Page 24 of Glamorous Notions

Chapter 23

The shock of seeing him rendered her mute. He looked the same—a little older, a little more worn, but the same, with his pomaded dark hair and those hooded dark eyes. He was dressed better, in a white tuxedo (perfect for Medusa , she couldn’t help thinking), but now she saw what she hadn’t seen before in Walter: a seediness, a whine that curled through him like a warning, and she couldn’t believe she had gone to bed with this man. Multiple times. Or that she had married him.

Good God, what was he doing here?

“Hello, Elsie,” he said with a grin. “Or wait, I guess it’s Lena now, isn’t it? Good name. It becomes you.”

The note abruptly made sense, the mocking Costumer to the Stars —how like Walter’s petty little jealousies. “It was you.”

“Imagine my surprise to see you in Louella Parsons’s column! I mean, we talked about it all the time, but it was supposed to be me. You were supposed to be on my arm, remember?”

“What do you want, Walter?”

“Don’t be that way, baby. I’ve come all this way to see you.”

She wanted to turn away, to walk away. But if she did, he’d surely make trouble, exactly what she’d been afraid of when it came to Walter. The door to her past, the man who could ruin everything. “Just tell me what you want.”

He shrugged. “A new name, a new life ... I thought maybe you might want to see your husband, you know? The man who took you away from the pig farm and brought you here? The one who saved your life? That’s what you said, anyway. I remember it. All those times in bed, you said—”

“I’ve got to get back.” She felt hot and sick, and it got worse when he leaned close, and she smelled his aftershave, the same he’d always worn.

“Meet me at that tavern by your apartment tomorrow night. Eight o’clock.”

It turned her stomach that he knew her address. She hoped against hope that he was bluffing. “Which tavern?”

“The Lucky 8.”

Yes, he knew it.

“Miss Taylor, are you all right?”

The voice came from down the hallway. Both she and Walter started at the sound, though she was relieved to hear it, even when she realized it came from Michael Runyon.

She tried to smile. “Yes, thank you, Mr. Runyon. Mr. Maynard was just leaving.”

“I was,” Walter said. “Good to see you again, Miss Taylor.”

He threw her another grin and sauntered off. The hem of his tuxedo coat was frayed at the back. The detail disconcerted her; it meant Walter was more desperate than he’d looked, and a desperate Walter was not good. But she had no time to think about it, because Michael Runyon stood looking at her with that too-intense stare, as if he saw something in her that disturbed him.

“I hope I didn’t interrupt something,” Runyon said.

“Of course not.” She started to leave.

“A quick word, if you don’t mind.”

She stopped and turned back. The last thing she wanted was to talk to Michael Runyon. Walter had rattled her. “About?”

“I wondered ... perhaps you know where Carbone was during the war?”

In the ballroom, the band started up. “He was in the army, with the troops who helped to liberate Rome. Why?”

Runyon’s gaze shifted. “Ah.”

“‘Ah’ what, Mr. Runyon?”

“Sometimes soldiers return with certain ... attitudes. About war. About America.”

“That’s not Paul,” she said, but she understood Runyon’s implicit threat, and her tension over Walter shifted to a different kind of tension. She wondered what Runyon knew about Paul’s past, and then her suspicions grew when the censor asked, “Where did you two meet?”

She had the feeling he’d asked Paul the same question, that he was comparing their answers. But she and Paul always told the same story. It was a joke between them, a protective one. “At a jazz club. I really have to get back to him.”

Runyon’s smile was the most insincere she’d ever seen. “Of course. Enjoy the party.”

Lena gathered herself as she made her way back to the table and Paul. She barely heard the music, all she could think about was the danger threatening on all sides, Walter appearing out of the blue, Runyon’s question that was not a question but a warning. Everything closing in, a meeting tomorrow night at the Lucky 8.

Paul stood to help her to her chair. He leaned close to whisper, “I was getting worried.”

“I got caught in too many conversations,” she whispered back.

She tried to concentrate on the evening, but it was too difficult. She drank champagne, she picked at the dinner. When Louella received her golden plaque honoring her thirtieth anniversary, Lena turned to Paul and said, “Do you think we could go?”

“You should at least say hello to Louella, shouldn’t you?” he asked. “At least so she knows you were here.”

He was right, of course. Lena nodded, and when the music started up again, she let him take her through the crowd to congratulate Louella, who stood near the stage taking her laurels like the blue ribbon winner of a county fair baking contest. Her sharp eyes raked Paul, Lena’s gorgeous gown in a drab gray, and of course, the ring on Lena’s finger.

“I guess I should offer congrats of my own,” Louella said. “Quite a match, the up-and-coming screenwriter and the costume queen. You must be grateful, Mr. Carbone, to have such an influential fiancée. I imagine she was crucial in getting you read at Lux.”

Lena smiled thinly. “They bought his screenplay before we were engaged. I had nothing to do with it. It’s a brilliant story.”

Louella ignored her and said to Paul, “You’re a lucky man. She has a way of getting what she wants.”

The gossip maven turned to greet someone else, leaving Lena wordless for a moment, the insult—was it an insult?—resting uncomfortably on what had already been an unsettling night. Then she was angry, and the anger played on her fears, and she turned back to say something.

“Don’t,” Paul cautioned in a low voice, leading her away. “It won’t help. Come on, I’ll take you home,” he said.

“I can’t go home,” she said quietly. “We have to talk.”

Paul closed his eyes briefly. “Not tonight, Lena—”

“I spoke to Michael Runyon. He was here.”

“This can wait. I’m exhausted.”

“It can’t wait.”

They were as silent on the way back to the Chateau as they’d been on the way to the gala.

When they got to Paul’s rooms, she put Thelonious Monk on the record player and poured them both a martini while he changed out of his suit and into shorts and a shirt. She traded the gown for one of his shirts. She sat on the pink sofa and sipped the martini and watched as he lit a cigarette and sat across from her—he was as tense as she was; his motions were tight and clipped.

“Runyon asked me what kind of man you were when you came back from the war,” she said shortly. “He said soldiers sometimes return with certain ‘attitudes.’ Then he asked where we met.”

Paul’s face shuttered. He took a long, slow drag of the cigarette. “Did you tell him?”

“I said the usual. A jazz club. What did you tell him?”

Paul looked troubled now. “He’s never asked. Why is he asking you?”

“I don’t know. I think ... it’s a threat. I don’t know what he knows or what he thinks he knows, but he told me before that your original screenplay was morally decadent.”

Paul said quietly, “So he thinks I’m a socialist now.”

“This changes things,” Lena said. “Higgy is a member of the MPA, Paul. He made training films for the army.” She watched as Paul rose and paced to the balcony doors. “Runyon will go to him, if he hasn’t already. You can’t quit without admitting you’re not on board with the changes, and to them that means you’re un-American.”

Paul had his back to her. Now he turned to look at her, and she saw in that look everything he’d said to her before the gala. “And they’ll fire you along with me. They’ll say the same things about you.”

She didn’t look away. “Yes.” She sighed. “There will be other movies. But not if you’re marked as trouble, Paul.”

Lena rose from the sofa. The dissonant harmonies of Monk’s “’Round Midnight” surrounded them, smoky, jagged. She put her arms around Paul and pressed her mouth to his chest, at the opening of his shirt. “I love you.”

He sighed in defeat and put his hands to her waist and kissed her. He tasted of gin and tobacco. He brushed back her loosened hair. “I love you too.”

And unexpectedly she remembered Walter standing in the hallway of the Cocoanut Grove. Walter with that grin, with trouble weighting his every word. She should tell Paul about him now. But this moment ... she wanted to keep this moment, and she recalled Harvey’s words this morning and she was afraid. There were so many wrong ways to go, so much to lose, and she could not lose this, she could not lose Paul. So she said nothing once again. She would work it out tomorrow. She would fix everything with Walter. It would be all right. It had to be.