Love Me

by Love Me (ARC) (epub)

“Then give her a message for me. Tell her I called. Tell her I called and called and wouldn’t stop calling until you agreed to tell her what I had to say. Tell her my wedding is next week and I need to see her. She doesn’t have to tell Father. She doesn’t have to tell anyone. But I’ve simply got to talk to her. I can’t get married unless my parents are there. It just wouldn’t feel right. It would be all wrong.” As Margo said these words, she was shocked at the intensity with which she felt them. “Please, Emmeline. Say you’ll tell her.”

  Emmeline was still for a long moment. Finally, she sighed. “Is there someplace you want to meet her? She’ll want it to be somewhere she won’t see anyone she knows.”

  Margo thought fast. “Schwab’s Drug Store.” That’s where all the trouble between us started, she thought, and that’s where it should all be laid to rest. “In Hollywood. Tell her I’ll be there every day this week at five o’clock. I’ll stay there as long as I can. She can come and meet me and still be home in time for dinner, with no one the wiser.”

  “All right.” Emmeline set her mouth in a grave line. “All right, I’ll tell her.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise. Now you’ve got to go. It’s getting late. They’ll be home any minute, whether the master’s feeling poorly or not.” Emmeline bit her lip. “But let me ask you something, Miss Margaret.”

  “Anything.”

  “Why does it matter so much to you? After everything that’s happened between you, why do you still care?”

  That’s a good question, Margo thought. I should ask myself that. “I don’t know,” she said simply. “I guess, no matter what, she’s still my mother.”

  Emmeline stood very still, looking off into the distance with an expression Margo couldn’t define and didn’t care to. Finally, Emmeline gave a brisk nod. “I’m going to pack some things for you,” she barked. “I don’t like the idea of you on the long drive back with nothing to eat.”

  It’s not that far, Margo wanted to say, but she knew better than anyone that while physical distances may be short, psychic ones can seem insurmountable. She watched, in awe once more, as Emmeline moved swiftly around the kitchen, fixing sandwiches, wrapping up pie, pouring the rest of the coffee into a metal thermos and packing it all, along with a couple of oranges, into one of the white string bags Margo remembered her using a lifetime ago to deliver lunch to the gardeners working outside.

  “Thank you,” Margo said, accepting it at the door. It seemed like a woefully inadequate phrase for everything Emmeline had given her, but she could think of nothing else to say.

  “You’re welcome, Miss Margaret,” the housekeeper said formally.

  She opened her mouth as though she was about to say something else; then, suddenly, she threw her arms around Margo in a rib-cracking embrace. “I’ll be at that wedding, honey child,” Emmeline whispered fiercely in her ear. “Let the devil himself try and stop me.”

  Eighteen

  Sucking in her stomach as far as it could go, Gabby tugged at the zipper of the dress, wincing a little as the sharp metal dug into her fingers. She let out a little gasp of triumph as she felt it close. Finally!

  She took an experimental breath or two and smoothed the material over her hips before she took a step away from her bedroom mirror, frowning at her reflection. It zips, but does it work? On Amanda, the satin-faced black crepe with the low sweetheart neckline looked dramatic and impossibly chic, offsetting her creamy skin and copper hair to perfection.

  Gabby, on the other hand, looked like she was going to a funeral.

  She sighed with disappointment. It just wasn’t fair. After all that dieting, all those pills, she finally had a waistline tiny enough to fit into the corseted Mainbocher Amanda had seemed to slip into so effortlessly. And still, Gabby thought glumly, still I look like the world’s best-dressed Sicilian widow.

  Snatching up the short length of drinking straw she’d taken from the Olympus malt shop and trimmed with a pair of nail scissors, Gabby leaned over one of the neat lines of greenish powder she’d laid out carefully on the polished surface of her dressing table. A single sharp inhale and the powder disappeared up her nose. She’d been crushing up her pills and snorting them since she noticed some musician friends of Eddie taking cocaine that way in the dressing room at the Club Alabam a couple of weeks ago. It took a little time to crush the powder fine enough not to burn, but it made them work so much faster. Already her heart was racing as she leaned over to snort the second line.

  Gabby wiped her nose and looked back at her reflection. I just need a little more color, that’s all. Swiftly, she snapped up the little pot of blush from its place on her dressing table and brushed the bright pink powder over the apples of her cheeks and into her hairline, like Viola had taught her to do years ago to keep herself from being washed out by the footlights.

  Lipstick was next, a rich scarlet carefully applied to accentuate the deep cupid’s bow of her upper lip. Her big expressive eyes were her best feature—even the Olympus makeup artists, who were not exactly shy about expressing their distaste for her various other perceived facial deficiencies, regularly marveled at how they hardly had to do anything to make them pop—but Gabby spat on a cake of mascara anyway and rubbed it onto her lashes with a little brush. It can’t hurt, she thought, diligently working the dark powder all around her lash line. Every little bit helps.

  Leaning back from the mirror, Gabby inspected her handiwork. Not bad. Her bright cheeks and spidery lashes looked painted, true, but vivid, a little like a china doll. Her eyes dropped to the neckline of her dress—or more accurately, to the two empty pouches just beneath it. It’s not that they aren’t there. They just aren’t quite in the right place.

  She opened her top dresser drawer and took out a pair of thick woolen socks. Carefully, she folded each sock into a kind of pad and stuffed them into the cups of her bra. Much better, she thought, admiring the way her new cleavage strained against the fabric. But what if tonight was the night? What if Eddie Sharp finally reached in there and came up with two handfuls of slightly sweaty wool?

  “I’d die,” Gabby said aloud to her reflection. “I’d die of embarrassment.”

  She glanced at her watch. Six-fifteen. As was their custom, Jimmy Molloy was supposed to pick her up at seven and take her back to his bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, where Eddie would be waiting to take her out again. It was the ruse they’d been playing for weeks, and it worked like a dream. Jimmy and Gabby always made sure to have their picture taken in the bar before Eddie showed up, and she and Eddie never went anywhere they were likely to be photographed. But it required coordination. Even if she could have convinced Viola to drive her down to Wilshire for an emergency shopping trip, there was no time now. Besides, she’d want to know why Gabby needed a new dress just to go to the movies with Jimmy, and that would give the whole game away.

  Reluctantly, Gabby removed the wadded-up socks and tossed them into a corner. It was no use. Until she could convince the studio—and Viola—just how urgently she needed a whole new grown-up wardrobe, Eddie was just going to have to see her in something she’d worn before.

  Sighing, she flung open the door of her closet, flicking dispiritedly through the tired, mostly pink dresses that hung there. The deep pink she’d worn to the Governor’s Ball was way too fancy, her blue cotton check not fancy enough. She brushed past plaid skirts and white blouses, a polka-dotted two-piece with a bow at the neck, the burgundy crepe with the white collar she’d worn the first time he took her to the Dunbar, still draped in the sachets of lavender and cedar she’d hung all over it trying to get the smell of reefer out of the fabric before Viola caught on. When she came to a yellow silk print, she paused. It was a little … sunny for evening, but she could wear the black evening hat and black gloves Amanda had left her. Like Margo had worn with her yellow outfit at the bridal shop. It just might work.

  Plus, to be perfectly honest
, Gabby thought, gasping a little against the bodice of the black Mainbocher, I can actually take a breath in it. Should the opportunity present itself, she could get out of Amanda’s dress—she just wasn’t sure she could get back into it. She slipped the yellow dress off the hanger and tossed it onto the bed, then turned back to the dressing table, picking up the heavy lead crystal perfume atomizer to crush another pill.

  “Gabrielle.”

  “God!” Gabby nearly jumped out of her skin at the sight of her mother in the doorway. “Don’t you ever knock?”

  “Why should I knock?” Viola raised an eyebrow. “What are you doing in here that you don’t want me to see?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing,” Gabby said quickly, putting down the atomizer and sweeping the loose pill and bits of leftover powder onto the floor with what she hoped was a surreptitious gesture. It wasn’t that she was taking anything she wasn’t supposed to be, she told herself defensively, just that she didn’t feel like explaining to Viola the logic—or the inspiration—behind this particular delivery system. “But, you know, I could have been dressing. I could have been undressed.”

  “Oh, please. I used to change your diaper,” Viola said, casting a critical eye over Amanda’s black dress. “It’s nothing I haven’t seen before. Although obviously, I hope I can’t say the same about your visitor.”

  “My visitor?” Reflexively, Gabby crossed her arms over her deflated, sockless décolletage. “What are you talking about?”

  “That bandleader,” Viola hissed. “He’s here. Says he wants to see you.”

  Oh God. Eddie Sharp. In her house. Probably sitting in one of those horrible brocade armchairs that somehow always smelled of face powder and old soup, staring at Viola’s humiliating collection of frolicking porcelain kittens and that photograph Gabby was always begging her to get rid of, the one of a chubby baby Gabby cheerfully lifting her sailor dress over her head to display a cloth diaper that Viola, for all her bravado, appeared not to have changed quite fast enough. Gabby had never had a boy show up at her house before, except for Jimmy Molloy, and even he had never been farther than the vestibule. What should she do? What would Amanda do in a situation like this? Or better yet—since Gabby had begun to wonder if maybe Amanda wasn’t quite the expert in the field of male-female relationships that Gabby had assumed her to be—what would Margo Sterling do?

  Margo would play it cool, Gabby decided. She’d act like it didn’t mean anything at all, like this was just the kind of thing that happened to her all the time.

  “Well, show him into the parlor, Viola,” she said, in her best approximation of Margo’s crisp, finishing-school diction. “Give him a drink if he wants one, and tell him I’ll be with him momentarily.”

  “Show him into the parlor?” Viola said, goggling in disbelief. “What am I, your maid?”

  No, Gabby thought meanly, but somebody should be. Viola was always going on about how expensive a maid was, and how she wasn’t going to pay some stranger her hard-earned money—her hard-earned money, that was a laugh!—to hang around all day snooping, eating their food, doing things Viola could just as easily do for herself, but honestly, it was positively humiliating for someone in Gabby’s position not to have any household help. Jimmy Molloy lived in a hotel half the time and still had a butler and a chef; Dane Forrest had a valet; hell, she’d even heard Amanda muse about hiring a lady’s maid to help her with her hair and clothes.

  “Just do it,” Gabby said fiercely. “I’ll be there in a second.”

  “Oh, yessum! I’s go tell the young gentleman at once,” Viola said, backing out the door in an obsequious imitation of an antebellum house slave. “And by the way, Miss Scarlett, you have lipstick on your teeth.”

  I bet Margo Sterling’s mother never answered her own door, Gabby thought furiously as she turned back to the mirror to rub the scarlet stain off her incisor. Margo Sterling probably had a uniformed butler who said things like “she’ll meet you in the library” and offered people brandy while they waited.

  I need to make more money, Gabby thought as she slipped quickly into the yellow dress. No more Viola negotiating everything, being so pathetically grateful for any little crumb the studio deigned to toss their way. No. As soon as her contract was up for discussion, she was going to call Myron Selznick herself and tell him it was a thousand dollars a week or nothing, with script approval on a guaranteed three-picture-a-year deal. She’d get a big house in Beverly Hills with a big green lawn, a car of her own, a real housekeeper, and a secretary to answer her fan mail and read her scripts out loud to her to memorize. If Olympus wouldn’t give her that, well, she could just go elsewhere.

  And if Viola doesn’t like it, she can go elsewhere too.

  Eddie was in the living room, sitting in exactly the chair she was afraid he’d be in, the one with the dark spot that had been the preferred toilet facility of Piggy, Frankie’s late cat, during the long years of his incontinent decline. “There she is!” he called, jumping to his feet as she entered the room. “There’s my best girl!”

  “Hi, Eddie.” It appeared that Viola, Gabby noted with some displeasure, had not offered him a drink. Maybe it was just as well. If she was going to have any chance of being alone with him tonight, the safest thing was to get out of the house as quickly as possible, before Viola could put her foot down and/or invite herself along. Besides, Gabby thought as he leaned over to kiss her proffered cheek, he smells like he’s had a few already. “You’re early.”

  “Early?” Viola’s ears pricked up. “What do you mean? I thought you were going out with Jimmy tonight.”

  “And Eddie,” Gabby said quickly. “We were all going to see some music, isn’t that right?” She shot him a meaningful look, praying he wasn’t too tanked to play along.

  “Uh, sure,” Eddie said. “That sounds right.”

  “And Jimmy was supposed to pick me up,” Gabby continued, “but obviously there’s been a change of plan. Anyway, we have to go.”

  “Now?” Viola looked pointedly at the clock over the mantel. “It’s not even six-thirty. I thought you weren’t going out until seven.”

  “Well, now we have to pick Jimmy up, don’t we?” Gabby said irritably. Leave it to Viola to make you as grumpy about lying as telling the truth. “And he’s all the way at the studio, so we better leave now. You know how Jimmy hates it when you’re late.”

  “Wait a minute.” There was a suspicious look on Viola’s face that Gabby didn’t like at all. “May I see you in the kitchen, please, Gabrielle?”

  “There’s no time,” Gabby whined.

  “It’ll only take a minute,” Viola insisted. “Mr. Sharp, you’ll have to excuse us.”

  When Viola got that tone in her voice, it meant she was about ten seconds away from causing a major scene. Unless Gabby wanted to risk being led away by the ear like a naughty little kid—in front of Eddie!—she had no choice but to obey.

  “I don’t like this,” Viola hissed when the kitchen door had swung closed behind them. “I don’t like this one little bit.”

  “And I don’t see what you’re getting so upset about,” Gabby replied, trying to keep as calm as possible. “It’s just a change of plan. Big deal.”

  “Big deal?” Viola’s eyes, fringed with their usual layer of ineptly applied false lashes, were practically popping out of her head. “Big deal? I knew it. I knew you’d been sneaking around with that punk behind my back, and now you’re dragging Jimmy into it?”

  “Keep your voice down!” Gabby begged. “He’s right outside.”

  “You think I care? You think I care what he thinks of me? You know what I do care about? I’ve heard stories about that kid, about the people he spends time with. I care about what Larry Julius is going to say. What Leo Karp is going to say when he finds out you’ve been hanging around that”—she sputtered, trying to think of just the right word—“that degenerate. That drug addi
ct.”

  “Yes, I’m curious about that too,” Gabby said coolly, “since they were the ones who made me into the same thing. With plenty of help from you, of course.”

  Viola began to shake with rage, so hard that one of her errant eyelashes came loose and fell to the floor. It lay on one of the white linoleum tiles, curled up like a hairy bug. “I will not be spoken to that way.” She was trembling. “You will not speak to me that way in my own house.”

  “Only it’s not your house, is it?” Somehow, the more upset Viola got, the calmer Gabby felt. “It’s my house. I pay for it, and for everything in it.” She looked down at the eyelash, resisting the urge to crush it with the toe of her shoe like the smoldering butt of a cigarette on the sidewalk. “You’re living under my roof, not the other way around.”

  “Gabby,” Viola implored. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know what’s best for you. You’re just a child.”

  “Only I’m not, am I? A child is looked after by others. A child isn’t expected to be responsible for feeding her family, or clothing them, or keeping a roof over their heads or,” she added, unable to resist, “a Cadillac in their driveway. So since I’m not a child and this is my house, I think that from now on I’m going to do whatever I want. And what I want right now,” she said, pushing casually past her gobsmacked mother, “is to go out with Eddie Sharp. Don’t wait up for me.”

  “So that’s your old lady,” Eddie said when they were safely in the car, Viola’s forlorn figure in the front yard growing comfortingly smaller as they drove away. “She seems like a handful.”

  “Tell me about it,” Gabby said, reaching into the glove compartment for the fifth of Scotch he always kept there.

  Eddie held up a neatly rolled joint. “Mind if I spark it up? I kind of need it after all that.”

  “Oooh, yes please.”

  He took a drag and passed it to her. She sucked the smoke, careful not to swallow so much that it set her throat on fire this time. Let it never be said I’m not a fast learner, she thought happily, pleased with her expertise. Old One-Take Gabby. More like One-Toke. She started to laugh, the smoke billowing from her lungs and settling around her in a sweet-smelling fog. Green pills, Scotch, and reefer, she thought happily. The cocktail of the gods.