Dreams Are Not Enough

by Jacqueline Briskin

  They glanced away from each other, accepting that without so much as a fleeting touch or a word they had reinstated their love affair.

  48

  Irving had remained home that morning to choose a site to display his newest acquisition, a J. Seward Johnson, Jr., statue that would arrive the following week. As he and Beth went into the front garden, Alyssia and Hap were passing the gate. Irving’s face pulled into lines of disapproval. Having maintained grim fidelity for over three decades to a wife who considered sex a messy martyrdom, he nursed a hidden distrust of the Cordiner family that was based solely on their relaxed attitude toward extramarital activity.

  “I didn’t even realize she was up yet,” Beth said, quavering on the last word.

  “Beth, maybe this makes me old-fashioned and out of it, but I can’t for the life of me understand these open marriages.”

  “Me either,” she sighed, then felt an obligation to set the record straight for her sister-in-law. “Before I got close to Alyssia, I blamed it all on her. When the chips were down, though, and Barry was at Villa Pacifica, I can’t tell you how wonderful she was. But Irving, what if it’s starting all over?”

  “I shouldn’t have said that about open marriages. Bethie, don’t look so worried. In a few days she’ll be safe with Barry at their Loire place.” (At Ma Maison, Alyssia had glossed reality by saying there had been a misunderstanding at the financial end, so she and Hap were backing out of The Baobab Tree, an excuse Beth had swallowed with a vast sense of reprieve.) “I’m sure that they got together to discuss how to leave the production with the least embarrassment to Maxim and PD.”

  Irving was sure of no such thing—with a family that had every kind of meshugeneh arrangement, who could maintain such a certainty? Besides, the intense way the couple had been looking at each other bore no relationship to any kind of business except monkey business.

  At a faraway shriek, the Golds turned in tandem.

  “She’s cranky this morning.” Irving sighed. He had been overjoyed at the birth of the pretty pink and white child of his old age—finally a daughter!—and her disorder grieved him almost as much as it did Beth.

  “Nurse said she has a temperature,” Beth said distractedly.

  “A temperature? How high?”

  Beth continued gazing up at the nursery window. “A hundred!”

  This time Irving, father of three healthy sons, could honestly allay the fears of his adored young second wife. “A hundred? At Clarrie’s age that’s nothing.”

  “But she’s never sick.”

  “She’s not exposed like other kids,” Irving said. “She must’ve picked up a little cold from one of the nurses.”

  “She’s never sick,” Beth reiterated.

  • • •

  When Alyssia returned, her host and hostess were near the raised flower bed, Irving stooping over to press some sort of a post into the grass, Beth tilting her head appraisingly. At the whir of the gate mechanism they looked up. From Beth’s hastily averted gaze and Irving’s purposefully blank expression, she realized they had seen her with Hap.

  Smiling, she went toward them. “I called Hap to discuss a few ideas I had about the script.”

  “But you said you were canceling.” Beth nervously clenched and unclenched her fingers.

  “There’s no choice,” Alyssia replied. “I didn’t want to get you all upset, but what I told you last night wasn’t total truth. Meadstar’s the problem. Irving, you were right about Nevada. It’s Robert Lang.”

  “Lang?” Beth breathed, flooded with memories of the dawn when she first heard the name. She felt herself flush. Though Irving knew everything about her and PD, she felt vaguely adulterous whenever she, now a married woman, recollected their intimacies.

  “He owns Meadstar?” said Irving. “Then you’re right, Alyssia. You have no choice but to go ahead. From what I’ve heard, smart people don’t fool around with Lang.”

  “I better go phone Cyril about the costumes. I’ll set up an appointment for this afternoon.”

  • • •

  Beth had put aside the afternoon to clean up her Queen Anne desk, but Clarrie’s crankiness continued, and at each shriek the numbers on the bills she was checking would jumble. For most people an ailing child would drown out all other problems. Not so for Beth. Though frantic about Clarrie, she kept seeing Hap and Alyssia—Barry’s wife!—as they drifted past the gate. Beth, devoted to Irving, could never admit it even to herself, but her twin was the person she felt closest to on this earth.

  A series of particularly piercing yells made her press both hands to her flat-set ears. When the cries ceased, she picked up her phone.

  It was after midnight in France, but Barry answered on the first ring.

  “Should I be superstitious and grumble?” he asked, his exuberant elation traveling six thousand miles. “Or should I dare the envious gods by telling you that the flow is incredible. Would you believe ten, sometimes twelve pages of original material in a day?”

  “Wonderful.” Beth hesitated, suddenly fearing that the problem might send him rushing to the bottle. But he seemed in high spirits, so she said cautiously, “Barry, have you ever considered this is the first movie Alyssia and Hap have made together since, uhh . . .?”

  “Bethie, Bethie.” His chuckle was clear as if he were in the next room. “You’re a compulsive worrier.”

  “They did, uhh, well, have a thing going for quite a few years.”

  “Don’t give it a moment’s thought. That’s ancient history. Hap has a wife of his own now. And our marriage has settled into what I can unequivocally describe as felicitous harmony.”

  “Yes, but you will join her when they get to the Kenya location, won’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ll be in Nairobi when they arrive?”

  “I’ll be there! Do I have to take an oath on both testaments!”

  “I only meant—”

  “Bethie, for God’s sake, stop worrying. The affair is over. Moribund. Dead as a doornail.”

  When Beth hung up, she was shivering.

  • • •

  Three weeks passed. Three weeks during which Clarrie’s temperature hovered around a hundred. Dr. Severin, the pediatrician, initially decided that chickenpox or measles or some other childhood disease was incubating, but when no symptoms developed, he consulted with other specialists, whose presence made Clarrie scream endlessly. Only the child psychiatrist ventured a diagnosis. The illness was Clarrie’s method of weaning herself from her mother, and chances of recovery would be enhanced if Mrs. Gold would limit her visits.

  Thus Beth was denied even her token role in the nursery.

  Alyssia insisted that Clarrie’s illness made her stay an imposition.

  “The last thing you need right now is a houseguest,” she said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous! Irving and I adore having you here,” Beth remonstrated agitatedly.

  “You’re a doll, Beth, but I do have a home of my own.”

  Alyssia’s maid had quit, so she hired a Guatemalan couple and returned to her isolated ledge in Beverly Hills.

  • • •

  On Thanksgiving the Golds shared turkey with Irving’s side, afterward dropping by at Uncle Desmond and Aunt Rosalynd’s mob scene. Hap was there with Madeleine. Beth asked the blonde and smiling Madeleine about her plans for Kenya.

  Madeleine retorted, “I had enough of the dark continent for a lifetime that week I spent at the relief center. Hap’s being a darling about my begging off.”

  Beth, who had called Barry with each development, phoned him the minute she got home, although it was only six thirty in the morning for him. To her surprise he, the perennial slugabed, was already working.

  “To mangle Shakespeare,” he said, “there comes a creative tide that must be taken at the flood.”

  She related her news, finishing, “So Madeleine won’t be in Africa at all.”

  “I’m following suit,” Barry said. “In a
minor way.”

  “What do you mean?” She could hear her dismay in the echo on the long-distance cables.

  “I already explained to Alyssia how magnificently Spy is coming, and she agreed that I ought to hold off joining her until the Nairobi sequences are finished.”

  “Oh, Barry.”

  “Will you stop dreaming up fictive drama, Beth? Madeleine isn’t worried, I’m not worried. Why should you be? Anyway, I’ll be there for the bulk of the shooting.”

  • • •

  The rest of the Thanksgiving weekend Clarrie’s temperature remained normal.

  Sunday night Beth brushed her hair at her dressing table. Irving watched her from the bed.

  “Why so pensive?” he asked.

  “Just thinking. . . . Dear, if Clarrie stays well, I’ll take a vacation. Since you’re still tied up with Tahoe—” He was opening a major vacation complex on the north shore of Lake Tahoe. “—I’ll have to go alone. So East Africa seems the obvious choice. I’ve never been, and the family’ll be there.”

  Irving had been deeply involved in Clarrie’s illness, but it was watching his adored Beth crumble that had hit him hardest.

  Smiling, he raised up on his elbow. “A wonderful idea.”

  “You don’t think Clarrie needs me?”

  Clarrie, alas, had never needed her mother. “She’s on the road, Beth,” he reassured. “And besides, won’t I be here, keeping an eye on her?”

  She came to the bed, kissing the deeply grooved forehead. “You’re so good to me, dear.”

  “While they’re shooting, you can safari around with Barry.”

  “He’s coming later. He won’t be in Nairobi.”

  Shrewdly astute, Irving immediately accepted that Beth was traveling around the globe to protect her brother’s interests. Though he considered his brother-in-law a weakling, and also a fool for abdicating his marital responsibilities to an opulently beautiful wife, at this moment he was blessing him.

  Beth had turned out the light. He embraced her slim, sweetly scented body. Obediently she placed her arms around his neck. What a woman! Irving thought.

  49

  Alyssia left the doctor’s office white and dazed, stumbling as she got into the elevator. Reaching the parking structure, she stared around the gasoline-odored dimness, tears clogging her throat because she couldn’t spot her Jaguar. After two full minutes she realized she’d left it on the next level. In the car, she closed her eyes, leaning back against the headrest and breathing shallowly.

  “God,” she muttered to herself. “God. . . .”

  She had made this appointment with her internist because since before leaving France she had been having digestive problems—not nausea, which would have been a dead tipoff. Everything tasted as though it had been dipped in a coppery substance. Afterward, she suffered. In her entire life she’d never gotten indigestion from the stalest hamburger, hottest chili, the greasiest junk food. She had shrugged off her new problem as a trivial manifestation of the same psychological disorder that caused her anxiety attacks. And her schedule on The Baobab Tree was hectic. Pre-production rehearsals were in full, acrimonious swing. Her fittings generally escalated into high-pitched arguments—Cyril Lewin had designed each of her fifty costumes to be soft, delicate replicas of 1910 Worth gowns, refusing to listen when she insisted that a parsimonious Cockney miner’s daughter living in Kenya would scarcely spend her toil-filled days in the latest Paris creation. Even missing a period hadn’t seemed all that significant—occasionally when working hard she’d be late, or even skip a month. Today, however, the doctor, stripping the glove from his right hand after her internal, had inquired about her last menses. The implied diagnosis had sunk into her consciousness with the sureness of an arrow finding its target.

  Several years earlier, when the airwaves were jammed with connections between cancer and the Pill, she had decided that with her near-nil sex life there was no need to court malignancy. Since then she’d used her Delft-blue diaphragm only about half of the times. The same old problem: if she left the bed, Barry might lose his erection and turn defensive or sad. The infrequency gave her a sense of security. Barry’s contract for Spy, however, had acted like a shot of testosterone. There had been one time here, twice in New York, and several more encounters at the château.

  On the stirrup table, she had immediately acknowledged that the baby couldn’t be Hap’s. They hadn’t started again until three weeks ago. As if reading her mind, the doctor had said, “You’re well into your second month.”

  She looked at her pale reflection in the rearview mirror. An abortion? she thought.

  They weren’t leaving on location for three days, so she still had time.

  Of course—an abortion.

  All at once she could hear her mother’s stentorian groans, could see the blood-smeared, party-partying thighs.

  Why think about that? Abortion was legal now. And she wasn’t May Sue Hollister, tended by a warty crone and two terrified children. Alyssia del Mar, movie star, would have a safe, sterile procedure.

  I’ll go back to ask the doctor for the name of the top person, she thought. She left the car, plodding between slant-parked automobiles. She didn’t hear the first honk, or the second. Not until a lengthy, irate blast did she shift onto the zebra-striped pedestrian path. The parking attendant eyed her questioningly, as did the elevator man. She didn’t notice. When she got to her doctor’s door, she gazed at his gilt-painted name and saw a meaningless jumble of letters.

  The door swung open. A woman in a magenta velour warm-up suit swept out, giving an irritated sniff as she was forced to circle Alyssia. All at once the puffy, wrinkled face did a comic double-take. “Aren’t you—”

  “No!” Alyssia shouted. “I’m not!”

  She raced up the hall to the emergency stairwell. Gasping, she leaned her full weight against the door until the danger of pursuit had passed, then she sank down, huddling on the snow-coldness of a metal-edged cement step.

  I can’t do it.

  Her mind was stripped of all pretense by her burst of primal emotions, and she knew that no matter how inconvenient the small cluster of cells multiplying in her womb, abortion was an impossibility for her. Why?

  What’s the difference? I just can’t.

  Driving home, she decided that The Baobab Tree was entirely feasible. They had an eleven-week schedule, which would put her only in her fifth month at the conclusion of shooting. She would be wearing a period corset, so nothing would show. She was still in a state of shock, otherwise she would have realized that her sanguine planning had less to do with the realities of filmmaking and childbearing than with her intense desire to be with Hap.

  • • •

  “What happened this afternoon?” Hap asked.

  Naked in bed, she had one arm behind her neck and was smiling somnolently as she watched him dress. He had dropped by on his way home from Magnum—he dropped by whenever possible, and they always ended up in bed. (What the Guatemalan couple thought, she didn’t know, but chances were that they considered visits from a lover normal for Alyssia del Mar.)

  At his question, she shifted her arm, pulling the sheet over her breasts. “I’m fine,” she said.

  Hap sat on the edge of the bed. “Then why have you been chugalugging Pepto-Bismol?” It was he who had insisted she make the doctor’s appointment.

  “As my director you’ll have to get used to the new me. Sometimes when I’m working I get . . . edgy.” The most understated truth of the year.

  “What, exactly, did the doctor say?” he pressed.

  This was the question she had been dreading. Even in her most catatonic state she had known that she couldn’t share her news with Hap, who never made any secret about his hurt jealousy of Barry.

  After a long pause, Hap took her hand, pressing it against his firm, naked thigh. “Love, look—if there’s a problem, better to face it here at home than when we’re in Africa. Is he running gastrointestinal tests?”

&nbs
p; “He says it’s not necessary. He thinks the problem’s either the cholera and typhoid shots or the malaria pills.”

  “So he’s positive you’re only having a reaction?”

  “That’s his opinion. I already told you mine. Nervous stomach. So take your choice.”

  Hap released her hand, picking up his watch. “I better get a move on,” he said.

  “Only three more days,” she said, feeling tendrils of anticipation.

  Madeleine’s complete absence during the eleven weeks of shooting and Barry’s recently announced postponement had given her a fuzzy sense that she and Hap were setting out on a holiday. But of course they would not be vacationing, they would be in equatorial Africa, working with several hundred sensitive, gossipy people. During pre-production she’d had a foretaste of those speculative eyes glancing from her to Hap. The utmost discretion was called for.

  She pulled on her robe and went outside to give Hap a goodbye kiss. After he drove away she stood on the doorstep gazing up at the near-full moon.

  The phone rang. Positive it was Juanita, she darted inside. She couldn’t tell her sister, either. Juanita would insist on leaving Salvador to accompany her on location.

  “Alyssia?” It was Beth’s voice.

  “I was going to call. How’s Clarrie?”

  “Still normal.”

  “Thank God.”

  “This whole thing’s really dragged me down,” Beth said.

  “You ought to get away.”

  “That’s what Irving says. But he’s totally tied up with the Tahoe project. I was thinking I’d zip on over to Kenya. I’ve never been to the game reserves.”

  “Oh. . . .”

  “Do you think I’d be in the way?”

  “It’s a fabulous idea, Bethie. But wouldn’t someplace closer be easier?”

  Beth sighed. “I would be a nuisance.”

  “Oh, Beth, don’t be silly—Maxim and Hap would love to have you. And Barry won’t be there at the beginning, so when I’m not working we could chum around—I’ve never been to Kenya, either.”

  Alyssia hung up thinking, If I had a brain in my head, I’d have scheduled an abortion for first thing tomorrow morning.