“I always knew she was going to do something dangerous, to herself or somebody else,” he said. “If I could get my hands on her I’d strangle her. She ought to be committed; she should have been put away years ago—”
“So what are you going to do?” I said through lips numb and stiff with shock and fear.
“Keep calling until Glynn gets there and tell her to get herself on back here or she’s going to be in the kind of trouble she never knew existed. For starters,” he said, “she’ll be lucky if I don’t slam her in a convent.”
I turned without a word and ran up the stairs.
“Where are you going?” he shouted after me.
“I’m going to go get her,” I said over my shoulder.
“Don’t be a goddamned fool, Merritt,” he yelled. “You can’t do that! Who’ll look after Mommee? I can’t take any time off from the clinic—”
“Fuck the clinic,” I said furiously, “and fuck you if you don’t like it.”
From behind her closed door Mommee began to howl dismally.
“Fuck you, too,” I said to her and slammed my door.
Three hours later I was on a plane west, feeling virtually nothing but the giddy, not unpleasant sensation that I had leaped off the very edge of the world and was falling free in clean, blue space.
4
Laura met me at the Los Angeles airport at two o’clock that afternoon. Glynn was not with her. Our meeting felt strange and disconnected from reality, like something you would see in a film. I knew that I was tired from the long trip and the near sleepless night before; in Atlanta it would be late afternoon now. And I had not managed to eat much of my plastic-encased airline lunch. But it was more than that; more, even, than the simple incredibility of what I had just done. It was Laura. She was the Laura I had always known, and yet she was not.
It had been six years since I had seen her, though we had talked a few times on the phone before this morning, and I wrote once in a while and received a scribbled reply now and then. It stood to reason that she would have changed. She had been through three hectic marriages and three hard-fought divorces, and I knew her career was not flourishing. If she had been a real success in films we would have known. I did not hear much about the plays she was in, and the TV commercials that were the bones of her income were apparently local and regional ones. And the stylist’s job, and the jewelry and poetry and talk of becoming an agent all spoke eloquently, though not of success. Of course she would not be the Laura who had breezed through Atlanta those six years past, on her way to the Caribbean to do a film starring Mel Gibson. “Susan Sarandon gets him, but I get the best sex scenes.” She was thirty-two then, at the very apogee of her looks and talent, fully bloomed and ripe, seeming to shine. She was still happily married to her third husband, whose carrier had not yet vanished up his nose, and her own career seemed poised at last to careen skyward.
She was thirty-eight now. The Mel Gibson movie had not, after all, gotten off the ground, and the marriage had crashed into it. I don’t know what I was expecting.
She was leaning against a pillar just beyond the arrival area, wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt and cowboy boots. For a moment I was not sure it was her, though the posture and the tilt of the head were all Laura. She was deeply tanned, something I had never seen before, and her hair was a yellowish platinum, sleeked straight back behind her ears. Her teeth flashed white in her dark face when she smiled at me, and for a moment she was purely a creature of celluloid, none of my own and nothing to me. But then the sherry eyes crinkled, and she moved toward me with the old hip-shot Laura prowl, and I knew her once again.
We hugged, and she gave me a little sucking air kiss on either side of my face. She smelled of Opium, as she always did, and of something else; was it whiskey? Had she been drinking? Laura had never drunk much after her last disastrous foray into alcohol and pills, and that was years ago. I did not think she used anything now, despite Pom’s words about cocaine. But I did not know what the smell might be. Medicine of some sort, maybe. When I pulled back from her, still holding her hands, to look at her, I saw that her face was much thinner, and sharper of cheekbone and brow, and there were delicate taupe shadows under the extraordinary eyes. She wore no makeup that I could see, and her lips were slightly chafed. Around her eyes was a faint webbing of tiny white lines. And she was definitely thinner. I could see sharp ridges of hipbones through the tight, white-faded blue jeans, and even the bones in her hands were sharper, more fragile.
“Wow,” I said. “Look at you. You are a bona fide glamour puss.”
“God, Met, glamour puss? Who’s writing your material? It’s for a film I just finished; I’m letting it grow out now. Well. You look good yourself. Not at all like a middle-aged lady who just ran away from home.”
She used her old toddler’s nickname for me; she had not been able, at first, to manage Merritt.
“I didn’t run away, as you well know. Where’s Glynn? Is she okay?”
“Oh, yeah, she’s fine. Aghast at what she’s done and scared shitless that you’re going to snatch her home to Daddy and he’s going to kill her, but basically she’s fine. We thought it would be better if I came by myself, to sort of see how the ground lay. Neither of us wanted her to get spanked in the middle of LAX.”
“Nobody has ever spanked Glynn in her entire life,” I said. “Did she say we had?”
“No. Lighten up. She just acts like you do. Come on, I’m parked at the curb and they’re going to tow me for sure. You have luggage?”
“Just this,” I hefted my carry-on.
“Not planning to linger, are you?”
“No. This is not a social call. You know I just came to take her home. We’re not going to argue about that, Laura.”
She held up a propitiating hand, and walked ahead of me down the concourse toward the baggage claim. I followed her, the duffle slapping against my leg. Fatigue and strangeness hovered around me like a miasma. I felt as though I was walking and walking, and not getting anywhere. But presently we were through the thonged claim area and out into the strange bronze sunlight of early afternoon. We did not speak until then.
A red Mustang convertible, top down, was pulled up to the curb in the no parking zone, and an airport cop was just walking around behind it to get the tag number. It was an old model, but it gleamed as if it had just come, newly molten, from the factory.
“Oh, Lord,” Laura said huskily. The southern accent she had lost in high school drama class crept back. “I guess that’s nonnegotiable, huh?”
“Afraid so,” the cop said, staring at her. Even in the Los Angeles airport, where half the women who walked through were blond and wore the jeans-T-shirt uniform and were probably Somebody, Laura stood out. The indefinable, old electric charge smote the air around her. I saw the cop register the fact that here indeed was Somebody and hesitate very slightly. I knew then he was lost. Laura did, too.
“You see, officer, my big sister has come all the way from Atlanta to see me for the first time ever, and my radiator started acting funny in the desert, and I just got the car and I don’t know anything about it yet, and I wanted to surprise her, and I was running so late…” Laura let her voice trail off and crinkled her nose. She grinned, managing somehow to make the grin both repentant and imploring. He grinned, too, slightly.
“Well, seeing as how it’s your big sister—”
“That’s very decent of you,” Laura said, and made that sound as if it were an invitation into her bed.
I tossed my bag into the backseat and Laura climbed into the driver’s. As she started the ignition the cop appeared at her side.
“I wondered if you’d mind,” he said, handing her in a blank ticket pad. “I’ve got this kid—”
“Of course.”
Laura took the ticket pad and scribbled on it with his proffered ballpoint and handed it back with a flourish. He examined it, and broke into a broad grin.
“This’ll kill him,” he said. “Batman w
as his all-time favorite. Seen it four times.”
“Hope he likes it,” Laura said, and gunned the car, and we were out of the shade of the overhang, into the strange pewter air.
“You didn’t,” I said, laughing helplessly.
“Why not? He saved me a fine,” she said. “Some people do think we look alike.”
Not anymore, I thought, and felt a rush of sadness for her, and the old, fierce, protective love.
“You’ve got her beat a country mile,” I said, and she smiled, and it was the old, sweet, enchanting Laura smile, without salt or shadows in it.
“I’m glad you’re here, for whatever reason,” she said. “I was afraid you were going to be furious with me.”
“I should be, I guess. At you and Glynn. But right now I’m madder at Pom and maddest at Mommee, and neither one of them can help it, really.”
“He can’t help screaming at Glynn and grounding her for the rest of her life? And yelling at you? The old lady can’t help setting Glynn’s clothes on fire and then squalling for her sonnyboy?”
“She has Alzheimer’s, Laura. She doesn’t know what she’s doing most of the time. And he…well, command is sort of what he does. It’s what a doctor is all about; it’s got to be that way or he can’t function. Pom runs a charity clinic down in the projects. Can you imagine what that would be like if he couldn’t control it? Sometimes he forgets where he is; it’s hard to turn a lifetime of habit on and off. And he’s crazy about his mother, and this illness just devastates him. I think it frightens him, too. To get outside help, or put her in a home…that means that he can’t take care of her, that it can’t be fixed. He just can’t handle that yet.”
“Poor baby,” Laura said. I was too tired to keep the discussion going, and did not answer. She was silent for a while, too.
She wove the car in and out of the heavy traffic on what the signs said was the San Diego Freeway. It could have been any large artery in any commercial-industrial area of any large city in the world. The air was noxious, foul and tasting of metal and sulfur and asphalt and gasoline. It stung my nose and eyes and throat. I felt tears start, and a scum of stinging stickiness film my face and arms. The heat was monstrous. Every few minutes we would come to a halt in a frozen river of traffic and the air would eddy and sway, cobralike, above the glacier of cars, and horns would begin to shriek. Before we had gone five miles I surrendered.
“Could we put the top up?” I said. “Maybe you’re used to breathing this stuff, but it’s stripping my throat out.”
“Yeah, Atlanta has such pure air,” she grinned, and I smiled reluctantly, because Atlanta’s air is frequently just as awful a stew of assorted fumes and stinks, only with the addition of killer humidity.
She pressed a button and the top rose and glided silently into its groove. She raised the windows and turned on the air conditioner and the immediacy of the devouring air shrank back, leaving us sealed in a capsule of quiet and stale cool, rushing air. The Mustang’s windows were tinted gray-green and gave the landscape outside the sinister air of a futuristic movie set on some alien, metallic planet where a thin no-color ether took the place of air. The strangeness I had brought with me bloomed into fullness, and I gave myself up to it.
“Nothing feels real,” I said, lying my head back against the headrest.
“Nothing is,” she said. “That’s our secret. You’re going to do just fine out here.”
She pushed a tape into the deck and the pure, somehow lonely voices of the Fifth Dimension spun out into the car: “When the moon is in the seventh house/And Jupiter aligns with Mars/Then peace will guide the planets/and love will steer the stars./This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius…”
She turned her head to me and smiled.
“This was one of the first albums you ever bought me, remember? When you were in college and I was feeling kind of down? It’s always seemed the most comforting song to me; it promises so much…”
I remembered. She had played the record over and over, shut away in her room, until it had become inoperable, and I had had to buy her another.
“Do you need comforting, Pie?” I said, like her reverting to an old nickname.
“Who doesn’t? But no, not really. I just like the song, that’s all.”
Her tone said the discussion was over, and we fell silent once more. She turned onto the Santa Monica Freeway, and I watched as names I had heard all my life sailed by on off-ramp signs: Century City, Twentieth Century Fox Studios, La Brea, Venice. I acknowledged them in my mind, but felt no curiosity about them as I usually did such signs in other new places. Here in this hurtling gray-greenness, everything was strange and consequently nothing was.
She made another turn and said, “I think we’ll try the San Bernardino Freeway. It’s a little longer, but you’ll have a better shot at the mountains this way. Sometimes this stuff lifts outside L.A. proper.”
“What mountains? Will we pass the Hollywood sign?”
“No, that’s back there behind us, in the Hollywood Hills. I’ve seen it about twice. We’ll see the San Gabriels and later the San Bernardinos. I hope. Right near Palm Springs the mountains come right down to the road; they’re really something. It’s beautiful country. I hate it when I have to leave.”
I put my head back and closed my eyes. Pom’s face swam into the space behind them, furious and anguished. I felt a stab of pity and love, and then, once more, the cold, constricting anger that had set me on this journey. Only this morning, it was. It felt like days, weeks. Pom’s face faded. I must have slept.
When I opened my eyes again the seemingly endless string of flat, sun-blasted little towns and strip shopping centers had given way to long stretches of pastel desert broken by strange, spiny, sentinel cacti and scrubby copses of small, silvery gray, wind-ruffled trees. The metallic sky had turned deep blue, and to our left a tidal wave of sharp, deep-shadowed mountains rose. They were so clearly defined that I could see small folds and crevices, carved cliffs and rock faces, the lighter scars of tracks and roads. They were stained the colors of earth and air: rose, brick, taupe, dust-gray, slate, deepwater blue. Beautiful; they were as alien and beautiful to me as the face of the moon.
“Are those the San Gabriels?” I said. “Where are we?”
“No. The San Bernardinos. We’re just past Ontario, coming up on Redlands. Home before long,” said Laura. She stretched both arms straight out and rotated her head on her neck.
“I’ll bet you could use a drink and something to eat,” she said. “I left Glynn making miso soup. She only said yuck six times.”
“How can she be making miso soup? I don’t even know what it is, much less Glynn. You may be sorry.”
“Nah. It’ll be good for you and her, too. Full of vitamins,” Laura said. “Listen, Met, it may be none of my business, but she worries me. She’s a neat kid…Lord, what a beauty; I had no idea…but she’s not really a kid. She doesn’t giggle, she doesn’t squeal, she doesn’t preen and look at herself in mirrors, she doesn’t even have any hot rollers or makeup with her. What’s going on with her? What’s wrong at your house?”
“There’s nothing going on with her,” I said stiffly. “She’s never giggled and squealed and all that silly teenage stuff; I think we’re going to be spared that. She is a good kid; the best. She writes and paints, and she’s good at music and great at science, and her grades are tops, and she’s a terrific swimmer; she wins meets…and there’s nothing wrong at our house. Thank you for asking, though.”
“Don’t mention it,” she said dryly. “Nothing the matter, huh? That’s why she runs away from home and you come tearing out here right behind her? There damned well is something wrong, and if you don’t know it, she’s in even worse trouble than I think she is.”
“Look, it’s just this stuff with Mommee,” I snapped. “That’s going to be settled when we get home, believe me. It’s not easy to be sixteen in a house with an addled old lady—”
“It’s more than that,” Laura said.
“No, I will not shut up, so spare me that familiar scowl. She may be your daughter, but she’s my niece, and she came to me for help. Have you looked at her lately, really? God, Met, she’s so serious, and pale, and so damned thin! And she seems apprehensive, even scared, all the time; she whispers like she’s listening for something. What does she do for fun, clean out her closets? Or no, I remember, there’s nothing now to clean out, is there? She told me about her new clothes. Christ. Why do you put up with that old harpy? No wonder Glynn ran away. I bet Pom’s sainted boys split long ago, didn’t they?”
“The boys are twenty-two and twenty-five,” I said. Anger thickened my voice. She had always known just which buttons to push. “Chip is working in New York for a brokerage house, and Jeff is in med school at Hopkins. They’re gone because it was time for them to go out into the world; nothing drove them away. Mommee wasn’t even with us when they left. She was with Pom’s brother and his wife then.”
“What did they do, leave her on a hospital doorstep and skip the country? So now you have her. And I mean you, because I bet Pom doesn’t spend more than five minutes a day with her. Brings old Mommee home and leaves you with the whole thing, you and Glynn.”
“It was my choice, Laura,” I said evenly, determined not to fall back into the old pattern of attack and defend, thrust and parry. I could not stop myself from adding, “Everybody can’t run away.”
My voice sounded smug even to me. But she only shrugged.
“Why not? Where is it written? So you’re going to cart my niece home tomorrow, huh?”
“That’s right.”
She gave me a long, oblique look from the sherry eyes.
“Let her stay,” she said. “Let me show her some of my world. I know a zillion people in the industry; we could see studios, and screenings, and go to lunch at famous places, and I could introduce her to some really famous people. It’s fantasy land, maybe, but it’s mine, and what kid wouldn’t love it? She might even turn into a real kid.”
“Even if I wanted to, Laura, I can’t,” I said. “Pom is really angry at both of us. He’ll get over it, but if I push him much right now he’s going to ground her for the rest of her life. I don’t want him to really punish her.”
Fault Lines Page 11
