The Movie (16 page)

‘My God, it’s Captain Caveman,’ Eleanor said. ‘And I bet you ate at home, too.’

Tom shrugged defensively, grinning. ‘I work out. Sometimes.’ He reached forward and wiped gently across her chee removing a small oozing trickle ofjelly that was slowly running down her chin, licking his thumb clean. ‘President of a movie studio, and she has no doughnut eating technique at all. I find that very sad.’

‘Talking of which’ - Eleanor put down the rest of her doughnut and patted her script - Tve got something you should see.’

‘We can talk business later. It’s only eight o’clock, you’ll have all day for chat,’ Goldman said, impatiently. ‘When do we ever get a chance to talk? Tell me how you are.’

Eleanor shifted on her seat. She was almost embarrassed. Her feelings for Tom were long recognized and admitted, filed neatly away under ‘might have been’. But that didn’t stop the private joy that ran through her during their early morning moments together, when she was alone with him before any of the assistants arrived. And, she was dismayed to find, it didn’t stop the wild arousal that had swum hot and squirming into her belly when his hand touched her cheek. She’d wanted to press it into his palm, to turn her. lips to his wrist and cover it with hot kisses, to take that

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thumb into her own mouth and lick and suck it dean. From that one faindy erotic touch she was wet. There was more sensuality in Tom brushingj elly from her cheek than there was in the whole of the sexual act that she performed with Paul every morning.

The morning session with Tom was enjoyable and innocent precisely because they never did or said anything of consequence, unless it was business. But now he was looking her straight in the eyes and asking her how she was!

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Are you?’ Tom asked softly. ‘How’s life at home? How are you getting on with Paul?’

Words trembled on her lips. ‘Just great.’ ‘Terrific, thank

‘ you.’ ‘Oh, he’s incredible.’ All the safe, stock answers she came out with every day. They were the solid couple. R, ock steady, the way LA royalty should be; the studio head and the investment banker, William III and Mary II, joint sovereigns. Monogamous and neatly paired off. Very nineties.

But somehow, sitting here looking at Tom Goldman, she found it hard to say. She flashed back to the scene today. The first light of dawn creeping through the fragrant darkness of their garden, the scent of hibiscus and jasmine in the cold morning air, the way it always was when they woke at 5 a.m. to the strains of whatever soft classical music he’d programmed into the CD the night before - Bach or Mozart. And then Paul would reach for her. No preliminaries, he would just reach for her, as much a part of his early-morning routine as the jog at half-five, or the orange juice and mineral water at six.

Only this morning she’d turned away.

‘Come on, what’s the matter?’ he’d asked sleepily,

nuzzling against her shoulder. ‘Don’t want to?’

Tmjust tired.’

But the truth was she didn’t want to: Not right now. Not

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after going to sleep on See the I’ghts, with all that raw passion and obsessive love. She’d dreamed about Tom, and just for today, just for this morning in the gentle half-light, something in her skin rebelled at the thought of Paul touching her.

‘You’re never tired.’

She hated that tone - it was accusatory, whining. ‘You just forgot to put your diaphragm in last night.’ Eleanor started to deny it. ‘No I didn’t, Paul, I ‘

‘I don’t see why I can’t make love to you without it. I don’t see why you always have to insist on using that damn thing.’ He was angry and cold now. Thankfially, she felt his erection shrivelling against her thigh. ‘You say yoh want kids, but you know it’s getting hter and later. I don’t see why we can’t get married.’

‘We’ve had this discussion before,’ Eleanor said, feeling her defenges fly up. She hated, utterly hated, to talk about this. She didn’t want to acknowledge it or see it, didn’t want to confront it. ‘This just isn’t the right time.’

‘When will it be the right time? When you’re fifty, and we have to adopt?’

Paul threw back the covers and stood up to dress, his long, lean body blackly silhouetted against the weak dawn light from the sash windows. Eleanor could see anger in

the whole way he carried himself, in the set of his muscles. ‘Will you marry me?’

It was a demand, not a request.

She tensed. ‘Not yet.’

‘I won’t wait forever, Eleantr,’ he warned her as he walked towards the bathroom. ‘I want kids.’

Oh, so do I, she’d thought as she lay there, Irish cotton sheets clutched protectively around her. So do I.

Children. A baby, maybe two or three, little infants with their wide eyes and tiny hands and all the love and fears that they couldn’t even articulate. She had always wanted children, in that confident way that young beautiful

women have, sure that life will serial them the husband they desire and deserve, happy to trust in their wombs, unhurried and unpressured. ‘Kids some day.’

She couldn’t now mark out, couldn’t recall, the exact moment that the first flush of youth had left her, the precise period of months when she’d started to get concerned and anxious. Maybe it combined with the period when it had dawned on her that Tom Goldman was never going to take his flirtation any further, when one girlfriend replaced another, and suddenly all the girlfriends were five, seven, ten years younger than her. Teenagers and twenty-twoyear-olds. That was when she’d accepted the best, most eligible of the bachelors who swarmed around her, fetched her drinks at charity bails and monopolized her at Isabelle Kendrick dinners. Paul Halfm had then been thirty-nine, handsome, rich, educated, champing. He was fun to talk to, if you didn’t want anything too wild. Knew everything there was to know about Shakespeare and Vivaldi, and his firm was pretty hot, had been involved in a couple of high-profile entertainment deals just that year. Eleanor was thirty-two. They were two ‘beautiful people’. They would be a power couple, Bill and Hillary on the way up their separate ladders.

Eleanor thought Paul was cute. She moved in with him. The relief had been amazing, so much so that it revealed to her as though for the first time how pressured she’d felt being single. For the ft time, she had nothing to prove in social situations. Executive wives thawed perceptibly to her. She always had someone to take her to Artemis premieres, and a wonderful, enviable escort for company dinners. For the first few months together they had teetered on the brink of marriage, which, inevitably, would have led to children. An ideal Beverly Hills family. She couldn’t do it.

That was what stopped her. Children, the thing she’d

dreamed of since she was a child herself, tucking her doll into its cot, nursing teddies through their various exotic ailments. She’d been an only child of elderly parents, and she’d always imagined herself as a beautiful young mother with a gaggle of babies. When she got older and started to dwell on it, the precious wonder of human life, she simply couldn’t understand how so many people treated their children so lightly, divorcing without the slightest effort at patching it up for the kids’ sake, or starving them of affection. She couldn’t believe all those deadbeat fathers that snuck away from mothers they no longer desired, frightened of responsibility or scared of another mouth to feed. God, weren’t they even curious? A baby was such a miracle, it was their descendant, their link to the future, their line spanning down the generations. Did they never see it like that, those men? Eleanor wondered. Did they never look’at their babies and see their own eyes staring up at them, the future small and soft in their arms when they hid it in the crib at fright? To create life, together, was that not the ultimate bond two people could have?

And in her own mind, when she thought of her child, flesh of her flesh and blood of her blood, she could not see it with Paul’s eyes, his nose, his chin.

When she saw the features of the father of her child, she imagined Tom Goldman’s eyes, staring back at her.

Of course that was quite ridiculous. Tom felt nothing for her. He had this string of interchangeable nubilebabes, he was her boss and her friend. So she’d had a crush on him once, so what?

It was the advent of Jordan Caboi that finally drove Eleanor to admit what she was feehng. Jordan, who’d arrived in LA from San Francisco eighteen months ago, the blonde scion of a rich, gentile family, just another stupid bimbo looking to hook a Hollywood executive. By tim time, of course, Tom was chairman of Artemis and the biggest catch in town. Jordan, possibly, had simply lucked

out by being the right girl at the right time, coming along when Tom was newly promoted and pleased with himself and his life. And let’s face it, in a town full of pneumatic flaxen-haired curies, Jordan Cabot was something else. A perfect hourglass figure combined with a truly-pretty face of the All-American type. Great skin, white teeth, athletic muscle tone, and a mere twenty-three years old. But even that n-light not have been enough to get a ring on Tom’s finger, as chary of tying himself down as Eleanor knew he was. What had finally swung it for Jordan was her ability in bed. Whatever skills she’d perfected, Tom was addicted to them. This Eleanor knew because he’d told her, buddy to buddy. He wasn’t coarse about it; he would just come into her oftice and marvel at how incredible, how alive, how

‘ young Jordan made him feel. Said he could never get enough. Could never get tired of it. Soon, Eleanor had to knock on his office door instead ofjust walking in like she used to, for fear ofinterrupring one of his heavy phonesex sessiors.

Torn became obsessed. He said Jordan made him feel lille a teenager again.

Eleanor began to have nightmares, dreaming of Jordan, young, flawless, perfect, contorting her body in wild ways which she, Eleanor, could not even begin to imagine.

Three months after he’d met her they were engaged. A month later they were married. And when Tom, two months into their marriage, confided in Eleanor that he wished Jordan would get pregnant, that children were the one remaining consuming desire of his life, she was forced into recognizing the great tragedy of her own life.

She loved Tom Goldman, loved him desperately. It was the explanation for the searing, ravaging pain that swept through her as she listened to him. And she wanted no man but Tom to be the father of her children.

It was never going to be. She knew that, accepted it as the clear truth. If she, Eleanor Marshall, wanted, to be a

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mother, she was going to have to find a different set of genes to mix with. Moreover, she was going to have to find them pretty soon. She was thirty-eight. And if not Paul, who else? If she left Paul, would that do her any good? Whoever else she hooked up with, they wouldn’t be Tom either.-So shouldn’t she avoid making the perfect the enemy of the good? When there was no guarantee that she was ever going to fred anything better? And the feeling of desperation, of endless longing for that child waiting so impatiently to be born, was beginning to swamp her. Sometimes seeing little children with their mothers in the mall would make her cry. She’d started to dream about babies, torturingly realistic dreams, where she could smell the milky, sleepy smell of their velvety skin, see every tiny finger curl with its miniature fingernail, notice how their fragile lashes seemed too long for those minute eyelids.

And Pal was pressing her to marry him, to conceive. So far, for three months she’d been stalling.

This morning, Eleanor had felt all the walls starting to close in. She’d have to decide. And she had no idea what to do.

Eleanor gazed up at Tom, leaning over her, staring at her with his odd intensity. ‘You want the truth? Things aren’t so hot.’

‘Work pressure?’

He was probing her now. For a moment Eleanor sensed he didn’t want her to answer yes, that he wanted to hear something more personal.

She thought about saying that Paul was swamped over at Albert, Halfin, Weissman.

‘Paul wants me to marry him. I guess I’m not sure if I’m ready,’ she said. ‘And you? How are things with Jordan?’

‘Not so hot.’ Tom smiled ruefully at her, but then looked away. ‘I probably didn’t realize what the age difference would mean.’

‘Nothing serious, though?’ God, look at me, Eleanor

thought, mad at herselE. All I do is reach out to comfort him. Why don’t I do something about it?

‘No. I’m sure it’ll all work itself out. Especially when we get pregnant.’

She nodded, trying to stifle her disappointment. Not to mention that horrible ironic stab - ‘when we get pregnant’. Tom was bunting to be a father, then. He longed to beget children. But not with her.

‘But I gotta tell you, sometimes it’s really hard. Talking to her, I mean. It’s not’ - she could see him struggle with his words, wanting to tell her his problem, trying to avoid. criticizin.g his wife - ‘not like it is with you. She’s not interested in -‘

She’s not interested in anything. Except sodal climbing, ‘ designer dresses, and making thegossilo columns, Tom thought. He’d thought that he could never get fired of sex with Jordan. And he wasn’t. But he was wondering if he’d tired of everything else.

He heard his own voice trailing away. He couldn’t admit it, not even to Eleanor, as well as they knew each other. In fact, especially not to Eleanor. Not as she sat there in that deep blue suit, radiating intelligence and sensuality. Flirting with her had been a constant as long as he’d known her, but lately the flirtation seemed to have taken on a new edge. He had always desired her, but his respect for their friendship, his wariness of professional misconduct, and his terror of-what? Ofleing tied down? Of sex that wasn’t the type you could walk away from? Well, his terror of that nameless connection, all those things had kept him from making his move. Desire was joyous and clean. Desire you could control. And he had, in the end, married a girl who could satisfy his desire with the skill of a virtuoso.

Jordan. She was far more attractive than Eleanor, surely. And fourteen years younger. So why was lust curling around his crotch? Why had he