Bells of Avalon (13 page)

Chapter Twelve

Pacific Palisades, California

1956

He heard the abroad sound of thunder but didn’t look up.  He watched his scuffed boot push his mother’s porch swing—back and forth, back and forth—every movement followed by a short creak. His mother had called his name a few moments before, at least he though she had.  Maybe she’d given up on rousing him. He imagined the clouds fumbling over the Pacific Ocean’s horizon line. The storm would have another five miles or so before it reached the house. Fae had worried it would rain. She was a nervous girl, which made her a nervous bride.

He’d seen the way she stared at her thin wedding dress hanging from his mother’s kitchen door. She inspected every bit of the fabric, wringing her hands in a way that said nothing would ever be right. It needed extra frills, extra lace. Extra of whatever was supposed to make cheap satin look like silk.  No matter how much cutting or beading his mother did, it would never be more than an imitation garment bought somewhere off Sunset Boulevard. 

That was probably why she’d wanted to wear the necklace, something fancy to dress it all up.  He wasn’t sure why he’d been so against to the idea, but it didn’t take a lot of dreaming to know it had to do with Katie Webb.

She’d loved that necklace. She’d loved just about everything his mother did. Every dinner she ate with them was divine, every pathetic doily his mother crocheted was piece of art to rival Botticelli. That seemed strange at first, but soon after he had understood…Katie had never had a mother, while he’d had a lifetime to get used to having one.

Why doesn’t she want me to wear it? She hates me!
  Fae’s whining echoed through his brain.

He’d told her to find something else. That his mother would never let her wear it in a million years. That she was fussy about lending her jewelry.

He’d never asked his mother.

He knew she would have given Fae whatever she wanted. She’d even suggested it on her own a week before the wedding, but he’d shut her down with a single look.

The only jewelry Fae got from him was the ring. Her soap opera daydreams must’ve died every time she glanced down at the bland yellow band, a few diamond chips barely revealing it was an engagement ring.  She’d hidden her disappointment well at first, holding out to for the shiny person she’d seen in theaters as a little girl.  But soon, her disenchanted glances were hard to miss. That was the problem with people outside the film colony: they expected so much—and were invariably disappointed. He’d played no part in tricking her.

His sleek roadster was nothing but a sad memento of when there’d been more money than he’d known what to do with. It was the same with everything else that hinted at some kind of glamour for her. The truth was—he was barely working.  She’d thought the single radio anthology he’d done that year was something to write home about.  She didn’t know that radio was where actors went to die, the last leg of the shoot before hitting the slaughter house.  People on the outside just didn’t know things like that. He’d met her at a party outside Boyle Heights for chrissake—he hadn’t been looking to impress anyone. He hadn’t been looking for anything but something to take the edge off a bad summer.

He’d tried to shake her, but she was the first person in awhile who’d looked at him like he was actually
something
. The way people had used to look at him when he was younger.  That was something he found hard to reject. After awhile, things got comfortable. She was a very pretty girl who came from nowhere important. She flattered him and what she didn’t know about his world became more and more appealing. He hadn’t meant for the fling to last long. He wanted to break it off before it went too far.  Besides, he missed Katie.

She’d gone to New York in April. He thought the job was good timing. Things had gotten worse before she’d left. Max and Katie were the only ones who hadn’t dumped him after the accident. He begged Katie not to leave him when she got out of the hospital. He’d thrown every promise in the book at her until she agreed to stay. He wasn’t certain why, although he suspected it was because she thought she owed him something. He didn’t like think about the reason she felt that way. He hated that about himself. He hated so much about the person he had become to her. He hated seeing the stretched pink scar that jagged up her arm. She’d caught him staring at it few times—but said nothing. That was the worst thing about her: she never said anything—even when she had the right. 

Katie always made things so damn difficult. After she went to live with the old couple, it seemed like forever til he saw her again. They’d been forced to share every waking moment as kids; he never dreamed he would wind up missing her. He’d been plumb giddy when he heard she was going to the professional school…though he never let on as much. He went out of his way to run into her after class. He tried to talk to her the way he had before, but she made him feel thick-tongued, stupid—and desperate. Most of the time she looked at him like he was an idiot. Like he was the last person in the world she wanted to see. Sometimes she acted like she almost liked him, but the next day she was an ice princess again. She confused the hell out of him. One day he broke down and lied that his mother wanted her over for dinner. When he said that, she’d looked at him like a million bucks. He changed the story up for his mom, of course—saying Katie had asked to see her. His mother was thrilled. He had a notion that she missed Katie even more than he did. He pretended to ignore her when she came over, flaunted girls in front of her at school in some vain attempt to make her jealous. Nothing worked.  It went on that way forever. That is, until he got drunk enough to make the first move in Chicago. Like an idiot, he’d spent the night fake-fawning over Violet Clayworth. Katie never took the bait, of course. She barely glanced at him while she’d obligatorily worked the room. Violet caught on pretty quick what was going on. She ditched him in his drunkenness, leaving the party with her brother and a second-rate trombone player. Hours later, he saw Katie looking beautiful and exhausted from across the dance floor. He thought if he didn’t kiss her then and there—he’d explode. The worst thing she could do was haul-off and slap him. But she hadn’t slapped him. She’d actually kissed him back, which confused him even more. After that, he thought maybe being together couldn’t be as hard as it was to be apart. But it
had
been hard—for a million reasons it had been. They weren’t kids anymore, and being away from her now hurt worse than anything he could imagine. When it hurt like that, it didn’t seem to matter what Katie barely gave him and what Fae always did. 

He kept his head clear for awhile after she went. Max came around more and more. He seemed set on squeezing every ounce from his valley good-looks before he racked out in Los Angeles. The jobs had never really stopped for Katie. While she seemed simple, she had a whip of savvy that understood how to hang on to the meal ticket of her wide-eyed tenderness. It wasn’t something she knew she did, but he’d watched her do it since they were kids. It was what kept her from the chopping block while he and Max’s heads were positioned firmly in place.

He and Max didn’t talk about the work drying up. It seemed enough that they were going through it together. So it went that summer: Sunday dinners at his mother’s house, baseball games. Some nights they drove east into the city to hear acts at the Hillcrest. Kate hated the Hillcrest. She’d gone along with him more times than she would’ve liked. They always sat in the back, his arm around her, his thumb twined through her hair as he kept beat against her shoulder.  She just sat and listened, trying very much to like the music along with him. At times like that, she made him feel truly peaceful. No one else made him feel like that. Katie didn’t know she had that effect on people, just as she didn’t know most things about herself.

Most of that summer he’d sat on the balcony of his dingbat rental in Culver City, smoking cigarettes and waiting for her to call. She had sounded so different over the phone. Her voice was whole, happy, and so different from the uncertain English tone he was used to. The excitement in her voice cut him hard and fast. The show had gotten extended through the summer. She’d be gone longer than she thought.

He’d made good on his promise to stay clean since she’d left. He didn’t think she’d have ever have gotten on the plane if he hadn’t promised her. Katie and her airplane
juju
. But this time, as she’d stood on the black tarmac, she hadn’t laughably palmed off the contents of her purse. He was no longer the crutch that made flying safe for her. She stared at him through the birdcage veil that covered her face, failing to conceal the childlike worry in her eyes.  He never knew what to say when she looked at him that way. He’d pulled her against him, kissed her long and hard—as if it would wear the worry right off her face. He could have kissed her that way forever. When she pulled away, he watched her tall frame grow smaller and smaller as she boarded the plane. 

The day after Mickey Mantle went 5 for 5 against the Tigers, he started drinking again. A week later, he’d hunted down a paper boy and was back on the noise. He didn’t know how he’d let it happen. He hadn’t touched the stuff since sweating through the big flu at Katie’s a few months after the accident. He didn’t remember much of the summer after that. There were pieces here and there, like badly edited scenes around a whir of color.  Some mornings he woke shaking, remembering the horrible things that he had done. The images came the way he’d used to watch himself on film. He watched himself walk through the breezeway of the house on Fiske Street. He was in her room, opening the jewelry box—his hand feeling the sharp edge of the ring’s setting. The faint light of the room shone off the gold band and fibrils of small diamonds as it fell over his thumb. 

He’d popped it at a jewelry and loan on Pico Boulevard. A shop where he knew the uncle well enough to get it back in time—but that had never happened. One of the many promises he’d fallen short of. He hadn’t known until later that he’d taken the important one. He hadn’t meant to take the important one. Katie had so much jewelry. Katie had so much of everything. He thought she wouldn’t miss one little thing for a while. He would get it back, but,
dear God
, he hadn’t meant to take that one. It was the one she’d lost her mind over the morning after they got back from Catalina. She’d torn up her house up in an obsessed daze until she’d found it slipped under the lining of her jewelry box. Even after she found it, she’d just sat there crying. He didn’t think she would ever stop. He carried her to the bed and laid her down. She finally fell asleep against his shoulder. Going to bed with Katie Webb—something most men dreamed about—was a lot of tears and not much of anything else. It was something he’d gotten used to over the years.

Fae wrung her hands on her lap as she’d told him. She had the most delicate hands he’d ever seen—and white against the evergreen color of her dress.
Her condition…their condition.
He’d only sighed and smiled. Somehow he’d already known. Fickle fate had let him get away with too much already. He’d been expecting the other shoe to drop. He drove her home, but spent the rest of the night driving up and down the coast. When he hit Port Hueneme beach, he turned off the car and watched the dark waters lapping at the honey sand. It had been a windy night but, as he sat watching the waves, the air and everything with it seemed to still. He felt like the last person on earth. The next day he cooked up a wafer-thin excuse for Fae, scraped together a bit of money, and caught a flight to New York.  Horribly, Fae had believed every word. 

The minute he landed, he all but forgot what he had come to do. All he wanted was to see her. He had several drinks in the theater lobby while he waited for the matinee’s opening notes. He was thoroughly drunk by the time he ambled to his seat. The drinks did little to dull the pain of seeing her up on that stage. It was like seeing her for the first time, but even more.  Some stupid part of him still thought he had the upper hand where she was concerned. At that moment, he loved her more than ever.

He peeled himself from his seat when the show ended, wandered the back skeleton of the theater until he found the doorway to her dressing room. He didn’t have to wait long. He saw her walking with her hand slipped through the arm another actor. The man’s eye’s narrowed on him. He put an arm in front of Katie in an unmistakably protective gesture.

Katie followed suit, falling behind, squinting through the low light.

“Can I help you buddy?” The man had asked, polite for the moment.  He didn’t have to answer when Katie’s eyes squinted again—then flew open to reveal that she was actually happy to see him. The joy seemed to burst from her as she ran and wrapped her arms around him. She introduced him as though she spoke of him often. There was a brief flicker of recognition in the man’s face, though not enough to diminish his concern. He finally left them, throwing a last concerned look their way before disappearing.

He found two unopened bottles of champagne and a half-empty bottle of scotch in Katie’s dressing room. He poured scotch into a glass without asking and watched her take her makeup off. She wiped cold cream from her eyes, exposing barely-there blonde eyelashes. She wouldn’t stop talking as she slipped out of her costume and into a white robe. She turned from the harsh glow of her vanity and looked at him. Her face without makeup was shiny and perfect.  She raised a suspicious brow, only now noticing that he was very drunk and looking at her like a desperate man. 

“What?” she said with a nervous laugh. He thought in that moment he could have told her. If he didn’t do it then, he never would. Instead he sank to his knees and began to cry loose, drunken tears. He crawled to her and laced his hands up her thighs and to her waist.  He felt her go rigid then relax and sigh as her hand went to rest in his hair. He pulled up against her body and began to kiss her like he never had before. The way he’d always wanted to kiss her. He’d had to be gentle with her from the start. A part of him had always known why, but that didn’t seem to matter as he kissed along her neck and made desperate tugs at her robe belt.