Fast Start, Fast Finish

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Charlie studied Nancy’s face. She was removing the salad plates now, collecting them and placing them on a tray. He offered her his plate. Is she a bitch?

  “Well,” he said after a moment. “I definitely want to see Harold get a job.”

  “If he wants to,” Nancy said, “then let him.”

  “He’s old enough. I had a summer job when I was his age,” he said. When she said nothing he added, “But of course I had to. We were poor.”

  12

  So much of Tessa’s life, he had realized, had to be spent in hiding—from people, the public. Her public that she had worked half her life to get had become her enemy—the threat to any privacy she might ever want. That was why Bruno and Richard were essential to her. They surrounded her, flanked her, ran interference for her, and fended the people off whenever she made entrances and exits anywhere. There was no place she could go, really, without hearing the whispers, “It’s Tessa Morgan … Tessa Morgan.”

  She had come to Westmount, she told him, because a friend had told her, “This is a sophisticated, upper-class town, where nobody will bother you, where they won’t pay any attention to you. This man said, ‘So-and-so, the famous violinist, lives in Westmount, and so does So-and-so, the famous opera singer.…’ Well,” she said, “maybe they do, and maybe they get left alone. But as far as I’m concerned, this sophisticated, upper-class town is no different from any other place.”

  From the beginning there had been intrusions, and by now, she insisted, the Westmount Police Department was fed up with her complaints and would no longer come in answer to her calls. People stopped their cars in front of her house and stood there taking pictures. Others walked brazenly up her driveway with their cameras. One camera-carrying stranger had come tiptoeing across her lawn and she had looked up from her chair to see him standing at the window, focusing. “I don’t know what’s so special about me,” she said to Charlie. “I really don’t. I don’t mind having my picture taken. Good Lord, I’ve been having my picture taken for twenty years. But I like to have it taken when I’m ready for it—with the face right, the hair right, the clothes right. But that’s not the kind of pictures these people want to take. They want to get me with my hair a mess, no lipstick, a cigarette in my mouth, and no girdle on.”

  Sometimes, it seemed to him, she was overly suspicious and imagined intrusions when none were intended. “Charlie?” she would say suddenly, seizing his arm. “See that blue car? It’s driven by here at least three times in the last hour, I’m sure.”

  “Are you sure it’s the same one? There are an awful lot of blue cars.…”

  “Bruno?” she would call. “Bruno, honey, go down and hide at the foot of the driveway by the gate. If a blue car comes by, get the license plate.”

  She had a habit, too, when they were talking, of suddenly putting her finger to her lips, giving him a frightened look, and then going quickly to the closed door to the room and flinging it open to surprise the eavesdropper some secret ear had told her she had heard. She never found anyone.

  One day she told him that she was convinced her house was bugged. She went around the bedroom floor on her hands and knees, lifting the rugs, looking for hidden wires.

  “Who would want to bug it, Tessa?”

  “I don’t know. Bruno, maybe.”

  “Why would Bruno want to bug it?”

  “You can never tell. I had a secretary once. After I fired him he went and sold his ‘impressions’ of me to a magazine. You can’t trust any of these people.” She continued hunting for the elusive wires.

  Once, when he had been posing her by the pool, a helicopter had come and hovered overhead. Though perhaps it hadn’t been, she assumed that it was part of her public again, with its omnipresent camera, and ran into the bath house to hide until it went away. The craft had departed, and Charlie was sure that its brief pause above them had been for another reason. But she hadn’t believed him, and the incident had grown in her mind until she had begun to say, “Can you believe it? They’ve started sending planes over my house to take pictures of me.”

  She never accepted invitations from Westmount hostesses anymore. In fact, it was likely that she no longer received any. She had, though, in the beginning. “But they don’t want me at their damn parties. They want my name, so they can show off—these upper-class, sophisticated people!” She had gone to only one Westmount party; that had been enough.

  “Do you know some people named Parsons? Or Parker? I forget what the hell their name was. He’s a doctor.…”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Well, if you meet them, don’t tell them you’re a friend of mine.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “It was right after I moved here. I’d met them at the club, and they seemed nice. They invited me to dinner, and I thought—what the hell, why not? Be nice, be sociable. So I went.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Well, there were quite a few people there, and it was so funny. The men were all afraid to talk to me—you could tell. Afraid their wives would get jealous, maybe. Anyway, the men all just stared. Stared at me.” She imitated the bug-eyed stare. “Only the women talked to me, and all they wanted to talk about was Hollywood. I hate to talk about Hollywood. I mean, like what is there to talk about? But they’d say, ‘Do you know So-and-so?’ If I did, they’d all roll their eyes, and say, ‘Ooooh! What’s he like?’ So, I started making things up. They’d say, ‘Do you know Bing Crosby?’ I’d say, ‘Oh, yes, poor Bing—queer as a bent pin.’ They’d say, ‘Do you know Loretta Young?’ I’d say, ‘Poor Loretta—she’s been mainlining it for years.’ I thought I was being funny. But needless to say I was not winning friends or influencing people.”

  He laughed.

  “Anyway, it was still during the cocktails, and suddenly the host and hostess—Parsons? Parker? Something with a P.—came up to me, one on each side of me, taking my arms, and started sort of steering me across the floor. I thought, what is this? Some kind of dance? And she was saying to me, ‘Oh, dear Miss Morgan, you know this is our wedding-anniversary party—’ And then it happened. Pop! Off went a flashbulb.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I stood there for a minute. Then I said, ‘What is this?’ ‘Just the society editor of the local paper, dear,’ this broad said. I was to be in the middle of them, you see, like their oldest friend, on their anniversary—for the local paper.”

  “And zen what happened?”

  “Zen,” she said, and giggled at the memory, “zen I said, ‘Fuck off, sweetheart!’ And threw my drink in her face. Then I went over to the photographer. He said, ‘Oh, no you don’t, darling!’ And I said, ‘Oh, yes I do,’ and kicked him in the balls, grabbed his camera and threw it into the fireplace.” She gave Charlie her most beautiful, most photographed smile. “I’ve never been invited back,” she said. “Remember that fight you told me you had with some neighbors in California? When you got scrappy? Well, when I get scrappy, love, I really mix it up!”

  Laughing, he said, “We’re like two peas in a pod. It’s the damn fools I can’t stand. The God-damned fools!”

  She frowned. “Fools I don’t mind so much,” she said. “Fools are—almost everybody. Me too. It’s the dishonesty that I mind. I mean, why didn’t she tell me it was going to be an anniversary party? I’d probably have brought her a present. Why didn’t she ask me if the guy could take a picture of us all for the damn paper? I’d have said sure. But instead she had to try to con me. Why do people always try to con me?”

  “Listen,” he said, “let me tell you about some of the upper-class sophisticates in this town.” And he told her about the Willeys’ party, and Alice Mayhew, and Jane Willey’s electric letter opener, the charcoal burners—and Edgar Willey himself, his liquor pool and how Edgar Willey had tried to get him to pay fifteen hundred dollars for repaving the Lane.

  “Jesus, I hope you didn’t give it to the bastard!” she said.

  He paused. “Hell, no!�
�� he said.

  They often joked and laughed about the attitudes of Westmount people. To him they were ridiculous. But to her they were always something a bit more serious, because these people threatened her everywhere she went. Even at the club, she pointed out, the little knots of people gathered. She could not walk down the main street of the village or go into a shop without hearing the whispers, feeling the stares, without the risk of being accosted by someone with an autograph book or camera, or of being surrounded, mobbed. She was physically afraid of people hurting her.

  “I’ll bet if you went out more in Westmount, Tessa, people would get used to you and eventually nobody’d even notice you,” he said.

  But she was unconvinced. “Oh, I suppose it’s nice to know you’re recognized,” she said, “to know you’re still important, still a big name. And I suppose, when the day comes that nobody recognizes me, then I’ll really worry. I don’t know, Lord Charles. I guess I want to have my cake and eat it too.” She smiled. “To be in my cake, and out of it.”

  It was astonishing the lengths she went to to keep people away from her. When she traveled she always bought a seat at the front of the plane and the seat next to it. One woman in the front of the plane who had paid two fares to ensure her solitude. “Oh, but I usually have somebody with me,” she said. “Bruno or Richard. Or Minnie. Somebody.”

  Her views of foreign capitals were, for the most part, from the windows of hotel suites where incoming phone calls were screened or from within closed, air-conditioned automobiles. She was not even safe riding in a car. Though she always sat in the front seat, next to the driver, where she felt she was less conspicuous, and kept her face turned away from the window, there was inevitably a situation—stopped at a traffic light—where someone would shout, “It’s Tessa Morgan!” And people would materialize around the stopped car, coming from everywhere. “The Queen of England gets this kind of jazz,” she said, “but for her they all clap. For me they just push and try to get the doors open.”

  And so there were no places she and Charlie could go together. Whenever he thought of something they might do, he had always to remember the people and rule it out. He was running, hiding with her.

  “It isn’t easy to love a movie star,” he said to her.

  She looked at him. “It isn’t easy to love anyone,” she said. “And don’t talk about loving me. You love your wife—you told me so. You told me you always had. Didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you still do, don’t you?”

  “Sometimes—I don’t know,” he said.

  “Would you ever divorce her?”

  “I don’t know.” But that wasn’t true. He knew what the answer to that question was, and he was sure that Tessa knew it too.

  She had become reluctant to go to the club anymore for tennis. She was terrified, she said, of meeting Nancy there. “She hardly ever goes there,” he said. “And I know she won’t be there today.”

  “Are you sure? I can’t bear the thought of running into her, somehow—this town’s so small. I don’t know what I’d do. They pay me to be an actress, but I can’t act.”

  “You won’t run into her.”

  “Does she suspect, Charlie, do you think—about us?”

  “No.”

  He had to assume, though, that Bruno and Richard and certainly Minnie, and probably even Juanita and the gardener and the man who came by the week to vacuum the pool, now knew about him and Tessa. They had possibly suspected something long before there was anything to suspect. He did his best to keep out of their way. Minnie treated him with the same shuffle-footed obsequiousness as always and would throw herself into a parody of a curtsy whenever she encountered him in the house. She had also taken to making gratuitous offers of extra services. (“Why’nt you let me get that lazy Winnetka to shine those shoes of yours, Mr. Lord?”) And when he politely declined, she would say, “You are exactly right and I see what you mean. That girl would ruin those nice shoes of yours, so why’nt you let me do it and do it right?”

  “No thanks, Minnie.”

  Bruno, it seemed to him, had grown somewhat more aloof—perhaps because Bruno knew that it had been Charlie’s suggestion that Tessa give her staff a talking-to.

  He tried to keep as distant as possible from the household crises that occurred—such as the day Juanita was discovered sitting on the cellar floor, surrounded by piles of undone laundry, drunk and singing strange West Indian hymns. Tessa, to her credit, never tried to involve him in these eruptions, and he was grateful to her for that.

  Alone in her bedroom, after making love, they would talk, both trying, he could see, to avoid speaking of the present or the future, and staying safely in the past. She told him about the little Southern town and about her family—a huge, unwieldy family with all the brothers and sisters, herself the youngest. She never went back there anymore, having grown tired of having them gather around their famous relative for handouts. She had severed relations with them almost completely, and there were none she cared about anymore. There had been only one she had really loved—an aunt, whose namesake she was. “I gave Aunt Tessa some beautiful pearls once,” she said. “She loved them more than anything. When she died, I wanted to have those pearls buried with her. They told me that they had been. Later I found out that of course they hadn’t. They’d sold them.” As a child she had been ignored, friendless, allowed to do as she wished. “I’ve never really had friends,” she said. “Now I don’t need friends—just one friend. One at a time.” She had been pale, skinny, and raehitic, and everyone had assured her she was ugly. Behind the barn, in the tall summer grass, under the cottonwoods at the corner of the cow pasture, and in the deserted cornshed, she had made friends of a sort.

  “I used to let them touch me,” she said. “And I’d touch them. It was sweet, almost pathetic, the way it seemed to make a boy feel when I touched him there. So proud and pleased with himself! You’d think he was the only one in the world who had that little gadget. I did it because it used to make them feel so proud—and I hoped it would make them like me better. Oh, and of course I was curious too—just as they were curious about me—but I had such a lot of brothers, it was really no surprise. And of course it didn’t take long for the word to get around town that I didn’t mind touching a boy there. And later, when I let them do the next thing, that word didn’t take long to get around town either. It’s funny, the way men tell each other, boast about it to each other. Women never do. Something kind of homosexual about it, don’t you think—that makes men do that? A little bit of the homo in them, is my theory, Lord Charles.”

  “Perhaps.…”

  “They wrote my name on the wall of the boys’ john at school. Oh, well,” she said. “Anyway, when I was about sixteen or seventeen a cousin came to visit us—he’d been working in New York. He told me I was pretty. I’d never been told that before. After he laid me in a—in a rather bored, disinterested way, as I recall—he took some pictures of me. And I was on my way. Jumping out of cakes. On my way.” A tiny quiver of fear tugged at a corner of her face. Tears seemed not far away. Charlie kissed the small shivering spot, then kissed her, separately, on each lip.

  She stood up and walked to the mirror that hung over her dressing table and stood in front of it, staring into it, pulling the dark hair back tight against her scalp, with both hands. “Is it a pretty face?” she asked him.

  “A beautiful face.”

  “Anyway, it’s the face I’m stuck with. It can’t be disguised. I worked on a picture once where I was supposed to age into a very old woman. The makeup man worked on me for hours, putting in the wrinkles, the bags under the eyes, the crape under the neck. Finally he said, ‘It’s no use. You still look like Tessa Morgan.’”

  From the bed he said, “We’ve been neglecting the portrait, you know. We’d better get back to it, get it finished.”

  “I don’t want it to be finished now.”

  “Why not?”

  Still looking at the
mirror, she said, “You know why not as well as I.” She picked up her hairbrush and began brushing her hair. “Yes, I was on my way,” she repeated. “Girls nowadays do it much differently from the way I had to do it. Why, they tell me nowadays a roll in the hay won’t even get you a salami sandwich in Hollywood. These girls—they study. They go to classes, take courses, read, rehearse, they learn technique. These girls—they’re actresses. It was different in my day. All I was was a piece of ass.” She laughed.

  “Ah, Tessa—”

  “No, I’m serious, Charlie. It’s true. That’s why, when I really stop to think about it, I’m glad I never had children. I’d really be too ashamed to have some child call me ‘Mother.’ What a shitty trick that would be to play on a kid.”

  “Couldn’t have any, or never wanted any?” he asked her.

  The brush flew faster through the air, and her hair crackled with electricity. “Could have had, and did want—once. Almost did have, in fact. Came very close.”

  “What happened?”

  “My first husband—he was also my manager. He didn’t want me to have it. I could see his point. I was supporting him, and I was about to start a picture. They’d have fired me from the picture if they’d found out about it. So we had the baby taken out, and they took the little baby-making apparatus out with it.” She put down the hairbrush.

  She came and sat down on the bed beside him. “There’s only one thing I want,” she said.

  “What’s that, Tessa?”

  “We always have to make love when the sun is shining, you and I,” she said. “It’s different—just different, somehow, making love in the daytime. I’d like to have you all night long sometime.” She smiled at him and in her cockney accent said, “I’d like to ’ave you ’ere beside me all night long, Lord Charles. Like a proper ’usband.”

  “But of course we can’t do that,” he said.

  “Why don’t you send that wife of yours on a trip—to visit her folks or something? I’m only half serious.”