Judith Krantz (17 page)

“I am, if you are,” he said carefully, trying not to sound as grim as he felt. He hadn’t made a serious effort to comprehend what a movie star’s work meant in terms of sheer time. He had refused to face something he hoped would disappear by itself. But he could never let her go. That was not an option.

“But, Mike, do you think that you’ll still mean that in the future—say five years from now? I warn you, my darling, it’s not easy for an actress to be a good wife. Acting is not merely what I do, it’s the one thing I absolutely
need
to do and
I must feel free to do it
. Free, Mike, really and truly free, without any guilt, without being torn apart by compromise, without ever looking over my shoulder at a part I turned down because I knew that it would upset you if I took it.
What I want, I must have
. The only way I know how to live, the only way I intend to live, is fully and deeply, taking
everything I can from existence. It’s as simple as that for me—I’m selfish, you see, dreadfully selfish, the kind of selfishness that it’s fair to call ruthless. I’m determined to live exactly as I choose, no matter what anyone wants of me, no matter what anyone says. This summer, these months with you—they’ve been—outside—the rest of my life. I may never
be
like this again. We may never have months like these again. If you change your mind about me, I will never blame you.”

“I’m willing to take my chances,” he replied confidently. He could tear out his heart with his bare hands more easily than he could change his mind now. And how could any twenty-year-old girl—even this beloved, fierce, eloquent nymph—possibly imagine how she would feel in five years? She thought she was a philosopher, she thought she could see into the future, she thought she knew exactly how she wanted to lead the rest of her life, but already she had been changed by love more than she guessed. How could she imagine that she was selfish and ruthless? Those ridiculous words alone proved that she was overdra-matizing the situation. Of course she’d always be free to act, but didn’t she realize that love inevitably took away perfect freedom? That no one had
ever
had both? She’d find that out sooner or later, God knows, for marriage changed women even more than it changed men.

“I think,” Sylvie said, so thoughtfully that she sounded sad and somber, “that perhaps a woman like me should never marry. Perhaps it is not fair to any man.”

Now he was sure that she was a little cockeyed, Mike Kilkullen told himself as he shut her up firmly with a storm of kisses. A woman like her was meant to be married if ever a woman was. If his darling Swede were allowed to run around without a wedding ring on her finger, no man was safe. If she wanted to go away from time to time and do the work she loved almost as much as she loved him, so be it. In any case, what choice did he have?

I
n the summer of 1960, Lydia Henry Stack Kilkullen flew out to California to pick up her final divorce papers. She rented a car at the airport and checked into a room she’d reserved at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. This was, she realized, the first time she’d ever spent a night on her own in Los Angeles, a city that was an hour and a half’s drive from San Juan Capistrano, but a galaxy apart in attitude.

During her early years of life at the ranch, Liddy had been aggressively antisocial. Since she knew in advance that Orange County would never provide the kind of society she belonged in, she had turned her back on it. Orange County had never noticed. However, in the sixth year of her marriage, she had formed a friendship with a childless couple from San Clemente, Nora and Deems White, the son and daughter-in-law of Henry White, who had long been the Kilkullens’ banker.

Nora was an immensely rich girl, an orphan who had inherited a vast fortune from her San Diego family,
but to Liddy she had always been without interest, in spite of her money and the good schools to which she had been sent. Nora was lumpy and irredeemably plain, with no charm or conversation. She adored her husband and harbored great ambitions for him, which she shared with her father-in-law.

Deems White, a lawyer, was an exceptionally attractive man, indeed so attractive that it was apparent to anyone who met the couple that he could only have married Nora for her money. Yet such was Deems White’s charm that people not only didn’t hold the cold-blooded marriage against him, but thought that Nora had been damned lucky to get him.

Deems White was of middle height, with straight sandy hair above a finely molded, sensitive yet somehow impish face. He resembled a young English university don in a 1920s photograph, with his long, mildly crooked nose, his reluctant, sideways grin, his ever-present pipe and his way of casually wearing his well-chosen clothes.

Deems couldn’t make himself take the legal profession seriously, although he was as clever as any well-connected lawyer needed to be. However, it was one way to pacify his father about his future, since Henry White, the dominating parent of an only child, never ceased to insist that Deems had the capacity to do something important with his life. Indeed, Henry White had engineered his son’s marriage with the thought that Nora’s money would help Deems’s future, and he had found it useful to go along with his father’s plan.

If Deems White had had his own private income, he would have drifted to Europe and fallen in with a raffish, rich, bohemian group who lived off their unearned wealth, who painted a little, who wrote a little, who skied a little, drank a lot and didn’t care with whom they slept. Nora’s income was the closest he’d come to inherited wealth, since his father gave him nothing more than the legal business he steered toward his son. The young Whites’ large house and frequent
trips to Europe were the nearest equivalent to the life Deems felt he had been born for.

Fortunately for Deems, Nora was a worshipful woman, painfully aware of her plainness, who was easy to please, and easier still to ignore. She was convinced that it was entirely her fault that her husband made love to her only on the rarest of occasions. Sex, she decided, wasn’t important to her, but it was essential to be able to live in Deems’s beloved shadow and she was grateful to spend her large income keeping him happy.

In 1953, Henry White gave a dinner party to celebrate his fifteenth year as president of the San Clemente Bank. Mike Kilkullen insisted that Liddy make an effort and go with him to honor the man who had been his father’s banker, and whose grandfather had been his grandfather’s banker.

Liddy agreed, although an evening with San Clemente’s small and provincial business community made her turn up her nose. She was twenty-four at the time, the mother of one five-year-old child with a bad cold and another who was two and teething, but as soon as she applied makeup and dressed, Liddy became utterly un-Californian, a sophisticated woman who was far more brittle and hard-edged than she had been when Mike Kilkullen first laid eyes on her. Her mouth was firmly painted in scarlet now, her skin powdered uncompromisingly white, and she had learned to use eye makeup in a discreet but striking way. She was aware that she reminded people of a young version of the Duchess of Windsor, and did nothing to diminish the resemblance.

Liddy came from a background in which women rarely departed far from the hairstyle they wore in their debutante year. However, the waves that had once fallen to her shoulders had been cut so that her neat cap of hair was chin-length and parted in the middle. Her profile was cosmopolitan in its severity, and her inborn, un-Philadelphian sense of style was kept up to date by the fashion magazines she devoured in
grieving frustration every month. For the Whites’ dinner party she decided to wear a Donald Brooks black linen dress, a completely self-confident, East Coast dress that she had ordered from Bullock’s in Los Angeles, without any real expectation that she might need it.

Liddy found herself seated next to Deems White at the dinner. The two of them, evenly matched in age, equally disappointed in their lives, equally unable or unwilling to do anything about their unsatisfactory situations, immediately fell into a deep and intimate conversation which they both knew had to be resumed as soon as possible.

From that first night they divined things about each other that they hadn’t yet spoken of; they sensed clearly that they would become important in each other’s lives; and, without a word, they shared a mutual knowledge that it was essential to hide this sudden, intense affinity from the eyes of the world. It was too strong to be analyzed, too strong to be given a name. It was more than a friendship, more than a flirtation, it had nothing to do with sex. It was a meeting of two people who needed each other emotionally for reasons they couldn’t explain, didn’t need to explain, didn’t want to explain. But the need was painfully real.

There was no business reason which could explain a future meeting between Liddy Kilkullen and Deems White. Only a social occasion that included Mike and Nora was possible, and that evening Liddy invited the Whites to come and have dinner with them the following Saturday. The invitation was reciprocated, and soon the Whites and the Kilkullens became a recognized foursome.

Mike Kilkullen, who found neither of the Whites particularly interesting, went along with the arrangement out of hope that through them Liddy would be drawn into accepting the social life of Southern California. Nora was flattered to be treated as a friend by glamorous Liddy Kilkullen, whom everyone considered an East Coast snob, although they couldn’t help but admire her.

“I don’t understand what you have against Deems White,” Liddy reproached her husband.

“I don’t think he treats his wife well. And what’s more, I don’t think he likes women.”

“That’s absurd! Women are crazy about him.”

“That’s not what I mean, Liddy. I think he’s not physically attracted to women.”

“What kind of basis is that on which to judge someone?”

“Never mind, Liddy. You’re right. It’s not important.”

Oh, but it was important, Liddy thought. If Mike was right, it meant that no other woman could become more important to Deems than she was already. No other woman would come into his life and lure him by the promise of sex, that unfastidious, muddled coupling she occasionally had to perform with her husband no matter how little pleasure it gave her.

Since the Whites, thanks to Deems, were a popular couple who knew everybody, the Kilkullens inevitably found themselves invited to parties. Liddy even began to give dinner parties herself, because only in a group could she and Deems find the occasions to carry on their increasingly necessary and increasingly intense private dialogue. It was not what they said that was meaningful, but the fact that they said it only to each other.

They did not touch in the same frankly sensuous way that two young people might, not even when they danced together. A strong inhibition, an inability to speak with utter frankness, kept them from arranging for a contact that they both craved, a different kind of physicality than any sexually attracted couple could have accomplished by a rendezvous in a motel.

Liddy and Deems both wanted the freedom to hold each other silently, tightly, for a long, long time, and comfort each other for everything that had gone wrong, everything that they had been robbed of, every compromise they had made. They wanted to hold each other as if each were the other’s mother and each were the other’s child.

If there had been an attraction of the flesh between them, they could have gratified it easily, but their needs were too complex, too strange. When a young man and woman need to be alone together without sexual intercourse, and when it is impossible for them to explain to each other precisely why sex is not an aim, they are doomed to a frustration of this need that makes it all the keener.

Except for the conventional hug and peck on the cheek as the two couples parted after an evening together or at someone’s home, she and Deems had never touched each other, Liddy reflected as she sat in her room at the Beverly Wilshire, on the day before her divorce became final.

Liddy had kept in touch with the Whites by phone during the last year in Philadelphia. They were the only people in Southern California to hear from her, and she always managed to call at a time when Deems would be home. Now she tried to think of a way to get Deems to come to Los Angeles by himself to see her this evening. She should have managed to arrange it before her quick trip out, she realized, but now it was too late, too much at the last minute. She resigned herself to a lonely evening. Tomorrow she’d make the obligatory trip to the courthouse in Santa Ana, the county seat, pick up her final divorce papers, and return to Philadelphia the following day.

As Liddy was packing for her return flight, a reporter from the
Los Angeles Times
reached her by phone in her hotel room.

“Mrs. Kilkullen, what do you think of your former husband’s marriage to Sylvie Norberg yesterday afternoon?” he asked.

“What?”

“You know about it, don’t you?”

“Why, yes … yes, of course.” In the astounding black ambush of his words, she had only one thought: she must not seem surprised.

“Could I trouble you for couple of quotes, Mrs. Kilkullen? How did your ex and Miss Norberg get
together? How long have you known about this romance? What kind of stepmother do you think she’ll make, considering that she’s fifteen years younger than he is?”

“I have nothing to say.”

“Come on, Mrs. Kilkullen! Your husband married the hottest star in the movies a few hours after the two of you got divorced, and you haven’t got a word to say? I can understand your desire for privacy, but Sylvie Norberg’s public property.”

“In that case, why don’t you call her?”

Liddy hung up the phone and told the operator not to put through any more calls. She fell into a chair, so penetrated by shock that there was no room for emotion. Only slowly did her mind begin to work as she tried to put things together. Mike couldn’t have known Sylvie Norberg before she and the children had left the ranch last summer, or she would have known about it. At some point during the last year they must have met, and managed to keep it quiet.
A movie star. Fifteen years younger. A
shattering hatred, a corrosive bitterness that would not die until she did, became part of Liddy Kilkullen at that moment, falling over her shoulders like an invisible mantle of heavy, dark fabric.