Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (29 page)

T
he budget was small: smaller than that, even. The budget for the entire film was less than what the Gardner Brothers would have paid for Laura’s dresses alone. Laura missed her old dresses, the silk that slid along her skin, the rich wools, the crepe de chine. She’d never felt fabrics like that before she started working for Gardner Brothers, never knew the difference. Of course, it wasn’t really the dresses
themselves that she missed; it was the way she would walk out of her dressing room, the sky over Hollywood warm with twilight, and walk down to the soundstage, the material sliding back and forth over her hips as she moved. Irving would have been close; he was always close. He could have been watching her out his office window. That was it: She’d always felt as if he were watching her, and that in his eyes, she was the most beautiful creature on the lot. Laura was only thirty-nine. That was still young enough to be beautiful, wasn’t it? It was difficult to concentrate on the present when so much of what Laura loved was in the past. She thought about her sister and her father and her husband, all gone, all gone. Losing Hildy had been hard enough to make her split in two, and now Laura worried that there weren’t enough parts of her left to split, that she had divided too many times, until there was nothing left, nothing left but what was missing.

At Jimmy’s insistence, he accompanied Laura to and from the set every day. The shoot was short: only four weeks. Laura was glad for the company, as much as she could feel gladness. There were brief moments of the day when she was talking to Jimmy that she would forget her grief; he was from the Midwest, which she liked. When she told him that she’d grown up in Door County, he didn’t believe her, and Laura began to cry, so distraught that all traces of Wisconsin had been expunged from her biography that the idea was so far-fetched. Once she’d taken another little blue pill and calmed down a bit, she and Jimmy had had a long conversation about different flavors of frozen custard, which would have made Laura giddy if she hadn’t felt so tired. She wanted to tell Jimmy all about Josephine’s job at the custard shop, but she couldn’t quite recall the name of the shop. She would tell him later. Jimmy had been talking to Clara on the telephone at night, as regular as a rooster. Laura could remember that:
that when the phone rang at half past eight, she had a feeling deep inside her gut that it was Irving calling from the lot to say he would be home later than usual, but by the time someone answered, the truth would have come back to her, as sharp as ever.

Laura’s memory had never been a problem before, but now she was having trouble with her lines. Even as a child, she found there was a place in her brain that was always just the right size for the words she had to say, as if they were written on the back of her tongue, and would spill forth on command. The first time she flubbed a line, the director told her not to worry about it. Laura thought she saw him make a face to one of his grunts. But it wasn’t Shakespeare. Laura discovered that any approximation of the line worked just as well. There was something funny about the movie—whether or not it was intentional Laura couldn’t discern—and she hadn’t been in a funny movie since she was a girl. It felt like several lifetimes ago that she and Ginger were poking those umbrellas at each other, doing their tap steps up and down those stairs, their hands holding bunched-up layers of petticoats. Ginger would be glad to see Laura doing something entertaining, if Ginger ever called. Gardner Brothers was old-fashioned, and Laura was glad to be rid of them. She stretched a paw toward the camera. She was tickling the audience’s heads, lapping up their attention. When she wasn’t on the set, Laura sat in her trailer and stared at the mirror. She was sure that if she stared long enough, her eyes pitched just over her left shoulder, where the door was, eventually Irving would walk in. She couldn’t even picture him doing it without starting to cry, her anticipated relief was so great. All he had to do was come back. In a funny way, it made it easier to imagine now that she was filming again. It was so clear to her now: He hadn’t felt needed. With the girls so close to being out of the house, and Junior a grown boy, why would they need him there? Laura shook her head slowly, without taking her eyes off the mirror.

G
inger thought it was a good idea to get out of the house, and disagreeing sounded like more trouble than it was worth, so Laura acquiesced. She hadn’t been out to dinner in six months, since before Irving died. Ginger and Bill had a table at Pierre’s, which sat a few hundred feet above Hollywood Boulevard and overlooked downtown Los Angeles, the kind of place that tourists dreamed about, always crackling with fresh ice cubes. Dinner would be just the two of them, just the girls. When Irving was alive, they always had to decide whether their dates would be single or double, but now that he was dead, having dinner as a threesome was too depressing for words. Even though Ginger and Bill rarely seemed as happy as they’d once been, when they wore leather jackets with each other’s names stitched on the back in a gentle rainbow, even watching them glare at each other and pick tiny fights was excruciating.

The restaurant clung to the side of the hill, and one had to make a series of hairpin turns around the hillside in order to reach the overstaffed driveway, where men in vests waited to properly park your car. The inside was just as precarious and overdecorated, with framed photographs of famous patrons hung on every available wall, and a photo of Ginger beside the entrance. The owner, a Frenchman who’d lived in Los Angeles longer than Laura, kissed Ginger on both cheeks and then led them to their table. Everyone in the restaurant turned to look as they walked by, squeezing their way between tables. Laura sat first, and waited for Ginger to finish talking. A decade earlier, Laura would have known every person in the room, but she recognized only the faces in the photographs on the walls. It seemed like generations ago that Laura had been the more famous of the two.

“Did you see that writer?” Ginger said as she sat, lowering her voice.

“What writer?” Laura looked around the room. She recognized everyone and no one—it was a typical crowd, with women in dresses tailored tightly against their waists, no matter that they were at a restaurant and not a cocktail party, and men in dark suits slim against their shoulders, their hair always so neatly cut. She could have been in a room full of extras playing diners. Laura was too tired to pretend to be anything more or less than what she was, heartbroken and exhausted by the simple act of leaving the house after dark.

“The one who came to your dinner party. For the magazine. Harry, I think, or Henry. He’s at the bar, see?” Ginger spoke without turning around. She knew what it felt like to have strangers looking at her, knew how easy it was to detect a stare from across the room. Laura craned her neck.

Sure enough, Harry Ryman was sitting at the bar, alone. Laura hadn’t seen him since the dinner party he’d come to so many years earlier, and he’d aged since she saw him last. His thick blond hair was now thinning at the crown, and his broad shoulders had filled out a bit. The horse picture had never gotten made, not by Gardner Brothers, and not by anybody else. Laura felt a pang of guilt—it had been her doing, the picture getting buried, all because she didn’t want to play somebody’s mother. As if she didn’t have three children, as if she had a choice whether or not to get older.

“I wonder how he’s doing,” Laura said. It had been a long time since she’d wondered about anyone but herself and the children. Harry was drinking a martini, and Laura watched as he tipped the glass and poured the rest of the liquid down his throat in one long swallow. “I’m going to go say hello—do you mind?” Ginger started to say something in response, but Laura was already up and moving across the room.

Laura watched Harry recognize her. She’d aged too, she
supposed—certainly her face was not as elastic, as creaseless, as open. He recovered quickly, and smiled broadly as she approached.

“Laura Lamont,” he said.

“How are you, Harry?” Laura perched herself on the empty stool next to him, sliding up the smooth oxblood leather. Ginger could wait.

He chuckled. “I’m just fine.” A sudden thought flashed across his face,
Irving
, and Harry’s smile vanished. “I’m so sorry about Mr. Green. I thought about writing, but I didn’t think you’d remember me.”

It was refreshing to be out of the house; Ginger had been right. Laura looked back at her friend, on the far side of the room. This was the idea: Break the pattern. There was too much death in Laura’s life, too much silence, too much solitude. She wanted to be surrounded by other people, to hear their stories, to lose herself in someone else’s life.

“Why don’t you join us for dinner?” Laura motioned for the waiter before Harry had a chance to respond. She pointed at Ginger’s table, and by the time she and Harry had made their way back across the room, arm in arm, another place had been set. For the rest of the night, Laura laughed at every single one of Harry’s jokes, whether or not they were funny. Ginger watched with a fish eye, unsure of what was unfolding, but Laura didn’t care, and when Harry offered to drive her home in thanks for the dinner, she said yes. The three of them stood outside, throats vodka-soaked, waiting for the valets to fetch the cars. Ginger’s boat of a Cadillac arrived first, and she hesitated before getting behind the wheel, clearly conflicted about leaving Laura snuggled up against a man who was nearly a complete stranger. But eventually Ginger drove off, and they were alone. Laura didn’t wonder until later why Harry hadn’t minded leaving his own car at the restaurant. She was happy to have someone else at the wheel,
and lolled her head against the back of the seat, closing her eyes and humming along to whatever song was on the radio.

The house was dark when they pulled into Laura’s driveway. It was after ten, and Harriet would’ve put Junior to sleep hours ago. Florence was likely in her room studying, and there was no telling where Clara might be. She’d been staying overnight at a friend’s house, which Laura took to mean that she’d been spending nights at Jimmy’s. Laura wouldn’t have disobeyed her mother for a boy, not ever. She thought about the last summer she spent in Door County, and the way she and Gordon had talked to each other for hours in the grass behind the barn. Their voices would have carried to the house, or they wouldn’t have, but Laura thought that if her mother had ever listened, she wouldn’t have heard anything so horrible. She would have heard two kids who’d never seen the world talking about what it might be like, two blind men describing the color of the sky. Clara seemed to have a more concrete understanding of the romantic universe.

“I’m sorry if I got in the way of your movie,” Laura said. She rested her hand on the back of Harry’s head, feeling his thin hair, and the smooth scalp beneath it. In front of them, the house looked as perfectly kept as a doll’s house, with straight trees growing on either side of the front door, and the Spanish tiles so neat along the roof. She hadn’t touched a man like this for years, a man other than her husband. Laura closed her eyes and pretended that it was Irving’s head beneath her fingers. That was all she wanted: to touch him again, to have his full, healthy body beside her, smoking and talking as if they had all the time in the world left.

Harry lit a cigarette and exhaled a plume of smoke out the open window. His head nearly brushed against the roof of the car. It had been so many years since Laura lived with a tall man that she’d forgotten what their bodies were like in space, how their knees jutted up
when they sat down, how the ceiling always seemed lowered around them, like they were another wooden beam holding the earth and sky apart. She let her body slump against his, arm to arm, thigh to thigh, not worrying about her dress getting mussed against the seat.

“Don’t worry about it,” Harry said. He was staring at the house. Laura lifted her bottom off the seat and smoothed the hem of her dress with her free hand. When she settled back down, Harry put his arm around her shoulder and held her tightly against him. Laura felt Harry’s ribs expand with each breath, and she slowed her own breathing to match his. She wanted to feel another body moving close to her, and she didn’t. Laura let her lips fall against Harry’s lapel. She arched her neck backward so that she could see him better, and then shut her eyes and waited for contact. If she didn’t move, then it wasn’t really her doing, Laura thought. Through her closed eyelids, she pictured her husband, alive and able, his strong hands and lips waiting to touch her.