Everything and More (64 page)

BJ and Maury had gone to Rome for Linc’s wedding at the Norwegian embassy, they had seen Gudrun several times during the two years and three months span of the marriage, as a couple they obviously
felt warm toward Linc’s wife, yet BJ seldom spoke about her to Marylin. (To Joshua, they never mentioned Linc at all: whenever his firstborn’s name came up, Joshua either charged from the room or diverted the conversation.)

BJ’s atypical tact had earned Marylin’s wholehearted gratitude.

Hearing about Mrs. A. Lincoln Fernauld made her head throb with a sense of fullness behind her eyes. Indeed, during the entire time of Linc’s marriage she had been in a mild depression. She had caught cold easily, she had begun suffering from these darn sinus headaches. The physical dimensions of her jealousy—for she had come to realize that jealousy was at the base of her problems—shamed and repelled her.
She
had a life of her own, a husband, children, she cherished Linc, so why couldn’t she rejoice in his marriage? In her reasonable mind, she
did
wish him well, yet her subconscious remained an intractable dog in the manger, grudging him his Scandinavian wife.

When BJ had broken the news that the couple had split amicably, nasty little quivers of exultation had passed through Marylin’s entire body, and her hands had begun to tremble. Even though she felt pangs of guilt—after all, Linc must be going through a rough time—she could not dim her happiness.

He’s single again, she would think. Billy and Sari are grown, so why have I never made an overture toward him? The answers to that were twofold. First, how could she desert Joshua, that aging lion? She did not kid herself that it was simple duty that had kept her with her marriage but a complex array of feelings that ranged from pity to irate exasperation to warm, sharing affection.

Furthermore, over the years she had begun to doubt that the capacity for romantic love still existed within her. What was love, anyway? The sentimental inclinations and heightened hormonal secretions of youth. Love was for the young, not the mother of two grown children.

Sighing, Marylin turned right on Sunset, steering along the rustic folds of Mandeville Canyon, after a couple of miles turning right again at a shrub-secluded private driveway. She pressed the small remote-control box on the car seat. Wrought-iron gates swung open, closing behing her. She echoed across the wooden bridge that spanned an effervescent stream. During the rainy season the streambed filled naturally; otherwise a pump kept water rushing over the boulders. Live oaks spread luxuriantly, as did chemiso and manzanita, shrubbery that was for the most part native chaparral, yet nevertheless the Fernaulds’ acreage required the full-time services of three gardeners. Up the hill to her left she glimpsed the rustic cottage
that Joshua used as his office. Ahead of her, surmounting a long, grassy slope, lay the house.

Built more than forty years ago by Tessa Van Vliet, widow of the silent-movie star Kingdon Vance, the long, comfortable building was designed in the Californio style, with appurtenances once more coming into fashion—balconies, ornamental iron window grates, tile roof, massive exposed beams, rough white stucco.

Exuberant masculine voices resounded in the rear patio. Joshua and his elderly buddies were playing pinochle amid a scattering of largecurrency bills, drinks, lavish platters of cold cuts.

She said hello, smiling at their admiringly scurrilous gallantries, then plodded upstairs to stretch out on the bed.

When she awoke the light was waning.

Joshua stood over her.

An unmotivated shiver passed through her. Although Joshua had never been physically violent since that brutal rape, when he surprised her like this she was unable to quell her initial fear.

He went to press the door bolt, then sat on the bed undoing the pearl buttons of Marylin’s robe, staring down at the small sensual body, which had changed remarkably little, the breasts as high and round, no dimming of the pearl luster that caught the light so incredibly. Joshua, though, bore the stigmata of age on his body: the tanned, white-haired barrel chest and imposing belly had gone lax, blue veins knotted the thin shanks. Time’s wounds humiliated him, so he unzipped and unbuttoned but left on his clothes as he lay down next to her.

He caressed her with all of the technical skill of his earlier years—and none of the spirit. Now his carnal transactions had an almost frantic quality, as if he were racing from failure. Like the creative demon that had ridden his youth, Joshua’s concupiscence had waned. Still, after a few minutes he moved onto her, and she arched up for his entry.

Then . . .

Nothing.

He groaned, moving off her. She held him tenderly while her pulses slowed to normalcy. Joshua was her husband and if she did not love him, she felt much for him, and his mortification hurt her, too.

“I’ll make an appointment with Webber,” Joshua growled. “Jesus Christ! Isn’t that the almighty shits, having to go to a quack urologist for a shot before making love to my wife?”

She cradled his head against her still-taut breasts. Any remark would provoke him to call her a ball-crushing star-type. He resented her financial support, he resented her youth, he loved her desperately.

Below was the sound of a car driving up: Tuesday was inviolably family night.

“I better get dressed,” Marylin said, kissing Joshua’s sweat-and-pomade-scented white hair. Despite her hapless condition, married to an often impotent, vindictively jealous husband, she had never considered infidelity. The man she yearned for dwelt on another continent, belonged to another life.

  
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Eucalyptus logs crackled, throwing waves of spicy warmth from the dining room’s massive fireplace.

Joshua bulked at the head of the oval Georgian table that Ann Fernauld had bought at auction, Marylin graced the other end; between them were ranged Sari, NolaBee, Roy, Billy, and Charles Firelli. The table leaves had not been put in, for BJ’s contingent was absent. BJ, Maury, and their two younger daughters had flown to Israel two weeks earlier: Annie, married to a kibbutznik, had just given birth to her first child. Joshua viewed his ascendancy to the role of great-grandfather with a mingling of patriarchal pride and sheer terror at further proof of time’s inexorable passage.

The gathering had just attacked enormous slabs of pink rib roast, over-sized baked potatoes, emerald-flecked spinach soufflé.

Joshua beamed down the table. “Is everybody happy?”

“The beef is perfect,” said Charles, turning toward Marylin.

Marylin’s lovely smile was a shade fixed. Since Charles had entered the house, she had been experiencing flurries of vague distrust that boomeranged back as an abrasive question. Why couldn’t she see Charles as the handsome, assured heir of a vast fortune rather than as Althea’s son?

Charles slit his potato skin. Steam burst out.

“Here, Charles,” Sari said, her dark eyes fixed on the cut-glass bowl of thick sour cream that she was pushing toward him.

Sari looked like a thin, shy waif in her faded jeans and a loose madras blouse. She neither plucked her brows nor straightened her cloud of soft black hair, and at nearly twenty she could have passed for thirteen. She had dropped out of her junior year at Mills College to “get my head straight,” a fairly typical move for Sari. She was forever attempting to reconcile her considerable intellect with her extraordinarily vivid emotional range. She would disappear for hours, sometimes hiking through the canyon, sometimes leaning against the trunk of an oak tree staring dreamily at the stream. Behavior, Marylin and Joshua had decided jointly, befitting an incipient poet. But Sari, alone of Joshua’s offspring, had never had any literary aspirations.

“Thank you, Sari,” Charles said in his grave basso.

Sari darted him a smile.

“The way you girls today let your hair hang, it’s right unglamorous. No style at all,” NolaBee pronounced, tossing her own ratted coiffure, which was now dyed a dashing shade of marmalade.

“Not everybody can be a sexpot like you, Grandma,” said Billy.

“Oh, you!” NolaBee cried, fluttering her eyelashes flirtatiously. She adored both her grandchildren; however, her Marylin remained the one person on this earth for whom she would willingly lay down her own life. “But I reckon us Fairburn and Roy women always did have the knack of being belles.”

“You tell ’em, NolaBee,” said Joshua.

Everybody laughed.

Roy, choking a bit, took a sip of her Perrier. The others had Beaujolais, but Roy, since her siege with the bottle, had come to dislike the taste of wine. Besides, a glassful had nearly a hundred calories and, as usual, she considered herself five pounds overweight—that other bane of her existence, the curl in her brown hair, had been tamed into a sleek, straight curve by a Vidal Sassoon blow dryer. Her face had a pleasant certainty, a by-product of her success with Patricia’s. “Well, Charles, what do you make of my family? Aren’t they exactly like I told you?” On her buying trips East, she had made it a habit to visit Gerry’s secret son at Groton, then at Harvard. “Did I exaggerate?”

“Yes, Charles,” Billy said. “Let’s hear your opinion of the humble peasantry of Beverly Hills and Mandeville Canyon.”

Charles, though one sensed humor was alien to him, retorted in the
same vein as Billy. “Your women are spectacular, your men talk either too much or too loudly.”

“Amazing, isn’t it,” Billy said, “how engaging we humble folk can be?”

“I fear for you, Billy, if this is your opinion of humble.” Charles glanced around the well-appointed, beamed dining room.

“Touché,” boomed Joshua. “Touché!”

“Charles, what was he like, your father?” Sari asked. The mysterious, often unjust laws of genetics had denied the girl her mother’s beauty while endowing her with the gentle, husky little voice. On the telephone the two were often confused. “I’ve heard a million stories.”

“He was everything people said. A true musical genius. A magnificent human being.” The praise emerged in the rhythm of a much recited line of poetry.

Sari reacted like litmus paper to emotional chemistry. “You must have been asked that ten million times. I’m sorry.”

For the first time, Charles leveled more than a cursory glance at the girl opposite him, looking into Sari’s eyes, eyes that Joshua had once fancifully described as having the soulful darkness of an Italian saint. “My father was old when I knew him, in his eighties. People told me he was a perfectionist on the podium, they said his orchestras stayed on pins and needles. For my part, I can’t ever remember him shouting.

“He had so much life,” Roy said. “I must have told you this a thousand times, Charles. When I met him I was seventeen, and he bowled me over—I’d never met an older person who truly got such a kick out of everything.”

“The last time I saw him,” Charles said reflectively, “he was on holiday in England. We have a house in Eastbourne—we have places in Geneva and London, too, but this he considered his home. Anyway, it was an Arctic winter, and old people stayed indoors. Not Father. There are three levels to the front in Eastbourne, and we would walk along the one nearest the sea. I’ve tried to remember what we talked about, but I can’t. All I can remember is my lungs hurt from so much laughing in the cold wind.” Charles stopped abruptly, as if the remembrances were too intimate to share.

After the dessert, Billy said, “Charles, how’s about joining me? The Ahhs are playing the Troubador.”

“This has to be an early night.”

“That’s a helluva note when I’ve lined up a couple of the foxiest ladies in Beverly Hills.”

“Another time,” Charles said. “Tomorrow is my grandfather’s operation, and Mother’s expecting me home around nine.”

*   *   *

“Althea’s boy has right nice manners,” NolaBee repeated.

It was a half-hour later, the three young people were gone, and the others were settled into the deep upholstery of the den.

“So you said five times already,” Marylin retorted with a cantankerous annoyance so out of character that Joshua and Roy turned to her in surprise.

“I reckon it’s true,” NolaBee retorted. Her chatter had taken on a repetitiveness, but other than that she showed remarkably few signs of the aging process. “Good-looking as all get-out, and rich as sin. I reckon he has the girls swooning over him.”