“I’m taken for pop’s sister already,” said Val tragically.
“Go on,” said Walter, examining Val all over. “You’re the young connubial type.”
“Mr. Spaeth, you’re positively clairvoyant! I sew the meanest seam, and I’ve always been marked A in bedmaking.”
“I didn’t mean exactly that.” She did have the most remarkable figure, Walter thought.
Valerie eyed him sharply. “What’s the matter? Am I coming out anywhere?”
“There’s something wrong with the movie scouts!”
“Isn’t it the truth? Just like the Yankees letting Hank Greenberg go to the Tigers—a Bronx boy, too.”
“You’d photograph well,” said Walter, edging closer. “I mean—you’ve a nose like Myrna Loy’s, and your eyes and mouth remind me of—”
“
Mr
. Spaeth,” murmured Val.
“My mother’s,” finished Walter. “I have her picture. I mean—how did they ever miss you?”
“Well, it’s like this,” said Valerie. “They’ve camped on my tail for years, but I’ve always turned ’em down.”
“Why?”
“I’d never succeed in the movies,” said Val in a hollow voice.
“That’s nonsense!” said Walter warmly. “I’ll bet you can even act.”
“Shucks. But you see—I was born right here in Hollywood; that’s one strike on me. Then I hate sables and flat heels. And I’m not a homesy girl sick of it all. So don’t you see how hopeless it is?”
“You must think I’m a fool,” growled Walter, whose large ears had been growing redder and redder.
“Oh, darling, forgive me,” said Val contritely. “But you
are
wide open for a left hook. Finally there’s kissing. Look!” She seized him, squeezed him with passion, and kissed him fiercely on the lips. “There, you see?” she sighed, biting into the orange again. “That’s how it is with me.” Walter smiled a flabby smile at the polo fiends around them and wiped the lipstick off his mouth. “What I mean to say,” continued Val, “was that in the movies you’ve got to go through all the
motions
of passion, but when it comes right down to it they just peck at each other. When I kiss, I
kiss
.”
Walter slid off the rail. “How do you spend your time?” he asked abruptly.
“Having fun,” mumbled Val.
“I knew there’d be something wrong with you. You never got those hands over a wash-tub!”
“Oh, God,” groaned Valerie, “a reformer.” She popped the last segment into her mouth. “Listen, my lean and hungry friend. Pop and I, we live and let live. We happen to have some money, and we’re trying to spend it as fast as we can before it’s taken away from us.”
“You’re the kind of people,” said Walter bitterly, “who cause revolutions.”
Val stared, then burst into laughter. “
Mr
. Spaeth, I do believe I’ve misjudged you. That’s the cleverest line! Isn’t the next step a suggestion that we stage a private sit-down strike in the nearest park?”
“So that’s what you meant by having fun!”
Valerie gasped. “Why, I’ll slap your sassy face!”
“The trouble with you people,” snapped Walter, “is that you’re economic royalists, the pack of you.”
“You just heard somebody say that!” flared Valerie. “Where do you come off lecturing me? I’ve heard about you and your father. You’re just as fat leeches as we are, feeding on the body politic!”
“Oh, no,” grinned Walter. “I don’t care what you call yourself or my old man, but
I
work for a living.”
“Yes, you do,” sneered Val. “What’s your racket?”
“Drawing. I’m a newspaper cartoonist.”
“There’s work for a man. Yes, sir! See tomorrow’s funny section for the latest adventures of Little Billy.”
“Is that so?” yelled Walter.
“Mr. Spaeth, your repartee simply floors me!”
“I draw political cartoons,” yelled Walter, “for the
Los Angeles Independent!
”
“Communist!”
“Oh, my God,” said Walter, waving his long arms, and he stamped furiously away.
Valerie smiled with satisfaction. He was a very young man, and he did look like Gary Cooper. She examined her mouth in her hand-mirror and decided she must see Mr. Walter Spaeth again very soon. “And tonight’s date,” she shouted after him, “is definitely off. But
DEFINITELY
!”
T
HERE
were other nights, however, and other meetings; and it was not long before Mr. Walter Spaeth despairingly concluded that Miss Valerie Jardin had been set upon earth for the express purpose of making his life unbearable. Considering Miss Jardin
in toto
, it was a pleasant curse; that was what made it so vexatious. So Walter wrestled with his conscience daily and nightly—Walter was an extremely spiritual young man—and he even plunged into Hollywood night life for a time with a variety of those beautiful females with whom Hollywood crawls. But it all came out the same in the end—there was something about the idle, flippant, annoying Miss Jardin to which he was hopelessly allergic. So he crept back and accepted every electric moment Miss Jardin deigned to bestow, thrashing feebly in his exquisite misery like a flea-ridden hound being scratched by his mistress.
Being totally blind to the subtleties of feminine conduct, Walter did not perceive that Miss Jardin was also going through a trying experience. But Rhys Jardin, physically a father, had had to develop the sixth sense of a mother in such matters. “Your golf is off six strokes,” he said sternly one morning as Pink mauled and pounded him on the rubbing table in the gymnasium, “and I found a wet handkerchief on the terrace last night. What’s the matter, young lady?”
Val viciously punched the bag. “Nothing’s the matter!”
“Filberts,” jeered Pink, slapping his employer. “You had another fight with that wacky twerp last night.”
“Silence, Pink,” said her father. “Can’t a man have a private conversation with his own daughter?”
“If that punk calls you a ‘parasite’ again, Val,” growled Pink, digging his knuckles into Jardin’s abdomen, “I’ll knock his teeth out. What’s a parasite?”
“Pink, you were listening!” cried Val indignantly. “This is one heck of a household, that’s all
I
can say!”
“Can I help it if you talk loud?”
Val glared at him and plucked a pair of Indian clubs from the rack in the wall-closet.
“Now, Pink,” said Rhys, “I won’t have eavesdropping. … What else did Walter call her?”
“A lot more fancy names, and then she starts to bawl, so he hauls off and kisses her one.”
“Pink,” snarled Val, swishing the clubs, “you’re an absolute
louse
.”
“And what did my puss do?” asked Rhys comfortably. “A little more on the pectorals, Pink.”
“She give him the chorus girl’s salute—like she meant it, too. I mean, that was a
kiss
.”
“Very interesting,” said Val’s father, closing an eye.
Val flung one of the Indian clubs in the general direction of the rubbing table, and Pink calmly ducked and went on kneading his employer’s brown flesh. The club cracked against the far brick wall. Val sat down on the floor and wailed: “I might as well entertain my friends in the Hollywood Bowl!”
“Nice boy,” said her father. “Nice lad, Walter.”
“He’s an oomph!” snapped Val, jumping up. “He and his ‘social consciousness’! He makes me
sick
.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Pink, massaging. “There’s something in it. The little guy don’t get much of the breaks.”
“Pink, you keep out of this!”
“See what I mean?” complained Pink. “This master and man stuff. I should keep out of it. Why? Because I’m a wage slave. Turn over, Rhys.”
His employer docilely turned over and Pink set about trying to crack his spine. “You don’t have to see the boy, Val—ouch!”
“I should think,” said Val in a frigid voice, “that I’m old enough to solve my own problems—without interference.” And she flounced off.
And Walter
was
a problem. Sometimes he romped like a child, and at other times he positively snorted gloom. One moment he was trying to break her back in a movie kiss, and the next he was calling her names. And all because she wasn’t interested in labor movements and didn’t know a Left Wing from a Right, except in fried chicken! It was all very confusing, because of late Val had had practically to sit on her hands; they had developed a sort of incorporeal itch. Either they wanted to muss his unruly black hair and stroke his lips and run over his sandpaper cheeks—he
always
seemed to need a shave—or they yearned to hit him on the point of his dear longish nose.
The situation was complicated by the fact that Solomon Spaeth and her father had gone into business together. Rhys Jardin in business, after all these splendid idle years! Val could not decide whether she disliked rubicund Solly more for his oozy self than for what he was doing to her father. There were tedious conferences with lawyers, especially a wet-faced little one by the name of Ruhig—arguments and contracts and negotiations and things. Why, Rhys neglected his yachting, golf, and polo for three whole weeks—he barely had time for his Swedish exercises under Pink’s drill-sergeant direction! But that wasn’t the worst of it. It was what happened at
Sans Souci
after the contracts were signed.
Sans Souci
dated from the careless, golden days. It occupied half a dozen acres high in the Hollywood hills and was designed for exclusiveness, with a ten-foot fence of stout peeled-willow stakes all round to keep out hucksters and trailer tourists, and a secondary paling of giant royal palms to make their envious mouths water. Inside there were four dwellings of tile, stucco, plaster, and tinted glass which were supposed to be authentic Spanish and were not. The development was shaped like a saucer, with the four houses spacing the rim and all the rear terraces looking down upon the communal depression in the center, where the democratic architect had laid out a single immense swimming pool surrounded by rock gardens.
Rhys Jardin had bought one of the houses because the realtor was an old acquaintance in need—an empty gesture, for the bank foreclosed promptly after the depression began and the realtor shot his brains out by way of his mouth. Valerie thought the place ghastly, but their dingy expensive shack at Malibu and their bungalow-villa on the Santa Monica Palisades always seethed with people, so
Sans Souci
’s promise of privacy attracted her.
The second house was occupied by a male star with a passion for Dandie Dinmonts, whose barking made life a continuous agony until their owner suddenly married an English peeress who carried him and his beasts off to dazzle the British cinema public, leaving the house happily unoccupied except for brief annual visits.
The third house was tenanted for a time by a foreign motion picture director who promptly had an attack of
delirium tremens
at the edge of the pool; so that worked out beautifully, because he was whisked off to a sanitarium and never returned.
The fourth house had never been occupied at all. That is, until Solly Spaeth bought it from the bank “to be nearer my associate,” as he beamingly told Valerie, “your worthy and charming father.” And when the insufferable Solly moved in, Walter moved in, too.
There was the rub. Walter moved in. The creature was so
inconsistent
. He didn’t
have
to live there. In fact, he had been living alone in a furnished room in Los Angeles until his father took the
Sans Souci
estate. The Spaeths didn’t get along—small wonder, considering Walter’s ideas! But suddenly it was peaches and cream between them—for a whole week, anyway—with Solly bestowing his oleaginous benediction and Walter accepting it glumly and moving right in, drawing board, economic theories, and all. And there he was, only yards away at any given hour of the day or night, making life miserable… preaching, criticizing her charge accounts and décolletage and the cut of her bathing suits, fighting with his father like an alley cat, drawing inflammatory cartoons for the
Independent
under the unpleasant
nom de guerre of
W
ASP
, heatedly lecturing Rhys Jardin for his newly assumed “utilities overlordship,” whatever that meant, scowling at poor Pink and insulting Tommy and Dwight and Joey and all the other nice boys who kept hopefully bouncing back to
Sans Souci
… until she was so angry she almost didn’t want to return his kisses—
when
he kissed her, which wasn’t often; and then only, as he hatefully expressed it, “in a moment of animal weakness.”
And when Winni Moon came to live at the Spaeth house as Solly’s “protégée,” with her beastly beribboned chimp and a rawboned Swedish chaperon who was
supposed
to be her aunt—you would have thought a self-respecting moralist would move out
then
. But no, Walter hung on; and Valerie even suspected the impossible Winni of having designs on her benefactor’s son, from certain signs invisible to the Spaeths but quite clear to the unprejudiced female eye.
Sometimes, in the sacred privacy of her own rooms, Valerie would confide in little Roxie, her Chinese maid. “Do you know what?” she would say furiously.
“Yisss,” Roxie would say, combing out Val’s hair.
“It’s
fantastic
. I’m in love with the beast, damn him!”
Walter leaned on his horn until Frank, the day man, unlocked the gate. The crowd in the road was silent with a rather unpleasant silence. Five State troopers stood beside their motorcycles before
Sans Souci
, looking unhappy. One little man with the aura of a tradesman leaned glassy-eyed on the shaft of a homemade sign which said: “Pity The small Invester.” The crowd was composed of tradespeople, white-collar workers, laborers, small-business men. That, thought Walter grimly, accounted for the inactivity of the troopers; these solid citizens weren’t the usual agitating mob. Walter wondered how many of the five troopers had also lost money in Ohippi.
Driving through the gate and hearing Frank quickly clang it shut, Walter felt a little sick. These people knew him by now, and the name he bore. He did not blame them for glaring at him. He would not have blamed them if they had tossed the troopers aside and broken down the fence. He ran his six-cylinder coupé around to the Jardin house. More than a dozen cars were parked in the Jardin drive—sporty cars of the same breed as their owners, Walter thought bitterly. Valerie must be fiddling again—while Rome burned.