We sat with our tea and watched the sky darken, the leaves of the ice bushes brushing against the windows, rustling in the slight evening breeze. “My sister Bappie was very fond of him. After her marriage fell apart, she was footloose, scattered. Some summers back, when he was out here, they found each other, not romantically, I mean, but like two wandering souls who bump into each other in the night. They’d go to the movies, plays, stuff like that. Then she met a new guy and they drifted apart. Sol, being Sol, didn’t resent it, though I think he was lonely much of the time. I know he spent more and more time with Max. And then Max and Alice.”
“Another life shot down.”
Ava stood and peered out the window. “Remember back at The Coffee Pot with Sol? How we waited for the rain that never came? Sometimes I pray for rain at night, especially lately. You know, that drumming on the roof, on the windowpanes. When I was little, I slept under the eaves of the attic, the rain drumming ping ping ping all night long, and I’d drift into a blissful sleep.” She turned to face me. “Nothing has ever been that good, Edna. The rain riled the flies trapped under the shingles, and they’d buzz around me. Ping ping ping. You know, I can’t sleep out here in this land of perpetual sunlight. I stay awake all night long.” She tapped the windowpane. “Sometimes when the breeze starts up at night I stand in the dark and wait for rain.” She smiled wistfully. “Help me with dinner, Edna.”
I hadn’t planned on constructing my own meal that evening, but, led by Ava’s rhythmic direction, I found myself bustling about her kitchen, shrouded in one of her full-length aprons with so many ruffles I feared I‘d become one of the Floradora girls in a vaudeville song-and-dance routine.
“Now drop the pieces in that flour mixture there, Edna, because it’s filled with special spices my mama told me about. Secret spices.” Then: “Edna, you need to let the butter melt first, otherwise…”
The two of us moved in curious syncopation.
Slowly, wonderfully, thrillingly, the meal took shape: chicken sizzling and popping in the hot oil, potatoes mashed and garnished with parsley, green peas-“I grew them myself, but no one will believe me”-gleaming in salted water, a loaf of sourdough bread rising in the oven. Aromas flooded the room, the inviting tang of bubbling yeast, of crispy chicken skin, of peas slathered with butter, a conflicting war of tantalizing smells. Dizzying, the sum of it, but totally satisfying.
There I was, dressed in my fine black silk dress with the filigreed lace collar, covered now from neck to knee with Ava’s own apron, my hands caked with flour, my eyes watery from the boiling water and the diced pearl onions.
“Edna, too much salt. What are you thinking?” She moved me aside and tasted with a spoon. She nodded: yes. Yes. And yes. Yes, indeed, I thought. I was flabbergasted by it all, and rapturously intoxicated with her.
By the time we sat at the kitchen table, side by side-“Not in the dining room, for heaven’s sake, we’re friends”-I found myself smiling with a kind of mindless delirium: I’d rarely had so satisfying an evening as this.
The sex goddess Ava Gardner-and me, the aging novelist, the world’s finickiest eater, culinary martinet. Delightful, marvelous. I ate everything on my plate and Ava sat back, her eyes twinkling, and watched me. “Good Lord, Edna. You have the appetite of a fifteen-year-old boy.”
Darkness had fallen outside now, lights switched on. A coziness here, safe haven.
Of course, it couldn’t last. Ava started talking about Frank’s moodiness lately. “He sulks now. Everything gets him down. His career, Max, Columbia Records.” The wrong conversational turn because, as my old Negro housekeeper liked to say, we talked him up. She made him appear on her doorstep. A car stopped on the gravel driveway as Ava rushed to the window. “I told him not tonight and he promised me.” For a second she shut her eyes, biting her lower lip. “Damn him.”
I stood next to her as we watched the occupants tumble out of the flashy car. “Damn them.”
Frank and the Pannis brothers stormed in, resentful that I was there, my arms folded over my chest as though I were a threatening schoolmarm, my cheeks sucked in-my most practiced look of disapproval.
“Christ, I forgot,” Frank said. “I’m sorry, angel. I did forget.”
She looked ready to slap him.
“Tell her,” Tony bellowed.
“Tell me what?”
“Calm down, boys,” Frank muttered. “Both of you are making way too much out of this.” But the news obviously bothered Frank himself because his reassuring words were yelled out, rushed. When he looked at Ava, his face seemed to collapse, the blue eyes downcast and troubled, his chin bobbing up and down. Frank suffered out loud, I realized, the public groaner. Taking care of him when he had the flu would be a battlefield assignment. “All right, all right.” Anger in his tone. “The bastards. I should have expected this.”
Ava walked up to him and placed an arm around his waist. “Tell me, darling.”
Tony blurted out. “The cops took him in, Ava. Frank Sinatra, the hottest singer on the planet. They took him downtown. They questioned him like a street thug. Frankie boy. Where’s the respect…”
Ethan was burning. “Shut up, Tony.”
Frank eyed him. “I can do my own talking, Tiny.” Said with white-hot anger, his words punched the stage name. Tiny. Dismissal, mockery, the fat slob in the schoolyard made fun of one more time by the class lover.
Tony shot him a look, not a happy one. He looked ready to cry.
Ethan nudged Tony into a chair but I noticed he didn’t seem pleased with Frank’s treatment of his brother. Frank was oblivious, his arm around Ava’s waist, his face nuzzled in her neck. “Baby, the way things are in this damn town.”
Ava tightened her hold on him. “I don’t know what’s going on, Francis.” Loud, insistent. “Tell me now.”
Frank glanced at me, a look that communicated his desire that I be elsewhere, preferably out of town: the ancient dowager back among her lavender and old lace, her white curls under a Mother Hubbard bonnet. “Yes,” I said, “tell us.”
“Max’s murder.” The two words hung in the air, ominous. “Can you believe it?”
Tony joined in. “Just because they can’t solve it and can’t pick up the nut out there who’s popping off the Commies in town…”
Ethan poked his finger into Tony’s side. “Could you let Frankie tell…”
Frank rushed his words. “They never talked to me about that incident when I threatened Max at dinner, that stupid squabble, the shoving. Yeah, Louella Parsons and the gossip sheets had a field day, but that’s nonsense for the lame-brained knucklehead readers in Hollywood. Yeah, I had my publicist talk to someone at the precinct-and nothing happened. I never thought the cops would pay any mind to it. But I guess there’s been a few pushy calls to the police, you know, folks who can’t stand me, resent me, and today they made me go downtown.”
Tony sputtered. “We drove him there.”
“They wanted to know my alibi. My alibi? Jesus Christ! I got none. I was in the desert all night.”
Ethan was matter-of-fact. “The matter should end now. Finished. Your word is good.”
No one paid him any mind.
“The police have a job to do,” I offered.
Ethan pursed his brow and eyed me. “Frankie doesn’t lie.”
Frank let go of Ava, dropping into a chair, his elbows on his knees, his hands cradling his head. “I guess I lost it a little down there. I played the wise guy at the precinct.”
“Oh, Francis, no.”
“I told one cop who pushed me around-‘You’ll get a belt in your stupid mouth.’ I don’t like cops.”
“So now what?” From Ava.
“I gotta make a statement. Go back with my lawyer tomorrow.” He looked at me now, hurt in his eyes, disbelief. “They might charge me with murder.”