Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

He started to drive away, and then put his head out the window and chirped, “You tell Orion O’Neill Jesus say’allo!”

7

The production studio where the test would be done was in Culver City, just off the San Diego Freeway South, near the airport. The limo picked us up at six. Our driver this morning was not Jesus, but a dark, impassive man who might have been a Pakistani, or from another Middle Eastern nation. He did not speak except to confirm our destination, and we did not, either. Much of the shine was gone from the limo when Jesus was not at the wheel.

Despite the lateness of the hour when we went to bed, neither Glynn nor I slept well. Overexcitement did that to her, I knew, and her restless tossing set the waterbed to rolling like a frail craft in a nasty sea. I clung to my side of the mattress and tried for oblivion; I knew that the next day would be hard for us. The excitement of the test and the proximity to the world of casual glamour and unreality that Caleb Pringle commanded, the rush to make the noon plane, and the meeting, at last, with Pom all lay ahead, stuffed into this one day like sausage into a casing. Add to all that the shuffling specter of Mommee and jet lag, and the mere thought of the next twenty-four hours stunned me with fatigue and a lassitude that seemed to settle in my very bones like some Victorian malaise. There was no way to know what it did to Glynn. Like a young bride on the eve of her wedding, she could not see past the altar of the screen test.

We were up before five, padding blindly around the kitchen for juice and toast and coffee, bumping into each other in Stuart’s tiny coral and aqua bathroom. I pulled on the much-derided blue pantsuit and hastily packed my few things, tossing the jeans and T-shirt I had worn into Stuart’s washing machine and hanging up his tux jacket. Laura had said she would come back to the apartment and wash and dry the things we had borrowed, and his linens. Glynn had been living out of her duffel, so she had little to pack. She would be made up at the studio, Caleb had said, so she needed no makeup, and I, weary of the last two day’s ersatz Merritt, wore none, either. By the time the heat-grayed morning came sliding in from the east we were sitting on the little balcony, watching Sunset Boulevard come wearily alive and sipping coffee. Humidity was thick in the air and the heat was already shimmering off the hazy towers of Century City and downtown. It was going to be a smoggy, broiling day. I thought of Atlanta, and the heat and thickness we had left behind us, and sighed. The vision of the Penobscot Boy cottage superimposed itself over the scene below. Cool, sharp, resinous, clean, clear—that was what I needed. Clarity. I was starved for starkness and clarity.

“Do you think they made it up last night?” Glynn said in the rusty voice of early morning.

“Who?”

“Oh, Mom. Aunt Laura and Caleb. You know she didn’t come in. The sofa bed wasn’t out. She had to have spent the night with him.”

“I thought they already had pretty much made it up,” I said. I did not trouble to pretend that I thought Laura had spent the night anywhere but with Caleb Pringle. Of course she had. I had seen her face last night at Spago when she looked at him. Laura was in love with him. Spending the night was what she did when she was in love, or thought herself to be.

I thought that it was not much of an example to set for an unworldly sixteen-year-old niece, but Glynn had seemed, on this trip, far older than sixteen much of the time. There was a perceptiveness, an adult insight and tolerance in her that we did not see in Atlanta. But then we did not see much of anything about Glynn there except her carefully guarded, post-Mommee demeanor. How much richness were we missing in our daughter, I wondered wearily. Well, that would stop, too. Mommee would be gone, and Glynn would have room and air to become whoever she might. In the sun of her father’s undivided attention, we just might see the last of the starving child who haunted the house by the river. Already, out here, she was eating far more. I hated the thought of the looming confrontation, but resolved that it would come soon. I did not want to lose this budding wholeness of Glynn’s.

“What do you think of him?” Glynn said.

“Caleb? Well, he’s certainly attractive, and he’s being lovely to us. And he seems to be very fond of your Aunt Laura. I don’t really know what I think yet. I don’t know any other film directors to compare him to. What do you think?”

“I think he’s wonderful. He’s funny and not at all stuck-up, and he doesn’t make me feel like a silly kid. He treats me like someone he enjoys listening to and being around. I hope Aunt Laura marries him. I’d love to have him for an uncle,” Glynn said.

I could not see Caleb Pringle as anyone’s uncle, not, come to that, anyone’s husband, though I knew he had been married twice before. I did not think he was or ever could be a creature of the thousand lilliputian tendrils with which marriage and children bound you. But then, neither could I see Laura trussed with them. We were, Glynn and I, far away from home and out of our milieu altogether. Without my context, I found it hard to catch the sense of the people I met. I had never stopped to think how much I depended on simple familiarity.

“I wouldn’t count on that,” I said. “I think they’d have an alternative relationship at best.”

“You mean like just a long affair or living together all their lives but never marrying?”

“Something like that,” I said. “This place just doesn’t seem set up for plain old garden-variety marriages.”

“Well, that would be okay, too,” my child said placidly. “As long as I got to see him every now and then.”

“Don’t you go getting a crush on Caleb Pringle,” I said. “The percentage in that is less than zero.”

“I don’t get crushes anymore,” she said loftily. The limo came then, saving me from wondering when she ever had. I had seen little evidence of them, except the occasional almost obligatory infatuation with untouchable celebrities like this troublesome Rocky MacPherson about whom I had heard so much. Pom had said once, almost wistfully, that it looked as though he was never going to have to run off some obnoxious, lovesick little punk.

We got to the studio about six-thirty. It was a large, sprawling, one-story brick and aluminum building that looked vaguely like a warehouse, sitting in the middle of an asphalt parking lot that, I thought, would be worse than Death Valley at midday. There was a high wire fence around the whole complex, topped with barbed wire, and a heavy steel gate with a guardhouse. It manages to be both forbidding and banal, far removed from the fabled Hollywood studios that had lived always in my mind.

There were few cars in the lot. The limo’s driver lowered the silky, whispering window and said a few words to the guard, who consulted a clipboard and nodded. The driver followed his pointing finger around to the back of the building, which was even barer and less attractive than the front, and pulled up to a plain steel door next to a loading ramp. Glynn looked up at me and rolled her eyes.

“So much for A Star Is Born ,” I said, ruffling her silky hair. She had washed it and blown it dry, and it seemed to drift around her face, never quite settling. She wore the same tunic she had worn last night, and the leggings and boots. Caleb Pringle had asked specifically for them.

“I wasn’t expecting all that old silent-movie stuff,” she said. “I know they don’t do that anymore. It would have been fun, though, wouldn’t it?”

The driver opened the door and we went inside. A young woman who seemed hardly older than Glynn was waiting for us. She wore blue jeans and a sweatshirt and enormous, clunking Birkenstock sandals over thick ragg socks, and had a head of glorious, improbable, Dolly Parton hair. Over her tiny mouse’s face it looked so incongruous that Glynn and I both grinned.