Magic Hour (24 page)
"How did you get it to her?"
"Her father lives outside of Scottsdale. She visits him once a year, then drives over, sees the mock-ups for new catalogs. We talk and..." If this guy went through a red light, he'd probably handcuff himself, turn himself in and beg the judge for the max.
"You talk and what? You hand her the money?"
"Yes, in an envelope. But I promise you, it won't happen again." All right! I thought, as I hung up. Score one for the good guys.
I searched around and finally found a couple of paperbacks, Stephen King and Clancy, and brought them into her room. I didn't want her to hate it, being stuck in there, and I didn't want her to think I was a semiliterate jerk who, when he read at all, read statistics—although that was more true than not. She was a writer; she had full bookshelves. What was I going to say? Hey, Bonnie, I may not read books much, but I read three papers a day and watch all the historical documentaries on cable. You want to know about the Battle of Midway? Metternich's life story? Just ask me.
"These are for later," I said. "Now it's time to talk." I pulled back the shade and looked outside. The last of the soft, magic daylight was fading.
"Okay, but ... I'm not telling you how to do your job ... maybe you could give Vincent Kelleher a call."
"Why?"
"Because he wasn't telling you the truth. And
I'm
going to tell you the truth. I know how badly I've messed things up for myself, and now you're giving me another chance. Well, I want to be worthy of your confidence. And I want you to believe me about everything."
This time, the cop beat out the man. She shouldn't think she had me on her side; she should convince me. I said: "Maybe I'll call him later. For now, tell me how you hooked up with Sy again."
When you and Sy split, was there a lot of bad feeling?"
"No." Bonnie leaned back against the headboard, one of those cheapo woven wood jobs that squeak every time you inhale. She was wearing what she'd worn when I found her folding laundry: red nylon running shorts and a black tank top. The white socks she'd had on had gotten filthy on the run through the field, so she'd taken them off. She hadn't been wearing shoes.
She drew her knees up together, folded her arms over them, then rested her head on the arms. Jesus, was she flexible; it was the kind of position that normally only an eight-year-old can be comfortable in. "The day I signed the separation agreement, he took me out to lunch. Le Cirque. Soft lights, soft linen napkins. Soft food, so you wouldn't crunch when you chew. We were sitting on the same side on the banquette. He held my hand under the table and said, 'It's my fault that I wasn't able to love you enough. But I'll always be there for you, Bonnie.' "
So, obviously, would Moose. The dog rested her face on the blanket until Bonnie patted her. Then she lay down on my feet.
"Did you throw up when he said that?"
"No, it was before the appetizer. But see, in his own way, Sy was sincere. He truly believed what he was saying, even though twenty seconds after he dropped me off at Penn Station so I could get the train back to Bridgehampton, I ceased to exist. But since I hadn't given him a hard time about splitting up ... I mean, I cried a lot and asked him to go to a marriage counselor, but that was all. I didn't want alimony. So he felt kindly toward me. If someone had asked, 'Sy, what was your second wife like?' he'd have said, 'Hmmm, second wife. Oh, yes. Bonnie. So
sweet
. Down-to-earth.' It was funny: If you crossed him, he'd never forget you, but niceness made no impression on him."
"Why didn't you fight harder to stay together?"
"Because..." She put her hands together, prayer fashion, and touched her forefingers to her lips. Finally, she said: "Because I knew he didn't love me anymore—if he ever had. Sy could fall in love, but it was like an actor immersing himself in a character. The week I met him, in L.A., he must have just come back from a John Ford retrospective—so I became his cowgirl. He walked around wearing a denim jacket, squinting, smoking; this was before his decaffeinated days. He broke off the filters and lit his cigarettes with those matches you'd strike on the bottom of your boot; he actually took to wearing an old pair of shit-kickers, which wasn't so terrible because he was three inches shorter than me. God knows where he got them—probably in some Madison Avenue antique-boot boutique. We'd go riding a lot. Western saddle. He said, 'The English saddle is so effete.' But after three weeks back in
"How was he a decent husband? I thought you said he cheated on you—with some socialite."
"Decent for Sy. He held doors open. He remembered birthdays, anniversaries. He had great style; one Valentine's Day he bought me a new tackle box, and when I opened it, there was a beautiful long strand of fourteen-millimeter pearls."
"What are fourteen-millimeter pearls?"
"
Big
pearls." Her hands described a sphere that was about the size of the average classroom globe. It annoyed me that she liked such an expensive gift. I wanted her to say, I told Sy to take back the pearls; I only wanted the tackle box. But she didn't. "You have to understand Sy," she went on. "He couldn't be faithful. He couldn't be straight. He
had
to be ... I don't know if 'crooked' is the word. He had to manipulate every situation. Some of it was money. He was always afraid someone was cheating him, so he played one stockbroker, one lawyer, one accountant, against another. But
he
cheated people all the time. He hid personal expenses in movie budgets. I'm not just talking about a sweatsuit and a set of barbells; his second movie paid for a gym and a hot tub in our apartment in the city. And you couldn't use words like 'illegal' or 'immoral' with him, because in a weird way, he took them as compliments. He saw his finagling as an adventure and himself as a kind of swanky Robin Hood. But all he was doing was robbing from the rich to give to the rich."
"You didn't see any of this when you agreed to marry him?"
"No. I just saw this charming, cultured man with crinkles around his eyes who was crazy about
Cowgirl
and who knew all about westerns. Not just a superficial knowledge: I remember him describing one of Tom Mix's silent movies—
Cactus Jim's Shop Girl
. Actually, he seemed to know about everything: Cambodian architecture, the Big Bang theory, the linguistic connection between Finnish and Hungarian. But I think what got me most about Sy was that he
appreciated
me. My work. My eyes. My hair. My ... All the usual stuff. This man was such a connoisseur, I thought: Lord, am I something!"
She concentrated on massaging her knee, a slow back-and-forth motion, the way you do to ease an old injury. Suddenly she glanced up at me, then, quickly, back down to her knee. I knew what she was thinking: despite our very different resumes, I was like Sy. Oh, how I had appreciated her that night: I swear to God, I've never met anyone like you, Bonnie. Bonnie, your skin is like warm velvet. You know what, Bonnie? Your eyes are the color of the ocean. Not a summer ocean. Like on a bright winter day—so beautiful. I could talk to you for hours, Bonnie. Bonnie, I love you.
"But Sy's enthusiasms never lasted. He had a closet with equipment from sports he'd tried a few times and given up: golf, racquetball, scuba diving, polo, cross-country skiing. And if he could have put women in a closet, he would have; he was on to other enthusiasms by our two-month anniversary."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. Actually, it got to be amusing." She lifted her chin and gave a little closed-lipped smile, a superior city-slicker expression that overflowed with
savoir faire
. It was fake as hell. "I could tell who he was having an affair with by the way he dressed. One day he put away his nipped-in-waist Italian suit and took out a torn T-shirt and bleached jeans, and I knew he'd stopped with the production designer with the surrealist jewelry and taken up with the third-string
Village Voice
movie critic, this girl with a lot of hair who was about ten minutes past her Sweet Sixteen. You couldn't help but laugh."
"Don't bullshit me."
The blanket on the bed, which the architect had probably decided was a grand bucolic design statement, was a pukey green plaid. Bonnie traced a thin, dark-green line with her finger. "All right," she said quietly, "what he did to me stank. More than that. It broke my heart. I'm not the kind of woman men fall for. Then, finally, one did. I was so happy. But before I could even finish the love poem I was writing to him, a sonnet—fourteen lousy lines—he stopped loving me."
"So the marriage was over before it was officially over."
She nodded. "We still had sex, but there was no love, and not much companionship. On the nights he was home, he'd hole up in his study and read scripts or make phone calls. After the separation, I went on with my life. It wasn't hard to do; we hadn't really been a couple."
"But your economic situation, your social status, changed. What was your life like?"
"What do you mean?" She got very engrossed in following another, thicker line in the plaid.
"Happy, sad, wonderful, terrible?"
"It was okay." She didn't look up at me.
"Come on, Bonnie."
"Why is this necessary?"
"Because I want to know the circumstances surrounding your taking up with Sy again."
"The circumstances were that I was—am—an independent woman. No ties. My mom died when I was seventeen: a brain tumor. My dad remarried—to a woman from
"My life: I live in a lovely town by the ocean in a part of the country I don't belong in. I have Gideon and his lover, two women friends, and a lot of pleasant acquaintances. Summers are a little better; I kept a couple of friends from my Sy days—a film editor, a
Wall Street Journal
entertainment industry reporter—and they have houses around here. We have some good times. I do volunteer work with illiterate adults and for every environmental cause that comes down the pike. That's how I met Gideon. He was representing a land rapist, and we started out screaming at each other because roseate terns have become an endangered species, but we wound up great friends. You want more? I make eighteen thousand dollars a year writing pap for catalogs and the local paper and industrial publications like
Auto Glass News
. What else do you want to know? Sex? Until AIDS, I slept with any man who appealed to me. Now I read and watch two movies a night and run five miles a day. I had an abortion when I was married to Sy because he said he wasn't ready to have children. I wanted to have a baby more than anything. From the time I was thirty-eight, when it dawned on me that I'd never get married again because no one would ever ask, I stopped using birth control. I was never able to conceive; I found out my fallopian tubes were scarred closed from a dose of gonorrhea I'd gotten from my husband about six months after the abortion. Well, that's it." Bonnie clasped her hands on her knees. "I guess you expected something a little more upbeat."
"A little." I had to be professional. What was the alternative? Taking her in my arms, hugging her, whispering tender words of condolence? I asked: "We found two condom wrappers in a wastebasket in Sy's guest room. If you couldn't get pregnant—"
"AIDS, chlamydia, gonorrhea again. If I could have found a way of slipping a Trojan over his head before I kissed him, I would have, but it would have lacked a certain subtlety."
"Tell me more about your life."
"What's there to tell? I had such a happy childhood. And then my screenplay became a movie and got wonderful reviews, and then Sy came along and married me. Sure, I knew there'd be bumps. Tragedy even, like losing my mom. But it didn't occur to me that life wouldn't basically be wonderful. Well, it's not. It isn't terrible, but I never thought I would be so lonely."
"But now you have to deal with something a little more serious than personal happiness," I reminded her.
"I know."
"Like the possibility of a murder conviction." My voice was grim, deep and low, like a 45 record playing at 33. The small bedroom suddenly felt tight, airless, like a cell.
Bonnie seemed determined not to succumb to the gloom. She flashed one of her great grins. "So worse comes to worse, I get convicted for murder. After twenty, thirty years in jail, think of the script I could write. None of those
Blondes in Chains
cliches for me. You know: the dyke matron, the ripped uniforms so breasts peekaboo out. No, I'll write a socially significant screenplay and maybe get on
Entertainment Tonight
."
"Tell me about the screenplay you were working on with Sy."
"Oh, right.
A Sea Change
. It's based on a real incident during World War II. A German submarine surfaced off the coast of Long Island, and a couple of saboteurs slipped in. In my story, two women spot them down by the beach: a middle-class housewife and a bargirl who turns tricks on weekends. Anyway, it's about their helping catch the Nazis, but also about the friendship that develops."
"You sent it to Sy when you got finished with it?"
"I called him."
"What happened?"
"Well, first I spoke to his secretary, asked that he call me back, which he did a couple of days later. Kind of wary, to tell you the truth: I guess he was nervous I might be asking for money. But when I told him what it was, he was nice: You sound fantastic. Send it Fed Ex. Can't
wait
to read it."
It wasn't only that she didn't wear makeup, or that she did have incredible calf muscles; Bonnie was simply like no other woman I'd ever met. She seemed to be incapable of womanly wiles in any form. I looked her straight in the eye and she made no defensive feminine gestures. Her hand didn't fly up to touch her nose to check if it was oily, or up to her head to smooth down or fluff up her hair. She didn't make cow eyes or wounded-doe eyes, spread her legs an intriguing inch, thrust out her pelvis. No, she just looked straight back at me. I thought: Maybe it came from growing up with all those older brothers and that elk-shooting father and that rangy, broad-shouldered mother. Maybe she'd even tried batting her eyelashes or giggling, and nobody noticed. Maybe she'd acted wide-eyed and inept around all those Brownings and Remmingtons and Winchesters in the store, or gazed upon the engine of the family Buick and said, "Oooh, what's all that?" and got a swift kick in the butt, real or symbolic. She wasn't feminine. She was female.
"You say Sy liked your screenplay?"
"Yup."
I thought about what Easton had said about it. "Then why would he have told one of his people to find something nice to say about it, so he could get you off his back? And why would he have told Lindsay..." I tried to think of a way to say Sy thought the script was a piece of crap without actually having to say it.
"I can't say for sure. With Lindsay, I think it was natural he'd try and cover up any relationship with me." Bonnie rotated her ankles, making circles with her feet. "I mean, Lindsay has perpetually twitching, supersensitive antennae that can pick up any other woman within a fifty-mile radius. Sy was so careful; he did everything except wear sunglasses and a false nose when he came over." She stopped twirling her feet and started to do toe touches, flexing her calves as she bent over. She could have been stretching for a marathon; she was ready to run. She was not someone who could tolerate being confined.
