So Little Time (62 page)

“A penny,” Marianna said.

“What?” Jeffrey asked.

“A penny,” Marianna said again. “A penny for your thoughts.”

The triteness of the expression hurt him.

“Don't use someone else's lines,” he said. “Say it. Don't be fancy. I was thinking about you in that Shaw play. Do you remember how I taught you to sit down? That's the main thing about a Shaw play, isn't it? Everybody must sit down all the time.”

He could not see her face clearly, but he knew that she was smiling.

“Yes,” she said. “Not slop down, but do it slowly. I can do it now. Do you want to see me do it?”

“No,” Jeffrey said, “you've learned it.”

“Darling,” Marianna asked, “what else are you thinking of?”

“I was thinking about Jim,” he said. She did not answer. He was glad she did not answer.

“There's a girl,” he said. “Madge is afraid he'll marry her. That's all”

She did not answer, and he spoke again. “There's nothing the matter with her. He likes her. She's a nice girl.”

“You're angry,” she said, “aren't you?”

“Yes,” he said, “but never mind it now.”

“Then don't think about it,” she said. “Of course, it isn't Madge's fault.”

“What isn't her fault?” Jeffrey asked.

“That she can't see things as you do, and that she tried to stop you from growing. She knows that you're too kind.”

“Too kind?” Jeffrey repeated.

“You've never thought enough about yourself,” Marianna said. “You mustn't always be thinking about other people.”

“No one does,” Jeffrey said, “not really. Only in terms of yourself.”

“Jeff,” she said, “please be happy. You were earlier. Please, I'm so happy.”

“You can't make yourself, you know,” Jeffrey said. “No one ought to try. It's silly to see everyone trying.”

“Then don't think about it,” Marianna said. “You're here and I'm here.”

“You're here and I'm here, so what do we care.” He wished that his mind did not keep running into jingles.

“I don't know,” he said. “Maybe Jim's too young. You can't know exactly what you're doing when you're young.”

“You're here and I'm here,” Marianna said again. “Jeffrey, darling, all that matters of you is here. The rest of it doesn't matter.”

“I got to thinking on the train,” he said, “maybe there isn't as much of me—not as much of me left as there used to be.”

It was not a consoling thought. There were Madge and the children and things he was used to, but none of it had any sense or value any longer.

“You don't know,” Marianna said, “you can't know. You're better than you ever were. You're better all the time.”

It was because she was younger. He could remember that same sort of faith in capability, that belief in an eventual happy ending.

“Thanks,” he said, “it's nice that someone thinks so.”

She leaned closer to him, and her face was clearer in the starlight. “Don't say it that way,” she said. “There's everything here—everything.”

Suddenly everything seemed completely natural. There was a simple way to get away from all the rest of it and he kissed her. It was not entirely desire, it was because he knew that something of the sort was inevitable. There had even been some sort of graceless, perfunctory idea of getting it over with, now that they were there. Yet it was entirely different when the time came. He had never thought that anything would be like that for him again. When his arms were around her, everything that he had lost and forgotten seemed to come back to him from all sorts of distant places.

“Darling,” she said, “are you feeling better now?”

“Yes,” he said, “much better,” but he did not want to speak. He wanted to be silent, to deal with his own surprise that that sort of thing was not over with him long ago. What astonished him most was that he felt no qualm of disloyalty. Something in that talk with Madge seemed to him very final, leaving him free to do anything he wanted.

“Don't,” he said to her, “don't speak a line.”

“I don't want to talk at all,” she said. “It's never happened to two people just this way, ever.”

“No,” he said, “not just this way.”

It must have been what everyone had said. It was that sad human desire to keep individuality out of universal experience. Yet even so, he knew that he would always believe that nothing like that had happened in just that way before.

“You needed someone else,” she said. “Don't worry, dear. It doesn't have to be for always, unless …”

“I'm not worried at all,” he said.

There had been no one for a long while to whom he could tell everything and they must have talked for a long while about all sorts of things.

Some problem that he had been trying to reconcile seemed to be solved. He did not want to see Madge or any of it again.

“I brought a play out with me,” he said. “When I'm finished with this script, I might stay on and work on it.”

The truth was that he felt like someone else, someone he might have been if things had been different.

38

It's Time to Take the Clipper

When Jeffrey stopped at the Bronxville at half-past nine one morning some weeks later, to get his mail, the clerk looked up from arranging a bowl of white magnolia flowers, which, according to Jeffrey's observation of the clerk, was a very nice thing for him to be doing.

“You haven't been with us much for the last few days, Mr. Wilson,” the clerk said.

It was an obvious, and, to Jeffrey, not a comforting remark. Although he kept his room there, he had not been at the Bronxville very much, and now it seemed necessary to offer the clerk some logical explanation, although the clerk and the Bronxville had no connection whatsoever with what he did or where he went. He wondered if it were because he was not used to that sort of thing that he felt it necessary to be logical with so many people. After all, there was no reason to think that anyone cared where he went or what he did.

Yet only yesterday, when he had been interviewed by Mary Pringle, who wrote one of those syndicated gossip columns on Hollywood, she had made a similar remark—that he was always too busy to talk to her at the studio and that he must be very gay, like every other writer, because he was never at the Bronxville. He had not wanted Miss Pringle to interview him, but the Publicity Department had asked for it, particularly since the word had been passed about that the new Miller script, when he had finished with it, was a real, terrific story, but terrific. He was not to say anything to Miss Pringle about the script except in the most general terms. That was why Jerry Small from the Publicity Department was right in the room with him when he was being interviewed by Miss Pringle, and all Jerry Small could say was that Mr. Wilson was top-flight, brought from New York at as high a figure as they had ever paid a writer, and that Mr. Wilson had batted out a terrific job for them—but terrific; and Miss Pringle could say it was a Miller vehicle if she wanted to, all Miller. All Mr. Wilson could do now, under orders from Mr. Mintz, was to answer questions about how he wrote, whether he wrote with a pen or on a typewriter, and whether he wrote regularly or when the spirit moved him, and whether he wrote in the morning or in the evening. If Miss Pringle wanted anything more, she must really ask for it from Mr. Mintz personally—but really.

That was when Miss Pringle asked Jeffrey about his wife and kiddies, and said that he must be very gay, because she had tried and tried and had never been able to contact him at the Bronxville. And now she saw why she couldn't contact him because Jeffrey looked so handsome. He was what she called a “writer heartbreak type” and was he breaking many hearts in Hollywood? Jeffrey had said that Miss Pringle ought to know how hospitable Hollywood friends were—always asking you out to spend the night at their cabañas and their ranchos, and besides, he had worked on the script a great deal with Mr. Bliss out at Palos Verdes. That was why he was not at the Bronxville as much as he wanted to be. Then Miss Pringle had said that a little bird, but it was a little bird that was off the record (and Mr. Wilson must have heard that she could be like a clam when she wanted to be, no matter what a feather in her hat the story might be personally)—Well, a little bird had told her that Mr. Wilson had been quite often at the lovely home of a certain Someone at Malibu Beach. And Jeffrey had said that of course he had, and if the little bird hadn't told Miss Pringle who it was, he could tell her. He had been working on the script with Miss Miller, since it was a Miller vehicle, and she could add, if she wanted to, that he had known Miss Miller for years and years. Miss Miller had great charm, but she also had a bad temper. Miss Pringle knew what actresses were like, and he had seen too many of them. Besides, he did not believe that emotion between people working on a picture was ever conducive to good work, and Miss Pringle could put that down, if she wanted to: No emotion and good work. He saw enough of stage and screen celebrities in working hours. He wanted to get back to New York and to his Connecticut farm, and that was that.

Yet now the clerk was making the same remark, that Mr. Wilson had not been with them at the Bronxville very much.

“Not as much as I'd like,” Jeffrey said. “You see, I have a good many Hollywood friends and you know how hospitable everyone is in Hollywood.”

“Yes,” the clerk said, “indeed I know. Lady Gregson—she is with her Pekingese in Bungalow E—Lady Gregson was just saying to me this morning that she had never seen a place with so many delightful people.”

“Yes,” Jeffrey said, “and it's a delightful place.”

“Oh Mr. Wilson, I forgot to remind you,” the clerk said, “there is a friend of yours who has been inquiring for you. Mr. Walter Newcombe, the world correspondent. He said he wanted very much to see you.”

Walter Newcombe's messages had completely slipped Jeffrey's mind and he hoped that other more important things had not also slipped it.

“Is he staying here?” Jeffrey asked.

The clerk said he was not staying there, though he wished that Mr. Newcombe might be with them. He was staying with Mrs. Newcombe at the Val Halla, rather too near the center of things to be as comfortable as they could have made Mr. and Mrs. Newcombe at the Bronxville.…

“Thank you,” Jeffrey said. “I'm going down that way before I go to the studio. I'll stop in to see him.” He disliked giving so many explanations, but it occurred to him that it might be just as well to see Walter. He did not want Walter to go back to New York saying that he was never at the Bronxville.

The Val Halla was on a side street off the boulevard and the city had grown up around it. It was near the filling stations and the drive-in luncheons and the drugstores and the open-air markets and the Motels where you could drive your car right under a shelter and walk into a room. It was noisy, as the clerk had said, and a great many people known as “fallen stars” lived in little apartments near it. The Val Halla, however, still had its large grounds and its date palms and its monkey puzzle trees and its roses. It was built, Jeffrey supposed, on lines inspired by one of the old Spanish missions—a main building where the guests ate and lounged and then lots and lots of cloisters with rooms opening right out upon lots and lots of miniature gardens, each with a little pool filled with lotus flowers. Hanging from the arches of the cloisters were lots and lots of birds in gay lacquer cages, known as “parakeets” when Jeffrey was younger, but now termed “lovebirds.” Their conjugal quarrels and their reconciliations, all going on at once, formed an odd and slightly hysterical background. It was what the clerk had said, “a very delightful place, but a little noisy.”

“Yes sir,” the bellboy said, “Mr. and Mrs. Newcombe are in. They're directly at the end of cloister Number 3.”

“Perhaps you'd better show me,” Jeffrey said. “I don't know whether I can find cloister Number 3.”

Then he began following the bellboy through the cloisters past bougainvillaeas, roses, snapdragons, and nasturtiums, past orange trees, grapefruit trees, fig trees, avocado trees, and monkey puzzle trees.

“That one,” the bellboy said, “is called a ‘monkey puzzle' tree because they say a monkey wouldn't know how to climb down it.”

“Yes,” Jeffrey said, “I know. You've got a lot of birds.”

“Yes, sir,” the bellboy said. “Lovebirds. This is Mr. Newcombe's room.”

“Thank you,” Jeffrey said.

“You bet,” the bellboy said. Out there they always said “You bet.”

There was one of those serving trays on wheels outside the Newcombes' door with empty coffee cups and eggshells and the remains of grapefruit in cups of ice with the green leaves that hotels use to dress up grapefruit. A battered wardrobe trunk and two new suitcases stood beside the tray.

“Is Mr. Newcombe moving out?” Jeffrey asked.

“Yes sir,” the boy said. “They're checking out on us this morning. Mrs. Newcombe is going back East. Mr. Newcombe's taking the plane to Frisco to catch the China Clipper.”

It was peculiar to hear the boy speak of it so casually, just as he might have said that Walter Newcombe was going to the races; but somehow it all fitted perfectly with the cloisters of Val Halla, and with the preposterous conglomeration of flowers and fruits and pools and clock-golf sets in the courtyards. If a Siamese elephant, white and sacred, should have appeared around the corner, Jeffrey thought he would have accepted it implicitly.

“Well,” he said again to the bellboy, “thank you.”

“You bet,” the boy said.

The door to the Newcombes' apartment was heavily studded with hand-beaten nails. Before Jeffrey could knock, it opened suddenly and both of Walter Newcombe's hands appeared filled with empty White Rock and whisky bottles. Jeffrey could not see Walter at the moment—only Walter's clean, purple shirt sleeves with a handsome pair of gold cuff links and the bottles—but he could visualize Walter's position behind the door. Walter would be half crouching in his effort to shove the bottles outside, furtively.