“Join us. We’re celebrating,” Laura said, and Stuart Feinstein waved his glass. It was nearly empty. Laura did not appear to be drinking.
“Celebrating what? Surely not a runaway teenager and a grim old bat of a mother in hot pursuit.”
“Well, of course, that. But there’s something else. I’ve just finished a movie—I promised Glynn not to tell you until we got here—and this angel of a man has gotten me an interview with the Hollywood Weekly. That may not mean anything to you, but it means shit-all in the industry. It might even mean I can kiss that goddamn concho jewelry good-bye.”
She reached over and hugged Stuart Feinstein hard and gave him a smack on the mouth, like a child. He hugged her back with one arm, the other hand balancing the sloshing wineglass.
“How about it, huh? Can the old man still deliver or what? Huh?” he crowed. Also like a child. In the light of the big, white lamp I could see that he was not only ill, but, as I had first thought, rather old, or at least far from young. They looked poignantly like two children, I thought suddenly, huddled together on the big, white sofa as if for comfort against the limitless night outside. The image brushed at my mind like a black bird.
“A movie! Oh, Pie, that’s really wonderful! Tell!”
I poured myself a glass of wine and sank cross-legged to the floor in front of the fire. A small sheepskin rug cushioned my bony buttocks against the quarry tile floor. A picture flashed through my mind that I had not seen there in many years: a dorm room at college, before I moved back home, crowded with Noxema-dotted girls in nightshirts, sitting on the floor and the beds, laughing and talking, talking, talking. Some of that same laughter bubbled somewhere in my chest. I felt, for just a wing-flutter of a moment, very young again.
“Well, it’s not the lead, but it’s a career maker,” Laura said. Her voice sang. “The movie is about this guy, he’s a real sonofabitch, coming up in the industry, from a gofer to a studio head, and about the people he does in on the way. Kind of like The Player, only darker, denser. It’s a real character piece; not so much action, but these intense, devouring relationships. Caleb Pringle did it. You know, Bad Blues and Burn? The character stuff is his signature…”
She stopped and looked at me, waiting for me to recognize Caleb Pringle and register my delight and wonderment. I did not have the foggiest notion who he was. I had never heard of Bad Blues and Burn.
“I’m sorry, Pie, I haven’t seen a movie since Mommee came. I’m hopelessly behind. Tell me about this Caleb Pringle. He sounds like he ought to be manufacturing cashmere sweaters in New Hampshire, or something. After you tell me about your part.”
“I play one of the women he seduces and leaves behind in the gutter, as it were. An older woman, an actress hoping to make a comeback, still very beautiful, but lost, fragile, doomed. He’s just starting out when he meets her, and she still has terrific connections, so he uses her for that and then dumps her. Remind you a little of Sunset Boulevard? Believe me, it’s better. I commit suicide, or my character does. Liquor and pills on the deck of his empty, locked beach house, only ambient sound and this strange, white sunlight. There’s this seagull who sits on the railing and stares at me while I’m dying—it sounds dumb, but it’s very powerful. Pring says it’s best-supporting stuff. He says nobody but I could have done it. This interview—God, Met, it’s going to help so much! The guy who’s doing it is a shit, but everybody reads him first, and I can handle him.”
“He’s latent,” Stuart said. “Makes him mean.”
“Oh, you’re telling! You said you’d wait,” wailed Glynn, coming into the room. She had brushed her hair back and tied it high, so that the bare symmetry of her facial bones showed, and her skin was flushed with scrubbing and excitement. We all smiled at her. It was impossible not to. Where did I get this lovely being? I thought. I thought I would kill the first thing that hurt her.
“You can tell her who plays the jerk,” Laura said.
Glynn turned to me, her face suffused with rapture.
“Rocky MacPherson,” she breathed, as if she were saying “‘Ave Maria.’”
“Rocky MacPherson? Isn’t he that kid who keeps busting up thousand-dollar hotel rooms? See, I do keep up.”
“He’s an incredible actor,” Glynn cried. “He’s all…all spirit; he just burns on film. Caleb Pringle uses him in almost all his movies.”
“He’s also about fourteen, isn’t he? It’s a real stretch from busting up the Biedermeyer to studio head. He must be good.”
“He is, as a matter of fact,” Laura said lazily. “Very focused and very sensuous. He’s almost stopped with the hotels. Pring has brought him a long way. And as for studio heads, I don’t know many over thirty anymore. I found our love scenes very…believable.”
“Oh, God!” Glynn cried, her eyes closed in ecstasy.
“Like to meet him?” Laura said casually.
“Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Don’t tease about something like that…” my rapt daughter whispered, and I looked at her in faint alarm. Was this the child who had said only last week that she planned to have her children by sperm bank because she couldn’t stand the thought of any of the stupid boys she knew touching her?
“I’m not teasing,” Laura said. “Stu says they’re screening The Right Time sometime this week. Rocky’s sure to be there. I can easily make a call or two and find out where and when. Pring was supposed to let me know, but Stu says he’s out of town courting some money guys for a new movie. The production office will still be open. They’ll give us some passes. That is, they would if your mother would let you stay for a few days.”
She dropped her eyes and fiddled with the silver bracelet that circled her thin wrist. I wanted, as I had wanted so many times in the past, to shake her until her perfect white teeth rattled.
“Mother…Mom…”
I took a deep breath. I was certainly not going to allow Pom to punish her for this flight. On the other hand, I could not let her be rewarded for it, either. Glynn was a responsible child, but I had a horror of her coming to think that running away was an answer. There had been too many flights, literal or figurative, in my life to allow her that notion. I knew the prices paid all around for them. But my heart hurt me, just the same. Damn Laura. Damn Pom. Damn Mommee.
“Not this time, Glynn,” I said firmly. “This isn’t a pleasure trip, remember? We’ve got to go home tomorrow. Your father is already fit to be tied, and there’s nobody with Mommee. Show him you can be grown up about things this time and I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t let you come back and visit Aunt Laura before school starts.”
“But Rocky MacPherson—”
“Rocky MacPherson is the very last reason on the face of this earth I would let you stay in California, Glynn. I don’t want to hear any more about him, or this. Aunt Laura spoke before she thought.”
I gave Laura a long, level stare and she gave me her three-cornered kitten’s smile in return. Stuart Feinstein studied the contents of his glass with interest.
“I think I’ll go to bed. I’m very tired. Excuse me, please,” Glynn said, her voice shaking, and walked with absurd and touching dignity out of the room. I heard her steps climbing stairs somewhere off to the right. All of a sudden I felt old, as old as Mommee, as old as the world. Old and dull and inflexible and…all right, mean. And tired within an inch of death.
“Good work, Laura,” I said.
“I didn’t mean any harm,” my sister said. “You ought to lighten up on her, Met. You could lose her if you keep treating her like a prisoner.”
“Do tell me where you acquired your child-rearing expertise,” I said, suddenly furious with her.
“Not, apparently, the same place you acquired yours.”
The old sullen petulance was in her voice.
“I managed to keep you fed and clothed and out of jail for a lot of years,” I said.
We stared at each other.
“It’s late. I’ve got to be getting back,” Stuart Feinstein said, ri
sing painfully. He seemed for a moment to totter. Laura broke the stare and turned to him, putting her arms around him.
“No way am I letting you drive all the way back tonight,” she said. “Met and I will save our fight for tomorrow; it’s nothing new. It’s been going on for thirty-odd years now. We know the rules. You can have the couch. I’ll even give you the mink throw. I’ll make you cinnamon toast for breakfast and you can go back after that. Please, old Pooper. I just can’t worry about you passing out on the road tonight.”
“I’ll take you up on it, if you dollbabies will stop fighting,” he said, giving us the sweet smile. “You’re too precious and pretty to fight. Merritt, did anyone ever tell you you looked like Kay Kendall? She was an English actress, very classy. Used to be married to Rex Harrison. An offbeat beauty with such a nose, and a smile that could melt your fillings. You’ve got both of them. You’re far too pretty a dollbaby to fight with this bad child.”
“I’ll stop if she will,” I said, managing to smile at him. Even ravaged with illness, his charm was enormous. “I need to sleep more than I need to fight. Where am I sleeping, Laura? Not, I hope, in the room with Camille up there.”
“No. I’ll sleep on the other bed in her room. You take mine. It’s the first door at the top of the stairs. I need to get up early, anyway, and you need to sleep a little. If you’re set on the noon plane you can zonk in till about eight.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I guess I’d better call Pom and get it over with. I’m surprised he hasn’t called four hundred times by now. Is there a phone upstairs?”
“There is, but why don’t you wait until morning? It’s one A.M. in Atlanta now. And he may have called; I turned off the answering machine and the phone bell. Glynn was spooked bad enough as it was.”
“Oh, shit, Laura,” I said. “Now he’s going to think that we’ve all three run away or been ax murdered or something. But you’re right. I forgot the time difference. He’s got early pediatric clinic in the morning. He’ll be asleep by now. Wake me when you get up. I need to get that over with.”
“I will,” she said. “You go on up. I want to talk to Stu a little while longer.”
The last thing I heard as I climbed her deep-carpeted stairs into darkness was my sister’s melted-butter voice saying, “Now, tell me everything you know about Pring. Don’t leave anything out.”
I didn’t call Pom the next morning for the simple reason that Amy Crittenden called me first. Laura came and shook me awake at six A.M.
“Grendel’s Mother is on the telephone for you,” she said.
“Who?”
“The snottiest woman I ever heard in my life. She says she’s Pom’s secretary, but I doubt it. He’d have fired her years ago.”
“Oh, God. Amy,” I sighed, and reached for the phone on Laura’s bedside table.
“Hello, Amy,” I said as cheerfully as I could. “I’m sorry you had to call. I was going to call in a little while.”
“Well, I wish you had thought to do it last night, Merritt,” she said in her long-suffering tone. I wondered if Pom really heard her anymore. Laura was right; he’d have had to fire her.
“Sorry. It was so late there when we got in that I thought I’d let Pom sleep,” I said. “What’s up?”
“You could have called any time. Doctor hasn’t slept in twenty-four hours. Neither one of us has. His mother was terribly agitated, and your housekeeper declined to come in on her day off. Doctor was so distraught that he called me. I was glad to come, of course. He absolutely must have his sleep; we have pediatrics this morning, I expect you know. He asked me to call you and find out if everything is all right. You simply cannot imagine how worried he has been, what with his daughter running off like that, and then you, and his poor mother—”
“Yes, I’ll bet he was,” I said, idiot laughter tugging suddenly at my mouth.
“Well, Doctor has some messages for you,” she went on briskly, after waiting a space for the apology that did not come.
“I’ll bet he does. Shoot, Amy,” I said, gulping back the laughter.
“The first is that he has you and Glynn booked on Delta’s noon flight out of Los Angeles today. The tickets are waiting for you at the counter. The second is that you’re to come straight to the clinic on your way from the airport. We had to bring his mother with us this morning; he simply could not spare me another day, and of course it was out of the question that he stay home with her. She has been terribly disruptive; we have had to lock her in the children’s playroom, I’m afraid. Two of the nurses are with her, but she is upsetting the children no end, and of course we cannot spare the nurses indefinitely.”
“Where on earth is Ina?” I said, the picture of Mommee commandeering rocking horses and dolls from tearful toddlers threatening to undo me completely.
“I think Doctor had some words with her when she refused to come in,” Amy said repressively. “I believe he discharged her.”
“Shit! He can’t do that!” I shouted. “Sorry, Amy. It’s not your fault. But Ina is my right hand; I can’t manage that old…Mrs. Fowler without her. You tell Pom—”
“He is going to be tied up most of the day,” Amy said. I could have sworn there was satisfaction in her voice. “He is most adamant about your coming to pick Mrs. Fowler up, though. Oh, and one more thing—”
I drew a long breath.
“And that is?”
“He has made Glynn an appointment with a new therapist tomorrow at two P.M. Dr. Ferguson; we think very highly of him. He specializes in families. He will want to see you, too.”
I did not speak. A red mist of rage seemed to start on the horizon and roll toward me. I watched it with fascination.
“Are you still there, Merritt?” Amy said. “We must insist that you pick up Mrs. Fowler as soon as it is possible. She is utterly out of control. Yesterday she got away from me and got into the swimming pool and I had to go in after her clothed. My foundation garment was ruined.”
A great yelp of laughter escaped me. I simply could not help it. The red mist dissipated.
“You give Doctor a message for me, Amy,” I said, choking on laughter. “You tell Doctor that Mrs. Doctor and Daughter Doctor are not coming home on the noon plane today. It will be two or three days, at least. I will let him know when we decide. And we will not be here after an hour or so.”
“Where may I tell him you are going?” Amy said. She sounded as if she were trying to speak with her jaws wired shut.
“You may tell him,” I said, “that we are going to the movies.”
5
In the middle of my first night in California I woke feeling that I was on a boat and lay awake trying to think why that might be. After a moment of profound disorientation, in which the light of a whiter moon than any I knew at home flooded a room I could not put a name to, I remembered where I was and why, and sat up. The green glow from Laura’s digital bedside clock said four ten a.m. I sat listening, holding my breath, but heard no sound that would account for the boat notion. The house was silent and still, and presently I got up and pulled on my robe and went into the adjacent bathroom. The top floor of the condominium was chilly, and the air that poured in through the window I had opened was dry and sharp and smelled of the desert. I thought of my child sleeping in a narrow twin bed across the hall from me, in Laura’s guest room, and wondered if her sleep was troubled, and if she, too, dreamed of boats. I had a sudden, nearly irresistible urge to tiptoe across and open the door and look at her, but hesitated to wake her. She needed respite from the tension of the night before, and so did I. Tomorrow, I thought. We can sort it all out tomorrow. Or rather, later today.
I had turned on the cold water tap and was bending to splash my face when the cold tile floor beneath my bare feet rolled greasily, as if it were the deck of a boat. It rolled again, more strongly. I clutched the sides of the washbasin, thinking that I had not, after all, dreamed the motion. But what could it be? The floor seemed to undulate, and I felt queasy and queer. Wa
s I going to faint, had an illness of some sort overtaken me? It was not until I noticed that the glass accessories on the countertop were tinkling and the towels were swaying on their bars that I thought: earthquake. By the time the terror hit, the motion had stopped.
I cannot remember a simpler and deeper fear. It had never occurred to me that the real terror of an earthquake is not, in its first instant, the threat of injury or death, but the simple betrayal of one’s primal covenant with the earth. With that connection gone, anything at all is possible; no horror imaginable is beyond possibility. It is the old, cold, howling terror of the abyss, that black and limitless space that underlies all the armaments and rituals of the human condition. We all sense it is there, in the deepest and most unexamined core of us, but there are few things that call it out past the careful layers of civilization. The convulsing of the earth is one.
I froze to the washbasin, holding my breath, and then turned and fled from the bathroom straight downstairs, where a light burned. I would remember that flight with shame for the rest of my life. When the earth began to retch, I ran, not to my child, but to the light. The fact that there was no light and no stirring in Laura and Glynn’s bedroom assuaged the guilt only slightly. I like to think that if I had heard evidence of alarm from my daughter I would have gone there instantly, but now I will never know for sure. It was the first chink in the surface of my selfhood, the first of my intimations that Merritt Fowler might not be Merritt at all, but someone unknown to me.
Fault Lines Page 13
