Acts of Love (5 page)

“Miss Lodge.” She looked at him expectantly, her pen poised. “I thought you'd be able to grasp the reason I told that story. I thought I was making it clear that I have no intention of talking about my marriage or my friends or my feelings about children. I'll be glad to talk to you about my grandmother and the plays I've directed and those I plan to direct and what I'm trying to achieve in my directing. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, I assume that's what you came to hear.”

“Well. Do you always tell interviewers what kind of an interview they can do?”

“Always.”

“So you direct the interview the same way you do a play. Did you direct your marriage that way? Oh, dear me, I'm sorry,” she said quickly as Luke stood up. “That slipped out. I apologize. May I rephrase it? Do you direct any of the events of your life in the same way?”

He smiled. “No.”

“Would
you sit down again? I
am
sorry. It's just that I'm known”—she smiled again, a confidential smile—“for getting all those intimate details no one else can get. Those are what make a person come alive on the printed page: I'm sure you know that.”

“A good writer makes people come alive through language and imagery, not titillation.”

She flushed. “Well, yes, of course. But I'm thinking of our readers, you know; they expect to read about your personal life; they want to
know
you.”

“They'll know me through my work. I'd think that's what
The New Yorker
readers would be most interested in.” He remained standing, leaning casually against the wall behind his desk. “From the time I was seven to my thirteenth birthday, when Constance decided I needed a real high school, and after that on summer vacations, I lived backstage, watching, listening, asking questions, pestering the crews to let me work on stage sets, lighting design, props, everything that goes into a production. When I was fifteen I knew I'd be a director and I was already criticizing the way plays were being staged. I was an unbearably arrogant teenager, absolutely sure I'd already learned everything I needed to know. Constance listened to me with great patience and more than a little humor and then told me that I had a few things left to learn and I was going off to college, whether that was part of my lifetime plan or not.”

Having launched himself, he talked easily about his early years in the theater and then all phases of theater life, using anecdotes, famous names, a sprinkling of technical backstage terms, an inside look at scandals of the past and his own style of directing, especially in the plays and films that had made his name one of the most famous on Broadway. Then he added the statistics magazine editors love: how many plays he had directed, where they had opened and later toured, the number of tickets sold, how many people were involved in the production of a play and how many people in the theater made a good living at it (very few).

By the time he stopped, almost two hours had gone by, the photographer had long since left, and Marian Lodge had changed her tape twice and filled her notepad. Not bad, Luke thought when she left. He had no desire to see his picture or his quotes in yet another magazine, but if profiles such as this one led to larger audiences, longer runs of his plays, more great scripts sent to him from known or unknown playwrights, then the two hours had been well spent. In fact, he would do anything within reason to help his plays and the theater in general.

I wake up and help my mother around the house . . . but then I think about getting to the theater and being on stage . . . and everything is beautiful again.

Jessica again. Odd how her words, from only those few letters that he had read, kept weaving through his thoughts. But the words fit his life, slipping smoothly into whatever he was doing. Well, we're both so deeply a part of the theater, he thought. Or at least she was. Good God, how she must miss it. The way my grandmother felt when she moved to Italy. Jessica must have written about that. I'll find out, one of these days, when I have a chance to get back to her letters.

He ate a sandwich at his desk and worked through the afternoon. He liked his office: the serene quiet that was accentuated by faint sounds of traffic from the street eleven stories below, the cool black, gray and blue furnishings his decorator had chosen, one book-lined wall and two walls covered with photographs of the stars with whom he had worked, and of presidents, senators, prime ministers, kings and queens, all standing beside him, smiling into the camera, or shaking his hand, or bestowing a medal or award, or presenting him with a gift after he had visited a country to oversee the staging of a play. He knew it was faintly childish to exhibit the photographs—splashing his importance all over his walls—but he told himself he did it to impress visitors, and so each season there were new ones to add to the collection. He worked contentedly through the afternoon, mostly undisturbed, letting his secretary screen his calls, until, as he was about to leave, Claudia called.

“Dinner tomorrow night?” she asked brightly. “I haven't seen you for ages.”

“You'll see me tonight, at the benefit.”

“With five hundred other people in the St. Regis ballroom. Luke, don't be coy. You know I meant just the two of us.”

He glanced at his calendar. “I'm going to Joe and Ilene's cocktail party tomorrow night, and then to Monte Gerhart's. We could have a drink before that, if you'd like.”

“Luke, I need to talk to you; there are some things I can't handle. . . . Why are you doing this to me?”

“All right, tomorrow night, but not dinner; we'll have drinks at Pompeii. Eleven o'clock. I'll meet you there.”

“You could pick me up.”

“Claudia, it's half a block from your building. Meet me there and I'll walk home with you afterward. Make a list of what you want to ask me; you're always forgetting something.”

“Make a list?
I don't plan my dates as if they're board meetings; life should be spontaneous. Anyway, I won't forget; it's mostly about money.”

And Claudia never forgets anything involving money, Luke thought as he hung up; she still talks about the time she had to pay for dinner at the Terrace because I'd left my wallet backstage. That was before we were married and she was on her best behavior, so she paid with a smile and a little joke about absentminded directors, but she never forgot it.

His limousine was waiting downstairs and as he sat back in its cool interior, his driver turned to scrutinize him. Arlen O'Day had been Constance Bernhardt's driver for thirty years and had watched Luke grow up before going to work for him when Constance went to Italy, and with all his Irish intensity he took over as Constance's stand-in, watching over Luke, worrying about him, offering advice. He studied Luke's face for a moment before starting the car and pulling out into traffic. “Bad day, Mr. Cameron? Or just the heat? It's a killer, the heat; God must be punishing somebody, but I don't know why the rest of us have to get it, too.”

Luke smiled. “I don't think it's punishment for anyone. And I didn't have a bad day; it was a pretty good one, at least the afternoon.” He fell silent, thinking about his day. Indoors, all of it, arguing with Monte Gerhart, giving Kent Home a lesson about the theater, probably the first of many, fending off a persistent interviewer, dealing with his ex-wife, who insisted on calling it a date when Luke agreed to take her out for a drink, having his most normal conversations with a taxi driver from Pakistan and a limousine driver from Dublin. Suddenly he felt stifled, wanting to run. Run where? He didn't know. Somewhere. To find something. But he had no idea what he wanted or where to look for it.

Forty-five years old, he thought. Healthy, financially secure, internationally known, admired, maybe envied. Unmarried. Unattached.

“Shall I wait, Mr. Cameron?” Arlen asked as he turned onto Fifth Avenue.

“Yes. I'll be about half an hour.” I'm attached to Arlen, he thought ruefully: the only person who always waits for me. Good God, that sounds maudlin. It's the heat, as everyone says. Or the beginning of a new play; for me that's always the hardest time, when nothing yet has a shape, when I have a manuscript but no actors, no characters coming to life, nothing to mold. I'm always tense at the beginning of a project; it doesn't mean a thing.

But the truth was, there was something else that he wanted, something he hadn't achieved, and even though he could not define it, he often felt a longing that crept up on him, as just now, taking him by surprise. It always faded, but it always came back.

Across the street from the Metropolitan Museum, Arlen pulled up at a limestone building festooned with stone gargoyles and rearing dragons and wrought-iron balconies that stretched the width of the building at each floor. A doorman reached for the limousine door as Luke opened it. “Well, sir, Mr. Cameron, it's a hot one, and hotter tomorrow, the radio says.” Luke wondered how many times that day he had said those words to other residents of the building, how many times he had ducked inside for a breath of cool air and a swig of something iced, how many times he had mopped his face and changed his white gloves to keep them pristine. We all have stifling days, he thought, but his own restlessness, a kind of urgency, still gripped him, and he wished, as the second doorman took him to his penthouse in the self-service elevator that the residents insisted be run by a doorman, that he could stay home that night and try to figure out what was wrong with him.

But there were almost no nights that he could stay home, and so he greeted his butler, who told him that it was exceedingly hot outside but that the apartment was blessedly cool, swiftly took a shower, shaved and changed into his tuxedo and returned to the street. Arlen pulled up just as he emerged and, without being told, drove to the glass-and-steel tower on Madison Avenue where Tricia Delacorte was coming toward him across the lobby. She kissed Luke lightly as her doorman closed the car door behind her. “My, you do look handsome; your hair is different.”

“Still wet from the shower.” He looked at her with pleasure, admiring her cultivated beauty and the expensive perfection of her ball gown that exposed a good part of her creamy skin between puffed sleeves in a rainbow of colors. She had been born Teresa Pshevorski on the west side of Chicago, but at seventeen, newly arrived in Los Angeles, she got her first job as a maid, as Tricia Delacorte, a name from a novel long since forgotten. She had planned to marry a famous actor or director she met while serving hors d'oeuvres at parties, but the years went by and it never happened, and one day, bored and angry, she wrote an article for a neighborhood newspaper describing the scandals of fictitious characters as if they were major names in Hollywood: the high and mighty who ate and drank but ignored the maid. Her writing was lively and racy and attracted the attention of the editor of the
Los Angeles Times,
who called her in.

By then she had had two face-lifts and could talk like an insider, using the storehouse of gossip and movie lore she had overheard in years of parties. She talked her way to a column in the
Los Angeles Times,
which was soon picked up by a national syndicate, and then she was offered a column in
The Sophisticate,
a glossy weekly magazine for those who thought they were sophisticated even if others did not. Soon she no longer needed fictitious names because she was invited everywhere and her telephone rang constantly with tips on impending marriages, divorces, births, the end or beginning of affairs, a son or daughter on drugs, a fortune lost or made, an engagement broken, a criminal indictment in the works. The most enticing appeared in her column with names in boldface. Occasionally she ran a blind item: “Who ducked out of Spago the other night rather than answer questions about the agreement in the works between his wife, his mistress and his two teenage children?” She was the sole arbiter of whether such questions ever were answered, or were left to dangle in the steamy air.

By the time Luke met her, she divided her week between apartments in Los Angeles and New York, collecting tidbits about actors, actresses, directors and producers who now were scattered as widely as Aspen, the plains of Montana, and Sharon, Connecticut. She had never used an item about Luke.

“Well, they did it again,” she said to him in the limousine, sliding along the leather seat until her thigh was against his. “You'd think they'd have some sense of responsibility.”

“Should I know what you're talking about?” he asked.

“I did tell you. Joe and Ilene Fassbrough were quarreling at LAX when they came back from Europe; they fought all the way through customs. Well, last night they had a major blowup at Freddy Parkington's dinner—stopped the entrée from being served for a good ten minutes—and then Joe actually told me I should ignore the whole thing, that he had the flu and was feverish and said a lot of things he didn't mean. But these people have a responsibility, you know: the rest of the world looks up to them and sickness is no reason to absolutely lose your standards of behavior. If he really was sick. He looked fine to me. But of course men always look wonderful in tuxedos.”

“Did you say he was sick in today's column?”

“Of course not; I said that he and Ilene stopped the entrée from being served. It's a much livelier item, Luke, you know that; it would be a wonderful scene in a play. I wanted to say something about people who let down their social class by behaving badly, but that really doesn't belong in the column. Maybe in
The Sophisticate
next month.”

Luke sat back, his arm along the seat behind her shoulders. “What social class is this?”

“Ours. Oh, Luke, don't be tiresome. You know what I mean.”

“You mean that Joe and Ilene Fassbrough, who are two of the most asinine people I know, and dull besides, are role models for an upper class.”