Richard Patterson - Fall from Grace

Adam took a swallow of scotch. “Try me.”

Carla hesitated. “At the risk of sounding self-absorbed, the story starts with me. Or, more accurately, the person I was before I met him-or wasn’t. Stop me if you’re bored.”

“I doubt I will be,” Adam said crisply. “Go ahead.”

“All right. I got out of UCLA at twenty-two, with a major in drama, a minor in psychology, and not much life experience beyond working pretty damned hard to get there. For the next four years I kept on like the Energizer Bunny-failed auditions, failed relationships, aborted movie projects, pilots no one wanted. All I could think to do, like your father told me he did, is keep striving to become the person I imagined-an actress people cared about.” Her voice became rueful. “And then, before I could absorb what had happened, I became the lead in Deep Cover.”

“More than the lead. As I recall it, you were in every scene.”

Carla laughed in surprise. “You actually watched it?”

“A few times. Not for you, of course. I consider myself a scholar of espionage.”

Her eyes glinted with amusement. “Then I guess it escaped you that we were all about cleavage.”

All at once, imagining himself as Ben, Adam grasped what his father must have found appealing-not just her appearance but a keen intelligence accented by humor and vitality. “True enough,” he said. “I’m one of those guys who reads Playboy for the articles.”

“Don’t they all? Anyhow, despite the fact that I was the centerpiece of a male fantasy, I found myself nominated for an Emmy, then another. People kept on watching; I kept filming season after season, shooting thirty shows a year while transitioning into movies during the summer hiatus. First, a gross-out film where I played the unattainable love object, then an okay romantic comedy-”

“As the Romans Do. I remember it.”

She gave him a mock-incredulous look. “You saw that, too.”

“On an airplane to Karachi. It was a very long flight.”

“It must have been. But at least you could get off in Karachi.” Her smile faded. “I was working all the time, trying to become the great actress of my generation. But I was living life in the third person. The real Carla was like a gerbil on a wheel, becoming even more lonely and anxious, yet going faster all the time. And so the gerbil started needing stimulants.”

“You could have stopped,” Adam said evenly. “Or at least taken a summer off.”

For a moment, Carla closed her eyes. “That seems so obvious, doesn’t it?” she said, then looked him in the face again. “Later, when I talked to Ben, I understood it better. He was always running scared, he admitted, afraid the past he was trying to escape would grab him by the collar-”

“He said that?” Adam inquired.

“He said many things, some of which I know were hard to admit. This one struck me. Like Ben, I’d had two uneducated and inattentive parents-not as cruel, I’m sure, but hardly nourishing. I left home without having any concrete sense of who I was. Seeing myself in the eyes of others was the only way I felt real.” Carla paused, her voice dispassionate, as though pronouncing judgment on the woman she had discovered. “Having drive and talent is different from having character. When the pressures of celebrity and constant work started to overwhelm me, I had no self to fall back on. Just a shell.”

“Hence cocaine.”

“And bourbon.” Her voice became raw. “Throw in cigarettes to keep me way too skinny and help accelerate the aging process. At first all that propped me up. Other people had done it, I told myself-Dick Van Dyke and Robert Young went through their hit shows drunk from noon to night. But it became the same old tired story-the more cocaine I snorted, the more ragged and paranoid I got. I started showing up late and blowing lines. But I was the one on whom everyone else’s jobs depended, so the producers covered for me. You know the rest,” she finished. “Another haggard actress in a mug shot, tossing her career in the trash with both hands. ‘The End.’”

She said this wearily, Adam thought, but without self-pity. “There was a little more to it, I thought.”

Carla raised her eyebrows. “Which part? Where my show was canceled? Or where it turned out my financial manager had embezzled all my money?”

Their waitress interrupted them, taking their dinner orders-a green salad and seared ahi for Carla; calamari, swordfish, and a glass of chardonnay for Adam. Looking at her across the table, he said, “Maybe the part where you triumphed over drugs, moved to the Vineyard, and discovered my father.”

She ignored the sarcasm in his tone. “A long journey,” she said. “It began when I woke up at Betty Ford. It came to me that I might have filmed my last scene as an actress and couldn’t even remember what it was. When I told your father that, I could read it in his face: I’d become what he feared most-a failure, an object of pity. But instead of despising me, all that mattered to him was that it never happen again.”

Adam struggled to imagine this. “That’s more compassion than he ever showed my mother about anything.”

“Maybe so. But Ben was closer to the end of his life than the beginning-too late for failure, but with time to reflect. Maybe I got the best Benjamin Blaine there was.”

Adam wondered if any part of this was true. But with her story of ruin and redemption, and her claim to be innocent of Ben’s intentions, Carla might well make a compelling witness on her own behalf. Probing this, he asked, “What was treatment like?”

“I had to take what they call a ‘fearless moral inventory,’” Carla answered dryly, “and found out how much I had to fear. It’s no fun to discover you’ve lived a wholly self-centered life without developing any sense of self. Or to find out you’ve got no money to fall back on, and no career that would be healthy to resume. So I threw myself into therapy and exercise with the same single-mindedness I’d put into acting. That’s what addictive personalities do.”

The waitress brought their appetizers. As the rhythm of their conversation slowed, Adam felt acutely conscious of how strange it was to be with this woman-his father’s lover, the cause of his mother’s humiliation. Over coffee, she finished quietly, “Coming to the Vineyard was a fluke-a fateful one, I know. I needed a place to get stronger, and my actor friends Ted and Mary knew someone with a guesthouse. The last thing I imagined was meeting Ben.”

The phrase contained the hint of an apology. “But you did,” Adam said, “and quickly, too.”

“Not for months, actually. My life was the daily AA meeting in Vineyard Haven, the yoga studio in West Tisbury, a little painting, and reading more books than I had in years-many on psychology. I began to wonder if counseling was a possible career. I’d learned what genuine therapy can do.”

Once more, Adam felt skeptical-a Hollywood ending, he thought, contrived by a woman who had Hollywood in her bones. “Not acting?” he prodded.

Carla sipped her coffee, seeming to weigh her response. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I’m getting used to being a private person, not depending on celebrity to fill the void inside me. One challenge is letting go of who people expect me to be. That’s why I began avoiding the social scene, especially in Chilmark. Too many of those people are insecure, self-referential, and reflexively unkind. Ferreting out intimate facts about others becomes their coin of exchange.”

“You sound like my father,” Adam said. “I remember him saying ‘a more secure bunch would have bored each other to death. Only gossip keeps them going, and gossips make lousy friends.’”

Carla smiled at this. “Ben and I were attracted for a reason, after all. Several, in fact. But celebrity wasn’t one of them.” Her smile vanished. “The last thing I wanted was a return engagement with the National Enquirer. Not that I didn’t know better. But our time together will stay with me, money or no money.”