Til the Real Thing Comes Along (20 page)

F
or the first time in twenty years, Rand Malcolm didn’t go to work. He showered, dressed, then sat in the living room of his
home, alternately looking at the portrait of Lily that hung above the mantel and at the hastily written letter he held in
his hand.

My dearest Mal,

I couldn’t face you to tell you this, so instead I just left. Forgive my cowardice and please forgive a lie I told you six
years ago that I can no longer live with. I have to have my career back, Mal. I miss the hard work of making a movie, the
thrill of escaping into another character’s skin, the importance of being Lily Daniels the actress. I tried, Mal, but as much
as I love you, being a wife just wasn’t enough for me, and pretending it was has been a terrible mistake for both of us. And
being an actress, giving it the kind of dedication I need to give it, means to me that I can no longer be your wife.

I hope some day you’ll forgive me for this, and understand. I am going today to Julian to ask him to sign me and give me another
chance. I’ve heard about a script that’s perfect for me, so maybe I can convince him that a comeback would be worthwhile.

Thank you, Mal, for six wonderful years. Please let’s proceed with our parting without malice.

Lily

All his life he’d prided himself on having perfect instincts about people. Even from a distance. Like when he met Lily at
San Simeon and again when he saw her on the screen. There had been such an enormous honesty about her work as an actress,
he was certain that Lily Daniels the woman had to be just that honest. Well, this time he’d really missed the boat. Amazing.
Lily leaving him. His own Lily wanting to go back to an acting career. And she had seemed so happy. Loved the travel. Loved
the luxury of work-free days when she could drive her convertible to Culver City, pick up her mother, and take her to the
beach for lunch. More than all of that, loved him. But not enough, and now she was gone. Why? Why in the hell would she go?

Lily sat in the guest parking spot at Hemisphere Studios hating what she was about to do. Her head was still pounding with
her mother’s admonishments from this morning. She was a foolish ungrateful girl and leaving that man was the dumbest thing
anyone ever did and…

“Lily, is it really you?”

Jackie Welles looked tan and fit, and flashed her what he used to tell her, when visitors came on the set, was his “fan smile.”

“God damn it’s good to see you. What in the hell are you doing slumming around here?”

“Jack,” Lily said, getting out of the car to give him a hug. All those pictures together, and yet when she looked at him,
hugged him, he felt like a complete stranger to her, and the memory of all their work together seemed like a dream she could
only vaguely remember.

“I’ve come to see Julian,” she said. “I don’t have an appointment. I guess I was afraid if I called and asked him to see me
he’d refuse. He wasn’t exactly happy with me when I left six years ago. But…”

“Well, truth be known, dollface, neither was I. You practically blew my whole career right into the crapper,” Jackie said,
still smiling, his capped teeth catching the noonday sun. ‘I mean, I’m surviving nicely without you, but—”

“Do you think he’ll take me back, Jackie?” Lily asked, and
she
had to turn her face away as if she were looking
around the lot, because she was afraid she would cry if she didn’t. My God, she thought. I’m about to go in and beg for the
last thing on earth I want.

“You mean that’s what you’re here for?” Jack Welles asked. “Kiddo, if you mean it I’m the happiest man in the world. I can
take that place at the beach I’ve been longing for, and get rid of Lulu! She’s been a goddamned albatross lately, and I met
a girl last month—”

“I’d better go inside before Julian goes to lunch,” Lily said.

“Lil,” Jackie said to her, putting his hands on her shoulders and looking beseechingly into her eyes, the way he had done
in
The Sheriff’s Daughter
when he was begging her to run away with him. “Let me come in with you. Raymond loves me. I can help your case. I mean, just
seeing the two of us together again, his little gold mine. That could help your case.”

“No, Jack,” she said. “I’d better go alone.”

He took his hands from her shoulders and gave her a little pat on the cheek. And then, as she walked toward the building that
housed Julian Raymond’s office, Jackie’s final words caught her and made her turn and give him one last look of pain.

“Marriage not working, huh?” he asked.

She turned back and kept walking. Julian Raymond’s secretary Stella, who had always oohed and ahhed and gushed all over Lily,
nodded coolly in greeting and said she would see if Mr. Raymond was in. Lily bit the inside of her cheek. To begin with, if
he
wasn’t
in, Stella would certainly know it, and Lily had seen his car outside, so of course he was.…

Stella returned quickly after a moment in Julian Raymond’s office and told Lily: “Have a seat, and he’ll get to you as soon
as he can,” in a voice that sounded as if she wanted to add, “even though I don’t know why he would.”

Nervously, Lily thumbed through some magazines. Her stomach ached. Colleen had tried to get her to eat breakfast before she
left the house this morning, but Lily had been too queasy. Too afraid, because she knew what she had to do as soon as she
unpacked the few things she brought with her to her mother’s, Get Raymond to take her back. Under contract. That way she could
make a dean break with Mal. Not have to take one cent from him. Be independent and
let him leave the marriage with everything that was his. Mal. Oh, please, she didn’t want to think about how much she loved
him or she would fall apart. Lose her resolve, and she mustn’t. This was right. She was barren. Incapable of conceiving. Could
never give him what, because she loved him more than anything, she knew he must have. Blood relatives. Offspring. An orphan,
left by an unwed mother at birth, never knowing one blood relative of his own, Mal had to have a child that was his.

When she thought about her own mother and how close they were, and her angelic father and how much he’d meant to her, and
even her brothers who bragged to their friends about “my sis the star,” and knew that Mal would never feel the power of that
kind of connection because of her, it broke her heart. Soon, when Mal realized that she was serious, wasn’t ever coming back
to him, he would divorce her and eventually remarry, someone who could have children, and that would be the best thing. For
him. Because she loved him she had to leave him.

“Good day, Lily,” Julian Raymond said, in what sounded like the same voice in which he had said those same words to her six
years before. She dropped the magazine and stood.

“Mr. Raymond.”

“Please come in.”

Julian Raymond’s office looked exactly as it had on the day Lily had come to tell him she was leaving, and for a minute she
had the eerie feeling that her life with Mal hadn’t existed in reality at all but instead was just another role she’d played
on the screen. Raymond was barely in his chair when Lily spoke.

“I want to come back to Hemisphere,” she began, hating the childish sound of her own voice. “I know I made you angry when
I left and I’m sorry for that. I was swept off my feet and couldn’t help myself, and I know I acted irresponsibly toward you
and the studio… but I think that it hasn’t been so long that the moviegoers have forgotten me, especially the pictures I made
with Jack, and if you’ll forgive me and sign me again I’ll—”

“Let me stop you,” Raymond said. “Is Malcolm’s business failing? Did you find him with another woman? What’s really going
on here, Lily? Try and keep in mind that you’re talking to someone who knows you very well. And knows
you’re not here because of your concern over the moviegoers’ loss. So before I tell you that I welcome you back—which of course
I will because I need the money—tell me the goddamned truth.”

“Mal and I are going to get a divorce,” Lily said, shuddering at the sound of her own words.

There was a pause until Raymond spoke again. “His loss, my gain,” he said. “I’ll have the contracts ready by Wednesday at
noon. For another seven years. Where are you living now?”

“At my mother’s,” Lily answered.

“Fine. I’ll send a few scripts over for you to look at this afternoon.”

“You won’t be sorry,” Lily said. But I will, she thought, and she nodded a kind of humble nod to Raymond, who didn’t stand
as she walked to the door and left.

“He’s called every hour for the last three, and finally some guy who works for him dropped off this envelope for you,” Colleen
said.

Mal. He was looking for her. How Lily longed to run to him, burst into his office and tell him it was a joke, a lie, a crazy
stupid idea she’d thought of in the middle of the night but now wanted to forget about. Instead she got undressed and slid
under the covers of the bed in her old bedroom. The bed where she had spent so many nights dreaming and praying to meet a
man like Mal. And now she was giving him up. She opened the envelope slowly. Maybe the letter would say “I know you left because
you can’t have children but I don’t care about that anymore, because I don’t really want children anyway. I only want you.
Forever.” But it didn’t. It said,

Lily,

I understand. And I guess you have to do what you have to do.

Mal

For the next few days Lily left the bed in Colleen’s house only to come downstairs and eat, or to take an occasional shower,
or to come out to the front porch and
say hello to her brothers when they came by to visit Colleen. Mostly, she stayed in her old room and read the scripts Raymond
had sent over. She didn’t know or care if they were any good; she only knew that Mal wasn’t calling to try to change her mind,
and that she had this horrible queasiness she couldn’t shake which she knew was fear. Fear that she couldn’t pull this off.
Fear that once she signed the contract she wouldn’t even remember what to do in front of a camera. Fear that she would hurt
so much, trying to live without Mal, that soon she wouldn’t care about life at all.

“Gonna make yourself sick,” Colleen said, entering Lily’s room on Thursday morning.

“Am sick,” was all Lily could get out before she had to throw the blanket off and run for the bathroom.

Friday morning she could hardly move from her bed to the shower, but she had to. Had to wash her hair, had to look good. Julian
Raymond had told her on the phone the day before that the entire board of directors of Hemisphere would be at the meeting
to welcome her back. She could hear in his voice that he had forgiven her, and he told her that everyone at the studio was
delighted about her return, and that he was being treated like the hero who had made it happen. Had to get out of bed. Had
to look good. Dear God, she was so sick.

“You’re going to see the doctor,” Colleen said as her daughter stepped out of the shower. “You look like a corpse.”

“Can’t. Meeting.” Lily said, drying her hair with a towel. “I have no time for a doctor.” She sighed as she caught sight of
herself, emaciated and awful, in the bathroom mirror. All for losing Mal, her beloved Mal. She wouldn’t blame the Hemisphere
people if they laughed when they saw her and ripped the contract into pieces.

“Fortunately the doctor
does
have time for you,” Colleen said, and as soon as Lily had slipped her robe on, Colleen opened the bathroom door and there
stood Alvin Brockman, the family doctor. Holding his black bag and smiling his gentle smile at Lily, just as he had when she’d
had tonsillitis and the mumps so long ago.

“How a be?” Dr. Brockman asked, the way he did to all his patients.

“I’m fine,” Lily lied. “My mother’s an alarmist. There’s not one thing wrong with me, Doc,” she said, and then her
body went limp and she kind of folded in the middle and fell into a heap on the floor.

The doctor knelt, lifted Lily, and carried her to her bed to examine her.

Rand Malcolm’s limousine pulled up on the tarmac at the Santa Monica airport. Fred Samuels got out first. The company plane,
The Lily,
was ready for takeoff. They would be in Chicago by nightfall, then a brief business dinner and back to the penthouse to rest
for the board meeting tomorrow. Rand still sat pensively in the back of the car, as though he didn’t realize that they had
arrived at the airport. This was how he’d been behaving for the last few weeks, since Lily’s departure. Samuels couldn’t believe
it. He’d known this man for twenty years. Watched him build a multimillion-dollar business, face down the giants of industry,
never ever make a business deal that wasn’t startlingly to his own advantage, and here he was, devastated by the loss of this
woman. Granted, Lily had been a lovely charming girl but…

“Boss?” Samuels said.

“Mmm.” Rand Malcolm looked out. “Oh. Right.” Still distracted, he got out of the car, walked out on the tarmac and up the
steps and into the airplane. Samuels made a few jokes as they sat in the cockpit about not being sure if he wanted to put
his life in the hands of a guy who didn’t even know they had arrived at the airport, but Rand Malcolm didn’t smile, just took
off the jacket of his suit, put on his headset, and began checking his instruments. He was very absorbed with the instrument
panel and later, when he thought about it, wasn’t even sure what it was that made him look out the window, to see the blue
convertible come tearing around the corner, pull aggressively into the airport gates, and race toward the plane, where it
came to a screeching halt. Its driver emerged.

Lily. The airport winds were blowing her bright-red hair wildly around her head, and the skirt of her pretty print dress blew
against her legs. Those legs. Rand stood and moved to the heavy door, released the steps, and ran down them to her. Her face
was pale and gaunt, and he saw a wildness in her eyes that unnerved him. She didn’t say a
word, just threw her arms around his neck and held on tight. Sobbing. Weeping. Pulling him tighter and tighter to her. What
was wrong? What could have happened? Maybe her mother had died, or one of her brothers. Maybe
she
was the one who was ill. My God, she looked awful.