Chapter 5 People Can Surprise You #2
The sides of his cheeks bunch with a smile.
And with this, the woman’s expression shifts to surprise.
Surprise and shock that someone like Frankie would make Jack Sawyer smile.
Frankie, in pants, with only ChapStick glossing her lips.
When he turns to her, he meets her gaze and doesn’t look away.
He observes everything, Nico once said about Jack.
You think he’s staring, but he’s studying.
The guy’ll meet you once and know exactly what you do with your hands when you talk.
“Ladies,” Jack finally says. “The studio’s reeling me in. This is good night.”
Heads turn as Frankie leads the way. More and more. Quick, furtive glances, along with blatant stares. And Dottie, she realizes, is no doubt perched by the entrance, ready to pounce and ask why he’d be here and not with his betrothed.
As they pass the kitchen, Frankie says, “I thought you don’t like yourself when you’re drunk.”
“One: Who says I like myself right now? And two: I’m not drunk. Out of five drinks, I had one and dumped the rest. Fine, I had two.”
A pause in her step as she glances over her shoulder. “You did this so Nico’d send me?”
He smiles. “I kept watering a palm tree with Old Staggs so I could keep going and Nico’d get the call. A waste of bourbon, but it did the trick.”
“Well, you almost got the troops, not me. If it weren’t for Olivier—”
“Olivier hitting on a married woman at the Canteen, just down the street from here? Who do you think was at the Canteen, telling him all night just how much that woman was making eyes at him?”
She smiles as she searches for the best, least noticeable way out. “All that to get me out of Sunday dinner?”
“Nico took enough from me today; I at least wanted you for the evening.”
They can’t talk about this now. Not yet. “I heard your accent back there.”
“I said I wasn’t drunk. I didn’t say I was sober. Take the side entrance, through that hall.”
She veers off, taking the hallway. They’ve almost made it to the side exit and are passing a man who’s leaned heavily against a pay phone, when suddenly that man sees Frankie and steps forward and pinches her butt.
Without thinking, she wheels around and slugs him.
Not a slap. Not a sweet scolding, but a full-on punch.
All her anger at the situation landing on the man’s jaw.
There is a moment when no one does anything.
Each thrown by the sudden course of events.
The man holds his face, confused and staring at Jack as if sure he is the one who threw the punch.
Then Frankie snaps to and is pulling on Jack’s arm, and the two are running through the hall when the man starts to yell.
In seconds they’ve burst into the night.
Outside, Jack stops, doubled over. Unafraid and laughing.
“Don’t stop! Move!” She spots her car and grabs his elbow, and they’ve just made it to the next row of cars when she hears the door to the club sigh as it opens. Quickly, she yanks on him to duck. They crouch by someone’s tire.
Jack’s eyes flash. “Nico teach you to punch like that?”
Just barely, she raises her head enough to see the man turning back inside. “I’m from New York. We don’t slap.”
“I’ll say you don’t.” A pause. “I liked it.”
She ignores him, focused on the side entrance. For a bit longer, they stay crouched, then hurry to the car.
“The guy’s not following,” Jack says, getting in the passenger seat. “You’re fine.”
But her heart won’t stop racing—even as she drives, she checks the mirrors.
“Cop-spotter,” he says, motioning to the side mirror. “That’s what they used to call them. And why they put them in cars, so you could see if you were being trailed. Are you?”
“No.”
“See? We’re fine.” He gives a short laugh and puts his arm on the door, relaxed wherever he goes. “Maybe your dad was a boxer.”
“Not my mom?” She grins, but calling anyone but Fiona her mom feels wrong, and she quickly loses the smile.
She’s always been curious about the people who raised her for five years before deciding she wasn’t worth the effort, and even the curiosity feels like a betrayal.
When she thinks of them, she sees a large Italian family, but that could just be a result of people assuming that, with her first name and dark hair and olive skin, she’s Italian.
When she nears Westlake Park, the night air is cold, and feels like a reprieve, a separation from what just happened.
Palm trees splay like fireworks against the stars.
The implications of tonight’s events are hitting her.
Jack Sawyer, in a private hall with a woman who’s not his fiancée, a woman who’s throwing punches.
Nico sent her to keep him out of trouble, yet she caused it.
On the night he promoted her. “Did that man see it was you?”
Jack shrugs. “He didn’t yell out my name, so here’s hoping.”
Frankie debates over where to go. Where they are now seems to be in the middle of everything.
Though they’re somewhat close to the studio, which isn’t too far from Frankie’s apartment, Jack’s houses are either in Venice—west from here and on the coast—or Pasadena, which is east from here and farther inland.
Even without traffic at this time, the drive, with so much unsaid, seems torturous.
Then she thinks of the bungalows, two little houses that the studio owns, one behind the other on a long and secluded lot.
They’re near her own building and not far from where they currently are. “I could take you to the bungalows.”
“We having an engagement party?”
He laughs, and she shoots him a look. Stars go to the bungalows for privacy or parties, a place for either seclusion or secretive intemperance.
Rumor has it bootlegging tunnels exist beneath the lush grounds, and Frankie knows of one that’s closed off, a sign on the door with a drawing of a gorilla with an X through it, as if everything else is allowed.
Just a bunch of spiders, Nico told her about what’s in the tunnel, but you go through it, and you end up on the street behind the property, so take note if the cops ever arrive.
They shouldn’t bother us, but now and then you get a Boy Scout who’s new on the job and doesn’t know better.
“I’m kidding,” Jack says. “June’s at the bungalows. Maybe she’s there with the father of my child.” He adds a laugh at the end, but it falls flat.
“June likes the first bungalow. We could put you in number two.”
“Frankie, you make things really hard sometimes, you know that? I need you at my house because I have something for you there. A surprise.”
She tightens her hands on the steering wheel. “You just got engaged.”
“But I’m not going to do it.”
Quickly, she glances at him. “They’ll call your bluff.
Jack, I’ve seen what they can do. Remember what the sound guys did to that actor in Let It Lay?
Raising his voice? People laughed the entire movie, and it wasn’t a comedy.
Really, you don’t want to mess with them.
You’ve got years left on your contract, that’s years till you—”
“It’s not a bluff. I’m not getting married. I’ll work it out, but it’s not happening. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. But tonight, tonight we don’t talk about it.”
Her job, of course, is to force this. To convince him. To make him take his medicine, as Nico said. But that objective is directly opposed to what she wants. And what she wants is for there to be a way. Finding time together would be harder than before, but could be possible.
Then she thinks of what the studio knows, of why the strong arm of their protection could easily turn against him.
Jack never had the life they painted for him in his bio.
There was no ranch in Montana, no doting parents who have since passed.
Instead, there was a more-than-rocky existence in Louisiana, and a wife he left high and dry.
Donna. She’s the person the studio has dealt with, the reason for the subterfuge and stories.
Jack claimed she never loved him and only married him because it got her out of her family’s house, and that when he went to war—a war that battered him with incessant, nerve-racking noise and blasts of fear—he realized that if he survived, he needed to be more than just a paycheck to someone and to lead a life that was more than just a ticket out.
But he did it the wrong way. He took the coward’s exit and simply never returned to Louisiana, abandoning Donna to do what, he wasn’t sure.
Deplorable. Shameful. A regretful move he most likely wouldn’t have made had he been of sound mind, but at the time he only knew that acting made him happy, the one production he’d done in school, and so he moved to New York, where the theatre saved him.
By the time he found his sense of right and wrong, it was too late to contact her.
There was no going back. And when the studio discovered him and lured him to Los Angeles, Donna saw him on the big screen and did what any scorned person with no love in their heart would do: She promised to destroy him.
So the studio stepped in with a divorce attorney and Nico, who took care of the rest.
People abandon people all the time. But not Hollywood’s leading man. Not like that.
“So,” Jack continues. “My house. O’Shea isn’t there. I gave him three nights off.”
“I thought that was so you could . . .” She pauses, looking for the word.
“Break down?”
She smiles. “Maybe.”
“Just goes to show you, Frankie, sometimes people can surprise you.”