Beaches (30 page)

“Mmm,” Bertie said, thinking about David Malcolm, of the way he had held her hand earlier.

“Well,” Cee Cee said, “I gotta go get dressed. Zack’s comin’ over and we’re going to a screening.”

“Night, Cee.”

A screening? So late? That’s right, it was three hours earlier in Los Angeles. Here it was ten o’clock. Nina long asleep. Maybe she would read herself to sleep.

The phone rang. Her heart was pounding. No. She wasn’t going to hurt herself this way-want it to be David and be disappointed when it wasn’t.

“Hello.”

“Bertie?”

“David,” she said, certain her voice gave away entirely too much. More than she wanted to. More than she should.

“God,” he said. “I was really a jerk. When I think that I could have been sitting somewhere with you, looking at your pretty face, instead of listening to some boring bankers drone on endlessly about business. Anyway, I wanted to tell you that I think you’re a terrific woman and that if it would be all right with you I’d like to call you from Los Angeles tomorrow. Just to chat and to get to know you better.”

“Of course,” Bertie said, but she was worried. This was feeling too good. And the next day, when she looked at the clock and subtracted three hours from the time, ten forty-five here, seven forty-five there, too early, one-fifteen

here, ten-fifteen there, probably hasn’t arrived yet, three-thirty here, twelve-thirty there-won’t call now, probably at lunch. At five, the phone rang just as she got back from picking Nina up from dancing school. She heard it as they were coming up the walk. Nina was gabbing about how Robin, her friend, had pushed her at nursery school and how Mrs. Weingarten saw it and moved Robin to the back of the line on the way to recess.

Bertie was in the door and at the phone, but by the time she’d grabbed the receiver and held it to her ear, whoever was trying to reach her was no longer there. Damn.

She sat at the dinner table only half-listening to Nina. Excited in a way she couldn’t remember being in years, maybe ever. Who had made her feel this way? Made her mind refuse to think of anything else?

She picked at her dinner. This is dumb, she thought again. Schmucky is what Cee Cee would call it. Who was this man? Son of a rich father, Libby Collins had said, Malcolm Industries. So what? That’s all she knew. That, and a one-hour date during which he told her how much he loved Libby and Wally Collins, how he grew up in Los Angeles, how he spent a lot of time in northern California and bought land and developed property and . . . something like that. She should have listened more carefully instead of looking. Counting the freckles on his handsome face.

“Time for your bath, Neen,” she said.

“Oh, Mom, I don’t want a bath. Please, no bath.”

“Nina, come on, why do we have to have a discussion? Let’s take our plates and clean up in here and-”

The phone. Seven o’clock here is four o’clock there. Another ring. That would be perfect. Day winding down. Figured I’d be here. Another ring. “Okay,” she told Nina, “no bath.” She picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Bertie? David Malcolm.”

He still used his last name. Of course, because they were strangers. Nina skipped off to her room, and Bertie sat at the table, the plate containing her barely touched dinner in front of her, and took a deep breath. Take a moment. Not to sound too glad.

“Hello, David,” she said. “How was your trip?”

After that he called constantly. Sometimes in the morning. Sometimes very late at night, with apologies for the hour, but saying that his day had been full and he had thought about her all day, but just couldn’t find a moment when there wasn’t some reason why he couldn’t get near a phone. And she would tell him it was just as well because she had been running all over with errands and her daughter. But she was only telling half the truth since she deliberately had every one of her errands done by noon here, nine o’clock there, so she would be home by the time he’d even dream of calling.

There were three weeks of endless conversations. Bertie usually sitting, melted, in a chair or flopped across her bed like a teenager. At the end of the third week, David mentioned something about his education at Stanford. He had gone to school there during the war, she thought she heard him say. War? What war?

Young. He looked young, but not that young. Not too young. Bertie was thirty-five. How much younger could he be? No. She’d better . . . during the war?

“How old are you?” she asked him one night.

“Twenty-seven.”

Oh, Jesus. That much younger. Bertie was glad he couldn’t see the look of surprise on her face. Robbing the cradle.

“Do you have any idea how old / am?” she asked. She knew she looked younger. Maybe thirty-three, maybe thirty. But wait until she told him the truth. She had to tell him. She didn’t want to, but before this thing got started, she ought to. Well, actually, it was already started, but at least

now everyone could back off before they were too involved or …

“To the day,” David Malcolm said. “September twenty-second, 1944.”

“Oh, Cod,” she said. “How?” Libby. It must have been Libby. Of course, but . . .

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Not one bit.”

Sweet, she thought. And funny. This is funny. He’s known all along. That I’m … an older woman. She was an older woman to this boy. Guy. Man. At thirty-five. Now that he’d said it didn’t matter to him, the idea of it all made her smile. Good heavens.

When she was twenty-two, already married to Michael, David Malcolm was fourteen and in prep school. Hah. Imagine if he’d walked up to her then, a little red-headed flat-topped boy and said, “How’s about a kiss, sweetie?” A kiss. Bertie grinned at the thought. They’d never even shared a kiss-only barely touched-and she was smitten, gone, fallen for a man she’d seen twice in her life. She loved his gentle voice on the phone and his sweet sense of humor. He told her all about what he called his “overprivileged youth” and all the adventures he’d had “by virtue of the remarkable accident of my birth.” About his extraordinarily powerful father’s influence on his life, and all of it was told without any pretense or any attempt at seduction, but simply as an unfolding of himself.

At first, almost because she felt he was telling so much she had to tell at least a little, Bertie began to talk about herself. Her own childhood, how it was to be raised by a single mother, how sometimes she heard herself saying things to her little daughter that sounded like her own mother.

“Bertie,” David said one night. “I really want to see you. Get to know you better. Spend some time with you. And I’ve been trying, I honestly have, to schedule coming to Sarasota, but between my own business and a lot of

business I’m doing for my family, I can’t seem to get out of here. Why don’t you come and visit me here?”

“Come to Los Angeles?” she asked, as if the request had been to come to the moon.

“Better yet, my parents have a wonderful place in Pebble Beach. They’re in Europe. Next weekend I have a few meetings in Carmel, but in between, we could take walks, drives, have dinner in Big Sur.”

A tryst in Pebble Beach. A romantic weekend. With a boy. What if she got there and looked at him and didn’t want to sleep with him? All the way to Pebble Beach. She felt the way she had when she used to be invited to college weekends. “Always make certain that you have appropriate and private accommodations,” Rosie would tell her, and Bertie would have to tell some panting college boy, “You see, I have to have my own room with a shower,” and the boy would say, “Huh? Yeah. Oh. Sure. Yeah.” And then find her a room on the first floor of a dormitory or sorority house so he could slip in the window to “visit” her at night, and try to jump all over her. Except for Michael. He had never tried anything like that. Until they were pinned. She should have known then that he was a cold fish.

“You can have the guest cottage, which is an absolute palace. My mother decorated it, and it’s heaven,” David offered.

Gentlemanly. This man had promise.

“Thank you, David,” Bertie said. “It sounds wonderful. Let me think about it.”

“Think about it? You wishy-washy bitch. Call the little prince back and tell him not only are you on your way, but you’re bringing your friendly neighborhood movie star with you as a chaperone,” Cee Cee said when Bertie told her. “Bertie, why are you stalling? This guy sounds great.”

“Well. . . I’ve never left Nina with a sitter for so long before and-”

“Two lousy days, Bert. The kid’s not gonna shrivel up and die if you leave her. I’ll take her, for chrissake.”

“No. She’s in nursery school. And there’s a nice woman who I trust here, and-”

“So when’re you goin’?”

“David has meetings in New York and Chicago during the week. But he wants to meet me in Monterey on Friday evening.”

“Hey!” Cee Cee said. “Make it four days and come to L.A. for two. Or wait-better yet, I’ll rent a car. And when you get here I’ll drive up there with you. We’ll hang out on Wednesday and Thursday, and then when he shows up Friday I’ll leave, and you two can shack up.” Cee Cee sounded excited to see her. It had been a long time. And it sounded like a perfect plan. A few days of laughing with Cee Cee would relax her. Cee Cee was right. Nina wouldn’t fall apart without her, and the time away would feel good. And David. Getting to see David-to be in the same room with him, to touch him-see how it felt to be this turned on about someone at last, at last.

“I’ll do it,” Bertie said.

David sounded sincerely delighted to hear that Bertie had taken him up on the offer and insisted the two women go to Pebble Beach directly to his parents’ home. Stay there for the two days. Be let in by one of the servants, and stay there,

“Without you? Oh, no,” Bertie said, imagining Cee Cee dropping clothes and cigarette ashes and spilling wine all over Rand Malcolm’s estate. “We’ll stay in Carmel.”

“I insist,” David said, and immediately air-expressed her a handmade map of “the forest,” as he called the area where his family’s obviously grand home was located, and instructions on how to get in the gate, and the names of the servants who would be waiting.

“David.”

“All you have to do is pick me up at the airport on Friday night,” he said. “I’ll fly from Chicago to Los Ange-

les, then Los Angeles to Monterey. Be in at eight-thirty
PSA
.”

“You’ll just miss Cee Cee,” Bertie said. “Her flight leaves for L.A. at seven-thirty.”

“Love to meet her,” and then he added, “some other time.” He and Bertie both laughed.

Cee Cee met Bertie at
LAX
outside the baggage claim. She sat in a red Camaro she’d rented that morning. She was wearing her usual floppy hat and glasses. Bertie had one small bag and the trunk of the Camaro was already full and .so messy that she had to put her bag on the back seat.

“Gee,” she said after she had slid into the passenger seat and hugged her friend, “you’re only going to be gone for two days, what do you have there?”

Cee Cee shrugged. “The usual. Pillow, hairdryer, face steamer, snacks, clothes, tape deck-stuff,” she said, shrugging again.

She drove like a maniac, weaving in and out of traffic on the L.A. freeways, gabbing away about some new man she’d met (Zack was already old news). This one was a photographer, “He came to do a layout,” she said, and couldn’t miss the opportunity to lean on the pun, “and boy, did he ever.” And as the Camaro hit the open road, she talked about some new songs she was going to record, and then with all the windows open, as they went blazing up the coast road, she sang one of the songs for Bertie, full voice. It was a country-and-western tune called “Gettin’ Through a Day Without You.” The words were heart-breakingly beautiful, and they made Bertie think about the fact that she hadn’t been really in love in years, or maybe ever. Not the way they talked about it in songs. Never really loved Michael that way. And now she had a chance. A far-fetched chance with this . . . boy . . . young man, who seemed so nice on the phone, so self-assured, so … interested in her. Maybe these few days she was

going to spend with him would begin something special between them.

Cee Cee didn’t stop except for gasoline until they got to San Simeon to see the Hearst castle.

The lines to get in to see the home of William Randolph Hearst were long, and even though she wore the hat and glasses and Levi’s and a shirt, several people recognized Cee Cee and pressed forward for autographs.

“I’m just lookin’ the place over ‘cause I’m thinking about moving out of L.A.,” Cee Cee said loudly, and some people who hadn’t noticed her before recognized her voice and came over.

During the tour she made loud jokes about Hearst and Marion Davies’s sex life and the tacky taste of some people, for the amusement of the crowd. Bertie burrowed her chin into the turtleneck sweater she was wearing, as if she were trying to disappear. But soon even she had to giggle, because the jokes were funny, and she was always amazed at the way Cee Cee could make any location a backdrop for her own special act.

By four o’clock, the two of them sat outside by the fire at Nepenthe in Big Sur nibbling cheese, drinking Cabernet Sauvignon, and watching the fog roll in over the water below. Cee Cee was tired from the drive. Bertie had called Nina from a pay phone and was musing about how when the babysitter told Nina it was “Mommy calling from California,” Nina wasn’t all that interested. And then her mind wandered to David, and she remembered how he’d said on the phone, “I like kids. I haven’t been around too many of them, but when I am I always like their honesty.”

David. Tomorrow evening they’d be together.

“I’m excited for you, Bert,” Cee Cee said, as if she were reading Bertie’s thoughts.

“Me, too,” Bertie said, afraid to say anything more, to feel too hopeful, for fear of the pain and disappointment.

The gate to the house on the Seventeen Mile Drive moved open slowly.

“Drive down long driveway to the left,” Bertie read from the paper bearing David’s directions. Cee Cee turned left, and as they had their first glimpse of the view from the Malcolms’ estate, both women spoke at the same time.