“Did you say ‘clever, ‘ Willy?” It’s Helen.
“I’m in a story conference, Helen, and we’re speaking tonight at suppertime. Why are you calling at lunch for?”
“Hostile, hostile.”
Never argue with your wife about hostility when she’s a certified Freudian. “It’s just they’re driving me crazy with stupid notions in this story conference. What’s up?”
“Nothing, probably, except the Morgenstern’s out of print. I’ve checked with Doubleday’s too. You sounded kind of like it might be important so I’m just letting you know Jason will have to be satisfied with his very fitting ten-speed machine.”
“Not important,” I said. Sandy Sterling was smiling. From the deep end. Straight at me. “Thanks though anyway. “ I was about to hang up, then I said, “Well, as long as you’ve gone this far, call Argosy on Fifty-ninth Street. They specialize in out-of-print stuff.”
“Argosy. Fifty-ninth. Got it. Talk to you at supper. “ She hung up.
Without saying “No starlets now.” Every call she ends with that and now she doesn’t. Could I have given it away by something in my tone? Helen’s very spooky about that, being a shrink and all. Guilt, like pudding, began bubbling on the back burner.
I went back to my lounge chair. Alone.
Sandy Sterling swam a few laps. I picked up my New York Times . A certain amount of sexual tension in the vicinity. “Done swimming?” she asks. I put my paper down. She was by the edge of the pool now, nearest my chair.
I nod. staring at her.
“Which Zanuck, Dick or Darryl?”
“It was my wife,” I said. Emphasis on the last word.
Didn’t faze her. She got out and lay down in the next chair. Top heavy but golden. If you like them that way, you had to like Sandy Sterling. I like them that way.
“You’re out here on the Levin, aren’t you? Stepford Wives? “
“I’m doing the screenplay.”
“I really loved that book. That’s, like, my favorite book in all the world. I’d really love to be in a picture like that. Written by you. I’d do anything for a shot at that.” So there it was. She was putting it right out there, on the line.
Naturally I set her straight fast. “Listen,” I said, “I don’t do things like that. If I did, I would, because you’re gorgeous, that goes without saying, and I wish you joy, but life’s too complicated without that kind of thing going on.”
That’s what I thought I was going to say. But then I figured, Hey wait a minute, what law is there that says you have to be the token puritan of the movie business? I’ve worked with people who keep card files on this kind of thing. (True; ask Joyce Haber. ) “Have you acted a lot in features?” I heard myself asking. Now you know I was really passionate to know the answer to that one.
“Nothing that really enlarged my boundaries, y’ know what I mean?”
“Mr. Goldman?”
I looked up. It was the assistant lifeguard.
“For you again.” He handed me the phone.
“Willy?” Just the sound of my wife’s voice sent sheer blind misgivings through each and every bit of me.
“Yes, Helen?”
“You sound funny.”
“What is it, Helen?”
“Nothing, but—”
“It can’t be nothing or you wouldn’t have called me.”
“What’s the matter, Willy?”
“Nothing is the matter. I was trying to be logical. You did, after all, place the call. I was merely trying to ascertain why.” I can be pretty distant when I put my mind to it.
“You’re hiding something.”
Nothing drives me crazier than when Helen does that. Because, see, with this horrible psychiatrist background of hers, she only accuses me of hiding things from her when I’m hiding things from her. ”Helen, I’m in the middle of a story conference now; just get on with it.”
So there it was again. I was lying to my wife about another woman, and the other woman knew it.
Sandy Sterling, in the next chair, smiled dead into my eyes.
“Argosy doesn’t have the book, nobody has the book, good-by, Willy.” She hung up.
“Wife again?”
I nodded, put the phone on the table by my lounge chair.
“You sure talk to each other a lot.”
“I know,” I told her. “It’s murder trying to get any writing done.”
I guess she smiled.
There was no way I could stop my heart from pounding.
“Chapter One. The Bride,” my father said.
I must have jerked around or something because she said, “Huh?”
“My fa—” I began. “I thou—” I began. “Nothing,” I said finally.
“Easy,” she said, and she gave me a really sweet smile. She dropped her hand over mine for just a second, very gentle and reassuring. I wondered was it possible she was understanding too.
Gorgeous and understanding? Was that legal? Helen wasn’t ever understanding. She was always saying she was—”I understand why you’re saying that, Willy”—but secretly she was ferreting out my neuroses. No, I guess she was understanding; what she wasn’t was sympathetic. And, of course, she wasn’t gorgeous too. Skinny, yes. brilliant, yes.
“I met my wife in graduate school,” I said to Sandy Sterling. “She was getting her Ph. D.”
Sandy Sterling was having a little trouble with my train of thought.
“We were just kids. How old are you?”
“You want my real age or my baseball age?”
I really laughed then. Gorgeous and understanding and funny?
“Fencing. Fighting. Torture,” my father said. “Love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Truths. Passion. Miracles.” It was 12: 35 and I said, “One phone call, okay?”
“Okay.”
“New York City information,” I said into the receiver, and when I was through I said, “Could you give me the names of some Fourth Avenue bookshops, please. There must be twenty of them. “ Fourth Avenue is the used and out-of-print book center of the English-speaking chapter of the civilized world. While the operator looked, I turned to the creature on the next lounge and said, “My kid’s ten today, I’d kind of like for him to have this book from me, a present, won’t take a sec.”
“Swing,” Sandy Sterling said.
“I list one bookstore called the Fourth Avenue Bookshop,” the operator said, and she gave me the number.
“Can’t you give me any of the others? They’re all down there in a clump.”
“If yew we-ill give mee they-re names, I can help you, “ the operator said, speaking Bell talk.
“This one’ll do,” I said, and I got the hotel operator to ring through for me. “Listen, I’m calling from Los Angeles, “ I said, “and I need The Princess Bride by S. Morgenstern.”
“Nope. Sorry,” the guy said, and before I could say, “Well, could you give me the names of the other stores down there, “ he hung up. “Get me that number back please,” I said to the hotel operator, and when the guy was on the line again, I said, “This is your Los Angeles correspondent; don’t hang up so fast this time.”