All That Glitters (78 page)

“Okay, that’s enough,” I blurted. I’d heard enough. “Why don’t you knock off all this dreary crap, anyway? In the first place, going back to our original discussion, I never said I didn’t like you. In the second place,
you’re
not bending over to help
anyone
, you never have and you never will. And if you think I enjoy listening to you bare your soul, you’re dead wrong! And while we’re on the subject, I may as well tell you—no, I
don’t
like you, god damn it, you’re not an easy person to like. I don’t even know what the hell I’m doing here, I don’t know why I’m doing this stupid book of yours—Oh, God damn it, it’s happening, I said it wouldn’t, I promised I wouldn’t let it, but it is, it’s happening—”

“What are you talking about?”

“I promised myself I wouldn’t get into one of these crazy scenes with you.”

“Then why don’t you just get the hell out? I’m fed up with you anyway!” She kicked aside an embroidered stool in her effort to get at me. “And while you’re at it, maybe you’ll tell me just who the hell you think you are, coming around here to my house and criticizing me. Well, I’ve heard all I’m going to, buster—I think you’re full of absolute shit!”

“Claire—”

“Naw—don’t give me that ‘Claire’ routine, I’m sick of it. You hear me, sick sick
sick
! I don’t need you! I don’t need anyone! And I don’t need your goddamn flowers stuck in these goddamn vases all over the goddamn place, either.” She hefted up a vase of the flowers I’d given her and sent it crashing on the hearth, the glass scattering, the water splattering across rugs and furniture. “
That’s
why I have plastic covers!” she crowed and folded her arms in triumph. I eyed the transparent slips that covered everything like the Mer de Glace.

“Thank God for plastic,” I muttered. “Where would she be without it?”

“You lousy bastard—I keep those covers on so that the goddamn upholstery won’t mildew!”

“The goddamn upholstery wouldn’t
dare
mildew.” I faced her in the middle of the room. “Look, damn it, I don’t need another of your scenes, so save it for someone who’ll appreciate it. If you want me out of here, fine, then I’m out of here. And don’t bother looking for me, because I won’t be back. But remember to ask your next publisher to send me a copy of your book—when it comes out.
If
it comes out.”

I grabbed up my briefcase and coat and headed for the door. I heard the heels of her mules on the parquet as she flew after me; then she grabbed my arm and yanked me around to her. “Wait a minute, buster,” she snarled, actually baring her teeth, “you’re not just going to get up and walk out of here—”

“I thought that was what you wanted me to do.”

“You’re damn right I do, but first I’ve got a couple of things to say to you.”

I tossed aside my things and dropped into the nearest chair, crossing a foot over my knee. “Okay, shoot.”

“I said don’t get smartass with me. You’re just like all the rest of them. I know you’re only using me. All your bunch wants is your pound of true confessions, then you’ll go marching out of here, making fun of me. Everybody seems to think I’m just some kind of big Hollywood joke they can go around laughing about behind my back. It’s that goddamn Viola. She’s the one who started this whole thing, saying I should write my memoirs, and that she could get you to do it for me. With a snap of her fingers!”

This was interesting news. “Is that what Viola said, really?”

“You’re fucking well told she did! And if she was here right now I’d tear that wig off her head, I’d scratch her eyes out! Some friend she is! And you just go tell her that—I never want to see her or hear from her again.”

She flung herself onto the Ambassador’s chaise, burst into tears, and grew so hysterical that I became alarmed and called for the maid.

No sooner had Ivarene appeared than Claire leaped up again and dashed across the room and through the door. As she went, the heel of her mule caught on the threshold and she pitched forward into the hallway. There was an ugly sound as she struck the floor and lay still. While Ivarene fetched water, I carried Claire to the bedroom. She was out cold; she didn’t stir when I laid her on the bed and tried to revive her. Not even cold water did the trick, and when I asked Ivarene what to do she hurried onto the terrace and called down to the apartment below.

“Mrs. Sadikichi, can the doctor come quickly? Miss Regrett has had a fall.”

In short order the doctor came hurrying through the front door with his little black bag. He examined Claire, then drew up a chair and waited. “Miss Regrett—Miss Regrett—can you hear me? Wake up, please. I am your friend of downstairs, Dr. Sadikichi. Wake up, please.” Meanwhile, Ivarene slipped in to me and said that she’d called the practitioner; Mrs. Conklin would be on her way in fifteen minutes.

Presently Claire’s lids fluttered and she revived. It was the old “Where am I? What happened?” routine. We explained that she’d had a fall, but no damage had been done. We didn’t mention that her grogginess was due to the shot the doctor had given her.

Later she was remorseful in the way I’d become familiar with. She’d done no damage to herself, or, I felt, to our relationship. With the passing of time I’d become more or less accustomed to these outbursts and was learning to take them in my stride.

Not long after these all-too-forgettable events, one day in early August when we’d been hard at it for some hours, Claire suggested that we go for a walk in the park. We’d had a lot of rain that summer; the park foliage was a deep country green, the day was warm and humid. Everywhere you looked there were crowds of shirtsleeved New Yorkers doing what New Yorkers do: sitting, walking, running; dogs, children, babies in shiny blue prams with fat white rubber tires. I could see that Claire was glad to be out-of-doors. We walked beside the lake, then crossed over the Bow Bridge toward the Conservatory Basin, where youngsters were sailing their toy craft in the breeze. We sat down on a newly painted bench, and she remained quiet, watching the merry children and the flashing sails as the rented boats sprang forward across the water. I kept wondering what the passing crowds would think if they realized that this was the famous Claire Regrett strolling among them, Star of You Know What, this shrunken, wrinkled woman. I thought of the Cora Sue Brodsky she’d once been, that skinny girl in a Dutchboy bob nursing rusty cans of geraniums on a fire escape where the wash hung on the line. Great oaks from little acorns grow; great stars from little salesgirls, too. Mentally I covered that long stretch of ground since she’d tossed up her job to “go on the stage,” when she met her fate in the person of the cigar-chomping Sam Ueberroth, who’d set her feet on the path to fame and glory.

Today she was subdued in a way I couldn’t recall having seen before. I knew she’d been talking a lot recently with Mrs. Conklin about Christian Science, and though she never discussed these sessions with me, holding them private above all things, I suspected that she was giving way to fits of depression. Recently she’d been neglecting her usual household schedule, and she often became bored with talking into my recorder. The cassettes had piled up on my desk, but I sometimes found myself wondering if the candle was worth the game, if there would ever be a book.

One thing I’d been noticing lately was a definite softening of attitudes; she didn’t seem so quick to rush to judgment, not so free with her gibes and criticisms. Though the reasons for this weathervane swing escaped me, I believed it a good idea to make the most of it, for who knew when things might veer, the climate alter again?

For two or three minutes the silence between us continued; then she sighed and finally spoke. “You can quit, if you want,” she murmured, as if such a thought had just floated into her head. “You don’t have to go on. I don’t care, honestly. And as far as the letters go, all that Crispin stuff—I wouldn’t have done it, you know.”

“Done what?” I asked.

“Blown the whistle on you, sold you out, you, Maude, Belinda. I just said that so you’d agree to work with me. You knew that.”

No, I said, I hadn’t known. If I had, I probably wouldn’t have started. She laughed at that; it amused her to think how she’d hooked me with her threats. “I’m not that much of a bitch,” she said. “So you can relax. Belinda, too. I had to laugh, seeing how uptight she was, the time she came to the apartment. As if I was going to give away the gag then and there.”

I said I’d been aware of the tension, that day and later at the party, but it was all water over the dam now. “Anyway, you don’t really want to quit, do you? You shouldn’t, you know. We should keep on. There’s a lot of good stuff there.”

Ironic, my encouraging her to keep on with her book. She gave me a quick glance to see if I meant what I said; satisfied that I did, she touched my arm. “We’ll see, we’ll see”—the eternal mother’s reply to her child.

Together we watched the sun drop behind the twin apartment towers where she lived, the only towers on the West Side that lighted up at night, like two lighthouses high above Fortress Regrett. After a while we got up and started back. I took her arm, but instead of crossing the Bow Bridge again, we continued on to the corner of Seventy-second Street, past the rustic arbor where the purple and white wisteria bloomed in the springtime.

The traffic signal was against us and we stopped close to where four or five West Side ladies sat talking on a bench, like so many sacks of potatoes. The light turned green, and as we prepared to cross one woman spoke up loudly.

“Look who it is—can you believe it? Claire—Claire Regrett. Such a sight.” I felt Claire stiffen at my side; her arm began to shake; then she pulled away from me. I watched her shove her way past the people in front of her and dash headlong off the curb and into the street. I shouted a warning: there was a taxi heading straight toward her. The driver’s eyes bugged as she dashed into his path. Honking his horn, he jammed on his brakes with a squeal of rubber; he spun his wheel hard, but he hit her all the same, knocking her to the ground. I shouted and elbowed my way past the onlookers at the curb, passing the hood of the taxi, which had run up on the sidewalk and collided with a trash container, pushing my way through the crowd that had already gathered around the fallen figure of Claire, who lay on her side, outstretched, her face looking up, a dazed, pained expression in her eyes.

I tried to help her up but I could see she’d been hurt. I pulled off my jacket and laid it over her, then knelt down and held her head in my lap until the ambulance came. Another woman offered her long coat and I accepted it.

“Oh gosh,” she murmured, “it’s Claire Regrett.”

“Claire Regrett… Claire Regrett… Claire Regrett…” The name buzzed about the circle of curious faces gaping at the sight of a famous movie star felled in the street. “Is she drunk?” a man wondered aloud.

Claire jerked him a look of molten fury. “No, she isn’t, god damn it, but she wishes she was.” Hey hey. She got a little round of applause for that. A squad car arrived, two of New York’s finest jumped out and stood guard over her. An ABC news team appeared with a camera set-up and began shooting. C.R. was back in the movies.

“Kin I have your autograph, Miss Regrett?” I heard a voice say, and I roared at the stupid woman to get the hell away.

The ambulance wailed up and I rode with Claire to the hospital, which happened to be Roosevelt, over on Columbus Avenue at Fifty-ninth Street. They rolled her away on a gurney and I made some phone calls, including one to Mrs. Conklin, then I commenced that tedious interval known as hospital waiting.

After a considerable time, a young intern came to report. She’d broken her hip and had multiple contusions as well.

“She’s going to be all right, isn’t she?” I asked when the intern seemed dubious.

“We’ll do everything we can. Are you her son?”

I explained that I was a colleague. “You know who she is, don’t you?”

“Nope.”

I supplied the name and his eyes popped. “No kidding! She got any hospitalization? Blue Cross? Whatever, you’ll have to fill out the forms.” He pointed me in one direction, he took off in another, and by the time I’d finished struggling with a ton of paperwork, the word was all over the place that Claire Regrett was on 8 with a fractured hip and the nurses were gathering along the halls, looking me over, since they knew I had some connection with the new patient.

Reports of the accident were on the evening news. I stared in fascination at a full replay of the grotesque tableau: Claire laid out, head cradled in my lap, me with my mouth hanging open, looking frantic and dazed, she covered by a donated shepherd’s coat of soiled goat’s wool with embroidered epaulettes, the crazy woman demanding an autograph, my ferocious roar, the works. By the time Claire was settled into bed, in a plaster cast, the whole world knew of her mishap.

I’d already contacted Vi in Los Angeles, and later she called back saying the pictures had been on network news out there and her phone had been ringing off the hook. Next morning the media descended on the hospital, equipped with cameras attached to mobile units: three networks and some local stations. There were photographers and reporters clamoring for interviews, and again the question seemed to be, Was the lady drunk?

I found myself a reluctant spokesman in the affair, but I set them straight. Anyway, I could see that Claire was lapping it all up. It was what she lived for, the attention and hullabaloo, the curiosity and enthusiasm, this new wave of publicity that engulfed her, proving that her name could still sell papers.

I had to admit she performed admirably. It was strictly Oscar-time; she dragged out Valiant Carrie and Poor Pitiful Pearl and whipped them up together in a sort of soufflé; then she gave us some Mary Noble, Backstage Wife, and a couple of other soap-opera heroines, with a dash of
All My Children
tossed in. She joked with the press and explained how she’d been saying a prayer for the health of a woman she’d just passed in the street, and consequently wasn’t looking where she was going.

Naturally, they’d seen that she was bedded down on the “Gold Coast,” the celebrity floor where you were allowed special privileges and the staff indulged you because you were a star. The food was above par, you were allowed round-the-clock visitors, and you could even keep liquor in the room. She offered it to all comers but didn’t touch a drop herself.