CHAPTER TWELVE
I HAD NEVER KNOWN a girl like Lulu, nor had I ever been in such a romance. Of course I had had my share of other girls—one doesn’t go through the Air Force without learning something about women—but I had always been a poor detective and ladies were way ahead of me.
Yet I think Lulu would have had her surprises for any man. I couldn’t tell from one hour to the next if we were in love or about to break up, whether we would make love or fight, do both or do nothing at all. The first time I saw her again, she was with friends and never let me be alone with her; the next day she came to visit my house and not only made it easy, but told me she was in love. Naturally, I told her the same. It would have been hard not to, and for sure I was in love if love is the time to do nothing else. Before she left, we had a quarrel; we would never see each other again. A half hour later she telephoned me from the Yacht Club and burst into tears. We loved each other after all.
It was out of control, beyond a doubt. I was able to discover emotions I never knew I owned, and I must have enjoyed it as much as Lulu. So I thought by virtue of the things we did I would put my mark on her forever. What she may have intended as a little dance was a track and field event to me, and I would snap the tape with burning lungs, knotted muscles, and mind set on the need to break a record. It was the only way I could catch her and for three minutes keep her. Like a squad of worn-out infantrymen who are fixed for the night in a museum, my pleasure was to slash tapestries, poke my fingers through nude paintings, and drop marble busts on the floor. Then I could feel her as something I had conquered, could listen to her wounded breathing, and believe that no matter how she acted other times, these moments were Lulu, as if her flesh murmured words more real than her lips. To the pride of having so beautiful a girl was added the bigger pride of knowing that I took her with the cheers of millions behind me. Poor millions with their low roar! They would never have what I had now. They could shiver outside, make a shrine in their office desk or on the shelf of their olive-drab lockers, they could look at the pin-up picture of Lulu Meyers. I knew I was good when I carried a million men on my shoulder.
But if I caught her in bed, I caught her nowhere else. There were days when Lulu told me to leave her alone, there were other days when she would not let me quit her for a minute, but the common denominator was that I had to follow every impulse. I could go over at noon to her suite in the Yacht Club after a summons by phone; she would be decided that we go horseback riding in the desert. I would arrive to find her still in bed. Breakfast had not yet come, would I have coffee with her? The moment room service left a tray, Lulu told me she wanted a Stinger.
“I don’t know how to make Stingers,” I would answer.
“Oh, sweetie, everybody knows how to make a Stinger. There’s brandy, crème de menthe. What did you do in the Air Force, milk a cow?”
“Lulu, are we going horseback riding?”
“Yes, we’re going horseback riding.” She would hold up a minor, study her face with the stare of a beauty-parlor operator, and stick out her tongue at the reflection. “Do I look good without make-up?” she would ask in a professional tone which allowed no nonsense.
“You look very good.”
“My mouth’s a little too thin.”
“It wasn’t last night,” I would say.
“Oh, you. A corpse could satisfy you.” But she would hug me matter-of-factly. “I love you, darling,” she would say.
“Let’s go horseback riding.”
“Do you know, Sergius, you’re neurotic.”
“I’m neurotic. I can’t stand to waste a day.”
“Well, I don’t feel like getting on a horse,” Lulu would decide.
“I knew you wouldn’t. I didn’t want to either.”
“Then why did you wear jodhpurs?”
“Because if I didn’t wear them, you would want to go.”
“Oh, I’m not like that.” Sitting in bed, she would hug herself, her beautiful face arched above her cool throat. “Honest, I’m not.”
The phone would ring. It would be a call from New York. “No, I’m not marrying Teddy Pope,” she would say to a columnist. “Of course, he’s a son of a bitch. Yes, say we’re good friends and that’s all. Good-bye, sweetie.” She would hang up, she would groan. “That stupid press agent I’ve got. If you can’t handle a gossip columnist what kind of press agent are you?”
“Why don’t you let him try?”
“He’s beyond hunger.”
So it would go. About the time I was past exasperated she would begin to dress. The coffee was cold she would tell me and call room service for more. I would lose my temper. I was definitely leaving I would tell her. She would run after me and catch me at the door. She knew I was willing to be caught. “I’m a bitch, I tell you,” she would say. “I was trying to get you mad.”
“You never came near.”
“You’ll end up hating me. You will. Nobody likes me who really knows me. Even I don’t like myself.”
“You love yourself.”
She would grin delightfully. “It’s not the same thing. Sergius, let’s go horseback riding.”
Finally we would go. She was always dawdling or at a gallop. One time we were riding around an abandoned wooden fence and she told me to jump it. I told her I wouldn’t because I was a bad jumper. It was an honest estimate. I had been riding for a month.
“The lousiest stunt man will fall on his ass for fifty bucks,” she said, “but you won’t try anything.”
Actually, I wanted to jump. I had the anticipation of falling and Lulu nursing me. That was a part of our affair which had never been tried. When I took the jump, and I thought it was a good one, I turned around for her applause and saw her trotting away in the opposite direction. For all I knew she hadn’t even looked. After I caught up to her, she turned on me. “You’re a baby. Only a second-rater would take a stupid dare like that.”
We rode back without a word. When we reached the Yacht Club, she went into her cabaña, came out in a bathing suit, and talked to everybody but me. The only time our eyes met, she held out her glass as she had done the night of the party, and said, “Sugar, get me a small Martin.”
Her caution when our affair began was often a chore. She used to come to my house on foot, or she would admit me to her room only after dark. “They’ll crucify me when they find out,” she would complain, “look at Eitel,” that way comparing me to Elena. About his affair she was furious. “Eitel never had any taste,” she would say. “Any tramp who tells him he’s terrific can always sell him a ticket to her favorite charity.” And once when we met them on the street, she was hardly easy on Elena. “I bet she has dirty underwear,” Lulu said. “You watch. She’s going to be fat as a bull.” When I argued that I liked Elena, Lulu became sullen. “Oh, sure, she’s the underdog,” Lulu snapped. Yet, a few hours later, she said to me, “You know, Sugar, maybe it would have been better if I had to struggle. Maybe my character would be better.” Her finger to her chin, she asked, “Am I really a bore?”
“Only when you’re vertical … says the Irish in me.”
“You’ll pay for that.” And she chased me around with a pillow. When she had finished pounding me, she made me lie down beside her. “I’m awful, but Strong-Arm O’Shaugnessy, I want to be good. It was terrible with Eitel. He would laugh at me and some of his friends were intellectually very overbearing.” She giggled. “When I was with Eitel, I used to study to be an intellectual.”
If she had been decided to keep our affair a secret, she changed her mind one day by sitting on my lap at the Yacht Club pool. “You ought to try Sugar some time,” she said to several of her woman friends, “he’s not bad at all.” Which depressed me. Because I knew if I was really good, she wouldn’t give her friends a clue. For a few days she couldn’t walk in public without my arm around her. Pictures were taken of us by night-club photographers. I got up one morning to find Lulu by my bed, a gossip column in her hand. “Look at it. How awful!” she
said to me. I read the following:
Atom Bomb Lulu Meyers and the potential next Mr. Meyers, ex-Marine Corps Captain Silgius McShonessy, scion of an Eastern-or-is-it-Midwestern fortune, are setting off those Geiger counters in Desert D’Or.
I didn’t know if I was more pleased or more horrified. “Don’t they ever get a name right?” I blustered. Lulu began to tickle me. “You know that’s not bad. They could have been a lot nastier,” she said. “Atom Bomb Lulu Meyers. Do you think people really think of me that way?”
“Of course they don’t. You know your press agent wrote it.”
“I don’t care. It’s still interesting.” Like so many name-people in Desert D’Or, it didn’t matter to Lulu that the news came from her. Seeing the printed lines made an alchemy; I know our affair was more real to her. “Geiger counters,” Lulu said thoughtfully, “that’s a smart line, publicity-wise. Oh, he’s a good press agent. I’m going to call him in a day or two.”
Now that our romance was publicly big, or better, torrid, Lulu started to confuse people again. “They make Sugar sound so good in the newspapers,” she said one night to some people in a bar, “that I’ll really try him. I really will, Sugar.” And she gave me a sisterly kiss. Older sister.
We soon found something new to fight about. I discovered that to make love to Lulu was to make myself a scratch-pad to the telephone. It was always ringing, and no moment was long enough to keep her from answering. Her delight was to pass the first few rings. “Don’t be so nervous, Sugar,” she would say, “let the switchboard suffer,” but before the phone had screamed five times, she would pick it up. Almost always, it was business. She would be talking to Herman Teppis, or Munshin who was back in the capital, or a writer, or her director for the next picture, or an old boy friend, or once her hairdresser—Lulu was interested in a hair-do she had seen. The conversation could not go on for two minutes before she was teasing me again; to make love and talk business was a double-feature to her.
“Of course I’m being a good girl, Mr. Teppis,” she would say, giving me the wink. “How can you think these things of me?” As the end in virtuosity, she succeeded one time in weeping through a phone call with Teppis while rendering a passage with me.
I would try to get her to visit my place but she had grown an aversion. “It depresses me, Sugar, it’s in such bland taste.” For a while everything would be bland. Her own place was now spoiled by that word, and one day she told the management to have her room suite redecorated. Between morning and evening its beige walls were painted to a special blue, which Lulu claimed was her best color. Now she lay with her gold head on pale-blue linen, ordering pink roses and red roses from the telephone; the florist at the Yacht Club promised to arrange them himself. She would buy a dress and give it to her maid before she had even worn it, she would complain she had not a thing to wear. Her new convertible she traded in one afternoon for the same model in another color, and yet the exchange cost her close to a thousand dollars. When I reminded her that she had to drive the new car slowly until it accumulated the early mileage, she hired a chauffeur to trundle it through the desert and spare her the bother. Her first phone bill from the Yacht Club was five hundred dollars.
Yet when it came to making money she was also a talent. While I knew her, negotiations were on for a three-picture contract. She would phone her lawyers, they would call her agent, the agent would speak to Teppis, Teppis would speak to her. She asked a big price and got more than three quarters of it. “I can’t stand my father,” she explained to me, “but he’s a gambler at business. He’s wonderful that way.” It came out that when she was thirteen and going to a school for professional children in the capital, Magnum Pictures wanted to sign her to a seven-year contract. “I’d be making a stinking seven hundred and fifty a week now like all those poor exploited schnooks, but daddy wouldn’t let me. ‘Free-lance,’ he said, he talks that way, ‘this country was built on free-lance.’ He’s just a chiropodist with holdings in real estate, but he knew what to do for me.” Her toes nibbled at the telephone cord. “I’ve noticed that about men. There’s a kind of man who never can make money for himself. Only for others. That’s my father.”
Of her father and mother, Lulu’s opinion changed by the clock. One round it would be her father who was marvelous. “What a bitch my mother is. She just squeezed all the manhood out of him. Poor daddy.” Her mother had ruined her life, Lulu explained. “I never wanted to be an actress. She made me one. It’s her ambition. She’s just an … octopus.” Several phone calls later, Lulu would be chatting with her mother. “Yes, I think it gives me hives,” she would say of some food, “glycerine, will that do, mommie?… He’s what?… He’s acting up again.… Well, you tell him to leave you alone. I wouldn’t put up with it if I were you. I would have divorced him long ago. I certainly would.…
“I don’t know what I’d do without her,” Lulu would say on hanging up the phone, “men are terrible,” and she would have nothing to do with me for the next half hour.
It took me longer than it need have taken to realize that the heart of her pleasure was to show herself. She hated holding something in. If Lulu felt like burping, she would burp; if it came up that she wanted to put cold cream on her face, she would do it while entertaining half a dozen people. So it went with her acting. She could say to a stranger that she was going to be the greatest actress in the world. Once, talking to a stage director, she was close to tears because the studio never gave her a part in a serious picture. “They ruin me,” she complained. “People don’t want glamour, they want acting. I’d take the smallest role if it was something I could get my teeth into.” Still, she quarreled for three days running, and how many hours on the telephone I could never guess, because Munshin who was producing her next picture would not enlarge her part. Publicity, she announced, was idiotic, but with her instinct for what was good to an adolescent, she did better than co-operate with photographers. The best ideas always came from Lulu. One sortie when she was photographed sipping a soda she shaped the second straw into a heart, and the picture as it was printed in the newspapers showed Lulu peeping through the heart, coy and cool. On the few times I would be allowed to spend the night with her, I would wake up to see Lulu writing an idea for publicity in the notebook she kept on her bed table, and I had a picture of her marriage to Eitel, each of them with his own notebook and own bed table. With pleasure, she would expound the subtleties of being well photographed. I learned that the core of her dislike for Teddy Pope was that each of them photographed best from the left side of the face, and when they played a scene together Teddy was as quick as Lulu not to expose his bad side to the camera. “I hate to play with queers,” she complained. “They’re too smart. I thought I had mumps when I saw myself. Boy, I threw a scene.” Lulu acted it for my private ear. “You’ve ruined me, Mr. Teppis,” she shrieked. “There’s no chivalry left.”
For odd hours, during those interludes she called at her caprice, things had come around a bit. To my idea of an interlude which must have left her exhausted, she coached me by degrees to something different. Which was all right with me. Lulu’s taste was for games, and if she lay like a cinder under the speed of my sprints, her spirits improved with a play. I was sure no two people ever had done such things nor even thought of them. We were great lovers I felt in my pride; I had pity for the hordes who could know none of this. Yes, Lulu was sweet. She would never allow comparison. This was the best. I was superb. She was superb. We were beyond all. Unlike Eitel who now could not bear to hear a word of Elena’s old lovers, I was charitable to all of Lulu’s. Why should I not be? She had sworn they were poor sticks to her Sugar. I was even so charitable that I argued in Eitel’s defense. Lulu had marked him low as a lover, and in a twist of friendship my heart beat with spite. I stopped that quickly enough, I had an occasional idea by now of when Lulu was lying, and I wanted to set Eitel at my feet, second to the champion. It pleased me in my big affair that I had such a feel for the ring.
W
e played our games. I was the photographer and she was the model; she was the movie star and I was the bellhop; she did the queen, I the slave. We even met even to even. The game she loved was to play the bobby-soxer who sat with a date in the living room and was finally convinced, always for the first time naturally enough. She was never so happy as when we acted at theater and did the mime on clouds of myth. I was just young enough to want nothing but to be alone with her. It was not even possible to be tired. Each time she gave the signal, and I could never know, not five minutes in advance, when it would happen, my appetite was sharp, dressed by the sting of what I suffered in public.
To eat a meal with her in a restaurant became the new torture. It didn’t matter with what friends she found herself nor with what enemies, her attention would go, her eye would flee. It always seemed to her as if the conversation at another table was more interesting than what she heard at her own. She had the worry that she was missing a word of gossip, a tip, a role in a picture, a financial transaction, a … it did not matter; something was happening somewhere else, something of importance, something she could not afford to miss. Therefore, eating with her was like sleeping with her; if one was cut by the telephone, the other was rubbed by her itch to visit from table to table, sometimes dragging me, sometimes parking me, until I had to wonder what mathematical possibility there was for Lulu to eat a meal in sequence since she was always having a bit of soup here and a piece of pastry there, joining me for breast of squab, and taking off to greet new arrivals whose crabmeat cocktail she nibbled on. There was no end, no beginning, no surety that one would even see her during a meal. I remember a dinner when we went out with Dorothea O’Faye and Martin Pelley. They had just been married and Lulu treasured them. Dorothea was an old friend, a dear friend, Lulu promised me, and before ten minutes she was gone. When Lulu finally came back, she perched on my lap and said in a whisper the others could hear, “Sugar, I tried, and I couldn’t make doo-doo. Isn’t that awful? What should I eat?”