The Englishman’s Boy

Where’s the proof when it comes to Fitz?”

“The way he looks at me.”

“That clinches it. The way he looks at you.”

Suddenly she’s very angry, her eyes flash green fire. “I grew up in New York. I know the look, Harry. Don’t make light of it. My brothers got called Christ-killers and beaten up by Irish Catholic toughs often enough for me to be able to recognize it when I see it.”

“I stand rebuked. All Irish Catholics are anti-Semites?”

“Why are you defending him?” she bursts out. “Why are you cross-examining me? Who do you think you are? Chief legal counsel for the Klan?”

“Point of order,” I say. “Fitz would not be welcome in the Klan – he’s a Catholic. Maybe you two have more in common than you think.”

The steaks arrive. The waiter manoeuvres them into position in a bristling silence. The band has taken a break and the Grove is as quiet as it ever gets. Rachel and I eat without speaking. When I can’t stand it any more I say, “Listen.” She doesn’t look up. I rap the table hard with the butt of my knife. “Listen!” Her eyes lift, reluctantly. “You’ve got to believe me, Rachel. They haven’t asked me a single thing about anybody I work with. Nothing. I swear to you.” I actually raise my hand. All that’s needed to complete the picture is a Bible. “I’m not selling anybody out.”

Rachel gives me a despairing look, reaches out and catches my jacket sleeve in a white-knuckled grip. Like she’s teetering on a precipice. “Don’t you get it, Harry?” she whispers fiercely. “I’m warning what might happen. To me as much as to you. In a single year I make more money than my father did in ten. And the more money I make, the more I’m afraid of losing it. Chains of gold are the hardest chains to break.” She makes a sweeping gesture that takes in the Grove, the diners. “Do you think anyone in this room has even considered they might have to give this up? Even entertained the notion? I started in movies because they were fun. They’re not fun any more and I’m still here. Why? Because I got used to good clothes, money, fame of a sort. But I liked it better when we wrote a scenario Tuesday, filmed it on Wednesday. Finis. Everybody an outlaw. Patent-breakers, fly-by-night independents, here today, gone tomorrow. Making it up as we went along. You know what, Harry? It wasn’t respectable to be in pictures then. A reputable stage actor wouldn’t appear on screen; they considered photoplays the kiss of death. Hollywood was the end of the earth, the place that in the Middle Ages used to be marked on maps: “Here Be Monsters.” And we were monsters – misfits and crackpots, dreamers and schemers. But slowly, step by step, bit by bit, money transformed us until one day we woke up and found ourselves lords of the earth. Making more money than the President of the United States. Maybe exerting more influence. Our childhood was over, Harry. We were no longer kids dressing up in mother’s clothes, telling each other nutty stories and falling all over ourselves laughing. Fifteen years ago you could make a picture for a thousand dollars. Now they put up von Stroheim’s production costs on a billboard in New York. He’s gone over a million! they scream.” She pours herself another drink; the alcohol is showing its effect. “We made stupid movies then. They were fun. Even more fun to make than to watch. We still make stupid movies, but they’re not fun to make any more. Too much at stake. Every stupid movie we launch we cross our fingers and pray it isn’t the Titanic, because if it is, we’re all on the deck chairs. The question is, What’ll we do to get into the lifeboats?”

Another interloper. Sammy Burns from the Fox table.

“Speaking of stupid movies – here is the king of the stupid movie,” says Rachel. “Nobody can write them stupider than Sammy.”

Sammy is too far gone to absorb this. “C’mon, Goldie,” he coaxes, “cut the rug with old Sammy. Be a peach.” He executes a couple of haphazard steps with one hand pressed to his stomach and the other held at eleven o’clock. His face is shining with sweat and his white tie has come undone.

“You be a peach,” says Rachel. “Climb in a bowl on your dining-room table and be a peach there, Sammy. I’m not in the mood for dancing.”

Burns abruptly halts his solo. “If I were you, I’d be nice to people. You might need a friend when Mr. Eastern Seaboard finishes running his studio into bankruptcy. I know people,” he says.

“A word of advice, Sammy,” says Rachel. “Modesty becomes you as much as anything can. Aspire to modesty. And the day I need help from you getting a job in this town is the day that Gog and Magog stalk the earth.”

Sammy rocks back and forth on his heels. “What?”

“Exactly,” says Rachel. “And please tell the other dreamboats at the Fox table not to bother putting themselves on offer here. I breathe my quota of cigar breath at the office. Now run along. This is the adults’ table.”

Sammy departs in high dudgeon.

Rachel says, “So what are you doing for Chance now?”

“Research.”

“Which you can’t talk about.”

“That’s right.”

“And after that?”

“I think he’s going to let me write the picture.”

“That’s a big step.”

“I know it.”

Rachel purses her lips, lifts her glass, “Congratulations. To Harry Vincent, scenarist of photoplays.” She notices her glass is empty. “Any more gin?”

I shake the flask. It’s empty. “Nothing but the brandy.”

“Pour, My Little Truth Seeker, pour.”

I do. Neither of us seems to want to take up where we left off. I can feel between us the sour disquiet of stubborn people. I put her behaviour down to jealousy. It irks her that Chance has spirited away her disciple. Although she always thinks herself in the right, she is never so certain that she doesn’t value a loyal seconder. For a year and a half I have seconded all her motions in the writing department, and when she laid down the law about Mencken, Dreiser, and Norris, I seconded that too. I seconded her when she expounded her theory of photoplays. I knew no others. It is Rachel Gold who taught me my job.

I don’t really know why I defended Fitz. My motives are complicated. I certainly don’t like him, or even respect him, while I have loved and admired Rachel from the moment she swept down on me at that lunch counter in L.A. like a wolf on the fold, seizing my heart in her jaws.

I love her in the only way I can, silently, humbly, discreetly, from a distance. I know that she will never be interested in a rail-thin, gangly, bespectacled man so ordinary-looking that to be truly ugly would lend him some badly needed distinction. I do not lie awake at night imagining the impossible, tormenting myself. Not any more anyway. Friendship is the best I can hope for. I love her with resignation.

Perhaps these are the reasons I see her more clearly than is usual in a case of unrequited love. I know she drinks too much, throws herself at pretty, stupid men. I know that her progressive politics (sometimes she calls herself a socialist) collide with her taste for the high life, and that her brittle gaiety and white-powdered face are both attempts to mask Jewish melancholy and ethical rage.

Thirty years later I still do not know why I loved her with a husband’s love rather than the blind passion women like her seem to require – only that I did. But I do know what I admired in her. She had no calculation in her. Which is not to say she was ever blind to what she was doing. She understood the consequences of her adventures, was ready to live with them, was ready not to make excuses. Her mistakes were on a grand scale. She made enemies and friends with abandon, embracing both as badges of honour. She carried her head high. Hers was the beauty of courage and intelligence, to be read in her face, in her eyes, in her passionate, grasping, darting hands. She was a passionate, grasping, darting woman. Rachel Gold sometimes confused rudeness with honesty, but never honesty with anything else.

I am thinking these things when I spot William DeShane crossing the floor, headed in our general direction. The look on my face alerts Rachel. “What?” she says sharply. I don’t answer; I’m watching him. William DeShane has caught more than my attention; a lot of people are suspending their conversations, neglecting their shrimp and soup and meringues to follow him with a hungrier interest.

William DeShane is a graceful man, capable of sailing across a room without faltering under close inspection because he is confident inspection will find him faultless. At the moment he is attracting more stares than even a great star might expect to attract because the diners in the Grove are industry insiders, and for insiders a star in