Marjorie blurted, “What? A hundred twenty a week, right off the bat?”
Noel grinned, and ran a knuckle along his upper lip. “You don’t flatter me, dear. The idea is to shift me around through the departments for training, and eventually land me in a sort of chief-of-staff capacity under him, if I work out. Sam’s been suggesting this off and on for a couple of years. I used to laugh at him. I didn’t see myself as a wage slave. But I started talking seriously about it a week or so ago. He’s sure I’m a misguided genius, and he’s going to discover me and make me into a major executive. He says I can be making twenty-five thousand a year or more in a few years. I think he’s more excited about my coming to work than I am…. Well, that’s the story. Doesn’t it please you?”
“Why, I’m breathless. Gosh, there’s no end to you, is there? Just to walk out and get a job at a hundred twenty a week—in the middle of what everyone else calls a depression—”
“I’m getting an odd kick out of it so far, to tell you the truth. How do you like my junior-executive costume?”
“Perfect. Brooks Brothers?”
“Feinberg’s, on Delancey Street. I’ve been outfitting myself there for years. One size too small in the extra longs gives me a fairly acceptable fit. However, I’ll put a real tailor to work, one of these days. Haven’t done it since Raining Kisses. Fun, but costly. I don’t really care whether I fling money around or squirrel it, Margie, life’s interesting either way, but I’ve had a long squirrel siege, and I must say I’ve been getting rather tired of it.”
Marjorie had observed Noel’s peculiar skill at managing his money. He had stretched the thousand-dollar fee from Greech through the fall and most of the winter. He knew an amazing number of cheap restaurants. He was good at cooking, too, much better than she was, but lazy. He would make a vast pot of excellent spaghetti, and eat at it for a week. “You’d just about run out, hadn’t you?”
“Oh, I could have gone along for a few more months. I’d have gotten a little thin and irritable, maybe, like a hibernating bear. In Paris they make an art of this kind of living. You pick it up. I swear I’d just as lief be poor as rich. It’s sport, nibbling away at a store of money, and scheming to make it last.”
The lunch was superb: hors d’oeuvres which Noel selected from a huge wheeled cart, veal delicately sliced and cooked with mushrooms and rice, a side dish of curiously prepared eggplant, and a salad with eggs and anchovies which he dressed himself. The white wine had an exquisite glowing clean taste. Marjorie forgot her self-consciousness, eating with great relish.
Noel said, pouring wine, “Why kid ourselves, Marjorie? The best things in life cost like the devil. Every time I poke my nose back into the upper-crust atmosphere, I realize why people kill themselves for money. Oh, hell, there’s a case for impoverished freedom, but—” He drank. “You know, there are some charming perquisites to this job. Where do you suppose I go from here, this afternoon? Newark Airport. To meet Janice Gray, if you please, and escort her to the Waldorf.”
“Janice Gray?” Marjorie did her best to keep the note of alarm out of her voice. “Well, that should be nice. She’s beautiful.”
“Yes indeed. Usually Sam meets her. This is high policy. She’s been a bad girl at the studio, showing up late for shooting, balking at stories, and so forth. I’m an insult to her, you see, a mere hireling greeting her, instead of the boss.”
“Well, I hope she’ll be properly offended.” Marjorie’s appetite was suddenly gone. She put a cigarette in her mouth, and the waiter startled her by springing at her with a lit match.
Noel said, busily eating, “She’s a dull creature, no doubt, in person. She’s on her third or fourth divorce, and I hear she’s utterly dissolute. Probably arrive drunk as a goat.”
“No doubt. And you’ll probably be in bed with her before the day is out. I hope you enjoy it.”
He put down his knife and fork and laughed at her, his eyes brilliant.
She said, “All right, laugh. You’ve always lived like a pig, and there’s no reason for you not to go on that way. I swear I don’t care what you do. Only one thing puzzles me. Why do you keep coming around to me? Why is it me you call up when you’ve got the new job? And why have you taken the job? What are you trying to prove to me? I’m just a West End Avenue girl, dumb, untalented—”
“Beautiful—”
“Not like Janice Gray—”
“Fresh, sweet, blue-eyed, a sprig of lilac in the morning sun. Darling, I shouldn’t bait you, but I can’t help it. Why do you always bite? Janice Gray’s a revolting old bag. When she walks in front of the camera to play a scene, I see nothing but her agent just off camera, blotting the new clause in the contract. She’s odious.”
“Oh, sure,” Marjorie growled, but she felt better. “Well, you still haven’t answered me. Why have you taken this job?”
Noel shrugged. “Isn’t it pleasanter to eat at the Ritz than at Mama Mantucci’s on Eleventh Street?”
“Why, of course, but you seem to like it the other way—”
“I like life almost any way it comes—except—well, I was going to say, except the respectable way, but I’m not sure that’s so. I’m beginning to think I might love being bourgeois, with a difference. With an inward grin, you might say. Hell, Marjorie, I like good things. I like the thought of being able to afford them. I like shirts that fit well, and ties that knot attractively because the material is good, and suits made of fine stuff instead of Feinberg’s wrought iron.” He fingered his sleeve. “I like gold cuff links, but I’m damned if I’ll wear plated ones. I’m more and more attracted to the notion of affording these things all over again, as I did in the Raining Kisses days. It was a golden time. All the good things in my wardrobe date from then. I like ocean trips, too—first class. It’s a deep pleasure just to know I can go if I want to. And then of course there’s that luxury of luxuries, a bourgeois wife. Love knows no logic. Suppose I should one day be unfortunate enough to want to marry such a creature?”
She avoided his look, and said with a great effort at lightness, “Here’s hoping you don’t. You’d make her acutely miserable for life.”
“Possibly. Then again, if I knew exactly what I was doing, I might make her happy as a fairy princess.”
She couldn’t help it; she faced him. His unsmiling passionate glance agitated her. She murmured after a few seconds, “Don’t look at me like that, you fool.”
“I’ll look as I damn please.”
“Don’t, I say. Let me ask you this, what’s suddenly brought on such a radical change of front? Have you given up your writing ambitions?”
Noel sipped at his wine, his expression thoughtful. “Not in the least. There’s been a conspiracy of events forcing me into Sam’s office lately. That disaster with Kogel and Princess Jones, for one thing. The theatre is nothing but a machine for breaking spirits, Margie—that is, so long as you try to make a living from it. Cole Porter’s a millionaire. So’s Coward. Light music, light verse, comedy, are products of leisure, of a debonair existence. I’ve been living like a Chicago slum novelist. It’s all wrong. The theatre’s exactly like a silly girl. Pursue, beg, coax, be willing and assiduous, and you get kicked in the face. The careless confident gesture is what conquers. I fully believe now I’ll crack Broadway the day I don’t give a damn whether I do or not. That’s reason number one for taking Sam’s money. To break out of my stagnant poverty-stricken rut and live well—until I crack through with Princess Jones, or write a new show. Maybe I’ll stay on with Sam even then. Maybe the pattern will prove a stable one. It all depends on whether I can effectively split my time between breadwinning and writing, over the long haul. We’ll see.”
“Well, that makes sense, God knows.”
“I think it does. I feel full of beans today. And I’m grateful to you. Do you know, I believe it was your graduation that pushed me over the edge. I actually went from Schrafft’s and phoned Sam. The graduation was such a great divide of time for you… and somehow, I f
elt myself passing over it, too. I saw myself all too clearly. Thirty, and nowhere, and disgusting your parents, your ratty down-at-the-heels admirer from Greenwich Village. Maybe if it hadn’t been so gray and rainy, and I hadn’t been wearing my oldest coat and my greasiest hat—And then Marsha showing up, grinning at the pair of us like an itchy old maid… I don’t know, everything closed in on me, all at once, and I went and called Sam. I’d been fearfully low for days, you see. Last Sunday I found out that my brother Billy was engaged to be married.”
Marjorie looked startled. “Billy!”
“Twenty-two. In his second year at law school. She’s the daughter of a big corporation lawyer, a heavyweight in the Democratic party in Brooklyn. Another Marjorie, by the way, Marjorie Sundheimer—”
“Marjorie Sundheimer? Good Lord, Billy’s marrying her?”
“You know her, then?”
“Oh, for years at fraternity dances—and all that—Well, well, Billy Ehrmann and Marjorie Sundheimer. Honestly, truth is stranger than fiction.”
“Marjorie, ugly girls get married, too.”
“I never said she was ugly.”
“Your tones, dear, are implying that you’d be less surprised if Billy’d become engaged to a red-bottomed baboon.”
“That’s absurd. She’s a lovely girl. It’s just—well, they’re both so young.”
“Sweetheart, this sets Billy up for life. He’ll be a judge at forty. Nothing can stop it. What the devil, I’m happy for him, he’s a decent egg.”
“Billy’s grand.”
“He dropped in with this girl unexpectedly at my apartment, the night of your graduation. That’s why I didn’t call you. I couldn’t have been more depressed. They’re such children! I’m barely used to the idea that he shaves. She’s had her nose fixed, by the way, and she’s really quite pleasant-looking. And for such a rich girl, she’s touchingly humble. Like Billy. They’re a nice couple. I think they’re going to be happy.”
“No doubt she knows all about us.”
“The last thing she said at the door was, ‘Love to Marjorie,’ in a quavering voice, after nobody’d referred to you for two hours. I think coming below Fourteenth Street was a scary adventure for her. She kept staring around, you know, at the books, and the carpet, and the pictures, and the dust on the molding, and at me. She laughed hysterically at everything I said, including half a dozen remarks that were perfectly serious. Obviously she thought I was a highly decadent monster, like Baudelaire. I think she was looking around for hypodermic needles. I was sorry I didn’t at least have a gorgeous drunken blonde to fall naked out of the closet at one point. She seemed to be waiting for something like that.”
“What she was waiting for, more likely,” Marjorie said, “was for me to come out from under the bed in a transparent negligee.”
Noel burst out laughing. “I swear I think that was it.”
Marjorie said, “Well, what do I care? My reputation’s gone, anyway, from associating with you.”
He said with sudden earnestness, “Honestly, the uptown idea of Village life is preposterous, isn’t it? Believe me, the main charm of the Village is the cheap rent. For me, anyway. I find overgrown hair and dirty necks as offensive as you do. As for the celebrated Village sex life, which had Billy’s girl’s eyes popping out of her head looking for evidence—what is it, after all, once you’re over the college boy’s glee at finding it available? Most of the time it’s a mean dirty chore. Unattractive people snuffling and wrestling together because they’re bored, or lonesome, or sick in the head. You say I’ve lived the life of a pig. Well, it’s not true. I’ve always been fastidious by any standard, I claim. But I’ll tell you this, and I don’t say it to score a point. Since the day you left South Wind, there’s been nothing like that for me. Nothing at all.”
This question had been plaguing Marjorie for months. Her heart swelled to have the answer, but how like Noel to drop it casually into a conversation, as a fact of no importance! She looked him in the face. “I’m not sorry to hear that.”
“Understand this, I have no more scruples or morals than before. I’ve simply decided it’s the better part of self-indulgence to have love or nothing.”
She couldn’t repress a grin. “Noel dear, I think you’re slowly but surely reverting to your origins.”
He shook his head at her. “You’ll make me over, come hell or high water, won’t you? Or you’ll tell yourself you’re doing it, anyhow. Your voice just then had the timbre of your mother’s. Let’s get out of this oak-panelled vault.”
“All right, but I must say I love it here.”
“What tastes you’re acquiring! You’ll keep your husband broke, and working nights in his dress business.” He paid the check.
“I’m not marrying anybody in the dress business.”
“Of course. I forgot. A doctor. A specialist.”
“Yes, with a big black mustache, named Shapiro. We’ve been all through that.”
“Ah, you see, our relationship’s exhausted. I’m repeating my jokes.”
They walked up the side street to Fifth Avenue. It was cold and windy, but clear, and the sunshine was almost blinding. He said, “Come, walk up Fifth with me. I have to pick up Sam’s car at Sixty-third.”
“Sure.—Ever heard of a producer named Guy Flamm?”
“Of course. The fringe of the fringe. What about him?”
She told him the story while they strolled uptown past the shopwindows, amid a scurrying crowd. He was amused and sympathetic. “You poor baby.”
“Oh, I don’t much care. It didn’t last long enough to mean anything. And anyway, the play was such balderdash—at least I thought it was.”
“Of course it was. All the same, he’ll probably produce Down Two Doubled one of these days, when a Clarice walks into his office with a richer or dumber father than yours. It can happen tomorrow, there are so many Clarices drifting around Broadway. The desire to be an actress, in middle-class American girls of a certain IQ—say around 115—isn’t even a conscious decision, Margie. It’s a tropism, an organic thing that comes out of the nature of their lives…. All right, all right—” She was gnawing her lips, scowling at him. “I thought we’d agreed that no generalizations whatever applied to you.”
“Noel, does Flamm know Down Two Doubled is rubbish? Or does he really think it’s good?”
“Who knows? For a career like his what you need is an infinite capacity for self-deception.”
“How does he live, pay his rent? His name gets in the theatre columns—”
“Why, dear, he’s a real producer. He probably has scratched up some money with Down Two Doubled already, small amounts from idiotic amateur backers. The theatre is so cockeyed, he may even produce a smash some day. Those scripts you saw his girl reading were the flotsam that drifts around the producers’ offices forever, one abomination more frightful than the last. I was a playreader for a few months once. I nearly went crazy. Undoubtedly he pulled Down Two Doubled out of that rancid flood. Maybe he likes it. Maybe he’s had the author rewrite it ten times. Maybe he’s charged him for his advice. There’s no end to the follies that go on in the theatre.”
She said, “I take it you’ve decided I have no talent. You were still dodging the issue, last time we talked about it.”
His face wrinkled. “I’m really not sure. Anyone can see you’re bright and pretty and full of nineteenish charm. You walk on stage endowed by nature with half the effects a skilled actress has to work to create. But such incandescence doesn’t last. What you’ll be left with when it goes, I can’t say. My guess is that you’ll be snagged into a fine fat marriage long before that, so you’ll never really find out. One thing I’ll tell you, though. If you’re going at this seriously, you ought to get rid of that Marjorie Morningstar name. It has a fake ring.”
“Shows how much you know. It’s in the New York phone book.”
“I don’t care. You’d be better off calling yourself Marjorie Morgan.”
“That’s dr
ab and commonplace.”
“Well? The idea of a name change is to make you more like other people, not less.”
“I suppose Noel Airman is commonplace.”
“I was in just about the stage you are now when I thought of that. If I had it to do over again, I’d call myself something like Charlie Robinson. If you want to pretend you’re not a Jew, you may as well do it right.”
“That’s not why I’m doing it.”
“Then what’s wrong with Morgenstern?”
“It’s too ordinary.”
“I see. You want an unusual name, like Maggie Sullavan.”
“Well, that’s different. Morgenstern sounds so… I don’t know—”
“So Jewish, girlie, so Jewish. Those overtones of potato pancakes, Friday-night candles, gefilte fish—that’s what you don’t like.”
She said, irritated, “Of course, everybody’s motives have to be as wretched as yours. All the same, Noel, I’m going to call myself Marjorie Morningstar, and I’m going to become an actress, in spite of Guy Flamm, and my mother, and you, and all the odds.”
He put his arm around her waist and briefly squeezed it. “That’s the old college fight.” They walked in silence for a while. He said, “But I can’t picture it, and you know why, Margie? Every real actress I’ve ever known has had a—I don’t know, a sort of iron core. When you talk to them—even romantically—you get a metallic ring in response. I’m not putting this well. I don’t mean insincerity, d’you see, or phoniness, or frigidity. It’s—well, they’re more like men, in a fixity of purpose, and a hard alertness to the business at hand. Most of them make a hash of their love lives. It’s as though the price of having talent is the loss of the womanish instinct for sniffing along the right path of life. Well, you—you’re such a female, such a cat picking your way with dainty paws—”
“I often wonder where you get your ideas about me. Of all my graduating class, I think I should have been voted the girl most likely to hash up her life.”