The Trouble With Scarlett by Martin Turnbull

Author:Martin Turnbull [Turnbull, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical Fiction
Amazon: B009OH4DM6
Publisher: Rothesay Press
Published: 2014-01-13T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 26

“I have wonderful news!” Irene Selznick exclaimed, cornering Gwendolyn underneath the huge Cuban flag John O’Hara had strung up between his villa and the one Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett shared. Hemingway’s novel about a fishing boat captain running contraband between Cuba and Florida had just been released to great acclaim, and a bunch of Garden of Allah’ers decided to throw a Cuban-themed party.

Gwendolyn was surprised to see Irene—until she saw Dorothy di Frasso ladling cups of God-only-knew-what into the huge punchbowl that Lillian Hellman conjured up from God-only-knew-where.

“Wonderful news is always welcome,” Gwendolyn said.

“Alistair lost the Carmichael! Isn’t that terrific?”

If Gwendolyn hadn’t started sleeping with Alistair Dunne on the day of the Carmichael deadline, this news would have indeed been terrific. She’d said yes that first time purely as a matter of expediency, but the second time she’d slept with him—much like the time after that and all the times after that—had nothing to do with Gone with the Wind. There was really no polite way of putting it: Alistair Dunne was spectacular in bed.

It wasn’t as though Gwendolyn’s love life had been conducted in a convent and she brought no experience to his bed. She was an attractive girl in a town full of attractive men, many of whom had laid it on thick and heavy with her, and some of whom she had said yes to. But none of them—not even Eldon Laird—had prepared her for the relentless tidal wave of gusto with which Alistair pursued her pleasure. He was a wrecking ball of a lover, demolishing all memories of the men who preceded him, as well as any vestiges of Southern belle modesty she may have still clung to. As far as Gwendolyn was concerned, her sex life began the day of the Carmichael deadline.

Within weeks, Alistair’s talk had changed from “If I win the Carmichael” to “When I win the Carmichael.” When Gwendolyn pointed it out to him, he smiled that dreamy smile of his and she felt like she was the only girl in the world. He said to her, “All I needed was to watch your face when you looked at the portrait . . . I felt like Perseus, Odysseus, and Hercules rolled into one.”

He started to dream of prizes, coverage in Art Digest, gallery openings, collections, retrospectives. If it had all been just talk, Gwendolyn probably wouldn’t have paid much attention. Years of living and working around creative types at the Garden of Allah and the Cocoanut Grove had taught her that excessive volumes of yackety-yak came with the territory. But with Alistair, the talk paralleled a prolific period of work during which he produced a painting almost every week.

It was a remarkable output—two abstracts, a still life, and a painting of elephants juggling Bibles against a background of Japanese pagodas and the setting sun that he’d called surrealist, but which escaped Gwendolyn’s boundaries of comprehension altogether. His most recent work, a portrait of his seventy-year-old Mexican cleaning lady, took Gwendolyn’s breath away almost as much as the one he’d done of her.

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