Chocolates for Breakfast Page 11

  The waiter brought their dinner and Courtney ate as though it were her first meal in days.

  Al smiled. “Hungry, kid? . . . Yeah, I guess you are. You aren’t very used to being broke.” Courtney continued eating. “You know, there isn’t anything for your mother out here. When someone has hit the skids in this town, the only thing to do is to leave it, to re-establish yourself someplace else and then have them call for you. Here it is March, and your mother has had one lousy job. She ought to go back to New York, try some TV there. People know her there, and they aren’t afraid of her the way they are here, they’re so wary about people on the downgrade. This is no town for a comeback, people are too unsure of themselves.”

  Courtney was glad that the subject had shifted from herself.

  “Well, it’s a funny thing about Hollywood,” Courtney said. “Once you’ve been out here awhile, it’s hard to go someplace else, and it gets harder the longer you stay here. Takes some real propulsion to make you leave.”

  “It’s always hard to change your way of life, but sometimes it’s got to be done—like with you.”

  “Al, will you please stop lecturing me? I’ve had enough for one evening. I’m sick of your moralizing, as though I were a fallen woman or something.”

  “Court, stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

  Courtney didn’t answer.

  “Show some guts. Pull out of this.”

  She was very angry with herself then, because she started to cry. Not really, just silently, inside herself.

  “I’m sorry, kid. Your mother’s always telling me I have no sensitivity. I guess she’s right. But I just don’t like to see you waste yourself. I’m real fond of you, Court, and I hate to see you make yourself unhappy and guilty. There isn’t any need for that. If you were middle-aged or something, it would be different, but everything’s ahead of you, so don’t screw your life up now.”

  “Al, please stop talking, just stop. Leave this up to me, will you? It’s my problem. I know it isn’t any good, it hasn’t been for a couple of months now. But I just can’t face being alone again.”

  “But isn’t it better to like yourself? Isn’t that more important than some guy’s companionship just because he sleeps with you?”

  She finished her dinner very quickly, because, after all, the food wasn’t worth it. She hated to lose Al’s respect. She hated to have him criticize her, to have him feel he had to help her. She wanted to go, though she didn’t know where. She didn’t want to go to Barry’s apartment, not tonight. Maybe home would be the best place to go.

  When she got home, her mother was asleep. She went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face because she had been crying in the car; leaning against Al she had cried. Al and Barry were the only men she had ever cried in front of.

  It was after she dried her face and started to put the towel back that she saw the package of razor blades. She felt as she had at Scaisbrooke when she stood at the window of her room and looked at the ground. She was afraid. She could not trust her mind, she could never trust her mind. She looked back at the door. It was shut, and her mother never woke up when she came in. She held her hands in front of her under the light. She rested her left hand on the sink.

  She took one of the razor blades from the package and held it above her hand. She was afraid, and, oddly enough, she was embarrassed. She felt foolish. She was too intelligent to hurt herself. But no, she would allow herself the luxury of self-punishment. She would give in.

  She took the razor blade and she slashed one of her fingers at the first joint. Whenever she used it it would hurt, and it would remind her of her guilt, of her sensuality and her sin. It hurt, it was very sensitive, her finger, so she cut at the other fingers of her left hand very quickly so the pain would be over soon. It bled profusely, and she was pleased at the blood in the sink. What a beautiful symbol that Christ should have bled to expiate the sins of men, men of little courage. It took so much courage to be good, but it took even more courage to sin. She had neither. Al was right, she couldn’t take sin. Living with her sin, living with herself in a state of sin, it was too much for her, and she had to punish herself. She hadn’t even enough courage to destroy herself.

  She took some toilet paper and wrapped it around her hand to stem the bleeding. What an awful lot of blood in her fingers. She folded her hand tightly, making a fist to stop the bleeding. Jesus that hurt. She wanted to show somebody what she had done to herself; she had a crazy desire to wake her mother up and show her. But that was one thing she would not give in to. She would maintain at least that much dignity. She got in bed very quietly so her mother wouldn’t wake up. She had cleaned up the sink, and no one would ever know.

  In the morning she woke up late, and the first thing she thought of was her hand. She looked at it. The bleeding had stopped in the night. That was good, she felt embarrassed at her weakness and childishness. Her mother had gone out for lunch. She got up and took off the toilet paper and with an edge of Kleenex she gingerly cleaned her fingers. The cuts were clean and, being in the joints, they didn’t show. They would heal soon. Until then they would hurt, to remind her.

  Chapter 13

  There was spring in the early California evening, and as Courtney left the sanitarium with her father she was glad to be among people again; she was glad that the psychiatrist had said she could leave. Two months ago there had been nothing that she had wanted more than to leave life, to be taken care of and not asked to decide anything. But now she was anxious to be a person again, and only a little afraid. She looked at her father, sitting beside her in the cab. She was glad that he had come to California for her release. She liked the way her parents seemed so anxious to be with her, and to do things for her, since she had gone to the sanitarium.

  Robbie took her to a restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, a very good restaurant that he always went to when he came here on business. Courtney had never been there, because it was not a place frequented by Hollywood people. It was very New York, which she liked. Her father must know that she wanted to be far away from Hollywood and its associations. But, of course, Courtney thought as she looked out the cab window, he couldn’t really know that much about her. Probably he was just ill at ease in her mother’s Hollywood world.

  “I hope you like this place,” he said as they got out of the cab. “This is your evening,” he smiled.

  They had talked little in the taxi, and they were uneasily silent as they sat down at the table. The things uppermost in their minds had been left at the gate to the sanitarium, and were forbidden subjects. Whatever had driven her to seek brief asylum was known only to Courtney, and though Robbie wished he could talk to her about it, perhaps help her, he knew that he must not invade her privacy. Perhaps it was just as well that he did not know it. They had shared so little—occasional afternoons and evenings over a span of so many years—that Robbie found himself searching his mind to make conversation with his daughter.

  “What would you like to begin with?” he asked.

  “I’d like a drink, please.”

  Yes, she drank now. He should have remembered that.

  “A martini,” she said. “Very dry, with no lemon peel or anything.”

  He ordered two martinis. He wondered where she had learned to drink martinis. With her mother, of course.

  “It’s good to be with you, Courtney,” he said. “It’s been a long time since we had dinner together.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I guess it was when you saw me off to California. It’s been about a year, I guess.”

  “You’ve grown up a lot in a year.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I have.”

  The waiter brought the martinis.

  “When I take you out to dinner now,” Robbie said, “people must wonder what I’ve got to be going out with such a lovely young girl.”

  “I don’t know. You’re very attractive.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “How is your martini? Dry enough for you?”

&nb
sp; “Yes, thank you. You know,” she said, fingering the glass, “it’s funny how a drink seems reassuring. Because of its associations, I guess. It’s always been a permanent fixture of home.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. It’s always been a permanent fixture with your mother, but you’re a little young to find a drink reassuring.”

  “Daddy, really. Let’s not have the New England morality routine.”

  “No, Courtney. You are too young to drink.”

  “I know,” she grinned. “Have you ever thought that by the time I’m old enough to drink, I’ll have been drinking for seven years illegally?”

  “I’d rather not,” he said drily.

  Courtney sipped her drink defiantly.

  “You’re certainly your mother’s daughter.”

  “Yes,” she said leaning forward. “I’m Mummy’s daughter, and I’m decadent, alcoholic at sixteen, blasé . . .

  “Now, Courtney.”

  “Anything else you’d like to add?”

  “Courtney, I didn’t mean . . .”

  Courtney leaned back. She took out a cigarette and he lit it for her.

  “Why are you so worried about me? I remember when I was little, and insisted that you take me someplace nice like Twenty One or the Plaza when you took me to dinner, you always said ominously that I had my mother’s extravagance. That’s not such a bad thing, you know. To insist on good things, to be able to drink well. You know you wouldn’t like to have a daughter who thought Longchamps was the height of elegance, and a furtive sip of ale or a cigarette in the john a great adventure.”

  “Let’s not pursue the subject further.”

  “That’s all right with me. You brought it up.”

  They were silent. Robbie sipped his drink and studied his daughter. He resented her sophistication. He resented her not being a little girl any longer. She argued with him just the way her mother always had. They even used the same phrases, the same images, as though the only alternative to their ways was a boorish conventionalism. Her mother always used the picture of the gray-headed mother, with knitting on her plump lap. It made him angry that Courtney should have become like Sondra, and that it should have happened so quickly. He resented having been cheated of the years that other fathers took for granted, dancing with their daughters at country-club tea dances, and surveying their dates with a protective and slightly jealous eye.

  “You know,” Courtney said looking around her, “I feel a little the way I used to when I came to New York from boarding school. I remember how I used to be surprised by all the colors on the street, and all the people. But most of all, it was the fact that the people weren’t wearing Scaisbrooke blue that amazed me—like a man getting out of the army or something.”

  “Remember how you used to astound the waitresses at Schrafft’s by ordering two desserts?”

  “Yes,” she said. But she was not interested in remembering.

  She used to be so delighted at leaving school, Robbie thought. She didn’t take things for granted then. He would take her to a play. Once he took her to Pal Joey, and was disturbed because she enjoyed it. But what she liked most was the year the D’Oyly Carte Troupe was in town, before she went to boarding school, when he took her to a matinee every Saturday. They must have seen all the Gilbert and Sullivan in the repertoire, Robbie thought wearily. It was always an occasion for Courtney to see her father. That was too bad, in a way.

  “Daddy,” Courtney said suddenly, “what did Dr. Wright say to you? What did he tell you?”

  “Very little,” Robbie said. “That you were tired, that too much responsibility had been thrust upon you. I know your mother is a problem to you,” he said.

  “No. No, not at all. Only when I was very little, and she would go into tirades that I didn’t understand, and get angry with me.”

  “I know,” Robbie said. “It was always hard for you to understand that her tempers had nothing to do with you. I still remember the day you went into her room one morning to ask her if you could go into New York with a friend of yours to see the rodeo, and she got furious with you and wouldn’t let you go, because you woke her up. She was in a play then.”

  “Yes,” Courtney said. “I remember that very well. I remember I called you, to ask you if you would go with us so that it would be all right with Mummy, and you said no.”

  “I couldn’t interfere with your mother’s discipline, even if she was wrong.”

  “I was as angry with you as I was with her. I always thought you were the sane one, who would mediate.”

  “I couldn’t take responsibility for your disobeying your mother.”

  “Of course you could. But that was years ago, let’s not argue about it now.” Courtney sipped her martini. Why did they always have to argue? Her father was always defending himself.

  “You’re still doing the same thing,” Robbie said. “You’re still playing one of us against the other.”

  “I play one of you against the other! You’ve got it backwards. You’re always putting me in the middle, like a pawn. When I do something that displeases you, or when I need something that’s a bore—like having to go to the dentist—you disown me, I suddenly become a child of parthenogenesis.”

  “What would you like for dinner?”

  “I don’t know,” Courtney said petulantly. “I want another martini.”

  “One is enough.”

  “What are you trying to do? Suddenly legislate for me? You gave up that right a long time ago, you know. Maybe when you wouldn’t take me to the rodeo.”

  “All right. Have another martini. Get loaded, I don’t care. It’s not my responsibility, since you refuse to do anything I say.”

  “I’ve never gotten bombed. Never in my life.”

  “What a remarkable record to hold at sixteen. How could you go all those years with an unblemished record? To say nothing of the pre-natal cocktail parties.”

  “You mean when Mummy was walking around pregnant and loaded, like Tobacco Road? You know she had never gotten tight, either. It just makes you mad that we can drink and spend money and never pay some black Protestant fee for it.”

  “Stop talking like your Irish mother.”

  “Look, why are you always maligning Mummy? You know I never believe what you say, anyway.”

  “I know. But your mother’s word is gospel. It means nothing that I’m paying for your sanitarium, and the psychiatrist. I don’t suppose your mother mentioned that.”

  “So what? Why do you always talk about money, as though money means something?”

  “Because it does, to you. You’re just like your mother. All you care about is what you can get out of me.”

  “You want another drink, Daddy? Do you feel a crying jag coming on? Nobody loves me, they just want to bleed me white, and leave me battered by the roadside?”

  “Don’t be disrespectful, young lady.”

  Courtney grinned. “You could at least have a sense of humor.”

  “I don’t see anything amusing.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “Now, look here—”

  “All right. Let’s drop it. I’d like another drink, please.”

  Robbie sighed. He had so looked forward to this evening with her. He had not seen her in so long, and he had hoped that now, since her mother’s world had gone to pieces, she would want to trust in him a little. But he had had another daughter in mind, a prototype daughter who needed people, who depended on her parents and looked to them for help. Courtney was like her mother. If she were drowning, she would wave off the rescuers, in a last gesture of defiance, because they were fishermen in a rowboat and she wanted to be saved by a yacht. He ordered two more martinis.

  “Daddy,” Courtney said, serious again, “was that really all Dr. Wright said to you?”

  “Yes,” Robbie answered. “Whatever you told him was in trust. Whatever it is that you are so afraid of our knowing, you can be sure he didn’t tell us.”

  He lit a cigarette. What could
it be that it should weigh on her mind so? She was so young, despite all her sophistication. What could worry her so, at sixteen? It must be that she had told the psychiatrist things about her parents, feelings that she didn’t want them to know. God knows, there was enough that she might have said. Something had gone wrong somewhere to make her so unlike other daughters. But then, how could she be like other young girls? There weren’t many mothers like Sondra, fortunately for the future of the race.

  “Your mother and I were talking about your future, Courtney,” he said as their drinks were brought. “We decided that we should leave it up to you; you know better than we do what you want. There is one thing that we have decided, though. As you know, your mother isn’t finding much work here in Hollywood, so she has decided to come to New York—TV is opening up a lot of work.”

  He took a sip of his martini.

  “Now don’t get defensive when I say this, but your mother’s future will be very uncertain for awhile. We don’t want you to have any more insecurity than you have already. In the fall you can go back to Scaisbrooke if you like—”

  “I don’t want to go back to boarding school.”

  “We thought you might feel that way. There are a lot of schools in New York just as good as Scaisbrooke, so that presents no problem. The question is—and I want you to think about this a little—we both know your mother’s instability, and when she isn’t working her moods are worse. Your mother realizes this, and our concern now is your welfare. We both think it might be a good idea if you stayed with me. Temporarily, until Sondra gets some good parts, if that’s the way you want it.”

  Courtney ran her fingers along the stem of her glass. Robbie knew what her answer would be. Why was he put in this position, of begging for his daughter’s favor? Why did he have to put his petition in her mother’s mouth? He would never understand her devotion to her mother. Sondra had done so much to hurt Courtney, yet as he watched his daughter he knew her mind was made up and that she was only going through the pretense of making a decision because he had asked her to.