The Great Pretenders

by Laura Kalpakian

  “When is it due?” I asked.

  “June sometime.”

  “She probably thought at his age he was firing blanks,” said Gordon. His brow creased uneasily. “Is it his? Maybe she . . .”

  “You better keep thoughts like that to yourself,” said Irene.

  Was it Leon’s? Or was it the child of a man much younger and more virile? A man like Jonathan Moore. At least since September, Jonathan and Denise . . . I looked from Irene to Gordon. Did they have the same suspicion? Shut up, I told myself, though I had uttered no word. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

  “If Leon thought Denise walked on water before this, just imagine . . . just imagine.” Gordon seemed to physically collapse inward; he reminded me of a cabbage I found last week at the back of the fridge. “She’ll consolidate her power over him. She’ll rule Empire Pictures. Really. She’ll bring us down in ruins.”

  “The pregnancy won’t be public till after the premiere,” said Irene. “You can count on that. In fact . . .”

  “What?” said Gordon, as he alternately flushed and paled. “What else do you know?”

  “I’m sure Leon will tell you soon, but he wants the premiere moved up from February or March to January.”

  “January! I can’t, we can’t—”

  “But you will, because Denise doesn’t want to look pregnant when she steps in front of the press, the limelight.”

  Gordon rose, with difficulty it seemed to me. He gave a tight little sort of sphincter-smile, kissed Irene’s cheek, thanked me for coming, for my time, and said he had to get back to work, and he’d be home late.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  I parked the MG on PCH and went up the steps to my house mentally, physically, and emotionally bedraggled. Terrence looked up from the Royal, alarmed. “What’s happened?”

  I dropped my briefcase on the floor, kicked off my high heels, and went to his embrace. “I have some good news.”

  “You don’t look like you have good news.”

  “I have some bad news too.”

  “Tell me the good.”

  “Irene made up with me. She came by the office, and we went to Empire.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “Denise is knocked up. Baby’s due in June.”

  “Jesus! That’ll be . . .” But words failed him. Words never failed Terrence. “Your aunt or uncle? Come on, sit down, Liza Jane. I’ll pour you a drink.”

  He put a glass of Scotch in my hand, and I bolted it, letting the warmth suffuse inside of me. He wadded his discarded drafts for kindling, and soon a fire snapped and warmed the place. I put my feet in his lap and I told him that I feared Jonathan had fathered Denise’s baby, that I was certain they’d been having an affair for months, though I had no proof except for the Packard in front of Casa Fiesta that day, and a glimpse of bright blonde hair in the window.

  “Well, that sounds pretty damning.”

  “I think Irene and Gordon suspect too.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You can’t be sharing that outside these walls, Liza Jane. No good can come of it.”

  I sipped my drink. “I know. And there’s other bad news. Irene took me to Empire to see a full cut of Fly Me to the Moon this afternoon. Jonathan is great. Denise is . . . well, she doesn’t stink or anything. I hate to say it, but actually, she’s a competent actress, but Maisie is supposed to be brainy, and Denise is too voluptuous. Audiences will look at her and think Professor Bleeker must be some kind of eunuch if he doesn’t want to get her into bed. The casting is out of balance.”

  “Is that what Leon thinks?”

  “Leon has tossed the whole thing back in the laps of Gordon and Phil and told them to fix it. Gordon knows he better by hell do just that, and it might be killing him.” A knock sounded at the door. We both startled. “What if it’s Popeye?” I whispered.

  Terrence went to the door, and I stood behind him. As he opened it I felt like I was in a scene from The Asphalt Jungle or some other gritty noir film, because standing there in the rain was a tall, thin, hawk-faced man with long gray hair wearing a trench coat and a fedora. But behind his thick glasses, his eyes were a lively green.

  “Jerrold!” I cried. “Jerrold Davies! What are you doing here! Come in!” I pulled him inside and quickly closed the door. He hugged me, and it was the old scent of Julia’s Paris salons, of Gauloises, and clothes not washed often enough, and an unidentifiable whiff of something distinctly artistique, and full of bonhomie and élan.

  “How good it is to see you, chérie! And now, you are so much more beautiful than you were at eighteen!”

  “But . . . How can you be here? Are you in the clear?”

  Jerrold put his finger to his lips in a conspiratorial fashion. He held out his hand to Terrence, and I introduced them. Then I went and stood beside Terrence, and he put his arm around my shoulders. Jerrold understood everything. “Bon.”

  We took his wet coat and hat and brought him to the fireplace and gave him a drink. “My mother was dying. Has died,” he said. “My father died in fifty-two, and I had to stay in France. I did not say goodbye to my own father. This time? No.”

  Terrence and I both said how sorry we were about his mother’s death. Terrence refreshed his glass. “But didn’t the government revoke your passport?” I asked.

  “I am someone else now. Someone French. Please do not ask who, or how I got this passport.” He spoke with a slight lilt, not a French accent, but a way of ordering his words that was no longer wholly American. “I could not let my mother leave this world without saying goodbye. But have no fear; I was careful. I came in through Canada and took the train across to Vancouver. My brother drove up to get me. The border crossing in Washington is easy. We drove down to Portland, and I spent time with my mother. She was happy at the end. I did not go to the funeral, you can understand why, but I said my farewells. That’s all that mattered to me. To her. Is that Nelson’s old upright piano!”

  “Yes,” I said, not caring if it actually was or not.

  “How happy he would be to know that you play it. Max writes to me often, how successful you are! Until he gave me this address, I thought you must be living in Beverly Hills.”

  “If she lived in Beverly Hills,” said Terrence, “I’d have to drive a milk truck, wear a white uniform, and come to the back door.”

  Jerrold laughed. “Oui, that is certainly true. Your life here, I assume, is a secret you must keep from the world. You should come to Paris, both of you. There, it would not be so. The French are many things—arrogant, of course, utterly unsentimental, with long, unsparing memories—but they are always on the side of love. You would be happy there. I am happy there. I have an African wife, chérie, did you know that? My Annette.”

  “No. What happened to . . .” I struggled to remember his American wife’s name.

  “She left me, divorced me in New York. I don’t blame her. It was terrible for a long time. I wasn’t working. I was desolate, depressed, and angry and we were both homesick. Marriage is . . . well, in the best of times, marriage is taxing, and what we went through, that was the worst. I was so angry with Leon, so angry at being forced to leave my own country, torn from my career, my friends, my family, I thought I could never forgive him. But in truth, I’m grateful to him.” Jerrold waved his cigarette. “Now I see it as fate. I will never return here to live, no matter what. Think how Americans would treat my African wife, how they would treat us both.”

  “No one knows that better than we do,” said Terrence. “People look at us like we’re Sodom and Gomorrah on the hoof.”

  “Do you still live in the same little Montparnasse flat?” I asked.

  “Oui.” He laughed. “And I still use the Oscar for a hat rack. I am working, contented. My wife is teaching. She came to Paris years ago, as a student from Ivory Coast, and she stayed on to teach. We love Paris, but lots of my old Holly
wood compatriots, they are not so fortunate. For some, to be driven from one’s country is like a sickness, eating at the heart. Simon and Max were both dying down in Mexico. But now, thanks to you, Roxanne, they’re working again. Everyone is so grateful to you.”

  “The money isn’t even a fraction of what any of you used to make.” I noticed the satchel he had put on the floor. I knew what was coming next. A script needing a front. Oh well—as they say, in for a penny, in for a pound.

  “But working is what keeps a man alive. And that Leon would buy Max’s picture! When Max wrote me that, I thought, Roxanne has pulled off an incredible coup!”

  “Yes, well, I thought so too. I thought I was very clever and ironic, like Julia, poking a finger in Leon’s eye when she financed your film, Les Comrades.”

  “And now?” asked Jerrold.

  “Now I think it was foolish of me. I’m sure Leon thinks I betrayed him. Maybe I did.”

  Jerrold’s lined face relaxed into contemplation. “I have so many fond memories of Leon, of Empire, and all the good times at Summit Drive before he became so enthralled with Denise. His political judgment was bewitched as well, corroded with Communist suspicion. Julia would have never left him had she not been driven to the limit. She was devoted to him, and to you, chérie.” He smiled tenderly. “I have brought you something that I found in your grandmother’s apartment after she died. Something I could not let be offered for sale.” From the satchel on the floor, he gave me an antique music box, burnished wood with an inlay of onyx and lapis in an intricate pattern.

  “Oh!” I exclaimed, “I bought this for her at a watchmaker’s shop on the rue Saint-Honoré for Christmas!” I opened it, and an elaborate, tinny version of “The Blue Danube” echoed out. Tears came to my eyes.

  “Yes, it was the first Christmas I was in Paris, and I swear to you, without Julia—really, without the two of you, chérie—I might have shot myself, I was so devastated. But she created a genuine American Christmas, and you, you gamine, you did cartwheels down the parqueted hall. Do you remember?”

  Of course I did. Jerrold and I spun our shared memories of Julia and Paris, and the soirées at the Parc Monceau apartment, the clever people who congregated there, Julia’s genius at creating happiness and connection among so many disparate types. The time she had smuggled in a print of Casablanca from somewhere, how she hung a bedsheet in the drawing room, and showed it for three nights straight to a packed house, all of us crying our eyes out at the end, the airport scene, no matter how many times we’d watched it. As we talked, Jerrold broke out the two bottles of Sancerre that were also in the satchel and offered to make us some genuine French omelettes to accompany it. I followed him into the kitchen, where, ever the director, he gave me instructions.

  We three talked long and late into the night. Jerrold insisted that we must come to Paris. This was the best time to be an American in Paris. Ever since the Liberation in forty-four, the French, inasmuch as they loved anything, loved all things American, especially American jazz. “Sidney Bechet is a god in France! You remember when we went to see him, chérie?”

  “I’ll never forget it. I have his albums, and I love them, even if Terrence isn’t that crazy about him.”

  “I like progressive jazz. My brother is a trumpet man.”

  “Your brother must come to France. They are mad for American jazz. France is good for American artists. Annette and I have been to dinner a number of times with Jimmy Baldwin. I see you have his book, Notes of a Native Son, on your shelves.”

  “Terrence is a writer too,” I said.

  “I’m a reporter for a hometown paper,” he said. “Not a writer like James Baldwin.”

  “Few people are,” said Jerrold. “Jimmy says he could never write in America, that being black stifled him there.”

  “But that’s what he writes about,” said Terrence, “being black in America.”

  “Yes, but he doesn’t live in America. He lives in France.” Jerrold sipped his wine. “Paris is the place to pursue your dreams. It’s a place to be free as a man, as an artist. You and Roxanne could be openly in love there.”

  I reached over and put my hand over Terrence’s. “I would go.”

  “And leave everything you’ve built up here?” asked Terrence.

  “If you wanted to go, I would leave with you,” I said.

  Terrence shook his head. “Our lives are here. The battles I want to fight are here.”

  “Love should not be a battle,” said Jerrold, “but all too often it is. I’m writing a film now, The Oubliette, about a French girl who falls in love with an African student, and both their hearts are broken. In the days before the French Revolution, the oubliette was a cage, a place where, if you were once cast there, you would be forever forgotten, but I am using the title more poetically. When their love affair breaks up, they both try to oublient, to forget; they each seek a place where they can forget the other. We start filming soon. You should come and help me. Paris is a wonderful place for artists and lovers.”

  I leaned against Terrence. “Maybe we should go. We should make the time. And thanks to Julia, I have the money.”

  “No, Liza Jane.” He put an affectionate arm around my shoulders. “My mama didn’t raise me to live off a woman, but I sure do enjoy the French lessons you teach.” He winked.

  The hour grew late, and Jerrold wanted to be out of Los Angeles before dawn. He was driving down to Riverside to see Max and Marian briefly, and then back to Portland. He gathered his hat and coat, and before he left he held me close. “You are like a daughter to me, Roxanne.” He reached out and took Terrence’s hand in his own. “Look after her.”

  “I do, though I can’t always keep her out of trouble.”

  “Oh, most of that I make for myself,” I said, tucking myself in the shelter of his arm.

  “Trust each other,” said Jerrold. “Don’t let the world come between you. And when you come to Paris, you come to me first, you understand?” He gave me a last kiss on the forehead, pulled his hat down over his eyes, and walked out into rain that had diminished to a mere silvery drizzle.

  Before I went to bed that night I put the music box on the desk beside the picture of Julia. I wound it up and listened again to thin notes of “The Blue Danube.” I closed my eyes and just for a moment pretended I was back in that Paris apartment, a girl with so little care, such high spirits that she could bicycle through Paris on her way to finishing school and cartwheel down the parqueted floor. Where was that girl now?

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Humming “Silver Bells,” I struggled up the stairs carrying my purse, briefcase, a bag of groceries, and a huge Christmas wreath looped over one arm. Terrence and I planned to go to Baja for Christmas (as we had for the Thanksgiving weekend), but I wanted the old, remembered scents. Julia always loved Christmas, and when I was a kid, the whole house at Summit Drive was festooned for the holiday, including a massive tree in the foyer and specially made wreaths on the doors. Julia shopped for months to get the perfect presents, not just for the family, but for the staff and friends, and there were parties galore. She created such a sense of festivity, especially in planning for the big Empire Christmas party held in the commissary on the winter solstice.

  I hung the wreath on the mantelpiece, kicked off my shoes, changed clothes, put my hair in a ponytail, and set to work making dinner (thank you, Thelma and Fannie Farmer). I turned on the radio, KMPC 710, and hummed along with the infectious “Sixteen Tons” while I poked holes in the potatoes, and when the news came on, I listened halfheartedly to whatever the dreaded Soviets were up to. But I stopped chopping green onions and listened intently when the announcer spoke of a bus boycott in Alabama. All the Negroes in Montgomery, Alabama, were staying off the buses to protest an arrest the week before. I heard the Porsche rumble, rinsed my hands, and met Terrence at the door, alarmed to see he carried a battered suitcase as well as hi
s briefcase. “What’s wrong? Has someone died?”

  He draped an arm over my shoulders and pulled me close. I could feel his warm breath on my neck. “Let’s go inside.”

  He took his coat off, threw it over the desk chair, and retrieved some typed pages from his pocket. I turned off the radio, got us both a drink, and sat on the floor beside him, reading what he’d written. His column for the next day was about the woman in Alabama, a Mrs. Rosa Parks, who had been arrested the week before for refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white man.

  “Is that the actual law there?” I asked. “Legally she had to give up her seat?”

  “It is. She’s been arrested, fingerprinted, and released on bail. She’s the secretary of the NAACP there, and between Thursday when she was arrested and the bail hearing on Monday, people in Montgomery organized themselves. Oh, you wouldn’t believe what they did in such a short time! Mimeographed off thirty-two thousand flyers, strung them all over the city, and declared that on Monday, Negroes should refuse to ride the bus. That was days ago, Roxanne. They’re still off the buses. They’re gonna stay off the buses till they get some changes. It’s mostly black folks who ride the buses, anyway, and the city of Montgomery is gonna feel the pinch, and soon.”

  “What does that have to do with the suitcase you brought home?”

  “Mr. Branch’s old college friend from the Alabama State College for Negroes telephoned him this afternoon. Mr. Branch called us all into his office to listen to Reverend Cooke on the speaker. He and some other leaders of the NAACP have set up the Montgomery Improvement Association, and they got a dynamic young preacher to lead it.”

  “But the suitcase?” I insisted.

  “When we got off the phone, Mr. Branch just looked at me and said, ‘You wanna go to Alabama, Terrence? We’ll send you.’”