Don't Speak to Strange Girls (3 page)

“Sit down, Kay. Sit down. We’ve been enemies too long to be polite to each other.” He watched her in a detached way as she sat beside him. “Age is a matter of the mind, my dear Kay. You were an elderly lady when I met you. I hate to insist. But it was true. Elderly. An old maid.”

“You’re full of lies,” she told him, voice heated. “I was engaged to be married when you came along — ”

“Now don’t start that again,” he said in a lazy tone. He lay back in his chair, watching the eucalyptus leaf. “Don’t start that romance talk again … You were engaged. An engaged old maid. It would never have worked. You’ve been far happier with me, Kay, than you’d ever have been with that character — whatever his name was.”

“That isn’t the point,” she said. “That isn’t the point at all.”

“Admit it, you can’t remember his name, either.”

Her lined mouth twitched slightly. People said Clay Stuart owed her much, but she knew better. She owed him a terrible debt, one she felt obliged to repay. She was on guard for fear he’d see the way she felt on her face, and this was foolishness, because he never looked at her that closely any more. Just the same, now when Clay glanced at her, teasing her, Kay averted her face. Clay didn’t suspect what was on her mind, but she knew.

Her voice remained vinegary. “I remember his name quite well, but I’m not going to bandy it about in this atmosphere.”

“Because you’re a lady,” he mocked her.

“The point is that every woman needs a man — ”

“My God, Kay, you’ve had a man. Better than that, you’ve had me. Thirty-odd years — ”

“Very odd. Yes. For thirty years I’ve been Clay Stuart’s doormat, secretary, armor, weapon — ”

“And you’re complaining? Who are you kidding? It’s made you one of the most formidable women in Hollywood, and you know it. People who hate your guts send you Christmas gifts, open doors for you, fawn over you at parties. Could what’s-his-name have given you all that?”

She changed the subject abruptly. “Have you read it?”

“What?”

She gestured with the blue-covered script. “You know what.
Man of the Desert.
Warners wants an answer. You have a commitment. There’s Grant, you know. Jimmy Stewart. There’s Wayne — ”

“Yeah. And there’s Tab Hunter, too. Tell them to get Tab Hunter.”

“Have you read it? I told them as far as I was concerned, you would do it. They’ve got Dick Creek to direct. They’re lining up a supporting cast that will strain marquees. Ed Wynn for the old prospector. They want to borrow Joanne Woodward for the femme. There’s a doctor role they’re after Claude Rains for. It may not make as much money as all
Ten Commandments
— but it ought to top the first seven.”

He exhaled. “Such enthusiasm. You must have come straight here from Warners.”

“I’ve been talking to Hoff. And Shatner. And Warners. I’ve been talking to everybody but you. Have you read it?”

He shook his head.

“Why not?”

“Give me time, Ringling.”

“Time. It’s been over a week since Ruth’s funeral, Clay. You haven’t stirred out of this house. You won’t even read a script. What are you planning to do?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t. It’s just that I don’t seem to give a damn, Kay. I’m sorry.”

“Clay, don’t do this to me.”

“I’m not doing anything to you. Not intentionally. If I have no interest in anything, I can’t help it. If I read the book I’d hate it. If I tried to do the movie, I’d show I couldn’t do it.”

“Once you get back to work, you’ll be all right.”

“All right.”

“You said that a week ago.”

“It’s all I can say.” He stared at the pool. The eucalyptus leaf still floated.

“We’re trying to help you. You must know that.”

“Then let me alone.”

She caught her breath. “Will you tell me something?”

“If I can. I’ll try.”

“What do you want? Is there anything we can get you?”

“No. Because I don’t know. Since the baby has been here — Sharon — for the funeral, I got interested — I thought she and I might go somewhere, travel, while I got back whatever it is that’s gone … She was too busy.”

The tall woman leaned forward. “Of course she is. Sharon’s a lovely, twenty-year-old girl with a life of her own to live. Life goes on, Clay, you can’t just stop.”

He sighed. “It isn’t something I want, Kay. It’s as if I were driving along at sixty, and suddenly shifted into reverse for no reason and chewed the gears all to hell, you know?”

“No.”

He shrugged. “Then I can’t explain it to you.”

“I can’t understand you. It’s not like you to turn in on yourself like this. Even Sharon can’t talk to you. She’s filled with things she needs to say to you, but you turn her away.”

His jutting chin tilted. “That’s not true.”

“It’s true all right. She had to talk to me. Because she couldn’t talk to you. She’s in love. It’s the most wonderful thing in her life — and like you, she goes overboard on everything she cares about. Neither of you ever learned to do things moderately.”

“In love?” Clay smiled, almost coming to life in his gray face. “Why couldn’t she tell me?”

“Because she loves you so much she’s afraid of alienating you, or incurring disfavor … She’s like Ruth in that she doesn’t like Hollywood — she doesn’t even like Southern California. She knows this place is your idea of heaven — and it isn’t easy for her to tell you she’d rather live — back east in New England.”

“My God. Nobody would rather do that — ”

“You see?” Kay said. “She knows you won’t understand any part of what she wants. She dislikes the movies, and the people involved in them — present company excepted, she insists … The man she loves didn’t even know you.”

Clay smiled in irony. “Where’s he been these past thirty years?”

“He remembered, Sharon told me, he had seen some of your movies when he was in Harvard. Kind of slumming … Now, before you start yelling, there are such people. They don’t go to the movies, they hold others things — art, opera, sailing, conversation — more rewarding. They can smell a wine and tell the valley it came from in France, and what year. They can hear an accent and know what schools you attended, and what your grandparents did for a living — ”

“Oh, hell. John O’Hara writes about such people all the time. I didn’t believe in them when I read about them in his books, or when I played one of them in one of his movies.”

Kay smiled in a taut way. “Well, now you know they actually do exist, and that Sharon loves one of them, and they love her.”

“And she’s afraid to tell me this?”

“She was afraid she couldn’t make you believe it — without hurting you.”

“She doesn’t know me very well, does she?”

“She knows you very well … You see, the man she is in love with has been divorced — ”

“I’ve heard the word without becoming violent.”

“The marriage has been over a long time. The girl was from a good family, but she was a nympho, and he signed church papers accusing her of adultery, though he knew her family’s lawyers might filet him. He belongs to the Episcopal Church and it was important to his family that he remain a communicant… . Sharon says they are truly in love, and I believe her. She wants to marry him when she finishes school this spring and live in Massachusetts.”

Clay moved his shoulders. “I haven’t heard anything yet that’s made me violent. Sharon’s going back to Ruth’s kind of people doesn’t surprise me very much. Sharon spent a lot of time with her grandparents. Ruth influenced her… . Am I violent?”

“You haven’t heard it all. I saved the spicy part for last. The man she loves is Amory Darrow.”

“So?”

“So he’s thirty-six years old.”

For a long time, Clay didn’t even move. He remained staring at the pool and not even seeing it. He was remembering the way the colonel always snorted through his left nostril when the rages fired up in him.

He remained perfectly still. This he had learned, he kept his emotions tightly packaged. They showed in his sun-washed gray eyes, in the set of his jaw, but in thirty years no movie-goer had ever seen Clay Stuart lose control of his emotions, and neither had his nearest friends. Kay was one of the few who knew how he boiled and seethed and wept inside.

She saw it all happening to him now. She remembered that first time they’d gone to bed together, he’d been a blister of hurts and rages, ready to burst, and even then she’d known he needed something. He needed something now, only she couldn’t help him any more, she couldn’t even reach him except in a distant, detached way.

“Well, I’ll just keep her here at home,” he said at last, voice flat and measured. “She’ll get over him.”

“No, Clay. Don’t do that.”

He turned, gray eyes dark with shadows, but voice flat: “You want me to let her go back there?”

“Yes. I do.”

“Why?”

“Give her time to think, Clay. You want to drive her into that man’s arms? Oppose her. That’ll do it… . Let her go back. It’ll give you time to think, too.”

His voice was low. “What’s to think about? I’ll break his neck. I’ll twist loose his testes.”

“That’s right. That’s my boy said that. Off we go — scratching and gouging.”

He drew the backs of his fingers across his mouth. “What do you think I should do?”

“I think you ought to let her go back to school. Wish her well. She’s promised to stay in school until spring. Wish her well. Give her time. Give yourself time.”

“Give that old lecher time … Jesus, Kay. The guy is thirty-six years old. Divorced.”

“Yes,” she said mildly. “That’s what Sharon told me about him, too.”

He stared at her. “He’s sixteen years older than she is.”

“Listen to me, Clay. Sharon will always be attracted to older men. I’m no head-doctor, I admit, but it seems only common sense that it has to do with the way she tries to find you in any man she could care for deeply.”

“But sixteen years difference in their ages … He’d be almost fifty when she was only thirty.”

“You’re almost fifty,” she reminded him in an ironic tone.

“I don’t lech after young girls.”

“But you don’t feel older than God, either, do you?”

He shrugged, glanced away. “I don’t want to waste time talking to you about it.”

“I’d rather you talked to me about it than Sharon right now. You can wait until she comes home for the holidays — ”

“Oh, is she coming home for the holidays?”

“Don’t claw at me, Clay.”

“She’s my daughter.”

Kay smiled. “She’s Ruth’s daughter, too. Trust her a little.”

He shrugged.

Kay stood up and paused, looking down at him, angular arms clinging to the blue-covered script as if it were the flotsam that would save them both.

“Read the script. Get back to work,” she said.

Clay wriggled his feet inside his sneakers, sat watching them and didn’t speak.

Kay stared down at him. “I don’t understand you,” she said.

“I don’t understand myself.”

“Yes. But I should be able to understand you. I’ve loved you for so many years — I never loved any other man.” She gave a short laugh. “Not even what’s-his-name … I should be able to understand.”

He did not say anything. After a moment he heard her precise, knee-rubbing walk going away from him across the flagstones. He didn’t move except to turn his head, searching for the eucalyptus leaf on the pool surface.

It was gone.

chapter three

W
HEN
K
AY
R
INGLING
stood up from the lounge chair beside the pool, Marc Shatner moved guiltily away from the gameroom window.

He took a long pull at the highball. Through the panes he saw Kay approaching the French doors, and he became elaborately interested in a hangnail. She would resent it if she saw he had been watching her and Clay out on the terrace. He had long ago learned never to tangle with Kay Ringling. Whatever softness was in her she reserved for Clay Stuart exclusively.

He leaned with studied casualness against the hunt table.

“Here she comes,” he said to Hoff.

Hoff glanced up, nodded without saying anything.

Kay entered the gameroom, closed the door behind her. Her face was gray. She set the script she carried on the desk.

“He hasn’t read it,” she said. “He’s not going to read it.”

“What’s the matter with him?” Hoff said. He picked up an hors-d’oeuvre and plopped it into his mouth, chewing. “I’m not hungry. I’m on a diet. I eat. All the time lately, I eat. Why? Because I’m worried. I don’t have enough trouble at home with my wife and my girls. I have to come here to worry, too.”

“I can tell you what’s the matter with you,” Shatner said. “But I can’t tell you what’s the matter with him.” He jerked his head toward the swimming pool.

“Apathy,” Kay Ringling said, half to herself. “Even when I told him about Sharon — and her ivy-league divorcee — a male divorcee? — he got mad, but he didn’t really get mad. It hit at him, but it didn’t really reach him.”

“He’s got to get working,” Hoff said.

Shatner mixed himself another drink. “I don’t truly care if Clay takes this picture at Warners or not. Money? The government gets most of it. A hit picture? Who needs it?

He’s never made a picture yet that wasn’t a top grosser, even that one about Texas that they saved money on by shooting out here with California mountains in the background. Even that turkey gobbled big dough.”

“You,” Hoff said. “You’re a big help.”

“It’s Clay himself I’m thinking about,” Shatner said. He was a small man, with compact, compressed mouth, delicate features, blue eyes and tight brown curls like a skull cap.

“It’s Clay we’re all thinking about,” Hoff said. His feelings were injured. “He needs to work. As I told him from the first. He needs to get his thoughts away from himself.”

Kay sat down on the divan. “Well, there’s no way we can force him to work. And he’s just not interested.”

“Not interested?” Hoff plopped another round cracker into his mouth, chewed frantically. He thought, these people should have lived with me in Milwaukee on what my old man could bring home from his peddler’s cart. His father, God rest him, had dreamed only of his freedom in the United States, and he dreamed only of never being hungry again, and to insure this, a man had to work, no matter what he had.