The smell of the rare turkey nauseates Ben. “Would you all excuse me one minute?” he asks, standing up. “I just need to use the—the men’s room.”
Glick looks up at him with one eye. “You seem to have stomach troubles,” he says. “Whatever you need, I’ve probably got in my bag.”
Ben just smiles.
In the men’s room, he retches over and over—but nothing comes up. He sits there on the floor, out of breath, cradling the cold ceramic of the toilet, his face inches above a public shit hole.
Shit hole. Shit heel.
What’s the difference?
Finally he rouses himself. He brushes the dust off his pants. When he gets back to the table, Xerxes has gotten him the deal. They shake on it all around, and Glick winks at him just a little too familiarly.
Then they all eat their lunch.
He sees Jean from a distance first, standing on the little wooden bridge that crosses the stream in the Japanese tea garden. The sky is pink and the shadows in the garden are long and blue. He just watches her for a minute before he enters, as she closes her eyes and turns her face to the setting sun.
She’s beautiful, he thinks. I’ve never allowed myself to really see before.
Damn, he abruptly scolds himself. Don’t even go there, Ben.
Her eyes open and she spots him. She waves.
He begins to enter the gardens when a Japanese woman stops him. Ben can’t tell whether she works here or is a visitor. “No, sir,” she says. “First.”
She hands him a bamboo dipper. “Here,” she instructs, pointing to a stone trough filled with water near the gate. “Your hands.”
She seems insistent. He’s not sure what to do, but reaches over with the dipper, ladles up some water from the trough. She nods. He rinses his hands with the water. She smiles and takes back the dipper.
He proceeds inside.
Jean’s smiling as he meets up with her on the bridge. “She had me do that, too,” she tells him. “It’s like dipping your fingers in the holy water when you enter a church. A ritual cleansing.” Her smile fades as she looks out over the lush green garden. “You leave the debris of your outside life behind upon entering another realm.”
The pink glow of the sky reflects across her cheeks. Her strawberry-blond hair takes on a pinkness, too, making her look like a faded color photograph from the ’50s in which everything eventually turns pink.
But Ben thinks it only makes her look prettier.
“What’s going on?” he asks. “Your message said to meet you here.”
“Oh, Ben,” she says, looking back up at him. She seems near tears.
“Is it Flo? Is she all right?”
“She’s fine. At least, for now. She’s still resting. The news about that doctor upset her.” Jean looks off across the garden. “But that’s not why I asked you to meet me.”
“Come on,” he says, putting his arm around her. “Let’s walk.”
The evening’s getting a little chilly. They walk across the bridge through a row of pines, across a carpet of deep velvety green moss. Conical junipers and round-shaped spruces greet them as they turn, facing the teahouse. “Do you want some tea?” Ben asks.
Jean nods.
The teahouse, made of bamboo and looking out over a small, placid, lotus-dotted lake, is empty. A kind-faced old man bows gracefully as they enter. Ben gestures to Jean to sit at the bench overlooking the lake.
“They want me to come back,” she tells him after they’re settled.
“Who does? Come back where?”
“The Board.” The old man silently brings them their tea in a steaming copper pot. He places two tiny porcelain cups in front of them. Ben pours them each some tea as Jean continues. “They called this afternoon. They said they weren’t comfortable with how things were going for Flo, all the media attention and speculation. We should return to St. Mary’s immediately.”
“But we have an agreement,” he says.
Jean sighs. “I don’t know what to do. You’ve seen her, Ben. She hasn’t been herself since we got here. She’d been so anxious to see San Francisco again, but she doesn’t have the strength to leave the hotel room. She just sits for hours without saying a word.”
“She needs a good rest,” Ben agrees. “We should just let her be for a while. Let her get her strength back. She’ll be fine.”
Jean runs a hand through her hair. “The Board said if Flo chooses not to return, that’s up to her. She’ll have to sign some papers saying she absolves St. Mary’s of all responsibility, and she can remain with you and whoever else she chooses.”
She takes a small sip of tea. “But I’m to return. As soon as possible.”
Ben looks over at her. “What are you going to do?”
She looks to be near tears. “I don’t want to go back, Ben. I don’t want to go back to that life, living in those cold, sterile rooms, surrounded by all that grandeur that masks the misery. I want to go back to doing the work that I entered religious life to do: working with the poor and the disenfranchised and the sick in the inner cities. I’ve decided if the church won’t let me do it under their auspices, I’ll do it on my own.”
“You’ll resign from St. Mary’s?” Ben asks.
“I’ll resign whatever I need to.”
Ben’s not quite sure what to say. All he knows is he wants to say something. He wants to find something to say that will make it easier for her.
“This must be really hard,” he finally offers, feeling lame and inadequate.
She nods.
He lifts his hand to place it on her back, then reconsiders. He lets it fall back into his lap.
“When I decided I had the calling,” she tells him, “I never questioned it.” Her face is set calmly as she stares out over the unmoving lake, its surface reflecting the pink and gold shards of the setting sun. “I met this woman. She was a Sister of Mercy, and she had devoted her life to helping others. I wanted to be like her.”
“But you do help others, Jean. You’re like a mother hen to Flo. All the residents of St. Mary’s love you.”
She shakes her head. “No, you don’t understand,” she tells him. “They’ve helped me. Especially Flo. She’s the only family I have. What she’s given me is incalculable. I just help her in and out of bed. I just tie her shoes.”
Ben’s quiet for several seconds. “What if Flo decides to go back? What will you do?”
“Go back with her.” She smiles. “You see, Ben, for however much longer God intends to have Flo stay on this earth, I will be with her. Wherever she goes, I will go.”
“Ruth and Naomi, I think,” Ben says with a smile.
“Right.” Jean smiles, too. “But after that point, after Flo goes home to God—”
“You’re going back to the work you feel called to do.”
Ben sees a tear collect in the corner of her eye and then drop slowly down her cheek. “Some nuns talk about their calling as a need to serve God,” she says. “They see it as being in the convent, cloistered in prayer, or teaching in Catholic schools. Not me. I’ve never seen it that way.” She makes a small laugh. “Anne Drew, my mentor, used to call us heretics. She was just kidding, of course, but we never bought the idea of God being up on a cloud somewhere, an old white man with a beard.”
“I bet you believe God’s a woman,” Ben says.
“Sometimes God is a woman. Sometimes God’s a man.” She looks off into the garden. “God’s that tree over there, those giant goldfish in the lake. God isn’t separate from us, Ben. Heaven isn’t just for those who follow the rules. It’s already here, available to anyone.”
Ben chuckles. “You are a heretic,” he says.
She smiles back. “Only the heretics ever made a difference.”
He can see the wisdom in her eyes. The stunning sense of self. He’s bewildered by it actually. It makes him feel like a kid again at the Chicopee Public Pool, when he’d wade too far into the deep end. That’s how he feels now: He’s in too deep and every
one will learn that he can’t swim. Richard, of course, had already mastered the breast stroke, so he’d be swimming laps across the entire pool—but Mom would always be standing up there on the cement in her too tight bathing suit, shrieking at Ben to get back to the kiddy side before he drowned.
“You’re—you’re pretty special,” is all he manages to say to Jean.
She takes his hands. He can feel her warmth. It feels good on this chilly night. “So are you, Ben,” she says. “So are you.”
Anita never said that to him. He imagines she must have thought so, once upon a time, but not anymore. Now she just gripes that he’s wasting his time, spinning his wheels, letting the world pass him by.
Yet it’s not Anita he sees when he looks across at Jean. It’s Mary Kay Silenski, the first girl he ever really fell hard for, and they’re sitting on his bed, in his room, back in Chicopee. They’re sixteen.
“You’re all right, Ben,” Mary Kay said. “You know that?”
He blushed.
“I mean, here I am, going on and on about Richard, and here you are, his brother. I don’t mean to lay all my shit on you.”
“He should treat you better,” Ben told her. “He’s an asshole.”
Mary Kay shrugged. “He’s just not as … sensitive … as you are.”
She reached over and kissed him. Right on the mouth. Ben felt his body tense, his dick swell.
Why hadn’t he kissed her back? The thought plagued him for weeks. Years. Here she was, spilling out her guts to him about how horny she was, how Richard hardly even kissed her, and Ben freezes up. He just sat there, let her plant her big red lips on his, and did nothing. Just swallowed and blinked his eyes a few times.
If I’d kissed her back, maybe I could’ve made her my girlfriend. Stolen her right away from Richard.
Maybe even gone to the prom.
Jean’s looking over at him now with eyes so round and filled with pink light that Ben thinks he might cry. Or laugh. He’s not sure. She’s still holding his hands.
“I think you’re very special,” Jean tells him again.
He kisses her. Just reaches over and puts his lips against hers and kisses her. He feels no resistance, no surprise.
She kisses him back.
Jean gently breaks the kiss. The server passes, smiling indulgently down upon them.
He thinks we’re lovers, Jean thinks. Maybe even engaged to be married.
“I’m … sorry,” Ben tells her.
“Don’t be,” she says.
“I just—it just—felt right.”
“More tea?” the server asks.
“No, thank you,” Jean says. She’s still holding Ben’s hands. She releases them, looks out over the lake.
“It won’t happen again,” Ben is telling her.
Victor had said the same thing the first time he’d kissed her. It won’t happen again. But it had. Once, twice, three times—and then Anne had discovered him in Jean’s bed.
“Will I go to hell for kissing a nun?” Victor had asked her right at the start.
Jean laughed. “I think God makes certain allowances,” she reassured him.
Such a child, Victor was, in so many ways. Like Ben. He sits there now next to her, overcome by his impulse, surprised and shocked and angry at himself.
That’s because he hasn’t a counterfeit bone in his body, Jean thinks. The sincerity in his eyes is almost too awful for Jean to look upon. In the past few weeks, she’s come to rely on Ben more than she could have imagined. In New York, faced with the first crush of reporters, he’d been there to guide her—and Flo—through it all. In Hollywood, as the stories and questions mounted about the girl, Ben had been Jean’s rock, her sounding board, her guarantor that they’d make it through.
He’d been something else, too: her admirer. Her solicitor. Not since Victor had she seen such tenderness, such affection, in a man’s eyes when he looked at her. He’d caught her one afternoon, the day she dared to try on that absurd purchase, that stretchy tank top with the stripes. “Lookin’ good,” he’d said, and she’d felt her blush spread from her face and neck down her goosefleshy exposed arms.
“Ben,” she says. “I wanted you to kiss me. I think lying is a far worse offense than lust, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I wanted it.”
He seems uncomfortable with her honesty. “But it won’t happen again,” he repeats.
She nods. “No, I don’t imagine it will.” She smiles at him. “That doesn’t mean I won’t want it again.”
He blinks, as if uncomprehending.
“Oh, Ben.” She laughs. “Do you think just because I took a vow to a religious order means I stop being human? That I’ve lost the capacity to love? To fall in love?”
He doesn’t respond.
“There was a man once, Ben. A man I loved very dearly. And still do. I have no problem telling you that. Love comes from the soul, and it gets expressed through all our human conditions. Through our hearts, our minds, and yes, our bodies. I have no shame for how I loved him.” She pauses as Victor’s face fills her thoughts. “I broke my vow of celibacy to be with him. It was a conscious, deliberate, and terribly difficult decision—one that for many reasons I’m not apt to make again. But it doesn’t change how I feel, how I respond.”
Ben seems touched by her words. “Where is this man now?” he asks softly.
She wants to say, Here with us. In the lake. In the trees. In the air.
In you, Ben.
But instead she tells him that Victor died.
“I’m sorry,” Ben says.
“Stop apologizing, Ben, as if everything is your fault.” She finishes the last of her tea. “Let’s walk some more.”
They stand. They pause for a moment, looking at each other. Jean reaches up and kisses him lightly on the lips.
“But if Flo doesn’t go back,” she tells him firmly, “I’m staying here.”
“What if they kick you out because of it?”
She doesn’t answer. She just takes his hand and leads him down the hill, past the statue of the Buddha, and back through the park.
It’s late when Jean gets back to the suite she shares with Flo. She thanks the hired nurse for sitting with her. “She’s awake,” the nurse tells her. “She’s watching television.”
Jean opens the door a crack to the bedroom. “I’m back, Flo.”
She steps inside. Flo’s propped up in bed with pillows, and she’s wearing her blue glasses. None of the lights are on; Flo is bathed in the blue-and-silver glow of the TV set. The remote control is in her hand.
“What are you watching?” Jean asks, sitting down beside her on the bed.
“They were showing Camille,” Flo tells her.
“Isn’t that with Garbo?”
Flo nods. “And Robert Taylor. I tried to spot myself. Molly and I were extras in the opera scene.”
“Were you successful?”
She shakes her head.
“Flo,” Jean says, stroking the old woman’s thin, wispy hair, “we can stop now, you know.”
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“Flo, you’re tired. You’ve had aches and pains you’ve never had before.”
“Oh, I’ve had them before,” she tells her. “Just not in a very long time.”
“Do you want to go back? To St. Mary’s?”
Flo just looks at her.
“We can, you know. We can pack our bags and go back tomorrow. I’m sure Henrietta will be happy to see you. And maybe Gertie’s kid has more cookies she needs to sell.”
Flo grins, as if Jean’s being foolish. “They only run the cookie drive once a year,” she tells her.
“Do you want to go back?”
“I’d hate to disappoint them,” she says weakly.
“Disappoint who, Flo?”
She looks up at Jean as if she’s being silly. “The fans,” she says.
“The fans?” Jean laughs. “Oh, Flo, you talk as if you were a movie star again.”
F
lo seems not to comprehend Jean’s point. “I have to keep working. It’s the only way.”
Jean leans in toward her. Her eyes are distant. “Flo. The only way for what?”
“To get back to number one,” she says.
“Flo,” Jean says, getting a little alarmed now. “I don’t think you know fully what you’re saying.”
Flo looks back at the television. She says nothing further.
“Flo, I think we ought to go back.”
“No.” Flo turns her eyes back to Jean. “I can’t. Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“I’m supposed to appear at the theater this week, aren’t I?”
“They can show the films without you.”
Flo manages a small smile. Just seeing it makes Jean feel a little better. “Do you want to go back, Jeannie?”
“The decision is yours, Flo.”
She flicks the channel with the remote control. A Seinfeld rerun. A shopping channel. A Pepsi commercial. The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
“You know, it’s not just Bill Clinton who’s suspected of having affairs,” Leno’s saying in his monologue. “Heard they caught Bob Dole with a dame the other day.” A beat. “Florence Lawrence.”
The crowd hoots, whistles.
“They’re laughing at me,” Flo says in a terribly small voice.
“Flo, we can get on a plane tomorrow and fly back east.” Jean takes her hands in hers but Flo’s eyes are off in that place all their own. “Or we can fly anywhere we want. Just you and me.” She rests her head on Flo’s shoulder.
“No,” Flo says, her eyes still faraway. Her old hand with all its veins and creases reaches up to caress Jean’s face. “Not yet, Jeannie. Not yet.”
“She wants to go on then,” Ben says.
Jean nods. She seems as if she might cry, so Ben draws her to him for an embrace. “I’m worried,” she says. “She’s just so … incoherent at times.”
“There’s nothing on the schedule at all this week until the screenings at the Castro,” Ben tells her. “She’ll perk up.”
Jean appreciates the hug. She likes the feeling of being held. She’s torn between allowing Flo to make the decision to stay or just ordering her back on the plane.
“We still don’t know any more about Molly,” Ben adds.
The Biograph Girl Page 49