Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [9]
Gideon lowered Penelope from his shoulders and she ran to embrace her mother. She still had a slight limp from the accident three years earlier. It had happened in the blink of an eye. Val had turned her back for only a few seconds when Penelope ran into the street as a bus came roaring through the intersection and sideswiped her ... fractured skull ... broken ribs ... wrecked knee.
It took over two years for Penny to heal. Val, with great compassion and support from Gideon, learned to manage her guilt but would take some of it with her to her grave.
They looked at her and smiled and said silent “thank Gods.” They always did.
Val ordered the girls to strip and they squealed under the outdoor shower. She rubbed them dry with big towels, dressed them in muumuus, and sent them to their room to do their lessons.
In the kitchen, Gideon reached under Val’s muumuu and caressed her backside. Most of the Jewish men she had met since Gideon often as not had their hands on their women. A lovely horny breed.
“What’s for dinner?”
“Surprise. We’ve got prime rib.”
Gideon peeked into the oven. “Chicken,” he grumbled. Gideon hungered for a thick, juicy slab of prime rib. His visions of food, which grew daily, always ended up at Lawry’s Restaurant. He’d get off the plane at L.A. International and all the customs officers would have been alerted to pass him through without formalities. A helicopter would be waiting to fly him directly to the Lawry parking lot. The big silver cart would be rolled up to his table, the lid would be opened, and there would be ... one entire steer. He wouldn’t get up from the table until he was so bloated that a pair of waiters would have to pack him out on a hand-cart. ... Well, anyhow, the fruits and vegetables were outstanding in Israel.
Gideon seated himself at the kitchen table and snapped on the radio. His hand snaked over to the fruit bowl as he checked the mail.
Oh, thank God, a letter from F. Todd Wallace, his literary agent! Gideon had bombarded Wallace with letters pleading with him to find some writing assignments—a magazine article, a guest column, anything to augment the foundering bank account.
Val watched Gideon’s anxiety turn to deflation and then to anger. “Incompetent, lazy son of a bitch. All that mother knows how to do is collect commissions like a hungry landlord. The whole God-damned Middle East is about to blow up, he’s got a writer in place, and he can’t get me a nickel’s worth of work!”
“Why don’t you just replace him?”
“He’s got me tied up on this book and there’s no way he’s going to give it up. You remember how it was? We were in a real mess with J. III and Reaves Brothers Publishers and in comes Wallace, Princeton charm in Brooks Brothers’ uniform. We thought we were lucky to have him at the time.”
“Honey, don’t get yourself all churned up.”
“Depend on that literary pimp to pull you through and you’re dead, man, dead. You’ve got to lay a winner in that sucker’s lap. Give him any God-damned task requiring creative selling and you might as well be represented by the seals at Sea World.”
“Listen, we can only eat two chickens a day. We’ll get through.”
Gideon was pacing, throwing his middle finger up. “F. Todd Wallace and his God-damned club. Harvard and Yalie blimps with rigor mortis, in their overstuffed chairs, sneering down on Fifth Avenue. That crowd is drunk by noon. Can you believe it? God, I hate that crowd. Hey, Wallace, how’d they let me in? Do they know I’m a Jew?”
“Calm down, Junior, gor nisht helfen,” Val said, once again butchering an attempt at Yiddish.
Gideon jammed his hands into his pockets and continued his monologue. “If worse comes to worst I can always do a doctoring job on a screenplay. That’ll set the novel back three months. I’d better write and see what’s doing at the studios. There’s always a script in trouble.”
He flopped back down. Val had taken