“Men,” she said. “It’s not women who are silly about sex. It’s men. You think it ought to be important.” She stretched the word into three spaced and portentous syllables. “Women don’t. Women know it’s useful.”
I went to the kitchen for another beer. “Sounds sexist to me,” I said from the refrigerator.
“Why? If I use what I’ve got to exploit men and further my interests, why is that sexist? They have strength, we have sex. They don’t hesitate to use strength.”
I sat back in the chair. “Okay,” I said. “Want a sip of my beer?”
She shook her head. “You haven’t got an argument, have you? So you just change the subject.”
“I’m a romantic,” I said. “Arguments are useless with romantics. You want a sip?”
“No,” she said. She stood staring at me. I drank my beer. “You still disapprove, don’t you?”
“I do the best I can to approve and disapprove only of my own behavior. I don’t always succeed, but I try. I’m trying now and I’m going to keep at it, How about a whole can for yourself?”
“I don’t like beer,” she said.
Chapter 22
CANDY HAD TO be at work at noon. I went with her. Since she was convinced that Brewster was trying to find out what she knew, there was reason to suppose she might still need protection. Especially if he figured out that, while he was trying to find out what she knew, she was trying to find out what he knew.
We spent the first hour of the afternoon walking along Broadway, Candy walking with the wife of a Mexican- American congressional candidate, talking or pretending to while the cameras cranked. Candy asked several questions while the cameras zoomed in. I was lurking around, out of. camera range, alert in case a captain of industry lunged from the crowd and hurled Candy on a couch. The candidate’s wife didn’t bother to answer the questions. She’d done this before and she knew the real interview would take place someplace else and would then be dubbed over the pictures of them walking. Then we all drove back to KNI3S studios, where Candy taped the interview and they shot some reverses, and then a car took the candidate’s wife home.
At eight o’clock Brewster and his driver and his Caddy came by the studio and took her to a Dodger game, where they sat in his private box. Or I assumed they sat in his private box. He was the type. But I had to way to know, because I never got into the game. I sat in the MG in the parking lot listening on the radio, and at about eleven followed them back to his place and then went back to Candy’s and let myself in with her key and went to sleep. We had agreed before we started out that morning that there was no point in me hanging around in the bushes at Brewster’s house. If he was going to do her damage, I’d be no use to her there anyway. At least here she could phone me.
She didn’t come home that night at all. I felt like somebody’s worried father until she came home at seven fifteen in the morning amid the chirping birds.
That day I hung around while Candy interviewed a rape victim, talked to the chairwoman of an educational- reform group, did a stand-up in front of a new boutique that had opened in Beverly Hills, and interviewed a glossy- looking kid who had just finished shooting the pilot for a TV series that was coincidentally going to be carried locally on KNBS-TV. Then I hung around the studio while Candy did some film editing and taped some narration over some of the edited film, and spent maybe a half hour in conference with Frederics, the news director.
That evening I finished up my book on Edmund Spenser while Brewster took Candy to the revival of a Broadway musical at the Music Center.
The next day Candy covered a blood shortage at the L.A. Red Cross blood bank, a Right to Life protest outside an abortion clinic in El Monte, a benefit fashion show staged by the wives of the California Angels, and the finals of a baton-twirling contest in Pasadena.
That evening she went with Brewster to a party at Marina del Rey. I stopped at a drugstore on La Brea near Melrose and bought a copy of The Great Gatsby off the paperback rack. I hadn’t read it in about five years, and it was time again. I picked up some tomatoes, lettuce, bacon, and bread at Ralph’s, along with a six-pack of Coors and a jar of mayonnaise, and went back to Candy’s apartment to an orgy of B.L.T.‘s. And elegant prose. And beer.
Candy called from the station the next morning around nine to tell me that she’d be at the station most of the day, and there was no need for me to hang around there. Station security was enough protection.
“I’ll be home this evening, though,” she said. “Brewster’s out of town until Thursday.”
I told her I’d pick her up when it was time. And she said she’d call. And I hung up. I had finished GatsUy in a sitting. With breakfast I’d read the L.A. Times. I was irritated, bored, restless, edgy, useless, frustrated, bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. I wasn’t making any money. I wasn’t solving a crime. I wasn’t saving a widow or an orphan. I was sleeping on a couch and my back was getting stiff. I thought about packing it in and going home. I could be having dinner with Susan this evening. I looked at my suitcase, tucked in between the couch and the wall. Ten minutes to pack, ten minutes to get a cab, half hour to the airport. I could make the noon flight easy. I shook my head. Not yet. There was something besides coitus happening in the Sloan-Brewster romance, and I had to stay around until I found out what.
But in the meantime I had to get rid of the feeling that my gears were grinding to a halt. I put on my running stuff and did about ten minutes of stretching and then went up to Sunset and headed west at an easy pace. You run out of sidewalk on Sunset, and the traffic is too ugly to run in the street, so I shifted down a block to Lomitas and went along amid the affluence to Whittier Drive, down Whittier to the place where it joins Wilshire by the Beverly Hilton Hotel. I went along Wilshire to Beverly Glen, up Beverly Glen, and started cruising among the neighborhoods of Westwood until I ended up on Le Conte Avenue in front of UCLA Medical Center. The sun was hot, and the sweat had soaked pleasingly through my T-shirt. The hills in Westwood were just right. You’d barely notice them in a car, but it was a good varied workout running. I took it easy, ten twelve-minute miles, sightseeing. I U-turned at Westwood Boulevard and jogged back east along Le Conte. There were orange trees, ripe with fruit in people’s front yards, and lemon trees, and now and then an olive tree with small black fruit on it. The roofs of the houses were mostly red tile, the siding often white stucco, the yards immaculate. There was no residue of sand and salt from the winter’s snow. The driveways often slanted up, without fear of ice. “He sent us this eternal spring,/Which here enamels everything.” Who had written that? Not Peter Brewster. I jogged along just fast enough to pass someone walking. Except, like everywhere else in Tinsel Town, no one was walking. Somewhere I heard two dogs barking. Probably a recording. “He hangs in shades the orange bright,/Like golden lamps in a green light.” The houses were close together. i never figured out why. There was space abounding out here at the fag end of the way west. Why did everyone huddle together? Why didn’t they ever come out on the street? How could they produce something as
