Once Upon a Day (30 page)

That night, Lucy felt so much more confident that she decided to risk having sex with Charles the way they used to. She let him look at her naked body and touch her anywhere he wanted, including the scars. He told her she was gorgeous, and she knew he meant it because he was as excited as he had been the first weekend they were together. The next morning, they woke up holding each other and smiling, and they had breakfast on the balcony, just the two of them. It was already December, but it was warm enough that day to be comfortable. Lucy didn’t even mind seeing the electric fence. The view was still great. The ocean had never looked more glorious.

The script arrived a little before eleven. Tom brought it to her in the playroom, where Dorothea and Jimmy and Susannah were involved in a game. Charles was in his office talking to Russell Daley, the cinematographer he’d worked with for years, who was also interested in doing
Master of Dreams.
For a movie that was never going to be made, it was proving to be a lot of work in preproduction. She wasn’t sure why he was keeping up this pretense, unless it
was for Walter’s sake. Even though he and Walter had argued plenty over the years, Charles was fiercely loyal to him. It was something she’d always admired about her husband—except when Charles was collaborating with Walter to keep her from working.

As Lucy read the script, she became more and more excited. Pam was right; it was the perfect part for her, playing Adele, the wife of a senator who’d lost his hope after their son drowned. “We still have two daughters who need you,” Lucy read aloud, with feeling. She was typecast as a savior, just like Joan and Helena; as the one who would bring the senator back to himself. She could do this role in her sleep.

While the children had lunch, she made acting notes. The difficulty of this part, she wrote, is that Adele has also lost her son. How can she reach through her own damage to help Martin (the senator)? Won’t she feel resentment that her pain is so secondary (at least as it’s written now) to his?

Lucy shoved the script behind the toaster when she heard Charles coming.

“I have to meet Russell.” Charles had his car keys in his hand. “I told him today is the wrong day for this, but it can’t be helped.” He leaned over and kissed her. “Sorry, my sweet. You know I wouldn’t leave you if I didn’t have to.”

“I understand,” Lucy said.

“I’ll be home at six-thirty, seven at the latest.” He walked over and kissed Jimmy and Dorothea. “Before you two go to bed.”

She watched him walk out, and then she picked up the phone to call Pam. She had a feeling Pam would jump at the chance to set up a meeting this afternoon, and she did.

“I have to have lunch with some dickhead producer, but I can make it by two. Will that work?”

“Sure,” Lucy said. “But I’ll need a ride home, and I have to be back by five-thirty.”

“Not a problem,” Pam said. “I’ll drive you myself.”

Krista was leaving for her night off. Lucy asked if she would
mind driving out of her way and dropping her at Pam’s office in West Hollywood.

“As long as Mr. Keenan doesn’t mind,” Krista said.

“He doesn’t,” Lucy said, only feeling a little bad for lying. Krista worked for her too, didn’t she?

She hurried upstairs to put on her lucky violet dress. She also had to do her makeup, but she brought most of it with her, to do in the car. They had to rush to get to Pam’s.

She made it on time and she and Pam were only a few minutes late for the meeting, which was held over drinks at The Beverly Hills Hotel. The casting director and a guy from marketing were there too, but Brett did most of the talking. What a nice guy, Lucy thought. He praised her talent and told her his vision for the movie. She told him her concerns about the way Adele was written. They talked at length about finding character motivation, what she could bring to each scene and what she might need reworked in the script. Lucy couldn’t remember when she’d ever had a better conversation about acting. Probably because Brett had started out as an actor, he brought something different to directing than Charles did.

Different, but not better. Lucy had no bad thoughts about her husband and no reason to feel guilty, though she couldn’t help feeling a little bad when they brought the salads and she remembered her little girl’s excitement over these pink bowls. She didn’t want to think about Charles and the children staying here when she’d been in the hospital, how hard that had been on them—but on her too, of course. She’d suffered plenty. All she was trying to do was move on with her life, was that so wrong?

At four o’clock she told Pam they really had to run. The drive home would take less than an hour and a half, even with traffic, but she wanted to be on the safe side.

All the way back, she and Pam talked about what a fabulous opportunity this was. And how Lucy should approach Charles with the news. “After a blow job,” Pam said, smirking. “You’ll already be on your knees. He should appreciate that position.”

“He’s not like that,” Lucy said.

“Of course he isn’t, kiddo. Didn’t mean anything by it.” She lit another cigarette. “Let’s get back to Brett. Isn’t he just a doll?”

Lucy opened the window, though she knew she’d smell like smoke. Everyone at the restaurant had been smoking too; it couldn’t be helped. She’d just have to get in the shower right when she walked in the door.

They made it back by 5:10, plenty of time for the shower. Lucy said hello to the security guard, and rushed inside, only to find Charles standing right there, waiting for her.

He hadn’t gone to meet Russell. He’d gone into the city, but at the last minute, he’d changed his mind and decided to come home. On the way back, he’d stopped at the jeweler and picked out a present for her: a beautiful milky pearl necklace that was still clutched in his hand, even though he’d been pacing the front hall for two hours.

Before she could say anything to explain, he threw the necklace against the wall with such force that the string broke and the pearls went rolling all over the hall floor.

“Charles, wait—”

“You didn’t even leave me a note.” His voice wasn’t loud, but it was shaking with anger. “I couldn’t get through to Krista. I had no idea where you were until I finally thought to call your agent’s office about fifteen minutes ago.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t think—”

“You didn’t think I’d be worried?” He jerked his glasses back and quickly rubbed his eyes. “Oh, of course, it’s not as if anything could happen to you. That’s impossible.”

“Well, it is unlikely.”

“ ‘Unlikely’ isn’t good enough. ‘Unlikely’ will drive me insane, and you know that.” He paced over to the door and then came up right next to her. He brought his face down to hers. “Are you trying to punish me?” His voice was a hiss. “Is that what this is about?”

“Punish you?”

“For taking Jimmy to the fire station that day. If I hadn’t done it,
I would have been home. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about that. I’ve thought about it a thousand times.”

“I really haven’t,” she said.

“Then what are you punishing me for? Being rich? I know you hate having money, and maybe you’re right. Maybe if we didn’t have all this, you wouldn’t have been hurt.”

“I don’t think that—”

“Do you know what having money means to me? It means never having to do something I don’t believe in for money. It means knowing I can always provide for my family, unlike that corrupt bastard James Joseph Keenan.”

Charles so rarely mentioned his father that it took Lucy a second to realize he wasn’t talking about Jimmy. Whenever Margaret mentioned her husband it was in perfectly glowing terms, calling him a fine man and a good father. But now his son, who had never cursed in the seven years Lucy had known him, was calling his father a corrupt bastard.

Lucy was too surprised to speak, and Charles didn’t give her a chance anyway.

“But if it’s important to you, I’ll give away every dollar we have. Whatever you say. I’ll call Peter tonight and tell him I’m donating it all to his homeless project. I can make the money back. The money is nothing to me without you.”

“It’s not the money.”

“Then what is it?” His voice grew quieter. “Please tell me. Why are you determined to break my heart?”

“I don’t want to break your heart,” she whispered. “It’s not your fault what happened to me, it really isn’t. But it’s not mine either, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to act anymore.”

“Do you have any idea what the last two hours were like? It was absolute torture, imagining you being knifed on Sunset Boulevard or kidnapped and raped if the car broke down on the freeway.”

“But here I am, and I’m fine.”

He shook his head. “You don’t understand what I’m telling you.
I don’t know if you can’t understand or you won’t, but either way, you just don’t see that I’m not going to make it through this.”

Lucy was trying to think of what to say when the children came downstairs with Susannah, fresh from their baths, already in their pajamas.

“Mommy, you look bootiful.”

“Thanks, baby.” Lucy reached down and picked up Dorothea. Her daughter was breathing fine. It had been over a month now since she’d had an attack, the longest so far. “What have you been doing, my pumpkin?”

“Playing!”

“How about you, Jimmy?”

“Same old, same old.” He smiled then because he knew Lucy would laugh. She always did when he said that. Charles had taught Jimmy the expression, but it sounded so funny coming out of the little boy’s mouth.

“What’s that?” Jimmy said, pointing at one of the pearls on the floor. Dorothea saw them too and said, “Pretty.”

“I guess you’re waiting for me to make dinner?” Lucy said. “Since Krista isn’t here?”

“Or Daddy could,” Jimmy said.

Charles was standing motionless, staring out the front window. He hadn’t even looked at the children or said hello.

“I think I should do it,” Lucy said. “Come on, you guys, let’s find something easy for Mommy to cook.”

Lucy sat with Dorothea and Jimmy while they ate their macaroni and cheese. Charles didn’t join them. She had no idea what he was doing, but she hoped he wasn’t still standing in the front hall.

An hour later, after she put the children to bed, she threw steaks on the broiler for the two of them. She assumed Charles was in his office, but when she looked, he wasn’t. She checked their bedroom too, and all of the rooms upstairs. Then she went back downstairs, and flipped the steaks, before looking around for him on the first floor. She was just starting to feel anxious when she saw the glow
from the breakfast room patio door. He was sitting outside in the garden, smoking a cigar.

She opened the door and went out to tell him the steaks would be ready soon.

“Thank you,” he said.

“What are you doing out here?”

“Thinking about
Master of Dreams.
”

“Oh,” Lucy said, sitting down next to him, relieved that this was such a normal topic. “Want to talk about it?”

“So you can talk about whatever project you decided to do today?”

Of course he knew. Why else would she have been at an afternoon meeting with Pam? “I don’t have to talk about my movie,” she said, “but I’d still like to hear about yours.”

“Master of Dreams
isn’t a movie, I’ve told you that. The idea came to me when you were in the hospital. It was while you were in the ICU, and I kept having dreams that none of this had happened.” He took a puff from his cigar; she watched the end glow bright orange. She wished she had a sweater. The breeze was too cold. “The dreams were all so ordinary. We were feeding Dorothea and playing ball with Jimmy, reading scripts in bed together, driving to the beach. Nothing we hadn’t done hundreds of times.”

He paused and she tried to see his face, but it was too dark. All she could see was the cigar end and it seemed to be twitching, as though his hand were shaking.

“Each dream was so ordinary that when I first woke up, I didn’t understand it was a dream. I thought the dream had to be the nightmare in front of me, with you screaming from a pain I couldn’t do anything to stop.”

She suddenly realized why he was sitting out here. They were right on top of where the sunroom used to be, maybe even on the very spot where he and Jimmy had found her.

“I have to check the steaks,” she said, but before she could move, he grabbed her hand.

“I was wrong, do you know why?”

“Because the hospital was real,” she said flatly. “It wasn’t a nightmare.”

“No. Because all those ordinary things, they were always a dream. Even when we thought we were living them, we were really dreaming. This was why it was so beautiful, don’t you see?”

“Please, I can’t—”

“This was why it was more beautiful than anything I’d ever written or even imagined. I finally understood. More beautiful than I should have ever thought I had a right to keep.”

She didn’t respond. She was cold, she was exhausted, and her wrist and leg were both hurting. She’d had a headache for hours. She wished she could go to sleep and not wake up again until all of this was over.

“Too beautiful,” he muttered. He waited another minute, maybe more, before he finally dropped her hand, and she rushed away from him, back into the house.

T
HE FILMING FOR
The Senator’s Wife
was set to start in the middle of March, but it didn’t actually start until the beginning of August. Delays like this weren’t uncommon because of the thousand things that could go wrong before production, including losing one of the financial backers, as Brett had, leaving him to scramble for an alternative source of funds. Lucy was eager to get to work, but she was also grateful for the extra time to concentrate on getting her family ready before she had to begin.

She sometimes felt like she was pushing a rock uphill just to watch it roll back down if she relaxed for even a second. Dorothea and Jimmy were unquestionably getting better with every month that went by, but Charles was another story.

After that day when Lucy met with Pam, Charles started sleeping in his office, but he only lasted a few weeks before he was in their bed again. “I can’t resist you,” he said irritably, “even if you are going to destroy me.” Well, hello to you too, Lucy thought, but she didn’t
object because she desperately wanted things to be better between them. It was the only thing she prayed for anymore because the failure of their marriage was starting to seem less and less impossible. How long could she keep living with a man she couldn’t understand? A man whose only consistency was his moodiness? A man who spent hours every week second-guessing the police department, and bothering them, and staying angry that they couldn’t focus exclusively on a crime that was more than a year and a half old? A man who, as Janice put it, continued to be obsessed with one day in their lives, as though that one day had ruined everything?