“It’s a Fernauld family failing, letting ourselves be led on.”
“That’s what I called about. With Charles gone, the guest room is free,” Althea said. “Can you be in New York this weekend?” She had intended to sound lightly amorous, but the question ended in a shrilly plaintive bleat.
“Hey, Althea,” he said. “Hey.”
* * *
“Mrs. Stoltz,” Gerda’s Swiss-German accent was calling softly. A supportive throb of muted raps on the door. “Mrs. Stoltz?”
Althea rose from the depths of drugged sleep, her thoughts swimming torpidly around death and irreconcilable loss.
She glanced at her clock—9:15. Though she often rose before this hour, the ironclad household rule was that should she choose to remain in bed, she be left undisturbed. “What is it?”
“There’s a gentleman who insists on seeing you—”
“No gentleman,” said Billy’s voice. “Me.”
Althea’s annoyance dissolved. Thank God he’s here, she thought. Though rigidly observant of proprieties in front of her servants, she called, “Come on in.”
She had a blurred glimpse of Gerda’s horror-struck face, then Billy shut the door behind him.
“Where did she train for guard duty?” he asked. “Buchenwald?”
“She’s Swiss.”
“That’s what the Übermenschen all say.”
Althea’s lips twitched in a smile. “You got here fast.”
“Aboard United’s red-eye. All these plants—baby, where’s the jungle drums?” He slapped both palms on his T-shirt. “Me Tarzan. Eeeyeehahh!”
“Shut up, you fool! You’ll have Gerda calling the police.” She patted his arm fondly—he had seated himself on the monogrammed blanket cover.
“That’s a terrific nightgown. Did I ever mention what cream silk does to my libido?”
“This is Wednesday. What about your job?”
“The Rain Fairburn Show will survive a week or so without me. Frankly, my humor’s too urban for Mother.”
“I didn’t mean to lead you astray.”
“No?” Behind the horn-rims, the quick, clever eyes remained fixed on her. “Let’s face it, that call last night was a cri de coeur.”
She turned away, admitting, “It’s been bad, very bad.”
He touched her shoulder sympathetically. “Vith Doctor Fernauld, you don’t have to awoid zee crucial oedipal area.” He affected the Viennese accent with infinite tenderness.
“Did they give you breakfast on the plane? Shall I have Gerda bring us some?”
“Later,” he said. “Like they say in novels, dot, dot, dot, a long time later.” He folded his glasses on the nightstand.
Encircling him with her arms, she drew him down to the warm, sleep-scented bed. There was a faint, faraway bounce of a Mozart horn concerto, then only Billy’s urgent breathing against her ear.
64
One evening in early June, Roy came home with a load of groceries—Sari was coming to dinner. Kicking off her stack-heeled patent pumps, she set the heavy brown bags on the kitchen counter and began putting things away.
Patricia’s had made Roy more than comfortable financially. She could well afford larger, more opulent quarters and a competent full-time maid-cook rather than a once-a-week cleaning man, but with her energies focused on the store, she seldom gave a thought to raising her standard of living—a Mercedes was her one personal status symbol.
Picking up her shoes, she went into the living room. Long rectangles of darker beige showed where Gerry’s oversize canvases normally hung. The paintings were on loan to the Gerrold Horak Gallery. A comprehensive retrospective would open at UCLA on July 23 with a huge cocktail bash to which everyone who was anyone in the business, political, entertainment, and aesthetic life of the state had been invited. As Roy considered the retrospective, her eyes filmed with a sensual glow, and her lips curved in a softly amorous smile.
She took off her beige-brown-and-red-striped Missoni, looking hastily away from the mirrored reflection of a pleasantly curved body in panty hose and bra. Fat as a hog, she thought.
This flesh was hidden under a flowing silk caftan when the doorbell rang.
Sari extended a huge, artless bouquet of roses. “I picked these a few minutes ago.”
“Oh, you beautiful things,” Roy said, burying her nose in fragrant petals. “Sari, you’re a darling. Come on in while I put on the lamb chops.”
Sari volunteered for salad duty. As she washed and sliced, she drooped unconsciously. These eight weeks that Charles had been in Stockholm, Sari had wilted like an unwatered fern, reviving a little when her parents offered her a European vacation. In common with many a childless aunt, Roy had spilled her maternal instincts over her niece and nephew, exaggerating the importance of her role in their corporeal and mental well-being. She cursed herself endlessly for introducing Althea’s son to Billy. “What’s the latest on your trip?” she asked. “Made your airline reservations?”
Sari, peeling an avocado, stared down at her green-stained fingers. “I don’t think I’m going.”
“But it’s your birthday present! And what about Lucie?” BJ’s middle daughter had been given the vacation by Marylin and Joshua, ostensibly as a gift for graduating from UCLA, but in truth so she could accompany Sari. “I thought you two had it all set to spend a week in Sweden.”
Avocado cubes slipped between Sari’s thin fingers.
“Honey, I’m interested,” Roy said. “But if you don’t want to talk about it, I understand.”
Sari rinsed off her hands, sighing. “Charles called last night. He says he’s not positive he’ll be in Stockholm when we’re there. The bank’s moving him around.”
Roy busied herself with slicing sourdough bread. “That’s how apprenticeships are, honey. You’re sent from pillar to post learning the job.”
“Oh, Auntie Roy, why can’t I be happy that for a little time we had a really good relationship going?” The spattering sounds of broiling lamb chops nearly covered Sari’s soft murmur.
“Honeybunch, don’t talk like that. It’s not in the past. He calls and writes, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, but . . . well, Charles is good at everything except feelings—the one thing I am good at. His letters are sort of formal. And you know how transatlantic lines are, they either rumble or echo every word you say. I just don’t know anymore, I just don’t know.”
It hurt Roy to look at her niece’s woebegone face. “What’s so wrong with going to Stockholm to find out?”
“He’s so polite he’ll imagine he has to be there when I am, even if it’s difficult for him . . . even if he doesn’t want to be. . . . Oh, let’s leave it alone, okay?”
Roy, her eyes pitying, set the breakfast table with the roses and festive red-and-white place mats. “I heard from Billy the other night,” she said, arranging the silverware. “He hardly said a word about himself. He’s sure closemouthed about what he’s doing in New York. Should I be cherchezing for la femme?”
Sari, who had brought the salad bowl to the table, sat down.
“There’s a pregnant pause if I ever heard one,” Roy said. “So he does have somebody new?”
“. . . Auntie Roy, promise not to tell Mother? She was really shook when he took off like that. And this isn’t anything sure.”
Fat sizzled loudly as Roy opened the broiler, forking the two larger lamb chops onto Sari’s plate. “I’m all discretion and ears,” she said.
“The night we went out to dinner, Billy was totally wrapped up with Mrs. Stoltz.”
“Althea!” Roy cried. The plate tilted. Chops would have slid onto the linoleum but for the raised rim. “You’re saying she’s the woman?”
“Just vibes.”
“I have never heard anything so outlandish!”
“She’s in New York.”
“So are four million other women! Althea? She’s my age! Why, Charles is older than Billy!” It was not disbelief but furious outrage that made Roy bark
out her words like a marine top sergeant. “How did you ever dream this up?”
Sari shrank into the yellow booth. “Nothing, nothing,” she murmured. “Forget it.”
“I didn’t mean to scream at you,” Roy said, patting her niece’s thin arm. “But it’s too far-out to consider.”
“Billy’s always gone for older women—that Nella, remember her?”
Nella, with whom Billy had lived for a few months when he was twenty, was a model who worked the Patricia’s fashion shows. “An aged crone, twenty-eight,” Roy said ruefully.
“There’s nothing definite that I can tell you, really. Except Billy was really on with Mrs. Stoltz that night. And she kept smiling at him—yet Charles told me she was really in a mess about her father.”
Sari ate practically nothing. Roy, utterly forgetful of her current diet, downed both her lamb chops with all the fat, buttered slabs of sourdough bread, ravenously consumed the abundant contents of the salad bowl. All metabolic messages were canceled and the meal churned in her stomach without assuaging her hunger. Sari’s intuition replayed two of her worst recollections: the darkness of the poolhouse and Althea’s long, slim, white foot arching in passion . . . the hot Oaxaca hotel room and Gerry’s shamefaced admission of an incurable love for Althea.
After Sari left, she found herself pacing up and down the living room as if she had been shot with massive jolts of Benzedrine. She no longer saw Sari’s divination as an impossibility—in fact, the longer she considered Billy’s abrupt departure and secretiveness, the longer she mulled over that damn Althea’s lecherous propensities, the more feasible the two as a couple became.
She halted abruptly, her caftan swirling around her. All right, she thought. Either Sari’s right about this, or she’s wrong. Marylin and I will have to find out.
* * *
The following morning, before eight, Roy telephoned her sister. “How about lunch?” she asked.
“Today?” Marylin’s feathery voice was anxious. “Roy, are you all right? Is it Mama? Have you run into problems with my wardrobe?”
“Nothing like that. I need to talk to you, that’s all. If you’re booked solid, we can make it after I finish work.”
“No, no. I’ll be there as soon after one as I can.”
The sisters always lunched incommunicado at Patricia’s: though Beverly Hills was reasonably sophisticated about well-known faces, Marylin dreaded the inevitable oblique stares in restaurants, the occasionally overheard whisper: Don’t look now, but there, in that booth, it’s Rain Fairburn.
* * *
Roy had ordered two Cobb salads to be sent over from the Brown Derby, and at 1:15 the two wooden bowls of chopped, crisp raw vegetables topped with chopped pink ham, turkey, and bacon, as well as the pitchers of rich, lumpy Roquefort dressing, were set neatly on a tablecloth that covered the same scarred old desk that had served Mrs. Fineman.
When Marylin came in, fragrant with a recent spraying of Diorissima, her clean-washed face aglow, Roy examined her sister as a young man might, accepting that the faint lines of brow and forehead, the minuscule softening of luminous flesh enhanced her beauty by rendering it accessible.
“Do I have a smudge on my face?” Marylin asked with her breathy little laugh.
“Sorry. I was thinking of something else. Marylin, sit down. Tea or coffee?”
“Tea, please.”
Roy sent the secretary to boil the kettle—she had taken space from an upstairs stockroom to build a large, pleasant employees’ lounge with a stove and refrigerator.
“Now, what’s this all about?” Marylin asked. “It’s not like you to make mysteries. Did Sari tell you something last night? My poor baby. Roy, I knew no good would come from that Charles.”
“She was pretty shaken. I’m fairly positive Europe is off.”
“It is.” Marylin sighed. “When she told us, Joshua blew his stack—and you know he never does with her. He’s decided that the moment she hits Sweden she’ll get that Charles out of her system.”
“Charles isn’t sure he’ll be in Stockholm.”
“So he is bowing out! My poor, poor Sari. She takes everything so hard.”
Roy ladled a teaspoon of dressing on her Cobb salad. “I was really disturbed by something, well, she said about Billy.”
Marylin looked down, and the incomparable eyes were veiled. She took Billy’s sudden departure without giving The Rain Fairburn Show any kind of notice as a complete rejection of her and her career. For the past two months she had felt herself locked into a dark tunnel. Her rejector, after all, was the child for whom she had sacrificed love. She would find herself brooding about Linc, wondering what their lives would have been had she not made that long-ago decision in favor of maternal duty. Though Linc had not remarried, he had also never once asked BJ about her. No man waits for decades. Linc was enjoying himself as a divorced man. To him she was doubtless immensely less important than that Gudrun, another memory among the rainbow of exotic, foreign girlfriends. And what did she have to show for her renunciation? A son who rejected her. Nothing, she had nothing.
Incapable of looking at Roy, she speared a small, glistening cube of ham. “Billy? Last night he called us.”
Roy sat up straighter. “What’s new?” she asked.
“Joshua talked. I didn’t. Something about making a picture—”
Roy interjected, “Now, there’s a different angle.”
“I know, I know. Like father, like son. The two of them always talking and planning the big box-office smash. But Billy’s actually come up with financing.”
Roy set down her fork. “Financing?” she asked slowly. “Did he say who would give him the money? A bank?”
“No, private sources. Joshua said he was cagey, yet sounded positive it’ll come off.”
“What about his social life?”
“I really don’t know.” Marylin’s smile was frayed. “Roy, to tell you the truth, he hasn’t given us his phone number, even.”
“Sari’s decided he’s fallen into some woman’s fell clutches.” Roy spoke lightly, but her jaw was set.
“That’s Billy. Always in and out of an affair.”
“Maybe,” Roy said slowly, “it’s Althea.”
“Althea?” Marylin asked, mystified. “You think she had something to do with Charles leaving Sari?”
“I’m talking about Billy. Althea and Billy.”
Clutching her napkin, Marylin jumped to her feet. “Are you crazy? What a hideous thing to say!”
“It’s what Sari thinks, and she’s Miss Sensitive about relationships and things. It does make a kind of ghastly sense, Marylin. And this movie financing fits right in. Althea could put up a cool fortune and never miss a penny of it.”
A truck was noisily backing along the narrow alley, and while the grating sounds poured through the office windows, Marylin’s color drained until the exquisite features seemed powdered with white flour.
Roy worried that she’d been too blunt. “You okay, Marylin, hon?” she asked, leaning across the desk.
“We’ll find out if it’s true,” Marylin said in a normal voice.
“How?”
“I’ll call Althea and ask her.”
The idea was so simple that Roy, a direct, to-the-point woman, felt idiotic for having fretted all these hours without considering it.
Marylin asked, “Do you have her number?”
“My book’s at home.”
Marylin reached for the telephone: A. Stoltz was listed in the Manhattan directory.
“Let me talk—I’m her friend,” Roy said. “It’ll be easier for me.”
“I’m the actress, or meant to be,” Marylin retorted, gripping the telephone firmly.
Roy held her breath. Her sister pressed the receiver to her ear; then a muscle jumped near the beautiful mouth, raising the upper lip for a vulnerable instant.
She jammed her finger on the button.
“Why are you hanging up?” Roy demanded. “Did you chicken out? Yo
u should have asked for Althea.”
Marylin’s sea-colored eyes glittered in her stark white face. “I didn’t need to,” she said. “Billy answered the phone.”
65
That same Thursday afternoon Marylin booked an early-morning flight to New York for Saturday, reserved a hotel suite, and mailed Althea a special-delivery note: she would be in New York this weekend, and would Althea join her for drinks Saturday evening. I’m staying at the Regency, and for me it’s easier if we meet privately in the suite—I hope you understand. It’ll be just the two of us.
Marylin kept mum about the folie à deux of Billy and Althea, not mentioning it even to Joshua. Neither did she disclose her New York journey. Instead, she told her family that she needed to invigorate her flagging body with exercise and massage at the Golden Door Spa.
She spent the final two days of The Rain Fairburn Show’s work week bottled up inside herself, a preoccupation reminiscent of her studio days. Once assigned a role, she had withdrawn, not talking out her interpretive thrust even with the director, reasoning superstitiously that her emotional impact would poop out before reaching the camera’s unerring eye.
She no longer felt rejected by Billy. In her mind, Althea was a blend of Judith Anderson’s Medea, Lucrezia Borgia, and the Wicked Witch of the North. How could she blame her boy for being spirited away on Althea’s broomstick? In her mood of heightened maternal outrage, she was determined to wield all her talents to rescue him.
She was flying on one of those new jumbo jets. As soon as she buckled up in her first-class seat, she opened an undersize looseleaf whose spine was gone. She had used this notebook during the filming of Island, and had kept it—another superstition—for every film, putting in a fresh supply of lined paper on which to jot down notes to herself. Even for the simpy comedies, she had filled page after page with each particular woman’s family background, transgressions, pet peeves, affections, aversions, gestures, sexual idiosyncrasies, musical and literary preferences, medical history. Inevitably, from this plenitude of detail she had uncovered the core of the character. This time, however, she was not molding a fictional persona. She was ransacking her memory cells for images of Althea.
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