Acts of Love

by Judith Michael

  By the time he stopped, almost two hours had gone by, the photographer had long since left, and Marian Lodge had changed her tape twice and filled her notepad. Not bad, Luke thought when she left. He had no desire to see his picture or his quotes in yet another magazine, but if profiles such as this one led to larger audiences, longer runs of his plays, more great scripts sent to him from known or unknown playwrights, then the two hours had been well spent. In fact, he would do anything within reason to help his plays and the theater in general.

  / wal^e up and help my mother around the house... but then I thin about getting to the theater and being on stage . . . and everything is beautiful again.

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  Jessica again. Odd how her words, from only those few letters that he had read, kept weaving through his thoughts. But the words fit his life, slipping smoothly into whatever he was doing. Well, we're both so deeply a part of the theater, he thought. Or at least she was. Good God, how she must miss it. The way my grandmother felt when she moved to Italy. Jessica must have written about that. I'll fmd out, one of these days, when I have a chance to get back to her letters.

  He ate a sandwich at his desk and worked through the afternoon. He liked his office: the serene quiet that was accentuated by faint sounds of traffic from the street eleven stories below, the cool black, gray and blue furnishings his decorator had chosen, one book-lined wall and two walls covered with photographs of the stars with whom he had worked, and of presidents, senators, prime ministers, kings and queens, all standing beside him, smiling into the camera, or shaking his hand, or bestowing a medal or award, or presenting him with a gift after he had visited a country to oversee the staging of a play. He knew it was faintly childish to exhibit the photographs—splashing his importance all over his walls—but he told himself he did it to impress visitors, and so each season there were new ones to add to the collection. He worked contentedly through the afternoon, mostly undisturbed, letting his secretary screen his calls, until, as he was about to leave, Claudia called.

  "Dinner tomorrow night.^" she asked brightly. "I haven't seen you for ages."

  "You'll see me tonight, at the benefit."

  "With five hundred other people in the St. Regis ballroom. Luke, don't be coy. You know I meant just the two of us."

  He glanced at his calendar. "I'm going to Joe and Ilene's cocktail party tomorrow night, and then to Monte Gerhart's. We could have a drink before that, if you'd like."

  "Luke, I need to talk to you; there are some things I can't handle. . . . Why are you doing this to me?"

  "All right, tomorrow night, but not dinner; we'll have drinks at Pompeii. Eleven o'clock. I'll meet you there."

  "You could pick me up."

  "Claudia, it's half a block from your building. Meet me there and I'll walk home with you afterward. Make a list of what you want to ask me; you're always forgetting something."

  "MaJ^e a list? I don't plan my dates as if they're board meetings; life

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  should be spontaneous. Anyway, I won't forget; it's mostly about money."

  And Claudia never forgets anything involving money, Luke thought as he hung up; she still talks about the time she had to pay for dinner at the Terrace because I'd left my wallet backstage. That was before we were married and she was on her best behavior, so she paid with a smile and a little joke about absentminded directors, but she never forgot it.

  His limousine was waiting downstairs and as he sat back in its cool interior, his driver turned to scrutinize him. Arlen O'Day had been Constance Bernhardt's driver for thirty years and had watched Luke grow up before going to work for him when Constance went to Italy, and with all his Irish intensity he took over as Constance's stand-in, watching over Luke, worrying about him, offering advice. He studied Luke's face for a moment before starting the car and pulling out into traffic. "Bad day, Mr. Cameron? Or just the heat? It's a killer, the heat; God must be punishing somebody, but I don't know why the rest of us have to get it, too."

  Luke smiled. "I don't think it's punishment for anyone. And I didn't have a bad day; it was a pretty good one, at least the afternoon." He fell silent, thinking about his day. Indoors, all of it, arguing with Monte Ger-hart, giving Kent Home a lesson about the theater, probably the first of many, fending off a persistent interviewer, dealing with his ex-wife, who insisted on calling it a date when Luke agreed to take her out for a drink, having his most normal conversations with a taxi driver from Pakistan and a limousine driver from Dublin. Suddenly he felt stifled, wanting to run. Run where? He didn't know. Somewhere. To find something. But he had no idea what he wanted or where to look for it.

  Forty-five years old, he thought. Healthy, financially secure, internationally known, admired, maybe envied. Unmarried. Unattached.

  "Shall I wait, Mr. Cameron?" Arlen asked as he turned onto Fifth Avenue.

  "Yes. I'll be about half an hour." I'm attached to Arlen, he thought ruefully: the only person who always waits for me. Good God, that sounds maudlin. It's the heat, as everyone says. Or the beginning of a new play; for me that's always the hardest time, when nothing yet has a shape, when I have a manuscript but no actors, no characters coming to life, nothing to mold. I'm always tense at the beginning of a project; it doesn't mean a thing.

  But the truth was, there was something else that he wanted, something he hadn't achieved, and even though he could not define it, he often felt a

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  longing that crept up on him, as just now, taking him by surprise. It always faded, but it always came back.

  Across the street from the Metropolitan Museum, Arlen pulled up at a limestone building festooned with stone gargoyles and rearing dragons and wrought-iron balconies that stretched the width of the building at each floor. A doorman reached for the limousine door as Luke opened it. "Well, sir, Mr. Cameron, it's a hot one, and hotter tomorrow, the radio says." Luke wondered how many times that day he had said those words to other residents of the building, how many times he had ducked inside for a breath of cool air and a swig of something iced, how many times he had mopped his face and changed his white gloves to keep them pristine. We all have stifling days, he thought, but his own restlessness, a kind of urgency, still gripped him, and he wished, as the second doorman took him to his penthouse in the self-service elevator that the residents insisted be run by a doorman, that he could stay home that night and try to figure out what was wrong with him.

  But there were almost no nights that he could stay home, and so he greeted his butler, who told him that it was exceedingly hot outside but that the apartment was blessedly cool, swiftly took a shower, shaved and changed into his tuxedo and returned to the street. Arlen pulled up just as he emerged and, without being told, drove to the glass-and-steel tower on Madison Avenue where Tricia Delacorte was coming toward him across the lobby. She kissed Luke lightly as her doorman closed the car door behind her. "My, you do look handsome; your hair is different."

  "Still wet from the shower." He looked at her with pleasure, admiring her cultivated beauty and the expensive perfection of her ball gown that exposed a good part of her creamy skin between puffed sleeves in a rainbow of colors. She had been born Teresa Pshevorski on the west side of Chicago, but at seventeen, newly arrived in Los Angeles, she got her first job as a maid, as Tricia Delacorte, a name from a novel long since forgotten. She had planned to marry a famous actor or director she met while serving hors d'oeuvres at parties, but the years went by and it never happened, and one day, bored and angry, she wrote an article for a neighborhood newspaper describing the scandals of fictitious characters as if they were major names in Hollywood: the high and mighty who ate and drank but ignored the maid. Her writing was lively and racy and attracted the attention of the editor of the Los Angeles Times, who called her in.

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  By then she had had two face-Hfts and could talk like
an insider, using the storehouse of gossip and movie lore she had overheard in years of parties. She talked her way to a column in the Los Angeles Times, which was soon picked up by a national syndicate, and then she was offered a column in The Sophisticate, a glossy weekly magazine for those who thought they were sophisticated even if others did not. Soon she no longer needed fictitious names because she was invited everywhere and her telephone rang constantly with tips on impending marriages, divorces, births, the end or beginning of affairs, a son or daughter on drugs, a fortune lost or made, an engagement broken, a criminal indictment in the works. The most enticing appeared in her column with names in boldface. Occasionally she ran a blind item: "Who ducked out of Spago the other night rather than answer questions about the agreement in the works between his wife, his mistress and his two teenage children?" She was the sole arbiter of whether such questions ever were answered, or were left to dangle in the steamy air.

  By the time Luke met her, she divided her week between apartments in Los Angeles and New York, collecting tidbits about actors, actresses, directors and producers who now were scattered as widely as Aspen, the plains of Montana, and Sharon, Connecticut. She had never used an item about Luke.

  "Well, they did it again," she said to him in the limousine, sliding along the leather seat until her thigh was against his. "You'd think they'd have some sense of responsibility."

  "Should I know what you're talking about?" he asked.

  "I did tell you. Joe and Ilene Fassbrough were quarreling at LAX when they came back from Europe; they fought all the way through customs. Well, last night they had a major blowup at Freddy Parkington's dinner—stopped the entree from being served for a good ten minutes— and then Joe actually told me I should ignore the whole thing, that he had the flu and was feverish and said a lot of things he didn't mean. But these people have a responsibility, you know: the rest of the world looks up to them and sickness is no reason to absolutely lose your standards of behavior. If he really was sick. He looked fine to me. But of course men always look wonderful in tuxedos."

  "Did you say he was sick in today's column?"

  "Of course not; I said that he and Ilene stopped the entree from being

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  served. It's a much livelier item, Luke, you know that; it would be a wonderful scene in a play. I wanted to say something about people who let down their social class by behaving badly, but that really doesn't belong in the column. Maybe in The Sophisticate next month."

  Luke sat back, his arm along the seat behind her shoulders. "What social class is this?"

  "Ours. Oh, Luke, don't be tiresome. You know what I mean."

  "You mean that Joe and Ilene Fassbrough, who are two of the most asinine people I know, and dull besides, are role models for an upper class."

  "They spend a lot of money, people recognize them and like to be seen with them, and they're invited everywhere. It's more than upper class, Luke, it's like royalty, if we had royalty. Well, we don't, but Americans really would love it if we did—why else do you think every magazine with Charles and Di on the cover sells out in five minutes? Instead we have people like Joe and Ilene, who are movie stars and who do all those royal things like sponsoring benefits and getting their pictures in the paper and buying a lot of art. Readers love to read about them. And if you think they're asinine and dull, why are you going to their house tomorrow night?"

  "A good question. They've invited a playwright from the former Yugoslavia; I've heard of him and I want to meet him."

  "Invite him for dinner at your house."

  "It's easier to meet him at the Fassbroughs' and see if we have anything to talk about."

  "Why do you think they're asinine and dull?"

  "Because they prattle about money, and measure people by money, and because they're exhibitionists, which I find infantile."

  "But they're famous."

  "And you write about famous people, so you certainly should write about them. But as if they're royalty? You don't really believe that."

  "I believe they're as important as royalty, and that's what counts."

  He shrugged. He knew that Tricia's enormous success was due in large part to just that sort of serious naivete, her pure belief that the people she documented—most of whom were shallow and unimportant— were as newsworthy as royalty, their doings every bit as interesting to her readers as the machinations of presidents, generals and crooks.

  And he knew that that was exactly what he asked of his audiences: that

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  they suspend their disbelief and let themselves be swept into the worlds he created. All his work as a director was toward that end: to bring to life the work of the playwright so that audiences responded to it with a pure belief in its reality and importance. For that reason he understood Tricia and even sympathized with her. She had the kind of belief that children have in fairy tales and adults have in fantasies that make their lives tolerable by keeping everything on the surface, avoiding depth and complexity. Together with her blond beauty and endless store of anecdotes, that had kept him amused and interested for almost four months.

  He liked her fame, too. He always chose to be with beautiful, well-known women and he was used to attracting photographers, and the night at the St. Regis was no different. For Luke, the whole evening—the auction to raise money for a cause he had not bothered to notice, the dinner and dancing, the fragments of conversation snatched from the air as groups gathered, broke apart and re-formed—seemed to float on the attention that surrounded him and Tricia. It was a way of getting through the evening without feeling boredom or impatience.

  Without feeling anything. The words flashed and were gone, but they left him feeling as he had in his limousine earlier that long day: stifled, waiting for something and trying to figure out what it was.

  He danced with Tricia, made conversation, bid on and won three items in the silent auction, and engaged in a fierce battle in the live auction for a sculpture he had determined to own. He won there, too, and the crowd broke into applause. In the limousine, he gave Tricia the necklace he had bought in the silent auction, and she cuddled against him. "Are you getting serious about me, Luke.?"

  "As serious as you are about me," he said easily.

  She frowned. After a moment, she said, "I think someday I might like to marry you. I'm just not sure. I think you'd be hard to live with."

  "You're probably right." The limousine stopped in front of her building; Luke sent Arlen home and he and Tricia went upstairs.

  "What does that mean?" she asked. "That I'm probably right. What does that mean?"

  "That I would most likely be very hard to live with." He walked with easy familiarity through her living room, a large, coldly modern square space filled with clusters of wood-framed glass tables, white couches and armchairs, marble floors with Stark geometric rugs and a scattering of min-

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  imalist paintings on the white walls. Luke disliked it all, finding it neither beautiful nor comfortable, but a major designer had done it for a sum of money that even Tricia found excessive and so she defended it vigorously and wore bright colors that made her stand out like a brilliant flower in a black-and-white photograph. Luke went to the bar and made Tricia a drink and she sipped it while he made one for himself. Then he sat beside her on the couch and took her in his arms. "It's not something we need to talk about now."

  She held herself slightly away from him. "Do you want to get married again?"

  "Probably not."

  "Luke, you keep using those words. Probably. Most likely. Aren't you sure.''"

  "Probably not," he said, smiling, and kissed her, pulling her into his arms and feeling her move pliantly against him. Her tongue tasted of the martini he had made her; her skin became flushed beneath his hands, as supple as warm, polished taffy. She led Luke to the bedroom and when they lay on the silk coverlet of
her bed she fit herself beneath him with rippling movements that came from her own experience and her familiarity with him. So skilled was she that she blurred into anonymity. In sex, as in the times they were apart, Luke never spoke her name; in fact, he barely thought about her. He did not think that was a bad thing or a good one; it was as if their moves had been scripted—they could have been any two people in bed after an evening on the town—but he was aware of Tricia's skill at making him feel that whatever he wanted she would do: she would bend and sway and stretch and open to him however he wished because at this moment nothing in the world was important to her but pleasing him. And that was enough to make him dismiss their conversation, and if Tricia remembered it or let it intrude on the next few hours, she never said a word to Luke. As far as he was concerned, marriage was as far from her thoughts as his.

  But when he walked home just before dawn, striding through the oddly quiet streets, his restlessness returned. When he let himself into his silent apartment, he went to his study and sat at his desk and thought of reading for half an hour before going to sleep: a few scenes from The Magician or a new novel. He did neither of those things. Instead, he reached for Constance's box of letters, and pulled one out at random.

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  Dearest Constance, I can't telieve we're in anotner play togetner! Do you know it's exactly two years since we met? Ana I reel just tne same as I aid tnen: I wake up ana the world is nrignt and exciting, sort of nolding its breatn, waiting for evening, wnen I'll he with you. I've been working so hard—I've hardly seen anybody at all because I'm trying to do everything you told me to do. I'm taking classes in ballet and modern dance and speech. When you wrote, "You must learn about your own body, every movement you make, and about your voice, how it sounds to others, how you can control and vary it, how the shape of your mouth changes when you speak with anger or joy, or with an accent ... if you learn all this, when you are on stage, you will be in command of it, " I shivered when I read that; the idea of being in command . . . Anyway, I'm also in a yoga class— I guess it is discipline of mind and body, the way you said it was, but mostly it's a lot of fun—and I'm reading lots of biographies and autobiographies, which you also said I should do, to understand all kinds of people in all hinds of situations. With all that, I'm much better than I was two years ago; I can feel it and it makes up for being alone so much. I hope you think I'm better. If I am, it's all because of you.