Private Screening (7 page)

The promise reassured him; only later did he hear a second meaning.

In the months that followed, Colby strained to personify his city, all safety and security and regard for her best side. His guilty hope was that her roles seemed fewer; she spent more time in San Francisco. Waiting, he did not speak of marriage.

That September his watchful tension ended.

They had eaten at Orsi's: walking her to the Mark on a crisp, clear evening, Colby pondered her lack of appetite. Near the Fairmont, she asked to stop. As Colby sheltered her from the breeze, she gazed down at the lights of boats inching across the bay. A cable car of tourists, crossing in front of them, vanished down a precipitous grade with its bell still clanging. Leaning on his shoulder, Lexie murmured, “I love this city.”

Colby fought against his impulse and lost. Pulling her to him, he said, “Marry me, Lexie—please.”

She looked at him so intently that for a moment he felt his chance collapsing. Her voice was husky. “Yes, Colby. I will.”

Awkwardly, he kissed her. “Come back with me,” she whispered.

The bedside lamp was on. As they embraced, her hips pressed into his. Elated and confused, Colby slid down the spaghetti straps of her dress: suddenly he did not know whether her shudder was desire or distaste. Then Alexis cupped his chin and murmured, “Help me.”

It was done so quickly that he felt embarrased. He could not see her face.

“Did it hurt too much?” he asked.

“No—not too much.”

“I wasn't sure.” The act made him confiding. “This was new to me too.”

As she moved closer, he could smell the perfume on her skin. “Once we're married,” she said, “we'll have many years and many times.”

The thought made things much easier. “When shall we?”

“Soon.” Her urgency surprised him. “Now that I've decided, I want to be in San Francisco with everything else behind me.”

Colby realized that in some parallel conversation he had been broaching this to John Joseph. “What about your contract?”

For a moment she grew quiet. “I think they'll let me go.”

The next morning Colby told his father. “So she failed there,” John Joseph replied.

Colby flushed. “I've learned not to expect too much approval. So I came here ready with an answer.”

“Yes?”

“Fuck you, Dad.”

Colby walked out. Six weeks later, Lexie told him she was carrying his baby.

In the excitement of their hasty wedding, Colby savored the toasts and knowing backslaps which signaled that he was quite a fellow, and lucky in Alexis. But the part of him which felt his father's silence began counting months.

He did not do this often. Once married, Lexie seemed so delighted to be pregnant that he could not help but join her. He felt them becoming a couple without the anxiety of sex. The baby sealed their marriage: once they could make love again, time would lay his doubts to rest.

Eight months after they had first made love, Lexie bore him a son of normal size, with black hair like his own. John Joseph did not come to see him. When Colby could not choose a name, Alexis called him Robert. On the first night she could make love again, he reached for her.

As more nights followed, and she began crying out beneath him, he recalled she was an actress. But the pregnancy which followed shamed him: Lexie seemed more pleased than before. When sharp, sudden pains signaled a miscarriage—ending her childbearing and quite nearly her life—they agreed to dedicate themselves to Robert.

Determined to give the affection he himself had lacked, Parnell emulated Alexis, playing or talking or smelling the newness of Robert's skin. But at night he found himself staring into the crib. Robert would look back at him; Parnell had the odd sensation that the baby knew his doubts.

It did not help that as a lover he felt awkward and too quickly spent. As worry that Lexie's cries of pleasure were a pretense became fear that she feigned pleasure in their life, he became obsessively thoughtful, filling his appointment book with dates he should remember or gifts that had pleased her. And always, he tried to share with her the flow of a life he felt them part of: the charities and social seasons; the largesse through which they graced some corner of their city with an artifact or cherry tree or performance by a new soprano; the pleasant backdrop of familiar faces who shared this same communal purpose, to make the place where their parents and children alike were rooted something finer than it was. Their house on Broadway overlooked the soothing sameness of the water, and the window where they took their drinks filtered sunset into shafts, casting the spell of the only time and place Colby ever wished to know. But in the calm with which Alexis looked through this same window, Parnell sensed that part of her was still in Hollywood, or somewhere else beyond his reach, with Robert.

As soon as he could speak she began inventing plays for him, acting but each role in turn as Robert clapped in pleasure or watched her with bright black eyes. By four he too was wildly inventive, ascribing each trampled flower or broken dish to some imagined friend so sharply realized that it struck Parnell as eerie. When Alexis bought him a television, he began appearing at the dinner table as whatever singer or actress he had seen, demanding to be called by her name. Parnell said little; Alexis was delighted.

As if excited by this dual response, Robert began smearing on his mother's lipstick. “We've got to stop this,” Parnell suggested over cocktails, “before he finds your sanitary napkins.”

She smiled at the window. “He's imaginative. I of all people should understand the impulse.”

“This is no impulse. It isn't normal.”

“Does that mean I'm not either?” She turned on him. “He's your son too, Colby.”

Parnell sipped his manhattan. “That's why I'm concerned about him.”

“I understand. Just please try to be that without becoming
your
father.” When Parnell looked up again, she had turned back to the window.

His puzzlement seemed to make her smile more at Robert. The five-year-old would follow her even when she undressed: she would hold him close and murmur, “Lexie-love,” until he would repeat it as his name. Parnell grew more detached.

One evening, leaving the paper, it struck Parnell that, like his father, he did not play with his son. On the way home, he bought a baseball bat, and took it up to Robert. “Here,” he said.

For an instant, Robert's wish to grasp the hand-tooled bat was palpable. Then he looked up at his father. With a bright, peculiar smile, Robert ran away.

That night, the pattern of his bedtime started.

Still hurt, Parnell wandered into the darkened room. But as he bent to kiss his son, Robert drew one hand across his eyes. The boy's face and body were quite stiff; Parnell did not know if this was fear or theater or dislike. Shaken, he rose to leave. In the several years of nights to come, as Robert would cover his face, Parnell would recall the child's voice behind him saying, “Lexie-love …”

As Robert grew, Alexis listened to fantasies which ranged from being Laurence Olivier to president of his own republic. The music room became his province.

Accomplished at classical pieces, Alexis played piano for him. Robert's favorite was the Paganini Variations; again and again, he asked for it, watching until Alexis placed his chair nearer the keyboard. But for reasons he could not define, Parnell avoided joining them, until he told himself there was no reason he should not. Returning from work, he heard Alexis playing the variations. He entered the music room, standing behind his son until his wife had finished. As she gazed down at the keys, lost in what she had played, the ten-year-old Robert stood, and touched her face.

Alexis smiled to herself, then saw her husband. Following her embarrassed glance to the father at his back, Robert bolted from the room. The two parents looked at each other. Murmuring, “I'm sorry,” Alexis went to find their son.

In the silent language of their marriage, Parnell began to read her guilt at Robert's preference. But his sense that part of her was absent persisted when he touched her. Without clear reason to be jealous, he felt her waiting for some nameless lover. And as she dressed in the window above their courtyard, he realized with an anguish which bordered on self-loathing how much he feared that someone else might see or have her.

He struggled not to punish her for this. It helped that John Joseph's sudden death had freed him to run the paper, and that it seemed to prosper from his air of calm and sense of whom to trust. He was not a founder, Parnell reasoned, but a preserver. Few events of substance in the city occurred without his knowledge; he and Alexis led a pleasant public-private life in a circle where they both were liked—all this distracted him from doubts about her happiness, and the unseen something he felt between himself and Robert.

As Robert moved into his teens, their relationship assumed the classic forms of parent-child conflict, in a way Parnell distrusted. With Alexis, Robert would take pleasure in the staging of an opera or ballet, but the boy scorned his father's world or any plans he made for him. Though Parnell selected the finest schools in San Francisco, Robert's grades were poor. Even his schoolboy talent for acting suffered from eccentricity of interpretation and a penchant for inventing his own lines, and though such marked singularity seemed to fascinate his peers, he had no real friends. Tall and rangy, Robert took on a posture of masculine protectiveness toward the smaller Alexis; in his son's gaze, Parnell felt a first hint of violence. His son would not talk to a psychiatrist; he wished only to hear his mother play piano. The maid found marijuana in his dresser.

Parnell resolved to send his son to a boarding school in Maine.

The idea seemed to frighten Alexis. “He's just fifteen—it's obvious that Robert needs us.”

“At his age, my father shipped me off to Groton. We have to face that there's something wrong here—at least wrong for him. It's selfish to go on saying ‘one more year' when every day now he gets stranger.”

She turned on him. “You
want
him gone. That's what this is.”

For once he did not look away. “I don't love Robert the way you do,” Parnell said softly. “And I never will.”

Her face contorted. “You're blaming me.”

“No, Alexis. I'm just not blaming lack of love.”

At dinner, Parnell told Robert of his decision.

Standing, Robert leaned across the table toward his father, face distorted.

Parnell stood. “Robert!” Alexis cried out.

Her eyes were wet. Robert turned to his mother and, quite softly, said, “You bitch.”

Tears ran down her face. Slowly Robert walked to his mother, resting his forehead against hers.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered.

In the candlelight, Parnell saw his son's throat working. He closed his eyes.

A week later Robert left for Maine.

But things went no better there or at the next three schools. Robert started fights and would not stop until he'd broken someone's nose or teeth. He was a loner who found drugs and lived at the edge of rules. There was to him, one poetic headmaster wrote Parnell, bright anger and a ruined sensitivity. At seventeen, the last expulsion brought him home.

His rhythms changed abruptly. Robert showed no inclination to bait his father or do anything but watch him. Though his mother saw this as a sign of progress, Parnell felt his son taking stock of him: recalling that Robert's bedroom window had an angle on their own, he began to draw their curtains. He sent Robert to a psychiatrist. Returning, Robert would closet himself with a film projector, studying old John Garfield movies as if his life depended on it. He made calls late at night, followed by strange absences. Parnell began waiting for something to happen.

But Alexis seemed certain that she could make Robert whole. At first, he spurned her impulsive hugs and invitations to some film or play. Then, as though seized by childhood cravings or sure that he had punished her enough, Robert began to ask that she play sonatas for him, or come to his room to watch a musical they had enjoyed when he was younger. Encouraged, Alexis asked him to the opera. He spent more time with her, and showed no sign of leaving.

“What's he planning?” Parnell asked her.

“In what sense?”

“In the sense that he never finished prep school.”

“Please, Colby—don't push him away yet. We're so close to where we were.”

The following afternoon, for the first time since his son's return, Parnell heard Paganini coming from the music room. That night, leaving with Alexis for the opera, Robert smiled at his father. The smile struck Parnell as so triumphant that he could not sleep.

The next morning, as Alexis dressed, Parnell put on a robe and went to Robert's room. Within an hour, Robert was gone.

Six months later, Parnell shook hands with the FBI agent who met him at the cabin.

Special Agent McCarry brought two others with him. They searched the area as he questioned Parnell, his red-veined face expressionless.

“Do you know who'd want to do this?”

Parnell shook his head. “No. But that my family owns a newspaper is no secret. Or that we own this cabin.”

“Why was he living here?”

“His school performance has been disappointing.” Parnell had rehearsed his answer carefully. “This cabin was a kind of retreat. To reflect.”

“Who else knew he was here?”

“His mother—perhaps a few of our friends. I don't know Robert's friends. He's been East until recently.”

“Any involvement with drugs, or sudden need for money?”

“He's smoked marijuana. About the other, his mother gave him money whenever he needed it.”

“How about problems over girlfriends?”

“No—nothing like that.” Parnell hesitated. “What are you after?”

“Several things.” The agent's gaze was steady. “Any unusual conflict, for one.”