Read Online Make Believe by Ed Ifkovic - Free Book Online

they’d be here.” Frank shrugged and chuckled. He’d obviously had a few belts at his…casa.
    I didn’t know what to think of this contradictory duo. The slick accountant with the neat haircut and horn-rimmed glasses, the sensible pale-blue necktie, a conservative feathered fedora held discreetly in hand. And the carnival act, all glitter and riotous confection and blubber.
    “We’ve been dying to meet you,” Tony/Tiny said.
    I said nothing.
    Ava made no attempt to hide her distaste. “Francis,” she began, her words low and angry, “what are they doing here?”
    He didn’t look at her. “They were at my place in Palm Springs when I got back.” He smiled. ”You said it was a party. I brought a party with me.”
    Ava glanced at Alice and Max, both sitting on the sofa, looking uncomfortable. “Damn you.”
    Tony seemed to be happy anywhere that would allow in a man who happened to be wearing a dynamited clown tuxedo covered with green and red and silver buckshot sequins. Tony, I guessed, now spent most of his offstage time as…Tiny. A Hippodrome elephant in a Groucho Marx fright wig.
    Ethan looked as though he wanted to be home adding up a column of figures, far from the maddening brother, though, as his brother’s resident sheriff, he immediately frowned as Tony walked to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a martini from the pitcher resting there.
    “Christ, Tony,” he muttered. He nodded at me. “A pleasure to meet you, Miss Ferber.”
    He nodded at his former wife when she glanced his way, and for a moment they both smiled at each other, though Ethan’s quickly disappeared. Lorena, I noticed, seemed to be waiting for something. Ethan stepped closer, and the hard, set face relaxed, became almost boyish.
    Oddly, he spoke now in a stilted Elizabethan voice, so lilting it compelled us all to pay attention. “‘How now! What do you here alone?’”
    Lorena, obviously settling into an old and familiar playfulness, became a fluttering heroine, her voice equally Elizabethan. “‘Do not chide; I have a thing for you.’” She winked.
    He grinned. “‘A thing for me? It is a common thing—to have a foolish wife.’”
    She bowed.
    For some reason Ethan addressed me, and his severity had returned—that rigid jaw, those unblinking eyes. “And Hollywood said I couldn’t write dialogue.” He glared at Max, who was ignoring him.
    “Well,” I countered, “if you’re going to plagiarize, you might as well go for the best.”
    He grumbled. “Shakespeare is over-rated.”
    A stupid remark, best ignored. Said by the court jester who never learned to jest.
    Ethan turned away, a little flustered, but what caught my eye—and sadly so—was the look in Lorena’s eyes: a lingering affection there, perhaps unwanted but unavoidable, a bond she’d refused to relinquish. It saddened me, then. I realized that Lorena, despite her feisty, tough-as-nails demeanor, that hard-bitten exterior, might be a foolish woman.
    “Ethan,” she announced. “You’ve brought the circus.”
    “Be nice, Lorena,” he pleaded.
    “Why would I go out of character?”
    He laughed, a dry, brittle laugh that seemed more sardonic than celebratory. Immediately he disappeared into a corner of the sofa, and began picking a trace of Rags’ generous dog hair off a pants leg. “In Arabian countries,” he told no one in particular, “it’s considered unclean to have dogs inside a house.”
    “I’m a hard-shell Baptist,” Ava told him.
    “Christ,” he mumbled.
    Ava looked toward Max and Alice, shrugged her shoulders, and mouthed the words: I’m sorry . Max waved back, a thin smile on his face.
    Reenie circulated with more appetizers, but deliberately rolled her eyes when she approached Tony, who was mixing his drink with his index finger. For a few minutes I talked quietly with Lorena about her life in the script department of Paramount, but it was a strained conversation. Everyone seemed to be keeping a deliberate, if tense,