Dreams Are Not Enough

by Jacqueline Briskin

  “Our relationship is that I’m married to your cousin. Period.”

  “If it’s kneeling you want, kneeling you get.” He dropped in front of her, flinging his arms around her waist.

  She pushed at him. “Don’t be ridiculous, Maxim!”

  “Ridiculous? I’m so hung up on you I can’t see.” He pressed kisses on her lap.

  She pushed at him. “Maxim, I do not want you near me! Ever! So cut it out!”

  Neither of them heard the door open.

  “Maxim!”

  Hap’s gray eyes were narrowed, his fists clenched. In two swift steps he crossed the trailer to yank his brother to his feet. Maxim, startled, stepped backward, banging into the table and overturning her lunch plate, scattering coleslaw and tuna salad. Immediately he regained control of himself, and his lips curled into a knowing smirk.

  Looking pointedly from Hap to Alyssia, then back at Hap, he said, “So that’s how it is.”

  “Get out,” Hap said.

  “How long has it been going on?”

  “Listen, if you don’t get the hell out I’ll—”

  “You’ll what? Hit me? Not you, brother, never you.” Maxim gave a mirthless chuckle. “The attachment’s long-term, isn’t it? You always were a card-carrying bleeding heart, so why wouldn’t you fall for the first sexy pachuco domestic who came along? Now that I think about it, when the Barry Cordiners hastily departed for la belle France, you went around for months like Chicken Little after the sky fell in.”

  “Listen, you—”

  “No, you listen. My amorous inclination for the lady must have blinded me to the reason behind your heavy politeness to each other.”

  Hap took a step to stand within a few inches of Maxim. “I’m telling you to get your ass out of this trailer. And stay away from Alyssia. Is that clear enough?”

  “Clear as glass, big brother, clear as glass,” Maxim said. “Enjoy your fun and games now, kiddies. Repercussions will come in the future.”

  The trailer shook as the door slammed behind him. His jaunty whistle receded, fading in the direction of the remote buzz of lunchtime voices.

  “Okay?” Hap asked.

  Drawing a breath, she murmured, “Embarrassed.”

  “He’s been coming on to you all the time, hasn’t he?”

  “Uhh . . . sort of.” So Hap, like everyone else in the straight world, was ignorant of his brother’s true preference. How could Maxim keep such a secret? By being desperate enough, she thought.

  “He’ll be talking about us,” she said softly.

  “Do you mind?” He was watching her carefully.

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Then neither do I,” he said.

  23

  She woke to the certainty that someone was in her room. She heard nothing, and—peering into the darkness—saw nothing. Not a movement, not a misplaced shadow, yet the sense of not being alone pervaded her. Her mouth tasted of copper, and a vast stone seemed to weigh down her chest. Don’t move, she told herself. Breathe regularly, pretend to be asleep.

  Yet that foolhardy nut within her was whispering aloud, “I know you’re there. Who is it?”

  Then the sound began. It wasn’t quite human, more like the rubbing of skeletal tree branches, yet she recognized it as laughter. “He’s on his way to Mendo,” said a sepulchral version of Maxim’s voice.

  “Who . . .?”

  “My father.” The eerie laughter sounded again. “Repercussions will come.”

  Alyssia woke drenched in sweat. Since the shattering of her ankle she had been bedeviled by anxiety dreams and nightmares. None, however, came close to enveloping her in this sense of impending doom. She pressed the switch of the bedside lamp. Normalcy showed in the crumpled Hershey wrapper, the pink pages with tomorrow’s script changes.

  I’m safe, she told herself. I’m fine.

  But she did not turn off the light.

  • • •

  This was the last day of shooting. By ten o’clock Fort Bragg’s temperature had risen well above ninety, but the heat had not discouraged an astonishing crowd for so small a town. Women clad in shifts and men in short-sleeved shirts were packed behind the ropes that blocked off this portion of the street, which was patrolled by three sweating, off-duty cops hired for the day by Harvard Productions.

  The drugstore’s sign was covered by another sign with gold-painted Gothic letters: WINSLOW’S DRUGS. Alyssia sat on the curb, the cast hidden by a maxiskirt, her tie-dyed tee shirt revealing the lack of a bra.

  Hap, who had been examining her through his viewfinder, conferred briefly with Maxim. At the same moment, both brothers raised a hand to squint up at the sky: the blaze of sun was cut off by a slow-moving, puffy white cloud. Hap glanced at Alyssia, signaling her that he was nearly ready. Maxim formed a circle with his thumb and forefinger, smiling at her. Here we are, she thought, the three of us, not a hint of yesterday’s emotional pyrotechnics, simply a director, producer and actress cooperating.

  Again Hap glanced up at the sky, then nodded to the assistant director.

  The assistant director shouted, “Start your action!”

  The extras—local recruits—began walking from left to right, right to left, a dusty old Chevy and a new Onyx sedan drove along the block. The sun came out at the moment the colorful bus pulled up in front of Alyssia, a dazzling effect Hap and Maxim had been timing.

  Diller kept stumbling over his lines.

  When finally he got an approximation of the dialogue, Hap called it a take. Somebody handed Alyssia her crutches. Maneuvering to a standing position, she glanced across the street.

  Between an obese, shirtless man and Nurse Shawkey stood Desmond Cordiner.

  Alyssia gazed at him, feeling no surprise. May Sue had sometimes boasted about dreaming things before they occurred—the gift of second sight, she’d called it. My mother’s daughter, Alyssia thought.

  Six years had not altered her old antagonist. His hair remained the same dark pewter, and from this distance no new wrinkles or sags showed in the tanned face. He smiled at her, then lifted the rope. The hired cops, awed by his tailoring and supreme confidence, did not move to halt him. He strode over to her.

  “Alyssia,” he said. “That was some performance.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I talked to PD yesterday. He was extremely positive when he discussed you—in fact he sounded very much like an agent pitching a client to me.”

  “You’ve got PD wrong, Mr. Cordiner. He knows as soon as Wandering On is launched, we’re going back to France.”

  “Oh? And what about Barry’s new career as a screenwriter?”

  With a bright smile, she said, “He’s dying to finish his novel.”

  Maxim and Hap had come to greet their father.

  “Why didn’t you phone you were coming, Dad?” Hap asked.

  “I only got it into my head yesterday,” Desmond Cordiner said.

  • • •

  Desmond Cordiner was a man on the brink of the bottomless chasm.

  Magnum, his fiefdom, like all studios, had eroded disastrously. The across-the-board industry decline had started in 1950, when the courts handed down an antitrust ruling that studios must divorce themselves from their theaters. This meant Magnum no longer had an automatic outlet for its product. Revenues declined. But the true harbingers of disaster were the television antennas burgeoning from more and more rooftops. People didn’t go to the movies, they stayed home to watch Jackie Gleason, Dinah, Ed Sullivan; to see Mary Martin fly through the air and Lucy get the best of Desi.

  The audience who ventured forth to a theater wanted more than the sanitized fare available gratis. Accordingly Magnum, like every other studio in Hollywood, made widescreen epics loaded with stars, crowds, violence and sex—productions that cost a fortune.

  Recently Desmond Cordiner had done the unforgivable. He had given the go sign to three of these extravaganzas that had flopped in a row. To round off his problems, the company’s m
ajor shareholder, Rio Garrison, the luscious widow of the studio’s founder, had taken a lover who was a shrewdly successful businessman. Upon scrutinizing the company books, he pointed out to Rio that although her enormous dividend checks continued to arrive quarterly, the cash came not from profits but capital. To pay for the bombs, Magnum had quietly divested itself of the company’s East Coast headquarters on Madison Avenue as well as the ranch in the Valley.

  Desmond Cordiner knew that Rio was about to give him the old heave-ho. Though outwardly unchanged, inwardly he had reached a near demented state. His mind circled obsessively around a single thought: I must come up with a major blockbuster.

  He, who had always rescued his family, needed to determine whether PD was right, whether his two sons could somehow save him. Was Wandering On the sleeper that would recoup Magnum’s losses? It was the end of shooting, but impatience tore at him. He flew to Northern California in a studio-rented Lear.

  He promptly caught the tensions between Hap and Maxim. In Los Angeles he had heard rumors connecting Maxim with Barry’s wife, that little extra he had given a start, a girl so far below the social ladder that she had pretended to be a wetback in order to reach the bottom rung. Obviously Hap was at her again, too. He ignored the sexual computations. A man about to be shoved into nothingness cannot concern himself too deeply with where his grown sons choose to put their cocks.

  • • •

  “I’d like to see the rough cut,” Desmond Cordiner said over the remains of his apple pie à la mode. He, Hap and Maxim were in the rear booth of Fort Bragg’s top eatery, Lucy’s Cafe, two blocks south of the location.

  “You’ll have it sometime in September,” Hap replied.

  “A month to see the rough cut?” his father asked.

  “Dad,” Maxim said smiling, “you ought to know by now that your number-one son is a perfectionist. Left to Hap, nobody’d see an inch of film until the final print.”

  “We’ve got the project penciled in for an October release.”

  “October?” Hap exclaimed. “But this is August! We planned six months for the scoring and editing.”

  “Hap, if Magnum’s going to release your film—what’s the title? I never can remember.” In every negotiation, no matter how close to home, Desmond Cordiner kept his opponents in full possession of their uncertainties.

  Hap’s gray eyes didn’t blink. “Wandering On.”

  “If we decide to give Wanders a major release, I’ll have to okay four million on advertising and promotion. If it bombs, I’ll be on the firing line with the stockholders for backing my own sons’ cheapie with big bucks.”

  Hap was already having a problem staying on an even keel with his father—he kept thinking about that long-ago coercion of Alyssia. He inhaled deeply, then exhaled. “Dad,” he said, “there’s no point trying to frighten us—”

  “Frighten you? I’m merely pointing out a fact that you both already know. October’s a more advantageous month to release than January or February.”

  On the way out, the trio passed Alyssia and Diller, who were in the front booth. Maxim reached them first.

  “Our star people, lunching à deux,” he said. As his father caught up, he added, “It’s rare to find Diller with a lady.” A quirk of his left eyebrow made the innuendo abundantly clear.

  Desmond Cordiner’s benign smile didn’t falter, but appeared to solidify.

  “Knock it off, Maxim!” Hap snapped.

  “I’m only trying to point out to Dad, who’s hot to trot with Wandering On, that there’s not much chance of Magnum’s publicity department drumming up a romance between our two leads.”

  “A shame,” Desmond Cordiner said, looking coldly down at Diller.

  Diller flushed, then peered around the cafe in bemusement, as if uncertain of where he was.

  That afternoon Diller and Alyssia did another shot on the sidewalk. Diller kept blinking dazedly at the camera and despite the cue cards could not get his lines.

  Alyssia murmured comfortingly, “Dill, you know Maxim didn’t mean anything. He’s just a born gadfly.”

  “What’s wrong with the sound people?” Diller asked. “Why don’t they turn off that damn radio? Jesus, how I hate waltzes!”

  “Dill, there is no radio,” she said.

  After fourteen takes under Desmond Cordiner’s piercing gaze, Hap called, “That’s all. We’ll use Alyssia’s reaction shot.”

  Diller wandered as if aimlessly to one of the production cars, a maroon Dodge, and talked to the driver. Alyssia, the perspiration on her nose being powdered, wanted to go over and say something upbeat and soothing, but they were waiting for her.

  She watched Diller drive off alone in the Dodge.

  • • •

  It was after seven and growing dark when they completed the final day’s shooting. As Alyssia returned to Three Rock Inn, her leg throbbed mercilessly: to divert herself she watched the passing scenery.

  At the curve where the road almost touches the cliff she saw tire tracks, black double lines that swerved for yards across the asphalt, growing invisible on the granite.

  “Do you remember those skid marks this morning, Victor?” she asked her young, short-haired driver.

  “Beats me, Miss del Mar. But this is one dangerous curve. Last year a car went off the cliff.”

  Alyssia felt a prickling of apprehension on her skin. “Maybe there’s been another accident. Mind if we go back?”

  The driver slowed, turning.

  In less than a minute they were parked. “I’ll go take a gander, Miss del Mar,” the driver said. “Be right back.”

  As he peered over the cliff edge, he jerked backward, holding his hand over his mouth.

  Alyssia hopped out of the car, scarcely aware of the pain or the hampering cast, moving more rapidly on the crutches than she ever had before. The roar of the breakers grew louder, thundering through her as she reached the edge of the cliff.

  A hundred feet below, a wave was spuming around a maroon fender. The foamy swirl hid the interior of the Dodge. Then the wave ebbed. Alyssia felt a physical shock in the pit of her stomach, a jarring pain.

  In the front seat floated a dark-haired, masculine body.

  24

  She couldn’t move. The sun, a flaming coin, was dropping below the horizon, and in this last red light she gazed hypnotized as the waves broke and receded to show Diller’s body drifting in its steel and glass coffin.

  “We better get some help, Miss del Mar,” the driver muttered shakily.

  Staring down at the precipitous tumble of rocks, she said, “You go.”

  Barging back to the highway, the youngster jumped into his car, digging away.

  Her eyes fixed on evidence of mortality, her ears filled with the sound of the Pacific, she didn’t realize that Maxim was standing next to her.

  “Your driver passed me yelling out something.” Maxim peered down. His face was contorted into the odd, half-humorous rictus one sees on a corpse. “So good old Diller finally did it.”

  “God. . . .”

  “No shock to me, Alyssia. The guy never quit about not being able to stand any more of life.” Maxim gave a discordant laugh. “Snuffing himself was a preordained act.”

  Barry had once pointed out to her that whenever Maxim was distraught, his protective sarcasm grew more frenetic, an astute character analysis that she forgot in her outrage.

  “Preordained?” she cried. “You forced him to it!”

  “Diller Roberts was a faggot with suicide programmed into his genes.”

  “He was kind, talented, good. He loved you. God knows why, but he loved you.”

  “So the pansy was spilling all to you.”

  “How could you have blamed him because I didn’t want you? And that crack in the cafe—God, wasn’t he down enough? How could you broadcast it, you, of all people?”

  “You dumb, castrating bitch—Diller Roberts was an aberration in my life! Ask any one of a hundred women. You want references, I’ll
give you references.” Maxim’s voice rose and the words rushed out frenziedly. “Better yet, I’ll give you proof!”

  He turned, clutching at her, kissing her, thrusting his tongue deep into her mouth. Through her blouse she could feel the iciness of his hand as he squeezed her breast hurtfully. A crutch fell, skittering across the granite. He drew away, staring at her.

  His eyes glittered, and that death-mask smile again twisted his lips. Then he locked her body against his, lifting her from her feet, carrying her a few steps to the point. From here the cliff fell in a sheer drop.

  There was no ground beneath her. Nothing to keep her from falling except the inescapable, bony strength of Maxim’s arms. A hundred feet below, a breaker crashed, spuming over the maroon car and the rocks with their sharp barnacles.

  Her breath rasped loudly through her arid throat; Maxim’s breath rushed at her. Her eyes widened as she stared into the glint of his eyes. The remaining crutch dropped, falling into the murderous surf, and she accepted that she might follow. Perspiration covered her face and body. She felt her bladder go loose.

  Then Maxim lurched backward, setting her down.

  She crouched, pressing a hand to the rough, still warm stone. Her blood pulsed so strongly through her carotid artery that her neck vibrated. She was so dizzy that she worried she might faint. But it was more than vertigo that made her touch the rock. She needed reassurance that the earth’s substance was beneath her.

  Maxim, staring down at the crashing sea, began to laugh.

  Obviously he had gone around some hairpin bend in his sanity. It was impossible to calculate his next move—would he hurl her down to the barnacle-covered rocks below? The anesthesia of terror numbed the agony of putting weight on her left leg as she escaped through the gathering darkness toward Highway One.

  Oncoming headlights shone on Maxim’s Porsche (he was the only member of the production crew to drive his car nearly the length of California to Mendocino), and a Ford Fairlane sedan glided to a halt. Before it had fully stopped, the rear door opened. Hap jumped out, followed by his father. Obviously her driver had spread the word to them as well as to Maxim.