“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.
Fault Lines Page 17