Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“The camera doesn’t love me,” she had written disconsolately after her first film, a slight thing about three Southern sorority girls during the civil rights era, bombed spectacularly. “I simply don’t photograph. I had a little surgery; David thought it might be something to do with my chin and nose, but that wasn’t it. It comes from the inside, David says. Whatever I have on the stage doesn’t get through the lens.”

David was her first husband, the director of the failed sorority movie. He was on a fast track then, young and promising and hip, and he left his second trophy wife to marry Laura. Both of them were hot, so the buzz went. The little movie’s failure did not even slow David’s trajectory; his is an awesome name in Hollywood now. But it shod Laura with lead. There had been a few other small movies, because she was obviously a gifted actress, and a good bit of television, but nothing stuck. She had done highly lauded stage work in L.A., and still did some, mainly with touring companies, and a few commercials, but there again the fickle camera refused to connect with her. Now, in addition to the stylist’s job and the jewelry and poetry, she did dinner theaters around the state, and a very occasional low-budget movie, and worked sometimes as script supervisor or makeup or wardrobe stylist, and was thinking of becoming an agent. After all, she wrote, she knew virtually everybody who was anybody in the industry, and David and Marcus, the middle-level studio executive who followed David, owed her. Her contacts were faultless.

“And you have to admit I can still hack it in the looks department,” she said in the latest of her letters. I did have to admit it. Despite the periodic dark times she went through, she looked stunning, vivid, and bursting with health and vitality. But I could not read her sherry eyes. They shone with such an opaque glitter that light seemed to bounce back from them.

“Coke,” Pom said matter-of-factly when I showed him the photo.

“No. She promised not,” I said.

“I know it when I see it, Merritt,” he said. “I see it all day.”

“I don’t believe it. She couldn’t hold down all the jobs she does if she was on coke.”

“Sure she could, for a good while. It’s a powerful stimulant. You can run on it twenty-four hours a day. If she’s just started back, she could go for months yet. We’ll know when the telegrams for money start coming, won’t we?”

Pom and I had bailed Laura out of two bad times, when she lost jobs and husbands and condos at the same time. He had always thought drugs were involved. I had put them down to her innate fragility and her inability still to handle being alone for long periods. She was self-destructive then, erratic and inconstant and somehow insatiable. But I had not believed she would turn to drugs or alcohol. She had always been so careful about what she ate and drank, had exercised so meticulously, had had a daunting regimen of self-care and anointing. And it had been years, literally, since the last telegram.

Now, though, I lay in the thick heat of Georgia and thought of my little sister in her magical cave, astride the place where two great tectonic plates met, self-destructing, if my husband was right, all over the high desert.

“I should go get her,” I said to Pom when we had that conversation about her. “Just go out there and snatch her back. She doesn’t do this when there’s somebody around to bolster her. I could steady her. She could make good money in local theater and television. She could help with Mommee, maybe, until she gets her own place. And you know Glynn adores her.”

It was true; the few times that Laura had visited us, flitting through town like a migrating butterfly, Glynn had been fascinated with her. And she had seemed to adore Glynn, spending endless hours with her, dressing up and showing my shy child her exotic case full of stage makeup, rearranging Glynn’s thick, tawny hair. Glynn’s first word had been ’Aura. She still called Laura that sometimes. Laura actually courted Glynn, almost flirting with her, watching me to see how I reacted. I didn’t care then. I was glad for the attraction between them. I still thought something might bring Laura home one day.

I still did not see the danger in her.

“Not on your life,” Pom said, when I spoke of bringing Laura back to Atlanta. “She made her bed. Or beds. Let her lie in them. I’m not having an addict in the house with Glynn.”

I did not think he really considered Laura an addict. He had always seemed to like her, to be fascinated with her even in the face of her rejection of him. He was impatient with her inability to order her life, but he had not demurred when the requests for money came in. He simply did not want his own orderly life disarrayed, I thought, especially with Mommee worsening. And he was, of course, accustomed to command. All doctors are.

Nevertheless, the remark about Laura’s being an addict stung.

“No addicts in the house with your daughter, nossir,” I muttered after he had left for work. “Just a madwoman.”

But I was not ready to say this to him. The intimation that his mother might be mad gave him real pain. Sooner or later, I thought, he would work through his denial, and then he himself would see what needed to be done. Action would follow swiftly. It always did when Pom saw the need for it.

The sun moved to the west and broke free of the shading trees. I drifted, sweating and flinching away from the hum of midges and gnats. Their sound, and that of the chuckling of the river, seemed to swell and fade in my ears like the tide. Finally it stopped. I dozed, and did not wake until a shower of droplets hit me. I sat up, blinking stupidly. The dogs were milling about me, shaking themselves. River water was flying everywhere. It felt wonderful, like liquid ice on my sweating skin. The powerful smell of wet dog ran up my nose almost like the scent of skunk, burning not unpleasantly.

All of a sudden I was so hot that I could not bear my clothes, could hardly bear my own skin. I stood up and shucked off my shorts and T-shirt and panties and bra, and hit the water in a flat, clumsy racing dive. I knew that it was deep here off this bank, dark and murky in its depths, undercutting the bank. I had lain here for hours at a time before, watching for the huge, lazy catfish that hung suspended there sometimes, seemingly trapped in the still, particulate layers of sunlit water before the thick darkness started. The river closed over me with a shock of coldness that stopped my breath for a moment. Our cold May still lived here, in the water.

I opened my eyes underwater. It was like looking through heavy scrim. The water tasted of mud and fish, an oddly clean taste. I could see the layers of sunlight above me, and in them, the steadily pumping legs of the dogs. They had joined me in the water.

I gave a lazy kick and my head broke the surface. The sun was warm on it and on my shoulders, though the cold still claimed the lower part of me. It was a wonderful feeling, both exhilarating and silkily indolent. I was a good swimmer, and my long bones seemed to float me effortlessly. I had won meets in high school, and been a lifeguard two years running at our community pool during my summer vacations from college. I loved the water. It is like a second element to me.

I turned over and did a fast, easy crawl out into the middle, where the current was stronger, and then turned over and churned back to the bank in a back stroke. The dogs were trailing along behind me, their sleek, wet skulls beautiful, their healthy teeth shining in their twin grins. But they were beginning to breathe heavily, and I did not want them to go far from shore. For a time the three of us paddled mindlessly in the pool of sunlight near the bank, lost in pure sensory pleasure. Once or twice I porpoise-dove down into the darkness and came up trailing bubbles, for the sheer joy of it.