Downstairs a single lamp burned, and Stuart Feinstein sat on the sofa wrapped in a beautiful, dark fur throw, sipping from a glass of amber liquid. His face was so gray and ravaged that at first I thought the same fear that had frozen me had gripped him, but then he saw me and gave me the sweet child’s smile, and the grayness receded somewhat. It was not fear, I saw, but illness and despair.
“Did our little twitch wake you, dollbaby?” he said.
“Twitch! My God! It felt like…I thought for a minute I was on a boat! The floor rolled—”
“About a three point eight or a four,” he said. “A mere shiver. We get one like that about twice a week, maybe more this summer. We have ever since I came out here. I don’t even get out of bed anymore unless I hear wood splintering. I used to lie there and listen to the Waterford crashing, until I got smart and packed it all up. This was nothing, I promise. Come here and have a snort with me.”
I went over and sat on the opposite end of the sofa. He tossed the end of the throw over me and passed me his glass, and I drank. It was scotch, very good scotch. Even I could tell that. My usual drink is vodka in whatever is tart or sweet, and then not often.
“Thanks,” I said, passing the glass back to him. “I needed that, as they say.”
“Thank you,” he said, and when I looked at him inquiringly, he said, “For not being afraid to drink after me. Or for not showing it if you were. Is this your first earthquake?”
“I work with AIDS patients at home,” I said. “I’m not afraid. And yes, it is my first earthquake. Now that I am afraid of.”
“Don’t be. Like I said, we get them all the time. We’re close to the San Andreas here, and it grumbles constantly. But it’s already had its big one; we’re not scheduled for another thirty years. San Francisco, now, that’s another story. The Hayward is ripe.”
“How do you know? How can you be sure of all that?”
“I can’t, of course,” he said, running his hand over the rich, shining folds of the mink. “But the odds are good. That’s about all anybody can hope for, isn’t it?”
I could see blue veins through the dry, crepey skin of his hands, and fancied that I could see the bird’s bones themselves. Stuart Feinstein was a man who would know about odds. Somehow the thought, or perhaps the whiskey, made me relax.
“I’ll go back to bed and let you get some sleep in a minute,” I said. “But first, tell me about this movie Laura is in. Tell me about this Caleb Pringle. There’s something there, isn’t there? They’re something to each other, or were…?”
He took a deep swallow and made a face and put the glass down on the coffee table.
“The movie’s good. Her part is good, and she’s very good in it. She’s a real actress, you know; this part could be the one that gets these schmucks out here to see that in her, and not just her tits and ass. There’s a lot riding on it. She’s almost past the age where she can play babes; she’ll have to do it on the acting from here on out. Pringle sees that in her, and he can get it out. I’ll give him that. Yeah, there’s something between them; I think that’s why he put himself on the line with the studio over this part of hers. He almost doubled her pages. From what I hear, it paid off. I don’t hear much anymore. I’m a has-been. I was that before the disease was obvious. I was never all that much of an agent; she was the best thing I ever had or ever will, now, and I called in an awful lot of chips to get Pringle to let her test for this one. Once he did, she did the rest. The chemistry was there between them from the first. You could see the lightning hit. They were together all through the filming, hot and heavy. I was welcome on the set because of that, and that only. No, don’t protest, dollbaby, I know I’m done in the industry. I don’t care, really, except for her. I’m sick of it; it eats you alive. Makes you little. I’d have pulled out of it long ago except for her. The last thing I could do for her was to get her this interview with Billy Poythress. It was the last chip I had. The production office wouldn’t even tell me when the screening is, but she can find out when she’s up there. Poythress will know. After today there’s nothing much I can do for her except hold her hand and pray.”
“Does this Pringle care for her? Is he good to her?”
He made an impatient gesture.
“He was while they were shooting last winter. He couldn’t do enough for her. Everybody knew about them. The media was all over it. As for now, I don’t know. He hasn’t been around. He’s off chasing down money for a new film. I heard he was in Europe for a while; he may still be there. If he is, he hasn’t let her know. I don’t think she’s heard from him in a month or so, but she wouldn’t tell me that. Tells me what she has from the beginning: It’s the real thing for her, the rest of her life, and so forth, and so forth. Says he feels the same. But I’ve got a bad feeling about it. She doesn’t look good to me. She’s thin, she acts like she’s somewhere else most of the time. Sleeps too much. Sometimes her eyes are red like she’s been crying. Like I said, she’s not going to tell me. Doesn’t want to worry a sick man. Like she could help it.”
“So what kind of person is he? Would he dump her; does he do that?”
“He’s an asshole jerk, is what I think. He’s a phony. Wears tennis sweaters and a baseball cap, drives an old woody, got freckles and a gap in his teeth and a big, crooked grin. His name isn’t Caleb Pringle; it’s Sherman Goetz, but I don’t care about that. Nobody out here uses their real name. Yeah, he’d dump her. He sure does do that. He does it after every film. It’s his schtick, ditching his last film’s squeeze when shooting’s over, just like copping ideas is his schtick. He calls it derivative filmmaking, says it’s an art unto itself, to take a film that’s already been done and do it better. Some other folks call it stealing. But he’s good at it. He has the touch. He makes big bucks. I just want to make sure that he does right by her in this movie, no matter what he does to her personally. After it comes out she’s not going to need him.”
“I don’t like the sound of this stuff.”
“Neither do I, dollbaby. That’s why this interview is so important. It’s her ticket to ride. You make her promise to dress up pretty and be polite to Poythress. You look after your little sister for me.”
“You’re not going with her?”
“No. I think I’ll stay here and kick back a little. Lie in the sun by her pool, sleep in, have some friends over. We worked it out last night. She’s going to stay at my place above Sunset. You really ought to go. It’s a great location. Right near all the things she’ll want to show Glynn. The Sunset Marquis, where the interview will be, is right down below. And you’d have a terrific view. All of Hollywood at your feet, as it were. And I wouldn’t exactly be an asset to her at this stage.”
“Stuart, I just have to get Glynn home. But I really wish we could stay, just to get to know you better,” I said. “I wish there was some way I could thank you for being so good to my sister.”
“You can go up there with her. You can give her moral support and have a good time yourself, is what you can do, dollbaby. She says you haven’t had much of one lately. You or that pretty child of yours, either. Go. Enjoy. Giggle. Drink things with flowers in them. Eat only things that will make you fat. Ask for autographs. Drive that little red car too fast. Wear things that let your pretty tchotchkes hang out. That’s what you can do. What’s two more days out of your young life?”
“They are long days, believe me. But I think you’re the best thing that’s happened to Laura since she came out here,” I said, getting up and kissing him on the cheek. “I wish you’d stick around to take care of her.”
Then I winced, remembering why he could not. He smiled.
“I wish I could,” he said. “Somebody is always going to have to do it. But now there’s you. God looks after fools and actresses.”
“But I can’t do it indefinitely,” I said.
“Why not?” he said. “Haven’t you almost always, one way or another?”
“Oh, Mom, look! Oh, it’s just so cool!”
Glynn stood on Stuart Feinstein’s tiny balcony, staring out at the valley that cradled Los Angeles. I went out and stood beside her. The valley looked to me like two dirty cupped hands holding a city captive; the gray-yellow smog that lay thickly over it seemed the foul breath of the captor. It was not cool to me or beautiful; the sense of alienation I had felt at the airport the day before was back full force. But she was right in a way. It was a stunning vista. It had the impact of a slap.
We had left Palm Springs at seven, and Laura had kept the car at a steady eighty miles per hour through the desert, until the clutter of small towns and shopping centers began. We had gotten into L.A. well before ten, and wound our way through the stalled traffic on back streets, up into the hills to Sunset and across it. Stuart Feinstein’s building rode the crest of one of the canyon ridges directly above Sunset, and we pulled into his parking lot just at ten. After Amy’s call at six, there did not seem to be any point in going back to bed, so I woke Laura and Glynn. Over bagels and coffee I told them we were going to Los Angeles after all. They were both jubilant; last night’s conflict melted with the cold desert dew. The careening drive was brushed with a magical giddiness.
We were flushed from wind and sun—Laura had kept the top down all the way this time—and from laughter. The minute she had pulled out of her own driveway a great gust of liberation and silliness had swept us all, and we had laughed and shouted and sung songs out of our respective girlhoods all the way to the L.A. suburbs. I had not felt anything like it since college. Once or twice then my sorority sisters and I had driven in someone’s convertible over to the Gulf Coast for spring break, crowded and sunburned and giddy and drunk on wind and speed and possibility, singing endlessly, laughing, laughing. This trip felt like that. In the hurtling Mustang, my blowing hair stinging my face and desert grit peppering my bare arms, I was someone else entirely than the angry, worried woman who had driven this road not twenty-four hours before. I had no sense, for that space of time, that Glynn and Laura were daughter and sister to me. We were, for those few hours, all young and all free and all waiting to see who we would be when the car finally stopped. I don’t think I will ever forget that windborne flight through the California desert.
Back inside, Glynn and I prowled the small apartment while Laura closeted herself in the bathroom with Stuart’s cellular phone. She had turned back into Laura when we opened the door to the apartment, kicking off her shoes and padding restlessly about, humming, picking up bric-a-brac and putting them down, straightening pillows, riffling through the opened mail in a shallow copper bowl on the coffee table. Finally she said she needed to make a call or two and then we’d change clothes and go prowl around Sunset a little.
“I don’t have much to change into,” Glynn said hesitantly.
“I don’t have anything, to speak of,” I said. “Do you have to dress for Sunset Boulevard?”
“Not the way you mean,” Laura said, looking me over lazily. I was wearing the knit pantsuit I had worn yesterday, the one I usually travel in. “But not the way you are, either. Glynn’s fine in her jeans and tee, but you are definitely from Away. Waiters will snub you. Street people will howl with laughter. Let me see what Stuart’s got. He’s about your size now, with all the weight he’s lost. You can bet he’ll have the right stuff.”
“I can’t wear Stuart’s clothes, Laura,” I said. “That’s a terrible presumption. I’ll see if I can find something on Sunset, maybe. You can bear the shame of being seen with me that long.”
“Nonsense,” she said, and went into the bedroom and began pulling open drawers and tossing clothes onto the huge, canopied bed. It was ornate and theatrical, by far the most imposing piece in the apartment. Somehow it made me want to avert my eyes. I hoped Glynn and I would not have to sleep in it, but I saw no other bed.
“Anything on Sunset will cost you an arm and a leg,” Laura went on. “I wear his clothes all the time. He probably wears mine, too, when he’s at my place. He’ll be flattered.”
She brought me out a couple of pairs of blue jeans, faded almost to white and beautifully pressed, and an armful of T-shirts, and went to make her phone calls. Glynn and I explored, the clothes slung over my arm. The apartment was small and low-ceilinged, and almost bare of furniture. Indentations on the thick, gray carpet spoke of furniture recently removed, and lighter places on the walls of vanished paintings, as they had in Laura’s place. This place was much less opulent, much more utilitarian, than her condo, but it had the same air of transience, of waiting. The air was stale and close, and the few pieces of furniture left were lightly skinned with dust. Plants and a large ficus in a corner drooped, and in the tiny kitchen dishes sat in a rubber drainer on the counter, washed but not put away. They were yellow melamine, patterned with ivy. I could not imagine a Hollywood agent eating off them. I could not imagine a Hollywood agent living so meanly as this, especially in an aerie above Xanadu. Automatically I picked up the dishes and put them away in the cupboard over the sink, and filled a plastic pitcher with water for the plants.
“You’re at it again,” Glynn said, grinning at me from the doorway.
“At what?”
“Taking care of people. Of things.”
“Well, the plants are in dire straits, and Stuart was dear to let us stay here. I thought I might as well—”
“It’s a nice thing to do. You’re a nice lady. I wasn’t criticizing you.”
Laura came into the kitchen, a tiny white frown furrowing her forehead.
“Nobody in this asshole place answers their phone anymore,” she said. “Billy Poythress’s oh-so-excruciatingly British secretary said he was tied up with the East Coast but would see me this afternoon at two at the Sunset Marquis for lunch as planned, unless, of course, his plans changed, and then she’d let me know. That is, if I could be reached at this numbah. I said I would be out all morning and would just have to take a chance. She said she quite understood. Bitch. I’d say he was screwing her, but I don’t think he does women. Maybe she gives good—”
“Laura.”
“Sorry. Go on and get dressed. I could use a cup of coffee and all Stu has got is instant.”
“Did you get the production office?” Glynn said as I went into the bedroom. Something in her voice told me she enjoyed saying the words.
“Nobody’s answering there, either,” Laura said. “Which doesn’t surprise me. If the receptionist isn’t around, and she almost never is, nobody else will answer. Too demeaning for filmmakers.”
In Stuart Feinstein’s bedroom, cell-like except for the towering Egyptian barge of a bed, I took off my pantsuit and panty hose and pulled on a pair of the blue jeans. They were so tight that I could scarcely zip them, but the other pair was tighter still, so I put them back on and riffled through the T-shirts. They, too, fit so snugly that I could see every rib on my torso. I chose the largest, a white one that had faded Day-Glo fried eggs and bacon strips on it and said “Eat your breakfast.” I looked at myself in the large mirror on the bathroom door and laughed. I looked like a punk adolescent boy in the alien clothes, angular and slouching and high-rumped. It was not, somehow, a bad look. I would never have worn the clothes in Atlanta, but seeing that I had no other choice, I was not going to worry about it here. Nobody knew me. Impulsively I took off the barrette that held my hair back and shook it out, bending at the waist. When I straightened up it flew about my head in a mass of tangles and ringlets and snarls that looked, in this place, not so wrong either. I went out and stood still for inspection by Laura and Glynn.
“Jesus, that’s perfect, except for the shoes,” Laura said, and Glynn said in surprise, “You don’t look in the least like you. Not in the least. It’s terrific. I think. You sure don’t look like anybody’s mom. Dad would die.”
Then she dropped her eyes. I knew how she felt. I had forgotten Pom for the moment, too. I felt the familiar flush of guilt start, and pushed it back. I would call home that evening, I thought. No matter how angry I was at him, he
could not be having an easy time.
Laura went back into the bedroom and returned with a pair of beautiful boots, pointed of toe and with a slight, undercut heel. They were worn but carefully tended, and looked expensive.
“Put them on,” she said. “They may be a little big but you can stuff the toes. You can’t go out in those Hush Puppies.”
“They’re not Hush Puppies, they’re Ferragamos,” I said indignantly, but I took them off and put on the boots. They were only a little loose. I went to the mirror and looked. Laura was right. The boots were perfect. I could not help swaggering just a little when we left the apartment. It was a feeling that seemed to start in my hip joints.
“These boots were made for walkin’,” Glynn sang, and I hugged her and we all laughed and went down into the fever dream that is Sunset Boulevard.
An hour later we were sitting at an outdoor cafe, drinking iced lattes against the sultry heat and watching the passing parade. Sunset Boulevard never fails you. Anywhere else it might seem freakish, almost grotesque, a Fellini street, but here the streams of strolling denizens looked charming, stylish, festive, funny, each in his own costume like people in a Mardi Gras parade. Everyone seemed either very old or young; I saw no one who appeared to be my age, and certainly no one who appeared to be my age as I was at home in Atlanta. Women were thin and striking and either wore chic black or chic jeans or so little of anything that they should have been on beaches. Men wore virtually the same thing, except the ones in outright costumes. There was enough spiky hair and pierced body parts and leather to break the monotony, and a careful scattering of Gap Prep, as Laura called it, but these last were, she said, almost surely visitors from the Valley. The rest belonged. We sat with our jeaned legs stretched out, sipping the lattes and watching, eyes shielded by sunglasses. I stared through mine at my daughter and watched heads turn as people passed her. She eclipsed all the passing young women, with a beauty built of chiseled bones and taut, polished bare skin and the wheat sheaf of hair. Why did she look so different than she did at home? I wondered. She wore almost exactly what she would wear there on any given day. But a flame, a new kind of blood, seemed to shimmer under her skin. Here, in this thick, metallic sunlight, Glynn shone like a tall candle.
Fault Lines Page 14
