Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“You think he’ll forgive me, then?”

“He already has. He got up this morning and went downstairs to make pancakes especially for you. He was taking them in to you when he found your note.”

“Oh, poor Daddy—” her eyes welled up again.

“Let’s not go too far with this,” I said. “Daddy acted like an ass and he knows he did. He needs you to forgive him as much as you need him to forgive you. He may not have gotten around to realizing it yet, but he will before you see him again. And I promise you, the Mommee stuff is going to stop.”

She sighed deeply. “Will you forgive me?”

She brushed the drifting, wheat-colored hair out of her mouth. Her blue eyes were still shuttered with the thick, gold-tipped lashes that were Laura’s lashes, too. She was not yet ready to look me full in the face.

“For what?” I said, brushing the hair back and looping it behind her ear.

“I must have scared you to death. You never would have taken off out here otherwise.”

“You did. You did indeed scare me to death, and I do indeed forgive you. Now wash your face and come on in the living room. I want to meet this strange man who had you yodeling like Mammy Yokum.”

“Mammy who?”

“Go on and wash. Scram,” I said. “We’ll talk some more about this after I’ve called Daddy and told him when our plane gets in.”

She hesitated for a moment.

“Mom…”

I knew she was truly over the spell of tears and nerves. “Mom” was back. “Mama” was for the bad times.

“Hmmmm?”

“Oh…nothing.”

She vanished into a door that I presumed led to a bathroom and I went into the living room to meet Stuart Feinstein.

He and Laura sat close together on a large, white sofa before a fireplace. A small fire of some strange, sweet-smelling wood snickered behind a beautiful, old, wrought-iron screen, and a bottle of white wine and four glasses stood on a coffee table of weathered gray wood. Besides a tall white lamp, large pillows, and a pair of black canvas butterfly chairs, the room was empty of furniture. Bookcases lined three walls but were bare, and whiter spaces on rough adobe walls spoke of paintings that had once hung there. One wall was uncurtained glass, and the view out over the night-blue bowl that held Palm Springs was breath-stopping. I could see why Laura had fought so hard to keep the condominium. It would be like living in the sky, like a god.

“Join us. We’re celebrating,” Laura said, and Stuart Feinstein waved his glass. It was nearly empty. Laura did not appear to be drinking.

“Celebrating what? Surely not a runaway teenager and a grim old bat of a mother in hot pursuit.”

“Well, of course, that. But there’s something else. I’ve just finished a movie—I promised Glynn not to tell you until we got here—and this angel of a man has gotten me an interview with the Hollywood Weekly . That may not mean anything to you, but it means shit-all in the industry. It might even mean I can kiss that goddamn concho jewelry good-bye.”

She reached over and hugged Stuart Feinstein hard and gave him a smack on the mouth, like a child. He hugged her back with one arm, the other hand balancing the sloshing wineglass.

“How about it, huh? Can the old man still deliver or what? Huh?” he crowed. Also like a child. In the light of the big, white lamp I could see that he was not only ill, but, as I had first thought, rather old, or at least far from young. They looked poignantly like two children, I thought suddenly, huddled together on the big, white sofa as if for comfort against the limitless night outside. The image brushed at my mind like a black bird.

“A movie! Oh, Pie, that’s really wonderful! Tell!”

I poured myself a glass of wine and sank cross-legged to the floor in front of the fire. A small sheepskin rug cushioned my bony buttocks against the quarry tile floor. A picture flashed through my mind that I had not seen there in many years: a dorm room at college, before I moved back home, crowded with Noxema-dotted girls in nightshirts, sitting on the floor and the beds, laughing and talking, talking, talking. Some of that same laughter bubbled somewhere in my chest. I felt, for just a wing-flutter of a moment, very young again.

“Well, it’s not the lead, but it’s a career maker,” Laura said. Her voice sang. “The movie is about this guy, he’s a real sonofabitch, coming up in the industry, from a gofer to a studio head, and about the people he does in on the way. Kind of like The Player , only darker, denser. It’s a real character piece; not so much action, but these intense, devouring relationships. Caleb Pringle did it. You know, Bad Blues and Burn ? The character stuff is his signature…”

She stopped and looked at me, waiting for me to recognize Caleb Pringle and register my delight and wonderment. I did not have the foggiest notion who he was. I had never heard of Bad Blues and Burn .

“I’m sorry, Pie, I haven’t seen a movie since Mommee came. I’m hopelessly behind. Tell me about this Caleb Pringle. He sounds like he ought to be manufacturing cashmere sweaters in New Hampshire, or something. After you tell me about your part.”

“I play one of the women he seduces and leaves behind in the gutter, as it were. An older woman, an actress hoping to make a comeback, still very beautiful, but lost, fragile, doomed. He’s just starting out when he meets her, and she still has terrific connections, so he uses her for that and then dumps her. Remind you a little of Sunset Boulevard ? Believe me, it’s better. I commit suicide, or my character does. Liquor and pills on the deck of his empty, locked beach house, only ambient sound and this strange, white sunlight. There’s this seagull who sits on the railing and stares at me while I’m dying—it sounds dumb, but it’s very powerful. Pring says it’s best-supporting stuff. He says nobody but I could have done it. This interview—God, Met, it’s going to help so much ! The guy who’s doing it is a shit, but everybody reads him first, and I can handle him.”

“He’s latent,” Stuart said. “Makes him mean.”

“Oh, you’re telling! You said you’d wait,” wailed Glynn, coming into the room. She had brushed her hair back and tied it high, so that the bare symmetry of her facial bones showed, and her skin was flushed with scrubbing and excitement. We all smiled at her. It was impossible not to. Where did I get this lovely being? I thought. I thought I would kill the first thing that hurt her.

“You can tell her who plays the jerk,” Laura said.

Glynn turned to me, her face suffused with rapture.

“Rocky MacPherson,” she breathed, as if she were saying “‘Ave Maria.’”

“Rocky MacPherson? Isn’t he that kid who keeps busting up thousand-dollar hotel rooms? See, I do keep up.”

“He’s an incredible actor,” Glynn cried. “He’s all…all spirit; he just burns on film. Caleb Pringle uses him in almost all his movies.”

“He’s also about fourteen, isn’t he? It’s a real stretch from busting up the Biedermeyer to studio head. He must be good.”

“He is, as a matter of fact,” Laura said lazily. “Very focused and very sensuous. He’s almost stopped with the hotels. Pring has brought him a long way. And as for studio heads, I don’t know many over thirty anymore. I found our love scenes very…believable.”

“Oh, God!” Glynn cried, her eyes closed in ecstasy.

“Like to meet him?” Laura said casually.

“Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Don’t tease about something like that…” my rapt daughter whispered, and I looked at her in faint alarm. Was this the child who had said only last week that she planned to have her children by sperm bank because she couldn’t stand the thought of any of the stupid boys she knew touching her?