Spearfield's Daughter (47 page)

He came to her room that night after everyone had gone to bed. Her room was at the end of a corridor, with no one occupying the room next to her. It occurred to her then that Alain had, somehow, engineered her location; but when he came, she was glad of the near-isolation. She remembered something Tom had said: there's no humpin' without bumpin'. Then she put Tom out of her mind and, only stopping short of screaming aloud when her climax came, enjoyed the love-making without restraint. Alain was a practised lover, but if he was proud of his talent he had the modesty not to mention it. He made love to her twice, she made love to him once: which wasn't a bad night's pleasure, she thought, for a girl out of practice. He went back to his own room, limping as much from exhaustion as from his leg, and she went to sleep. Her last thought, lost and forgotten as soon as she fell asleep, was that she had been given another visa to a country of one, Alain.

13

I

OVER THE
past year or more things had not gone as well as Tom Border had expected. Hollywood had turned out to be less than he and Simone had hoped for. Like so many novelists he had thought writing for the screen would be easy. He had filled pages of yellow paper with what he thought was witty, well-turned dialogue, only to have the producer and the director blue-pencil it as no newsroom copy editor had ever worked on his stuff.

“Half of today's movie audiences are deaf from listening to rock music, so they never hear any of the dialogue.” The producer had been forty years in the movie business, which he insisted was a business and none of your film-is-an-art crap. “Ninety-five per cent of the other half wouldn't know Oscar Wilde from Oscar Fishbein, who's my bookie. So wit is wasted on ‘em.”

“That leaves two and a half per cent. What about them?”

“They go to Woody Allen pictures. We're not making this movie for them. I dunno what you had in mind when you wrote your book, Tom, but it's basically a thriller and that's what we bought. You can't thrill people outa their pants with witty dialogue. Try again, will you, Tom?”

Tom knew he was probably being given more chances than most writers. He had learned that novelists still had a certain standing with most producers, as if writing novels was more difficult than writing films, though he was finding the opposite true. He had been given his own bungalow, small though it was, and not a room in the writers' building. The studio had a vast parking lot where everyone below a certain executive level had to park and pay for the privilege; but Tom had his own parking space, free, outside his bungalow. He was pampered, but it didn't help his writing the screenplay.

At the end of six weeks the producer, with best wishes for the future, patted him on the back and let him go; as Tom moved out of his bungalow, the associate producer was already moving in. When Tom
went
out to get into his rented car, a studio sign-writer was painting out his name and had a stencil ready to substitute the new occupant's name.

“You don't waste any time,” said Tom, not feeling in the least witty today.

“That's life, buddy.” The man was old enough to have grown up with
buddy
and, Tom imagined, even
twenty-three skidoo.
His coveralls creaked with years of paint. “You come, you go. The only writers permanent around here are us guys that paint the names.” He wiped his brush over the last
r
of Border. That's all I am now, thought Tom, a blank space. “So long, buddy. Try TV. They don't put your name on a sign if you're a TV writer, they put a meter there.”

The wit of studio sign-writers: did he go to see Woody Allen movies? “Watch out. I'd hate to run over your brush.”

“Up yours, buddy,” said the man.

Tom went home to the apartment he and Simone had rented on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. It had once belonged to Rita Hayworth and Simone said she could still feel the essence of glamour in the place. But not today. She threw her arms round Tom and let fly a stream of French abuse about Hollywood producers that would have earned her
Cahiers du Cinema's
critic-of-the-year award. Tom was glad of her comfort and even the mere fact that she was
there;
he would have hated to come back to an empty apartment, even one full of the essence of Rita Hayworth. He might still be a drifter, but he had become less of a loner. Simone's attention and devotion to him had spoiled him, had brought home to him the disadvantages of being self-reliant, especially in cooking a meal, doing one's laundry and shopping for groceries. He loved her, but still felt guilty, since he sometimes felt he loved her only for her services. He would never love her as he had loved Cleo.

Simone gave up abusing Hollywood producers, which is as self-defeating as trying to flatter certain movie stars, and became practical.
“Chéri,
we have a six months' lease on the apartment. It will cost us money to break it.”

“Thrifty. How did French girls ever get a reputation for being sexy?”

“We're thrifty in bed, too. Haven't you ever noticed how long I make our love-making last? No, chéri, I'm being serious. We have money, lots of it, but I am not going to see it wasted. We shall stay on here till the lease is up and you will write.”

“
What?”

“Something. Another book, magazine articles. Something. You will go to work tomorrow morning. I'm not going to let you sit around and be sorry for yourself.”

“I've never felt sorry for myself.” But he had; immediately after he had left Cleo in the café in Rockefeller Center. But that was all behind him. “What are we going to do between now and tomorrow morning?”

“Go to bed and make thrifty love. Then tonight you can take me to dinner at Chasen's.”

“They don't have thrifty prices there.”

“It will be our last fling. Tomorrow I start being a very thrifty French housewife.”

He did not start another book; he discovered he did not have another book in him, not then. He called Gus Green, who wasted no time on sympathy over losing the script job but got him a commission for two pieces for
Playboy.
He wrote them and
Playboy
paid for them but didn't ask for any more from him. He did a couple of pieces for the
Los Angeles Times,
but he was writing mechanically and he knew it and he got no pleasure at all from it. If he was going to write for newspapers he wanted to be back in the atmosphere of a newspaper office. But he could not bring himself to ask for a job on the
Times,
not while he was supposed to be a highly successful novelist.
The Guns of Chance
was still on the bestseller list. Reporters on the
Times
would not welcome another reporter whose royalty cheques made their weekly pay envelopes look like food stamps.

When the lease ran out they left for Paris, stopping over for a few days in Missouri, where Tom's parents almost smothered Simone in their delight with her. Simone asked them to come visit her and Tom when they were settled in Paris and they said they would, which surprised Tom. All his life his father had said there was no point in travelling when you could get everything in Missouri or, if you were really stuck, next door in Kansas.

But Tom and Simone did not settle down in Paris. He was suddenly restless, the old drifter again. His British publishers were bringing out the paperback edition of his novel; they asked him to come to Britain to promote it and he accepted. They mentioned that it was about to be published in Australia and New Zealand and on the spur of the moment he asked would they like him to go out there and promote it. So he and Simone went to Australia, where Tom sought some of the essence of Cleo and found none. He
saw
Senator Spearfield's name in a newspaper and the name Spearfield was like a stab in his breast. His publishers' Australian office overwhelmed him with hospitality, but it also worked him into exhaustion and he was glad to leave Australia for New Zealand. There the pattern was repeated and he boarded the Air New Zealand flight for Tahiti with relief.

“You were looking for something, weren't you?” said Simone. “What?”

He shrugged. He really didn't know, unless he had been looking for the ghost of a girl who had long since fled her homeland. “What would you think about staying in Tahiti for six months?”

“Gauguin wrote a book when he lived there. Perhaps you can, too.” She wanted him to be a writer, thinking that was what he wanted.

But Tahiti produced no book. At the end of six months they moved on, drifting. Tom said he wanted to see all the places he had read about: they went to South America, to Machu Pichu, then to Rio de Janeiro. At last Simone put her foot down. Or said she wanted to, in Paris.

“I have had enough of all this,
chéri.
All we are doing is spending money. Neither of us is enjoying himself.”

He agreed. “Okay, we'll go back to Paris and settle down. I've got an idea for a novel, I think. It's a love story.”

“You and me?” She was only half-joking: she wanted to be in a book written by him.

“Maybe. I'll see how it works out.” He was half-afraid to write it. The story was still only vague in his mind, but the wrong girl kept coming into his mind as the heroine. “It'll be set in Paris, about a rich American and a young French girl.”

“It
is
you and me. Oh
chérì—”
She took him to bed and made thrifty love.

Two weeks later they flew to Paris. Their drifting, each of them hoped without saying anything to the other, was over.

Paris in October, Tom always thought, was the perfect marriage of time and place. Paris in the spring had its moments but autumn had always been his favourite season, no matter where he was. They rented an apartment on the Left Bank with a view of the Seine. Simone screamed
bleu merde
at the rent and beat the landlord down ten per cent, something no foreigner could ever have done. What would I do without her? Tom wondered. And had no answer.

Then
he settled down to write a novel about the love-hate relationship between a young French girl and a much older rich American, told from the viewpoint of a young artist waiting, with mixed feelings, in the background.

II

Cleo had started work at the
Courier
on the day that Richard Nixon vacated the White House. It was an awkward day for a foreigner to move into an American newsroom. Somehow Cleo felt a sense of shame, as if she should have known better than to choose today to start.

“You'll be on police rounds, Miss Spearfield.”

Jake Lintas looked more like a banker than the stereotype of a newspaperman. He was stout, always impeccably dressed, wore a homburg to the office, never had a hair out of place on his sleek head; he did not wear his jacket in his office, but he never rolled up his sleeves and protected his cuffs with old-fashioned paper cuffs which he ordered by the dozen pairs from somewhere in Vermont. He tried to give the impression that news should not happen till he was ready for it, but never showed any fluster if the news did break too fast.

“I've never been a crime reporter, Mr. Lintas.”

“You'll learn. If you want to write about this city, you'll get all the education you want down in the police shack. Here is our style book. You will notice that all women are referred to as Mrs. or Miss. I don't allow words in this newspaper that can't be pronounced.”

“You mean Ms.?”

“Exactly.” He had let her know at once that he had no time for Women's Liberation and their aberrations. She was unsure just how much time he had for her personally, but he had made no attempt to welcome her.

She presented herself to the city editor, Carl Fishburg. A once lean reporter, he had become fat and sour at his desk; he envied the men who were able to get out and about. More importantly, with his promotion he had lost his by-line, the seal that every newspaperman worked for. He was better paid and he had authority, but he was now anonymous.

“Hal Rainer will show you the ropes.” Carl Fishburg also did not sound welcoming.

Hal
Rainer, thin-nosed and bald-headed, looked like a studious city-bred eagle. He was fifty years old, came from Denver, Colorado, and hated New York but could never leave it.

“It's like some girl you fall for. You know she's a whore, but because she's giving you a free lay you think she loves you.” He talked to all the women on the
Courier,
of whom there were not too many, as if they were men; a newspaper was a man's world, or should be, and he made no concessions. “I came here like Lochinvar out of the West, got a job on the
Brooklyn Eagle
and I thought I had it made. I was gonna be the new Heywood Broun, the new Ring Lardner. Those names mean anything to you?”

“I've heard of them.”

“You sound doubtful. Never sound like that in front of a New York newspaperman. They are gods in our pantheon.”

“What happened to you? Did they pull you up at the pantheon door?”

“I never got within sight of it. I found out I was a facts man, not an ideas man. I had a skull full of fancy phrases, but my typewriter refused to use them. I became a police reporter and I got a life sentence. I never write a word unless I got to and I've worn out three re-write men. All I console myself with is that I know more about crime than even the Mafia. I believe you knew Tom Border?”

The question so surprised her she thought there was something behind it. “Yes. We were kidnapped together.”

“Yeah, I know. He was a nice guy, Tom. Pity he wrote a book, he'll never write anything decent again.” Then he seemed to put Tom out of his mind. “Well, this is the shack. A little seedy, but it's our home away from home.”

The police shack was two rooms above a bail bond store on a narrow street at the back of Police Headquarters in downtown Manhattan. Tattered and yellowed sheets torn from newspapers were stuck to the walls, New York tapestries, stories of major crimes long forgotten: criminals fade almost as fast from memory as their victims. An embittered newspaper reporter had scrawled a message for history on a wall:
TV news is for the eyes and ears of idiots.
There were other less caustic messages, some of them yellowed and torn, some of them dated: on 11/3/48 Nita wanted Hal Rainer to call her urgently.