Everything and More (37 page)

“Linc,” she said quietly. “It’s not in you to behave badly.”

He formed a sad, dark smile.

“I know you,” she said.

“Well, so let’s put it this way. At least I never stole anyone’s rations. That was the most heinous—and most tempting—crime. Toward the end I contracted typhoid. When our guys marched into the camp, I was completely out of it. I woke up in a nice clean bunk on the
Brady,
a hospital ship. I was, of course, Dean Harz. Good old Dean has no family, unless you count a cousin in Gary, who ignored his letter. There were magazines on the ship. Dean read them and caught up on the news of the late Lieutenant Fernauld’s near and dear. Life is full of surprises.”

“Linc, we were told you were
dead.”

“Look, I’m sorry I blew up before—seeing you hurt more than I expected. I didn’t mean to sound so accusatory.” He looked toward the window. “Mother . . . Did she die of cancer?”

“So then you knew she had it?”

Closing his eyes, he shook his head. “No, but I should have
guessed. She’d had one operation, and on those last leaves she seemed, well, frightened. I had my own fears, though, and we never did connect.”

“Linc, she was a lovely, lovely lady. When we met her, she had lost you, and knew she was going, too. Yet she took the effort to be gracious to us.” Marylin fished through her mind for family tidbits of solacing cheer. “Did you know BJ’s married?”

“Little Beej? Married?”

“His name is Maury Morrison and he’s really nice. He’s at USC law school on the GI.”

BJ’s husband was Jewish. She, who had always been slippery if not secretive about her mother’s religion, had been married by a rabbi beneath a flowered
chupa
in the Fernauld back garden, and from then on had become open about her maternal heritage, not in a bragging or defensive way, but as if she had turned an interior knob to adjust. The young Morrisons belonged to Temple Israel in Hollywood, and BJ occasionally peppered her conversation with the Yiddish phrases that her lapsed Catholic father had used for decades. Marylin, always considering BJ her best friend, had moved yet closer to the stout, good-natured, loud-voiced young Jewish housewife.

Linc was smiling. “Well, hubba-hubba. When?”

“Two years ago. She dropped out of school. They’ve got this adorable baby, Annie, she’s six months old. Billy’s ready to bust, being an uncle. Annie’s called after your mother, and she looks exactly like her. Linc, wait until you see her!”

Linc’s hands clenched on his stiffened leg. “Full fathoms five, A. Lincoln Fernauld lies, his bones of coral, pearls his eyes.”

“Linc, are you telling me that you aren’t going to see
anybody?”

“This one visit is my quota,” he said.

“Not even BJ and Annie? Or Joshua?”

He sighed and shook his head.

“If you had any idea how he grieved for—”

“Marylin, I never should have come today.”

“If it’s just this once, why did you?”

“The flame asks that of the moth?” He pushed to his feet, gazing down as if he were memorizing her exquisite, over-made-up features.

The lavish decor of the dressing room melted away as she stared back at Linc. In his eyes she found the answer to why he had stayed away for these long years. He had not wanted to wreck the life she and Joshua had glued together. Even when he was at his most vulnerable, a starveling racked with typhoid, he had elected not to imperil
them. Instead he had picked up the scattered pieces of another man’s past.

“Darling,” she murmured.

His eyes were wet, and so were hers.

There was a discreet rap on wood. “Marylin,” Tippi called. “I’ve brought you the orange juice.”

Linc, without a farewell, opened the door, edging out as the makeup woman entered.

Marylin paid no attention to whatever it was that the Danish accent said. Her sweetly
triste
tears were as one with her humming joy.

He’s alive, she thought.

  
33
  

The scene scheduled for the morning was shot in the afternoon. Under hot klieg lights, France’s absolute monarch by divine right, Louis XV, for the first time meets his domain’s most beautiful woman, who subjugates him with a smile and a flicker of her false eyelashes. Marylin played up to Tyrone Power (Louis) with such tender joyousness that the director called it a take and moved on to the next setup. At home, Billy introduced her to his hamster, now christened Rat, and she rested her glowing cheek against the smooth flat pelt. A French film that Joshua wanted to see was screening at the Academy theater. Afterward in the lobby the Fernaulds ran into friends, and Marylin’s soft, husky little laugh rang.

At home, after they had looked in on Billy’s sleep, Joshua said, “What gives, Marylin? Has good Saint Nicholas arrived early?”

He embraced her.

Her exultant euphoria dropped away. This was her reality, a husband whose substantial flesh smelled of suntan lotion, Chivas Regal,
and not-unpleasant sweat. Joshua, father of three children: her beloved, her best friend, and her son, whose woolly blankets she had just pulled up. Normally the vital authority of Joshua’s advances aroused her willy-nilly, but tonight his purposeful kisses were as unerotic as a row of X’s on the bottom of a postcard. She pulled away, moving into their room. Following, he reached for her again. “Mmm?”

“Not tonight. I, uhh . . . Joshua, I had a little dizzy spell this morning.”

He pulled back, scrutinizing her. “Dammit, why didn’t you tell me? I’d never have let you go out tonight. Dizzy spell? What do you mean, dizzy spell?”

He’d hear about the faint sooner or later. “I . . . well, I blacked out.”

Joshua’s heavy face went ashen below its surface tan. The slightest ailment of his gorgeous angelpuss terrified him—hadn’t he already lost one wife to catastrophic cellular multiplication? “Blacked out? Jesus frigging Christ!”

“It happened during makeup. Low blood sugar, Doc Green said.”

“That quack, that horse’s ass!”

“Don’t get excited, Joshua. It was nothing.”

“That money-grubbing, prick-face Garrison!” Joshua’s voice shook. His poker friendship with Garrison had evaporated under the Magnum insistence that Marylin be tied to every fine-print clause in that skinflint original contract. “Are you telling me that the bastard kept right on with the shooting schedule
after
you fainted?”

“Joshua, I rested all morning.” Actressy syrup. “It was the ballroom sequence, and they had two hundred extras on the payroll.”

“Goddammit, Marylin! Isn’t it enough Magnum’s got you at a pippy assistant director’s salary? Do they have to squeeze the life’s blood out of you, too? I’m calling Garrison this minute!”

“All I need is a good night’s sleep—”

Joshua was already dialing. While she brushed her teeth, she could hear the rumbling voice laying down the law to Magnum’s top dog.

He slammed into the bathroom. “You’re sleeping late tomorrow.”

“But the extras—”

“You’re always in a hot sweat about other people’s problems, Marylin. You’re too nice, too damn considerate. Let Art Garrison worry about his own frigging costs. I’m here to watch over you. And you’re staying home!”

When the lights were out, his forceful bluster ended, he kissed her cheek tenderly and rolled onto his own side of the big bed rather than making his usual invasion of her space.

On her back with her arms taut at her sides, she listened until her husband’s breathing changed to measured gusts.

Then, turning onto her stomach, she swam in this morning’s happenings, buffeted by alternating waves of grief that she and Linc must exist forever separated and that incredible rapture—
he’s alive, alive.

The curtains were showing a faint light when Billy tiptoed noisily into the room, crawling between her and Joshua. She put her arms around her son, burying her nose in his petal-soft cheek. They both drowsed.

Joshua commanded breakfast in bed for her before going forth to the brutal internecine warfare that was a studio story conference. When Billy returned from his thrice-weekly nursery school, he stamped his Keds in fury at his father’s absence. Joshua stayed home because of Billy. Having given up directing entirely, he refused to write at the studio unless, as today, there was an urgent battle over a first draft. Indeed, he would desert his often-renovated typewriter in favor of excursions with the kid. He held Billy on his lap and let him kibbitz poker games—several of the card players also had layered families, but none was quite so bananas about his autumnal offspring as Joshua. The amused cronies encouraged Billy to smart-mouth them all. Billy was, as his old man often remarked with a doting smile, the archetypical Beverly Hills movie brat.

To assuage her little boy’s disappointment, Marylin suggested a mother-son outing.

“Where?” he asked.

Marylin honestly considered it random chance when she replied, “The apartment where I used to live.”

“And then Wil Wright’s?” Billy demanded.

“Of course.”

She steered along quiet Charleville, blinking behind her dark glasses. How was it possible that these small houses with their tiny strips of greenery had once seemed to her as out of reach as an enclave of royal palaces? Outside the garage with its rickety staircase leading to a flat-roofed, illegal apartment, she stopped, leaning over to unlock the other door for Billy, who scrabbled out from the backseat, tugging down on his cowboy hat.

Not until she herself got out of the car did she see Linc, his hands thrust into the pockets of his gray flannel slacks, his black hair stirring in the breeze. An aeon ago he had thus gazed at her in the early-morning gloom, and now her mind obliterated the rush of a gardener’s hose, the smell of just-mowed grass, Billy. Once again an impecunious, unhappy Beverly High bobby-soxer and a taut-nerved Navy pilot were being drawn together as if by gravitational force.

Then she heard Billy shouting, “Mommy, come on! I’m going upstairs.”

The railings had broad interstices through which a small child might easily tumble. “Wait for me!” she yelled.

“Billy?” Linc asked quietly.

Her face grew hot, as though she had maneuvered her little boy to an assignation. “Who else?” she snapped. “What are you doing here?”

He rapped on the hood of a dark blue Chevy coupe. “I rented this.”

“Oh.”

“I had no idea you’d come too, Marylin,” he said very quietly.

“You were right, we can’t see each other,” she said, wishing she didn’t sound both feisty and shaken.

A convertible swerved onto Charleville. Billy, bouncing up and down impatiently, was on the sidewalk, but his movements zigged with swift unpredictability. She swooped on him.

Holding the squirming child tightly, she said, “Billy, this is Mr. . . . Mr. Herz.”

“Harz,” Linc said. “Hello, Billy.”

Billy said, “Howdee, pardner.”

Linc made a swift gesture from his belt to point his index finger at Billy. “Draw!”

Still in his mother’s grip, Billy, too, aimed an imaginary pistol.

Linc staggered backward, clutching at his chest. “You got me.”

Billy laughed excitedly. “My dad does just like that!”

Color blotched Marylin’s cheeks. She set the child down.

“Mr. Harz, we’re going up to where my mommy lived. Come on.”

Linc climbed the creaking steps with them. Billy reached for his hand.

“This is far enough,” Marylin said. “We don’t want to disturb anyone.”

Billy said, “Oh, who cares about a dumb apartment? We’ve been here a hundred hundred times. Anyway, Coraleen and Percy’s is a million million times better!”

At this mention of the faithful Fernauld family retainers, Linc’s expression grew purposefully blank.

Billy pulled at his hand. “Come along. Now we’re going to Wil Wright’s.”

Marylin turned to Linc. However tormenting the itch of being with both half-brothers, the thought of Linc getting in his rented car
and driving off shriveled her heart. Briefly she lifted her dark glasses to look at him with her naked eyes. “Do.”

He followed them in his rented car to Wil Wright’s.

There were no other customers in the red-and-white-striped ice-cream parlor. They sat near the counter at one of the plate-size marble tabletops, Billy ordering a sundae for the delight of spooning hot fudge from his own individual pitcher, Linc a chocolate soda, and she a scoop of coffee flavor. Wil Wright’s ice cream, buttery rich, clung to the roof of the palate, and Marylin, an ice-cream addict from way back, was forced to ration her visits—the camera exacts outlandish retribution for every ounce on a small woman. This was a rare treat, but with Linc sitting so close that she could feel the warmth emanating from his thigh, she let most of her scoop melt thickly into the footed metal dish.