by Rona Jaffe
"It's bad for you."
"Why?"
"If you insist on liking the wrong person, don't teU yourself fairy
tales that he's this or he's that. That he's pathetic, that he needs your help, that you put him on his worst behavior . . . Just admit you like the wrong person, but don't give yourself the wrong reasons."
She looked up and saw Alvin's white face in the distance as he made his way toward them through the darkened room. She realized that she had already forgotten what he looked like. "I like that," she said. "But it certainly doesn't apply to me and Alvin. He's just someone who came into my life by accident and he's going right out again after tonight."
"I don't necessarily mean it for you and him," Mike said. "I mean it for you and anyone. It might be someone you'd get to care about. Someone a lot closer to home."
He was looking at her intently as he said it, and suddenly she felt, for an instant, a cold shiver pass through her. It wasn't the chill of foreboding, but rather of excitement, of the unknown, of that same unreality-coming-true feeHng she'd had when he had told her Mr. Shahmar was afraid of her.
"Who?" she said. "Who?"
"It's a good thing I'm not as drunk as Alvin," Mike said, "or I might tell you and make a fool of myself."
She sat there looking at him in surprise for a moment until Alvin came and jovially wedged himself in between them. But she had something to take to herself and think about, and it was enough. She felt astonished and warmed by her own feehngs. Really, what had he said? Nothing. And yet, it could be a great deal.
All the way home on the train, sitting next to Alvin and pretending to look out the wdndow, she found herself thinking about Mike. She let the thought of him enter her mind and stay there, uncau-tiously. He was nearly twice her age, he was used and bitter. As with any dissipated person there were many things in his past life that she was sure would arouse her sympathy—a disappointment, a heartbreak, a failure—events and misfortunes that might not deserve that sympathy but which would be sure to receive it from a girl like herself to whom they would all be new and shocking and therefore poignant. That was what he was trying to warn her against, she was sure. And because he cared enough to warn her against him she found herself totally disarmed. He must care about her in some way that was more than friendship, she was thinking, or he would never have said anything. The possibility of a romance between herself
and Mike was the strangest thing that had ever happened to her, and yet it was beginning to seem the most natural thing in the world. She could not help but compare Mike and his sophisticated understanding of her secret thoughts with the succession of dreary boys she had been out with since she had been graduated from college. With each of those boys it seemed as if there was a barrier, hurled up because she was a woman and he was a man and each wanted something from the other. It was a kind of juvenile competition. With Mike, it was as if because he was a man and she was a woman each had something to give to the other. She wasn't afraid of him. To her, something dangerous meant being hurt. She didn't believe tliere could be any other kind of danger in becoming involved with him. The hazards of a changing outlook, of a mind that could become as old as his, seemed very far away.
Chapter 5
Gregg Adams, in the shower, looked a great deal better than she sang; nevertheless she was happy (for her, which is to say tonight she had a general absence of depression) and so she sang and splashed, hurriedly so that she could wash all the soap off before the day's supply of hot water disappeared. A tune was going through her head, some old thing from her mother's flapper days. Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries. "Life is just a boll of weevils," she sang to that tune. "Da dee da da da . . . Life is just a boll of weevils, da dee da dum." She had managed to get twelve lines in a morning soap opera for next week, with promise of more in the future. As usual she was playing a teen-ager, baby-voiced and excruciatingly sweet. That slight Western accent she hadn't been able to get rid of didn't hurt either. She had noticed that all the nauseatingly sweet little children who did commercials—"Gee, Mom, this tastes like more!"— seemed to have a Western accent. Perhaps some executive power thought it made them sound more childlike.
She was going to a party tonight with Tony, who was in her acting class and was one of her semi-platonic friends. They lent each other
money and took each other to parties where free food and Hquor could be had for a minimum of charm. He was younger than she and had long hair that fell into his eyes when he shook his head, and he mumbled when he spoke. If you asked him a question he would wriggle and scratch himself and look at the floor as if he were feeling out the line, and finally he would grunt some extraordinarily emotional result like: "Yeah, let's go to the movies." She knew it was an act, that when he was very excited or overwrought he lapsed into the most beautifully modulated Shakespearean diction she had ever heard. All the boys in her acting class were like that, the ones who took her out and the ones who were married and even poorer and the fairies. She was bored with them all.
In her messy, overcrowded closet she found a red dress she had liked and had forgotten she owned. It was a meeting-people dress for parties; a blond girl in a red dress always seemed to be able to manage without introductions. It wasn't as if she hoped to meet anyone non-boring at tliis party, actually she was only going there because there would be food and good Scotch and it would be a way not to be alone. When she was alone in her apartment she could feel the stifling sensation she had learned to fear creep up on her; one minute things were all right and then all of a sudden a ten-pound weight would establish itself on her chest and she would hardly be able to breathe, let alone swallow. Jazz music on the phonograph and cheap vermouth helped a little, telephone conversations with her friends by the hour helped even more, but all of these were merely sedatives to dull the panic and lift tlie weight, they could not remove it. Around the circle of light by her bed there were shadows waiting to envelop her as soon as she put down the telephone receiver and broke away from the reassuring voice at the other end.
Sometimes her cat would slip up to her and rub his furry head against her ankle, and, looking down at him, she would feel an immense, overwhelming affection for him. My little cat. Pencil-line ribs to move witli breathing as he slept, signs of life to remind her that there were other worlds inside of other people's skulls, even inside a cat's little skull. It made her feel less alone, less stifled, less afraid of something she could not really name. You could die in New York behind the locked door of your apartment and no one would ever know until some neighbor complained of the smell. Yes, your friends would say then, I remember I hadn't heard from her for some time,
but I thought she was just sulking. Or I thought she had a new job and was busy. Busy? Ha, Gregg thought, busy being unemployed.
Tony was an hour late, which was like him. When he finally arrived she was so lonely she was even glad to see him. "Hey," he said, "I remember that dress." He leaned down and kissed her on the cheek.
She remembered then with embarrassment that she had worn the dress on the evening of the first and only night she had gone to bed with him. No doubt he thought of the dress with sentiment. No wonder she had forced it to the far end of her untidy closet. It was a night and a dress she wanted to forget. There were some lovers you could have once, and only once, and then you never wanted to have them again. Not that they weren't skillful and considerate, because they usually were. But they had held each other out of loneliness and fear and curiosity and lust and hope that this time they would find something beautiful. And in the morning they would find sheets that looked like a geographical terrain, and perhaps an overturned ash tray on the rug beside the bed, and no trace whatever of the face of love.
"Come on," she said, taking his hand. "They'll eat everything before we even get there."
The party was at the apartment of a middle-aged actress whom Tony knew. The room was dark and already filled with smoke and people, as if they were leftover observers from a fire. Gregg coughe
d and moved with the clockwise motion of the crowd to the window end of the room, hoping she would find the bar there. With an icy glass in her hand she felt better. Tony put a lighted cigarette into her other hand; now she had the props and the play could begin. A play called Isn't This Fun?
"See those three men over there," he whispered. "See the tall young one? You know who he is?" Tony must have been excited, he had said three complete sentences one right after the other.
"Who?"
"David Wilder Savage."
David Wilder Savage had been one of the first people she had heard of when she had come to New York. It was an eccentric name, and he suited it. Most people thought it was a pseudonym, taken so that he would be remembered. For whatever reason, it had worked. Nobody ever referred to him as Savage, they went through the whole
routine. He had been one of the boy wonders of Broadway, producing his first play at twenty-five, a hit which had run for nearly two years. Every play he produced after that was a success, until the one he had done at the beginning of this season, which had closed in four weeks. The magic name David Wilder Savage had been the only thing to hold it on Broadway that long.
The play itself had little theatrical excitement. Thoughtful, fragile and of limited appeal, it had been written by a man who was one of the few people David Wilder Savage had ever been close to. Like many men who cut a heartless swath through the worlds of business and of bedrooms, David Wilder Savage had one friend whom he cared for deeply and whom he protected. They had been roommates in college, the author and the producer, and in the fourteen years since their graduation the author had been working on this one play while holding various jobs to make a living. That fact alone would have warned away nearly any would-be producer. It would have warned away David Wilder Savage before anyone else, because if anyone had an instinct for success and failure it was he. But this closest friend had been killed in an automobile crash in the spring, and in the fall David Wilder Savage, against the advice of anyone who dared to give it to him, put the play on Broadway. It was not because he was confused by his bereavement. He knew exactly what he was doing. It was one of the rare gestures of sentimentality—and even more, of love—from a man who was known for his ruthlessness. It was ironic that his one act from the heart should turn out to be a debacle, but not unusual, since David Wilder Savage himself would be the first to say that if a con man ever tried to save a child from drowning in a moment of pure goodness he would be sure to be eaten by a shark.
"Do you know him?" Gregg whispered back.
"I read for him once. He probably doesn't remember me."
"Do I dare go over and talk to him?"
"Why not? It's a party," Tony said without much enthusiasm.
"Come with me."
He kissed her lightly on the temple, his cheek bulging out with an hors d'oeuvre he had just gobbled. "What for? Pretty girls have much better luck alone."
She was relieved that he didn't want to accompany her, but when she had worked her way through the crowd to where David Wilder
Savage now stood by himself she was taken with panic. What could she say to him? Hello, I'm an actress. She might as well hold her hand out and ask for a dime for a cup of coffee. It would be greeted by the same entliusiasm.
What an attractive man he was! Satanic, that was the word for him. Thirty-five years old and on top of the world, with that knowing, civilized face looking down at all the ambitious people like herself who were sidling up trying to think of clever things to say to him. She looked down at her glass, wishing she could find a place to get rid of it.
"Who tlie hell are you?" he said pleasantly.
She looked up at him, surprised. "Gregg Adams."
"I'm David Wilder Savage. And as they always say at cocktail parties, what do you do?"
"I'm a dental assistant."
He smiled. "That's a surprise. You look like a parolee from boarding school."
"I was once. And very sophisticated, too. Black lipstick and all."
"Have you read a book called Many Faces?"
She had heard of it, the author was a Portuguese. "I read the reviews."
"That's not much help."
"You'd be surprised," she said, "how well I can discuss a book from the reviews."
"And a movie from the cast Hsting on the marquee?"
"That's right." There was an American couple talking French at her elbow. She nodded toward them. "And with people like that, I can say, I really understand your French perfectly, but I can't speak it back to you because my accent is unintelligible."
"I'm sorry you haven't read Many Faces," he said. "I would have liked to know if it did something to you too, and what. I'm a producer, and I think there may be a good play in it."
He had a way about him, something in the intimate lowering of his voice, that made her feel as if she and her opinions were very important to him. Actually, why should he care what she—a working girl he'd met at a party—thought of a book? Because he thought she was the average public, of course, a girl who came to Manhattan every day on the subway from Queens with her tuna-fish sandwich in a brown paper bag, who lived with her parents, and washed her
hair every Tliursday night and went to the movies with her boy friend every Saturday night. And yet, he had that way about him. . . .
"I'll read it tomorrow," she said. "Itll be too late to tell you what I think, but now I want to read it anyway."
"You'll love it."
Anyone else, she was thinking, could say "You'll love it" and it would be small talk, a mere figure of speech. With David Wilder Savage the sentence was like handing someone a gift. It was as if he wanted to give her the bit of pleasure of discovering a new idea, a magical story. Charm, she thought. Charm was just a word before, but now I know what it is. It's anything this man says.
He touched her arm. "See that couple over there? They've come to the wrong party. There's another one in the apartment downstairs, and that's where they were supposed to go. Now he wants to leave and she says she's having a good time and wants to stay. They're having a fight."
They were a young couple, a pouting bosomy girl in a white dress and a weak-looking man. "Look at the gestures and angry faces," Gregg said, laughing. 'They look like a TV set with the sound turned ojBF."
"Did you ever do that? Turn the sound off? Especially on a commercial? It's like an old silent movie."
"I know. I've been doing it for years."
"Look," he said, amused. "He's leaving and she's going to stay."
"And without even so much as a glass in her hand."
Gregg had expected to be afraid of David Wilder Savage and was surprised that she was not at all. She felt instead as if he and she standing here together laughing and observing the others were something special, the "in group," and everyone outside of the two of them were the "out group."
"Where did you get that diction?" he asked her.
"In speech class."
"You want to be an actress."
"I am an actress. One might say."
"Not a dental assistant."
She laughed. "No, I'm really an actress. I just didn't want to waltz up and tell you because it would have sounded so damned clubby."
"Like someone coming up to you at a cocktail party and saying,
We have something in common—as if that's supposed to make you like him."
"Exactly," she said. "Exactly!"
"Are you here with someone?"
Tony would understand, she thought, he'd do the same thing himself if he could. "No," she said. "No, I'm not."
"Not the dentist?"
"No one."
"This is a very boring party, don't you think?"
She looked up at him. "Not right in tliis corner."
He took her arm. "Let's take the comer with us."
"I'll get my coat." She slipped o£F to the hostess' bedroom to retrieve her coat, looking for Tony out of the comer of her eye but hoping that she would not be able to find him. She paused f
or an instant at the mirror, looking at her face. How dark her eyes were, and how much they revealed, even to herself. She had noticed another quality to David Wilder Savage, something just under the surface—a kind of hidden cruelty. It was as if he were basically a ruthless person but had a tender side that he would show only to the one person he cared about. His charm told her that the person could be her, and her sense told her it was a lie, a trap, one that few girls could be cautious enough to resist putting to a test. She pulled her coat on and lifted her long hair out of the collar. She was a near stranger to him and he to her, but she had seen the challenging combination of cruelty and tenderness. She saw it all in an instant, as a drowning person sees his life pass before his eyes, and then she plunged out of the safe room to where he was waiting for her in the hall.
It was odd—ordinarily she would have been impressed and delighted by the wave of recognition that went around the room when he took her into the restaurant for dinner. She liked walking into a room with someone who was known, it gave her confidence. And at the back of her mind was always the hope that she would be introduced to or discovered by someone who could help her in her career. But with David she found herself resenting the table hoppers who took his time, the greeters who demanded his attention. Everything he said to her seemed important, and every time he turned away to speak to someone else, she felt as if she had left the safe
"in group" for a moment and she remembered who she was and how alone she would be again in an hour or two.
When they had finished dinner it was after midnight. The diners had left tlie restaurant and the drinkers had appeared. "Come uptown to my house," he said.
Knowing herself, she tried to think of any inane remark to play for time. "Why?"
He looked at her perfectly calmly, as if it were not an inane remark at all, and said, "Because I want to make love to you."
