I called him first thing the next morning, though. Somehow his weight and presence were palpable to me even all these miles away. I had what felt uncomfortably like a child’s simple need to check in with him, to see if I was doing okay far away from home all by myself. I disliked the feeling so much that I almost did not call, but then I thought, it’s not that I’m asking permission to be here. I already know he doesn’t want me to be here. It’s that I’m telling him where we are and when we’ll be home. Anyone has a right to know where his child is, even if he’s angry at the one who took her there. An adult would make this call.
So I did. I called the clinic. A voice I did not know said that Dr. Fowler was in a meeting across town and not expected back until late afternoon. No, he hadn’t said where. No, Miss Crittenden would not be in, either; she was taking a few days of her vacation time.
“I’m a temp,” she said cheerfully. “They called me in on short notice. I don’t know where Miss Crittenden went. Maybe one of the nurses knows; shall I ask?”
“No, if you’d just take a message for Dr. Fowler,” I said. “Tell him his wife called from Los Angeles and said that she and his daughter plan to come home tomorrow on the midday Delta flight. Please ask him to call me at this number around eight your time. We’ll be away after that.”
I gave her Stuart Feinstein’s number.
“Oh, yes, Mrs. Fowler,” burbled the temp. “I saw both your pictures on the doctor’s desk just a few minutes ago. So pretty, both of you. I’ll be sure to give him your message.”
“You don’t happen to know if Dr. Fowler’s mother is in the office, do you?” I said.
“His mother? No, I don’t believe so. I can find out for you, though—”
“Never mind,” I said. “You’d know if she was.”
After I hung up I dialed the house. Could it be possible that poor Amy Crittenden was baby-sitting Mommee for Pom? But no one answered, and presently I heard my own voice, the one Pom calls my playing-grownup voice, say, “You’ve reached the Fowler residence. We can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave a message we’ll return your call as soon as possible. If you’re trying to reach Dr. Fowler, call the clinic at 555-3004, or his answering service at 555-0006. Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it,” I muttered, faintly troubled. Could something really have happened to Mommee, some accident or illness? Guilt poked its head into my mind, and I booted it out. Pom was a doctor, after all. What better hands for her to be in if calamity had struck? I would only have called him anyway.
But the guilt skulked behind me as I went out into the living room, where laughter and the smell of coffee beckoned me. Glynn and Laura must have woken early, I thought, but looking at my watch I saw that instead I had slept late. It was nearly ten.
They were out on the balcony. Below them Sunset swam in a white-bronze haze, and the tall buildings of downtown were barely visible. The mountains behind us were totally invisible. You could feel the heat’s promise and taste the air already. It was dry, but as enervating to me as Atlanta’s thick summer humidity. I thought of clean, sharp sea air, of pines and Canadian cold fronts. Pom and Glynn and I had planned to take an August vacation at a cottage we sometimes rented on Penobscot Bay. I felt a sudden shiver of fierce longing for it.
Laura looked up when she heard me. If she had been crying the night before there was no evidence of it now. Her face was loose and lazy, softly beautiful as it had been when she was very young, all the hard dry lines gone, and her eyes seemed brimful of liquid light. She was licking jam off her fingers, her legs propped up on the iron railing. A grease-spotted white paper bag lay on the little wrought iron table beside her, and the buttery remains of croissants were scattered about. A carafe of coffee sat beside it, and pots of jams and jellies. A half-smoked cigarette lay in an ashtray on the arm of her chair. Across from her Glynn sat cross-legged on a rickety aluminum chaise, wolfing the last of a croissant. Both of them grinned up at me.
“Morning, Glory,” Laura said in a lazy, sated voice. “Hi, Mom,” Glynn said. There was a sort of stifled hilarity in her voice, as if I had caught them doing something forbidden. Then it spilled over into a giggle.
I smiled.
“You two look like the cats just finishing up the canary,” I said, and poked at the paper sack. “Are there any of those left? Don’t tell me you’ve scarfed them all up.”
“All gone,” Laura hummed, giggling, too. “Vanished down the gullets of three voracious Mason women. Or do I mean rapacious? I know I mean Mason-Fowler women…”
I looked more closely at her. She sounded almost like she had when she had come in tipsy, when she was at Georgia State. But I smelled nothing, and besides, I knew that if she had resumed drinking it would not be in the morning, and not around Glynn.
It dawned on me then, and I looked more closely at the cigarette. It was clumsy and homemade, not a commercial brand.
“You’re smoking pot,” I said in disbelief. “And Glynn, you are, too. Laura, what in the name of God has gotten into you? You know Glynn doesn’t smoke that stuff—”
“Neither do I, normally, but it’s the drug of choice for nausea, and boy was I nauseated this morning,” Laura said, stretching mightily.
“You should have heard her hurling,” Glynn said. “It was gross. I’m surprised it didn’t wake you. It did me.”
I gave her a later-for-you-young-lady look and said, “Why were you sick? Surely there’s something else that works as well as this. If you really are sick, you shouldn’t be smoking this stuff.”
“I get sick before I see myself on film,” she said. “I always have. It’s some kind of stage fright, I guess. And there’s nothing better than pot. Nothing has ever stopped the heaving but that. I’ve tried everything. I can’t barf in the middle of the screening tonight, obviously. Lighten up, Met. I don’t do it except then.”
“Well, Glynn doesn’t do it, period,” I said, furious at her. Things were going along so well among the three of us and now this. It was as if she simply could not go for long without provoking me back into the authoritarian role. She had always done it.
“I just had a couple of puffs, Mom,” Glynn said. “Just to see what it was like. It didn’t do anything for me except make me hungry. I ate three croissants and nearly a whole pot of jam.”
“Yeah, she really did,” Laura said. “You know, pot could be just the ticket for what ails her. You can bet it would fatten her up better than all those shrinks you’ve been carting her to. Cost a lot less, too.”
“Let’s get one thing straight, Laura,” I said tightly. “You will not give Glynn pot. You will not give her crack, or whatever it is that you all stick up your noses out here. You will not give her liquor. You will not do anything that will put her at risk in any way. I want her to get to know her aunt, and I want her to have a good time while we’re here, but I will not tolerate this kind of crap. Your lifestyle is your business only until you let it spill over onto her. Then it’s mine. I’ve got a good mind to take her home this afternoon. We can still get the four o’clock flight.”
“Mommm,” Glynn wailed. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t think. I didn’t even like it—”
“It’s a shame you have to punish her because you’re pissed at me,” Laura said, looking off into the smog. Then she ground out the cigarette. “But you’re ever the vigilant mother lioness, aren’t you, Met? I almost forgot you were for a while.”
I knew what she was trying to do, but it angered me anyway.
“I don’t have to be,” I said. “How I am out here is entirely up to you. It seems to me you’re the one who called the lioness out.”
She smiled. It was her old, sweet, open smile.
“You’re right. I did. And I’m sorry. I could have gone in the john and smoked this. It was inappropriate and I won’t do it again, I promise. I’m really uptight about this screening tonight, it means so damned much, but that’s no excuse. If you’ll stay, I’ll be so exemplary you won’t know me.”
“If you take me home for smoking pot Dad will never trust me again,” Glynn whispered, and I knew that she was right. Everything he thought about Laura, and about my hasty flight West and our staying over, would be vindicated. It never occurred to me not to tell him, and I knew that it would never occur to Glynn, either.
“I know I sound stuffy and old-fashioned, harping at you about pot,” I said, knowing that I did. “I hate always being the heavy. But you both know I can’t condone that.”
“We both do,” Laura said. “It won’t come up again.”
“Then let’s put it behind us,” I said. “What’s on for today?”
Glynn jumped up and hugged me, and said, “I’m going down to the strip and look for some tights and shoes to go with my silk tunic. Laura said they could be an early birthday present from her. I can’t go to a Hollywood screening in Doc Martens. You don’t have to worry, Mom; you can sit right here and see me the whole time. It’s just to those boutiques down there.”
I sighed and let her go. I was not going to be the crow in this flock of songbirds anymore.
“What about you? You want to shop, or prowl, or anything?” Laura said. She did not move from her chair. I did not think she wanted to go out, but I did not know what she did want.
“I think I’d just like a lazy morning,” she said. “Keep me company. I’ll make a fresh pot of coffee and some toast for you. At least there’s bread and jam left. We haven’t really talked since you got here.”
We drank the coffee and sat for a while in companionable silence. The slight, constant pain of missing Laura was stilled, and the solace of seeing my daughter behaving like an ordinary teenager, flitting off after clothes and bubbling with the excitement of a real Hollywood screening, was soporific. The pot incident shrank into the category of adolescent hijinks. On this sunny balcony not yet baking in the heat, the air of festivity and holiday was very strong, and the sense of sheer youngness, of the head-spinning innocence and camaraderie of college, was even stronger. How long since I had spent even a few days in the sole company of women with whom I shared deep bonds? Not, surely, since school and the days just after, when Crisscross and I spent long weekend days together, laughing, talking, being. Except for the scratchy prickle of Pom and the faraway, half-forgotten furor of home, lodged far back in my mind like a faint tickle in the throat, I was nearly perfectly steeped in well being.
“Tell me about this Caleb Pringle,” I dared say into the suspended sunny morning. I could not have said it before.
There was a silence, and then Laura sighed. It was a long sigh.
“He’s the director of The Right Time. He’s probably the hottest director in the industry right now. Everything he touches turns to money, which is all the studios understand, and most of it turns to awards. He’s really good, really creative in a strange, dark, almost delicate kind of way. There’s always a touch of decadence in his films, what he calls a sweet corruption, but there’s this surprising innocence to them, too, even the most violent. And some of them, like Burn, were really violent. He has a mind like I’ve never seen and a vision like I’ve never encountered and—”
“And you’re in love with him,” I said. I would have known from her tone even if Stuart Feinstein had not told me. I did not mean infatuation, either. I had seen Laura through several of those. This was different.
“Yes.” She swung her eyes from the undulating skyline and fixed them on me. Tears shimmered in them, but there was a strange, sweet smile on her face, one I did not associate with Laura. It was tender and it was somehow humble. For some reason that frightened me rather badly. I remembered Stuart’s words.
“So are congratulations in order?” I asked, trying to keep my tone warm yet casual.
“I…don’t know. Yes. I think so. Oh, Met, I do think so; we’ve been just so close, just so…awfully close.…We were together constantly during the shooting of Right Time, and just after, when we came back and he started editing. We laughed all the time, at everything. I know the sort of reputation he has, but he said things—we did things—you can’t do and say things like that unless you’re really in love with someone. You just can’t. I know. I’ve said and done practically everything there is to say and do to a man, and had them said and done to me, and this wasn’t like that. There was nothing on earth held back between us. I can tell when I’m being fed a line. This wasn’t that. He was always talking about next year, or years from now, and he’d said he wanted me to come up to his place in the mountains. He doesn’t take anybody there; everybody knows that. Everybody knows about that place, and the way he goes off up there by himself. But he said he wanted me to see it—”
“Where in the mountains?” I asked. I did not care, but I wanted the happiness to stay in her voice and on her face for a little longer.
“Up in the Santa Cruz mountains below San Francisco. It was just the wreck of a big old hunting lodge when he bought it; but he’s completely done it over. It’s all national park land now, but you can have a place on it if it was there before the park was, and this was. Some very rich San Francisco guy built it in the early twenties. It’s really isolated, I hear, and very beautiful; that’s redwood country up there, and the land is so wild and rough that you can hardly walk it, much less get roads through it. There’s a little private road into his property, but except for that and an old fire tower where his hermit caretaker lives, there’s nothing else. He used to tell me about it, about how much he loved it, and how important it was to him, and what he did up there, and what we’d do.…I might almost have thought this was just, you know, a fling or something, until he asked me up there. But then I knew it was what I thought it was—”
“Why are you talking about it in the past tense, then?” I said gently.
“I wasn’t, really,” she said, and smiled again. This time it was a strained smile that did not reach her eyes, and I damned myself for speaking. But I wanted to know more about this man, about his capacity to hurt Laura. What I already knew did not endear him to me.
“You were. Look, Pie, if he really loves you and means all this, nobody in the world is going to be happier for you than me. But if there’s even the remotest chance that he could hurt you—”
“Pring would not hurt me,” she said. But she did not look at me.
“Then why hasn’t he called you? Why didn’t he let you know about the screening?”
“Oh, Met, he just gets so totally involved when he’s got a new movie in this stage, with everything up in the air and all the ends flying loose—it’s like he’s all swallowed up, hypnotized, or something. Stu said he was in the middle of courting this Margolies for money; you know, you heard what Corky said. Or he could be up at the mountain place. There’s not a phone up there except in the caretaker’s place.”
“A hermit with a phone?” I smiled, hoping to divert her. The anxiety in her voice was too painful to hear. I was very sorry I had brought up Caleb Pringle.
“Well, he’s not really a hermit. He’s a writer and I think he does something about earthquakes, too; he’s got all this equipment and stuff up there, Pring says. It’s just that he almost never goes down into any of the towns. But Pring has to have some way to tell him when he’s coming up and what he wants done, and all that. I don’t think he’d go up there and use the phone in the tower. He doesn’t much like this guy, or rather, he thinks he’s nuts, or something. Obsessed, he says. But he keeps him on because he does a pretty good job and he doesn’t pay him anything. Pring lets him live in the tower in exchange for keeping the place up. The guy has some money, I think.”
“Terrific. A rich hermit with a phone. Just who you want peeping in the windows in the middle of a mountain idyll.”
“He doesn’t come around the place. Pring says it’s like being alone in the middle of a primeval wilderness up there. Oh, Met, nothing ever sounded so wonderful to me as that—”
“Well, I hope you spend years and years up there, baby,” I said, reaching over and kissing the top of her head. The strange platinum hair, flying free today, felt like the pelt of an animal, glossy and strong and a little rough. She smelled, as she always did, of her signature Opium.
“You’ll love him when you meet him,” Laura said into my shoulder. “He should be at the screening. He always is. I’m so glad you and Glynn are coming.”
“Moral support?”
“No. More like prizes to show off. Let him see what an impeccable gene pool I come out of.”
“I’d rather think he was going to carry you off to the mountains than count your teeth and breed you,” I said, laughing.
She stiffened, then relaxed.
“Well, come to that, we would have absolutely gorgeous children, Met. Someday, I mean. Although I have to say my clock is definitely ticking.”
I pulled back and looked into her face.
“You’re not serious.”
“No. It was just a thought. He’s crazy about kids, though. And he’s wonderful with them. There’s this little kid in Right Time; you’ll see tonight. When we started shooting nobody would have given you any odds at all on getting a decent performance out of the little cretin. But after Pring got ahold of him he changed completely. It’s a remarkable performance. In front of Pring’s camera he’s just magic.”
“Well, I look forward to the little cretin and everything else,” I said. “Now. What shall I wear that won’t embarrass you out of your wits? Not, I suspect, the faithful pantsuit and the Hush Puppies?”
She rolled her eyes at me and got up, stretching.
“God forbid. Follow me. I know just the thing.”
Just before we left for the screening I called Pom again. I got answering machines both at home and the clinic. The morning’s worry crept back, stronger this time.
“For God’s sake, don’t spoil this night stewing about Pom and that old woman,” Laura said. “If there’d been anything wrong he’d have called you here. You gave him the number, didn’t you?”
I nodded. The phone had not rung all afternoon. I was particularly aware of that because every now and then Laura would look at it as if willing it to speak. Damn Caleb Pringle, I had thought. If he had any feeling for her at all he’d call her. Nowhere is that far away from a telephone.
“Pom’s punishing you, is what it is,” Laura said, tilting her head at the bedroom mirror. We were all three in Stuart’s bedroom, finishing dressing. Once again I thought of college: date nights, proms, fraternity parties. The strident, embattled seventies seemed to have skimmed LSU without leaving any stigmata at all.
“Pom doesn’t punish people,” I said. “He wouldn’t even think to do it.”
“How do you know? Have you ever run away from home before?”
There was a combative note in her voice, and I did not answer her. I knew that she was nervous about the evening; more than nervous. The shimmer that always hung about her when she was keyed up was nearly visible, and she had been pacing and smoking all afternoon. Not, I was grateful to see, the homemade marijuana cigarettes, but far too many unfiltered, stubby ones. They smelled powerfully, and when I asked her what they were she said, “Players. I know. They’re awful for you. Pring got me started on them. I really don’t smoke much, but I’m giving myself permission today.”
I studied her in the mirror, smiling a little because she simply looked so wonderful. She had brushed the platinum hair straight back and plaited it so that a fat, glossy braid hung down her brown back, and she wore the short black minidress she had worn the day before. It bared her arms and back and much of her breasts, and the only other adornment besides her golden skin was the very high-heeled black sandals. She wore no stockings and, I could see through the fabric of the dress, no bra. She wore no lipstick, either, but had made her tawny eyes up heavily. A faint scattering of the family freckles showed on her scrubbed cheekbones. She looked so much like the young Brigitte Bardot, all sensuality and insouciant innocence, that I could not help staring. I never tired of looking at her, this beautiful chameleon who was my sister. She could be, literally, whoever she chose at any given moment. I wondered if very beautiful people ever simply got tired of the beauty, ever found it a barrier between them and life. I had heard actresses and models bemoan their beauty as burdensome on assorted talk shows, but I had always put that down to cloyingly false modesty. You had to wonder, though. When you looked like Laura, did people expect far more of you or far less? I thought it was a question I might ask her soon.
“Well,” she said, turning to inspect Glynn and me. “The Mason women can hold their heads high tonight. Lord, but we’re something, aren’t we?”
Abruptly, my introspection fled before a gust of the giddy laughter that had bubbled in my chest for the two days I had been in California. She was right. We really were something. I had sleeked my hair back and gelled it the way I had done the night of Pom’s party, and she had found a huge, tawny artificial tiger lily in a drawer, and stuck that over one of my ears.
“Don’t even ask where he got it,” she said.
She had done my makeup: bronze cheek blusher, matte gold eyeshadow, thick strokes of inky liquid eyeliner and mascara, some sort of pink-gold powder on my cheekbones, only a hint of coppery gloss on my mouth. The effect was startling, bold and rakish. Only my own freckles, unmasked by foundation, softened the theatricality. I never would have allowed it to be done to me at home, but I was far from home in more than miles this night. I wore the faded jeans, the boots, and the jacket to a tuxedo she found in the back of Stuart’s closet.
“What under it?” I said, when she hauled it out.
“Nothing,” she said matter-of-factly, and in the end that was what I wore. The jacket was a single button shawl collar, and fit tightly enough so that it did not gap open. But you could see my freckled chest all the way down to my diaphragm.
“I can’t wear it like this,” I gasped, looking into Stuart’s mirror. “I’m all knobs and bones and freckles. What boobs I have have vanished like the morning dew.”
“If you had any you couldn’t wear it, but it looks wonderful, very chic and go-to-hell. Come on, Met. I dare you. What do you care? You don’t know anybody who’ll be there tonight.”
“I know my daughter, who in one moment is going to groan, ‘Motherrrrr,’” I said, looking at Glynn. She was grinning in pure delight.
“No, I’m not,” she said. “You look great. Totally cool.”
“Oh, well, then of course I’ll wear it,” I said. “That’s the ultimate accolade. Not at all what somebody’s middle-aged wife and mother has come to expect.”
I spoke lightly, but I was absurdly pleased.
“You can be those and other things too,” Laura said. “Out here, you’re the other things. It’s about time.”
Flying on the crest of the laughter, I did not stop to examine that. I looked at Glynn and said, “Speaking of other things, who is this waif? Kate Moss?”
“Better than that,” Laura said, studying Glynn fondly. “Way, way better than that.”
Glynn wore the silky tunic that had escaped the fire simply because she had been wearing it. She wore it over tight leggings the color of burlap, and on her narrow feet were soft suede ankle boots in a slightly darker shade. She had folded the tops over to make a wide cuff, and Laura had brought out a wide, aged brown leather belt from Stuart’s closet and looped it loosely around her waist, so that it just rode the top of her hipbones, and bloused the tunic over it. Glynn’s hair fell straight to her shoulders from a central part, like a pour of molten vermeil, and she wore no makeup at all except a faint stroke of the coppery blush, to further hollow her cheekbones. She looked younger by far than her sixteen years, and more than ever, to me, like a creature of centuries-old alabaster and dim golden light from high, arched stone windows. It was such an otherworldly effect that for a heartbeat it gave me a small, terrifying frisson, as if I had looked upon my daughter in her coffin. But at the same time she seemed literally to burn with life. I shook my head and the image faded.
“I feel like I’m Cinderella, going to the ball with two total strangers that I’m supposed to know,” I said. “Come on and let’s get out in the air and light, otherwise we’re all three just going to vanish into thin air.”
“Beam us up, Scotty,” Glynn laughed, and we went out into the twilight that was spilling down the canyons onto Sunset Boulevard.
We were late to the screening, because the traffic on Santa Monica and La Cienega was at a virtual standstill.
“It doesn’t matter; nobody gets to these things on time,” Laura said. For the moment, it was pleasant simply to sit in the stopped Mustang, the top down, the late sun gleaming off the red lacquer, and see, from behind our dark glasses, eyes in all the other cars turn to us. Again I felt the simple urge to preen and flirt and toss my hair that I had felt in those long-ago college convertibles, streaking toward the sea. I knew I would not feel this way again; it would not be possible back in Atlanta, no matter what open-top car I sat in. Atlanta knew me for what I really was. This feeling was born of strangeness, mine and my context, or lack of it. I did not care. This moment was sweet.
By the time we had parked the car in a labyrinthine underground parking lot and made our way up in an elevator to a middle floor in a white building identical to the ones in the cluster around it, it was nearing six-thirty.
“It’s all offices,” Glynn had said in disappointment. “It looks just like downtown Atlanta. I can’t imagine Rocky MacPherson in a place like this. Do you suppose we passed his car?”
“No, I imagine Rocky came in a limo if he came at all,” Laura said. “He alternates between those and his Harley. If he’s to be believed, the last time he rode in a car he was coming home from his christening. They look like offices because they are; the money stuff gets done here. The glamour stuff is done either on location or at a studio. This is a movie theater owned by a chain that does sound mixing; production companies rent it or one like it when they need to screen something. There’ll be music and dialogue, but it’ll still be considered a rough cut. Never mind, everybody who is anybody connected with this movie will be here. This is the first time anybody’s seen this version but Pring.”
We got off the elevator and were in a vast, low-lit lobby furnished in large steel and tweed pieces, with a few towering plants and a terrazo floor and a wall of windows curtained now against the fierce glare from the west. The lobby was empty except for a catering crew setting up a bar against one wall. A ticket booth held a young woman reading a magazine. From behind double swinging doors came a blat of sound that became music.
“Shit, we’re late,” Laura said, taking our tickets from the bored young woman, she took a deep, shuddering breath and we went inside, and stood for a moment, blinking in the darkness. The movie had not started, but there was sound coming from speakers on the walls, a hard-driving, atonal rock beat, and blank white film flashed by. There seemed to be no seats at all left.
“I see two down front,” Laura whispered. “You and Glynn go on down and take them. There’s a row here in back empty. I’ll meet you in the lobby when it’s over.”
“No, you sit with Glynn and tell her what’s what,” I said. “I won’t know anything about anything. I’ll see you after.”
They went down the aisle. Heads turned to follow them. I saw Laura nod and smile at people she knew, and watched my daughter glide behind her with the airborne gait she used when she was acutely self-conscious and trying to hide it. Pride rose in my throat, bringing with it a slight prickle of tears. My daughter and my sister. My beautiful girls. They were the focus of every eye in the theater. I heard a slight buzz of conversation follow them, saw them slip into two seats down front, and found my way to a back row where no one else sat. Sliding into the low, cushioned seat I let my breath out gratefully, and realized how nervous I had been about seeing my sister’s performance in her presence. This was much better. In this anonymous darkness I could suspend my knowing of her, give myself totally to the movie and the woman she would become.
Looking back, I can remember scarcely any of The Right Time. It was as Laura had said, dark both in content and technique. While I was watching it I was mesmerized; I could tell that the acting was excellent, and the cinematography and lighting and sets were arresting. The sly aura of corruption was overpowering, yet affecting. I had the odd sense that it was every contemporary film I had seen, and yet was none of them; Stuart Feinstein had said Caleb Pringle’s trademark was the derivative made new by art, and I recognized both the derivativeness and the art. I knew from the outset that it would win awards, and there was certainly enough sex and violence, both beautiful, to assure its box office appeal, but later I could not have described it to anyone. Partly, I suppose, it was because I was so focused on waiting for Laura to appear that I missed much of the film’s context. Partly, but not all. Somehow The Right Time did not speak to me.
About fifteen minutes into the film a small group of men slipped into the seats next to mine. I nodded and they did, too, and we all fastened our attention on the screen. I did not notice them particularly, except to note almost subliminally that the man next to me wore a dark suit and a tie and had tiny, pointed highly polished shoes on small feet that almost dangled above the floor and that he smelled powerfully of something I could have sworn was Old Spice. Every boy in my high school class had worn it for dates and proms. But that could hardly be true out here, in this time, and so I tuned out the scent and lost myself in the images on the screen. Surely, any moment now, Laura would appear.…
Twenty minutes into the film I saw Laura walk up the aisle past me and out the doors. Light from the lobby flared and then faded. I turned around and looked after her; was she ill again? Had the morning’s nausea overtaken her? She had not looked ill; had seemed, in my brief glimpse of her, simply Laura, in her black and her expanse of bare tanned skin, vivid and arresting. She did not look at me or anyone else. I did not want to get up and rush after her and saw that Glynn still sat in her down-front seat, eyes glued to the screen. If anything had been wrong, surely Glynn would have known. There was a slight murmuring, like a wind in trees, in the theater, but it did not seem to have anything to do with Laura’s leaving. No heads turned when she passed. I settled down again to watch.
The man on the end of the row made a short, low sound when Laura passed us, and in a few moments he too got up and went out. I sat for a few minutes more, increasingly restless, and then the little man beside me left too. He did not speak to the two other men who had come in with him, only nodded, unsmiling, to me and went up the aisle in the spraddling waddle of a penguin. The two remaining men looked at each other, but said nothing.
It was only then that it occurred to me that Laura was not in this movie.
Shock and a swift, punishing grief kept me in my seat for a moment, motionless, and then anger jerked me out of it. This was why Caleb Pringle had not called her, then. He knew her part had been cut, of course he did; he would have to have known. It was he who directed the new version. He knew, and he did not tell her. Instead he let her see for herself, in a theater surrounded by everyone who had worked on the film, who knew what her part had been and what she and Caleb Pringle had been to each other. He knew and let her talk about both the part and the relationship to that poisonous little slug, Billy Poythress. Or, if he had not known precisely that, he should have anticipated such interviews. It was, after all, Caleb Pringle who had told her that her part was, to quote Laura, “best-supporting” stuff. I was so angry that I shook all over, so angry that my knees trembled on my way up the theater aisle.
I looked around for her, blinking against the pitiless fluorescence, but the lobby was empty except for a white-coated waiter leaning against the wall behind the buffet table, smoking a cigarette. Even the young woman in the ticket booth was gone. When I approached the waiter he stubbed out his cigarette and stood at attention.
“I’m afraid the bar isn’t open yet,” he said, showing his perfect white teeth in an opossumlike smile. Everybody in Los Angeles, I thought irrationally, had perfect white teeth. Maybe the Chamber of Commerce passed bleaching kits out to newcomers, or the Welcome Wagon.
“I don’t want a drink,” I said. “I’m looking for a young woman in a black dress, with blond hair in a braid. She came out a few minutes ago.”
“Yeah,” he said, rolling his eyes in appreciation. “She sure did. Went into the ladies’ room so fast I thought she was sick or something. Then some guy went in there, right after her. Some real squealing been going on ever since. Nothing to me; I don’t care. You see everything out here. But if that’s where you’re headed you might want to knock first.”
I glared at him and went swiftly toward the room marked “Ladies,” but paused at the door. I could hear the sounds of sobbing clearly, Laura’s sobbing, and a man’s voice speaking lowly, urgently, as if soothing her. It must have been the man in the seat down the row from me; obviously a friend from the production then, someone who would know what the amputation of her part would mean to her. I went back into the lobby and sank down on a steel and chrome bench. Her friend was probably in better position than I to comfort her, but I could not make myself go back into the theater. I had never heard Laura cry that I had not moved to comfort her. To sit still and know that this time I could not was agony.
I was still sitting there, wondering what on earth I could say to her, what she would do now, when Glynn came into the lobby, like me, blinking in the light.
“Where’s Aunt Laura?” she said. “She left and didn’t come back; did you see her go by? Mom, I don’t think she’s in the movie. I think something happened to her part—”
“I think so, too,” I said. “It’s awful. It’s monstrous. Somebody should have told her. She’s in the rest room now, crying her eyes out, but there’s a man in there with her, comforting her. He was sitting in my row, so he’s got to be a friend. I think he’s the best one to be with her right now. We’ll stick around till she comes out and then we’ll take her home. She’s not going to want to go on to any cast party.”
I thought then of Glynn’s whole-souled anticipation of this evening, of going to a famous restaurant with movie stars, of meeting this Rocky MacPherson who loomed so large in her small pantheon of heroes.
“I’m so sorry, Tink,” I said. “I know how you were looking forward to tonight. But you can see that something like Spago would just kill her—”
“I know,” Glynn said. “No sweat. I heard somebody say Rocky’s not here, anyway. Poor Aunt’ Aura. This is not a good place, is it? Hollywood?”
“No,” I said, getting up and giving her shoulders a hug. Their sharpness, beneath the silky flow of her tunic, jolted me anew. I had almost forgotten the anorexia.
“Thanks for understanding,” I said. “You’re a neat kid. As if I didn’t know that.”
We went back to the bench and she sat for a moment, worrying her fingernail with her teeth. Then she said, “He should have told her. How can she be in love with somebody who could let this happen to her? If she was that close to him, why couldn’t she see what a jerk he is?”
“The old saw about love being blind is true, I guess,” I said. “Most people will bend over backward not to see the bad in somebody they love.”
“Then how on earth do they keep from being hurt all the time,” she said, pain sharp in her voice.
“They don’t. People do get hurt, most by the people they love. Otherwise they wouldn’t care. It’s a price you pay for the love. Most of us think it’s worth it. Most of us don’t get hurt this bad either; people who really love you just don’t sell you out.”
“But you can’t really know—”
“No. You can’t really know.”
“So. Love means hurting. Or it could. Wow. What a wonderful thing love must be,” Glynn said, anger and misery in her scornful voice. I did not answer her. How could you explain it to someone who had not yet known it? But Glynn loved; she loved me; I knew that she did. She loved Pom.
And she had felt the pain of that love. I knew that she had not yet drawn the parallel, perhaps would not. You start young to bury that knowledge deep. The hurt in my heart for my sister spread out to encompass my daughter. Damn you, too, Pom, I thought. She’s too young to equate love with rejection and punishment. You should not have yelled at her; you should not have punished her. Not when none of it was her fault. You truly should not have done that. You’re going to have to make that up to her. I can’t let that go.
The young man behind the bar came over to us carrying glasses.
“The bar just opened,” he said. “You two look like you could use a little something. It’s just white wine,” he added, taking in Glynn’s youth. “Or I could bring some Perrier or something.”
“No, wine’s fine,” I said. “Thank you. This is nice of you.”
“My pleasure,” he said, smiling at Glynn. She kept her head down and did not smile, but she sipped at her wine.
“Thank you,” she mumbled. My good girl.
We had almost finished our drinks, sitting in silence, when the door to the ladies’ room opened and Laura came out. I leaped up and ran forward. A tall man in blue jeans and a tweed sports coat over a T-shirt walked beside her, arm around her. His head was bent to hers. His hair was dark and curled over his ears, and his face was snub-nosed and freckled and attractive in a boyish, unfinished sort of way. He seemed very young. He looked up at me and I saw that he had hazel eyes with laugh lines fanning out from them, and a network of tiny, dry creases about his mouth and on his forehead. Not so young, then, just seeming that way…
I knew instantly that this was Caleb Pringle. I could feel my teeth clench. My eyes moved, almost reluctantly, to Laura’s face, and I realized that I had been avoiding looking at her. Her face was red and swollen, and still damp from tears and undoubtedly a scrubbing with paper towels, but she was smiling, a misty, full smile. Her head nestled into the hollow where his neck met his shoulder.
“Oh, poor Met,” she said tremulously. “Waiting to pick up the pieces. Oh, I’m so sorry you had to be here for this. It’s all right, Met, I promise it is. I understand now. It was Margolies who made Pring cut the part; he cut two others, too. He wanted the emphasis to be all on Lorna’s part. She’s his new patootie. I should have known that. Pring couldn’t argue with him on the cuts, not and save the picture. Not and get Margolies’s backing for the new one. Margolies made it clear that if he didn’t like Right Time he wasn’t going to put any money into Arc, and oh, Met, Pring’s got to make Arc. It’s going to be by far the best thing he’s done, and there’s already a script, and several parts cast, and Pring will lose the actors if he has to go back to the drawing board on money, and there’s this absolutely wonderful part in it for me, better than Right Time, better than anything I’ve ever done, the lead, really…”
She stopped for lack of breath, and laughed. It was a carol, a lark’s song. I smiled, in spite of myself.
“This is Caleb Pringle,” she said. “I forgot you didn’t know him.”
Caleb Pringle smiled. The pleasant, ordinary face bloomed into something extraordinary.
“This is my big sister, Merritt Fowler, Pring,” Laura said. “Of whom you’ve heard more than you probably ever wanted to know. To whom I owe everything. Be nice to her. I think she’s probably mad at you.”
“As well she should be,” Caleb Pringle said. His voice was wonderful, deep and smooth as dark honey. “I could kick myself for not making sure she got my message about the part. I called from Margolies’s place several times but by that time he was so paranoid about the way Right Time was going that I think he was bugging my phone calls. I couldn’t get Laura, so I called Stuart and told him to tell her, but apparently he forgot. I should have made sure—I know HIV gets to the brain eventually—but I didn’t. And believe me, I am terribly sorry, both for Laura and this big sister I have, indeed, heard so much about. I apologize to you both. I feel like a worm about Right Time, but it’s over and I can’t do anything about it, and Arc is going to be a very important picture for a lot of us. I hope…I think…it’s going to mean a lot more to Laura than Right Time ever could have.”
He stopped and looked at me, still smiling. I did not know how to respond. I was not ready to let go of my anger over Laura’s humiliation tonight; I did not want it tossed aside lightly. But I wanted to be happy for her if indeed this new opportunity meant so much more, and I realized that I knew less than nothing about her world and Caleb Pringle’s. It felt important to me to be fair. If he really had tried to get a message to her.
I saw Stuart Feinstein’s wrecked face and heard his voice: “I called in a lot of chips for her on this one.” And “There’s nothing more I can do for her but hold her hand and pray.”
Not the words of a man who would forget a phone message of such import. Not a man to let a cherished friend be ambushed by pain.
But I knew that HIV did indeed, in many cases, affect memory and reasoning. I did not know what to say. And then I looked at Laura’s radiant, ravaged face, and did know.
“As long as you take care of my little sister you don’t owe me any apologies at all,” I said.
“I’m certainly going to try,” Caleb Pringle said. He leaned over and kissed Laura on the top of her head.
“Laura told me everything about you except what a stunning woman you are,” Caleb said. “If there are any more of you at home I could cast a whole movie around the Mason women.”
I smiled politely, not wanting to be complimented just now. It would be very easy for my tremulous liking for this man to slump back into anger.
“There are, and here she comes,” Laura said, just as Glynn got up from the bench and walked toward us.
“This is my niece, Glynn Fowler,” Laura said. “Isn’t she something? Look at that face; wouldn’t a camera love those bones, though?”
Caleb Pringle didn’t speak, only looked at Glynn. He stood very still, and his face did not change expression. He did not move. He did not speak. Then he said, “I imagine it would, yes. Hello, Glynn. I’m Caleb Pringle, the director of this debacle, and I want to assure you, as I have your mother, that I meant no harm to your Aunt Laura, and that I have found a way, I think, to make it up to her. I hope that you will forgive me. I’d like very much to be in your good graces.”
Glynn did not blush or drop her eyes or stammer. She looked at Caleb Pringle for a long moment, an adult’s whole, measuring look, and then said, “I love Aunt Laura very much. I hope you will be good to her.”
She said it in a soft, grave little voice, a near whisper, and he smiled. It was a smile of quick, pure delight. It had been an extraordinary thing for a very young girl to say, and I was flooded with pride in her.
“I’ll try not to disappoint you,” he said. “And for a start, will you three be my guests at dinner tonight? It’s at Spago, and the food is really very good. I expect you’ve heard of it. I want Laura to show the flag, and I’d love to show you two off. Most leading ladies’ relatives are fat and wear aqua polyester pantsuits.”
Glynn giggled, a soft little snort.
“Mom has one of those,” she said, grinning. “She almost wore it tonight.”
“I do not, and I did not,” I said.
“Well, she would have lifted the taboo on aqua polyester pantsuits forever, but I like her just like she is,” Caleb said. “You, too. You look just like a new young star on her way to Spago. The paparazzi will fall all over you. Will you come?”
Glynn looked at me, her face luminous with hope, and I looked at Laura.
Okay? I asked with my eyes.
Oh, yes, hers said.
“We accept with pleasure,” I said, and he nodded and said, “I’ll have my car brought around. We can pick up yours later. I’ll tell you a little about the movie on the way over. Oh, by the way, weren’t you sitting down the row from us, Merritt? Next to Margolies?”
“That was Margolies?”
“Aka the penguin. They tried to get him for Batman. How did he seem to be liking the movie?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He left before I did, just after you.”
He was silent a long moment. Then he said, casually, “Was he smiling, do you know?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t believe he was.”
“Shit,” Caleb Pringle said softly, almost savagely. And then, “Well, he will. Come along. Your carriage awaits without.”
The carriage was a stretch limo of such length and dazzling, sepulchral whiteness that I was embarrassed to get into it. Laura, however, slipped in without even looking at it, and I heard Glynn give a little gasp of joy. This would be incendiary stuff with her small crowd at home. The driver, a diminutive Hispanic in correct livery, nodded and bowed and smiled us into the car.
“Lord, but this is chopping tall cotton,” I said, looking around me at the limo’s interior. It had a bar and more electronic gadgetry, including a tiny television set, than I had ever seen, and there were fresh flowers in a bud vase. Peruvian lilies, I thought. Telephones sprouted all over.
Caleb Pringle laughed.
“The studio hired it,” he said, and pressed a button. The privacy shield rose noiselessly. “I’d much rather drive my old Woody, but Margolies is in love with these things. They must cost Vega as much as Ishtar did. I’ve always thought these things were like riding in a coffin on wheels. Jesus here, however, is a jewel. He thinks I’m working for Ryan O’Neill, who seems to be his idol. I think it’s because I once told him I was working for Orion, because now every time he drops me off he says, ‘Tell Orion O’Neill Jesus say ’allo.’ Oh, well. The first time I shot in Mexico, my Spanish was so bad I told everyone I was making a gorilla. I was a sensation there for a while.”
We burst into laughter and Caleb Pringle popped open a bottle of champagne that rested in a silver bucket and poured it, and passed it around. We all took a glass.
“To Arc,” he said. “Because this is where it starts.”
He raised his glass and looked at Laura, and she smiled dazzlingly and raised hers.
“To Arc,” she said. “And everything else.”
We drank. “Mmmm,” Glynn said, her nose buried in foam. “It’s like drinking perfume.”
“The old monk who invented it said it was like drinking stars,” Caleb said, smiling at her, and she said, “Oh, it is! That’s much better!”
He told us a little about Arc as we ghosted through the spangled night toward the restaurant. The people and cars on the street looked as unreal, as phantasmagorical, as images in a fever dream. The limo’s glass was tinted, but I thought that they would have seemed ephemeral, anyway. I had the notion that legions of Los Angeles’s homeless were watching our rococo progression and felt myself redden in the sheltering dimness, even as I knew it was an absurd thought. There were no homeless in Beverly Hills. At least, I did not think so.
Arc, Caleb said, would be a story about power and passion and innocence and the loss of it, and would proceed on the thesis that Saint Joan had not, after all, been burned at the stake in 1431, but had recanted and lived, and had a passionate affair with the French monarch who was supposed to have abandoned her to her fate, and had, as he said, “changed history another way entirely. I’m not going to tell you just how, because that’s the kernel of the movie and Laura will tell you that I never talk about that, but it’s delicious just the same, and powerful. I want that delicate and battering sense of passion corrupted, of innocence transmuted into power of another sort, of obsession, of purity given over to the service of…the world, I guess you could say. Can’t you just imagine all that religious frenzy, that virginal rapture, put to the use of the body? It could blow a world apart. It will, in Arc. The focus will be on the mature Joan, the lover of the monarch; the young Joan will be only a prelude, for contrast. Joan the woman will carry the load. And what a woman: tormented, passionate, guilty, hungry, sated, rapturous, humble, exalted—it will be an unforgettable role.”
“Who will play the Dauphin?” I said. The concept made me recoil, but it undeniably had power as well as perversity. I could see why Laura was so enraptured by the prospect of playing the adult Joan. It would have everything for an actress.
“I don’t know. I haven’t cast that yet, either,” Caleb Pringle said. “And it won’t be the Dauphin. It’ll be the Dauphine.”
“Oh, my God,” breathed Laura into the silence. “Of course. How perfect. Saint Joan would never have been seduced by a man, but a woman? A woman with sleekness and subtlety and a great worldliness—”
“A woman like that would be a monster if she did that to a young saint,” I said.
“Ah, but Joan was not a saint,” Caleb Pringle said. “Not until after her death was she canonized, and of course in Arc she will not die, but you’re right. The Dauphine will be a monster. The exact opposite of what the French call a monstre sacre, a sacred monster. My Dauphine will be a profane monster. A profane, monstrous, enchanting ghoul, stronger than Medea or Lilith. All evil. Totally depraved. An eater of flesh. Irresistible. It will play wonderfully off all that vast, untouchable innocence.”
“It will be a masterpiece,” Laura said. Her voice was hushed.
“It sounds like the worst of Roman Polanski,” I said sourly. The whole Arc thing made me unreasonably angry and disgusted. Just like, I told myself, somebody’s relative in an aqua polyester pantsuit.
“Well, I’ve heard that before,” he said mildly. “Glynn? What do you think?”
“I think,” Glynn said, “that I see what you mean. All that…untouchedness…spoiled with hands. Like snow when feet have trampled it. It’s still snow, only is it, really?”
He clapped his hands lightly.
“Exactly. Exactly. Innocence corrupted is still innocence, only soiled. Or is it? The conundrum at the heart of the matter. Are you sure you don’t write screenplays on the side?”
She laughed, embarrassed, and dropped her eyes. I stared from one of them to the other. Where had she gotten that? What could there possibly have been in her short experience to enable her to grasp it?
Then she said, “Will Rocky, you know, MacPherson? Will he be at the restaurant, do you know?” and she sounded so much like the teenager I knew that I smiled in the dark in sheer relief.
“I believe Rocky is in the slammer in Carmel as we speak,” Caleb said. “He seems to have taken a dislike to his room at the Pebble Beach Lodge and trashed it. This time I’m not going to bail him. Let him sit there and miss the screening and all the petting and the ink. I’ll send somebody down there to get him out tomorrow. Maybe. Or maybe I won’t. He’s been told what would happen if he did it again.”
“Oh, nuts,” Glynn said, and then buried her face in her hands.
“Don’t be upset,” Caleb said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll get him out in the morning if it will please you.”
“I’m not upset,” she said from between her fingers. “I’m embarrassed. Nobody says nuts, absolutely nobody.”
He laughed for a long time, a young, free sound, and she laughed too, behind her long fingers; her old, froggy belly laugh. Then we had some more champagne, and Laura fixed her makeup, and Caleb thumbed the dial and soft rock poured into the car, and we were there.
At first glance Spago looks like a diner made of double-wide trailers set side by side. At second glance it doesn’t matter what it looks like. One glance at the army of shoving, shouting, sweating photographers mobbing the entrance and you know you are in one of those rare places on the earth where powerful forces converge.
“Who are they waiting for?” Glynn whispered in awe.
“Anybody famous who happens to come in,” Caleb said. “And anyone who looks like they ought to be famous. You. Your mother. Your Aunt Laura.”
“Yeah, right,” Glynn said, but when Jesus helped us from the car the paparazzi did indeed rush at us, frantically, shooting rapidly into our faces, mine and Glynn’s as well as Laura’s and Caleb’s. The little Hispanic darted at them making fierce shooing sounds, and they parted just enough for us to run into the restaurant.
“Wow,” Glynn said, lifting a luminous face to mine. “Did you see that, Mom? Did you?”
“I did,” I said. “Ridiculous. Don’t let it go to your head. You’re flown enough with yourself tonight.”
“No! I want to be more flown! I want to be flown all the way to the moon!” she caroled, and did a little pirouette in the restaurant’s foyer. Her hair fanned out in a surge of silk, and her eyes closed in rapture. Caleb stood and watched her, unsmiling once more.
“Glynn,” I said warningly. Enough was enough.
Caleb Pringle scanned the crowd inside. I looked, too. It seemed to me that every beautiful woman in Los Angeles was in Spago tonight, and every older man, and all of them were rich. Everyone could have been Someone, but I could not tell who all those someones were.
“Are all these women in movies?” I whispered to Laura. “If so, who are they? I never saw so many beautiful women and so many gorgeous clothes, but I don’t know who anybody is. Am I supposed to?”
Caleb overheard me and laughed.
“No, you’re not, mostly. Who they are is women who go to Spago.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, that’s what they do. They get invited to Spago and then they spend the rest of the week, day and night, getting ready to go. And after they’ve gone they kick back and wait until they’re invited again, and the whole thing starts over.”
I looked at him in disbelief.
“You’re kidding.”
“Only a little. Look, there’s somebody I want you to meet. Let’s go over, and then we’ll find the rest of the gang. I think they put us in a private room.”
We followed him through the thronged room, and again, as I had in the movie theater, I felt rather than saw eyes follow us, heard a small, windlike sigh ruffle the surface of the room. Ahead of me Laura pulled her shoulders back and tucked her buttocks in and fell into her prowl. My own shoulders went back and my spine straightened automatically. Next to Laura, Glynn was floating again.
Laura stopped suddenly. She looked up at Caleb.
“That’s Margolies over there,” she said, and her voice was low and angry. “That’s who you want us to meet, isn’t it? No way, Pring, absolutely no way in hell am I going to go over there and make nice on the bastard who cut me out of that movie. No way. Nada. What are you trying to do to me?”
“I’m trying to save you a little face, my beautiful ass. That’s what I’m trying to do,” Caleb Pringle said lazily, but there was something urgent in his voice. “Listen, Margolies doesn’t have any idea who you are; the cut wasn’t personal. It was for his Jacuzzi-brained honey, I told you that. He wouldn’t recognize your face if it got up off the cutting room floor and bit him. As far as he knows, you’re somebody he’s meeting for the first time, somebody he knows I want for Arc. He’ll be charming and polite and think you’re entirely as fetching as you are, and how smart I am to put you in the picture, and that’ll be that. And nobody else in here knows you’ve been cut from Margolies’s new picture, because nobody at all does, but they soon will. And what will they remember? They’ll remember that you sat at Margolies’s table the night of the screening and he slobbered over you and everybody smiled and giggled and yukked, and you were with me, and I’m doing another hot picture with Margolies, and they’ll go around telling the whole industry that they were here the night he hired you for Arc. The fact that you weren’t in Right Time after all will be forgotten because Arc is going to be newer and ten times hotter than that. Capice?”
“I do. Yes,” Laura said. “Thank you, Pring. I shouldn’t have doubted you.”
“No, you shouldn’t,” he said, and tugged her braid, and we moved toward the corner booth where the little man who had sat beside me at the screening shoveled in pasta, head down over his plate. He was, oddly, alone. I would have thought studio heads traveled with retinues.
He looked up when we stopped beside him and smiled. It reminded me of the smile on the face of Bruce, the mechanical shark they used in Jaws. The eyes above the smile were chips of basalt, old and cold and long dead. I thought that I had far rather meet Bruce in the water than this man.
“Caleb,” he said, and his voice was smooth and thick, a flowery oil. “Dear boy. We meet again. Yes. Sit down and introduce me to these pretty things with you. Yes.”
Caleb handed us into the empty seats in the booth, putting Laura across from Margolies so, I thought, he could better look at her. He motioned me in beside her. He put Glynn next to the little man, and nodded to a waiter, who produced a chair as swiftly as if he had woven it out of air and set it at the end of the booth. Caleb Pringle draped his long frame over it.
“Leonard, this is Laura Mason, about whom I have told you an enormous amount,” he said. “I want her very badly for Arc, and I know that after you have looked at her for a few minutes you are going to let me have her with abiding joy. And this is her beautiful big sister, Merritt Fowler, from Atlanta, and the stunning child beside you is her daughter and Laura’s niece, Glynn Fowler. Maybe we should put them all in Arc. What do you think?”
Leonard Margolies nodded sleepily at us, and the shark’s smile widened. “Yes. Lovely, both of them. Yes, we should probably do that, my boy. If indeed there is going, as you seem to think, to be an Arc. Yes.”
I wondered if the repeated “Yes” meant anything, or was just a habit peculiar to Leonard Margolies. It was disconcerting, like hearing a toad hiss. Or a penguin. Or, of course, a shark.
“Oh, there must be an Arc, Leonard. It will be the jewel in your crown, as it were,” said Caleb evenly. “Especially with Laura here on board. I take it from your comment, or lack of same, that you think Right Time might use a little touching up.”
“Well, my boy, yes. A tad of cosmetic dentistry, shall we say. Yes. We will, of course, discuss that in the morning. I’m staying in town just to talk to you about it. See what I do for you? Come to my office about seven. We’ll order in.”
Caleb laughed. I did not think there was much humor in it.
“It will be,” he said, grinning around the table at us all, “in the nature of the condemned man’s last meal. Never mind. Let’s order something wonderful to eat and drink, and be very merry, for tomorrow, et cetera.”
Leonard Margolies raised a limp white hand and two waiters collided with each other trying to reach him first.
“Bring us something bubbly and so expensive for these pretties here,” he said. “Yes. Lots of it. We’ll order for them after we’ve toasted them; I want to think about what they should eat. Yes. I assume,” he said, looking at Laura and me and then at Glynn, “that you belles drink something besides bourbon and branch water.”
We smiled and nodded and he said, “Good. Good,” and looked at Glynn again.
In the low light of the restaurant she had the afternoon’s unearthly shine back, the shine that made me think of alabaster and medieval effigies. Excitement flamed along her cheekbones, but shyness paled the rest of her face to pearl-white. Her eyelashes lay along her cheeks, and I knew that she was struggling with shyness, struggling not to seem what she was: a sixteen-year-old sitting beside one of the world’s legendary restaurants. My heart squeezed in empathy. If I was tongue-tied here, how much worse for her. Too much; we had heaped too much on her tonight.
Abruptly Margolies leaned over and whispered into her ear, and she started and turned to look at him, the satiny hair swinging out, and then she began to laugh. It was the belly laugh. Margolies smiled conspiratorially at her, his eyes alive now, and heads turned toward us, and faces smiled. I had seen the effect of Glynn’s infectious croak before.
“What on earth did you say to her, Leonard?” Caleb grinned.
“That will be our secret, won’t it…is it Glynn? Yes. Glynn. We shall never tell, shall we?”
“Never,” Glynn said. The shyness was gone. She looked at him as one might a favored uncle. Forever after, she never told me what he said.
Margolies studied her openly, turning his head this way and that, smiling a faint smile. It was a gentler smile, but I thought the shark ghosted just below the surface. I was suddenly glad we would be going home the next day.
“Tell me, Glynn, do you want to be an actress like your pretty aunt?” Margolies said. It was more than a casual question; he sounded genuinely interested. I thought that this sudden, real charm was not the least of his power.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so. I don’t think I have, you know, the looks and everything for it. I think I might like to write or paint, though. Or maybe do something with music.”
“Ah, then, the creative urge is there,” he said.
“As well as a rather startling perception,” Caleb Pringle said. “She caught the absolute essence of Arc before I’d even worked it out for myself.”
Margolies looked at her some more.
“You like Arc, my little Glynn? Yes?”
“I don’t think anyone is going to like Arc, exactly,” she said shyly. “But I think everybody is going to be, you know, different after they see it.”
He did not reply, but nodded several times.
We sat quietly for a bit, a silence that puzzled me but did not seem strained. Into it, Caleb Pringle said presently, “Well, if she doesn’t want to be in the movies like her aunt she could always save France.”
Leonard Margolies looked at him and then at Glynn again. The smile deepened.
“She could indeed,” he said. “Yes. She could indeed do that.”
Glynn looked puzzled and started to say something, but Laura made a small motion toward her and smiled, and she fell silent. There was a kind of suppressed glee in Laura’s face that I could not read, and a sleepy sort of triumph in Caleb Pringle’s. But no one said anything else.
The champagne came and was uncorked, and Leonard Margolies tasted it and said, “Yes,” and the waiter poured it all around. Margolies lifted his glass.
“To Miss Laura Mason and her pretty sister and niece. To a wonderful visit with us. May the magic of Hollywood never fade.”
We drank.
“Now. What can I do to make your trip memorable?” Leonard Margolies said, putting his glass down. “What have you seen? What would you like to see? Have you seen a real studio, had a Hollywood tour? I like to think Vega is one of the great ones. I would be most happy to show you around it. Yes.”
“I can’t think of anything any more special, than to see Vega in the presence of the man who built it,” Laura said. Her cheeks were flaming, and her eyes glittered. She had drunk her champagne rather faster than I liked to see. Laura never could hold her liquor.
“Oh,” Glynn cried in delight. “Could we? Mom? Could we do that? Oh, Jess and Marcia would just die!”
“Glynn, you know we’re going home at noon tomorrow—”
“But if we went early? Maybe we could do it real early?” her voice broke in something near despair.
“Mr. Margolies has an early breakfast meeting. You heard him. No, darling, he’s been kind enough to us as it is.”
“Wouldn’t it be fun if we gave her a test?” Caleb said, as if I had not spoken. “It only takes a few minutes. Glynn, would you like to have a real screen test? We could send you home with a tape of it, so you could make sure Marcia and Jess die. Leonard, we could do that, couldn’t we? We can meet afterward—”
“We could do that, yes. The meeting can wait,” Leonard Margolies said. He sat back, hands together like a Buddha, smiling. Shark, penguin, and toad had fled, leaving an indulgent uncle.
“Mom—”
“Why not, Merritt?” Caleb said. “We could have you on the plane in plenty of time. I’ll send Jesus with the car for you and he can wait, and take you to the airport afterward. Send you both off like royalty. It would be something to tell the gang, wouldn’t it?”
He was looking at Glynn.
“Oh, really, Caleb, I don’t think—” I began.
“It would give me great pleasure,” Leonard Margolies said. “Yes.”
“Oh, come on, Met. There’s no earthly reason not to do it,” Laura said. “How many young girls in the world will ever be able to say that Leonard Margolies personally gave them a screen test? Let her have something wonderful of her very own.”
And of course, there was no reason not to do it. It seemed to disaccommodate no one, and we would make our plane home with time to spare. And Laura was right; after that, there was not apt to be anything special for Glynn for a long time. Why not let her have this luminous moment without spoiling it? I did not know where my reluctance was coming from.
“Well…all right. It sounds like fun and we both appreciate it very much,” I said. “I can’t imagine why you’re being so nice to a couple of visiting Georgia relatives, but we accept with great pleasure.”
Glynn’s face abruptly went stark white and she closed her eyes.
“Thank you, Mom,” she said, in such a breathless small voice that we all looked at her. She looked as if she was about to faint.
I had seen the look before; it meant Glynn was stressed to the very limits of her being, every circuit overloaded. This was simply one liter too much joy in her cup. The next step would be nausea and vomiting, perhaps unstoppable tears. The embarrassment that followed these scenes was killing for her. She had not had one in a very long time; her world until this trip had been orderly in the extreme. I knew that she could not eat her dinner now, not in this place, not with these people. I put my hand on hers and said, “I think Glynn and I will skip dinner, after all, and go back to the apartment. We’ve both had too long a day, and she has an early morning call tomorrow—isn’t that how you say it? I’ll just ask the waiter to call us a cab; you all go on with your dinner, please.”
Glynn did not protest. She looked at me gratefully. No one else protested, either; her white face was eloquent.
“You do that, my nice, pretty girl,” Margolies said as fondly as if to a favorite niece. “Get your beauty sleep and be fresh for your big scene. Caleb, the car, I think.”
“Of course. I’ll send you both home in the limo and it can come back for Laura and me,” he said. “I’ll drop her at her car when we’ve finished dinner. I should have paced this better. Of course she’s worn out.”
When we got up to leave, Leonard Margolies kissed both our hands. Holding Glynn’s, he said, “You mustn’t take all this frou frou too seriously, my dear. It’s very good make-believe, but that’s just what it is. Make-believe.”
Thank you for that, I said silently.
“I won’t,” Glynn said. “Thank you, Mr. Margolies. I’m looking forward to tomorrow.”
He smiled.
“No more than I,” he said. “Yes.”
Caleb waited with us in the foyer until Jesus arrived with the limo, and then hurried us down the steps, his long body blocking Glynn from the milling paparazzi and the exploding flashbulbs. He handed us into the car and said, “Until tomorrow, then. You made a big hit with a very tough customer tonight, both of you. Rest on your laurels. Jesus will pick you up at six, if that’s okay, and we’ll shoot at eight. Jesus, take care of these ladies. They’re very good friends of Orion O’Neill.”
We rode home in the tomblike quiet of the ridiculous limo in silence, simply too full of the last seventy-two hours to speak. When we reached Stuart Feinstein’s aerie above Sunset Boulevard, Jesus handed us as tenderly out of the limo as if we had been Fabergé eggs.
He started to drive away, and then put his head out the window and chirped, “You tell Orion O’Neill Jesus say’allo!”