Somebody's Darling

by Somebody's Darling (retail) (epub)

  Dusk has always accentuated my innate tendency to self-pity. Sometimes, without the slightest reason, I plunge into self-pity as if it were a swimming pool, or the running surf.

  Jill registered the self-pity on her radar. She woke from a little nap she was having and said, “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Go back to sleep,” I said, swirling the brandy in my glass in what I fancied was a cheerfully enigmatic way.

  “Don’t waste those Casablanca gestures on me,” she said. “I never responded to Humphrey Bogart anyway. You wish you’d stayed home with your girl, don’t you?”

  “Not so much with my girl,” I said. “After all, I’m with my girl. I guess I’ve just been a guest at the party too many times.”

  “But this is my party,” she said, looking slightly hurt. “I would have thought you might want to be a guest, at my party.”

  “Oh, I do,” I said. “Sometimes I just get to wondering why I never give the party.”

  “You always talk bullshit when you drink brandy,” she said. “Two sips of brandy and you start making up categories and popping yourself into them. The only thing that’s wrong with you is that you’ve moped around Hollywood too long, pretending it’s the world. I’m the same way. This trip is long overdue, for both of us.

  “I’ll be glad when we land,” she added. “Maybe you’ll get out and meet a debutante. Anything is better than watching you mope.”

  Soon the night got deeper, beneath us, and we stopped bickering and waited for New York to arrive. We passed over unseen hills and descended until we could see the lights of Jersey. I had not exactly recovered my equanimity.

  “You see, we lost most of a day,” I said. “We got on at noon and now it’s night. We got cheated out of an afternoon.”

  “I can spare an afternoon,” Jill said. “It’s worth it to see you with a tie on, for once.”

  Then our living room landed and rolled up to an unloading dock. We were ushered out with great courtesy. The fellow Jill claimed was Bertolucci was met by a gang of diminutive Italians. About half the people in our compartment were met by drivers, including us. A driver popped up at us before we were off the plane good.

  “Miss Peel,” he said. “I’m Sam. You just follow me. I’ll have you back to your hotel in no time.”

  Sam took our baggage stubs and got our baggage with wonderful dispatch. They were the first bags up the chute, as if Sam had arranged it that way. A number of well-dressed people, no doubt more important than us, frowned when they noticed that their bags weren’t first up the chute.

  We followed Sam to a limo and got in, like obedient children getting on a school bus. No sooner had Sam pulled out than taxi drivers began to honk at us. Sam ignored them, safe in the knowledge that his limo was impregnable, superior to any number of taxis. They might nip at its bumpers, but they would never be able to bring it down. We drove along a freeway and over a vast bridge. Manhattan loomed before us, as it had in so many movies.

  Jill was mute, but with excitement. Manhattan was something new, something she knew scarcely a thing about. It was a fantastic new world. Her eyes were full of lights, like Page’s eyes after sex.

  “Look at it,” she said. “Let’s stay a month.”

  I tried not to let on what a provincial I felt. After all, I spent most of my time pretending to be a man of the world. I was the man who had been everywhere and seen everything—or so I allowed. Since I am just enough of a writer to be able to convince myself with my own lies, I had easily managed to take myself in. I really considered myself a man of the world. It took a jolt like the sight of Manhattan to remind me that I was only a middle-class resident of the Hollywood hills—a man of Burbank in the daytime, and of two or three familiar bars at night. I hadn’t been to Europe since World War II, or to New York for almost that long, and my memory of earlier visits was foggy at best.

  My trouble was that I was in daily contact with people who went places, so naturally I came to assume that I went places, too. The people I worked with were always jetting off to Paris or London, to New York or Rome—sometimes even to Lisbon or Morocco or Copenhagen. I caught the backwash of their travel, meanwhile jetting off myself mostly only to Vegas. I had been to Houston once or twice, to Omaha, to Spokane, to Point Barrow, Alaska, and a few other unlikely places, but most of my cosmopolitanism was reflected off people who scarcely knew they had it and passed on to people who never realized I didn’t. In that respect, I even had Jill fooled. She had never actually known me to be more than two blocks out of orbit, but I had her convinced that I knew the world like the palm of my hand.

  In order to sustain that impression for as long as possible, I assumed a knowing expression as we rode in. I was even able to point out Park Avenue when we zoomed across it. “Oh,” Jill said, “Park Avenue.” For a moment she may even have had delusions of worldliness herself, probably because in Hollywood there are a lot of people with foreign accents—talking to people with foreign accents is a good way to become convinced of your own savoir faire.

  Clearly, though, the staff of our hotel knew the world. There was steel in their formality. The doorman got to the door of the limo even before Sam could, which bespoke a real pro. I offered Sam a tip anyway, but he looked sternly at me and I retreated. Then I forgot to offer to tip the doorman, who looked sternly at me too. Jill tried to carry a suitcase in, a clear breach of established practice. A bellboy rushed out and appropriated all the luggage.

  By the time we reached the desk, we had forgotten why we were there. We had to be prompted to sign the register. Then we shot up in an elevator and were deposited in a suite of large rooms. The bellboy rapidly instructed us in how to work the air conditioner, the heater, and the television set. I guess he assumed we could manage the water faucets for ourselves. Mastering a semblance of suavity, I tipped him.

  Two minutes later, the doorbell rang. It was the bellboy. “The lady didn’t get her messages,” he said, handing me a brown manila envelope. I offered him another tip, but he brushed it aside. “It was our mistake, for godsakes,” he said.

  “I thought you knew when to tip, at least,” Jill said. She perched on a windowsill and looked across at the park.

  “Are you accusing me of lack of polish?” I asked. “Read your messages. You’re probably missing an important party, right now.”

  She turned the envelope upside down and about thirty messages fluttered down onto the rug. Most of them were from magazines or TV stations, wanting interviews. There was also a typed itinerary of the places she had to appear the next day.

  “I don’t want to look at this now,” she said. “We’re wasting New York. Can’t we go to a night spot?”

  “A what?”

  “Someplace impressive,” she said. “Or just for a walk or something.”

  I went to the bathroom and checked my tie, which was, as near as I could judge, adequately tied. “I thought you’d gone to sleep,” she said when I returned.

  We discovered that we didn’t have to go far for a night spot, since there was a fairly inviting one right in our hotel. I had a double scotch. Jill, in what for her was wild abandon, had a Campari and soda. Her eyes were still alight—she was drinking in the scene. The night spot, which is to say the hotel bar, was full of well-dressed people, all of them talking rapidly to one another. I was happy to think that my tie was adequately tied.

  “New York seems to have deprived you of your usual insouciance,” she said.

  I made no defense. Jack Lemmon was a few tables away, talking to the son of O. B. O’Connor. O.B. had been an uncommonly smart producer, in my day. His son had no particular flair. Farther back, at a corner table, I noticed Maxine Nutip, undoubtedly one of the meanest women in the world. In her day, she had been the agent—had it not been for Maxine, someone like Lulu Dickey would not have been possible. But Maxine’s day had passed, and she had returned to New York to piddle around a little with Broadway people. I had never had much to do with her personally, but I knew stories
. She was with a couple of blue-suited junior agents. Her profile was like that of a saw.

  “Maxine Nutip’s over there,” I said. She was a rarer sight than Jack Lemmon, at least.

  Jill looked. “Trust you to spot an oldie,” she said. “What do you suppose all these men do?”

  “They arrange the world’s economy, for one thing,” I said.

  “I’m not sure about them,” she said. “Let’s go for a walk before you get any drunker.”

  We paid up and proceeded down Fifth Avenue at a slow pace, zigzagging back and forth across the street so Jill could look in windows. At about the fourth I lost my patience. I was freezing, which is never good for my patience.

  “This is absurd,” I said. “You could see all this stuff right in Beverly Hills, you know. I can’t believe we’ve crossed the fucking continent just to window-shop in Bonwit’s.”

  “I don’t get to Beverly Hills very often,” Jill said. “You know how expensive stuff is there.”

  Rather than abandon her, I let her have her way. We proceeded willy-nilly until we fetched up at Rockefeller Center. I dragged her down to see if anybody was skating on the ice rink, but the ice was white and empty. A wind had come up and it was getting colder by the minute. Jill looked so snazzy in her pantsuit that I concluded we would probably be mugged. I had forgotten about muggers on our walk down the avenue, but as we meandered over toward Broadway the street got darker and I became acutely conscious of all we had read about them.

  “There’s a high incidence of mugging in this city,” I said. She meandered on, several paces ahead of me.

  “When in Rome,” she said, meaning, I guess, that we should welcome our muggers. Without them we would not be having a true New York experience. Despite her nonchalance I scrutinized all approaching persons carefully. We encountered several youths who looked to me fully capable of mugging us, but happily they didn’t. Perhaps, like lions, they had eaten their fill for the evening and were apathetic. I was anything but apathetic.

  Eventually we emerged onto Broadway and were sucked into a maelstrom of obviously unreliable humanity. I would have felt more comfortable in Africa, but Jill was oblivious to danger. She even went into a penny arcade, where pock-marked youths were restlessly toying with strange, loud machines of various kinds. The scene around us was like the scene around the bus stations in downtown Los Angeles, only raised by a factor of about ten thousand. “Now I realize what a sheltered life I’ve been leading,” I said.

  “Right, you and your rich girls,” Jill said.

  We walked on up the Great White Way, past the theater district. A black man suddenly clapped his hands and did a little dance in front of Jill. He was wearing an almost identical white pantsuit. “Hey, that’s a nice cut,” he said, and moved on.

  As we moved on up Broadway the crowds gradually thinned out, and most of the shop windows seemed to be filled with cameras or cheap luggage. I became mugger-conscious again, particularly when we found ourselves alone on a traffic island beneath the Gulf & Western building. Down 59th Street the bright entrances to a line of hotels seemed to promise safety, but my companion was looking at the deep, dangerous park.

  “Couldn’t we just walk across it?” she asked. “You’re not tired yet, are you?”

  “No, nor insane, either,” I said. “I have my future to think about. If I let you get killed before your picture opens, old Aaron will hunt me down.”

  I got her down the street, nearly to our hotel, and then when I relaxed my guard she jumped in a horse cab and forced me to come with her. Soon we were clip-clopping through the park, behind a speckled horse. The driver, a gnarled little man, was telling Jill how much worse New York was than it used to be. Apparently he had long since despaired of his life, which was why he dared to go through the park at night. As we approached the West Side we could see a pale, pear-white moon above the towers of great, dark, cathedral-like apartment buildings.

  Later, back in the safety of the hotel bar, I drank too fast, out of relief. Jack Lemmon was gone, and Maxine Nutip as well. I attempted to impress on Jill that we were in a dangerous city, a city filled with random, arbitrary violence, but she was beyond my influence.

  “The only bad thing that will ever happen to me is that I’ll outlive everybody I know,” she said, yawning.

  “Yeah, but what about me?” I said. “I’m one of the people you’ll outlive. Must I be murdered in Central Park just so you can get started on your fate?”

  When we got back to our suite she spent some time testing the mattresses. Being a firm person, she believed implicitly in firm mattresses. I went to sleep in a chair while she was making her choice, and she had quite a time getting me awake enough to stumble to the bed I had been relegated to. She seemed to be wearing a peach velour bathrobe, which was so much more voluptuous than anything I associated her with that for a second I thought she was Page, or some other woman.

  “It’s a good thing I’ve known you for a long time,” she said as she was trying to tug my pants off. I had fallen into bed with them on, a vice I’m prone to. She was so persistent in her efforts to tidy me up for bed that I had a hard time getting back to sleep. A peach velour bathrobe kept moving around my room, putting clothes on hangers and taking change out of pockets, not necessarily in that order. Then it turned out the light but refused to go away. It sat on the edge of my bed for a while, and the woman in it, Jill, watched New York out my window for as long or longer than I can remember. Near dawn, when my bladder tugged me up briefly, she was not there.

  7

  “AREN’T YOU EVEN GOING TO EAT BREAKFAST WITH ME?” she asked, the next morning. She was in the doorway of my bedroom, wearing a red dress. At that hour—whatever hour it was—I was only used to seeing her in jeans and her sweat shirt. I had to take a second look at the red dress.

  “Was I drunk or were you wearing a peach velour bathrobe last night?” I asked. “Fame’s certainly done a lot for your image.”

  “You were more than normally drunk,” she said. “Get up. Your food’s getting cold.”

  “I didn’t want any food,” I said. “I can’t sleep when I’m in a strange place. I need a warm body beside me.”

  “It’s not going to be mine,” she said.

  She disappeared, so in hopes of seeing more of her in her fresh, stylish incarnation, I got up and managed to drag on my own bathrobe, a disreputable white terry cloth on which, through the years, a great many substances have been spilled. In my view a bathrobe is a garment whose only virtue is that it can be flung off hastily, if one is in the heat of passion. So far, though, my personal terry cloth has had an unromantic career. I never seemed to be wearing it when the heat of passion took me. Mostly, I wore it while carrying out the garbage.

  Jill sat at a table spread with food, eating a frugal piece of brown toast. She was also having some tea. Evidently the rest of the food, which included a poached egg, was meant for me. The Times was on the table but Jill wasn’t reading it. I glanced at the headlines and couldn’t see them.

  “I’m going blind,” I said. “I can’t see the headlines.”

  “This is The New York Times,” she said. “The headlines aren’t a foot high. You have to make a little cultural adjustment.”

  Besides the poached egg there were some buckwheat cakes. A rich array of syrups and marmalades had been provided. Why Jill had decided I would be in the mood for buckwheat cakes and a poached egg, I don’t know, but as it turned out she was right.

  “What am I supposed to do all day while you get interviewed?” I asked.

  “Go to museums and improve your mind.”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “My mind’s totally full. It’s like an elevator. It can go up or down, but nobody else gets in.”

  The doorbell rang and Jill got up to get it. Marta Lundsgaarde strode in, in an iron-gray suit that went well with her disposition. Her coal-black hair had been somewhat extravagantly streaked. My own unkind thought was that she was wearing a skunk wig.

&
nbsp; “Good dress,” she said to Jill.

  “You know Joe,” Jill said.

  “From years back,” Marta said, favoring me with perhaps a tenth of a second of her attention.

  “Hi, Marta,” I said ebulliently.

  “I hope you’re ready,” she said to Jill.

  It looked to me like she was ready. Her eyes were still bright. She gave me a nice kiss before she left. “You can come to the press conference,” she said. “It’s at the Plaza at four.”

  They hurried out the door, and I was left to contemplate my own enviable prospect: a free day in New York. In certain moods I might have wished for Page, but I didn’t seem to be in any of those moods. My heart was in a mood to relax, not to contend, and even an unquestioning innocent like Page required a good deal of contending. I doubt that I’ve ever spent a day with a woman without becoming aware, at some point during it, that the bottom could drop out any second. Neither the secure routine nor the ecstatic moment altered that basic fact: the bottom could always drop out.

  For once, I didn’t feel the need of such a stimulant. I had only one errand to accomplish all day, which was to buy Jill a jewel. It was not an errand for the morning hours, so I had several cups of coffee and tried, with little success, to work my way into The Times. All the news in The Times was probably fit to print, but that did not mean that I was fit to read it. I would have had to read thousands of words, all of them closely marshaled in long gray columns, just to assure myself that I knew where matters stood in the world, as of that moment. It didn’t seem worth it. With no effort at all, I could assure myself that I didn’t much care. By the time I could have finished The Times, things would have rearranged themselves anyway. There is really no keeping up, as Claudia used to say. Claudia had zero interest in the world at large. “It’s better to keep your eyes forward than your eyes backward,” she said. The past—in the phrase of the day—was not her bag.

  Then, abruptly, the past swallowed her, and sentiments that we had contested all our lives became my favorite sentiments. My normal procedure with sentiments is to intone them in bed, for the benefit of whoever I’m in bed with. If that person won’t listen, then I intone them while lunching or dining. Jill had heard a great many sentiments intoned and had paid them no heed, but even so, I meant to buy her a modest jewel. She usually got involved with tightwads, men who never bought her anything.