Don't Speak to Strange Girls (8 page)

“I understand, sir. I can send her away if you like.”

“No … I mean, she’s here. What the hell?” He
remembered her asking if he liked daiquiris; he decided to have them made;
it would be a touch. Anyhow, it would show he remembered what she’d
said to him. “You might fix us a mixer of daiquiris and some light
sandwiches. You know the amenities, McEsters, better than I do.”

“Yes, sir. Shall I send the young woman in?”

Clay stood up and shrugged his shirt up on his shoulders. He gave McEsters what he hoped would pass for a casual, bored smile.

“No,” he said. “I’ll go out to her.”

“Yes, sir. She’s in the foyer, sir.”

• • •

No matter what he had expected her to be, she was more than that, different. She was much, much more than he had permitted himself to anticipate. She was a tall girl, he saw that first, slender, the way the New York model agencies liked them. She was young, younger than hell, he thought bitterly, looking across a one-way gulf at her — that one expanse he could never recross to her. Of course she had to be young — when they called a star they were ever young, or they wanted something.

She was standing with toes pointed in, looking at the house as if she’d never been surrounded by precisely Ruth’s brand of quiet elegance before. She tried to be casual, but her eyes were impressed and when she heard him and turned to face him, she looked at him in that same way, as if he were another fabulous appointment in this glamorous house.

“I’ve seen you so often,” she said. “On the screen, I mean. I feel I know you.”

He took her proffered hand and looked down at her. He thought that the look of her warned you, if you were smart enough to sense the warning. She could make you joyous or miserable for the rest of your life, but you were never going to relax completely as long as she was part of your existence. There would be no plateaus in the life of the man who got himself entangled with this one. The slender body bore full breasts like overripe fruit. A man could feel his eyes bleeding.

She tossed her head in a way that shook her shoulder length red-gold hair back from her pale, high-planed face, and her green eyes were intrigued, entranced.

“I’m Joanne Stark,” she said.

“Sure you are. So here you are at last.”

He was still holding her hand. He gave a wry smile and released it.

“I know you must think I’m forward. Subtle as the front wheel of a bus. I wanted to meet you.”

“If I’d known, I’d have given green stamps with my phone number.”

“Do you want to know how I got it?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you how it is. Sometimes I go up in a plane and drop leaflets. Call — ”

“I found one of them,” she said. “Will that do?”

“Fine.”

“Only I still don’t feel right about it. I feel I ought to tell you — now I’m here.”

These were just words, Clay saw. It did not matter what she said. She was not giving any thought to her words, only to the fact she was talking, the way a kid might whistle in the dark.

“Why don’t you come into the library?” he said. “Take off your shoes, or something.” He had entered the game with her now. The words didn’t matter. The chatter was to cover the awkward bridge between this first moment and that first drink.

He nodded toward the library. She smiled and followed him.

“I’m not intruding?” she said. “Not breaking into anything?”

“I was waiting for you.” He said it flatly, truthfully.

Her green eyes glittered. She smiled over her shoulder at him. “I’ve always wanted to meet you. For such a long time.”

He smiled. She sat at one end of the divan and he flopped on the other, leaning against the arm rest, watching her. Her dress did not cover her knees. She tugged at it once. It was no use. She forgot it, a born philosopher. She turned at the far end of the couch, crossed one leg under the other. He caught his breath.

“I suppose everybody says that to you?”

“What?” he said.

“Always wanted to meet you.” She appeared unconscious of the way she lay back, the way he had to look at her. “But with me, it’s true. I’ve wanted terribly to meet you. All my life.”

“All your life,” he said. “All of it wouldn’t add up to very long.”

She shrugged, tossing her red-gold hair back. “It seems a long time to me.”

McEsters entered with the daiquiris and the sandwiches. He
glanced at the girl lying back on the divan, ankle crossed under her knee,
leg like a golden pillar polished to a sheen. Faint disapproval showed in his
face. He left the room.

“He looks like something somebody made up,” Joanne said.

He poured a daiquiri for her, poured one for himself. “I
hope daiquiris are all right. We’ve got a houseful of liquor if you
want something else. You mentioned them — when you called.”

She smiled, pleased that he remembered. “I love them.” She sighed. “Why, I love everything about this place. I’ve never been in a house like this. Not that I can remember, anyhow. Oh, I’ve been in some swank places. But there’s something about this one. It is the sort of place my mother would have had if she’d lived.”

“Oh?” He held out the plate of sandwiches. She took two of them and placed them in a napkin, balanced on the swell of her thigh.

“Yes.” Her eyes clouded. “She died when I was a little girl. Two years old. I don’t remember her, really. We had this place. It was lovely. Long Island. From what I’ve heard, it must have been like this — quiet elegance that doesn’t knock your brains out, you know — ”

“What happened?”

She looked as if the pain were still real for her. “It burned. One night. My father — got me, everything out of the house except mother. She wouldn’t leave.”

Clay scowled. “Why not?”

“That place. It was her whole life. Everything in her life was in that house — all her happiness, all her possessions… . You’d have to know how it was with her to understand.”

Her voice was very low. She had her gaze fixed on something in the distance.

Clay wanted to laugh. She was acting. He could not say if she were a good actress or not. It did not matter. She was doing what she wanted to do.

She waited, but when he did not speak, she brought her gaze back to him and met his eyes levelly.

“That isn’t true,” she said. “Not any of it.”

“I know.”

She finished off the daiquiri, held out the glass. She ate greedily for a moment while he refilled her glass.

“Sometimes I think it’s true, though,” she said. “I’ve told it to myself, and so many people — but not to you. I could see you did not believe me. It made me realize I was lying, and there was no sense in it.” She smiled. “It wasn’t going to get me anywhere with you. You were too smart for me.”

He watched her finish off her second drink.

“You could grow strawberries in that, too,” he said.

She looked up. “What?”

“In that stuff you’re spreading on me now. What is the truth about you, honey? Are you a pathological liar?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you lie because you can’t help it?”

She registered as if the baby spot were fixed on her, trimmed and with halo light. Sadness. It was too bad there was no camera moving in for a close-up.

“Sometimes,” she said. “I guess I’ve never had what I really wanted. Never been what I really wanted to be. It’s all right to admit it to myself. But I never could see why I had to tell it to other people.”

“It’s none of their business?”

“Sure. I mean, I make them happier by telling them lies. After all, why not? If you want to know the truth, Joanne Stark’s life is pretty depressing. Depresses me. When I tell them lies — it doesn’t hurt anything. I just tell them what they want to hear.”

“And you thought I wanted to hear about an estate, and a fire?”

“No. Not really. You see, I’ve wanted to get in pictures. All my life. I’ve read so many fan magazines. I know what they want, too. So what I told you is what you’ll read about me someday in the fan magazines. It won’t be the truth, but it’ll be a lot more fun.”

He laughed. My God, he thought, how long since I’ve laughed like this?

She laughed with him. “Why, I’ve had that story ready for two years. Ready for the publicity department of any studio that hired me.”

“You’ve been out here two years?”

“Almost.”

“You don’t look it.”

“What does that mean?”

He lay back against the arm rest. He stared at her. What did it mean? For one thing she looked too new, the gloss wasn’t off the merchandise. Even New York didn’t take off the gloss the same way Hollywood did. Two years in Hollywood, a girl either had to make it in the movies, or get out of town. Two years changed them.

He could not say any of that to her. And he did not went to say it to her anyhow. But more than that, there was a diamond kind of hardness to her. He could not overlook this. A diamond could rub against fake glass for a long time without showing any scars. This girl looked as if she had held conferences with herself. There was an aura of enchantment about her, but she knew what she wanted. This was certainly true. You could not escape this. She knew about prices; she expected to pay them. But then there was the scrubbed look of freshness; she couldn’t lie about that, or fake it.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “How did the studios miss you for almost two years?”

“It was easy.”

She held out the glass. He refilled it. She got up, gathered in two sandwiches, and walked about the room, munching, and sipping at her rum drink.

She stood in the French doorways, natural daylight rim-lighting her ankles.

“What a lovely pool. Is it heated?”

“You mean they have unheated pools in California?”

“I was in one once. Nearly froze my — well, it was cold.”

He got up, walked across the room. He stood behind her. He looked at the firm young lines of her body. The thought surged through his mind that she was no older than Sharon. He thought about Amory Darrow, about Darrow’s bachelor apartment, and Sharon at a window and that man looking at her like this.

He moved to turn away, but he could smell the faint scent of Joanne’s hair.

He did not move. He kept his voice flat. “I might be able to find you a bathing suit,” he said. “Would you like to swim before dinner?”

She turned, her green eyes warm, warmer than the daiquiris
could make them.

“I want to do anything you want to do,” she told him.

Her gaze held his. He waited to see color touch her cheeks. It didn’t happen. So young, he thought with the heated need in him. So young and so wise and so far ahead of me.

He rang for McEsters, thinking he had lived with Ruth too long, had worked too hard. He had forgotten there were girls like Joanne Stark.

Then he caught himself abruptly. He had forgotten because he forced it. All these years. He had tried to forget. But the truth was, he had never forgotten. They were always there, like nudes in men’s magazines. And now suddenly here was one of them in the flesh, almost as if he had created her from his own imagination, from his own incredible longing.

chapter eight

H
E WAS
waiting beside the pool in swim trunks and goose bumps when Joanne came across the flagstones.

She was wearing a pale-green swim suit that belonged to Sharon. Sharon was a lovely child, but this was a woman in her green suit. Clay inhaled heavily, thinking with pleasure that it was truly as though he’d invented Joanne Stark from the materials of his loneliness, his memories and his needs. She could not have come any more directly from his dreams if he had molded her with his own hands.

He found himself recalling the theme music from the old movies — like the music they played every time Vilma Banky appeared in scenes of
The Son of the Sheik.
This sort of haunting background melody was all that was lacking as Joanne crossed the flagstones toward him, punching her hair under a green bathing cap.

Her cheeks were faintly touched with color. She watched his face with a look that was almost shy. She was looking for approval, or more than that, approbation and applause.

He could not think what to say. He wanted it to be right, knew it had to be light, casual and yet full of the excitement that throbbed in him at the sight of her and warmed away the wind-raised goosebumps. He admitted what he needed in that moment. He needed a clever director, a clever script writer. Dialogue by …

“What took you so long?” he said. He did not take his eyes off of her. It did matter what he said, after all.

“I stood in that room, afraid to come out here. I was afraid — you might not like me.”

“Well, everything is all right now,” he said. “I like you.”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s easy to see you do. But I was worried.” She shivered slightly. “It’s cold in the wind.”

“It will be warmer in the pool.”

She put out her hand, braced herself with her fingers against his bicep. Her fingers were like pieces of dry ice against his flesh.

She extended the gleaming pillar of her leg, pointing her toes and touching gingerly at the water. She nodded, turning her head and smiling at him.

“Come on in,” he said.

“Just a minute.”

She took a deep breath, tested her cap with both hands against the sides of her head.

Clay dived into the pool. He hit the water sharply, cutting it cleanly, thinking he was like a teenager showing off for her. Why not? He wasn’t brilliant, he was athletic. There were few enough things he could do well. Why shouldn’t he show off for her? It was what he wanted to do. He wanted to see her excited and pleased at his diving, and the effortless crawl-stroke that sliced him through the water, and the way he could stay under water almost two and a half minutes. Accomplishments.

He broke through the surface near the far side of the pool from her. He blew water from his face, watching her. She was still poised on the rim of the pool. The light behind her, the lights from each side of her, the underwater lights illumined her in full detail. No, he thought, I don’t believe it. She’s not real. No one who is real is this perfect. He tried to discover a flaw about her as she dived outward toward him. Perhaps her mouth was a trifle large. My God.