Dreams Are Not Enough (47 page)

He got up from the bed.

“The Industry,” he mumbled.

Since he had never shared any portion of his career with her, she had no reason to suspect anything more than his usual caginess lay behind this grudged response.

*

April Fools’ Day brought another surprise.

Alyssia had invited Juanita for brunch. She was delivered by Yellow Cab. Leading the way around the heart-shaped pool to the cluster of outdoor furniture, Alyssia asked, “How come Salvador didn’t drive you?”

At this, Juanita slumped into a wrought-iron chair and began to cry, between sobs explaining that Salvador had somebody else, a peroxide blonde who was sixty-five if she was a day.

Alyssia comforted her sister, then asked her to return to live at the house: “After all, the baby needs an aunt on my side to even things up,” she said.

Juanita, still crying, refused.

“Just give me my old job back.” When Alyssia persisted that she wanted a relative, not a maid, Juanita blew her nose.

“Listen to me, Alice. I know Barry. Once he hears about where you really come from, Momma and the picking and all, take my word, he won’t be so excited about this baby.”

Alyssia, thinking of Barry’s initial reaction to paternity, gave a long, wavery sigh.

“I guess you’re right,” she said reluctantly.

That same afternoon Juanita was reinstated in the pleasant servants’ quarters behind the kitchen.

A few days later a limousine arrived to take Alyssia to the studio for a couple of retakes of close-ups. As she drove east toward Magnum, she alternated between hopeful pleasure that she would be with Hap and dread for the distance he would inevitably place between them.

She had not seen him since London. He had flown home a couple of days after her, and since then had been immured in a Magnum editing room with a hundred hours of film to prune into a commercially viable movie that ran under three.

She had heard his name often enough, though.

Since the news broke about his and Madeleine’s separation, there had been a fair amount of media coverage—and a storm of family gossip.

Because neither Hap nor Madeleine gave any reason for their split, and because they had never even bickered and were so admirably mated in all respects, there was a paucity of hard facts to go on. The baffled Cordiners were reduced to endless speculation about the divorce.

Hap was waiting with a minimal crew on Stage 8. Alyssia wore her new white maternity slacks topped by her costume, an ecru lace shirtwaist that due to her girth was unhooked below the back of its high-stayed collar.

They were finished with both shots in less than an hour and Alyssia pulled on a loose cardigan to hide her naked back.

Hap came from behind the blaze of lights.

“May I talk to you, Not having anticipated any interest on his part in prolonging the session, she blurted the first thing that popped into her mind.

“Aren’t you going back to the editing?”

“If you’re in a hurry” — “No, not at all. Come along to the dressing room.”

There, she poured him coffee, taking a carton of low-fat milk from the mini-refrigerator, pouring it into a tumbler, adding a dash of coffee.

She understood, as no doubt he did, too, that these bits of business were to cover her awkwardness. He waited until she was sitting.

“I’m going to Zaire,” he said.

“To the medical center.”

She nodded.

“When?”

“The day after tomorrow.”

She had been taking a sip. Coffee-spiked milk went up her nostrils and she began to cough helplessly. He took the glass from her hand.

She controlled herself, wiping the milk that dribbled down her chin.

“Hap, you’re in the middle of editing.”

“Jones and Trapani share our offices,” he said.

“I heard.” She had also heard about—and cringed at—his steadfast refusal to show any of the rough cut to the Meadstar duo.

“But you can’t leave the cutting and the scoring to other people.”

“Why not?”

“You never did before.”

“This time I am.”

“Hap, you’ve put your whole self into Baobab. You’re the only one who really knows the footage.”

“I just wanted to say goodbye.”

“What about Maxim? He’s counting on you. You’ve never left anybody in the lurch.”

“I’ve considered all that.” Hap spoke evenly, but his expression was tired and sad.

“This isn’t you.”

“Maybe it is,” he said.

She reflected that he’d told her he almost cracked after she went back to Barry.

“I realize you’re going through a rough time, Hap, with the divorce and everything. But at least stick around until you’ve finished the rough cut.” She hated the begging tone in her voice.

“Hy Kelley” —the head editor”—can do the same job I can.”

“Don’t you understand? Why are you making me spell it out?” Fear made her loud.

“First you refuse to show the film, then you quit” — “I’m not indispensable.”

“You’re daring Lang!”

“I’ve already told Kleefeld I’m coming to the center.”

“I won’t let you do this!”

The gray eyes fixed on hers.

Confusion overcame her, and she was suddenly aware how she must appear to him: a shouting, very pregnant ex-mistress in grease makeup with a milk-stained sweater pulled over an undone blouse.

He went to the door.

“Take care, Alyssia,” he said.

The image her memory held was of his weary dejection as he raised a hand in a valedictory salute.

Beth sat in the day nursery. Her eyes were open but her face was relaxed and expressionless, almost as if she were asleep.

Paradoxically, only in this room, where nothing had been changed, surrounded by shelves of pristine toys and a never-to-be-finished web of macrame—surrounded by tangible proofs of Clarrie’s existence-could she abstain from her lacerating self-accusations. At the sound of a car turning in at the gate she tensed, then recalled that such intrusions no longer heralded high-pitched wails that could become interminable shrieking sessions.

“Beth?” Barry was calling from downstairs.

Tilting her head, she listened for another voice. If Alyssia were with her brother, she would have to tell him that she had a vicious migraine and couldn’t see a soul. However much Beth avoided tearing the social fabric—to refuse to see a friend or relative had hitherto been beyond her scope—she could no longer bear being with her sisterin-law.

Barry’s heavy tread sounded on the staircase. He was alone.

“Beth, where are you?”

“In here,” she called. A trace of color and the worry lines had returned to her face. Glancing into the nursery mirror, she saw a woman in early middle age who showed evidence of mangled grief and guilt for a dead defective daughter.

Barry kissed her cheek.

“You spend too much time in there, Bethie.”

“It’s the only room in the house without a phone. Why didn’t you tell me you were coming? I’d’ve waited and had lunch with you. What’s that?”

A plump blue folder was tucked under his arm.

“My piece for The New Yorker,” he said proudly.

“Oh, Barry!” She hugged him.

“It’s unbelievable! In less than a year you’ve done a complete novel, and this too.”

“Editorial’s been through it with me, but you’re the first outside reader.”

“I appreciate that,” she said softly.

“I’ll go in the garden while you digest it,” he said. And bolted down the stairs. He always felt queasy watching anyone read his work, and one of his main complaints against TV was being forced to be present while some idiot producer or sharp-nosed network story editor went over his rewrites.

Sitting on the top stair rung, Beth opened the folder.

THE MAKING OF A DISASTER MOVIE

Even in the land of major deals and enormous egos, creativity thrives on innovation rather than cash. The grossly overbudget The Baobab Tree is a case in point. The brothers Cordiner have been producing (Maxim) and directing (Harvard) penetrating, deliciously watch able films since they burst on the screen nearly a decade and a half ago with the bargain-basement-budgeted Wandering On. On their latest, as yet unreleased film with an apparently endless supply of the green stuff available, they have finally come a cropper. The media were barred from the location in Africa, but intrepid Hollywood correspondents interviewed members of cast and crew in the watering holes of Nairobi emerging with tales of the roaring of lions and executives. Rona Barrett has chirpily given America thirdhand information of the doings of the stars, Alyssia del Mar and Cliff Camron, on the inhospitable but sex-inviting veldt.

Because of my relationship to three of the four major participants, my reportage has more of an immediate, fly-on-the-wall quality. Beth, who had become a crack speed-reader during her years in Magnum’s story department, let her eyes travel swiftly down the center of the seventy-three double-spaced pages.

When she turned the last sheet, the permanent grooves above the bridge of her delicate nose were deep.

“Well?” Barry, at the foot of the staircase, was looking up at her with an expression that mingled truculence and nearly insupportable anxiety.

“Who else has seen this?”

“I told you! Outside of the literati, you’re the only one!” He stamped up the curving staircase, halting a step before the top.

“If you don’t like it, just say so!”

“Why must you always be so touchy about your work?”

“The consensus from the East Coast is that it’s lively, witty, candid, well-informed” — “Barry, it’s not a matter of quality. The writing’s magnificent. But don’t you see what you’ve done? The people in it aren’t fictional characters. They’re our family.”

“I plead guilty to a writer’s objectivity.”

“You show Hap as an egomaniac intent on squandering millions of feet of film to prove what an artistic hotshot director he is. You show him wasting a fortune to get an effect you say won’t be noticed by the audience, jettisoning his relationship with Meadstar. Maxim comes across as a high-strung wisecracker who would be selling used Chevys if his father hadn’t been head of Magnum. You hint strongly that they both signed away their souls in blood to the Mafia so they could do the project.”

”” The Baobab Tree was financed by Meadstar,”” he recited from memory, ‘“a Las Vegas—based production company whose major stockholder is Robert Lang. Lang, the son of Bartolomeo Lanzoni, founder of the Las Vegas Fabulador, is a longtime backer of the Cordiner brothers. The film was packaged by PD Zaffarano, the savvy, expensively tailored, iron-pumping Hollywood agent. Not too coincidentally, Zaffarano is cousin to the Cordiner brothers as well as related to Miss del Mar through her marriage to this writer. So it’s all in the family.” ” ” Barry, listen to the tone. “

“What did you expect, fan magazine gush? It’s for The New Yorker!”

“You’ve damned them all. Not only Maxim and Hap, but PD—he reads like you lifted him from The Godfather. And what about….” Her voice trailed away. She could not bring herself to even say Alyssia’s name anymore. But Barry had word-painted his wife as the ultimate bitch movie star who feels no compunction about letting cast and crew wither on location while she gets her beauty sleep.

Barry was saying, “… an entire issue of The New Yorker, in case you aren’t aware of the fact, is considered the ultimate in status publicity.”

“Oh, Barry, you more than hint that The Baobab Tree is the disaster of the decade—who wants that kind of promo?”

Snatching the manuscript from her hand, Barry stalked down the stairs.

Beth ran after him.

“Barry, don’t leave. Please, let’s try to see how it can be changed.”

“What you just read is the final draft! The exact wordage and punctuation that will appear in print!” He pulled open the heavy front door, slamming it after himself.

Beth stood amid the abundantly Heshed Rubens nudes for a full minute, and her mournful eyes fixed on the door might have belonged to a maternal forebear surveying the aftermath of a pogrom. Then she went slowly to the den and picked up the phone.

PD piled cream cheese on half of his bagel while the elderly, plump waitress poured expertly from the Pyrexes she held in both hands-coffee for him, decaf for Beth. Beth had invited him to breakfast at Nate ‘n’ Al’s, the deli on Beverly Drive favored by film folk of every denomination.

When the waitress had departed, Beth looked down at her cup, suddenly prim.

“I would have asked you to the house for dinner with Irving and me, but it seemed better to discuss this in private.”

“I hear you, Beth. Now lay the problem on me.”

“I saw Barry’s New Yorker piece.”

“What’s the subject?”

“You don’t know?”

“Barry’s been as secretive as hell. The same way Hap’s been about the editing—you do know he’s refused to show a single frame?”

“Yes, I heard.”

“Then this you won’t believe. Before the crack of dawn this morning, he calls to tell me he’s off to Africa, to his medical center.”

“The editing’s finished? Already?”

“No way. After cracking the whip over every damn detail, he calls me before six to tell me he’s taking off. Just like that.”

“He’s all shook up about the divorce,” Beth said.

“And Barry’s fuming at me.”

PD sighed.

“How did two guys who were perfectly normal kids develop such temperaments?”

“The Baobab Tree” — “Don’t say another word!” PD interrupted.

“Beth, give me a break. The effing movie’s all I hear about. From Meadstar, from Maxim, from all my socalled friends. I’ve had it up to my gullet with The Baobab Tree.”

“That’s what Barry’s written about. The making of it.”

PD’s hand jerked, and cream cheese smeared the barber-shaven skin around his mouth.

“Jesus!”

“While he was in Kenya and England, he evidently took a lot of notes.”

Beads of sweat stood out on PD’s forehead.

“Did he trash us?”

She looked away again.

“It’s investigative reporting done breezily.”

“A real hatchet job, then. Who does he mention?”

“Everybody.”

“Me? Lang?”