Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (25 page)

“What is it?” Laura asked. “Are you all right?” The house was so dark at night, with no streetlights or passing cars. She’d be happy to get back home. The house wasn’t the same without her father in it, not remotely. The only noises she could hear were ghost steps, her father’s feet on the floorboards, her father’s large body moving around the kitchen. Every time, Laura’s body would give a start, a synapse firing falsely, telling her that he was still there, still alive. The moments that immediately followed, when the reality would slowly sink back in, were excruciating, and Laura was glad to have the blue pills by her side. If she thought that the pills would have taken away all the pain at once, without any consequences, she would have swallowed the entire bottle.

Irving turned onto his back. “I’m sorry about the movie,” he said, meaning the boy writer’s horse picture, or
Flowers from the Dead
, or maybe both.

“It’s not your fault.” Laura waited, sensing that Irving wasn’t finished.

“And I’m sorry about your father. I don’t even remember mine, not really. Nothing more than what I’ve made up.” They rarely spoke of Irving’s life before Gardner Brothers, his mysterious childhood in
New York, his dead Russian family, just as they rarely spoke of Laura’s. There had been nothing wrong in Irving’s childhood, nothing more painful than poverty. But that was enough to keep him from ever mentioning it.

“She was a really good mother, my mother.” Irving was holding his tongue.

“Of course she was,” Laura said. She sat up straight, her body the only thing moving in the dark, silent house. “What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing. I don’t mean anything. I was just thinking about how hard it’s going to be for your mother to be alone. My mother was alone too. There were five of us.”

Irving had never mentioned his siblings, not once. Laura had always assumed that her husband was an only child. The four phantom siblings—all girls, Laura knew at once—floated around her, transparent as ghosts. He turned back onto his side, but at least he was facing her again. Laura stroked the top of his head.

“You didn’t do that to her, Irving. You didn’t leave her alone.” She wriggled back under the covers, until their noses were almost touching. Laura wanted Irving to stop talking, to press his nose against hers until they were breathing each other’s breath and half-asleep.

“Of course I did,” Irving said. “I was seventeen when I left home to come to California, and she died the next year. Who was supposed to take care of her, my sisters?”

“She had her daughters.” Laura didn’t understand the conversation she was having, didn’t understand why it felt as if she were lying on a bed made of quicksand, with no rope to climb out.

“Just like your mother,” Irving said. “Daughters, grown and absent. Only my mother didn’t live.”

“Are you trying to make me even sadder?” There were so many reasons to feel miserable on any given day, so many slights to absorb.

Irving sighed, and his breath slid over Laura’s cheek. “No,” he said. “I was just thinking about her, that’s all.”

Laura hated to think that coming to Door County had made Irving unhappy in a way she hadn’t anticipated, that being around her sadness had made him remember his own. That was what love was, though, wasn’t it? Holding each other’s misery as close as your own? They had a good life together, a good marriage. Laura thought that anyone on the Gardner Brothers lot would have said the same. Still, no matter how good, Hollywood marriages were fickle things, like gusts of wind in a broken sail, with disaster always likely around the bend. So far their marriage had been built on love and luck, but luck didn’t last. Laura wrapped her leg around Irving’s waist and drew him closer to her. No matter the weather, she wanted to tell him, no matter the past, this was for good.

T
here were socks missing and juice stains on the rug, and Laura loved it all. The years following her father’s death were busy with everyday tasks. Laura stayed home; she tried to learn to cook, much to Harriet’s amusement, and drove the children to school in Irving’s Rolls-Royce, waving at their friends’ parents through the window like a queen in a passing parade. The world was a different place without her father in it, and Laura wanted nothing more than to love her family and to keep them nearby. The girls chafed at their mother’s close attention, claiming that she counted their fingers and toes in the middle of the night, which was creepy, and also sometimes the truth. Laura had dreams about building a fortress somewhere deep in the countryside, maybe in Wisconsin, a place big enough for all the children and even her mother and sister, if they wanted to come. It would be big enough for everyone, with enough bedrooms for her unborn grandchildren, and maybe their children too.

The audiences didn’t seem interested in Susie and Johnny anymore, and it was Irving’s job to find the next smiling faces to fill the
vacuum. He stayed late on the lot poring over scripts and photographs of teenagers, and pretend teenagers, who were often even better than the real thing. Pierce had taken a shot on a young European actress, Bernadette LaFarge, who was smoldering across every screen in the country despite having only a tenuous grasp of the English language. Irving had seen her and passed—she was too obviously sexy for Gardner Brothers—and now he was paying the price. Every studio in town was looking for someone with an equally kissable pout, an equally outrageous figure. It didn’t matter whether they could talk; that was what the box office numbers said. Irving stayed late every night, sure he could find the right face for the next decade.

“Have you checked all the pregnant women?” Laura asked him in bed.

Irving took her chin in his hand and kissed her on the cheek. “That was only you, my dear.”

“What about this one?” Laura picked a photo out of the pile—a gloomy-looking blonde with a mouth the size of Pittsburgh. Irving shook his head. She picked out another one—a tall brunette with light eyes and a mole in the middle of her cheek. Irving shook his head even more strongly.

“I wish it could just be you,” he said.

“Susie transitioned from child star to bombshell,” Laura said, though not in protest.

“It has to be a new face.” Irving took off his glasses and set them on the nightstand. He rubbed his eye sockets with the palms of his hands. It was late, almost one, and he hadn’t slept well in days.

“I know, my love.” Laura fanned out the photographs on the bed and began to sift them into piles: the young, the glamorous, the foreign, the strange. Bernadette was the latter, not an average beauty. Her face was more angles than curves, with eyes disproportionately
large for her other features, and with a body as twiggy as a young boy’s. She wasn’t Irving’s type, and so he had missed her. Laura tapped all the strange photographs on her knee, so that they were all lined up properly, and began to leaf through her selections. Olga Kalman was all chin; Jean Baxter had eyes that seemed to stare off in opposite directions; Ruth Reed had a squarer jaw than Robert Hunter. Laura reached toward to her side of the bed and took a blue pill.

“Headache,” she said to Irving, who had flung his arm above his face and was staring at the ceiling.

He reached over and put his hand on Laura’s thigh, holding it there until she had wriggled under the covers next to him, sending all the photos sliding onto the floor.

“I wish I could find you over and over again,” he said. Laura set her ear against his chest and listened to his heartbeat.

“Me too,” she said. Everyone in the house was asleep, everyone in the neighborhood. The only people awake in Los Angeles were the ones who were still after something, and Laura was glad she wasn’t one of those. She shut her eyes and held on tight.

T
he first signs were small: more coughing in the night, Irving’s cheeks sunken farther into his face. By the New Year, there was no mistaking that something serious was happening inside Irving’s cells. The doctors were vague, or at least Irving was vague when he relayed their messages. Nothing was the matter—it was the same problem he’d had since childhood, a rheumatic heart. Laura was not permitted to accompany her husband into the office, and instead sat in the waiting room, her hands folded in her lap, an unread magazine open underneath them. It couldn’t be
so
serious, whatever was
wrong with Irving. Her father’s heart had been enormous, the size of a giant’s, too big for a simple human chest. That was what Laura always imagined, that her father had arteries as large as hubcaps—
that
was the problem, and it physically couldn’t last forever. But Irving was different, as slim as a pencil. How hard could it be to keep the blood moving in a space so compact? Laura decided to take matters into her own hands.

Irving had never taken a sick day, not one, despite his medical history, and those days had accrued: An entire month of days, at the very least, was at his disposal. Laura counted them off with the secretary, and then had the girl book two tickets to Mexico. There was a healing center on the beach several hours south, in a town so small there was only one flight every three days. Laura didn’t wait for Irving to agree.

The center was small, with six bungalows for patients and their families and then a central building with treatment rooms and an office. It reminded Laura of Gardner Brothers, with different costumes. The other patients—all of them older than Irving by thirty years, with white hair and slowed gaits—were polite enough, or simply old enough not to notice that someone famous was now in their midst. The doctors—they were doctors, of a sort—used herbal remedies and steam baths and massage and yoga and hovered magnets over his body. They adjusted Irving’s qi, which had something to do with his energy. When he was being treated, Laura sat in their room and cried.

On days Irving was feeling healthy, they would walk along the beach, Laura supporting Irving’s diminishing body with his arm slung around her shoulder. She told him things that he already knew about her childhood in Door County, stories that he liked: the fresh cherry pies, the fish boils, skipping stones. She told him details
that she couldn’t believe she’d never told him before: about Hildy’s laugh and Josephine’s unflappability. On days when he was feeling bad, they rested inside in the dark, Irving on the bed and Laura in the wicker chair beside him, the sunlight peeking through the blinds only enough to draw yellow stripes on the floor. On the days he was feeling worst of all, Irving sent Laura out into the world without him, and she sat on the sand, feeling far away from everything she loved in the world, as if he were already gone, and there would be no going back to the life she’d had before.

They stayed three weeks, until the Mexican doctors—were they doctors?—told Laura to take her husband home. Sand was in every corner of their suitcases, clinging defiantly to the soles of their shoes. Irving closed his eyes on the airplane home and Laura worried, not for the first time, whether he might not open them again. When Harriet opened the door for them at home, the look on her face told Laura that the treatments hadn’t gone as well as she’d thought. Nevertheless, being in Los Angeles brightened Irving’s mood, and he was soon back to worrying over box office numbers, and asking after Florence’s and Junior’s days at school. Some days he would forget that Clara had already graduated, and ask her whether she’d done her homework, to which she would roll her eyes affectionately and say, “
Pa
-pa,” which meant,
I love you, don’t leave
.