Love Me (28 page)

They had reached the top of the stairs now and followed
Miss Perkins down a carpeted corridor that seemed positively endless.
If this is the way to the bedrooms
, Margo thought,
I’m going to have to start carrying mixed nuts and a canteen every night
.

“The ones you did after the Oscars?”

“The very same. Same songs, same arrangements, same band. But we can’t record the sound track until Eddie gets back from New York.”

“They didn’t make him finish the picture first?”

Gabby rolled her eyes. “Like I said, it was last-minute. And besides, it seems he’s got some clause in his contract that says he can take off whenever he gets a live gig in a theater of a specific size. Addendum ‘Music Comes First.’ ” She snorted. “God only knows how he swung that. I never could. He’s never even been in a picture before.” She shook her head furiously, her dark brown curls bobbing from side to side. “Damn men! They let each other do whatever they want. Meantime, if I gain so much as a pound over my contract weight, the studio is fully within its rights to tar and feather me and ride me down the middle of North Crescent on a rail.”

Margo gave Gabby’s arm a squeeze, although inside she was dying of jealousy.
God, what I wouldn’t give to have a picture to worry about
. “I’m sure he’ll be back soon.”

“Yeah. He better be.” Lifting her big brown eyes back to Margo’s, Gabby gave a strange little laugh. “Anyway, in the meantime, here I am, your friendly real estate know-nothing. Honestly, Margo, I don’t know the first thing about houses, or architects, or what you’re supposed to look for, or what it’s all supposed to cost. If it’s got a roof and an indoor toilet, it all seems fine to me.”

Margo laughed. “You should go live with Dane, then. The two of you will get along just fine.”

“Don’t go putting ideas in my head.” Gabby looked at her carefully. “Still, it’s too bad he couldn’t come today. I mean, it’s going to be his house too, isn’t it?”

Theoretically
. “Well, like I said, he’s not too particular about this sort of thing,” she said airily, waving her hands as though to swat away Gabby’s questions before they were even asked. “And besides, he’s got reshoots on that Western picture they loaned him to Metro for, and wardrobe for the mountaineering thing he’s supposed to start right after the honeymoon. And with the wedding next week already, he’s just got so much to do.” She bit her lip. “I know he’d have come if he could.”
Right?

“Right,” Gabby said, as though she could hear Margo’s thoughts. “I’m sure.”

They had finally reached the end of the corridor. Miss Perkins unlocked a pair of immense walnut doors. “Voila,” she said. “The master suite.”

Suite? More like a wing
. Growing up in Pasadena, and now moving among the upper echelons of Hollywood, Margo had seen more than her fair share of lavish homes, but she’d never seen private quarters quite like this. Miss Perkins led them through a series of rooms that, judging from the dark wood finishes and rich, aromatic leather covering the walls, seemed meant for the man of the house: a sitting room, a library with a full bar built into the rolltop desk, a circular dressing room with an old-fashioned bellpull for the valet and a custom-built suit rack that rotated mechanically at the touch of a button.

“Yeah, it’s nice,” Gabby said as Miss Perkins was showing them the breathtaking view of the Pacific Ocean that was visible
even from the gentleman’s bed, “but I don’t see the point of separate bedrooms. Kinda takes all the fun out of it, you know what I mean?”

Margo understood, even without Gabby’s knowing wink, but the second they exited what Miss Perkins kept ostentatiously referring to as “the master’s quarters” and entered “the mistress’s,” the separation made perfect sense.

The main bedroom was, quite simply, the most elegant, most feminine, most downright
beautiful
room Margo had ever seen. The gently curved walls were papered a gorgeous shade of robin’s-egg blue, embossed with delicately drawn fronds in silver and pale gold. The round bed, covered in tufted lavender satin, was set against an iridescent headboard made to look like an open oyster shell. The chandelier—if you could call something of its splendor by so mundane a word—was made of thousands of ropes of gleaming pearls that stretched across the ceiling like a canopy. Unlike the hard reflective dazzle of crystals, the pearls seemed to absorb the light, casting a rosy, dreamlike glow over the entire room. Margo imagined lying in bed in the half darkness, looking up at them through heavy-lidded eyes as Dane lay beside her, took her in his arms, kissed her.…

“Drat!”
Miss Perkins exclaimed, her composure rattled by the stubborn lock on an adjoining door. “The boudoir is right through here, but I don’t seem to have the right key.”

“It’s okay,” Margo said, almost relieved to be shaken out of a daydream that she had no business dreaming in public. “I don’t need to see it.”

“Oh, believe me, you do. If you think this bedroom is to die for, just wait until you see the bath. The right key has to
be around here someplace. You don’t mind if I go and make a phone call, do you?”

“Not at all.”

Miss Perkins bustled out of the room, the plush carpeting mercifully muffling the click of her heels. Gabby sidled up alongside Margo, a mischievous gleam in her eyes. “You were thinking about getting Dane in here, weren’t you?”

“What?” Margo felt her face flush. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, Margie, come on. You can’t fool me. I saw the look on your face right now, looking at that bed. You can’t wait to see how that gorgeous husband-to-be of yours looks in it.”

Giggling, Gabby flopped down on the satin comforter.
She sounds like her old self
, Margo thought. It was at times like this, when Gabby reverted to the funny, bubbly, instantly confiding girl who had made her feel so at home in her first lonely weeks at the studio, that Margo remembered why they had become friends in the first place. Before the Charles Darwin survival-of-the-fittest dogfight that was life on the Olympus lot had divided them.

Well, I guess she can afford to be nice now
. Gabby’s star was on the rise, and Margo’s, which last year had blazed bright enough to blind, was beginning to fade.
She’ll be Gabby Preston and win her own Oscars. I’ll be Mrs. Dane Forrest and get to stand around and look at his
. Somehow, it didn’t seem like a very fair trade.

“Believe me, I don’t blame you,” Gabby continued, curling her knees to her chest. “It’s so amazing, isn’t it? I mean, once you do it once, you just want to do it all the time. To be perfectly honest, I don’t see how anyone gets anything else done.”

“Gabby Preston.”
A realization woefully late in coming began to creep over Margo. “You don’t mean …”

Gabby wore the satisfied grin of a cat that had just licked up every last drop of the cream.
If she were wearing any buttons, she’d burst them
. “Eddie,” she breathed, wrapping her arms tightly around her chest, her eyes shining. “Eddie and me. We did it. I went all the way with Eddie.”

Of course
, Margo thought irritably.
Of course she did. I’m not stupid. Why am I always so slow on the uptake?

“Wow,” Margo said, with almost exactly the same inflection with which she had acknowledged the dubious splendor of the Egyptian ballroom. Gingerly, she sat down beside Gabby on the oyster bed. “Wow.”

“ ‘Wow’? Is that all?” Gabby was practically jumping out of her skin with excitement. “Don’t you want to hear how it was?”

“It seems like you want to tell me.”

“Of course I do!” Gabby squealed, snatching up a shell-shaped pillow and clutching it to her chest. “Telling’s the best part. Well”—she grinned sheepishly—“maybe not quite the
best
part. But a good part.”

Margo smiled weakly. “Then I guess you better tell me.”

“Well, it was all very spontaneous. Unplanned. I mean, I
planned
it”—Gabby wrinkled her pert nose prettily—“but not like this. I mean, I’d imagined I’d surprise him. I’d book some fancy suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel—”

“Not the Chateau?”

“Nah, something about that place makes me feel dirty.” Gabby shivered. “Like you could murder someone and the chambermaids would just scoop the body into the incinerator,
no questions asked. Besides, Larry Julius has practically the entire lobby staff on his payroll. All those newsreels about those men in the trench coats spying on everybody in Germany? Jeez Louise, they oughta hire
him
.”

“I don’t think Hitler pays quite as well as Leo Karp,” Margo said tersely. It seemed churlish to point out that Larry lacked the specific, should one say,
ethnic
qualities the Nazi regime required in their minions.

“Well, anyway, I prefer the Beverly Hills. It’s classier. So I had it all planned, how it would happen. I mean, since Eddie seemed like he was never going to make the first move. I thought I’d rent myself one of those fancy suites by the pool, maybe even a bungalow. Then I’d call him up and invite him to a drinks party, something that seemed like an occasion, so he’d be dressed up and looking nice. And then, when he got there, whoops! There’s nobody else there. Like that trick Diana Chesterfield pulled in that picture she made for Metro, with Robert Montgomery—”

“Move Over, Darling,”
Margo replied instantly.

“Yes! Where she invites him to her room at the Plaza and gives him a glass of champagne and says, ‘Oh, I’m
terribly sorry
.…’ ”

“ 
‘The party is just you and me
,’ ” Margo finished along with Gabby, mimicking Diana’s breathy murmur.
God!
She and her old friend Doris had seen
Move Over, Darling
at least four times during the two weeks it had played the Pasadena Rialto, and then sat at the soda fountain practicing talking with drinking straws clamped between their teeth, the way Diana did with her tortoiseshell cigarette holder in the picture.

“And now she’s in your wedding,” Gabby said, as though
once again she could read Margo’s mind. “Funny how life works, isn’t it?”

“Keep telling me about Eddie,” Margo said, eager to change the subject. “You said he’s in New York for a gig?”

“If you can call playing the Palace a gig,” Gabby said proudly. “It’s kind of like calling that diamond mine on your finger a ring. But like I said, it happened all of a sudden. It was Friday night. He was supposed to pick me up at Jimmy’s bungalow at the Chateau to take me out, but he showed up at my house instead, hours early, and said it was important. He
had
to see me.”

Her eyes took on a dreamy, faraway look. “He was supposed to catch the train that night, see, and he just couldn’t go without saying goodbye. Well, Viola pitched a fit, as you can imagine. Gave me that whole over-my-dead-body, not-while-you’re-under-my-roof song-and-dance. Mothers!” She rolled her eyes. “Can’t live with ’em, can’t be born without ’em. But she got it back this time, and good. Maybe it’s these new pills I’m taking, or maybe it was having Eddie there. Maybe it was divine inspiration, who knows? But I told her as long as I’m paying, she’s under
my
roof, and from now on, I’m going to do whatever I want and go wherever I want with whoever I want. And if she doesn’t like it, then she can just go and find some other little singing and dancing meal ticket to exploit.”

“Wow,” Margo said dumbly once again.
I wonder what’ll happen when Mr. Karp gets wind of that
.

“Wow’s right,” Gabby said with a proud nod. “So Eddie and I beat it, and we went for a drive in the Hills. He pulled over into this secluded spot, and that’s when he told me how he was going to New York, and he’d be gone for a month at least, and
well”—she looked up with a naughty grin—“I guessed I’d better give him something to remember me by.”

“Gabby!” Margo’s hand flew to cover her open mouth. “You mean … right in the car?”

“Yeah, like I said, it wasn’t exactly what I’d been imagining. But still, it was awfully romantic in its way.” Gabby’s eyes were dreamy again. “We were up so high, nobody could see us, but we could see the whole city spread out in front of us. Like we were up in heaven or something. We were in a grove of cypress trees that smelled so good, and there was a cool breeze coming through the windows. Besides,” she added quickly, recovering from her brief, uncharacteristic lapse into poetry, “Eddie’s got one of those huge new model Lincolns. The backseat is practically as big as a double bed.”

“Yes,” Margo said, “but didn’t it make an awful mess?”

Gabby frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Well, with, you know, the blood, or …” Margo trailed off.

“There wasn’t any blood.”

“There wasn’t?”

“No. But I wasn’t really expecting there to be. Amanda says it’s a myth, about the bleeding. She says hardly anyone does.”

“Well, I guess she would know.”

Gabby shrugged. “It’s not just Amanda. Pretty much everybody says that.”

“Everybody?”

“Well, Dr. Lipkin, at least. I went to him a while back to see about getting fitted for one of those—whaddaya call it—that thing you can use—”

“A pessary,” Margo said quietly, her cheeks burning with embarrassment. She might have recovered from most of the
psychological injuries inflicted on her by the Orange Grove Academy for Young Ladies, but the scars never throbbed so hard than when she was discussing matters like this.
If only this were a real oyster shell
, she thought,
I could push Gabby out and slam the whole thing shut
. It seemed a more attractive alternative to the usual wanting to crawl into a hole to die.

“A pessary?” Gabby shook her hand. “No, I don’t think that’s right. Isn’t that some kind of weird Australian bird?”

“You’re thinking of a cassowary.”

“Oh. Well, whatever it’s called, he wouldn’t let me have one. Said he didn’t think it was moral for a girl in my situation, and I didn’t want to press, for fear he’d go and blab the whole thing to Karp. But you have to have an examination, and he told me not to worry. That when the time came—when I got
married
, that is”—Gabby scoffed—“that it wouldn’t hurt a bit.” Her eyes glinted bitterly. “Remind me to thank that monster Tully Toynbee the next time I see him, will ya? Turns out he was good for something after all.”