Read Online Don't Speak to Strange Girls by Harry Whittington - Free Book Online Page B

because it made him seem old, touched with the first quaverings of senility. Maybe it was just that he had been in the movies too long.
    Abruptly he was remembering the old character star who’d once been a circus roustabout, the way the old fellow waved stock certificates worth hundreds of thousands of dollars around on the sets, yelling, “Look at these, you college sons of bitches. You own anything like this? Yeah. And I got boxes full of ‘em at home. Safety boxes stacked with them. Just like them.” The old boy loathed young actors and would do anything to louse them up, refuse to read a cue line, twist it, delay it, anything to throw the newcomer off-stride. Ask him why he did it, you always got the same answer: “Aw, I don’t like them, these new guys. Who needs ‘em?”
    Clay shook the thought from his mind. And the actresses they put in his pictures, all like children, and he kept comparing them to people he’d known in the past. Seeing a girl like Natalie Wood in the Green Room at Warner’s commissary he would find himself remembering Gloria Swanson because both were so tiny, so dark and so lovely — so damned far apart, in different eras, but in one you could see something of the other, and he belonged in the big moments of the careers of both. It confused the dimensions of time for him; today was yesterday, yesterday was today and today was forever lost — like the name of that lovely young actress he’d wanted above everything on earth, and had never had.
    “Mr. Stuart. Sir.”
    Clay jumped up guiltily as though his pants were unzipped. The sound of McEster’s voice had startled him, yanked him back to this moment, and it seemed his thoughts trailed after him unwillingly.
    Clay pushed his hands through his matted hair, blinking at McEsters in the wanly-lighted library.
    “I’m sorry sir. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
    “What is it?”
    “The young lady, sir. I’m sorry. The one who has called you so persistently — even when you were out of town. I tried to get rid of her. She insists you are expecting her.”
    Clay closed his fists, and his heart banged against his rib cage and he wondered expectantly what she looked like. She was here. She was out there beyond that door.
    “What was her name?” he said. He kept his voice level.
    “Miss Stark. Miss Joanne Stark. Shall I send her away, sir?”
    “No. I reckon not. I did say something to her about dropping in sometime. For cocktails. If she was ever up this way. You know? The kind of invitation you give out when you don’t mean it.” Even talking, Clay saw that he was trying to hide behind that flat exterior the way his raw emotions churned inside him. He’d been doing it all his life, since he was a kid on a Nebraska farm where you never cried no matter how badly you hurt. “The way you ask somebody how they are, and then hold your breath for fear they’ll tell you.”
    He was pushing his hands through his hair, batting at the wrinkles in his slacks.
    “I understand, sir. I can send her away if you like.”
    “No … I mean, she’s here. What the hell?” He
remembered her asking if he liked daiquiris; he decided to have them made;
it would be a touch. Anyhow, it would show he remembered what she’d
said to him. “You might fix us a mixer of daiquiris and some light
sandwiches. You know the amenities, McEsters, better than I do.”
    “Yes, sir. Shall I send the young woman in?”
    Clay stood up and shrugged his shirt up on his shoulders. He gave McEsters what he hoped would pass for a casual, bored smile.
    “No,” he said. “I’ll go out to her.”
    “Yes, sir. She’s in the foyer, sir.”
    • • •
    No matter what he had expected her to be, she was more than that, different. She was much, much more than he had permitted himself to anticipate. She was a tall girl, he saw that first, slender, the way the New York model agencies liked them. She was young, younger than hell, he thought bitterly, looking across a