Everything and More (70 page)

“Do I have a smudge on my face?” Marylin asked with her breathy little laugh.

“Sorry. I was thinking of something else. Marylin, sit down. Tea or coffee?”

“Tea, please.”

Roy sent the secretary to boil the kettle—she had taken space from an upstairs stockroom to build a large, pleasant employees’ lounge with a stove and refrigerator.

“Now, what’s this all about?” Marylin asked. “It’s not like you to make mysteries. Did Sari tell you something last night? My poor baby. Roy, I
knew
no good would come from that Charles.”

“She was pretty shaken. I’m fairly positive Europe is off.”

“It is.” Marylin sighed. “When she told us, Joshua blew his stack—and you know he never does with her. He’s decided that the moment she hits Sweden she’ll get that Charles out of her system.”

“Charles isn’t sure he’ll be in Stockholm.”

“So he is bowing out! My poor, poor Sari. She takes everything so hard.”

Roy ladled a teaspoon of dressing on her Cobb salad. “I was really disturbed by something, well, she said about Billy.”

Marylin looked down, and the incomparable eyes were veiled. She took Billy’s sudden departure without giving
The Rain Fairburn Show
any kind of notice as a complete rejection of her and her career. For the past two months she had felt herself locked into a dark tunnel. Her rejector, after all, was the child for whom she had sacrificed love. She would find herself brooding about Linc, wondering what their lives would have been had she not made that long-ago decision in favor of maternal duty. Though Linc had not remarried, he had also never once asked BJ about her. No man waits for decades. Linc was enjoying himself as a divorced man. To him she was doubtless immensely less important than that Gudrun, another memory among the rainbow of exotic, foreign girlfriends. And what did she have to show for her renunciation? A son who rejected her. Nothing, she had nothing.

Incapable of looking at Roy, she speared a small, glistening cube of ham. “Billy? Last night he called us.”

Roy sat up straighter. “What’s new?” she asked.

“Joshua talked. I didn’t. Something about making a picture—”

Roy interjected, “Now,
there’s
a different angle.”

“I know, I know. Like father, like son. The two of them always talking and planning the big box-office smash. But Billy’s actually come up with financing.”

Roy set down her fork. “Financing?” she asked slowly. “Did he say who would give him the money? A bank?”

“No, private sources. Joshua said he was cagey, yet sounded positive it’ll come off.”

“What about his social life?”

“I really don’t know.” Marylin’s smile was frayed. “Roy, to tell you the truth, he hasn’t given us his phone number, even.”

“Sari’s decided he’s fallen into some woman’s fell clutches.” Roy spoke lightly, but her jaw was set.

“That’s Billy. Always in and out of an affair.”

“Maybe,” Roy said slowly, “it’s Althea.”

“Althea?” Marylin asked, mystified. “You think she had something to do with Charles leaving Sari?”

“I’m talking about Billy. Althea and Billy.”

Clutching her napkin, Marylin jumped to her feet. “Are you crazy? What a hideous thing to say!”

“It’s what Sari thinks, and she’s Miss Sensitive about relationships and things. It does make a kind of ghastly sense, Marylin. And this movie financing fits right in. Althea could put up a cool fortune and never miss a penny of it.”

A truck was noisily backing along the narrow alley, and while the grating sounds poured through the office windows, Marylin’s color drained until the exquisite features seemed powdered with white flour.

Roy worried that she’d been too blunt. “You okay, Marylin, hon?” she asked, leaning across the desk.

“We’ll find out if it’s true,” Marylin said in a normal voice.

“How?”

“I’ll call Althea and ask her.”

The idea was so simple that Roy, a direct, to-the-point woman, felt idiotic for having fretted all these hours without considering it.

Marylin asked, “Do you have her number?”

“My book’s at home.”

Marylin reached for the telephone: A. Stoltz was listed in the Manhattan directory.

“Let me talk—I’m her friend,” Roy said. “It’ll be easier for me.”

“I’m the actress, or meant to be,” Marylin retorted, gripping the telephone firmly.

Roy held her breath. Her sister pressed the receiver to her ear; then a muscle jumped near the beautiful mouth, raising the upper lip for a vulnerable instant.

She jammed her finger on the button.

“Why are you hanging up?” Roy demanded. “Did you chicken out? You should have asked for Althea.”

Marylin’s sea-colored eyes glittered in her stark white face. “I didn’t need to,” she said. “Billy answered the phone.”

  
65
  

That same Thursday afternoon Marylin booked an early-morning flight to New York for Saturday, reserved a hotel suite, and mailed Althea a special-delivery note: she would be in New York this weekend, and would Althea join her for drinks Saturday evening.
I’m staying at the Regency, and for me it’s easier if we meet privately in the suite—I hope you understand. It’ll be just the two of us.

Marylin kept mum about the
folie à deux
of Billy and Althea, not mentioning it even to Joshua. Neither did she disclose her New York journey. Instead, she told her family that she needed to invigorate her flagging body with exercise and massage at the Golden Door Spa.

She spent the final two days of
The Rain Fairburn Show
’s work week bottled up inside herself, a preoccupation reminiscent of her studio days. Once assigned a role, she had withdrawn, not talking out her interpretive thrust even with the director, reasoning superstitiously that her emotional impact would poop out before reaching the camera’s unerring eye.

She no longer felt rejected by Billy. In her mind, Althea was a blend of Judith Anderson’s Medea, Lucrezia Borgia, and the Wicked Witch of the North. How could she blame her boy for being spirited away on Althea’s broomstick? In her mood of heightened maternal outrage, she was determined to wield all her talents to rescue him.

She was flying on one of those new jumbo jets. As soon as she buckled up in her first-class seat, she opened an undersize looseleaf whose spine was gone. She had used this notebook during the filming of
Island,
and had kept it—another superstition—for every film, putting in a fresh supply of lined paper on which to jot down notes to herself. Even for the simpy comedies, she had filled page after page with each particular woman’s family background, transgressions, pet peeves, affections, aversions, gestures, sexual idiosyncrasies, musical and literary preferences, medical history. Inevitably, from this plenitude of detail she had uncovered the core of the character. This time, however, she was not molding a fictional persona. She was ransacking her memory cells for images of Althea.

She was still writing when the plane landed.

On the drive into Manhattan she concentrated on her notes, not looking up until the limo passed above the East River. Her eyes were slightly bloodshot from working in the pressurized cabin. “Althea never could bear people laughing at her,” she said aloud.

Having secured the key to Althea, she flipped back through pages of neatly written observations. At the Regency, the desk clerk handed her a message slip: “See you at 5:45. Althea.” Marylin let out a relieved sigh. It goes without saying that she had fretted about her course of action if Althea did not show. (Would she need to camp outside of Althea’s apartment building, or what?)

Miniature liquor bottles stocked the mini-fridge under the bathroom counter, but she ordered fifths of Scotch and vodka to be sent up at 5:15 along with an hors d’oeuvres tray. The next two hours she absorbedly prepared herself as she would for the camera, shampooing under the shower, blow-drying her brown hair, applying cosmetics in her magnifying travel mirror, donning a black silk jersey exactingly selected to dignify rather than glamorize her small body.

At precisely a quarter to six, the door buzzer sounded.

Marylin took a deep-breathing-exercise breath before answering.

Althea stood there in a honey-toned midi-suit with matching boots.

It had been years since Marylin had seen Althea, and she stared across the threshold at her sister’s friend. She, too, was prey to that indefatigable arch devil, Time. Lines were pressed at the corners of Althea’s eyes, and a fine wrinkle showed near the base of the still-firm throat.

Althea stared back, her head raised haughtily.

In this moment of empathy, however, Marylin recollected that Althea had always hidden awkwardness behind a facade of snooty reserve.

“Come in,” Marylin said with a surprising note of affection. “Althea, I was so very sorry about your father.”

“Yes, I got your condolence note.”

“Won’t you sit down? Let me fix you a drink. Vodka? Scotch—there’s everything else in the refrigerator.”

“Why should we clutter the occasion with social amenities?” Althea inquired in an abrasive drawl. “Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

Marylin’s misplaced generosity faded. “I want to talk about Billy.”

Althea’s mouth formed a quizzical smile. She said nothing.

“He told us he was going to make a movie and had arranged financing. He made a big mystery about who was putting up the money. Sari thinks you were pretty darn interested in him.”

“And clever little you put two and two together.”

“Then it’s true, isn’t it?”

Althea shrugged her elegant shoulders. “Marylin, maybe in Hollywood people play this sort of game with each other, but I find confrontations vulgar and distressing.”

Althea’s disdain might be a front, but it chilled regardless. Althea had her claws in Billy. Marylin’s mouth had gone dry, and dread swirled through her, but she managed to abdicate her inner ravages in favor of her particular discipline. Deciding that her diminutive stature was against her—she had played a similar scene with Barbara Stanwyck in
Recaptured Past
—she sat in a wing chair, her spine erect. “Distressing?” she asked. “How about the smirks when people see you with a boy younger than your son?”

“I couldn’t care less what’s in their nasty little minds,” Althea retorted.

“I’m not throwing myself on your better nature, Althea. Whatever Roy says, I’m not sure you have one. I’m only pointing out that you and Billy as an item aren’t likely to escape being in the trash newspapers.”

Althea smiled as though she were thinking of a wickedly risqué jest.
“I
don’t set out to be in them, dear heart.”

“Yes, but if there were some sort of scandal . . .”

“As I live and breathe, a threat. You’ll set the
paparazzi
on me, is that it?”

“I won’t have to. You’re a Coyne, and they know it. As soon as they figure out Billy’s my son, they’ll swarm.”

“So I’d be wise to drop him, is that your gist?”

“It’s the only sensible thing.”

“How do you think
he’ll
feel?”

“It has to end eventually.”

“I
haven’t let myself think about
that,
Marylin, but Billy has. Oh, hasn’t he just. He’s talking marriage.”

Marylin could not control her tremors; she clasped her hands tightly to hide the shaking. “Wouldn’t that make a headline? ‘Billionairess Bags Baby as Fourth Husband.’”

“Ouch,” Althea said. “But, Marylin, dear, there’s no point in discussing this with me. Your dear Billy is the one who’s pushing for wedding bells.”

“He doesn’t understand what he’s getting into.”

“He’s a full-grown man, a terrific, immensely talented man.”

“I’m his mother. I know that.”

Althea raised her chin. “Joshua helped your career, and it seems to
me there was a minor age discrepancy—aren’t I right? I do seem to recall you mooning after his son.”

You bitch, you unutterable bitch, Marylin thought.
“My
marriage,” she said with all the dignity she could muster, “is not what we’re discussing.”

Althea shrugged again. “I only imagined that Billy might remark on it, he might say something.”