Youngblood hawke, p.20
Youngblood Hawke, page 20
"Now what will I call you? It seems to me I had a name for you, a pretty good one."
Hawke said, with considerable embarrassment, "I remember, if you don't. Bloody."
Frieda Winter laughed, a low quiet laugh, and glanced mechanically around at the other tables. "Well that sounds like the Christmas spirit, doesn't it? Sausages and corn fritters in a shut-up house and all that. No, it won't do for an ordinary weekday, will it? What shall it be? Not Youngblood."
"No, only strangers trying to get friendly in a hurry call me that. And Hollywood people. For some reason they love it. My name is Arthur, Frieda."
"Then Arthur it is. Now tell me, this man Hoag down in Kentucky—why is he bothering to manage your money for you?"
"I think it flatters his vanity to be associated with a live novelist. He's an old college classmate of mine. I think too he enjoys patronizing me with his superior wisdom about real estate. Besides, on however small a scale, I'm supplying him with venture capital."
Frieda spun her lighter swiftly. "By and large people like that are out for themselves. It might not be a bad thing, somewhere along the line, if Paul looked into your Mr. Hoag. There are painless and effective ways of checking on business men."
Hawke didn't like the idea, but he realized the prudence of it. "That would be very kind of him."
The food came: cold poached salmon for both of them, garnished with garden vegetables. The captain poured a sip of white wine into Hawke's glass, gravely keeping up the New York fiction that an American can tell one wine from another. Hawke just as gravely sipped, and nodded. He had simply ordered the most expensive number in the white Burgundies, and its taste was excellent.
Frieda said, "Well, what do we drink to? Shall we say to literature, and to hell with onions, lard, and real estate?"
"To money, so long as it's honestly earned," Hawke said.
"Nothing doing. I won't drink to money, and I'm damned if you will. Here's to your book, Arthur, and here's to my book—for which I'm more grateful than I can say."
"The book, then," Hawke said, and they drank.
For a few minutes they ate eagerly, laughing at each other.
"Now, a couple of questions," Frieda said. "You lost me, cutting thirty thousand dollars down to eight. Where did all that money go, again?"
"For one thing Prince House took half."
"Half!"
"Jay maintains stoutly that it's standard for a first novel."
"Arthur, Jay Prince drives hard bargains, everybody knows that. But that's robbery."
"He gave me a printed form contract and I signed it. What's more I tied up two more books on that formula."
"Christ! Didn't you have an agent or a lawyer?"
"No. Being fresh down out of the hills, still full of my last meal of fried squirrels, as you might say, I naturally was playing the suave man of the world. I've had two arguments with Jay about that contract since. One last Christmas, right after Ferdie Lax told me something about movie percentages. Jay put me off with that heavy joviality of his—we wouldn't have any trouble, men of good will could always get together, let's get the book published and then we'll see—that kind of thing. Then three days ago, when they sent me that first book off the press, I went down and talked to him again. I lost that argument too. You see he's so damned pleasant about it. So I'm pleasant and nothing gets changed, nothing on paper. Just cheerful chatter about the future. Meantime he's collected my thirteen-plus thousand dollars. I owed it to him, and I was honor bound to give it to him. In return I got vague talk of a new contract, and maybe a refund if the book is a hit. It's more than he advanced me on all three books. And the contract says I owe him half the movie rights of two more books."
Frieda's arched brows contracted in a fierce way, emphasizing the slant of her eyes. She looked almost Chinese. "You'll have to get ugly with Jay."
"I'm becoming aware of that."
"Get an agent to do your arguing for you. Their business is getting ugly when necessary. I can recommend several."
"Well, I thought maybe I'd get hold of Ferdie Lax."
Frieda ate in silence for a little while. "That's all right. Ferdie can be as jovial a thug as Jay and then some. Of course you need an Eastern agent for magazine rights and that kind of thing, but Ferdie can arrange that. You'll have to give him ten percent of everything you earn."
"I know."
"And Ferdie is no Mahatma Gandhi, you understand. All he wants is money. He makes money by being on your side. Ferdie Lax is okay, Arthur."
The captain was filling her glass. "Everything all right, Mrs. Winter?"
"Fine. Fred, this young man is a new and important novelist, Youngblood Hawke."
The captain, with a sidewise dip of the head, and a small bow, said, "Yes, sair, Mr. Hawke," and refilled his glass too. When he left Frieda said, "It helps when they know your name. Sometimes you want a reservation at the last minute."
"Seems to me all I'd have to say is I'm a friend of Mrs. Winter."
"Oh well. This is around the corner from home. I use it a lot for lunch." She drank wine and laughed. "I must say I've fallen into quite a different vein than I intended. Sitting here in my old business corner and all. We haven't talked about anything but money, have we?"
"No. It's been all onions and lard, so far."
"You might as well be having lunch with Paul. Let's beat it. I want my coffee, and then I want to see where you work. The room without a telephone."
"Frieda, it's a hole, it's almost stagey it's so squalid. It's hot and it smells and I left it in a disgusting mess. I wouldn't take a dog up there, let alone Frieda Winter of Fifth Avenue."
"Oh, damn that Frieda Winter of Fifth Avenue, will you? I won't be patronized just because you don't have money, you're goddamn anxious for money, yourself, Bloody my boy." She was glaring at him from under her brows like an offended cat, the gray eyes wide and menacing. It was a droll, delightful effect.
Grinning, he said, "So I'm Bloody again."
Her anger, real or assumed, dissolved into amusement. What a face this woman had! She said, "It just came out. I guess because you were being a bloody bore. We'll have our coffee and then we're going to look at young Balzac's garret, do you hear?"
"Yes, Mrs. Winter," Hawke said.
She put her fingers for a moment on his clasped hands on the table. "Okay," she said. "That's settled."
When the captain brought the check he laid it unhesitatingly beside Frieda. She started to sign, but Hawke whisked the check from under her pen, saying, "Are you out of your mind?"
She said, "Look, Bloody, I'm not going to play snatch-the-check with you. But don't be a fool. I run an account here. It's all expenses for me. I eat on the government and I'm damn well entitled to do so with the taxes I pay. Give me the check."
"Where I come from men still pay if they take a lady to lunch."
"Oh, look, this is a business lunch, I exploit every writer I know, one way or another, and all I'm really after is the dramatic rights to your next novel. Don't you know that? Please give me the check and stop being a bully."
He gave her the check; it seemed the least ridiculous thing to do, though the little incident was not pleasant. At bottom he was enough of a Hovey boy still to be relieved at saving twenty-seven dollars, the price he had seen scrawled on the back of the check. "So much for the honor of Southern manhood," he muttered.
She signed the check cheerfully. "The Civil War didn't kill it, but the income tax did," she said. "Let's get on to your garret."
3
Going up the stairs he was conscious as never before of the grime, the gloom, the broken steps, the grooves worn by the feet of sweatshop workers in other days. "Don't say I didn't warn you, Frieda. Just remember I pay seventeen dollars a month for this."
"I'll remember."
The wide metal door came open with its usual horrible rasp, after a few tugs. Frieda hesitated in the doorway, head down, glancing around with dilated eyes. "I can't see anything."
He went in and switched on the overhead light, a fiercely glaring two-hundred watt bulb hanging on a long cord and shaded with a cone of green tin.
She came in with slow, uncertain steps, shading her eyes with a gloved hand. "What the devil do you have that floodlight for?"
"Spite. My landlord supplied a twenty-five watt bulb. I get electricity thrown in. I don't think he's making a nickel on me. He wants me to leave, but he's afraid I'd throw him down the stairs, so he doesn't press it. I talk real Southern when he comes around. He thinks I distill moonshine here and have a shotgun hidden away." He was talking with nervous haste while the elegant woman stood with her feet together, her purse under her arm, in the middle of the room, looking at the tumbled mattress-bed on the floor, the cardboard box half full of empty cans and bottles, the open wooden footlocker which was bureau, closet, and laundry hamper, the books scattered pell mell, the old newspapers and magazines. Her eyes came to a stop on the clothes line stretching from an overhead pipe to the hasp on a window, strung with shirts, underwear and socks. "Ye gods, Bloody, you do your own washing?"
"Why should I waste five or ten dollars a week to get my shirts so starched they rub my neck raw? Seen enough, Frieda?" He turned on the desk lamp and switched off the overhead blaze. "Sit down. That's the chair in which I write. It's an honorable chair."
She sat, taking off her gloves and the jacket of her suit. It was stifling in the room. "Arthur, I've known many bachelors and various bizarre characters. There's nothing new about this to me. If it suits you, all right."
"It suits my present income."
"Couldn't you spend a little of the money you're speculating on onions and lard to rent a little furnished apartment, say over on Third Avenue? Want me to dig something up for you?"
"I know those places. Jeanie Green has one on Third and Sixty-fifth. I'll tell you, Frieda, that seems worse to me than this. Here I'm frankly holing up. I can bide my time."
"The prince disguised as a beggar."
"If you will. The prince disguised as a beggar."
Frieda said, "You keep your desk neat, at least. Remarkably so." She was peering with open curiosity at the squared-off files, the dictionary and the thesaurus, the yellow pad centered on the desk with the pen upright in the middle of it, and the cheap watch centered on the base of the pen holder.
"That's my gun mount."
"Jeanne Green . . . that's the girl at Prince House, isn't it? The one who corrects manuscripts?"
"Yes."
"She seemed extremely bright."
"She's brilliant. She's a find. I'm using her instead of Karl Fry to read this book as I go along."
"I thought she was very pretty."
"She is. Moody, severe, fits of acute melancholia, but damned attractive."
"Maybe you should marry her." With a swift charming gesture of one hand Frieda seemed to sweep the abominable loft room clean.
"I don't want a wife and children just yet. I have work to do. In this hole I get it done."
"Is Jeanie Green in love with you?"
"You can be pretty direct, Frieda."
"So I've been told."
"Well, every man knows he's irresistible and every woman he meets is in love with him, unless there's something wrong with her. If Jeanie isn't in love with me she should be, obviously."
"And so should I, eh?"
This knocked him off balance. He was enjoying this turn of the conversation, it was thrilling, and he was afraid of it too. It was as though he were in a roller-coaster car, clanking slowly up to the high point for the plunge. "You're a happily married woman. That's different."
Frieda Winter stood, straightened her skirt, and came to him. He was leaning against the desk. She faced him, standing very close, and looked at him, from under her brows. "You're quite right, Bloody, I'm a happily married woman. Accidents don't count, and Christmas comes but once a year." She put both hands on the back of his neck, without moving closer. "All the same I think we can be friends, and I think I can do you some good, maybe."
"You can? What good?" He could scarcely get out the words. His hands went to her waist, to the silken frilled shirt under her open jacket. He held her lightly. She was a thin woman; he could feel the ridges of her ribs. Mrs. Winter had slight breasts, and a small figure that could hardly be called sexy. There was a fascination in her bony pretty face, and in the great sombre eyes full of intelligence and zest.
She said, "Well, I'll tell you, Othello my lad, Venice is a devious town with crooked streets and canals and byways, and it's pretty easy to get lost, or garrotted, or drowned. I think I can guide you around a bit, until you get the hang of it."
He tried to pull her toward him. She resisted, and her firm arched resistance—the thin body taut in his hands, the big gray eyes looking straight into his—was more pleasing than a slovenly yielding would have been. Frieda said, "We've got things to do. Let's get out of this place. I've seen it. I don't like it." She put her strong hands on his forearms and broke free. "Where's the nearest telephone?"
Hawke had eaten a couple of expensive dinners in the grill room of The Park Tower, where Frieda now took him, after making a long phone call in which she seemed to be talking French most of the time. The Park Tower was one of the grand apartment hotels that lined Central Park South, thrusting thirty stories and more into the air. "What are we going in here for?" Hawke said as he paid the taxidriver.
"Just come along," Frieda said, "and mind your manners. This man you're going to meet is awesome at first, but he's really a darling. Just be yourself. He can see through any pose. He posed all the poses before you were born."
"Who is it?"
"You'll know him." She was obviously enjoying the little mystification. The elevator took them up twenty-five floors. Hawke was staggered, literally so, when Frieda rang a bell and the door was opened by Georges Feydal. The actor was in maroon silk pajamas and his long brown hair, streaked thickly with gray, stood in a mussed tangle on his head, a few straight locks falling into his eyes. "Frieda, I look horrible. Hello," he said to Hawke, drawing aside to let the young man in. His big belly showed naked and hairy through carelessly tied pajama bottoms. He was even fatter than he looked in the movies; but his church organ voice, with the slight French accent, was as unmistakable, as familiar to Hawke, as his own mother's. This was possibly the most recognizable person, and the most recognizable voice in the world: the great French actor, son of another great French actor and a British actress; Georges Feydal, first a star in the Comedie Française, then a Parisian actor-manager, then a Hollywood movie star; with a face of unforgettable gargoyle ugliness, he had yet played in love movies in his younger years opposite Garbo, and Dietrich, and Shearer and Karen; then he had been thin; now a fat man, a player of character parts, he was no less famous, no less admired. Feydal was in a Broadway play that was about to close, one of the catastrophes of the spring season, a translated French whimsy about Socrates.
The actor picked up a telephone lying off its hook, motioning Frieda and Hawke to chairs with a light kingly gesture. "Yes, now what else is there? No, no, this is my breakfast. Do you have some bouillabaisse? Very good. Bouillabaisse, and two double dry martinis, and—" he looked to Frieda and Hawke. Frieda shook her head. "That's all. Thank you." He sank in an armchair, and closed his eyes. Hawke became aware of a typewriter clicking behind the closed bedroom door.
Frieda said, "I suppose I was a beast to wake you up, but really, Georges, it's three in the afternoon."
Feydal opened his eyes, shrugged, and smiled at Hawke. "I was up till dawn, a ridiculous party. Unwinding after a performance to a hundred empty rows—so. You are the young man who wrote Alms for Oblivion. I hear great things about it."
Frieda said, "From whom?"
"Roberto came backstage last week. He's very high on it. Imagine, Anne's going to play an old woman."
"It's about time," Frieda said.
He turned to Hawke. "Is there a part in it for me? The kind old uncle, the villainous banker? Roberto said there isn't, but I never know when he's bargaining or telling the truth. Have you read it, Frieda?"
"Not yet. I just got an advance copy today." She glanced at Hawke, who could not help smiling at her. He saw the Frenchman look from his face to Frieda's, and he felt that Feydal could at this moment write a short memorandum describing how things stood between him and Frieda, exact to a hair.
His slight embarrassment prompted him to talk. "I think there are many good parts in my book, but I don't think there is a part for Georges Feydal."
The actor laughed shortly, his thick lips hardly opening, and he blinked heavy lids over his bloodshot twinkling eyes. "My dear Mr. Hawke, Georges Feydal as of eleven-fifteen tomorrow night will be an out-of-work actor looking for a job, and not at all proud or hard to get."
"Poor fellow," Frieda said, "with only a four-month platform tour booked solid, and what average take per night?"
"Frieda, my darling, I'm deeply grateful to you for booking me into the concert circuit, it fills in for the summer, but then what happens? And by the time I pay your commissions and expenses all along the line you know what it boils down to."
"Yes, a goddamned fortune," Frieda said.
"Pennies," Feydal said, his eyes twinkling at Hawke. "Pennies thrown in my hat at the street corner."
The typewriter had stopped clicking. A tall young man came out of the bedroom, carrying a few yellow sheets of paper. He had a mass of wavy black hair, manly features like a statue's, healthy brown skin, a small waist, a stomach flat as a wall, and perfectly cut clothes: fawn-colored jacket, dove-colored slacks, gray suède shoes, and the thick doubled cuffs of his white shirt were fastened with huge black stone links. He would have seemed unreal, a walking dummy, so perfectly was he formed and turned out, except for an unpleasant pout on his full mouth, a puffy look about his brilliant blue eyes, and a grossness in his jaw.
"Already?" Feydal said. "You know Frieda. Youngblood Hawke—Pierce Carmian." He took the sheets. "Excuse me," he said to Hawke, putting on thick glasses and beginning to read, pencil in hand. Silence ensued. Feydal now and then emitted a groan, drawing his pencil through some lines and scrawling notes in the margins. Carmian lit and smoked a cigarette, making a show of long bony brown fingers, lounging on the arm of Feydal's chair. The waiter came. Carmian admitted him, told him where to put the table, signed the check, and handed Feydal one of the brimming double martinis in a wide shallow glass. The actor drained it absent-mindedly. "Pierce, this is much, much better, I think now you have a second act curtain." Feydal took off the glasses and handed the sheets to the playwright, who displayed gleaming teeth in a pleased smile.
