Love Always (22 page)

“You mean so much to me,” Andrew said. “I worship that strange, wonderful mind. I missed you so much when we were apart. A writer’s life is so lonely, and to have found a soulmate …”

When Anita and Howley came home, they were still watching.

“Another goddamn plodding movie about some guy that’s obsessed,” Howley said. “He’s driving around, listening to crap on the radio, and thinking about this woman, and outside the car there are magnificent, snow-covered mountains, and he’s so out of it, he’s just whizzing by, going to meet this woman for two seconds just to have a look at her … I paid good money to see that?”

Howley stood in front of Lillian, blocking her view. “What the hell is this?” Howley said.

“Passionate Intensity
,” Andrew said.

“What in the hell is happening in this world?” Howley said. “This thing looks like a soap opera.”

“It is a soap opera, Howley,” Anita said.

“It’s like
General Hospital
,” Andrew said.

“Yeah?” Howley said, kicking the footstool away from the chair and sitting on it. “Famous people do cameos?”

“Is this the show that had Elizabeth Taylor?” Anita said, sitting on the floor, next to Howley.

“I don’t know,” Andrew said.

“That was
General Hospital
. I don’t think she was on two of them,” Lillian said.

“Make us drinks, baby,” Howley said. “I’d do it just to seem liberated, but it breaks my heart to put as much ice in a glass as you like. You’d better make them.”

“None for me, thanks,” Andrew said. “It’s not true that all writers have a problem with alcohol.”

“I’ll have one,” Lillian said.

“Now how do you figure in this?” Howley said.

“I’m going to get inside their minds,” Andrew said. “I’m going to add dimension to what’s going on. I’ll be enlarging those characters, subtly telling the public what they are and what they aren’t.”

“I can tell you what they aren’t,” Howley said. “They’re not real. There’s not a guy on this show that would spit crossing the street.”

“Make drinks and don’t put ice in them; that’s fine with me,” Anita said, hugging his leg.

“That’s Stephanie Sykes,” Andrew said, when Nicole came on the screen. “Look at that face. They picked her because she’s got depth.”

Howley turned from the screen and looked at Andrew. Lillian looked at Anita.

“Come on,” Anita said to Lillian. “Help me pour whiskey in glasses.”

Lillian got up. All the tumbling and talking on the screen was making her exhausted. She wanted to bolt down a whiskey or two before she had to get up and go home.

In the kitchen, Lillian and Anita heard the bloodhounds, wailing in the backyard. They let them in, and they tore into the living room. They ran to Howley, and he reached down and stroked their ears. The dogs joined the crowd, mesmerized by people crying on
Passionate Intensity
.

N
ICOLE
answered the phone, so she was the first to get the news of Jane’s marriage. One week after Nicole flew East, Jane had married the twenty-four-year-old would-be tennis pro. Piggy Proctor had given her away. They were married in a friend’s backyard. She could not remember the names of the friends, because they were Piggy’s friends, not hers. In attendance were Piggy, Piggy’s wife, and Piggy’s mother, who was visiting for the week.

Nicole tried to sound cold, but she had to fight back tears. “Why wasn’t I there?” she said.

“It was sudden,” Jane said. “It was just something that we had to do, and it seemed silly to make a big production of it and have you fly back—”

“See how you like it when I do this to you,” Nicole said.

“I didn’t do it
to you
,” Jane said.

“Yeah. You were just feeling up and thought you’d marry that guy.”

“We’re all going to be happy together. Even Piggy loves him.”

“No way,” Nicole said. “Piggy gets it together when he has to get it together.”

“You know how much I love you,” Jane said. “Don’t sulk.”

“You’re my mother, not my director,” Nicole said.

Lucy was standing in the kitchen doorway. Nicole handed her the phone. A few minutes later Nicole was slumped in a chair on the side lawn. She was painting her toenails.

“Tell me about it,” Nicole said. “Tell me about how great it is that I have a twenty-four-year-old stepfather. That would
make him ten when I was born. I’m supposed to call him Daddy? His balls hadn’t dropped when I was born.”

“Nobody said you have to call him Daddy,” Lucy said. She was upset, but she didn’t think it would be a good idea to make Nicole any more upset than she already was. Lucy was remembering Jane’s first marriage, and how she had immediately taken a deep breath and tried to keep their mother calm by pretending that everything was fine. Jane had married the first rich man who proposed. He had saved her from a dreary life as a model, living in a shared studio apartment with another girl, who was studying languages. Jane had become a cliché: the beautiful, intelligent, aspiring New York girl who lives with her expansive ideas in one room, with a full-length mink in the closet and a purebred kitten for company. Lucy had been to the apartment. Jane’s desk was also her makeup table and her bureau drawer. She slept on a thin mattress, folding it so that it would fit partially under the desk and sleeping with her shoulders and head in the kneehole tunnel so that her roommate wouldn’t trip over her if she went to the bathroom during the night. The desk drawer was filled with piles of pastel underwear, boxes of cosmetics, love letters tied neatly together with ribbon. The same drawer held her checkbook, her diaphragm, and four boxes of Joy which had been given to her in exchange for twenty subway tokens by a photographer’s assistant who had been given the perfume by a client. Lucy had been with Jane when she made the exchange. Later, when Lucy lived in New York, too, she understood these trades: the cumulative effect of the desperation—all the things dreamed of and coveted—resulted in an atmosphere in which lesser things meant nothing. Small things were small things: to be shoplifted, given away, swapped for other small things. The two-carat diamond Jane was offered at the end of her first year in the city was no small thing, and she promptly agreed to get married. Her former roommate recited love poems in French, Italian, and Turkish. The Beatles, piped through her mother’s sound system, sang “The Long and Winding Road.” Under her wedding dress, Jane wore a garter she had been given by a man she picked up hitchhiking on the Cape the previous fall, with “Obladi,
Oblada” spelled out in rhinestones. She sprayed on the Joy the way woodsmen apply Deep Woods Off. The shoes were Eighth Street pink satin, with three-inch heels. She held tight to Lucy’s hand when she walked out of the bedroom and started down the corridor to the living room of what was by then only their mother’s house. A man played “Here Comes the Bride” on a pump organ that had been brought in for the day. The best man, the groom’s brother, was a retired jockey from Columbus. Jane and Lucy exchanged looks during the ceremony. Lucy had forgotten what those secret looks meant. Her personal secret had been that she did not know what was happening. Why hold herself accountable when her own sister was happy to have everything go up in dust, particularly white dust, inhaled through one nostril? Years later, in nightmares, that organ music still came back to her. Even at the time, it sounded like what would be played in a B movie when someone was drowning. And then Jane’s husband had drowned.

Nicole blew on her toes. “Notice that she’s too much of a coward to have told Grammy,” she said. “And notice that Piggy was too much of a coward to tell me.” Nicole sighed. “I mean, I bust ass so we can have this great life, and she runs off with some kid.”

Except for her vocabulary, Lucy thought, Nicole sounded very much like her grandmother.

“Who is he?” Lucy said, unable to hide her distress.

“He’s not Jimmy Connors, or you would have heard of him.”

The cows had come into the back field and were grazing, swishing their tails and occasionally snapping their heads around, trying to scare off flies. St. Francis was tied up in his spot by the rhododendrons. He was feeling very bad after all the screaming he had had to endure regarding the incident with the sheep.

“Honest to God,” Nicole said, “if you don’t have Brooke Shields’ mother and that set of problems, you’ve got a mother like mine and a whole different mess to deal with.”

“Do you think she loves him?” Lucy asked.

“She hardly knows him. I’ll tell you, she was getting really down because she wasn’t meeting anybody interesting who was straight. She told me she was beginning to think all straight guys were like Piggy. This guy’s some jock.”

“He doesn’t want to be in the movies, at least,” Lucy said.

Nicole rolled her eyes. “Sure he wants to be in the movies.”

“How do you know?” Lucy said.

“Because he got all excited about being an extra. He got to jump out of his seat and catch a baseball in some movie that never got released, and he had a still blown up and hung it on the back of the bedroom door.”

Nicole had been reading magazines. From time to time she had also been reading
Pride and Prejudice
, but she thought it was too weird. She read a chapter or two, then got back to the news of Princess Di. She was on the cover of this month’s
Good Housekeeping
, which was on the top of the magazine pile. Princess Di was shown in profile, the hat she wore indistinguishable from a cow pat except for the spray of feathers.

Jane had told Lucy that what she wanted for a wedding present was for her to make the call to their mother. Lucy had offered to send a silver-rimmed salad bowl instead. Jane had gone into gales of laughter. Stoned. She had made the call stoned.

Now, Nicole was walking around the lawn, aimlessly, like a small child. She was squinting in the sun, and the breeze was blowing through her hair. Standing by the car, she looked small—just a pretty little girl in summertime. She could have been happier, but the truth was that her mother’s phone call hadn’t been the only blow; part of her world had ended the day Ralston-Purina and Campbell’s Soup canceled.

Lucy decided that the best thing to do was to let Nicole be alone for a while. She went into the house and dialed her mother. This was really her summer of doing favors for her sister.

“I have something to tell you,” Lucy said when Rita answered. “It’s not terrible, but I don’t think you’re going to think it’s good news.”

“Say it,” her mother said, her voice almost a whisper.

“I don’t really have the details,” Lucy said, “but a few days ago Jane got married, in California.”

There was complete silence on the line.

“She didn’t tell us right away.”

“Who did she marry?” her mother said.

“Well, it’s embarrassing to admit, but I didn’t write his name down when she told me, and I don’t remember.”

“What does he do?”

“I’m not sure of everything that he does, but he’s a tennis player.”

“If that’s the best thing you can start with, I don’t know that I want to know what else he does,” her mother said.

“It’s her life,” Lucy said. “She can take care of herself.”

“She’ll have to, married to somebody who plays tennis.”

“But it’s just that I’m not sure of what else he does.”

“He wants to be in the movies, if he isn’t already. That’s what he does.”

Lucy said nothing.

“She didn’t invite you to this wedding?”

“No,” Lucy said. “She just called us. Nicole was hurt. I wish Jane had given her the option of being there.”

“Jane doesn’t think about anybody but herself.”

“That isn’t true.”

“I’m not going to argue with you,” her mother said.

“She was afraid to call you,” Lucy said. “Are you going to call her and wish her the best when you get yourself together?”

“Give her my best wishes when you speak to her,” her mother said.

“I don’t want to be the go-between,” Lucy said.

“No one wants to star in a movie that’s already been made,” her mother said.

“Please call her.”

“Couldn’t Piggy stop her?” her mother said.

“Piggy gave her away.”

“What does Piggy say about this?”

“I haven’t spoken to him about it.”

“Is she pregnant again?”

“I don’t think so,” Lucy said. “That wouldn’t be any reason—”

“Your sister doesn’t do anything as the result of reason.”

“I don’t think so,” Lucy said. “Is he foreign?”

“No. Apparently he’s a Wasp. She’s sending pictures.”

“Is he an old man?”

“Quite young.”

“I assume that he isn’t well off, or you would have said so.”

“I assumed that if he was, Jane would have told me.”

“What does Piggy say?”

“We-we-we, I want some.”

Her mother was silent.

“I didn’t speak to Piggy.”

Lucy waited for her mother to continue. There was a long silence.

“How is Nicole?”

“We’re all as surprised by this news as you are. She’s taking it okay. I think she’s having a pretty good time here—better than I thought she’d have.”