Belinda

by Anne Rice

“Well, if you want, darling, I’ll have my secretary let you know everything, of course.”

  I put down the phone and I had a very funny feeling in me, a cold feeling, but I didn’t know what to do. The fact was, I was happy working with Marty. I had not wanted to be anyplace else. But they should have told me what they were doing. I felt mad, but I did not want to be mad.

  But that night I told Marty about it. “Did you want me to do bits in the series?” I asked.

  “Yeah, at first,” he said, “but bear with me, Belinda. Just listen to what I say. I’m building your Mother right now. And why waste you in the background while that’s happening? The smart thing to do is bide our time, see how the show does, and then build an episode around you.” I could see the wheels turning as he was talking. “Got a couple of ideas already. But we’re talking deep into the season, say, November, and I think I know just what I want to do.”

  As I said, it was confusing, because I was really happy working on the production end of it and, besides, I didn’t know about being in the series. I mean, I wanted to make movies. I felt funny about the whole thing.

  Next day on the way to the studio I asked Mom if she minded if I did something in the series. We were in the studio limousine and Marty sat next to her with his arm around her as always and I was across from them on the little jump seat beside the TV that nobody ever turned on.

  “Of course not, honey,” she said in her sleepy morning voice. She was staring out the window at the tacky pastel stucco apartment houses of Los Angeles as if it was not one of the most ugly, boring sights in the world. “Marty, let Belinda be in the show, OK?” But then she said, “You know, honey, you could go to school for a while now. You always wanted to. You could meet boys your own age. You could go to Hollywood High now if you wanted to. Doesn’t everybody want to go to that school?”

  “I don’t know, Mom, I think I’m past all that. When September comes, I’m not sure what to do. Maybe I want to be in movies, Mom, you know what I mean?”

  But she had drifted off just looking out the window. It seemed to me none of it mattered to her. She would look sleepy like this till she stepped on the set of “Champagne Flight.”

  “You do what you want, honey,” she said a moment later like the last message had just gotten through. “You be in ‘Champagne Flight’ if you want to, that’s just fine.”

  I said, Thanks, Mom, and Marty leaned forward and put his hand on my leg as he kissed me. And maybe I never would have thought a thing about it except that, as he drew back, I got a glimpse of Mom’s face.

  Mom looked at me in a very steady way. It seemed all the drug haze cleared for a second. And when I smiled, she did not smile. She was just staring at me like she was going to say something, and then slowly she turned and looked at Marty, who did not even notice because he was looking at me. Then she looked out the window again.

  Not too cool, I was thinking, like don’t get everybody on your case, Belinda, for being lovers with Marty. Leave well enough alone. But Mom probably hadn’t even noticed—he’d been thinking of something else most likely when she was staring. I mean, Mom noticed almost nothing where I was concerned. Right?

  Well, let’s just say it was what I thought at the time.

  Susan hit town a couple of days later. She came roaring into the Beverly Hills driveway in a white Cadillac convertible, in which she’d driven all the way from Texas because she had to think, she said, and talk to herself out loud while she was driving, about the Brazilian film.

  I was very confused about Of Will and Shame. I didn’t want to leave Marty, but no sooner had I gotten in the car with Susan to drive down to Musso and Frank’s than I got fired up again. I’d have to leave Marty for this picture, no question. If I didn’t, what the hell was I? An actress or nothing. I didn’t tell Susan about Marty naturally. And I didn’t tell her that Uncle Daryl might try to stop me either. After all, Mom would let me go, I was sure.

  All through lunch at noisy Musso and Frank’s, Susan talked about this picture. It was going to be terrific. They’d go for me all right. It was the ingénue part and I was Bonnie’s daughter. Her big problem was Sandy. They would want a bankable actress for Sandy’s role.

  “So will you give in on that?”

  “I’ll have to. Sandy will ride it out, and I’ll make Sandy when I have the power to make Sandy. She knows.”

  That night Marty listened to Susan’s pitch very patiently. He set her right up for a meeting at United Theatricals. And when the bedroom door closed, he said, “You gonna be faithful to me in Brazil?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And you’re going to be faithful to me back here in Starletville, aren’t you?”

  “Do you ever have any doubts about that, honey?” He looked very sincere at that moment and very loving and I felt that he was really on my side and had always been.

  But they turned down Susan at United Theatricals. It was too risky, this picture. And Susan was too young to produce and direct herself. But they had an offer for Susan, a contract to direct three movies for television and they had the scripts right there.

  Susan was crushed as I’d expected. When I went over to the Beverly Hills Hotel to see her, she was reading the scripts in the bungalow, drinking ice tea and smoking and making notes.

  “Strictly formula,” she said, “but I’m taking it. I mean Spielberg did his TV movies for Universal. OK. I’ll go this route. They’ve agreed to Sandy in one of them. So that’s settled. But there’s nothing here for you, Belinda, nothing decent, nothing like what I was planning at all.”

  “I’ll wait for Brazil, Susan,” I said. And she looked at me for a minute, like she was trying to figure something out or thinking of saying something. But then she just said, OK.

  Later on the phone Marty told her she did the smart thing. “Everybody’s watching her,” he said to me. “When she’s got a real commercial idea, they’ll listen. She just needs to be careful, you know. Don’t pitch anything till it’s dynamite and those three films are done.”

  I was kind of speechless through it all but watching everything down to the last detail. Susan would make it all right with these people. And I had my time now with Marty and didn’t have to tell Susan about that and the Brazilian film might yet be made.

  “Don’t forget about it, Belinda,” Susan said to me before she left. “We’ll do that thing.” I told her she could count on me whenever it happened. If she wanted to go tearing off without any money, well, I had enough cash in traveler’s checks to carry myself down there. She just smiled at that.

  “But there’s something else,” she said, “that I want to tell you before go. You watch yourself with Marty.”

  I just stared at her. I thought, I will die if she knows I am sleeping the man who killed our picture. How can I ever explain?

  “You had them screaming at Cannes,” she said, “and now look you’re doing, you’re making this guy’s coffee for him and emptying ashtrays and riding to and from work with him and hanging around hand him a Kleenex to wipe his nose.”

  “Susan, I’ve only been here two months. And you don’t understand.”

  “Don’t understand what?” she asked. “That you’re hooked on this and you’ve been balling him since Cannes? I’m not putting you down for that, Belinda. I know this guy. He’s straight with you, though he’s scared shitless your mother or those two sorority sisters in there are going catch on. But I’m just telling you, Belinda, to remember who you are, OK, you’re just a kid and you’ve got time, but what do you want to do with your life, Belinda? You want to be somebody or somebody’s girl?”

  Then she roared off in her Cadillac digging the wheels into the gravel and barely missing the electric gateposts, and I was just standing there thinking, well, she knew all the time.

  And I will tell you something. The next time anybody asked me what wanted to do with my life, what I wanted to become, well, it was almost a year later and it was you, in San Francisco, when we were having that first dinner together at th
e Palace Hotel. You looked at me the way Susan had, and you asked me what I wanted for myself.

  Anyway Susan was gone, Brazil was gone. And I was having a ball with Marty. And having a ball just being in America, too. And very frankly I was having a ball not having to take care of Mom anymore.

  On Saint Esprit Jill and Trish had been wonderful, but there had been a million little decisions they could not make. It had taken the three of us to do the hiring, firing, managing of the household. One of us was always with Mom.

  Now Marty was taking over. And as he relieved us of more and more responsibilities, one thing was coming clear. Marty was actually better for Mother than we had been. It wasn’t that we meant to support Mom in her drinking. We just couldn’t control it. Marty could. He had “Champagne Flight” as the reason for every rule he laid down.

  And he made Mom beautiful and kept her on the wagon. And the more he babied her and controlled her, the more she blossomed. Mom was definitely what Mom had thought she always wanted to be.

  Of course, a lot of this was California self-improvement crap, you know, the mania for exercise and health food and vegetarianism and meditating and God knows what other garbage that is supposed to make you live forever and feel like a good person while you’re doing all that. But it turned Mom into an amazon queen who could handle all the pressure of a TV series, the interviews, the appearances, which was far worse than a movie, if you ask me.

  By the week of the premiere Marty was dominating Mom’s life. He was sitting by her while she bathed, and reading her to sleep. He was picking her nail polish for her and standing around to make sure the hairdressers didn’t pull her hair. He dressed her in the morning. He undressed her in the evening. And Trish and Jill and I were of no use anymore at all.

  I loved it, no matter how disloyal or guilty I felt. And I was very relieved that the school year had started without anybody even noticing. I was having a wonderful time.

  I don’t know if you saw the premiere of “Champagne Flight,” so I will tell you what Marty did. This was a two-hour special, of course. And in it Bonnie Sinclair, émigré actress, comes home to Miami to take over the family airline after her dad’s mysterious death. A young devastatingly handsome cousin tries to blackmail her about the old erotic European films she has made. She appears to take the bait; she goes to bed with him; lets him think he’s got her; then after they have made out, she tells him to get dressed and come into the other room. There’s a surprise for him. Well, it’s a big party and the whole family is there. All the important people in international society, too.

  Then Bonnie introduces the young hunk cousin to everyone, just as he wants, and then a screen comes down and the lights go out and everybody settles back to watch scenes from Bonnie’s old erotic films. The cousin is dumbstruck. I mean, Bonnie shows the very scenes the kid thought he was blackmailing her with. And Bonnie just smiles and tells him it has been a real wonderful evening and he should come see her anytime. He leaves, feeling like a fool.

  Mom played all this very sympathetically. She is sad and wounded and philosophical as always, and when the young guy takes off in shame and embarrassment, she looks at the screen where they are showing the love scenes from her old pictures, and we see tears in Mom’s eyes. That was the heart of the plot. The show ends with her in control of the airline, getting rid of the bad guys, including this cousin, and trying to find out who killed her father, of course.

  OK, TV, I know. But it was perfect for Mom, and, of course, the budget was outrageous, the sets sumptuous, the costumes great. Even the sound track was a cut above the usual thing.

  The big hit “Miami Vice” had had a powerful influence on Marty. He was horribly jealous of it. And he had sworn to make “Champagne Flight” stylish, more sophisticated than the other nighttime soaps. He also wanted a cop-show pace. The old “Kojak” was his model in that regard. And to tell the truth, Marty did what he set out to do. “Champagne Flight” had a cop-show feel to it and a rock-video look.

  Actually there is an old cinema term for what Marty did, though I don’t think Marty would know it. The term is film noir. “Champagne Flight” is probably the only film noir prime-time soap.

  Marty waited like a maniac for the ratings. And within hours we knew everybody in America had tuned in to see Mother. “Champagne Flight” was a hit. It even made the news all over the country: Bonnie and Bonnie’s old films.

  After that, the reporters were after us constantly. The tabloids hounded us. And suddenly Marty could not be out of Mom’s sight. Mom insisted he sleep in the room next to hers, moving Jill out of it, and she kept waking up, in spite of the sleeping pills, and getting confused about where she was. At three o’clock in the morning he’d be feeding her a little breakfast and telling her how good things were going and how they were all going to mop up.

  Even getting Mom a full-time nurse didn’t help the situation. Marty had to be there. The masseuse, the hairdresser, the lady’s maid who took care of Mom’s room and nothing else—they all took directions from Marty. Then one night some reporter from a European paper got over the electric fence and started photographing Mom with a flashbulb through the glass doors of her room. She woke up screaming. And Uncle Daryl had to bring her a gun from Texas, though everybody told her, You are crazy, you can not shoot that gun. But she had to have it in the table by her bed.

  Of course, they were still shooting all through these early weeks, revising future episodes as reactions came in to what was already done. And Mom was OK when she was working. She was OK acting or even reading a script. It was any other time that Mom got crazy. Mom is one woman who has never minded working late.

  Maybe three weeks into the season I realized I had not been alone with Marty since the night of the premiere. Then I woke up early in the morning and I saw Marty standing at the foot of my bed.

  “Lock the door,” I whispered. I knew damn good and well Mom might get up and start wandering around in a drugged-out state.

  “I have,” he told me. But he just stood there in his robe and pajamas and did not get in the bed. I think I knew even in the dark that something was terribly wrong with him. Then he sat down beside me, and he turned on the lamp. The look on his face was awful. He looked embarrassed and cut up and crazy.

  I said: “It’s Mom, isn’t it? You went to bed with Mom.”

  His mouth was all out of shape. He couldn’t seem to talk. He said in this very strained voice that when a woman like that wanted you to go to bed, you just couldn’t say no.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Honey, I can’t turn her down. Nobody in my position ever turned her down. Don’t you see?”

  ! just stared at him. I couldn’t say anything. My voice was absolutely gone. And right before my eyes he started to choke up, to cry.

  “Belinda, I don’t just love you, I need you!” he said to me in this choked whisper. And he reached out to put his arms around me. He started to kiss me.

  I couldn’t do this. I didn’t have to think about it. I knew it. And I had gotten out of the bed and away from him before I even made up my mind what to do. But he came after me, kissing me, and then I was kissing him, and this chemical thing had taken over and, of course, the love, the real strong love, that probably didn’t even need the chemical thing anymore.

  I did a lot of arguing and saying no, but we were already back in bed together, and we did it, and I cried myself to sleep.

  Of course, he wasn’t there when I woke up. He was with Mom again. And nobody even noticed me pack up and leave the house.

  I went down to the Strip, to the Chateau Marmont, and I got a bungalow there, and I made a couple of calls. I told Trish to cover the bills, I had to be there right now, and please don’t ask me why.

  “I know why,” Trish said. “I’ve seen this coming. Just be careful, Belinda, will you?” She called the Chateau and took care of the credit. And that evening she left the message that she had squared it with Mom, and Mom had signed
a nice check for my bank account.

  And there I was, sitting on the side of the bed in the Chateau Marmont and everything was over with Marty, and Susan was in Europe shooting a TV movie, and my mom, of course, did not even care apparently that I had moved our of the house.

  Well, I went wild in the next few weeks. I roamed the Strip at night, talking to the bikers and the crazies and the runaways. I called back all the Beverly Hills kids who had called me when I first got here. I went to their houses, their parties, even drove with them to Tijuana one afternoon. I hung around Hollywood High sometimes when school let out. I made the sights of the city, the studio tours and even Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. I just ran around. Anything not to bc alone, not to be by the phone. But I made sure I checked in with Trish at least once every afternoon. And the report was Mom was just fine. Just fine.

  Mom probably didn’t even notice my absence. And I was being driven out of my mind trying not to think about Marty, telling myself that it had to be over with Marty, that I had to decide about my future right now.

  Now when I look back on it, I wonder what would have happened if I had called G.G. in New York. Mom might not have cared at all then if I had gone to G.G. Mom did not need me the way she had years and years ago. But the truth was, I could not bear the thought of losing Marty. I was in pain, just terrible pain.

  And so I just ran around town. And of course some rather irritating things were happening, too. I was finding out I was a legal child.

  For example, I’d known how to drive since I was twelve, but I couldn’t get a license in California until I was sixteen. I couldn’t go into places that served alcohol even if all I wanted was a Coke and the right to sit at a table and listen to the comedian who was doing the show. And, of course, I couldn’t really confide in the kids I met. I wasn’t about to tell them about my affair with Marty.

  And I wasn’t like these kids. I didn’t get their mixture of being grownup and childish, real hard little LA kids on the one hand and babies on the other. I could never never figure it out.