Laura met me at the Los Angeles airport at two o’clock that afternoon. Glynn was not with her. Our meeting felt strange and disconnected from reality, like something you would see in a film. I knew that I was tired from the long trip and the near sleepless night before; in Atlanta it would be late afternoon now. And I had not managed to eat much of my plastic-encased airline lunch. But it was more than that; more, even, than the simple incredibility of what I had just done. It was Laura. She was the Laura I had always known, and yet she was not.
It had been six years since I had seen her, though we had talked a few times on the phone before this morning, and I wrote once in a while and received a scribbled reply now and then. It stood to reason that she would have changed. She had been through three hectic marriages and three hard-fought divorces, and I knew her career was not flourishing. If she had been a real success in films we would have known. I did not hear much about the plays she was in, and the TV commercials that were the bones of her income were apparently local and regional ones. And the stylist’s job, and the jewelry and poetry and talk of becoming an agent all spoke eloquently, though not of success. Of course she would not be the Laura who had breezed through Atlanta those six years past, on her way to the Caribbean to do a film starring Mel Gibson. “Susan Sarandon gets him, but I get the best sex scenes.” She was thirty-two then, at the very apogee of her looks and talent, fully bloomed and ripe, seeming to shine. She was still happily married to her third husband, whose carrier had not yet vanished up his nose, and her own career seemed poised at last to careen skyward.
She was thirty-eight now. The Mel Gibson movie had not, after all, gotten off the ground, and the marriage had crashed into it. I don’t know what I was expecting.
She was leaning against a pillar just beyond the arrival area, wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt and cowboy boots. For a moment I was not sure it was her, though the posture and the tilt of the head were all Laura. She was deeply tanned, something I had never seen before, and her hair was a yellowish platinum, sleeked straight back behind her ears. Her teeth flashed white in her dark face when she smiled at me, and for a moment she was purely a creature of celluloid, none of my own and nothing to me. But then the sherry eyes crinkled, and she moved toward me with the old hip-shot Laura prowl, and I knew her once again.
We hugged, and she gave me a little sucking air kiss on either side of my face. She smelled of Opium, as she always did, and of something else; was it whiskey? Had she been drinking? Laura had never drunk much after her last disastrous foray into alcohol and pills, and that was years ago. I did not think she used anything now, despite Pom’s words about cocaine. But I did not know what the smell might be. Medicine of some sort, maybe. When I pulled back from her, still holding her hands, to look at her, I saw that her face was much thinner, and sharper of cheekbone and brow, and there were delicate taupe shadows under the extraordinary eyes. She wore no makeup that I could see, and her lips were slightly chafed. Around her eyes was a faint webbing of tiny white lines. And she was definitely thinner. I could see sharp ridges of hipbones through the tight, white-faded blue jeans, and even the bones in her hands were sharper, more fragile.
“Wow,” I said. “Look at you. You are a bona fide glamour puss.”
“God, Met, glamour puss? Who’s writing your material? It’s for a film I just finished; I’m letting it grow out now. Well. You look good yourself. Not at all like a middle-aged lady who just ran away from home.”
She used her old toddler’s nickname for me; she had not been able, at first, to manage Merritt.
“I didn’t run away, as you well know. Where’s Glynn? Is she okay?”
“Oh, yeah, she’s fine. Aghast at what she’s done and scared shitless that you’re going to snatch her home to Daddy and he’s going to kill her, but basically she’s fine. We thought it would be better if I came by myself, to sort of see how the ground lay. Neither of us wanted her to get spanked in the middle of LAX.”
“Nobody has ever spanked Glynn in her entire life,” I said. “Did she say we had?”
“No. Lighten up. She just acts like you do. Come on, I’m parked at the curb and they’re going to tow me for sure. You have luggage?”
“Just this,” I hefted my carry-on.
“Not planning to linger, are you?”
“No. This is not a social call. You know I just came to take her home. We’re not going to argue about that, Laura.”
She held up a propitiating hand, and walked ahead of me down the concourse toward the baggage claim. I followed her, the duffle slapping against my leg. Fatigue and strangeness hovered around me like a miasma. I felt as though I was walking and walking, and not getting anywhere. But presently we were through the thonged claim area and out into the strange bronze sunlight of early afternoon. We did not speak until then.
A red Mustang convertible, top down, was pulled up to the curb in the no parking zone, and an airport cop was just walking around behind it to get the tag number. It was an old model, but it gleamed as if it had just come, newly molten, from the factory.
“Oh, Lord,” Laura said huskily. The southern accent she had lost in high school drama class crept back. “I guess that’s nonnegotiable, huh?”
“Afraid so,” the cop said, staring at her. Even in the Los Angeles airport, where half the women who walked through were blond and wore the jeans-T-shirt uniform and were probably Somebody, Laura stood out. The indefinable, old electric charge smote the air around her. I saw the cop register the fact that here indeed was Somebody and hesitate very slightly. I knew then he was lost. Laura did, too.
“You see, officer, my big sister has come all the way from Atlanta to see me for the first time ever, and my radiator started acting funny in the desert, and I just got the car and I don’t know anything about it yet, and I wanted to surprise her, and I was running so late…” Laura let her voice trail off and crinkled her nose. She grinned, managing somehow to make the grin both repentant and imploring. He grinned, too, slightly.
“Well, seeing as how it’s your big sister—”
“That’s very decent of you,” Laura said, and made that sound as if it were an invitation into her bed.
I tossed my bag into the backseat and Laura climbed into the driver’s. As she started the ignition the cop appeared at her side.
“I wondered if you’d mind,” he said, handing her in a blank ticket pad. “I’ve got this kid—”
“Of course.”
Laura took the ticket pad and scribbled on it with his proffered ballpoint and handed it back with a flourish. He examined it, and broke into a broad grin.
“This’ll kill him,” he said. “Batman was his all-time favorite. Seen it four times.”
“Hope he likes it,” Laura said, and gunned the car, and we were out of the shade of the overhang, into the strange pewter air.
“You didn’t,” I said, laughing helplessly.
“Why not? He saved me a fine,” she said. “Some people do think we look alike.”
Not anymore, I thought, and felt a rush of sadness for her, and the old, fierce, protective love.
“You’ve got her beat a country mile,” I said, and she smiled, and it was the old, sweet, enchanting Laura smile, without salt or shadows in it.
“I’m glad you’re here, for whatever reason,” she said. “I was afraid you were going to be furious with me.”
“I should be, I guess. At you and Glynn. But right now I’m madder at Pom and maddest at Mommee, and neither one of them can help it, really.”
“He can’t help screaming at Glynn and grounding her for the rest of her life? And yelling at you? The old lady can’t help setting Glynn’s clothes on fire and then squalling for her sonnyboy?”
“She has Alzheimer’s, Laura. She doesn’t know what she’s doing most of the time. And he…well, command is sort of what he does. It’s what a doctor is all about; it’s got to be that way or he can’t function. Pom runs a charity clinic down in the projects. Can you imagine what that would be like if he couldn’t control it? Sometimes he forgets where he is; it’s hard to turn a lifetime of habit on and off. And he’s crazy about his mother, and this illness just devastates him. I think it frightens him, too. To get outside help, or put her in a home…that means that he can’t take care of her, that it can’t be fixed. He just can’t handle that yet.”
“Poor baby,” Laura said. I was too tired to keep the discussion going, and did not answer. She was silent for a while, too.
She wove the car in and out of the heavy traffic on what the signs said was the San Diego Freeway. It could have been any large artery in any commercial-industrial area of any large city in the world. The air was noxious, foul and tasting of metal and sulfur and asphalt and gasoline. It stung my nose and eyes and throat. I felt tears start, and a scum of stinging stickiness film my face and arms. The heat was monstrous. Every few minutes we would come to a halt in a frozen river of traffic and the air would eddy and sway, cobralike, above the glacier of cars, and horns would begin to shriek. Before we had gone five miles I surrendered.
“Could we put the top up?” I said. “Maybe you’re used to breathing this stuff, but it’s stripping my throat out.”
“Yeah, Atlanta has such pure air,” she grinned, and I smiled reluctantly, because Atlanta’s air is frequently just as awful a stew of assorted fumes and stinks, only with the addition of killer humidity.
She pressed a button and the top rose and glided silently into its groove. She raised the windows and turned on the air conditioner and the immediacy of the devouring air shrank back, leaving us sealed in a capsule of quiet and stale cool, rushing air. The Mustang’s windows were tinted gray-green and gave the landscape outside the sinister air of a futuristic movie set on some alien, metallic planet where a thin no-color ether took the place of air. The strangeness I had brought with me bloomed into fullness, and I gave myself up to it.
“Nothing feels real,” I said, lying my head back against the headrest.
“Nothing is,” she said. “That’s our secret. You’re going to do just fine out here.”
She pushed a tape into the deck and the pure, somehow lonely voices of the Fifth Dimension spun out into the car: “When the moon is in the seventh house/And Jupiter aligns with Mars/Then peace will guide the planets/and love will steer the stars./This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius…”
She turned her head to me and smiled.
“This was one of the first albums you ever bought me, remember? When you were in college and I was feeling kind of down? It’s always seemed the most comforting song to me; it promises so much…”
I remembered. She had played the record over and over, shut away in her room, until it had become inoperable, and I had had to buy her another.
“Do you need comforting, Pie?” I said, like her reverting to an old nickname.
“Who doesn’t? But no, not really. I just like the song, that’s all.”
Her tone said the discussion was over, and we fell silent once more. She turned onto the Santa Monica Freeway, and I watched as names I had heard all my life sailed by on off-ramp signs: Century City, Twentieth Century Fox Studios, La Brea, Venice. I acknowledged them in my mind, but felt no curiosity about them as I usually did such signs in other new places. Here in this hurtling gray-greenness, everything was strange and consequently nothing was.
She made another turn and said, “I think we’ll try the San Bernardino Freeway. It’s a little longer, but you’ll have a better shot at the mountains this way. Sometimes this stuff lifts outside L.A. proper.”
“What mountains? Will we pass the Hollywood sign?”
“No, that’s back there behind us, in the Hollywood Hills. I’ve seen it about twice. We’ll see the San Gabriels and later the San Bernardinos. I hope. Right near Palm Springs the mountains come right down to the road; they’re really something. It’s beautiful country. I hate it when I have to leave.”
I put my head back and closed my eyes. Pom’s face swam into the space behind them, furious and anguished. I felt a stab of pity and love, and then, once more, the cold, constricting anger that had set me on this journey. Only this morning, it was. It felt like days, weeks. Pom’s face faded. I must have slept.
When I opened my eyes again the seemingly endless string of flat, sun-blasted little towns and strip shopping centers had given way to long stretches of pastel desert broken by strange, spiny, sentinel cacti and scrubby copses of small, silvery gray, wind-ruffled trees. The metallic sky had turned deep blue, and to our left a tidal wave of sharp, deep-shadowed mountains rose. They were so clearly defined that I could see small folds and crevices, carved cliffs and rock faces, the lighter scars of tracks and roads. They were stained the colors of earth and air: rose, brick, taupe, dust-gray, slate, deepwater blue. Beautiful; they were as alien and beautiful to me as the face of the moon.
“Are those the San Gabriels?” I said. “Where are we?”
“No. The San Bernardinos. We’re just past Ontario, coming up on Redlands. Home before long,” said Laura. She stretched both arms straight out and rotated her head on her neck.
“I’ll bet you could use a drink and something to eat,” she said. “I left Glynn making miso soup. She only said yuck six times.”
“How can she be making miso soup? I don’t even know what it is, much less Glynn. You may be sorry.”
“Nah. It’ll be good for you and her, too. Full of vitamins,” Laura said. “Listen, Met, it may be none of my business, but she worries me. She’s a neat kid…Lord, what a beauty; I had no idea…but she’s not really a kid. She doesn’t giggle, she doesn’t squeal, she doesn’t preen and look at herself in mirrors, she doesn’t even have any hot rollers or makeup with her. What’s going on with her? What’s wrong at your house?”
“There’s nothing going on with her,” I said stiffly. “She’s never giggled and squealed and all that silly teenage stuff; I think we’re going to be spared that. She is a good kid; the best. She writes and paints, and she’s good at music and great at science, and her grades are tops, and she’s a terrific swimmer; she wins meets…and there’s nothing wrong at our house. Thank you for asking, though.”
“Don’t mention it,” she said dryly. “Nothing the matter, huh? That’s why she runs away from home and you come tearing out here right behind her? There damned well is something wrong, and if you don’t know it, she’s in even worse trouble than I think she is.”
“Look, it’s just this stuff with Mommee,” I snapped. “That’s going to be settled when we get home, believe me. It’s not easy to be sixteen in a house with an addled old lady—”
“It’s more than that,” Laura said. “No, I will not shut up, so spare me that familiar scowl. She may be your daughter, but she’s my niece, and she came to me for help. Have you looked at her lately, really? God, Met, she’s so serious, and pale, and so damned thin! And she seems apprehensive, even scared, all the time; she whispers like she’s listening for something. What does she do for fun, clean out her closets? Or no, I remember, there’s nothing now to clean out, is there? She told me about her new clothes. Christ. Why do you put up with that old harpy? No wonder Glynn ran away. I bet Pom’s sainted boys split long ago, didn’t they?”
“The boys are twenty-two and twenty-five,” I said. Anger thickened my voice. She had always known just which buttons to push. “Chip is working in New York for a brokerage house, and Jeff is in med school at Hopkins. They’re gone because it was time for them to go out into the world; nothing drove them away. Mommee wasn’t even with us when they left. She was with Pom’s brother and his wife then.”
“What did they do, leave her on a hospital doorstep and skip the country? So now you have her. And I mean you, because I bet Pom doesn’t spend more than five minutes a day with her. Brings old Mommee home and leaves you with the whole thing, you and Glynn.”
“It was my choice, Laura,” I said evenly, determined not to fall back into the old pattern of attack and defend, thrust and parry. I could not stop myself from adding, “Everybody can’t run away.”
My voice sounded smug even to me. But she only shrugged.
“Why not? Where is it written? So you’re going to cart my niece home tomorrow, huh?”
“That’s right.”
She gave me a long, oblique look from the sherry eyes.
“Let her stay,” she said. “Let me show her some of my world. I know a zillion people in the industry; we could see studios, and screenings, and go to lunch at famous places, and I could introduce her to some really famous people. It’s fantasy land, maybe, but it’s mine, and what kid wouldn’t love it? She might even turn into a real kid.”
“Even if I wanted to, Laura, I can’t,” I said. “Pom is really angry at both of us. He’ll get over it, but if I push him much right now he’s going to ground her for the rest of her life. I don’t want him to really punish her.”
“Bullshit,” Laura said. “It’s you he’ll punish. Listen, has she ever had a boyfriend? Has she gotten her period yet?”
“She’s a late bloomer. I was. Lots of her friends are.”
She was silent for a long while, and then she said, “Anorexia can kill you, Met.”
“Do you really think we haven’t been treating her…eating disorder?” I cried. “She’s been to doctors and in therapy since she was fourteen. It’s much better.”
“Couldn’t be much worse,” Laura said. “Why not try something different? Aunt Laura’s Sure Cure. I advise a long motor trip in sunny California, with the top down and good food and new clothes and exotic locations and glamorous people—”
“I can’t let her run all over California by herself, Laura. Be reasonable.” My heart was thumping with annoyance and something else I did not want to examine.
She was silent again, and then she said, “She’d be with me. What you mean is, you can’t let her run all over California with a crackhead actress. I haven’t done a line or had a drink in years, if you’re keeping score. Besides, you could come, too. See my world. I’d love that, Met. I’d love to show you what draws me, what makes me real. I’ve always wanted to; I’ve always thought that if you could just see it, you’d understand…you might see who your daughter is, too, or who she could be. You might even see what you are. You might like what you see.”
“Oh, Laura! I have family—”
“I thought we were family,” she said softly. She kept her eyes on the road and the mountains. They were darkening, casting long blue shadow fingers over the earth. Reaching for us in the red car.
She looked over at me then.
“Aren’t we three here just as much family as your four back there?” she said.
“Pie, please understand—”
“Oh, I do,” she said. She did not speak again.
I was silent, too.
We swept over a rise and down into the vast, mountain-ringed bowl of a valley. Its flat bottom was steeped in shadow like tea, but light still limned the peaks of the mountains, and the sky over them was going silvery. On our left and right stretched huge fields of what looked at first to be strange, stylized, prehistoric birds, all in frenetic motion. They ran in orderly rows that reached to the base of the mountains. I drew in my breath, and then saw that they were propellerlike wind-mills, all running in place before an unseen wind.
I exhaled in pure delight. Laura looked over at me and smiled.
“I know,” she said. “They never fail to knock me out, no matter how many times I pass them. They’re driven by convection, the hot air rising from the bottom of this valley where the mountains hold it in. It’s like someone has literally planted the wind.”
I smiled at the lovely little turn of phrase, forgetting completely that I was angry with her.
“What are they for? What do they do?”
“Power. They can light this desert up for a hundred miles. Back when the big quake up at Big Bear Lake took out all the power these guys went right on working.”
“Quake…Lord, that’s right,” I said, remembering the strange weather and the talk of storms and sinister atmospheric phenomena and the renegade climatologist on TV. “Y’all are supposed to have the big one any minute now. No way am I going to let Glynn stay out here with that hanging over you—”
“Jesus, Met, we have them all the time, little ones, and none of them ever turn into the really big one. Northridge was the Big One; everybody says so. We barely felt Big Bear, and it wasn’t far. If you’re thinking about that wacko scientist, you might remember how the New Madrid business turned out. You’re just reaching, now.”
And I took another deep breath and let it out, and was quiet, because that’s just what I was doing.
You can see Palm Springs a long way away. It is a great swathe of green, a dense emerald prayer rug, flung down in all the tawny, wild-animal colors of the desert. I found it hard, when it came into view, to look away. Palms, jacarandas, hibiscus, lantana, and a great many other exotic flora for which I had no name yet, formed bowers and islands in the almost continuous velvet carpet that, Laura said, was a network of golf courses without parallel in the United States. These were spotted with flashes of silver and blue: ponds, water holes, lakes, and the swimming pools of hundreds of hotels and villas, all catching the last of the sun. In the shadow of the mountains, and up in their steep foothills, lights were beginning to bloom. It looked like a Fabergé village or a particularly glittering Disney theme park.
“Where are the people?” I said. There seemed to be no cars moving on the arrow-straight toy roads that bisected the green.
“At cocktails. Or getting ready for cocktails. Or in some cases getting over the ones they had at lunch,” Laura said. “This is the hour of the dressing drink.”
“What do you do if you don’t drink?”
“Oh…eat. Make love. Garden, if you are so undistinguished as not to have a gardener. Bicycle or run; it’s too hot to do it any other time, except early morning. Ride the tram.”
She gestured ahead, and following her hand I made out a miniature railway snaking up a mountainside, with a tiny tram toiling slowly up it, toward the pink-gold light just receding from the peaks. I thought that what you saw from the top at this hour must be incredible.
“That looks like fun,” I said. “Have you ever been up to it?”
“Believe it or not, I haven’t. It’s sort of like New Yorkers and the Staten Island Ferry. But we could go tomorrow. Glynn wants to.”
“The plane I want leaves at noon,” I said. “I don’t think we could make it if we did the tram.”
“There’s another one at six.”
I did not answer her. The teasing, singsong note I remembered from her childhood was back in her voice. It made me want to shake her and hug her close at the same time. I did not need for Laura to revert to childhood; I had enough on my hands with one agitated child.
Laura swung off the freeway and onto a narrower road. It ran for a time through low, sculptured buildings where fairy lights bloomed on outdoor patios and cobbled streets twisted off into the blue shadows of other buildings. There were people here; strolling in and out of shops, sitting on terraces sipping drinks, jostling and crowding in the canyonlike streets. The buildings were adobe, I supposed, and bleached by the fading light; they reminded me more of Casablanca or Tangier than the American West. Then we were through the cluster and Laura nosed the car up an even narrower road that seemed to climb straight into the roots of the mountains.
Buildings here were low and many-leveled, climbing with the earth. Lights starred some of them. At the end of the road, where the mountains jutted straight up into a rock cliff, lay the carved white cluster of Merlin’s caves that I remembered from her photographs. They were beautiful, but seemed somehow inimical to life. Where would you put your garbage cans in this place? Where would you hang your wet bathing suits, air your rugs? Where would you park your car? When we swung around behind, I saw where: a long, low, white, stable-like building with twisted log supports housed a scattering of Mercedeses and Jaguars and BMWs. There were one or two more Mustang convertibles like Laura’s, gleaming in the dusk. Some of the spaces were empty, but Laura stopped and stared at one that was not. The dusty back end of what appeared to be a late seventies Pontiac protruded from it.
“Shit. Somebody’s company has got my space,” she said. “Everybody knows not to do that; now I’m going to have to call around and catch whoever it is, and they’re going to give me all that crap about not knowing their guests were parked there and…oh, it’s Stu! Oh, good! Or at least I hope it’s good. Damn him, he knows I’m going to have to park in the driveway now. It embarrasses him for people to see that wreck he drives—”
“Who is Stu? I’m surprised Glynn let him in. She knows better,” I said uneasily, thinking that I was not exactly thrilled to have Glynn left alone with one of Laura’s men friends. My mind swiftly built Stu from the air: lithe as a panther, snakehipped, ponytailed and earringed, teeth bleached the white of bones and flashing in a tanned face, jeans riding low, and shirt unbuttoned to show the gold chain nestled in the thatch of chest hair. The gold chain holding the key to Laura’s condo.
She caught my tone and laughed.
“Stu is my agent. Stuart Feinstein. He has a key. No, he’s not going to ravish Glynn. He’s far more likely to be feeding her something healthy and horrible and regaling her with lifestyles of the rich and famous. He’s a darling, an angel, my best friend; he’s never given up on me. And he’s HIV positive and I think he’s got active AIDS, though he won’t say so, and that’s breaking my heart. He seems awfully frail lately. I think I’m the only client he still does much for. He truly believes I’m an extraordinary actress, and that’s more than I can say for most people around here these days, including, sometimes, me.”
“AIDS—”
“She’s not going to catch it from him, Met. Not unless she’s sleeping with him, and I doubt that. He’s gay as a goose. You’re not going to catch it, either. Doesn’t Pom see HIV at that famous clinic?”
“Of course he does, all the time,” I snapped. I was not accustomed to having my sister treat me like a child.
“And I do, too. I volunteer at Jerusalem House back home; it’s this wonderful place where people with active AIDS go and live out whatever time they have left. Their families won’t have them. The volunteers are incredible; they do literally everything that needs doing. The residents are pretty great too, come to that.”
“Terrific,” she said, climbing out of the car and stretching. “What do you do there?”
“Well, I help out with public relations. In fact, I’m going to take that over full-time when we’ve got Mommee settled, I think. I’d love to put what I know to work for them.”
“PR. Whoopdedoo,” Laura said, and went into the gated back entrance of her condo without looking back. Picking up my tote I followed her. I felt like a Junior Leaguer discussing her provisional work. In fact, I had not wanted to join the League, and was pleased that Glynn did not, either. But still, that’s how Laura made me feel. I tried to run lightly and authoritatively up the little curved staircase, needing to regain my big-sisterhood again. Out here in this vast, glittering desert, without my familiar context, I had the uneasy feeling that I was not at all the woman who had boarded the Delta jet in Atlanta that afternoon. But if not her, then who?
She opened the door and vanished into it, and I stood for a moment simply breathing in the alien sounds and smells, and thinking what I would say to my daughter. Somehow, in all the long afternoon and evening, I had never sensed what would be right. I could not feel my way into the meeting ahead. But then, I had never had a daughter who had run two thousand miles away from home, either. I had no precedent for this.
“…and so I said, well, darling, somebody’s got to tell you, and I might as well be the one, because I really don’t give a happy rat’s ass, see, and the plain truth is, you look like a bratwurst in that dress.”
The voice was a tiny, breathy, beelike drone, and might have come from a petulant child, except that there was a sort of corrupted warmth in it that no child could possess. Over it I heard my daughter’s laugh. It was what I thought of as her real laugh, the one she used when she was flat-out tickled and delighted: a belly laugh, a charming, froggy croak.
The other voice laughed, too, and said, “Yes, well there are distinct advantages to dying. You don’t care what you say to who. I’ll bet nobody ever said anything even remotely like that to her in her life. And you know what? She went back and changed the dress.”
“Really? Was it better?” Glynn said.
“Oh, tons. This time she only looked like a meatloaf.”
I stood still, feeling as if I were eavesdropping on children at play.
“Are you really dying?” Glynn said.
“I really am. Not for a while yet, I don’t think, but yep, I’m definitely buying the farm,” the bee voice said.
“Is it awful?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s pretty awful indeed. And then sometimes it’s almost hypnotic, a nice, dreamy, underwater feeling. I kind of like those times.”
“Which do you feel most of the time?”
“You know, most of the time I really don’t think much about it,” he said. “HIV people learn to live right square in the moment. Like babies.”
He must have seen Laura then, because he cried, “Hello, dollbaby! Look what I found messing about in your miso. Can I keep her? She’s quite the prettiest thing I’ve seen until you walked in.”
“Stuart, you faithless hound,” Laura said, and there was the sound of her air kiss and an answering smack of lips on flesh. “This is my niece, Glynn. She’s running away from home.”
“Well, I know that,” he said. “In fact, I know just about everything there is to know about this dollbaby, including the fact that her mama is coming to get her and is in fact here, if that long, tall shadow I see on the floor there is to be believed.”
I felt myself flushing and walked into the kitchen.
A tiny man looked at me. He was damply pale and bald as an egg and looked very old. Then I saw that he was not old, but very ill. Illness seeped out of his pores and dragged at the flesh below his eyes so that the whites showed; illness had eaten away at the meat of him until only his bones were left, fragile and somehow very formal and lovely under the translucent, greenish skin. He had deep-shadowed dark eyes and the remnants of a dark beard, spotty and dry now. His smile was one of singular sweetness and mischief. I felt myself smiling back.
“The shadow says hello,” I said. I looked past him. Glynn, still flushed with laughter, stood stiffly against the refrigerator, backed up against it. Her eyes were wide and her silky hair, fresh-washed, hung in them. She wore her Guess jeans and one of her voluminous, knee-length sweatshirts and her Doc Martens. She should have looked ridiculous, but instead she looked beautiful, and so frightened and vulnerable that I felt tears well into my eyes. I loved her and was glad to see her and was even gladder that it had turned out to be as simple as that.
“Hi, baby,” I said, and she began to cry and ran across the floor and buried her head in my neck. The sweet-smelling top of it came up past my ears now. We had known early on that she would be tall.
Laura drew the little man out of the kitchen and I rocked Glynn gently while I held her, and then said, “Such a lot of tears for such a skinny kid. Don’t waste ’em on your ma; save them for when you need them. I’m not going to holler at you. Didn’t you know I wasn’t?”
“Is Daddy terribly mad at me?” she said, her voice muffled with tears and the cloth of my blazer.
“Terribly. But I imagine he’ll be over it by the time we get home. In fact, I’m sure of it. He’s even madder at me, if that’s any comfort. But what he really is, baby, is scared. He’s scared because his mother is sick and crazy and he can’t help her, and he’s scared because he yelled at his only daughter, whom he loves more than anything in the world, and she was so hurt she ran all the way across the country by herself, and he thinks maybe he can’t get her back, and he’s scared because I took off right behind her. Think about that: the three main women in his world and one is crazy and the other two are on the lam. How would you feel?”
I felt her laugh a little and thought that the tears were over. She raised her stained face to me.
“I feel like such a dork,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to hurt him or scare him, or you either. I just…it just seemed like after what he said nothing would ever be the same, and I didn’t think I could stand that. And it wasn’t fair, Mama, it wasn’t fair—”
“Oh, Glynnie,” I said, sighing at how far she had to go, and how little my words could help her. “Almost nothing is, really. There’s what people feel about each other and what they do to each other, but hardly any of it is a matter of fair. I want you to grow up expecting all sorts of wonderful things, but I mustn’t let you grow up expecting fair.”
“You think he’ll forgive me, then?”
“He already has. He got up this morning and went downstairs to make pancakes especially for you. He was taking them in to you when he found your note.”
“Oh, poor Daddy—” her eyes welled up again.
“Let’s not go too far with this,” I said. “Daddy acted like an ass and he knows he did. He needs you to forgive him as much as you need him to forgive you. He may not have gotten around to realizing it yet, but he will before you see him again. And I promise you, the Mommee stuff is going to stop.”
She sighed deeply. “Will you forgive me?”
She brushed the drifting, wheat-colored hair out of her mouth. Her blue eyes were still shuttered with the thick, gold-tipped lashes that were Laura’s lashes, too. She was not yet ready to look me full in the face.
“For what?” I said, brushing the hair back and looping it behind her ear.
“I must have scared you to death. You never would have taken off out here otherwise.”
“You did. You did indeed scare me to death, and I do indeed forgive you. Now wash your face and come on in the living room. I want to meet this strange man who had you yodeling like Mammy Yokum.”
“Mammy who?”
“Go on and wash. Scram,” I said. “We’ll talk some more about this after I’ve called Daddy and told him when our plane gets in.”
She hesitated for a moment.
“Mom…”
I knew she was truly over the spell of tears and nerves. “Mom” was back. “Mama” was for the bad times.
“Hmmmm?”
“Oh…nothing.”
She vanished into a door that I presumed led to a bathroom and I went into the living room to meet Stuart Feinstein.
He and Laura sat close together on a large, white sofa before a fireplace. A small fire of some strange, sweet-smelling wood snickered behind a beautiful, old, wrought-iron screen, and a bottle of white wine and four glasses stood on a coffee table of weathered gray wood. Besides a tall white lamp, large pillows, and a pair of black canvas butterfly chairs, the room was empty of furniture. Bookcases lined three walls but were bare, and whiter spaces on rough adobe walls spoke of paintings that had once hung there. One wall was uncurtained glass, and the view out over the night-blue bowl that held Palm Springs was breath-stopping. I could see why Laura had fought so hard to keep the condominium. It would be like living in the sky, like a god.
“Join us. We’re celebrating,” Laura said, and Stuart Feinstein waved his glass. It was nearly empty. Laura did not appear to be drinking.
“Celebrating what? Surely not a runaway teenager and a grim old bat of a mother in hot pursuit.”
“Well, of course, that. But there’s something else. I’ve just finished a movie—I promised Glynn not to tell you until we got here—and this angel of a man has gotten me an interview with the Hollywood Weekly. That may not mean anything to you, but it means shit-all in the industry. It might even mean I can kiss that goddamn concho jewelry good-bye.”
She reached over and hugged Stuart Feinstein hard and gave him a smack on the mouth, like a child. He hugged her back with one arm, the other hand balancing the sloshing wineglass.
“How about it, huh? Can the old man still deliver or what? Huh?” he crowed. Also like a child. In the light of the big, white lamp I could see that he was not only ill, but, as I had first thought, rather old, or at least far from young. They looked poignantly like two children, I thought suddenly, huddled together on the big, white sofa as if for comfort against the limitless night outside. The image brushed at my mind like a black bird.
“A movie! Oh, Pie, that’s really wonderful! Tell!”
I poured myself a glass of wine and sank cross-legged to the floor in front of the fire. A small sheepskin rug cushioned my bony buttocks against the quarry tile floor. A picture flashed through my mind that I had not seen there in many years: a dorm room at college, before I moved back home, crowded with Noxema-dotted girls in nightshirts, sitting on the floor and the beds, laughing and talking, talking, talking. Some of that same laughter bubbled somewhere in my chest. I felt, for just a wing-flutter of a moment, very young again.
“Well, it’s not the lead, but it’s a career maker,” Laura said. Her voice sang. “The movie is about this guy, he’s a real sonofabitch, coming up in the industry, from a gofer to a studio head, and about the people he does in on the way. Kind of like The Player, only darker, denser. It’s a real character piece; not so much action, but these intense, devouring relationships. Caleb Pringle did it. You know, Bad Blues and Burn? The character stuff is his signature…”
She stopped and looked at me, waiting for me to recognize Caleb Pringle and register my delight and wonderment. I did not have the foggiest notion who he was. I had never heard of Bad Blues and Burn.
“I’m sorry, Pie, I haven’t seen a movie since Mommee came. I’m hopelessly behind. Tell me about this Caleb Pringle. He sounds like he ought to be manufacturing cashmere sweaters in New Hampshire, or something. After you tell me about your part.”
“I play one of the women he seduces and leaves behind in the gutter, as it were. An older woman, an actress hoping to make a comeback, still very beautiful, but lost, fragile, doomed. He’s just starting out when he meets her, and she still has terrific connections, so he uses her for that and then dumps her. Remind you a little of Sunset Boulevard? Believe me, it’s better. I commit suicide, or my character does. Liquor and pills on the deck of his empty, locked beach house, only ambient sound and this strange, white sunlight. There’s this seagull who sits on the railing and stares at me while I’m dying—it sounds dumb, but it’s very powerful. Pring says it’s best-supporting stuff. He says nobody but I could have done it. This interview—God, Met, it’s going to help so much! The guy who’s doing it is a shit, but everybody reads him first, and I can handle him.”
“He’s latent,” Stuart said. “Makes him mean.”
“Oh, you’re telling! You said you’d wait,” wailed Glynn, coming into the room. She had brushed her hair back and tied it high, so that the bare symmetry of her facial bones showed, and her skin was flushed with scrubbing and excitement. We all smiled at her. It was impossible not to. Where did I get this lovely being? I thought. I thought I would kill the first thing that hurt her.
“You can tell her who plays the jerk,” Laura said.
Glynn turned to me, her face suffused with rapture.
“Rocky MacPherson,” she breathed, as if she were saying “‘Ave Maria.’”
“Rocky MacPherson? Isn’t he that kid who keeps busting up thousand-dollar hotel rooms? See, I do keep up.”
“He’s an incredible actor,” Glynn cried. “He’s all…all spirit; he just burns on film. Caleb Pringle uses him in almost all his movies.”
“He’s also about fourteen, isn’t he? It’s a real stretch from busting up the Biedermeyer to studio head. He must be good.”
“He is, as a matter of fact,” Laura said lazily. “Very focused and very sensuous. He’s almost stopped with the hotels. Pring has brought him a long way. And as for studio heads, I don’t know many over thirty anymore. I found our love scenes very…believable.”
“Oh, God!” Glynn cried, her eyes closed in ecstasy.
“Like to meet him?” Laura said casually.
“Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Don’t tease about something like that…” my rapt daughter whispered, and I looked at her in faint alarm. Was this the child who had said only last week that she planned to have her children by sperm bank because she couldn’t stand the thought of any of the stupid boys she knew touching her?
“I’m not teasing,” Laura said. “Stu says they’re screening The Right Time sometime this week. Rocky’s sure to be there. I can easily make a call or two and find out where and when. Pring was supposed to let me know, but Stu says he’s out of town courting some money guys for a new movie. The production office will still be open. They’ll give us some passes. That is, they would if your mother would let you stay for a few days.”
She dropped her eyes and fiddled with the silver bracelet that circled her thin wrist. I wanted, as I had wanted so many times in the past, to shake her until her perfect white teeth rattled.
“Mother…Mom…”
I took a deep breath. I was certainly not going to allow Pom to punish her for this flight. On the other hand, I could not let her be rewarded for it, either. Glynn was a responsible child, but I had a horror of her coming to think that running away was an answer. There had been too many flights, literal or figurative, in my life to allow her that notion. I knew the prices paid all around for them. But my heart hurt me, just the same. Damn Laura. Damn Pom. Damn Mommee.
“Not this time, Glynn,” I said firmly. “This isn’t a pleasure trip, remember? We’ve got to go home tomorrow. Your father is already fit to be tied, and there’s nobody with Mommee. Show him you can be grown up about things this time and I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t let you come back and visit Aunt Laura before school starts.”
“But Rocky MacPherson—”
“Rocky MacPherson is the very last reason on the face of this earth I would let you stay in California, Glynn. I don’t want to hear any more about him, or this. Aunt Laura spoke before she thought.”
I gave Laura a long, level stare and she gave me her three-cornered kitten’s smile in return. Stuart Feinstein studied the contents of his glass with interest.
“I think I’ll go to bed. I’m very tired. Excuse me, please,” Glynn said, her voice shaking, and walked with absurd and touching dignity out of the room. I heard her steps climbing stairs somewhere off to the right. All of a sudden I felt old, as old as Mommee, as old as the world. Old and dull and inflexible and…all right, mean. And tired within an inch of death.
“Good work, Laura,” I said.
“I didn’t mean any harm,” my sister said. “You ought to lighten up on her, Met. You could lose her if you keep treating her like a prisoner.”
“Do tell me where you acquired your child-rearing expertise,” I said, suddenly furious with her.
“Not, apparently, the same place you acquired yours.”
The old sullen petulance was in her voice.
“I managed to keep you fed and clothed and out of jail for a lot of years,” I said.
We stared at each other.
“It’s late. I’ve got to be getting back,” Stuart Feinstein said, rising painfully. He seemed for a moment to totter. Laura broke the stare and turned to him, putting her arms around him.
“No way am I letting you drive all the way back tonight,” she said. “Met and I will save our fight for tomorrow; it’s nothing new. It’s been going on for thirty-odd years now. We know the rules. You can have the couch. I’ll even give you the mink throw. I’ll make you cinnamon toast for breakfast and you can go back after that. Please, old Pooper. I just can’t worry about you passing out on the road tonight.”
“I’ll take you up on it, if you dollbabies will stop fighting,” he said, giving us the sweet smile. “You’re too precious and pretty to fight. Merritt, did anyone ever tell you you looked like Kay Kendall? She was an English actress, very classy. Used to be married to Rex Harrison. An offbeat beauty with such a nose, and a smile that could melt your fillings. You’ve got both of them. You’re far too pretty a dollbaby to fight with this bad child.”
“I’ll stop if she will,” I said, managing to smile at him. Even ravaged with illness, his charm was enormous. “I need to sleep more than I need to fight. Where am I sleeping, Laura? Not, I hope, in the room with Camille up there.”
“No. I’ll sleep on the other bed in her room. You take mine. It’s the first door at the top of the stairs. I need to get up early, anyway, and you need to sleep a little. If you’re set on the noon plane you can zonk in till about eight.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I guess I’d better call Pom and get it over with. I’m surprised he hasn’t called four hundred times by now. Is there a phone upstairs?”
“There is, but why don’t you wait until morning? It’s one A.M. in Atlanta now. And he may have called; I turned off the answering machine and the phone bell. Glynn was spooked bad enough as it was.”
“Oh, shit, Laura,” I said. “Now he’s going to think that we’ve all three run away or been ax murdered or something. But you’re right. I forgot the time difference. He’s got early pediatric clinic in the morning. He’ll be asleep by now. Wake me when you get up. I need to get that over with.”
“I will,” she said. “You go on up. I want to talk to Stu a little while longer.”
The last thing I heard as I climbed her deep-carpeted stairs into darkness was my sister’s melted-butter voice saying, “Now, tell me everything you know about Pring. Don’t leave anything out.”
I didn’t call Pom the next morning for the simple reason that Amy Crittenden called me first. Laura came and shook me awake at six A.M.
“Grendel’s Mother is on the telephone for you,” she said.
“Who?”
“The snottiest woman I ever heard in my life. She says she’s Pom’s secretary, but I doubt it. He’d have fired her years ago.”
“Oh, God. Amy,” I sighed, and reached for the phone on Laura’s bedside table.
“Hello, Amy,” I said as cheerfully as I could. “I’m sorry you had to call. I was going to call in a little while.”
“Well, I wish you had thought to do it last night, Merritt,” she said in her long-suffering tone. I wondered if Pom really heard her anymore. Laura was right; he’d have had to fire her.
“Sorry. It was so late there when we got in that I thought I’d let Pom sleep,” I said. “What’s up?”
“You could have called any time. Doctor hasn’t slept in twenty-four hours. Neither one of us has. His mother was terribly agitated, and your housekeeper declined to come in on her day off. Doctor was so distraught that he called me. I was glad to come, of course. He absolutely must have his sleep; we have pediatrics this morning, I expect you know. He asked me to call you and find out if everything is all right. You simply cannot imagine how worried he has been, what with his daughter running off like that, and then you, and his poor mother—”
“Yes, I’ll bet he was,” I said, idiot laughter tugging suddenly at my mouth.
“Well, Doctor has some messages for you,” she went on briskly, after waiting a space for the apology that did not come.
“I’ll bet he does. Shoot, Amy,” I said, gulping back the laughter.
“The first is that he has you and Glynn booked on Delta’s noon flight out of Los Angeles today. The tickets are waiting for you at the counter. The second is that you’re to come straight to the clinic on your way from the airport. We had to bring his mother with us this morning; he simply could not spare me another day, and of course it was out of the question that he stay home with her. She has been terribly disruptive; we have had to lock her in the children’s playroom, I’m afraid. Two of the nurses are with her, but she is upsetting the children no end, and of course we cannot spare the nurses indefinitely.”
“Where on earth is Ina?” I said, the picture of Mommee commandeering rocking horses and dolls from tearful toddlers threatening to undo me completely.
“I think Doctor had some words with her when she refused to come in,” Amy said repressively. “I believe he discharged her.”
“Shit! He can’t do that!” I shouted. “Sorry, Amy. It’s not your fault. But Ina is my right hand; I can’t manage that old…Mrs. Fowler without her. You tell Pom—”
“He is going to be tied up most of the day,” Amy said. I could have sworn there was satisfaction in her voice. “He is most adamant about your coming to pick Mrs. Fowler up, though. Oh, and one more thing—”
I drew a long breath.
“And that is?”
“He has made Glynn an appointment with a new therapist tomorrow at two P.M. Dr. Ferguson; we think very highly of him. He specializes in families. He will want to see you, too.”
I did not speak. A red mist of rage seemed to start on the horizon and roll toward me. I watched it with fascination.
“Are you still there, Merritt?” Amy said. “We must insist that you pick up Mrs. Fowler as soon as it is possible. She is utterly out of control. Yesterday she got away from me and got into the swimming pool and I had to go in after her clothed. My foundation garment was ruined.”
A great yelp of laughter escaped me. I simply could not help it. The red mist dissipated.
“You give Doctor a message for me, Amy,” I said, choking on laughter. “You tell Doctor that Mrs. Doctor and Daughter Doctor are not coming home on the noon plane today. It will be two or three days, at least. I will let him know when we decide. And we will not be here after an hour or so.”
“Where may I tell him you are going?” Amy said. She sounded as if she were trying to speak with her jaws wired shut.
“You may tell him,” I said, “that we are going to the movies.”