Stars Over Sunset Boulevard

by Susan Meissner

  “Do you really think Bert would care that it was you who took the hat?” Audrey asked. “It was so long ago.”

  “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

  Audrey studied her friend for a moment. “I can have it destroyed if that’s really what you want.”

  Violet grimaced, as if the image was painful to contemplate. “No,” she murmured.

  Several moments of silence hung between them.

  Violet breathed in deep and looked out over the landscaped yard, the towering cypress trees, bougainvillaea and stately palms. “Bert’s been invited back to South America to work on a research project on birds that migrate to the Amazon. He’s wanted there by the first of January. He wants us to go. It would be for at least a year.”

  Audrey sensed a tugging in her chest, and the faintest pull of regret that she had her own secrets. She closed her eyes for a second against the idea that it could be a very long time before she saw Violet again. “Think you will do it?”

  Violet looked down at the crumpled napkin in her hand. “Bert says we should. It’s different now with Lainey married and so far away. Bert says she has her own life to live now and we can’t forget we still have ours, too.”

  “He’s right,” Audrey said.

  “We’re hoping to see her and Marc before we go. We’ve asked her if they would like to come home to the States for Christmas. We’ll pay for them to come. I don’t know how we will, but we will.”

  “So, things are good again between you and Lainey?”

  Violet inhaled deeply. “I guess that’s the best word for it. It’s not perfect or wonderful. But it’s good. It’s so expensive to call. So we’ve been writing, and that’s probably best. Writing gives us a chance to see what we’re going to say before we say it. What she wanted to know more than anything was why I wouldn’t tell her who you were.”

  “And what did you tell her?” Audrey asked.

  Violet locked eyes with Audrey. “I told her the truth. That I didn’t want her to stop needing me because she had you.” Then she laughed as she looked away, off into the trees again. “And here she is, thousands of miles away now, married. She doesn’t need you or me.”

  “That’s not exactly true. I know how much a young woman needs a mother.”

  But Violet hadn’t seemed to have heard her. When she spoke again, she seemed far away in thought. “Everything is changing, Audrey, and nothing is turning out the way I thought it would.”

  “How did you think it would be?”

  Violet tossed her gaze back to Bert by the pool and the hopeful young man he was talking to. “I don’t know. I guess I thought I would feel it had all been worth it. But instead I feel like . . .”

  Violet paused and Audrey waited expectantly for Violet to finish.

  “I feel that everything I’ve ever held close is being torn from me,” Violet finally said. “Like a cage door has opened and all my little birds are flying away on the wind, and everything that matters to me is disappearing.”

  For a moment there was only this spoken thought hovering between them. And then Audrey heard someone say her name, and she turned from the heaviness of Violet’s observations. It was the first time that day that she’d felt the full weight of Glen’s absence, and she now embraced the interruption like one seeing an oasis in the desert. She was wanted in the house.

  Audrey touched Violet on the shoulder and went inside.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  November 1963

  Violet stood at the open double doors and looked over undulating hills in shades of mossy green and the tiny thousand-year-old Tuscan village of Adine off in the distance. In her hands was a cup of frothy cappuccino—her first—and at her right, Audrey had laid out a breakfast table with jam-filled cornettos and orange slices. Bert was walking off the hours they had spent sitting the day before; first the flight from Los Angeles to New York, then New York to Rome, and then the train from Rome to Siena. They had arrived at Audrey’s villa tired and sore, but the beauty of the Italian countryside was charming away their little discomforts.

  It had been Audrey’s idea for Violet and Bert to spend a week with her before they all flew to Paris to see Lainey and Marc. Marc was a new hire at an investment firm in Paris’s financial district. Lainey was taking language classes so that she could continue her college education at a French university, now as a literature major. While it hadn’t been feasible for the newlyweds to hop on a plane back to California for Christmas, they had both been amenable to a visit from the three of them before the holidays—Marc especially so. He didn’t like the friction between Lainey and her deux mamans, as he described them. Her two mothers.

  Audrey had made all the arrangements with, what seemed to Violet, a sense of urgency, as though she and Violet had unfinished business between them.

  Violet had sensed it, too. Since the day of Glen’s funeral when she’d told Audrey that it felt as if everything that mattered to her was poised to take flight, she had known that she owed Audrey an explanation. She had owed her one for twenty-three years, not just about the hat, but about a lot of things. For the past eight weeks, this debt had weighed on her more than it had during the previous two decades. The tugging of all that she held dear also seemed to apply to everything else that she held, including her secrets.

  Audrey came into the room at that moment with her own cappuccino, and Violet startled as if Audrey had heard her unspoken thoughts.

  “Bert out for a stroll?” Audrey said.

  Violet nodded. “He’s on the lookout for a zitting cisticola.”

  “That’s survivable, I hope.”

  Violet smiled. “It’s a warbler of some kind.”

  “How’s the cappuccino?”

  “Divine. As is your view. It’s so beautiful and peaceful here.”

  “It is. Glen bought this place for us based on photographs. He would have loved it.”

  Several seconds of silence passed between them.

  “Want some breakfast?” Audrey nodded to the little table laden with food.

  “Actually, I need to tell you something before Bert gets back,” Violet said, not daring to raise her eyes to meet Audrey’s. “Something I should have told you long ago. And, surprisingly enough, I have the courage to tell you now, which I’ve never had before.”

  Audrey laughed, but nervously. “I actually have something to tell you, too.”

  Violet looked up. “You do?”

  “Maybe we should sit.”

  Audrey led her to a little room just off the kitchen, with a large picture window cracked open a few inches to let in the morning air, and which looked out over the Tuscan hills. Two plump armchairs faced the glass. Bookshelves lined the walls, and a mariner’s chest served as a coffee table. They sat down.

  Audrey took a sip from her cup and then set it down on a tiled table between the two chairs. “I’ve had a lot of time to think since I got here. It’s really all I’ve done. I barely know any Italian, and I’ve no nearby neighbors. And the nearest village has only a handful of people living in it, so I’ve had many hours to myself here. I feel like I’ve been given a second chance to live the rest of my life, Violet. I don’t know what I am going to do with it yet, but I want to start it with no dark spots. I need to make things right between us.”

  For several seconds Violet could only gape at her. Audrey had it all wrong. “I’m the one who needs to make things right,” Violet said. “If that is even possible. I did something terrible to you. And not only you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Violet studied Audrey’s face, beautiful even with the artistry of the years beginning to crisscross her skin in every direction. “I . . . I have wanted to tell you this for a long time, but I was afraid you would hate me. And I was too young to have you hate me for the rest of your life.”

  Audrey’s brow crinkled wit
h puzzlement. “If this is about the hat . . .”

  “It’s not just about the hat. I feel like I’ve . . . like I’ve altered Bert’s life, ruined it, maybe, and Lainey’s, too. And I think I may have ruined yours, even though you don’t know it.”

  Audrey stared at her. Violet closed her eyes against the rush of guilt. “It started with that hat but it didn’t end there. That day that it came up missing I wanted Bert to think you’d taken it and lost it. I wanted him to think you were someone he couldn’t trust. I wanted to break the spell.”

  “The spell?”

  “The spell you had over him.”

  Audrey looked baffled.

  “That night we got drunk in the wardrobe department, you staggered into my bed, thinking it was yours. Bert came to the cottage looking for you the next morning because the hat was missing, remember? Because you were the last one to have it. But you weren’t in your bed when he came; you had already left. And it didn’t occur to me until later that you hadn’t slept in your bedroom; you had slept in mine. You had tossed your big bag onto the floor in my room and that’s where the hat was. I knew as soon as I saw it that you had put it in your bag by mistake because you were drunk, but I let Bert think you had lost it so that he would be mad at you. He almost lost his job over it, and I wanted him to blame you for that. So I wrapped the hat up in clothes I didn’t need and sent it home to Alabama so you wouldn’t find it in the bungalow.”

  Audrey stared at Violet, incredulous. “Because . . . because you were in love with him?”

  The rest of Violet’s confession bubbled out of her like poison she was spitting out of her mouth. “Because he was in love with you! And I wanted him to love me instead. I wanted him to be mad at you for nearly costing him his job. And he was. He started to see you differently after that. And then after the hat went missing, I let him think you were seeing Vince when I knew he was only a friend who was engaged to someone else. I gave you that little porcelain nightingale the day before Valentine’s Day instead of on Valentine’s Day, like Bert asked me to, because I didn’t want you to know just how crazy he was about you. He was in love with you, not me. He loved you, Audrey. You were the one he wanted.”

  Violet turned away. She wished Audrey would say something, anything. But her friend was silent beside her. “I made a mess of everything, Audrey. If Bert had been with you instead of me, Lainey would have been yours and his. And there could have been more children. You could have given him the son he wanted and that I couldn’t give him. I made a mess of everything first because I wanted Bert, and then because I wanted Lainey to be mine, not yours. I can’t help feeling that I ruined everything.”

  Sobs gathered thick in her throat. Violet had thought a confession would somehow lessen the burden of her old offenses, but she felt worse, not better.

  “You didn’t ruin everything, Violet,” Audrey finally said.

  Violet couldn’t believe she heard Audrey correctly. She turned her head slightly. “What?”

  “I said, you didn’t ruin everything.”

  “But I did! Bert loved you.”

  “Maybe he was in love with me at one time, a very long time ago, but he loved you after me. I know he did. He still does. And who can say he would’ve been happy with me?”

  “Of course he would’ve been happy with you.”

  “You don’t know that! None of us knows that. And I wasn’t in love with him.”

  “But when things started going badly for you, you talked like you wished you could just run off with Bert and forget all about Hollywood. You were starting to think that way.”

  “Because Bert was such a good man. And I was envious of your dream. Violet, he chose you.”

  “Because I made choosing you seem like a disastrous idea. Sometimes I wish I’d never gotten on that train to California. I can’t help thinking that if I’d never come, you and Bert could’ve had a long and happy life together. But I came and ruined it all because I was so insanely jealous of you. I wish I’d never come.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true. I wish I hadn’t.”

  In an instant Audrey was kneeling before Violet, clasping her hands. “Listen to me! Don’t ever wish that you and I had never met. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you. I wouldn’t have met Glen. I wouldn’t have reconciled with my father. I wouldn’t even have Lainey if it wasn’t for you.”

  “Yes, you would’ve.”

  “No! No, I wouldn’t, because I’d be dead. Do you hear me? If it wasn’t for you, I’d be dead!”

  Audrey paused and released Violet’s hands, willing Violet to look at her.

  When Violet raised her head, Audrey continued.

  “Do you remember the night I gave you those sleeping pills and told you to throw them away? Do you remember that night?”

  Violet nodded. She remembered.

  “That was the night I was going to end my life, Violet. I really was. You convinced me not to. Do you remember what you told me?”

  Violet could only remember desperately trying to convince Audrey to focus on her career so that she’d be too preoccupied to shift her focus onto Bert. She shook her head.

  “You told me that my mother was still watching over me and that she would want me to keep reaching for my dreams, even though I was so tired of fighting for them. You said tired people don’t give up. Tired people just take a rest. Rest a bit and try again. You told me that I didn’t want to live with regret.”

  Violet could barely recall those words, and yet as soon as she heard them she remembered saying them.

  “You saved my life, Violet.”

  “I did it for me,” Violet murmured.

  “It doesn’t matter why you did it. It only matters that you did. You saved my life. And because you saved mine, you saved Lainey’s. And were it not for you and Bert raising her, I would not have the pleasure of having her in my life. And it’s this reason that I wanted you here to confess to you what I did.”

  “I already told you. You did nothing. I’m the one who messed everything up.”

  “No, Violet. We both made mistakes. I was jealous, too. Jealous and angry. I was jealous that Lainey was yours, and I was angry that you wouldn’t allow her to know I was her real mother. When she found out that I was, I wanted her to prefer me over you. I wanted her to want to be with me instead of you. I should have told her from the very moment she learned the truth about me that were it not for you, I would be dead and she would have never been born. But I didn’t. So you see? We’ve both done things for all the wrong reasons.”

  An ache like none she had ever suffered was pounding in Violet’s chest as she searched for a response. “Are you saying this makes us even?” she finally said.

  “No!” Audrey answered quickly. “It shows how fragile we are. We were both shattered. We were broken people who longed to be whole. We thought it was love that was driving us to do what we did. But it wasn’t love. It was fear. We were both too afraid of ending up unwanted and unneeded.”

  Several seconds of silence passed.

  “Do you remember the night the three of us were on Sunset Boulevard, looking for that nightingale?” Audrey said, a moment later.

  Violet remembered. There had been no nightingale. Only a sky full of stars, distant, glittering and cold. “It was never there.”

  “I choose to believe it was.”

  “But we never found it.”

  “But we did. We did find what we were looking for. Do you remember the story of the emperor and the nightingale?”

  Violet shook her head. She couldn’t.

  “The emperor loved the plain brown nightingale that sang in his garden, but then he received a beautiful, mechanical bird as a gift and he sent the real one away. But then, many years later, the emperor was dying and the mechanical bird had long stopped working. He heard his old friend the real nigh
tingale singing just outside his window. Her beautiful songs made him well again, and the emperor demanded she stay at his side always. But she told him she sang only to give pleasure to those who would listen, and she asked for nothing in return except her freedom. Remember?”

  Violet nodded. A tear dropped from her eyes and landed on her folded hands.

  “We held too tightly to what we were afraid we would lose,” Audrey continued. “I don’t want to live that way anymore. It’s not too late. You were right. We don’t want to live with regret.”

  Violet knew in that moment that she would always be a mother to her daughter, no matter what came between them, and that she was bound to her marriage not just by love but by the vows she had taken. But she could have stepped away from Audrey’s friendship whenever she wanted and there wouldn’t have been a judge or jury to call her back, and Audrey had always been free to do the same.

  Yet they had both chosen, despite their colliding desires, to hold on to the love between them. Year after year after year.

  Some things Violet did need to let go.

  But others she would choose—always—to keep.

  A distant figure appeared on the horizon outside the window. Bert was returning to the villa.

  “And what should we do with that hat back home in the bungalow?” Violet asked as she watched her husband move toward them, his gaze on the sky.

  Audrey smiled. “We’ll keep it, secretly, to remind us of what we promised each other this morning.”

  “That hat is the color of envy and greed,” Violet murmured.

  “Not always. Not today.” Audrey took her hand in a gesture of solidarity. “Today green is the color of life springing up out of the earth, Violet. Today it’s the color of new beginnings.”

  Hollywood

  March 10, 2012

  Christine rings the bungalow’s doorbell and the front door opens. The woman standing in front of her is pretty and seventyish. Her silver hair is fashionably cut, and there is a lilt to her voice that sounds like a foreign accent but it is too subtle for Christine to be sure.