Private Screening

by Richard North Patterson

  A ripple of laughter, cameras jostling.

  “That’s when I realized that the president not only thinks that all minority citizens are equal, he thinks they’re interchangeable.…”

  As the laughter rose, Jamie’s voice rang out, “When he thinks of them at all.”

  Leaning back, he let the applause widen until it came back to him again. Stacy felt the same disturbing excitement—she could help him become president.

  Damone edged close to her. “Good at this, isn’t he?”

  “It’s easy for him.”

  A reporter in the press pool called out, “Forty seconds,” and resumed timing the applause on his wrist-watch. Stacy saw a camera aiming toward her, and smiled up at Jamie. A part of her began wanting to escape.

  Damone stared at something. She followed his gaze to a lone man, crouched on the roof of a trading company. “You’re making me nervous,” she told him.

  “I don’t like this. Especially for you.”

  Jamie raised the microphone again.

  “But the unemployed in this community are forced to think of him. For they’ve been forced to serve as extras in the Grade B script he calls an economic program.…”

  There were three sharp cracks.

  Jamie recoiled, mouth falling open.

  “No …” someone screamed.

  Damone hurtled onto the car and hit Jamie at the knees; as they fell together, the crowd released a keen of agony.

  “Jamie!” she cried out.

  In the chaos, police covered Damone. As Stacy tried to reach them, a cameraman pushed her aside. All she could see were Jamie’s legs; the camera was in his face.

  “Stop!” a policeman shouted at her. Two Secret Service agents wrenched Damone to his knees.

  Slowly, Jamie raised his head.

  The two men stared at each other. “You all right?” Damone managed.

  Cameras whirred; the crowd pressed against a barrier of police. Looking to the men who held Damone, Jamie’s face was white.

  “Let him go,” he said. “What was it?”

  “Probably firecrackers, Senator.”

  There was sourness in Stacy’s throat. Jamie mumbled to Damone, “Thanks, anyhow,” but did not look at her.

  As Damone crawled off the hood, she saw his lip was split.

  “Oh, John.…”

  “Reflexes,” he muttered. She touched his lip, and then his forehead bent to her shoulder.

  She looked back up at Jamie. Please, she thought, you have to stop this.

  He stood on the cartop as if nothing had happened.

  Cameras followed him. As the tumult died, Damone turned back to watch.

  Jamie spoke. “It was only firecrackers.…”

  A deep groan.

  “Still, I have to worry. At Princeton, no one ever tackled me from behind.”

  The nervous laughter became applause, swelling with gratitude. For the first time, Jamie turned to her.

  She grinned at him, words stuck in her throat.

  5

  ARRANGING to meet Danziger, Parnell had suggested the Pacific Union Club.

  They’d needed lunch and a quiet place to talk. It was only as he waited, examining how deftly Lord had questioned him, that he fully understood his choice: the trauma Lord touched on had begun there, sixteen years before.

  Parnell sat back, remembering.

  He had been playing bridge when the phone was brought to his table; in these decorous surroundings—oak and leather and soft-spoken waiters—the caller had sounded like an applicant for membership. With the gentle wheeze of an asthmatic, he asked when Parnell had last heard from his son. The question was so polite, and its setting so incongruous, that for a moment Parnell was merely confused.

  “Who is this?” he asked.

  The caller hung up. After a moment’s thought, Parnell excused himself, and went to phone his lawyer.

  “What have you heard from Robert?” John Danziger asked.

  “Very little.” Parnell’s mouth felt dry. “He’s been living at the Tahoe place. There’s been somewhat of a rupture.”

  “Occasioned by …?”

  “Cumulative disagreements. At seventeen, he no longer fit comfortably at home.”

  “I see. And have you tried to reach him?”

  “Not yet.” Parnell adjusted the rim of his glasses. “As I said, we don’t really speak.”

  “If you’re determined to stand on ceremony,” Danziger responded dryly, “you might have Alexis call. And let me know what happens.”

  Hanging up, Parnell dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief. Without calling Alexis, he phoned Lake Tahoe.

  There was no answer.

  At dinner, Alexis was full of high-strung humor. That afternoon they’d shown one of her old films on television, the swimsuit walk-on scene with Cary Grant. It reminded her, she told her husband, that Dorian Gray had also had a body.

  Parnell excused himself, went to the library, and placed a second unanswered call. The next morning, after his third call, he invented an excursion to Bohemian Grove and drove to Tahoe without stopping.

  On the piny, sunlit hill, the door of their ski home was ajar. As he approached, Parnell saw that the lock was broken; the subliminal wish to have no son became chill on his flesh.

  Entering, he saw a captain’s chair toppled, a beer and half-sandwich on the coffee table, the corner of a throw rug kicked up. On the floor behind that was Robert’s typewriter with one sheet curling from it.

  The note read simply: “Is your son worth one million dollars? Details to follow.” Without touching the telephone, Parnell drove to a gas station and called the FBI. He did not call Alexis.

  For two hours he waited on the front steps, fearing their inevitable question, Why was he here?

  Parnell could never tell them.

  Part of it he did not know. The seeds of that last incident, he understood, lay somewhere between Alexis and himself. But by the time Robert had been forced to leave, his causes and effects were so entangled with their lives that to think of them did not illuminate, only wounded.

  The tangle began with Alexis herself.

  He had met her at his roommate’s wedding in Newport, the same June that he had finished Yale. Daydreaming through a prewedding party, he had quite literally bumped into Alexis.

  As she caught her balance, Colby saw that she was more than pretty. “I’m sorry,” he managed. “I was on a mental trip to San Francisco.”

  The laughter in her cool gray eyes seemed friendly. “Then I should go with you,” she said. “To see you don’t bump into things.”

  Relieved at her good humor, he began to think he’d like that before he’d even asked her name.

  She was Lexie Fitzgerald, she answered, and an actress. “And I’ll be working in Hollywood, so perhaps some weekend I will visit San Francisco.”

  But three months later, when he took Alexis home, his father did not warm to her. “She’s an actress without money,” John Joseph told his son. “And that makes her an adventuress. If her first ambition fails, then you’re her consolation prize.”

  It did not matter to his father that Lexie had found acting while on scholarship at Smith, and Colby was too proud of her to yield. Instead, he financed her weekend visits between bit parts as a contract player at Fox, until he wanted her more fiercely than he’d ever wanted anything. She was small and poised and lively, with features so precisely cut that he found the subtle over-bite when she smiled at him a charming flaw. Her lack of wealth helped him feel more assured: seeing her delight in the sailing trips and polo games and parties, he began to hope that shared enjoyment might replace the male magnetism he knew he did not have. Yet she seemed so adaptable to the life he led that it bothered Colby to imagine the unspoken side of her which San Francisco did not satisfy. As Lexie drew oblique, admiring glances over dinner at the Blue Fox or dances at the Fairmont or the Mark Hopkins, he began floridly envisioning Hollywood as the palm-laden Byzantium of suntanned men who wished
to trade its secrets for her own. A year after his roommate’s wedding, Colby was still a virgin.

  He felt Lexie responding when he kissed her, but their kisses gave no hint of whether more was wanted, or whether she remembered them as he did. Lacking his father’s hearty maleness, and fearful of his own, it felt safer to be the gentleman whose code respected virtue.

  One night, parked in front of the Parnells’ brick Georgian home, Colby tried to broach this as protection for them both. “You may not always live in Hollywood,” he told her. “I don’t want them to change you.”

  She smiled. “It’s not what you’re imagining.”

  “Then why don’t you want me to visit?”

  Her gaze was so self-contained that Colby felt uneasy. “Because you’re something separate and apart from that. I want to keep you both clear in my mind.”

  “But what is it you need there?”

  “I want the chance to be more than just one person, at least for a little while. Perhaps I need the attention.” She kissed his cheek. “But nothing I ever do there will make a life with you impossible.”

  The promise reassured him; only later did he hear a second meaning.

  In the months that followed, Colby strained to personify his city, all safety and security and regard for her best side. His guilty hope was that her roles seemed fewer; she spent more time in San Francisco. Waiting, he did not speak of marriage.

  That September his watchful tension ended.

  They had eaten at Orsi’s: walking her to the Mark on a crisp, clear evening, Colby pondered her lack of appetite. Near the Fairmont, she asked to stop. As Colby sheltered her from the breeze, she gazed down at the lights of boats inching across the bay. A cable car of tourists, crossing in front of them, vanished down a precipitous grade with its bell still clanging. Leaning on his shoulder, Lexie murmured, “I love this city.”

  Colby fought against his impulse and lost. Pulling her to him, he said, “Marry me, Lexie—please.”

  She looked at him so intently that for a moment he felt his chance collapsing. Her voice was husky. “Yes, Colby. I will.”

  Awkwardly, he kissed her. “Come back with me,” she whispered.

  The bedside lamp was on. As they embraced, her hips pressed into his. Elated and confused, Colby slid down the spaghetti straps of her dress: suddenly he did not know whether her shudder was desire or distaste. Then Alexis cupped his chin and murmured, “Help me.”

  It was done so quickly that he felt embarrased. He could not see her face.

  “Did it hurt too much?” he asked.

  “No—not too much.”

  “I wasn’t sure.” The act made him confiding. “This was new to me too.”

  As she moved closer, he could smell the perfume on her skin. “Once we’re married,” she said, “we’ll have many years and many times.”

  The thought made things much easier. “When shall we?”

  “Soon.” Her urgency surprised him. “Now that I’ve decided, I want to be in San Francisco with everything else behind me.”

  Colby realized that in some parallel conversation he had been broaching this to John Joseph. “What about your contract?”

  For a moment she grew quiet. “I think they’ll let me go.”

  The next morning Colby told his father. “So she failed there,” John Joseph replied.

  Colby flushed. “I’ve learned not to expect too much approval. So I came here ready with an answer.”

  “Yes?”

  “Fuck you, Dad.”

  Colby walked out. Six weeks later, Lexie told him she was carrying his baby.

  In the excitement of their hasty wedding, Colby savored the toasts and knowing backslaps which signaled that he was quite a fellow, and lucky in Alexis. But the part of him which felt his father’s silence began counting months.

  He did not do this often. Once married, Lexie seemed so delighted to be pregnant that he could not help but join her. He felt them becoming a couple without the anxiety of sex. The baby sealed their marriage: once they could make love again, time would lay his doubts to rest.

  Eight months after they had first made love, Lexie bore him a son of normal size, with black hair like his own. John Joseph did not come to see him. When Colby could not choose a name, Alexis called him Robert. On the first night she could make love again, he reached for her.

  As more nights followed, and she began crying out beneath him, he recalled she was an actress. But the pregnancy which followed shamed him: Lexie seemed more pleased than before. When sharp, sudden pains signaled a miscarriage—ending her childbearing and quite nearly her life—they agreed to dedicate themselves to Robert.

  Determined to give the affection he himself had lacked, Parnell emulated Alexis, playing or talking or smelling the newness of Robert’s skin. But at night he found himself staring into the crib. Robert would look back at him; Parnell had the odd sensation that the baby knew his doubts.

  It did not help that as a lover he felt awkward and too quickly spent. As worry that Lexie’s cries of pleasure were a pretense became fear that she feigned pleasure in their life, he became obsessively thoughtful, filling his appointment book with dates he should remember or gifts that had pleased her. And always, he tried to share with her the flow of a life he felt them part of: the charities and social seasons; the largesse through which they graced some corner of their city with an artifact or cherry tree or performance by a new soprano; the pleasant backdrop of familiar faces who shared this same communal purpose, to make the place where their parents and children alike were rooted something finer than it was. Their house on Broadway overlooked the soothing sameness of the water, and the window where they took their drinks filtered sunset into shafts, casting the spell of the only time and place Colby ever wished to know. But in the calm with which Alexis looked through this same window, Parnell sensed that part of her was still in Hollywood, or somewhere else beyond his reach, with Robert.

  As soon as he could speak she began inventing plays for him, acting but each role in turn as Robert clapped in pleasure or watched her with bright black eyes. By four he too was wildly inventive, ascribing each trampled flower or broken dish to some imagined friend so sharply realized that it struck Parnell as eerie. When Alexis bought him a television, he began appearing at the dinner table as whatever singer or actress he had seen, demanding to be called by her name. Parnell said little; Alexis was delighted.

  As if excited by this dual response, Robert began smearing on his mother’s lipstick. “We’ve got to stop this,” Parnell suggested over cocktails, “before he finds your sanitary napkins.”

  She smiled at the window. “He’s imaginative. I of all people should understand the impulse.”

  “This is no impulse. It isn’t normal.”

  “Does that mean I’m not either?” She turned on him. “He’s your son too, Colby.”

  Parnell sipped his manhattan. “That’s why I’m concerned about him.”

  “I understand. Just please try to be that without becoming your father.” When Parnell looked up again, she had turned back to the window.

  His puzzlement seemed to make her smile more at Robert. The five-year-old would follow her even when she undressed: she would hold him close and murmur, “Lexie-love,” until he would repeat it as his name. Parnell grew more detached.

  One evening, leaving the paper, it struck Parnell that, like his father, he did not play with his son. On the way home, he bought a baseball bat, and took it up to Robert. “Here,” he said.

  For an instant, Robert’s wish to grasp the hand-tooled bat was palpable. Then he looked up at his father. With a bright, peculiar smile, Robert ran away.

  That night, the pattern of his bedtime started.

  Still hurt, Parnell wandered into the darkened room. But as he bent to kiss his son, Robert drew one hand across his eyes. The boy’s face and body were quite stiff; Parnell did not know if this was fear or theater or dislike. Shaken, he rose to leave. In the several years of nights t
o come, as Robert would cover his face, Parnell would recall the child’s voice behind him saying, “Lexie-love …”

  As Robert grew, Alexis listened to fantasies which ranged from being Laurence Olivier to president of his own republic. The music room became his province.

  Accomplished at classical pieces, Alexis played piano for him. Robert’s favorite was the Paganini Variations; again and again, he asked for it, watching until Alexis placed his chair nearer the keyboard. But for reasons he could not define, Parnell avoided joining them, until he told himself there was no reason he should not. Returning from work, he heard Alexis playing the variations. He entered the music room, standing behind his son until his wife had finished. As she gazed down at the keys, lost in what she had played, the ten-year-old Robert stood, and touched her face.

  Alexis smiled to herself, then saw her husband. Following her embarrassed glance to the father at his back, Robert bolted from the room. The two parents looked at each other. Murmuring, “I’m sorry,” Alexis went to find their son.

  In the silent language of their marriage, Parnell began to read her guilt at Robert’s preference. But his sense that part of her was absent persisted when he touched her. Without clear reason to be jealous, he felt her waiting for some nameless lover. And as she dressed in the window above their courtyard, he realized with an anguish which bordered on self-loathing how much he feared that someone else might see or have her.

  He struggled not to punish her for this. It helped that John Joseph’s sudden death had freed him to run the paper, and that it seemed to prosper from his air of calm and sense of whom to trust. He was not a founder, Parnell reasoned, but a preserver. Few events of substance in the city occurred without his knowledge; he and Alexis led a pleasant public-private life in a circle where they both were liked—all this distracted him from doubts about her happiness, and the unseen something he felt between himself and Robert.

  As Robert moved into his teens, their relationship assumed the classic forms of parent-child conflict, in a way Parnell distrusted. With Alexis, Robert would take pleasure in the staging of an opera or ballet, but the boy scorned his father’s world or any plans he made for him. Though Parnell selected the finest schools in San Francisco, Robert’s grades were poor. Even his schoolboy talent for acting suffered from eccentricity of interpretation and a penchant for inventing his own lines, and though such marked singularity seemed to fascinate his peers, he had no real friends. Tall and rangy, Robert took on a posture of masculine protectiveness toward the smaller Alexis; in his son’s gaze, Parnell felt a first hint of violence. His son would not talk to a psychiatrist; he wished only to hear his mother play piano. The maid found marijuana in his dresser.