Cheating at Solitaire (31 page)

No, what the paparazzi wanted—whateveryone wanted—was acting. These people had to make a living. The money
was in the drama, the breakups and meltdowns, the blood feuds, the disasters. It was as if the whole world were your own personal high school, and you were part of the popular crowd. Everybody wanted to talk about the popular crowd. Everybody wanted to gossip about interesting people, and people became interesting when they became popular. At least, that was what Kendra had told her. She might be mixing it up. She was very tired, and beyond being tired she was scared to death. Still.

Marcey thought about Stewart Gordon for a minute, but only for a minute. He had come in here and given her his usual advice, and she was glad of that. That was what she had called him in for. But she hadn't actually intended to take his advice. His advice was always wrong because he didn't understand how things were supposed to be. He was old, and he had been to college for years and years, and he read books. He was content to be only sort of famous. People recognized him from television, but they didn't follow him around to stores or try to sit at his table in restaurants. Marcey wondered what that was like. It wasn't like being invisible, or nonexistent, or whatever it was nonfamous people were. She didn't think about those people much, because there didn't seem to be a point. Their existence was hypothetical, as Kendra put it. Marcey had had to look up “hypothetical,” and then it had taken her forever because it didn't occur to her it was spelled with a y. Sometimes she thought Stewart Gordon might have a point, if only a very little one, about education. It was embarrassing to get into things like that. It made you look like a rube.

She tried sitting up in the bed, and it worked. She had no idea how long she'd been lying in it, but she thought it was a long time, long enough so that they should already have found her a bed in the regular hospital. Unless they didn't mean to admit her to the regular hospital. In L.A., it would have been automatic. She'd have passed out dead drunk and had her stomach pumped for alcohol and then they would have put her in a room and kept everybody in the world out except the people she wanted to see. Maybe this was not the
way they did things in Margaret's Harbor. If it wasn't, she would have to insist. She couldn't go walking out the hospital's front door into the waiting flashbulbs of the press, not when she was looking like this, and didn't have a chance in hell of looking any better anytime soon.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed. The sudden movement made her heave. She sat very still until her stomach settled. Her head did not settle. She was very dizzy. She pushed herself forward and slid slowly toward the floor. For a split second, she thought she wasn't going to get it done. She thought her legs were going to collapse in front of her and the nurse was going to find her in a puddle on the linoleum. That would be an interesting headline: “Marcey Mandret Hospital Collapse!” Or however they would put it. Everything that happened to her seemed to come with exclamation points. She wondered why that was. Kendra said that it was very important to stay in the public eye all the time. It wasn't success that brought fame. It was fame that brought success. People would pay to see famous people even if the famous people had done nothing at all.

There was a little table on rollers right next to the bed. Marcey braced herself on it, very carefully, so that it did not roll out from under her. Then she braced herself on the bed. She stood up. Her back hurt. She stopped leaning against the bed and stood up absolutely straight. Her back still hurt. Her stomach was still rolling. She was still dizzy. Nothing much had changed from an hour ago, except that she thought she was pretty close to sober.

Sometimes she thought Kendra might be wrong about things, especially about publicity. It did not seem to Marcey that Kendra was becoming successful. In fact, everything Kendra did fell apart. On the other hand, Kendra did not have to be successful if she didn't want to, because she already had money. Real money. Money made Marcey's mouth go dry. She spent so much of it all the time. She spent it and spent it, and it was always there, but she wasn't sure how that happened. The movies paid her. The taxes were enormous. There had to be some explanation for this.

She was wearing a hospital gown. The only clothes in the room were the ones she'd been wearing when she'd been brought in, and they were no help. They were her going-out in-public clothes. There was practically nothing to them. Marcey could feel the cool breeze on her bare behind, which meant she was in this hospital gown without underwear, and it felt awful, even though she almost never wore underwear. It was one thing to go commando because you were being daring and naughty and hoping to get a little attention, and another to have your bare rear end exposed because you'd gotten too drunk to stand up and they took your clothes. She looked around the room for anything that would suit, but all that there was were sheets and pillowcases. She tried to strip the sheet off the bed and it wouldn't come. She saw the visitor's chair and sat down in it. She wanted to throw up again. She wanted to pass out.

She looked around the room one more time. In the beginning, the hospital had seemed to be full of people. There was the doctor, and a nurse, and Stewart Gordon, and some people he had with him. Now she couldn't hear anybody at all, at least anybody close, but that didn't mean there wasn't anybody. She got onto her feet again, and this time it was better. Here was something she was good at. She could negotiate a space when she was dizzy and unsteady on her feet. She couldn't go out with the gown like that. She couldn't get the sheet off the bed. She looked around again and realized that there was not just a sheet, but a blanket. The blanket was folded at the foot of the bed. She didn't have to rip out hospital corners to get it.

The blanket was heavy. It was impossible to tie around her waist like a sarong. Marcey had no idea how people managed to do that in movies. She tried tying it in a knot in front of her, which left her legs exposed in the front, but at least covered her backside, and the front of the hospital gown went down almost to her knees. She wished she had something she could use to cover up completely, like one of those things Muslim women wore. It would be the perfect disguise, if she ever decided she needed a disguise. She
could go anywhere she wanted and nobody would know who she was.

She looked down at her feet, and it was just then that she realized she had no shoes. That was when all the resentment and anger and annoyance she had been feeling since they'd first gotten here finally took her over, and she admitted to herself that she didn't just hate Margaret's Harbor in the usual way. She hated Barbie dolls and tacos, too, but that was normal hate. It was the kind of hate you were supposed to have. She hated Margaret's Harbor with an emotion so deep it split her in half. She hated the twin sets and the A-line skirts and the books that were absolutely everywhere. She hated the weather. She hated the women with their snow boots and espadrilles and faces that had never seen a facelift. What was wrong with all these people here? Who did they think they were? She didn't care if presidents of the United States had vacationed here. Presidents of the United States were boring.

She hobbled over to the side table, where somebody had left her clothes, folded, and got her shoes. They weren't much better than going barefoot, but they would have to do. They were all she had. If this were a movie, she would be able to go through the rooms without being seen and find something to wear. She would never get away with that on her own.

It didn't matter. What did matter was getting out of here, and she was going to get.

3

Stewart Gordon knew that there were times, these days, when he was just a cartoon of himself, but he also knew that he had tried and failed to find any other way to handle the changes in the world he had to live in. He was very careful never to tell anyone that he wished he had not taken that part in that “damned science fiction television show,” as one of his fellow cast members had put in, in the London
Guardian
, in the middle of a rant about the tyranny of middlebrow. He wasn't sorry he'd taken that part. It had made him
financially independent even without the residuals, and with them it had made him more than comfortable. These days, he got the work he wanted, just because he wanted it. He never had to take work just to work. He took vacations when he wanted to take them. He bought the books he wanted to read. He went to the theater when he felt like it. There was a lot to be said for financial independence, and he didn't mind saying it, no matter what sort of effect it had on his standing as an unrepentant socialist of the sixties generation.

The problem was that it wasn't only money that made Stewart Gordon decide to accept film roles, and the other thing—that ingrained Scottish need to work and go on working, that Calvinist charge to never be idle on pain of hellfre and eternal death—was not as easily satisfied as the need for money was.
Nightmare Island
, the thing was called, last time he checked, but the name had already been changed so often he might be getting it wrong, and the title was so silly it made him want to cringe. The plot had possibilities, because all plots had possibilities. What made the work was not the plot but what you did with it. Unfortunately, they were doing absolutely nothing with this one. Bunch of teenage girls going to high school on this tiny island, their big evil principal, the arrival in the middle of the night by a mysterious man, in a boat—good grief, Stewart thought, you could do an enormous amount with that setup. You could rival Edgar Allan Poe, or Henry James. Unfortunately, all anybody wanted to do with it here was the obvious: give Marcey Mandret a chance to wear very little in the way of clothes; give Arrow Normand a way to sing; film Stewart himself looking menacing for no good reason. That was the problem with the Scottish thing. It made him accept work he shouldn't have touched with a ten-foot pole. It also made him stick with it. It was enough to make a sane man British.

Now he paused at the door to the dining room of the Oscartown Inn and looked around. Carl Frank was definitely there, along the wall at the back, at one of those ridiculously small tables for two. Weren't Americans all supposed to be fat as elephants? How did they fit at those little tiny tables
for two? He had to watch himself. He'd turn himself into an ass. He should have walked Anna home, even if it would have attracted the photographers, a large contingent of which were wandering through the corridors of this very hotel. They weren't used to these people here. The hotels in Los Angeles made the paparazzi stay outside.

Somebody exploded a flashbulb in his face, and he pretended not to notice it. They weren't really interested in him. They were just bored. Of their three prime targets, one was in jail, one was in the emergency room, and the last was hiding out in her palace fortress. Palace fortresses should have gone out with the Blitz. It really was enough to make a sane man British.

Stewart made his way to the back, stopping politely to tell the seating hostess that he was meeting someone who was already here. She seemed relieved. Stewart thought she was probably having a bad month. You had no idea how rude people like Marcey Mandret, or the press that followed them, could be, until you'd met them, and then you were often left breathless. He got to Frank's table and pulled out a chair. It was a ridiculously small chair. Those elephantine Americans would probably fall right through it to the floor.

Carl Frank was getting up, but only halfway. It was one of those Los Angeles things, a nod in the direction of etiquette while still being entirely, offensively dismissive. Stewart sat down. A waitress rushed over, and he asked her for coffee.

“So,” he said. “There's some reason for us to be meeting in public? I'd think you'd want to keep the papers from plastering a photograph of us in the middle of some big interior spread full of rumors about the ultimate demise of the movie.”

“I always meet in public,” Carl said, unperturbed. “I'm a lot less worried about rumors of the ultimate demise of the movie than I am about people saying I've been engaged in some kind of secret, underhanded scheme to—I don't know to do what. But I do know Michael Bardman. whatever it was, he'd believe it.”

“Ah,” Stewart said. “This is about Michael Bardman. How is the old bastard? I hope he's got ulcerative colitis.”

“If you could get ulcerative colitis by being an asshole and an idiot at the same time, he'd have it,” Carl said. “And that will tell you how he is: being an asshole and an idiot. But I got an interesting proposition today, and I don't dare not take it to him. So I thought I'd run it by you first.”

“Run away.”

“Kendra Rhode came to see me,” Carl said. “Actually, she called, and I had her meet me here. She actually made some attempt to get here without anybody seeing her. It even mostly worked, until the end, when she wasn't trying anymore. Do you want to know what she asked me about?”

“Do I have to know?”

“Well, Stewart, if we take her up on it, you'll have to live with it, so you should know. She came here to suggest to me that now that Arrow Normand is out of the picture, she should take over the part. Herself. Kendra Rhode wanted the part for herself.”

“I got that bit,” Stewart said. The waitress had come with the coffee. He thanked her for it and gave it a go. It wasn't bad. He'd spent a lot of his youth being forced to eat in the little convenience areas for British Rail, and almost any other coffee wasn't bad. He homed in on what seemed to be the issue. “Is that true?” he asked. “Is Arrow Normand out of the picture?”

“Not off cially, no,” Carl said. “And I'll have to admit, until Kendra came to see me, I'd been operating under the assumption that we'd find some way to pull it out of our asses. It's a small part. She spends the only significant time she has in the movie singing, and Kendra Rhode can sing well enough to handle that particular scene. And I've got to at least contemplate the possibility that Arrow won't be available for any further flming.”