“Now? Here?”
Sheldon nodded. “I think it’s going to be very vital to us to have Brenda go with us to Canada.”
“You’re damned right,” B.F. agreed.
“But she doesn’t want to go.”
“She’ll go.”
“I’m not sure....”
“Don’t worry about it. What I tell her to do, she does.”
“She might quit.”
B.F. shook his head, a knowing smile on his lips. Somehow, it didn’t look pleasant. “She won’t quit. She can’t. She’ll do what I tell her, no matter what it is.”
6: THE CONFRONTATION
Ron Gabriel sipped a gingerale as he sat at one of the Sky Bar’s tiny round tables. Brenda Impanema sat on the couch beside him, staring moodily out at the moonlit ocean. On his other side, Allen Jenkins and Frank McHugh were playing poker on a little table of their own.
The crowd in the bar had thinned considerably. Many couples had drifted outside, now that the ship was clear of the L.A. smog and the moon could be seen. Others had gone down to their staterooms for some serious sexual therapy.
“It’s like a movie scene,” Brenda said, reaching for her Hawaiian Punch. “Moonlight on the water, the ship plowing through the waves, romantic music....”
Gabriel scowled at the computer, which was now issuing a late 1970s rotrock wail. “Call that romantic?”
Brenda, still in Lauren Bacall’s looks, made a small shrug. “It could be romantic.”
“If it was different music.”
“Right.”
“Then all you’d need would be Fred Astaire tapdancing out on the deck.”
“And sweeping me off my feet.”
Gabriel looked in the mirror across the room and saw Jimmy Cagney. But he no longer felt like Cagney. I should have come as Astaire, he told himself. But Cagney fitted his personality better, he knew.
“How come I can’t sweep you off your feet?” he asked Brenda.
Bacall grinned back at him, “It’s chemistry. We just don’t react right.”
“I’m crazy about you.”
“You’re crazy about every girl you meet. And I don’t want to go to Canada with you.”
Gabriel remembered why he had come aboard. He picked up his glass of gingerale. In the mirror, Cagney’s face hardened.
“I don’t want to go to Canada at all. Period.”
“We can drink to that.” Brenda touched her glass to Gabriel’s.
Cagney scowled.
She tossed her head slightly, so that the long sweep of her hair flowed back over her bare shoulder. “Are you really after me or just my body? Or just a grip on B.F.?”
“That’s a helluva question,” he said.
“It’s of more than passing interest to me.”
Gabriel put his glass down firmly on the tabletop. Without looking up from it he said, “I’m crazy about you. I don’t know anything about your body. I’ve seen it clothed and it looks pretty good. But more than that I can’t tell. And I don’t go after girls for business reasons.” He looked up at her. “What I have to settle with Finger I’ll settle for myself. And it’s time that I did.”
Brenda put a hand on his arm. “If you confront B.F. you’ll blow the whole series. He’ll have you kicked off the ship and out of any connection with Titanic.”
“So I’ll take the idea someplace else. I don’t need Titanic. He needs me.”
“He’ll make life miserable for you.”
Gabriel pulled his arm free of her. With a light tap on her cheek, he went back to pure Cagney. “Don’t you worry about me, kid. I know how to handle myself.”
To his cronies, who looked up from their cardgame, Gabriel said, “Keep her out of trouble.”
They nodded. Both unemployed, nonselling young writers, they were looking forward to script assignments on the series. If they could avoid starvation long enough to wait for the series to go into production. At the moment they were avoiding starvation—and work—by living in Gabriel’s house.
The rest home for starveling writers, Gabriel thought as he made his way around the dancefloor and toward the Sky Bar’s exit. But he remembered his own beginning years, the struggle and the hollow-gutted days of hunger. Somehow he seemed to have more fun in those days than he did now. Shit! You’d think there’s be a time when a guy could relax and enjoy himself.
He reached the exit and gave a final glance back. Jenkins and McHugh had resumed their cardgame. Bacall had moved closer to them and started kibbitzing.
