“… And then today,” he said, “today everything on the set had to stop dead—cameras, sound, everything—while he took me off in a corner and sat me down to discuss what he called Dramatic Theory, and he asked me if I was familiar with the work of a playwright named George Bernard Shaw. You think anybody’d believe that? You think anybody in America’d believe how dumb the son of a bitch is? Christ’s sake, this year he’s discovered Shaw; three years from now he’ll discover the Communist Party.”
Oppenheimer seemed to tire of his monologue after awhile; he came heavily to rest in a deep sofa and put his arm around Ellis, who nestled close to him; then he asked Sally if she was an actress too.
“Oh, no,” she said quickly, brushing invisible specks of cigarette ash off her lap, “but thanks anyway. I don’t really do anything very—I’m only—I’m a secretary. I work for Edgar Todd, the agent.”
“Well, hell, that’s fine with me,” Oppenheimer said expansively. “Some of my best friends are secretaries.” And as if aware that this last line might not have been wholly successful, he hurried on to ask her how long she’d worked for Edgar, and how she liked her job, and where she lived.
“I live in Beverly,” she told him. “I have an apartment in the home of a friend there; it’s very nice.”
“Yeah, well, that’s—nice,” he said. “I mean Beverly’s very nice.”
For the last hour or so of that evening in Oppenheimer’s house, Jack found himself perched cozily with Ellis on two of the tall, leather-topped stools along the bar that occupied one side of the room. She told him at length of her childhood in Pennsylvania, of the summer stock company that had provided her first real “experience of theater,” and of the wonderfully lucky sequence of events that had led to her meeting Carl. And Jack was so pleased with her youth and prettiness, and so flattered by her attention, that he only dimly realized he had heard the whole story before, during the time he’d stayed here.
Across the room, Carl and Sally were engaged in a steady and intense discussion. Jack couldn’t hear much of it, in the several times he tried to listen, beyond the insistent, dead-serious rumble of Carl’s voice, though once he heard Sally say, “Oh, no, I loved it. Really. I loved it all the way through.”
“Well, this’s been great,” Carl Oppenheimer said when it was time for them to leave. “Sally. Wonderful meeting you; good talking to you. Jack: we’ll be in touch.”
And then came the long, drink-fuddled ride back to town. For what seemed twenty minutes there was silence in the car, until Sally said, “They’ve sort of—got everything, haven’t they. I mean they’re young, they’re in love, and everybody knows he’s a brilliant man so it doesn’t really matter whether she’s got any talent or not because she’s a cute little sexpot anyway. What could ever go wrong in a house like that?”
“Oh, I don’t know; I can think of a couple of things that might go wrong.”
“You know what I really didn’t like about him, though?” she said. “I didn’t like the way he kept asking me what I thought of his movies. He’d mention one picture after another and ask me if I’d seen it, and then he’d say, ‘So what’d you think? Did you like it?’ Or he’d say, ‘Didn’t you think it kind of fell apart in the second half?’ Or ‘Didn’t you feel so-and-so was a little miscast as the girl?’ And I mean really, Jack. Isn’t that a bit much?”
“Why?”
“Well, because who am I?” She rolled her window half open and snapped her cigarette away into the wind. “I mean Jesus, after all, who am I?”
“Whaddya mean, who are you?” he said. “I know who you are, and so does Oppenheimer, and so do you. You’re Sally Baldwin.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said quietly, facing the black window. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.”
When they walked into the Beverly Hills house, Jack was startled to find Woody Starr instead of Cliff Myers sitting with Jill, until he remembered Sally’s telling him that Cliff had agreed to stay away for a night or two so that Jill could sensibly and permanently disengage herself from Woody. And the way Woody looked now as he rose from the sofa to greet them—drawn, shamefaced, seeming to apologize for his very presence—made it clear that Jill had already broken the news.
“Well, hey, Sally,” he said. “Hello, Jack. We’re just having a—can I get you a drink?”
“No thanks,” Sally told him. “Good to see you, though, Woody. How’ve you been?”
“Oh, can’t complain. Not much business at the studio, but apart from that I’ve been—you know—staying out of trouble.”
“Well, good,” she said. “We’ll see you, Woody.” And she led Jack smiling through the clumps of leather furniture and out into the living room and up the grand staircase. Only when she had closed and locked her own door behind them did she allow herself to speak again. “God,” she said. “Did you see his face?”
“Well, he didn’t look very—”
“He looked dead,” she said. “He looked like a man with all the life gone out of him.”
“Well, okay, but look: this happens all the time. Women get tired of men; men get tired of women. You can’t go around letting your heart get broken over all the losers.”
“Ah, you’re in a mellow philosophical mood tonight, aren’t you,” she said, leaning forward and reaching back to unfasten the hooks of her dress. “Very mature, very wise—it must’ve come over you when you were all cuddled up with Ellis What’s-her-name at Oppenheimer’s bar.”
But within an hour, after she had cried out for love of him and after they’d then fallen apart to lie waiting for sleep, her voice was very small and shy. “Jack? How much time is there now? Two more weeks? Less?”
“Oh, I dunno, baby. I may stay around a little longer, though, just for—”
“Just for what?” And all her bitterness came back. “For me? Oh, Jesus, no, don’t do that. You think I want you doing me any favors?”
Early the next morning, when she brought their coffee up to the room, she could barely wait to put the tray on a table before telling him what she’d found downstairs in the den. Woody Starr was still there, lying asleep in his clothes on the sofa. He didn’t even have a blanket or a pillow. Wasn’t that the damnedest thing?
“Why?”
“Well, why didn’t he leave last night, for God’s sake?”
“Maybe he wants to say goodbye to the boy.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, yes, I suppose you’re right. It’s probably that. It’s probably because of Kick.”
When they went downstairs and caught a glimpse of Woody and Kicker talking quietly together, they withdrew quickly into the kitchen to socialize with Nippy and to wait in hiding until it would be time for Kicker to leave for school. They didn’t know, and Jill Jarvis wouldn’t remember until later, that this was a school holiday.
“Oh, Jesus, Nip,” Sally said, wilting onto a kitchen chair. “I really don’t feel like going to work today.”
“Don’t, then,” Nippy said. “Know something, Sally? I’ve never seen you take a day off the whole time I’ve been in this house. Listen, that old office can get along without you once in a while. Why don’t you and Mr. Fields do something nice today? Go someplace nice for lunch, take in a good movie or something. Or take a drive; it’s beautiful weather out. You could go down to San Juan Capistrano or something nice like that. You know how they say in the song about when the swallows come back to Capistrano? Well, if I’m not mistaken, it’s just about that time of year. You could go down there and watch the swallows coming back and all; wouldn’t that be nice?”
“Ah, I don’t know, Nippy,” Sally said. “It’d be nice, but I think I’d better at least put in an appearance at the office or Edgar’ll be eating his arm. And I’m practically fifteen minutes late as it is.”
Leaving the kitchen at last, when Sally said it would be “safe” to face the den, they were relieved to find themselves alone. Jack noticed too, in passing, that the black velvet painting of the clown had been removed from the wall ab
ove the fireplace. But then, through the sunny panes of the French doors, they saw Woody and Kicker out on the pool terrace, standing close together and still talking.
“Oh, why can’t he just go?” Sally said. “How long does it take anybody to say goodbye?”
Woody Starr’s luggage was heaped on the terrace beside him: an old Army duffel bag that he’d probably used in the Merchant Marine, a suitcase, and a couple of well-filled paper shopping bags, bright with department-store advertising and heavily reinforced with brown twine. He bent over to divide the load, and he and Kicker carried all the stuff down from the terrace and stowed it in his car. Then they came back up, Woody with his arm around the boy’s shoulders, and walked up close to the house for their final parting.
Jack and Sally retreated well back into the den to avoid being seen watching, and they watched. They saw Woody Starr put both arms around the boy and gather him up into an abrupt, tight, clinging embrace. After that, Woody started to walk away and Kicker made for the house—but Kicker stopped and turned, and then they saw what had caught his eye: a small cream-colored delivery truck coming swiftly up the driveway with MYERS emblazoned in brown letters on its side.
“Oh, I can’t bear this,” Sally said, going limp and pressing her face into Jack’s shirt. “I can’t bear this.”
The truck came to a stop a few yards beneath the place where Woody waited on the terrace and Cliff Myers got out, red-faced, with a self-conscious little smile, into the sunshine. He hurried around to the rear of the truck in his coveralls, which were several sizes too small for him, brought out his glistening metal tub with its massed and wobbling heads of a great many roses, carried it up to Woody Starr, and thrust it into his hands. He appeared to be talking as he did this—seemed, in fact, to have been talking steadily and perhaps mindlessly since his arrival, as though compelled to do so by an unexpected spasm of embarrassment—but once the tub of roses was in Woody’s possession he was able to stop. He drew himself exaggeratedly straight, touched two fingers to the neat visor of his cap, and made his getaway to the truck in a stiff-legged run that was almost certainly faster and clumsier than he’d planned it to be.
Kicker had missed none of it. He went back across the terrace to join Woody, who had squatted to set the tub down, and now they were both huddled low over it in conference.
“It’s okay, baby,” Jack said into Sally’s hair. “It’s okay now. He’s gone.”
“I know,” she said. “I saw the whole thing.”
“Well, look: you think we could find something in the house for his hands? Think Nippy could find something?”
“Like what, though? Some kind of detergent, or solvent, or what?”
But it wasn’t necessary to find anything in the house. After a minute or two Woody and Kicker moved away together with the bright roses riding between them, and with Jack Fields following at a stranger’s distance. They went into the shadows of the big garage, where Kicker carefully poured gasoline from a five-gallon can down the surface of the tub and over Woody’s hands until Woody was able to work them free. That was all it took. Then Kicker used the heel of his shoe to shove the tub raspingly across the floor of the garage and hard against the wall, where it would stay until long after the glue had dried to harmlessness and the roses were dead.
* * *
Alan B. (“Kicker”) Jarvis enrolled in what his mother described as the finest boys’ boarding school in the West, and he left home to take up residence there almost at once.
Later in the same week Jill and Cliff went to Las Vegas to be married—she said she had always wanted to be married in one of the “adorable” little wedding chapels of that city. Their honeymoon plans, at the time they left Los Angeles, were still indefinite: they hadn’t yet decided whether to spend a month in Palm Springs, a month in the Virgin Islands, or a month in France and Italy. “Or maybe,” she confided to Sally, “maybe we’ll say the hell with it, take three months and go to all those places.”
Jack Fields’s screenplay had been finished and accepted and quarreled over and finished and accepted again; then Carl Oppenheimer fervently shook hands with him. “I think we’ll have a picture, Jack,” he said. “I think we’ll have a picture.” And Ellis rose to give him a quick, sweet kiss.
He talked long and jovially on the phone with his daughters about the fine times they’d be having in New York very soon, and he spent a day buying gifts for them. With Sally’s advisory help, he also bought two new suits of clothes at the Los Angeles Brooks Brothers in order to go home looking like a success. And at Sally’s suggestion, secretly wincing at the cost of it, he bought quart bottles of brandy, bourbon, scotch, and vodka and arranged for them all to be gift-wrapped, packed in a gift box, and delivered to Jill’s house with a brief, carefully worded note about her “hospitality.”
When he’d closed out his occupancy of the beach place, he and Sally drove down to spend four days of a prolonged holiday weekend in an oceanside motel near San Diego that Sally recommended as being “wonderful.” He would have liked to know when and with whom she had learned how wonderful it was, but with so little time left he knew better than to ask.
On the way back to Los Angeles they stopped at the Mission of San Juan Capistrano and walked slowly around and through it among many other cordially shuffling tourists, each with a handful of tourist brochures, but there were no swallows in sight.
“Looks like they’ve all taken off this year,” Sally said, “instead of coming back.”
That gave Jack what seemed a pretty funny idea, and when they were out at the car again he backed away from her into the roadside weeds with the nimble steps of an entertainer. He knew he looked all right in his new clothes and he’d always been able to sing a little, or at least to fake the sound of singing. “Hey listen, baby,” he said. “How’s this?” And he sang from a straight-standing crooner’s posture, with both arms rising slightly from his sides, palms out, to convey sincerity.
“When the swallows take off from Capistrano,
That’s when I’ll be taking off from you…”
“Oh, that’s sensational,” Sally said before he could even go on to the next line. “That’s really socko, Jack. You really do have a great sense of humor, you know that?”
On their last evening, seated in what Edgar Todd had solemnly promised them was the finest restaurant in Los Angeles, she looked disconsolate as she picked at her crabmeat Imperial. “This is kind of dumb, isn’t it?” she said. “Spending all this money when you’ll be on the plane in a couple of hours anyway?”
“Doesn’t seem dumb to me; I thought it might be nice.” He had thought too that it might be the kind of thing F. Scott Fitzgerald would have done at a time like this, but he kept that part of it to himself. He had tried for years to prevent anyone from knowing the full extent of his preoccupation with Fitzgerald, though a girl in New York had once uncovered it in a relentless series of teasing, bantering questions that left him with nothing to hide.
“Well, okay,” Sally said. “We’ll sit here and be elegant and witty and sad together and smoke about forty-five cigarettes apiece.” But her sarcasm wasn’t really convincing, because she’d met him at the office that afternoon wearing a new, expensive-looking blue dress that he could have sworn she’d bought in the hope of being taken to a place like this.
“Can’t get over that dress of yours,” he told her. “I think it’s just about the best-looking dress I’ve ever seen.”
“Thank you,” she said. “And I’m glad I’ve got it. Might be useful in helping me trap the next counterfeit F. Scott Fitzgerald who comes stumbling out to Movieland.”
Driving her home to Beverly Hills, he risked two or three glances at her face and was pleased to find it calm and reflective.
“I guess I’ve had sort of an idle, aimless life, when you think about it,” she said after a while. “Work my way through college and never use it, never do anything I could be proud of or even enjoy; never even adopt a child when I had the chance.??
?
And a few more miles of illuminated city went by before she moved close to him and touched his arm with both hands. “Jack?” she said shyly. “That wasn’t just kidding around, was it? About how we can write a whole lot of letters to each other and talk on the phone sometimes?”
“Aw, Sally. Why would I want to kid around about that?”
He took her up to where the shallow steps of the pool terrace began and they got out of the car for their leave-taking: they sat together on a lower step and kissed as self-consciously as children.
“Well, okay,” she said. “Goodbye. Know something funny? We’ve really been saying goodbye all along, since the very first time I went out with you. Because I mean we’ve always known there wasn’t much time, so it’s been a saying goodbye kind of deal from the start, right?”
“I guess so. Anyway, listen: take care, baby.”
They got up quickly, in embarrassment, and he watched her make her way up onto the terrace—a tall, supple, oddly gray-haired girl in the best-looking dress he had ever seen.
He had just started back for the car when he heard her calling, “Jack! Jack!”
And she came clattering down the steps again and into his arms. “Oh, wait,” she said breathlessly. “Listen. I forgot to tell you something. You know the heavy sweater I’ve been knitting all summer for Kicker? Well, that was a lie—I’m pretty sure it’s the only lie I ever told you. It was never for Kicker; it’s for you. I took the measurements from the only ratty old sweater I could find in your place, and the whole plan was to get it finished before you left, only now it’s too late. But I’ll finish it, Jack, I swear. I’ll work on it every day and I’ll mail it to you, okay?”