Magic Hour

by Susan Isaacs

  She drew her knees up together, folded her arms over them, then rested her head on the arms. Jesus, was she flexible; it was the kind of position that nor­mally only an eight-year-old can be comfortable in. "The day I signed the separation agreement, he took me out to lunch. Le Cirque. Soft lights, soft linen nap­kins. Soft food, so you wouldn't crunch when you chew. We were sitting on the same side on the ban­quette. He held my hand under the table and said, 'It's my fault that I wasn't able to love you enough. But I'll always be there for you, Bonnie.' "

  So, obviously, would Moose. The dog rested her face on the blanket until Bonnie patted her. Then she lay down on my feet.

  "Did you throw up when he said that?"

  "No, it was before the appetizer. But see, in his own way, Sy was sincere. He truly believed what he was saying, even though twenty seconds after he dropped me off at Penn Station so I could get the train back to Bridgehampton, I ceased to exist. But since I hadn't given him a hard time about splitting up ... I mean, I cried a lot and asked him to go to a marriage counselor, but that was all. I didn't want alimony. So he felt kindly toward me. If someone had asked, 'Sy, what was your second wife like?' he'd have said, 'Hmmm, second wife. Oh, yes. Bonnie. So sweet. Down-to-earth.' It was funny: If you crossed him, he'd never forget you, but niceness made no impression on him."

  "Why didn't you fight harder to stay together?"

  "Because..." She put her hands together, prayer fashion, and touched her forefingers to her lips. Fi­nally, she said: "Because I knew he didn't love me anymore—if he ever had. Sy could fall in love, but it was like an actor immersing himself in a character. The week I met him, in L.A., he must have just come back from a John Ford retrospective—so I became his cowgirl. He walked around wearing a denim jacket, squinting, smoking; this was before his decaffeinated days. He broke off the filters and lit his cigarettes with those matches you'd strike on the bottom of your boot; he actually took to wearing an old pair of shit-kickers, which wasn't so terrible because he was three inches shorter than me. God knows where he got them—probably in some Madison Avenue an­tique-boot boutique. We'd go riding a lot. Western saddle. He said, 'The English saddle is so effete.' But after three weeks back in New York—six weeks into our marriage—he got tired of being Hopalong Cassidy. And he got tired of loving me. I knew it." She turned away from me for a minute and got busy fold­ing over the pillow, so it made a better support for the small of her back. "There was no percentage in fighting him on the divorce. He'd tried to be a decent husband, and it got to be too much of a burden."

  "How was he a decent husband? I thought you said he cheated on you—with some socialite."

  "Decent for Sy. He held doors open. He remem­bered birthdays, anniversaries. He had great style; one Valentine's Day he bought me a new tackle box, and when I opened it, there was a beautiful long strand of fourteen-millimeter pearls."

  "What are fourteen-millimeter pearls?"

  "Big pearls." Her hands described a sphere that was about the size of the average classroom globe. It annoyed me that she liked such an expensive gift. I wanted her to say, I told Sy to take back the pearls; I only wanted the tackle box. But she didn't. "You have to understand Sy," she went on. "He couldn't be faithful. He couldn't be straight. He had to be ... I don't know if 'crooked' is the word. He had to manipulate every situation. Some of it was money. He was always afraid someone was cheating him, so he played one stockbroker, one lawyer, one accountant, against another. But he cheated people all the time. He hid personal expenses in movie budgets. I'm not just talking about a sweatsuit and a set of barbells; his second movie paid for a gym and a hot tub in our apartment in the city. And you couldn't use words like 'illegal' or 'immoral' with him, because in a weird way, he took them as compliments. He saw his fina­gling as an adventure and himself as a kind of swanky Robin Hood. But all he was doing was robbing from the rich to give to the rich."

  "You didn't see any of this when you agreed to marry him?"

  "No. I just saw this charming, cultured man with crinkles around his eyes who was crazy about Cowgirl and who knew all about westerns. Not just a superficial knowledge: I remember him describing one of Tom Mix's silent movies—Cactus Jim's Shop Girl. Actually, he seemed to know about everything: Cambodian architecture, the Big Bang theory, the lin­guistic connection between Finnish and Hungarian. But I think what got me most about Sy was that he appreciated me. My work. My eyes. My hair. My ... All the usual stuff. This man was such a connoisseur, I thought: Lord, am I something!"

  She concentrated on massaging her knee, a slow back-and-forth motion, the way you do to ease an old injury. Suddenly she glanced up at me, then, quickly, back down to her knee. I knew what she was think­ing: despite our very different resumes, I was like Sy. Oh, how I had appreciated her that night: I swear to God, I've never met anyone like you, Bonnie. Bonnie, your skin is like warm velvet. You know what, Bon­nie? Your eyes are the color of the ocean. Not a sum­mer ocean. Like on a bright winter day—so beautiful. I could talk to you for hours, Bonnie. Bonnie, I love you.

  "But Sy's enthusiasms never lasted. He had a closet with equipment from sports he'd tried a few times and given up: golf, racquetball, scuba diving, polo, cross-country skiing. And if he could have put women in a closet, he would have; he was on to other enthusiasms by our two-month anniversary."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Don't be. Actually, it got to be amusing." She lifted her chin and gave a little closed-lipped smile, a superior city-slicker expression that overflowed with savoir faire. It was fake as hell. "I could tell who he was having an affair with by the way he dressed. One day he put away his nipped-in-waist Italian suit and took out a torn T-shirt and bleached jeans, and I knew he'd stopped with the production designer with the surrealist jewelry and taken up with the third-string Village Voice movie critic, this girl with a lot of hair who was about ten minutes past her Sweet Sixteen. You couldn't help but laugh."

  "Don't bullshit me."

  The blanket on the bed, which the architect had probably decided was a grand bucolic design state­ment, was a pukey green plaid. Bonnie traced a thin, dark-green line with her finger. "All right," she said quietly, "what he did to me stank. More than that. It broke my heart. I'm not the kind of woman men fall for. Then, finally, one did. I was so happy. But before I could even finish the love poem I was writing to him, a sonnet—fourteen lousy lines—he stopped lov­ing me."

  "So the marriage was over before it was officially over."

  She nodded. "We still had sex, but there was no love, and not much companionship. On the nights he was home, he'd hole up in his study and read scripts or make phone calls. After the separation, I went on with my life. It wasn't hard to do; we hadn't really been a couple."

  "But your economic situation, your social status, changed. What was your life like?"

  "What do you mean?" She got very engrossed in following another, thicker line in the plaid.

  "Happy, sad, wonderful, terrible?"

  "It was okay." She didn't look up at me.

  "Come on, Bonnie."

  "Why is this necessary?"

  "Because I want to know the circumstances sur­rounding your taking up with Sy again."

  "The circumstances were that I was—am—an in­dependent woman. No ties. My mom died when I was seventeen: a brain tumor. My dad remarried—to a woman from Salt Lake who gets pedicures. He sold his store and they moved to Arizona, to a retirement community; they play bridge. My brothers are all mar­ried, with families of their own." She got quiet, thoughtful. She stopped with the blanket and reached back and played with the end of her braid. Absentmindedly, she unwound the rubber band. She unplaited her hair, and, as she began to talk again, stroked it, as if comforting herself. In the light of the green-shaded lamp, it gave off soft copper glints.

  "My life: I live in a lovely town by the ocean in a part of the country I don't belong in. I have Gideon and his lover, two women friends, and a lot of pleas­ant acquaintances. Summers are a little better;
I kept a couple of friends from my Sy days—a film editor, a Wall Street Journal entertainment industry reporter—and they have houses around here. We have some good times. I do volunteer work with illiterate adults and for every environmental cause that comes down the pike. That's how I met Gideon. He was represent­ing a land rapist, and we started out screaming at each other because roseate terns have become an en­dangered species, but we wound up great friends. You want more? I make eighteen thousand dollars a year writing pap for catalogs and the local paper and industrial publications like Auto Glass News. What else do you want to know? Sex? Until AIDS, I slept with any man who appealed to me. Now I read and watch two movies a night and run five miles a day. I had an abortion when I was married to Sy because he said he wasn't ready to have children. I wanted to have a baby more than anything. From the time I was thirty-eight, when it dawned on me that I'd never get married again because no one would ever ask, I stopped using birth control. I was never able to conceive; I found out my fallopian tubes were scarred closed from a dose of gonorrhea I'd gotten from my husband about six months after the abortion. Well, that's it." Bonnie clasped her hands on her knees. "I guess you expected something a little more upbeat."

  "A little." I had to be professional. What was the alternative? Taking her in my arms, hugging her, whispering tender words of condolence? I asked: "We found two condom wrappers in a wastebasket in Sy's guest room. If you couldn't get pregnant—"

  "AIDS, chlamydia, gonorrhea again. If I could have found a way of slipping a Trojan over his head before I kissed him, I would have, but it would have lacked a certain subtlety."

  "Tell me more about your life."

  "What's there to tell? I had such a happy child­hood. And then my screenplay became a movie and got wonderful reviews, and then Sy came along and married me. Sure, I knew there'd be bumps. Tragedy even, like losing my mom. But it didn't occur to me that life wouldn't basically be wonderful. Well, it's not. It isn't terrible, but I never thought I would be so lonely."

  "But now you have to deal with something a little more serious than personal happiness," I reminded her.

  "I know."

  "Like the possibility of a murder conviction." My voice was grim, deep and low, like a 45 record play­ing at 33. The small bedroom suddenly felt tight, air­less, like a cell.

  Bonnie seemed determined not to succumb to the gloom. She flashed one of her great grins. "So worse comes to worse, I get convicted for murder. After twenty, thirty years in jail, think of the script I could write. None of those Blondes in Chains cliches for me. You know: the dyke matron, the ripped uniforms so breasts peekaboo out. No, I'll write a socially sig­nificant screenplay and maybe get on Entertainment Tonight."

  "Tell me about the screenplay you were working on with Sy."

  "Oh, right. A Sea Change. It's based on a real inci­dent during World War II. A German submarine sur­faced off the coast of Long Island, and a couple of saboteurs slipped in. In my story, two women spot them down by the beach: a middle-class housewife and a bargirl who turns tricks on weekends. Anyway, it's about their helping catch the Nazis, but also about the friendship that develops."

  "You sent it to Sy when you got finished with it?"

  "I called him."

  "What happened?"

  "Well, first I spoke to his secretary, asked that he call me back, which he did a couple of days later. Kind of wary, to tell you the truth: I guess he was nervous I might be asking for money. But when I told him what it was, he was nice: You sound fantastic. Send it Fed Ex. Can't wait to read it."

  It wasn't only that she didn't wear makeup, or that she did have incredible calf muscles; Bonnie was sim­ply like no other woman I'd ever met. She seemed to be incapable of womanly wiles in any form. I looked her straight in the eye and she made no defensive feminine gestures. Her hand didn't fly up to touch her nose to check if it was oily, or up to her head to smooth down or fluff up her hair. She didn't make cow eyes or wounded-doe eyes, spread her legs an intriguing inch, thrust out her pelvis. No, she just looked straight back at me. I thought: Maybe it came from growing up with all those older brothers and that elk-shooting father and that rangy, broad-shoul­dered mother. Maybe she'd even tried batting her eyelashes or giggling, and nobody noticed. Maybe she'd acted wide-eyed and inept around all those Brownings and Remmingtons and Winchesters in the store, or gazed upon the engine of the family Buick and said, "Oooh, what's all that?" and got a swift kick in the butt, real or symbolic. She wasn't feminine. She was female.

  "You say Sy liked your screenplay?"

  "Yup."

  I thought about what Easton had said about it. "Then why would he have told one of his people to find something nice to say about it, so he could get you off his back? And why would he have told Lind­say..." I tried to think of a way to say Sy thought the script was a piece of crap without actually having to say it.

  "I can't say for sure. With Lindsay, I think it was natural he'd try and cover up any relationship with me." Bonnie rotated her ankles, making circles with her feet. "I mean, Lindsay has perpetually twitching, supersensitive antennae that can pick up any other woman within a fifty-mile radius. Sy was so careful; he did everything except wear sunglasses and a false nose when he came over." She stopped twirling her feet and started to do toe touches, flexing her calves as she bent over. She could have been stretching for a marathon; she was ready to run. She was not some­one who could tolerate being confined.

  "Why would he ask his assistant to find something nice to say?"

  "Busywork, maybe."

  "No."

  "When did he ask his assistant to read it?"

  "A couple of months ago."

  "I'd just handed in my second draft then. Sy said he liked it a lot but that he wouldn't have time to really go over it until Starry Night wrapped."

  "This was the rewriting you did based on his sug­gestions?"

  "Yes."

  "Knowing Sy, was it possible he didn't like it, even though he told you he did?"

  She considered the question. "Knowing Sy, yes. Maybe he—I don't know—wanted me back in his life for a while." She looked disheartened, as if she'd just gotten a brusque rejection letter in the mail. "But he did write me this nice note. Something like: 'Skimmed it. Adore it. Can't wait to really read it.' "

  This could be another one for the good guys; if Sy had liked the screenplay, and if she had written proof, she'd have every motive for wanting him alive; a dead executive producer can't make a movie. "He wrote you a note?" I demanded.

  "Yes. He has little three-by-five note cards with his name. He used one of them."

  "Typed or in his own handwriting?"

  "I think he wrote it."

  "Did you save it?"

  "It should be in my Sea Change file. In my office." She stopped cold. "Oh, wait a second. You want proof that he liked it originally too. Right? Fine. Look in that same file. There's his original memo, the one he wrote after he read the first draft. Typical Sy. Eight pages, single-spaced, multisyllabic. Talking about ev­erything from character arc to how I misused the subjunctive mood. But filled with 'brilliant' and 'trenchant' and 'poignant.' "

  "What does 'trenchant' mean?"

  She chewed her lip for a second. "I don't know, to tell you the truth. It's one of those words that nobody in human history has ever said out loud, and you don't see it written that often. He also wrote it was 'au courant.' That must have been a shock to him. Sy had always told me I was born too late, that I belonged under contract to RKO—if there still was an RKO—because my writing talent was for great 1941 movies. He couldn't get over that I'd finally written a screenplay that would appeal to someone besides my Aunt Shirley, and a perverse USC film professor. An eastern, not a western." She got off the bed and be­gan to pace, which isn't easy when you can only pace three steps forward and three steps back. "You know, you had a search warrant. How come you didn't read that file?"

  "Robby Kurz probably looked at it and decided it wasn't important." I took ou
t my notebook and jot­ted down: "Bon's Sea file."

  "Not important? You're hearing from people that Sy hated my work, that he rejected me—which would give me a motive to kill him if I was a homi­cidal maniac, which I'm not. And you say it's not important?"

  "It's not our job to dig up exculpatory evidence."

  "No. It's your job to railroad people."

  "Sit down."

  "I don't want to sit down," she snapped. "God, I feel so cooped up in here."

  I was pissed. I wanted her to like being with me. "Want to try a jail cell?"

  "Do you? Maybe you can have the one next door. You know, when you go up the river for your Class D felony." Bonnie's pacing got faster, more desperate. Suddenly she stopped short. Smiled. That phony, movie-biz smile, falsely warm, fraudulently agreeable. "Listen, I have a great idea. We can share a cell! Have a hot affair after lights-out. Not just your conventional hot affair. I mean, a love affair. We'll actually talk! Tell each other our life stories. The true ones, even when they hurt. Not the slick ones we make up to entertain people. And sex! We'll do it standing up, sitting down, frontways, sideways—"

  "Bonnie, stop it!"

  "Why? I'm telling you, it could be magic. Like we were creating something the world had never known before. And then the next day—"

  "I asked you to stop it."

  "—the next day you'd be free. You could forget it happened. You could forget it meant something." She hoisted an imaginary glass. "Hey, I'll drink to that!"

  "I'm sorry if I hurt you," I began. "That time of my life, I was a mess."

  I got up and walked into the bathroom. Moose fol­lowed. No tissues, so I brought her a wad of toilet paper, knowing she was going to cry. I came back and put my arm around her shoulders, ready to ab­sorb her sobs. But she pulled away and turned from me; she wasn't crying, and she didn't want me com­forting her.