“Thanks for telling me what you really think of me, Mike.”
“Listen; I know this woman. A small-town woman, pretty and poor, surrounded by snobs.”
“I know that woman, too. We come from the same town, Mike.”
“You never knew the people. You were shut away, protected from the problems of the sordid citizens, the rich girl living in your castle behind the stone wall.”
Nancy stared into the fire. “Perhaps I can’t judge this play at all, Mike. Perhaps it’s too personal. I’m all tied up in prejudices. You ought to get someone else to read it.”
It was then that Mike made a grotesque mistake: “Phyllis has read it and she thinks it’s absolutely true to life.”
“She would.”
“Don’t be a vipress, Nancy.”
She neither spoke nor stirred. In her greens and reds and golds, with the big hoops in her ears, she was like one of those haughty, rebellious duchesses that Goya loved to paint. Mike lost his temper, screamed, called her an egotist and a snob. Furious because his anger seemed trivial beside her aloofness, he gathered up his things, thrust the play back into his brief case, stamped out into the hall for his hat, coat, scarf, and rubbers. As he let himself out he looked back at her. She sat in the same position, hunched before the fire, staring as if in a trance into the flames.
Three days later she left for Florida. When the season was over, she drove to Mexico. Through Phyllis, who got the news from her aunt, he learned that Nancy had taken a year’s lease on a house in Taxco.
She had been right about the play. Mike heard the same criticism from his wisest friends, and in April he began to rewrite it. While he was working he thought constantly of Nancy. He felt that some measure of gratitude was due her, but he could never humble himself before Nancy nor beg her forgiveness.
In June he sold the play, and spent the summer making further changes. It opened on the thirteenth of September and was immediately a hit.
Gilbert Jones headed the cast, and at the party after the opening Mike introduced him to Phyllis.
When Mike saw them together on the dance floor, he was reminded of that New Year’s Eve when she had danced so recklessly with Johnnie Elder. Excitement colored her cheeks. Above the flimsy black stuff that veiled her shoulders she was like a painting on ivory. She wore black jet earrings, fine old ones set in gold, an inheritance from her grandmother.
She and Gilbert Jones danced together, drank together, laughed, teased, flirted, and forgot that there were other people at the party. Behind them, like a shadow, hovered Fred Miller. He had caught his annual cold earlier than usual, and he blew his nose constantly.
Every woman at the party envied Phyllis. Gilbert wore his good looks like an advertisement of superior masculinity.
He was not a fine actor. He was too handsome to play any part as well as he played Gilbert Jones. In Mike’s play he was cast admirably as a vain and selfish bachelor who had been for years the lover of the heroine’s mother. Gil loathed the part and the play, but it was a distinguished production and he could not have afforded to turn it down. He fancied himself a romantic rogue and believed that he would come into his own if he ever found a lush, heroic, swashbuckling part. He had a theory which he argued tirelessly whenever he found a listener. This weary and cynical world, Gil said, longed for escape into romance; the great play of the century would be three acts of capes and boots, duels and balconies.
While Mike’s play was in rehearsal, its press agent, needing copy, sent out a paragraph about Gilbert Jones’s quest for the perfect romantic role. It was a typical press-agent blunder, for Mike’s play, which he had been paid to exploit, was anything but romantic escapism. The paragraph, printed by dramatic editors too bored to be careful, bore fruit. Gil received a flood of manuscripts by writers who agreed that the theater would be saved by swashbuckling romance. Most of the plays were too amateurish to bear reading, but finally one came in that fitted all of Gil’s requirements. It was about the Cavaliers who settled in Maryland. A schoolteacher in Moline, Illinois, had written it.
Not long after Mike’s play had opened and royalties were pouring in, Gil asked Mike to read the swashbuckling script. Mike read it and laughed. He had better use for his money than investment in that rose-garlanded tripe.
One day Phyllis came to see Mike. She said that Mike was shortsighted and stubborn, and that in refusing to put money in Gil’s play he was losing the chance of his life.
“It’s kind of you to be so interested in my career,” Mike teased, “but I happen to be making as much money as I need, and I’m not interested in the financial end of show business.”
“But you love the theater,” she said with pretty reproach. “I’ve often heard you say it needs a shot in the arm. Here’s your chance, Mike, not only to make a fortune for yourself, but to do something really important for the theater.”
“Since when have you become a patroness of the drama, Mrs. Miller?”
Suddenly angry, she cried, “Why do you always call me Mrs. Miller? You know me well enough to use my first name.”
“I know why you’re out procuring for the drama, Phyllis.”
“But it’s a great play. People are so tired of realism. Life is hard enough nowadays, with war and taxes and all; nobody wants to be reminded of it in the theater. They want escape.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Mike said. “From the source.”
She shrank into a corner of the chair. Her love for Gil had influenced her taste in clothes. She had begun to seek picturesque, old-fashioned effects, which on her were charming. She had on a black velvet suit with white ruffles at wrist and neck, and a little black tricorne tilted over one eye and tied on with a black veil. As she sat in the wing chair, touching her nostrils with a lace handkerchief, she was appealing and beautiful.
“Mike,” she murmured, “don’t laugh at me. You know what my life’s been. Can I help it if I’ve fallen in love? He’s everything I’ve dreamed about all my life.”
Mike’s heart was affected, but not his pocketbook. He tried to make Phyllis understand that there was no hope for Gil’s cumbersome, dated play. She listened politely, but Mike’s arguments failed to move her. At the end he felt that he had grown as tiresome to her as Fred Miller.
She had become a woman with a mission. All of her energy was devoted to a single end. Loving Gil, she sought a means of proving herself worthy. She tried, in every way she knew, to find a backer for Gil’s show.
One morning her telephone rang, and there was Nancy, just arrived by plane from Mexico City. She had also called Mike, and suggested that they all meet for lunch. It was like Nancy to have forgotten that she had departed in anger.
Mike and Phyllis hurried to Nancy’s apartment. It was crowded with open trunks and packing cases, woven baskets, painted furniture, wooden plates, painted trays, serapes, and such an assortment of tin and silverware that it looked as if she were planning to open a shop. She crushed them both in enthusiastic embraces, kissed Mike’s mouth and Phyllis’s cheek, gave them extravagant presents, declared that she had always prophesied Mike’s success, and called to her maid for tequila so they might drink to his career.
She looked serene and healthy. The cadaverous hollows were gone, the angles softened by a few becoming pounds of flesh...
That night Phyllis proved she was the better woman by showing that she possessed something even more dazzling than Nancy’s jewels and furs. The love of Gilbert Jones, his splendid masculinity, gave Phyllis such glamour that Nancy’s sables might have been muskrat. There was no doubt that Nancy was impressed. As was his habit, Gil flirted with a new woman. Phyllis watched as an author might watch actors rehearse the scenes he has written. Her temper was so good that she laughed at Fred Miller’s poor attempts at humor.