Fault Lines

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  I glanced involuntarily at the azure pool and turned away. So did Glynn. I knew that whenever after we thought of the Sunset Marquis, we would both see the body bobbing in the bright water, facedown, like a dark, drowned bird. What a terrible man this Hollywood columnist was. I thought that Laura would pay dearly for her courage.

  Our food came and we picked at it in silence, listening as Billy Poythress, good temper restored, regaled us with industry gossip, most of it scurrilous and some of it, I thought, actionable. Then he told us about his boyhood in St. Louis and how he had come West to be a journalist, but found that he was “too sensitive, too vulnerable,” for that hard-edged profession, and so had drifted into what he called the people game.

  “Everyone wants to know everything about everybody with any celebrity, and I have contacts that no one else has,” he said. “I give enjoyment to a great many people every week. It makes them happy and it makes me happy. It’s an ideal way to make a nice little living.”

  Better than nice, I thought. I would wager that Billy Poythress had not paid for a meal in twenty years.

  We finished our coffee and he pushed away his cup and took out a little leather notebook. I saw the tiny Hermès logo stamped inconspicuously on it.

  “Now,” he said. “I’m going to do something a little different with you, Laura Mason. From what I hear—and I hear everything—this role of yours in Caleb’s new movie is soon going to be the talk of the industry, so I thought we’d talk today about you and Caleb instead. Simply everybody will be wild to know about that. He hasn’t had anybody on the side since way before Jazz; there was some buzz that he was leaning toward little boys. But you’ve put an end to that. So do tell me all, my dear. I promise to give you as many inches as you give me dish.”

  We were all silent. I did not dare look at Laura. Every instinct told me to simply grab her and hustle her out of there, but this was, after all, her territory and her career, and I had to trust that she knew best how to navigate in it. But the sense of danger was almost palpable.

  “Stuart told me this would be about my part in Right Time,” she said finally. Her voice was low and level and pleasant.

  “Well, we all know that Stuart isn’t exactly at his best these days, don’t we?” Billy said, smiling. Smiling. “I really don’t think you’re very well served there, dear, but you know best about that. No, I told him quite plainly that I wanted to know about your little affaire d’amour. He said he didn’t think you would have any problem with that. After all, it’s been getting beaucoup ink ever since filming started.”

  “I don’t know if I can do that,” Laura said presently, and looked over at me. Her face was strained and set. I knew what this interview meant to her. Nevertheless, “Don’t,” I said back to her with my eyes. “Don’t.”

  “Well, it’s your call,” Billy Poythress said, putting his notebook back in the pocket of the bizarre jacket and lifting his hand for the waiter.

  “Wait,” Laura said. “Let’s talk some more about this.”

  “Good,” he said, settling back.

  “You’ll want to be private for this, so Glynn and I will walk around on Sunset for a while,” I said. “Why don’t you meet us at that bookstore you like when you’re done?”

  She nodded, not looking at me. I stood, and Glynn did, too.

  “It was nice meeting you, Mr. Poythress,” I said tightly. Glynn mumbled something I did not catch.

  “You too, pretty ones,” he said, beaming. “Enjoy your day.”

  When we finally reached the crest of Sunset, breathing hard, Glynn said, her voice subdued, “He’s awful, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” I said, but said nothing more about Billy Poythress. What, after all, was there to say? What he was burned in the air like the afterimage of a great blast.

  We had a pleasant stroll in the cooling afternoon, and bought a couple more odds and ends to flesh out Glynn’s Hollywood wardrobe. I had thought to find something I could wear tomorrow night to the screening and Spago, but did not, after all, have the heart to look. I did not think I wanted to go. I would let Laura take Glynn. Billy Poythress had been all I wanted to know about Hollywood.

  We did not speak of him again until Laura joined us at the bookstore, and then only briefly.

  “Did it go okay?” I said. She was distracted and pale.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “God, what an asshole. It may have been all right. There’s no way to tell until I can talk to Pring. I’m going to go back to the apartment and try to call him. Then we’ll go get some early supper. We’ve had a long day.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “We’ll get a Coke or something and walk on up, give you a little time.”

  “Thanks,” she said briefly, and walked out of the store. Her head and shoulders were erect, but there was no lithe spring in her step, none of the old Laura prowl. My heart hurt for that.

  When we finally got back to the apartment the shadows were long across Sunset below us, and the hills behind us were blue. A few lights had come on far across the valley and twinkled like fallen stars. In the spreading stain of twilight the view really was beautiful, soft and somehow tender. Nighttime must be the real time, here.

  Laura was not about, but I heard the shower running. Presently she came out, wrapped in a white terry robe that must have been the departed Bobby’s, her face scrubbed shiny, blond hair dark and wet down her back. Her eyes were very red. I knew that she had been crying.

  “Any luck?” I said casually, avoiding looking into her face.

  “No. I can’t reach him. He’s probably still out at Margolies’s and that number wouldn’t be listed. He’s probably called here, but I forgot to turn on the answering machine. Stu doesn’t use it anymore. Let me get dressed and we’ll go get something to eat. I think I’ll take you to Orso’s. Best pasta in the world.”

  And it was good. We sat at a candlelit corner table in a little walled patio, under the branches of a huge, low-spreading tree, and ate sublime pasta and drank red wine and looked as Laura pointed out this industry notable and that one, and laughed when she told stories about them only slightly less scurrilous than Billy Poythress’s had been. We did not mention him, and she did not mention Caleb Pringle again, but both men were as surely present at the table as if they sat across from us. We finished early and left, and it was scarcely ten when we went to bed.

  Glynn fell asleep almost instantly, but I lay awake for a long time in the outrageous bed of Stuart Feinstein’s, which turned out to be a waterbed and sloshed disconcertingly whenever one of us moved. There would be no question of feeling an earthquake in this bed, I thought, but tonight, unlike the last one, the idea brought me no alarm. The damage tonight was inside Laura and not the earth.

  Sometime deep in the night I thought I heard her crying softly on the living-room couch, but when I slid out of bed to go to her the sound stopped, and I stood for a while at the closed door and then got back into the waterbed beside Glynn. The last thing I remembered as I slid into thin, restless sleep was that I had not, after all, called Pom.

  6

  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.