“It’s good to see you, Dad,” Barry said, choking back his desire to weep.
“Uncle Desmond’s arranged for Doctor Prinzmetal to come to see her tonight.” Myron Prinzmetal attended to the overstressed hearts of the Industry’s upper echelon. “And I got her a private room and private nurses around the clock.” Tim voiced these extravagances with pathetic pride.
“Can we see her?” Barry asked.
They had been walking up the corridor. Tim tapped on room number 513.
A capped gray head popped out. “No visiting right now, Mr. Cordiner. Our girl needs her rest.”
“My son and daughter wanted to look in on her.”
“Oh, you must be Barry,” the nurse said. “She’s been asking for you.”
Barry slipped into the dimly lit room. Clara Cordiner’s thin face looked as white as if the skull beneath were showing.
“Mom?”
Her eyes opened slowly. “Barry . . .?”
“Hi.”
“My heart. . . .”
“Don’t try to talk, Mom,” he said, smoothing her hair. “Doctor Prinzmetal’s on the way. He’ll patch you up.”
“Missed you. . . .”
“And I’ve missed you, Mommy.” How long since he had called her that?
“Your school . . .?” she whispered.
“Practically have a Phi Bete key in my pocket.” The still hospital air seemed to vibrate with his lie. He hadn’t even told Alicia the bad news when his self-addressed postcards had arrived with ten units of Ds and four of Incompletes. “Mom, I sold a story. A famous literary magazine’s going to print my work.”
Clara’s white lips curved in a weak semblance of a smile, then her eyes closed.
The nurse tapped Barry’s sleeve. As he left the room, thick tears spurted. Embarrassed, he ran up the corridor to the men’s room, where he gasped out his filial remorse. When he emerged, he saw his Uncle Frank standing with his arm around his brother-in-law. Frank Zaffarano was five four, and Tim Cordiner nearly a foot taller, but the director, virile in his alpaca sport jacket, appeared the dominant figure.
Seeing Barry, Frank raised his clenched fist. “You’re lucky we’re in a hospital, Barry. If we weren’t, I’d give you a good beating.” In his thirty years in California, Frank had lost much of the Sicilian accent of his youth, but the final syllables of his words became more lyrically inflected when he was in the midst of emotion-drenched family brouhahas like this. “What sort of son are you, staying away from your mother?”
“Uncle Frank,” Beth murmured, “Barry came the minute Dad called.”
Frank shook his head, from which thick gray hair grew in profusion, as if bewildered by the ways of irresponsible sons. “And where has he been all these months?”
“Barry, how’s Mom?” Beth asked.
“She spoke to me,” Barry said, trying to sound confident.
Frank tapped his stocky chest. “Seeing her son is the best cure for a mother’s heart.”
• • •
Myron Prinzmetal pronounced his patient’s condition to be serious. Tim Cordiner and his two children sat up all night in uncomfortable hospital waiting room chairs. When the doctor arrived at seven he reported that Clara’s condition had stabilized. The twins and their father returned to the tract house in Westchester.
The breakfast was like thousands of others, except that Beth, not Clara, scrambled the eggs. Barry and Tim ate, then lingered over black coffee at the kitchen table, splitting the Times, Tim reading the sports section while Barry turned to Robert Kirsch’s book review. Despite his guilty anxieties about his mother, Barry felt more at peace than at any time since he’d left this house with Alicia.
11
“Do you think it’s a good idea for me to buy a used car?” Alicia repeated.
“What did you say, hon?” Barry’s pen stopped racing, but he continued to scan his yellow notepad.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “We have enough for a down payment on a car. You won’t need to drive me to work.”
“If a car’s what you want, fine with me.”
“Can you go with me to look this weekend?”
Barry had begun to write again.
This was one of their rare evenings together: he had gone to the afternoon visiting hours at the hospital.
During the five weeks that Clara Cordiner had been at Cedars of Lebanon. Barry had spent at least two hours every day with her. On the night of her heart attack, horrified by her absolute weakness, he was convinced that if he’d been around she never would have been stricken. And he was positive that she would recover only if he dedicated himself to becoming a far better son than he’d ever been.
Clara no longer needed private nurses; she was wearing her gift bedjackets and reading her gift books, yet that slave-driving guilt brought Barry back each day. He never suggested that Alicia accompany him—after all, hadn’t their marriage quite literally broken his mother’s heart? Usually he had a bite afterward with Beth and their father and whoever in the family happened to be around.
“Barry?” Alicia said.
Frowning, he looked up. “What?”
“Is Saturday or Sunday better for you?”
“This’ll be your car. Pick whatever you want.”
“I don’t know the first thing about motors and stuff like that, or financing.”
“I can’t spare the time,” Barry said, then softened. “But PD has a good grasp of financing. Let me see if he’ll go with you.”
• • •
Saturday afternoon Barry went to see his mother. Alone in the apartment, Alicia peered critically in the bathroom mirror. Barry’s pointed exclusion of her at the hospital had increased her insecurity about being with his family. Would PD think her new white slacks too tight? And what about the sweater? It had come from Saks, Hap had made the selection, so it had style . . . yet wasn’t the royal blue garish on her, and the fit too snug over her breasts?
A firm tap sounded on the door.
“Coming, PD,” she called.
But it was Hap who stood outside.
The blood drained from her head, and she experienced the same weakness in her legs as when she had passed out picking strawberries in Oxnard.
The Central American sun had deepened Hap’s tan, and streaks of his hair were bleached to tow. Dressed in a white Oxford shirt and khaki slacks, he looked top drawer—and far too handsome. And he’d been avoiding her.
Self-consciously wetting her lips, she bestowed a dazzling stage smile. “Welcome home from Guatemala,” she said. “When did you get back?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“I was expecting PD.”
“He asked me to fill in. That okay with you?”
She made another smile.
“Otherwise PD can probably do it tomorrow,” Hap said, adding, “He’s a much better bargainer than I am.”
“You took me by surprise, that’s all,” she said, reaching for her purse.
Traversing the rows of freshly waxed cars at Baumgarten’s Used Chevrolets, she decided that Hap’s easy friendliness and calm advice was proof positive that he, as opposed to her, had recovered from being in too deep.
She liked a two-tone ’56, but the down payment was out of her range.
They drove two blocks east to Alton’s Foreign Cars.
A roly-poly salesman in a navy suit and navy shirt bounced over to them. “Well, sir, and what can I do for you and your gorgeous little wife?”
“This is my cousin. She’s buying the car,” Hap said, explaining Alicia’s needs and price limit. They were led to a maroon Volkswagen bug with fifty-three thousand miles on the odometer. They drove around the block and Hap decided the engine seemed in good shape. In a small, airless office, he cosigned the sheaf of forms. The rotund salesman told Alicia that when her loan application was approved, the VW would be hers, “—and the bank’s, hahaha.”
“How long will it take?” Hap asked.
“You know how banks are. Slo
-o-ow.” The salesman laughed again. “The little lady won’t have her VW until Wednesday at the earliest.”
As they left the lot, Alicia said, “I really appreciate you cosigning, Hap.”
“You’re not going to run away, are you?” he asked. “Besides, Dad’s got you on the preferential treatment list, so you’re good for the payments.”
“Anyway, thank you.”
And then he smiled.
He hadn’t smiled since he’d picked her up. Hap didn’t go in for forced joviality like PD, or polite laughs like Beth, or a nervous baring of teeth like Barry; he was never wittily caustic like his brother Maxim, but on the other hand, he never went for hours like this without cracking a grin.
His smile had a reassuring warmth. “You’re wearing the sweater,” he said.
“I do all the time. I love it.”
He opened the door of his MG for her. A Buick was waiting for the parking space, but he didn’t start the motor.
“When PD asked me to fill in,” he said slowly, “I almost refused.”
“Why didn’t you—” She coughed to clear the rustiness in her throat. “Why didn’t you turn him down?”
“I wanted to see you.”
“But it’s been months. I thought. . . .”
“What?”
“It’s nothing.”
“No, tell me.”
In the hazy March sunlight she stared at him, knowing the attraction of the magnet for the pin, and heard herself come out with the unadorned truth. “I figured you’d been avoiding me.”
“I was.”
“Ohhh. . . .”
“I explained, Alicia.”
“Yes, but by then you’d heard my life story. A major turnoff for anyone.”
“You sure don’t understand me very well,” Hap said. The driver of the waiting Buick honked rapidly. Hap ignored the blasts, taking her hand, twining his large fingers between hers. She began to tremble. He raised her hand, pressing their clasped knuckles against his cheek. “You don’t understand me at all.”
• • •
On Monday Alicia was in a street scene on the Magnum back lot. In the early afternoon Hap dropped by to suggest he drive her home. Her face was hot when she phoned the apartment. “Great!” Barry said enthusiastically. “This way I can head right on over to Cedars.”
But Hap did not take her home. He drove along Hollywood Boulevard turning left on a side street, pulling up at Don the Beachcomber’s. The restaurant, decorated as a Polynesian jungle with rocky nooks and a warehouseful of plants, was extremely dark, and the candlelit hurricane lamp on their table cast a glow on Hap’s face, intensifying his tan. She requested a Coke. Hap ordered a rum drink that came in a coconut shell.
“Want a sip?” he asked.
She sucked at the red cellophane straw. “Mmm, delicious.”
“That’s why I chose it—I figured you’d like it.” He paused. “Alicia, isn’t it lonely for you with Barry gone so much?”
“He’s swamped,” she said, defending her husband. “There’s his studying, his work in the Student Union and his writing—I guess you heard he sold a short story to a big literary magazine? And to top it off there’s his mother’s illness.”
“I wasn’t knocking him, Alicia. Yeah, I suppose I was. So he never takes you to the hospital?”
“I’d hardly help Mrs. Cordiner’s recovery.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“Sort of,” Alicia sighed. “He says it’d upset her and that might be dangerous.”
“You wouldn’t have to be in her room. Everybody else drops by and afterwards has dinner with him and Beth and Uncle Tim.”
The Cordiner gatherings were news to her. She said nothing.
“Why let Barry shut you out?” The knobs of Hap’s jaw showed.
He’s mad at me, she thought, and immediately understood that his anger was directed not at her—or even at Barry and his parents—but at the injustice of the situation.
“He’s not really shutting me out,” she said, and changed the subject. “I’ve been getting a lot of work. Hap, when I went to those cruddy theaters, I used to tell myself one day I’d be up there on the screen, but in my heart I knew it was a ridiculous daydream. And now look at me—I feel like Alice through the looking glass. The dream’s come true.”
“Dreams are not enough,” Hap said, refusing to be diverted. “If Barry took you there every night, Uncle Tim and the others would accept it. You’d become part of the family.”
“Mexican maid mingles with Hollywood high society?”
Hap’s jawbones showed again. “Uncle Tim’s a grip.”
“And what about Mr. Zaffarano? And you know who your father is.”
“Uncle Frank freely admits to arriving in California with less than five dollars. And I explained about Dad.”
“Hap,” she said, “let it go.”
“Don’t you see? Barry’s always had a massive inferiority complex. Because he’s insecure, he’s making it impossible for you to ever fit in with the family.”
Although she had known since the post-elopement scene at Barry’s parents’ house that she never would be accepted by the Cordiners, hearing Hap say it demolished her. She bent over her Coke.
After a moment or two he said gently, “I’m sorry, Alicia. I didn’t mean to make you feel worse. But by now you must have figured that what hurts you hurts me too.”
She looked up. The flame of the hurricane lamp flickered in his gray eyes. He was gazing at her with such transparent supplication that words were unnecessary. He reached out to cover her wrist. Once again his touch made her tremble. He didn’t move his hand and as they stared at one another inexplicable tears formed in her eyes.
“There’s motels on Cahuenga.” His voice was stretched out of shape.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes. . . .”
12
On Thursday, March 16, the same day that Alicia picked up her VW from the dealer, a Schaefer ambulance took Clara Cordiner home. On the small crabgrass front lawn Tim and the twins were waiting to greet her.
Clara smiled weakly up from the gantry. “This is what makes it all worthwhile,” she murmured. “Having my family around me.”
Five nights a week Barry drove the traffic-clogged miles to the Westchester tract house. He, Tim and Beth—when she was not on a date or at an AEPhi chapter meeting—shared the salt-free, fat-free, taste-free dinners prepared by the elderly, officious practical nurse, eating at awkward metal TV tables in the sickroom. He seldom returned to the apartment before eleven. Routinely he found the lights on, the Late Show movie rattling away, and Alicia asleep tightly curled into a fetal position. He had no reason, therefore, to speculate on how she passed the numerous evenings that he was absent.
• • •
“Hap. . . .”
“What?”
“Hap . . . that’s not your real name.”
“Harvard,” he supplied.
“Harvard? Like the college?”
“It’s mother’s maiden name. When I was a baby they nicknamed me Hap and it stuck.”
“A good thing. You’re not a Harvard, it’s way too pompous.” She kissed the fair, crisp hairs of his chest.
They had already made love once, and a provocative, musky odor surrounded the thrown-back sheets. He had been caressing her slippery epithelial flesh, she had been running her fingers on his hard, deliciously silken penis. The Cahuenga Inn, their regular meeting place since their precipitous departure from Don the Beachcomber’s a little over six weeks earlier, did a brisk hourly business. They would arrive discreetly in their own cars, Alicia waiting a full two minutes to follow Hap to whichever door she had seen him unlock.
She had stored up nuggets of information about him. Some were intimidating: his mother came from a wealthy and philanthropically inclined old family, he knew celebrities by their first names—he called Lauren Bacall Betty and Rain Fairburn Marylin, Henry Fonda Hank and Edward G. Robinson Uncle Eddie. On the other hand,
it delighted her to discover that, unlike his brother Maxim who bed-hopped in the best Hollywood tradition, Hap had slept with only three other women. (His reticence was partially due to a nice, sensitive shyness and partially because he felt that entering a sexual entanglement meant you were serious.)
“You’re a man of mystery,” she said. “All I know about you is that you’re upright—”
“Very,” he chuckled, clasping her hand tighter around his penis.
“—and strong and good.”
“The exact opposite of the correct adjectives to describe a guy in bed with his cousin’s wife.” The amusement was gone.
“Don’t let it bug you so much. Hap.”
“How not?”
“I’m his wife, I’m the one who’s cheating.”
“And what about me? Not only his cousin but his so-called friend.”
“It’s different for the woman.”
“That’s the double standard, love, and I don’t believe in it.”
“The rest of the world does.”
“You can’t argue me out of feeling like a shit.” He drew a sigh whose depth she felt and heard beneath her ear.
She raised her head, peering at him. “Sorry we started?”
“Jesus, no. How can you even think that’s what I meant? I was trying to explain having a go at other people’s wives isn’t my usual style.”
“That’s not how it sounded.” Because of her sudden fear that he might want to break off, she spoke too forcefully.
“I won’t be the one to end it.”
Her pupils were enormous as she said, “You’re free.”
His arms tightened around her. “No, love, I’m not free.”
He strained her body closer. Caressing the curve of her back and buttocks, he kissed her eyes, then her mouth. She returned his kisses with equal fervor, stroking the muscles of his arms, his shoulders. Away from Hap, the memory of his tactile qualities—the strong body hairs, the large bones, the musculature that was well developed without being grotesquely delineated—could make her grow wet and ready. And when she was with Barry, though she despised herself for it, she couldn’t help making comparisons—her husband was smaller and narrower everywhere.
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