Dreams Are Not Enough (21 page)

“Maxim thinks I’m in the head now. He’s a bloodhound when you and I’re together. He blames me.”

“For what? He knows why I ran and tripped.”

Diner pulled a chair to the bed, sitting tensely.

“He’s positive if I hadn’t mentioned his switch-hitting, you’d have fallen into his arms.”

“But Diner, I never said a word about our conversation.”

“He’s got a sixth sense about things like that.” Diner’s deep-set eyes were haunted.

“He’s leaving me, Alyssia. Leaving me. He’s threatened before, but this time it’s for real. We’ve had our battles, but never like last night. It went on for hours and hours—he even said that I indoctrinated him, that before me he was straight.”

“Was he?”

“We met at a New York party. Nobody was a flaming queen, but nobody was straight, either.”

“People say a lot of things they don’t mean when they fight. Dill.”

“All he thinks about is you.”

She shuddered.

“Once the movie’s finished, he’ll never see me again.”

“Maxim won’t give up. With you, he says, he’ll be completely heterosexual. I told you, he’s in love with you.”

“Whatever he feels, it’s not love.”

Diner’s eyes filled.

“How am I going to live without him?”

“It won’t be easy—believe me, I know. But people survive.”

“Not me, Alyssia, not me. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I’m really crazy.”

The sheriffs’ rape of Cassie takes place in the slain Duke’s bus.

Playing a scene of this emotional intensity in such cramped surroundings with the stifling heat of the weather plus the lights, the strong odors of numerous sweating bodies, required Alyssia’s utmost concentration. At two, when they finally broke for lunch, she began to tremble and pains darted from her left ankle to engulf her entire body. She could scarcely propel herself to the trailer. Barry and Whitney, as usual, lunched at the shaded barbecue tables near the buffet. (Though Whitney wasn’t in any further scenes and therefore off the payroll, she still slept in Hap’s cottage, causing Alyssia to ask herself a hundred questions, all of them hurtful. ) Juanita, standing at the trailer door, held a glass of water with a codeine capsule.

Alyssia downed it gratefully.

“Thanks, Nita. It was a grim morning. I better take two.”

“That’s all there is. I figured this one would last out the day. But I can get a ride into Mendocino now. Here’s your lunch.”

The last thing Alyssia wanted was food. As soon as juanita left, she set the untouched, crowded plate on the Formica table in back of Barry’s typewriter and stretched on the rear bed. The sheer nylon curtains sucked back as the door opened.

It was Maxim.

She jerked to a sitting position. Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. Maxim’s been a doll the last few days. And besides, he’s not about to pounce on me in a trailer with an unlocked door.

“I’m not saying the original scene wasn’t good,” he said.

“But today’s had dimensions beyond dimensions.”

“Thank you.”

“The thing is,” he said, “guilt and misery are destroying me.”

She breathed shallowly and said nothing.

“I am offering apologies.”

“You sent Howers for that.”

“Yes, and you had your girl toss them.” He paused.

“Tell me I’m forgiven or I’ll bleed all over the trailer floor.” His narrow mouth was pulled into that amused smirk, but his hands were clenching and unclenching. Once again that freak compassion trickled through her.

“I’ve forgotten,” she lied.

“Why don’t you forget it, too?”

“What I’m trying to do here is get a fresh start on our relationship.”

“Our relationship is that I’m married to your cousin. Period.”

“If it’s kneeling you want, kneeling you get.” He dropped in front of her, flinging his arms around her waist.

She pushed at him.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Maxim!”

“Ridiculous? I’m so hung up on you I can’t see.” He pressed kisses on her lap.

She pushed at him.

“Maxim, I do not want you near me! Ever! So cut it out!”

Neither of them heard the door open.

“Maxim!”

Hap’s gray eyes were narrowed, his fists clenched. In two swift steps he crossed the trailer to yank his brother to his feet. Maxim, startled, stepped backward, banging into the table and overturning her lunch plate, scattering coleslaw and tuna salad. Immediately he regained control of himself, and his lips curled into a knowing smirk.

Looking pointedly from Hap to Alyssia, then back at Hap, he said, “So that’s how it is.”

“Get out,” Hap said.

“How long has it been going on?”

“Listen, if you don’t get the hell out I’ll” — “You’ll what? Hit me? Not you, brother, never you.” Maxim gave a mirthless chuckle.

“The attachment’s long-term, isn’t it? You always were a card-carrying bleeding heart, so why wouldn’t you fall for the first sexy pachuco domestic who came along? Now that I think about it, when the Barry Cordiners hastily departed for la belle France, you went around for months like Chicken Little after the sky fell in.”

“Listen, you” — “No, you listen. My amorous inclination for the lady must have blinded me to the reason behind your heavy politeness to each other.”

Hap took a step to stand within a few inches of Maxim.

“I’m telling you to get your ass out of this trailer. And stay away from Alyssia.

Is that clear enough? “

“Clear as glass, big brother, clear as glass,” Maxim said.

“Enjoy your fun and games now, kiddies. Repercussions will come in the future.”

The trailer shook as the door slammed behind him. His jaunty whistle receded, fading in the direction of the remote buzz of lunchtime voices.

“Okay?” Hap asked.

Drawing a breath, she murmured, “Embarrassed.”

“He’s been coming on to you all the time, hasn’t he?”

“Uhh … sort of.” So Hap, like everyone else in the straight world, was ignorant of his brother’s true preference. How could Maxim keep such a secret? By being desperate enough, she thought.

“He’ll be talking about us,” she said softly.

“Do you mind?” He was watching her carefully.

She shook her head.

“No.”

“Then neither do I,” he said.

She woke to the certainty that someone was in her room. She heard nothing, and—peering into the darkness—saw nothing. Not a movement, not a misplaced shadow, yet the sense of not being alone pervaded her.

Her mouth tasted of copper, and a vast stone seemed to weigh down her chest. Don’t move, she told herself. Breathe regularly, pretend to be asleep.

Yet that foolhardy nut within her was whispering aloud, “I know you’re there. Who is it?”

Then the sound began. It wasn’t quite human, more like the rubbing of skeletal tree branches, yet she recognized it as laughter.

“He’s on his way to Mendo,” said a sepulchral version of Maxim’s voice.

“Who… ?”

“My father.” The eerie laughter sounded again.

“Repercussions will come.”

Alyssia woke drenched in sweat. Since the shattering of her ankle she had been bedeviled by anxiety dreams and nightmares. None, however, came close to enveloping her in this sense of impending doom. She pressed the switch of the bedside lamp. Normalcy showed in the crumpled Hershey wrapper, the pink pages with tomorrow’s script changes.

I’m safe, she told herself. I’m fine.

But she did not turn off the light.

This was the last day of shooting. By ten o’clock Fort Bragg’s temperature had risen well above ninety, but the heat had not discouraged an astonishing crowd for so small a town. Women clad in shifts and men in short-sleeved shirts were packed behind the ropes that blocked off this portion of the street, which was patrolled by three sweating, off-duty cops hired for the day by Harvard Productions.

The drugstore’s sign was covered by another sign with gold-painted Gothic letters: winslow’s drugs. Alyssia sat on the curb, the cast hidden by a maxi skirt her tie-dyed tee shirt revealing the lack of a bra.

Hap, who had been examining her through his viewfinder, conferred briefly with Maxim. At the same moment, both brothers raised a hand to squint up at the sky: the blaze of sun was cut off by a slow-moving, puffy white cloud. Hap glanced at Alyssia, signaling her that he was nearly ready. Maxim formed a circle with his thumb and forefinger, smiling at her. Here we are, she thought, the three of us, not a hint of yesterday’s emotional pyrotechnics, simply a director, producer and actress cooperating.

Again Hap glanced up at the sky, then nodded to the assistant director.

The assistant director shouted, “Start your action!”

The extras—local recruits—began walking from left to right, right to left, a dusty old Chevy and a new Onyx sedan drove along the block.

The sun came out at the moment the colorful bus pulled up in front of Alyssia, a dazzling effect Hap and Maxim had been timing.

Diner kept stumbling over his lines.

When finally he got an approximation of the dialogue, Hap called it a take. Somebody handed Alyssia her crutches. Maneuvering to a standing position, she glanced across the street.

Between an obese, shirtless man and Nurse Shawkey stood Desmond Cordiner.

Alyssia gazed at him, feeling no surprise. May Sue had sometimes boasted about dreaming things before they occurred—the gift of second sight, she’d called it. My mother’s daughter, Alyssia thought.

Six years had not altered her old antagonist. His hair remained the same dark pewter, and from this distance no new wrinkles or sags showed in the tanned face. He smiled at her, then lifted the rope. The hired cops, awed by his tailoring and supreme confidence, did not move to halt him. He strode over to her.

“Alyssia,” he said.

“That was some performance.”

“Thank you.”

“I talked to PD yesterday. He was extremely positive when he discussed you—in fact he sounded very much like an agent pitching a client to me.”

“You’ve got PD wrong, Mr. Cordiner. He knows as soon as Wandering On is launched, we’re going back to France.”

“Oh? And what about Barry’s new career as a screenwriter?”

With a bright smile, she said, “He’s dying to finish his novel.”

Maxim and Hap had come to greet their father.

“Why didn’t you phone you were coming, Dad?” Hap asked.

“I only got it into my head yesterday,” Desmond Cordiner said.

Desmond Cordiner was a man on the brink of the bottomless chasm.

Magnum, his fiefdom, like all studios, had eroded disastrously. The across-the-board industry decline had started in 1950, when the courts handed down an antitrust ruling that studios must divorce themselves from their theaters. This meant Magnum no longer had an automatic outlet for its product. Revenues declined. But the true harbingers of disaster were the television antennas burgeoning from more and more rooftops. People didn’t go to the movies, they stayed home to watch Jackie Gleason, Dinah, Ed Sullivan; to see Mary Martin Hy through the air and Lucy get the best of Desi.

The audience who ventured forth to a theater wanted more than the sanitized fare available gratis. Accordingly Magnum, like every other studio in Hollywood, made wide screen epics loaded with stars, crowds, violence and sex—productions that cost a fortune.

Recently Desmond Cordiner had done the unforgivable. He had given the go sign to three of these extravaganzas that had flopped in a row. To round off his problems, the company’s major shareholder, Rio Garrison, the luscious widow of the studio’s founder, had taken a lover who was a shrewdly successful businessman. Upon scrutinizing the company books, he pointed out to Rio that although her enormous dividend checks continued to arrive quarterly, the cash came not from profits but capital. To pay for the bombs. Magnum had quietly divested itself of the company’s East Coast headquarters on Madison Avenue as well as the ranch in the Valley.

Desmond Cordiner knew that Rio was about to give him the old heave-ho.

Though outwardly unchanged, inwardly he had reached a near demented state. His mind circled obsessively around a single thought: / must come up with a major blockbuster.

He, who had always rescued his family, needed to determine whether PD was right, whether his two sons could somehow save him. Was Wandering On the sleeper that would recoup Magnum’s losses? It was the end of shooting, but impatience tore at him. He flew to Northern California in a studio-rented Lear.

He promptly caught the tensions between Hap and Maxim. In Los Angeles he had heard rumors connecting Maxim with Barry’s wife, that little extra he had given a start, a girl so far below the social ladder that she had pretended to be a wetback in order to reach the bottom rung.

Obviously Hap was at her again, too. He ignored the sexual computations. A man about to be shoved into nothingness cannot concern himself too deeply with where his grown sons choose to put their cocks.

“I’d like to see the rough cut,” Desmond Cordiner said over the remains of his apple pie a la mode. He, Hap and Maxim were in the rear booth of Fort Bragg’s top eatery, Lucy’s Cafe, two blocks south of the location.

“You’ll have it sometime in September,” Hap replied.

“A month to see the rough cut?” his father asked.

“Dad,” Maxim said smiling, “you ought to know by now that your number-one son is a perfectionist. Left to Hap, nobody’d see an inch of film until the final print.”

“We’ve got the project penciled in for an October release.”

“October?”

Hap exclaimed.

“But this is August! We planned six months for the scoring and editing.”

“Hap, if Magnum’s going to release your film—what’s the title? I never can remember.” In every negotiation, no matter how close to home, Desmond Cordiner kept his opponents in full possession of their uncertainties.

Hap’s gray eyes didn’t blink.

“Wandering On.”

“If we decide to give Wanders a major release, I’ll have to okay four million on advertising and promotion. If it bombs, I’ll be on the firing line with the stockholders for backing my own sons’ cheapie with big bucks.”

Hap was already having a problem staying on an even keel with his father—he kept thinking about that long-ago coercion of Alyssia. He inhaled deeply, then exhaled.