“To my knowledge, he’s never cheated on me.”
“Why would he? You’re his goddess, it’s written all over him. Now, why he fell for his son’s girl, well, there’s something only a good psychiatrist could figure out.”
It was after five when she felt up to navigating the hundred feet to the motel office with its exterior telephone booth. Linc produced a handful of silver, then strolled to the sandy ledge to look down at breakers, the kind of tactful consideration about personal privacy to which Joshua never succumbed.
Percy answered the phone.
After the greetings, Marylin said, “Get Billy for me, will you, Percy?”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Fernauld,” Percy said embarrassedly. “But Mr. Fernauld, he say, well, he say anything regarding Billy must be cleared with him. He’s been drinking heavy all night and day, drinking like he done when Linc died—when Linc was missing. If I put Billy on the phone, he’ll fire us, sure. I feel awful about this, Mrs. Fernauld.”
She closed her eyes. “That’s all right, Percy. Tell Mr. Fernauld I’ll be over in an hour or so.”
“He stepped out a while ago. And, well, you know how it is with him. Tonight he might get some sleep. Best to try in the morning.”
She hung up and rested her aching forehead against the sand-pitted glass of the booth.
Linc returned. “That was quick.”
She explained Joshua’s interdiction.
“What a shitty thing to do,” Linc muttered.
She sighed. “Billy must be positive I’ve run out on him.”
“The poor little kid.”
“You warned me, Linc, I know, but it seemed impossible Joshua would act like this.”
“The aging bull elephant defends his territory every dirty which-way he can.”
“I said we’d go there tomorrow morning. I’ll explain it all to Billy then.”
* * *
Joshua opened the door. His thick gray stubble showed, and he had on the same slacks and Mexican wedding shirt, now rumpled and food-spotted, that he’d worn for the festivities of Linc’s return.
“Well, if it isn’t my beauteous helpmeet and my devoted offspring.” Joshua, a heavy drinker, held his liquor well, but when he was loaded, his tendency to hectoring elaboration grew more pronounced.
She pushed by him into the hall. “I came to see Billy,” she said.
“Billy, my lovely, is in the companionship of his peers. The young of Beverly Hills attend nursery school, my beauty, despite the adulterous storms raging behind the handsome facades of their homes.” He wove unsteadily to his writing room.
Marylin and Linc followed.
The desk was littered with bottles and dirty dishes, and the air smelled dead, a combination of sweat, stale food, liquor, stubbed-out cigarettes.
Marylin said, “I’ll pick him up.”
Joshua was pouring a tumbler of J&B. “The fuck you will, beloved.”
“He’s mine too.”
“A fact you seemed happy enough to ignore when you departed this roof two evenings past.”
“You know damn well why she left,” Linc said in a low, shaking voice. His face was suffused with passionate rage. “I should have killed you.”
In reply, Joshua downed his drink.
“Can’t you remember?” Linc demanded. “Were you too blind drunk to remember what you did? Let me give you a hint—Marylin’s still bleeding.”
Joshua sank into the worn maple seat of his captain’s chair, the only chair in the room, momentarily permitting his unshaven chin to rest against his soiled shirt, a position of either grief or irrevocable defeat; then he raised his head. “I goddamn well remember doing to my wife what the law allows, a privilege you, my small-balled, long-lost scion, have to sneak,” he said savagely. “Now, get out before I beat the living shit out of you.”
“You really think I’d leave her alone with you?”
“You knew from the beginning, Joshua,” Marylin said. “You understood why I married you.”
A tiny muscle was working in the lid of Joshua’s left eye. “The pair of you! Puling children! What do you think, you’re playing on the swings in Roxbury Park? This clawing, painful vérité. Marylin-Rain, you leave Joshua Fernauld for Abraham Lincoln Fernauld and his hotshit Pulitzer, and you’ll find yourself smack in the middle of a big, juicy dog turd of a scandal.” He gestured at a heaped mass of newspapers on the floor. “Have you been keeping up with the news? No? Well I have. The front sections carry a paragraph about the miracle raising of the dead Pugh-litzuh Prize-winning author of Island from his watery grave, and the entertainment pages are full of questions about Rain Fairburn’s suspension. The star, in seclusion, could not be reached for comment, but her devoted husband avers she has been laid low with a dire, mysterious bronchial ailment ever since she wore herself out shooting Versailles.”
“Thank you Joshua,” Marylin murmured.
“Oh, I am the soul of Christian forgiveness.” The eye was ticking vehemently. “I absolve you of every past trespass. In the future, alas . . .” Joshua poured himself another drink. “If in the future you persist in trespassing, John Q. Public will get to sniff those dogshitty tracks—Rain Fairburn disappears with stepson. Heartsick husband breaks down and admits Rain and son have long-term affair.”
“I don’t care about acting.”
“Who’s talking careers, my pocket-size Venus? Tell me, do you honestly believe any judge would give over a four-year-old innocent into a ménage that defines the word ‘motherfucker’?”
“Oh, Joshua . . .”
“Listen to me, and listen carefully. You persist in spreading your sweet movie-star twat for Prizewinning Novelist—”
“That Pulitzer really bugs you, doesn’t it?” Linc broke in, his fists clenching.
“—and I hire the best frigging lawyers in town. They’ll fix me up with custody and you won’t get visiting privileges with Billy from eleven-fifty-five until midnight on February 29.”
Linc said, “We’ll hire lawyers too.”
“Are you so flush from that big-time job in the Detroit Public Library?”
“Marylin has the royalties from Island.”
Joshua gave an ugly laugh. “You just don’t know the full generosity of our blessed Saint Marylin-Rain of the Motion Pictures. She has not only endowed numerous charities but also supported her family.”
“Lest you forget,” Linc said, forcing his fury into the channel of that regrettable archness, “this is a community-property state.”
Joshua’s tan was muddy. “That Pulitzer and those A’s at Beverly and Stanford don’t mean a rat’s fart, do they? Why, you asshole half-kike, what do you know about life? You grew up in a big house with a Jewish mother to spoon-feed you caviar-matzoball soup whenever you sneezed. Whereas I—I had the real advantages. I learned to steal my daily bread before I was five. I know enough to always go direct for the jugular.” He drew a loud breath. “Our joint accounts are closed out. The community property’s buggered.”
“You bastard!” Linc’s voice rose into a note that chilled Marylin’s spine. And she realized that it was not only Linc’s outrage on her behalf but a retroactive horror for his dead mother that caused him to reach across the desk and grip his father’s collar. The chokehold pulled the drunken older man to his feet.
“Please stop it,” Marylin whispered. “Please stop it.” Her hands were clasped and she was actually wringing the small fingers.
She was at the end of her emotional tether, and some of this must have cut through Linc’s fury, for he released his father, who slumped back in his chair.
“Joshua,” she said, “why are you acting like this? We both love Billy, we want what’s best for him. And you love Linc, too—you know you do.”
Joshua gulped his drink, hurling the glass at the brick fireplace, where it shattered in a noisy explosion. “Yes,” he said bitterly. “I love Linc.”
“Then why destroy us?”
“Jesus frigging Christ, list
en to her. ‘Then why destroy us?’” Joshua mimicked Marylin’s soft voice. “After all these years, haven’t you the least clue what I feel for you? Am I so fucking inscrutable? I can’t help myself, I cannot help myself!” He glared at Linc. “Now, get your prizewinning Jew ass out of my house!”
“Let’s go, Marylin,” Linc said in a level voice.
“Tell Billy I’ll see him later.”
“What do I have to say to make you understand?” Joshua’s face was darkly twisted as he stood to stare down at his wife. “The choice is between my sons. You can pick one or the other. Not both.”
The telephone rang, but neither Joshua nor Marylin moved to pick it up. He swaying, she gripping the old desk, they continued to examine each other above the spindly old typewriter. On the third ring either the caller gave up or was answered on another extension.
Unequal adversary that she was, Marylin felt the dangerous power of those bloodshot, willful eyes. Yet she was fighting for what she loved best, Linc and Billy. “Judges give children to the mother,” she said.
Joshua blinked and his jaw sagged with surprise. “You mean you’re going through with a divorce?” he asked, his voice as full of disbelief as his expression.
She nodded.
“You’re damn well telling me you’re walking out on Billy?”
“I’ll get him, Joshua.”
He swiveled to face the yard, where Percy was using a long-handled net to fish eucalyptus leaves from the pool. She stretched her hand, as if to touch her husband’s thick, quivering shoulders, but Linc pulled her from the Spartan room.
* * *
While Linc arranged in the motel office for them to stay through Sunday, she dialed Leland Hayward’s number to see what her agent could do about her suspension—not that she desired armistice with Magnum; she would infinitely prefer returning to Detroit with Linc. But she needed money, money, money, in order to pay sharp lawyers to get Billy for her. Therefore, work she must.
The secretary put her on immediately and her agent greeted her with his most hearty tone, informing her he had been trying to reach her. Metro was hot to borrow her for a light comedy with Gene Kelly, and if she reported to Magnum Monday morning, all would be forgiven.
“Have you heard that I’m leaving Joshua?”
Rather than answering directly, her agent referred to Clause Fourteen in her contract. “You agreed in writing, and I’m reading this, Marylin, ‘not to commit any act or become involved in any situation or occurrence or make any statement which will degrade her in society or bring her into public disrepute, contempt, scandal, or ridicule or which will shock, insult, or offend the community, or which will reflect unfavorably on the company.’”
“A divorce isn’t immoral.”
The four-times-married Hayward agreed heartily through the telephone. “But let me throw it all on the rug, Marylin. Garrison says before you get through the Magnum gate, you have to promise no more fooling around with your stepson.”
The sky was clouded, giving an ugly purplish cast to the sea. “Do I have to give you ten percent of my heart, too?”
“Marylin, I don’t make the rules. This Bergman brouhaha has everybody running scared. The exhibitors won’t touch her new film with a ten-foot pole.”
“Linc,” she murmured, “is going back to Detroit.”
“Good. Now we’re in business.”
“I need more money,” she said. “A lot more.”
He said he’d try to hammer out a reasonable raise.
39
Magnum’s head set designer had corrected for his employer’s deficiency in height by providing a dais for the outsize desk. Marylin, her mind empty of everything except panic to earn a salary that would bring her salvation, stood on deep-piled carpet below this intimidating altar listening to Art Garrison roar out the riot act. There would be no more episodes like her disappearance, there would be no more of that incestuous crap. If there were, she would find herself in serious trouble.
Serious trouble spoken in this poisonous half-whisper meant only one thing. Blacklisting. Intangible and unprovable, the blacklist was the studio system’s ultimate weapon against its alcoholic or homosexual or intractably scandal-prone luminaries. A more formidable anathema than a papal excommunication—the religious outcast, after all, can embrace another sect to worship God, but every one of the rivalously embattled studios bowed in obedience to the elusive interdict. A blacklisted actor, no matter how big a star, never again acted in front of a Hollywood camera.
I need the money, I need the money, thought that most valuable property, Rain Fairburn, whose shapely, dimpled knees were like water. She nodded agreement.
To ameliorate the harsh ultimatum, the voice that spoke from the depth of purple upholstery gave Marylin dispensation to separate from Joshua. But—a hairy finger waggled at her—none of that Oedipus shit. Again ritual balm eased the harshness. Out of the corporate goodness of Magnum’s heart, she would henceforth receive a thousand a week. The raise was a pittance compared to Rain Fairburn’s true worth, but Marylin, in her desperate need, babbled her gratitude. It was Garrison’s ritual to personally hand the upper hierarchy of his vassals the first paycheck of a raise. Marylin ascended three shallow steps to take the yellow paper that normally was mailed to her agent’s office. Without a glance, she thrust it into her purse.
She drove directly from the studio to Stanley Rosewood’s offices on Wilshire Boulevard. The broad, slab-faced attorney shared honors with Greg Bautzer when it came to arm wrestling over sticky settlements and alimony, but Stanley Rosewood, everyone agreed, had the edge in custody messes.
In his sunny private office—far more gemutlich than Art Garrison’s—Stanley Rosewood went through an obligatory attempt at disuasion. Marylin firmly restated her intention to terminate her marriage.
The lawyer’s facial planes relaxed. “You know about my fees?” he inquired.
Joshua had taken charge of those personal negotiations not handled by the business manager; Leland Hayward hassled out the professional finances. Marylin had a sinking sense of her fiduciary ineptitude that she covered with a spirited smile. “Refresh my memory,” she said.
“The initial retainer is twenty-five hundred.”
A sum so dismayingly beyond reach that her bright expression must have sagged.
Stanley Rosewood added smoothly, “Under friendly conditions, that often covers it. Let’s be frank, though. Joshua Fernauld is a powerful man in this town, used to throwing his weight around. You tell me he’s opposed to this divorce. He’s hardly going to toss in the towel about the minor child.”
“I’m Billy’s mother.”
“It’s true, custody is generally awarded the mother. But in one of my other cases, where my client has proved herself unfit, I can do nothing.” A discreet professional pause to let Marylin recall that Ingrid Bergman had retained Stanley Rosewood—she was beginning to feel herself harnessed in tandem with the misfortunately philoprogenitive Swedish actress. “There the court will decide for the father.”
“But I’m a fit mother.”
“I’m only saying we’d better be prepared for a court battle. And your behavior will have to be irreproachable. Your husband might use detectives.”
“Spy on me? Yes, he would.”
Stanley Rosewood nodded. “Above reproach, then. You do understand that the preliminary payment is made in advance?”
Please, God, let Mama have that much to lend me, Marylin thought as she said, “Of course.”
In her car, she took out her paycheck. The thousand dollars, less the diverse deductions, amounted to $715.23, out of which must come Leland Hayward’s hundred-dollar agent’s bite. With a worried frown she took out an envelope, scribbling numbers on the back. As she added the column her soft, beautiful mouth drew into a bleak curve.
Since the best part of her old salary was already pledged to supporting the house on Crescent Drive, the hoped-for maternal loan would take a long time to repay.
S
he had not yet discussed her divorce with NolaBee. The previous night when she had called home, her mother had been out, so she had broken the news to Roy that she would be moving into the house, explaining why. Roy had steadfastly backed her decision, insisting Marylin take her bedroom: The couch’ll be fine for me, Marylin, I mean it.
NolaBee, however, had not taken the dissolution of her beautiful older daughter’s marriage with the same loyal equanimity. In a state of nerves, she had not slept. Though it was nearly noon, she answered the door in her old blue kimono with the dragon on it—no matter how many robes her daughters presented her with, NolaBee favored this disgraceful garment.
She flung her arms around Marylin. “Roy told me! Darlin’, darlin’, you can’t mean it!”
“I do, Mama.” Marylin, battling to hold on to her precarious composure, released herself from her mother’s clutch. “And I need to borrow a huge amount of money. Twenty-five hundred dollars.”
“There’s something like that, I reckon, in the savings, but—”
“I’ll pay it back as quickly as possible.”
“Oh, Marylin, you gave me that money, it’s yours. But a divorce? Why, nobody in our family ever, ever got one! And let me tell you, some of our women put up with an awful lot.”
“Mama, my mind’s made up, so please don’t make it any harder.”
NolaBee sat on the couch, taking a pack of Camels from her frayed sash. “Darlin’, listen to me. You know I never thought Joshua was The Man, he being so much older. But you did marry him. He’s your husband. I’m not saying a word against Linc—my heart’s just brimmin’ over that he’s alive. He’s a right fine boy. And my guess is that he stayed away all those years for this very reason. He knew if he came back, your marriage would bust wide open. You were seein’ him this summer, weren’t you?”
Her mother’s Southern voice divining the truth seemed to come from an echo chamber.
“How did you guess?”
“Mothers know a lot of things. Honey, the way you ran out on the tour, the way the two of you left the party the other night, that’s not like you. You’re my good, beautiful girl who never hurt a living soul.”
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