Dreams Are Not Enough

by Jacqueline Briskin

  As Beth crossed the airy, bright upstairs hall which was hung with Irving’s da Vinci sketches, the now permanent twin lines between her hazel eyes grew deeper. With an air of resolve, she pushed open the heavy fire door.

  Clarrie did not glance up.

  The child sat at the small, brightly painted table, knotting the length of string stretched between her hands. A pretty, redheaded five-year-old wearing meticulously ironed yellow corduroy pants with a yellow shirt on which a smiling bear had been appliquéd. In the walk-in closet hung twenty identical sets, which when she outgrew them would be replaced with others in the next size. Clarrie refused to wear any other style.

  Beth glanced at Mrs. Patrick, whose thick legs were propped on an ottoman. The nurse nodded. It was all right to come in. Beth glided past the deep shelves crammed with toys in pristine condition, moving toward her daughter with the same caution she would employ cozying up to a bird.

  Clarrie continued knotting and looping the dark-brown twine. The macramé developing between her small hands would bring pride to an adult—if the adult were without artistic talent. She did not appear to notice her mother. But of course she did. When Clarrie was less than a year old they had learned by her piercing screams that she noticed the most minuscule alteration in her immediate environment. By the time Clarrie was two, she had developed an uncanny awareness of every minor discrepancy in the household. The Golds stopped inviting people to the house, entertaining either at Hillcrest Country Club or in the upstairs banquet room of the Bistro. If the slightest change—a forgetful servant whistling, a delivery truck turning in at the front door rather than the back—occurred during one of Clarrie’s bad times, she would shriek, sometimes for so long that Dr. Severin would have to be called to okay a sedating injection.

  Perching on a childsized chair, Beth turned to the nurse. “How is she today?”

  Mrs. Patrick, like the others rotating in the nursery, was a pediatric RN. Picking up her chart, she read in her Alabama drawl: “‘Woke at five past seven. Dressed self. Breakfast, the usual.’” If anything other than oatmeal was set in front of Clarrie for breakfast, lunch or supper, she would hurl her much-dented sterling porringer across the room. The cereal was fortified with a special mixture of liquid vitamins, protein powder and dried milk. “‘Bowel movement in commode at twenty past eight. Walked in garden for thirty minutes, then heard helicopter and grew distraught.’”

  “Yes, we heard her crying.”

  “‘Came inside at nine oh five. Nine thirty-five, calmed. Watched cartoons.’”

  Watched? Beth thought. Who knew what transpired in Clarrie’s brain when she gazed at the television screen?

  Clarrie raised her strings higher.

  “It’s beautiful, just beautiful,” Beth said. “Daddy and I framed your last macramé.” As she described the frame, its position in the house, her pretty voice assumed a false brightness.

  With Clarrie, she was completely out of her element.

  Beth’s self-esteem was intricately connected with helping others. She wasn’t sure whether this had developed from the psychology of being a twin, half of a person—the lesser, female half at that—and having to earn her share of attention and love, or whether she was born with an innate urge to make herself useful to others. In earliest childhood she had toddled off to perform errands for her parents and Barry. Later she had worked for good grades to please the teachers as well as her mother. At Magnum she had delighted in her long work hours and her efficiency. When PD started his first agency, she had volunteered to do his books. After marrying Irving, a widower, she threw herself into caring for him and his homes—a sprawling pink bungalow in Palm Springs, a house in Aspen, this Holmby Hills mansion.

  The specialists whom Irving brought here, sometimes at vast expense, gave a name to the child’s disorder. Acute chronic childhood psychosis. Beth didn’t care what they called it. She knew only that she was unnecessary in her child’s life, and no type of hideous physical or mental birth defect could have been more damaging to her.

  At the sound of a car moving up the long driveway, Beth stiffened, waiting for Clarrie’s shriek. She rested a light, comforting hand on her daughter’s silken hair, which was the same coppery shade of red as Barry’s had been at her age. Clarrie squirmed away, standing to continue her knotting.

  “The car’s not disturbing her,” Beth said.

  “She knows it’s her Auntie Alyssia.”

  How does she know? Beth wondered.

  Smiling and waving unacknowledged bye-byes, she left the nursery and felt five pounds lighter. She ran down the stairs to greet her sister-in-law.

  Alyssia wore yet another of those tee shirts studded with a pattern of rhinestones. Beth unconsciously smoothed the pleated skirt of her classic beige silk, thinking with rueful affection, Poor Alyssia, she has the tackiest taste.

  The two women hugged fondly, chatting as they went through the hall, which was designed specifically for Irving’s huge Rubenses—yards of stoutly rosy female nudes. They wound through the Oriental garden to the blue-tile-roofed teahouse, where a table was set for two.

  Pouring the iced coffee, Beth asked, “How’s Barry?”

  “He’s been busy on the book.” During the long hiatuses between Barry’s infrequent TV assignments, he rewrote the novel that he had started in the early weeks of their marriage.

  “And he hasn’t . . .” In the September sunlight hovered Beth’s unspoken words: Fallen off the wagon? Since Clarrie’s birth, she saw impending disaster everywhere. Barry hit the bottle less than once a year, and never stayed on a toot long enough to further damage his internal organs, yet Beth agonized incessantly about his drinking problem.

  “He’s great. As a matter of fact, he’s at L’Ermitage having lunch with a visiting editor from New York.”

  “Wonderful!” Beth cried wholeheartedly. Then, incapable of escaping her new and unwanted role of pessimist, she added, “Let’s hope it’s not another false alarm.” Last year the oft-revised novel had roused interest from a local publishing house, but no contract had been forthcoming.

  “Not to worry. He’s braced for this to be only a friendly lunch.” Alyssia sipped her iced coffee. “You said there was good news about Clarrie.”

  “Yes. Mrs. Patrick explained you were coming, and when your car turned into the drive, she didn’t get worried.” Even with Irving, Beth spoke in euphemisms, keeping up the fiction that Clarrie was a normal child going through a stage. But on the last word her lips turned downward.

  “Bethie,” Alyssia said sympathetically, “why don’t you and Irving have another child?”

  “He’s sixty-two and I’m forty. It’s out of the question.”

  “A lot of men his age have second families.”

  Beth looked at the pretty artificial pond, unable to banish the thought of her joinings with her husband. Irving, lacking any trace of PD’s amatory skill, followed a single routine. He French-kissed her until his erection was established, then climbed on top missionary style to grip the custom-made headboard with both hands as he pounded away for a maximum of two minutes. Yet, despite the inadequacies of their sex life, she cared deeply for him. She hadn’t married him for his money. In fact, she’d had no idea he was immensely wealthy when she met him at one of Uncle Desmond’s barbecues. It was a few months after she and PD had broken up, and she had been drawn to him because of his kind expression and sympathetic voice. “You look blue,” he had said. “I am, a bit,” she admitted. They talked about her work, and he diffidently invited her to a movie—“If you don’t mind being with an older man, that is.” She took him to an Academy showing because she didn’t want him to throw away more money than he could afford.

  Those first years the act hadn’t excited her, but neither had she found it repellent. When Clarrie’s problems were discovered, though, she had become convinced that the failure stemmed from her—after all, Irving in his first marriage had fathered three sons, energetic men with healthy families of their own
. From then on sex became a nightmare. Legs spread, molars gritted, she would pray that she wasn’t conceiving. Already on the Pill, she went to a second gynecologist to be fitted for an IUD. She also used vaginal foam, in part for the now necessary lubrication, but mainly for contraception.

  Alyssia was inquiring gently, “. . . What about adoption?”

  “I won’t adopt. I absolutely couldn’t.”

  “A lot of people say that, then go bananas over the baby.”

  “The child wouldn’t be part of me.”

  “But a newborn—”

  Beth sighed deeply. “Alyssia, I wish I were different. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I could never accept a child who didn’t have my genetic makeup.”

  “But you can’t know how you’d feel.”

  “I do know,” Beth said, her melodious voice going flat. “I know exactly. A stranger’s baby would be a placebo and nothing else. What could be more unfair?”

  She fell silent as Roscoe labored up the path with the tray.

  Eating thin-sliced papaya and freshly broiled shrimp (Beth was on a perpetual maintenance diet), they talked about the movie Alyssia was finishing at Universal.

  “So the retakes are almost done,” Beth said. “Then what?”

  “A little vacation time. After that, PD’s put together a package.”

  “Who’s in on it?”

  “Old times revisited.” An Alyssia del Mar chuckle. “Me. Maxim. Hap.”

  “Hap?”

  “It surprised me,” Alyssia said. “I figured after he finished that movie in Yugoslavia, he’d be going back to Zaire.”

  Beth had assumed so, too. She donated lavishly to the relief center that Hap had founded in Zaire (she still inwardly thought of the new country as the Belgian Congo), feeling a deep shame that the checks she mailed were not for good deeds but to keep her cousin geographically separated from her brother’s wife. Photographs of the center, which was in a remote section of tropical rain forest near the Ruwenzori Mountains, showed why it possessed no more ornate name. It was a twenty by twenty-five frame house on stilts with a thatch roof and broad veranda where those receiving medical care were nursed by their families. The supervisor was Dr. Arthur Kleefeld, a bearded young New Yorker, a graduate of Johns Hopkins. Those first five years Hap spent all of his time in Zaire. When he resumed directing, Beth was overjoyed that his films were made on location. He hadn’t come back to Los Angeles on a permanent basis until three years ago, when he married Madeleine Van Vliet, of the Van Vliet supermarket chain. At the big June wedding in All Saints Episcopal, Beth had felt a great burden lifted from her.

  Madeleine never accompanied Hap on his African jaunts, and seldom went on location with him, but in all other respects they were a golden couple. They looked magnificent together—Madeleine was as tall for a woman as Hap was for a man, as fair-haired as he. They never argued. She swam in a sea of Blue Book friends, a sociability that the Cordiner clan agreed was the perfect antidote to Hap’s tendency to shy away from large-scale parties.

  At the rare family gatherings when Alyssia showed up with Barry, Beth kept a sharp eye on the onetime lovers. They would exchange a few cousinly pleasantries, then move apart.

  Beth watched the goldfish darting below the placid surface of the pond. “What’s the story line?” she asked.

  “It’s called The Baobab Tree and it’s set in Africa.”

  “Probably that’s what attracted him.”

  Alyssia shrugged. “Who knows? All I can tell you is why I agreed to do it. Beth, after they see this, they won’t dare offer me any more of those dumb sex comedies.”

  The faint assertiveness of her tone disturbed Beth yet more. Her fingers shook as she emptied the pink paper of Sweet’n’Low in her iced coffee, and traces of white powder spilled on the table. “It sounds fabulous,” she said.

  In truth Alyssia had no idea what her role was or what the film was about. She knew the locale, East Africa, and the title, nothing more. She had agreed to do The Baobab Tree for a single reason. PD had told her that Hap was already signed to direct.

  44

  Upon Barry’s release from Villa Pacifica, Alyssia had bought a new, one-story home in the Santa Monica Mountains a mile or so north of the Beverly Hills Hotel. The builder had developed five of what he called luxury manors, getting the utmost view from his expensive crag by layering the pads. The Cordiners’, the topmost of these, was reached by a long, steeply zigzagging private lane.

  Alyssia wound up the hill, and as she pulled into the large parking area, Barry opened the front door, waving to her.

  On the short drive from the Golds’ Holmby Hills estate, she had been thinking about Hap. How his gray eyes had darkened before they made love, the brief hesitation before he answered a question that gave his reply weight. The total security she had felt with him both on and off the set.

  Seeing Barry, she experienced a cockeyed sense of alienation. It was as if she were observing a woman in white slacks and a smashing tee shirt emerge from a car and walk to a tall, balding man.

  A concerned, wifely voice inquired, “How did your lunch go?”

  “Come on inside.” Barry’s eyes glinted with boyish excitement.

  She followed him into a large, sun-splashed living area, which a decorator had strewn with sleek pale woods and large pieces of squashy red upholstery. Beyond plate glass glittered the heart-shaped pool that she’d recently put in.

  “Mrs. Cordiner.” Juanita emerged from the kitchen wing. “You got some calls.”

  “Tell Mrs. Cordiner about them later,” Barry said.

  Leading Alyssia to his study, he closed the door and then tamped tobacco in his pipe, an obvious attempt to prolong the mystery.

  More to oblige him than out of curiosity, she asked, “What happened at lunch?”

  “Gebhardt”—the visiting editor—“offered me a contract.”

  “He didn’t!” Every trace of spectatorhood vanished and she hugged Barry. “Tell me what he said! Every word!”

  “He called The Drifting Tide” (the much rewritten novel whose numerous versions she had never glimpsed) “overly literate for the marketplace.”

  Her exultation waned. “That other editor said it was a work of art!”

  “Hon, Gebhardt’s right. Commercial novels are what the readership buys. So I pitched him the espionage thriller, the script outline I’ve been laboring over for lo these many weeks.” Barry’s chest expanded. “That’s what they’ll publish.”

  Alyssia kissed his cheek. “Fabulous!”

  “Since it’s only a sketch, not a real outline, Gebhardt warned me the advance will be minuscule.”

  “That’s PD’s worry.”

  “PD’s not a literary agent.”

  “The woman in his office who handles books—isn’t she meant to be tops?”

  “For out here, maybe. But to have the proper élan, the necessary prestige, one needs a New York agent. I’ll fly back east and interview them.”

  “Can you wait a few days until I finish the retakes on Counter Point? I’ll go with you.”

  “Great idea,” Barry said, adding in the stilted tone that he used to voice compliments to her, “Hon, I told Gebhardt how supportive you are.”

  • • •

  That night Barry edged over to her side of the outsize bed, curving his hands on her breasts, squeezing and kneading. Before turning to face him, she experienced a moment of disbelief. They had made love less than a month earlier.

  Fans of the second-sexiest woman in Hollywood (according to an Esquire poll, she was close runner-up to Jacqueline Bisset) would be stunned to hear how seldom her husband availed himself of his conjugal rights—and possibly yet more astounded to learn that she had not attained orgasm in nearly a decade.

  When Barry fell asleep, she cupped a hand to her pubis, then pulled her fingers away. She had never achieved anything but self-contempt in the solitary vice.

  Rolling onto her stomach, she thought, I reall
y ought to start a little discreet adultery. But what was the point? She had voluntarily separated herself from the man she still loved, and now he was married to Madeleine. Then she sighed deeply. When she’d heard Hap would direct The Baobab Tree she had been unable to turn the film down, but now she was asking herself how she would feel, facing the class couple during the lengthy shooting schedule. Mercifully, Barry would be with her.

  • • •

  The following afternoon she was sensually fondling a telephone while flashing a come-hither smile at Edgar Wiatt, the romantic lead of three decades’ endurance who was her costar in Counter Point.

  Edgar said, “What makes you so sure—”

  She didn’t hear the remainder of his line.

  A sudden pain was shooting down her left arm, an agony that intensified so swiftly that it seemed to explode from within the marrow. Simultaneously, a heavy weight clamped against her chest.

  Edgar was looking down at her questioningly; the short, black assistant propman was holding up a chalk board with her line.

  Alyssia’s pupils registered only the corruscating brilliance of the lights. The ghastly pressure increased against her rib cage. In her urgent need to draw air into her lungs, she opened her mouth.

  “Alyssia, what is it?” Edgar asked.

  I’m having an acute coronary, I’m dying.

  “Cut,” the director called peevishly. “Cut!”

  Aware of eyes fixed on her, Alyssia gasped, “’Scuse me.” And fled from the circle of brilliant suns.

  She left a wake of disgruntled voices.

  “What is it this time?”

  “You know, stars. They feel like leaving, they leave.”

  She stumbled into her dressing room, locking the door behind her. Dizzy from lack of oxygen, afraid she couldn’t make it to the couch, she lowered herself onto the floor, and, open mouthed, sucked in dust odors of white carpet fibers.

  “Miss del Mar.” A masculine voice.

  It’s only an attack, she informed herself. It happened on the set, so it has to be an attack.