“I don’t know if you’d call me a good friend. I’m not sure if Kirk makes real close friends. He’s something of a loner. But, I guess I’m as close to him as anyone on the campus.”
She felt a cold uneasiness within. “I see he has a girlfriend,” Natalie murmured, nodding at the group of pictures. She was surprised at how directly she had posed the question. But she wouldn’t have any peace until she knew the facts about Kirk and this young woman.
Bill glanced at the pictures and his gaze became somber. “Oh, yes. That’s Jacqueline Davis. Hasn’t he told you about her?” And he immediately answered his own question. “No, I guess he wouldn’t. Jacqueline is a subject Kirk doesn’t talk about.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It was a tragedy in his life. Jacqueline was a young rock singer on her way to becoming famous. They were engaged to be married. She was killed in an accident.”
Suddenly Natalie remembered Kirk telling her about his motorcycle wreck. He had said a friend riding with him was killed, but he hadn’t mentioned name or sex. He had just said “a friend.” She recalled the glimpse of wrenching pain she had seen in his eyes, which he had quickly covered up. Now she understood a great deal more about Kirk Trammer, about the dark shadows in his eyes. Not only had he been through the hell of war, he had also suffered the tragic loss of a woman he loved. No wonder he had a maturity beyond other young men she met on the campus. She could better understand his driving obsession with film-making, too. Tragedy such as he had known could ignite deep, storm-driven flames that become a powerful motivating force. Along with grief, he might be living with the torture of guilt over the death of the girl.
Now she found herself with a whole new set of emotions, a strange mixture of compassion for Kirk, sadness for the beautiful girl. But this unexpected development did little to clarify her thoughts about her own relationship with Kirk. If anything, she was only more uncertain and disturbed.
The crowd began thinning. By eleven o’clock, the last couple left. She was alone in the house with Kirk. He had collapsed on a lumpy old couch in the room that had the projection equipment. He was puffing on a cigarette, watching the smoke curl toward the ceiling.
She sat beside him, gazing at his rumpled hair, the dark circles under his red-rimmed eyes, the lines of fatigue etching his features. An unexpected wave of caring engulfed her. “You look tired, Kirk. You need to get some rest.”
A corner of his mouth smiled. He blew a smoke ring, watched it circle above him and dissipate. “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep for a week. What did you think of the film, Natalie?”
“Why are you asking me? You ought to know by the reaction of all your friends. Everybody said it’s breathtaking.”
There was something boyish about his grin. “I want to hear you say it.”
“All right. I’m certainly not a critic. I’m not as hep about this film-making business as your friends in the cinema department. I’m an actress. But I thought it was absolutely superb. I don’t know when I’ve been so moved.”
Despite his state of near-exhaustion, for the present moment the haunting shadows were gone from his eyes. In their place was an expression of burning triumph. “The color balance is still off in places, but the lab can fix that. Otherwise...yeah, I guess it isn’t too bad.”
Natalie couldn’t control her hands. She had to touch him. Her fingers reached out, gently traced the lines of his face, trailing down from his temple to the stubble of beard on his jaw. They moved to the moist corner of his lips. A shiver coursed through her.
He crushed his cigarette in a tray beside the couch; then he captured her hand, pressed it against his cheek. His eyes held hers captive for a long moment as he slowly moved her hand to his lips. One by one he kissed her fingers. He turned her hand over. She felt the tickle of the tip of his tongue. Her breath caught in her throat with a stifled gasp. Her heart had begun a steady, pounding tempo, sending waves of warm blood through her body, making her flesh tingle.
She became acutely aware of how close she was to him. Sitting beside him, her hip pressed against his side. It was a burning contact.
He released her fingers. His hand dropped to her knee. Her eyes widened. She saw a questioning look in his gaze; she couldn’t answer it. Her eyes closed. She sucked in her breath through parted lips as his touch strayed from her knee to her inner thigh. Sensations cascaded through her. Pulsating waves of heat began within the recesses of her being and spread through her.
His other arm went around her and gently drew her into his embrace. For a long moment, their eyes were inches apart. She felt his breath on her lips. She was breathing hard, her heart pounding. She had never felt this way with a man before. The nightmare of childhood had haunted her all these years, locking passion behind closed doors of her psyche. She had thought she would never become a whole woman and had accepted her fate, to play out love scenes on a stage that she would never feel in real life.
Even now there was a war being waged within her. Desire was so new to her it was frightening. A dam was threatening to break inside, drowning her in emotions and sensations that she had never before known.
Ever so slowly, he drew her closer and closer. After what seemed an eternity, his lips just barely met hers, a feather touch. Again and again they touched that way, light as a moonbeam, gently making contact until her own mounting desire demanded more and her mouth locked hungrily with his.
His arms became steel bands around her. She welcomed the pressure. Her breasts were mashed against his muscular chest. He had pulled her all the way down until now she could feel the entire length of his body beneath her. The quivering flesh of her thighs felt the warmth of his burning through their clothing. She knew the intimate contact of her stomach, soft against the muscular ridges of his abdomen.
His caress moved down the small of her back, exploring the curves of her hips, testing the yield of soft flesh under mashing fingers. She felt herself growing faint with longing.
From her lips, his kisses traced a fiery trail along the soft curve of her cheek to the hollow of her throat. He gently nuzzled the curves of her bosom. Her breasts suddenly throbbed with an aching fullness. She found his caress unbearably sweet, bringing tears to her eyes. Churning emotions gripped her heart.
With a slow, gentle sweetness that annihilated her muffled objections, he opened her blouse. His searching fingers found their way under her bra, cupping the delicate, pale curves he found there.
“Natalie...,” he whispered in a voice thick with desire.
He had awakened desire that now raged through her in a molten flood. Never...never had she dreamed in her wildest fantasies that she could experience such wanton hunger. Her flesh yearned for his flesh. Her breasts ached to rest naked against his strong, broad chest. Her thighs quivered to feel themselves pressed against his. She groaned with the hunger he had aroused.
Natalie wrenched her mouth from his, panting. She was on the brink of something so vast and overwhelming that she was terrified, and began shivering uncontrollably.
His hands moved up, cupped her face. He gave her a long, serious look, then gently pushed her head against his shoulder, stroking her hair and cuddling her until the shivering subsided.
“I’m—I’m not very good at this,” she apologized. “I’ve never been with a man before.”
There was a surprised silence. She was aware of his questioning gaze and buried her flushed face against his shoulder. Her voice was muffled. “Don’t ask me to explain. It has to do with something that happened to me as a child. I freeze up around men. It’s different with you. I hadn’t expected anything like this to happen. I wasn’t prepared for it.”
He slowly sat up, his face serious. “Neither was I, to be frank. I guess first impressions aren’t very valid. When I first met you I saw a cool, poised, golden-haired beauty whose diction was right out of the finest East Coast finishing school, clothes from Saks Fifth Avenue, name in the social register...yacht races, limousines...tr
ips to Europe. What does this type want with a guy like me? Slumming perhaps?”
“You snob!” she chided gently.
“Maybe.” He grinned wryly. “But it’s a valid question. Why me?”
“I don’t know. Why me? You’re a fascinating, sexy man. You could have your pick of co-eds on the campus.”
He shrugged. “I don’t have time for that kind of stuff.”
I’m glad to hear that, she thought.
There was a moment of silence. “Cigarette?” he offered.
“Thanks. I don’t smoke.”
He picked up a crumpled pack from the floor beside the couch, but put it back down without taking a cigarette. “Maybe,” he said, “it’s the insanity of the evening. We’re all a little high over seeing the finished job on the film.”
“Yes, maybe.” His words made her feel letdown.
He gazed at her intently. “Well, Natalie Brooks, we are facing a decision. Are we going to see each other some more?”
“I—I guess that’s up to you.”
“Is it?”
She avoided his eyes, her cheeks warm, unable to deal with the question.
“Well,” he said slowly, taking her hand, “if it’s up to me, I say, yes, I want to see you some more. But you’d better not rush into this without thinking it over. You’re not the type to become involved in a casual affair. Do you really want to get your life all tangled up with a guy like me? What would your family and your friends in the social register say?”
Natalie raised her eyes. Face flushed, she said softly, “It’s my life. It’s not my family’s decision.”
From that moment on, it was like hooking a ride on a fast express. At times she wondered if she had ever truly been alive before she met Kirk. He lived his life as if it were scenes from a movie script. When working on a movie, he could shoot scenes all day and stay up editing all night until he finally collapsed and slept around the clock. He played as hard as he worked. They dashed around the country to student film festivals where Kirk’s movies won award after award. He took her with him to a hot-air balloon meet which he was hired to film as a documentary. Somehow he got the use of one of the balloons and took Natalie on her first balloon ride. They drank champagne and kissed in the basket, high above the patchwork of fields. They went on wild dune buggy rides across the desert, stopped in the wilderness to have a picnic and make love in the shade of a Joshua tree.
Somewhere in the whirlwind of events, they got married. As Kirk warned, Natalie’s family and friends on the East Coast were dismayed. Who was Kirk Trammer? Natalie was too much in love to be concerned.
But sometimes she asked herself the same question. Who, really, was Kirk Trammer? She was constantly finding out new things about him. She hadn’t known he was an accomplished amateur magician until he pulled some of his sleight of hand prestidigitations on her without warning. It was just one of those things he’d dabbled in since a kid, he’d explained with a shrug. When working on a movie idea, he would spend hours at the piano, playing furiously, getting a feeling for mood from his music. There were times he would lapse into a brooding silence, withdrawn from her and the world. Those times she felt shut out from his life. The longer she was with him, the more she wondered if she would ever really know Kirk. He was a complex individual, tormented by drives and creative impulses that baffled her. With all her polish and finishing school sophistication, Natalie was by contrast a simple, direct girl.
After graduation, Kirk got his first break with a major studio. Impressed by his student films and documentaries, the studio agreed to finance a low-budget motion picture he would produce and direct. It was a simple story about a young soldier coming home from Viet Nam, trying to find his way back into the small-town life he had left. He shot the film on location with an unknown cast in less than four weeks. The motion picture was titled The Home Front. To everyone’s surprise, most of all the studio executives’, it became a cult movie among young audiences and ended up earning the studio a huge profit and turning Kirk into a rich young man overnight.
Meanwhile, Natalie’s acting career was blooming. She had caught the eye of an advertising executive at one of the school’s drama workshops. His company was actively producing commercials for national TV networks. She was offered a part in a cosmetic commercial. It was successful and was followed by a part in an hour special TV drama. That was when she acquired Ira Bevans as her agent. From then on her acting career took off like a skyrocket. A major role in a TV series led to a part in a motion picture and, almost overnight, Natalie Brooks became a promising young star.
That was when Kirk invented a nickname for her that she hated—”Lucky.” He told her, “Remember when I told you you are one of the lucky ones? Life smiles on people like you. Sunshine is going to follow you wherever you go, Lucky. All you have to do is touch something and it turns to gold.”
For a while they lived a love story out of a movie scenario, two beautiful young people with the world at their feet. They went to the south of France for a second honeymoon, then bought the huge old mansion in Beverly Hills and spent a fortune remodeling it.
But their love story had an unhappy ending. Kirk embarked on a major motion picture production that was to become a disaster. Carrying the title The Two of Us, it was both the sweeping drama of a young woman’s tumultuous career as a rock singer set against the background of the 1960s protest era, and her love story. Originally budgeted at $12 million by Continental Films, halfway through the film, because of Kirk’s ambitious demands, it became obvious that the cost was going to be double that. Continental threatened to scrap the production unless Kirk would personally guarantee the loans they took out to complete the production. Kirk agreed to sink all of his capital into the film, certain it would be another money-maker like The Home Front. Some critics liked it. Audiences did not. It was a financial disaster. The studio lost a lot of money. Kirk lost all his money.
The film cost Natalie more than money. When she read the screenplay, it was obvious to her that The Two of Us was Kirk’s own tragic love story with Jacqueline Davis. Natalie felt betrayed by the film. She tried to talk Kirk into dropping the project, but he plunged into it with a burning intensity that broke her heart. He became totally immersed in the production, shutting her out of his life.
At that time Natalie’s acting career was taking her out of town much of the time. She didn’t want to be separated from Kirk, but she had no choice. After The Two of Us cost Kirk his entire bankroll, they were living off her acting income. Kirk became even more of a stranger to her. With the colossal flop of The Two of Us, Kirk’s career hit the skids. He roamed around the Beverly Hills mansion, his eyes looking burned out and empty. When he tried to call studio executives about doing another film he could no longer get past secretaries. “He’s in a conference. I’ll have him get back to you.” They never called back. He didn’t even have any luck finding a lesser job in a production department. He had been quickly typed as a flash in the pan, a young film school whiz kid who’d made a lucky strike with his first production, but he was temperamental, stubborn, unpredictable. The studio blamed him for unrealistically sinking a huge budget into a film that had no mass appeal.
Gossip tabloids hinted that Kirk now had a drinking problem, was spending his wife’s money in bars and was having an affair with the actress who had starred in his ill-fated movie. Natalie never found out if there was any truth to the rumors. She flew home from the East Coast one weekend to find a note from Kirk saying that he had left for Europe. “So long, Lucky. You’ll be okay. Remember what I told you. You’re one of the ones life smiles on. Wherever you go, sunshine will follow you. Whatever you touch will turn to gold.”
There had been no hint of ever wanting to see her again. He’d made no move to contact her during the two years he had been away. Suddenly he had returned from Europe and walked back into her life again, dropping a fresh emotional bombshell into her existence.
CHAPTER FOUR
Now at the Dentme
ns’ Malibu beach house party, Natalie looked around at her friends, shaking her head in bewilderment. “Kirk wants me to star in his new film? You can’t be serious.”
“We’re very serious,” Bill Dentmen insisted. “We all want you to take the part, Natalie. We’ve always wanted to work together as a team. This is our opportunity.”
Natalie fought back tears. “It’s out of the question.”
“Won’t you at least read his story synopsis?” Linda persisted. “The part is perfect for you.”
“I don’t care if it’s the greatest part in the world,” Natalie said heatedly. “The last thing I want to do is put myself in a position of having Kirk direct a film in which I would act. The next time I get anywhere near Kirk Trammer it will be in a divorce court!”
There was a moment of silence. Then Bill said gently, “Look, Natalie, we’re more than friends, we’re like family. So maybe I can say this—we don’t know what went wrong with you and Kirk. It started out so great, just like the perfect romantic screenplay, two lovers made for each other. I guess, like in so many Hollywood marriages, the odds were stacked against you. Each of you had your own careers. Kirk’s future seemed to hit the skids about the time you started making it big. Maybe Kirk’s pride couldn’t take that. Maybe he just had to get away to find a new direction, get his feet back on the ground. Going to Europe was good therapy for him. The critics over there hold him in much higher esteem than those here in the States. His film that bombed out at the box offices here won awards at European film festivals. Kirk got his morale back. He directed several documentaries over there that were extremely well done. He’s changed, Natalie. He’s got his confidence back. This story he brought back with him could put him on top of the business where he belongs. You know I’ve always thought Kirk was a genius.”
“Bill, I know you’re probably Kirk’s best friend and a great admirer of his,” Natalie said sullenly. “Maybe he is a genius, another Orson Welles, or something. I just don’t want to have anything more to do with him. He’s caused me enough grief. Anyway, this conversation is pointless. My agent told me all about this film Kirk wants to produce and direct. He said there isn’t a studio in Hollywood that will touch the project with a ten-foot pole.”
The Movie Page 5