Everything and More (34 page)

Althea pressed both hands against her thighs. “You sound like an old friend.”

“Gerry leaves a swath of us old friends behind him, doesn’t he?” The woman’s fuchsia-painted lips twisted in a cynical smile of comradeship. “Here, take this a sec, will you.” She thrust her heavy brown paper bag into Althea’s arms and searched through her purse. “Key, key, where is that damn key?” Finding a jangling chain, she said, “Eureka!”

“Is this your house?”

“In all its palatial splendors, yes.”

“I thought it belonged to a man.”

“My husband. He’s overseas, ETO. Hopefully stuck there for a good long time without enough points to be released. To be honest, Gerry’s more my type. A terrific guy, Gerry, if you don’t mind the unreliability. . . . Listen, you aren’t mad he stayed here, are you?”

“Not I.” With a cool little smile, Althea set the bag down on the veranda. “With him, that’s how it is.”

“You said it, sister!” The woman laughed. “Listen, if he should show up, any message?”

“None.”

“Sure?”

“Positive.”

“Not even your name?”

“Not even my name.”

The blonde shrugged. She stood on the porch, lighting a cigarette. As Althea got into the station wagon, she waved.

Althea started the engine. She was trapped inside her mind, which was working in a curiously unselective way.

It’s one thing to talk sophisticatedly of a lover’s previous flings, quite another to be faced with a bleached blonde who reeks of cheap lilac perfume and who tells you in chummy tones that he’s concurrently been sleeping with her. Althea stepped down on the accelerator, digging along the quiet street. Fool, fool, fool, fool! How long, O Lord, how long would it take her to learn never to trust anything human?

Sweat broke out on her face and body, and suddenly it was imperative
that she let Gerry Horak know exactly how unimportant to her he was, how little she cared about his stupid affair with the peroxide kid.

As she sped through a boulevard stop sign, she wondered how she would avoid accidents on the way to the institute.

  
30
  

Althea got there just before six, the witching hour when Henry Lissauer invariably crossed Rodeo Drive to Mama Weiss’s restaurant for his early dinner so he could be home in time for the curfew. She pounded the knocker until the door opened.

“Miss Cunningham.” His mouth opened and closed uncertainly before his large face jelled into that ceremonious dignity. “I was informed of an illness.”

“Rumors, rumors.” She smiled glitteringly. “I have to talk to you.”

In a nervous, barring gesture he stepped athwart the threshold. “I am on the way out.”

Althea eased by him into the hall. “This won’t take a sec,” she said.

“We can talk when the institute is open—”

“Mr. Lissauer,” she interrupted with another too-bright smile. “Gerry Horak has a ton of things at my place—paints, brushes, canvases. It’s cluttering up the poolhouse. My parents are at me to get it cleaned up. He’s moved again. What’s his new number?”

At Gerry’s name, Henry Lissauer’s chin had braced back. “I have no information about Mr. Horak.”

“But you were friends, he lived here. You must have
some
way to get in touch with him.”

“We have not talked since I . . . hnn . . . had to request that he leave. He gave me no forwarding address.”

“Don’t you understand? I must get his stuff back to him!”

“Miss Cunningham, I apologize, but I cannot help. Hnn, hnn . . . now, if you will excuse me.”

The Mozart rollicked through her head. “You won’t tell me because you’re jealous of him!”

Henry Lissauer flinched. “Miss Cunningham, I beg of you,” he said, his supplication heavily accented. “You are upset. Please, please go home to your parents, they will know how to take care of . . . of what Mr. Horak has left in your house.” His rimless spectacles enlarged his weepy look of anxious pity.

Oh, God, God, here was Althea Coyne Cunningham raising a ruckus and exposing the ultimate shame of being yet another in the long line of idiot females taken in by Gerry Horak.

She fled down the institute’s three front steps. The door closed swiftly and a chain rattled.

In the station wagon she sat hunched over the steering wheel. She could not return to that gracious jail presided over by her tormentors—God, they’d have a big, knowing laugh about Gerry’s defection. But where else could she go?

“Roy,” she said aloud.

The Waces’ house on Crescent had never become the refuge to her that the garage apartment had been, and the wounds inflicted by Roy still festered unhealed, yet without a demurring consideration Althea drove the few blocks to the small stucco bungalow.

The door was answered by Roy, wearing shorts and an off-the-shoulder blouse.

Her large brown eyes widened, her mouth opened in flabbergasted surprise before stretching into a joyous, welcoming smile. “I don’t believe it!” she cried, turning to shout through the empty house to an open window, “Everybody! You’ll never guess who’s here, Althea!” She gripped both Althea’s flaccid hands, drawing her inside. “Joshua and Marylin and BJ are over.”

“I was passing by,” said Althea.

“Hey, are you okay? You look sort of beat.”

NolaBee called from the yard, “Bring Althea right on out.”

A triangular red brick incinerator barbecue had recently been erected in the small, overgrown yard, and Joshua Fernauld, swathed in aromatic smoke, clad in a checkered sport shirt and Bermudas, presided with a long fork over ripely brown chicken. BJ was rising to her feet—she too wore shorts, displaying her massive thighs. Marylin lay on a new redwood chaise longue, her loose dress showing a gentle mound of pregnancy.

NolaBee stubbed out her cigarette before hugging her guest.
“Well, Althea, I reckon you’ve been a stranger around here too long.”

BJ patted her shoulder. “Long time no see,” she said.

And Marylin, smiling her lovely, luminous smile, shifted as if she, too, would rise to embrace Althea.

“Now, Marylin,” said NolaBee, her eyes anxious. “You know what-all the doctor told you.”

“Listen to your mother. Stay put,” Joshua commanded his young wife before holding out his big hand to Althea. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

Their welcoming smiles of uncomplicated friendship befuddled Althea: she felt like a soldier behind foreign lines. “I just dropped by,” she said. “I better be going.”

NolaBee said, “That’s right silly. Call your house and tell them you’re having supper with us. My son here”—she smiled archly at big, paunchy, gray-haired Joshua Fernauld—“makes the grandest barbecue, and I’ve got my beaten biscuits ready to pop in the oven—I reckon you remember my biscuits? And there’s—”

“No need for commercials, Mama,” Roy interrupted. “Althea, you’re staying and that’s that.”

“Tell us about the art school,” said NolaBee. “Roy says this Mr. Lissauer takes only the top artists, and . . .” For a couple of minutes NolaBee vivaciously passed on her third-hand knowledge of the institute.

Althea’s cool, forced smile did not falter.

Joshua Fernauld, watching her from the barbecue, said, “Althea, girl, you look in need of a pick-me-up. Roy, sneak around your lady mother and give our friend here a medicinal snort of that Haig and Haig I brought last week.”

“Now, Joshua,” NolaBee said. “I reckon you know the girls are too young to drink.”

“Oh, Aunt NolaBee,” BJ groaned. “When are you going to get over being such a Carry Nation? Believe me, college is where a girl learns how to hold her liquor.”

“Beej,” Joshua said, “for that
you
don’t need college. It’s in the blood.”

Laughter and that damn Mozart! Althea escaped into the kitchen.

Roy followed her. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it, Althea?” she said gently. “Let me help?”

“Dear me, I must have fallen into a snake pit of good Samaritans.”

“No, simply the other side of the Big Two,” Roy said, patting Althea’s arm.

At her touch, Althea’s tears began flowing, irrepressible as on the previous night.

“Hey, Althea, hey,” Roy mumbled awkwardly. “Come on in my room.”

The pink-and-blue children’s wallpaper had been replaced by trim lines of yellow roses. Roy scooped up skirts and blouses draped over the chair and vanity stool—despite her love affair with clothes, she had not yet learned to treat them with respect. She went to get a roll of toilet paper, “reasonable facsimile,” as the Waces called it, to use as Kleenex.

Althea dabbed at her streaming eyes.

“Roy, Althea,” BJ bawled outside the window. “Daddy says the chicken’s ready.”

“Don’t wait for us,” Roy called back. “We’re catching up. We’ll be out in a bit.”

Althea gasped out, “I keep hearing this music. A Mozart horn concerto. . . . I don’t even
like
the revered Wolfgang Amadeus. Roy, if only the music would stop . . . if only . . .”

Though Roy considered herself an entirely different person from when she had been one of the Big Two (she had become so utterly normal that she had signed up for the fall sorority rush week at UCLA), the claims of friendship never died within her. She could not bear to see Althea, who hid every sign of emotional stress, break down. Near to sympathetic tears herself, Roy tore off fresh lengths of toilet paper as she murmured soothingly. Finally she went to pour Joshua’s Haig and Haig into a tumbler.

“Here, drink this.” She handed Althea the glass, conscious of similar scenes in various movies.

Althea’s hand shook: A few drops of Scotch spilled, but she downed the rest, coughing amid her tears. “That horn concerto,” she gasped. “God, I hate it!”

The wacko remarks combined with the out-of-character, unconsolable tears convinced Roy she could not handle this on her own.

Outside, in the cooling twilight, Joshua sat at the foot of Marylin’s chaise while NolaBee and BJ occupied the new redwood love seat. After the wrenching sobs in the bedroom, there was something almost excruciatingly normal about four people finishing up a barbecue supper with coffee ice cream—Joshua invariably brought along Marylin’s favorite flavor.

As Roy stepped onto the patio, NolaBee said, “There’s breasts and drumsticks on back of the barbecue, and biscuits in the oven—I reckon you and Althea had loads to tell each other.”

“Where is she?” Marylin’s soft voice asked.

“She’s really shook up about something.” Feeling as though she were betraying a confidence, Roy scarcely moved her lips. “She just keeps crying.”

“Crying?” said BJ. “That’s not the Althea Cunningham
I
knew.”

“She’s been at it since we went inside.”

NolaBee’s head tilted. “That long?”

“She looked deep in the slough of despond, at the bottom of foggy hollow, when she got here,” Joshua said, touching his lips to Marylin’s cheek before he stood. (Roy had noted he seemed utterly incapable of keeping his kisses or his hands off Marylin.) “I’ll go check.”

“Now, Joshua, you just stay put,” said NolaBee. “I reckon after all these years, the poor child’ll feel more comfy with me.”

“My specialty, NolaBee, my area of competence,” he said. “Working with actors or writers, you either get a bead on hysterics—or you quit.”

Roy trailed him to her room, where Althea slumped on the bed weeping.

“Althea,” said Joshua, a deep-chested rumble. “Stop this.”

“I . . . can’t. . . .”

He pulled her up from the bed, shaking her. Her head wobbled from side to side, but the sobs continued, mechanical as a cracked record, so he held her against him. Behind her back, he used both hands to mime the dialing of a telephone. “Her parents,” he mouthed.

Roy shook her head, whispering, “She doesn’t get along with them, they’re oddball—”

“Get them!”
His lips puffed out imperiously.

In less than fifteen minutes, headlights halted outside the house. Before the chauffeur could emerge from the limousine, Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham were hurrying up the path.

NolaBee waited at the open door. “Come right on in,” she said. “I reckon you’re the Cunninghams. I’m NolaBee Wace. Roy and Joshua—my son-in-law, Joshua Fernauld—are in with Althea. The room at the end of the corridor.”

“Before we go in, dear,” said Mrs. Cunningham, gripping her husband’s arm, “shouldn’t we find out from Mrs. Wace what the problem is?”