Considering she was crazy in love with Gerry Horak, she knew amazingly little about him.
When she inquired about his life in America, he put her off truculently. “I’m not much at shooting the bull.” The meanings behind his vivid, huge abstracts eluded her, and she would have thought him a failure at his profession had she not discovered a slickly handsome four-color brochure put out by his New York gallery: the first page listed the museums where he’d been exhibited, an impressive number of first-rankers that included the Tate and the Museum of Modern Art. From Roxanne de Liso she learned that he had spent a year in the psychiatric ward at the Birmingham military hospital in the San Fernando Valley. “I don’t mean to be a gossip,” said Roxanne, “but I knew him back at poor Henry Lissauer’s, and well, you seem to have fallen under the Horak spell. So you ought to know he does have a spotty history. Personally I’ve never seen a sign of mental instability, but he was in psychiatric confinement.”
Though Gerry never discussed his family, he definitely was not what her mother would call a gentleman-though-poor. His manners left something to be desired. He could be truculent. He invariably cut off her attempts to share her past with him. But so what difference did any of this make? At her advanced age, when every single girl in her KayZee pledge group was married and had a minimum of two babies, she had finally found love.
Two days before she was to return home on the twenty-four-hour polar flight, she accepted that the most important part of her would die—literally cease to exist—if she were torn from Gerry Horak.
“Gerry,” she asked, her face burning, “what about coming back to California?”
“California,” he said with a brooding look. “Why?”
“You’ve been talking about trying seascapes in all different lights. I seem to recall that Los Angeles lies on the coast—I forget the name of the ocean.” She reached for his broad hand. “Gerry, I have a good job, we could share expenses.”
“Look, babe, we get along just swell in the hay, and you’re great to be with, too. And I’d probably join up with you if I hadn’t been badly stung once. But now I stay clear of entanglements.”
“One rotten apple,” she said. “All women aren’t bitches.”
“It soured me. Eventually you’d be getting a raw deal, holding the bag.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
They were resting on a sunlit bench in the slanting, cobbled little park near the Rue Ravignon. Shading his eyes, he squinted at her with a funny, wistful expression she had never seen on him.
“I’m self-centered about my work,” he said. “I can be a mean bastard when I’m disturbed.”
“You need somebody to do everything for you so you can paint.”
“And it’s not in my books to get married.”
“I respect that.”
“Later on you won’t.”
“Hey, you’re talking to a career gal.”
“That’s what you say now.”
“Marriage isn’t on my agenda either,” she lied. Once they were together, Gerry would see the manifold advantages of marriage to a woman with a full and loving heart.
Gerry continued to squint at her with that peculiar pensiveness.
She held her breath, waiting, waiting. A woman lugged two string bags into a house with fringed lace curtains.
“What the hell,” he said finally. “I’ve been gone damn near four years, that’s plenty.”
Returning to Beverly Hills, Roy did the unthinkable. She moved out of her mother’s house to set up housekeeping with a man.
NolaBee poured out a stream of Southern-accented, smoke-punctuated pleadings, warnings, reproaches. Waces, Roys, and Fairburns, she implied, were turning in their Greenward graves. When Roy carried out her cartons, NolaBee hurled her final invective: “I reckon you’re making your own bed, Roy, and my feelings just don’t enter into it.” Roy invited her mother for dinner, to Sunday brunch; NolaBee refused, and with each refusal Roy felt that ancient, futile jealousy: her mother had forgiven Marylin her trespasses.
It wasn’t that Roy wanted to alienate her mother or horrify her KayZee alumnae group. She couldn’t help herself. Gerry Horak was in her blood. It was as if in surrendering her body to him, she had also committed her soul. He owned her. Yet, paradoxically, for the first time in her life she felt absolutely in the center of herself. Adoring, loving, sexy. (She was uncertain whether or not she had reached the ultimate peak, but she found physical joy and a ravishing satisfaction in giving her guy what he needed.) I’m a real woman, she would think. Gerry’s woman.
He never mentioned marriage.
Roy thought about it all the time. Panic, sweaty panic, overcame her when she thought they might not eventually be married.
She stopped to market, then drove up Beverly Glen. Here, in this steep canyon wilderness where mule deer mated and opossums went their solitary way, artists, musicians, writers, and other oddballs avoided the bourgeois straights of the Eisenhower era.
She parked in a stone-paved notch, lugging her heavy grocery bag up the fifty-three steps that led through a sylvan grove of spicy-scented eucalyptus.
Moisture curled the tendrils of her short poodle cut and she was panting by the time she reached the narrow grassy ledge fronting the redwood cottage. In the ruddy late-afternoon sunlight, Gerry—naked except for his faded cut-off jeans—stood slashing paint onto a huge canvas stretched against the wood shingle wall.
Totally absorbed, he did not notice her arrival, so she watched him a few moments. Sweat sparkled on the golden pink on his broad shoulders where the tan had peeled. Virile brown hairs sprang from his strongly muscled thighs and calves. Biceps swelling massive as a peasant’s, he thwacked on a gob of paint.
The work itself, she ignored. All greens and browns, its meaning was inexplicable to her.
He could get pretty brutal when she watched him, so she proceeded into the inconvenient old kitchen. Before she put away the groceries, she took off her flower appliquéd yellow Adele Simpson—if she wore anything good around the kitchen, she invariably spattered herself. Barefoot, wearing old black toreador pants and a halter, she started the coals in the round portable barbecue outside the kitchen door, then peeled the potatoes, slicing them thinly to fry in butter.
She was washing the salad when she heard the shower.
These hot nights, they ate outside. She lit the hurricane lamps.
“Pretty swank,” Gerry said. The first words he had spoken to her in the hour and a half since she had arrived home.
Roy’s freckled face crinkled eagerly. “I aim to please,” she said. “Have a good day?”
“Worked,” he said tersely. “What about you?”
If she nattered when he was preoccupied, he would blow up, but once he had directed a question at her, she knew it was all right to talk. Between mouthfuls of rare porterhouse, crisp potatoes, and salad, she told him about a good customer who had returned a Galanos original with makeup stains around the collar, about the well-corseted young Brazilian matron who—hallelujah!—had bought fifteen pairs of shoes with matching purses, a shipment of fall sweaters arriving in the wrong colors. Beyond the glass-enclosed candle flames, Gerry nodded. He was sympathetic to her, though not to Patricia’s. He scorned the idle females who made a cult object of their aging flesh. Roy was baffled by the impressive resentment that he nursed against these rich women whose elegant modus vivendi she admired without envy.
While she did the dishes, Gerry sat at the living-room table frowning over some sketches he had done last Sunday on the beach at Santa Monica.
The night air had cooled off the small cottage, and she sank onto the bulbous couch with its cretonne slipcovers, listening to the owl that lived in the live oak, to the crickets, the faraway cars. The haysweet scent of the grass that she had just watered drifted through the open windows to mingle with the smell of Jergen’s lotion on her hands. For a few minutes she floated in the rustic pleasures.
She reached for Time.
Marylin’s new movie, Providence Valley, was panned with bitchery and insufferable wit. A final ameliorative paragraph read: “Rain Fairburn gives a luminous performance which so captures the innocence of first love that it is impossible to believe this lovely creature has two children. The crumbling studio system should recognize her qualities and not cast her in wells of mediocrity like Providence Valley.”
If they’d had a telephone she would have called Marylin to congratulate her on the paragraph. Resting the magazine on her halter, Roy considered the paradox of Marylin, who was universally viewed by the press as having the best of all possible worlds, a tip-top career as well as a long-lasting marriage, a child brought back from the dead to perfect normalcy. (Marylin’s travail over Billy’s hospital bed, gushily rehashed by the avid-eyed day nurse, had taken up nearly an entire issue of Ladies’ Home Journal.) But the outside world was not privy to Marylin’s heartrending stillness and pallor during Billy’s slow recovery. Marylin once again had been suffering the unassuageable pain that follows amputation of love. Neither Marylin nor Joshua ever spoke of Linc, but BJ corresponded with her brother. He had moved to Rome. Marylin had patched her life together as best she could, tied to an aging, domineering husband and a career that she had not sought, solaced by two adorable children. (Roy’s fey little niece, Sari, had been born nearly a year to the day after Billy’s accident.)
Gerry put down his sketchbook.
“There’s a review of Providence Valley in here.” She held up the magazine. “Hated the film, loved Marylin.”
“She was damn good,” Gerry said. With Roy he had attended the sneak at the Bruin. They occasionally went to the Fernaulds’ Sunday barbecues, and as far as Roy could tell, he and Joshua hit it off at these hectic and lavish affairs—he certainly warmed to Marylin, but what mortal man wouldn’t react favorably to that exquisite, luminous glow? NolaBee’s continued failure to show up when they were at the Fernaulds’ made it obvious that she was avoiding them. Gerry had laughed about it. But when Roy had wept, he comforted her.
Stretching vigorously, he came over, grasping her hand, pulling her to her feet. As they hugged, a delicate flush covered her freckled face. She could feel his rising erection.
“Love you so, Gerry,” she murmured.
She went into the bathroom to insert her diaphragm. No matter how hot and heavy they got, she always took it from its round blue metal box. Marylin’s long-ago contretemps had indelibly marked her. Often, though, as Roy squatted with the rubber circle, a thought would come to her: Maybe being preg will do the trick. Yet she always pressed home the jelly-slathered disk. Bad enough that she was concealing from Gerry her unquenchable need for matrimony. She rebelled with all her warm and open mind at further subterfuge or devious trickery. In bed, she kissed down his scarred chest to his hard penis: he expected intimacies of her that once had shocked her to the core but that she now accepted as part of being his woman. He himself spent ages on what marriage manuals called foreplay. She was wet everywhere before he threw off the sheet to kneel behind her crouching body. This was the position he preferred, so she accepted it, though she longed to be face to face so they could kiss. (In those bleakest moments of pain when she wondered if he would ever marry her, she had decided that he preferred the anonymity of an abstract vessel.) His sweating body rushed swiftly over her, and then he collapsed gasping.
Had it happened to her? In all the heavy breathing, his and her own, she never could be positive.
43
At Patricia’s, each customer had her own saleslady, and if that saleslady was busy, the customer waited, browsing in the little boutique that carried handsome belts, a few carefully selected glimmers of antique jewelry, Hermès scarves, and crazily expensive sweaters. Generally by five o’clock most of the customers had completed their shopping.
Roy, in addition to her managerial tasks, had her own clientele. The following day at a little after five she was returning a richly colored armload of fall evening gowns to the stockroom. Her feet hurt, and pain splintered behind her eyes. She had spent the entire afternoon waiting on the fortyish, sleekly attractive, alcoholic wife of a prominent surgeon; the woman, having tried on Patricia’s extensive stock of size sixes, had just walked out sans apology or purchase.
The saleslady designated to watch over the boutique was nowhere in sight, and a tall, slender woman with a loose, streaked blond chignon stood picking through the unattended sweaters. From the back, Roy could recognize the easily cut beige silk as part of the Paris Fath collection. And there was something familiar about the hair.
“Do you have a saleslady, madam?” Roy said. “If you’ll give me her name, I’ll get her right away.”
The blonde turned. The long, handsomely patrician face relaxed into surprise. “Roy?”
“Althea!” Roy dropped the formals on one of the velvet poufs.
Their embrace was a brief feminine hug, the sort in which bodies do not enter into configuration and kisses are pressed in the air near the cheek, yet for all of the stereotyped awkwardness their eyes grew moist as inevitable memories assailed them: the Big Two . . . lunches in proud isolation on the Beverly High cafeteria patio . . . hours spent plastering on odalisque makeup . . . slow, croony Frank Sinatra records and the hypnotic seduction of Ravel’s Boléro. . . .
They drew apart.
Althea gave a little cough. “So you work here?” she asked.
“Yes. I’m the assistant manager,” Roy replied proudly.
She didn’t need to inquire about Althea’s life. In the intervening decade Althea’s doings had been duly noted by the press. She was twice married. At seventeen to Firelli—that wonderful old man, as Roy mentally called the English maestro. Invariably, though, Roy shuddered at the repellent image of her erstwhile friend’s slim youthfulness locked in the marital embrace with that rotund little old man, an image far more loathsome than Joshua with Marylin because of the far greater age span. Althea had a son by Firelli. After their divorce, she had picked off another Englishman, Aubrey Wimborne. The lovely Mrs. Carlo Firelli, the lovely Mrs. Aubrey Wimborne, was photographed at the parties of Coynes, Guggenheims, Rockefellers, Mellons, at the Côte d’Azur estate of the Duchess of Alba and the châteaux of various Rothschilds, at the Paris opera house between Firelli and Horowitz, in Bermuda with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, at Princess Margaret’s wedding to Anthony Armstrong-Jones.
Althea said, “Cheating and clawing your way to the topmost haute couture?”
Roy laughed. Yet suddenly she felt more than the four inches shorter that she was to Althea. What a stupefying chasm between their lives.
Mrs. Fineman had come to stand outside the boutique area, a squarish, carefully coiffed and jeweled presence. As she stared at the heaped, rich-colored designer garments, her fleshy face took on a disapproval that was both proprietary and maternal.
“I’m in the market for some evening things,” Althea drawled loudly. “Like those little frocks you have there.”
“Yes, Mrs. Wimborne.” Roy scooped up the armful of luxurious silks. “If you’ll follow me, Mrs. Wimborne.”
She led Althea to the largest of the fitting rooms. Their reflections receded endlessly in the angled mirrors, and neither woman looked directly at the other. How strange to be confronted by an infinity of their paired images after so long. . . . Roy could not help attempting to reconcile this serene and worldly Althea (who wore no smidge of makeup on her smooth, exquisitely tanned skin, not even lipstick on her narrow, well-delineated mouth) with the aloof, secretive, unhappy, overpainted schoolgirl Althea. Into Roy’s mind popped a memory of those crazy, unending sobs reverberating through her messy bedroom. Her awe of her old friend vanished.
Roy asked, “Are you living back here?”
“I’m at Belvedere while I get a divorce. A two-time loser. Hopeless, aren’t I? What about you? Are you married? Divorced?”
“Neither. I’m in love,” Roy replied, not even attempting to disguise the radiance of her smile.
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“In love?” Althea spoke in a questioning tone as if it were an expression she had never heard.
“You know—a mad, passionate involvement. He’s the only thing in the world that matters to me.”
“Oh, Roy.” Althea smiled, shaking her head. “You haven’t changed—not one iota.”
“That may be true, but this is the first time I’ve ever really fallen. I’d all but abandoned hope. It’s like a religious experience. It’s like somebody’s switched on all the lights. Do I sound corny? Well, love’s done it to me.”
“I’m joyous for you,” Althea said with a superior little half-smile. This was her old way of dousing Roy’s enthusiasms. After a brief silence, though, Althea was inquiring warmly, “How is your family? I read about Marylin, of course, but tell me the news about your mother.”
Roy sat on the velvet bench. “We’re on the outs,” she sighed. “Gerry and I live together without benefit of clergy.”
“You don’t! But hadn’t you become so veddy, veddy proper? Sorority life and all that jazz. Openly?”
“I was Miss Middle Class Propriety for a few years. But now I live in sin.”
“Wonders will never cease.”
“He’s the most important thing that ever happened to me.” Roy glimpsed a hundred repetitions of her cherry-red, sappily smiling face. She said crisply, “I read you have a little boy. He’s a bit younger than Billy.”
“Carlo’s almost ten—oh, drat! I keep forgetting he calls himself Charles now. That’s Firelli’s real name.”
“Yes, I know. I still remember nearly dropping in my tracks when I heard the English accent. He told me the whole deal about changing his name. Originally he was Charley Frye.”
“Exactly. My Charles is gorgeous. The strong, take-command type—he treats me like a bit of fluff. At the moment he’s keen for his grandpa’s collies.”
“How are they, your parents?”
“The same. Mother tends her flowers and worships Daddy. He strides gracefully around, lord of the manor,” Althea said levelly. “They defy time.”
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