Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“I did,” I said. “Ridiculous. Don’t let it go to your head. You’re flown enough with yourself tonight.”

“ No ! I want to be more flown! I want to be flown all the way to the moon!” she caroled, and did a little pirouette in the restaurant’s foyer. Her hair fanned out in a surge of silk, and her eyes closed in rapture. Caleb stood and watched her, unsmiling once more.

“Glynn,” I said warningly. Enough was enough.

Caleb Pringle scanned the crowd inside. I looked, too. It seemed to me that every beautiful woman in Los Angeles was in Spago tonight, and every older man, and all of them were rich. Everyone could have been Someone, but I could not tell who all those someones were.

“Are all these women in movies?” I whispered to Laura. “If so, who are they? I never saw so many beautiful women and so many gorgeous clothes, but I don’t know who anybody is. Am I supposed to?”

Caleb overheard me and laughed.

“No, you’re not, mostly. Who they are is women who go to Spago.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, that’s what they do. They get invited to Spago and then they spend the rest of the week, day and night, getting ready to go. And after they’ve gone they kick back and wait until they’re invited again, and the whole thing starts over.”

I looked at him in disbelief.

“You’re kidding.”

“Only a little. Look, there’s somebody I want you to meet. Let’s go over, and then we’ll find the rest of the gang. I think they put us in a private room.”

We followed him through the thronged room, and again, as I had in the movie theater, I felt rather than saw eyes follow us, heard a small, windlike sigh ruffle the surface of the room. Ahead of me Laura pulled her shoulders back and tucked her buttocks in and fell into her prowl. My own shoulders went back and my spine straightened automatically. Next to Laura, Glynn was floating again.

Laura stopped suddenly. She looked up at Caleb.

“That’s Margolies over there,” she said, and her voice was low and angry. “That’s who you want us to meet, isn’t it? No way, Pring, absolutely no way in hell am I going to go over there and make nice on the bastard who cut me out of that movie. No way. Nada. What are you trying to do to me?”

“I’m trying to save you a little face, my beautiful ass. That’s what I’m trying to do,” Caleb Pringle said lazily, but there was something urgent in his voice. “Listen, Margolies doesn’t have any idea who you are; the cut wasn’t personal. It was for his Jacuzzi-brained honey, I told you that. He wouldn’t recognize your face if it got up off the cutting room floor and bit him. As far as he knows, you’re somebody he’s meeting for the first time, somebody he knows I want for Arc . He’ll be charming and polite and think you’re entirely as fetching as you are, and how smart I am to put you in the picture, and that’ll be that. And nobody else in here knows you’ve been cut from Margolies’s new picture, because nobody at all does, but they soon will. And what will they remember? They’ll remember that you sat at Margolies’s table the night of the screening and he slobbered over you and everybody smiled and giggled and yukked, and you were with me, and I’m doing another hot picture with Margolies, and they’ll go around telling the whole industry that they were here the night he hired you for Arc . The fact that you weren’t in Right Time after all will be forgotten because Arc is going to be newer and ten times hotter than that. Capice ?”

“I do. Yes,” Laura said. “Thank you, Pring. I shouldn’t have doubted you.”

“No, you shouldn’t,” he said, and tugged her braid, and we moved toward the corner booth where the little man who had sat beside me at the screening shoveled in pasta, head down over his plate. He was, oddly, alone. I would have thought studio heads traveled with retinues.

He looked up when we stopped beside him and smiled. It reminded me of the smile on the face of Bruce, the mechanical shark they used in Jaws . The eyes above the smile were chips of basalt, old and cold and long dead. I thought that I had far rather meet Bruce in the water than this man.

“Caleb,” he said, and his voice was smooth and thick, a flowery oil. “Dear boy. We meet again. Yes. Sit down and introduce me to these pretty things with you. Yes.”

Caleb handed us into the empty seats in the booth, putting Laura across from Margolies so, I thought, he could better look at her. He motioned me in beside her. He put Glynn next to the little man, and nodded to a waiter, who produced a chair as swiftly as if he had woven it out of air and set it at the end of the booth. Caleb Pringle draped his long frame over it.

“Leonard, this is Laura Mason, about whom I have told you an enormous amount,” he said. “I want her very badly for Arc , and I know that after you have looked at her for a few minutes you are going to let me have her with abiding joy. And this is her beautiful big sister, Merritt Fowler, from Atlanta, and the stunning child beside you is her daughter and Laura’s niece, Glynn Fowler. Maybe we should put them all in Arc . What do you think?”

Leonard Margolies nodded sleepily at us, and the shark’s smile widened. “Yes. Lovely, both of them. Yes, we should probably do that, my boy. If indeed there is going, as you seem to think, to be an Arc . Yes.”

I wondered if the repeated “Yes” meant anything, or was just a habit peculiar to Leonard Margolies. It was disconcerting, like hearing a toad hiss. Or a penguin. Or, of course, a shark.

“Oh, there must be an Arc , Leonard. It will be the jewel in your crown, as it were,” said Caleb evenly. “Especially with Laura here on board. I take it from your comment, or lack of same, that you think Right Time might use a little touching up.”

“Well, my boy, yes. A tad of cosmetic dentistry, shall we say. Yes. We will, of course, discuss that in the morning. I’m staying in town just to talk to you about it. See what I do for you? Come to my office about seven. We’ll order in.”

Caleb laughed. I did not think there was much humor in it.

“It will be,” he said, grinning around the table at us all, “in the nature of the condemned man’s last meal. Never mind. Let’s order something wonderful to eat and drink, and be very merry, for tomorrow, et cetera.”

Leonard Margolies raised a limp white hand and two waiters collided with each other trying to reach him first.

“Bring us something bubbly and so expensive for these pretties here,” he said. “Yes. Lots of it. We’ll order for them after we’ve toasted them; I want to think about what they should eat. Yes. I assume,” he said, looking at Laura and me and then at Glynn, “that you belles drink something besides bourbon and branch water.”

We smiled and nodded and he said, “Good. Good,” and looked at Glynn again.

In the low light of the restaurant she had the afternoon’s unearthly shine back, the shine that made me think of alabaster and medieval effigies. Excitement flamed along her cheekbones, but shyness paled the rest of her face to pearl-white. Her eyelashes lay along her cheeks, and I knew that she was struggling with shyness, struggling not to seem what she was: a sixteen-year-old sitting beside one of the world’s legendary restaurants. My heart squeezed in empathy. If I was tongue-tied here, how much worse for her. Too much; we had heaped too much on her tonight.

Abruptly Margolies leaned over and whispered into her ear, and she started and turned to look at him, the satiny hair swinging out, and then she began to laugh. It was the belly laugh. Margolies smiled conspiratorially at her, his eyes alive now, and heads turned toward us, and faces smiled. I had seen the effect of Glynn’s infectious croak before.