Mario Puzo - Fools die

She debated bringing her son back with her, but that would be impossible, so she left him with her ex-husband again. She felt miserable leaving him, but she was determined to make some money and some sort of career before setting up a household.

Her ex-husband was still obviously smitten by her charm. Her looks were better, more sophisticated. She turned him on deliberately and then brushed him off when he tried to get her to bed. He left in an ugly mood. She was contemptuous of him. She had truly loved him, and he had betrayed her with another woman when she was pregnant. He had refused the milk from her breast that she had wanted him to share with the baby.

“Wait a minute,” Merlyn said. “Give me that again.”

“What?” Janelle said. She grinned. Merlyn waited.

“Oh, I had great tits when I had the baby. And I was fascinated by the milk. I wanted him to taste it. I told you about it once.”

When she filed for divorce, she refused to accept alimony out of sheer contempt.

When she got back to her apartment in Hollywood, she found two messages on her phone service. One from Doran and the other from Theodore Lieverman

She called Doran first and got him in. He was surprised that she had gone back to Johnson City but didn’t ask a single question about their mutual friends. He was too intent, as usual, on what was important to him.

“Listen,” he said. “That Ted Lieverman is really gone on you. I’m not kidding. He’s madly in love, not just after your ass. If you play your cards right, you can marry twenty million dollars. He’s been trying to get in touch with you and I gave him your number. Call him back. You can be a queen.”

“He’s married,” Janelle said.

“The divorce comes through next month,” Doran said. “I checked him out. Re’s a very straight square guy. He gets one taste of you in bed and you got him and his millions forever.” All this was off the top of his head. Janelle was just one of his cards.

“You’re disgusting,” Janelle said.

Doran was at his most charming. “Ah, honey, come on. Sure we split. Still, you are the best piece of ass I ever had in my life. Better than all those Hollywood broads. I miss you. Believe me, I understand why you split. But that doesn’t mean we can’t stay friends. I’m trying to help, you have to grow up. Give this guy a chance, that’s all I ask.”

“OK, I’ll call him,” Janelle said.

She had never been concerned about money in the sense that she wanted to be rich. But now she thought about what money could do. She could bring her son to live with her and have servants to take care of him when she was working. She could study with the best teachers of drama. Gradually she had come to love acting. She knew finally that it was what she wanted to do with her life.

The love for acting was something she had not even told Doran, but he sensed it. She had taken countless plays and books on drama and film from the library and read them all. She enrolled in a little theater workshop whose director gave himself such airs of importance that she was amused, yet charmed. When he told her she was one of the best natural talents he had ever seen, she almost fell in love with him and quite naturally went to bed with him.

Charmless, stingy, rich, Theodore Lieverman held a golden key to so many doors that she called him. And arranged to meet him that night for dinner.

Janelle found Lieverman sweet, quiet and shy; she took the initiative. Finally she got him to talk about himself. Little things came out He had had twin sisters, a few years younger than he, who had both died in a plane crash. He had had a nervous breakdown from that tragedy. Now his wife wanted a divorce, a million dollars in cash and part of his holdings. Gradually he bared an emotionally deprived life– an economically rich boyhood which had left him weak and vulnerable. The only thing he was good at was making money. Re had a scheme to finance Doran’s movie that was foolproof. But the time had to be ripe, the investors played like fish. He, Lieverman, would throw in the pump-priming cash, the development money.

They went out nearly every night for two or three weeks, and he was always so nice and shy that Janelle finally became impatient. After all, he sent her flowers after each date. Re bought her a pin from Tiffany’s, a lighter from Gucci’s and an antique gold ring from Roberto’s. And he was madly in love with her. She tried to get him into bed and was astonished when he proved reluctant. She could only show her willingness, and then finally he asked her to go to New York and Puerto Rico with him. He had to go on a business trip for his firm. She understood that for some reason he could not make love to her, initially, in Los Angeles. Probably because of guilt feelings. Some men were like that. They could only be unfaithful when they were a thousand miles from their wives. The first time anyway. She found this amusing and interesting.

They stopped in New York, and he brought her to his business meetings. She saw him negotiating for the movie rights for a new novel coming out and a script written by a famous writer. He was shrewd, very low-key, and she saw here was his strength. But that first night they finally got to bed together in their suite at the Plaza and she learned one of the truths about Theodore Lieverman.

He was almost totally impotent. She was angry at first, feeling the lack in herself. She did everything she could and finally she made him get there. The next night was a little better. In Puerto Rico he was a little better still. But he was easily the most incompetent and boring lover she had ever had. She was glad to get back to Los Angeles. When he dropped her off at her apartment, he asked her to marry him. She said she’d think it over.

She had no intention of marrying him until Doran gave her a tongue-lashing. “Think it over? Think it over? Use your head,” he said. “The guy is crazy about you. You marry him. So you stick with him for a year. You come out with at least a million and he’ll still be in love with you. You’ll call your own shots. Your career has a hundred times better chance of going. Besides, through him, you’ll meet other rich guys. Guys that you’ll like better and maybe love. You can change your whole life, lust be bored for a year, hell, that’s not suffering. I wouldn’t ask you to suffer.”

It was like Doran to think that he was being very clever. That he was really opening Janelle’s eyes to the verities of life every woman knows or is taught from her cradle. But Doran recognized that Janelle really hated to do anything like that not because it was immoral but because she could not betray another human being in such a fashion. So cold-bloodedly. And also because she had such a zest for life that she couldn’t bear being bored for a year. But as Doran quickly pointed out, the chances were good that she would be bored that year even without Theodore to bring her down. And also she would really make poor Theodore happy for that year.

“You know, Janelle,” Doran said, “having you around on your worst day is better than having most people around on their best day.” It was one of the very few things he had said since his twelfth birthday that was sincere. Though self-serving.

But it was Theodore acting with uncommon aggressiveness who tipped the balance. He bought a beautiful two-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar house in Beverly Hills, with swimming pool, tennis court, two servants. He knew Janelle loved to play tennis, she had learned to play in California, had had a brief affair as a matter of course with her tennis teacher, a slim, beautiful blond young man who had to her astonishment billed her for his teaching. Later other women told her about California men. How they would have drinks in a bar, let you pay for your own drinks and then ask you to go to their apartments for the night. They wouldn’t even spring for the cab fare home. She enjoyed the tennis pro in bed and on the tennis court, and he had improved her performance in both areas. Eventually she tired of him because he dressed better than she did. Also, he batted right and left and he vamped her male as well as her female friends, which even Janelle, open-minded as she was, felt was stretching it.