The Truth Hurts (21 page)

25
Marie

“Nathan?”

I don’t know which of the three of us looks more startled—me, to find my cousin is here, Steve to confront a stranger in my suite—one so good-looking, tanned, and stylish he could pass for a movie star, no less—or Nathan, who has run smack up against the scary bulk of my bodyguard.

“Nathan! What are you doing here?”

“Who are
you ?”
Steve demands of him, looking ready to kill.

“Are you kidding?” My cousin looks from me to Steve, then back again. “What do you mean, who am I? What do you mean, what am I doing here? I’m her cousin, asshole.”

“Steve, it’s okay. This is my cousin Nathan from L.A.” And to Nate I repeat, “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Very funny,” he says, moving cautiously away from Steve and closer to me. Behind him I see a second bedroom, smaller than the one we’re in, but just as pretty. “You send me an E-mail and tell me to get my ass to Sebastion, and I drop everything and pay full price to get here today and then Rocky Graziano here scares the shit out of me, and you want to know what I’m doing here? Which one of us has lost our mind, that’s what I’d like to know.”

He’s close enough to reach for me, and with a grin, he does.

I hug him fiercely, and we exchange cousinly smooches, but then I push myself back from him.

“I didn’t tell you to come, Nate.”

“Yeah, you did. You told me to come here and to get one suite for both of us.”

“No, I swear I didn’t, but I think I can guess who did.” Glancing over at Steve, who is still glowering at the entrance to the second bedroom, I say, “Come on. Let’s sit down, and I’ll tell you about it.” I lead him over to the bay window and make him sit there with me. Steve comes only as close as the four-poster bed and takes a seat on the edge of it, as if he’s leery of getting any closer to us. But he leans forward with his elbows on his knees, to watch and listen to us.

“Uh, Nathan, this is Steve Orbach. Steve, this is my cousin, Nathan Montgomery.”

“We’ve met,” says my cousin, wryly.

My cousin Nathan has a heart of gold; truly, he’s the kind of guy for whom other people would celebrate his good luck if only he had any, apart from being born looking like F. Scott Fitzgerald. But here’s this beautiful, sweet-natured man who is unlucky in his parents, his love life, and most of all, his career. Because of that, I know there is a certain conversation we have to get out of the way before we can go any further.

“How’s your karma?” My lifetime of experience with Nathan has taught me that it’s always a good thing to find out as soon as possible what tragedy has recently befallen him. That’s so I don’t feel like a self-centered jerk after I’ve chattered on for an hour while he listens kindly, only to find out when I do give him a chance to speak that his cat died yesterday and he was just washing out the litter box when I called. Thursday, when I phoned him from my car, was an exception, an emergency, and so we have some catching up to do.

“Sucks as bad as ever,” he says, sounding casual, like somebody who’s used to misfortune.

“Oh, dear. Well, tell me the worst of it.”

“Now? The whole sad litany?”

Nate knows this routine, too, and he’ll play his part until we run through it. This is our script, in which the facts change, but the general tenor, unfortunately, does not.

“Every sad morsel,” I assure him. I glance over at the man sitting on the bed. If Steve’s face weren’t so naturally impassive, I’m sure it would be reflecting disbelief right about now. How can we talk about anything else, he must be thinking, when lives are at stake? He doesn’t know Nate, that’s all I can say. “You still dating that actress person?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“She left me for another actress person.”

“Oh, Nathan. Are you sad? Should I pretend I’m sorry?”

“You never did like her,” he accuses. “It’s okay, I’ve had distractions.”

“Oh, dear, that sounds bad.”

“It is. Marie, my agent died!”

I grab for one of his hands. “No! Not again! I mean—”

“Yeah, different agent. Same fate.”

I have to laugh, as people who love him always do. He’s so damned funny about being cursed. “You’re not joking, right?”

“This is the problem with writing comedy. People can’t tell when to take me seriously.”

“Oh, stop it. But that’s terrible, Nate! I’m so sorry.”

He writes screenplay after screenplay and they get “optioned,” which is Hollywood-speak for “going nowhere,” and he earns thousands of dollars from them. But in the ten years he’s been trying to get a film produced, not a single script of his has made it to the big or the little screen. I don’t know how he keeps going, but he does. Sometimes I worry that my success must stare him in the face like an evil queen in a mirror, though he has never once made me feel that way.

And now his agent’s dead. Poor Nate.

It always seems so ironic to me that Nathan looks the very picture of success, much more than I do, but then he claims that’s what you have to do in Hollywood. In the New York publishing world that I inhabit, they’re accustomed to writers looking like ordinary people, or like tweedy college professors, or even slobs. In this as in many things, it’s different in L.A.

Today, my cousin is elegant in soft summer slacks and a short-sleeved silk shirt, both a gorgeous pale gray, with soft gray loafers that look as if they had to have been made by a little Italian shoemaker in a small shop on the Ponte Vecchio. By comparison, I’m rumpled and gritty in travel slacks and shirt. I’ve often thought that Nathan missed his calling in Hollywood by about fifteen years, because he might have made a beautiful child star. Instead, he’s a ne’er-do-well, grown-up screenwriter. It’s funny, I’m the one with the Hollywood screenwriter grandparents, but it’s Nathan who followed in their footsteps, though he’s no blood relation to them, but only to me and my mother. When I look at him, I wonder if I’m seeing a bit of her. But then, I wonder that, too, whenever I look at myself in mirrors.

Knowing better, I still hope for the best in this latest bad situation of his. “Did she leave you with one of her associates?”

“Well, she probably would have, but it was that associate who killed her.”

“You’re making this up!”

“Okay.” He grins. “That part I made up. But my agent really did die. And no, the sucky answer is no, she didn’t leave me with an associate, because it was a one-agent shop—who else could I get in L.A.? No big agency will have me. I think her poodle inherited me. I’ve finally done it, I’ve officially got a dog of an agent.”

“Oh, God.” I have to laugh, though I want to cry for him.

“But, hey, it’s a really smart poodle. Hell, it can’t be any less successful with my stuff than she was.”

“And so, anything happening with your scripts?”

“Yeah, well, like a farmer who is land rich, cash poor, I am option rich, movie poor. I’m all hat and no pony. All scepter and no crown. All crust and no filling. All—”

“All talent and no audience.” I refuse to laugh at his schtick when it degrades his own ability. “No audience
yet,
that is. Yet.”

“No sightings of the Loch Ness monster. Yet.”

“What did she die of, Nate?”

“Old age. Sitting by telephones waiting for producers to call. It’ll kill you.”

“I believe it. Listen, Nathan,” I say, taking his other hand, too.

“Excuse me,” Steve interrupts from the bed. “I’m going outside.”

Apparently, he’s had all he can take of this brother-sister act.

We watch until the door closes behind him.

“Who’s Bruto?” Nathan immediately demands. “Where’s Franklin?”

“Franklin’s fine, he’s back home in Bahia, taking care of business and his family. Steve is my bodyguard.”

When he sees that my mouth quivers on that word, he turns my hands over so that now he’s the one who’s doing the holding. As long as Nate’s on this earth, I can never ever claim that nobody loves me and that I might as well go eat worms.

“So it’s true,” he says, looking worried, “and it’s bad.”

I can only nod while I try to keep from crying. “It got worse last night, Nathan. This Paulie Barnes sent me an account of what he claims is the murder of my mom and dad.”

My cousin’s mouth drops open, closes, opens again.

“You look so flummoxed,” I tell him, half-smiling, half-laughing, “it’s almost funny.”

“What does he say, for God’s sake? Who does he say did it? Do you believe him, Marie?”

“I’ll let you read it, and you tell me what you think.”

“Bad things aren’t supposed to happen to you, Marie, they’re only supposed to happen to me. I thought I had the exclusive contract on disasters. When you lost your parents, that was supposed to use up your entire quota of calamity for one lifetime.”

I find a smile for him again. “I forgot to read the fine print.”

“I’ll say. Wait a minute! Did you say Orbach? Wasn’t that the name of the guy in your last book, the one you saved from the death penalty?”

“I wasn’t the only one who helped him—”

“It’s
him ?
Let me get this straight, Marie. You protect yourself from one psycho by inviting another one to live with you? Are you
crazy ?
Have you lost your fucking
mind ?”

“He’s not a psycho, Nate.”

“He murdered his
mother.”

“Yeah, well, she had it coming.”

Nathan laughs a little wildly. “Well, aren’t
we
getting relativistic in our old age?”

“Nate, he’s okay, trust me, okay?”

He shakes his head, looking disgusted with me.

“Look,” I argue, “I can understand why somebody who doesn’t know Steve might hesitate, but he’s tough and he understands the criminal mind and he’d do anything for me.” A niggling thought sneaks into my brain: actually nobody really does know Steven Orbach all that well.

Suddenly Nate is pulling me over into another warm, hard hug.

“God, this stinks, Marie. This is awful, even worse than dead agents.”

“Don’t be silly.” I laugh a little against his shoulder. “Nothing’s worse than a dead agent.”

Nate laughs, too. “Well, that’s true. But this is pretty bad.”

I pull back from him. “But none of this explains why you’re here, too.”

“You sent me an E-mail, or I thought you did.”

“What did I say in it?”

“You said, Dear Nate, I need your help. Please meet me at the Southern Inn in Sebastion tomorrow.”

“You sweetie! You dropped everything to come.”

“Of course, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes. Why didn’t you call me and ask me about it?”

“I wasn’t supposed to, remember? We were trying to hide the connection between us, to protect poor little Deborah. Who is a sweetie, by the way.”

“I thought you’d like her. What do you think of Erin?”

His expression turns wry.
“Sweet
is not a word I’d use to describe that woman. Interesting, sexy—”

“No,
Nathan,” I say, alarmed. “You don’t want to mess with her.”

He grins at me. “You have no idea what I want to mess with, Cousin.”

I make a face at him. “Well, don’t even tell me.”

“So I guess we think your Paulie Barnes sent me the E-mail?”

“I guess we do. Do you remember the address on it?”

“No, sorry, although I do remember thinking it wasn’t your usual one. I thought maybe you’d switched servers, or something. So we think he sent it, but we don’t know why?”

“We haven’t a clue.”

“There’s one thing to be said for it.”

“There is? What?”

“We haven’t been in Sebastion together since we were kids,” Nate comments. “And now we’re back.”

“Is that supposed to be the good news?” He laughs. “I don’t remember this town at all.”

“You were too little.”

“You weren’t exactly large, yourself. What do you remember?”

“Practically nothing.” I stare out at the branches of the nearest oak tree. “I just
think
I remember things, because of what other people have told me.”

“Like what, Marie?”

“Like about my mother and my father. I have some notes I took from a conversation I had with a woman named Eulalie Fisher.” I turn and look at him. “Do you want to read them?”

B
ETRAYAL

By Marie Lightfoot

—•—

CHAPTER SEVEN

S
he lifted a slim silver case from the antique table beside her, and opened it. The first time I ever met Eulalie Fisher was the first time I saw her smoke. I tried to hide my surprise at the sight of the pristine white cigarettes lined up in a single row within it. “I allow myself one a day,” she told me, “never with a drink, and I never allow myself more than one drink on any occasion. If I drank more than one, I would probably smoke. If I smoked more than one, I might drink. I don’t suppose you smoke at all?”

“No, thank you.”

“Thought so.” She plucked one out with her fingernails, clicked the case shut, and put that down, and then picked up a little silver lighter, and lit up. She took a delicate drag, then gazed at me curiously through the bit of white smoke that hung between us now. “Did you ever?”

“Cigarettes, no. Drink, yes.”

“Um. Your mama smoked like a chimney, course your daddy did, too, course who didn’t back then? In many ways it does seem to me that life was a lot more fun back then, at least for the rich white folks like us. Nowadays there areso many belts to strap us in and bags to suffocate us, and helmets to keep the wind from blowing in anybody’s hair. So many dreadsome deaths to fear. Not that people didn’t go on ahead and die back then, and often dreadfully, but it was easier not to have to worry so dang much about it all of the time.”

“It’s not much fun anymore? Even for rich, white folks?”

She smiled a bit. “Not so much, but at least now there are more rich black folks to share the misery. I suppose we have to call that progress.” She took another delicate drag, closed one eye against the smoke. “Has anybody ever—I mean really ever described your mama to you?”

“Well, I—I don’t know, if you put it like that.”

“You’ve seen pictures.”

“Sure.”

“What did you think?”

“Of her? I guess, pretty and she looks like fun.”

“You don’t know the half of
that,”
she tells me, arching her eyebrows in emphasis. “Sit down and I’ll explain your mama to you. No picture can ever capture any of us and certainly not Lyda Montgomery Folletino. What I can tell you is that most of the boys and men in Sebastion were in love with her. She was a natural-born flirt, not so serious as you are, and of course, males respond to that. Most of the time, Lyda didn’t mean nothin’ by it, but I do believe she paid a high price for it in the end.”

“How so?”

“Well, because it encouraged her to believe she was invincible. I would bet you any amont of money that up to her dying day Lyda believed to her toes that no man alive would ever, could ever possibly hurt her.”

I thought that over, trying to relate. “Did it make her—daring?”

“Daring! I should say! A thing like that, a conviction that you are safe in the company of men, will make a girl takerisks she oughtn’t. It’ll fool her into thinking every man’s a bit of a fool in general and a fool for her in particular. I don’t believe it will give her a high opinion of women, either.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because she’ll observe that other women aren’t so daring, she’ll draw the conclusion that they’re timid little mice by comparison with herself, and she might begin to preen a bit.”

“You say she didn’t think any man would hurt her.”

“I believe that’s so, yes.”

“Do you think that she hurt any of them?”

“Darling, of course she did, how could she not, a girl like that?”

“Eulalie—” She had invited me to call her that instead of Mrs. Fisher. “You’re not intimating, are you, that my mother had affairs?”

“Before or after she was married, do you mean?”

“Yes.”

She smiled slightly through the smoke. “Yes is your answer, yes is mine. Would you mind very much?”

“How could I? I didn’t even—I don’t even—know her.”

Her gaze was a bit skeptical. “Well, I wouldn’t actually know anything for sure about what she did in that regard after she married your father, or what she didn’t. Perhaps we’ll give her the benefit of the doubt, even though it
was
the sixties and that kind of thing was going around like the flu.”

Even though she was talking about my own mother, I had to laugh.

“Maybe she behaved herself. She did love him. Your father, I mean. And besides, whether or not she had an affair doesn’t have a thing to do with the price of peas.”

I laughed again. “Eulalie, if I had lived here all of my life, would I sound like you?”

“Well, darlin’, we can’t all be sweet magnolias. At leasta few of our daughters have got to grow up to be prickly pears, or we won’t never make no progress at’all.”

“Do you think I’m prickly?”

“My dear, I think you’re northern.”

Nothun,
she pronounced it. I risked teasing her. “If I said ‘ma’am,’ would that help?”

She looked amused. “It might, some.”

She stubbed out her cigarette and then leaned back and asked me a question that gave me a little jolt. “And what would you most like to know about your daddy?”

“Oh. Do I get only one question?” When she smiled at that but didn’t answer, I said, “All right. I want to know, did he love my mother? Did he love me?”

“That was two. Maybe I’ll give you three. Don’t you want to know if your mama loved you?”

“I guess I took that for granted.”

“Yes, that’s right, that’s a verity. You may take your daddy’s affection for both of you for granted, too.”

“Affection?”

“He was a distant kind of man, my dear. Passionate, but perhaps not for people. More for causes, if you know what I mean. Always thinking big thoughts, which I suspect he had to do just to keep up with your mama. She was a pistol! No, that’s not quite right, she was a live wire, but of two different natures, such as you find on a car battery, do you know what I mean by that? One wire is red and the other is blue, I believe, and if you attach the wrong one to the wrong post, you get dangerous sparks and maybe even an explosion. That was your mama. Smooth and happy as a Rolls-Royce engine most of the time, but cross wires with her and you’d better stand back. I suppose you know where they met?”

“No! Do you?”

“I do, and it’s a funny story. Supposedly, they met right in front of a movie theater in Hollywood. It was thepremiereof one of those films your grandparents wrote. Your daddy was all dressed up in a tux, escorting his parents, whom I believe he could hardly stand, but toward whom he felt a certain filial loyalty one can only admire. Your mother was picketing the film.”

I laughed.

Eulalie was pleased at my reaction. “I thought you’d like that. It was some union question, perhaps, or it may even have been a question of employing women and minorities in the film. At any rate, they met straight out of a movie script, you might say. Your mama waved a picket in your father’s face and yelled something unpleasant at him, and he looked down and saw this darling girl who obviously agreed with everything he held to be important in life, so he asked her if she would go out with him and try to convince him of her views.”

I laughed again, delighted with this story.

Eulalie’s eyes twinkled, too. “I don’t know how long it took your mama to catch on that he didn’t need very much convincing.”

“Wait a minute,” I ask her. “Are you saying that they were liberals to start with, but that they changed their minds?”

“I don’t know what they were, darlin’. I’m merely passing on to you the stories they told on themselves.”

“Why did they move here?”

“To get away from there, I expect. And of course, your mama’s people had been here since the sands of time began to run. They were family, such as it was. A viper’s nest of segregationists is what they were, in my opinion, and about the only good thing that could be said of any of them was that they had never betrayed any of their friends to a Senate committee as your other grandparents had. Although knowing the Montgomerys, that was probably only for lack of opportunity.”

“But if my parents started out as liberals, they must have hated it here.”

“No, I don’t believe they did, child. No more than mercenary soldiers in a field of war. No more than spiders in a web.”

“Affection,” I said, without realizing I’d spoken out loud.

Her face took on a sympathetic but sardonic look. “They loved bigger things, dear. Truth. Justice. The American Way. We just never suspected the manner in which they defined that Way. Of course, it meant you came in second. But then, I suspect you understand that, don’t you? If you don’t mind my asking, ’cause I’m a nosy old woman, what comes first in your life, before your work?”

“Nothing,” I admitted.

“Hm. You are their child, it’s sure.”

“Would I like them?”

“Probably. Your mother could charm the honey out of hives and your father had a sweetness about him that none of his high-mindedness could ever quite disguise. On the other hand, they made enemies, and maybe you’d have become one of them, as they were enemies toward their own families.”

She looked suddenly old and very tired.

I said quickly, “I should go.”

She merely nodded her head and waved a hand at me, seeming to have been overtaken by weariness, or possibly by hard memories. The movement of her hand had such a grandeur and grace that I found it impossible to take offense at her easy dismissal of me.