Sometime before midnight, the phone rang. Maggie held the opinion that people who phoned after ten o’clock were a lower life-form, but she was not the kind of person who could lie there and ignore a ringing phone, even if the caller was apt to be the unspeakable pig who had until lately shared her bed.
“Do you have any idea what time it is,” she barked into the hand-set, which had been cunningly embedded in a little section of birch log.
“Maggie, never mind that. It’s me, Lindy.” This was Lindy Hagan, formerly Lindy Katz, Maggie’s roommate at Smith. Lindy was married to Buddy Hagan, the extremely successful producer (A Woman Scorned, Dreadnought, A Kind and Restless Heart, Second Chance), and lived in Los Angeles. Lindy and Maggie had not talked in perhaps a year. Once they’d been as close as sisters. Closer, really, for there were no sibling resentments. Lindy had an actress’s husky voice, though she hadn’t worked professionally since the eighties.
“I have to get out of here,” she said without any small talk. Lindy’s manic edge—the quality that always made her so fascinating to be around—seemed more like sheer panic now. “I hate everyone and everything in L.A., okay, and I can’t handle being here another day. Not another second.”
“What on earth is going on?”
“So I find out last week that Buddy is gay, okay—”
Maggie sat up and gasped. Buddy Hagan, gay? A series of snapshots flashed through her mind: Buddy Hagan waxing a surfboard on the beach at East Hampton, 1983 (the summer that she and Kenneth had the old windmill house on Rum Road), all the media wives, art groupies, and starlet wanna-bes tripping over one another to get a look at him; Buddy in his tuxedo at the Academy Awards with his face as golden as the statuette’s, hoisting his Best Picture Oscar in triumph; Buddy relaxing under a linden tree in the Place Dauphine in Paris one Easter in the nineties when the four of them took the Concorde over on a lark. She never would have suspected …
“Did you catch him in the act?”
“Are you kidding? I’d be a fugitive on a murder warrant in Paraguay by now. No, no, no, no, no. He announced it, just like that. We’re at Bagatelle on Melrose, okay? Little pink tables. Fresh poppies. Nicholson is sitting across the room. Geffen, Katzenberg, Whoopie Goldberg, George Clooney. Julia Roberts. The Boss and Patti. It’s like goddamn Entertainment Tonight in there, which I realize is very shrewd on Buddy’s part because he knows I won’t throw a shit fit in front of this crowd, okay? ‘There’s something I’d like to share with you,’ he goes. You like that part? ‘Share with me’? Ha! You get the close shot? The rugged face, the slitty Clint Eastwood eyes, the Ralph Lauren western casual wear. Is this too much? So I go, ‘Share away, pal,’ which, okay, sounds a little snotty, but I’m not into this New Age, kiss-my-crystal, sugar-coat-the-bad-news bullshit, which I can see coming about thirty miles away, only me, dumb bunny, I think he’s lost another twenty mil or something on some stupid development deal that’s gone into turnaround for the third time. Only he goes, ‘I’ve become acquainted with a side of myself that lay buried for years.’ This sounds like dialogue from one of his shitty movies, okay? ‘Speak English,’ I go. ‘Okay,’ he goes. ‘I’m bisexual.’ Okay, reaction shot— me with my jaw bouncing off the tablecloth. Got it? So I go, ‘Am I supposed to congratulate you, like this is some kind of achievement in life?’ ‘No,’ he goes, ‘I just want you to know, because I’m being blackmailed by someone, and I’d rather share it with you myself than have you see it on the news.’ Tell me something, Maggie, what is it with men and their pricks? Why do they have to stick them in every hole—?”
“What on earth did you say to him?” Maggie asked, refusing to be sidetracked by cosmic questions.
“Well, I go, ‘How long has this been going on?’ What I’m thinking right now is about maybe gouging both his eyes out with my demitasse spoon, okay. And he goes, ‘Some time now.’ And I go, ‘Is he the only one, this blackmailer?’ And he goes, ‘No, there’ve been others.’ So I go, ‘Can we leave or do I throw up right here in the persimmon clafouti?’ So, like nine minutes later we’re in the car driving over Mulholland, and I go, ‘Will you take an AIDS test?’ and he goes, ‘Don’t be silly.’ And I’m thinking, if he wasn’t behind the wheel I’d ram my nail file into his brain stem, okay? Just put him out of his misery right there. So the next day I go into Dr. Eugene Brill’s office for an AIDS test. That was ten days ago. The results come back tomorrow.” At this, Lindy broke down sobbing.
Maggie tried to comfort her over the line, inserting phrases between sobs like “poor thing” and “poor Lindy” and “there there.” She wished she could rock Lindy in her arms and felt that all her words were inadequate.
“I thought I could handle it, but I can’t,” Lindy sobbed.
“Get on the first plane out of there tomorrow morning,” Maggie said, as though she were giving directions to Nina for a catering job. “And I’ll be at Kennedy Airport to meet you.”
“Oh, I was hoping you’d say that. Dear, dear Maggie!”
“Where’s Buddy now?”
“Who cares? The Sunset Marquis, for all I know, playing kiss the lizard with a valet parking attendant. I threw him out of the house the night he broke the news.” Lindy resumed weeping.
“Don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right,” Maggie said.
“Not if I have AIDS,” Lindy shrieked. “I’ll get covered with sores, okay, and my brain will turn to potato kugel, and I’ll go blind and deaf and have fungus growing out of my—”
“Lindy! Lindy! Lindy! Darling! You’re going to be here with someone who loves you. That’s the only thing that matters. What time is it in L.A.? Nine o’clock? Start packing pronto. It’ll make you tired. Bring a lot of things for a long stay. Remember, it’s winter here. Call me as soon as you know your ETA.”
“Maggie, you’re so … you’re the perfect friend,” Lindy said, sniffling now.
“Funny,” Maggie said, “that’s what I always thought about you.”
“I didn’t ask you a thing about your life. I’m such a self-involved piece of shit.”
“Look, you’re the one who’s in a jam. You get the attention now. That’s how it works. Pack up, knock back a vodka, and get some sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
A chill slowly spread from her center down her arms and legs as she replaced the phone. Scrunching down under the fresh sheets and the wool blankets, she thought, How easily we are reassured, like little children waking from a nightmare. Mommy or Daddy need only be there, invincible, omniscient, eternal. With a stabbing sensation in her stomach, she remembered the very first moment she became aware of mortality. It was during that same childhood illness she’d remembered upon awakening and seeing the sunlight on the ceiling. “Will you die someday, Daddy?” she’d asked during one of the respites from her delirium.
“Oh, that’s way, way off. Can’t see it from here.”
“And Mommy too?”
“Oh, maybe in a thousand years.”
“And me?”
“No, not you, honeybear. God made you special.”
“Does that mean I don’t get to go to heaven?”
“Y’see that’s just it, this is heaven. You’re already there. That’s the biggest secret of all. This world, and everything in it, was made just for you. Nothing can ever hurt you here.”
“But I’m so sick, Daddy.”
“Oh it’s just God’s way of making sure you’ll appreciate things more when you feel good. Now try and get some sleep.”
Frank had switched off the lamp, whose base was a painted carousel horse he had carved himself. Maggie remembered feeling so sad when he left her in the dark because she knew she wasn’t that special, and even at eight years old, she knew what the darkness really meant.