“Would you?” I’d never had anyone pay me so much attention.
He read off each dish and told me what was in it and finally ordered for me. While we waited to be served, he explained the view. He pointed out the pier stretching into the sea and identified the many kinds of boats tied to its pilings.
Waiters hovered and we kept the conversation impersonal. I knew better than to touch hands. The food was amazing and I tried to remember all the names. I forgot about the dress until after Laurence signed the bill and left first.
I walked alone across the dining room, across the foyer, and up the staircase.
He appeared at the far end of the hall, opened a door, looked around and then waved me in. With his arms around me in our sun-flooded room, I tried to forget the guarded looks that had followed me.
No one could possibly know me, not that it mattered. I was free to go where I wanted. It was Laurence who had to be protected. I knew it, hated it, but didn’t argue. If I argued, he would leave me.
“Can we walk on the beach?” I asked. “It’s a beautiful beach.”
“You can. Later. I’ll stay here and do my crossword.”
“You and your crosswords! Golly, Laurence.”
“I’m halfway through the book.”
“What will I do on a beach all by myself?” I pouted.
“Put your toes in the ocean,” he said and laughed. “How many little Iowa girls get to do that?”
“Minnesota,” I said.
“Close.”
“You know I’m from Minnesota.”
“No one is from Minnesota. There is no such place. You made it up,” he teased.
“Oh, you’re so mean!” I laughed and ran my fingers into his ribs, tickling him.
Catching my hands, he spun me around and held me against himself, my back to him, his arm tight around my waist. I wriggled without really wanting to be free.
“I am not mean,” he said, his mouth against my ear. “Read my reviews. I am winning, versatile and slick, but never mean.”
He had been reviewed once for his role in the photoplay Her Gypsy Lover. Although he hadn’t played the lover, he’d been in several scenes. I hadn’t missed a showing when it played at the nearest moving picture theater. I sat in the dark and memorized every line of his face, every tilt of his eyebrow, and I nearly burst into tears when he looked straight into the camera and smiled that smile.
He undid the buttons on my awful dress, undid them one by one, kissing the nape of my neck while his fingers moved down my spine. His hands were warm, pushing aside the lacy pink material, gliding under my arms, circling my waist, slipping up under the Janine Dreams real silk chemise he’d given me.
“It’s still afternoon,” I protested, barely able to speak he amazed me so.
“Umm. Two whole days for us,” he murmured.
Remembering we would have to return to our separate lives, I shivered. I wished I could die right there, standing at that window looking out at the sea, his arms around me.
“Are you cold?” he asked, his voice soft.
He slipped one arm around my shoulders, the other beneath my knees, swung me up, and carried me to the bed the way the Arab had carried the English lady in King of the Desert. He lowered me carefully, centering my head on the pillow, then folded the chenille spread across me to envelope me.
Standing at the bedside he smiled down at me. After dropping his trousers and drawers, he bent forward to unfasten the garters that held up his socks.
I turned my face away.
“Don’t you like to watch me?” he asked.
“No,” I lied, embarrassed to admit I did.
“Why not?” His voice rose in surprise.
“I want you for always.”
It slipped out. I hadn’t meant to say it. Tears stung my eyes. If I tried to wipe them away, he would see and be angry. He hated it when I cried. Instead, I kept my face turned away from him.
Opening the spread, he settled down beside me. I could feel his bare warmth the length of my body, along my arm and breast and through the lace-edged rayon step-ins and my stockings.
Hugging me, he whispered, “Don’t be a tease.”
I could smell the mixture of aromas that clung to him from his shaving lotion and Fatima cigarettes.
He said, “All the dodging, parking the Lincoln in the garage two blocks away, arriving in separate taxis, that’s not how I want us. But what can I do? The studios are getting strict. Too much gossip in the papers. Any scandal and I’m ruined.”
He wouldn’t be the first and I knew it because several scandals had recently rocked Hollywood. The stories had been in all the papers, not just in Hollywood but all over the country, my friend Ruth had told me. Infidelity and divorce, and some very big stars suddenly decided to return to the New York stage.
“I’ve been offered the lead in the most wonderful new production,” they were quoted as saying, but Ruth said they wouldn’t get work there, either. Their careers were over.
Hoping to hide my tears, I said, “I’ve still got my shoes on, Laurence.”
Beneath the cover he bent his leg over my legs and ran the sole of his bare foot down my silk stockings from my knees to my toes. “Do you? So you do!”
He sat up and leaned forward to unbuckle the silver kid straps. With my arms free and his back to me, I quickly rubbed away my tears.
Holding out a slipper, he balanced it on his upturned palm. “What tiny feet you have, Cinderella.”
I couldn’t help giggling. He was always doing that, driving me from giggles to tears and back.
Smiling into my eyes, he said, “How perfect. Silver slippers for a lady named Silver.”
When he said my name and looked at me, I went as warm as a sunbather on a sun-drenched beach. My mind touched total joy, a brief flicker.
And then it was gone and I was April again.
CHAPTER 5
I opened my eyes and stared into the laundry basket, fucking romantic, that. I left the basket in the middle of the kitchen, grabbed my wallet and keys and windbreaker and headed out. Because I knew for certain if I stayed in the apartment alone and thought about Laurence and the hotel and my reaction to his every word and touch, I would soon be insane. Maybe I already was.
If my mind was going to disintegrate anyway, I should at least have had the fun of a few recreational drugs, shouldn’t I? Or had I done that, forgotten it, and lost a whole mess of brain cells on the way?
The thought did cross my mind to keep my mouth shut, and at least I didn’t go hysterical this time. I was getting used to these unwanted vision/dream/blackout whatevers.
Unfortunately, some things don’t stay bottled. I met up with my friends at the coffee shop where they always did lunch, a small crowded place in walking distance from their jobs. I had ridden a bus downtown.
The others had already picked up their lunches at the counter and found a table. I waved at them, stood in line, bought my lunch.
I’d no more than slid into my chair, coffee cup in one hand, plastic-wrapped sandwich in the other, than Cyd said, “What’s the matter, April?”
Tom and Macbeth swiveled their heads in unison to look at me.
“Love your sweater with the shirt,” I said, hoping to distract her.
“Yeah, you say so every time I wear this sweater, which is about once a week. So now, what’s wrong?”
With great care I slipped off my slightly damp windbreaker, pushed up my sweater sleeves, ran my fingers through my mass of frizzy hair to hook it behind my ears. Picking slowly at the plastic, I unwrapped the sandwich.
“I’m waiting,” Cyd said.
Maybe I should have taken a large bite of sandwich, then mumbled and pointed to my mouth the way people do, but instead I blurted, “Some hotel dining room in L. A. near a beach.”
And then I blabbed right on, filling in all the details of background and clothing. I didn’t mention the Laurence character, didn’t mention his name or the fact he had been with me. It wa
s stupid, can’t explain why, except I felt my relationship with a man who had probably never existed and was no more than a hunk from my imagination in some way insulted the guys with me now.
Like they weren’t closer? More real? And from what I remembered of my conversation with the Laurence person, Tom and Mac were also a whole lot nicer than he was. As far as I knew, neither of them had ever been ashamed to be seen with me, although if I kept traveling down this road to madness, the day might come when they would be.
“There was even this maitre d’ and I was wearing a party dress. Party dress! High school, I guess, puffed sleeves, full skirt, really pathetic.”
“Aw, I bet you looked cute,” Tom said.
“You were by yourself?” Cyd asked.
“The room was full of people. No one I recognized.”
Cyd toyed with her glass mug of espresso, turning it around on the table top to draw a pattern of overlapping damp rings. Pulling her cell phone out of her purse, she flipped it open, punched in a number on her directory list, and the next thing I heard was, “Lisa? Hi, Cyd here. Remember telling me about a hypnotist? Right. Sure. Could I get her name?”
“Are we going on a field trip?” Tom asked.
Cyd flipped closed the phone. “I am. April is.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Tom said. “Hypnotist? Lovey, do you want some stranger getting in your head?”
“No, I don’t.” Added to all the other weirdness, I did not want a hypnotist messing with what little was left of my mind.
Macbeth grinned at me, the gap between his front teeth softening his expression. “Good for you.”
“What’s that mean?” Cyd asked.
“It means wherever April goes in her thoughts, she gets there all by herself. The day she can’t get back is the day we cart her off to an ER. Until then, let her work this through at her own pace,” Macbeth told Cyd.
There I sat, the infant with three bossy parents.
“Tightass,” she said. “You can’t accept anything you can’t touch.”
Tom said, “Are you offering your ass for touching?”
“Oh shut up, you know what I mean. Trouble with both of you is you reject anything that falls outside your beliefs, and that’s my definition of prejudice. Are you afraid of running into your own past lives?”
Macbeth laughed at her. “Maybe I don’t have a past. Maybe I am a true basic first-time-around primitive.”
“I have a past,” Tom said. “All of it forgettable.”
“Get serious,” Cyd said. “If reincarnation is a reality, then the soul or mind or whatever it is that gets reincarnated has to be eternal. Eternity goes in both directions. If our souls will exist forever in the future, they must also have existed forever in the past. Eternity implies no end and therefore no beginning.”
“You’re viewing eternity as a circle,” Tom said.
Macbeth and I looked at each other and kept our mouths shut. When the history majors started arguing philosophy, I tended to tune out and Macbeth simply stayed out.
“Do you think eternity is linear?” Cyd demanded.
“Huh. You want to get serious. Okay, I think finite minds cannot define infinity,” Tom said.
“But if our souls are eternal then so are our minds, which means we are capable of understanding anything. We simply need to bridge the gap between our limited conscious memory and our cosmic subconscious.”
Breaking apart a croissant, I muttered, “Contemplate the butter. Does it flow from the rising dough or is it an extra layer applied by the baker? That question taxes my intellectual limits.”
Macbeth said, “Okay, I will give three minutes of serious questioning. Then I’m headed back to the office. So tell me, babe, in this scene you saw, did you have a name? Did anybody have a name? Did the hotel have a name?”
I licked butter from my fingers. Of course Macbeth was the one to come up with a logical approach and as long as nobody dragged me to a shrink, why not.
I thought about it, figured out how to keep the story at a level I could handle, and said, “Don’t know about the hotel or the maitre d’ or the waiter. None of that ‘I’m Tony and I’ll be your waiter tonight’ stuff. But my name was Silver. I’ve never known anyone named Silver besides the Lone Ranger’s horse. Must have been a stage name. I was trying to get into the movies.”
Cyd propped her elbows on the table and counted on her fingers as she made points. “So far we know you were in a restaurant, had a pink party dress and were named Silver. Sounds like something made up to match the hair thing. You did say someone else called you Blondie?”
“Yes. And also Millie. I think maybe Millie was my real name.”
“Silent films. That narrows the time,” Macbeth said. “Any other names?”
“Umm, yes, sort of, there was this actor, his name was Laurence and he’d been in a film titled Her Gypsy Lover, but I don’t think he was the lead.”
“Now there’s something to toss at Google. Okay, keep thinking, toots, and we’ll knock it around tonight.” He patted my head daddy-style, kissed Cyd, said something along the see ya line to Tom and left the three of us to try to dig more information out of my weary brain. Now that Cyd was excited by the idea, Tom cooled.
He said, “Maybe Mac’s right. Maybe you’re remembering some movie you saw years ago.”
Was he only trying to be kind the other night when he listened and seemed to take me seriously?
“Something odd about your memories,” Cyd said.
“What?”
Cyd peered at us over the tops of her glasses frames with one of those looks that always made me suspect she could see into other people’s minds. “April, do you realize you told us brand names of stuff you saw? Delica mascara, Eau de Coty shaving lotion, Janet, no, Janine, Janine Dreams chemise, Fatima cigarettes, and you know why that’s weird?”
“Weird that you’d remember all those names.”
“Exactly! Because I realize I know those names. And I shouldn’t. I don’t suppose any of those brands exist any more. But I know them, and I know the camera was a Mitchell camera.”
“What camera?” Tom asked.
“Ah, therein lies the rub,” Cyd said slowly, waving her hands in a stage gesture. “That was the camera being used on the movie set.”
“So what’s the point?” Tom asked.
Neither of them seemed to be in a hurry to go back to work. Fine with me. I really needed company. What if I blacked out in the coffee shop surrounded only by strangers? Although I knew it was impossible, I kind of wished I could tag along with one of them, sit in an empty cubicle at their job site. Lord, I was rapidly convincing myself I needed a babysitter.
I rubbed the rest of the butter off my hands with a paper napkin while I thought. “Cyd, I was the one on the set. How do you know the name of the camera?”
Tom said, “Oh crap.”
We both stared at Cyd and before we could ask, she said, “No, I do not remember your memory. I did not see it or imagine it. But for some weird reason, I know what you’re talking about. I don’t know the place or the year, but when you describe something and give it a name, I recognize the name. And when you mentioned the camera, I thought the word Mitchell.”
“I told you that you were there.” I managed to say it without shrieking.
But inside I was shrieking. Because if Cyd was there, it all really happened and Cyd knew it and I knew it and now Tom knew it.
I said, “My name was Silver. And I wore Delica eye makeup. And you were there thinking more about cameras than eye makeup. Type casting, right?”
“And what have you left out? Who called you Silver? Who was smoking Fatima cigarettes?” Propping her elbows on the table, Cyd counted off statements on her fingers. “This Gypsy Lover actor? Okay, that name is familiar, too. I’m thinking we really both need to go to one of those reincarnation sessions.”
Tom said, “You’ll both freak out.”
“That’s why you’re coming with us,” Cyd said sweetly
. “You and the square-headed one. If April and I freak out, you two can take us home.”
“That part is okay. I will go with you.”
“And? Because I know you, Tom. There’s some sort of condition tacked on to your agreement,” Cyd said.
I sat back and looked from one to another, waiting. Nobody wanted my opinion. This was a contest between Cyd and Tom and it ended with Tom saying, “Before we let somebody shrink our heads, let’s see if we can get a little info elsewhere. Maybe find some books on the silent film era. Look through the photos.”
“You’re stalling.” Cyd leaned so close their noses were almost touching. Tom backed away with a laugh.
“It’s the hypnotism thing, Cyd. I don’t like that. Ask Lisa more about it.”
Cyd backed down. “If we can find answers elsewhere, maybe we don’t need to try hypnotism.”
And that challenge tossed the three of us into a typical Cyd-Tom activity from our days at the U. We phoned Macbeth at his office and invited him but he said no thanks and added something along the lines of, “I’ll search the web. I can probably find more in an hour than you’ll find in a week of searching the library.”
“True, but the library is more fun,” Tom said.
That evening, after they returned home from work, Cyd switched from her slacks to jeans while Tom tossed together a pasta supper. Then the three of us headed over to Suzzallo, the original UDub library, where there were still poorly lit rows of metal shelves filled with books no one had touched in eons.
We buried ourselves in the old catalog room, a cold and impersonal space that once held rows of wood cabinets with card drawers and had once been the heart of the Gothic-styled gray stone building. The card files were gone, along with the microfiche machines. In their place were computers.
Not everything we hoped to find was in the computers, but we did find that the film books were scattered, some in the Undergraduate library across the quad, some in buildings used by the English department. Enough volumes were still at Suzzallo to send us off to another floor and rows and rows of shelves and a section containing books on the early years of Hollywood. We dug through them, carried them to better lighted reading areas, flipped through dusty pages.
My Deja Vu Lover Page 4