Chocolates for Breakfast Page 5

  “How’s your kid?” Al asked.

  “Darling, if one more person asks me that this evening, I’ll scream.”

  “Oh, shut up. You ought to be proud of having such a great kid.”

  “Courtney doesn’t make me seem any younger.”

  “Who the hell do you want to be young for, anyway? A fag like Barry Cabot?”

  “No, no. He couldn’t interest me less. I want to be young for myself. I was never meant to be someone’s mother.”

  “You got a point there.”

  “Look, if you’re going to be difficult too . . .”

  “I asked you how your kid was. She’s the only worthwhile one in your goddamn family, you know. That weak first husband of yours, and that bastard Russell—”

  “Let’s leave him out of this. You have no sensitivity.”

  “Sensitivity. I leave that for the screwballs like you. I’m a business manager, sweetie.”

  “Frankly, Al, I’m a little worried about Courtney. She doesn’t seem at all happy at school. Her housemother wrote me a long letter, and she told me how Courtney wishes she were here, and how she neglects her studies and has no friends to speak of.”

  “I told you at Christmas that that kid needs a home. Now that Russell is out of the picture—I know, I know, I have no sensitivity—I think you ought to let her stay here, with you.”

  “Al, do you know what you’re asking?”

  “Yeah, that you act like a mother to the kid for a change. That you face up to your responsibilities.”

  “Look, you know as well as I do what kind of a life I’d give her.”

  “I’m afraid I do. Propping that kid up at a bar on her Christmas vacation.”

  “Propping her up at a bar! Really, darling! Courtney loves to feel like an adult, drinking a daiquiri with all of us.”

  “Crap. A kid likes to feel like a kid.”

  “Nonetheless. I don’t like to be alone, you know. I’m a woman who was meant to be surrounded by men dancing attendance on me.”

  “So let them. But take that kid out of boarding school.”

  “But she has security there.”

  “The hell she does. How can she have security when she has no home?”

  “Are you trying to tell me how to raise my child?”

  “Yes. You know, the kid talks to me like I was her father. I know what goes on inside of her.”

  “Then you know more than her father or I.”

  Al nodded.

  “Where do you suggest we send her to school?”

  “Hollywood High School.”

  “Good God, no.”

  “What’s wrong with it? I went there when I was a kid.”

  “That’s just what I mean. No, she wouldn’t get along there at all. Courtney has been sent to all the best schools and camps in the East. I can’t ask her to change her way of living and face an entirely different group.”

  “Then send her to Beverly Hills High School with all the little rich bastards.”

  “You know,” she said toying with her drink, “that might not be a bad idea.”

  “It might not be a bad idea either if you moved outta here and got a house in Beverly Hills.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. We’ll see. You might have something in what you say, though.”

  “I’ll leave you with that, doll. I gotta go. I have a date with that cute little broad I had in here the other night. She wants me to pick her up at her apartment, for Chrissake. She’s got real class, this broad.”

  “Have a good time,” Sondra smiled.

  “So long, screwball,” he said fondly.

  Sondra Farrell was frightened by the thought of having Courtney live with her, of having to make a home for the child. She had been able to live as a young woman for the four years that she had been in Hollywood. Now suddenly she would be the mother of a child who was almost a woman. The idea appalled her. But she knew that Al was right, Al was always right, damn him, in that coarse, direct way of his. Courtney did need a home, and Sondra had realized it for several years now. It took time, but Sondra Farrell always faced her responsibilities eventually, and she prided herself on the fact. Of course, she always did it reluctantly, conscious that she was making a sacrifice, so that the good that she might have done was lessened. She gave Courtney the best schools, the best camps, lovely clothes, as she often told herself. Giving of herself was something else again. She had never been able to do that, not even with her husbands. She knew, however, that it must be done, and so she left the bar of the Garden of Allah and wrote Courtney a letter.

  Chapter 5

  Courtney was glad that she could tell Scaisbrooke to go to hell. Although she experienced a pang of remorse when Mrs. Reese told her that she was being seriously considered for editor of the Lit Review for next year, she felt good about finally leaving. She didn’t like to be a malcontent, and she felt that it was only fair if you didn’t like a place to get out of it. Besides, Janet was being kicked out, and Courtney wouldn’t have had anyone to room with.

  She felt even more excited than usual when she got on the plane at LaGuardia, because she knew that this time she was leaving boarding school for good. Although Courtney had been flying since she was a year and a half old, and flying alone since she was seven, she still got a feeling of exhilaration when the motors revved before the take-off. When they had been out of New York for about an hour, and that view of the city that she loved so much had given way to the confining denseness of night clouds, she took out her mother’s letter to read it again.

  Courtney Darling,

  The other day I received a letter from your housemother which upset me a great deal, but I hesitated to answer it until I could offer a solution for the problems so clearly indicated. Your housemother told me about the session with Dr. Reismann. The school is very worried about you. I don’t know what stories you made up to give the doctor the idea that you had suicidal tendencies—although we know that is nonsense, the school does not, and you mustn’t play games with this sort of thing. But enough of chastisement.

  I was very glad to hear that you ended your dependence on that English teacher. I know how difficult it is for you to make friends of your own age, but you make life even lonelier for yourself by forming an attachment to an older person—such things can’t help but alienate you from your contemporaries. Your housemother said that you seemed to be seeing more of the other girls, and she mentioned a couple—Alberts and somebody—that you seemed to have struck up a friendship with, which I was happy about.

  I gathered, reading between the lines of Mrs. Forrest’s letter, that you are even more dissatisfied with Scaisbrooke since spring vacation. At any rate, it is clear that your excessive sleeping means something is bothering you. I don’t know what you want to escape from, but it seems to me that it is about time I gave you a real home. For one thing, you should be having dates and parties, and you should be free to raid the icebox at night if you want to—the things that most children take for granted. I know I can never be the little gray-haired mother, nor can I give you the stability that you find at boarding school. But you know all this. The choice is up to you.

  I talked this over with your father on the telephone yesterday, and he thinks that you should come out here—that is, if you want to. He is, of course, always delighted to have his responsibilities on the other coast. If you do decide to leave, tell me as soon as possible so that I can enroll you in Beverly Hills High School, and let your father know so that he can talk to Mrs. Reese. Don’t feel we are putting pressure on you, though—if you want to stay at school we will understand that, too.

  By the way, Al Leone sends his love and the entire Garden is alerted for your arrival. Do well in your exams, darling, and I look forward anxiously to seeing you. We’ll have champagne for breakfast and I promise you’ll have a ball this summer.

  I love you,

  Mummy

  There hadn’t been much question in Courtney’s mind, and as she got off the pla
ne in Burbank she was even more confirmed in her decision. The Garden had been alerted; Al Leone and assorted actors were waiting in the bar, and they did have Champagne for breakfast. There was an actor there that Courtney had not met before, Barry Cabot. He was a little loaded but rather charming, and he greeted her with the expected embrace and the expected comment on her eyes, which were very dark in the dimness of the bar. He had an arrogance that interested her; it seemed like her own. As he turned his head, he posed as though he did not want the camera to record the fullness under his chin which, despite his lean body and his twenty-eight years, was the inevitable result of countless martinis. In this pose he reminded Courtney of the picture of Rupert Brooke in the front of her well-worn copy of Brooke’s poetry. Barry Cabot stayed in her mind as she fell asleep that night.

  The next morning Courtney awoke with a vague sense that she was late, and had missed breakfast and chapel. The soft morning sunlight fell on her bed and she looked around her. She saw a palm tree brushing against the window and lay back in bed, reassured. Scaisbrooke was far behind her. Courtney dressed and went into the living room, which was cluttered with empty glasses and full ash trays. This reassured her further; cocktail parties were one of the few constants in her life. All her life she would associate liquor with her childhood. When she was alone and did not wish to be, a drink would reassure her as the smell of dinner cooking or the sound of a hose spraying a summer lawn would another.

  On the couch, wrapped in a blanket against the cold California night, Barry Cabot slept soundly as a small boy. She looked at Barry, his head buried in his arms and his face relaxed and boyish in sleep. She sat across from him. She did not know why she liked to watch him in sleep. His skin was pale and clear, like a woman’s or a child’s, and a shock of reddish brown hair fell across his high forehead. His mouth was finely and delicately formed, with a petulant fullness to the lower lip.

  She looked up as her mother came into the living room, very tan in her white satin bathrobe.

  “Good morning, darling, did you sleep well?”

  “Very well, thank you, Mummy.” She looked over at the couch. “Our guest is sleeping well, too.”

  “Oh, yes. The party broke up late last night— I made the mistake of having a ham sent in, and I don’t think they had eaten in days. Barry was afraid to go home—you know these Peter Pans who are frightened to be alone with themselves in the dark—so I told him he could sleep on the couch.”

  There was a sudden and demanding knock on the door. Courtney got up to answer it. Framed against the late morning brightness stood Patrick Cavanaugh, a New Yorker writer and one of the guests of the evening before. In his hands was a silver tray with four Bloody Marys. Courtney grinned and took the tray.

  “Patrick, you darling!” Sondra Farrell rushed to him and threw her arms about him.

  “Wake up that freeloader Cabot,” he said.

  Barry put his face into the couch and muttered something incoherent.

  “We’ve got a Bloody Mary for you, Cabot,” said Patrick.

  Reluctantly awake, he sat up.

  “May I have one, too, Mummy?”

  “I brought one for you,” said Patrick.

  “No, Courtney, not vodka at eleven in the morning. If your father knew, he would have an asthma attack.”

  “Let the kid have a drink,” said Barry.

  “Well, you may have a quarter of a glass,” her mother relented.

  Patrick raised his glass solemnly.

  “To Courtney,” he said. “May she always rise late to find a drink awaiting her.”

  “And amusing men around her,” her mother added.

  “Daddy would flip,” Courtney said, but she liked the toast, and she was pleased to find that the Bloody Mary tasted like tomato juice with tabasco.

  Her mother ordered breakfast brought for all of them in the villa, with more Bloody Marys and a great deal of black coffee. Courtney wasn’t allowed to have another Bloody Mary, but she was hungry anyway and she wanted to finish breakfast and go for a swim.

  She put on her black strapless bathing suit, and looked at herself in the mirror while they talked in the living room. She had a good body, and she was very aware of it. Her legs were firmly muscled, like a dancer’s from years of athletics. She was slim and athletic, her shoulders were broad and the collarbone and the molding of her upper body was smoothly distinct beneath her warmly tanned skin. Her breasts were firm and full, even at fifteen. She had a woman’s body, curved, firm and sensual, and this did not pass without notice. The ease and assurance with which she used her body even in such simple actions as walking, her perpetual consciousness of her body, the vitality and challenge in her green eyes—all these things spoke clearly of passion. She was not yet sixteen, but she was ready for love. Men were aware of it, although her mother could not be and Courtney sensed it only vaguely. She had never kissed a man, she had never indulged in any of the byplay of love-making as Janet had, but her passions ran high and her need for love was great.

  When she came to the pool, she was surprised to see three young boys there, about her age. Somehow the couples that lived at the Garden seemed incapable of breeding children, and the youthful laughter as the boys ducked one another in the pool seemed to startle the sun bathers and disturb the haze of fantasy and self-delusion that hung about the lotus-shaped pool. She was not pleased to see the boys there; they were intruders from the harshly bright, barbarian world of youth invading the soft untrodden sands of disappointment.

  Al Leone, mahogany-tanned, had come over from his apartment across the street and was doing push-ups on his deck chair.

  “Hi, doll,” he greeted her amiably. “What time did you go to bed?”

  “About two, I guess.”

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “Some people came by the villa and they’re all drinking Bloody Marys. So I left, because I wanted to swim.”

  “Barry Cabot there?”

  “Yes, he slept on the couch.”

  “I thought so. What do you think of him?”

  “I like him. He kind of interests me.”

  “Christ, I was afraid of that. Look, baby doll, watch out for that faggot. He is worth exactly nothing.”

  “What do you mean, watch out for him?”

  “He is the sort of guy you would like, being an artist type with intellectual pretensions and also having some charm for women. Also, he is around your villa a great deal as your mother provides him with occasional drinks and dinners and finds him amusing. So don’t you start to get interested, because he is a real shit-heel guy.”

  “Al, I’m not interested in anybody—and not anybody of Barry Cabot’s age,” she said patiently. “I’m just a kid, you know.”

  “I don’t know. You are a woman, and an attractive one. There are some guys around here who would take advantage of that.”

  “Who are these kids in the pool?” she said, changing the subject.

  “Two of them are the sons of a television producer, and the third is the son of a director. They’re here for the summer. Want to meet them?”

  “Not particularly. They’re making a lot of noise.”

  “I’ll introduce you to them. They’re kind of young for you, but they’re nice kids. A couple of years older than you.”

  “I’ll meet them when they get out of the pool,” she said without enthusiasm.

  Al lay for a few minutes in the sun.

  “Sweetie, I want to talk to you about your mother,” Al said in a confidential tone. He looked around him, but no one was nearby. “She would be the last one to tell you this, but I figure you ought to know,” he said in a low tone. “She is about to go into bankruptcy, unless some break comes along awfully fast.”

  Courtney frowned, puzzled. “But her contract . . .”

  “The studio is not taking up her option. There’s a chance that she might get the lead in Nick Russell’s new picture, and that’s about the only hope she has. You know, she isn’t the draw that she wa
s a year ago. They’ve been tightening up, as you probably know, and actors are being let out of their contracts by carloads. She’s very much in debt, and unless she gets this assignment I don’t see anything for her to do but declare bankruptcy. Those last two pictures were really bombs, and everybody’s so frightened they’re not able to take a chance on her now.”

  “But what about the Plaza, and the Garden, and the house she’s going to get in Beverly Hills this fall?”

  “Baby, you know your mother as well as I do. She’s a screwball, and she thinks that money will always be provided for her by some invisible power. She can’t believe that she is broke, so she just goes more and more in debt, figuring that at the last minute something will come along.”

  “Mr. Micawber,” Courtney mused.

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So, kid, that’s how things stand. I thought I’d better tell you, because you’re the only sensible member of the family, and maybe you can keep her from crazy shopping binges and all that. Also, I didn’t want all this to hit you like a bomb. I wanted you to be prepared, because you’re old enough to handle these things.”

  Courtney was reminded of what had been said to her all her childhood as she was handed responsibility that a child should never have, and as she was made aware of realities that a child should ignore until the child himself chooses to step down from his tower of fantasies to the plain of Babel. She sighed inaudibly.

  “I’m glad you told me, Al. Maybe you and I together can make her act a little sensibly, but I doubt it. Anyhow, I’ll try, and I’ll try not to ask for money or clothes or things, so she won’t be tempted to go more into debt.”

  She saw the house in the hills above Beverly Hills become indistinct in the sunlight, merging with the pastels of this most unreal of real worlds. What the hell, she thought, I didn’t base my decision to come out here on money. Though money always helps, she added. How grubby! she thought suddenly, angrily. How grubby and obscene to be facing bankruptcy! But then, that was the price that had to be paid for living in a world of fantasy and illusion, a charming world. Maybe. She didn’t know.