Chocolates for Breakfast Read online

  Janet sighed. “Have a banana.”

  “Janet, sweetie, you’re an idiot.”

  They laughed and split a banana and when Janet left for study hall, Courtney stared at the ceiling again and fell asleep, although she wasn’t tired.

  Chapter 3

  Dr. Reismann’s office was heavy and pine-paneled, and its manliness made Courtney immediately comfortable. The idea that she was there to talk about herself pleased her, despite the fact that Mrs. Forrest had insisted on being present. Housemothers were so zealous in their intrusion of their students’ privacy. The doctor, a short and scholarly-looking German, who, Sondra Farrell had told Mrs. Forrest, was one of the best diagnosticians in the New York area, leaned back in his upholstered chair and looked at Courtney.

  “Well, Courtney, you are a very healthy young woman. I can find nothing wrong with you but a very slight anemia, which is common at your age. Let me see, you’re fifteen, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. You mean that you don’t know why I’m tired all the time, either?”

  “There is nothing physically wrong with you. Tell me, you’re on the hockey team at Scaisbrooke, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I’m on the junior team.”

  “You must have to train a great deal. Does that tire you?”

  “No more than it tires the other girls. I’m most tired in the mornings when I wake up.”

  “How much sleep do you get?”

  “About ten hours a night.”

  “I see. What do you do right after you wake up?”

  “I make my bed and straighten the room for inspection, then I have breakfast, then we have to walk around the quadrangle after breakfast, then we have inspection of our uniforms, then we go to chapel, then there are about ten minutes before the first class.”

  “You’re busy in the mornings.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” This was dull. “I get awfully tired in the afternoons, when we have some free time,” she added.

  The doctor was looking over his sheet of paper.

  “Your parents are divorced,” he commented.

  “Yes, when I was about ten,” she said. This was more interesting.

  “Do you see much of them?”

  “Of Mummy, yes.”

  He was making notations so steadily that Courtney hardly noticed.

  “Being so far away from your mother,” he said, “I suppose you get homesick—think about California.”

  “No,” Courtney answered. “I’m never homesick.” She looked out the window. “I daydream a lot though,” she said. “When it’s nice weather like now, I go out to the hockey field and lie in the grass and daydream, and in the evenings I used to go into the chapel.” She leaned forward. “You know, in a corner of the quadrangle there’s a big rabbit’s burrow. Used by whole generations of rabbits, I suppose. Anyhow, it’s very big and I can fit in there under the brush, and it’s as though there’s no one around but me in that rabbit’s burrow, as though the school buildings and all the people weren’t there at all.”

  It sounded kind of silly to talk about a rabbit’s burrow, she thought. She would have told him about the place on Mrs. Reese’s grounds where the boxwoods were all around, and there was a little path that she had discovered one day that seemed as though nobody had used it in about fifty years, it was that faint. She followed it in and pushed aside the boxwood, and inside she found a little cracked marble bench, that also looked as though it hadn’t been used in about fifty years. So she went in and sat on the little marble bench in that secret place all hidden by the boxwoods, and liked the thought that probably nobody around Scaisbrooke now even knew it was there. When she left her secret place, she brushed the snow over her footprints, so that the gardeners wouldn’t follow them and find the cracked marble bench. That place was her favorite in the winter, but in the spring and fall she liked the rabbit’s burrow best. Crazy, a rabbit’s burrow. She ought to talk about more adult things to this man. She couldn’t tell him about the boxwood place anyway, because it was off bounds and Mrs. Forrest was there.

  “What are your daydreams like?” he asked casually.

  That one made her stop and think. What were they like? What ran through her mind when she sat in a secret place and imagined? She thought a lot of silly things about Miss Rosen, like having dinner with her in New York and wild things like that, but she couldn’t tell him that because Mrs. Forrest was there. Anyway, she didn’t think about that much any more, because she only thought about things that might conceivably happen. Courtney was a very practical girl.

  She put her hand up to the lapel of her blazer and pulled at it while she tried to remember, then she stopped that because it was an ill-at-ease gesture and she had to be charming.

  “Well,” she said uncomfortably. “I guess I think about people I know, as though I were with them and talking to them.” She thought about the way she pretended she was talking to Al Leone when she was confused, and how the matter-of-fact answers that he would give helped her to think clearer.

  “Do you just think these conversations, or do they seem real?”

  “Oh, they seem awfully real,” she said intensely. “Sure, the people talk just as they always do, with the inflections and all that. They don’t just talk like me or something,” she said scornfully.

  “So it’s almost as though they were there?”

  “Yes, it’s really as though they were there, except I know they aren’t, although I have a picture of them in my mind so I can see their faces and their expressions.”

  Mrs. Forrest sat forward incredulously, and then remembered that she should show no reaction, like the doctor, and sat back.

  “Well, we all have daydreams,” the doctor said absently as he wrote. “Yours are very vivid.”

  Courtney nodded. This was an accepted fact, and there was nothing remarkable about her having a better imagination than most people.

  “Tell me, Courtney, do you ever get depressed?”

  Courtney thought about looking out her window at the ground two stories below it, and thinking what it would be like to fall there. That frightened her, but she liked to do it all the same. Heights had always terrified her, even when she was a little girl in Westchester and had climbed trees like all the other little boys, even though she was terrified when they swayed in the wind and she was very high up. She liked to climb high all the same, although she always thought about falling down. That’s how she felt when she was very depressed, as though she were looking down from a height and thinking what it would be like if she should fall down.

  “Yes,” she said. “I get depressed sometimes.”

  “Mmm-hmm. For very long, or just for a couple of hours?”

  “For periods of time,” she said thoughtfully. “And then there are times,” she said with pleasure, “when I feel just terrific and as though I can do a whole lot of things better than most people.”

  She stopped herself there, because Mrs. Forrest was listening and she sounded awfully conceited when she said things like that. They were always accusing her of being conceited, because when she felt that she wasn’t such a good person after all, when she felt that she wasn’t even as good as everybody else, she didn’t let anyone know it.

  But the doctor was standing up now, and she knew that the appointment was over. There were a lot of things that she would have liked to say to this man who seemed so interested in what she thought, but she hadn’t had time and she never got around to them. She felt that she hadn’t said anything that would have helped him very much in finding out why she was so tired, but she didn’t know what she could have said anyway.

  “I very much enjoyed talking to you, Courtney.”

  “Thank you,” she murmured automatically. She said thank you as a reflex, answering almost any statement, instead of just uuh or something.

  “You take these iron pills and see if they help you at all. I can’t suggest anything else, except possibly cold weather instead of this lovely spring,” he smiled.

  “Thank
you, Dr. Reismann, and goodbye,” she said and extended her hand. She didn’t so much mind leaving, although his office was very manly and comfortable, because the day outside was lovely and it was a nice walk from town to Scaisbrooke. Even Mrs. Forrest was easier to take on a day like this. It was Saturday and the dinner was foul, but there was no study hall, so she didn’t mind going back after her brief sortie into the world outside. On the walk back she wanted to run, but she stayed with the plump steps of Mrs. Forrest, like a polite Scaisbrooke girl, although it was difficult not to respond to the sun like any other young girl in the springtime.

  “Oh, Jan, you haven’t any clothes on again,” she said in exasperation when she came into the room.

  Janet stretched and said, “No. I feel terribly sensual, I feel as though I ought to be out making love with somebody. Anybody,” she said thoughtfully, “so long as he wasn’t overweight.”

  Courtney eyed her suspiciously.

  “Have you been reading my Christopher Isherwood?”

  “Isherwood? Never even heard of him.”

  “He heard of you,” she smiled. “Read it some time. You’d like Sally Bowles.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “Oh, she’s out of her head. Really game, but out of her head.”

  “Like that Zelda that you were telling me about, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife?”

  “Yeah,” said Courtney. “Like that Zelda, when she jumped into the fountain near the Plaza because it was a hot night.”

  “I’m like that,” Janet said proudly. “Like a Fitzgerald person.”

  “Kind of,” Courtney said.

  “I’m glad I have a literary roommate,” Janet said. “Did you get any bananas while you were out?”

  “No, I was with Fo-bitch, and she wouldn’t let me. Ran into some little second-former, Sommers, and she said she’d get them.”

  “How did you and Fo-bitch get along?”

  “Oh, it was all right, because I didn’t have to talk to her or anything. This doctor was great. Asked me all sorts of questions, about daydreaming and being tired and feeling depressed and all. It was kind of interesting, but didn’t prove anything.”

  The iron pills did not help Courtney at all, and her excessive sleeping got worse as the weeks passed and summer vacation drew near. Dr. Reismann knew that they would not help her. As he said to his wife at dinner that night, “Why shouldn’t the child sleep when she has nothing that she wants to be awake for?”

  Chapter 4

  The Garden of Allah was conveniently located on “The Strip,” a block from Schwab’s Drugstore where a whole afternoon of black coffee was provided for the price of the first cup. Across the way was a reducing salon which advertised itself by a bicycling mannequin in the window and pictures of broad-shouldered 1940 stars on similar machines, and nearby was a Chinese restaurant where a cheap and filling meal could be found. The Garden shouted its identity to the passers-by on Sunset Boulevard by a glaring, blinking, shifting neon sign of generally neurotic behavior. The palm trees, of course, were lit by floodlights because it is man’s business to improve upon actuality. The general impression given to the uninitiated by the sign and the bizarre name was one of a particularly brazen house of ill repute, but the prices of the villas were equal to those of the bungalows of the more sedate Beverly Hills Hotel, and any behavior of ill repute indulged in by the inhabitants was generally not on a professional basis.

  The villas surrounded a pool whimsically built in the shape of a lotus leaf, but of course the pool wasn’t meant to be practical, only symbolic, and in that it succeeded admirably. The lotus-eaters gathered daily around the pool to play gin rummy, talk about the work that they hoped to get or that they had recently completed, and drink vodka in various guises. Beside the pool was the main building of the hotel, if it may be called that—actually the Garden was only symbolic and symptomatic as well—and in the hotel was a bar, which was very definitely practical.

  The bar was papered in an unobtrusive green, and the seats were of green leather. A later and more flagrant management papered the bar in candy-stripes in an attempt to make even that room into a symbol, but their reign was short-lived anyway, and at this time the green that had solaced F. Scott Fitzgerald in his brief and tragic stay in Hollywood still remained.

  This was the interim time of day, the hour that was once, in an earlier and less uprooted time, referred to as the children’s hour, but which today is called the cocktail hour. This was the time when working Hollywood showered and changed, and when out-of-work Hollywood looked out of its window at the evening sky and put on its corduroy jacket.

  This was the hour that Sondra Farrell hated with a hatred bred of solitude, and which she passed in the bar of the Garden of Allah because it was one of the few places where a woman could go alone without having overly determined passes made at her. Marty, the bartender, saw to that for her.

  “How are you this evening, Miss Farrell?” he said pleasantly. He expected no information but few remarks are made in that expectation, being used only to fill space and cover gestures like the clearing of glasses.

  “As well as usual, Marty. Make that a Barry Cabot martini,” she added, meaning nearly pure vodka and a great deal of that.

  “Mr. Cabot was in late last evening,” Marty said as he mixed the vodka martini.

  Barry Cabot was a juvenile, boy-next-door actor in his late twenties, conscious of the fact that he would soon be very much out of work. For his type, the working years were as short as a boxer’s, and the wait until he could go into character roles would be long and hungry. He was often “in between roles” now, and almost any bar in Hollywood knew what was meant by a “Cabot martini.”

  “Did he behave himself?” Sondra smiled.

  “Oh, you know Mr. Cabot,” Marty answered. “But he was all right. Just kind of moody, that’s all. Didn’t throw any martinis in anybody’s face or anything like that.”

  Cabot was a young man who had particular appeal to older women, but since Sondra was never more than briefly interested in weak young men, they had a comfortable, working relationship. He was a good drinking companion when he was sober, but that was less and less of the time now, so Sondra seldom bothered to speak to him when he sat sullenly at the bar. Barry Cabot’s chief contribution was his amusement value.

  “How is your little girl?” Marty asked, because he could see that Sondra was very lonely this evening.

  “She’s all right,” Sondra lied. “She’ll be coming home soon,” she added.

  Marty digested this piece of information and moved to the other end of the bar to serve some people who had just come in. One of them nodded to Sondra Farrell, and she raised her hand in a slight gesture of greeting. She couldn’t remember where she had met him, probably on some picture.

  Suddenly someone slapped her on the back very hard, so that her martini splattered a little way from her lips. The man next to her chuckled and said, “Friend of yours?”

  “Hiya, Sondra, you bitch, where have you been?” Barry Cabot had an ingratiating way about him.

  “Available,” Sondra smiled. “Who’s been buying you the martinis?”

  Barry smiled that white, boyish smile.

  “That doesn’t matter at all, darling, because you’re buying them for me now.” He was almost as famous for his beautiful and deep voice as his martinis, and he realized this and spoke slowly as though he were stretching in bed and hadn’t gotten up yet. Yes, thought Sondra, he had a bed voice.

  “Only if you’re charming, Barry. I can’t bear moody gigolos.”

  “I don’t know that I shall be charming now that you put it that way,” he said petulantly. “Tell me”—and he smiled again, that totally insincere but effective smile—“how is your daughter?” He knew that Sondra hated to be reminded that she had a daughter fifteen.

  “Oh, a problem, as usual.”

  “I should like to meet her,” Barry said to annoy her.

  “She’ll be out here soon, dammit. Sh
e’s my duenna, you know.”

  “She’s lovely, of course.”

  “Oh, yes. Very.”

  “With all the charm of youth,” he said.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Youth appeals to me, you know,” he said.

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Don’t be bitchy,” he said.

  “But I always am.”

  “Margaret’s only your age,” he said.

  “She looks ten years older.”

  “She’s convenient,” he said. “Where the hell is my drink?”

  “How delightful it is to be with you.”

  “You don’t have to be, you know,” he said.

  “Would you rather I left?”

  “You’re paying,” he said.

  “God, you’re a spoiled child.”

  Barry picked up his drink, and then slowly and deliberately turned his back on the woman. Everyone who knew Barry Cabot was accustomed to this. Sondra did not take the trouble of leaving. The best way to treat a difficult child was to ignore him. She looked at Barry’s classic profile reflected in the mirror behind the bar, a face too weak to play male leads. His expression was one of practiced arrogance and did not change. He was posing now. In the mirror Sondra saw with relief that Al Leone had entered, and she waited for him to see her and come over. When he came up to the bar Al looked at Barry, shrugged to Sondra and ignored him. Al, like most men, intensely disliked Barry Cabot.

  “Drinking alone, I see.”

  “Yes, Al, that’s the usual now.”

  “Don’t go into that again, doll.”

  Sondra smiled. “All right,” she said in the childlike, intimate voice that made men think that she was flirting with them, which she was. “I promise not to be depressed if you have a drink with me.”

  “Sure, baby. Can I buy you another?”

  “I like you, Al.”

  “I’ll tell you what, let’s move to a table.” He felt that he was in Barry Cabot’s lap, standing between him and Sondra.