Make Believe

sneaking tequila into his dressing room. Keel, I gathered, a show-business trooper with matinee-idol looks, was a bit of a character, a rollicking scamp who enjoyed his late-night revelries.

I nursed my glass of merlot, while Ava and Frank finished off their zombies. But what alarmed me was that Max, famously an infrequent drinker, a man who joked that he got tipsy on rum cake, seemed hell-bent on getting drunk. Not pretty, that picture, though I sensed that the morning’s photograph in the Examiner had wound him up. Here was the birthday boy in the land of the zombies. Avoiding Alice’s disapproving eye, he kept signaling for another drink. At one point he sloshed liquor onto the tablecloth and seemed surprised that someone had behaved so indecorously.

The mood at the table shifted when Louella Parsons led an entourage to a nearby table. The Hearst gossip columnist glared at our table as she passed, and she emitted a raspy harrumph that would do justice to the hectoring Parthenia Hawks as she watched the sleight-of-hand gambler Gaylord Ravenal step onto the showboat. Max laughed out loud, a hiccoughed titter, and seemed unable to stop.

Dressed in a muddy red dress that exaggerated her small, chunky build, Louella Parsons kept looking over, particularly at me, the shrinking violet at the table; and I wondered whether she knew who I was. Doubtless, given my photo in the Examiner, chummy with Ava and the Commie. Perhaps she was feeling scooped, and now, perforce, was hoping I’d execute some egregious faux pas-an unseemly belch, a toppling onto the floor, swooning at Frank’s knee and revived by ammonia salts held under my nose-that would enliven tomorrow’s mean-spirited diatribe for the Hearst readership.

On my best behavior-I do have a few of those moments, Aleck Woollcott notwithstanding-I smiled back at her, even tilted my head. The dreadful tyrant-a squat fireplug wrapped in that ill-chosen dress, perching on a chair and sipping some grotesque concoction that looked like cough medicine-shared a second, though sotto voce, harrumph, and turned away. I was immensely happy.

I didn’t notice the young man approaching our table. Ava, of course, did, attuned as she most likely always was to the serendipitous attention of all the men in the world, whether he was a hayseed boy or a tottering codger. Men zigzagged through her life, giddy and ready to blather inanities at her. So Ava had already turned, the huge smile at the ready, as the young man tentatively neared. Perhaps late twenties or early thirties, he was a dark- complected man in a pristine Army uniform, his cap held tightly in his hand. On his face a puppyish grin, two pinpoints of red dotting his cheeks. He looked the wholesome farm boy, athletic and sturdy, that new American breed, the extra for a World War Two propaganda newsreel.

“Miss Gardner,” he stammered. “I hate to disturb you but…” He stopped, and from under the Army cap he withdraw a slip of paper and a pen. His hand shook. “I’m rude, I know, but…” The sloppy Peck’s bad boy grin. Andy Hardy from the front lines. D-Day boy, now delivered safely home.

Ava waved him closer. “You’re not disturbing me, handsome.”

The man shuffled close to her and he was visibly trembling, which amused me. Who was this Hollywood Helen of Troy who could easily topple the topless towers of Ilium and make men immortal with a kiss? Which, to my horror, she did. She quietly signed her name, handed it back, but as he bent forward, she half-rose and cupped his face between her hands. She kissed his forehead lightly. “What’s your name?”

“Harold Porter, Junior.” But the space between “Porter” and “Junior” was so long-I swear it had to be five seconds-that she laughed. We all did, and his face got beet red, as he tried to back away.

“Were you in the war?” she asked him.

He nodded.

“That’s why I kissed you. You’re a hero.”

“I ain’t a hero. I just served.”

“No, you’re a hero.” But she had already turned away, and Harold Porter (space) Junior was himself backing away, delirious and punch drunk. For me, watching, rapt, it was an illuminating moment, and a touching one. With a seamlessly graceful gesture, Ava the sultry siren became, for one moment, the girl next door.

Frank glared at her. “Was that necessary, Ava?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Not now, Francis.”

“If I kissed a girl…like the waitress…”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” she blurted out.

“It seems to me…”

“Not now, Francis.”

He reached for his pack of cigarettes, angrily tapped one out, and it flipped off the table onto the carpet. While we watched, mesmerized by his jerky movements, he ground it under his shoe. He lit another and puffs of smoke clouded the table. One hand was a fist, the knuckles white. We sat there, silent, silent.

Alice cleared her throat. For some reason, she started talking about Sol Remnick in a twittering, birdlike voice. “Sol mentioned that Larry Calhoun wants to sell his shares in the property they all own together…He needs cash. He knows Max won’t give him money and…” She breathed in. “Sol said…” She stopped, looked down.

No one was listening.

Well, I was, of course, but something else was happening at the table. The cigarette vender, a pretty girl in a colorful Polynesian wrap, her case suspended around her neck, had paused at the table, but was waved off. As she moved away, Frank grasped her arm. For a second she paused, uncertain, because Frank’s touch lingered a little too long. She turned, smiled vacuously at him, and then, rattled, scurried away.

Ava burst out laughing. “Now we’re even, Francis.”

“Christ, Ava.”

From a table some yards away, the young man we now knew as Harold Porter (space) Junior was passing around the autograph, preening before an older couple I assumed were his smiling parents. Now and then he glanced over, as though to make certain he’d actually met the goddess, or, perhaps, to imprint the magical image on his lifelong memory. I smiled, tickled. I doubted whether my autograph, sometimes requested, though not so much any more, garnered such attention. I doubted it.

Max had been mumbling, but I couldn’t understand him, his words running together, swallowed. His hand slipped on the glass he held. Alice watched him, concern and fear in her eyes. This was not the Max any of us knew, this suddenly libidinous man, giggling and hiccoughing, downing glass after glass of the sinful zombies. His face was flushed, with half-shut lazy eyes, his movements slow and languid. A turned-over glass.

Frank kept twisting in his chair, scanning the room, his eyes narrowed. When he spoke, he slurred his words. He breathed with short, quick gasps that reminded me of a scolded child. None of us at the table mattered, I realized, save the beautiful Ava. A man possessed, intoxicated, paralyzed by a stunning woman-a man cowed and yet emboldened by a fierce and awful jealousy. The spotlight focused solely on Ava and her unpardonable transgression.

For a moment, startled, I let my mind play with images of Julie and Steve and Pete on the showboat. Julie, the beautiful mulatto with the melodious voice, a doomed woman, hungered after by men like Pete, a lowlife towboat worker, himself haunted and driven. And Steve, the possessive husband, jealous of any man’s attention to his wife, pledging a love that was to last forever but would crumble on the mean Chicago streets after exile from the Cotton Blossom. Two men, maddened by jealousy and lust. Pete who squeals to the local sheriff to punish her-punish them. He would destroy her if he can’t have her. Frank and Ava, jealous and possessive and…destructive.

Ava singing her dirge as night shadows covered her. Can’t stop lovin’ dat man of mine…fish gotta swim…birds gotta…

I came out of this idle reverie with a start: something was happening at the table. Max, tipsy, was flirting stupidly with Ava, half-serious and a little self-mocking. He rolled back and forth in his seat, a pale dervish, and babbled something about Harold Porter (space…now ten seconds, though no one laughed) Junior getting a chaste kiss from Ava, a young man who fantasized about kissing the screen goddess.

“Dreams to last a lifetime,” he babbled.

Ava looked amused, though she kept shaking her head. “Max, what’s got into you?” She tapped the back of his wrist.

Alice whispered, “Okay, Max, you’ve had enough to drink.” Idly, she fiddled with her purse, snapping it open and shut.