Cheat and Charmer Read Free

jacket over his shoulder. He quickly scanned her face with impassive eyes, one of them squinting to avoid the smoke that curled up from the cigarette that he removed from the thin line of his lips. “Are you Dinah Milligan Lasker?”
    “Yes, I am,” she said, and in that instant he shoved an envelope at her. “You are hereby served.” Tossing his still-burning cigarette into one of the rosebushes behind the box hedge, he turned aside and walked quickly along the redbrick path to the driveway. She stood there, paralyzed andblinking, as he drove off in a black sedan. The whole encounter had taken less than a minute.

    How on earth, she wondered now, as the aspirin eased her headache, had she managed to dance with Irv and Jake or down even one glass of champagne? More astonishing still was how she, who was almost constitutionally unable to keep a secret from Jake, hadn’t said a word to him when he came home from the studio late that afternoon, elated, expansive, joking with the guys on the pool crew, playing a brief game of catch with Peter, then thumping upstairs and locking the bedroom door, grabbing her by the crotch and steering her to his bed, where he insisted on some highly athletic pre-party efforts at starting the first of the three new babies (one per picture) he’d promised her in light of his newly secure situation at Marathon. After their lovemaking, while she raised her legs and rested them against the bedroom wall, he had fallen into a deep sleep with the bedspread pulled high over his head. When she woke him up to get ready for the evening, he asked her to keep him company. So after her shower, dressed in a light blue bathrobe, she went through his dressing corridor and the extra bedroom he used as an office to his bathroom, announcing her presence with “ ‘Here I am, all freshly b-b-b-bathed and scented,’ ” in imitation of Jessica Tandy’s soft southern accent, and perched herself on the closed toilet seat. She sipped Scotch on the rocks and smoked a cigarette while he regaled her with the dirty lyrics he had written to “It Could Happen to You,” which he crooned in a Yiddish accent. She watched him shave and breathed in the scent of Yardley’s gooey green brilliantine, which he slicked on over his thinning hair, and broke up when he grabbed the Oscar from the shelf he’d had installed for it and kissed it on the mouth. Later, when she came downstairs, hair, clothes, and makeup in place, she found him sitting at the kitchen table with Gussie and the kids, stealing bites from their Gussie Fried Chicken and Gussie Sugar Rice and telling them about plans for his next movie—the locations he would use, the visits to the set he would arrange for them, the movie stars they were going to meet.
    She had said nothing during the long drive out Sunset to the Palisades, nothing throughout the long glittering evening, the smiles, the hugs, the jokes, the congratulations, the dinner, and the dancing. Her head was stillthrobbing, but it was time to go back to the party. Standing before the mirror and applying bright red arcs of lipstick to her full mouth, she looked hard at herself and adjusted her expression until it became the smooth empty plate of a party face, then she pressed a handkerchief between her lips, blotting the fresh lipstick, snapped her clutch, and went back to the Engels’ patio. Anya had disappeared from the table and, it seemed, from the party itself. Dinah wasn’t surprised; Anya hardly ever lasted out a whole evening.

    The party was still going on at one. Enchanted by the spring air, the guests danced on and on, and told stories and forgot that the maid was asleep in the den, her aching feet propped up on the ottoman, and the TV long since gone to snow, while the children threw off blankets, and the neighborhood cats prowled through the ivy, searching for mice and momentarily stopping the cricket song.
    Eventually, however, the band stopped playing. The musicians packed up their