Make Believe

by Ed Ifkovic

  Max looked at me with utter admiration. “You said it, sister.”

  I roared. Max’s clipped voice, exaggerated now with a squeak in it, had the same amused tone he’d employed, years before, at the National Theater in Washington D.C. at the Show Boat tryout. Echoes of: “This is all your fault, Madame Show Boat.” At that moment we must have been thinking the same thing, for he mouthed the very words at me: Madame Show Boat. Only I noticed. I tilted back my head and winked at him.

  Ava turned to Alice and nodded toward us. “Darling, those two have something going on.”

  “I hope so,” Alice answered. “And I’m happy about it.”

  Ava put down the cigarette she’d been toying with for a minute or so. “This’ll all blow over.”

  “What will?” Frank asked, testily.

  “You know, this Commie stuff. Every so often a bunch of dizzy gnats swirl around the picnic table, irritating everyone, making everyone think it’s a plague of Biblical locusts. Then the sun shines and they’re gone. America is like that—we got good people here.”

  “Yeah, Ava.” Frank sucked in his cheeks. Unexpectedly, he got reflective. “My agent told me to back off public statements. In fact, he said it’s time to join a pro-America organization. You know, Red Channels will remove your name from their list of pinkos if you publicly take a loyalty oath and join, say, some flag-waving group.”

  Max groaned. “You’re not serious, Frank.”

  “I’m just saying…”

  I drew my tongue into my cheek, waited a moment. “Have you considered the Daughters of the American Revolution?”

  “The Sons of Italy,” Ava giggled.

  Frank was taking this all too seriously. “No, it’s got to have ‘America’ in the name.”

  “You’re kidding.” From Alice.

  Ava chuckled. ‘The American Sons of the Italian Revolution.”

  Everyone laughed, especially Frank, laughing at himself.

  The conversation drifted away from the explosive topic as Ava shared an anecdote about Howard Keel sneaking tequila into his dressing room. Keel, I gathered, a show-business trooper with matinee-idol looks, was a bit of a character, a rollicking scamp who enjoyed his late-night revelries.

  I nursed my glass of merlot, while Ava and Frank finished off their zombies. But what alarmed me was that Max, famously an infrequent drinker, a man who joked that he got tipsy on rum cake, seemed hell-bent on getting drunk. Not pretty, that picture, though I sensed that the morning’s photograph in the Examiner had wound him up. Here was the birthday boy in the land of the zombies. Avoiding Alice’s disapproving eye, he kept signaling for another drink. At one point he sloshed liquor onto the tablecloth and seemed surprised that someone had behaved so indecorously.

  The mood at the table shifted when Louella Parsons led an entourage to a nearby table. The Hearst gossip columnist glared at our table as she passed, and she emitted a raspy harrumph that would do justice to the hectoring Parthenia Hawks as she watched the sleight-of-hand gambler Gaylord Ravenal step onto the showboat. Max laughed out loud, a hiccoughed titter, and seemed unable to stop.

  Dressed in a muddy red dress that exaggerated her small, chunky build, Louella Parsons kept looking over, particularly at me, the shrinking violet at the table; and I wondered whether she knew who I was. Doubtless, given my photo in the Examiner, chummy with Ava and the Commie. Perhaps she was feeling scooped, and now, perforce, was hoping I’d execute some egregious faux pas—an unseemly belch, a toppling onto the floor, swooning at Frank’s knee and revived by ammonia salts held under my nose—that would enliven tomorrow’s mean-spirited diatribe for the Hearst readership.

  On my best behavior—I do have a few of those moments, Aleck Woollcott notwithstanding—I smiled back at her, even tilted my head. The dreadful tyrant—a squat fireplug wrapped in that ill-chosen dress, perching on a chair and sipping some grotesque concoction that looked like cough medicine—shared a second, though sotto voce, harrumph, and turned away. I was immensely happy.

  I didn’t notice the young man approaching our table. Ava, of course, did, attuned as she most likely always was to the serendipitous attention of all the men in the world, whether he was a hayseed boy or a tottering codger. Men zigzagged through her life, giddy and ready to blather inanities at her. So Ava had already turned, the huge smile at the ready, as the young man tentatively neared. Perhaps late twenties or early thirties, he was a dark-complected man in a pristine Army uniform, his cap held tightly in his hand. On his face a puppyish grin, two pinpoints of red dotting his cheeks. He looked the wholesome farm boy, athletic and sturdy, that new American breed, the extra for a World War Two propaganda newsreel.

  “Miss Gardner,” he stammered. “I hate to disturb you but…” He stopped, and from under the Army cap he withdraw a slip of paper and a pen. His hand shook. “I’m rude, I know, but…” The sloppy Peck’s bad boy grin. Andy Hardy from the front lines. D-Day boy, now delivered safely home.

  Ava waved him closer. “You’re not disturbing me, handsome.”

  The man shuffled close to her and he was visibly trembling, which amused me. Who was this Hollywood Helen of Troy who could easily topple the topless towers of Ilium and make men immortal with a kiss? Which, to my horror, she did. She quietly signed her name, handed it back, but as he bent forward, she half-rose and cupped his face between her hands. She kissed his forehead lightly. “What’s your name?”

  “Harold Porter, Junior.” But the space between “Porter” and “Junior” was so long—I swear it had to be five seconds—that she laughed. We all did, and his face got beet red, as he tried to back away.

  “Were you in the war?” she asked him.

  He nodded.

  “That’s why I kissed you. You’re a hero.”

  “I ain’t a hero. I just served.”

  “No, you’re a hero.” But she had already turned away, and Harold Porter (space) Junior was himself backing away, delirious and punch drunk. For me, watching, rapt, it was an illuminating moment, and a touching one. With a seamlessly graceful gesture, Ava the sultry siren became, for one moment, the girl next door.

  Frank glared at her. “Was that necessary, Ava?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Not now, Francis.”

  “If I kissed a girl…like the waitress…”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” she blurted out.

  “It seems to me…”

  “Not now, Francis.”

  He reached for his pack of cigarettes, angrily tapped one out, and it flipped off the table onto the carpet. While we watched, mesmerized by his jerky movements, he ground it under his shoe. He lit another and puffs of smoke clouded the table. One hand was a fist, the knuckles white. We sat there, silent, silent.

  Alice cleared her throat. For some reason, she started talking about Sol Remnick in a twittering, birdlike voice. “Sol mentioned that Larry Calhoun wants to sell his shares in the property they all own together…He needs cash. He knows Max won’t give him money and…” She breathed in. “Sol said…” She stopped, looked down.

  No one was listening.

  Well, I was, of course, but something else was happening at the table. The cigarette vender, a pretty girl in a colorful Polynesian wrap, her case suspended around her neck, had paused at the table, but was waved off. As she moved away, Frank grasped her arm. For a second she paused, uncertain, because Frank’s touch lingered a little too long. She turned, smiled vacuously at him, and then, rattled, scurried away.

  Ava burst out laughing. “Now we’re even, Francis.”

  “Christ, Ava.”

  From a table some yards away, the young man we now knew as Harold Porter (space) Junior was passing around the autograph, preening before an older couple I assumed were his smiling parents. Now and then he glanced over, as though to make certain he’d actually met the goddess, or, perhaps, to imprint the magical image on his lifelong memory. I smiled, tickled. I doubted whether my aut
ograph, sometimes requested, though not so much any more, garnered such attention. I doubted it.

  Max had been mumbling, but I couldn’t understand him, his words running together, swallowed. His hand slipped on the glass he held. Alice watched him, concern and fear in her eyes. This was not the Max any of us knew, this suddenly libidinous man, giggling and hiccoughing, downing glass after glass of the sinful zombies. His face was flushed, with half-shut lazy eyes, his movements slow and languid. A turned-over glass.

  Frank kept twisting in his chair, scanning the room, his eyes narrowed. When he spoke, he slurred his words. He breathed with short, quick gasps that reminded me of a scolded child. None of us at the table mattered, I realized, save the beautiful Ava. A man possessed, intoxicated, paralyzed by a stunning woman—a man cowed and yet emboldened by a fierce and awful jealousy. The spotlight focused solely on Ava and her unpardonable transgression.

  For a moment, startled, I let my mind play with images of Julie and Steve and Pete on the showboat. Julie, the beautiful mulatto with the melodious voice, a doomed woman, hungered after by men like Pete, a lowlife towboat worker, himself haunted and driven. And Steve, the possessive husband, jealous of any man’s attention to his wife, pledging a love that was to last forever but would crumble on the mean Chicago streets after exile from the Cotton Blossom. Two men, maddened by jealousy and lust. Pete who squeals to the local sheriff to punish her—punish them. He would destroy her if he can’t have her. Frank and Ava, jealous and possessive and…destructive.

  Ava singing her dirge as night shadows covered her. Can’t stop lovin’ dat man of mine…fish gotta swim…birds gotta…

  I came out of this idle reverie with a start: something was happening at the table. Max, tipsy, was flirting stupidly with Ava, half-serious and a little self-mocking. He rolled back and forth in his seat, a pale dervish, and babbled something about Harold Porter (space…now ten seconds, though no one laughed) Junior getting a chaste kiss from Ava, a young man who fantasized about kissing the screen goddess.

  “Dreams to last a lifetime,” he babbled.

  Ava looked amused, though she kept shaking her head. “Max, what’s got into you?” She tapped the back of his wrist.

  Alice whispered, “Okay, Max, you’ve had enough to drink.” Idly, she fiddled with her purse, snapping it open and shut.

  And then, bouncing in his seat, Max whooped like a moon-besotted Indian and leaned over and kissed Ava on the mouth. It happened so suddenly that nothing seemed to register immediately. Watching the violation, I thought how innocent it was, passionless, perfunctory, the ah-shucks apple-cheeked boy kissing the pretty girl in school on a frivolous dare.

  Ava pulled back, wide-eyed, and waved a schoolmarm finger at him. She giggled, “Now, now, young man, do I have to tell your mother?” She winked at Alice.

  I was laughing.

  Max slumped back into his seat, eyes nearly closed now, a simpering smile plastered to his face. I thought he’d drifted off into a catnap.

  A sudden grunt, mean, thick, as Frank shot out of his seat and lurched around the table, his arm brushing my sleeve. He hovered over the drowsy Max as Ava squealed, “Francis, what are…”

  She got no further. Another coarse grunt as Frank’s fist flew out, a missile, and slammed hard into Max’s jaw. The crack of bone on bone. Max’s head revolved like a puppet’s head unhinged. A spurt of purple blood splattered on the white tablecloth.

  Alice screamed. She started to stand but slipped back into her seat.

  Surprised and wounded, Max toppled backwards, the chair crashing onto the floor and spilling him onto the carpet. He lay in an ungainly heap, doubled over, his hands cupping the bleeding jaw. He hunched there, looking up at Frank who rocked back and forth, his eyes flashing, his hard blue eyes now brilliant purple. He hadn’t unclenched his fist, smeared now with blood.

  “I never liked you,” Frank sputtered.

  Max opened his mouth to speak but he dissolved into a fit of nonsense giggling. Blood oozed through his fingers, down his neck, onto his shirt. “Thump thump thump,” he burbled. I had no idea what that meant. He gave a drunkard’s idiotic smile. “Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me.”

  Thump thump thump.

  Giggling.

  Alice and Ava crouched on the floor next to him. Whimpering, Alice cradled his head in her lap while Ava dabbed the blood with a linen napkin. Ava’s fingertips glistened with Max’s blood.

  “Damn you, Francis.” She looked up at him.

  Silence in the restaurant.

  Someone screamed, a woman, hysterical.

  Frank looked around, his eyes zooming in on the screaming woman.

  He looked down at Max.

  “I could kill you in a heartbeat.”

  “Francis…”

  “A goddamn heartbeat.”

  He stormed away.

  At the nearby table the anonymous woman screamed and screamed. And Louella Parsons smiled.

  Chapter Six

  My day began, of course, with Louella Parsons’ insidious but tremendously entertaining column.

  The gossip queen devoted her entire column to our sad escapade, given the fact that she had a front-row seat and, to use her words, “was close enough to see spittle at the corners of Frank’s mouth.” Obviously she’d been dizzy with delight, fueled by her own intake of zombies, tottering to her typewriter minutes after Frank’s outburst, her column probably delivered by midnight to the yellow journalistic presses. Her prose dripped with giddiness, though she loaded her paragraphs with tut-tut phraseology—“ignominious shame,” “truly a sad spectacle,” “a waste of talent,” a “wanton disregard of civilized behavior,” “a low point in Hollywood history.”

  On and on, an endless and platitudinous array of admonishment. “And then, while we all watched, Frank threatened to kill the hapless man.” She italicized the infinitive.

  But in her stream of consciousness narrative, she most likely rued her use of the word “hapless,” for in the next paragraph she described Max Jeffries as a “lamentable pinko” who “defends the indefensible.” Oddly, her easy condemnation of Frank, though over the top with venom, then paled by comparison to her depiction of Max, whose treasonous behavior clearly trumped Frank’s gangland fisticuffs.

  Louella Parsons, I realized, carelessly assigned folks to various rungs of her own perversely conceived hell. She knew who should suffer the most heat in Hades. Like Dante, she buried the traitors at the bottom.

  My phone never stopped ringing, yet I never answered. Slips of paper in my cubbyhole mailbox downstairs identified the writers as reporters from the Los Angeles Times, the Examiner, and even, to my horror, the New York Times. Someone provided me with clippings from the Examiner. My name was mentioned, which surprised me. I was labeled the activist writer, some latter-day Upton Sinclair or Ida Tarbell. “Edna Ferber, whose Show Boat is to be premiered July 17, is an intimate of Max Jeffries.”

  Hmmm, I considered: MGM just shuddered. Walls shook. All of it made very little sense.

  I hid away.

  When I called, Alice informed me that Max was nestled in bed, sipping orange juice. His doctor had patched him up, and would be returning shortly. Max, whimpering, kept asking for more pain medication. He was, she insisted, impossible to be with. Lorena Marr, checking in, invited her out and Max, overhearing the invitation, insisted Alice leave him be. He’d hole up with the radio on—“Burns and Allen,” she said, “will shut him up”—and drift into a hazy, drug-induced slumber. Girl’s night out. Alice consented, though Ava begged off. She wanted no limelight this evening, secluded in her Nichols Canyon home where, she told Alice, Francis knew he was not wanted.

  “Lorena has convinced me to go out,” Alice told me.

  “Good idea,” I told her. “Men who are ill believe the earth’s rotation must immediately be adjusted to suit their desires.”

  She laughed. “Oh, I know. Poor Max. I love him dearly, but…” She stopped. “We’re catching a movie. P
lease join us, Edna,” Alice pleaded. “An early dinner at the Paradise. You can see it from your hotel. A movie. The three of us.”

  So I found myself strolling a half-block up from the Ambassador and opening the doors of the Paradise Bar & Grill: Steaks and Chops! A modest eatery with the capitalized “d” of “Paradise” blacked out on the neon sign. The “i” of “Grill” flickered madly. PARA ISE. Lorena and Alice were already there, and waved me over.

  “Everything is free,” Lorena announced. “I own the place. Well, we own the place. My ex-husband Ethan and I. We’ve yet to make a penny off the place and I’m intent on unloading it.”

  Alice looked sheepish. “I haven’t been here since my marriage.” She looked around. “I didn’t really want to come here. Ethan and Tony don’t want me here…”

  Lorena broke in. “Look here, Alice. I own half of this place. You’re my good friend.” Then she laughed. “As I say, the food and drinks are free.”

  But I noticed Alice looking around, uncomfortable. The apple-dumpling widow of Lenny Pannis, accused of murder by Ethan and Tony, now back behind enemy lines.

  Anyone looking for paradise would not locate it in that dimly lit dining room with red-and-white checkered tablecloths on wobbly tables, circled by wrought-iron ice-cream parlor chairs. A line of booths hugged the kitchen wall. At the back an old walnut-stained bar with red-leather-and-chrome stools. As we settled in, a burly waiter placed a bud vase on each table. Each one contained a white carnation tied with a red ribbon. A red wicker-covered bottle held a lit candle.

  The Paradise Bar & Grill was one step up from the Automat. Archie and Veronica holding hands over a New York strip steak, medium rare. Which, of course, was what I ordered, and it was surprisingly good—toothsome, robust, tender, though served with canned green peas and onions, alongside a baked potato unnaturally titanic, stuffed with chives and slathered in sour cream. Alice, I noticed, barely picked at her grilled Catalina swordfish. Lorena ordered an avocado salad, the turkey club, and a pitcher of martinis.

  Lorena had brought five clippings of Louella’s nasty column. She bubbled over, and in seconds she had Alice and me laughing, though I’d resisted. Last night’s melee at the Beachcomber still upset me…Max’s bloody jaw and Frank’s feral eyes. Lorena glibly termed it the “Mai tai Massacre.” A natural mimic, she assumed a haughty, imperious tone last heard, I supposed, from the throat of stuffy Margaret Dumont in the Marx brothers’ films. She arched her back, trilled her r’s, imagined a pince-nez slipping off an aggressive Roman nose, and oozed condescension. I laughed like a schoolgirl on holiday.