Liars in Love

  And they did. Mrs. Rosenthal went along too. Dan came back to the office overflowing with enthusiasm for everything about Harvard, including the very sound of its name. “You can’t imagine it, Bill,” he told me. “You have to be there; you have to walk around and look, and listen, and take it all in. It’s amazing: right there in the middle of a commercial city, this whole little world of ideas. It’s like about twenty-seven Cooper Unions put together.”

  So it was arranged that Phil would be enrolled as a Harvard freshman the following fall, and Dan remarked more than a few times that the kid would certainly be missed at home.

  One evening when we left the building together he held our walk down to a stroll in order to get something off his chest that seemed to have been bothering him all day.

  “You know all this ‘need help’ talk you hear around?” he inquired. “‘He needs help’; ‘She needs help’; ‘I need help’? Seems like almost everybody I know is taking up psychotherapy as if it were the new national craze, like Monopoly back in the thirties. And I’ve got this friend of mine from school—bright guy, good artist, married, holding down a pretty good job. Saw him last night and he told me he wants to be psychoanalyzed but can’t afford it. Said he applied to this free clinic up at Columbia, had to take a lot of tests and write some half-assed essay about himself, and they turned him down. He said, ‘I guess they didn’t think I was interesting enough.’ I said, ‘Whaddya mean?’ And he said, ‘Well, I got the impression they’re up to their ass in overmothered Jewish boys.’ Can you understand something like that?”

  “No.” We were strolling in the dusk past brilliant storefronts—a travel agency, a shoe store, a lunch counter—and I remember studying each one as if it might help me keep my brains together.

  “Because I mean what’s the deal on being ‘interesting’ in the first place?” Dan demanded. “Are we all supposed to lie on a couch and spill our guts to prove how ‘interesting’ we are? That’s a degree of sophistication I don’t care to attain. Well.” We were at the corner now, and just before he moved away he waved his cigar at me. “Well. Regards at home.”

  I had felt terrible all that spring, and it was getting worse. I coughed all the time and had no strength; I knew I was losing weight because my pants seemed ready to fall off; my sleep was drenched in sweat; all I wanted during the day was to find a place to lie down, and there was no place like that in the whole of Remington Rand. Then one lunch hour I went to a free X-ray service near the office and learned I had advanced tuberculosis. A bed was found for me in a veterans’ hospital on Staten Island, and so I retired from the business world, if not from the world itself.

  I have since read that TB is high on the list of “psychosomatic” illnesses: people are said to come down with it while proving how hard they have tried under impossibly difficult circumstances. And there may be a lot of truth in that, but all I knew then was how good it felt to be encouraged—even to be ordered, by a grim ex-Army nurse wearing a sterile mask—to lie down and stay there.

  It took eight months. In February of 1951 I was released as an outpatient and told I could get continuing treatment at VA-approved clinics “anywhere in the world.” That phrase had a nice ring to it, and this was the best part: I was told my illness had qualified as a “service-connected disability,” allowing me to collect two hundred dollars a month until my lungs were clean, and that there was a retroactive clause in the deal providing two thousand dollars in cash.

  Eileen and I had never known such a glow of success. Late one night I was trying to make plans, wondering aloud whether to go back to Remington Rand or look for a better job, when Eileen said, “Oh, listen: let’s do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “You know. Go to Paris. Because I mean if we don’t do it now, while we’re young enough and brave enough, when are we ever going to do it at all?”

  I could scarcely believe she’d said that. She looked, then, very much the way she’d looked acknowledging the applause after her scene from Dream Girl—and there was a touch of the old secretarial “toughness” in her face too, suggesting that she might well turn out to be a sturdy traveler.

  * * *

  Because everything happened so fast after that, the next thing I remember clearly is the cramped farewell party in our cabin, or tourist-class “stateroom,” aboard the SS United States. Eileen was trying to change the baby’s diaper on an upper berth, but it wasn’t easy because so many people were crowded into the small room. My mother was there, seated on the edge of a lower berth and talking steadily, telling everyone about the National Association of Women Artists. Several employees of Botany Mills were there, and several other random acquaintances, and Dan Rosenthal was there too. He had brought a bottle of champagne and an expensive-looking hand puppet, in the form of a tiger, which the baby wouldn’t appreciate for another two years.

  This tense gathering was what I’d heard Eileen describe on the phone a few times as “our little shipboard soignée”—I didn’t think that word was right but didn’t know enough French to correct her. There was plenty of liquor flowing, but most of it seemed to be going down my mother’s throat. She wore a nice spring suit, with a rich little feathered hat that had probably been bought for the occasion.

  “… Well, but you see we’re the only national organization in the country; our membership is up in the thousands how, and of course each member has to submit proof of professional standing as an artist before we’ll even consider their application, so we’re really a very…” And the deeper she settled into her monologue the farther she allowed her knees to move apart, with a forearm on each one, until the shadowy pouch of her underpants was visible to all guests seated across from her. That was an old failing: she never seemed to realize that if people could see her underpants they might not care what kind of hat she was wearing.

  Dan Rosenthal was the first to leave, even before the first warning horn had sounded. He said it had been very nice to meet my mother, shaking hands with her; then he gravely turned to Eileen with both arms held out.

  She had finished with the diapering—finished too, it seemed, with all concern for any of the other visitors. “Oh, Dan,” she cried, looking sad and lovely, and she melted fast against him. I saw his heavy fingers clap the small of her back three or four times.

  “Take care of my friend the promising writer,” he said.

  “Well, sure, but you take care, Dan, okay? And promise to write?”

  “Of course,” he told her. “Of course. That goes without saying.”

  Then he let her go, and I sprang to his service as an escort upstairs to the main deck and the gangplank. We were both quickly winded in climbing, so we took our time on the sharply curving, paint-smelling staircase, but he talked a lot anyway.

  “So you’re gonna send back a whole bunch of stories, right?” he asked me.

  “Right.” And only dimly aware of paraphrasing his Levittown plans, I said, “I’m gonna write my ass off over there.”

  “Well, good,” he said. “So it turns out you didn’t need that shitty little art school after all. You’ll never have to sneak around pretending to be an artist and playing hooky all day, and conspiring with a bunch of very ‘casual’ Frenchmen to rob the United States. That’s good. That’s fine. You’ll be doing this whole thing on your own, with money you’ve earned from your fucked-up lungs, and I’m proud of you. I mean it.”

  We were up on the open deck now, facing each other in the cluster of people near the gangplank.

  “So okay,” he said as we shook hands. “Keep in touch. Only, listen: do me a favor.” He stepped back to pull on his topcoat, which flapped in the light wind, and to shrug and settle it around his neck; then he came up close and looked at me in stern admonishment. “Do me a favor,” he said again. “Don’t piss it all away.”

  I didn’t know what he meant, even after he’d winked to show he was mostly kidding, until it occurred to me that I had everything he must ever have wanted—everything he’d resign
ed himself, since his father’s death, never to wish for again. I had luck, time, opportunity, a young girl for a wife, and a child of my own.

  A great, deep ship’s horn blew then, frightening dozens of seagulls into the sky. It was the sound of departure and of voyage, a sound that can make the walls of your throat fill up with blood whether you have anything to cry about or not. From the railing I saw his thick back descending slowly toward the pier. He wasn’t yet far away: I could still call some final pleasantry that would oblige him to turn and smile and wave, and I thought of calling, Hey, Dan? Regards at home! But for once I managed to keep my mouth shut, and I’ve always been glad of that. All I did was watch him walk away between fenced-off crowds and into the heavy shadows of the pier until he was gone.

  Then I hurried back down those newly painted, seaworthy stairs to get my mother off the boat—there wouldn’t be many more warning horns—and to take up the business of my life.

  Saying Goodbye to Sally

  JACK FIELDS’S FIRST novel took him five years to write, and it left him feeling reasonably proud but exhausted almost to the point of illness. He was thirty-four then, and still living in a dark, wretchedly cheap Greenwich Village cellar that had seemed good enough for holing-up to get his work done after his marriage fell apart. He assumed he’d be able to find a better place and perhaps even a better life when his book came out, but he was mistaken: though it won general praise, the novel sold so poorly that only a scant, brief trickle of money came in during the whole of its first year in print. By that time Jack had taken to drinking heavily and not writing much—not even doing much of the anonymous, badly paid hackwork that had provided his income for years, though he still managed to do enough of that to meet his alimony payments—and he had begun to see himself, not without a certain literary satisfaction, as a tragic figure.

  His two small daughters frequently came in from the country to spend weekends with him, always wearing fresh, bright clothes that were quick to wilt and get dirty in the damp and grime of his terrible home, and one day the younger girl announced in tears that she wouldn’t take showers there anymore because of the cockroaches in the shower stall. At last, after he’d swatted and flushed away every cockroach in sight, and after a lot of coaxing, she said she guessed it would be okay if she kept her eyes shut—and the thought of her standing blind in there behind the mildewed plastic curtain, hurrying, trying not to shift her feet near the treacherously swarming drain as she soaped and rinsed herself, made him weak with remorse. He knew he ought to get out of here. He’d have had to be crazy not to know that—maybe he was crazy already, just for being here and continuing to inflict this squalor on the girls—but he didn’t know how to begin the delicate, difficult task of putting his life back in order.

  Then in the early spring of 1962, not long after his thirty-sixth birthday, there came a wholly unexpected break: he was assigned to write a screenplay based on a contemporary novel that he greatly admired. The producers would pay his way to Los Angeles to meet with the director, and it was recommended that he remain “out there” until he finished the script. It probably wouldn’t take more than five months, and that first phase of the project alone, not to mention the dizzying prospect of subsequent earnings, would bring him more money than he’d made in any previous two or three years put together.

  When he told his daughters about it, the older girl asked him to send her an inscribed photograph of Richard Chamberlain; the younger one had no requests.

  In someone else’s apartment a jolly, noisy party was held for him, closely attuned to the jaunty image of himself that he always hoped to convey to others, with a big hand-lettered banner across one wall:

  GOODBYE BROADWAY

  HELLO GRAUMAN’S CHINESE

  And two nights later he sat locked alone and stiff with alcohol among strangers in the long, soft, murmurous tube of his very first jet plane. He slept most of the way across America and didn’t wake up until they were floating low over the miles upon miles of lights in the darkness of outer Los Angeles. It occurred to him then, as he pressed his forehead against a small cold window and felt the fatigue and anxiety of the past few years beginning to fall away, that what lay ahead of him—good or bad—might easily turn out to be a significant adventure: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood.

  * * *

  For the first two or three weeks of his time in California, Jack lived as a guest in the sumptuous Malibu home of the director, Carl Oppenheimer, a dramatic, explosive, determinedly tough-talking man of thirty-two. Oppenheimer had gone straight from Yale into New York television during the years when there were still strictly disciplined “live” plays for the evening audience. When reviewers began to use the word “genius” in writing about his work on those shows he’d been summoned to Hollywood, where he’d turned down many more movie projects than he accepted, and where his pictures rapidly made a name for him as one of what somebody had decided to call The New Breed.

  Like Jack Fields, Oppenheimer was a father of two and divorced, but he was never alone. A bright and pretty young actress named Ellis lived with him, prided herself on finding new ways to please him every day, often gave him long, rapturous looks that he seemed not to notice, and habitually called him “My love”—softly, with the stress on “my.” And she managed to be an attentive hostess too.

  “Jack?” she inquired at sunset one afternoon as she handed their guest a drink in a heavy, costly glass. “Did you ever hear what Fitzgerald did when he lived out here at the beach? He put up a sign outside his house that said ‘Honi Soit Qui Malibu.’”

  “Oh yeah? No, I’d never heard that.”

  “Isn’t that wonderful? God, wouldn’t it have been fun to be around then, when all the real—”

  “Ellie!” Carl Oppenheimer called from across the room, where he was bent over and slamming cabinet doors behind a long, well-stocked bar of rich blond wood and leather. “Ellie, can you check the kitchen and find out what the fuck’s happened to all the bouillon?”

  “Well, certainly, my love,” she said, “but I thought it was in the mornings that you liked bullshots.”

  “Sometimes yes,” he told her, straightening up and smiling in a way that suggested exasperation and self-control. “Sometimes no. As it happens, I feel like making up a batch of them now. And the point is simply that I’d like to know how the fuck I can make bullshots without any fucking bouillon, you follow me?”

  And as Ellis hurried obediently away, both men turned to watch the movement of firm, quivering buttocks in her skintight slacks.

  By then Jack had grown eager to find a place of his own, and perhaps even a girl of his own, and so as soon as the screenplay was outlined—as soon as they’d agreed on what Oppenheimer called the thrust of it—he moved out.

  A few miles down the coast highway, in the part of Malibu that looks from the road like nothing more than a long row of weather-beaten shacks pressed together, he rented the lower half of a very small two-story beach house. It had a modest picture window overlooking the ocean and a sandy little concrete porch, but that was practically all it had. He didn’t realize until after moving in—and after paying the required three months’ rent in advance—that the place was very nearly as dismal and damp as his cellar in New York. Then, in a long-familiar pattern, he began to worry about himself: maybe he was incapable of finding light and space in the world; maybe his nature would always seek darkness and confinement and decay. Maybe—and this was a phrase then popular in national magazines—he was a self-destructive personality.

  To rid himself of those thoughts he came up with several good reasons why he ought to drive into town and see his agent right away; and once he was out in the afternoon sun, with his rented car purring along past masses of bright tropical foliage, he began to feel better.

  The agent’s name was Edgar Todd, and his office was near the top of a new high-rise building at the edge of Beverly Hills. Jack had been in to talk with him three or four times—the first time, when he asked how
to go about getting the inscribed photograph of Richard Chamberlain, it had turned out to be a matter that Edgar Todd could settle with a single quick, casual phone call—and each time he’d grown more and more aware that Edgar’s secretary, Sally Baldwin, was a strikingly attractive girl.

  At first glance she might not quite have fallen into the “girl” category because her carefully coiffed hair was gray, with silver streaks, but the shape and texture of her face suggested she wasn’t more than thirty-five, and so did the slender, supple, long-legged way she moved around. She had told him once that she “loved” his book and was certain it would make a wonderful movie some day; another time, as he was leaving the office, she’d said, “Why don’t we see more of you? Come back and visit us.”

  But today she wasn’t there. She wasn’t at her trim secretarial desk in the carpeted hall outside Edgar’s office, nor was she anywhere else in sight. It was Friday afternoon; she had probably gone home early, and he felt a chill of disappointment until he saw that the door of Edgar’s office was ajar. He knocked lightly, twice, then shoved it open and went inside—and there she was, lovelier than ever, seated at Edgar’s enormous desk with the spines of at least a thousand shelved, bright-covered novels forming a backdrop to her sweet face. She was reading.

  “Hello, Sally,” he said.

  “Oh, hi. Nice to see you.”

  “Edgar gone for the day?”

  “Well, he said it was lunch, but I don’t think we’ll see him again till next week. It’s nice to be interrupted though; I’ve been reading the worst novel of the year.”

  “You do Edgar’s reading for him?”

  “Well, most. He doesn’t have the time, and anyway he hates to read. So I type up little one- and two-page summaries of the books that come in, and he reads those.”

  “Oh. Well, listen, Sally, how about coming out for a drink with me?”