Everything and More

by Jacqueline Briskin

  “Darling,” she murmured.

  His eyes were wet, and so were hers.

  There was a discreet rap on wood. “Marylin,” Tippi called. “I’ve brought you the orange juice.”

  Linc, without a farewell, opened the door, edging out as the makeup woman entered.

  Marylin paid no attention to whatever it was that the Danish accent said. Her sweetly triste tears were as one with her humming joy.

  He’s alive, she thought.

  33

  The scene scheduled for the morning was shot in the afternoon. Under hot klieg lights, France’s absolute monarch by divine right, Louis XV, for the first time meets his domain’s most beautiful woman, who subjugates him with a smile and a flicker of her false eyelashes. Marylin played up to Tyrone Power (Louis) with such tender joyousness that the director called it a take and moved on to the next setup. At home, Billy introduced her to his hamster, now christened Rat, and she rested her glowing cheek against the smooth flat pelt. A French film that Joshua wanted to see was screening at the Academy theater. Afterward in the lobby the Fernaulds ran into friends, and Marylin’s soft, husky little laugh rang.

  At home, after they had looked in on Billy’s sleep, Joshua said, “What gives, Marylin? Has good Saint Nicholas arrived early?”

  He embraced her.

  Her exultant euphoria dropped away. This was her reality, a husband whose substantial flesh smelled of suntan lotion, Chivas Regal, and not-unpleasant sweat. Joshua, father of three children: her beloved, her best friend, and her son, whose woolly blankets she had just pulled up. Normally the vital authority of Joshua’s advances aroused her willy-nilly, but tonight his purposeful kisses were as unerotic as a row of X’s on the bottom of a postcard. She pulled away, moving into their room. Following, he reached for her again. “Mmm?”

  “Not tonight. I, uhh . . . Joshua, I had a little dizzy spell this morning.”

  He pulled back, scrutinizing her. “Dammit, why didn’t you tell me? I’d never have let you go out tonight. Dizzy spell? What do you mean, dizzy spell?”

  He’d hear about the faint sooner or later. “I . . . well, I blacked out.”

  Joshua’s heavy face went ashen below its surface tan. The slightest ailment of his gorgeous angelpuss terrified him—hadn’t he already lost one wife to catastrophic cellular multiplication? “Blacked out? Jesus frigging Christ!”

  “It happened during makeup. Low blood sugar, Doc Green said.”

  “That quack, that horse’s ass!”

  “Don’t get excited, Joshua. It was nothing.”

  “That money-grubbing, prick-face Garrison!” Joshua’s voice shook. His poker friendship with Garrison had evaporated under the Magnum insistence that Marylin be tied to every fine-print clause in that skinflint original contract. “Are you telling me that the bastard kept right on with the shooting schedule after you fainted?”

  “Joshua, I rested all morning.” Actressy syrup. “It was the ballroom sequence, and they had two hundred extras on the payroll.”

  “Goddammit, Marylin! Isn’t it enough Magnum’s got you at a pippy assistant director’s salary? Do they have to squeeze the life’s blood out of you, too? I’m calling Garrison this minute!”

  “All I need is a good night’s sleep—”

  Joshua was already dialing. While she brushed her teeth, she could hear the rumbling voice laying down the law to Magnum’s top dog.

  He slammed into the bathroom. “You’re sleeping late tomorrow.”

  “But the extras—”

  “You’re always in a hot sweat about other people’s problems, Marylin. You’re too nice, too damn considerate. Let Art Garrison worry about his own frigging costs. I’m here to watch over you. And you’re staying home!”

  When the lights were out, his forceful bluster ended, he kissed her cheek tenderly and rolled onto his own side of the big bed rather than making his usual invasion of her space.

  On her back with her arms taut at her sides, she listened until her husband’s breathing changed to measured gusts.

  Then, turning onto her stomach, she swam in this morning’s happenings, buffeted by alternating waves of grief that she and Linc must exist forever separated and that incredible rapture—he’s alive, alive.

  The curtains were showing a faint light when Billy tiptoed noisily into the room, crawling between her and Joshua. She put her arms around her son, burying her nose in his petal-soft cheek. They both drowsed.

  Joshua commanded breakfast in bed for her before going forth to the brutal internecine warfare that was a studio story conference. When Billy returned from his thrice-weekly nursery school, he stamped his Keds in fury at his father’s absence. Joshua stayed home because of Billy. Having given up directing entirely, he refused to write at the studio unless, as today, there was an urgent battle over a first draft. Indeed, he would desert his often-renovated typewriter in favor of excursions with the kid. He held Billy on his lap and let him kibbitz poker games—several of the card players also had layered families, but none was quite so bananas about his autumnal offspring as Joshua. The amused cronies encouraged Billy to smart-mouth them all. Billy was, as his old man often remarked with a doting smile, the archetypical Beverly Hills movie brat.

  To assuage her little boy’s disappointment, Marylin suggested a mother-son outing.

  “Where?” he asked.

  Marylin honestly considered it random chance when she replied, “The apartment where I used to live.”

  “And then Wil Wright’s?” Billy demanded.

  “Of course.”

  She steered along quiet Charleville, blinking behind her dark glasses. How was it possible that these small houses with their tiny strips of greenery had once seemed to her as out of reach as an enclave of royal palaces? Outside the garage with its rickety staircase leading to a flat-roofed, illegal apartment, she stopped, leaning over to unlock the other door for Billy, who scrabbled out from the backseat, tugging down on his cowboy hat.

  Not until she herself got out of the car did she see Linc, his hands thrust into the pockets of his gray flannel slacks, his black hair stirring in the breeze. An aeon ago he had thus gazed at her in the early-morning gloom, and now her mind obliterated the rush of a gardener’s hose, the smell of just-mowed grass, Billy. Once again an impecunious, unhappy Beverly High bobby-soxer and a taut-nerved Navy pilot were being drawn together as if by gravitational force.

  Then she heard Billy shouting, “Mommy, come on! I’m going upstairs.”

  The railings had broad interstices through which a small child might easily tumble. “Wait for me!” she yelled.

  “Billy?” Linc asked quietly.

  Her face grew hot, as though she had maneuvered her little boy to an assignation. “Who else?” she snapped. “What are you doing here?”

  He rapped on the hood of a dark blue Chevy coupe. “I rented this.”

  “Oh.”

  “I had no idea you’d come too, Marylin,” he said very quietly.

  “You were right, we can’t see each other,” she said, wishing she didn’t sound both feisty and shaken.

  A convertible swerved onto Charleville. Billy, bouncing up and down impatiently, was on the sidewalk, but his movements zigged with swift unpredictability. She swooped on him.

  Holding the squirming child tightly, she said, “Billy, this is Mr. . . . Mr. Herz.”

  “Harz,” Linc said. “Hello, Billy.”

  Billy said, “Howdee, pardner.”

  Linc made a swift gesture from his belt to point his index finger at Billy. “Draw!”

  Still in his mother’s grip, Billy, too, aimed an imaginary pistol.

  Linc staggered backward, clutching at his chest. “You got me.”

  Billy laughed excitedly. “My dad does just like that!”

  Color blotched Marylin’s cheeks. She set the child down.

  “Mr. Harz, we’re going up to where my mommy lived. Come on.”

  Linc climbed the creaking steps with them. Billy reach
ed for his hand.

  “This is far enough,” Marylin said. “We don’t want to disturb anyone.”

  Billy said, “Oh, who cares about a dumb apartment? We’ve been here a hundred hundred times. Anyway, Coraleen and Percy’s is a million million times better!”

  At this mention of the faithful Fernauld family retainers, Linc’s expression grew purposefully blank.

  Billy pulled at his hand. “Come along. Now we’re going to Wil Wright’s.”

  Marylin turned to Linc. However tormenting the itch of being with both half-brothers, the thought of Linc getting in his rented car and driving off shriveled her heart. Briefly she lifted her dark glasses to look at him with her naked eyes. “Do.”

  He followed them in his rented car to Wil Wright’s.

  There were no other customers in the red-and-white-striped ice-cream parlor. They sat near the counter at one of the plate-size marble tabletops, Billy ordering a sundae for the delight of spooning hot fudge from his own individual pitcher, Linc a chocolate soda, and she a scoop of coffee flavor. Wil Wright’s ice cream, buttery rich, clung to the roof of the palate, and Marylin, an ice-cream addict from way back, was forced to ration her visits—the camera exacts outlandish retribution for every ounce on a small woman. This was a rare treat, but with Linc sitting so close that she could feel the warmth emanating from his thigh, she let most of her scoop melt thickly into the footed metal dish.

  Billy, bored from sitting with his silent, moony elders, raced energetically around the little tables and spindly wire chairs while the two short, full-faced waitresses—they were alike enough to be sisters—beamed indulgently, having already secured Marylin’s autograph on red-and-white-striped paper napkins.

  “My mother and Roy are away,” Marylin said without premeditation. “They live at 114 North Crescent. Tomorrow afternoon, I’m dropping over to see about the mail.”

  “One-one-four?”

  “The house next to Ralphs,” she murmured. “I’ll be there around two.”

  34

  She got there just after one.

  NolaBee and Roy had departed on Monday for an automobile trip to Yosemite, leaving the front room bestrewn with proof of their last-minute changes in packing. Marylin scooped up her mother’s things, which smelled faintly of tobacco smoke, carrying them to the front bedroom. Blushing, she made the double bed, changing the linen; then she returned to put away Roy’s pale blue cashmere sweater and raglan-sleeved coat.

  Around the vanity mirror where Roy had once tucked crazily posed snapshots of herself and Althea Cunningham were arranged group photographs of the Kappa Zetas. Roy’s wholehearted, eager smile and short, resiliently curly hair jumped out from the conventional shoulder-length pageboys and primly curved lips. The Kappa Zeta house was relentlessly mediocre, and Marylin could never sort out the sorority sisters, although she had attended several “Relative Teas” (suffering the oblique, condemning glances of curiosity) and also thrown Sunday barbecues for Roy’s closer friends.

  As she straightened the photograph of Roy in her mortarboard and graduation robe, Marylin heard the rap on the front door.

  Her head lifted and she was momentarily incapable of movement; then, flushing deeply, she ran to answer.

  Wordless, she and Linc embraced in the dim living room, straining their bodies close, a fiercely shared urgency to annihilate the years of separation, to forget the shroud over their future, to exist in this one instant that was theirs alone. With an inarticulate whimper, Marylin drew him toward NolaBee’s room.

  Here, beside the recently made bed, they again clung together, his hands moving downward to clasp the peach-shaped outlines of what the Industry described as a “small but very fine ass.” Marylin was shaking and breathing unevenly, not only with desire but also with a complex longing to return to a mythical island inhabited by love, youth, unfettered joy. The drawn curtains did not quite meet, and a finger of sunlight drew a narrow line across their clinch.

  That incandescent line touched their naked joined bodies, the far-off bells of the Good Humor truck sounded against their unhearing ears, and they rediscovered each other.

  * * *

  “Mine?” Linc asked, tracing the small mole near the hollow of her navel.

  “You made it famous.”

  His hand, no longer demanding, curved over the luminous flesh. “Famous!” he asked. “You’ve lost me.”

  “Remember? It’s in Island.”

  “Oh, that. Never read it.”

  She smiled.

  “Marylin, I dashed off those stories and mailed them.”

  “And since you got back, you haven’t been able to locate a copy?” The same soft, disbelieving smile curved her lovely mouth. “After all, you’re never in a library.”

  Linc, as Dean Harz, had become a librarian at Detroit’s pillared main branch.

  “I’ve been petrified to look.”

  “You’re what you wanted to be. A fine writer.”

  “Writer? I wanted to best Dad, that’s all.” He raised up on his elbow. “You’re an actress—I saw that the afternoon I barged in on you treading the dusty boards of dear old Beverly. You not only have the magic, you have the dedication. I have neither. I am not a writer. I, am, not, a, writer.”

  “You only won the Pulitzer.”

  “It’s not all that unique for inspired youth to bring forth one novel. You’ll see. There’ll be a half-dozen by guys who were in the war, followed up by a mountain of—”

  The telephone rang.

  They both jumped guiltily. It’s Joshua, Marylin thought in sudden irrational terror, although this afternoon her husband had taken Billy to the San Fernando Valley Stable, where the little boy would jog circles on his stout Shetland pony until both mount and rider were exhausted. Her voice quavered as she said, “Probably for Roy—she’s the popularity kid.”

  But the jangling had shoved Joshua into the bed with them, and he remained there after the unanswered phone ceased to ring.

  “I wish,” she said with a tremulous sigh, “I wish Billy were yours.”

  Linc kissed her ear. “Offhand, I’d have said you wouldn’t have changed a hair on that tough little head.” He paused. “We’ll have to find a place.”

  “I’ll drive myself to work and use the car at lunch. There’s a motel on Sunset, the Lanai, about six blocks from the studio. . . .” She halted, aware she must be blushing.

  “Dad’s place?” There was a well-practiced anger in the question: Linc’s jealousy was a sturdy weed growing amid his filial ambivalences.

  “We went there—It was after your mother died, Linc. Let’s find someplace else.”

  After a moment he said, “I’ll scout around.”

  * * *

  In the immediate vicinity of Magnum, there were no other motels with the Lanai’s prime virtue, a stucco wall that hid day-rate fornicators from keen-eyed drivers. So the Lanai it was.

  It had always been Marylin’s habit to lunch in her trailer on the set, so she fabricated an excuse about medical treatments. The two rumors promulgated at Magnum were that she was seeing a shrink or getting boffed, and since she was famed as—mirabile dictu—a faithful wife, the shrink won hands down.

  The high-voltage impatience of the industry men who surrounded her was absent in Linc. The war and prison camp, he said, had beaten the rat-race hurry out of him. If a difficult take kept her, she would find him waiting in the room (they always got number five), absorbed in one of those small paperback books that he carried with him everywhere. She realized in his unruffled presence how much she shrank from those harried, voraciously ambitious bigwigs, all of them so driven.

  Marylin felt less guilt about her fall from grace than she would have imagined. By some mental sleight, she disconnected the anonymous motel room from her work, her family, from Joshua and Billy. She had returned to a past where she was her truest self, a quiet, lovely girl who wanted only the man she loved to love her.

  Another surprising revelation was that adulte
ry intensified her affection for Joshua. She had to bite back effervescent confidences to her husband: after all, wouldn’t Joshua, Linc’s father, be overjoyed to know the truth?

  * * *

  “I’ve booked reservations,” Linc said. “My train leaves Union Station on June twenty-ninth.”

  “The twenty-ninth? Linc, that’s tomorrow!” She had just showered and, naked, was combing back her hair. Snatching up her towel, she covered herself as if he had introduced a stranger into the room. Linc, already dressed, lay on the bed watching her.

  “There’s something to remember,” he said with forced whimsicality. “When you blush, your breasts turn the palest pink.”

  “Do you have to get back. Are you worried about your job?” He had told her that he’d telephoned his immediate superior about a particularly tenacious California virus.

  “Haven’t you noticed? I’m way out of my depth, and not treading water anymore.”

  “I want to be with you all the time.”

  “That’s it, in a nutshell.”

  Bending, she drew on a nylon. “Linc,” she said, “we could tell Joshua. He would understand—”

  “Marylin, Marylin, if you think old Dad would welcome home the prodigal and pronounce his blessings over us, you are crazy.”

  “He would be delirious you’re alive and—”

  “Sure he would. Unfortunately, alive, I covet what he has. He’d pull out all stops. You’d be shoved into one of those messes that ruin a career. No more Rain Fairburn.”

  “I can live without her.”

  “And Billy?”

  “Joshua would give me Billy,” she whispered.

  “In your married life, have you ever seen him offer his congratulations as the graceful loser?”

  Would her husband sink to using their beloved little kid? He might, she thought, it’s possible. He never sounds retreat. She sighed unhappily.

  “So then we’re agreed about the potential here for wrecking your life.” Linc’s lips were an alarming white. “We’ve managed without each other for enough years to know it’s feasible.”

  As she tucked her blouse into her full cotton skirt, she began to cry. Crossing the room, he put his arms loosely around her, and they swayed together like two orphans at their parents’ graveside.