Say You Love Her, An L.A. Love Story (16 page)

I’ve been fighting the urge to call Daisy to see how Angelina’s doing. I’ve also done a lot of thinking lately. Angelina said I was air. Air has no weight, no form—it’s nothing. Is that what she thinks of me? Maybe that was her way of saying that after our affair was over, I’d fade out of her life as if I’d never been there in the first place.

I grab my cell phone off the nightstand. It’s three a.m. Call-time is at four. I force myself to roll off the bed. What the hell. I’ll go to the studio anyway.

Chapter 11

The Aftermath

Angelina

Angelina sat alone at the kitchen table, attempting to write out the angst in her heart.
 

Today I’ll wear black from head to toe. I’ll ride in a black car. I’ll face the black sky
… She started rather zealously, but that’s as far as she could go.

“Mother is dead,” she whispered to see how it sounded out loud. “Madam Josephine Beauchamp is dead,” she said instead, thinking saying it that way would make it feel real. It didn’t.

The morning after dancing for Josephine and making love to Charlie, Angelina went to her mother’s room. It was then she told the complete truth. She did not return to Yale after graduating from Julliard. She was not registered at the UCLA School of Medicine and never intended to enroll. Josephine yelled at her in French. But in plain English she said, “You crawl in bed with that man and let him defile you? And where is he now?”

She tried to explain that he left for business, but Josephine screamed, “He is lying!” Her mother’s whole body trembled. In all her life Angelina had never seen her mother that angry. Josephine moaned. “I wanted you to be more than me,” she said.

Hearing that broke Angelina’s heart. Not the part about Charlie. Her mother had him all wrong—period. Jacques thought it best for her to leave him alone with Josephine for a while. Angelina did as he asked and walked dejectedly out of the room. She felt guilty because despite her mother’s fit of rage, she had no regrets. The fact that her mother didn’t want her involved in the performing arts when she herself was a songstress seemed absurd, which is why she had never taken Josephine’s forbiddance that seriously.
 

Angelina had a plan. One day, when she was accepted into the American Ballet Academy, she would invite Josephine to her first performance and make her mother proud. She would demonstrate how great an artist she was, how years of training with Karina and Lynnette had made her into a formidable dancer. In college she was known as the girl with the golden feet, who could dance any style of the art with perfect technique, grace, passion, and rhythm. All of her colleagues had thought she would’ve taken the dance world by storm by now. Angelina hadn’t because she’d spent the last eight years feeling guilty about her abilities. So trapped in the purgatory of life, she lingered between both worlds. She figured she’d pursue life passionately but her work objectively. Script consulting paid good money. It was a field that was difficult to break into, and she was actually “in,” which made her feel a small sense of accomplishment. Ten gigs a year, one month per gig, and a few callbacks if need be and she could do whatever the hell she wanted to do the rest of the time. Usually, she’d go to New York and dance in Off-Broadway productions. It was always fun to catch up with friends at parties in the clubs in New Orleans, Atlanta, and D.C. The trick was to hunt down venues where the general public wasn’t invited and she knew over fifty percent of the partygoers. Most of her friends were dancers, musicians, or actors, and if they were in one place, at one party, then she could count on getting down and jamming out until the sun came up. It was like chasing the dragon. Once she thought about it, that’s exactly how she’d been living her life, chasing the dragon. Then Charlie asked her to stay with him after she completed her last job and she said yes. Everything had changed since then.

After Jacques had calmed Josephine, Angelina returned to the room. Her mother looked so small, lying there in her sick bed. Dorothy was adding a sedative to her IV drip. At first they said nothing to each other. They only stared into each other’s eyes.

“I’m not your mama but if I were, then what would be wrong with that?” Angelina asked.

Seconds had passed before she asked Angelina to sit. For the next hour she listened to her mother reminisce about how numerous men had been seduced by her voice, stage presence, and beauty but had left her alone when they realized that she was merely a woman, flesh and blood like anyone else.
 

“The only one who stayed was Jacques, and fate had forbidden our love.”

“What are you talking about, Mama? Forbidden love? Daddy has loved you as long as I’ve been alive,” Angelina said.
 

Growing up, Angelina thought her parents were married. Jacques would ride into town and stay with them for weeks at a time and then leave for months, but she just thought it was because he had to go on the road. Angelina understood the life of musicians from a very early age. Once her mother remained on the road for a whole year just so she could pay off the mortgage and finally own their house.
 

When Josephine went away for long periods of time, Angelina would sometimes live with her mother’s sister, Aunt Lorraine, in Washington, D.C., for an entire school year. Other times, when Jacques was working in Paris, she would stay with him. But mostly she would remain home in Louisiana, and Karina, Lynette, and two other neighbors, Miss Marie and Miss Julia, would take turns watching her.
 

Some nights the ladies would gather in the parlor and drink rum and play bid wiz while discussing the wages of sex and love. Karina would let Angelina lie in the doorway and listen as long as she kept quiet. They said words like “fuck” and “pussy” and “dick” without batting an eye. They agreed that musicians made the best lovers. “They have the hands,” Miss Marie had said. Not until many years later did Angelina know this to be true.
 

Angelina loved her life back then. She loved that her mother was a jazz singer and her father was a music man and that they were always on the road. But what she didn’t know was that he was married to another woman—actually two other women! After he and Heloise Krantz, Daisy’s mother, divorced, he married Shelly Price, a nurse from Los Angeles, and they had two sons, Randall and Joseph. During both marriages he was involved with her mother. Her parents were lucky that nights listening to Karina, Lynnette, Miss Marie, and Miss Julia gossip, debate, and shoot the breeze prepared her for life’s shades of gray.
 

“Many times Jacques asked me to marry him, but I wouldn’t,” her mother said as her organs were shutting down.
 

“I still don’t understand how that remotely relates to your issue with me dancing,” Angelina said.

And then her mother said, “Beauty could give me the man but never his heart.”

Angelina sighed wearily as she shook her head. She simply could not repeat it again. Her mother did have her father’s heart. It was the one she stomped all over like grapes in the barrel. Angelina really believed that all Josephine had to do was say the word and Jacques would’ve made it official. But her mother never did. Angelina believed it was because she felt guilty about being the other woman. Josephine always warned her never to be the other woman, always to be the only woman.

“You know who I am?” her mother asked. “I’m a woman who wanted to be better. I wanted be president or a diplomat. I wanted to be important. The singing, the performing, the smiling and being beautiful for people—that was the least I could become. It was lazy of me.”

Angelina slapped herself on the chest. “Training to dance the way that I know how to dance wasn’t lazy of me.” She wasn’t going to let her mother minimize the broken toes, the back injuries, and the pulled muscles from hyper-extending. She worked hard to become as good as she was, and there was nothing lazy about it.
 

Angelina took notice of the adjustment in her mother’s eyes. In that moment something had changed. Had she finally reached her?

“You danced like a butterfly,” Josephine said. “I want you to remember. That’s what I thought when I saw you. Everything else I was thinking doesn’t matter. Not anymore.”

And so, Angelina wept into her hands. Later that afternoon her mother had taken a turn for the worse and still refused to be transported to the hospital in Baton Rouge. Right before midnight, Madame Josephine Beauchamp had passed away. She and her father sat with Josephine’s body until sunup.
 

Angelina wept until she couldn’t shed another tear. And so she pulled herself together and called Rodolfo St. Clair’s Funeral Home. She learned that Josephine had already planned her funeral and burial with Mr. St. Clair. She wanted to be buried four days after her death. She had already selected her coffin, the flowers, her dress, and the music and had set the program for the ceremony. Arlene Edwards, her long-time beautician from Baton Rouge, was to do her hair and makeup. She wanted to look pretty for God; however, for all other eyes, the casket was to be closed.
 

After Angelina spoke to Mr. St. Claire, she called Daisy on the house phone since Josephine had had Dorothy program her number on speed dial. She couldn’t stop sobbing while relaying the news about her mother’s death. Daisy and Belmont immediately flew to Baton Rouge to be with her. The next person she intended to call was Charlie. She spent hours looking for her cell phone before she realized she had left it at his house on the nightstand next to the bed. She tried to reach Daisy to ask for his number, but she was already on the way and couldn’t be contacted.
 

Things got busier even before Daisy and Belmont arrived. Word about Madame Beauchamp’s death traveled fast. Friends and neighbors stopped by to pay their respects. They brought pound cake, buttermilk beignets, fried apple pie, and bread pudding. Jacques spent most of the day at the funeral home, finalizing the musical requirements. It was his way of avoiding what Angelina couldn’t. She smiled solemnly and assured every visitor that she was fine and her mother had gone peacefully. She kept repeating the same phrases over again.
 

“She’s out of her misery.”

“She didn’t feel any pain because of the cocktail she was taking.”

“She was happy.”

“Thank you for your condolences.”

Goodness, was she relieved to see Daisy (who looked more pregnant than the last time she saw her) and Belmont drive up. She got them set up in the master guest room and made roasted pork chops, biscuits with gravy, and butter noodles for dinner. They were pretty impressed that she knew how to cook like that.
 

“Not all of us can afford a full-time cook,” she had said, finding some reprieve from the sadness in joking with Belmont.
 

Belmont laughed. It was pretty evident that he wouldn’t be shamed into firing his cooks anytime soon.
 

Later when they sat down to eat, Daisy and Belmont rehashed the story of how they met to make her feel better. Angelina thought it was a sweet tale. It reminded her of how she felt when she first saw Charlie.

“What about Charlie?” she asked. “Do you know how deep he’s in with Monroe?” Angelina never believed he was giving it to her straight regarding Monroe.
 

That’s when Daisy said that last Friday he hadn’t been in
 
Martha’s Vineyard a full day before he flew back to L.A. to be with Monroe. Apparently he had this big epiphany and realized he loved her.

“And not Daisy,” Belmont had said.

“Whoa, rewind please,” Angelina said. “What do you mean by ‘and not Daisy’?”

“Charlie has believed he was in love with me since we first met.” Daisy rolled her eyes as though that notion was ridiculous.

Shock made Angelina’s saliva travel down the wrong pipe, and she choked. She coughed as she tried to fully process what she had just heard about the man she really liked. She believed the time they spent together and the sex they’d had had been extraordinary. She was not the kind of woman who gave her heart recklessly, but Charlie was becoming more than a fling. On the other hand, from the very beginning her instincts had warned her that she should make an effort to protect her heart when it came to him. He had a classic case of self-loathing. L.A. was full of men who were plagued by the same disorder. She had been involved with a number of them before she decided to avoid them like the Ebola virus. But Charlie was slightly different than the norm. He had all the components to heal himself. All he had to do was realize that he was already good enough. But she wasn’t the kind of woman who forced thirsty horses to drink the water—as if she could anyway. After all, she had her own baggage to shrug off her back. However, it still stung to think that he was probably having sex with her while thinking about her sister the entire time. She was nobody’s second best.
 

“Excuse me,” she said, at the end of her coughing fit. “I just got sleepy all of a sudden. I have to go. Don’t worry about the dishes or the food, I’ll clean up in the morning.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Belmont said, studying her inquisitively.

Daisy stood up. “Angelina, are you okay?”

“Yes,” she said in an overly cheerful tone. “Everything’s just hitting me at once. I haven’t slept in a while.”

Angelina was usually an early riser, but she woke up late on Monday morning. Daisy brought her breakfast and sat with her as she ate.

“You made this?” she asked.

“I used to cook before Belmont came along.”

Angelina put a helping of scrambled eggs in her mouth. “Mm,” she said, impressed.

“I still got it.” Daisy winked.
 

They smiled at each other and Daisy looked as though she had something on her mind, so Angelina asked, “Is there something you want to say?”

Daisy patted the mattress. “Do you plan on getting out of this bed any time soon?”

Angelina stretched and yawned. “I may have run out of gas.”

“Did we say something about Charlie that upset you?”