Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

And sitting with him, she knew only despair. She was certain that he thought her a fool, certain her love for him was flaming out of her eyes, certain he knew and was teasing her, certain everything she said was absurd and juvenile and hopeless. She lifted her glass and some of the soda spilled over onto the table, and she fumbled for a napkin and saw the smile on his face and felt graceless and stupidly infantile and thought, I should never have come, I should have said No. And then she thought of the person she wanted to live in sin with, David Regan in his New York apartment where he came home each night and had whiskey on the rocks, probably with some damn television actress or some fashion model. She mopped up the spilled soda and went rattling on about the partition of Berlin and how it was the crux of world affairs today, and about the hopelessness of disarmament, all the while convinced that he wasn’t listening to a word she said. She condemned herself for having loved him all these years. She wondered what it would be like to kiss him. His mouth looked so hard, but she knew it would be soft. She had kissed him the day he’d put out the fire, the day he’d saved her life. His cheek had been covered with soot, and she had kissed him and got herself all grimy, and fallen in love at once with the man in the swimming shorts all covered with soot, a man she had hardly even noticed before that day. And she had kissed him over the years, throwing her arms around his neck and hugging him and kissing him whenever he came up to Talmadge to visit. But she’d stopped kissing him when she became fourteen, and at fifteen she began calling him “David,” and now she longed with all her heart to kiss him again, but not in that childish way, he would know how to kiss, he lived in New York.

I can have babies, you know, she thought, talking all the while about the failure of the United States’ latest moon probe, bitterly complaining about the stupidity of an administration that made our failures public. I am capable of having babies, you know, David, I’m not quite the child you seem to think I am. Louise Pelzer had a baby when she was sixteen, you know, can’t you look at me as if I’m something more than an infant? And knowing this was exactly the way he looked at her, and longing to be alone with him, and plotting desperately, wondering if she could suggest a walk over to the bird sanctuary, knowing he would never never never in a million years kiss her or touch her, a boy touched me, you know, she thought, a boy actually touched me, these are not foam rubber, you know. And wondering why he wanted to go to Los Angeles when the bomb fell, and thinking, Oh damn you, David, I will be seventeen in November, you know, that’s not very far away, you know, David, oh damn you, you are such a cruddy creep.

That November, Gillian Burke came in from the beach driving her sister’s convertible, a gray Thunderbird with the top down. She had figured on a forty-minute drive to the studio, but the traffic was unusually heavy, and even before she reached Brentwood, she knew she would be late. Impatiently, she waited out the traffic light near the shopping center, her fingers moving impatiently on the wheel. The matrons were out in force, wearing their tapered slacks and sweaters, peering into shop windows, idly crossing the street, their hair done in emulation of the latest Hollywood goddesses, it was amazing how many Kim Novaks and Ava Gardners walked the streets of the suburbs surrounding Hollywood.

There must be something wrong with that light, she thought, and in that instant it turned to green. She stepped on the accelerator. A woman had begun crossing the street, and Gillian almost tooted the horn at her before she remembered the California law, which she always forgot when she was in any kind of hurry. She put on her brakes and waited for the woman to cross. Take all your good sweet time, she thought. Go right ahead. Impatiently, she shifted to first again, stepped on the gas, and caught another red light not three blocks from the last one. At this rate, she thought, I should reach the studio by midnight. The light changed. She stepped on the gas and concentrated on making up for lost time, rushing past U.C.L.A. and the Bel Air gates, catching another red light on Beverly Glen. This was a conspiracy, she was certain of it. Someone was manipulating those lights. Someone had made a little voodoo doll of her, and was determined she would be not only late but hopelessly late. She resigned herself to her fate. There was no sense in getting killed in a traffic accident. No job was that important.

The traffic thickened the moment she entered the Strip. It always seemed to thicken there, but perhaps the reaction was purely psychological, perhaps the clutter of neon tubing, the shrieking signs for the strip joints, the restaurant and night-club awnings, the damn Las Vegas cowgirl towering over everything with her bent knee and her boots and hat made everything seem tight and cramped and suddenly bottlenecked. Psychological, hell, she thought. The traffic does get impossible here, and I hate this drive. I should have taken Santa Monica Boulevard, well, it’s too late to think of that now. Let’s go, please. The light is green, madam. Which indicates that it’s now legal and proper to set your vehicle in motion. Stop daydreaming, madam. That man on the sidewalk is not Jack Benny.

She smiled, remembering her sister’s story. Monica had been plagued by visitors from New York who automatically looked her up the moment they reached the Coast. Fortunately, her house in Malibu was fairly distant from the hotels in Los Angeles proper, or Hollywood, or even Beverly Hills, and most visitors were discouraged by the long drive. But she’d never been able to escape the callers entirely, and one girl in particular was convinced that Monica knew every star in Hollywood intimately and could point out their homes on demand. Monica had been a chemistry major in college and was working for a chemical research laboratory, and hadn’t the slightest interest in where or even how the stars lived. But the girl kept asking, “When are you going to show me the stars’ homes?” and Monica soon realized that the only way to get rid of her was to show her where the damn stars lived — if only she knew where. She had passed the old ladies selling maps on Sunset Boulevard a thousand times, sitting on their camp chairs, wearing wide-brimmed straw hats, holding signs that blatantly advertised invasion of privacy for twenty-five cents — but she refused to behave like a tourist in a town she’d come to think of as her home. She would not have bought one of those maps if her life depended on it. Instead, she climbed into the T-bird and drove her visitor through the last Bel Air gate and past the Bel Air Hotel and up through the hills, and every time she saw a house that looked elegant — and they all looked rather elegant — she said, “That’s Cary Grant’s house,” or “That’s Loretta Young’s house,” or “That’s Jack Benny’s house,” and her visitor was completely satisfied. Gillian, delighted with the story, asked Monica what she’d have done if Jack Benny had suddenly stepped out of the house she’d claimed was his.

“I wouldn’t have skipped a beat,” Monica said. “I’d have waved and said, ‘Hello, there, Jack.’”

The anecdote became an inside joke between Gillian and her sister. If ever they were driving past Bel Air together, one would automatically say, “That’s Jack Benny’s house,” and the other would instantly wave and shout, “Hello, there, Jack.”

The joke reached its climax when they were double-dating together one night. Gillian’s date was a contract player at Metro who claimed a familiarity with most of the stars. As they drove through Brentwood, he pointed out the land that belonged to Van Heflin.