Dreams Are Not Enough (36 page)

“I came in here to be alone.”

She backed toward the door.

Realizing he had barked at his top client, he said with forced warmth, “Dad was very appreciative of you making Transformations. Did he ever tell you?”

She gave him a stricken look. For a moment he thought she would break down. Then she said, “Not exactly, but that’s how the older part of the family is.”

Was that a reproach? He decided it was. She was slamming his dead father, blaming his dead father.

When time had mythologized and blurred the moment, he would forget that Alyssia had done the film for zip to pay his father’s debts-and coerced the intransigent Hap into the production, too. He would forget that she had helped raise the PD Zaffarano Agency from a joke to its present substantiality.

He would remember only that Alyssia, the eternal outsider, had slurred his father on the day of the funeral.

PD had his scapegoat.

“It’s over, isn’t it?” Beth said quietly.

“Jesus, Beth, give me time.”

“Darling, I’m not pushing you about that.”

They were in her living room, fully clothed. Dinner finished, he’d just told her he’d be heading home; tomorrow was a weekday. It was exactly four weeks to the day after the funeral, and he had yet to make love to her.

“Like hell you haven’t been!” he snapped.

“PD, it’s not bed, it’s everything—either you’re avoiding me or barking at me. You’ve done everything but tell me to get out of your life.” Tears ran down Beth’s smooth cheeks.

Hunched in his chair, he watched her weep. He longed to comfort her but he couldn’t. After a minute he said haltingly.

“It’s the Church.

Bethie, when Dad died, I saw I couldn’t give it up. I’m pretty sure we could get a dispensation . that is, if you”— ” Converted? “

“Yes. Aunt Clara’s stronger than you think.”

“When we told them about the engagement, she was ill for months… ” Beth’s melodious voice choked. Holding a Kleenex near her eyes, she whispered, “But it’s not only Mother. It’s me. I’m not Aunt Lily, I couldn’t throw myself into Catholicism the way she has.”

“I don’t ask that of you.”

“Judaism’s more than a religion, it’s an entire heritage.”

“Your father isn’t.”

“I’ve told you, PD. In Jewish law, it’s the mother who counts. And what about the children?”

“You know the Church’s position,” he muttered.

“Darling, if I do what you want, every single morning I’d wake up feeling a traitor to my ancestors. I can’t do it, I just can’t.”

She struggled to get the engagement ring from her finger: the diamond clinked as she set it on the marble coffee table.

Though his sigh shook his entire body, he didn’t argue with her to keep it. There was no point in argument. She was right. He loved her still, but it was over.

Picking up the ring, he mumbled, “I’ll see you at Uncle Desmond’s on Sunday.”

After Beth was gone, he began to cry hopelessly. And by some mental quirk, he also bound this ineluctable loss to Alyssia.

BEVERLY HILLS.

Remembering, PD sighed and took a long drink of his Campari and i soda.

“After Dad died,” he said, “I got a bee up my ass that his death and also certain personal problems were somehow connected to j Alyssia. Going through a rough time you dream up crazy things.” | “Dream up?” Beth’s mellifluous voice rose as she turned to her I erstwhile fiance.

“She treated you disgustingly.” , “She was my major client for years, Beth, and believe me, the major clients dish out far more crap than she ever did.”

Beth sat up straighten “Who took the brunt every time she didn’t show up on the set—or walked off?”

“The unreliability,” Barry put in, “didn’t start until after she lost her confidence. From then on she had to fight attacks of un ameliorated panic.”

“Yet she always radiated when the camera hit her,” PD said. J “If it weren’t for her, Hap would still be alive.” Beth’s voice shook.

“I can’t understand why you’re all defending her.”

“Stop me if I’m wrong, Madame Gold,” Maxim said.

“But for a while there weren’t the two of you closer than Cagney and Lacey?”

“She happened to be my sisterin-law. I did my utmost to get along.”

As Beth spoke, she felt oddly mean-spirited. But why? It was true. We had nothing in common, but I was so grateful when she reconciled with Barry that I made an effort to be her friend.

Yet, even as this went through her mind, Beth knew it was an expostfacto thought.

A decade earlier, her affection for her sisterin-law had been honest and pure. Only later did she come to hate and fear Alyssia for the destruction that she could wreak on Jonathon.

In the white leather datebook embossed mrs. irving gold, 1979, the neat notation for September 1 showed: Alyssia, lunch, 12:45. Beth finished dabbing on her Norell perfume before twelve thirty.

There’s time to visit Clarrie, she thought.

Clarrie, her only child, had been born June 12, 1974, a few weeks after Clara Friedman Cordiner was buried by a reform rabbi at Hillside, a cemetery not far from where she had lived. Abiding by Jewish custom, the Golds had named their daughter after her deceased grandmother.

As Beth crossed the airy, bright upstairs hall which was hung with Irving’s da Vinci sketches, the now permanent twin lines between her hazel eyes grew deeper. With an air of resolve, she pushed open the heavy fire door.

Clarrie did not glance up.

The child sat at the small, brightly painted table, knotting the length of string stretched between her hands. A pretty, redheaded five-year-old wearing meticulously ironed yellow corduroy pants with a yellow shirt on which a smiling bear had been appliqued. In the walk-in closet hung twenty identical sets, which when she outgrew them would be replaced with others in the next size. Clarrie refused to wear any other style.

Beth glanced at Mrs. Patrick, whose thick legs were propped on an ottoman. The nurse nodded. It was all right to come in. Beth glided past the deep shelves crammed with toys in pristine condition, moving toward her daughter with the same caution she would employ cozying up to a bird.

Clarrie continued knotting and looping the dark-brown twine. The macrame developing between her small hands would bring pride to an adult—if the adult were without artistic talent. She did not appear to notice her mother. But of course she did. When Clarrie was less than a year old they had learned by her piercing screams that she noticed the most minuscule alteration in her immediate environment.

By the time Clarrie was two, she had developed an uncanny awareness of every minor discrepancy in the household. The Golds stopped inviting people to the house, entertaining either at Hillcrest Country Club or in the upstairs banquet room of the Bistro. If the slightest change—a forgetful servant whistling, a delivery truck turning in at the front door rather than the back—occurred during one of Clarrie’s bad times, she would shriek, sometimes for so long that Dr. Severin would have to be called to okay a sedating injection.

Perching on a child sized chair, Beth turned to the nurse.

“How is she today?”

Mrs. Patrick, like the others rotating in the nursery, was a pediatric RN. Picking up her chart, she read in her Alabama drawl: ‘“Woke at five past seven. Dressed self. Breakfast, the usual.” ” If anything other than oatmeal was set in front of Clarrie for breakfast, lunch or supper, she would hurl her much-dented sterling porringer across the room. The cereal was fortified with a special mixture of liquid vitamins, protein powder and dried milk. ” “Bowel movement in commode at twenty past eight. Walked in garden for thirty minutes, then heard helicopter and grew distraught.” ” ” Yes, we heard her crying. “

‘“Came inside at nine oh five. Nine thirty-five, calmed. Watched cartoons.” ” Watched? Beth thought. Who knew what transpired in Clarrie’s brain when she gazed at the television screen?

Clarrie raised her strings higher.

“It’s beautiful, just beautiful,” Beth said.

“Daddy and I framed your last macrame.” As she described the frame, its position in the house, her pretty voice assumed a false brightness.

With Clarrie, she was completely out of her element.

Beth’s selfesteem was intricately connected with helping others. She wasn’t sure whether this had developed from the psychology of being a twin, half of a person—the lesser, female half at that—and having to earn her share of attention and love, or whether she was born with an innate urge to make herself useful to others. In earliest childhood she had toddled off to perform errands for her parents and Barry.

Later she had worked for good grades to please the teachers as well as her mother. At Magnum she had delighted in her long work hours and her efficiency. When PD started his first agency, she had volunteered to do his books. After marrying Irving, a widower, she threw herself into caring for him and his homes—a sprawling pink bungalow in Palm Springs, a house in Aspen, this Holmby Hills mansion.

The specialists whom Irving brought here, sometimes at vast expense, gave a name to the child’s disorder. Acute chronic childhood psychosis. Beth didn’t care what they called it. She knew only that she was unnecessary in her child’s life, and no type of hideous physical or mental birth defect could have been more damaging to her.

At the sound of a car moving up the long driveway, Beth stiffened, waiting for Clarrie’s shriek. She rested a light, comforting hand on her daughter’s silken hair, which was the same coppery shade of red as Barry’s had been at her age. Clarrie squirmed away, standing to continue her knotting.

“The car’s not disturbing her,” Beth said.

“She knows it’s her Auntie Alyssia.”

How does she know? Beth wondered.

Smiling and waving unacknowledged bye-byes, she left the nursery and felt five pounds lighter. She ran down the stairs to greet her sisterin-law.

Alyssia wore yet another of those tee shirts studded with a pattern of rhinestones. Beth unconsciously smoothed the pleated skirt of her classic beige silk, thinking with rueful affection, Poor Alyssia, she has the tackiest taste.

The two women hugged fondly, chatting as they went through the hall, which was designed specifically for Irving’s huge Rubenses-yards of stoutly rosy female nudes. They wound through the Oriental garden to the blue-tile-roofed teahouse, where a table was set for two.

Pouring the iced coffee, Beth asked, “How’s Barry?”

“He’s been busy on the book.” During the long hiatuses between Barry’s infrequent TV assignments, he rewrote the novel that he had started in the early weeks of their marriage.

“And he hasn’t …” In the September sunlight hovered Beth’s unspoken words: Fallen off the wagon? Since Clarrie’s birth, she saw impending disaster everywhere. Barry hit the bottle less than once a year, and never stayed on a toot long enough to further damage his internal organs, yet Beth agonized incessantly about his drinking problem.

“He’s great. As a matter of fact, he’s at L’Ermitage having lunch with a visiting editor from New York.”

“Wonderful!” Beth cried wholeheartedly. Then, incapable of escaping her new and unwanted role of pessimist, she added, “Let’s hope it’s not another false alarm.” Last year the oft-revised novel had roused interest from a local publishing house, but no contract had been forthcoming.

“Not to worry. He’s braced for this to be only a friendly lunch.”

Alyssia sipped her iced coffee.

“You said there was good news about Clarrie.”

“Yes. Mrs. Patrick explained you were coming, and when your car turned into the drive, she didn’t get worried.” Even with Irving, Beth spoke in euphemisms, keeping up the fiction that Clarrie was a normal child going through a stage. But on the last word her lips turned downward.

“Bethie,” Alyssia said sympathetically, “why don’t you and Irving have another child?”

“He’s sixty-two and I’m forty. It’s out of the question.”

“A lot of men his age have second families.”

Beth looked at the pretty artificial pond, unable to banish the thought of her joinings with her husband. Irving, lacking any trace of PD’s amatory skill, followed a single routine. He French-kissed her until his erection was established, then climbed on top missionary style to grip the custom-made headboard with both hands as he pounded away for a maximum of two minutes. Yet, despite the inadequacies of their sex life, she cared deeply for him. She hadn’t married him for his money. In fact, she’d had no idea he was immensely wealthy when she met him at one of Uncle Desmond’s barbecues. It was a few months after she and PD had broken up, and she had been drawn to him because of his kind expression and sympathetic voice.

“You look blue,” he had said.

“I am, a bit,” she admitted. They talked about her work, and he diffidently invited her to a movie”—If you don’t mind being with an older man, that is.” She took him to an Academy showing because she didn’t want him to throw away more money than he could afford.

Those first years the act hadn’t excited her, but neither had she found it repellent. When Clarrie’s problems were discovered, though, she had become convinced that the failure stemmed from her—after all, Irving in his first marriage had fathered three sons, energetic men with healthy families of their own. From then on sex became a nightmare. Legs spread, molars gritted, she would pray that she wasn’t conceiving. Already on the Pill, she went to a second gynecologist to be fitted for an IUD. She also used vaginal foam, in part for the now necessary lubrication, but mainly for contraception.

Alyssia was inquiring gently, “… What about adoption?”

“I won’t adopt. I absolutely couldn’t.”

“A lot of people say that, then go bananas over the baby.”

“The child wouldn’t be part of me.”

“But a newborn” -Beth sighed deeply.

“Alyssia, I wish I were different. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I could never accept a child who didn’t have my genetic makeup.”

“But you can’t know how you’d feel.”

“I do know,” Beth said, her melodious voice going flat.

“I know exactly. A stranger’s baby would be a placebo and nothing else. What could be more unfair?”