, nor even a Jill Goodwyn, Cindy decided stonily, who could damage Thornton’s attitude toward home life permanently. But it could be women in the mass, all tittering over his darling jokes and looking up at him adoringly and clustering around asking questions afterward, until the janitor swept them out.

For a disloyal moment, Lucinda Johns wished her husband had never mounted that platform, or that he had proved a dud once he had. She glanced at the folded newspapers and was instantly cleansed of this treachery, but she gave rapid thanks that there were only two more lectures to come. She had asked if he were going to make the next two different in any way, and he had replied, “If you have a hit show, why search for new lyrics?” For one, the fee was only fifty dollars, but already he could no more have said “No” than a snowball could roll up a hill.

Snowball and hill, she thought wanly; he’d make a joke out of that and have them in the aisles. Well, once we’re home, he’ll be limited to the platform of the Premium Club. Talking to men about annuities and term insurance and liability, even Thorn can’t be so goddam darling.

Comforted, she turned her mind back to the package of books. There were a lot of them and she picked them up one by one. Joe Miller’s joke book, Chic Sale’s joke book, Bob Hope’s joke book, two books, by Bennett Cerf and two by John Mason Brown.

“No!” exclaimed Cindy aloud, and hurled John Mason Brown halfway across the room.

T
HE
A
LICE
C
OHEN SHINDIG
was the last big event planned around Gregory and Abby Johns during that month in the City of the Angels. Immediately thereafter, word got about, as word will, about Gregory’s second untimely relapse, and though everybody was sad that he should be so frequently ill, it was as true in Hollywood as anywhere else that a hostess finds it calamitous to have her guest of honor drop out just as the canapés are being prepared.

“Anyway, I bet he isn’t as much fun as Thorn,” Alice Cohen was heard to remark that night, “authors are so stuck on themselves.”

Thus the only social life which Gregory and Abby Johns experienced on the Coast was an occasional evening where the word “party” would not have been a
mot juste.
To have dinner with Hy Bernstein and his wife could scarcely be called a party, and this they did several times. They also spent two evenings with the Moroskys and their four children, and one, slightly stilted apart from the good shop talk, with Harry and Peg Von Brann. Each of these occasions was singularly free from sequins, plastic ice, or rooms bubbling with brandy glasses.

On most of their evenings, Gregory and Abby stayed at home, or went for a drive, or went to the movies.

Because of their new wealth, each of these activities held new and seductive charms for them. At the movies they always sat in the loge. At the hotel, they slowly trained themselves not to refold damp towels for further use. On mild evenings they had dinner on their awninged balcony, against which blew the spiced air of eucalyptus, sycamore, and pepper trees. They accustomed themselves to buying cigarettes a carton at a time instead of a pack, and gradually lost their guilt at paying thirty cents for an air-mail
Herald Tribune on
weekdays and sixty on Sundays. Twice they telephoned Hat—at night rates.

But their greatest pleasure came from the drives they took along the curving coast, generally going north, with the shining roaring ocean on their left, and the leather-colored hills of the Malibu chain on their right; in other moods they drove inland through the lush green fertility of the Valley. During their last two weekends, with Gregory in perfect health again, they took two long trips: the first to San Francisco, which they found so glorious a city that they broke through their tight schedule and had to drive most of Sunday night to get home again in time for the studio on Monday; the second, to the desert, past the honky-tonk look of Palm Springs to the small town of Indio, where they stayed at a de-luxe motel at the edge of a date ranch.

“A date ranch,” Gregory said. “Can you tie it?”

“What about that carrot ranch in the valley, and the beet ranch?”

The desert astonished and moved them. They had always pictured it as a flat dead expanse of white sand, like movies of the Sahara; they were charmed by the soft scattering of spring flowers, by the sage green of tamarisk trees and the tender fluff of smoke trees. They looked far off to the snowcapped Santa Rosa Mountains, and at bare, iron-streaked Mt. Gorgonia and Mt. Jacinta, towering, it seemed, just over them. Once during the night, they left their cottage and walked along the road, looking up at the close shining web of the stars. Across miles of space, a cold wind blew, persistent, against their faces. “I guess,” Gregory said, “it used to be like this on a sailing ship at night, halfway across the ocean.”

And often during the week, they drove just before going to bed, impulsively, just for a half-hour or so. They would wind up at some neon-lit drive-in, refuse the speedy discomfort of car service, and go inside to sit lazily in a booth over coffee and doughnuts or cornflakes and milk. Here they talked about Thorn and Cindy and the newspaper stories and the parties they were no longer invited to, but which they could never wait to have meticulously described.

“I suppose I could stop him from lecturing about me,” Gregory said uncertainly, the night after the Sunday splash of pictures. “Thorn’s got the bug so hard, it would kill him, but I could just stop him.”

“Don’t go through it all again,” Abby said.

“It’s one thing to say you feel philosophical and remote, and another to feel it.”

“It
doesn’t
affect you in any basic way, though. You were right on that. If you made him cancel the two new dates—”

“He wouldn’t cancel. We’d have a bloody row and he’d go lecture about God knows what anyway and maybe get even sillier publicity.”

“About ‘Modern American Writing,’” Abby said.

“No, he wouldn’t,” Gregory said sharply. “Not until he’d studied up on it first.”

“I’m sorry, darling.”

“Today he told me all over again he was leaving the puppy out, and that he’d never dreamed it had hurt me when I was a kid.” Gregory hesitated. “You know what?”

“What?”

“I suddenly felt a fool for having jumped him so hard on it.” Abby didn’t answer. “And I turned right around and told him to go ahead and use it every time, if it got him any laughs.”

They both picked up their coffee cups and sat on in silence. Then Gregory said, “Come on, let’s get back to the car.”

Most of their driving was done not in the big rented Buick but in a small rented Ford. This was due to no distaste for Dynaflow Drive, Valve-in-Head Engines, Pushbutton Window Control, or Bodies by Fisher, but to frustration too often repeated. It would have been impossible to say anything but “yes” when, nearly every evening, Thorn and Cindy asked in worried voices, “Is it all right for us to take the car tonight, since you’re not going out?” Yet when the late impulse for a drive did arrive, both Gregory and Abby found it depressing
to
have to squelch it because no vehicle was available. That it was a vehicle for which they were paying made it neither more nor less depressing, but they could not bring themselves to date up the car in advance when there was no guarantee that at the last moment they might not both prefer to get into bed and read. Ultimately, they rented the Ford, and Thorn’s and Cindy’s nightly worry was abolished.

With so much practice Gregory became expert at the wheel for the first time in his life. He found rhythmic, soothing satisfaction in the act of driving, and Abby never grew weary at his side. “We’re born tourists,” she said one evening as they returned to the hotel and began to undress. “We never knew it, but we are.”

Gregory lighted a cigarette and snapped the match across the room. It missed the ashtray he had aimed at, and he walked over to rectify his error with what can only be described as a swagger of pride. “We sure are. The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose. Walt Whitman. The oiled macadam road, the concrete six-lane highway—someday we’re going to drive right across the U.S.A.”

“Oh, Gregory, I’d love it.”

“So would I.” He grinned at her.

“I wonder how long it takes.”

“Hy and his wife did it once in four days and four nights spelling each other at the wheel. But they knocked themselves out and never saw anything but the white line and the filling stations.”

Abby shook her head disapprovingly. “Me, I’d like to take eight days and eight nights.”

“Me too. Mosey along and take all sorts of side trips.” They looked at each other solemnly. “I bet the Grand Canyon is really astonishing in the flesh.”

“People say no matter how many pictures you’ve seen beforehand, you can scarcely believe it when you’re right there on the Rim.”

Again they looked at each other. Then Gregory said, “Abby, let’s do it.”

Abby was not a wife who says, “Do what?” or “You mean, buy a car and drive home?” Instead, she gave a little jump on the bed, like a child, and said, “Oh, darling,
let’s
!”

“We said we’d buy a car at home, what’s the use of waiting?”

“Could we get one right away? Is there any shortage? What kind will we get? Won’t we have to buy one of those canvas water bags they hang over the radiator when they go into the desert?”

Gregory laughed. “Hold everything; let’s see. We’re through here Tuesday, April fifth, and publication day is the twentieth. We could do it easily; we could take ten days if we felt like it.”

“The train takes three and Hat certainly can go on alone for another week. Oh, Gregory, have we a road map somewhere?”

“Nothing but California. No Arizona, no New Mexico, no Colorado, Nevada, Wyoming—lord, the names themselves! I wonder what route we’d take.”

“Let’s get a map
now
and see. Let’s go out and find a gas station that has big maps.”

He shot out his wrist, but said, “We wouldn’t sleep anyway,” before he looked at his watch.

Abby was already getting into her dress again. “What kind of car do you think?”

“Well, I’m sort of used to the Ford.”

“A Ford would be fine. Oh, Gregory, it’s lovely we’re going to do it. I can’t wait to tell Thorn and Cindy—”

They looked at each other without saying anything. A moment went by. Then Gregory said, “They’d rather fly.” And Abby said, “I’m sure they would.”

Two days later, if Gregory and Abby Johns had been standing on their balcony, looking down and beyond the hotel’s blue-tiled swimming pool and bright deck chairs and umbrellas to the geranium-banked parking area, they would have found themselves gazing at the first automobile they had ever owned.

It had been delivered Thursday afternoon and Gregory was at the studio with Hy, but the moment Abby telephoned to say the Ford had arrived, he became useless for truly creative collaboration. A few minutes later, Hy shoved back from the desk and said, “For Pete’s sake, get out of here and go take a drive in it.”

“Nothing doing.”

“Go on. You’re worse than a starlet with her first diamond ring.”

Gregory phoned for a taxi—Thorn was over in Culver City with the Buick—and asked the driver to hurry. At the hotel, the doorman told him, needlessly, where to find Abby. Gregory met his wife on the front seat, kissed her roundly, and grabbed the ignition keys. The loud-speaker at the pool chose this moment to say it was paging Mr. Johns.

“It’s for Thorn,” Gregory said, and inserted the key. “Look at the mileage. Zero, zero, zero, zero, eight. That’s
new.
”

“It smells new! I’ve been sitting here smelling it.”

“Mr. Gregory Johns,” the loud-speaker bellowed, and they both groaned.

“Come on then,” Abby said, “whatever it is, you’re too ill to go, aren’t you?”

“I’m dying.”

They raced past the pool and the terrace and into the lobby. At the front desk, the assistant manager said, “This parcel just came in air special. Did you want to see it before your drive?”

“I certainly do,” Gregory said. “Thanks for catching us.”

It was medium in size, oblong, plastered with stamps, and addressed in Ed Barnard’s own handwriting. It could be only one thing. The first one from the bindery.

“Let’s go up a minute,” Gregory said.

“Several letters too,” the assistant manager said, and gave them to Abby. She glanced at them in the elevator; one was from Hat, one from Digby, and one from Mary Zatke. She slipped them into her pocket and followed Gregory down the hall. In the living room, she stood a little apart and let him tear off the wrappings of his parcel.

“Oh, it’s a beauty,” she cried.

Gregory didn’t answer. He held the book on the flat of his hand for a moment and then lifted the cover and turned some pages. They had indeed made a handsome book this time. The paper was clear and heavy, the margins wide, the binding a rough-textured linen, the color of oatmeal. He closed the book and looked at the spine.

THE

GOOD

WORLD

JOHNS

At last, he thought. For months, for years, he had known it only as ideas, as yellow pads, pencils, manuscript, galleys, known it only as phrases, sentences, scenes, chapters, known it only as hopes, fears, discouragement, and hope again, known it only as discussions with Abby, work with Ed, as hours at a desk, hours of pacing, nights of work until he was kneading his fingers to rid them of cramp. Now all that past was gathered up into twelve or sixteen ounces of paper, linen, buckram, thread, and printer’s ink, and there was this swift catch in his heart.

He remembered Abby and gave her the book. She looked at the title page, the dedication page, the opening of Chapter One. She began to read, but he did not read with her. A sample, a snatch here and there—no. He would wait until he could settle down to the one thing he had never yet done—read it without a pencil in his hand.

A line on one of the turning pages, “Owen Barlowe knew the tenacity of pain,” had caught at him, and for no reason he could name, it stayed on in his mind. He left Abby and walked into their bedroom. Abruptly, precipitantly, Gregory Johns lost all interest in the studio. He wished he need not go back tomorrow, that there weren’t another ten days before they could pack and start East. He wanted to be back in the world of Ed Barnard and publication day and a book review in his paper every morning and new work before him on his own desk; all at once the very vocabulary of picture-making bored him. We fade in, we pan to, we dissolve, to—it was foreign to him still, it would always be foreign; the camera trucks back, the angle widens, Owen Barlowe rises, Owen Barlowe walks, Owen Barlowe faces his opponent, the present tense, always the present tense, always action, speech, gesture. You could not offer the great cameras with their waving cranes, like thrusting antennae of monstrous one-eyed insects—you could not offer them a sentence which said, “Owen Barlowe knew the tenacity of pain.” Out here you were always strapped into the straitjacket of the external. The test of everything was, “Will it play?”