Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“Yeah, she really did,” Laura said. “You know, pot could be just the ticket for what ails her. You can bet it would fatten her up better than all those shrinks you’ve been carting her to. Cost a lot less, too.”

“Let’s get one thing straight, Laura,” I said tightly. “You will not give Glynn pot. You will not give her crack, or whatever it is that you all stick up your noses out here. You will not give her liquor. You will not do anything that will put her at risk in any way. I want her to get to know her aunt, and I want her to have a good time while we’re here, but I will not tolerate this kind of crap. Your lifestyle is your business only until you let it spill over onto her. Then it’s mine. I’ve got a good mind to take her home this afternoon. We can still get the four o’clock flight.”

“ Mommm ,” Glynn wailed. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t think. I didn’t even like it—”

“It’s a shame you have to punish her because you’re pissed at me,” Laura said, looking off into the smog. Then she ground out the cigarette. “But you’re ever the vigilant mother lioness, aren’t you, Met? I almost forgot you were for a while.”

I knew what she was trying to do, but it angered me anyway.

“I don’t have to be,” I said. “How I am out here is entirely up to you. It seems to me you’re the one who called the lioness out.”

She smiled. It was her old, sweet, open smile.

“You’re right. I did. And I’m sorry. I could have gone in the john and smoked this. It was inappropriate and I won’t do it again, I promise. I’m really uptight about this screening tonight, it means so damned much, but that’s no excuse. If you’ll stay, I’ll be so exemplary you won’t know me.”

“If you take me home for smoking pot Dad will never trust me again,” Glynn whispered, and I knew that she was right. Everything he thought about Laura, and about my hasty flight West and our staying over, would be vindicated. It never occurred to me not to tell him, and I knew that it would never occur to Glynn, either.

“I know I sound stuffy and old-fashioned, harping at you about pot,” I said, knowing that I did. “I hate always being the heavy. But you both know I can’t condone that.”

“We both do,” Laura said. “It won’t come up again.”

“Then let’s put it behind us,” I said. “What’s on for today?”

Glynn jumped up and hugged me, and said, “I’m going down to the strip and look for some tights and shoes to go with my silk tunic. Laura said they could be an early birthday present from her. I can’t go to a Hollywood screening in Doc Martens. You don’t have to worry, Mom; you can sit right here and see me the whole time. It’s just to those boutiques down there.”

I sighed and let her go. I was not going to be the crow in this flock of songbirds anymore.

“What about you? You want to shop, or prowl, or anything?” Laura said. She did not move from her chair. I did not think she wanted to go out, but I did not know what she did want.

“I think I’d just like a lazy morning,” she said. “Keep me company. I’ll make a fresh pot of coffee and some toast for you. At least there’s bread and jam left. We haven’t really talked since you got here.”

We drank the coffee and sat for a while in companionable silence. The slight, constant pain of missing Laura was stilled, and the solace of seeing my daughter behaving like an ordinary teenager, flitting off after clothes and bubbling with the excitement of a real Hollywood screening, was soporific. The pot incident shrank into the category of adolescent hijinks. On this sunny balcony not yet baking in the heat, the air of festivity and holiday was very strong, and the sense of sheer youngness, of the head-spinning innocence and camaraderie of college, was even stronger. How long since I had spent even a few days in the sole company of women with whom I shared deep bonds? Not, surely, since school and the days just after, when Crisscross and I spent long weekend days together, laughing, talking, being . Except for the scratchy prickle of Pom and the faraway, half-forgotten furor of home, lodged far back in my mind like a faint tickle in the throat, I was nearly perfectly steeped in well being.

“Tell me about this Caleb Pringle,” I dared say into the suspended sunny morning. I could not have said it before.

There was a silence, and then Laura sighed. It was a long sigh.

“He’s the director of The Right Time . He’s probably the hottest director in the industry right now. Everything he touches turns to money, which is all the studios understand, and most of it turns to awards. He’s really good, really creative in a strange, dark, almost delicate kind of way. There’s always a touch of decadence in his films, what he calls a sweet corruption, but there’s this surprising innocence to them, too, even the most violent. And some of them, like Burn , were really violent. He has a mind like I’ve never seen and a vision like I’ve never encountered and—”

“And you’re in love with him,” I said. I would have known from her tone even if Stuart Feinstein had not told me. I did not mean infatuation, either. I had seen Laura through several of those. This was different.

“Yes.” She swung her eyes from the undulating skyline and fixed them on me. Tears shimmered in them, but there was a strange, sweet smile on her face, one I did not associate with Laura. It was tender and it was somehow humble. For some reason that frightened me rather badly. I remembered Stuart’s words.

“So are congratulations in order?” I asked, trying to keep my tone warm yet casual.

“I…don’t know. Yes. I think so. Oh, Met, I do think so; we’ve been just so close, just so…awfully close.…We were together constantly during the shooting of Right Time , and just after, when we came back and he started editing. We laughed all the time, at everything. I know the sort of reputation he has, but he said things—we did things—you can’t do and say things like that unless you’re really in love with someone. You just can’t. I know. I’ve said and done practically everything there is to say and do to a man, and had them said and done to me, and this wasn’t like that. There was nothing on earth held back between us. I can tell when I’m being fed a line. This wasn’t that. He was always talking about next year, or years from now, and he’d said he wanted me to come up to his place in the mountains. He doesn’t take anybody there; everybody knows that. Everybody knows about that place, and the way he goes off up there by himself. But he said he wanted me to see it—”

“Where in the mountains?” I asked. I did not care, but I wanted the happiness to stay in her voice and on her face for a little longer.

“Up in the Santa Cruz mountains below San Francisco. It was just the wreck of a big old hunting lodge when he bought it; but he’s completely done it over. It’s all national park land now, but you can have a place on it if it was there before the park was, and this was. Some very rich San Francisco guy built it in the early twenties. It’s really isolated, I hear, and very beautiful; that’s redwood country up there, and the land is so wild and rough that you can hardly walk it, much less get roads through it. There’s a little private road into his property, but except for that and an old fire tower where his hermit caretaker lives, there’s nothing else. He used to tell me about it, about how much he loved it, and how important it was to him, and what he did up there, and what we’d do.…I might almost have thought this was just, you know, a fling or something, until he asked me up there. But then I knew it was what I thought it was—”