Two Weeks in Another Town (27 page)

“I’m out here to make my pile, Mr. Bernstein,” Jack said, taunting the man, enjoying his anger. “Then, in a year or two I’ll buy a ranch and raise cows and orchids and retire from the public eye.”

“A ranch,” Mr. Bernstein said. “That’s a new one. I’ll wait to see your picture, young man. Maybe you’ll be able to retire from the public eye sooner than you think.” He stalked off, an outraged patriot of the magic and beautiful country created each day on the sound stages he loved and dominated.

“How old are you, Jack?” Delaney asked.

“Twenty-two.”

“Good,” Delaney said. “You can still talk the way you’re talking. But get it all in now. Because at the age of twenty-three, it will be insufferable.” With a grin, he went off, small, tough, knowing, to investigate the report that an English poet was drunk on crème de menthe in the kitchen and was making improper advances to the butler.

Carlotta was smiling more openly, the judgment in her long, green eyes clearer and clearer.

“I think this party is over the hill,” Carlotta said. “I think it’s time to take me home. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” Jack said.

And that was all he did that night. Take her home and leave her at her door. That night.

“I had a peculiar sense of honor. In those days.”

Another night. They had been working on exteriors on the back lot and it was past eleven when they finished and once again Carlotta had asked Jack to drive her home, because her own car was in the garage getting a new grille put on it after a crash. She drove well, but too fast, and her car was constantly laid up, being repaired.

They drove in silence, up the winding canyon road toward Carlotta’s house. From time to time Carlotta’s dog, a huge Belgian shepherd that she took with her almost everywhere, leaned forward from the back seat and licked the back of her neck and she pushed him away impatiently, saying “God damn it, Buster, control yourself.” The dog would then sit back, hurt, his mouth open, panting, his tongue lolling, until he could contain his love no longer and would repeat the gesture.

Carlotta kept looking obliquely over at Jack as they drove, an expression composed of curiosity and amusement on her triangular, vivid pale face. Again and again since the night of the wedding, Jack had surprised that same look, disturbing, mocking, inviting, all at the same time, on Carlotta’s face. For his own reasons, Jack had avoided, whenever he could, being alone with her or looking at her too closely, but the face, with its flooding vitality, its violent blond sensuality, its hint of malicious amusement, haunted his dreams and tormented his waking hours.

“You don’t seem to have any trouble controlling yourself, do you?” Carlotta said. “Not like poor old slobbery, heart-on-his-tongue Buster here, at all.”

“What do you mean by that?” Jack asked, although he knew what she meant well enough.

“Nothing,” Carlotta said, laughing. “Nothing at all. What did you do back East—take a holy vow to be rude to movie stars?”

“If I’ve been rude,” Jack said stiffly, “I’m sorry. Excuse me.”

“You’ve been rude to everybody out here,” Carlotta said carelessly, “and you’re well loved for it. This is Masochism Alley out here. The harder they’re hit, the better they like it Don’t change. It’ll ruin your charm.”

She had a strange way of talking. She had been brought up in Texas, one of seven children of an oil-rigger who had wandered all over the state like a gypsy with his brood, but there was no remnant of her native drawl in her speech. She had worked ferociously with speech teachers for two years and now when she spoke she sounded like a girl who had been to the best Eastern schools and who had consciously corrected all the more affected mannerisms of the language she had learned there. The voice itself was low and controlled and she made the men she knew uncomfortable and hesitant in her presence, as though she were ready at any moment to ridicule any stupidity or pretension. On the set she was concentrated and intelligent, selfish, ferocious in defending her interests, confident of her talent, merciless to fraud. Delaney had told Jack in the beginning, “I’ll do my best to protect you from her, but you’ve got to watch out for yourself, too. She’ll sweep you off the screen if you relax your guard for a minute.”

Her body, which was justly famous, and which seemed lithe and soft and girlish, she kept hardened to an athlete’s pitch, and she watched her food and drink like a heavyweight champion at a training table. She was twenty-six years old and when she wanted she could pass convincingly as eighteen. She read a great deal, without much plan or discrimination, as though making up for the lack of education in the oil-rigger’s wake, and her mind was a grab bag of facts and quotations from the most surprising places. Fiercely intent on her career, she had never been married.

All these things, as they had been revealed to him in the past few weeks, had pushed Jack swiftly through the stages of admiration, desire, and finally, love. But he had said nothing yet.

Jack drove up to the sprawling white house set on the hillside and stopped the car. The dog began to whimper in back, eager to get out.

“Oh, Christ,” Carlotta said.

“What’s the matter?”

Carlotta indicated a Cadillac parked in her driveway. “I have a guest,” she said. “You can’t come in.”

“Why not?” Jack asked.

“The guest would be jealous.”

“Who is he?” Jack peered speculatively at the car. It was large, new, and rich, but in Hollywood that meant nothing. All it might mean was that somebody had scraped together a thousand dollars for the first down payment and was hoping for the best. He himself had an open Ford that he had bought second-hand.

“Who is he?” Carlotta asked incredulously. “Don’t you know?”

“No.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Am I supposed to know?”

Carlotta laughed and leaned over and kissed his forehead swiftly. “For ignorance,” she said, “above and beyond the call of Hollywood.” Then she told him the name of the owner of the Cadillac. It was Kutzer, the head of the studio, the man who had dubbed Jack, James Royal. “I thought everybody knew,” Carlotta said carelessly. “It’s been going on since two days before the Flood.”

“Do you like him?” Jack asked.

“Stop whining, Buster,” Carlotta said to the dog.

“Do you like him?” Jack repeated. Kutzer was at least forty, married, with two children. He had thinning hair and a small paunch, and was the object of fear and ridicule at the studio, like all other men in similar positions in Hollywood. Jack had never heard anyone say that he liked the man.

“Let’s put it this way,” Carlotta said. “I don’t like him tonight”

“Well, give him my regards,” Jack said flatly. “Good night.”

Carlotta opened the car door, then closed it defiantly. “I don’t want to say good night,” she said. “I want a drink.”

“I’m sure you’ll be able to find a bottle in there,” Jack said, indicating the house.

“I want a drink with you,” Carlotta said. “Alone with you. And don’t be so godamn twenty-two-year-old stuffy. Sit down and keep quiet, Buster.” She settled against Jack’s shoulder, “Do you know the way from here to your place, Jack?” she said.

Jack looked once more at the house, secret and dark with its drawn curtains, and at the shiny expensive car in the driveway. Then he started the Ford and turned it around swiftly and drove back down the winding canyon road.

Jack lived on the wrong side of Beverly Hills, below the trolley tracks, in a section of what were called patio apartments. The building was in the form of a hollow square, with an entrance through an archway and a big, fussy garden traversed by gravel walks.

As he stopped the car, he saw that the owner of a bungalow across the street was standing in front of his house in shirtsleeves and suspenders, gravely watering his lawn. It was hard to know what love of the earth or what detestation of his own fireside had driven his neighbor to this midnight ceremony.

They got out of the Ford and, with the dog sniffing before them, went through the arch into the central garden. There were lights on in some of the windows and from one of them came the strains of “Valencia” being played by a dance band on the radio. A damp fragrance of laurel and eucalyptus came up from the garden. Jack opened the door to his apartment and pulled the curtains so that when he put on the light his neighbors would not be able to see in. Before he could turn on the switch, Carlotta moved between him and the wall, and stood there, waiting, in the darkness. “Well, now,” she said.

He put his arms around her and kissed her. As he held her he felt the dog sniffing inquisitively at his legs. He remembered their other kisses, on the set, under the lights and cameras and the eyes of the other actors and hairdressers and sound men and electricians. Well, at least we’re reducing the audience, he thought cynically, it’s down to one dog. The thought took the pleasure from the embrace. As though she had guessed something of what he was thinking, Carlotta pushed away from him and touched the button on the wall. There was a whirring sound, but no light.

“What’s that?” she asked, startled.

“You turned on the heat,” he said. He switched on a lamp on the desk near the window and he saw, with surprise, that she still had her make-up on from the night’s shooting. He had forgotten that they had both come directly from the studio. He looked at himself in a mirror. His face looked ageless, waxlike and unreal. When he turned away from the mirror, she had seated herself on the heavy, mission-style couch with her legs up. “You promised me a drink,” she said.

He went into the kitchen and brought out a bottle of whisky and two glasses and a pitcher of water. Carlotta was looking around her with a grimace of displeasure, and he realized that he had forgotten how ugly and bare the rented, garishly furnished room actually was.

“When people first come out here,” Carlotta said, “they always pick places like this to live in. I call them anti-homes.” She accepted the glass and took a long swallow. “We both look ghastly,” she said, touching her make-up. “Don’t we, Buster?”

The dog was lying in the middle of the floor, watching her, and he wagged his tail, thumping it on the bare tile floor, on hearing his name.

“People’re afraid to put down roots here,” she said, speaking rapidly. It was the first time since he had been introduced to her that Jack felt that she had seemed nervous and ill-at-ease. “They have the feeling that the ground beneath all this bright green grass is unhealthy and that the swimming pools are poisoned.” She waved her glass at the dark carved furniture, at the greenish stucco walls. “What this place needs is a woman’s touch, as they say in the pitchers.” She looked up at
him
uncertainly, inquisitively, her blond hair falling loosely over the shoulders of the sweater she was wearing. “There hasn’t been a woman’s touch at all, has there?”

“No,” Jack said, sitting on the edge of the desk, facing her, being careful to keep his distance from her.

“So they tell me,” she said, “so they tell me. They also tell me you’re married. Is that true?”

“Yes,” he said.

“They’re catching ’em younger and younger these days,” Carlotta said. She stretched out her legs on the couch, her toes touching in a little V. She rested her back against the high arm of the couch, cradling the drink in her two hands. “Where is she—your wife?”

“In New York.”

“How is it she turned you loose like this?”

“She wouldn’t come with me. She’s working.”

“At what?”

“She’s in a play. She’s an actress.”

“Oh, God,” Carlotta said, “will it never stop? Did you ask her to come out with you?”

“Yes,” said Jack.

“And she wouldn’t?”

“No.”

“What’s her name—I mean her stage name?”

“You never heard of her,” Jack said. “Nobody ever heard of her. It’s a tiny part.”

“And even so, she wouldn’t come…?”

“No. She’s very serious.”

“Oh—is she good?”

“No,” Jack said, “she’s awful.”

“Does she know that?”

Jack shook his head. “No,” he said, “she thinks she’s the American answer to Sarah Bernhardt.”

Carlotta chuckled maliciously. “Have you told her?”

“Told her what?”

“That she’s awful?”

“Yes,” Jack said.

“What did she say to that?”

Jack grinned painfully. “She said that I was jealous of her talent, that I didn’t have much of my own, that I didn’t know what it was like to be devoted to my art, and that all I was good for was Hollywood, anyway.”

“Happy days in the New York theatre,” Carlotta said. She finished her drink and put it down on the floor beside her and the dog got up and came over and sniffed hopefully at it.

“How much longer,” Carlotta asked, stretching back lazily on the couch, her arms above her head, “do you think your marriage is going to last?”

“Two days,” Jack said.

“When did you decide that?”

“Tonight.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

She stood up then and came over and stood in front of him, touching his shoulder lightly with her hand, the big, green eyes alive and somber in the mask of make-up. “I didn’t come here only for a drink, you know,” she said.

“I know. Come on, I’m going to take you home now.”

She stepped back and looked at him, frowning, trying to understand. “You’re the godamndest boy,” she said.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I’m going to take you home now and I’m going to fly to New York tomorrow and I’m going to tell my wife I’m in love with you and that I want a divorce and that I’m going to marry you as soon as I can.”

Carlotta held his face in her hands, staring into his eyes, as if to make sure that he wasn’t joking. “I’m a poor, simple, corrupt little girl who came to Hollywood at a tender age, Jack,” she said, smiling crookedly. “I don’t know if I can cope with all this purity…”

He kissed her, gently, putting a seal upon his words.

“And me,” she said harshly. “What do I do while all this is going on?”

“You get the Cadillacs out of your driveway,” Jack said. “Once and for all.”

Carlotta moved back a step, touched her lips uncertainly. “Well,” she whispered, “that sounds fair enough.”