California Time by Frederic Raphael

Author:Frederic Raphael
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448211067
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

‘Your mother must be very happy for you.’

‘It’s been nominated for five separate awards. I want you to be my date at the Presentation.’

‘Forget it,’ Dotty said.

‘I hope you like the roses,’ he said. ‘Week after next, they’ll be coming a dozen times a day.’

She goes with him to the Presentation. He wears a midnight-blue tux with a light-blue white-ruffed shirt and plum-coloured bow-tie.

‘I figured you’d be against anything ostentatious,’ he said.

‘Christ, you’re awful,’ she said.

‘I hope you’re going to be nice to me,’ he said.

‘I said I’d come. I didn’t say I’d be nice.’

‘Don’t you think that’s kind of sneaky?’ He smiled at the flesh wound, and she smiled back, for the first time. ‘Anyway, after tonight I’m going to be in demand. I’m going to be wanted everywhere.’

‘Oh good,’ she said. ‘I hope you go.’

He had been known to approach girls on the street, Rob Pascal the famous actor, and ask them whether they had ever been laid by a movie star. He got lucky quite often. He threw messages to girls from hotel balconies to come on up. And when they came, they came. There were those who shook their heads, but one or two of them walked slowly down the same street at the same time a day or two later and looked up, and didn’t shake their heads second time around. Rob Pascal had been in a good few pictures and a few of them had been good. He had been to school down the street. He surfed before he surfaced in a beach pic or two and then he was taken up by an impressed Impresario from the East who thought he was an unspoiled kid. He was unspoiled: even being spoiled didn’t spoil him. He rolled the dice, when nothing else was rolling, and knew to dodge when they were loaded. He stayed loose. He was California.

‘I don’t have a problem in the world,’ he said. ‘Except you don’t like me. And that’s a problem bigger than all the others put together. But if you’re nice to me, I’ll make sure you get all the hot pastrami you ever wanted.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he acted her. ‘You know what I’m talking about. There are a lot of girls’d give a lot to be where you’re going to be tonight.’

‘I have tickets of my own,’ she said. ‘I don’t need to go with you.’

‘I can be very helpful in that direction,’ he said. ‘Ask around.’

‘You’ve got a lot of teeth,’ she said, ‘for a baby.’

‘Treat me like shit,’ he said. ‘Treat me like shit. Go ahead. It’s your last chance.’

They reach the applauditorium. The architect has been given his headache and has solved the problem by building a latticed concrete straw hat with a parking lot on the brim. Rob looks in the car mirror and tousles his hair. He and Dotty go in, charm-in-arm, and down to the seats within a hope, step and a jump of the ramp to the stage where the Awards are to be dispensed.

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