Chocolates for Breakfast by Pamela Moore Read Free Book Online Page A

person.”
    â€œKind of,” Courtney said.
    â€œI’m glad I have a literary roommate,” Janet said. “Did you get any bananas while you were out?”
    â€œNo, I was with Fo-bitch, and she wouldn’t let me. Ran into some little second-former, Sommers, and she said she’d get them.”
    â€œHow did you and Fo-bitch get along?”
    â€œOh, it was all right, because I didn’t have to talk to her or anything. This doctor was great. Asked me all sorts of questions, about daydreaming and being tired and feeling depressed and all. It was kind of interesting, but didn’t prove anything.”
    The iron pills did not help Courtney at all, and her excessive sleeping got worse as the weeks passed and summer vacation drew near. Dr. Reismann knew that they would not help her. As he said to his wife at dinner that night, “Why shouldn’t the child sleep when she has nothing that she wants to be awake for?”

Chapter 4
    T he Garden of Allah was conveniently located on “The Strip,” a block from Schwab’s Drugstore where a whole afternoon of black coffee was provided for the price of the first cup. Across the way was a reducing salon which advertised itself by a bicycling mannequin in the window and pictures of broad-shouldered 1940 stars on similar machines, and nearby was a Chinese restaurant where a cheap and filling meal could be found. The Garden shouted its identity to the passers-by on Sunset Boulevard by a glaring, blinking, shifting neon sign of generally neurotic behavior. The palm trees, of course, were lit by floodlights because it is man’s business to improve upon actuality. The general impression given to the uninitiated by the sign and the bizarre name was one of a particularly brazen house of ill repute, but the prices of the villas were equal to those of the bungalows of the more sedate Beverly Hills Hotel, and any behavior of ill repute indulged in by the inhabitants was generally not on a professional basis.
    The villas surrounded a pool whimsically built in the shape of a lotus leaf, but of course the pool wasn’t meant to be practical, only symbolic, and in that it succeeded admirably. The lotus-eaters gathered daily around the pool to play gin rummy, talk about the work that they hoped to get or that they had recently completed, and drink vodka in various guises. Beside the pool was the main building of the hotel, if it may be called that—actually the Garden was only symbolic and symptomatic as well—and in the hotel was a bar, which was very definitely practical.
    The bar was papered in an unobtrusive green, and the seats were of green leather. A later and more flagrant management papered the bar in candy-stripes in an attempt to make even that room into a symbol, but their reign was short-lived anyway, and at this time the green that had solaced F. Scott Fitzgerald in his brief and tragic stay in Hollywood still remained.
    This was the interim time of day, the hour that was once, in an earlier and less uprooted time, referred to as the children’s hour, but which today is called the cocktail hour. This was the time when working Hollywood showered and changed, and when out-of-work Hollywood looked out of its window at the evening sky and put on its corduroy jacket.
    This was the hour that Sondra Farrell hated with a hatred bred of solitude, and which she passed in the bar of the Garden of Allah because it was one of the few places where a woman could go alone without having overly determined passes made at her. Marty, the bartender, saw to that for her.
    â€œHow are you this evening, Miss Farrell?” he said pleasantly. He expected no information but few remarks are made in that expectation, being used only to fill space and cover gestures like the clearing of glasses.
    â€œAs well as usual, Marty. Make that a Barry Cabot martini,” she added, meaning nearly pure vodka and a great deal of that.
    â€œMr. Cabot was