Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (32 page)

The thought was an idle one at first, then took shape.

All summer Doug had seemed low-key and funny, never demanding, never insisting. He had been moving about a world where there was little at stake; he masked his considerable strength so that it was noticed only by those who were watching. He had been even-tempered and friendly, redeemed from blandness only by his wit. His style was effortless and one of ease.

But style wasn't substance. Not until he joined her in her bed did Jill realize that. He was an athlete. He knew how to become a completely physical being, moving in an intensely physical world, where instinct and experience blended into total, focused, driving commitment.

Basketball was an intense sport, played by men of great endurance and uneasing concentration. Basketball was not a game for the laid-back. It was a game for the fast, the sweaty. It was dig in and try harder. And now, all that drive to win, the determination and intensity of a winning coach, had just been directed onto her graceful, grateful body.

She had to wonder what he did with that ambition and intensity the rest of the time. He had certainly managed to hide them from her. But surely this was the most important thing about him. Doug Ringling was not just a man who resembled a character in a movie. He was a man who played basketball.

CHAPTER 13

The strip of sunlight grew longer, and Jill grew drowsier. Her thoughts about Doug had not been enough to shock her into wakefulness. She might have missed a few things about him, but he was still Doug. As long as they were careful, as long as they didn't take any shortcuts, everything would be all right. She curled up closer to him.

He spoke. "How do you think people will have sex in space?"

"What?"
That woke her up.

"If you don't have gravity, how are you going to stay together? Can you imagine, you're holding someone, you're all ready, and she just floats away?"

"I don't know... you could use bungee cords. What on earth made you think of that?"

"Bungee cords? What an interesting idea. Boing, boing." Doug bounced his hands together imitating the action of a shock cord. "You know, that might be a lot of fun."

She stared at him.

Doug dropped his hands, pulling her close to him. "I was just thinking about how spatial some of the metaphors for great sex are—the earth moving, rockets shooting, all that—and somehow I ended up wondering about sex in space."

"Were you thinking about those metaphors for great sex because you were about to say something?"

"No," he said bluntly. "I figure if you've got to ask a woman how it was for her, the answer's probably 'right lousy.' "

Jill agreed with him on that one. "You know, for someone who talks as much as you do, you seem to let your body do the important communicating."

"Are you one of these women"—his eyes narrowed in mock suspicion—"who think that just because she goes to bed with a fellow, she has the right to analyze him to death?"

"Yes."

"That's okay," he said philosophically. "My sisters don't have that excuse and they do it all the time anyway. I'm used to it."

Jill smiled and started to trace a little pattern on his chest.

He dropped his chin and watched her finger intently, as if nothing else mattered but—

"Goddamnit." He sat up so abruptly that Jill lost her balance. "I don't believe it." He clapped a hand over his eyes. "I don't bloody believe it."

"What is it?" Jill sat up, the rats' feet suddenly stirring up the anxious ashes in the pit of her stomach. "What happened? What's wrong?"

Unmentioned diseases, forgotten marriages—no, no, she knew him, she trusted him. It wasn't any of that.

"I can't believe how stupid I am." He banged his head against the wall, disgusted with himself. "I left my ball at the school. It's my favorite one. I've had it for years, and I've never left it anywhere. I can't believe it." He sighed and leaned back against the headboard. "Oh, well, maybe it will be there in the morning."

Jill relaxed. How sweet and funny he was. All he wanted to do on earth was fling himself out of bed and go rescue his beloved basketball, but he had manners, he wasn't going to do it.

"Stop feeling sorry for yourself, boyo," she told him, tossing the sheet off. "Let's go get it."

They dressed hurriedly and trundled themselves in the car. As Doug ground the ignition, he leaned across the car and kissed her on the forehead. "You are a grand sort, Jill. Woman enough to make a man forget his basketball, mensch enough to let him go get it. I think I like you."

And mensch enough not to mind when you get busy during basketball season; traveler enough to go to away games and on recruiting trips; and self-reliant enough not to mind being left behind; rich enough so you wouldn't have to do radio shows and run summer camps.

Except that wasn't his life anymore. What was the point in being exactly the right woman for who he was a year ago?

A couple of ten-year-olds were playing soccer with Doug's beloved basketball, but they relinquished it obediently. Doug restored it to the trunk of his car, then took Jill out for as proper a dinner as could be had by people who weren't wearing all their underwear.

He shook out his napkin. "Now brace yourself, I'm about to motivate the pants off you."

"You've already done that."

He blinked. "Oh... I guess I have. I was just speaking figuratively."

"So what do you want?"

"No, no, no. We can't be that direct. We have to point the way"—his hands carved out a little road in the air— "so you see the conclusion yourself before we say it. That way—"

"What do you want?"

He made a face at her, but answered. "For you to check out of that hideous motel and move into the house, which, although equally hideous, is at least your own property."

"I'd love to."

He blinked again. "Wait a minute... you're being too easy. I used to be good at this."

"At what? Getting women to move in with you?"

"At motivation. Of course, my dad's a million times better than I'll ever be, but—"

"You'd be good at selling cars. I'd buy one from you."

"I know. But if you'd buy one from me, you'd buy two from him."

"So why aren't you selling cars?"

"Beats me. Have you ever been to bed with someone who's at such loose ends?"

"Not with anyone who's so proud of it, no."

They spent the rest of dinner wondering how dinosaurs had had sex. Then they went to pack Jill's things, arriving at the motel just in time to grab the phone.

"Jill, darling, it's Jacob."

Jake Steinherd was the photographer Jill had sent Bix's film to. "Did you get the film?" she asked eagerly, waving Doug to sit down on the bed. "Did you have a chance to look at it?"

"It arrived on Friday, and I put it back in the mail on Saturday."

"Oh, Jake, you're an angel. So there were some pictures?"

"There were eight of them. The first seven were of a party. We all guessed that it was the wrap party for that old movie
Weary Hearts."

"It was on the movie's set," Jake continued, "and a couple of the actors were still in costume. That's how— and I have to admit that it wasn't me—one of my assistants recognized everything. The last picture is of a man and a woman sitting at a table. We think the woman is Mary Deas, or whatever the actress's name is, but we don't recognize the man."

Knowing Jill as he did, Jake had assumed that she was not traveling with a portable fax machine and so was Fed-Exing the pictures to the Best Western. Jill checked out, instructing the front desk to call her the moment the package arrived, and, sure enough, the desk clerk called Monday morning at ten-thirty, and by eleven she and Doug were sitting on the curb of the parking lot, ripping open the mailer.

The pictures were indeed of a party on the set for the Briar Ridge dining room. Everyone was eating cake and drinking champagne; costumed actors were mingling with people in street clothes. Alicia and Charles were in costume. Mosby's gaunt-eyed rider, the man who played Stonewall, and Preston Havelock, the actor who played Pompey, were in street clothes; they had apparently turned up for the party. The director, Oliver McClay, was clad in a coat and tie; assorted crew members were less neatly dressed. Of the seven pictures, only two had Bix in them, suggesting that he had taken the others.

Charles looked the best—thin, but calm, proud and glad to be done. Alicia and Oliver McClay looked exhausted. In the two shots of Bix there seemed to be a wariness about him, which could have been either a holdover from his character or a dislike of having other people monkeying with his very expensive camera.

Then Jill flipped to last picture. As Jake had said, it wasn't the party at all, but Alicia and—

"Good God, it's my father."

Alicia and Cass were sitting outdoors at a table covered by papers. Alicia, as lovely as in the studio's posed stills, was wearing a print sundress, a little caplet falling over her shoulders. She was sitting forward, looking at the camera, a pen in her hand. Cass, his collar open, was lounging back, a cigarette in one hand. There was another chair between them; that must have been Bix's chair. Jill looked at clutter on the table, the glasses, the ashtrays, the papers. Jake had made eight-by-twelve prints, enough of an enlargement to see things that looked like bound scripts.

Jill would have bet anything that those were scripts for
Weary Hearts.

She pointed them out to Doug. "That's what we're looking for. Those must be the missing scripts, the ones that were filmed in April."

Doug squinted, as if hoping to read what was written on the pages of the open scripts. It was an impossible task. "So you think they're working on the revisions?"

"Wouldn't you think so? It was after the April wrap party. They're sitting at a table covered with scripts. What else would the three of them be doing together?"

Cass was looking directly at the camera, an alert man taking a break from his absorbing work.
What were you
doing, Daddy? What did you write on those papers? Why didn't you leave me a clue?

But how could he have known that forty years later his daughter, the child of a woman he hadn't met yet, would want so desperately to know what he'd done to this movie?

Doug was speaking. "But I thought when your father took over, Bix was demoted to brainless actor. I didn't realize that they all worked on the revisions together.

That's what Jill had thought, too. Never in any discussion of the film had there been reference to Bix—to say nothing of Alicia—being involved in Cass's reworking of the story.

It was no longer clear to her what her father's revisions were; clearly the love story and the baby, for which he had received credit, had already been a part of Bix's story. But until this moment she had never questioned that whatever work had been done over those summer months, whether it had made the movie better or worse, had been done by Cass. Although only an editor at the time, he was a story man, capable of narrative creativity.

But her father was slow. There was still a certain English-professor quality to his mind. Ideas needed to germinate in his mind. He'd read a book, and for months, even years, think about how to adapt it to film.

The story of the revising of
Weary Hearts
was one of lightning speed. The filming ended in late April; the rough cut was probably available six weeks later. By August the cast was back on location, filming an entirely different story. Cass was capable of completely overhauling a narrative, but in weeks, days?

No.

Bix knew these characters; they had been his companions during imprisonment. He would know them well enough to refashion their story. He had already done it once, flattening his ideas into the cliches of the war-movie treatment found in the studio files. Perhaps he had done it again.

"I don't get it," Doug said. "Why was Bix working on  the changes? If they really were out to ruin his masterpiece, why help?"

"So he wasn't Howard Roark," Jill answered. "There's no sin in that."

"He wasn't who?"

Jill explained about the architect in Ayn Rand's novel
The Fountainhead
who had blown up his building rather than let it stand with other people's modifications. "Bix probably knew that the end result would be better if he helped. It was the sensible thing to do."

"I suppose." He didn't sound convinced, and Jill wasn't sure she was either. "I'd always figured he had written it off as a bad bet and had gone on to something else."

"That's what
you
would have done." This was not the first time Jill had noticed Doug assigning his own character traits to Bix.

"I guess... although I'm not doing so great in the something else department." Doug picked up the pictures again and started to flip through the ones of the party. "Who's that?" He pointed to the one black in the picture. "It's not Pompey, is it?"

"I think so." Preston Havelock, the actor who played Pompey, was not instantly recognizable. His character was much older than he was himself; he looked relaxed and refreshed, the only one of the principal actors who seemed to have had enough sleep, and he had a beard. He was probably growing it for some other part.

"Wait a minute." She snatched the picture from Doug. "How long would it take you to grow a beard like that?"

"Me? I don't think I ever could. Whenever I try, it's all straggly, and I look like something that comes out of the swamp with bad teeth, a jug of moonshine, and patched long johns."

"Be serious."

He looked at the picture again. "I don't know. Maybe two or three weeks."

Two or three weeks. There had been twelve more days of filming in California after the company returned from Virginia. Preston must have started growing his beard as soon as his location scenes had been complete.

But the wrap party was on the battle-scarred version of the dining room set. In the final version of the movie Pompey had appeared on this set.

So Pompey had not appeared in any of the final scenes in the secret script. Pompey and the pathetic horse, Blossom, had never been in the same shot on the journey home from Appomattox. It seemed likely that Pompey had not come home. "What do you want to bet," Jill said, "that in the first version Pompey died during the war?"