Genius Page 12

  “That must have been some discussion. Will she?”

  “Not unless she’s in the starring role.”

  “Which is?”

  “A peasant girl of eighteen.”

  “Maybe you could tamper with the script a bit and have her go for fifty. And then there’s always Mamacita.”

  “Don’t be facetious, dear boy. Can’t you see I’m desperate? By the way, you’ve done awfully well lately. I don’t suppose . . .”

  “Right! But what are you whining about? Fate and a flat tire have landed you the biggest sucker in the business—Clarice. I’m sure you can talk her in to it. You’re in clover.”

  “Oh, you fool, you fool, you fool!” Starr tipped the bottle back again and then set it down with a thump. “Are you so blind that you don’t recognize what that woman wants of me?”

  “Same thing they all do, I suppose. God knows why. Well, old Worthington Pomeroy thought she was pretty special. We all have to make sacrifices for our art. All cats are gray at night.”

  “Oh, yes, there’s that. But Clarice wants more. She wants marriage!”

  “Woo hoo!” Clarice called. The kitchen door opened, and she waved coyly. “Now that’s enough boy talk; you fellahs come right in and join we ladies. I understand by the way, Mr. Dennis—do you mind if I call you Paddy?”

  “Terribly.”

  “Well, I understand that you know my dear friend Bunty Maitland-Grim.”

  “Oh, are you friends?”

  “Well, I mean I’ve met up with her you know like on the Riviera and like at a party at my friend the Countess of . . .” One thing about Clarice was that she always answered every question in depth, dropping names of people, places, restaurants, hotels—complete with rates—and always a petite histoire concerned mostly with the financial or social connections of the names she was dropping. In the long run it turned out that she didn’t know Bunty at all, but would like to have us arrange that wild sweet coupling. But then Clarice never came right out and admitted not knowing anyone you cared to mention. If you asked her if she knew Queen Nefertiti, she’d tell you first that they’d lunched at Laserre last week and then work her way around to begging for an introduction.

  As a matter of fact, it was both unkind and unfair of me to compare Clarice Pomeroy with Bunty Maitland-Grim. While they share many irritating qualities, now that I know them both better I can see certain unsubtle differences, and Clarice suffers by comparison. Outlandish as Bunty’s getups are, she sometimes manages to look rather nice. Clarice is first, last, and always the retired madam. Both collect people furiously, but Bunty, with an eye to who might be interesting or amusing, gets the better ones. With Clarice it is grim social climbing—and not very high at that. She has no discrimination; her conquests consist of shabby or shadowy titles, the not-quite café society who are seated on the wrong side of El Morocco, and people who have nothing except money—they make a deadly crew. Bunty is extravagant and generous. Clarice is extravagant, but every penny she pays out is expected to bring back returns. Bunty is an ass and a fool. Clarice is an ass, but she’s no fool; she is grimly calculating. But I guess that the greatest difference is that Bunty, for all of her shrill silliness, has a good heart. Clarice has none at all. But then I neither knew nor cared about these differences at the time. My only aim was to get the hell out of Starr’s hornet’s nest.

  I gave my wife that on-your-feet-and-fast glance and said, “Well, thanks so much for the drink.”

  “Oh, you’re not going,” Starr said desperately. It was more a command than a question.

  “Oh, yes, we are. Good-by, Mrs. Pomeroy. Nice to see you again.”

  “Oh, but it’s not good-by. Now that I’ve found you, I’ll be darkening your doorstep again. As a matter of fact, sweetie,” she said, turning to my wife, “maybe you and I can do a little house hunting together.”

  “What?” my wife said.

  “Yes. I’m getting sick of the El Presidente. I have this dinky little suite, and I’d hate to tell you how much they charge for . . .”

  “You already have,” Starr said.

  “So I thought for the same amount of money I could find something real nice in this neighborhood.”

  “Oh, but would you be staying here long enough to make it worth while?” my wife asked, a certain tone of dismay entering her voice.

  “Keen sobby, as the Spanish say. After all, I have houses in . . .”

  “Santa Barbara, New York, and Monte Carlo,” I finished for her.

  “Uh, well, yes,” she said, “and there’s such a nice set down here.” She reeled off a roster of local names that comprise the outhouse aristocracy of the Federal District. I wasn’t surprised that she knew them.

  “Well, I’m afraid I don’t know much about local real estate,” my wife lied—and badly—edging toward the door.

  “Or maybe you and hubby can come in for a little drinkie tomorrow about eightish? I’m having the new ambassador from . . .”

  “Uh . . .” my wife began miserably. She has never learned the art of the social lie, although I tell her that the mark of a truly creative writer is to be able to make up a plausible little story on the spur of the moment. Mark Twain always used to preface his social lies with “Oh, I’d love to, but . . . ,” and in the space of those five words he could invent a perfectly valid excuse. It’s good practice for a novelist.

  “Unfortunately we’re having people in for dinner,” I said.

  “Or Tuesday, I’m giving a luncheon at Passy for my dear friend the Marquesa de . . .”

  “Uh . . .” my wife began.

  “Isn’t that too bad,” I said, “that’s the day we’re taking a picnic to the pyramids of Teotihuacán with Dr. and Miz Priddy.”

  “We’re what?” my wife said.

  “Or on Wednesday,” Mrs. Pomeroy continued, undaunted. “I’m having a dinner dance at the Jacaranda in honor of my beloved old chums, Baron and Baroness . . .”

  “What a shame,” I said, “that’s just the night we promised to go to the movies with our dear chums, Maximilian and Carlotta—Max and Lottie—Weintraub.” I was pleased to note that that one produced a stifled giggle out of Emily, a gasp from Starr, and yet slid over Mrs. Pomeroy like mineral oil.

  “We-ell,” she said, “I’m not doing anything on Thursday. . . .”

  “Oh, but we are, more’s the pity. Katy Walch is showing lantern slides of her trip through Yugoslavia.”

  “Well, on Friday,” she said determinedly, “I’m giving an intimate little . . .”

  “Isn’t that the night the Bourkes asked us to play bridge?”

  “Why, uh,” my wife began. Then she, too, got the bit between her teeth. “Bridge Friday, poker Saturday, and canasta on Sunday. The Bourkes are inveterate gamblers.”

  “Well, tell me,” Mrs. Pomeroy said dangerously, “what day or night during March are you free?”

  I knew I was licked. “Oh, hell,” I said, “we’ll come tomorrow.”

  “Dee-vine! Eightish in my suite at the El Presidente. Shall I send my car for you?”

  “Please don’t. Well, goodnight.” Seeing poor Starr’s ravaged face, I added, “Can’t I see you to your car, Mrs. Pomeroy?”

  “Oh, no. The night is young. Woo hoo hoo! I’ll just have another little drinkie and dish old times with Leander and Emmy. À demain!”

  Thoroughly trounced, we made our escape.

  “Well, I never,” my wife said in the privacy of our bedroom. “Unzip this, would you. I can’t imagine what single women do about zippers down the back.”

  “They could always wear the dresses hindside-to. You never what?”

  “Thank you. I never in all my born days met anything to equal Mrs. Pomeroy. I mean she’s a real, man-eating shark. Well, she’s not going to get me.”

  “Oh, yes, she is.”

  “Oh, no, she’s not. I’ll have a headache, a delicate female complaint, a sprained ankle—I’ll break a leg if I’ve got to.”

  “And be lying in be
d immobile where she can prey upon you all the easier? Give it up. She’s tougher than we are. Admit defeat gracefully.”

  “I’ll be rude.”

  “She can be ruder.”

  “But, except for another name to drop, what is the frightful woman after?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “No.”

  “She’s after Leander Starr.”

  VII

  “There’s just the faintest likelihood,” I said to my wife the next morning, “that I might get a little work done today. It’s been some time, what with one thing and another, since I’ve done a tap, and what with the children’s spring vacations just around the corner, the federal income taxes, the New York State income taxes, and a few frivolous whims such as eating regularly, we could use some money. Do you suppose that if I put my typewriter out in the patio and hung up a big Do Not Disturb sign anyone would pay any attention to it?”

  “I doubt it,” my wife said, “but you might try. At least I won’t be around to disturb you. I’m going into town to get my hair done, have a girly lunch with Katy, and then go to Sanborn’s for a lot of interesting things like emery boards and vitamins and 4711 soap, and maybe I’ll just see if Lila Bath has anything I can wear. What with Emily and Bunty and Lady Joyce and Mrs. Pomeroy switching around in their fine feathers, I’m feeling very much the little brown wren. Have we got any money?”

  “No, but the National City Bank does, or you can always cash a check at El Paseo if that’s where you’re having lunch. And promise me you won’t come back until you can do it in a purple Cadillac with a mink and sequin sweater.”

  “Here’s my cab. Good luck.”

  I put on my Mexican working clothes from the High Life (rhymes with Fig Leaf) haberdashery, gathered up my paper and typewriter, and went out to the patio. All was typically serene at Casa Ximinez. Guadalupe was feeding her daughter, the vigilante, and the cousin who sells lottery tickets in our kitchen. Out in front, Madame X and St. Regis were having a heated quarrel over the Hispano-Suiza with Mamacita joining in occasionally in Mayan. A mechanic from the local garage was acting as interpreter and referee. Perro was barking, and a crowd of two or three dozen interested spectators had collected around the car and the tow truck, participating to the fullest. The gist of the argument seemed to be that St. Regis had been woefully negligent versus the point of view that the Hispano-Suiza was thirty-five years old and in run-down condition. I suspected that the truth was somewhere in between.

  I set up office on the rickety little tile table under Loro and the jacaranda tree, and tried to reread what I had written some days before. It was a light, frothy piece for a famous women’s service magazine that will buy any piece of fiction, no matter how bad, as long as it’s wholesome and the author’s name is sufficiently well known to beef up the front cover. They have a something-for-everyone formula that is one hundred per cent foolproof. While the ladies in the fiction department put away about a quart of gin apiece at lunch every day before dashing off to their analysts, the stories they insist on printing are simon pure. Nobody smokes, drinks, swears, or has any problem deeper than will-virtuous-Penny-get-dashing-Hillary-away-from-scheming-Marcia. The readers all know that she will, in three thousand carefully chosen words, but they’ve been happily reading the same story for more than half a century and still gurgle with pleasure and excitement when goodness and honesty triumph over wickedness. In the nonfiction department, however, anything goes, and the closer to pornography the better. Sandwiched in between fashions, recipes, beauty hints, model rooms, and stories of such a purity as to make Our Sunday Visitor look like Playboy are articles that would curl your hair—“Syphilis in Our Nursery Schools,” “Is Your Daughter a Teen-Age Prostitute?” “The Orgasm and You.” Still, I don’t have to read the magazine, just write for it, and one sweet, simple story (prefaced by a warning to the subscribers that I am very wicked) pays an awful lot of tuition.

  I began reading:

  Salli1 dabbed a bit of powder over her tip-tilted nose2 and gave her reflection a long, violet3 gaze.

  “Gloriosky,” 4 she said to herself, “twenty-two5 tomorrow and still an old maid.6 If only Mr. Right would come along.”7

  Fitting a sheet of paper into the typewriter and a cigarette into my mouth, I wound up for the big scene of pure hilarity, where Salli tries to get to Mr. Right’s heart through his stomach—oh, let me tell you, there’s a chuckle on every line in the kitchenette episode, culminating in a girdle-splitting, button-popping explosion of the pressure cooker that leaves broccoli all over the ceiling. (The kicker, quite naturally, is that he hates broccoli but loves Salli. He’s just been too shy to admit to either.) But before I’d struck the first key, I was conscious of another presence. I turned and saw both Dr. and Miz Priddy. “Ah, Mr. Dennis. ‘Then, rising with Aurora’s light/The Muse invoked, sit down to write,’ as Swift said of poetry.”

  “This isn’t poetry. It happens to be crap. Good morning. Playing hookey from old Mexico U?”

  “A diller, a dollar, um, a ten o’clock scholar. No, uh, today I am absenting myself from my seminar to accompany Modesta to a nearby village—well off the beaten tourist track—where the natives have a most unusual private celebration of considerable ethnical . . .”

  “Good mawnin’ Mr. Dennis? Yes, this little village is about thirty miles away? It’s said to be very picturesque?”

  “Good morning, Mrs. Priddy,” I said. “Well, if it’s that far, you mustn’t let me detain you. Some of the roads in those out-of-the-way places can be . . .”

  “While discussing our little, um, peregrination with, uh, my, uh, associate and, uh, heheheh, co-conspirator, Dr. Moreno y Moreno, he told me of a little known short cut whereby one can save . . .”

  “The children all weah these masks? And there’s a procession from the cathedral around the Zócolo? And then they invoke the . . .”

  “A cathedral, by the way, Mr. Dennis, of more than routine interest in that it dates from the viceroyship of the Conde de Revilla Gigedo during the last quarter of the eighteenth century—the, uh, Age of Enlightenment, as it has been so aptly called—and contains a reliquary which is said to . . .”

  “Well, you must tell me all about it when you get back. But I don’t want to hold you up.”

  “Ah expict you know we’ve got a new tinant?” Miz Priddy said. “He seems very unusual to me?”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, Ah asked our maid to find out his nay-yum? It’s Guber?”

  I became suddenly more interested than usual in Miz Priddy’s endless total recall. “Oh?”

  “Yes. He doesn’t exactly seem to be ouah kind?” Although I resented being lumped with Dr. and Miz Priddy even if it was meant as a compliment, I was suddenly all ears. “He seems to be that Noo Yoke-Miami type? Ah don’t have to tell you what Ah mean? He took the very smallest apartment?” (The one Miz Priddy couldn’t get, as a matter of fact.) “Numbah Fo-ah? He haggled something awful about the price? That whole race does that?” (But certainly not with the ardor of that smiling Southern belle, Modesta Lee Drain Priddy.)

  “Speaking purely technically, Modesta, and in the interests of pure semantics, ‘race’ is the incorrect appellation . . .”

  I stopped listening and thought about poor Starr. Here he’d come all this way to avoid paying up his back taxes, and now the revenue boys had planted their own hawkshaw right across the patio. Not that I had much sympathy for Starr. I don’t like paying taxes any more than the next man, but at least I do it. Still, with all of his other problems, Mr. Guber did seem to be the last straw. I looked across the patio and saw Mr. Guber emerging from his apartment dressed in a seersucker suit that looked exactly like a pair of pajamas.

  “. . . and so, my dear, even after five thousand years of ritual circumcision, the prepuce is, uh, still, uh, very much in, uh . . .”

  “I believe this is Mr. Guber coming now,” I said, “perhaps you’d like to discuss his circumcision with him.”

  “Oh
, de-ah, you don’t suppose he heard?” Miz Priddy said with a fluttering of her Roman-striped shawl.

  “I’m sure I don’t know. Let’s ask him, shall we?” I said.

  “Heavens, Modesta, we must, um, needs make haste.” Consulting his watch, Dr. Priddy let fly with one last platitude. “To quote the wise old Virgil, ‘Sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus.’ Or loosely translated, ‘Meanwhile time is flying—flying never to . . .’”

  “I’m familiar with the quotation,” I said. “But it is flying and you’d better fly with it.” With that they were gone, Miz Priddy tripping over a stone as she looked guiltily back at Mr. Guber.

  Turning back to Salli and the broccoli, I was able to type nearly half of a side-splitting line before I was interrupted again. “Top of a morningue,” a voice said. I turned and there stood Mr. Guber, bifocals gleaming.

  “Oh, good morning, Mr. Guber,” I said guardedly. “I see that you’re staying here.”

  “Yes. It’s very costly, but I prefer to be within walkingue distance. On per diem expenses he can be very diff-fi-cult about cab fares.”

  “Who can?”

  “Uncle Sam.” Although I haven’t had so much as a parking violation in my entire lifetime, I shuddered.

  “Comfortable here at Casa Ximinez?” I asked.

  “Definitely. Very Spanish. Reminds me a good bit of the Roney Plaza.”

  “Well, yes,” I said. “Mexico was a Spanish colony. But then I guess Florida was, too,” I added lamely.

  “I haven’t ever had the pleasure of travelingue to Spain, but I was down in Cuba on a case fi’-six years ago. That’s very Spanish, too.”

  “Do you travel much?” I asked conversationally.

  “All the time.”

  “Just a vagabond, I suppose.”

  “No. Business. Tax business. Shirl, that’s my wife, says why have a lovely home in Teaneck—that’s in Jersey—if I’m never in it. But I say . . .”

  “Do you mean the government really sends men outside the country to . . . to . . .” I could hardly say it “. . . to collect income taxes?”