It was too late. Nothing was resolved, and even after she took his hand and they kissed and walked on, he was afraid of saying the wrong thing. The breaking waves filled the silence. The shingle was flat and wide here, the surf foaming cold over their toes. There were supposed to be seals and dolphins, but all they saw were gulls.
“That’s the one,” she said, pointing to a clapboard cottage topped with a tarnished weathervane shaped like a whale. It was closed like the others, the windows shuttered, but they left the sea and trudged up the beach for it as if they lived there. A low wall fronted a brick patio drifted with sand. She sat and patted the wall for him to join her. The stone was cold. Far out, a great motor yacht inched along, probably headed for Catalina, its engines rumbling like an airplane’s.
They shared a cigarette, the wind taking the smoke away.
“Do you know who Frank Case is?” she asked.
“Of course.” He owned Dottie’s old haunt, the Algonquin, among other holdings.
“When I first came out here, it was like starting over. I had nothing. No family, no friends. My editor arranged with Frank Case for me to stay here till I could find a place of my own. I’d never even met him, and he let me stay here—alone. For that I’ll always be grateful to him.”
“He sounds very generous.”
“He is.”
“I was once thrown out of the Gonk, though I suppose that’s not exactly a singular distinction.”
“You needn’t be jealous of everyone I’ve ever met, is what I’m saying.”
“I am. I can’t help it, I’m selfish that way. I want to go back and get to know you as a schoolgirl.”
“You wouldn’t like me as a schoolgirl. I was tubby—and mean.”
“I can’t picture you as either.”
“Oh, I was vicious.” She seemed to take pleasure in confessing this. “I treated people horridly because I was unhappy. I’m much nicer now.”
“Why were you unhappy?”
“Why is anyone unhappy?” She squinted out at the dwindling motor yacht, a blip on the horizon, and he thought she would let the question stand. “I suppose I felt cheated. When I was little we hadn’t any money. I was too young to understand, and any time I wanted something we couldn’t afford, my mother would call me ungrateful.”
“‘How much sharper than a serpent’s tongue . . .’”
“She did worse than her tongue. She was a believer in not sparing the rod. I was lucky. She was harder on my stepbrothers.”
“That’s awful. I didn’t know you had stepbrothers.”
“I didn’t have them for long. They left with my stepfather and I never saw them again.”
“So it was just you and Alicia.”
“This was before Alicia.”
“Hadn’t your father already passed then?”
“She was my stepfather’s, actually.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Does it matter?”
“No. You just never told me before.”
“Probably because of what you’d think. It’s all very complicated and sad, and all a long time ago. That’s why I don’t like to talk about it. I don’t have a family in the sense that other people have family.”
“You have your Aunt Mary.”
“Please can we talk about something else? I don’t know why you brought it up in the first place.”
“Because I wanted to know you then.”
“You know me now. Trust me, you’re getting the better part of the bargain. Here, finish it.” She handed him the cigarette and stood, took a few steps back the way they came. He could tell he’d offended her by prying. To apologize again would only prolong the awkwardness, so he rose and followed her, rueing yet another lost opportunity.
He was being greedy, wanting all of her, when she’d given him so much. He knew how she took her tea and where she had her hair done. He could confidently order for her at a hot dog stand or a French restaurant. Her favorite star was Janet Gaynor, who’d granted her her very first interview. She hated Constance Bennett and couldn’t bear Charles Boyer, who’d made a lazy pass at her on the set. She walked briskly, as if she were late, and drove like a maniac. She was organized and clean, meaning he had to pick up his place when he knew she was coming over. She was vigilant about brushing her teeth, and loved going to the dentist. She was a better speller than he was, but knew fewer words. When she was typing a column, she scratched the side of her head with the eraser end of her pencil and stuck out her bottom lip like a bulldog. She liked it when he kissed her neck but not her ears. She thought her nose was crooked and that her eyes were too far apart, neither of which was true. More than anything, she loved to sleep. Wasn’t that enough?
After opening boldly, he’d become tentative. If, like his producer, he was replacing his long-lost love with this newfound one, he needed to be sure of her—impossible, and yet, indisputably, she was perfect. Perhaps that was what frightened him most.
Saturday they piled into the Coliseum with a hundred thousand other Angelenos for the traditional city game. For three quarters they waited for Kenny Washington to break loose. When he finally did, Sheilah jumped up and cheered with everyone else. Typically, Scott thought of Zelda, missing it, and afterward, filing down the long concrete ramps with the drained and giddy Bruins fans, he felt strangely dislocated. The feeling only deepened when they walked the few blocks up Vermont to where they’d parked and discovered his car was gone.
Sheilah comforted him, knowing he’d grown fond of the old jalopy.
“Probably just college kids,” he said, feigning equanimity, and held to that bland assumption even after, a week later, the police found it in Tijuana, missing its tires.
He’d gotten the call just before lunch, and because it was Friday and the impound lot closed at five, he had to either leave now or wait till Monday. He had to grab his passport, and money to pay the Tijuana PD for storing it—la mordida. On the phone Sheilah dithered, asking if Bogie couldn’t drive him, but Bogie was away on location.
If she was busy, he could just take the bus down. It might take a little longer with all the stops.
“It will,” she said vaguely, as if she were still debating, then relented.
She picked him up at the front gate, waited in the car while he ran into the Garden and the bank. She’d had to cancel an interview. To make up for inconveniencing her, he treated their race for the border as a mad adventure rather than the unhappy errand it was.
“I haven’t been down Meh-hee-co way in ten years, I bet.” He flipped through his passport. He’d forgotten their last trip to Bermuda, mercifully. Otherwise the stamps ended six years ago, when he’d given up on the clinic in Zurich and brought Zelda and Scottie back on the Aquitania. The pages before that testified to the restlessness of a generation, cataloging their jaunts to Nice and Capri and Biskra. It seemed impossible that he hadn’t been abroad since then, yet here was proof. Ernest was right: he’d wasted so much time.
“Well?”
“It doesn’t go back that far.”
In his picture he was thinner, light-haired and high-cheeked with a wolfish smile, radiating the confidence of the lucky. He didn’t recall for which trip it had been taken, but from the watery shine in his eyes he appeared to be tight. He was torn between feeling embarrassed but also sorry for this vain, unserious man, ill-prepared for what awaited him.
“It’s true what the natives say. Every time someone takes your picture, the camera steals a little bit of your soul.”
“That explains Bette Davis.”
“What’s yours look like?” he asked, wondering what story the stamps on hers told.
“My soul?”
“I’m sure you look stunning.”
“It doesn’t even look like me.”
“Let me see.”
“No.”
�
��Come on, don’t be shy now.”
“Stop, I’m trying to drive.”
It took him a minute to understand why she was so adamant. She was afraid he’d see her real age. There was no way to tell her he already suspected, or that it wasn’t uncommon, so he let it go, tuning in a Mexican station and swaying to a swoony accordion.
At the border he wasn’t surprised when she received her passport back from the clerk and, covering half of it with a hand, held it out to show him her picture. He didn’t try to take it, just complimented the younger, unsmiling version of her and let her slip it into her purse.
After a frustrating half-hour circling the dusty town, they found the lot, paid the clerk a storage fee and bought a used set of tires the yard mechanic offered to mount for another five dollars while they ate dinner at a cantina across the street.
“Think they do this to all the gringos?”
“It was rather convenient, having them right there.”
“They’re probably mine. It’s the perfect set-up. Who are you going to complain to?”
It was dark by the time they finally got going. He gassed up and followed her back through the neon carnival of Tijuana, the sidewalks alive with zoot-suited touts trying to entice sailors into the clip joints. The mechanic had mounted the tires but not balanced them, and the car fought him like a stubborn horse, pulling to the right. After they made the border she drove fast, as if trying to lose him, her disembodied taillights floating out ahead of him, smaller and smaller, the black void of the ocean dropping off to the left. The carne asada had been too spicy; a hot bubble lodged in his chest, threatening, any minute, to burst. He pictured the highway patrol finding the car off the road, overturned, his body flopped out one window in the glare of a spotlight.
He tuned the radio to San Diego and, as if summoned, it appeared, its wide streets bright as a stage. His stomach settled, and his thoughts. He was turning melodramatic in middle age, like his mother, seeing death and disaster everywhere, when he should have been grateful. Even more important than getting his car back was the fact that Sheilah had begged off an assignment and spent half the day helping him without the slightest complaint. It had been so long since he’d had someone he could rely on that her generosity—her friendship—seemed a lavish gift, one he’d done little to deserve, and which, in the dark warmth of the Ford burrowing through the night, banished any lingering hesitancy. He wanted to catch her and declare himself right there by the roadside, to thank her, in the soberest way possible, for saving him.
This was the glowing coal he tended as they rolled up the coast and through the low beach towns and working suburbs and into the city itself, and by the time they reached Sunset and climbed the snaking road to her place, he’d convinced himself that the trip had brought them together in a way no evening of dinner and dancing could. So he was surprised to find, when he stepped inside, that her eyes were swollen from crying.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, baffled, the eternal male.
“I can’t do this anymore.”
His first thought, as always, was Zelda. He was ready to plead for time and understanding, but Sheilah spun away from him and dug through her purse.
“Whatever it is . . .”
He didn’t finish because she was holding out her passport to him as if it were a gun.
“You wanted to look at it, so look.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does,” she said, pushing it at him. He fended her off but she was grimly insistent, and rather than let it drop to the floor, he took it.
The cover was bible black, with the rampant lion and unicorn in gilt.
“Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter.”
“Open it.”
“Sheilah—”
“Please, Scott,” she stopped him. “Just open it. After that, if you still want to speak to me, we can talk.”
“If I still want to speak to you.”
“I won’t blame you if you don’t.”
“This is nonsense.”
“You’ll see, it’s not.”
The answer came to him, glaringly obvious: Donegall. They’d been secretly married this whole time.
She took a seat at the dining room table, turning her back as if to give him privacy. He sat on the couch where he normally read and opened the cover.
There she was, younger, with duller, flatter hair, facing the camera with the humorless rigidity of the accused.
Beneath her picture was her name—or no, there must have been a mistake, one of those clerical errors that changes a family’s destiny. Instead of Sheilah Graham, it read: Lily Sheil.
He looked to her for an explanation.
“What is this?”
“That’s my name,” she said.
ROBINSON CRUSOE IN MALIBU
Like everyone in Hollywood, she wasn’t who she claimed to be. Sheilah Graham was a stage name she’d assumed at sixteen, when she made her West End debut—not in O’Casey or Shaw but the Brompton Follies. She was a dancer, meaning a chorine, decorating variety shows and musicals in scanty costumes. She had the ingenue’s usual ambitions, but when she tried out for speaking roles, she was told her accent was suited only for chambermaids and ladies of the evening.
She hadn’t come from money, as he’d so hopefully thought. She’d grown up in the East End, the youngest of six children. Her father died when she was just a baby—that was true. Her mother was from Kiev, a washerwoman who couldn’t read or write. She took ill when Lily was six and sent her to live at the Jewish orphanage where they shaved her head the first of the month and paddled her with a hairbrush when she stole moldy biscuits from the kitchen. She stayed there till she was fourteen, old enough to go out and earn money to support the family.
They lived in Stepney Green then, in an alley behind a brewery. There was no Alicia, no Aunt Mary, no stepfather. Her stepbrothers were her brothers, only one of whom remained, Henry, an army deserter who slept on the sofa and suffered from night terrors. She had to share the one bedroom with her mother, in the early stages of the stomach cancer that would kill her, and guiltily missed the dorm at the orphanage.
She’d been presented at court—that photograph was real—but later, after her transformation. Before taking to the stage, she’d been a seamstress, a waitress, an assembly line worker in an Addressograph factory, a maid at a seaside hotel in Brighton, and, lastly, a salesgirl at a milliner’s, where she’d been discovered by another dancer who, for a finder’s fee, introduced her to the man who would become her manager. To make the leap from dancer to player, she paid for elocution lessons as if she were training to be a governess.
It worked. She started getting bit parts—secretaries and party guests. Her looks had always garnered attention, often the wrong kind. Now they made casting directors envision possibilities. She already knew how to move.
Her big break came in a manor-house farce called Upson Downs, playing the innocent young piano teacher aroused by the power of music to seduce her pupil. The role was supposed to be risqué, involving a brief striptease to Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 3. Each night when she took her bows she was surprised at the catcalls and bouquets. She’d shown more as a chorus girl.
She was singled out in reviews, her name in boldface. The papers ran flattering photos of her, attracting London’s high-profile bachelors and not a few married men, among them a judge. Backstage, department store heirs and shipping magnates lined up to take her to the best restaurants, bearing roses and diamonds. Donegall wasn’t the first nobleman she’d spurned. Every week brought a new proposal. Having scraped by her whole life, she enjoyed arriving in a Rolls-Royce and ordering the pheasant under glass. It was comical, her good fortune, unreal. She treated it like a dream that was bound to end, leaving her unchanged.
Despite their elevated stations, her suitors were not all gentlemen. Having matured early in a rou
gh neighborhood, she had practice at discouraging advances, but several of her dates were shockingly ardent and then furious when she defended her honor. Once she was put out by the side of the road like a common tart. Another time she had to bite a lord who refused to let go of her breast.
Most, though, only wanted to be seen with her, her beauty an accessory to their vanity, and after Upson Downs closed and the papers chose the next fresh face, the rush subsided. She signed to do another racy part for more money, but at the last minute the backers pulled out and the show folded. Her next show was a flop. She’d been right about her fame being short-lived. She kept working, but instead of a queue of millionaires waiting backstage, some nights there was no one. It was then, after a poorly attended matinee, that she met Major John Gillam.
He was decades older than her, a dashing war hero injured at Gallipoli, tall and dark with a pencil mustache and a slight limp. Unlike her other suitors, he didn’t insist that she quit. She skipped their courtship, mentioning only that he was funny and gentle, arriving too soon, as Scott dreaded, at their marriage.
Gillam came from military royalty, a line of generals going back to the first graduating class at Sandhurst. His injuries ended his career, leaving him dependent on morphine and the family fortune, both of which warped and unmanned him. In the world of business he was defenseless, always chasing the bold stroke. His few conjugal ventures with her failed as well, their marriage a union in name only. At the same time he was presenting her at court as the model of English womanhood, he was encouraging her to see other men, an edict she resisted on principle, but she was eighteen and life in the theater was ripe. Looking back, she could see they had used each other badly.
She related all this in bed, in the dark, her head on his chest, alternately repentant and incredulous, as if she couldn’t believe this Dickensian past was hers. She’d never told anyone her story before. It was one reason she’d called things off with Donegall, the fear she’d be found out. Scott lay pinioned beneath her, absorbing the onslaught of new information, weighing it for truth. He felt at once betrayed and vindicated. He knew she’d been hiding something. Now he knew the reason. It made sense, keeping her secrets from the rest of the world, but why did she have to protect them from him?
West of Sunset Page 13
