Everything and More

by Jacqueline Briskin

  “Can I talk to you a sec?”

  “Sure thing.” He held up a hand to his friends. “Gotta talk to my Beej,” he said, and put his arm around her, opening the door to the left of the bar. Marylin followed them.

  They were in a medium-size room that seemed larger because its sole furnishings were a maple captain’s chair, a battered maple desk topped with a very old typewriter, and a sagging shabby couch. The Spartan heart that pumped the lifeblood of cash through this exquisitely appointed Tudor mansion.

  “Well?” said Mr. Fernauld.

  “Dad, this is a special friend of mine, Marylin Wace.”

  “Hello, Marylin.” Mr. Fernauld breathed liquor over her. “Has anyone ever told you that you are, to coina phrashe, one gorgeous little shiksa?”

  Marylin blinked.

  BJ, with the floundering embarrassment that she had displayed about the candle and her grandmother’s unknown word, said loudly, “You’re not Jewish, Daddy.”

  “Shush, lower your voice, Beej. You wanta ruin my brilliant career?” He gave a braying laugh.

  Marylin’s mind had gone white with terror. When she had determined to come here, it had been with the idea of bearding a sensitive author, a dignified, thoughtful humanist alone in his grief. Certainly never in her worst terror could she have conjured up this awful, booming drunk in a flowered shirt. Linc was sensitive, fine, decent even in his edgy anger. How could this be his father? Well, he is, she thought.

  “Mr. Fernauld,” she said in low breathiness, editing her rehearsed speech, “I have some things of Linc’s, and I want you to have them. . . .”

  Before she could complete even this truncated preamble, the reddened eyes had gone blank.

  She thrust the box toward him. Across the top she had red-crayoned: “For Joshua Fernauld. Please return to Marylin Wace, 8949 Charleville, Beverly Hills, Calif.”

  As he squinted down at the box, his drunken features contorted. “How dare you come here at a time like this, you nashty little cunt!”

  Marylin, who did not know this word either, could not mistake the distillation of pure animal fury. She stepped back, the box still extended.

  “Daddy!” BJ cried. “Daddy!”

  “You have some sweet friend, BJ, I have to inform you of that. Some sweet little friend. Push into the house at an hour like this, at thish particular hour, to try to get me to read her crap at thish hour, an hour like thish—”

  “Daddy, Marylin’s in my play, she’s a friend, she’s—”

  “All right, Beej, all right.” He patted BJ. Then he turned on Marylin with a look of anguished, venomous hatred, snatching the box roughly from her hands, shoving it into the top drawer of the scarred maple desk. “Don’t hold your breath!”

  He staggered back to his friends, and through the open door she heard him bawl. “‘Nother damn shcript to look at. Jesus God almighty, now, even now they shove their fucking stupid shit at me. Oh God, God, my only begotten son dead . . . Even now . . .” He was sobbing. One of his group slammed a drink at him, and he gulped at it, spilling some down his Hawaiian shirt.

  Marylin’s insides crawled sourly up her throat.

  BJ was staring at her with reproachful eyes. “What made you do that? I didn’t know you were trying to write. You should have come at Dad some other time.”

  “Bathroom?” Marylin gasped.

  BJ led her back into the hall. “There’s the powder room,” she said, pointing.

  The door was locked.

  “Can you wait?” BJ asked without warmth.

  Marylin shook her head.

  BJ gestured up the stairs. “Mine’s the first on the left.”

  On sunlit tiles, Marylin knelt in front of the john, vomiting in heaving, teary waves until only clear liquid came.

  For a long time she remained in that attitude of prayer, and sometimes it happened that the windswept branches mercifully drowned out the party sounds.

  Her body ached as if she had been whipped, the muscles quivering, the nerve endings raw. Never again in her life would Marylin so acutely experience the physical dimension of mental anguish.

  She was seeing Linc as he lay naked with her in the double bed of apartment 2B, seeing the small chickenpox scar above his left eyebrow and the smile that went down on one side, seeing the tenderness in his eyes. Love, she thought. Oh, love . . .

  Love was irrevocably dead somewhere in the depth of the Pacific.

  Rising unsteadily to her feet, she went down the thickly carpeted stairs, clutching the banister. The dining room was now noisy with cheerfully chattering people filling bone-china plates with beautiful food. She let herself out the front door.

  Fifteen minutes later, a Beverly Hills squad car found her wandering along Carmelita; the cops insisted on driving her home.

  NolaBee was waiting. Later she told Marylin that when, telephoning home, she had gotten no answer, she had been terrified, and rather than climb aboard the waiting bus, she had by some miracle found a cruising cab. A ruinously expensive journey.

  “He’s dead,” Marylin said. “Mama, he’s dead.”

  After that she said nothing. She let herself be undressed and put in bed, she let herself be fed bread and milk, she let NolaBee talk soothingly.

  There was no fight left in Marylin Wace.

  11

  “It’s a pretty day,” Marylin said. “Why stick inside?”

  “What a question to put to a registered nurse on duty,” Roy replied. NolaBee, working overtime on this soft, sunny Saturday, and other Saturdays, to pay back the money she had borrowed for the operation, had left Roy in charge of her sister. “Mama said—”

  “Mama’s been coddling me,” Marylin interrupted. “Call Althea.”

  “We had been talking about a good browse,” said Roy wistfully.

  “Then go on.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m healthy as a horse.”

  “A horse ready for the glue factory,” Roy replied, squinting at her sister.

  It was past noon, and Marylin was not dressed yet.

  In her long-sleeved flannel nightgown, she sat on her bed, bare feet tucked underneath her, her hair, unwashed since the operation, straggling around her shoulders. Her face was colorless except for the delicate lavender shadows that made her huge eyes seem more blue than green. (How, Roy asked herself, did her sister manage to summon up such heartrending beauty when anyone else would have looked an absolute witch?) The operation in a Culver City doctor’s office—Roy had not been told a single other detail—had taken place two days after Marylin’s visit to the Fernaulds’ house. April 24. A week ago. NolaBee admitted privately to Roy that she was worried: “My friend was back at work after three days, but Marylin still looks and acts so darn peaky.”

  Marylin had used hundreds of the off-brand pads that NolaBee bought for the three of them. Though she denied having cramps and never complained, she would sit for hours blankly cuddling the hot-water bottle. She moved hesitantly. She shivered. She pushed her food around the plate and—though an ice cream addict—did not even finish the Chapman’s coffee flavor that NolaBee had splurged on to tempt her. But (Roy inquired of herself) was this so weird? After all, the girl had a genuine gold star pinned to her heart, didn’t she? From time to time, Marylin would dash in the john and the water would run for ages before she emerged, lovely skin blotchy, eyes reddened.

  Marylin was watching her. “You and Althea always have a fun time together on Saturdays.”

  Roy looked away, torn. It was true that she and Althea reveled in these warm spring Saturdays. Mornings they strolled on Beverly Drive, parading their new hairdos and makeup, going in and out of Kress’s and Woolworth’s and the Gramophone Shop, lingering over the cosmetics at the cologne-scented counters of Owl and Thrifty. They spent hours in Taffy’s, Yorkshire’s, Nobby Knit, trying on summer clothes. Roy found a sensuous delight in the fresh, virgin smell, the crispness of unworn fabric. A becoming outfit held out infinite hope: if she could only aff
ord to buy this, she would be a new Roy Elizabeth Wace, entitled to popularity and love.

  She and Althea would fortify themselves with slabs of ice-cream cake drenched with hot fudge and mounded with whipped cream at Albert Sheetz or strawberry malteds so thick they had to be eaten with a spoon at Martha Smith’s—Althea paid from her change purse. The afternoons they invariably passed in the wondrous darkness of the Fox Beverly or Warner’s Beverly—again Althea’s treat.

  But, Roy thought. But. Mama left me in charge because there’s not another soul for Marylin to turn to. Old Mr. Hale, landlord of this illegal apartment, was visiting his son in San Diego, and the neighboring burghers stuck up their noses at the gypsy Waces. What if something dire happened? A hemorrhage or something?

  “Does it still hurt?” Roy asked.

  Marylin raised her eyes to the ceiling. “No.”

  “Sez you.”

  “Sez me. Roy, if you want to know, I’m dying to have the place to myself a bit.” Marylin’s soft murmur held a plea.

  After a pause Roy said, “I’ll toodle along.”

  She dialed Althea to make the arrangements, then coated on her makeup.

  “We might drop in at the library. Want any books?”

  “Pick me a novel. Say hi to Althea.” Marylin mouthed a smile so actressy that Roy turned away.

  After Roy had jogged noisily down the steps, Marylin stretched out on the patchwork quilt, which smelled of dust, letting the tears come.

  What a luxury to be able to mourn in solitude.

  Weekdays NolaBee worked graveyard shift so she could be home with Marylin while Roy was at school. Marylin was never alone. Waves of breathlessness would clamp over her, a symptom that she knew was not a sequel to the abortion but the result of her inability to express her grief. Yet when she wept, NolaBee looked drably crushed, Roy embarrassed. So Marylin, empathizing with them for having to live with such a sad sack, held herself in check. Like a polio victim drowning in his own lungs, she was drowning in her unshed, unsheddable tears.

  Linc, forgive me, forgive me, she thought, hugging a pillow to that bleeding, empty part of her.

  The door shook under a series of vigorous knocks.

  She looked up, her wet face startled and guilty as if she had been caught in the midst of some unthinkable depravity.

  “Who is it?” she wavered.

  Another knock.

  “Who’s there?” she shouted.

  “Me. Joshua Fernauld.”

  The resonant, gravelly voice brought back that drunken annihilation in his writing room. Her stomach cringing, she sat up. “Mr. Fernauld,” she called, “I’m not feeling well.”

  “I have them.” His voice was muffled by the door, yet he sounded sober. “The stories.”

  Marylin rubbed her knuckles over her eyes. To regain Linc’s writing had become an obsession with her. “Oh, thank you,” she called. “Would you please leave the box by the door.”

  “We have to talk.”

  Face that monster? Never! “The flu’s pretty bad. I’m very contagious.”

  “You’re giving me the runaround, Marylin.”

  However awful a man he is, she thought, he’s Linc’s father, he must be grieving in his own hideous way. “Be there in a sec,” she called, pulling on her ratty blue chenille robe, tightening the tie, blowing her nose, running a comb through her hair. She moved slowly to the door. With a deep breath, as if stepping onto a stage, she jerked at the cracked porcelain knob.

  Joshua Fernauld held the box crayoned with her name under his left arm. He wore another of those loose flowered shirts over his thick torso, his tanned, creased face shone, and the heady sweetness of suntan lotion surrounded him. His eyes glinted like polished dark stones as he stared intently at her.

  “I do appreciate this, Mr. Fernauld.” She reached for the box.

  He did not relinquish it. “I thought I was coming in to talk,” he said.

  “I really do feel pretty rotten.”

  “Honey, I’ve been reading these since three-thirty this morning. I’m not about to be turned away.” The command in his tone and the confident vitality of his stance brooked no denials. Linc had said, Big Joshua always gets his way. He continued to stare at her, a physical impact emanating from those eyes. She held the door open for him. The contrast between his impeccable mansion and this messy apartment washed over her and she bent to retrieve Roy’s nightgown and one of NolaBee’s rayon stockings.

  “Don’t do that,” he said. The folding chair creaked under his weight. “I despise fussing.”

  A dish caked with eggs was set carelessly on the window ledge, and she carried it to the makeshift kitchen.

  “For Christ’s sake, sit down.” He stared at her until she obeyed. “You’re Rain, aren’t you?”

  Her throat clogged, and she looked down at her hands. “Sort of, I guess.”

  “Before we go any further, I was informed, informed good and loud by my Beej, that I was the epitome of obnoxiousness the other day. I was loaded, sodden, blind, but I do remember being damn primitive.” The gravelly voice emerged more quietly.

  Marylin divined that Joshua Fernauld was apologizing. “I understand,” she sighed. “It’s okay.”

  He touched the box. “Damn fine stories, marvelous work.”

  “I think so too.”

  “Only a fine and sensitive young man could have written them. He was that. A fine, decent young man, Rain—”

  “Marylin.”

  He fished out a crumpled handkerchief, blowing his prominent nose with vigor. “This war—I can’t disassociate myself from my anger at the waste—the barbaric, outrageous waste. Linc was a master of the language—Marylin, he was good.” For several minutes Joshua orated about Linc’s stories and poetry, then blew his nose vigorously again. “I haven’t been able to talk about him before. Not to Ann—my wife—or BJ. Anyone.” He paused. “You know that story, ‘Leave’?”

  “‘Home Leave.’” It was a brief stream-of-consciousness piece about a pilot and his disastrous return to his calm and prosperous home.

  “Yes. ‘Home Leave.’ He talks about his ambivalence toward me.” Tears welled in the big man’s eyes. “Christ, imagine him being ashamed to be jealous! The innocence and purity of it! Didn’t he realize my goal was to have everybody including him worship at the shrine of the great I am?”

  “Mr. Fernauld—”

  “Joshua.”

  “I can’t call you that!” she burst out in bald anger, then held her sodden handkerchief over her mouth. How could she be hollering at this overwhelmingly superior, older, famous monster? His cheeks momentarily quivered. She added in a consoling murmur, “Envy’s really a form of admiration. Linc admired you. He wasn’t able to tell you. He felt too overpowered, I guess.”

  “The conundrum of fatherhood, the endless, insoluble conundrum. Even when you don’t intend to be casting a huge shadow, you do.” Joshua got up, going to a window, rapping his knuckles on a dusty pane. “I was only twenty-three when he was born, a funny, pink, helpless creature with my mouth, my eyes, and later, my schnoz. Here was another Joshua, but one that would have the things I missed out on, a big house, clothes, riding lessons, tennis lessons, swimming lessons, a convertible. The works. I was the classically proud father, yet it cut deep into the vitals, when it became obvious that he didn’t need anything from me to make him a finer man than I am. Sweeter, kinder.”

  He spoke with such despair that again she found herself consoling. “Maybe you were like that when you were young.”

  “Me? Oh, that’s rich, Marylin. You don’t know how rich it is. You’re looking at a gutter rat out of Hell’s Kitchen. If I hadn’t discovered writing, I’d’ve made one spectacular hood. Been head of the Mob by now—or in the electric chair. From the word go, a bastard, a driving, pushy bastard, greedy to grab the best life could offer, the finest liquor, the most beautiful women, the biggest houses, the flashiest cars, the warmest companionship of the richest and most famous, the goddamn
hottest career. To you alone I confess that I joined the Party not because my heart bled for capitalist enchained humanity, but because in those days you sold novels and earned hotshot reviews by being Red in tooth and claw.”

  There was a pull and magnetism, a power in the deep, rough voice as it rolled out a confessional of what she would later learn were routine failings for a sizable minority of the Beverly Hills population.

  “Linc loved you, Mr. Fernauld, he told me that.”

  “He did?” Joshua turned. Tears wet his cheeks. “Jesus, how I loved him.”

  “He knew that.”

  “How? We were exact opposites, he unassuming, honorable, aberrationally modest about his accomplishments . . . If you only knew how I was prodding him to blow his own horn! Trying to get him to be like his old man. As if the goddamn world needed two Joshua Fernaulds!” He rested his big, grayhaired head against the window. “How do you go on living, how do you keep going through all the stupid, shitty motions?” He started to sob, a rusty, clumsy sound that he cut off with a loud blowing of his nose. “Honey, would you happen to have some booze around?”

  “I’m sorry, no.”

  “Not so much as cooking sherry?”

  Marylin shook her head: even in her misery the ludicrousness of NolaBee preparing meals with elegant wine sauces brought a faint curve of a smile to the beautifully scrolled lips.

  “There is pain, such pain,” Joshua said.

  “I know,” she sighed. “Mr. Fernauld, I could fix some tea.”

  “Tea? God help me, tea! My mother was forever brewing pots, the same leaves two or three times, to ease her journey through this vale of tears.”

  Taking this as acceptance, Marylin lit a match to the front burner, filled the kettle.

  “When Linc came home,” said Joshua, who had followed her to the kitchen, “that first leave after he was downed, he was jumpy as hell. All raw nerves. He certainly captured it in ‘Home Leave.’ Before the war, he’d argued back, but in general he’d been a thoughtful kid. A hard-core reader. Yeah, an unregenerate bookworm. Once I caught him with my copy of Ulysses. I told him I wasn’t about to let any son of mine lie about the house turning into a bookworm faggot, then gave him a good, swift kick in the ass—physically.”