A Movement Toward Eden

by Clark Howard

  “Well, I was really very flattered, not only by the fact that he was very thoughtful and considerate of my feelings, but of the way he talked to me: as if I were an equal, as if I were—well, someone worth talking to. I was impressed, Doctor; I mean, really impressed.”

  “Of course you were, that’s perfectly understandable,” said the doctor. “Now tell me, how did Mr. Keyes pursue this advantage he had obtained by making such a favorable impression on you? What did he do next to become more intimate with you? ”

  “Well, I think it was about a week later that he asked me to have something to eat with him after work. He’d been on the phone until nearly six that night and he was very apologetic about it. As we got ready to leave the office, he asked if I had anything special to do and I told him no. Then he asked how I’d like to go down the street with him—there was a very nice bar and grill there, kind of an English-type pub, very smart—to have a light supper. He explained that his wife was away on location doing a picture—I did tell you he was married to Jennifer Jordan, the actress, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, you did. Go on, please.”

  “Well anyway, she was away and he said he didn’t like to eat alone and would I join him. A year or so earlier, of course, I wouldn’t have dreamed of saying yes; but now, after having learned so much from Evelyn and having a few nice clothes to wear to the office and my hair done up very stylishly, I didn’t see any reason at all why I shouldn’t be seen in public with a charming, sophisticated man like Keyes. So I accepted.”

  “The dinner was perfectly innocent, I suppose. Outwardly, that is.”

  “Yes, perfectly. It was quite pleasant, actually. We talked about the office, some of the clients; everything very general, you understand, not gossiping or touching on anything personal. Just very congenial. Afterward he walked to the bus stop with me and waited until my bus came; he apologized for not offering to drive me home, but said he wanted to go back to the office to finish up some work.

  “The next day he sent a dozen roses to my apartment. They were in a florist box outside my door, with a little card thanking me for saving him from a lonely evening. I was very touched by the way he put it. I remember feeling warm all over and thinking what a wonderful man he was. I think it was around this time that I grew to be infatuated with him.”

  “Tell me, Abigail,” said Dr. Fox, “were you going out with any other men at this time? Did you have any social life at all with men your own age, for instance?”

  “I had occasional dates, yes. There was a talent agent that came in to see Keyes once in awhile, and he asked me out a few times. And there was a fellow who lived in my apartment building that I occasionally went to dinner and a show with. And there was one young actor, Bill Conner, who was a client at the office; I went out with him a number of times during the year or so just before Keyes started paying attention to me. As a matter of fact, it was as a result of dating Bill that I went for supper the second time with Keyes.”

  “Tell me about that,” Dr. Fox said.

  “Well, Bill was kind of a bit player, you see. He was under contract to a studio but they never seemed to find a starring role that fit him, so he always ended up in a featured part. He thought he was going places, though; he pictured himself as a real honest-to-god movie star with the fan mail and the whole bit, really thought he was going to make it big. He was kind of cute in a babyish way, I suppose, even if it was so obvious that he was in love with himself. Anyway, he asked me out and I accepted. Well, from the very first date he was all hands and let’s go to bed and I’ll do this to you if you’ll do that to me, you know what I mean, Doctor?”

  “Yes, I think so. Go on.”

  “Well, I kept putting him off, pushing his hand away and that sort of thing, thinking he’d get discouraged and look for someone else to practice his sexual acrobatics with. But not Bill. He kept coming back, like a dog in heat. Finally he wanted it so badly that he started talking about marriage. Not about it, exactly, but more like around it. For instance, he’d say something like, ‘You know, Abby, you’re the kind of girl I’d like to marry.’ Not the girl he’d like to marry, mind you, but just the kind of girl he’d like to marry. Of course, I was supposed to fall into bed with him and go down on him and everything else at just the mere thought that I might have a chance of becoming the wife of one of the future great movie stars of all time—or so he thought, anyway. But I didn’t. I kept pushing his sweaty hands away, just like before.

  “Well, finally it got to be one great big drag with him and I ended up telling the whole story to Keyes. By this time we’d got into the habit of talking together for a few minutes before we closed the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays when Evelyn wasn’t there. Nothing deep or intimate, nothing like that; just pleasant, brief little conversations about one thing or another. So one night I told him I had a personal problem and asked if he would mind giving me some advice. Well, he seemed very pleased that I had asked him, and suggested we go have a drink and some dinner and I could tell him all about it. So that’s what we did.”

  “What kind of advice did he give you?”

  “He thought I should stop seeing Bill. He said I would be wasting myself on such a shallow, egotistical person, that I was really much too good for him, and that my wisest move would be to simply end the relationship before it went any farther.”

  “And is that what you did?”

  “Yes. I stopped seeing Bill after that. And a short time later I stopped seeing anybody at all except Keyes.”

  “Did you begin seeing Keyes on a regular basis after that?”

  “Yes, more or less. We started having supper together most Tuesday and Thursday nights, even after his wife got back from location. I commented on it one evening, about the fact that he shouldn’t be spending time with me when he could be with her; but he told me not to worry about it, that he would rather be with me. It was after he said that that our conversations became more personal, more intimate.”

  “Tell me about those conversations, Abby,” the doctor encouraged. “Tell me everything of a personal nature that Keyes talked about to you.”

  “All right. Now that I look back on it, it seems to me that he began by talking a great deal about himself: how he’d been the captain of a cruise ship, how he met his wife when she sailed with him one time, and how after they were married he started his business management firm with clients that he met socially through his wife. He went on about how hard he had worked to build up the business, to achieve what he called a flawless reputation for discretion in handling his clients’ affairs. He spoke of things like personal dignity and integrity and sophistication; that was one of his favorite terms: sophistication. He considered himself very sophisticated, so much so that he often lamented about having to deal with people who were beneath him in that area. He was forced to associate with people like that, he said, for the good of his business. He particularly disliked most of the talent agents who handled his clients professionally; and, I found out later, he had an almost violent hatred for any Jewish person in the entertainment field: he considered them all scavengers and parasites, and said they controlled too much of the money that would be better off in the hands of someone non-Jewish, someone like himself. That was the whole key to his feelings, I’m sure: the money. Most of the people he disliked so passionately were simply smarter at handling money than he was, and it was only incidental that those people happened to be Jewish. But of course he couldn’t very well admit that he hated them so much because of their financial ability, so he picked on their religion. I remember once, much later on in our relationship, he said something that actually made me sick to hear. He said ‘Thank God for Hitler. If he hadn’t taken the trouble to exterminate six or seven million of them imagine how many more of them we’d have to put up with today.’ That was a terrible thing, wasn’t it, Doctor, for a human being to say?”

  “Terrible, yes,” Dr. Fox answered softly.

  Silence then. For perhaps a full minute the only sound,
which itself seemed a part of the silence, was the soft rotation of the tape reels. Oddly, it was as if the moment of quiet had been ordained out of respect to the innocent millions.

  “Please go on, my dear,” Dr. Fox said at last. “What else did Mr. Keyes talk about?”

  “Well,” she sighed wearily, “about the only other thing, besides himself, was me. He used to praise me a great deal, tell me that I wasn’t just an ordinary person, that I was someone special. He was very critical of people like Bill Connor and other men whom he knew I had gone out with. He referred to them as shallow, immature, unsophisticated men who would never be able to appreciate a girl with my special qualities. He continually urged me not to waste myself on men like that. Of course, what he was actually saying was don’t go to bed with anybody. I think he was worried that I would lose my virginity before he could get to me.”

  “During this period, Abby,” the doctor said, “was your relationship with him still more or less platonic? That is, you hadn’t become physically intimate with him, had you?”

  “No, not really; not very, anyway. We held hands quite often and he always seemed to be putting his hand on my arm or shoulder or something like that; and occasionally we would kiss, just very briefly, nothing passionate. When I look back now, I realize that he was very patient and unhurried about the whole thing. I mean, this thing went on for months. Of course, I realize too, knowing now that he was smart enough to consider every possibility, that he might have been holding back because I was still legally under age. I suppose he was concerned about how it would look if a twenty-year-old girl started screaming rape and seduction. After my twenty-first birthday it wouldn’t look so bad if anything went wrong.”

  “So he waited?”

  “Yes.” She sighed again, much more heavily this time. “He waited. But he didn’t waste any of the time. He used every minute of it to build me up, to make me see things his way, to think like he did, to like the same things he did, dislike the same people he disliked, do everything just the way J. Walter Keyes would have done it. Would you believe, Doctor, I got to the point where I even practiced answering the phone with the same voice inflection that he used. It was—it was like my mind, my own mind, was nothing more than an extension of his mind.”

  “And what happened after that?” Dr. Fox asked.

  “After that, Doctor,” the girl said in a strangely subdued voice, “after he had my mind completely under control, he began to use the rest of me—”

  Fifteen

  Devlin guided his car off the beach highway and onto a patch of blacktop parking lot in front of the Cove, an ocean-side cocktail lounge set on pilings and rocks next to the water. He pulled around to the side protected from the mid-afternoon sun and drew up beside Jennifer Jordan’s white Cadillac. She got out of her car to meet him.

  “Hi.”

  “Hello.” Devlin took her hand, feeling the gentle squeeze she gave him. “Have any trouble finding the place?”

  “No.” She smiled up at him radiantly and leaned her cheek briefly against his shoulder.

  “Let’s go inside.”

  He led her up an outside ramp to the top of the pilings and through a door into the dark air-conditioned coolness of the bar. They took a far corner booth next to a curved bay window that looked out onto the breaking surf. A cocktail waitress came over and Devlin ordered drinks. When the waitress left, Jennifer reached across the table to take Devlin’s hand again.

  “I haven’t slept at all since you left me.”

  “Neither have I,” said Devlin.

  “It’s funny too, because I feel very fresh, very rested.”

  “You look lovely.” Her blood-red hair was drawn into a long braid at the back, making her look younger than she was. The white linen dress she wore was scooped at the neckline and had narrow straps that emphasized her wide shoulders and abundant breasts. From where he sat, when she leaned toward him, Devlin could see the soft, fleshy mounds of her bosom swell to form a shadowy crevice that enlarged and contracted with every breath she took.

  “I’ve never had a man make love to me for that long, or in that many ways, as you did last night—” Her voice was almost a whisper, the sound of it plunging his memory back to the moonlight-shrouded sight of her on the plush piled carpet, the cool leather couch, against the velvet brocade wall, and finally in the wet, pungent grass beside the patio—

  “Was it ever that way for you before? That good?”

  “No,” he said. “Never.”

  The waitress, bringing their drinks, interrupted the reverie between them and Devlin sat back to light a cigarette.

  “I don’t even know if I should offer you a cigarette,” he said when they were alone again. “Do you smoke?”

  “Yes,” she laughed softly, “but I don’t want one right now.” She propped her chin on both hands. “All I want to do is look at you. I never dreamed a man like you existed.”

  “Then I’m one up on you, love,” he said quietly. “I always knew you existed; I just didn’t know where to find you.”

  “That was sweet.” She squeezed his hand again and her eyes moistened. “Let’s go somewhere,” she said urgently. “Right now—”

  “No. We’ve got to talk first. There are things I have to find out.”

  “Can’t they wait?”

  “No.”

  Jennifer sat back, sighing, and took out one of her own cigarettes. Devlin reached across to light it for her.

  “All right,” she said resignedly. “What do you want to know?”

  “You can start by telling me why you don’t care if your husband is returned safely or not.”

  “I can answer that in two words,” she said mischievously: “last night.”

  “Be serious, Jennifer,” he said, straining to keep from smiling. “You didn’t care even before last night. Why?”

  “Do you want the whole, unvarnished truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. I don’t care whether he ever gets back again because I—I’m terribly afraid of him. I strongly suspect that he’s a sexual psychopath.”

  Devlin frowned, remembering the book by Kraft-Ebbing that she had been reading the previous night.

  “What makes you suspect that?” he asked.

  “If you lived in the same house with him, if you were a woman and married to him, you wouldn’t have to ask,” she replied bitterly. “He’s tried to get me to—well, to do things, sexual things, that are—well, beyond the bounds of—of—”

  “All right,” Devlin said, “I understand what you mean. Is that why you’re afraid of him?”

  “Yes, that’s why. But there’s more to it, actually. You see, it’s not for myself that I’m afraid. It’s for my daughter.”

  Again Devlin frowned. “Your daughter?”

  “Yes. I have a thirteen-year-old daughter. She’s in boarding school back east. Does that surprise you?”

  “The fact that you have a daughter is mildly surprising, yes; the fact that she’s thirteen years old is close to shocking. You must have had her when you were thirteen.”

  “You’re close, darling. Actually I got pregnant when I was sixteen and had Lorna when I was barely seventeen.” She put out her cigarette in an ashtray between them. “Do you think it would be less confusing if I just told you the whole thing as it happened?”

  “Probably. Why don’t we try it that way?”

  “All right.” She sat back, relaxing her shoulders. “The first part, the part I just mentioned, happened back in the midwest, back in Elgin, Illinois, when I was in high school. There was this boy, Arnold, I called him Arnie; he and I had a mad love affair: that means we got together three times in the back seat of his father’s car. One of those times, as fate would have it, I got pregnant. Two months later, when we were sure, I told my folks that Arnie and I wanted to get married—and why. So my parents got together with his parents and our mothers cried a lot and my father glared at Arnie and Arnie’s father glared at me; the whole small town
routine, you know.

  “So, to make a long scandal short, Arnie and I got married very quietly and I dropped out of school and we moved in with my folks. Well, you can imagine what a bed of thorny roses that turned out to be. I moped around the house all day getting fatter and fatter, while Arnie went on back to school just like before. He was supposed to get a job after school and his father was going to help out with expenses and all that; but Arnie never did even look for a job, I don’t think. He just went over to his mother’s house every day and stayed there until suppertime, sometimes until bedtime. It was—well, you can see it just didn’t even begin to work out.

  “Finally my father evicted him—bodily, by the seat of the pants. After the baby was born, I got a divorce—a quiet one, like the wedding had been. My folks wanted me to give the baby up for adoption and go live with my Aunt Florence, who was a widow, up in Santa Barbara. I said living with Aunt Flo was fine, if she’d have me, but I had no intention of giving up my baby. Well, Aunt Flo, bless her heart, said she wouldn’t dream of such a thing either, that I was to bring my baby with me and the two of us would raise her. So that’s what I did.

  “Aunt Flo had a house and a pension, and I got a job selling tickets in a movie, and between the two of us we got along just fine.”

  “How’d you wind up down here?” Devlin asked.

  “Oh, the usual route,” Jennifer said, tilting her head slightly and looking down at the wet rings her glass made on the table. “They were shooting a picture near Santa Barbara one weekend and I went out to watch. Instead of watching I got hired for a crowd scene and made twenty dollars for about twenty minutes work. Afterward this very nice assistant director—no, I mean it, he was very nice, completely straight—told me I could probably get bit parts like that every day if I wanted to move down to Hollywood. He gave me his card and told me to look him up if I was interested.