The Great Pretenders

by Laura Kalpakian

  “Do you know why my grandmother was so supportive of the NAACP?” I asked, after he had introduced me with a note of pride as Julia Greene’s granddaughter. “Or how she connected with them?”

  “How would I know?”

  “I just wondered. The day her will was read in the lawyer’s office, I just assumed she had supported the NAACP to offend Leon to his conservative core. But now, here with you, and what Mr. Branch said, and Ruby saying Julia used to bring me here when I was a kid, I think she must have truly believed in what she was doing. I wish I could ask her.”

  “You still miss her?”

  “I do. She and Leon were really my parents, and I was heartbroken when they split up.”

  “Even if you got to go to Paris?”

  “Even if. Paris was wonderful, though, and I’d love to go back, but now I have a job.”

  “Yeah, what exactly does an agent do? I didn’t quite hear you at the Comet Club, the music was too loud.”

  So I told him how the Granville Agency was an intermediary. “I’m like the feeder in the zoo,” I said, “the guy who walks around with the bucket full of meat and throws it at the lions, and the bucket of bananas for the monkeys, and the bucket full of palm fronds for the giraffes. Occasionally I wear a pith helmet. It’s a jungle out there.” I told him the story of how I went independent, dumping Rakoff/Holtz’s scripts in the LA River. I had long since shaped the story into something amusing, leaving out the part where Irv pressed his dick up against me.

  Terrence too had a lot of humorous anecdotes about growing up around here with lots of aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, everyone nearby. Except for his father, who had come from Alabama after serving on the Western Front in World War I, his family had been in California for generations. He told a story about an ancestor, sly, smart Nana Bowers, brought here as the slave of Mormon pioneers in the eighteen fifties, outwitting her owner in court, getting her freedom because California didn’t recognize slavery. The story was meant to elicit smiles, but slavery was a word I’d never heard except as part of a dry, academic past. I couldn’t imagine that word being part of your family’s story.

  “Terrence and Booker was spoiled rotten, both of them,” Coralee said when she brought dessert, apple pie with ice cream. “Only two boys in a family of girls? And the youngest at that! These two boys, they couldn’t do no wrong in that house. All their lives they had women looking after them, me and my sister, Bonita, my mama, my grandma, the aunts, the great-aunts. My mama like to die of the happiness the day Terrence graduated from UCLA. She always knew Terrence gonna do something really fine one day. He was always a reader, a thinker, good with words. Mama was so sure he’s gonna be a writer, she made him take typing in high school. Shorthand too.” Someone called to Coralee and she left us.

  Terrence chuckled. “I fought Mama something fierce on the typing and shorthand, but then, well, I go to school, and just lookie here! I was one of three boys in a typing class full of girls! Sixty-five words a minute,” he added. “And shorthand, well, I use shorthand every day on the job. My mother knew me better than I knew myself.”

  “My mother doesn’t even like to look at me,” I said, surprised at my own candor. I brought my hand up to my right cheek. “From the time I was born she hated the sight of me.”

  “Then you know what it is to be judged for your skin, don’t you?”

  “I never thought of it like that.”

  “Think of it,” he said. He smiled at me in a way that made me feel we were intimate allies. “You like the pie?”

  “It’s wonderful. I’ve never tasted anything quite like it.” I sipped the last of the root beer float. “Did you always want to be a writer?”

  “I’m not a writer, not like James Baldwin or Richard Wright. I’m just a reporter. International correspondent, that’s what I wanted to be, to see my byline in the New York Times. I was so certain that’s what I’d be, I got a passport the day after I turned eighteen. Then, well, time goes by, and hell-bent as I am on being an international correspondent, I begin to understand that the only way the New York Times gonna hire someone like me is to be pushing a broom, daddy-o.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I been working for the Challenger since I was eight, delivering papers on my bike, running stats for the sportswriters when I was in high school, writing obits, and filling in weekends when I was at UCLA, so taking a job there was just like stepping into a shoe already comfortable. It’s a great paper, and August Branch is a great man. He insists that your copy’s on time, that it’s the truth, and that you haven’t violated the code of ethics or the English language. He’s very particular about the code of ethics and the English language. Other than that, what I write, well, that’s up to me. The column is my own.”

  “Are you the colored Hedda Hopper?” I asked, thinking myself witty.

  “I’m not the colored anything, Roxanne, and I’m sure as hell not a Red-baiting gossipmonger.” He swooped up the check. “I need to get back to the office.”

  We left, and walked back to the Challenger’s office in silence, the moment of alliance shattered with my stupid comment. Here was the most interesting man I had met since Jerrold Davies, who didn’t count since Jerrold was old enough to be my father. If I didn’t speak up, apologize . . . A premonition of regret wavered before me, almost visibly. At the parking lot Terrence said a crisp goodbye. I put my hand on his sleeve. “Terrence, I’m sorry for what I said about the colored Hedda Hopper, I wasn’t thinking.”

  He actually looked suddenly tired; his shoulders sagged. “People like me get tired of hearing ‘sorry’ from people like you.”

  “Well, next time I’ll think.”

  “Next time?”

  “Look,” I said cheerfully, “it’s Tuesday. Why don’t you come out to my place on Saturday? I live in Malibu,” adding awkwardly, “at the beach.”

  “Can I bring my wife and kids?” he asked, suddenly solemn.

  Keeping my face frozen to conceal my shock, I said, “Sure. How many?”

  “Three.”

  “Well, sure, bring them all. I’ll make lunch.”

  “What’s your address?” He took out a pen and opened his palm, and wrote down the address. “See you Saturday around one.”

  I drove back to Clara Bow Drive wishing I hadn’t made the invitation, though I told myself: Just as well he’s married, Roxanne. After watching the chaos sown by adultery in my own family, I stay away from married men. No chance now I’d have an affair with Terrence Dexter, who could prove very dangerous. Not only was he married, he was a Negro. Just look at what happened to Diana Jordan, with her beautiful, battered face spread all over the papers and her promising career in tatters. Even apart from his being black, I don’t like complicated men, and clearly, Terrence Dexter was too complicated, too smart, too deep, and too intense by half. So why did I find him so compelling, and why did the very sight of him raise my heart, my spirits?

  * * *

  • • •

  Irene was already sipping a cocktail when I arrived at the Ambassador that Friday for our standing lunch date. “Tsk-tsk, Roxanne, if the shiner weren’t enough to make you conspicuous, you’re wearing trousers too? No hat. No gloves?”

  “A black eye is its own fashion accessory this spring.” I sat down and signaled the waiter for a Campari. “Besides, Betty Bacall wears trousers. Kate Hepburn wears them.”

  “I don’t think you’re quite Kate’s equal yet, are you?”

  “Who is?” We ordered, and then I noticed a new sapphire solitaire ring on her finger. An enormous sapphire solitaire.

  “From Gordon,” she said, nodding toward Julia’s sparkling diamond gleaming on my hand. “A present, and for exactly the same reason. I found out because Gordon isn’t as smart as he thinks he is, and he slipped up.”

  “Oh, Irene, this makes me so mad. Who was it?”

  “Some twit with a twat. Gord
on is a powerful man, and there are ten thousand girls who don’t care if he’s married.”

  “He ought to care that he’s married,” I said, thinking of the married Terrence Dexter, of the way he had danced with me, the way he had held me in the middle of the mayhem.

  “Actually, he does. Gordon’s been contrite, really sorry. He promises it’ll never happen again. It will, of course. This ring is a sort of business proposition, even if Gordon doesn’t yet know it. I have to get smarter as I get older. I’m almost thirty. I have to think of him less as a husband and more as a business partner, and the business is Us. That’s what Julia and Leon had for years. Of course, she detested Leon’s little peccadilloes, but together they were their own corporation, and that corporation was worth preserving.”

  “Until she walked away from it, from him, from everything, and started all over again in Paris.”

  “At least she had you.”

  “And I had her. To Julia,” I said, lifting my glass to Irene’s, though I did not add that I now knew my grandmother had helped out the NAACP for years, or that I had met August Branch, the man who had accepted Julia’s bequest.

  Suddenly Jonathan Moore burst into the restaurant, halted briefly by the maître d’, who was unaccustomed to men with big fat bruised lips bounding in. We waved, and the waiter let him pass. He was flushed with excitement, calling out in his imperious way, “Waiter! Bring us a bottle of champagne!” He gave us each a hurried kiss on the cheek, plopped himself down in a chair, and beamed. “I got called back for the Dr. Bleeker role!”

  “So you took my advice and auditioned for Fly Me to the Moon,” I said, feeling smug. “I’m waiting for your abject gratitude.”

  He laughed. “I’ve never done comedy, but I thought, well, what the hell? I wore a rumpled coat and a pair of thick horn-rimmed glasses and greased my hair up and let it hang in my eyes. I slouched and muttered and looked generally brilliant and unworldly. And even with my busted lip, I think they were really impressed.”

  “Did they say anything about the Comet Club?” I asked.

  “I made some lighthearted reference to the raid and the cops, but Phil Tobin, the director, didn’t think it was funny. And Leon definitely didn’t think it was funny.”

  “It’s not funny,” said Irene, blowing out a plume of smoke. “Getting beat up and arrested in a Negro jazz club is never funny.”

  “We weren’t arrested, Irene,” I insisted. “We got beat up by the photographers who were there to snag Diana.”

  “Let that be a lesson to you. Don’t befriend women who are sleeping with Negroes.”

  “Oh, I don’t want to talk about lessons or Negroes!” cried Jonathan as the waiter brought the champagne. “I want to talk about how I’m going to get the part! I couldn’t believe it when I read Fly Me to the Moon. It’s a damned fine script, crisp and witty. I never thought Charlie Frye was that smart, Roxanne. You must have been sending him to one of those Learn to Write in Your Spare Time courses you see advertised on the backs of matchbooks.”

  “Ah, Charlie Frye!” sighed Irene with a snide, sidelong glance to me. “Tanned and handsome, and now an irresistible success! A three-year contract at Empire! Everything a young writer could ever want. What a great client! What a great lover! I wonder what dazzling script he’ll turn out next.”

  I kept my gaze on the bubbles rising in the champagne glass. I could admit to no one, not even Thelma, my fears about Charlie, my mistake in choosing him to front for Max.

  “Am I missing something?” Jonathan asked in the long, awkward silence.

  Irene and I assured him he was not and returned the conversation to reflect on him while we women dutifully basked in his masculine glory. We clinked our glasses, toasted him, and then toasted ourselves together and individually. We had each in our own way emerged unscathed from what could have been, would have been, ruinous for anyone less fortunate, which, I reflected, was probably most of the world.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Why would a man with a wife and three kids drive a Porsche? Maybe the wife drove a station wagon. Why hadn’t he shown me pictures of his kids? Even Gordon carries pictures of his kids in his wallet. Though these and other questions nagged at me, for Saturday I bought some beach balls and a kite to amuse the kids, and a big basket of strawberries from the Farmer’s Market, and potato salad and chocolate cake too. Saturday morning I made ham sandwiches, about a hundred of them. Or at least that’s what it felt like. What do I know of kids other than Irene’s? And they don’t count.

  I was reading a script on the high front porch when Terrence Dexter came up the stairs. I peered down the steps behind him. “Where are Mrs. Dexter and the three kids?”

  He burst out laughing. “Oh, Roxanne, I was funning with you! I’m not married! I am so not-married I live in a rented room on Naomi Avenue with a hot plate and a garage. I live there so I can drive the Porsche.”

  “A worthy set of values,” I said, happily relieved.

  “Brought you a present.” He handed me a record album—Buddy Collette. “Buddy’s a Central Avenue man. Put him on the hi-fi. See if you like him.”

  “Thanks, I’ll do that,” I said, feeling pretty certain I’d like Buddy Collette better than John Philip Sousa. Buddy and his mellow quartet filled the little cottage with music that seemed to spark intimacy. Or maybe that was my own mood and Buddy just helped it along.

  “Nice place. Sure different than Summit Drive, with all those antiques.”

  “I was tired of all that heavy hand of the past. I want to be chic, modern.” I had a serious look around. “Or, if I can’t be chic and modern, then bohemian-eclectic.”

  “Are the movies in these posters by your writers?”

  “No, these are Empire films from a long time ago. The men who wrote these movies are long gone.”

  He stood in front of each one studiously while I nattered on, anecdotes about the making of this one or that, saying nothing of who had died or fled the country or been shamed or professionally maimed, or any of that. I didn’t want to tarnish the afternoon with any sad stories.

  “I don’t know shit about movies. I hardly ever go. Not even as a kid. My sisters sometimes took us to the Saturday-morning serials, but my mother, the women of my family in general, always say, ‘You need drama, children? Well look no further than the Baptist church. King Kong got nothing on the Baptist God. In the Baptist church, you get your religion in Technicolor.’”

  “Well, I got my religion in the Church of Rick and Ilsa,” I said before I remembered he had never seen my favorite film. “They’re the main characters in Casablanca, and the lines they speak amount to Holy Writ.”

  “Well, Roxanne, if you had grown up with Addie Dexter, you would know your Holy Writ and your hymns, or you wouldn’t eat.”

  “And if you had grown up in the Church of Rick and Ilsa, you’d know that the true Ten Commandments have to do with happy endings and snappy dialogue. You’d be able to recite the whole airport scene, along with big chunks of Citizen Kane, my little Rosebud.”

  At the fireplace he examined the huge, framed, florid poster of the 1931 talkie Cyrano de Bergerac where my father played the title role. I told him about being born on the set and named for the heroine.

  “If your father is Sir Rowland Granville, what does that make you?”

  “Lady Chopped Liver.” I laughed and took a deep bow. “Truth is, I throw my father’s name around when I want to impress people. He’s certainly good for that, but I hardly know him.” I detected in Terrence’s eyes a flash of condolence, or something very like it. I hastened to add, “I was lucky not to grow up with my parents—with my mother, anyway. If I had, I’d spend my whole life maundering to a shrink. My mother has a long-standing grudge against me. I thwarted her destiny and ruined her career. She always said if she hadn’t been pregnant with me, she would have played the beautiful Roxanne in nineteen thirty-on
e, and she would have been so absolutely stupendous she would have won an Oscar and landed the role of Scarlett O’Hara that went to that trollop Vivien Leigh a few years later. Oh, and then, there was this . . .” I brought my hand up to my stained cheek. “She hated the imperfection.”

  He reached over and touched my face. “You ever think that this just means yours is a face no one will ever forget?”

  “I have never thought that. It’s been the bane of my life.”

  “Yours is a face I will never forget.”

  His touch was so tender, I wanted to reach up, to hold his hand there forever, but instead I said, “You better come in the kitchen with me and get started.”

  “On what?”

  “You have to eat your weight in ham sandwiches.”

  We ate lunch out on the high porch. I was surprised at how mercurial Terrence was: cool and laconic when he drove me from Reg’s, warm and romantic in the Comet Club, seething with emotion in the police station, charming to the old ladies at Ruby’s. The man sitting beside me was relaxed, warm, expansive in the sunshine.

  “I love the ocean,” he said. “I love to look at it, I love to hear it, but when I was a kid, we hardly ever went.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, Roxanne, I’m already tanned. Those few times Mama took us to the beach, we’d get weird looks. Made us all real uncomfortable. My mama, my sisters, they were not women who looked for trouble. They always told me and Booker, even if you stand still, trouble will come to you.” He shook his head. “But I have to say, that raid the other night, overnight in jail, that was a first for me, though I don’t suppose it’ll be the last.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it’s just a fact of black lives like mine. Mama was right. Even if we stand still, trouble will find us.”