“Da-a-vy, Da-a-v-y Crockett,” he started to sing.
Cady smiled, in spite of herself. She couldn’t look away.
“Da-a-vy, Da-a-vy Cro-o-ckett,” she sang back, softly.
“King of the Wild Frontier, at your service, ma’am.” He made an elaborate, country-bumpkin bow.
For once, Cady could think of no words. This was absurd. Here was the man whose so-called art films—like Afro-Blue and Hey Mikey, She Likes It!—used real prostitutes instead of actresses to tell his gritty stories of ghetto life and drug addiction—the man whose movies were so shocking that even with today’s standards, the motion picture board refused to give his films any thing but an “X” rating. The man was her enemy; the enemy of all African-American women. All women on the planet, as far as she was concerned.
So why couldn’t she do anything but stand there, grinning like a schoolgirl at Myrna Magee’s baby brother, all grown up?
And he grinned back; a big, gee-whiz, happy kid smile.
“So how about that birthday lunch?” he said.
“Um, can’t.” She fought a pang of regret. “There’s this Spago thing, and I need to be at the Silver Cathedral by one. I’m late already. I’m sorry.”
“Then how about tea? In my limo? The drive would give us a chance to chat. To catch up.” His smile blazed.
To catch up. On nearly four decades? Poor Myrna had been dead two years, a victim of drug addiction and AIDS. What could they possibly have to say to each other?
He opened the door, gesturing for her to precede him.
She stood frozen. She could hear Albert’s strained, shallow breathing behind her. She glanced at Flo, whose eyes sparkled above her glasses.
“He’s single. You’re single. What’s the harm?” those relentless sparkles seemed to say.
Cady made a small step toward the door. Power Magee took her arm.
“Wait,” Albert said. “What about Spago? Do I cancel?”
“Yeah,” said Power Magee with a laugh. “Cancel Spago. Tell Wolfgang to get Pucked.”
Chapter 3—White Light for Breakfast
The therapist was wearing socks with Birkenstocks again. Thick wool socks. Sort of brown. And a long greenish tunic over mud-colored leggings. Regina decided the look was something between Visigoth and Arthur Rackham elf.
But she knew she was not in a position to make fashion judgments. Here she was with a plaster cast on one foot and the other encased in one of the Spoon’s slippers; a large, orange, fuzzy thing with the head of Garfield the Cat grinning on the toe, the only footwear of the Spoon’s that fit Regina’s long, narrow, foot. There had been no time to negotiate the stairs to Regina’s second-floor room before their required group therapy session.
The Spoon, whose actual name was Tina Davis—she must remember that—had sweetly offered to lend Regina a lovingly frayed T-shirt dress with a picture of the cast of Friends on the front, but Regina had declined. She’d wrung the excess water out of her dry-clean-only suit, and calculated she had an hour or two before it dried to a shrunken three-sizes-too-small disaster.
At least by then she would have her Cadbury bar. Nigel had given her a conspiratorial wink as she sat down.
But now time seemed to stand still as the offspring of some dead rock star whimpered on with an awful tale of child abuse and parental neglect. Regina’s heart went out to the wretched girl, who had been supporting herself as a telephone psychic sex worker, but her attention wandered as she sat politely in her damp clothes, her hunger giving way to a light-headed wooziness.
She reminded herself to be grateful to the girl for droning on. Every minute she talked diminished the likelihood that Regina would be required to “share” her own stories. She liked talking about herself almost as much as she liked reading about her weight gains in the tabloids. During the three days since she’d arrived at the Clinic, she’d managed to limit her self-revelations to a few mentions of her apprehension about the “accidents.”
She found it difficult to participate in the tales of horrific childhoods. Her own parents had been so boringly perfect. Her violinist father, from what she remembered, had only one flaw: dying of a heart attack when she was nine; and her music-teacher, foster-child-adopting mother simply had no flaws at all.
Which was why Regina never got on well with her.
She looked down at her hands, rough from the morning’s scrubbing; big, Dutch peasant’s hands, like her mother’s—a woman who had spent a lifetime doing battle with dirt and now lay buried beneath it in the peaceful hills of western Massachusetts. There were times she almost envied her mother that peace.
Like right now. The fashion-challenged therapist was talking in her direction. Regina could tell her number was up.
“… how about you, Princess? Would you like to share with us what brought on your decision to come to the Clinic and enter Recovery, your Highness?”
Regina gave the group a careful smile and cleared her throat. She had decided the best route was to tell some version of the truth, silly as it was.
“Several weeks ago, I got drunk,” she said. “Very drunk. So drunk I made a pass at my husband. I kissed him. Right on the mouth. I even used my tongue, I think. Then, I followed him into the royal bedchamber—the one with the sixteenth century Ludovico Carracci frescoes, which are so erotic—and proceeded to remove his clothes. If my chef hadn’t arrived with Max’s hot toddy, I suppose I might have done something even more embarrassing, like take off my own. Max was very upset the next morning and suggested I seek help.”
She took a breath. That really was when it had all started, wasn’t it? The next day the first accident happened—the brakes went out on the Ferrari. Thank goodness for a Le Mans-trained driver and the hangover that kept her from driving herself that morning.
Regina searched the circle of faces for reaction. Nothing. She’d have to give them a little more grovel-and-snivel.
“My husband had every right to be annoyed,” she went on. “I broke the agreement. I understood from the beginning that our marriage was not about sex, except what was required to produce an heir. He would have his—what he calls his “private liaisons”—and I would have, well, the title, the palaces, the jewels, everything. Not a bad arrangement. Until I went and ruined everything.”
“Yes. Alcohol can ruin everything,” said a former movie icon, her face permanently set in the death-rictus of too many face-lifts.
“No,” Regina said, finding this truth-telling strangely exhilarating. “It was worse than that. I got fat.”
The group leaned forward, gossip-greed in their eyes.
“Excuse me, Regina. Excuse me,” said Nigel, who was kind, but had the annoying way of pronouncing her name to rhyme with “vagina”. “But what does being fat have to do with anything? If Prince Max has ‘private liaisons’—by which I take it you mean he’s gay—he wouldn’t want you even if you got back that death’s-head look of your Warhol days. Save yourself the pain, dear heart.”
“Of course.” Regina felt her spine go cold at the mention of those days with Andy, but this game of self-humiliation had very strict rules, so she went on. “You’re right, Nigel, but you see, when I was thin—model thin, I mean—I didn’t want him. Or anybody. Marriage without sex seemed like a fine idea. An anorexic has no sexual needs to worry about. No hormones.”
She looked from his blank face to the others.
“I was a hormonal eunuch, my dears,” she said. “When the female body faces starvation, the first thing it does is shut down the reproductive system. Automatic population control for bad times. When I became a model, I forced my body back into a state of pre-pubescence, and held it there for years with constant starvation.”
The faces were still uncomprehending.
“But since the purpose of my marriage was to reproduce, the doctors made me start eating. First I resisted, but then I was ecstatic. I fell in love with food. I ate everything I’d deprived myself of all those years. I said ‘Chocolate, let me be y
our slave’. But I didn’t realize my metabolism was permanently frozen by another evolutionary safeguard: the ability of the once-starved, sexually active female body to store enough nutrients—in the form of fat—to survive nine months of famine, for obvious reasons. Mine is set to convert anything over a thousand calories a day into portable famine insurance.”
She patted the now-infamous matronly curve of her hip.
“After Tarquino was born, I went back to bulimic behavior, and Max went back to his liaisons, but I never got really thin, and then about five years ago, when I realized I was never going to regain my waif-like figure, I started eating like a regular person. The pounds came back and so, unfortunately, did the sex drive, which I tried to deal with discreetly—an occasional bellboy here, a stable hand there—until that horrible night I inflicted my needs on my poor, unsuspecting husband—although he really isn’t my type—so thin and pale. I prefer dark, mysterious Mediterranean men, actually.”
For a moment, the dark, mysterious ghost of the only man she’d ever really loved flickered through her memory.
“But now,” she said, trying to smooth her ruined skirt. “Here I am, as I said—because I got fat.”
There. That should satisfy them.
“Is that when you realized you were an alcoholic, your Highness?” said a recently discarded trophy wife.
Regina sighed. Here she was, baring her soul, and they wanted a drunk story. Too bad she’d never much gone in for alcohol.
“I certainly drank too much that night,” she said. “I told the kitchen not to make dessert, because that awful fat-photo of me had just come out in a Roman tabloid. But my chef, Titiana, had the night off—she’s so wonderful helping me to stick to my diets—and the kitchen sent out a decanter of amaretto with the fruit. Amaretto isn’t chocolate, but if you close your eyes and think of chocolate-covered cherries, it can be quite satisfying. Especially by the tumblerful.”
She thought back to that night, and how foolishly she had misread Max’s signals—she could swear he had refilled her glass that last time.
“Max would like to believe I’m alcoholic, I suppose,” she added. “Alcoholism is so much easier to deal with than an undesirable wife suffering from unbridled lust.”
Regina watched the faces harden around the circle.
“Now group,” said the Visigoth. “Do we hear Princess Regina experiencing a little denial here?”
“For sure,” said the rock-offspring in her sex-kitten whisper. “What about the accidents you told us about? Those things don’t just happen. You had to be way high on something.”
“Not necessarily, dear heart,” said Nigel, ever Regina’s defender. “People who are forced to stifle their sexuality are often what we call ‘accident prone.’ It’s the subconscious trying to do what the conscious mind isn’t brave enough to carry out. Suicide without the shame. And you pulled your last little drama in here. Last night. Didn’t you, Princess?” He lowered his gaze toward Regina’s cast. “You couldn’t have been drunk. Unless you know something about how to get booze in here that I don’t. What you’re in denial about is your self-loathing.”
“Wrong,” said the Spoon. “The latest accident wasn’t last night. It was this morning—in the first floor ladies’ room.” Her face had hardened again, with no trace of their camaraderie of an hour ago. “I nearly got killed. But Nigel is right. Who else could have rigged that toilet tank to fall? What about it, your Highness? Are you trying to off yourself because nobody wants to screw a fat lady?”
A sad little producer who had worked on too many science fiction films spoke up to agree. “After the aliens took me to the mother ship, I kept having all kinds of accidents. It was like I wanted to die, but couldn’t admit it. That’s just what you’re doing, Princess.”
Regina took a quick breath. Could it be true? Was her own subconscious plotting against her? It was true her life was far from the happy-ever-after it seemed: she had a lonely sham of a marriage, two sons who no longer needed her, dead parents, and no confidante but Titiana.
And there were times when even Titiana seemed a bit distant, especially since the amaretto night. But then, Titiana was unmarried and weighed well over two hundred pounds herself, not unusual for the buxom peasants of San Montinaro, but perhaps an impediment to empathy with Regina’s problems.
“Now, group,” the Visigoth was saying, “Let’s help the Princess here. Let’s all join hands and send her our own white light.”
Regina opened her eyes. A look of sweet, blissful smugness had settled on the faces in the circle. They sat in perfect silence, as Regina’s stomach let out a hollow growl. It was a low, menacing rumble; almost a purr—like the quiet menace of a jungle cat about to move in for the kill. But it was speaking as loudly as a pack of howling wolves. What it said was—yes, she had been in denial. She had been in denial about the danger that surrounded her; about the accidents; about the Clinic. About Max. Max had sent her here, knowing full well she wasn’t an alcoholic. He had insisted that no one be told where she was going, not even Titiana. In order to save her from the paparazzi, he said.
But these facts wouldn’t go away:
No one but Max knew she was here. But the accidents were still happening.
But they weren’t accidents.
They were attacks on her life. And no one could be causing them but her husband; or someone paid by him. Maybe someone in this room.
She looked around the circle. It could be anyone—the Spoon; the rock-offspring; the alien abductee; even Nigel.
She had to get out of here. Now. She rose from her chair as if it had been electrified.
“Thank you,” she managed to say with a polite smile. “Thank you all so much, but as a matter of fact, I had white light for breakfast—dinner, too.”
She took a deep breath and slung the chain of her Chanel bag over her shoulder as she raised herself on her crutches. There was only one person she could trust. And thanks to that newspaper, she knew where to find her.
“What I need now,” she said with a stiff smile. “Is to go to an old-fashioned, church box-lunch social.”
She took advantage of the shocked silence to propel herself out of the room. As fast as crutches and one foot could take her, she made her way through the lobby and past the front desk. And out. Away. She could hear the shouts and footsteps behind her, but she didn’t stop.
There would be no going back. The Recovery Clinic at Rancho Esperanza had strict rules—you were free to go at any time, but you would not be allowed back in.
A taxi stood waiting. Waiting for someone else, but she didn’t have time for manners.
“The Silver Cathedral,” she told the driver. “Now.” She had no luggage, but she’d manage. She’d just managed one of the bravest acts of her life. She’d escaped. Escaped those awful smiles. Escaped the lies. Escaped his Highness, Prince Maximus Saxi-Cadenti, the odd, remote man who was still a stranger to her after eighteen years of marriage.
She would go back to real life. Real people. Honesty and friendship. Back to Cady.
Let it not be too late.
Chapter 4—Bearing the Cross
Regina’s heart rate had returned to normal by the time the taxi swerved onto the Anaheim exit ramp—as normal as a heart rate could be in high-speed, bumper-to bumper traffic. And her head no longer felt in immediate danger of exploding, or her stomach of imploding. In fact, her hunger seemed to have evaporated.
Finally, she felt safe; safe enough, at least, to notice that the ponytailed taxi driver, one Fabiano Feinstein, an aspiring spokesmodel, had the profile of a young god.
She was going to see Cady. Things would be fine. She should have contacted Cady a long time ago. Cady had always been able to make even the most appalling things seem perfectly reasonable. Which was probably why she had survived in Washington. She would tell Regina she was overreacting, that hunger had made her paranoid, and maybe feed her some pie.
Then she could tell Max that Regina did not have a dr
inking problem; that the accidents were not her fault, and the sex stuff on the amaretto night was simply due to a hormonal imbalance. Regina could promise to stick to her diet; Max would go back to being his inscrutable self, and they could all go away somewhere safe and ordinary, like Paris.
The Silver Cathedral turned out to be a steel and mirrored-glass tower just down the road from Disneyland. Its entrance was a sort of plaza that had the grand steps and square fountains of a Mussolini-era government office building, and, like the Happiest Place on Earth, seemed to be a monument to tidiness, lower-middle-class taste, and crowd control.
Regina tried to make properly awestruck noises as Fabiano drew up to the curb just behind a large van with a TV network logo on the side. He was speaking with reverent admiration of the marketing savvy of the Cathedral’s fabled Reverend Elmo Greeley. According to Fabiano, Greeley, a lounge-act comic turned televangelist, had built the Silver Cathedral financed entirely by the “little silver dimes” donated by millions of children brought to Jesus by his Saturday morning Christian TV show, “Gladly My Cross-Eyed Bear” starring Gladly Bear, the sight-challenged teddy-bear angel.
A growing crowd was filling the plaza, streaming from the mausoleum-like gate to the underground parking garage, like resurrected souls emerging from a collective grave. They jostled Regina as she balanced on her crutches, fishing in her purse for the fare. With dawning horror, she realized she had no American currency. Last Friday, she’d gone directly from John Wayne Airport to the Clinic at Rancho Esperanza, without giving a thought to banks.
Wait. She usually kept a hundred dollar bill along with some euros in the zipper pocket of her bag for emergencies. It was there. She handed it to Fabiano.
“Sister, have you taken Jesus as your personal savior?” said a voice from the crowd. Someone put a pamphlet in her hand.
“Do you love Him?” another voice demanded. “Do you love Jesus?” A stringy-faced woman in a large hat decorated with small winged bears pulled on Regina’s arm. Regina tried to shake her off. The woman would not let go.
“Do I love Jesus?” Regina repeated. “Actually, I’ve never met him, dear, but I’m sure I would. I’ve always been attracted to Jewish intellectuals.” She turned to see if the delicious Fabiano Feinstein appreciated her joke—just in time to see the taxi take off from the curb.
Indie Chicks: 25 Women 25 Personal Stories Page 38
