Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“What on earth did you say to her, Leonard?” Caleb grinned.

“That will be our secret, won’t it…is it Glynn? Yes. Glynn. We shall never tell, shall we?”

“Never,” Glynn said. The shyness was gone. She looked at him as one might a favored uncle. Forever after, she never told me what he said.

Margolies studied her openly, turning his head this way and that, smiling a faint smile. It was a gentler smile, but I thought the shark ghosted just below the surface. I was suddenly glad we would be going home the next day.

“Tell me, Glynn, do you want to be an actress like your pretty aunt?” Margolies said. It was more than a casual question; he sounded genuinely interested. I thought that this sudden, real charm was not the least of his power.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think so. I don’t think I have, you know, the looks and everything for it. I think I might like to write or paint, though. Or maybe do something with music.”

“Ah, then, the creative urge is there,” he said.

“As well as a rather startling perception,” Caleb Pringle said. “She caught the absolute essence of Arc before I’d even worked it out for myself.”

Margolies looked at her some more.

“You like Arc , my little Glynn? Yes?”

“I don’t think anyone is going to like Arc , exactly,” she said shyly. “But I think everybody is going to be, you know, different after they see it.”

He did not reply, but nodded several times.

We sat quietly for a bit, a silence that puzzled me but did not seem strained. Into it, Caleb Pringle said presently, “Well, if she doesn’t want to be in the movies like her aunt she could always save France.”

Leonard Margolies looked at him and then at Glynn again. The smile deepened.

“She could indeed,” he said. “Yes. She could indeed do that.”

Glynn looked puzzled and started to say something, but Laura made a small motion toward her and smiled, and she fell silent. There was a kind of suppressed glee in Laura’s face that I could not read, and a sleepy sort of triumph in Caleb Pringle’s. But no one said anything else.

The champagne came and was uncorked, and Leonard Margolies tasted it and said, “Yes,” and the waiter poured it all around. Margolies lifted his glass.

“To Miss Laura Mason and her pretty sister and niece. To a wonderful visit with us. May the magic of Hollywood never fade.”

We drank.

“Now. What can I do to make your trip memorable?” Leonard Margolies said, putting his glass down. “What have you seen? What would you like to see? Have you seen a real studio, had a Hollywood tour? I like to think Vega is one of the great ones. I would be most happy to show you around it. Yes.”

“I can’t think of anything any more special, than to see Vega in the presence of the man who built it,” Laura said. Her cheeks were flaming, and her eyes glittered. She had drunk her champagne rather faster than I liked to see. Laura never could hold her liquor.

“Oh,” Glynn cried in delight. “Could we? Mom? Could we do that? Oh, Jess and Marcia would just die !”

“Glynn, you know we’re going home at noon tomorrow—”

“But if we went early? Maybe we could do it real early?” her voice broke in something near despair.

“Mr. Margolies has an early breakfast meeting. You heard him. No, darling, he’s been kind enough to us as it is.”

“Wouldn’t it be fun if we gave her a test?” Caleb said, as if I had not spoken. “It only takes a few minutes. Glynn, would you like to have a real screen test? We could send you home with a tape of it, so you could make sure Marcia and Jess die. Leonard, we could do that, couldn’t we? We can meet afterward—”

“We could do that, yes. The meeting can wait,” Leonard Margolies said. He sat back, hands together like a Buddha, smiling. Shark, penguin, and toad had fled, leaving an indulgent uncle.

“ Mom —”

“Why not, Merritt?” Caleb said. “We could have you on the plane in plenty of time. I’ll send Jesus with the car for you and he can wait, and take you to the airport afterward. Send you both off like royalty. It would be something to tell the gang, wouldn’t it?”

He was looking at Glynn.

“Oh, really, Caleb, I don’t think—” I began.

“It would give me great pleasure,” Leonard Margolies said. “Yes.”

“Oh, come on, Met. There’s no earthly reason not to do it,” Laura said. “How many young girls in the world will ever be able to say that Leonard Margolies personally gave them a screen test? Let her have something wonderful of her very own.”

And of course, there was no reason not to do it. It seemed to disaccommodate no one, and we would make our plane home with time to spare. And Laura was right; after that, there was not apt to be anything special for Glynn for a long time. Why not let her have this luminous moment without spoiling it? I did not know where my reluctance was coming from.

“Well…all right. It sounds like fun and we both appreciate it very much,” I said. “I can’t imagine why you’re being so nice to a couple of visiting Georgia relatives, but we accept with great pleasure.”

Glynn’s face abruptly went stark white and she closed her eyes.

“Thank you, Mom,” she said, in such a breathless small voice that we all looked at her. She looked as if she was about to faint.

I had seen the look before; it meant Glynn was stressed to the very limits of her being, every circuit overloaded. This was simply one liter too much joy in her cup. The next step would be nausea and vomiting, perhaps unstoppable tears. The embarrassment that followed these scenes was killing for her. She had not had one in a very long time; her world until this trip had been orderly in the extreme. I knew that she could not eat her dinner now, not in this place, not with these people. I put my hand on hers and said, “I think Glynn and I will skip dinner, after all, and go back to the apartment. We’ve both had too long a day, and she has an early morning call tomorrow—isn’t that how you say it? I’ll just ask the waiter to call us a cab; you all go on with your dinner, please.”

Glynn did not protest. She looked at me gratefully. No one else protested, either; her white face was eloquent.

“You do that, my nice, pretty girl,” Margolies said as fondly as if to a favorite niece. “Get your beauty sleep and be fresh for your big scene. Caleb, the car, I think.”

“Of course. I’ll send you both home in the limo and it can come back for Laura and me,” he said. “I’ll drop her at her car when we’ve finished dinner. I should have paced this better. Of course she’s worn out.”

When we got up to leave, Leonard Margolies kissed both our hands. Holding Glynn’s, he said, “You mustn’t take all this frou frou too seriously, my dear. It’s very good make-believe, but that’s just what it is. Make-believe.”

Thank you for that, I said silently.

“I won’t,” Glynn said. “Thank you, Mr. Margolies. I’m looking forward to tomorrow.”

He smiled.

“No more than I,” he said. “Yes.”

Caleb waited with us in the foyer until Jesus arrived with the limo, and then hurried us down the steps, his long body blocking Glynn from the milling paparazzi and the exploding flashbulbs. He handed us into the car and said, “Until tomorrow, then. You made a big hit with a very tough customer tonight, both of you. Rest on your laurels. Jesus will pick you up at six, if that’s okay, and we’ll shoot at eight. Jesus, take care of these ladies. They’re very good friends of Orion O’Neill.”

We rode home in the tomblike quiet of the ridiculous limo in silence, simply too full of the last seventy-two hours to speak. When we reached Stuart Feinstein’s aerie above Sunset Boulevard, Jesus handed us as tenderly out of the limo as if we had been Fabergé eggs.