“Well…all right. It sounds like fun and we both appreciate it very much,” I said. “I can’t imagine why you’re being so nice to a couple of visiting Georgia relatives, but we accept with great pleasure.”
Glynn’s face abruptly went stark white and she closed her eyes.
“Thank you, Mom,” she said, in such a breathless small voice that we all looked at her. She looked as if she was about to faint.
I had seen the look before; it meant Glynn was stressed to the very limits of her being, every circuit overloaded. This was simply one liter too much joy in her cup. The next step would be nausea and vomiting, perhaps unstoppable tears. The embarrassment that followed these scenes was killing for her. She had not had one in a very long time; her world until this trip had been orderly in the extreme. I knew that she could not eat her dinner now, not in this place, not with these people. I put my hand on hers and said, “I think Glynn and I will skip dinner, after all, and go back to the apartment. We’ve both had too long a day, and she has an early morning call tomorrow—isn’t that how you say it? I’ll just ask the waiter to call us a cab; you all go on with your dinner, please.”
Glynn did not protest. She looked at me gratefully. No one else protested, either; her white face was eloquent.
“You do that, my nice, pretty girl,” Margolies said as fondly as if to a favorite niece. “Get your beauty sleep and be fresh for your big scene. Caleb, the car, I think.”
“Of course. I’ll send you both home in the limo and it can come back for Laura and me,” he said. “I’ll drop her at her car when we’ve finished dinner. I should have paced this better. Of course she’s worn out.”
When we got up to leave, Leonard Margolies kissed both our hands. Holding Glynn’s, he said, “You mustn’t take all this frou frou too seriously, my dear. It’s very good make-believe, but that’s just what it is. Make-believe.”
Thank you for that, I said silently.
“I won’t,” Glynn said. “Thank you, Mr. Margolies. I’m looking forward to tomorrow.”
He smiled.
“No more than I,” he said. “Yes.”
Caleb waited with us in the foyer until Jesus arrived with the limo, and then hurried us down the steps, his long body blocking Glynn from the milling paparazzi and the exploding flashbulbs. He handed us into the car and said, “Until tomorrow, then. You made a big hit with a very tough customer tonight, both of you. Rest on your laurels. Jesus will pick you up at six, if that’s okay, and we’ll shoot at eight. Jesus, take care of these ladies. They’re very good friends of Orion O’Neill.”
We rode home in the tomblike quiet of the ridiculous limo in silence, simply too full of the last seventy-two hours to speak. When we reached Stuart Feinstein’s aerie above Sunset Boulevard, Jesus handed us as tenderly out of the limo as if we had been Fabergé eggs.
He started to drive away, and then put his head out the window and chirped, “You tell Orion O’Neill Jesus say’allo!”
7
The production studio where the test would be done was in Culver City, just off the San Diego Freeway South, near the airport. The limo picked us up at six. Our driver this morning was not Jesus, but a dark, impassive man who might have been a Pakistani, or from another Middle Eastern nation. He did not speak except to confirm our destination, and we did not, either. Much of the shine was gone from the limo when Jesus was not at the wheel.
Despite the lateness of the hour when we went to bed, neither Glynn nor I slept well. Overexcitement did that to her, I knew, and her restless tossing set the waterbed to rolling like a frail craft in a nasty sea. I clung to my side of the mattress and tried for oblivion; I knew that the next day would be hard for us. The excitement of the test and the proximity to the world of casual glamour and unreality that Caleb Pringle commanded, the rush to make the noon plane, and the meeting, at last, with Pom all lay ahead, stuffed into this one day like sausage into a casing. Add to all that the shuffling specter of Mommee and jet lag, and the mere thought of the next twenty-four hours stunned me with fatigue and a lassitude that seemed to settle in my very bones like some Victorian malaise. There was no way to know what it did to Glynn. Like a young bride on the eve of her wedding, she could not see past the altar of the screen test.
We were up before five, padding blindly around the kitchen for juice and toast and coffee, bumping into each other in Stuart’s tiny coral and aqua bathroom. I pulled on the much-derided blue pantsuit and hastily packed my few things, tossing the jeans and T-shirt I had worn into Stuart’s washing machine and hanging up his tux jacket. Laura had said she would come back to the apartment and wash and dry the things we had borrowed, and his linens. Glynn had been living out of her duffel, so she had little to pack. She would be made up at the studio, Caleb had said, so she needed no makeup, and I, weary of the last two day’s ersatz Merritt, wore none, either. By the time the heat-grayed morning came sliding in from the east we were sitting on the little balcony, watching Sunset Boulevard come wearily alive and sipping coffee. Humidity was thick in the air and the heat was already shimmering off the hazy towers of Century City and downtown. It was going to be a smoggy, broiling day. I thought of Atlanta, and the heat and thickness we had left behind us, and sighed. The vision of the Penobscot Boy cottage superimposed itself over the scene below. Cool, sharp, resinous, clean, clear—that was what I needed. Clarity. I was starved for starkness and clarity.
“Do you think they made it up last night?” Glynn said in the rusty voice of early morning.
“Who?”
“Oh, Mom. Aunt Laura and Caleb. You know she didn’t come in. The sofa bed wasn’t out. She had to have spent the night with him.”
“I thought they already had pretty much made it up,” I said. I did not trouble to pretend that I thought Laura had spent the night anywhere but with Caleb Pringle. Of course she had. I had seen her face last night at Spago when she looked at him. Laura was in love with him. Spending the night was what she did when she was in love, or thought herself to be.
I thought that it was not much of an example to set for an unworldly sixteen-year-old niece, but Glynn had seemed, on this trip, far older than sixteen much of the time. There was a perceptiveness, an adult insight and tolerance in her that we did not see in Atlanta. But then we did not see much of anything about Glynn there except her carefully guarded, post-Mommee demeanor. How much richness were we missing in our daughter, I wondered wearily. Well, that would stop, too. Mommee would be gone, and Glynn would have room and air to become whoever she might. In the sun of her father’s undivided attention, we just might see the last of the starving child who haunted the house by the river. Already, out here, she was eating far more. I hated the thought of the looming confrontation, but resolved that it would come soon. I did not want to lose this budding wholeness of Glynn’s.
“What do you think of him?” Glynn said.
“Caleb? Well, he’s certainly attractive, and he’s being lovely to us. And he seems to be very fond of your Aunt Laura. I don’t really know what I think yet. I don’t know any other film directors to compare him to. What do you think?”
“I think he’s wonderful. He’s funny and not at all stuck-up, and he doesn’t make me feel like a silly kid. He treats me like someone he enjoys listening to and being around. I hope Aunt Laura marries him. I’d love to have him for an uncle,” Glynn said.
I could not see Caleb Pringle as anyone’s uncle, not, come to that, anyone’s husband, though I knew he had been married twice before. I did not think he was or ever could be a creature of the thousand lilliputian tendrils with which marriage and children bound you. But then, neither could I see Laura trussed with them. We were, Glynn and I, far away from home and out of our milieu altogether. Without my context, I found it hard to catch the sense of the people I met. I had never stopped to think how much I depended on simple familiarity.
“I wouldn’t count on that,” I said. “I think they’d have an alternative relationship at best.”
�
��You mean like just a long affair or living together all their lives but never marrying?”
“Something like that,” I said. “This place just doesn’t seem set up for plain old garden-variety marriages.”
“Well, that would be okay, too,” my child said placidly. “As long as I got to see him every now and then.”
“Don’t you go getting a crush on Caleb Pringle,” I said. “The percentage in that is less than zero.”
“I don’t get crushes anymore,” she said loftily. The limo came then, saving me from wondering when she ever had. I had seen little evidence of them, except the occasional almost obligatory infatuation with untouchable celebrities like this troublesome Rocky MacPherson about whom I had heard so much. Pom had said once, almost wistfully, that it looked as though he was never going to have to run off some obnoxious, lovesick little punk.
We got to the studio about six-thirty. It was a large, sprawling, one-story brick and aluminum building that looked vaguely like a warehouse, sitting in the middle of an asphalt parking lot that, I thought, would be worse than Death Valley at midday. There was a high wire fence around the whole complex, topped with barbed wire, and a heavy steel gate with a guardhouse. It manages to be both forbidding and banal, far removed from the fabled Hollywood studios that had lived always in my mind.
There were few cars in the lot. The limo’s driver lowered the silky, whispering window and said a few words to the guard, who consulted a clipboard and nodded. The driver followed his pointing finger around to the back of the building, which was even barer and less attractive than the front, and pulled up to a plain steel door next to a loading ramp. Glynn looked up at me and rolled her eyes.
“So much for A Star Is Born,” I said, ruffling her silky hair. She had washed it and blown it dry, and it seemed to drift around her face, never quite settling. She wore the same tunic she had worn last night, and the leggings and boots. Caleb Pringle had asked specifically for them.
“I wasn’t expecting all that old silent-movie stuff,” she said. “I know they don’t do that anymore. It would have been fun, though, wouldn’t it?”
The driver opened the door and we went inside. A young woman who seemed hardly older than Glynn was waiting for us. She wore blue jeans and a sweatshirt and enormous, clunking Birkenstock sandals over thick ragg socks, and had a head of glorious, improbable, Dolly Parton hair. Over her tiny mouse’s face it looked so incongruous that Glynn and I both grinned.
“It’s one of the wigs Laura wore in Right Time,” she grinned back. “I’ve always wanted to try it on. I don’t think the effect is quite the same. I’m Molly Shumaker, Caleb’s gofer. He and Laura are waiting for you on the set.”
On the set. Waiting for you on the set. The words ran down my spine like little spiders, and I felt Glynn, beside me, shiver. I could just begin, dimly, to understand the magic in those words, feel the glue that held my sister out here, when the Eastern stage was so much more obviously her metier.
“After you, Miss Fowler,” I said, and Glynn gave me her I’m-having-second-thoughts-about-this smile.
“I’m not sure this was such a hot idea,” she said in a tiny voice.
“Well, it’s too late to back out now,” I said. “Besides, you’d lose your home-court advantage over Marcie and Jess.”
“Right. Let’s do it, then,” she said, and squared her thin shoulders, and marched ahead of me behind Molly Shumaker.
We followed her through a labyrinth of dark halls with closed doors on either side, past a dimly lit canteen, through an empty, cavernous sound stage where cameras stood like sleeping dinosaurs and cables snaked across the floor, and into a second huge room. It was brightly lit from banks of ceiling lights and standing floor lamps, and in front of a large white screen at the far end a group of people fiddled with equipment and drank coffee. Among them were Laura and Caleb Pringle. They were obviously talking and laughing with the crew, but the room was so large that we could not hear them. We went toward them, and I realized that both Glynn and I were walking on tiptoe. Leonard Margolies was nowhere to be seen.
Laura turned and saw us, and came running over and gave us twin hugs. She smelled of soap and lotion and wore a gray leotard and tights with red running shorts over them, and running shoes. They were obviously her own, and I thought that she must have left some of her clothes at Caleb Pringle’s house. He was in running clothes, too, sweatpants and a T-shirt that said The Right Time. The baseball cap on his still-damp dark hair said the same thing. He smiled, and stood waiting for us.
“Isn’t this exciting?” squealed Laura. “Isn’t it a beautiful day? Did you sleep at all? I wish you weren’t going home today; there’s so much else I want you to see…”
She sounded so much like she had when she was a teenager and things were, for a moment, right in her world that I smiled. I had not seen her this exuberant in a long time, not since before she left for Hollywood. The tautness was completely gone from her face; the thin angles were smoothed, and her skin shone with soap and health and something else entirely, which I knew was sheer happiness. I had seen that before, too, if only rarely.
“Yes to all the above except going home. No more discussion about that,” I said. “I don’t have to ask if you slept well. No, don’t answer that.”
She hugged herself with glee and did a little dance step.
“Can’t you see the answer?” she sang. “Oh, Met, he’s back one hundred and ten percent; last night was just—incredible! How could I ever have doubted him? Oh, it’s going to work out, it is…”
I shivered. “Listen, Pie, don’t rush it too much,” I said. “Please. Hold just a little back till you’re sure…”
Beside me Glynn said nothing, only studied her aunt gravely.
“I am sure,” Laura laughed. “You’re just being a big sister. Be my friend for a change! Be happy with me!”
“I am,” I said, smiling. But I wasn’t; not really. There was something about her that reminded me of an out-of-control toddler rushing toward a cliff. Laura, being Laura once again.
Caleb came over.
“Listen, you guys, let’s get this show on the road so there’ll be time to make a tape for the purpose of gloating,” he said. “This is what we’re going to do. John Metter there behind the camera will shoot it; he’s the best I know, and shot Burn and Right Time for me. We’re editing the final cut of Right Time so he was here anyway. You’ll have the crème de la crème, Glynn; he wins big-time awards, Oscars. We’re going to do a very short scene from Arc—one where the young Joan sees for the first time the shape of things to come, you might say. It’s just a few lines, and you’ll just read them off the TelePromp Ter—very simply. Don’t try to act. Just think about the words and say them. We’ll do it in front of this backdrop, because I want the focus to be on you. John will come in close at the end; don’t mind him. Just think about the words. It’ll be just you, but I need another female voice to read a few lines off-camera, and a woman’s arm and hand. I’ve asked Laura to do the honors there. Let her get a head start on feeling her way into Joan. I’ll be in back of the camera with John and I’ll give you a few simple instructions, nothing you’ll mind. Don’t be nervous. It’ll be fun. You look perfect, by the way; I don’t think we’re going to do much to you, but our makeup person is waiting to fluff you up a little. Molly will take you back there. Any questions?”
“I…no. I guess not,” Glynn mumbled through dry lips, and I thought with dread that she was going to freeze, and then she would castigate herself mercilessly for months. This had not been a good idea after all; my instinct had been right about that. She didn’t need anymore self-doubt.
“I don’t know about this, Caleb,” I began, but he held up a finger and smiled at me and said, “Trust me. I won’t scare her. It’s really simple. Piece of cake. That little bit of shyness and tentativeness is just what I want.”
I fell silent. Caleb nodded at Molly, and she touched Glynn’s arm and the two girls went out of the room. I look
ed from Laura to Glynn.
“I’m really worried about it,” I said. “She’s been having a go-round with an eating disorder and her sense of self-worth is in the basement right now, and then there’s been a difficult time with her father and grandmother…if this doesn’t turn out, she’s going to be more than embarrassed.”
“Laura told me a little about things at home,” Caleb Pringle said. “Don’t worry about her, Merritt. Even if she’s awful—and I don’t think for a minute she will be—we can make her look fabulous. This guy is a wizard. And she’s a very beautiful girl. I have an idea that the camera is going to love her. That’s everything.”
“I told you how good he was with kids,” Laura said, putting her arm around me. “He wouldn’t do anything to hurt her. I wouldn’t let him. I’ll take care of her. It won’t take long. You’ll be glad you let her do it; the tape is going to be a treasure.”
I raised my hands and then dropped them. I was trying hard not to hover over Glynn; the therapist had been adamant about that.
“Good,” Caleb said. “Laura and I thought it would be easier for Glynn if you waited in the canteen while we’re shooting. I’ve always found that parents on the set spook young actors. You can stay if you like, of course, but it’ll be more effective if you see the finished product on the monitor.”
“Whatever’s best for her,” I said helplessly.
“This is, I think,” he said. “By the way, Leonard sends his regrets; he had an unexpected morning meeting with somebody from back East. He’d like to give you the full studio tour and dinner if you could possibly stay over, or if not, maybe you’ll come back soon. He’s really taken with both of you. Laura too. Leonard doesn’t get taken too often.”
“Thank him for us,” I said. “Maybe we can come back sometime.”
Molly came back with Glynn. I stared at my daughter. Nothing seemed to have changed about her, and yet everything had; I could not tell what the makeup artist had done, beyond hang a heavy, rough-cast metal cross on a primitive chain about her neck, but her face had been altered. Her eyes seemed larger, her cheekbones even more prominent, and there were tender shadows in places I had never seen shadows before. Her skin literally shone; it seemed as translucent as alabaster over the bones of her face, although there did not seem to be any makeup or powder on it. Someone had drawn her hair back so that from the front it looked cropped at the nape, and the hair at her hairline had been feathered into silky bangs that brushed her eyebrows. She looked young and frightened and somehow stricken and almost completely medieval in the tunic and tights and the big cross. I could see now why Caleb Pringle had wanted her to wear them. Her wrists looked impossibly thin, and there were red marks around them that manacles might have left. My heart lurched with pity and fear for her; I had never seen anyone look so vulnerable.
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