GREGORY AND ABBY JOHNS’ arrival in California was slightly marred by two natural phenomena. It was pouring rain, and Gregory had a cold.
The rain had begun at the edge of the desert and from San Bernardino on, through Pasadena, through the orange groves bordering the roadbed for the last miles into Los Angeles, it emptied out of the close gray sky with unremitting ardor. The porter told them that water was good for vegetation, that the end of the rainy season was at hand, and that they would see the most glorious sunshine in the world before they returned East. But they were both sorry that their first impressions of California should be so untraditional.
Gregory’s cold, he kept saying, was nothing much. It had begun after their eight-hour stopover in Chicago, between the arrival of the luxurious Century and the departure of the luxurious Super Chief. In their private drawing room, which could have accommodated four people handsomely, Gregory airily ascribed the ache in his back and legs to their relentless day-long pursuit of landmarks and museums, but Abby sent for aspirins, bicarbonate, and hot lemonade, just the same. Not wishing to rob her of these rare wifely pleasures, Gregory swallowed everything, only to sneeze six times and settle down to his first illness since his thirtieth birthday. The prospect of being bedridden in such luxurious surroundings delighted him; he saw it not only as a heaven-sent excuse to avoid the camaraderie of the lounge car but as a virtual command to satisfy one of his curiosities and order an extravagant dinner served in their room.
Heretofore the most ambitious traveling either of them had ever experienced had been their trips to the Cape to visit Abby’s parents when Hat was small. These had been accomplished in day coaches smelling of plush and pickles, or in an upper and lower berth, with the baby tucked in beside Abby for half the night and then hoisted up to Gregory for his turn. This time, as they left New York (nearly the whole family east of Wyoming had gathered at Grand Central to see them off) Abby had gone into raptures about their drawing room. She had exclaimed over the color scheme, the movable armchairs, the washbasin and clothes closet and tiny bathroom. She had worked the air-conditioning and radiator and fan, discovered how to empty the streamlined ashtrays, pulled down the window shade, and turned on the blue, night light in the ceiling. When Gregory coldly asked, “No icebox?” she had laughed hysterically and hugged him and laughed again.
Gregory had enjoyed himself too, despite his cold, but his largest happiness began after Chicago and had nothing to do with fans, thermostats, and plumbing. It came because, for the first time in many weeks, he was able to do sustained work. Propped against three pillows, and comfortable in his new dressing gown, he spent part of two nights and all of one day writing, and when, on the last morning, he finally packed away his pencils and yellow pads, he had eight acceptable new pages.
Which is to say he had written enough to fill thirty or forty unacceptable ones. This seeming imbalance between Total Effort and Total Achievement occurred during the first half of every one of Gregory Johns’ novels (though it was rarely in evidence when he wrote anything else) and sprang from his conviction that no paragraph came even close to what he wanted it to be until he had tried it four or five different ways. Sometimes he would struggle for an hour with one sentence in the paragraph; often he would tear up an entire page and begin afresh, only to enter mortal combat with each substitute sentence. His passages of brief, sharp dialogue first appeared as lengthy, snail-paced exchanges between people who spoke in perfectly rounded periods; his spare, precise descriptive touches, to which critics gave their praise, had to be; carved away from massive blocks of verbiage.
Gregory Johns knew that some authors wrote entire books without pausing to read back or do over; he knew that others could abandon an obstinate passage or scene temporarily and go on to the next, but the first kind of author he would not, and the second he could not for the life of him, emulate. As for him, he had to do battle with each sentence, with each, phrase, until he had won unconditional surrender.
So it was that, when he carefully packed away his eight dearly won pages—which he would later call his first draft—Gregory Johns was suffused by the warm glow of accomplishment. Unlike the author who writes to sublimate sorrow, or to make an ex-employer sorry he fired him, or to take a purely coincidental revenge on an ex-wife or ex-husband—unlike any of these, Gregory Johns wrote because he was happy writing. Not happier, not happiest, but a simple uncomparative happy.
And Abby was happy with him. As she sat watching him put away his manuscript and pads, the only part of his packing he didn’t dump on her, she was thinking it was lucky she wasn’t a woman who resented her husband’s work or felt it a rival. Quite the opposite. With them it was always best when Gregory was working hardest, and that meant not on a newspaper article, not on a review, not on a story, but on a novel. Hours might go by without an exchange of words, but then the pause would come, the talk, the closeness.
She glanced at Gregory; he was fidgeting with his wallet. He looked rested and well, except that he had occasional bouts of coughing. He had read his eight pages aloud at two in the morning—they were so scribbled over she had been unable to decipher them herself—and she had thought them quite fine. Now she realized she had an odd personal sense of gratitude toward them, as if they had added depth to her happiness during the trip. Unaccountably, she felt her face flush, and she thought, Well, really! And thought instantly, It’s the sense of privacy we’ve had in this place, never having to worry about Hat in the next room. And thought again, Well, really, making up excuses!
She turned toward the window and watched the neat-clumpy trees slipping past. From the air these endless groves could look like nothing more than green meadows, their orange globes of fruit unseen and unsuspected. “I wonder how their flight was,” she said.
“We’ll know soon enough. I wonder how they celebrated their first night in Hollywood.”
“I wouldn’t have flown out, and missed this trip for anything, would you?”
“No.” He had taken two bills out of his wallet, and sat fingering them uncertainly. One was for five dollars and the other for ten.
“You’re not arguing that out all over again?” Abby said sternly.
“Five might seem awfully mean. With all the trouble he had about me being in bed the whole time.”
“Give him the ten, then, and stop worrying.”
“But overtipping is as bad as under.” He put the ten away, and folded the other bill into an inch-wide strip. “I should have asked Thorn about tips in fancy trains and hotels.”
“He’ll take care of it at the hotel. You know, I’m glad Thorn’s out here. I mean, apart from our real reason for asking them out. It’s helped you already.”
He said, “I know what you mean,” and sounded as though he didn’t.
“Look how relaxed you’ve been about getting in, not all worked up about whether you’ll find a little delegation at the station or what.”
“Like so many generous ideas, this could work out to my own advantage?” He laughed and the laugh made him cough. The cough was tight and hard; it turned into a paroxysm, and Abby watched him anxiously.
The train was now slowing down to the barest possible forward motion. In the narrow aisle, the thumping of suitcases, hatboxes, and golf clubs had given way to the sound of talk and laughter, as the people moving up toward the platform yielded to that noisy abandon which comes at the end of a long, well-mannered trip.
“Los Angeles,” the porter called, as if he were pronouncing the name of The Eternal City. “Los Ang-el-eeze.”
“All of a sudden,” Gregory said, “I’m as excited as a kid.” He pulled out his wallet. “Damn it, it’s going to be the ten.”
In a roped-off area in the station, at the bottom of the longest inclined ramp they had ever seen anywhere, Thornton and Lucinda Johns were waving and shouting hello. Then all four were greeting each other, asking about their respective trips and all talking at once. Thorn and Cindy might have been old-time settlers welcoming newcomers, as they apologized for the rain and warned them not to be discouraged by the dismal look of downtown Los Angeles.
“Wait till you see the Strip,” Cindy cried, “and Beverly Hills and the hotel. We have two rooms and two baths and a sitting room and a balcony stringing along outside the whole suite. It’s heaven, and we’re dining tonight at Romanoff’s with the MacQuades.”
“At Romanoff’s?” Abby said.
“The MacQuades?” Gregory asked. Josh MacQuade was the head of publicity at the studio—the last man he expected to be seeing so promptly.
“You’ll like him,” Thorn said firmly. “We had drinks and a big talk last night, and he knows all about you.”
While he spoke, he took the luggage checks out of Gregory’s hand, signaled to a porter, and counted the pieces of cardboard. Then he handed them over, said, “A dark green Cadillac in the right-hand lot,” and led the way out of the station.
“Whose Cadillac?” Abby said.
“The distances are so huge,” Thorn said. “I let Josh lend me his to fetch you. I’ve rented us a car; we’ll have it tonight.”
“A Cadillac?” Gregory asked.
“No, a big Buick.”
Gregory and Abby glanced at each other. Thorn was in fine fettle, and so was Cindy. An air of excitement and adventure clung to them both; the strain of disagreement had vanished and it was as if they were sharing a triumph equally earned.
Thorn supervised the stowing of luggage, tipped the porter—Gregory tried to see how much, but couldn’t—and opened the back door of the car. “You girls get in there,” he said. “We have to talk business.”
For most of the long drive Thorn proceeded to tell Gregory what he had accomplished since yesterday afternoon. His activity had already gone far beyond the talk with MacQuade. He had met Hyman Bernstein, the screen writer assigned to The Good World, whose office Gregory would share; Dick Morosky, the director; and Harry Von Brann, President of Imperial Century, who had bought the book and would produce the picture. These three had been teamed up, he told Gregory, on some of the most respected—and successful—pictures ever made; Gregory was a lucky man to have his book in their hands. There was a big rush on already. “Shooting script May first,” Thorn said with authority, “and in the cans October first. They’ll release around Christmas, to get under the wire for the Academy.”
“Whew. You’ve been covering some ground, haven’t you?”
“I’ve been finding out how things work around here. Josh is a great help. He’s letting me use an office down the hall from his—there’s a lot of stuff piled up already for me. I told you there would be. And Josh seems to think I’m O.K. to have around.”
“Evidently.” He said it with a sort of warm helpless admiration, and looked at his brother inquiringly.
“Over our first drink,” Thorn explained modestly, “I happened to hit on a happy phrase, and it appealed to Josh. I said I was out here as your non-pressagent. He apparently likes things on the offbeat. ‘Business representative,’ I said, ‘and non-pressagent.’ I told him the way you feel about things, and he pumped me about how I fit into this whole deal. So I gave him an earful.” Here Thorn took his eyes from the road to glance at Gregory. “‘Non-pressagent,’” Thorn said again and laughed.
“It’s a good way of putting it,” Gregory said obligingly.
Thorn looked back to the road. “This damn traffic is as bad as New York. But at least they stagger the lights, and they do have some bright gimmicks worked out. In Beverly Hills, they have the street names right at the curb, painted on in big black letters, so your headlights can pick them up at night. And every block is a new hundred block.”
“A new what?”
“Hundred block. Suppose there are only four houses on one street and the last one is number Three Thirty-Two. Just the same, the first house on the next street will be number Four Hundred. So you get the three-hundred block, the four-hundred block, the five, the six. You can’t get mixed up or lost. It’s bright, isn’t it?”
Gregory smiled. “You’re a push-over for the place, aren’t you?”
“There is something about it. And for all the money and the fame and success, it’s so human. Everybody got the point about the way you feel, not just Josh.”
“Were they planning interviews and parties or don’t they do as much of that as people think?”
“Never mind what they were doing,” Thorn said with satisfaction. “The way I’ve got it now is no interviews, no pictures, no lectures—there’s a terrible woman named Martin—no, never mind her. All that’s left now is maybe one or two parties. The Von Branns have asked all of us for Friday night and you can’t tell the man who bought your book to go to hell, can you?”
It happens that in the month which followed the uncertain transfer of that ten-dollar bill on the station platform, nothing venal occurred in the life and work of Gregory Johns. At the studio, no single assault was made on his integrity; not one of the men assigned to his book was a genius; nobody told him what to think or what to write; no seven-year contracts or complex option deals were offered to him. Neither Von Brann nor Morosky nor Bernstein wanted to improve his book by adding a chase, a killing, a case of amnesia, or even much more of a love story than it already had. A change in title was not even discussed; the movie was to be called The Good World.
The happy result of these six negatives was a seventh: by the end of his first working week, Gregory Johns no longer heard the thin persistent wail of his Martin Heights forebodings. My God, he thought, I like working with these people; it’s going to be all right; it is all right. I’ve learned a lot out here already; I’ll learn more. And Hy Bernstein and I could become real friends.
Since inner contentment is conducive to general well-being, it thus becomes all the more remarkable that, on Friday afternoon, Gregory Johns should have found himself thoroughly ill. At lunch he had suddenly gone hot and flushed; by four o’clock his eyes were stinging, his head buzzing, his cough strangling.
“That’s quite a business,” Hy Bernstein said, after one paroxysm which left Gregory wrung and limp. “Better get home and take care of it.”
Gregory shook his head and looked grateful for Hy’s concern. Hy was a few years older than he, a short, homely, unassuming man who had once written verse for poverty-stricken magazines. From amorphous poetry to rock-firm construction of screenplays was a long voyage, but it had taken Hyman Bernstein to a port he was content to call home.
“I was all through with that damn cold,” Gregory said. “I forgot I ever had it. Now look.”
“Go ahead and knock off for now. I’ll finish laying out the scene alone. You get to bed and stay there.”
“I can’t. We’re going out to dinner.”
“With that?” He picked up the telephone and asked for a taxi. Then he said, “No, better get me Thornton Johns’ office instead.”
On the drive home, Thorn spoke familiarly of Virus X. “Half of Hollywood’s had it. Sometimes it sends you to a hospital and sometimes it hits you for a couple of hours and then you feel great.”
“It’s not Virus X,” Gregory said.
“You get a hot bath and a good long rest. We’re not due at the Von Branns’ until eight.”
But by seven-thirty it was clear that Gregory was in no shape to go anywhere. Abby had telephoned for a doctor, who had taken his temperature, pulse; and blood pressure, looked down his throat and into his ears, stabbed his finger for a blood count, written out three prescriptions, and ordered him to stay in bed until further notice.
When Abby went in to report to Cindy and Thorn, she found Cindy putting on her second earring and Thorn sitting half dressed on the edge of the bed. They both looked worried. After Abby told them the doctor thought it only a relapse, they continued to look worried. “You two go to the party anyway,” Abby ended comfortingly.
“We wouldn’t dream—” Cindy said, and glanced longingly at herself in the mirror. Her new dark red evening dress was immensely becoming; she had had her hair done differently; she had for the first time in her life experimented with blue eye shadow and mascara.
“You have to go,” Abby said calmly. “Two missing at a dinner isn’t as bad as four.”
Thorn waved this aside. “Mrs. Von Brann had to ask me and Cindy, but it’s Gregory and you they planned this around. If you can’t go, we stay home too.”
“We wouldn’t want to go, anyway,” Cindy said with no ring of conviction, “and leave you to sit here alone, with Gregory sick.”
“Oh, heavens,” said Abby. She marched to the telephone and explained at length to Mrs. Von Brann. When she hung up, she said, “You’re expected. They’d feel awful if you didn’t show either, so run along and have fun.”
“Well, in that case,” Thorn said.
“And please drop these at the drugstore,” Abby said, “and say it’s a rush.”
Cindy reached eagerly for the prescriptions, as if they held absolution for an undefined crime, and said, in a practical tone, “Thorn, if we’re going, you’d better hurry.”
Abby said, “You look lovely, Cindy,” waved vaguely at both of them, and left Thorn to his dressing.
She went back into the bedroom and over to Gregory. He was sleeping. She tiptoed about, putting away his things, closing the open lid of the jeweler’s box in which lay his new evening studs and cuff links. Still virgin, she thought, and smiled to herself. She hung up his never-worn dinner jacket, whose travel-creased lapels she had been pressing when he had come in from the studio. As she hooked the hanger over the suspended horizontal pole in the huge empty-seeming closet, the coat swung into her only evening dress, and the two garments swayed together as if in a dance, slow-rhythmed and graceful.
She opened the window wider and paused. Gregory’s breathing was now deep and regular. She went over to him and cupped her palm lightly over his forehead. It seemed cooler already, and his face untroubled, even tranquil. She stood looking down at him and, in the semidarkness of the room, smiled once again.
High on a hill in Pacific Palisades, looking out to the ocean, the Von Brann mansion might have been a huge sprawling lighthouse at the edge of a cliff. The boom of the surf made a distant unchanging pedal point to the staccato laughter and voices issuing from the house. The fragrance of flowers and shrubs and trees, the moonlight shining down upon two tennis courts and a kidney-shaped pool, the shining hoods of many Lincolns and Cadillacs (and, unexpectedly enough, on the great hulk of a moving van parked at one side of the six-car garage)—all these attested to the fact that here life was well indulged, expensive, and cajoling.
Inside the house, thirty-two dinner guests could have attested to the same thing. And none more soulfully than Lucinda and Thornton Johns. The Von Branns were wonderful hosts; from the first moment, Harry and Peg Von Brann had acted as if it were even better to have an author’s relatives to show off than the author himself. It was true that for about fifteen minutes, Thorn and Cindy had found themselves victims of a faint discomfort, as at too big an experience, but with the second round of drinks they began to absorb more easily the undeniable fact that they were in the same room with such people as Joan Crawford, Danny Kaye, Betty Hutton, the Bogarts, Jill Goodwyn, and Darryl Zanuck. It was a dream; it was unbelievable; it was happening; it was life on the grand scale, and no other kind of life could even compare with it.
Then a minor mishap occurred.
“Mr. and Mrs. Thornton Johns,” Peg Von Brann said for the tenth time, as two more couples came into the room. “Martha and Fred Maynes, Bob and Alice Cohen—”
“Oh, Mr. Johns,” Alice Cohen cried, “I’ve read the galleys of your book and—”
“My book—Good Lord, I didn’t write it!”
“Oh, Alice!” said Peg Von Brann. “I said ‘Thornton Johns.’”
“I’m sorry—I—please forgive—”
Thorn had given one agonized thought to the proximity of the Bogarts and Joan Crawford. “It’s my brother, Gregory Johns, who’s the author, not me,” he said, with an affability he did not feel. “I’m just his agent, manager, representative, whatever you want to call it.”
Alice was more flustered than ever. “Well, anyway, please tell your brother I loved every word of his book. Wherever I go, I spread the good word.”
“Spread The Good World I trust,” Thorn said lightly and the burst of laughter from Alice Cohen and Peg and the others complimented him for being adroit. Then everybody talked about the book at once. They had read the galleys, or were just reading the galleys, or had been promised a set of galleys that very afternoon and could scarcely wait until they had them in their own two hands. Where was his brother? When could they meet him and thank him for so wonderful a piece of work? How long had he been ill? Was it serious? Virus X, Virus X, Virus X.
By the time the last of the guests had arrived at nearly nine o’clock, Thornton had had to disclaim authorship once more, but this time he did so without even an initial start of confusion: By then there had been a great deal of talk about books and plays and movies—“Didn’t Dudley Nichols write Mourning Becomes Electra?” somebody had asked.
“No, it was either Mankiewicz or Trumbo.”
“I bet it was Dudley.”
“Well, it wasn’t. You’re thinking of For Whom the Bell Tolls—he wrote that.”
“He did not. It was that boy Ardrey.”
“You’re crazy. Ardrey wrote Madame Bovary.”
Nobody, including the host and hostess, seemed to wonder when they were going to eat, and with sudden shame, Thorn remembered his tense misery at home when Hulda kept guests waiting ten minutes for dinner. He glanced at Harry Von Brann. Harry was talking to Humphrey Bogart and Cindy, or rather, Thorn thought uneasily, Harry and Humphrey Bogart were listening to Cindy. Cindy was animated, her voice ringing even more than usual, but apparently she was being amusing, for both men were laughing. Thorn wasn’t as lucky; he was talking to two men whose names he had not caught. Discreetly he managed a look at the clock above the mantel; it was twenty minutes to ten.
Just then the doors to a vast dining room were thrown wide. For a moment there was silence, and then everybody cried out at once.
“Peg, how wonderful!”
“Harry—how divine!”
“When did you have it changed? Just for tonight? Oh, darlings, how thrilling!”
The room was large enough for a ball. Even Thorn and Cindy knew at once that this was not the Von Branns’ ordinary decor for a dining room. Except for four large round tables, and the chairs around them, there was no sign of furniture in the room, no pictures, no rugs. “We had everything moved out in that van you saw,” Peg was explaining somewhere behind him. “It’ll all be moved in again tomorrow.”
The walls and ceiling of the room were hung with hundreds of yards of rippling blue velvet, iridescent with patches of sequins in the shape of stars, moons, comets; in a great swath above them was the Milky Way. The tablecloths and napkins were of the same blue and sequins; suspended from the two huge crystal chandeliers were thousands of glass icicles, and for centerpieces on the tables were four great confections of spun sugar that might have been snow. The floor was blue-white and gleaming.
“It’s ice,” somebody shouted.
“It’s ice. It’s real ice,” everybody echoed. One of the men tried to slide on the floor; another bent down to touch it. “It’s not ice, it’s warm. It would melt if it was ice.”
“It’s plastic,” Harry Von Brann said. “My wife,” he added indulgently, with a wave that included the Solar System around and above him, “has gone mad.”
“Oh, the glasses, oh, how clever, Peg.” This shout, too, instantly swelled into a tone poem of rapture.
“I will admit,” Peg said modestly, “the glasses are rather sweet.”
The water tumblers and wine goblets were not supposed to look like snow or ice or stars in a blue sky. They were merely crystal, but instead of being the conventional array of assorted sizes and shapes, the four glasses at each place were all identical—brandy glasses of giant size. Rapid calculation told half the ladies in the room that there were one hundred and thirty-six of them—a froth of anchored balloons which might float skyward at any moment, carrying the tables aloft with them.
The babble of praise did not die away until a butler and a bevy of footmen in tailcoats and white ties began to serve the first course. Across the distance of their separate tables, Thorn’s and Cindy’s eyes met in a look of mutual congratulation.
Thornton saw that Cindy was well placed indeed, with a handsome young actor on one side and their host on the other. As for him, he was ecstatic, with Peg Von Brann at his left and, at his right, the beauteous, the famous, the sensational Jill Goodwyn, star of Fire, Fire, and My Life For Love, and I’ve Gone Away.
When he could absorb what was being said to him, Thorn realized that Peg was talking about skiing and ice-skating. The whole table now took her up and discussed favorite vacation sports and resorts. They ranged the world, from the Riviera or Honolulu for swimming to Sun Valley or Switzerland for skiing. The Riviera, Switzerland—suddenly Thorn was back at his office window in New York, looking down at the two rivers and their freighters and ocean liners, moving slowly off and away. Who could have predicted, that aching afternoon, that in hardly two months he himself would be an entire continent removed from that window, that office, that derisive inner voice telling him he was a nobody and would always be a nobody?
Thornton Johns gulped with emotion. He did not dare to meet anybody’s eyes, and he was glad that Peg was now talking about her children, for that meant no calls on him beyond appreciative nods and monosyllables. His eyes kept roaming the room; they could not get their fill of the spectacular sight and the spectacular women and their spectacular jewels. His mind stumbled over the effort to believe he could be present in such surroundings and in such a gathering. Nobody could joke this off as the blathering of the clans or complain that there wasn’t one good hot prospect in sight. He was hip-deep in hot prospects! For an instant, the cool concise voice of Opportunity spoke to him.
At that moment, a remarkable thing happened. His wandering eye met the eye of Joan Crawford at the next table and, without thinking, he smiled at her. She smiled back.
Thornton Johns’ inner spirit glowed bright as tungsten. Nothing seemed too remote, too impossible. He had not yet dared to turn from the comparative safety of Peg Von Brann to the hazards of Jill Goodwyn, but now he felt himself unbeatable. He made appropriate remarks to Peg and looked to the right. The most famous profile in Hollywood was still talking about vacations.
“And are you,” he cut in, “packing off next week to the other side of the world?” His tone was somber, as of a man who had brooded long and bitterly on this possibility. The profile became a full face and he almost blinked.
“Not till summer. If I’m not dead by then.”
“You’re doing a picture?”
“I’m always doing a picture. Finish one, start another. That’s my life.”
“Chain-smoking.”
Jill Goodwyn gave him a dazzling smile. “Exactly. You’re bright, aren’t you?”
“Am I?” His smile was just as dazzling.
“Yes. You were beautiful over that silly Alice Cohen,” she said. “I almost applauded. I mean like this.” She clapped her slender hands twice. “And anyway, you have to be bright to be people’s agents. Says my agent.”
“I’m not people’s agents—just my brother’s.”
She looked at him inquiringly. Her great gray eyes were kind, even encouraging, and Thornton Johns thought, This is really going, this could go on if I play it right. “I’m not even a real honest-to-God agent,” he said with a kind of humble bravado, as if he were risking everything on honesty. “What I really am is an insurance broker.”
“An insurance broker?”
“Just another salesman with a foot in the door.”
Jill Goodwyn smiled again. This time it was not a dazzling smile but a gentle, pensive one and it was a pretty thing to see. Fleetingly Thornton Johns remembered Diana’s smile, and a brief pain went through him, as at a guilt yet to be established.
“At least your foot isn’t in your mouth,” Miss Goodwyn said, “like my insurance man’s. What a fool that one is.”
“Shopping?” Thorn said quickly. “Or just winning friends?”
She laughed. “I’m not sure,” she said. “Yet.”
The cool concise voice of Opportunity spoke once more and, as if in rebuttal, another voice immediately said, Don’t be cheap. Well, if not cheap, then at least inopportune. Take it easy. Wait. See. This could lead you places that have nothing to do with being Gregory’s brother or agent or manager or anything else. Thornton Johns looked once more about the room. He could feel Jill Goodwyn watching him, but he took his time. When he spoke, he lowered his voice. “Is your husband here?” he asked. “And does he decide about your insurance—or your friends?”
“I haven’t a husband,” Jill Goodwyn answered. “And when I had, he didn’t.”
“About either?”
“About neither.”
There was a pause. She picked up one of the fragile glasses, and held it cupped lovingly in her hands. Through her fingers the wine made curving rays of red; she tilted her head to one side and studied the effect. It was like a cartoon of sunrise, as if she were holding a bubble of a world while a new day came up on all sides at once. She knew Thornton Johns was watching her, not missing the lowering of her lids, not deaf to her small sigh. He was more attractive than anybody she had met in months. It wasn’t only that he was handsome, with his three-cornered blue eyes and tow-headed crew cut and striking tallness; handsome men were all over this place, where else? But the handsome men of Hollywood were stars too; they looked at any girl or woman, even at a Jill Goodwyn, expecting to be adored. This man watching every flick of expression on her face wasn’t expecting anything. He was thrilled to be near you, to see you smile, to hear you talk. He was ready to adore you. He remembered you were the star. Jill Goodwyn raised her glass to her lips and took a small sip of wine. Then, without turning to Thorn, she spoke. “Would you and your wife like to come lunch with me on Sunday? And your brother, if he’s well enough?”