Dreams Are Not Enough (52 page)

Pounding his fist into his palm, he hurried away from the clinic.

Previously he had noted a bistro, Le Chat Noir, opposite the cathedral.

The following morning he awoke fully clothed on his bed at the Trois-Rivieres Meridien. He attempted to recall the events of the previous night, but a wave of nausea sent him staggering to the bathroom. After he finished vomiting, he remembered. He ordered a bottle of cognac sent to his room.

Two days later, when he visited Alyssia, he was shaven, wearing a clean shirt, but the sour odor emanating from his skin and his red streaked eyes told her, drugged as she was, what he had been up to.

“Sorry—I haven’t been by, hon,” he said with a sheepish little grin.

“Been celebrating fatherhood.”

For several minutes they were silent, then the baby began crying in the next room.

She sighed, closing her eyes.

“You’re right,” she murmured.

“I can’t take care of him.”

A shudder passed down Barry’s spine, as if a window had blown open. He hastily searched the nightstand drawer, finding his de facto adoption paper, signing his name, then resting the paper on a magazine, giving Alyssia his pen.

Her hand shook and her signature—the autograph that she had scribbled so many thousands of times—wobbled unrecognizably.

Barry folded the paper, carefully putting it in his inside pocket.

Then he rested his head on his wife’s milk-swollen breasts and began to sob. She, dry-eyed, stared dully at the flowering horse chestnut tree outside the window.

The news was broken by Clan Rather. Yet another tragedy had overtaken the Cordiner family. Alyssia del Mar had given birth to a stillborn girl.

Irving was tired after the long haul of the Tahoe condominium project, Beth told her family and friends, so she was taking him away. They leased a large, handsome chalet isolated in the foothills of the Alps.

When they returned a month later, they had a six-day-old adopted son, Jonathon. He was a large, healthy infant, able to hold his blue eyes in a fixed position, exceptional in a baby so young. By some stroke of fortune or precise Swiss adoption proceedings, he had a trace of the red hair common in Beth’s branch of the Cordiner family.

BEVERLY HILLS, 1986

Beth gripped her wineglass so tightly that the tendons of her hand stood out. She was recalling her measured walk down the chalet’s front steps to Barry’s rental car. She had been warning herself to remain aloof for a year or so, until she could be positive that this baby had none of Clarrie’s abnormalities. Yet, as she unfastened the straps of the car crib and lifted the small weight, an exultant stir twisted within her abdomen, a blood knot tying itself. And so it had began, her bedazzled maternity. Sometimes she even forgot the nightmare of Clarrie, connecting her own pregnancy to Jonathon. God knows, the family traits showed up in abundance—her son had Tim’s impetuousness, a strong hint of the Cordiner temper; he had Barry’s intelligence without the laziness.

Beth sighed.

“What I can’t understand is why Alyssia wanted Jonathon here,” she said.

“Stop worrying, Beth,” Barry said.

“Yes,” Maxim said.

“Can’t you see that this is just a friendly Cordiner family get-together?”

Giving her cousin a reproachful look, Beth got to her feet.

“I can’t take another minute of this waiting. Besides, I have aPTA board meeting and” -She broke off as a car in low gear came up the steep drive.

Though the house blocked the foursome’s view, the sound captured their attention, and none of them spoke.

A car door slammed.

A faraway child piped, “Mommy!”

“She had a baby?” Beth whispered.

“But how could she? It would have been in the news.”

They heard the front door open, then Alyssia’s intonations but not her words.

At the lower rumble of a masculine response, Maxim’s head jerked.

Slowly all color drained from his lips.

“Maxim, what is it?” Beth asked, her charming voice solicitous.

He didn’t reply. He, who normally moved with total assurance, stumbled to his feet, barging to the house, attempting to slide open one of the mirror-treated windows. It was locked.

Slapping his palms on the glass, his voice almost unrecognizable, Maxim shouted, “Open up! Open up!”

HAP

19SO

Within three months of Hap’s death, Desmond Cordiner had recovered as much as he ever would from his stroke. The limbs of his right side were alien appendages devoid of all sensation, and his speech was nearly incomprehensible. Yet the brain trapped within this wreckage retained its agile wiliness. He spent his long, invalid days planning means to keep his beloved older son’s memory alive. With lavish donations from himself and the rest of the family, he endowed the Harvard Cordiner chair at the USE film department, the Harvard Cordiner Gallery of Cinematic Art at UCLA, he founded Harvard Cordiner film scholarships at Columbia and the University of Chicago.

(Desmond’s life had circled like a compass around the fixed point of the Industry, so it never occurred to him to build up the relief center in Zaire that had meant so much to Hap. ) Hap’s lack of a proper funeral preyed continuously on him. The left side of his face working, Desmond sputtered out an idea to Maxim. Art Garrison and Harry Cohn had each had a funeral on a sound stage of the studio he founded—Cohn at Columbia, Garrison at Magnum. Why not give Hap a memorial on this grand scale?

Maxim, who was finishing the great slag heap of post-production work with the urgency of his grief, fully agreed with the concept and promised to implement it. By chance that was the week The New Yorker with Barry’s article hit the stands. Maxim read the piece in a cold fury. That jealous shit—no wonder he was skulking in France! —had painted Hap as an ego maniacal spendthrift, a hack director with delusions of grandeur. What better refutation for this poison could there be than to premiere The Baobab Tree, which would be completed in August, at the memorial? Assuredly the film was Hap’s crowning achievement. He and the studio would see to it that all the important people were there, as well as the world press.

The August hot spell continued and that Saturday afternoon the thermometer rose to a hundred and three.

Outside Magnum’s iron-arched main gate, sweat-drenched onlookers strained against the cordon of equally sweaty off-duty LAPD cops hired for this occasion. The crowd ignored those mourners who lacked a V.

I.

P gold-embossed card and therefore were not permitted to drive onto the lot: for the most part these people who trudged inside mopping their saddened faces were the craftsmen from studio shops, the seamstresses, the extras, the hairdressers, the stunt men the makeup people. Many had worked with Hap, and others, the elderly retirees, had known him as a boy, the straw-haired son of Desmond Cordiner. He had been popular with them all.

The limousines carrying upper-echelon executives were greeted with near sullen disappointment, but the uncomfortable crowd came to exultant life, pushing and elbowing one another for a better view of Burt Lancaster and Richard Burton and Cliff Camron and Dustin Hoffman and Rain Fairburn and Shirley MacLaine. A small cheer went up for latecomer and star of the film Alyssia del Mar, arriving alone in a hired white stretch limousine. She glanced out the open window with an almost baffled expression, as if not sure why anyone should cry her name. Her Van Nuys fan club had heard on Good Morning America that for the first time she was emerging from her seclusion following the loss of her child to pay homage to her ofttimes director, with whom, as everyone in the club knew, she once had lived. A cognoscente announced that her soon-to-be ex-husband, Barry Cordiner, was staying in France because the family was pissed at something he had written about them.

On Stage 8, Magnum’s largest sound stage, the outsize screen seemed an insignificant blank postage stamp. Facing it were thousands of folding chairs in neat rows, and a dais banked with red roses that was reserved for the family.

Desmond Cordiner, slumping awkwardly in a wheelchair, was shielded from public view by an enormous arrangement of American Beauties. On each of the white leather seats on the dais had rested a place card.

In expansive Hollywood style the family included its divorced members.

Two of Maxim’s spectacular exes sat with their current spouses, and Madeleine Van Vliet Cordiner, as putative widow, had the place of honor behind the lectern. Every place was filled.

The ceremony had started with the full studio orchestra’s rendition of Quincy Jones’s haunting love theme for The Baobab Tree, and all eyes were fixed on Alyssia del Mar as she hurried toward the dais. She had lost considerable weight, but her new black silk Galanos was bloused to disguise this, and her pallor was hidden by several hours of effort on the part of her makeup artist.

“Can you believe it? The cunt even shows up late for this,” snarled a Hearst columnist, not bothering to lower her voice.

The “stillbirth” might have attracted sympathy for Alyssia among her die-hard fans, but Barry’s much-quoted article had fanned a general animosity toward her. To the media, and therefore to all of America, she had become the tardy star whose shenanigans had turned Hap Cordiner’s final film into a nightmare.

Alyssia climbed three of the plank steps, then halted, faced by a solid phalanx of staring Cordiners. A wave of vertigo passed through her as she realized there was no chair for her.

Maxim gazed coldly down. It was no accident she didn’t have a place, this woman who had somehow ensnared his brother. (Later Maxim would be ashamed of his vindictiveness, but at this moment he was relishing Alyssia’s public humiliation. ) Beth cleared her throat delicately, wondering if she ought to relieve the hideous awkwardness by smiling, but Irving took her hand, and she decided this was a reminder of the power that Alyssia had over them.

Jonathan, she thought, and stared fixedly at an overblown rose.

PD was grateful he was no longer forced to fake cordiality. Two months ago Alyssia had called to inform him that she had given up her career, maybe permanently. She was therefore no longer represented by the PD Zaffarano Agency.

To combat the dizziness, Alyssia dug her recently manicured nails into her palms. Just find another seat—don’t think about it—you might have an attack. She turned toward the central aisle. She didn’t recognize Richard Burton as he stepped by her to the podium. A stunt man in the second row stood to give her his place, but she didn’t see him, or the gaffer farther back who offered her the same courtesy.

Somehow managing to impersonate the del Mar strut, she got to the last row, where a few seats remained.

“How short is the time of man,” the amplified Burton voice was intoning.

“We’ve come here to honor one of our best and brightest, felled long before his time by his own unquenchable generosity….”

Alyssia, forcing an actress’s semblance of control, saw and heard nothing of the eulogies.

In a way she was grateful not to be on the dais. Everyone would be staring at her. She had not been out in public since she had left Dr.

Fauchery’s place.

Plon had argued with Barry that she ought to be transferred to a nearby psychiatric hospital where he was on the staff, but Barry, apologetic and filled with empathy after they had signed the baby over to Beth and Irving, had understood how she felt. She would rather submit to physical torture or a lifetime of illness than those drugs.

Juanita at her side, she had flown immediately home to Bev-eriy Hills, where her body supplied its own opiate, depression. She moved like a somnambulist through her days.

Her mind stumbled to attention as the mourners on the dais noisily turned their chairs around to face the screen. The sound stage darkened and the opening credits showed over a big-game hunt.

Every scene prompted memories. This had been shot when they were happy; this when they were shattered apart.

Watching the seduction episode in the stable, she felt a peculiar prickling sensation travel down her spine, as if somebody behind were peering intently at her. She continued to watch the screen, but her concentration was gone. The pins and needles sense of uneasiness grew stronger.

After several minutes she could no longer prevent herself from turning. In the darkness she made out the. figure of a man standing about twenty feet behind her. She couldn’t tell much about him except that he was tall, and unlike the formally clad audience, wore jeans and a pale windbreaker. She decided it must be embarrassment at not having the proper clothes that had kept him from taking one of the folding chairs. Then she tried to turn back to the film. She was powerless to look away from him.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw he was bearded. The scene with the electric storm was playing now, and in the special effects department’s most hectic burst of lightning, she could see him quite clearly.

His beard was considerably darker than his streaked blond hair, and the eyes staring at her were deep-set. Her heart beat rapidly, and with clear recognition she understood she was looking at Hap. An older, bearded Hap.

She knew this was a hallucination.

But the queer part was that the hallucination didn’t seem beyond the range of normalcy.

She started to rise from her chair.

Then he was gone.

Replacing him was a dark outline that she identified as one of the large tub bed ficus trees that propmen had set around to decorate the barren reaches of Stage 8.

She knew it was impossible to will a phantasm into being, yet a thought jittered through her.

Maybe if I wait, then look back, I’ll see him again.

She fidgeted with her black silk skirt, then, after an unbearably long half minute, turned her head. The tree remained a tree. She pushed aside her chair and ran unevenly to the red lights that spelled exit.

“Of course it sounds crazy!” Alyssia said for the dozenth time.

“But I’m telling you I saw Hap.”

“The movie,” Juanita said uneasily.

“You told me how every part of it reminded you of him.”