Hide and Seek (19 page)
I stood with my chief attorney, Nathan Bailford, in front of the bench. This couldn't be happening to me. None of it seemed real.
“Good morning,” Judge Sussman said in a civil tone, as though I'd come about a parking ticket, or a violation of the Bedford town code on keeping the grass cut short at the curbside around my house.
“Good morning, Your Honor.” I was surprised that I could speak so confidently, that I could get the words out, that I could be civil too.
Judge Sussman held up the black folder for me to see.
“Mrs. Bradford, I have here the indictment from the grand jury. You've seen it?” he asked. He talked plainly and simply, as though I were a young child, but accused of something very serious.
“Yes, I have, Your Honor.”
“You've read it, and had time to discuss the indictment with Mr. Bailford or your other attorneys?” he asked next.
“We've talked about the indictment.”
“You understand the charge against you? That you are accused of the murder of your husband, Will Shepherd?”
“I've read the indictment. I understand the charge against me.”
He nodded, like I was a good student, or an especially good defendant. “And do you plead guilty, or not guilty, to the charge of murder?”
I looked him square in the eye. I knew it didn't matter, but I needed to do this anyway.
“I am not guilty of murder. I plead
not guilty
.”
N
EW YORK CITY. Central Park. Will and I had been married for nearly a year
.
“Maggie, can you see anything? I can't see a damn thing. Too many bloody trees in this bloody park.”
Will, Jennie, and I were sitting in the fuzzy-gray darkness of a stretch limousine. Nervously, Will lit a cigarette, the match flaring blue and gold, lighting his face. He raked his fingers back through his thick curls.
How pale he is. Tired. Scared
, I thought as I watched him.
This is his World Cup all over again, isn't it? He needs to prove something tonight. Well, I can understand that
.
“What are they doing at the head of this blasted, interminable line?”
“I can't see,” I told him. “Clearing away pedestrians, I suspect.”
“See how popular your movie's going to be?” Jennie added support.
The limo was stuck, engine idling, at the Columbus Circle entrance to the park. We were fifth in a shadowed row of Rollses, Bentleys, and Lincolns bearing dignitaries, the producer/director, and the stars.
Finally, the caravan began to move, making its way down Central Park South, then onto Seventh Avenue and across Fifty-fourth Street to the Ziegfeld Theatre, and the world premiere of
Primrose
.
With each turn of the limo, Will's anxiety increased; his hand, when I took it to comfort him, was sweaty, and as soon as he finished his cigarette he lit another. He rarely smoked, but tonight he couldn't seem to stop. He wasn't himself.
“It'll be all right,” I said. “It's just pregame jitters.”
“All right?
In fifteen minutes the critics are going to watch me on the screen, thirty feet tall, nowhere to hide, saying ‘Top of the Morning, Ellie. That's a wonderful name for your horse. You take care of her, girl, just as you would your very own child.’ ”
“It's just a story, Will. People want it to sound like that. They want to escape from real life sometimes.”
“Not the New York critics. They'll see it for the abominable shit it is, see
me
for the fake I am, and—poof—there goes my short-lived acting career.”
“No way,” Jennie told him.
“Way,” Will joked with her at least.
The caravan stopped. Suddenly there were chubby, hairy fingers rapping at the limousine's side window. I recognized a chubby hairy face and released the door lock. “Trouble,” I whispered, “always comes in pairs.”
“Caputo!” Will grinned as the director squeezed his wide body into the backseat.
“They're going to crucify us,” Caputo said, his face mournful. “I just know it. My instincts are always right. Aren't my instincts right, Will? Comes from growing up in Brooklyn. People from Brooklyn have great instincts.”
He was so comically miserable I had to laugh.
“People are expecting big things from this film,” Caputo said. “As well they should for fifty mil—but Will and I both know they're getting sheep shit.
Australian
sheep shit. Not even the good stuff.”
Will laughed at the director's humor, which was nearly as dark as his own.
“Where's your wife?” I asked. “She doesn't seem to have had any more luck calming you down than I've had with Will.”
“Eleanor's in the car ahead of us with my saintly mother. They can't stand me when I get
meshuga
like this. They kicked me out of my own car. So I'm here.
Somebody's
got to take me to the theater.”
I opened the car door, and pulled Jennie along with me.
“Where are you going?” Will asked.
“To join Eleanor, and Michael's mother. You two artistes deserve to be alone together.”
I
REJOINED WILL when we reached the Ziegfeld, and we got through the searchlights, the screaming crowds, the reporters, the studio executives, and settled ourselves into our seats of honor.
Neither Jennie nor I had ever been to a world premiere. It was actually great fun. Everyone looked so wonderfully inappropriate in their tuxes, dark suits, and party gowns—just to go see a movie.
In about fifteen minutes, the picture started and the credits rolled. WILL SHEPHERD. There his name was, as large as Suzanne Purcell's. Even before the title appeared the crowd applauded, and I heard Will grunt. I'm not sure whether it was from fear or pleasure.
Then the movie started, and I was caught up in the gorgeous shots of the American West. Nestor Keresty had seen beauty in the landscape that I had not and had made his art come alive on the screen.
Will delivered the foal, carried it to his young wife (
she looks closer to thirty than nineteen
, I noted with satisfaction), and delivered his dreaded line.
The audience was quiet. No one snickered. Will finally relaxed in the seat beside me. Jennie flashed him a thumbs-up. “See?” she whispered. “Told you so.”
The movie went on for a little more than two hours. It was fast-paced, hokey, lush, romantic. I found myself enjoying it—until North came up on Ellie in the tub and began to wash her.
The way Will looked at her was the way he looked at me when we made love. It didn't look as though he were acting; it was desire in his eyes, lust. His hand disappeared under the suds, but I sensed, just by the way his arm moved, what he was really doing.
My heart clutched. Suddenly I couldn't breathe. I had to sit up very straight in my theater seat.
They've been to bed together
, I thought, and a dull ache spread through my body. I remembered the rumors in the press, and Will's firm denial of them.
They were lovers off-screen, weren't they? Oh please, don't let that be true
.
I made myself look at Will then. He was watching the screen intently, his mouth half open—
reliving it
!
When the interminable love scene finished, Will leaned over and tenderly kissed my cheek. “I was acting, Maggie,” he whispered. “I know what you're thinking, but you're wrong. Maybe I am an actor.”
I sighed, breathed deeply, and began to feel a little better. Yes, maybe Will was an actor, after all.
T
HE GLITZY PREMIERE party for
Primrose
was held privately upstairs at the Russian Tea Room on Fifty-seventh Street. A hundred or more people came over to shake Will's hand and tell him how superb he was. He recognized none of them, and only acknowledged their praise with an abstracted nod.
He was somewhere else, actually.
He was looking for his mother and his father. Their ghosts, he knew, would not miss an opportunity as grand as this
.
He was losing it big time, wasn't he? Yes, this was Rio all over again. It had all the makings of a disaster. He realized that he still hadn't learned how to live with defeat.
A Caputo public relations flack came running into the restaurant around eleven-thirty. Everyone looked up. This was the moment they had been waiting for.
“A hit!” he shouted, waving a copy of the
New York Times
. “A serious rave. Well, close enough.”
He handed the paper, already folded to the Entertainment Section, to his boss, then stood in the crowd which had gathered around Caputo to hear the producer/director read the important review aloud.
“Michael Lenox Caputo, that master of blockbusters, who alone among our current crop of directors can still produce an engrossing, even enthralling, entertainment, has surpassed himself with Primrose, sure to be one of this season's biggest box-office successes. …”
A cheer went up from the guests, especially the studio executives. A small band hired for the party played “Hail to the Chief.” Caputo read on silently as the noise continued, then, when the room was once again quiet, flung the paper aside.
“Modesty forbids me from reading more,” he said. “You'll all have your copies in the morning. Meanwhile, let's have a celebratory drink! Let's have several drinks! We've earned it tonight.”
Waiters served expensive champagne. The paper, which had landed on a table near the entrance, went unheeded by everyone except Will, who picked it up with a casual air, and began to read, wondering why Caputo had not gone on.
He found his own name almost immediately:
Caputo is wonderfully served by his female star, Suzanne Purcell, who radiates innocence and sensuality in equal measures and, in her love scenes, manages to be both nineteen (which in real life she is not) and a woman comfortable with her sexual appetite. Her male counterpart, however, the former sports star Will Shepherd, is patently more comfortable on a soccer pitch than the beautifully photographed plains of Texas. He treats her as though she were some luscious morsel, no more important than a slice of New York cheesecake, or maybe even Texas cheesecake. Both stars look great without their shirts, but when Mr. Shepherd is actually called upon to act, whatever emotion is generated by the raw sex disintegrates into a pout, a forced smile, or glycerine tears applied by a makeup man, but not produced by the heart. Mr. Shepherd seems not to have much of one. He should not have been so hasty about giving up his athletic career
.
Will read no further. He turned toward the guests. He was feeling crazed and frantic, absolutely wild.
He looked around the room, searching desperately for Maggie. She was standing by Caputo's side, smiling at something the director said.
Well, fuck her
.
She was supposed to be my salvation, my soul mate. That's what her songs promised
.
But she told me I was wonderful in the film
.
She lied to me, goddamn her
.
Bitch!
He hurled the paper down, and disappeared into the night. He feared that he was going mad, or maybe that he was already there. He needed to hear the cheers of the crowd, to feel that kind of absolute love, but there was nothing for him here.
Will turned onto Seventh Avenue and he started to jog. Soon he was running at almost full speed. And still there was no cheering, no love anywhere in sight.
The werewolf of New York
, he thought.
W
ILL HAD BEEN missing for two days, and I felt as though my heart had stopped.
Winnie Lawrence and I looked for him frantically, checking local and New York hospitals and police stations, calling everybody at the party with whom he might have left. The kids were in a panic too.
No one had a clue as to where Will might have gone. I remembered stories he'd told me about Rio—his disappointment. Something had happened down there that had changed him.
I had read the
Times
movie review, of course, as soon as Will had left the room—read it with horror and anger as I realized what it would do to him, how it would hurt. I'd been there myself. I'd suffered through mean-spirited reviews, some deserved, some not.
Another high-profile failure. So many failures in his own eyes.
I knew about that feeling too. I wanted to be there for him.
But where was he?
How could I help if I couldn't find Will?
On the third day I called Barry again, and asked him to come to the house. “I feel a little out of control,” I told him once he arrived. “I think I should be doing something more, but I can't think what it might be.”
“He'll come back,” Barry said. “He has something good to come back to. Don't forget that.”
“You always overestimate me, and underestimate Will. He could have killed himself, Barry. I'm really afraid for him. His father committed suicide.”
“People like Will
don't
,” Barry said. “He knows what he's doing.”
“How can you say that? You don't know Will. You don't know how hard he takes things.”
Barry shrugged. He didn't believe it. In a way, neither did I. I thought that Will would come back. He loved me, and he loved the kids. He had to come back.
“I fantasize finding him in a ditch somewhere. Just because the police haven't found him—”
“They haven't because he doesn't want to be found. I understand how terrible this is for you, but you're overreacting, Maggie. He's probably on the bender of benders. He'll come back when it's over.”
Would he?
I was afraid that maybe I didn't know everything about Will. I hadn't been with him in Rio. Who had? What furies drove him then? Which were driving him now? Perhaps he wasn't telling me the truth.
And how could he just disappear?
I saw a picture in my mind—Will and Allie riding Fleas across the lot in back of our house. He had to come back. It was inconceivable that he wouldn't.
A
ND EVENTUALLY, HE did.
I was awakened by a familiar hand touching my cheek, then lightly stroking my hair.
Will was in the bedroom!
I knew his touch so well. My heart jumped. Terror came over me.