Everything and More (38 page)

Billy, bored from sitting with his silent, moony elders, raced energetically around the little tables and spindly wire chairs while the two short, full-faced waitresses—they were alike enough to be sisters—beamed indulgently, having already secured Marylin’s autograph on red-and-white-striped paper napkins.

“My mother and Roy are away,” Marylin said without premeditation. “They live at 114 North Crescent. Tomorrow afternoon, I’m dropping over to see about the mail.”

“One-one-four?”

“The house next to Ralphs,” she murmured. “I’ll be there around two.”

  
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She got there just after one.

NolaBee and Roy had departed on Monday for an automobile trip to Yosemite, leaving the front room bestrewn with proof of their
last-minute changes in packing. Marylin scooped up her mother’s things, which smelled faintly of tobacco smoke, carrying them to the front bedroom. Blushing, she made the double bed, changing the linen; then she returned to put away Roy’s pale blue cashmere sweater and raglan-sleeved coat.

Around the vanity mirror where Roy had once tucked crazily posed snapshots of herself and Althea Cunningham were arranged group photographs of the Kappa Zetas. Roy’s wholehearted, eager smile and short, resiliently curly hair jumped out from the conventional shoulder-length pageboys and primly curved lips. The Kappa Zeta house was relentlessly mediocre, and Marylin could never sort out the sorority sisters, although she had attended several “Relative Teas” (suffering the oblique, condemning glances of curiosity) and also thrown Sunday barbecues for Roy’s closer friends.

As she straightened the photograph of Roy in her mortarboard and graduation robe, Marylin heard the rap on the front door.

Her head lifted and she was momentarily incapable of movement; then, flushing deeply, she ran to answer.

Wordless, she and Linc embraced in the dim living room, straining their bodies close, a fiercely shared urgency to annihilate the years of separation, to forget the shroud over their future, to exist in this one instant that was theirs alone. With an inarticulate whimper, Marylin drew him toward NolaBee’s room.

Here, beside the recently made bed, they again clung together, his hands moving downward to clasp the peach-shaped outlines of what the Industry described as a “small but very fine ass.” Marylin was shaking and breathing unevenly, not only with desire but also with a complex longing to return to a mythical island inhabited by love, youth, unfettered joy. The drawn curtains did not quite meet, and a finger of sunlight drew a narrow line across their clinch.

That incandescent line touched their naked joined bodies, the far-off bells of the Good Humor truck sounded against their unhearing ears, and they rediscovered each other.

*   *   *

“Mine?” Linc asked, tracing the small mole near the hollow of her navel.

“You made it famous.”

His hand, no longer demanding, curved over the luminous flesh. “Famous!” he asked. “You’ve lost me.”

“Remember? It’s in
Island.”

“Oh, that. Never read it.”

She smiled.

“Marylin, I dashed off those stories and mailed them.”

“And since you got back, you haven’t been able to locate a copy?” The same soft, disbelieving smile curved her lovely mouth. “After all, you’re never in a library.”

Linc, as Dean Harz, had become a librarian at Detroit’s pillared main branch.

“I’ve been petrified to look.”

“You’re what you wanted to be. A fine writer.”

“Writer? I wanted to best Dad, that’s all.” He raised up on his elbow. “You’re an actress—I saw that the afternoon I barged in on you treading the dusty boards of dear old Beverly. You not only have the magic, you have the dedication. I have neither. I am not a writer. I, am, not, a, writer.”

“You only won the Pulitzer.”

“It’s not all that unique for inspired youth to bring forth one novel. You’ll see. There’ll be a half-dozen by guys who were in the war, followed up by a mountain of—”

The telephone rang.

They both jumped guiltily. It’s Joshua, Marylin thought in sudden irrational terror, although this afternoon her husband had taken Billy to the San Fernando Valley Stable, where the little boy would jog circles on his stout Shetland pony until both mount and rider were exhausted. Her voice quavered as she said, “Probably for Roy—she’s the popularity kid.”

But the jangling had shoved Joshua into the bed with them, and he remained there after the unanswered phone ceased to ring.

“I wish,” she said with a tremulous sigh, “I wish Billy were yours.”

Linc kissed her ear. “Offhand, I’d have said you wouldn’t have changed a hair on that tough little head.” He paused. “We’ll have to find a place.”

“I’ll drive myself to work and use the car at lunch. There’s a motel on Sunset, the Lanai, about six blocks from the studio. . . .” She halted, aware she must be blushing.

“Dad’s place?” There was a well-practiced anger in the question: Linc’s jealousy was a sturdy weed growing amid his filial ambivalences.

“We went there—It was after your mother died, Linc. Let’s find someplace else.”

After a moment he said, “I’ll scout around.”

*   *   *

In the immediate vicinity of Magnum, there were no other motels with the Lanai’s prime virtue, a stucco wall that hid day-rate fornicators from keen-eyed drivers. So the Lanai it was.

It had always been Marylin’s habit to lunch in her trailer on the set,
so she fabricated an excuse about medical treatments. The two rumors promulgated at Magnum were that she was seeing a shrink or getting boffed, and since she was famed as—
mirabile dictu
—a faithful wife, the shrink won hands down.

The high-voltage impatience of the industry men who surrounded her was absent in Linc. The war and prison camp, he said, had beaten the rat-race hurry out of him. If a difficult take kept her, she would find him waiting in the room (they always got number five), absorbed in one of those small paperback books that he carried with him everywhere. She realized in his unruffled presence how much she shrank from those harried, voraciously ambitious bigwigs, all of them so driven.

Marylin felt less guilt about her fall from grace than she would have imagined. By some mental sleight, she disconnected the anonymous motel room from her work, her family, from Joshua and Billy. She had returned to a past where she was her truest self, a quiet, lovely girl who wanted only the man she loved to love her.

Another surprising revelation was that adultery intensified her affection for Joshua. She had to bite back effervescent confidences to her husband: after all, wouldn’t Joshua, Linc’s father, be overjoyed to know the truth?

*   *   *

“I’ve booked reservations,” Linc said. “My train leaves Union Station on June twenty-ninth.”

“The twenty-ninth? Linc, that’s tomorrow!” She had just showered and, naked, was combing back her hair. Snatching up her towel, she covered herself as if he had introduced a stranger into the room. Linc, already dressed, lay on the bed watching her.

“There’s something to remember,” he said with forced whimsicality. “When you blush, your breasts turn the palest pink.”

“Do you have to get back. Are you worried about your job?” He had told her that he’d telephoned his immediate superior about a particularly tenacious California virus.

“Haven’t you noticed? I’m way out of my depth, and not treading water anymore.”

“I want to be with you all the time.”

“That’s it, in a nutshell.”

Bending, she drew on a nylon. “Linc,” she said, “we could tell Joshua. He would understand—”

“Marylin, Marylin, if you think old Dad would welcome home the prodigal and pronounce his blessings over us, you are crazy.”

“He would be delirious you’re alive and—”

“Sure he would. Unfortunately, alive, I covet what he has. He’d
pull out all stops. You’d be shoved into one of those messes that ruin a career. No more Rain Fairburn.”

“I can live without her.”

“And Billy?”

“Joshua would give me Billy,” she whispered.

“In your married life, have you ever seen him offer his congratulations as the graceful loser?”

Would her husband sink to using their beloved little kid? He might, she thought, it’s possible. He never sounds retreat. She sighed unhappily.

“So then we’re agreed about the potential here for wrecking your life.” Linc’s lips were an alarming white. “We’ve managed without each other for enough years to know it’s feasible.”

As she tucked her blouse into her full cotton skirt, she began to cry. Crossing the room, he put his arms loosely around her, and they swayed together like two orphans at their parents’ graveside.

“Marylin, my sweet, gentle, beautiful Marylin.”

“You
really
think he’d be vicious about Billy?”

“I’m not trying to paint Dad as the heavy, but he does fight with every available weapon, doesn’t he?”

“Yes,” she sighed.

He led her along the exterior pathway and down the concrete steps to her Chrysler. “Good-bye Marylin,” he said, leaning on the open window. “Good-bye, love.”

She notified the studio that she was ill, and drove home with her handkerchief gripped to the steering wheel.

She went directly to bed. Joshua was out somewhere with Billy. When he returned, he called the internist.

The doctor, connecting her malaise with the fainting spell, diagnosed a virus.

She lay in bed the next three days, forcibly kept there by a worried Joshua, surrounded by a funereal trove of flowers—American Beauties from the
Versailles
crew, white cymbidium from Art Garrison, an enormous mixed basket from her agent Leland Hayward.

She was back on the set Friday, five pounds thinner (a fortune in period costumes had to be taken in), depressed, and silent except when the cameras were on her.

*   *   *

Shooting ended in mid-July. Joshua rented a sprawling furnished house in Malibu and the Fernauld household moved there.

Marylin spent her days on the sand under the yellow-and-white umbrella, protected by a large-brimmed straw hat and a loose ankle-length beach coat—the sun’s rays are anathema to a screen actress,
whose pigmentation must retain the pristine pallor that embraces Max Factor Pan-Cake.

Joshua, sleek as a brown bull seal under his Coppertone, would sprawl on the hot sand beside her. Sometimes she caught him examining her with a curious, waiting expression that she could not fathom.

“What is it, Joshua?” she would ask, quelling her guilty tremor.

“I’m here with one of the most gorgeous broads in the long history of the planet earth, and being neither a fool nor blind, I enjoy looking at her, that’s what. I’m goddamn happy, that’s what.”

Other than his occasional piercing glances, her husband was himself. In his deep rumbling voice, he amused her, wooed her, bossed her, and protected her from intrusions of every sort. In the foamy white curls left by the breakers, he frolicked with Billy.

The hot, quiet days with her child soothed Marylin’s wounds until she returned to that quiescent state of half-life that she had hitherto accepted as marriage. At night, between sheets that smelled of faint must and the sea, she succumbed to Joshua, her mind and body aching for a less-domineering lover.

*   *   *

In October
Versailles
was scored, edited. The studio fired its big guns of publicity, sending Tyrone Power and Marylin on separate but equal junkets. Detroit was the third city on the Rain Fairburn tour.

  
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