Genius Page 11
“And that car?”
“The rewards of regularity. Millions of satisfied Wonderlax users who have, to quote some of my own brilliant advertising copy, ‘thrown off the shackles of constipation and joined the regulars.’ Surely you haven’t forgotten my television commercial featuring a distinguished gray-haired man in white tie and an aristocratic actress in a rented tiara sitting in an opera box:
HE: Cynthia, you look ravishing tonight.
SHE: Thank you, Gregory, and I’m simply adoring Tosca.
HE: You have such joie de vivre, Cynthia, joy of life, as it were. Everyone at the club marvels at how you do it. They say you’re a wonder.
SHE: Wonder is only half of my secret. The whole truth is Wonderlax. Every morning upon arising, my maid brings me a refreshing, foaming glass of Wonderlax to combat the problems of . . .”
“I remember,” my wife said. “Just hearing it made me quite ill.”
Suddenly Starr caught a glimpse of us at the window and shouted at us, waving both arms like a drowning man hailing a passing ship, “Dennis, dear boy. Just the one I wanted most to see. Do join us and this charming lady”—he all but choked on the words—“for a drink.”
“I’m sorry Leander, but . . .”
“I won’t take no for an answer. If you can’t join us, then we’ll join you.”
“If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em,” my wife murmured.
“We’re not dressed for it,” I said weakly, comparing my Mexican cotton shirt and slacks with the opulence of Starr’s morning suit, the confidence of Emily’s good little white, and the grandiloquence of Mrs. Pomeroy’s whatever-it-was.
“Nonsense, darling boy, come as you are. I need you,” he added pointedly.
“Please join us,” Emily said in a desperate tone of voice that made me feel momentarily sorry for her once again.
“Let me fix my face, and we’ll be over,” my wife said, totally defeated.
When we got to Starr’s apartment, the lamps in the vast living room were lighted, Emily was sitting uncomfortably on the edge of a high-backed Spanish chair, Mrs. Pomeroy had spread herself and her belongings on the sofa and was lavishly powdering her nose, and Starr was wandering about helplessly as though he’d never seen ice cubes or liquor or soda before. The room was furnished in the same sort of fake antiques as our apartment, plus a lot of life-sized carved wooden santos with missing hands and a tremendous silver chandelier—the only genuine thing in the place—which had undoubtedly been left over from Casa Ximinez’s convent days.
“. . . simply adore it, sweetie,” Mrs. Pomeroy was saying. “So quaint and old world. Woo hoo!”
Introductions were brief on Starr’s part, but the response was effusive on the part of Mrs. Pomeroy. “Oh, this is indeed an honor and a pleasure. I just can’t tell you how many hundreds of copies of your books I’ve purchased as gifts for my friends. I’ve got a copy of everything you ever wrote in every guestroom in every home I own—in Santa Barbara and New York and Monny Carlo and the apartments in London and Paruss and Rome.” It was an impressive list of real-estate holdings, and I tried to figure what my royalties would have been but gave it up, not knowing the number of guestrooms each establishment contained. “I’m not much of a reader, but I never miss one of your books. Woo hoo hoo! Folks all say you must be writing about me! Woo hoo!” I shuddered involuntarily. People have said a lot of unkind things about my books, but I’ve never been accused of writing science fiction.
“Thank you, Mrs. Pomeroy,” I said. “But you know we have met before.”
“Really, sweetie? Where at? Practically everybody I know is a sillebrutty, but I never would of forgotten you.”
“It was when Mr. Pomeroy was still alive. I used to write the advertising copy for Wonderlax. I remember what an active part you took in the campaign.”
She squinted near-sightedly at me through her stubby, beaded lashes and then said, “Why, sure, sweetie. Now I remember perfectly. And I said to Mr. Pomeroy, I said, ‘Daddy, mark my words, that young man’s a comer.’ Oh, I remember now.”
The Pomeroy memory was perhaps not as effective as the product. Fifteen years ago the first Mrs. Worthington Pomeroy had been an entirely different person—a fey, withdrawn, quiet woman in her sixties who spent most of her time pondering the ponderous works of Mary Baker Eddy, perhaps in an attempt to believe that Clarice did not exist. But Clarice did, indeed, exist—first as the late Mr. Pomeroy’s secretary, then as his mistress, and finally, blatantly, as his out-of-town wife. On all of Mr. Pomeroy’s business trips—and they were far and frequent—Clarice simply went along, all matched luggage and mutation mink, registered as Mrs. Pomeroy, leaving the genuine article behind with her well-worn copies of Science and Health.
It was in the old advertising agency where first we met. For some years Wonderlax had done a roaring trade as the poor man’s purge, and social barriers aside, one alimentary canal is pretty much like another. But Clarice wanted to change all that by giving America’s biggest laxative the social cachet of a cure at Baden-Baden. Useless for me to suggest to her that the elite did not discuss the condition of their bowels at polo matches, regattas, hunts, embassy balls, dinner parties, or any place else; the newspapers, magazines, billboards, and airwaves of the nation were soon jammed with people of distinction—pink coats, ball gowns, parures, and commodore’s stripes—discussing their new regularity joys. While I doubt that Society went flocking to its collective friendly-neighborhood pharmacist in search of amazing new Wonderlax (made with miraculous scientifically proven SH-70), it gave the poor a new self-respect to think that they shared the same problem and the same cure with the Vanderbilts, and business went on as usual. What was even more important was that it helped to assuage Clarice’s yearnings for Class. Fifteen years later, now as the authentic widow Pomeroy, she was still yearning—and she still had a long way to go.
Shortly after plain old Wonderlax had been internationally launched as the physic of the chic, the first Mrs. Pomeroy admitted error and died—“Went over,” I believe is the term—of a massive and mercifully quick stroke. A year to the day after that, Worthington Pomeroy, who was only a moderately dirty old man and helpless in the web of a tarantula like Clarice, laid a memorial wreath on the Pomeroy mausoleum and then hotfooted it to city hall to make an honest woman—and a rich one—of Clarice. She must have been good at reading electrocardiographs, if not books, because he died a month later of a coronary aboard the Clarice, if not aboard the lady herself, leaving her sole heiress to just everything.
Nor did the Worthington Pomeroy fortune begin and end in the bathroom. The old boy, whose only extravagance was Clarice, had invested shrewdly in stocks and bonds, annuities, and real estate with an eye to such artful tax dodges as municipals and oil wells and depreciables. Clarice had come a long way from the typing pool, but, as I said, she still had a long way to go.
I was roused from my remembrance of things past by Starr’s bellowing “Damn!” from the kitchen.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Maybe I can help our host. What’s happened to St. Regis?”
“Oh, that’s a long story, Mr. Dennis. Woo hoo!” Clarice’s capacity for self-amusement seemed boundless. She patted the sofa and said to my wife, “You jess sit next to me, sweetie, and we’ll let the gentlemen wait on us. I love that creation. It’s from It’ly I’ll bet.”
“No, I bought it at Ohrbach’s,” my wife said.
I went to the kitchen where Starr was wrestling with ice trays, like ours, firmly frozen into the refrigerator. He gave the machine a vicious kick and was rewarded by a cascade of melons rolling out and bouncing off his somewhat dusty shoes. This was followed by a volley of such eloquent profanity that I quickly shut the kitchen door if only to spare Emily’s young ears.
“Here, Leander,” I said. “Let me.”
“Oh, thank you, dear boy. I can’t tell you what a day this has been. One mauvais quartre d’heure after another.”
“I can imagine. And how are
things going with you and Emily?”
“It’s uphill work, my dear Dennis. The Matterhorn! She’s a pretty little thing but a stick. Well, what can you expect with such a mother?”
“Yes. A pity you couldn’t have raised her.”
“Oh, please, dear boy, don’t mention such a ghastly prospect—not even in jest. What a mechanical gift you have! So that’s how you get ice cubes out of those things and into the bucket. Amazing!”
“Even more amazing is how you and your daughter managed to set out for a simple afternoon at the bullfight and end up with nobody but nobody but Clarice Pomeroy. How do you manage to get into so much trouble with so little effort, Starr?”
“Oh, darling boy,” Starr said, lowering his voice to the merest death rattle, “this has been a day of the sheerest hell. First my shattering encounter with a child I haven’t seen since . . .”
“Sorry, Starr, that was your second encounter. First came Catalina Ximinez. What did you ever do with that blue garter belt?”
“Don’t be facetious, Dennis—or caddish. Miss Ximinez and I are very old friends. After all, I took her out of the jungle and made a star of her. She will always owe me an enormous debt of gratitude. Then there was the meeting with Emily—oh, the drain on my emotions! And then that ghastly bullfight—sitting in the blazing sun and watching them torment that unfortunate animal. I thought I’d be sick.”
“Why, Leander,” I said, pouring rum—which was all he had to serve—into the glasses, “I thought you were an old aficionado, considering the arena as a career, I believe you said.”
“Please, dear Dennis. We kept a cow when I was a boy in Iowa. Her name was Flossie. But she died of natural causes. Gas. And then driving home in all that traffic on the Insurgentes . . .”
“Yes?”
“Well, Catalina’s wretched old car broke down completely—tires or something like that. And then . . . Oh, I can’t go on.”
“You must,” I said. “I’m spellbound.”
“Then what should come along but this orchid calliope, containing none other than the one woman I have been trying to escape from for the past five years—Madame la Veuve Pomeroy.”
“Just how did you and Clarice happen to meet?”
“Oh, it was an ill-fated dinner party in Monte Carlo some years back. I was in the south of France doing a film, when some frightful Greek people—well, they were backing the picture, but otherwise they had no pretensions to culture. Frightful social climbers . . .”
“Well, if they thought that Clarice was up, they must have been pretty low.”
“Oh, they were. But . . . well, I mean they’d been so niggardly about the budget for the picture—three million stinking bucks, and then they wanted to pay it in drachmas.”
I was beginning to get the drift. “Go on,” I said.
“Well, there was Mrs. Pomeroy—oh, she was younger then, more attractive, slimmer. She gave me to understand that she was quite well off . . .”
“She gives everyone that impression, Starr. She’ll come right out and tell you if you have any doubts. So you sold her a bill of goods and . . .”
“I simply saw her home to her vulgar villa, accepted a glass of champagne—quite a decent year, but pink, malheureusement—and attempted to discuss with her the tax advantages of investing in my film.”
“And?”
“My God, that frightful woman has stuck to me like a fungus ever since.”
“She did invest?”
“No, caro. And when one thinks of all that gelt. Why, she’s wearing enough jewelry today—pour le sport, mind you—to cover me twice over.”
“You mean all that ice she’s wearing is real?”
“Yes, more’s the pity. If there’s a Korvette’s for diamonds, she’s found it. And now . . .”
“And now?”
“And now when I have the onus of Emily heavy upon me, what do I do but break down on the Insurgentes and run into the one woman I’ve been trying to avoid. Fate is too cruel.”
Much as I was enjoying the old fool’s discomfort, I couldn’t find it in my black heart to tell him that someone whom he was trying even harder to avoid—Mr. Guber of the Department of Internal Revenue—had also appeared.
“The drinks are ready,” I said, “shall we take them in before the ice melts?”
“Just a moment, carissimo, I’m not quite ready.” With that, he tipped up the rest of the bottle of Ron Castillo and emptied it. “Right,” he added miserably, “in the middle of the Insurgentes.”
“Right,” Mrs. Pomeroy was saying as I carried the tray of drinks into Starr’s living room, “in the middle of the Insurgentes. My dears, it was too amusing. Woo hoo hoo! I was coming home in my Caddy—I call my Cadillac my Caddy—from spending the weekend with Mimi and Pedro Gomez-Gottschalk in Cuernavaca—surely you must know the Gomez-Gottschalks, Mrs. Dennis, sweetie; she was a St. Louis Niemeyer, and he’s very big in Peruvian emeralds.”
“I don’t believe I do,” my wife said. “Thank you, I need this,” she added as I offered her a drink, in a tone that only husbands and wives understand.
“Well, sweetie, I’ll see to it that you meet them. They have this dee-vine villa right near Bobsie Hutton’s in Cuernavaca. I always call her Bobsie, isn’t that cute? Woo hoo hoo!” (Nobody who knows the former Barbara Hutton ever calls her any such thing, but that, of course, was beside the point with Clarice.) “I had the most dee-vine time. I’ll tell you who was there. . . .”
While she was telling us, I passed the drinks around. Emily gave me an especially grateful glance. If she had found us perhaps bohemian and non-Main Line earlier in the day, she now gazed on me as though I were Vere de Vere, and snobbish as it may sound, as compared to Mrs. Worthington Pomeroy I was.
“. . . and there was this funny old-fashion foreign-type car all steaming over, sweetie, and with a flat tire. So I picked up the telephone and said to my footman . . .”
Starr sank into a chair with a soft moan.
“And lo and behold whom should it be but my old beau Leander and his cute little girl. Emmy, do you know that your daddy never ever told me he had a cunning little Philadelphia day-butante for a daughter? I’n’t he naughty!”
“I . . . haven’t . . . come . . . out . . . yet . . . Mrs. . . . Pomeroy,” Emily said in measured tones. I began to dislike her again. But not quite as much as I disliked Clarice—after all, I had known Clarice when.
“But ummagine, to run inta my old sweetie-pie, Leander Starr, right on the Insurgentes. Why, I didn’t have any idea that he even was in Mexico. And that funny old car!”
“The Hispano-Suiza was always a superior motor,” Starr said. “At least in my day—and yours.”
“. . . adorable place. I mean it’s quaint. You gotta gimme the gran’ tour. Woo hoo hoo! I mean I’m staying in this dinky little suite in the El Presidente, and I’d hate to tellya what I’m paying per day.” Within thirty seconds Mrs. Pomeroy had overcome her reluctance and was able to tell us, to the last centavo, exactly what she was paying, including quarters for her car, chauffeur, footman, and maid. “But I kinda think I’d like to move out here. I mean, sweetie, it’s convenient and yet it’s quiet and a lot cheaper. And you don’t run into a lot of American tourists.”
“We’re American tourists,” my wife said. It was lost on Clarice.
“Well, so’m I, sweetie,” Clarice said democratically. “I don’t s’pose you know of any vacant house around here?”
As a matter of sorry fact, there were, at the time, five houses ranging from ten to forty rooms for rent within a stone’s throw of Casa Ximinez, including one, said to have belonged to Cortés, just around the corner. “I . . . I don’t really know,” my wife said, and choked into her drink.
“You know, sweetie, I believe I know your mother,” Clarice said to my wife, with a friendly pat on the thigh. “She’s a dear friend of my dearest pal, Nellie Poindexter Dane. We’ve lunched many times at the Colony—the Club, I mean, not the rest’rant.”
“My God,” he said, “isn’t there some way to get this . . . this woman deported?”
“No, Leander, but there are plenty of ways to get you invited to leave.”
He opened a new bottle of Ron Castillo, took a swig, and handed it to me. I did likewise.
“But, Dennis, my dear, I can’t leave. In the first place I’m in a little . . . uh . . . income-tax difficulty back in the States. . . .”
“So I understand.”
“And now I have this totally strange daughter suddenly descending on me with all sorts of adolescent problems to be ironed out. . . .”
“I’m sure you can cast yourself as a male Abigail van Buren.”
“I don’t even know what they are yet. We were going to have a long, quiet talk tonight—that is before Medusa came onto the scene. Now you can’t get a word in edgewise.”
“The problems will keep till tomorrow.”
“And then there’s this picture I’m planning to make down here. It could be another Yucatán Girl. It’s called Valley of the Vultures. . . .”
“Oh, it sounds like a perfect scream. Something light.” I took another swig and passed the bottle back to Starr.
“My dear young man, I promise you it is art, art, art. It could be done on a shoestring—just a few hundred thousand.”
“Pesos or dollars?”
“Dollars, of course. A small crew, a dozen professionals, and the rest inexperienced natives but with marvelous facial planes. I was discussing it with Catalina Ximinez last night. I even went so far as to suggest that she might invest in it.”