Chocolates for Breakfast Page 19

  He stood silent, in anger and surprise, and Courtney wondered idly if he were going to hit her. Suddenly he laughed, sincerely laughed, with no malice in the laughter.

  “What’s so amusing?” Courtney said levelly.

  “Angel, you look so terribly Irish, a little Irish banty cock, ready to fight anyone.” Still smiling, he put his arms around her. She didn’t move.

  “Now, darling,” he said in that soft, low voice, “don’t be angry with Tony.”

  His face was solemn now, like a child who has suddenly realized that his teasing has made his mother angry, and is anxious to atone for it. He gently kissed her chin, still thrust out in defiance. She looked at his face, boyishly solemn. As suddenly as she had gotten angry, she smiled, and slowly put her arms around him. He picked her up easily, and looked down at the girl, resting in his arms. He kissed her cheek as he would a child’s.

  Suddenly the phone rang, insistingly, demandingly, in the adjoining bedroom.

  “We won’t answer it,” he said in a conspiratorial tone. She shook her head and smiled.

  The phone still rang, harshly, jarring their mood and shattering it, dropping its crystal fragments to the floor in disarray.

  “Damn,” Anthony said softly. He set her on her feet and she followed him into the bedroom.

  “Janet, darling,” Anthony said. “How marvelous to hear from you.” Courtney looked at him sharply. “I know, I’ve been out of town for a couple of weeks, Jan. Courtney? Yes, she is here, as a matter of fact.” He handed Courtney the phone.

  “Hi, Court,” Janet said, “your maid gave me this number. I’m awfully sorry to bother you, but something awful has happened. A real crisis.”

  Anthony lit a cigarette and handed it to Courtney. She nodded. He went into the bathroom and she heard the shower running. Courtney grinned.

  “ . . . so Pete and I didn’t get out of the after-hours club until about six this morning,” Janet was saying. “I was kind of bombed when I got home and so was Pete, and there was Daddy, waiting up for me with his bourbon. He practically drove Pete out of the house, I thought he was going to slug Pete or something. Daddy was really out of his head. Well, the point of the whole thing is, I was just bombed enough to pack my clothes and pull out. Daddy was even threatening to put me into the hatch, and he could put me in a sanitarium if he wanted to, you know, I’m not twenty-one yet. So I’m at Pete’s now, but his family is back and is mad at him because the house is a shambles, so I’m hung, I can’t stay here. I wondered if I could stay with you for a couple of days. I really can’t go home this time.”

  Anthony was standing in the doorway of the bathroom, drying his body with a Turkish towel. Courtney watched him a moment. This would mean a curtailment of their seeing each other so constantly, because Courtney was determined not to hurt Janet by letting her know.

  “Sure, Jan,” Courtney said finally. “I’ll tell the maid, and you can come over about five. Mummy won’t be through rehearsal until six, but I’ll be home.”

  Anthony looked at her sharply. She shrugged. “Thanks, sweetie,” Janet said. “I knew I could count on you. Give Anthony my love.”

  Courtney hung up and turned hopelessly to Anthony. He sat down beside her on the bed and kissed her softly on the shoulder. She was hardly conscious of him. She reached across him and flicked the ash of her cigarette in the ash tray beside the bed. He sat up and sighed.

  “Damn,” he repeated.

  He handed her the ash tray.

  “So Janet is moving in on you,” he said finally. “That will complicate things.”

  “I know,” Courtney answered, grinding out the cigarette.

  “Did that alcoholic father of hers finally throw her out?”

  “I gathered it was a sort of mutual agreement,” Courtney said. “She says she’s only coming for a couple of days, but I know Janet. Much as I love her, she plays the Man Who Came to Dinner whenever she stays with anyone. She has no consciousness of imposing on anyone, of overstaying her welcome. It’s all a part of this conviction that the world owes her everything.”

  “Courtney, I know how fond you are of Janet, and I know this ridiculous obsession you have about not letting her know we’re having an affair. I know you feel you betrayed her somehow because our on-and-off affair ended the night she introduced you to me. I trust you realize it will be awfully hard to keep this from her when she is staying with you and realizes how much we see each other.”

  “Well,” said Courtney, “I’ll just have to do what I do with Mummy, and let her think I see you only every couple of weeks, and have fictitious beaux.”

  “No, angel,” he said patiently. “Janet knows every one of the boys you tell your mother you go out with, because she introduced you to all of them. That won’t work. You’ll just have to kick her out after a little while and dispatch her to some other friend, or your kind deception will fail.”

  “No,” said Courtney thoughtfully, “I can’t do that. Jan has done too much for me, I just can’t kick her out when she needs me. Besides, I’m very fond of her, and when she’s in trouble, I want to help her. There’s only one solution,” she said, turning to Anthony. “And that’s to see less of you, darling, and maybe go to some of those cocktail parties with her, though I don’t want to, to erase any suspicion.”

  “Now, Courtney,” said Anthony, suddenly worried. “Don’t be rash in your loyalty. I know you have a very great sense of responsibility, and I know how you hate to hurt anyone. Janet was half in love with me for a year or so, I know, but it was no grand passion. Neither of us bothered even to be faithful to the other.”

  Courtney looked over at Anthony. “She wanted to marry you, you know. She told me that about a week after I got back into town, and she would talk about it often.”

  “Oh, she didn’t really,” Anthony smiled. “We would talk of marriage, but that is just one of the conventions of the love affair. I used to say that in a couple of years we would get married, but in the most offhand way. You know, ‘After you have your first husband and are broken in, we really must get married. We get along so well.’ That sort of thing.”

  “Nonetheless, angel, you meant something to her. Don’t you see, all of Janet’s friends habitually betray her. Her lovers laugh at her to other boys, her friends use her to get introductions and dates and, after their purpose is accomplished, take over her beaux and drop her. I want her to think she has one friend who is loyal; I want her to believe that, whether it’s true or not. She introduced us, and I proceeded to take you from her, after an affair that had lasted through a year. I know how it would hurt her to think I followed the pattern, too, and cared that little about her.”

  “A friend is that important to you,” Anthony said.

  “Yes. Janet is. Janet needs my friendship.”

  “You really think you want to see less of me,” Anthony said quietly, “and you really think you will be able to go through with it?”

  “Darling, for a purpose that I am convinced is right, I can go through with almost anything. I don’t want to. You know that, you know that what we have, the world that we create when we’re with each other—well, you know that I’m almost afraid of seeing less of you. But for Janet, I’ll do it. Not in any great altruistic sense, but because I’m never happy with myself when I compromise on something I know is right.” He studied her for a moment in silence.

  “Angel.” She smiled and took his hand. “Only for a couple of weeks. Until her father calms down; it never takes longer than that. Then, when I know she can go home, when I’ve fulfilled my obligation—we’ll see each other constantly again, and we’ll make up for all the days we’ve missed. All right?”

  “All right,” he smiled. “Let’s get decent, darling, and get over to the Plaza.”

  Janet moved in at five as she had promised, with two suitcases and a colossal hang-over. She took over Courtney’s room, establishing herself in the other bed and putting her numerous cocktail dresses and her three evening gowns into Cour
tney’s closet. In the top of the closet went all her collection of “acquired” purses, and Courtney’s notebooks and assorted letters were summarily dispatched from their shelf and put on the floor of the hall closet. Janet called her home and instructed the maid to transfer her phone calls to Courtney’s number. Then she sat down in the living room and announced to Courtney, “My tongue is hanging out for a drink. Hair of the dog and all.”

  Consequently, Courtney fixed two Scotches on the rocks, although she had not the remotest desire for a drink. As she set the drink in front of Janet and sipped her own, Courtney resigned herself to the fact that, through her own decision, her life for the next two weeks would be tailored to Janet’s.

  “Daddy is getting really unbearable,” Janet was saying. “I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do. This drink tastes good, ecstasy. I called Marshall from Pete’s house—you remember Marshall, the boy I have this thing with, who wrote the letter . . .”

  Courtney nodded and lit a weary cigarette.

  “Anyhow, I called Marsh out at Newport and he said he’d be back in town in a few weeks and said I could stay in his apartment—his roommate is spending the summer in Connecticut. So I guess that’s what I’ll do when I leave here.”

  Courtney looked up, startled. “Sweetie, don’t do that, really—I’m no one to moralize, God knows,” she said. “But you would be an idiot to live with this guy, openly. That’s very different from an affair. That means committing yourself to the affair, resigning yourself to it—announcing to society that this is what you want?”

  “What’s the difference? You’re drawing a thin line.”

  “Not thin at all, Jan. You know yourself. You know that once you start with something that hurts you, you go on with it, taking more and more important steps to hurt yourself. You sleep with a guy by inadvertence when you’re bombed one night. Then you can’t stop. Drinking the same way. You know what it’s like. Once you live with this Marshall for a few weeks, that will be it. You’ll leave him and go on to the next, anxious to show everybody your degeneration or something. You can’t stop yourself once you take the next step, you know that.”

  Janet looked sharply at her.

  “Look, Court, are you trying to give me a sermon or something?”

  “No, Janet,” Courtney said wearily. “Never in my life have I lectured you or moralized to you—or anybody, for that matter. I haven’t any right to, and I haven’t any desire to.”

  Courtney looked at Janet for a few minutes. How much older she looked than eighteen, how much more—well, tired she looked than she had any right to. Maybe it was just the hang-over.

  “Jan,” Courtney said quietly, “do you remember when we were at Scaisbrooke? Remember when you broke so many rules and were warned that you would be campused for the rest of the year, I didn’t say not to break the rules. I broke them, too, as much as you did, but I had an A in conduct because I got staff permits from my friends on the staff for being on the grounds at sunset when I used to like to walk on the hockey fields. I had illegal food, and I read after lights, but I was careful about breaking the rules. I broke every rule that inconvenienced me, but I never got caught. And I used to try to tell you, not to obey the rules, but to break them carefully, and not get penalties. To watch out for yourself.”

  Janet nodded.

  “You didn’t pay much attention to me then,” Courtney continued. “You got kicked out anyway, because you wanted to, I guess. You probably won’t pay any attention to me now. I still break all the rules, sweetie, all the rules that you break. But I don’t get caught. Nobody knows about it because I keep my life to myself, or else entrust it to people who won’t betray me. I don’t hurt myself in front of society.”

  “I don’t give a good God damn about society,” Janet said angrily.

  “The hell you don’t! Look, eventually you want to marry some Yalie and have kids and all that. You know you do. You don’t want to be frequenting the same bars in ten years that you frequent now, you don’t want to be walking into the Stork and Twenty One and the Plaza with an escort a little more aged and probably a little less desirable than those you have now, knowing that if you’re not gay, you’ll be alone. That’s not the life you want and you know it.”

  Janet sat in silence, contemplating her drink.

  “Look, Janet, don’t go on destroying yourself. You’re only eighteen. You still have grace, but there isn’t much time of grace. There aren’t many years which we are allowed to refer to as years of ‘youthful indiscretion’ or whatever. People are too harsh, too ready to condemn. Don’t live with this guy. That will be the beginning, and you know it, and then—”

  Courtney stopped herself because Janet was looking away from her, with an expression that to anyone else would have looked like anger, but Courtney knew it wasn’t.

  “Sweetie,” Courtney said gently. “I’m only going out on a limb like this because you’re really a good friend of mine, and I can’t sit by and see you hurt yourself. I’m no one to talk in one sense; I’m no saint. But I think that gives me a reason to talk. You’ve got too much on the ball for this, you’re too great a person.”

  Janet, embarrassed, took a sip of her Scotch and lit a cigarette.

  “It will be amusing as hell,” Janet said with a brittle brightness, “when I come out at Tuxedo this fall and I’m not living at home. You know, this is the thing Daddy has planned for since I was little, a kind of symbol that he gave me what he never had. It means so much to him, and I won’t even be living at home when it finally happens. It’s all paid for, too, and there isn’t a thing he can do about it.”

  Courtney sighed and took Janet’s glass, in which the ice had melted. She freshened Janet’s drink and made herself another.

  “I should have known better,” Courtney said finally. “Somebody talked to me like that once, too—a guy out in California. It didn’t do much good. I learned once that you can’t stop a man from drinking. I guess it’s the same way in this.”

  “Your mother should be in soon,” Janet said.

  “I guess so. It’s close to six. She’ll be home a little after.”

  “Does she know I’m here?” Janet asked.

  “I called her at rehearsal. She was delighted.”

  “She really has been doing a lot on TV lately, hasn’t she?”

  “Yes,” said Courtney. “She has this summer soap-opera thing, and then she has some appearances on shows and so on. Nothing very much, but enough to have the maid. That’s a real psychological boost to her, to be making enough to have the maid. Of course, she wouldn’t be able to do it without Daddy’s help, but it still is important to her.”

  Courtney sat down and lit a cigarette.

  “You know,” she said with a slight smile, “I really love to see the difference in Mummy when she’s working. It’s a funny thing, and hard for most people to understand. The actress is the only part of herself that she loves, the only thing that holds the pieces of her life together. When she isn’t working, she just isn’t a person. She feels she hasn’t any right to show herself to society, so she’s a recluse, the way she was out in Beverly Hills. But now, even though this TV bit is a real comedown for her, she’s almost the way she used to be. Funny the way it works. Symbols of her acting success, like the maid, Marie, and the clothes she buys, make her feel she’s a success as a person, almost—the way a devoted husband would reassure another woman, or something.”

  “Marie is an awfully good maid,” Janet said. “Well-trained.”

  “Mummy always spends a couple of days breaking in a new maid. The first thing she does is sit down and have the maid serve her, in mime, a full-course dinner. Then she sits the maid down and serves her. She’s a real perfectionist about her maids.” Courtney grinned. “We had this wonderful German maid once, Gretchen. Gretchen worked for us for three years. Poor Gretchen. One night Mummy had this big dinner party, when we were in Scarsdale, and I was a little girl, and the dessert was a chocolate soufflé. The soufflé fel
l and Gretchen was fired on the spot.”

  Janet laughed for the first time that evening.

  “She fired the maid because the soufflé fell?”

  “It was the pièce de résistance,” Courtney explained. “The great gesture. You have to understand Mummy, really it’s quite a logical reaction—not excessive at all.”

  A key turned in the lock and Courtney’s mother swept into the room.

  “We were just talking about you,” Courtney said, but her mother did not hear her.

  “Janet darling!” Sondra said, rushing over to her as though Janet were, at that moment, the only person in the room. “Courtney told me what happened,” Sondra said in her low, dramatic voice, “and I was so glad that she asked you to stay with us.”

  “A Scotch, Mummy?” Courtney broke in.

  “Martini, darling. No show tonight,” she said, as though it were extraordinary that she should have an evening free. “Courtney, Marie knows that Janet is staying with us—”

  “Yes, Mummy. Of course.”

  “Good. We’re having roast beef tonight. You like roast beef,” Sondra said to Janet. Janet nodded. “Courtney, darling,” Sondra exclaimed, “don’t drown it in vermouth, for God’s sake!”

  “No, Mummy,” Courtney said patiently. “I make an excellent martini, you know.”

  “I thought you had a date this evening, Courtney,” her mother said. “With that charming boy, the—”

  “No,” Courtney broke in hastily. “I saw him for lunch. I haven’t any date tonight.”

  “Courtney has been having a mad social life,” her mother said to Janet.

  “Oh, really?” Janet said. “You must have found new bars, Court.”

  “Yes, I have,” Courtney said. “I get tired of the same places.”

  Marie came in.

  “Dinner is served, Mrs. Farrell.”