The Deer Park Read online

  “What are you thinking, cupcake?” she would say afterward, chucking the old chorus girl under the chin.

  “You’re tremendous,” her friend would say adoringly.

  “Oh, Dorothea’s great,” the garage owner would rumble.

  “Angel, make me a small Martin,” Dorothea would say, and hand her glass to someone.

  Dorothea had lasted. If her night-club days were finished, if her big affairs were part of the past, she was still in fine shape. She had her house, she had her court, she had money in the bank; men still sent airplanes for her. Yet when Dorothea was very drunk, she was violent too. She always had liquor inside her, she was always restless, she used up people and time—you could go to her place for breakfast and eat scrambled eggs at four in the afternoon after hours of drinking—but unless she was very drunk, Dorothea was agreeable. Very drunk, she was unmanageable; she abused people, she threw things. Once she was even slapped around by a man and woman in a roadside brawl. A really drunken evening had to end with Dorothea screaming, “Get out, get out you son of a bitch before I kill you.” She could say it to anybody in the court, it did not matter who; she was most fond of saying it to one of her rich men friends. She hated to be alone, however, and such tantrums were rare. One could spend whole days with her, and all of the night, and at six in the morning when Dorothea was ready for bed, she was still coaxing us in her rough deep voice to stay a little longer. So automatic became the habit, that on those week ends and odd nights when Dorothea was away on one of her dates, the court still gathered at The Hangover, still drank in her pine-paneled den. Nobody knew how to stay away. Hours before going there, I could sense the worry that there was no other way to spend the evening.

  About a month after I met her, Dorothea settled on one rich man. His name was Martin Pelley, and he had a pear-shaped head, a dark jowl, and sad eyes. He had made a lot of money in oil wells, but there was something apologetic about him, as if he were explaining, “I learned how to make money, but I never learned nothing else.” Recently, his second marriage had been finished off in Desert D’Or. I remember his wife who was a platinum blonde with a neck corded by tension. They had had fights. You could not go by Pelley’s suite at the Yacht Club without hearing the terrific abuse she yelled at him. They were now getting a quick Mexican divorce, and Martin Pelley had found his way to The Hangover. He adored Dorothea. His big body would sit heavily in an armchair through the evening, he would chuckle at the quips of the court, he would have an anxious scowl on his forehead as though looking for some new way to win our approval. When Ghost was played, he was the first to go out. “I’m a bonehead for this sort of stuff,” he would say easily. “I’m not quick like Dorothea.”

  All the same, he was a spender. His preference was to invite everybody out from The Hangover for steak and drinks at a desert roadhouse, and when he was drunk he was very genial. Any young woman he called “Daughter,” and he would tell us over and over again, “I had a little girl, you see, by my first marriage. The cunningest little bugger. She died, age of six.”

  “You got to get rid of it,” Dorothea would say.

  “Ah, I just think about her once in a while.”

  For two weeks he was at Dorothea’s every night. The first time he found her out for the evening, he paced the floor and did not hear a word we said. The court learned from Dorothea about the fight which followed.

  “You son of a bitch,” Dorothea said, “nobody owns me.”

  “What are you, a tramp?” he asked her. “I thought you had character.” He gripped her shoulder. “You always said you wanted to get married again and have kids.” This was one of Dorothea’s favorite themes.

  She twisted herself loose. “Get your hooks off me. What do you think, you’re throwing some pipes around?”

  “I want to marry you.”

  “Go blow.”

  The quarrel ended with Pelley taking Dorothea to bed. Nothing happened.

  He could not get it out of his mind. He apologized to Dorothea again and again. The apology was painted on his face. I overheard them one night in a corner, and I think he wanted me to overhear for he did not speak softly. “I used to be great, you see,” he told her. “When I was a kid, I’d do it so much I got a strain, I had to see a doctor, that’s the truth. I know there’s no way you can believe me, but I was great.”

  Dorothea cuddled to him, her bold eyes full of sympathy. “For Christ’s sakes, Marty, I don’t hold it against you.”

  “I got a strain. You don’t believe me?”

  “Sure, I believe you.”

  “Dorothea, you’re a champ.” He held her wrists in his large paws. “I tell you, I was great. I’ll be great again.”

  “There’s no rush. Listen, there was a guy I knew. He was the greatest in the hay, and in the beginning he was the same as you.”

  Dorothea grew tender toward him. Their romance began on the sure ground of his incapacity. Pelley would have been absorbed into the court at The Hangover if it weren’t for the many times he insisted on standing treat. Dorothea’s evenings with other men came to an end. Now her rich friends were asked to visit the house, and hours were spent at Ghost with Pelley working sullenly against the new visitor. Finally, everybody accepted him as Dorothea’s boy friend. There even came the night when the fat ex-chorus girl telephoned me and announced excitedly, “Marty made it. He and Dorothea finally made it. They want to celebrate.” When I didn’t answer immediately, she added, “Don’t you even want to know how it was?”

  “What do I care?” I said.

  “Dorothea didn’t tell me, but she kind of hinted it was just a beginning.”

  We celebrated that night. Pelley acted like a new father passing out cigars. He not only bought champagne for everybody, but he nursed Dorothea through the meal as if she had just left the hospital. “You’re a bunch of champs,” he said to the people at the table, “you’re all champs, I never knew such champs,” including by this the fat show girl, the garage owner, the realtor, the wives, the press agent, myself, all the friends of Dorothea, even the drunk O’Faye who once had been her husband.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THAT WAS A STORY. When I thought of it, I would be sorry for O’Faye. A natty little sport with a smile and a hair-line mustache, I could never believe that years ago there were nights when Dorothea wept because she had lost him.

  She was seventeen when they met, and he was a vaudeville hoofer on the crest of a vogue. Dorothea lived with him, she was crazy about him as she swore, worked out song-and-dance routines to support the act they did together, and suffered his cheating, for he liked a different girl every night. They got nowhere together; she was always hinting that she wanted to settle down, to have children, and he would smile and say she was too young and ask her to look at the silk shirt he had bought that day. She thought how to save money and he thought how to spend it. When she found herself pregnant, he gave her two hundred dollars in cash, left the address of a doctor friend, and moved his belongings out.

  Dorothea sang in night clubs, she had a pattering little song for trade-mark: “I’m Sighin’ For My Scion Who’s a Yale Man,” and her audiences loved it. Her name was well known, she was nineteen and beautiful, and she was secretly pregnant again. That was the passing affair with the passing European prince and it delighted a pure vein in her. She was the janitor’s daughter and she now carried royal blood. She could not bring herself to extinguish such a creation. Three months went by, four months went by, it was much too late. O’Faye saved her. His vogue running down, his drinking begun, he dropped in to see her one day, and sympathized with her predicament. O’Faye was a rolling stone, he would never marry a girl who carried his own child, but he considered it right to help a friend out of her trouble. They were quickly married, and as quickly divorced, and her child had a name. Marion O’Faye she called him, and starred in a musical comedy that year. Later, years later, after Dorothea had made money and lost it and made it again, when she was retired in Desert D’Or, her go
ssip column sold and her court formed, O’Faye showed up again. He was a wreck, no doubt of that. His hands shook, his voice had lost its size, his working days were over. Dorothea was pleased to take him in; she hated to owe a debt. He had lived at The Hangover ever since, and she gave him a modest allowance. Between Marion Faye the son (as a boy he had dropped the “O”) and the nominal father, there was nothing at all. They looked at each other as curiosities. For that matter, Marion looked at his mother in the same way.

  When she was drunk, Dorothea could never resist bragging that her son was the gift of a prince. Marion had known this since he was a boy and maybe it can explain a few things about him. At twenty-four, he was very special. Slim, tight-knit, with light wavy hair and clear gray eyes, he could have looked like a choir boy, I suppose, if it had not been for his expression. He had an arrogance which was made up of staring at you, measuring your value, and deciding you weren’t there. At the present time he was living in Desert D’Or, but not at his mother’s house. They got along too badly for that, and besides his occupation would have interfered. He was a pimp.

  I often heard that when he was a child one would have predicted another career. He had been a high-strung boy, and he cried easily. When Dorothea had been able to afford it, there had been nurses and servants, she had always been pleased to spoil her son, to forget him, to love him and to match his tantrums with her own. There was a story she would tell about Marion when she was feeling sentimental and mourned the distance between them. Once, so long ago, she had been crying in her bedroom—over what, she no longer knew—and he had come in, he was three and a half at the time, and he had stroked her cheek. “Don’t cry, Mommie,” he had said, beginning to cry himself, and consoled her the only way he knew. “Don’t cry, Mommie, cause you’re so pretty.”

  He was a dreamy boy at school. She would tell me how he had been fascinated by railroad trains, by Erector sets, by collecting stamps and butterfly wings. He was shy, he was spoiled, he would be desperate at times with a desperate temper. In the first fight he ever had (it was with the tubby son of a motion-picture producer), he had been pulled screaming off the other boy’s neck. Somewhere in those years between ten and thirteen, changes occurred in him, he no longer seemed so sensitive; he turned surly and communicated with himself. To her amazement he told her once that he wanted to be a priest. His intelligence was startling at times, at least to Dorothea, but he had become difficult. He was always causing trouble, he was ahead of his teachers, smoking, drinking, doing whatever was not allowed. Before he graduated from high school, Dorothea had been forced to put Marion in one private academy after another, but no matter where she put him, he had a talent for making friends outside the school. At seventeen, he was arrested for driving eighty miles an hour on one of the boulevards of the capital. Dorothea fixed that, she had to fix many things he did. On his eighteenth birthday, he asked her for three hundred dollars.

  “For what?” said Dorothea.

  “There’s this girl I know and she needs an operation.”

  “Didn’t you ever hear of precautions?”

  He had stood before her, patient, bored, his clear gray eyes looking at her. “Yes, I’ve heard of them,” he said, “but you see, I was with two girls at the time, and I guess we got … distracted.”

  Dorothea managed to write a sentimental column about her son the day he went into service, but that was the last she could write about him. When he came out of the Army, he refused to work, he refused to do anything he did not care to do. She got him put on as an assistant to a well-known executive at a movie studio; three months later, Marion quit. “They’re preachers,” was all he would say, and moved in with her at The Hangover.

  In Desert D’Or he knew gangsters, he knew actors, he knew show girls and call girls and bar girls; he was even a pet of those few residents of the resort who might be considered international set, and with it all, since he was capable of spending days in one bar after another or hours at the Yacht Club patio, since he knew the headwaiters of the best clubs in the resort and was respected by them because he valued them so low, he had access to the pool of businessmen, entertainers, producers, tennis players, divorcées, golfers, gamblers, beauties and near beauties fed to the resort by the overflow from the capital. When Dorothea kicked him out after a quarrel over money, assuming she could force him to work—for her son she wanted respectability if for nobody else—he found his trade ready to hand. When Dorothea learned, she pleaded with him to come back, and Marion laughed at her. “I’m just an amateur,” he said, “like you.” She hadn’t even dared to slap him; somehow it was years since anyone had tried that.

  His operations were modest. He stayed away from the professionals; he did not care to take on the organization that would have meant, and many of his arrangements were unusual. He knew girls who would take a date once, and then never again, at least not for several months; he even knew a woman who did not need the money and merely was drawn to the idea of selling herself. As he had explained, he was an amateur, he dabbled. To work at a business was to be the slave of a business, and he detested slavery; it warped the mind. Therefore, he kept his freedom and used it to drink, to push dope on himself, and to race his foreign car through the desert, a gun in the glove compartment instead of a driving license, for the license had been suspended long ago. I drove with him once and tried to avoid it thereafter. I was pretty good with a car myself, but he drove like nobody I ever knew.

  From time to time he still would drop in at The Hangover, but he was contemptuous of the court, and they were uneasy with him. Of all the people there, he could tolerate only two. I was one of them, and he made no pretense about his reasons. I had killed people, I had almost been killed myself, and these were emotions he considered interesting. Out of the cat’s grace with which he held himself, he asked me once, “How many planes did you shoot down?”

  “Just three,” I said.

  “Just three. They lost money on you.” His mouth showed nothing. “You’d have shot down more if you could?”

  “I suppose I would have tried.”

  “You dig killing Asiatics?” Marion asked.

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “They know how to train you characters.” He took a cigarette from a platinum case. “I wasn’t an officer,” he said. “I went into the Army a private, and I came out that way. I’m the only private they ever had.”

  “They kept booking you in the stockade, I hear.”

  “Yes, I learned a thing or two,” Marion said. “You see, it’s easy to kill a man. Easier to do that than chase after a roach and squash it.”

  “Maybe you don’t know all there is about it.”

  But Marion was always ahead of me. “You want a girl?” he asked abruptly. “I’ll get you a girl for nothing.”

  “Not tonight,” I said.

  “I didn’t figure you would.” He had sensed what I was trying to keep from everybody. I had followed Pelley’s troubles carefully, for we shared the same trouble. It had come on me shortly before I left Japan, and I had been helpless ever since. Once or twice, with girls I picked up in the bars of Desert D’Or, I had tried to cut my knot and only succeeded in tying it more tightly. “I’m keeping myself for the woman I love,” I said to steer him away.

  Love was the subject which steered Faye. “You look,” he said to me, “you take two people living together. Cut away all the propaganda. It’s dull. The end. So you go the other direction. You find a hundred chicks, you find two hundred. It gets worse than dull. It makes you sick. I swear you start thinking of using a razor. I mean, that’s it,” he said, waving a finger like a pendulum, “screwing the one side, pain the other side. Killing. The whole world is bullshit. That’s why people want a dull life.”

  This was beyond me. I looked into his white-gray eyes, on fire with the argument, and said, “Where do you end up with this?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “I got to work it out.” He had straightened up then, had looked at his
watch as though to cover how surprised he was to hear himself talk for so long, and said quietly, “When is Jay-Jay getting here? I have something to tell Dorothea.”

  That was his other friend at The Hangover. Whenever Dorothea and Marion were not talking, he used the publicity man Jennings James for communications. Jay-Jay had managed to remain on good terms with them both. Years ago, he had been a legman for Dorothea, and he had known Marion as a boy. There was a tie between them; Marion tolerated him, he put up with Jay-Jay’s speeches, his drunks, his depressions; he had something like affection for him.

  No matter his red hair, Jay-Jay’s tall skinny body and his skinny face with its silver-rimmed spectacles made him look like a bank clerk. Yet there was something childish about him. He lived in the past, and he loved to reminisce about those early days of the Depression when he was penniless in the capital and lived in a bungalow with two musicians, existing on oranges and the hope he could sell one of his short stories. Those were the good old days and now he did scattered publicity for Supreme Pictures, filing items with gossip columnists on whatever Supreme stars might come to town. I knew for a fact he supplemented his income by sending an occasional girl Marion’s way.

  With it all, he had a wistful charm. He would tell story after story in a slurred voice, often telling me, for I was the only one new enough to listen, that the great line, “Men with lipstick on their mouths look like they just discovered sex,” credited to the movie star, Lulu Meyers, was in point of fact a sentence he had written for her. “I’m sick of it,” Jay-Jay would say to me. “Why, I remember when Lulu was married to Charley Eitel and thought brains was everything. I saw her walk into a room one night at a party with her face shining like she’d just discovered love or drunk some jungle juice. ‘Eitel has just given me my first acting lesson,’ she says, ‘and it was so stimulating.’ This, after three years of making movies and seven starring roles, and I have to run interference for people like her.”