Everything and More

by Jacqueline Briskin

  She sat down in a chair by the window.

  That morning the offerings began to flow in, creamy roses cunningly woven into a Pooh bear, a blue-and-yellow rocking horse formed of daisies, a chrysanthemum football, plush animals of various species.

  Nurses adjusted Billy’s tubes and bottles, doctors prodded him for reflexes, drawing up his eyelids to blaze flashlights into his unresponsive blue-green irises.

  Joshua ordered lunch and dinner sent in for her: constitutionally incapable of apology, he was using every means of making amends for his brutish behavior as well as having permitted this evil to befall their small son. Two shifts of private nurses relished meals from expensive restaurants.

  That evening NolaBee, Roy, BJ, and Joshua joined forces in an attempt to lure Marylin from her vigil.

  She remained in her chair all night.

  The nurse on the third shift was a plain, thick-ankled war widow who explained that she worked graveyard in order to be near her small daughter during the day. With a sweetly mournful smile, she spoke to Marylin as another mother rather than a source of gossip. In the night nurse’s quietly undemanding presence, Marylin relaxed a little.

  Around three in the morning, a light rain began to fall over the lit, somnolent hospital. Marylin, merged in that infinitesimal movement of Billy’s chest, did not drowse, but her thoughts moved in a random, spacious manner. She heard an old song:

  Now that you’ve come, all my griefs are removed,

  Let me forget that so long you have roved,

  Let me believe that you love as you loved,

  Long, long ago,

  Long ago. . . .

  Then she recalled a line of poetry: “The mills of the gods grind exceedingly slow, but they grind exceedingly fine.”

  She herself did not need to search for a universal mechanism that meted out justice. An inexorable sequence of events had brought Billy to this hospital bed: she had left her child for her lover. (With vivid clarity Marylin remembered the pitch black Michigan cabin and its odor of sawed pinewood, the cries of a night hawk, and her rushing joy at wakening in Linc’s arms.) Billy had reacted to losing her with belligerent misery. He had become an uncontrollable brat and run into the Beverly Drive traffic.

  She stared at the small, expressionless face.

  My fault, she thought, my fault. She pressed two fingers against her throbbing temple.

  In order for Billy to recover, she must relinquish her love.

  There was, she knew, no logic to this decision. Surgical successes bore no connection to renunciation. Yet in her odd, half-hypnotized state of mind she also knew that in the small hours of the morning there prevails something beyond logic or sense, the reason known to the unarmored heart.

  Give up Linc?

  The thought of being banished once again to that drab, loveless land filled her lungs, and she could scarcely breathe.

  * * *

  The next four days, Billy remained unmolestable in his remote cocoon. On the fifth morning, Dr. Rehnquist ordered more X rays for his patient. A bad sign. The possibility of further surgery was being considered.

  After that first night, Marylin had been returning to her mother’s house for a few hours of pill-induced sleep—in order to avoid the battalion of reporters, she had to sneak down to the basement loading dock, where Roy met her with the Waces’ used Chevy.

  Just after twelve on that fifth night, the war-widow nurse, Marylin’s friend, telephoned. Maybe this was pure imagination, but when she changed Billy’s I.V. she thought that she had seen the corner of his mouth twitch. Dr. Rehnquist was on his way over.

  Marylin called Joshua, who picked her up within ten minutes. They arrived in Billy’s room to find the surgeon, dressed in old slacks, aiming a medical flashlight at their child’s eyes.

  For an interminable minute, Billy’s face remained still.

  Then the lashes trembled.

  Joshua’s large, damp hand engulfed Marylin’s.

  The eyelids drew up.

  Those first heartbeats, the sea-colored eyes were the terrifying blank blue of a newborn infant’s. Then another flicker. The green intensified.

  “Billy?” Rehnquist’s arid voice rang in the night-still hospital. “Billy!”

  The child blinked.

  “You had an accident. I’m your doctor.”

  “Billy . . .” Marylin whispered.

  “Your—Mom—and—Dad—are—both—here,” Dr. Rehnquist was booming oratorically.

  Billy’s pupils swelled. Doctor, nurse, parents, the dark and sleeping world beyond this room maintained a reverential stillness as the small face seemed to ripple.

  Marylin could feel the shuddering of Joshua’s thick body.

  Then Billy’s gaze turned to Marylin. His lips formed an infinitely faint smile.

  With a soft cry, Marylin bent to embrace him.

  * * *

  After Joshua dropped her off, Marylin stood on the doorstep a few moments. Dawn pinkened the western sky, yet above the dark outline of the Santa Monicas the full moon still dangled like a pale, lost balloon. Her face set with mournful determination, she went inside. She’d had an extension installed in Roy’s room, and she called the long-distance operator.

  Sunday, Linc was home.

  In a hectic rush of words, she explained about Billy.

  “Marylin, love, I’m crying.”

  “So am I.”

  “He’s a terrific little kid, my brother. Tough, too. Made of iron.”

  She gripped the receiver tighter. How many of the crucial exchanges of their lives had been carried on through this unsatisfactory, unfleshed instrument? “Linc, darling, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking the past few days.”

  “Same here. This business, we have to settle it with the least hurt to Dad. Yesterday, when I talked to him, he sounded so old, drained.” The crises had cut through Linc’s outrage: he had called his father the last three evenings. “I’m pretty sure he’s given up fighting the divorce. The way I see it, we’ll live out there so he can see Billy as often as possible.”

  “Dr. Rehnquist said that the recovery will be slow, very slow, and uneven. There’s a chance that he . . . he won’t ever be really himself.”

  “He will be.” Linc’s reassurances never came adventitiously, but were always spoken from the heart, giving the words a solidity that comforted.

  “Even if he gets back to normal, Linc, I can’t take him from Joshua.”

  During the ensuing pause, a bird outside the window began its early-morning chirps.

  She said, “I’m going back.”

  “That’s a decision made under the worst kind of emotional stress.”

  “Linc, I love you, I always will.”

  “I’m coming out.”

  “Billy needs both of us. Ever since I left, he’s been an emotional basket case.”

  “You’ll stay at the house until he’s perfect. That’ll give him time to adjust.”

  “If I’d been home, this never would have happened.”

  “We’re going round in circles. Marylin, there’s no reason for you to crumble with guilt now that he’s getting better. He was hit by a car. An accident. Accidents happen.”

  “Please don’t make it more difficult.” Her voice shook.

  There was another long silence, while her mind resounded with memories of that long-ago telephone call when he had told her the Enterprise was sailing. Finally he said, “What’s wrong with taking more time to consider?”

  “Linc, darling, I can consider until the world ends. But how can I take my happiness at the expense of a four-year-old?”

  “And you think this is the answer? Kids’re aware what’s going on with their parents. Believe me, I know.”

  “Live your own life, darling,” she whispered. “Be happy.”

  “Happy?” A momentary bitterness tempered the word. Then he said crisply, “When Billy’s older, we’ll have another chance.”

  “I can’t let you waste your life waiting.” />
  “You have no choice, love.”

  “I won’t write to you, Linc. I won’t phone you.”

  “You will, someday,” he said, and hung up.

  Marylin collapsed on Roy’s bed, gasping with loud, primitive sobs.

  NolaBee, awakening, ran in terrified that her grandson had died. Marylin gasped out that it was the reverse, Billy was—as Dr. Rehnquist had cautiously pronounced—on the road. Her mother crouched over her, trying to render some comfort for this mysterious sorrow at a time of joy.

  Let me believe that you love as you loved,

  Long, long ago,

  Long ago. . . .

  Book Five

  1954

  Debbie Reynolds and Rain Fairburn are each buying dozens of the new, expensive Italian sweaters at Patricia’s.

  —Louella Parsons, Hearst Press, January 21, 1954

  Today the joint services exploded a hydrogen bomb which is far more powerful than an A-bomb.

  —President Dwight D. Eisenhower, television speech,

  February 2, 1954

  Make no mistake, the motion-picture industry has itself an inescapable problem. With more than 20,000,000 television sets in the country, the box-office gross has slipped a drastic 23%, and Hollywood is in upheaval. Studio shake-ups are announced daily. High-cost contracts are being scrutinized for escape clauses. Most studios are eyeing the small screen as a possible source of revenue.

  —Forbes, May 9, 1954

  Plate XLV: Seine Embankment. 1954. Oil, 76 × 104 in. Los Angeles County Art Museum.

  This is the largest painting Horak executed in Paris. The style may be called Neo-Plasticism. The lines, surfaces, and colors are units with which the artist has created an organizational force: the composition forms a whole to which nothing may be added or subtracted.

  —Horak, published by Marlboro Books, 1965

  42

  Late one afternoon in August of 1954, Roy Wace dawdled along Wilshire Boulevard looking into the plate-glass windows of Patricia’s. The shop’s advantageous new location on Wilshire in the Beverly Hills high-fashion zone near Saks and Magnin’s had come about through Roy. She had heard from the previous owner, a friend of Joshua’s, that he intended to sell this large two-story corner building. Roy’s employers, the Finemans, a shrewd, childless couple, had been searching for larger, more visible premises for their class women’s specialty shop. When Roy told them the property would be on the market, they had snapped it up before a broker entered the picture.

  Roy moved back toward the curb, halting, wriggling with sheer pleasure as she surveyed the entire row of windows. The shop mannequins were posed in versions of the coming autumn’s styles, some sporting day dresses with smart little Peter Pan collars, others draped in modishly full-skirted suits or sophisticated beaded formals. Every outfit was red. Since the end of May, Patricia’s windows had been decorated in a single, unified color scheme. The idea was Roy’s. (Well, she had picked it up on the Rue St. Honoré during her buying trip to Paris.)

  It goes without saying that both Finemans were not only very fond of Roy but delighted with her. Indeed, with her enthusiasm, her talent for imitation—a talent superior to creativity in their pricey trade—and her loyalty to Patricia’s, they had come to view her as a surrogate daughter. In her five years they had doubled her salary and given her the title “Assistant Manager.”

  Without thinking, Roy held out both arms as if gathering the line of elegant monochromatic mannequins to herself. Behind her, the men trapped in the hot rush-hour traffic smiled out their open car windows at the gesturing, fresh-looking young woman in the yellow dress with appliquéd daisies scattered down the flared skirt.

  With one final glance at the crimson sweaters displayed in the side windows, Roy crossed to Patricia’s parking lot, waving at the young black attendant, who waved back as she got into her car. Sitting gingerly on the hot leather of her Chevy, she smiled. A soft, dreamy smile. She was on her way home.

  Home meant Gerry Horak.

  She and Gerry—oh, scandal of scandals—were not married but lived together on one of the rustic ledges of Beverly Glen. They had known each other less than four months.

  She had met him last May on that fateful trip to Paris, at a party on the Île St. Louis given by Roxanne and Henri de Liso.

  The de Lisos were friends of Joshua and Marylin’s. He had been a top-notch set designer before being fired for his leftist leanings. (The Communist witch hunt, oddly enough, had never touched Joshua, a card carrier in the twenties, because long before it was politically expedient he had recanted, booming public anathemas on Trotskyites and Stalinists alike.)

  Roxanne de Liso, who was confined to a wheelchair, had steered herself through her place of exile, a bewitchingly cluttered, wonderful old apartment, introducing Roy to various guests, most of whom were well-known Hollywood names. The conversation had centered in knowledgeably vituperative tones on Senator McCarthy. Roy, feeling like a hopelessly inadequate, ignorant reactionary, had shrunk with her glass of Beaujolais onto the little balcony with its smart row of potted geraniums.

  A stocky, broad-shouldered man wearing a checkered sport jacket leaned on the iron rail. Roy, too, looked out at the ivory moon sailing above the peaked rooftops with their charmingly askew ancient chimneys.

  “C’est plus belle, Paris, n’est-ce pas?” she said in her careful Beverly High French.

  Turning to look her up and down, he flashed her a grin. “If you say so, baby,” he retorted.

  “You’re American!” she cried.

  “Whatever the fat-cat parlor pinkos inside tell you, it’s no crime,” he said, still grinning. In the dim light of the balcony, his teeth gleamed uneven and very white. He was in his mid-thirties, she guessed. The right age.

  She introduced herself and he told her his name was Gerry Horak.

  “It’s just too much,” Roy sighed in enchantment. “It looks just like a set from La Bohème—” She stopped, wondering if this attractive, proletarian-looking he-man would get the allusion—and if he did, would he consider her a phony for using it? She added, “This is my first time in Paris.”

  “You’re wasting your time in this dump. You might as well be back in—let me guess. Beverly Hills, California.”

  “You have me down pat.”

  “There’s a place called Chien Noir in Montmartre where you can see real Frenchmen. Game to try it?”

  Gerry Horak’s truculent air challenged her, and she liked what she could see of his broad, strong-cheekboned Slavic face. An excitement surged through her. “I have to get my coat and thank the de Lisos,” she said.

  Going down in the wrought-iron elevator that held only two people, he put his arm around her shoulder and she felt a crescendo in her stomach, as if they were rising rather than descending.

  He paid her way through a Métro turnstile, her very first time.

  At Chien Noir, boisterously singing, wine-imbibing working-class Parisians crowded the long wooden tables, and Gerry’s muscular calf pressed tight against her leg. Never in her life had she felt an electricity like this. She drank glasses of sour red wine from Burgundy, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to walk up the Rue le Pic, turn on a street that was actually a long flight of steps, winding yet higher along a narrow alley. Gerry lived in a tall gray house with crumbling plaster angels nestled into its eaves. She linked her arm in his to climb the four flights of steep, dimly lit, garlic-scented stairs, pausing for endless open-mouth kisses with this man she had just met. She did not even know he was a painter until he unlocked the door of a large attic and she was overpowered by smells of paint and turpentine: enormous unframed canvases were racked against every wall. Undressing in the bathroom that doubled as a kitchen, she grew less tipsy. What are you doing, Wace, you bad girl? she asked herself. Yet her fingers continued unsnapping and unhooking. At the last minute, in a flash of sobriety, she pulled back on her slip.

  Emerging, she said shakily, “I’m a beginner at this.�
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  Gerry was already in bed, leaning against the brass headboard: a band of white scar like a ribboned order slanted across the thick brown hair of his chest. “With that nice round ass?” he said. “Baby, what a waste. You must have had a ton of offers. Why me?”

  “Something crazy’s come over me,” she murmured.

  “Come to Poppa,” he said.

  She ran on bare feet across the paint-spattered boards, climbing into the high brass bed. Trembling, she clung to his firm flesh.

  For a long time he kissed and caressed her in a way that made her forget any embarrassment or regret, made her feel beautiful, desirable, wanted—or maybe she was still blotto. When she was embarrassingly wet down there, he moved onto her. From intimate talks with her KayZee sisters, she accepted that the first time would be uncomfortable, maybe painful. Surprisingly, though, it went swiftly and scarcely hurt. Afterward she felt irrevocably bound to Gerry Horak.

  The Finemans, who as a bonus had given Roy the trip that they normally took, had instructed her to take in all the showings as part of her education. For once Patricia’s was remote and hazy in Roy’s mind. She sat on spindly gilt chairs for the major collections—Chanel, Fath, Givenchy, and Dior—thrusting the creamy embossed cards of lesser houses into the desk of her room at the Scribe, where she no longer slept.

  With Gerry she strolled around the Place du Tertre, where a few of his buddies, in order to pay for their serious work, set up easels to paint Utrillo-style street scenes for the occasional tourist.

  Together she and Gerry shopped on the Rue des Abbesses and the Rue le Pic for the meals that she fixed in the bathroom-kitchen. They played a silly, happy game, dividing their purchases by gender. There were boy-Gerry-foods, the meats in Au Couchon Rose, the oysters in Lepic sur Mer. The girl-Roy-foods were selected in Patisserie Babette and Crémerie des Abbesses. They made love in the afternoon with dusty shadows of pigeons coming through the attic skylight.