Starstruck

by Anne McAllister

  A man surrounded by five bouncing, babbling children—even though he might be a dead ringer for famous actor Joe Harrington—scarcely got a second glance. Everybody knew that the lady on Joe Harrington’s arm would never be a five-year-old with straw-colored pigtails!

  He could hear Jennifer giggling now, her shrill laughter ringing out above the boys’ as they hammered and sawed, and he got up out of his chair in the den and went to the window to watch them. Usually Jennifer didn’t come—she stayed most days with her regular babysitter, Margie, and, nominally, he supposed the younger boys did, too. But though Margie might be their official baby-sitter, Ben, Stephen and Theo spent nearly all their time with him. And before he had left for scout camp the day before, Noel, too, had become a fixture here.

  Liv, as far as Joe could tell, tolerated the situation. She seemed to realize that if she forbade them to come it would be worse—rather like forbidding one’s children to see undesirable friends, he thought ruefully, wondering how his straight-laced parents would feel about that. They had done it to him often enough. Probably, he decided, they would agree with Liv. In any case, Liv hadn’t actually objected, though she did spend an inordinate amount of time when he was around her cautioning them not to bother him and to remember their manners, in such a way that he felt her disapproval even if they didn’t.

  “Hey, Ma! Hi, Ma. C’mere!” He heard Theo shout, and Joe craned his neck to see Liv coming around the side of the house, looking very proper in a navy knit shirtdress, her hair piled in a severe knot on her head, and her gray eyes hidden behind owlish sunglasses.

  Liv? Here? That was a first. His stomach roiled and he rubbed suddenly-damp palms on the sides of his faded denim cut-offs. Taking a deep breath he went to the door and opened it. She was standing on the porch, seemingly undecided whether to knock or to cross the yard to where the kids were in the tree, waving at her.

  “Well, look who’s here,” he said with a false heartiness that he knew didn’t mask his nervousness at all. Why had she come? Had she finally decided to give him a chance? His mouth felt dry and he licked his lips hurriedly.

  She seemed to be looking at him from behind the dark lenses, but then almost as quickly, her head turned back so that she was looking toward the children in the tree, and she said expressionlessly, “I’ve come for an interview.”

  “What?”

  She shrugged. “You didn't expect it to be a secret that you were in town, did you? Frances saw you in the grocery store.” She grimaced behind the glasses as though plagued by a distasteful memory. “Even got your autograph, I hear. So Marv wants a follow-up story on the one I did earlier.”

  Joe dragged a chaise longue over into the sun and motioned her into it, fetching himself a chair. “And you decided to do it?” he asked, unable to disguise the hopefulness in his voice. He was ready to take advantage of any opportunity at this point.

  “I didn’t have much choice,” Liv told him flatly. “If I hadn’t come, he’d have sent Frances. And I didn’t know what you’d tell her.”

  He wished she’d take the glasses off so that he could see her face. How else was he supposed to know what she was thinking in that suspicious little mind of hers. “I don’t kiss and tell, if that’s what you’re implying,” he said coolly.

  “No, you just kiss a lot.”

  Well, she hadn’t softened her stance toward him, that was certain. He leaned forward in the chair, his forearms testing on his knees, hands loosely clasped. “I haven’t kissed anyone since you, Liv.”

  “I want an interview, not a confession story,” Liv said coldly, and sat up on the very edge of the chaise longue, perching precariously like a very stiff crane about to take flight.

  Joe sighed. He wanted to reach out and stroke her, take her hair down and run his hands through it, soothe the stiffness out of her, ease the tension he saw in her shoulders. And all he could do was talk. One move would be disaster. One touch and she would flee. “All right,” he said heavily. “Shoot.”

  Liv looked at him uneasily, as though she hadn’t expected him to cooperate willingly, if at all. “Very well,” she said finally, and reached into her purse for a note pad and a small cassette recorder. “Do you object?” she asked, indicating the recorder.

  “No. I only object to one thing.”

  “What?” she asked warily, as if she would rather not know.

  “The glasses. I don’t like talking to people I can’t see.” He needed access to her face. If he couldn’t touch her, at least he had to have that. He lifted one brow in silent entreaty. “Please?”

  Slowly Liv’s hand went to her temple and she lifted the glasses off, like a knight removing his armor, and just as reluctantly. Her eyes mirrored just the turbulent storm he had expected, and his mouth lifted slightly at one corner. She wasn’t as indifferent to him as she pretended. Good.

  He dipped his dark head, concentrating on the toes of his bare feet, leaving the next move up to her. That she was here was enough. He wasn’t about to say anything to spook her now. Let her take the lead.

  “I—I suppose that Marv wants to know why you’re back in Madison,” she began awkwardly. He could hear her shift uncomfortably in the chaise longue, but he didn’t look up. The sun baked his back, drying up his nervous perspiration.

  “I’m working on a screenplay,” he said slowly. “In Hollywood everyone is on my back about Steve Scott. Scripts pop out of the woodwork, directors and producers rail at all hours. There isn’t a moment’s peace.” He spread his hands helplessly.

  “Poor you,” Liv mocked unsympathetically and wrote something on her pad. The cassette whirred on.

  “Your understanding is overwhelming,” Joe muttered. Damn her, couldn’t she give an inch?

  “I’m not being paid to understand you,” Liv replied, “only to interview you.”

  Joe sighed and shifted uncomfortably in the creaky deck chair. “I used to think you understood me,” he said quietly.

  Something flickered in Liv’s eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “When we talked on the phone all those times, when we cooked dinner, when we—”

  “Never mind about that,” Liv said abruptly, cutting him off. “How long will you be here?”

  “I’m not going to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “Unless you listen to me about what I want to talk about, I won’t give you the interview.”

  Liv glared at him, her fingers clenching, snapping her pencil. “Damn!” she muttered.

  “Come on, Liv,” he pleaded. “All I want to do is talk.”

  “That’s not all you want to do!” Liv snapped, her jaw tense, the sensitive cords of her neck standing out.

  “It’s all I want to do now!” Joe retorted. “What do you think I’m going to do? Ravish you right here on the lawn in front of four of your children?”

  “You nearly did in front of one of them!” Liv said angrily, her hand going up to brush her already severe hairstyle into even greater order.

  “Well, you sure weren’t fighting me off!”

  “The more fool I! I should have had my head examined, going out with you, eating with you…” Her voice rose and then trailed off as if she couldn’t bring herself to finish what she was going to say.

  “Making love with me,” Joe finished for her, and Liv exploded.

  “No! You don’t know what love is!”

  “And you’re the world’s greatest expert, I suppose?” he said scornfully, and immediately wished he hadn’t. She looked stricken, as though he had hit her in the most vulnerable spot there was.

  “Hardly,” she said bitterly in a voice that made him ache. A speedboat roared by towing a water-skier, and Joe watched the wake of the boat, unable to look at Liv and see the hurt he knew was in her face.

  Finally he rubbed an anxious hand across the back of his neck, lifting the sweat-dampened locks of hair that clung there. “I’m sorry, Liv,” he muttered. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “No, no.�
�� Her voice was shaky; her hands twisted the broken pencil in her lap. “You’re right. And I can’t blame you for what happened that night. As much as I might like to. I was as willing as you were. But it was a mistake.”

  Joe shook his head violently. “No. It wasn’t.”

  Liv jumped to her feet and crossed the porch, her back to him. He got up and followed her, stopping a few feet behind her, held back by an invisible shield that wouldn’t let him get any closer. “Yes, it was. I don’t want that sort of relationship. I want love, commitment, marriage, all those things I thought I had with Tom—” Her voice broke and her head bent. Then she shook it angrily and spun around to face him. ‘"I won’t be one of your women, Joe. I let my passions take over that one night. I won’t do it again!”

  The stormy, tornado-cloud-gray of her eyes held his green ones in silent battle, and he swallowed hard, his mouth dry. She reminded him of a doe, frightened and defenseless, facing a hunter with a loaded gun. If only she knew he was just as scared of her as she was of him, he thought. But then he realized that it wasn’t just him that she was seeing. “Tom really hurt you, didn’t he?” he ventured.

  Liv frowned, a tiny line appearing between her brows, accentuating her vulnerability. He wanted to take her in his arms, comfort her, but he knew if he even heaved a sigh or took a step she might vanish. So he held completely still, not even breathing. Her gaze slid past him to concentrate on the grove of trees near the lakeshore. “Yes,” she said woodenly. “I guess you could say that. I was devastated at the time.”

  “Wha…” Joe began, and then knew he couldn’t ask. If she were willing to tell him, that would be fine. But he couldn’t force her confidence in him.

  But Liv, obviously guessing what he wanted to know, shrugged and gave him an ironic look. “What happened? Nothing extraordinary, I assure you. He was the classic roving husband. I was the classic unsuspecting wife, convinced that it could never happen to us. I actually thought he was working late, going to out-of-town seminars, studying latest techniques. He was—only the subject wasn’t dentistry!”

  “When, I mean, how…” Joe stumbled, embarrassed by her frankness and afraid of making her dredge up a past that was painful, but still unable to contain his questions.

  Liv crossed the porch to lean against a planter filled with geraniums. “It took me a while to wake up, actually,” she said. “It had been going on for a couple of years before I wised up. I guess maybe Tom thought I never would, so he stopped being quite so discreet. People we both knew saw him and mentioned it to me. They didn’t know he was lying to me about where he was and who he was with. It wasn’t intended maliciously, but it was enlightening just the same. Anyway, once I had accepted the fact that it was a possibility, a lot of other things fell into place. I confronted him finally when he came home from a ‘weekend seminar’ and I discovered, to my surprise, that it was all my fault.” She snorted derisively, but her hands trembled and she clasped them behind her back.

  “Your fault?” Joe echoed, his forehead furrowing.

  “Oh yes, definitely. You see, I was always too busy with the raising of the kids to go places with him. This one was sick or that one had a game or we couldn’t get a sitter. So, if he couldn’t go with me he found someone to go with. First Janice, then Patty, then Di and several others. Now it’s Trudy. Anyway, all of them were women who were, according to Tom, better able to help him fulfill himself than I was.”

  Liv couldn’t hide the bitterness and hurt, didn’t even try to, and Joe wondered if love was even worth it if this was what it got you. For a moment he thought that maybe life with a succession of Linda Lucases was a better idea after all. But he was finally beginning to learn that even that solution had its drawbacks. He wondered if Tom would figure them out. The man was a jerk to leave a woman like Liv for a succession of empty-headed, full-busted broads, and Joe didn’t mind saying so.

  “Well, thank you,” Liv said wryly, “but it wasn’t quite like that. They were none of them dewy-eyed, dumb blondes like Linda Lucas.” Instantly she turned beet-red and clapped her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, obviously mortified.

  Joe’s mouth twisted. “Don’t be. Your honesty is One of your most appealing qualities.” His tone was dry.

  Liv made a face. “I suppose my other is that I look you right in the eye. Other women are appealing because of their smiles, their eyes—”

  “Dewy,” Joe supplied, grinning. “No, your other most appealing quality is your sense of humor.”

  “The kiss of death! No wonder Tom divorced me,” she said with a smile that didn’t quite eliminate her hurt. “He used to tell me how well I coped with adversity. ‘You always come up with a smile,’ he used to say. I sometimes wondered if he didn’t want to see if he couldn’t come up with something that I couldn’t bounce back from.” She sighed and plucked the leaf off a geranium. “He did a pretty good job.”

  “He ought to be shot,” Joe said wanting to kill the man for hurting her, yet at the same time, a part of him was perversely glad Tom had, so that she was free, so that Tom had no more claims on her.

  “Probably,” Liv agreed. “There was a time I would have done it myself. I sat home night after night, wondering what all those years of struggling through grad school and opening his practice and coping with teething and bumps and bruises and croup were for. I guess I’m one of those people who believes in delayed gratification, I didn’t mind the sacrifices. I figured we’d have a lifetime together to even things out.” She snorted inelegantly. “Well, I was wrong.”

  “Maybe I should have neglected the kids, I don’t know,” she went on. “Anyway, it’s too late to worry about it now. That’s over and done with. What I can do is make sure it never happens again.” She was looking at him squarely now. “I don’t fancy being one in a string of women. Not Tom’s. Not yours. So, if you’ll just excuse this digression and give me the interview, I won’t bother you anymore.”

  Joe dragged a hand through his already mussed hair. Where did he begin, for heaven’s sake? How could he tell her that she wasn’t just another of the women in his life, a successor to Linda Lucas? Because as surely as he knew that he didn’t want her to be that, he didn’t know what he really did want, either. “What if I said, ‘Let’s just be friends?’ ” he asked.

  “Friends?” Liv looked at him as though he’d lost his mind.

  “Why not?” He plunged ahead. Improvise, the drama coach had yelled at him time and time again. “I mean, you and I hit it off pretty well, once you decided that I wasn’t going to rape you that first night, didn’t we?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And when we talked on the phone, we were friends, weren’t we?” he pressed her.

  “Well, yes.”

  “And leaving off the ending of our Saturday, we got along tolerably well, wouldn’t you say?” He was pacing back and forth on the porch, the sun beating on his neck and back, feeling like a klieg light boring down while he played Clarence Barrow in a courtroom drama.

  “Leaving off the ending,” Liv agreed.

  “So, why can’t we just be friends? Look—” he stopped pacing and turned to face her, fighting for his life, wishing he knew why it mattered so much, “—I’ve had enough of strings of women like Linda Lucas, too. They’re one of the perks of my job, really.” He grimaced ironically. “Or one of the pains. In any case, I want something other than that. I’d like it if we could be friends.” He was holding his breath, watching her, waiting.

  “Friends?” Liv seemed bemused by the idea, examining the word in her mind, like a scientist probing a foreign object.

  Joe waited. His chest hurt, his throat was tight. The hammering from the tree house had nothing on the wild beating of his heart. Somewhere on the lake a speedboat cut loose.

  “All right. I suppose we can give it a try,” Liv said cautiously and offered him her hand as though expecting an electric shock, not a truce.

  He took it, feeling her hand warm and slightly
damp in his. He wanted to rub his thumb against the sensitive skin of her wrist and stroke her palm. His breathing quickened. Friends? He groaned inwardly. God help me, what have I done now? But he schooled his features into what he hoped looked like cheerful friendliness and made his handshake a firm one. “Good,” he said, and hoped she didn’t hear the tiny break in his voice that he heard.

  “Now, about that interview,” Liv said, removing her hand from his and going to sit on the edge of the chaise longue. She was more like the Liv he remembered from before the Saturday night disaster, and Joe sat down opposite from her and began to talk. He found himself opening up to her, telling her about his proposed screenplay, about his disgust with the continual pressures of being a Hollywood star, of sharing his life with Steve Scott, and he was amazed when she finally shifted on the lounge and said, “I really have to get back. It’s past three. If I’m going to write this up—”

  “Write it up?” he yelped, stung. It wasn’t an interview! He had forgotten entirely about that. He was just talking to her, sharing, one friend to another. He opened his mouth to protest, but Liv shook her head

  “Don’t worry,” she told him. “I’ve read enough interviews with Joe Harrington to know that nine-tenths of this was off the record. Trust me?” It was a question, and Joe removed his own glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. It was a fair request, he realized. If they were really friends, then he would trust her not to do him in, not to spread his plans, hopes, fears and insecurities all over her newspaper. She was trusting him, after all, not to make her into just another Linda Lucas in his life. But just as it hadn’t been easy for her, letting her have free rein with this material wasn’t easy for him. He was tempted to tell her to forget the whole thing, that the whole interview was off the record, that he’d send her a press release tomorrow instead.

  And then where would they be?