Love Always (10 page)

“The Nicole Nelson doll is being produced at just the right time. And in addition, there’s going to be a novelization of the series, to the point where it left off. It’s going to be … why isn’t this on my VDT, where it ought to be? … going to be monologues by all the primary characters. The book is going to be called
Barren
, and under that title it says ‘Passionate Intensity,’ and below that on the dummy there’s
you
, on a television screen—a CU slightly in profile. Your hair is windswept and you look great.

“Now: the man who’s doing this novelization seems to be a very serious fellow. He wants to talk to everybody in the cast, so I’m sure you’ll be obliging. The guy’s got credentials that would sound good played on a kazoo. He’s written another novelization, I mean a novel, that was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award, and he wrote a book on Vietnam—scratch that: he wrote something on Venus de Milo, an article or whatever it was—you tell me why my secretary can’t make simple, comprehensible entries on this disc. It looks like I’ve called up a fucking dream journal instead of a bio.

“I’m having the guy call you. I understand that he wants to come up, down, wherever the hell Vermont is, to interview you for a couple of days. Try to get back into the
Passionate Intensity
mind-set before he gets there. And get Lucy to send me receipts when she bills the corporation. I can’t go into Llewellyn’s office and talk up a hundred dollar dead animal. He thinks everything’s rechanneled money for drugs. I said, ‘You
don’t know what life is like in the country. Nicole’s got a dog, it’s her necessary protection, it guards her and we deduct the Alpo bills from her taxes, right? You don’t think that sometimes maybe the dog makes a mistake and kills a sheep, or whatever?’ Here’s the good part: I said, ‘Would I pull the wool over your eyes?’ You tell Lucy that the next time the dog kills something, there’s got to be a receipt.”

A snippet of music played; Dionne Warwick’s voice singing, “Don’t tell me what it’s all about …”

The next sound was Piggy Proctor’s lips, smacking the receiver.

Lucy was sunbathing on a chaise in the side yard. Edward, who was expected soon, was still waiting to hear whether he was required in New York to photograph the elevator. He was still at the Birches, collecting $800 a day plus expenses. Nicole clicked off the cassette player. She had been smiling all the time she was listening, and now she smiled more. “God, am I glad,” she said. “I thought in September I was going to have to sit still for school a whole day.”

“Congratulations,” Lucy said.

“Imagine Stephanie Sykes as the heroine of a novel.”

“What makes you think she’ll be a heroine?” Lucy said.

“Because she’s a main character.”

“All main characters aren’t heroines, you know.”

“I just mean that she’ll look good. Like, Juliet died and everything, but she came off looking good.”

“Shakespeare might have had an edge on the person who’s going to write the novelization.”

“What do you mean?” Nicole said. “You don’t think Stephanie Sykes is going to get trashed, do you?”

“Think about the series,” Lucy said. “Nobody is really a hero or a heroine; they’re all confused and pulled in different directions. Almost no decision they make can be right.”

“Yeah, but Lucy—don’t you feel sorry for me that I was treated cruelly as a child and I got into drugs and drinking and everything?”

“Well, if anything, the woman who saved you—”

“She didn’t save me just to save me. She wanted to make it
look like her marriage was normal and she and her husband were a family, and since she was a doctor and she knew about my child abuse and everything, it was heroic to take me in.”

“But you just explained it: she did it for good and bad reasons.”

“Luuuucy—nobody does anything except for good and bad reasons.”

“You don’t think that people are ever just good or
just
evil?”

“In fairy tales and stuff. I don’t know about real people.”

“Nicole, maybe we aren’t understanding each other—you aren’t saying that people, when they do some one thing, are doing it for a bad as well as a good reason, are you?”

“I guess it depends on how you define bad. Most bad stuff isn’t so bad that it matters.”

St. Francis was on his chain, resting his chin on a basketball that Edward had left at the house the day before. It was a clear, windy day, and the airplane that Piggy said might happen to be passing by was overhead now, a small plane that flew across the yard and field.

“You mean,” Lucy said, trying to sound casual, “that people are both good and bad, and sometimes they’re bad and sometimes they’re good.”

“Who doesn’t believe that?” Nicole said. “Like I said, there are probably some monsters and some angels.”

“And for the rest of it, do you … you think people are duplicitous, or what?”

“What’s ‘duplicitous’?”

“Deceitful.”

“No. People just do stuff. They look out for themselves, and if that means they step on other people’s toes, that’s just the way it goes. You’ve got to expect that.”

“Who do you know who’s like that?” Lucy said.

“What do you think about Piggy? You think he’s my guardian angel? That he’s just there to look out for me?”

“No, of course not. But what has Piggy ever done to you that wasn’t what it seemed?”

“He was going to take Jane and me to Chinois for my birthday, for example. He made a big thing about it. So we had to
go that night instead of doing what I wanted to do. He had the publicist carry on about my birthday for a week. Then he wrote a note to Barbara Gerrald and sent her six dozen roses and said he couldn’t see her because he had to ‘babysit.’ She sent me the note when he started going out with Sylvie Marlowe.”

“But he might really have had a change of heart, but he didn’t want to hurt you, and of course he never thought Barbara would show it to you. Or he might have been embarrassed by how fond he was of you, and saying that he was babysitting just sort of passed it off. You know?”

“You don’t get it,” Nicole said. “Piggy’s business.”

Another airplane passed overhead and disappeared temporarily in a patch of clouds. It emerged slowly, and for a second it seemed to be pulling the cloud behind it. Nicole laughed. “I’ll tell you what Barbara Gerrald did that was just great,” she said. “She told the carhop at Chow’s, when Piggy and his wife were in there, that the flowers were a birthday present and gave him ten bucks to put them on the dashboard. It’s not that original or anything, but when Piggy and his wife came out and saw the roses, he must have had a hard time explaining it.”

Lucy couldn’t think what to say. She felt in the position of standing up for morality, but she didn’t feel comfortable in the position of a conservative adult lecturing a child, either. She had to say something.

“Who’s Barbara Gerrald?” she said.

“She’s Penny Holden on
Summer Nights.
”

Lucy had learned not to persist. The more she questioned Nicole, the farther away she was led from any facts that would mean anything to her. People’s real names, their professional names, the movies and/or TV shows they appeared in meant nothing to Lucy, let alone who they were married to, having an affair with, or considering suicide because of. At first Nicole thought that Lucy was teasing her, when nothing she could say would define a person, but by now she had subsided into feeling a little sorry for Lucy because she was such an outsider. Nicole had liked Edward’s suggestion that they have marathon sessions in which Lucy would throw her arms around the
droning TV and Nicole would teach her by immersing her in the experience like Helen Keller’s teacher.

Though Lucy knew that she was really talking to herself, she said, “I guess that when Piggy saw the roses he could have pretended they were there by mistake.”

“That’s figuring that the carhop didn’t know who Barbara Gerrald was,” Nicole said.

“You really think he knew?”

“I don’t want to get into it, but anybody but you would know who Barbara Gerrald is.”

“But it was a surprise—the guy wouldn’t stand around and talk about it, would he?”

“I don’t know how it turned out,” Nicole said. “The thing that might have saved him was that even if the carhop did say something, it probably didn’t make any sense because those guys are so speedy. What a lot of them do is drop acid before they have to start parking the cars. One night when I was out with Bobby Blueballs and his mother, the guy that brought the car had flipped out, and he thought he was in the belly of a whale. It was about a hundred degrees out, and he had the windows up and he was sweating like mad, waving his arms around trying to swim. He sideswiped a Mercedes coming up to the front door. The cops had to smash a window to get him out, and there was an ambulance and everything, and they had to give him a shot of Thorazine and peel him off the wheel.”

Edward and Noonan pulled into the driveway, in Peter’s car. They were picking up Nicole, and they were going into town to see the two o’clock matinee of
Gremlins
.

“Get her to tell you her story about the new Jonah,” Lucy said.

“Hi,” Edward said. “What story?”

“What story?” Noonan said.

“Jonah?” Nicole said, turning to look at Lucy. “Who’s Jonah?”

I
N
his fantasies, Hildon was a shit kicker. He honestly believed that people who were less intelligent had superior lives, and the more stubbed the toes of their Corfam boots were, the better. Someone had to keep the garages of the world pumping gas. Someone had to think that politicians were going to improve their life. Shit kickers were up front about wanting to be studs and down home with their cooking. Seeing the charcoal glowing in their barbecue grills as he drove by, Hildon felt the same sense of peace and contentment that people feel in front of the candles lit on the altar of the church. He was simply fascinated to live among them, after a lifetime in the Ivy League. He liked it that as he lit his after-dinner Gauloises, they were wiping their mouths on the backs of their hands. Although they barely noticed that he was alive, their existence pointed out to him that he was absolutely absurd. Little Hildon with the heart murmur, who had squinted over Plato’s arguments until he ended up with thick glasses at twelve, now read first-person accounts in
Soldier of Fortune
of men blowing away gooks and grizzlies. He bent his beer cans before throwing them away, sent
$4
for an assortment of mail-order Superstud prophylactics and spread them out over his kitchen table with the reverence of someone laying out the Tarot. The summer before, he and Lucy had driven to another town to go to a summer street festival, and Hildon had totally indulged his fantasies. He had worn a Born to Lose T-shirt, torn jeans, pointed-toe boots with spurs and walked along paring his nails with a file clicked open from his knife. He ate hot dogs without spitting out his gum.
He wanted to stop at a bank to apply for a loan to buy a dishwasher. That was the point at which Lucy put an end to it, and drove them back in the borrowed pickup, with Merle Haggard singing Bob Wills’s songs on the radio and a smile on Hildon’s face as though he had just gone to heaven.

Today Hildon stood next to Lucy at the horse auction. He had on a straw hat, a T-shirt full of holes, torn jeans, the boots with spurs. His face was burning in the hot sun. He should have been at work, but what the hell. Who was going to point a finger? The pointed finger was never feared anymore; if anyone saw anything so silly, it was
meant
as an impossibility come true: E.T.’s magic finger aglow, not the demanding Uncle Sam Wants You point or the crooked finger of the Wicked Witch.

It was Hildon’s theory that nobody was doing what people assumed in the afternoon—that whatever he was doing, millions were doing with him. Nothing erotic happened at night, but everywhere, all over, all day, people were pretending to be Tinkerbell or Mr. T or marine sergeants or Godzilla and being hung by their thumbs and checking into motels with their lovers to put on diapers and play patty-cake until they came. That was why the chief loan officer wasn’t yet back from lunch, why the mechanic called in sick, why the judge threw the case out of court when the prosecutor’s only witness didn’t show. Doctors were checking in late for surgery, accountants were filing extensions, roofers weren’t appearing to repair leaks, bakers burned the bread. All day, people were so lost in passion and fantasy that they could barely get the essentials accomplished so they weren’t fired, the mortgage was paid, the children fed. Discos were a farce, and only geriatric cases ever attempted romantic weekends, following the recommendations of
New York
magazine. Everything stopped at night, and on weekends. Summer vacation you could forget entirely. At best, it was when people rested from their double, triple, and quadruple lives and took a break from the frantic fun they had all year long. Who was going to envy a cat for having nine lives when huge numbers of people had that many and didn’t have to pay the price of eating Puss’n Boots. How many people were
really going to go home and confess an affair? And if they did, how many weren’t going to live to tell? Wives who were told their husbands were in a meeting would never know that they were off at nude archery practice. The
real
big deals of the world were five eight and blonde. There wasn’t a traffic tie-up on the GW bridge—their husband was tied up, being flogged. Rapists were sleeping with their parole officers. Speeders were propositioning state patrolmen. And all the while, Jimmy Carter of Plains, Georgia, was committing adultery in his mind. Knowing how to move your fingers up and down the stem of your champagne flute was the new equivalent of dropping a glove. Platonic love was about as probable as the last game of the World Series being televised without Instant Replay.