by Lisa Tucker
“Well, she seems ready now,” Janice said. “Aren’t you ready, Lu? Come on, say yes. Do it for my mom, who loves bragging that her daughter is friends with a real movie star.”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said, but she laughed.
“That’s Jimmy,” Charles said, nodding at the monitor. He was crying out in his sleep, another nightmare. Susannah had just left for a party with friends.
“I’ll go,” Lucy said, but Charles was already standing. He put his napkin down and walked out of the room without saying a word.
Janice waited a moment before she whispered, “Did I say something wrong?”
“No,” Lucy said, gulping down the rest of her wine. “Don’t worry about it.”
By the time Charles returned, the three of them were eating dessert, a rich chocolate cake layered with strawberries, and laughing about one of Janice’s more bizarre client stories. When Tom asked Charles if he wanted any cake, Charles said no.
He was so quiet for the rest of the evening that Lucy could tell he was upset. So could Janice, but she wasn’t worried about him, like Lucy was. Before she and Peter left, she took Lucy aside and told her that she had to confront Charles about his “withdrawing and controlling behavior.”
“I thought you liked him now,” Lucy said.
“I do, but come on, Lu, you have to work. You have to see people, you have to go out. You and the kids are like prisoners, and I know, he’s scared something will happen to you, but that doesn’t mean you should accept not having a life.”
They were standing over by the piano, whispering. Peter and Charles were already outside. Janice had said she had to run to the bathroom, and dragged Lucy back in with her.
“I have a life, Janice.”
“Do you? Or do you have to go along with him or he stops talking? How often does he pull this withdrawal thing? It’s one of the ways some guys control women, withdraw—”
“It’s not like that,” Lucy said.
“Please just think about it, okay? Maybe you guys need counseling. You’ve been through a lot, but I’m telling you, he isn’t getting over this like he should.”
Lucy stood up straighter. Janice had never understood Charles, and this didn’t seem all that different from the things she used to say. Especially since Lucy knew Charles didn’t withdraw to control her, but because he couldn’t handle his feelings any other way and remain what he called “civilized.” It was very important to him to remain civilized. This was one of the things she’d loved about him from the beginning, that he never yelled or even raised his voice—unlike her uncle.
After Peter and Janice left, Lucy asked Charles if he was all right. He told her yes, but she still knew something was wrong. When they got in bed about a half hour later, she turned toward him to let him know she wouldn’t mind having sex. They were back to making love on a regular basis, though they still did it much less frequently than before, and always quickly, in the dark so he wouldn’t see her, with as little touching as possible so he wouldn’t feel her scars. She told him she couldn’t handle it any other way, and he seemed to understand, though she knew he longed for the way they used to be. The strange part was Lucy knew that she was probably being silly, but she couldn’t help it. The plastic surgeon had told her that she was healing incredibly well: most of the scars had already become thin white lines, and the few that hadn’t were obviously headed in that direction. But Charles had loved her skin so much before, when it was perfect, and she couldn’t stand the idea that she wouldn’t be as attractive to him now, especially when there was nothing she could do about it.
After they had sex, when they were lying next to each other, he told her he was sorry he’d been so quiet earlier. He had been a little upset—with Janice. “I found it very tiring that she kept returning to the same subject. I know she means well, but she has no idea what you’ve been through or she wouldn’t harp on you doing another picture.”
“I would like to work again though,” Lucy said slowly. “I realized tonight that I would love to do Ben’s movie, if there was any way.”
“I understand.” He was holding her hand, and he brought it to his lips and kissed it. “But you know how hard production is, and you’re just not up to it yet.”
“I’m a lot better though. I think I—”
“You still have headaches every day. You have trouble sleeping. Your right leg goes numb if you have to sit still for long periods. Your wrist—”
“I think I could do it, Charles. I really do.”
He paused for a moment. “They’re shooting in Asia for at least a month. Ben told me. You don’t want to be away from home that long, do you?”
“No,” she said. Of course she couldn’t leave the children, and she couldn’t take them out of the country with all the problems they were having. It was out of the question.
But the next morning, Lucy found herself wondering if Ben would be willing to work around this. She wasn’t sure it was even possible, but she knew how desperate Ben was to have her. While her husband was in his office, she impulsively picked up the phone and called Ben. And she was glad she did because he agreed immediately to film all her scenes in California. They could shoot the battlefield scenes on location, but have the art department create a field hospital set here for Lucy to work in. Maybe even in Malibu. He said MASH had been filmed at Malibu Creek State Park, so why not?
She hung up the phone and went up to Charles’s office. His desk was covered with paper, but on top she saw the folder marked “Sept. 21,” where he kept a record of all his dealings with the detectives who claimed to be still looking for the two men. He told her he was making notes for a meeting he had tomorrow at the police station.
She sat down on the leather couch across from him. She thought she would wait, but then she couldn’t. She had to share her good news. He listened to her whole excited monologue before he said it wasn’t going to happen.
“You’re not up to doing a film yet, as I said last night. I don’t intend to let you find that out by hurting yourself.”
Before she could say anything, he picked up the phone. And right in front of her, he told Ben that Lucy wasn’t capable of making a decision like this after what had happened to her. She was already staring at him like he’d lost his mind when he said something that shocked her even more. “If you still insist on casting my wife,” Charles said, “now that I’ve told you the situation, I will ask Walter to pull out of the project.”
If Walter pulled out of the project, the studio would pull out, and Charles knew it. Ben was a new director, with no track record other than working as Charles’s assistant. But Ben was a friend, and this was his dream. He’d been trying to get this film made for more than four years.
No surprise, Ben concluded that he couldn’t use Lucy in the movie, after all.
When Charles hung up, he said, “It may not seem fair, but please try to understand. It’s no different from us telling Dorothea that she can’t play with the kitchen knives.”
“Dorothea?” Lucy was sputtering. “Dorothea is our child.”
“And you are my Lucy. No matter what it takes, I will never let anything happen to you again.” He stood up. “Shouldn’t we be getting ready for mass? It’s already eleven.”
“I’m not going,” she said. “I have to call Pam.”
Pam was Lucy’s agent. She’d never really gotten her any work because Charles had done that. But Pam could get her work, of course she could. She was a VP at a very prestigious agency.
“You don’t want to fight me on this,” he said, looking into her eyes. “I promise you, you won’t win.”
Every time she’d heard him say this before, it turned out to be true. No one ever won against Charles, whether he was up against the president of the studio or the head of a tabloid he was threatening to sue if they wrote a single word about Lucy’s attack. It was part of the reason he’d been so successful in a business known for power plays: once he thought he was right, he would never give in.
“I don’t want to fight you,” she whispered, trying not to cry. “I just want to be an actress again. Can’t you understand?”
“I do understand,” he said, and his voice was so sincere, she actually thought he did. “For you, it’s about working. But for me, it’s about my life, my heart, my soul. It’s about what I vowed the day I found you half dead, what I promised God I would do if only he let you survive. You are everything to me. You are the only woman I’ve ever loved, the only woman I ever will love for the rest of my life.”
She’d heard this before too: the vow and the promise (which were the same: to protect her) and even the last two romantic lines. He said it when he was explaining why he wanted to accompany her shopping and to the park and to all her doctor visits, why he didn’t want her to go anywhere alone or with just the children. He said it when the topic of work first came up in May. He said it when she asked if they would ever go back to a normal life with friends and dinners out and something to live for other than just staying safe.
She never doubted that he believed it, and she didn’t doubt it this time either. This was the problem: she knew it was all true, and she even knew how it all added up together. He’d never lost a fight and this was the most important fight of his life. What conclusion was possible, other than that he would win now too?
sixteen
BUT LUCY COULDN’T give up. It wasn’t just that she wanted to act again, she had to act again, though she couldn’t explain why, even to herself. It certainly wasn’t about being happy. She’d been much happier before her agent started trying to get her a part—and before she’d found out how completely unimportant she was in this business.
A lot of studio execs seemed very interested in casting Lucy, until they found out that Charles would have nothing to do with the project. Apparently, both her Oscar nomination for Brave Horseman and her critical success in Helena had been attributed throughout much of the industry to him. In Brave Horseman, so the rumor went, he’d not only written a part for Lucy that most actresses would kill for, but he’d used all his talents as a director to make her look good. In Helena, though he didn’t direct, he’d done extensive script revisions to enhance his wife’s role and even strong-armed his friend Derrick Mabe into letting him have input into everything from Lucy’s wardrobe to the angles of her close-ups. Pam told Lucy this was obviously horseshit, but she admitted she’d heard some of it before. Why hadn’t Lucy herself ever heard it? Of course Charles must have known, but Lucy didn’t blame him for keeping it from her. This was back when he was helping her believe in herself, the opposite of what he was doing to her now.
Even those execs who did want Lucy initially, didn’t want her bad enough to alienate Charles and Walter. This was what Pam kept reporting to Lucy, and Lucy knew that Charles had been on the phone again, asking someone not to cast his poor wife, who was still suffering far too much to handle the incredible demands of shooting a film. He didn’t have to tell any of them why she was suffering. They all knew about the attack, and most of them knew a lot of the details. Like Pam said, word gets around. Both Pam and Lucy were positive the attack had absolutely nothing to do with why they wouldn’t cast her, though of course the studio people comforted themselves by pretending it did. It was all about kissing up to Charles, especially now that he and Walter were planning a brand-new movie that promised to be the biggest-budget film made in 1984.
The movie was called Master of Dreams. It was based on a strange sci-fi script that Charles had written, set fifty years in the future, when a group of scientists discover Dream Control, or DC. The idea is that by intense concentration, dreams can be manipulated to any desired outcome. The scientists claim DC will bring on a new utopia, where everyone will have more freedom and more creativity, and also help find solutions to enduring problems like war and cancer. But when DC falls into the hands of a greedy corporation planning to make employees more productive by chaining them to work as they sleep, the scientists have to get help from the only group who knows how to resist DC. Called the Uncons because of their belief in the premodern dreams the unconscious supplies, they will have to save humanity from becoming slaves who have lost their ability to dream.
The tagline for the movie poster was: Who Will Control Your Dreams? Walter had a mockup created to show the studio VPs, who went wild over the idea of what they called a “futuristic Western.” To Lucy, the truly wild part was that Charles had managed to convince everybody he was making a film, even though he was probably never going to shoot a single frame.
He was very up front about this with her, but only with her, and she could tell he wasn’t concerned in the slightest that she would tell anybody. And he was right. She wouldn’t publicly turn on her own husband. No matter what he’d done to her, she couldn’t bring herself to do that to him. She also hoped that if, by some bizarre chance, he did make this movie, maybe he’d let her act in it.
While Pam was trying to find someone, anyone, who would hire Lucy, Charles was trying to convince Lucy that her “obsession” with her career was hurting their relationship, not what he was doing to prevent her from getting a part she wasn’t physically ready for. To prove it, he agreed to go to counseling together, but the counselor he chose was their parish priest. Father Drake was an older man, very conventional, and Lucy wasn’t surprised when he said they both needed to put their marriage first, especially as neither of them needed to work to support their family. “The world provides many distractions,” Father Drake said. “The lure of money and fame can be very strong, but God tells us that these things will not bring us the peace we desire.”
On the wall behind the priest was a gorgeous picture of the Virgin Mary. Lucy had been looking at it since they sat down. Her veil was the richest blue and her halo was so radiant it seemed to catch the sun coming in the window across the room. But it was the expression on her face that really got to Lucy: the sweetness and wisdom and especially the complete serenity. No wonder Catholics prayed to her, Lucy thought. She was a human being who’d lost her only child in the cruelest way imaginable, and yet she still believed.
“I don’t want money and fame,” Lucy said, because it was true. She wanted serenity like Mary’s, but no matter how hard she prayed she still startled awake every morning with a dread that made no sense to her. She looked away from the painting. “I just want a job.”
“Have you considered volunteer work? It can be very rewarding, and you could do it for a few hours a week until you’re fully recovered.”
She’d already had to leave the office to walk around when her right leg went numb. Otherwise, she would have denied she wasn’t fully recovered now, the way she had with Pam.
Charles was looking at her, but she still said it. “I’m an actress. That’s what I do. If I could volunteer to act, I would.”
It was getting harder and harder for Lucy to believe that she’d ever really been an actress. Charles had made her successful, but more than that, he’d given her faith in her own talent. Now she wondered if she’d had any talent in the first place, or if she’d been just like a thousand other starlets, with one big difference. A famous man had fallen in love with her. Maybe he’d only given her the career the same way he’d bought her the house, to make her happy.
“Why is acting so important to you, Lucy?” Father Drake said. “You have two lovely children and a very devoted husband. Your family has suffered a great deal, but you’ve also been given much joy.”
Charles took her hand, and she said, “I like pretending I’m someone else,” knowing it would bother her husband. It wasn’t even true. She used to like acting because it made her feel everything more, including her own life.
Father Drake looked confused, but he turned to Charles and asked what he thought.
“I wish Lucy could understand that I’m only trying to take care of her.” His jaw was tight. “I’ve made so many more movies than she has, and I know how difficult filming can be in the best of circumstances. If she has a relapse
now, it might be years before she is back to being herself.”
“But shouldn’t that be my decision, Father?”
“I’m sure you’ve heard ‘As God is the head of the church, so the husband is the head of the family.’ Sometimes this is taken to mean that the husband has more rights than the wife, but this isn’t so. The true meaning is that to a husband is given a great responsibility for the welfare of his wife and children, both physically and spiritually.” Father Drake looked at Lucy. “Isn’t it heartening that your husband is taking this responsibility very seriously?”
She said yes, but when she and Charles were back in the car, she told him she was finished with Father Drake’s marriage counseling. “No wonder you wanted to see him,” she snapped. “He’s your puppet.”
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” he said, and he sounded genuinely sorry. He always did.
“I’m going to a therapist,” she said. “Somebody who has some training for a change.”
“Fine,” he said, “I’ll go with you.”
“No. I want somebody to hear what I have to say. Just me. Lucy Dobbins nobody, not Charles Keenan’s wife.”
“You’re not nobody, Lucy.”
“Sure.” She turned on the radio, and cranked up the rock song. She threw her arm out the window, even though it made her feel like a stupid kid.
Janice helped her find a therapist who specialized in women’s issues. Of course Charles did go with her because he went everywhere with her, and there was nothing she could do about that. Even her neurologist said she wasn’t allowed to drive until she was sure she wouldn’t lose feeling in her leg.
He had to wait outside the office though. It was her appointment, so she could tell the psychologist exactly what she thought. She was glad she’d booked two full hours because she had a lot to say. And Tracey, the psychologist, seemed to really understand. She said Lucy’s husband was obviously very controlling, and his keeping Lucy from getting any movie roles was both patronizing and aggressive, an act of symbolic violence against Lucy’s ability to exercise her own free will. She also said he was using the attack by the two men as an excuse to dominate both her and the children.
