An Inconvenient Woman (16 page)

“Arnie Zwillman.”

“Arnie Zwillman?” said Jules, in a shocked voice.

“Do you know him?” asked Kippie.

“Of course I don’t know him. Do you?”

“Yes.”

“How did you ever know such a person?”

“You sound like my mother,” said Kippie. “She says things like ‘How do you know such-a-person?’ ”

Jules ignored the remark. “This man is a gangster,” he said. “He burned down the Vegas Seraglio for the insurance money.”

“He’s never been busted,” said Kippie.

“And he cheats at cards. He has an electric surveillance system in the ceiling of his card room, and a man hides above the ceiling and sends him mild shocks telling him what’s in the other players’ hands.”

“You know a lot about Arnie for not knowing him.”

“Tell me, Kippie. What’s your connection with him?”

At that moment Pauline came into the room, dressed in black. She had come from the calling hours at the funeral home where Hector Paradiso’s body was on view.

“What was it like?” asked Jules.

“A nightmare,” said Pauline. “Poor Hector. He would have hated it. Such sobbing. The Latins do cry so audibly. The rosary went on until I thought I’d die. And the flowers! You’ve never seen such awful flowers. Pink gladiolus. Orange lilies. Everything I hate. Tomorrow, the funeral will be better. Rose Cliveden and Camilla are handling everything, and Petra von Kant’s doing the flowers herself.” She turned to Kippie. “How are you, darling? How’s the tooth? Let me see. Oh,
look. He’s doing such a good job, our Dr. Shea. How’s the finger? Does it hurt terribly? I’m so glad that little dog is out of our house. Get me a glass of wine, will you, darling. Your mother’s a wreck.”

Kippie poured his mother a glass of wine. When he brought it over to her, she was lying back on a chaise, her feet up. “Thank you, darling. Isn’t this nice, just the family, at my favorite time of day. It’s been so long since we’ve been together like this.”

She looked at her husband and son and smiled. Neither returned her enthusiasm, but both nodded. For a moment there was a silence.

“Casper Stieglitz has asked us to go there for dinner,” said Jules.

“Casper Stieglitz? Whatever for?” asked Pauline, with a chuckle at the absurdity of such a notion.

“And a film,” added Jules.

“Oh, heavens, all those people we don’t know,” said Pauline. As far as Pauline was concerned, there was no more to be said on the subject.

Jules turned to Kippie and shrugged, as if to point out that he had tried, and failed.

Kippie, looking at Jules, began to strum on his guitar again. “This is my latest composition,” he said. “Kind of a catchy lyric.” He began to sing in a low muffled voice.

Jules, rarely stunned by the events of life, looked at Kippie, stunned.

“Whatever that is, it’s lovely, darling, but I can’t stand guitar music at the moment. I have such a terrible headache.”

“Sorry, Mom,” said Kippie, putting down his guitar. “Arnie Zwillman will be there too.”

“And who, pray tell, is Arnie Zwillman?” asked Pauline. Pauline had a way of saying a name like “Arnie Zwillman” that left no doubt what her feeling was about such a person, without voicing a single derogatory word against him.

“You’ll like him, Mom. Arnie Zwillman’s from an old
mob family. Old mob money. Listed in the Mafia Register. None of your new people stuff. You’ll love him.”

Pauline laughed. “Do you think my son is making fun of me, Jules?” she asked.

Jules did not reply.

“How do you know such a person?” she asked Kippie.

Kippie laughed. He dearly loved his mother. He was proud of her beauty. At all the schools he ever attended, the other boys and the teachers vied with each other for him to introduce them to her, and she was never not charming to them in return. He was always thoughtful to her on her birthdays and at Christmas. But he was also bewildered by her life in society, and he could not bear Jules Mendelson. He never confided in her, although he knew that his secrets would be safe in her keeping.

“I wish my son would spend more time in the company of the sort of people he was brought up with, instead of the marginal types he’s constantly with,” she said. “I simply don’t understand how you get to know these people, Kippie.”

“Look, Pauline,” said Jules suddenly, rising from his chair at the same time. “I think we’d better go to Casper Stieglitz’s. Just this one time.”

“I never thought I’d hear that from you, Jules. I thought you couldn’t stand all those movie people,” said Pauline. “ ‘All they ever do is talk about movies.’ Isn’t that what you always say about them?”

“I think we’d better go,” Jules repeated softly, looking at Pauline with a married look that indicated she should go along with his wishes.

“Suit yourself, Jules,” said Pauline. “You go, but I have no intention of going. I don’t know that man, and I don’t know why I have to go there for dinner.”

Jules looked at Kippie again and made a loose gesture that indicated he would talk Pauline into going when the time came.

Arnie Zwillman had been having his daily massage from Wanda when Kippie Petworth came to call. Kippie sat reading a magazine in another room until Wanda was finished.

“Wanna massage?” asked Arnie, when he came out of his workout room, tying the belt of his terry cloth robe.

“No, thanks,” said Kippie.

“She’ll bring you off if you get a hard-on,” said Arnie.

“No, thanks,” said Kippie.

“See you tomorrow, Wanda,” said Arnie. He walked over to the bar and poured himself a glass of grapefruit juice. “This stuff’s good for you.”

Kippie nodded.

“What’d your stepfather say?” asked Arnie Zwillman.

“He’ll go,” answered Kippie.

“Good boy, Kippie. What about your mother?”

“My mother’s iffy.”

“Iffy, huh?”

“ ‘All those people we don’t know’ were her exact words,” said Kippie.

“Very hoity-toity.”

“That’s my mom.”

“You tell your mom—”

Kippie held up his hand in protest. “I can’t tell my mother where to go. Only my stepfather can do that. He’ll get her there.”

Arnie Zwillman nodded. “What happened to your finger?”

“Dog bit me.”

“You lost your finger?”

“Part of it.”

“Yech. I hate blood,” said Arnie. “What’d your old man say about me?”

“He’s not my old man. I told you that.”

“All right. What did your
step
father, Jules Mendelson, say about me?”

“He said you burned down the Vegas Seraglio for the insurance money,” said Kippie.

Arnie Zwillman turned red and shook his head. “That fat dickhead.”

“Hey, you’re talking about my stepfather.”

“What else did he say about me?”

“He said you cheated at cards.”

“Big fucking deal. I don’t know anybody who don’t cheat at cards. That’s part of the game to me. It’s a case of cheating the cheaters.”

“He said you had an electrical surveillance system in the ceiling of your card room.”

“How the fuck did he know that?”

“Listen, Arnie, you’re not hearing any criticism from me. I’m just the message carrier.”

“Your arraignment’s tomorrow. Judge Quartz will dismiss the case. Will your parents be going to the courtroom with you?”

“My parents don’t even know. Besides, they’ll be at a funeral.”

“Come in here a moment, Kippie,” Jules had said the next morning. He was standing in the door of the library, darkly dressed for Hector’s funeral, holding a coffee cup in his hand, as Kippie made his way to the sunrise room for breakfast. “There’s something we must discuss before your mother comes down.”

Jules returned to his chair beneath van Gogh’s
White Roses
and moved some newspapers aside. Kippie entered the room and closed the door behind him, but he did not sit down.

“I have called the rehab in Lyons,” said Jules. “I talked to Father LaFlamme. They’ll take you back. I think it’s where you should be.”

Kippie nodded.

“Miss Maple has booked your flight.”

Kippie nodded again. “Much obliged,” he said.

“Just get one thing straight. I did this for your mother. I didn’t do it for you,” said Jules.

“Much obliged, anyway,” said Kippie.

Flo’s Tape #9

“They had me down on the books as a consultant, although God only knows what I was a consultant for. I’ll say this for Jules Mendelson, he was a very generous man. Each month my check came addressed to F. Houlihan. Houlihan’s my real name, although I haven’t used it for years. March is only a made-up name, in case I became an actress or a model, none of which ever worked out, incidentally. Sometimes, if Jules ever had to write me about anything, he always started out the letter, ‘Dear Red.’ That was supposed to fool the secretary into thinking F. Houlihan was a guy instead of a girlfriend, and Miss Maple went along with the act. Only you couldn’t fool Miss Maple. She always knew who I was. One day she called me up on the telephone and told me, in a very nice way, that she thought I was spending too much money. Of course, Jules never knew she called me. If only she’d said to me, ‘Put some of that money in the bank and save it for a rainy day.’ But even if she had, knowing me, I probably wouldn’t have listened. You see, the big mistake I made was that I thought the merry-go-round was never going to stop.”

H
ad Flo March known how unserious the conflagration was going to be, she would have reacted with less alarm than she did when someone, a woman, running, had screamed the word “
Fire!
” in an altogether hysterical voice in the corridor outside her suite in the Meurice Hotel in Paris at two o’clock in the morning. Later, she told the person most affected by her action that her mother had died in a fire in a welfare hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Had she reacted with less alarm, Flo’s picture would not have appeared on the front page of
Figaro
and two other Paris newspapers, as well as the
International Herald Tribune
, with her lovely red hair in total disarray, wrapped in a blanket over her silver fox coat, and carrying a small Louis Vuitton case—its newness evident even in the photograph—that could only have contained jewels. Even that might have passed unnoticed, for Flo March was relatively unknown, as most mistresses are, but her benefactor and lover, dressed but tieless, was in the background of the same picture, another fleer from a four-alarm fire that turned out to be no more than a burned mattress caused by the dropped cigarette of an inebriated television star in an adjoining suite. And Flo March’s benefactor and lover was extremely well known. He was so well known that it was known he was staying at the Ritz Hotel in the Place Vendôme several blocks from the Meurice and could only have been having a midnight rendezvous at that hotel, as Cyril Rathbone, the gossip columnist for the Los Angeles magazine called
Mulholland
, who happened to be in Paris at the same time, noted on the clippings that he sent back to his old friend Hector Paradiso in Los Angeles.

“Poor Pauline!” Cyril wrote in his spidery handwriting, on the border of the newspaper. Cyril Rathbone had never
liked Pauline Mendelson, because she refused to allow him to cover her parties for his column, and no amount of persuasion, even on the part of her great friend Hector Paradiso, could make her change her mind. “Darling,” Pauline had said to Hector at the time, “don’t persist. We cannot have news-people like Mr. Rathbone in our home. Jules hates that sort of social publicity. And besides, Mr. Rathbone seems to write a great deal about us
without
coming to our house.” So, in Cyril Rathbone’s code of behavior, the very grand Mrs. Mendelson was fair game.

On several occasions, as recently as at the Mendelsons’ party on the night he died, Hector had tried to impart this information to Pauline, in order to save her from embarrassment should the photograph become public. Each time he approached his unpleasant task with reluctance, and each time he felt an inner gratitude that he had not been able to carry out his mission, because he knew how deeply hurt she would have been.

No man was more content with his marriage than Jules Mendelson. From the moment he first saw Pauline McAdoo Petworth twenty-three years earlier, at Laurance Van Degan’s birthday dance at the Everglades Club in Palm Beach, he had known that it was she for whom he had been waiting. She was dancing that night with Johnny Petworth, whom she was also divorcing, and she epitomized everything to Jules that was proper and swell. Jules was not thought to be a great catch in those days. He was at the time ungainly and vaguely untidy, a large rumpled-looking sort of man who gave no thought to his appearance. And, moreover, word of his immense wealth and financial genius had not penetrated the world in which Pauline, as young as she was, was already a fixture.

Palm Beach people found him dull and difficult to seat. “Darling, do you mind terribly that I’ve put you next to Jules Mendelson?” hostesses said to their best friends. It was in that way that Pauline was seated next to Jules on the following night at the home of Rose Cliveden and immediately saw the possibilities of him. Once Mr. Forbes began publishing his annual list of the four hundred richest people in America, and Jules Mendelson was listed so near to the top, the very people who had found him dull in the beginning became the first to find him fascinating. “Lucky me, Jules, sitting next to you,” the same ladies now said, but by then Pauline had been Mrs. Jules Mendelson for many years. No one who knew him then
ever suspected that he would allow himself to be done over, as Pauline had done him over, in much the same way she had done over the old von Stern mansion in Beverly Hills that Jules had bought and Pauline had turned into a showplace. She totally redid his appearance. She instructed Willi, his barber, to raise the part in his hair and shorten the length of his sideburns. She picked out his ties and cuff links and studs. She took him to the tailor in London who had made her father’s suits for years, as well as to her father’s shirtmaker and shoemaker, and made his decisions for him until he understood the look of her kind of people. Everyone remarked on his greatly improved appearance, as well as his ability to carry on a conversation at a dinner party.