Authors: Howard Fast
"The daughter of the man who built the yacht."
It was past two in the morning before Dyler emerged on deck again. Barbara was dancing. She waved at him. He stood staring at her glumly, and a little while later the party began to break up.
"Richard," Barbara said to Dyler as they were leaving, "I had the best time ever. It was divine. And you're very beautiful."
Crowded into the front seat of his car, sitting next to a voluptuous dark-haired woman whose name was Cindy, Barbara was driven home by Hargasey. "Tonight," he said to her, "you met some classy people, Barbara, but also some bums. Dyler is a bum. I got a responsibility to your father, so I must tell you that Dyler is a bum."
"It should happen to me," Cindy said.
"I had a wonderful time," Barbara told him.
She let herself into the house and crawled into bed, and lay there aching all over with desire. "I would have gone to bed with him," she told herself. "I would have. Christ, I'm so lonely and wretched." The effect of the champagne had worn off. She began to cry, and that way, weeping for herself, she finally fell asleep.
May Ling's mother, So-toy, died in June of 1940. She was only sixty-two years old. She had never recovered from the bronchial infection that had taken hold of her two months before. She grew weaker; it developed into pneumonia; and she died one night as she had lived, quietly, uncomplainingly, here in a strange land called California thousands of miles from a China she barely remembered. May Ling sat by the tiny, withered body, a meaningless death in a world gone mad with the making of death, and she wept for herself more than for her mother. They laid her to rest next to Feng Wo, her husband.
She had been so silent, so unobtrusive, so gently eager to satisfy Barbara's every want, that it was hard for Barbara to believe that she was no longer there. She had had an enormous respect for the act of writing, the strange mystery that is never so mysterious as to an illiterate, and during the day, when Barbara sat at her desk, struggling with a book that had become a monster that ruled her life, So-toy would enter silently and put down a pot of tea and a dish of small cakes. Now, working on the final pages of the novel, alone in the house, Barbara would look up expectantly and wait for the sound of the old woman's shuffling steps. Other times, Barbara had gone into the kitchen and had sat with her. So-toy always welcomed her with a delicious, slow smile, her wrinkled face trying to express what she could not put into words. They never said
much to each other, but there was communication between
them.
"I miss her so much," Barbara said to May Ling.
"I know." May Ling was not given to tears. Her hurts were something she dealt with internally.
Barbara finished the book in midsummer. The house in Westwood was silent and empty. Joe, having completed, his second year of medical school, was working in a hospital in San Diego for the summer. May Ling was working at the library, and Dan spent longer and longer hours at the shipyard. For Barbara, the completion of the book seemed to bring a whole period of her life to a close. It had been an endless task of writing and rewriting, and still she was dissatisfied with so much of what she had written. She decided to put the manuscript aside for a few weeks and then reread it. Suddenly at odds with herself, restless, filled with a strong sense of aimlessness, she decided to accept her mother's invitation and go to. San Francisco.
She took the manuscript with her, planning to go over it carefully and do whatever rewriting she felt was necessary, but in the first weeks with Jean, she hardly glanced at it. "My dear, lovely Barbara," Jean said to her, "you're as pale as a ghost and from what you tell me, you've been living the life of a nun. Well, so have I. But I am old and you are young. Why isn't there a man in your life?"
"Because I don't meet any men. I had four dates with a movie star. That took away my appetite."
"Who?"
"Richard Dyler."
"Well, he is certainly beautiful. Tell me all about it. But not right this minute. We'll talk about that at lunch. We are going to lunch and we are going to dinner—in all the very best places. We are going to the horse show at Menlo Park, and we are going sailing and we are going to the opera and to the theater, and I shall introduce you to fascinating and empty-headed young men, and we shall wander through every gallery in town and pretend we know more about paintings than anyone else—and we will have an absolutely wonderful, delicious time."
But there was no way Barbara could tell her mother all about her four dates with Richard Dyler. "What does one do?" she asked herself. "Does one say, mother, I finally went to bed with him." "Why?" would have to have an answer. "Mother, I just wanted to feel a man's body next to me. It was just too long."
It had happened on their last date, when Barbara finally agreed to go to his purplish-pink Moorish mansion in Bel Air. This time she had only a single glass of wine to drink, so being tight was no part of her rationale, which in any case was not very much of a rationale. She was the only guest. They swam in the seventy-five-foot swimming pool, and then they dined outside on his terrace, in a controlled jungle of palms and cactus and roses. It was one of those warm, gentle evenings that come in the latter part of the Southern California summer and that are known locally as "the Santa Anna effect."
Sitting there, looking about her, Barbara decided that the place was either beautiful or horrible, depending upon one's mood and how one reacted to fake Moorish architecture in Los Angeles.
"Not bad for a kid from Gary, Indiana," Dyler said. "It's kind of pretty in a classy way." Which was as much of a flight of poetic fancy as he was capable of.
"Are you really from Gary?" Barbara asked, thinking that with his face and eyes, he should at least have originated in someplace like Santa Fe or Tarpon Springs, neither of which she had ever been to, but at least they had names that went with the Dyler face.
"You ever been there?"
"Just on the New York train, passing through."
"Don't ever get off. It's a shithole."
"I suppose no one ever told you that your speech is colorful?"
"I never dated a writer before. Are you sure you're a writer? The writers I meet around the studio are creeps."
"I'm never sure I'm a writer."
"No? Well, that explains it."
After dinner, they went into his viewing room. It was a large room, with overstuffed chairs scattered around and a huge couch facing the screen. "I run pictures here," he explained. "You ever been in one of these before?"
"Never," Barbara admitted. "I'm so innocent, I never realized that you could have a small theater in your own home."
"Everyone has them."
"Well, not really. I mean we don't."
"Well, what the hell. I mean people in the industry."
The lights went down, and Barbara was watching the newest Richard Dyler film, called
Moonlight Bridge.
After about fifteen minutes, Barbara said, "I can't watch the film and be manhandled at the same time. What on earth are you trying to do?"
"You are absolutely the strangest broad I ever met in my life. Didn't anyone ever make a pass at you before?"
"Is that what you're trying to do?"
"I'm trying to make love to you. You're the first broad I can't get any closer to than the senior prom. I seen you four times. For Christ's sake, I want to go to bed with you. Isn't that plain enough?"
"Not here with the projectionist watching."
"It's dark."
"Richard, I'm sure you have a bedroom."
"Baby, eight of them."
"Well, let's pick one."
"I'll be damned," he said.
The bedroom was enormous, the ceiling set with mirrors, the bed covered with a spread of simulated leopardskin, the floor carpeted in white shag that gave underneath like a trampoline, the walls covered with glistening paper of shiny silver and dead black. Barbara had never seen anything like it before, and as she turned, staring at the room, Dyler asked eagerly, "You like it? Botticher designed it. It's got a lot of class, hasn't it?"
"Yes, a lot of class," Barbara whispered, wondering who Botticher was, bereft suddenly of all the passion and desire that had been frustrated for so many months. Dyler had evidently completed his preparatory lovemaking downstairs. Now he pursued the fact of sexual intercourse with simple directness. He undressed with speed and facility, waiting eagerly for Barbara to get out of her clothes. And then it was over in about thirty seconds, and he lay back on the bed, naked and satisfied.
"You got class too," he informed Barbara. "You got one hell of a figure." He glowed with satisfaction, his perfect face more perfect than ever.
Barbara pulled the leopard spread over her and regarded Dyler thoughtfully. "Dyler," she said at last, "do you know what an orgasm is?"
"Don't I ever. What do you think just happened to me?"
"What happened to you was an ejaculation."
"What's the difference?"
She sighed. "Dyler—"
"How come you call me by my last name?" he wanted to know.
"We don't know each other too well."
"You know, that's funny. For a writer."
"Dyler, how many women have you gone to bed with?"
"What a question 1 I don't get you, I swear."
"Don't you want to tell me?"
"It's no great secret, baby. Maybe three hundred, maybe four hundred. Who counts? I never claimed to be a virgin. Jesus Christ, you knew that."
Barbara nodded. "I guess I did."
"Well, what about you? Fair's fair."
"You're the third. No secrets."
"You know, I respect you for that," he said seriously.
"And with all those women, no one ever mentioned a woman's orgasm to you?"
"Are you kidding? Honey baby, you are talking to a specialist on the subject of women. That's why I picked you. If there's one thing I know about, it's women. A man's a man and a woman's a woman. They are different."
"They certainly are," Barbara agreed.
"You know, cookie, you and me are going to have a lot of fun together."
"I don't think we are," Barbara said.
"Come on."
"I think that in due time I would bore you," Barbara told him gently. "I wouldn't want to do that."
"Hey, you're not going to turn out to be one of those broads who go around working the fact that they went to bed with Dick Dyler? You're not scoring on me?"
"Scout's honor, no."
So it ended. Dyler called half a dozen times before he gave up, assuring Barbara that he respected her because this was the first time a girl had turned him down; and now, lunching with her mother at the Fairmont, Jean said, "But he must be charming. He can't be entirely stupid."
"Oh, no, not entirely."
"And certainly it must have been exciting to date the sex symbol of America."
"Well, I guess it was, for a while," Barbara admitted.
"He's no one to be serious about, I will admit that," Jean said. "Movie stars are not for marrying."
"Who is?" Barbara wondered.
"My dear, San Francisco is teeming with good-looking and eligible young men, and we absolutely must do something about it. You'll soon be twenty-seven years old."
"And I'm beginning to feel like forty."
"What nonsense! You're young and lovely and intelligent, and you can't go on burying yourself in that ridiculous place called Los Angeles." Seeing the expression on Barbara's face, she added quickly, "I'm not talking against your father. I've been meticulous on that point. By the way, how is he?"
"He's well enough. He works too hard. The shipyard has become a madhouse. They've laid the keels of four merchant ships, and he has hundreds of men working there—and he's not happy, not at all."
"Happiness was never Dan's strong point. Is he content, being married—" She paused.
"Don't get into that, mother. May Ling's a wonderful woman. Don't put me in between."
"All right." Jean smiled. "No more of that. Tonight, we dine with your brother. You shall see his handsome new uniform and his very beautiful but brainless girl friend, whom I'm afraid he's going to marry."
"Mother!"
"I know. I'm being nasty. Anyway, Tom is in the navy, the most painless transition imaginable. He has been given a commission, and he is now liaison officer between the navy and California Shipping. Well, I'm pleased about that. Sooner or later, we'll be in this dreadful war, and the navy is the best place to be, especially if you're a shore officer, which I gather is what Tom will remain. He's as thick as thieves with John Whittier, and they have all sorts of plans about taking over California and perhaps the rest of the world too, given time, of course."