Lovers (27 page)

“You’re entirely welcome. Wish I could have told you more.”

“Will you give my best regards to Billy? And kiss the kids?”

“Sure. Take it easy, guy, and try to stay warm. ’Bye.”

As he hung up the phone, Zach Nevsky knew two new things besides what Spider had told him. Spider Elliott had been unforgettably in love with Melanie Adams, he could tell that from his voice when he’d talked about her. Spider also knew that things were over between him and Gigi. He’d never so much as mentioned her name … the dog that didn’t bark. Well, what the hell had he expected, Zach asked himself furiously. That Gigi wouldn’t have announced that she’d kicked him out to one and all; that she’d have carried on, for months, as if things were all right, just because … because of what, for Christ’s sake? Over was over. But, Jesus, it had been hard, not asking for news of her. He’d wanted to desperately, just to say “How’s Gigi?” but he didn’t trust his own voice. If he could
read Spider over the phone, chances were that Spider could read him.

Spider Elliott put down the phone and put his feet up on the desk. He was deeply disturbed by Zach’s call. In the seven years of her explosive stardom, he’d avoided every Melanie Adams film. She’d damaged him right to the core of his being when she’d disappeared abruptly from his life, with only a foul, lying letter as explanation. She had been his first love, his first true love. No matter what had happened since then, like anyone else whose first love had been thrown back in his face with contempt, he had never completely recovered from the memory of her gratuitous cruelty. Only Valentine could have nursed him through the emotional crisis Melanie had caused.

He’d put Melanie out of his life, even when she’d tried to lure him back, using all her blandishments, and afterwards he’d discovered his love for Valentine, a totally different kind of love, a mature love, a reciprocated love. Then, little more than a year later, Melanie had come back again into his life. Valentine had died while she was working late, driven by the heavy responsibility of completing Melanie’s costumes for
Legend
.

Melanie hadn’t literally killed Valentine, he realized that, he’d come to terms with it, but it was a fact that if Melanie Adams hadn’t existed, Valentine would still be alive.

And if Valentine were still alive, he and Billy wouldn’t be married. Spider sighed in wonderment at the twists and turns of his life, a life in which Melanie Adams had been the thread of fate. All that he’d accomplished in life, all that he mourned today, all that he cherished today, existed either because of her, or in spite of her, but was, in some way, determined by her. If Melanie had been a girl with normal emotions, Spider was certain that they would have been married long ago and still married now. He’d probably be a successful fashion photographer, for that was where his greatest talent lay, and she’d still be a model, or
more likely, given the supremacy of teenaged models, she’d have retired to have children.

He wished Zach Nevsky didn’t have to deal with her, Spider thought as he got up and looked out of the high windows of his big office in Scruples Two at the last red glow of the winter sun drowning itself in the gray rim of the Pacific. He wished Zach Nevsky hadn’t called and brought up old memories. He liked Zach, always had, no matter why or how he had split up with Gigi, for reasons that weren’t clear even to Billy. Gigi Orsini could be trusted to take care of herself, Spider decided. Zach Nevsky, with all his power, was no match for Gigi … that much he
did
know about women.

Melanie Adams realized that Zach hadn’t asked for this meeting with her alone in order to discuss her performance as Lydia Lacy. She had become the best judge of her work, and the role of a very young and virginal music teacher who causes a blood feud between the two most powerful men in a small town in Montana was one well within the range of several other actresses, but she’d accepted it for two reasons: she was playing opposite Clint Eastwood and Paul Newman, and it was the very first major part that had been offered to her at the moment she had finally fulfilled her contract with Wells Cope.

While she was still unknown and unwary, with no confidence in her potential, Wells had seen the power of her beauty, he had brought her from New York to Hollywood, he had had her coached, he had had her tested, and immediately after he’d seen the dailies of her first movie, he had signed her to a four-picture contract.

She had been eager then to sign a deal that would protect her from all the lurking threats and unknown private agendas that can entrap any new girl in town, particularly when the town is Hollywood. Wells had promised her that he would “invent” her, and with his acute intelligence, his undisputed power with the studio, and his ability to curb her ravening impatience and pick exactly the right roles for
her, he was responsible for a career in which she had not made a single misstep.

Melanie Adams had desperately needed a mentor, and in Wells Cope she had found not just that mentor, but the only man she was ever to know who was content to make graceful and exquisite love to her without demanding any response, the only man who could immerse himself in her beauty, possess her at his leisure, and never ask any questions about whether she loved him.

All Wells wanted in return was to own her. When had she realized that she was his creature, she wondered. How long had it taken before she saw that although her leash was flexible, silken, invisible, and allowed her to roam, it was made of steel and soldered around her neck? When had she begun to rebel, and when had she realized that short of being self-destructive, which tempted her not at all, she could win only the smallest of victories?

She could spend as much money as she chose, but she wasn’t trusted to pick out her own dress for the Academy Awards. She could live anywhere in the world, she could buy a houseboat in the Vale of Kashmir, but she had to report for work on the day Wells appointed, for as long as he decided he needed her, in the role he had chosen for her from hundreds of scripts she was never given to read. She could, and had, rejected Wells sexually when he’d begun to bore her, but when she reached out and took the other man she wanted, he was neither surprised nor, it seemed to her, even interested.

On the other hand, Wells condemned her to long periods of leisure—the curse of certain of the greatest stars—leisure she loathed, although she kept it filled with acting classes—until he finally settled on a project he deemed worthy of her. She could marry, but what would marriage be but another layer of ownership? What husband wouldn’t expect something of his wife, even if she was Melanie Adams?

She could always fall in love, Melanie thought with a shrug, Wells couldn’t prevent that, but she had never been
“in love,” whatever that meant, and she knew by now that it was not her destiny. All her life she had been adored, from earliest childhood she had been told how she was loved, love washed over her in endless, demanding, suffocating waves, from every direction. She resented it, she struggled uselessly to reject it, it affected her as if she were being force-fed an ever-full bowl of melted chocolate. No. No to love.

Acting was all she was good for, she had to have acting or her life wouldn’t be worth living. This knowledge made her resign herself to being an object of love. It was the price she had to pay.

Children? Melanie Adams shuddered. If there could be anything worse than to be owned by Wells Cope, it would be to be owned by children, whose birth was the one irrevocable act in any woman’s life. At least a legal contract eventually had to come to an end, but the unthinkable ties of motherhood were lifelong, a child was the one person in your life you could not exchange for a more satisfactory substitute. She had never understood, never even considered it possible to understand, how any woman could be so unimaginative, so unself-protective, as to want a child. Of course, there was no accounting for the slave mentality of other women, she realized. They needed to be needed. Even beautiful women wanted children. It was simply incomprehensible.

All she asked, she told herself, was to be free, for no one to have any rights over her, never to answer questions, and, more important than anything else, to have some final proof that she existed,
really and truly
existed, outside of other people’s inadmissible, inescapable need of her.

She was able to find this proof that she craved with such anguish only in acting before a camera, surrounded by a crowd of people whose only interest was in what she did, not in who she was—people who paid her to be there on the spot, not, thank God, for love but for their own eventual gain.

Only when she felt herself being used to become someone
else, someone who was essentially
not
Melanie Adams, only when she was asked to throw herself, body and soul, into another being, did she feel that she had exercised the capacities of her heart. Only her craft quieted, during the time that she was practicing it, her anguished life-long search for a true sense of her own existence. Only when she was acting did she approach, but never arrive at—did she come close, but never close enough—to happiness.

For Melanie Adams, as well as for Eastwood, Newman, and the Rowans, four of the most comfortable houses had been rented in Kalispell. Other cast members, the union crew, and members of the production staff of
Chronicles
were put up in a variety of welcoming motels, but all of the extras were drawn from the local population.

At six o’clock in the evening, Zach drove the short distance from his suite at the Outlaw Inn through the well-plowed streets of the residential section, whose lawns were watched over by elaborate snowmen, and parked in front of the rambling Victorian house that Melanie occupied with her personal hairdresser, a woman named Rose Greenway, who had styled Melanie’s hair from the beginning of her career. Rose had become her indispensable assistant in many matters, her confidante, and, as far as Melanie was capable of friendship, her friend. When Melanie left Wells Cope, she took Rose with her.

It was through Miss Greenway that Roger Rowan had made all the arrangements for Melanie’s comfort during the shoot, which included employing a special vegetarian gourmet cook, a full-time masseuse, a personal publicist based in L.A., who regulated the access of the international press to the star, and a personal dresser who cared for her costumes. Wells Cope had surrounded her with all the luxuries of stardom, and Melanie had learned to take immensely good care of herself.

“Come on in, Mr. Nevsky,” Rose Greenway said as she took his parka and his fur hat. “Miss Adams said to go right on up, she’s expecting you. The door’s open. Just
close it behind you so the steam from the humidifiers doesn’t escape. This mountain air,” she added disapprovingly, “is really too dry for Miss Adams’s skin.”

“I know, Miss Greenway,” Zach said to the familiar complaint, and mounted the stairs and entered the large front bedroom with its bay windows, part of the half of the second floor that Melanie Adams had turned into her living quarters. It was the first time he’d been on the second floor of the house, and he expected it to be decorated with the same abundance of Sears’ Best overstuffed but nondescript furniture that filled the downstairs. However, Melanie Adams had transformed the room with dozens of thin paisley shawls in a multitude of sizes and a wide range of exotic colors and mysteriously compatible designs. She had draped every surface with them, the sofas, the chairs, the tables, even the headboard of the double bed. Every lamp wore a paisley scarf over its shade, the curtains at the windows were covered in paisley, there were white fur rugs scattered over much of the wall-to-wall carpet, and the open bed revealed embroidered Italian linen. The duvet, Zach decided as he prowled around the empty room, probably had been stuffed with the choicest feathers of ten thousand ducks. There was a large fire in the fireplace, and a profusion of green plants everywhere. Votive candles in small hurricane lamps provided points of light here and there; the evocative deliciousness of Chypre filled the air from four green Rigaud candles.

“Come on in,” Melanie Adams called from behind the open door that led to the bathroom. “The water’s fine.”

Cute, Zach thought.

“Thanks. I’ll wait till you’ve finished your bath,” he answered, and sat down on the largest of the sofas. He closed his eyes, and breathed in the luxuriously perfumed air, in which the warmth of the heat and the man-made humidity mingled with the subtle scented candles. All he could hear from the bathroom was the regular sound of a sponge being squeezed in and out and a muted splashing, as well as the drip of more water being added to the tub.

A visit to the gardens of the Alhambra, he asked himself? A romp in a sultan’s harem? The most elegant little whorehouse in Persia? Whatever this was meant to be, he’d get pneumonia when he went back outside if he didn’t take off his sweater and his flannel shirt in this heat, Zach thought, as he stripped them off and relaxed in his jeans and his T-shirt. Interesting little operation Melanie had going here, he thought. Confound and confuse, a good way to spare herself confrontation. On the other hand, she had never had to deal with anyone but Cope himself before, who lived in famous style, so this must all be for her own pleasure … pleasure …

By this time Melanie felt she had let Zach wait long enough and emerged from her bathroom, her hair wrapped in a turban of toweling, her thin white silk robe clinging to her moist body, wrapped tightly at her fragile waist, no trace of makeup on her astonishing face, he was deeply asleep.

She looked at him in disappointment; her entrance was wasted. But, on the other hand, this was a good time to catch him at a disadvantage, to inspect him more carefully than she could while they were discussing the part or working on the set and she was aware of his eyes evaluating her with their bright compelling intelligence. Even unconscious, with his flow of self-assurance cut off by sleep, Zach somehow remained at the center, Melanie thought. It would be impossible to ignore his presence in the room, difficult even to turn her back on him, for no matter how quietly he slept, Zach radiated a kind of pure physical energy. It came, she speculated, largely from the sheer size of him, the grace of him as he lay there, the rude life of his black hair, the thickness of his neck, the arrogant molding of his head, the rough edges of his face with its prominent cheekbones and a nose that looked as if it had been broken a half-dozen times. Sleep had not tamed Zach Nevsky.