And Jim had said to me, faintly amused, “That is brother Dennis. The brat of the family.”
Now, in the present, I saw that Dennis was still the brat of the family.
“Yeah,” I said, for want of anything better.
Young thing coughed. Dennis didn’t stir.
“I’m Jean Smith,” came a gushing introduction. “Dennis is just awful about introductions.”
I smiled and nodded. I forgot about her.
“Where’s Audrey?” I asked Dennis.
He looked at me coldly a moment. I guess he didn’t see what he was looking for. He turned away.
“She’s sick,” he said.
“That’s too bad.”
“Yeah, isn’t it?” he said and was up and moving for the bar.
“Are you in pictures?”
That was the young one. The busty one, revealing her deepest interest, her religion. To gain stardom at all costs, chastity to soul.
“Sure,” I said disgustedly, “I work at Metro.”
“Oh, really!”
Big eyes popping. Brassiere straining.
I was looking at Peggy. She was smiling at some big man who was holding her hand and obviously shooting her a line.
“You’re an actor, I bet,” the young thing simpered.
I paid little attention. “Producer,” I said.
“Oh?”
The poor girl was losing breath. She was dying to do something impressive. Chant Ophelia’s song going downstream, or peel clothes or do something noble.
“What have you produced?” she asked.
I took out a cigarette after she took one. I lit it and blew out a cloud. David Newton, producer and liar.
“I just did a remake of Lassie Come Home with Gene Kelly.”
“Oh?”
“Musical. Technicolor,” I said. I watched Peggy look around cautiously, looking for me. Around her waist still, Jim’s arm.
“Technicolor,” said the young thing.
“Couple of million,” I said. “Prestige picture.”
“Yes, I see.”
I looked at Miss Nothing. I sighed.
“My greatest picture though…” I stopped, overcome.
“What? What?”
“Vanilla Vomit,” I said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“That was the title.”
“Vanilla…?”
“Vomit.”
“I don’t believe I…”
She was still looking very blank as I moved for the big group. I was getting tired of this. It was obvious that Jim had no intention of sharing Peggy. She was private property.
“It was superb.” Jim was doing some soaping up. Lamar Brandeis, real producer. Influential man. I stood behind Peggy Lister.
“Peggy, let’s dance,” I said.
Jim’s smile was antiseptic. Toothpaste ad smile.
“Not right now, Dave,” he said. “We’re rather busy.” Then I was left to stand there, unintroduced, the ghost of Hamlet’s father at Malibu. I felt a heat churning up in my stomach. I’ve got a temper. I’ll be the last to deny that.
Peggy kept looking at me when she could, trying to smile. But Jim kept closing up the group so that his back was to me. I looked at the back of his neck. Jim Vaughan, I thought, my old buddy. You dirty, smug, son of a bitch.
Why didn’t she come to me, excuse herself? I figured that she was afraid to. She was a timid girl really. She could be taken advantage of.
I listened to the talk awhile. Then when my arm muscles felt like rigid glass I just moved around and grabbed Peggy’s hand.
“Come here, Peggy,” I said aloud. “There’s someone you must meet.”
I could feel their stares on me as I pulled her away.
“That wasn’t very polite,” she said.
I took her over to the small open portion of the floor where a few couples were dancing to record music.
“It wasn’t polite to bring me here and ditch me, either,” I said.
“I didn’t do anything,” she said. “He took me over.”
“No, you never do anything,” I said. “Peggy Lister, victim of fate.”
She tried to draw away. I tightened my hold. “You’re going to dance with me,” I said.
She was quiet then. Her mouth was a resigned line, parenthesized. She held herself stiffly.
“My old friend Jim Vaughan,” I said.
No answer.
“Peggy.”
“What?”
“Do you want to meet the person I was going to introduce you to?”
No answer.
“Do you?”
“Who is it?” she asked, with false patience.
“Me,” I said. “I’m all alone.”
Her eyes on me. And softness coming back. I felt her hand on my shoulder tighten.
“Davie,” she said softly.
“How do you do,” I answered.
Later. About. Jim taking her. Then me dancing with her. And both of us standing by, around eleven, while Dennis danced with her. Both of us trying to put on an air of Auld Lang Syne.
“I suppose Peggy has told you about our marriage plans,” Jim said. Casually. Jim loved to flick off bombshells.
“No,” I said, keeping it casual even though it killed me. “She didn’t say anything.”
“Well, it’s understood,” he said. The dampener. And was that a little threatening in his voice?
“Does Audrey understand?” I asked.
The twitching that presages a well-reserved smile.
“She understands,” said Jim Vaughan.
“The way Linda understood,” I said.
Another twitch, without a smile this time. I knew he remembered as I did the time at college when I’d started to date Linda. Linda, who everybody but myself considered Jim’s un-ringed fiancée. And Jim had taken me into the Black and Gold Inn one afternoon and given me the low-down. Told me, just as casually, that he and Linda were going to be married. Although Linda didn’t know it. Although Linda later on left him cold.
“That was a childish thing,” Jim was saying now. “I’m past childish things.”
I nodded. “I see,” I said. Then I said, “I hate to say it Jim but I’m in love with Peggy.”
No sign. No hint. He gazed at me like an exterminator, sighting on his prey.
I smiled thinly. “I know it isn’t very guest-like for me to tell you,” I said, “especially after what happened with Linda but… well, there it is.”
He looked at me as if making some sort of decision. His grayish-blue eyes examined me carefully through the lenses of his glasses. His thickish lips pursed slightly as he deliberated.
He decided.
“Come in here, David,” he said. Father about to tell his son that the birds do more than fly and the bees buzz.
He led the way to the library. He ushered me in. The door closed off the sound of the party. He locked the door. We stood together in the quietude, surrounded by the literature of the ages, all dusty.
“Sit down, David,” he said.
I sat. I didn’t know what to say. I decided to let him play the scene his own way.
“What has Peggy told you about herself?” he asked.
I sat quietly a moment, trying to figure out what his angle was. Jim was always trying for an angle. It might be hidden at first but it was always there. I knew that from school. He’d lead up, lead up, then sock you over the head with his coup de grace.
“Her family,” I said. “Her life.” I paused for effect. “Her divorce,” I said, as casually as possible, figuring that it was the angle he was working on.
James Vaughan, late of Missouri farm town, now of California society, raised his eyebrows. Most effectively. All right, let’s have it, Jim, I wanted to say, you can spare the histrionics. I know you.
“That’s what she told you,” he said. “That she was divorced?”
“That’s right.”
A sinking sensation in my stomach. What in hell was he driv
ing at?
He looked at me, still deliberately. Until the thoughts of what he might be hiding started to make my skin crawl.
“What is it, for Christ’s sake?” I asked.
He put one hand into his coat pocket.
“I don’t know whether you’ll believe what I tell you,” he said.
“What?”
“Peggy isn’t divorced,” he said.
“She’s still married?”
“No,” he said, “not now.”
“What about her husband?” I asked, perfect straight man for horror.
He hesitated. Then he said, “Murdered.”
I felt the cold sickness explode in me because I knew his coup de grace before he said it.
“Peggy murdered him.”
CHAPTER TWO
I sat there and I felt as if the walls were tottering, ready to fall in on me. Everything out of proportion and coldness in me and him looking down.
“You’re lying,” I said, weakly, very weakly.
“Am I?”
And I couldn’t convince myself that he was.
“All the facts can be found in newspaper files,” he said, “if you don’t believe me. I have some of the clippings here if you’d like to see them.”
I thought, I’ll throw him, I’ll ask to see the clippings. Then I was afraid to try. The thought of holding them in my hands, reading them, sickened me. I kept seeing that angelic smile in my mind. That smile. Those eyes, those lustrous, frank eyes. The way she stroked my hair. Her soft lips on mine. The long, happy days together.
Murder?
“Don’t you think it would be better if you left?” I heard him saying.
I want to see Peggy, I thought. I visualized it though.
A writer’s curse. I heard myself asking, inanely it seemed, “Peggy, did you murder your husband?”
“I’ll have Steig take you home,” he said.
I looked up at him. His face was without expression. Certainly there was no sympathy there.
“I should see her,” I said.
But without conviction. I didn’t want to see her. I was afraid to see her. Afraid of seeing her lower her eyes and refuse to answer me. And all I could think of was Peggy lying to me.
I couldn’t face it. I’m a coward, I guess, in lots of ways.
“I think it would be foolish to see her,” Jim said.
I found myself standing. For moments at a time I forgot where I was, even who I was. Just plain standing there, overwhelmed with misery.
“Listen,” I heard him say, “I know Peggy. For years I thought what you think of her now. That she was simple, uncomplicated.” He shook his head. “She’s not,” he said, walking me to the door. I wanted to get away. I was sick.
“She’s hopelessly erratic,” he said. “If you spoke to her now about it, she might cry. She also might explode in your face and tell you it wasn’t murder, really, and besides, it isn’t any of your business. Her mind shifts from one emotion to another. You must have seen that yourself, David.”
I don’t know whether I did or not. But the words were in my brain, and, in the state of shock I was in, I took them straight.
“Peggy is a dangerous girl,” he said.
David Newton, sheep. Led from the house. Luckily or unluckily, depending how you look at it, I didn’t see Peggy. I think she was in the big room again, dancing with Dennis. Or looking for me. A me that was being led, dazed and shocked, to the big black Cadillac. Slumping back on the cold seat. Vaughan leaning in.
“If you don’t believe what I’ve told you,” he said crushing some more, “I want you to check. Don’t take my word for it.”
Then the door slammed and Steig pulled the black car around the pear-shaped drive and onto the road that led precipitously down to the highway.
I sat in the car staring at the floor. And listening to the wind whistle by the car as it roared along the ocean at eighty miles an hour. Under a cold moon.
***
I wrote sporadically. I went to the beach, way up the beach, far from the spot where we’d met. I went to the movies. I read. And, from all activities, absorbed nothing. I was still half anesthetized. I hadn’t known her long, a few weeks. But she’d gotten to me.
I thought about her after the first few days of deliberately avoiding any thoughts at all about her.
I remembered taking her to the little bar downstairs in one of the hotels along Ocean Drive. I forget the name of it. I remember the soft lighting, the heavy wood paneling, circling the dance floor with Peggy in my arms, listening to the music of the three-piece combination. Sitting at the tables and having a couple of drinks together. Her eyes over the glass, looking at me. A soft look. Adoring and unquestioning.
I remembered the first time I’d told her how I felt about her.
I remembered other things. It had been such a short time really. Yet so long, it seemed. Years of walking through the silent streets of Santa Monica looking at the pretty houses, making unspoken plans. Walking together through Will Rogers State Park in the Santa Monica Hills. Finding fresh mountain lion tracks and running back to the parking place, breathlessly excited and laughing. And walking all the way back to Santa Monica. Walking everywhere, hand in hand, never needing to speak.
Murder?
I went to the library and looked through old papers. I didn’t find anything. And when I thought some more, I remembered Linda and that look Jim had given me on graduation day.
I went back to my love. Days after. In sorrow and repentance. And found her on the back lawn, trying to read. But just staring at the same page.
And she was cold at first because she’d been hurt. I didn’t let it stop me. I was apologetic. I smiled at her and said again and again and again:
“I’m sorry, Peggy. I’m sorry.”
***
“Murdered!” she said to me. “Is that what he told you?”
I nodded, grimly.
She shook her head. “How could he?” she said. And I felt some slight relish in seeing indications of the chinks in Jim Vaughan’s self-forged armor.
“Why, though?” she said. “I didn’t murder him.”
“Where is your husband?” I asked.
“He’s dead,” she told me. “He died in San Francisco. A year ago.”
We sat in the back yard, talking. And she kept shaking her head and saying she couldn’t understand how Jim could say such a thing about her.
“It is strange,” I said. “I never saw Jim involve himself in such an obvious lie before.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
She looked away. “I didn’t murder him,” she said, softly.
“I know,” I said.
“You didn’t know it before,” she said. “You believed what he said.”
“It came as such a shock,” I said. “Think of how you’d feel if, out of a clear blue sky, someone told you I’d murdered my mother or my wife.”
“I’d check before I believed.”
“What would you think if I told you I was divorced, made you think my wife was still alive?”
She didn’t answer.
“Let’s forget about it,” I said, leaning over to kiss her cheek. “I have missed you,” I said.
“But you stayed away.”
I couldn’t answer. I just felt rage. At Jim for lying so blatantly to me. At myself for believing him. Mostly the latter. For a guy who considers himself superior, I thought, I’d been awfully easy to delude.
It was around that time that I noticed Albert.
He was looking out of his window at Peggy. I forgot to mention it, but Peggy only had on shorts and a tight halter.
I called it to Peggy’s attention. Her mouth grew hard again.
“Oh.” She bit her lip. “I have to get out of here,” she said. “Do you think I could find an apartment… or something?”
“Has he… tried anything?”
“No. Not with his wife around. But I’m afraid.”
“We’d better get you o
ut of here.”
“And he pretends to be so pious,” she said angrily, “just like all men. Pretending to be moral when all the time they’re just pigs.”
I didn’t want to get started on that again. Besides, I thought, she was probably right in Albert’s case.
Albert turned away from the window when I made it obvious from my look that I felt a severe desire to plant my foot in his pudgy face. His white, sickly face. Mushroom shade.
“You sure he hasn’t tried anything?” I said.
“No,” she answered, “but I know he’d… like to. The other day Mrs. Grady called me to the phone. I had on my shortie nightgown. I was too sleepy to think about putting on my robe. And Albert came out in the hall and saw me.”
She shuddered.
“The way he looked at me made me sick,” she said. “Like a… like an animal.”
“I’d like to break his neck,” I heard myself saying. Manly pose. I really couldn’t break anybody’s neck, I was sure. I get melancholy just dressing a chicken for Sunday dinner.
“I don’t want any more trouble,” Peggy said. “I’ll just leave.”
“Trouble?” I asked. And, sometimes, wished I’d cultivated a deceiving voice like Jim’s. Too often, practically always, my voice is a mirror of my feelings.
She looked at me dispassionately.
“You’re still thinking about it, aren’t you?” she said.
“About what?” I pretended.
“You’re thinking about what Jim told you.”
I must have looked flustered.
“I’ll tell you what I mean,” she said. “Maybe you’ll be sorry I told you.”
Her sensitive face was cold, hurt.
“When I was eight years old,” she told me, “I was attacked by a boy. He was seventeen. He dragged me in a closet and tore all my clothes off.”
She swallowed and avoided my eyes.
“When my father found out,” she said, “he tried to kill the boy.”
I reached for her hand instinctively but she drew back.
“Was it…?” I started. “How far did… he go?”
Her voice was like an axe blow.
“All the way,” she said. “I was unconscious.”
Peggy, Peggy.
“I can’t help the way I feel,” she said, “about men. It’s in my flesh. If you weren’t… if you hadn’t been so different, I’d have run from you too.”