The Collected Stories

  “Yeah, well, look, Sally. You want to come home with me?”

  And she answered him without taking her eyes from the window. “I don’t know; I don’t think so. We’d just start fighting again. I’ll call you, Jack, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Besides,” she said, “I ought to be here when Woody and Kicker come home. I think I might be able to help. Oh, not Woody, of course, but Kicker. I mean Kicker loves me—or at least he used to. Sometimes he used to call me his ‘proxy mother.’” She lingered silent at the window for a long time, looking jaded, her upper lip beginning to loosen the way it did when she was drunk. “Have you any idea,” she asked, “of what it means to be a woman unable to have a child? Even if you don’t necessarily want one, it’s a terrible thing to discover you can’t; and sometimes—oh, God, I don’t know. Sometimes I think having a child is all I’ve ever really wanted in my whole life.”

  On his unsteady way out of the house, Jack went into the kitchen and said, “Hey, uh, Nippy? Think you could find me a beer?”

  “Well, I believe that can be arranged, Mr. Fields,” the maid said. “Sit right here at the table.” When he was settled with the beer she sat across from him and said, “See that blender? Empty, right? Well, twenty minutes ago that blender was full to the top with brandy Alexanders. And I mean I don’t think that’s very sensible, do you? Giving a man all that drink first thing in the morning when he prob’ly doesn’t even know where his brains are at anyway because it’s only been three days since his wife passed away? I like to see a little restraint.”

  “Me too.”

  “Well, but then you never can tell with Miz Jarvis,” Nippy said. “She’s very—sophisticated, you know what I mean? Very kind of”—she fluttered the plump fingers of one hand to find the right word—“bohemian. Still, I don’t care what anybody says—and I’ve heard a lot of people say a lot of things—I think the world of that lady, and that’s the truth. I’d do anything for Miz Jarvis. Twice now, over the years, she’s helped my husband get work in times we really needed it, and you know what she did for me, that I never can forget? She got me my contacts.”

  When he looked puzzled, Nippy pointed happily to the outer corners of her eyes with both index fingers, blinking. And if he hadn’t understood her then—“Oh, your contact lenses”—he felt sure she would have bent over, peeled back an eyelid, and dropped one of the moist, all but invisible things into the palm of her hand as an offering of explanation and proof.

  Back at the beach house, Jack worked as hard on the script all day as if he were trying to finish it in a week. He had begun to feel, in the last month or so, that it wasn’t bad; it was turning out all right; it would make a pretty good movie. Late in the afternoon he called Carl Oppenheimer to discuss the handling of a tricky scene; it wasn’t really a necessary call, but he wanted to hear a voice other than the voices of Jill Jarvis’s house.

  “How come you never come over, Jack?” Oppenheimer demanded. “Ellie’d love to see you, and so would I.”

  “Well, I’ve been pretty busy, is all, Carl.”

  “Got a girl?”

  “Well, sort of. I mean yeah, yeah, I do, but she’s—”

  “Bring her over!”

  “Well, that’s nice, Carl, and I will. I’ll call you again soon. It’s just that right now I think we’re sort of taking a vacation from each other. It’s very—it’s pretty complicated.”

  “Oh, Jesus, writers,” Oppenheimer said in exasperation. “I don’t know what the hell’s the matter with you guys. Why can’t you just get laid like everybody else?”

  “Well—” Sally began when she called him a few days later, and he knew he would now be on the phone for an hour. “When Woody and Kicker got back that morning, Jill went out and met them on the terrace. She sent Kicker inside to wash up, and she said to Woody, ‘Look. I want you to disappear for a week. Please don’t ask questions; just go. I’ll explain this later.’ Can you imagine a woman saying that to a man she’s been living with for three years?”

  “No.”

  “Neither could I, but that’s what she said. I mean that’s what she told me she said. And she said to me, ‘I’m not going to let anything interfere with what I have now.’ She said, ‘Cliff and I are special, Sally. We’re the real thing. We’ve established a relationship, and we’re . . .’”

  It occurred to Jack that if he held the phone well away from his head Sally’s voice would dwindle and flatten out and be lost in tinny gibberish, like the voice of an idiot midget. Disembodied, bereft of coherence and so of all envy and self-pity and self-righteousness as well, it would then become a small but steady irritant serving no purpose but to chafe his nerves and prevent him from getting his day’s work done. He tried holding the phone that way for five or ten seconds, flinching in the pain of his secret betrayal, and he abandoned the experiment just in time to hear her say “. . . and so listen, Jack. If we both agree not to drink too much, and if we’re very careful with each other in every way, do you think you might—you know—do you think you might come back? Because I mean the point is—the point is I love you, and I need you.”

  She had said any number of loving things these past few months, but never that she “needed” him. And the effect of it now, just when he’d determined never to go to Beverly Hills again, was to make him change his mind.

  “. . . Oh, God,” she said in the doorway of her room, half an hour later. “Oh, God, I’m glad you’re here.” And she melted into his arms. “I won’t be awful to you anymore, Jack,” she said. “I promise, promise. Because there is so little time left, and the least we can do is be nice to each other, right?”

  “Right.”

  And with her door locked against any possibility of blundering intrusion, they spent the whole afternoon being as nice to each other as either of them had ever learned to be. Only after the long bank of Sally’s western windows had gone from gold to crimson to dark blue did they rouse themselves at last to take showers, and to put on their clothes.

  Then, before very long, Sally went back to the inexhaustible topic of Jill’s behavior. She paced the carpet on her slim, stockinged feet as she talked, and Jack thought she had never looked prettier. But he let most of her talk go past his hearing, nodding or shaking his head at whatever intervals seemed appropriate, usually after she had whirled to stare at him in mute appeal for endorsement of her dismay. He began paying attention only when she got around to what she called the worst part.

  “. . . Because I mean really, Jack, the worst part of all this is what it’s doing to Kick. Jill thinks he doesn’t know what’s going on, but she’s crazy. He does. He mopes around the house all day looking pale and wretched and as if he’s about to—I don’t know. And he won’t even let me talk to him. He won’t let me comfort him or be friends with him or anything. And for the past two nights you know what he’s done? He’s taken off alone on his bike and spent the night with Woody, down in the studio. I don’t think Jill even noticed he was gone, either time.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s—that’s too bad.”

  “Oh, and he hates Cliff. Absolutely hates him. Whenever Cliff says anything to him he freezes up—and I don’t blame him. Because you know something else, Jack? You were right about Cliff from the start and I was wrong, that’s all. He’s nothing but a big, dumb—he’s a dullard.”

  On Jill’s instructions, Nippy had fed the boy at least an hour before the adults’ dinner was served. She had also equipped the big dining-room table with two matching silver candleholders, each bearing three new candles, and she’d turned out the lights so that everything was bathed in a flickering glow of romance.

  “Isn’t this nice?” Jill inquired. “I always forget about candles. I think we ought to have candles every night.” And the way she was dressed suggested other forgotten things well worth remembering, perhaps her own swift and careless girlhood as a privileged daughter of the South. She wore a simple, expensive-looking black dress with a neckline low enough to show
the beginnings of her small, firm breasts, and a single strand of pearls that she twisted nervously at her throat with her free hand while toying with her food.

  Cliff Myers was flushed and jovial with Old Grand-dad. He told one smiling, self-aggrandizing anecdote after another about his engineering firm, with Jill pronouncing each story “wonderful” in turn; then he said, “No, but listen, another thing, Jill. This you gotta hear. First of all, I find I get some of my best thinking done when I’m driving the freeway to work. Don’t know why that’s true, but I’ve learned to trust it. So. Know what I thought up this morning?” He efficiently sliced open his baked potato and lowered his face to savor the rising heat of it, making his audience wait. He heavily buttered and salted it, forked up a slice of lamb chop, and looked happily reflective as he chewed; then, talking around the meat, he said, “How’s this for openers?” And he swallowed. “We’ve got this very high-grade industrial glue in the lab. You wouldn’t believe it. Paint that stuff on any metal surface, touch it, and I swear to God you can’t get your hand loose. Try soap and water, try any kinda detergent, try alcohol, or you name it. Can’t get loose. So look.” Almost half a chop went into his mouth, but he was scarcely able to chew because he had begun to laugh. “Look: supposing I get this little truck.” He broke off, helpless with laughter, one hand spanning his forehead while he struggled for composure. Of his three listeners, only Jill was smiling.

  “So okay,” Cliff Myers said at last, and his mouth was apparently clear. “Supposing I get one of our company panel trucks. Supposing I dress up in one of our drivers’ uniforms—they wear these kind of cream-colored coveralls with the insignia on the front pocket and the company name spelled out across the back? With these visor caps? And of course the truck’s got the company name on it too, you follow me? ‘Myers’? So I come driving up here with this aluminum tub fulla roses—three, four dozen American Beauties, the very best—and of course when I bring it out I’ll be real careful to hold it by the dry part, so my mitts’ll be free; then your little friend Woody’ll come out there on the terrace to see what’s up, and I’ll say, ‘Mr. Starr?’ And I’ll shove that slick, glued-up tub into his hands and say, ‘Flowers, sir. Flowers for Mrs. Jarvis. Compliments of Cliff Myers.’ And I’ll get back into the truck and take off, or maybe I’ll stay just long enough to kind of wink at him, and old Starr of Hollywood’ll just be there. He’ll just be there, you follow me? It’ll take him maybe thirty seconds to figure out he’s stuck to the son of a bitch, and maybe five or ten minutes more to realize he’s been had, he’s been faked out, somebody’s pulled a fast one on him, and I swear to God, Jill, I’d bet money—I’d bet money the little bastard’ll never bother you again.”

  Jill had looked enraptured through the latter part of his recital; now she squeezed his hand on the table with both of her own and said, “Marvelous. Oh, that’s marvelous, Cliff,” and they laughed together, looking each other up and down with bright eyes.

  “Jill,” Sally said from across the table, after awhile. “This is just a joke, isn’t it.”

  “Well, of course it is,” Jill said impatiently, as if reproving a slow child. “It’s an absolutely inspired idea for a practical joke. The men in Cliff’s firm play practical jokes on each other all the time—I think it’s a delightful way to survive all the dull and boring parts of life, don’t you?”

  “Well, but I mean, you’d certainly never agree to going through with a thing like that, would you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Jill said in a light, teasing voice. “Maybe; maybe not. But don’t you think it’s a delightfully wicked idea?”

  “I think you’re out of your mind,” Sally told her.

  “Oh, I think so too,” she said with an attractive little wrinkling of her nose. “I think Cliff is too. Isn’t that what it means to be in love?”

  Later that night, when Jack and Sally were alone, she said, “I don’t even want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it or think about it or anything, okay?”

  And it certainly was. Any time Sally was unwilling to talk or think about Jill Jarvis was perfectly okay with Jack.

  The following night he took her to a restaurant for dinner, and then out for an evening at the home of Carl Oppenheimer.

  “Jesus,” she said as they drove up the coast highway toward the better part of Malibu, “I’m really a little scared to meet him, you know?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, because of who he is. He’s one of the few major—”

  “Come on, Sally. There isn’t anything ‘major’ about him. He’s only a movie director and he’s only thirty-two years old.”

  “Are you out of your mind? He’s brilliant. He’s one of the two or three top directors in the industry. Have you any idea how lucky you are to be working with him?”

  “Well, okay, but then, does he have any idea how lucky he is to be working with me?”

  “God,” she said. “You’ve got an ego that nobody’d believe. Tell me something: If you’re so great, how come your clothes are all falling apart? And how come you’ve got snails in your shower stall? Huh? And how come your bed smells like death?”

  “Jack!” Carl Oppenheimer called from the bright doorway of his house, after they’d walked the long, heavily leaf-shadowed path from the place where they’d left the car. “And you’re Sally,” he said with an earnest frown. “Really nice to meet you.”

  She said it was certainly an honor to meet him too, and they went inside to where young Ellis stood smiling in welcome, wearing a floor-length dress. She looked lovely, and she rose on tiptoe to give Jack an eager little kiss of old acquaintance, which he hoped Sally would notice; then, as they moved chatting pleasantly into the big room overlooking the ocean, where the liquor was, she turned to Sally again and said, “I love your hair. Is that the natural color, or do you—”

  “No, it’s natural,” Sally told her. “I just get it streaked.”

  “Sit down, sit down!” Oppenheimer commanded, but he chose to remain standing himself, or rather walking, slowly treading the floor of this ample and excellent room with a heavy glass of bourbon tinkling in one hand while the other made large gestures to accompany his talk. He was telling of his frustrations over the past few weeks in trying to finish a movie that was well behind schedule, and of how “impossible” it was to work with its star—an actor so famous that the very mention of his name was a kind of conversational triumph.

  “. . . And then today,” he said, “today everything on the set had to stop dead—cameras, sound, everything—while he took me off in a corner and sat me down to discuss what he called Dramatic Theory, and he asked me if I was familiar with the work of a playwright named George Bernard Shaw. You think anybody’d believe that? You think anybody in America’d believe how dumb the son of a bitch is? Christ’s sake, this year he’s discovered Shaw; three years from now he’ll discover the Communist Party.”

  Oppenheimer seemed to tire of his monologue after awhile; he came heavily to rest in a deep sofa and put his arm around Ellis, who nestled close to him; then he asked Sally if she was an actress too.

  “Oh, no,” she said quickly, brushing invisible specks of cigarette ash off her lap, “but thanks anyway. I don’t really do anything very—I’m only—I’m a secretary. I work for Edgar Todd, the agent.”

  “Well, hell, that’s fine with me,” Oppenheimer said expansively. “Some of my best friends are secretaries.” And as if aware that this last line might not have been wholly successful, he hurried on to ask her how long she’d worked for Edgar, and how she liked her job, and where she lived.

  “I live in Beverly,” she told him. “I have an apartment in the home of a friend there; it’s very nice.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s—nice,” he said. “I mean Beverly’s very nice.”

  For the last hour or so of that evening in Oppenheimer’s house, Jack found himself perched cozily with Ellis on two of the tall, leather-topped stools along the bar that occupied one side of the roo
m. She told him at length of her childhood in Pennsylvania, of the summer stock company that had provided her first real “experience of theater,” and of the wonderfully lucky sequence of events that had led to her meeting Carl. And Jack was so pleased with her youth and prettiness, and so flattered by her attention, that he only dimly realized he had heard the whole story before, during the time he’d stayed here.

  Across the room, Carl and Sally were engaged in a steady and intense discussion. Jack couldn’t hear much of it, in the several times he tried to listen, beyond the insistent, dead-serious rumble of Carl’s voice, though once he heard Sally say, “Oh, no, I loved it. Really. I loved it all the way through.”

  “Well, this’s been great,” Carl Oppenheimer said when it was time for them to leave. “Sally. Wonderful meeting you; good talking to you. Jack: we’ll be in touch.”

  And then came the long, drink-fuddled ride back to town. For what seemed twenty minutes there was silence in the car, until Sally said, “They’ve sort of—got everything, haven’t they. I mean they’re young, they’re in love, and everybody knows he’s a brilliant man so it doesn’t really matter whether she’s got any talent or not because she’s a cute little sexpot anyway. What could ever go wrong in a house like that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know; I can think of a couple of things that might go wrong.”

  “You know what I really didn’t like about him, though?” she said. “I didn’t like the way he kept asking me what I thought of his movies. He’d mention one picture after another and ask me if I’d seen it, and then he’d say, ‘So what’d you think? Did you like it?’ Or he’d say, ‘Didn’t you think it kind of fell apart in the second half?’ Or ‘Didn’t you feel so-and-so was a little miscast as the girl?’ And I mean really, Jack. Isn’t that a bit much?”