Make Believe

“I should sue that damn photographer hack. My knuckle’s gonna swell up tomorrow, you know…”

Ava ignored him. “Edna, what are you drinking? A zombie? They got this drink they invented called the mai tai. Rum is king here.”

“So I gather from the garish placards outside. I’ll have a glass of red wine.”

Ava insisted. “The zombies are…”

Frank rapped his good knuckle on the table. “You and those goddamned zombies. The woman can choose her own drink, Ava. Christ.”

“I’m only suggesting…”

“Leave her alone.”

I ordered a glass of wine.

Ava smiled at me. “We do love each other, Edna. You have to believe that.”

“Thank God for that. No one else would have either one of you.”

Both Ava and Frank stared at me, though Ava smiled. “Christ,” Frank muttered. And I swear he mouthed something about old crazy broads.

“All right, Francis dear, let’s have a pleasant evening.”

“Yes,” I added, “dining with stuffed monkeys watching me will be a sobering experience.”

Frank seemed to notice the monkeys populating the plastic palms for the first time. “This place is a dump.”

“I like the booze here,” Ava said.

“You like the booze everywhere.”

Somehow, through some sleight of hand I’d missed, my glass of wine appeared before me. “Cheers,” Ava toasted. “To Show Boat.”

Frank smiled. “Life on the wicked stage.”

Ava checked the entrance. “Where are they?”

I bristled, ready to leave this boorish young man-and, I suppose, boorish young woman-both wreathed in noxious clouds of cigarette smoke, their voices strangled with whiskey. All a bit wearying, if familiar. Old ladies should be spared the sight of the next generation sinking into a quagmire of dissolution. Sort of saps one’s faith in the progress of humankind.

Ava, I quietly concluded, was a tantalizing dish best savored away from the whiskey chaser that was her smarmy boyfriend.

Frank excused himself. “Call of Hoboken nature.”

Ava began apologizing. “We bring out the worst in each other, Edna. But, trust me, also the best. We’re so much alike-wild, jealous, craving the nightlife. Hot-headed fools, you know. We’re two insomniacs, lonely night animals wandering the desert. But I didn’t want you to see this. It’s just that…that photographer set Francis off, and that set me off and…”

I sipped my wine. “It’s all right, Ava. Years back I weathered the besotted members of the Algonquin Club in New York. After that experience-can you imagine Dottie Parker inebriated, her mouth running in top gear? — anything is bearable.” I batted my eyes. “Even you…and Francis.”

Frank returned, stopping to light a cigarette from one of the blazing tiki torches that speckled the room.

“Miss me?”

“We never stopped talking about you,” I noted.

“I’ll bet.” He narrowed his eyes.

For a while the squabble subsided, a sticky truce in which both drank too much, smoking incessantly, voices subdued but edgy. Unhappy, I snatched a Chesterfield from Ava, and Frank gallantly lit it. His fingertips were stained yellow. In the flickering candlelight of the table, I noted scars on his neck and cheek. A scrapper, I concluded. The Hoboken one-hundred pound runt bullied in the schoolyard who learned the most effective offense is cruelty and crooning.

“You look gorgeous,” Ava told me.

With a rose-colored shawl draped over my shoulders, accenting a polka dot black-and-white dress, I felt like someone’s visiting aunt.

But of course she was the gorgeous one, dressed in a slinky cocktail dress of lavender-toned marquisette with a strapless top of shimmering green taffeta, an oversized turquoise brooch pinned on the bodice, drop earrings that went on and on, cut emeralds mounted in filigreed silver cascades that caught the glint and flash of overhead lights. Frank wore a powder blue Norfolk suit with a scarlet bow tie; his hair was slicked back, oiled.

Max and Alice bustled in, apologizing. Max was waving what he announced was a clipping from the morning’s Examiner. “The paper has a photo of me and Ava and you having lunch yesterday. They mentioned you by name, Edna.”

“What does it say?”

“No article, just a photo with a long caption. You, readers are informed, won the Pulitzer Prize for So Big back in 1924. I am identified as a ‘Hollywood insider currently under a cloud.’” His face animated and yet ashen, he kept tapping the torn sheet.

Ava broke in. “Happy birthday, Max.” She stood and approached him, enveloping him in a bear hug. “Let’s be happy tonight.”

He grinned back at her, but I noticed he didn’t put the clipping away. He simply laid it on the table, face up, next to an ashtray.

We ordered a tableful of grotesque dishes no one seemed eager to eat, plates of Cantonese specialties that had migrated too far from the Chinese homeland: Bo Lo Gai Kew with sweet and sour sauce, chicken chow mein with water chestnuts, sesame beef with bell peppers, almond duck. Column A and column B. And everything garnished or disguised or simply destroyed with chunks of pineapple, for me the least interesting of tropical fruits.

Frank skewered a chunk of pineapple at the end of a knife, and then dropped it. It plopped onto the carpet and, again, by some magical sleight of hand, when I glanced down at the spot, the offending fruit had disappeared. Tiki voodoo, I supposed. Frank retreated into his own thoughts, his eyes scanning the room, and I noticed Ava sometimes followed his hazy gaze. If his eyes rested too long on some fluttery young beauty batting her kohl- rimmed eyelids-and they seemed to be generously positioned throughout the room like opening-night spotlights-Ava bit her lip and groaned.

I’d heard stories.

Ava moved her chair closer to mine and smiled. “Max, if you’ll forgive me, I want Edna to see one more… omen.”

Dramatically, she reached under her chair and brought up a small black velvet box. For a second she cradled it against her chest, lovingly. She opened it as though it were a Christmas present. In her palm she displayed a pair of green satin shoes, worn, tattered, the heels blackened.

“Edna, my sister Bappie won these at a charity auction in New York years ago. When she visited back home, she gave them to me. ‘These will take you to Hollywood.’ Her exact words. Irene Dunne wore them when she played Magnolia in the 1936 Show Boat.” She thrust them at me, but I didn’t take them: two scuffed, dirty shoes, doubtless a wonderful talisman for her, but, to me, nothing more than someone’s old and bacterial slippers.

“Beautiful.” I figured that would be the operative word for this doomed evening. Beautiful. Just plain beautiful.

Ava was going on about Bappie’s husband, a Manhattan photographer who’d taken the first photo of her, displaying it in his Fifth Avenue window where it was spotted by some scout. Ava as virginal country girl, with sunbonnet and a faraway look in her eyes. MGM offices, located in Times Square, called for a screen test and…and a Hollywood contract. Fifty dollars a week, Ava and Bappie traveling west by bus. The dream began.

Suddenly Frank’s hand swept across the table and sent the shoes flying. They landed at the foot of a blazing tiki torch.

Ava screamed. “Damn you.” Leaning across the table, she slapped Frank’s face, and he recoiled, rubbing the scarlet patch on his cheek. Immediately Ava crumbled. “Oh, Max, this is not the evening I planned for you.”

I said nothing.

Welcome to Hollywood.