Love and War in California Read online

  Even with all the bad headlines, people were still saying the war would be over before 1942 was out. Day by day, especially at midterm time, more guys from State were disappearing from campus, as Bob-O was doing.

  He offered his pack of Old Golds to the girls. A flame illuminated Amy’s cheek.

  “Stop that shivering!” Bob-O ordered.

  “I’m just worried about Daddy,” Amy whispered.

  The water taxi slid up to the pier with a hoarse putting. Toland helped hand the girls onto the launch. The four of us sat knee to knee facing each other on slat benches. Bonny was probably shivering, too. The driver stood at the wheel with Toland beside him, pointing the way.

  I thought about doped champagne. There was doped champagne in a Black Mask story I’d read. In some funny way, though, Flynn seemed like an antidote to Johnny Pierce.

  The fact was that I had got myself into a kind of two-sided mental state over Bonny. On the one hand, you were supposed to be trying to get into girls’ pants, but on the other, I didn’t really want an involvement with that mess of hysteria and recriminations. It really did seem an unfair game as far as girls were concerned. I had gone through all the shit with Martha Bailey, playing the role of the desperate hard-on knowing she wasn’t going to put out, which she never did. Which was a relief. Johnny Pierce had always thrown up a lot of implication about the tail he was getting, and though he had never mentioned Barbara Bonington by name, the fact was that she had worn his fraternity pin. She was called Bonny because there were four other Barbaras in her sorority.

  I tried to work up a scene for a mystery story for Black Mask, private eye Jeff Dodge aboard a water taxi, with the collar of his trench coat turned up like Alan Ladd, snapping his cigaret, spinning sparks out into the black water (don’t forget the smells!), stink of salt, tar, and diesel oil. Headed out to a yacht on the Bay where a beautiful redheaded woman—

  We were headed for Errol Flynn’s notorious Sirocco!

  “I understand you lose your virginity just stepping aboard Flynn’s boat,” Bob-O said. “But you can get it back buying war bonds.”

  “Oh, shut up!” Amy said.

  “Are you scared?” Bonny whispered in my ear.

  “No.”

  “Will you take care of me?”

  “Sure I will,” I said, and she leaned against me.

  The putting of the engine revved, then ceased as we slid alongside a long shape with the loom of masts disappearing into darkness, a leak of light past a curtained porthole, and moon gleams on polished woodwork. A figure crossed the deck with a scissoring of white trouser legs.

  I sucked a deep breath to brace against my own shivering. “Tell him to come back for us in an hour,” I said to Toland, who repeated the order to the driver. Bonny made an approving sound.

  The band of water between us and the Sirocco narrowed. The deckhand reached out a hand to help us across. The taxi drifted away. Light splashed across the deck as a door was opened. Ducking under a low lintel, we passed down steps into a gleaming mahogany cabin, with chairs ranged around in it. As soon as I saw Richie lounging with his long, uniformed legs stretched out, I thought it would be all right. My brother looked at me, grin spreading on his tanned face with the black bar of eyebrows.

  Flynn came forward to greet us, head ducked under the low ceiling.

  “Payton’s here!” Liz called out. She sat in a director’s chair with a champagne glass in her hand, smiling at me, her silken ankles crossed, her dark hair piled up from the nape of her neck. She raised her bright face to Flynn as he moved past her. Liz’s dark eyes reminded me of the “ox-eyed” goddess in The Iliad. At State she was only another dance major with good legs, but dolled up in a formal with her hair up she was beautiful.

  Flynn pivoted like a swordsman helping Bonny and Amy off with their coats, repeating the names as Richie made introductions. He had a stuffed-nose British accent and a pleasant voice recognizable from his movies, and he smelled of some scented lotion. He drew a heavy green bottle from a silver bucket and wrapped it in a napkin.

  Bob-O said it was nice of him to invite us out on his yacht.

  “It is brave of you to come, my friends,” Flynn said, easing the cork, and everyone laughed in relief.

  The walls of the cabin reflected confused shards of light from the glass on the framed photographs there. I peered at one that showed Flynn bare-chested in a boxer’s raised-fists stance. Others were of movie people. A photograph of Carole Lombard had a faded white blossom stuck in a corner of the frame.

  Flynn poured the champagne, gimbaling right and left, putting everyone at ease with jokes and attentions. I didn’t see how the champagne could have been doped. I thought about Flynn charming the crowd of Beta Eps from State.

  “Here’s champagne to our friends and pain to our sham friends,” he said. His laughter made me grin. He aimed his glass at Liz, posed in a graceful S in her chair. “To Miss Fletcher, who gleams as lovely as the stone in the ring on her finger.”

  “Hear!” Toland said, lighting a cigarette.

  Liz held up her hand to show off Richie’s ring.

  “And has the date been set?” Flynn wanted to know.

  “Last week of June,” Richie said. “Unless they ship me out first.”

  “Just as soon as the Senior Dance Performance is over,” Liz said. She had a slight lisp, as though her Bette Davis mouth didn’t work quite right. Her father was a Navy captain, a real bastard, Richie said. She was twenty-three, old for a senior, having been out of school sick for a year. She was supposed to receive an inheritance from her dead mother when she was twenty-five. Just as easy to fall in love with a rich girl, Richie had said, making a joke of it.

  “Are you going to live in Pensacola?” Bonny asked, with her smile that was like opening a door on an illuminated room.

  “Married Officers Quarters,” Richie said, nodding.

  Flynn pointed his glass again. “And here’s to the fair Miss Bonington and the dark Miss Perrine. And Mr. O’Connor and the younger Mr. Daltrey.”

  I felt myself flush at the attention. On the wall beside me was a poem, glassed and framed:

  One ship sails east, the other west

  By the selfsame winds that blow.

  It’s the set of the sails—and not the rules—

  That decides the way to go.

  Then they talked about They Died with Their Boots On.

  “I cried!” Amy said.

  “They called Custer ‘Old Iron-Bottom,’ you know,” Flynn said. “Ah, what a sore backside I had. We actors earn our pay! I’ve just signed to play James J. Corbett in a film. Rigorous training will be required.”

  Bonny asked who Corbett was.

  I told her that he was called “Gentleman Jim,” and he’d won the heavyweight boxing title from John L. Sullivan.

  Richie squinted at me as though he’d caught me showing off.

  “Bruiser versus artist,” Flynn said, nodding. “It will be hard work playing Gentleman Jim, but it will be an adventure. And that is what we are here for, is it not? To make our sun run, rather than stand still, eh?”

  Andrew Marvell! I thought I’d better not parade my English major or Richie would get the squints again.

  Flynn turned his attention to Bob-O. “And you are off to a life of adventure in the Marine Corps, Mr. O’Connor?”

  “Due at the Recruit Depot at two-oh-two tomorrow!” Bob-O said, flexing his shoulders in his glen plaid jacket. “How about you, Mr. Flynn? Does the draft board go after movie stars?”

  “Does it not! Unfortunately—fortunately!—the physical examination disclosed some rather nasty spots on my lungs.” Flynn stood with his head inclined under the low ceiling, one hand in his pocket, the other gripping his glass, always the center of attention.

  “In all truth, this war is not an adventure in which I care to participate. Colonials have had enough of pulling Britain’s chestnuts out of the fire.”

  “But aren’t you English?” Amy asked in her
small voice. She held her hands clasped together before her bosom, her shoulders in her pink formal as frail as bird wings.

  “Ah, no, little one. I am Australian, a colonial, as you were once also in this great country. I’m o’ Irish stock in addition, and you must know how the Irish feel about the Sassenach! I will tell you what true adventure is, my friends,” he continued. “New Guinea! I worked in the goldfields there. Headhunters! Orchids! Creepers strangling trees a hundred feet high! Men were men in that place, and women stayed well away. I bought the first Sirocco there, transporting native labor. Someday I’ll go back.”

  He lowered himself into a chair and set down his glass to light a cigaret. Bob-O had lit up also, and the cabin was layered with smoke. Richie looked amused, watching Flynn.

  “First ran across Jack London’s books in New Guinea,” Flynn said. “No one reads Jack London anymore.”

  “I’ll bet Brud has,” Richie drawled. “My brother’s read just about everything.”

  He had sounded proud of me! I said I’d read Martin Eden.

  Flynn said to me, “That’s the way to go, is it not? Off the taffrail when the voyage is over.”

  I explained the ending of Martin Eden to the others, Richie grinning.

  Just then the deckhand in the white trousers came down into the cabin on squeaking rubber soles. Flynn introduced him as Pancho Hagen. Hagen nodded curtly to us and moved into the galley, where he seated himself on a stool and lit up, as though trying to conceal himself in a smoke screen. He was dark-complected, with a hard, lined face like a cigar-store Indian.

  I remembered Toland saying Hagen was a stuntman, too, and Flynn their host aboard the Sirocco.

  When Flynn went on to talk about a film project Richie had worked on with David Lubin at Fontainebleau Studios, I saw Hagen thrust his face forward as though his attention had been caught. Then it was withdrawn into the smoke and shadows again.

  “I want to make films,” Richie said. “Someday I’ll make a film with Liz dancing.”

  “I’m a good dancer,” Liz said in her husky voice.

  “I’m sure you are, my dear,” Flynn said, gazing at her with his head cocked admiringly. And I saw that Liz was aware of it.

  The Sirocco rolled and pitched from something passing.

  Flynn asked Bob-O what he intended to do after the war. Bob-O said he would go to law school and join his father’s law firm. Amy wanted to be a schoolteacher. And the fair one?

  Bonny said she would marry a doctor. “We’ll have a boat. My family all have boats. It doesn’t have to be a schooner, though,” she said, to make a joke of it.

  The men in the Bonington family were all doctors. Bonny’s mother read novels like The Forsyte Saga and The Sun Is My Undoing and played bridge.

  “Ah, a schooner is not so large a boat, my dear,” Flynn said. “Especially when it is filled with lunks who have performed too many stunts without their helmets on.”

  Toland gave this the big laugh. Hagen lit another cigaret. Cocooned in smoke in the galley, he radiated that kind of anxiety you feel when some drunk seems primed to raise a ruckus.

  Flynn raised an eyebrow at me. “Younger Brother Daltrey?”

  It was queer that I had been ready for his question, and then was not ready when it came. I said I wanted to be a writer.

  “A writer for your brother, the producer-to-be?”

  “Well, a fiction writer.” Like Raymond Chandler; I didn’t say that. Richie watched me, not quite squinting. Bonny glanced sideways at me. It was interesting that people seemed embarrassed when you said you wanted to be a writer. In fact I was already a writer, with five unpublished stories back from Black Mask.

  Amy asked if Flynn had known Carole Lombard, pointing to the photograph with the faded flower. I saw Liz touch the flower in her own hair as she glanced at the photograph. Flynn rose to refill glasses.

  “A lovely lady,” he said, nodding. “The pilot lost the beam, I understand. Carrie and twenty others dead in an instant. Yours is a dangerous trade,” he said to Richie.

  Hagen was rocking on his stool with his shoulders hunched up around his neck.

  “I had a student who ran into a gas storage tank two weeks ago,” Richie said. “Killed himself and his instructor. It was just luck I wasn’t his instructor that day.”

  “Talk about killers!” Hagen said in a sudden, growling voice that struck everyone silent.

  “Please spare us your mutterings, Panch,” Flynn said. “I’m afraid you are drunk.”

  Richie made a show of slipping his cuff to glance at his watch, and, like prayers answered, there was the slight jar of the water taxi returning.

  “Does the young Martin Eden play tennis?” Flynn asked Richie.

  Richie said I had a pretty good forehand if I’d just get the racket back early.

  I had as good a forehand as he had.

  “You are invited to visit me at Mulholland Farm!” Flynn said to me, then extended a hand in a large gesture to include everyone. “I’ll give you good tennis! You’ll meet my friend Jack Warner. He is always interested in young people he might turn into stars of the silver screen.”

  “And writers,” Richie said.

  Liz gazed at Flynn with a nakedness to her face that was embarrassing.

  Richie helped her into her coat, shaking hands with Flynn with some dialog I didn’t hear. Toland helped Amy up out of the cabin, following her and Bob-O.

  In the galley, Hagen rose, shoulders hunched, dusting his hands on his trouser legs. He lurched toward Richie. “You throat-cutting studio cocksucker!” he growled, and surged inside Richie’s arm, smashing Richie staggering back. Liz cried out. Then Flynn was in motion, and with a crack of sound Hagen stumbled back across the cabin floor, knocking over two chairs with a crash of glasses, to finish squatting on the floor back in the galley again, shaking his big head. Bonny caught hold of my arm as though to stop me from hitting someone. Who had promised her I’d take care of her.

  “My apologies for my drunken friend,” Flynn said, extending a hand to help Richie straighten. He wasn’t even breathing hard. Richie’s face was white as paper.

  I helped Bonny up the steps and out of the cabin. Liz followed us, then Richie. I turned toward him, but he hissed, “Just forget it, Brud!” He put an arm around Liz, moving her toward the water taxi. Bonny held my arm.

  Seeing my brother at a disadvantage had unstrung me with the kind of panic I remembered from when my father had announced that he had to sell the house on Presidio Drive.

  When we were all aboard, the water taxi turned past the stern of the Sirocco toward the Emerald City lights of the Hotel del. Richie and Liz had their heads together. Bob-O offered his pack of Old Golds. No one spoke.

  At the pier, Richie and Liz called out good night and good luck to Bob-O, then disappeared into the darkness, Richie’s tall figure with the pale glow from a light standard kindling the white cover of his cap, Liz tucked against his arm.

  Back in the ballroom, the four of us ordered another round of too-sweet drinks.

  Bob-O and Amy didn’t seem to have been aware of the fuss in the cabin of the Sirocco. After another dance set they left, mounting the stairs to the lobby in lockstep, as though they couldn’t wait to be alone in Bob-O’s V-8.

  Bonny watched them with color in her cheeks, smiling with just her lips when I met her eyes. Maybe we were thinking the same thing. Bob-O’s last night.

  “Am I not supposed to ask what that was all about on Sirocco?” Bonny said, looking down at her hands on the table.

  “I don’t know what it was about.”

  “That scary guy! Did your brother knock him down?”

  “It was Flynn.” I got a laugh out and said, “I guess it should’ve been Richie.”

  Bonny nodded solemnly. “That’s like my brother. He’s always supposed to do the right thing.”

  We danced, cheek to cheek, flesh adhering to flesh in the body heat of the crowded dance floor with the flecks of colored light coursing ov
er the uniforms and the formals and the bare skin. Bonny’s body slumped against mine, sweet gardenia stink in my nostrils. She couldn’t help but feel my hard-on. Maybe the pink flush on her cheeks was the feminine equivalent. From my researches in Sexology magazine I knew that girls had the same genital instincts as men, but with more inhibitions. Crouched in the tangled shadows of going all the way was that disaster beyond contemplation of getting pregnant. I understood all too well the female risks, all prospects destroyed in one moment of getting carried away.

  “I don’t want you to make me feel funny!” Martha Bailey had said in her fake frank way.

  “Is that all you think about?” she had asked.

  I’d already thought about Bonny coming to my hospital bed to cover me with the tent of her fair hair like Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms.

  We left after the “One O’Clock Jump.” Bonny sat at a neutral remove in Ol Paint’s front seat on the ferry ride back across the Bay, arms folded on her chest, while I contemplated whether to try to kiss her parked in front of her house, or before the front door, or not.

  In front of her house, I didn’t make a move and she didn’t get out, though she sat with her back to the door and her arms still folded.

  “What a funny night,” she said. “It wasn’t fun exactly, but it was something. That terrible stuntman guy!”

  Hagen had made me wonder about Richie in Hollywood in a way I’d never wondered before. What did “throat-cutting” mean? Everybody knew that Los Angeles was a bad place, and Hollywood the worst of it.

  “Payton,” Bonny said, and didn’t go on right away.

  Then she said, “You have a job south of Broadway, don’t you? That funny newspaper down there?”

  “The brand,” I said. Lowercase.

  I couldn’t see her features in the darkness under Ol Paint’s top. “Do you know people down there?” she asked. “I mean, they’re different people down there, aren’t they? Closer to—things?”

  I couldn’t think what she was getting at.