Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (38 page)

“Fine, fine. Now, what’s the story?”

Jimmy ushered Laura into his office through the open door. The suite was small but sparse, with modern furniture placed at careful angles. That had been Clara’s influence; she was always so interested in life looking like a home decorating magazine. Every time they’d come over to Laura’s house with the children, Clara complained that the furnishings were too old-fashioned, the fabrics too dark. But Laura was happy to let things be. She sat down on the edge of a white
leather chair, and Jimmy sat opposite her. Outside, the traffic on Wilshire honked and zoomed, with everyone jostling for first place in a race that went on all day.

“Greek shipping family. Tobacco money, and oil. Very interested in Hollywood, and in the golden age.” Jimmy put his right hand over his heart. “And you, of course, are his favorite.”

“His favorite what?” Laura took off her sunglasses. Her son-in-law still looked boyish, with his blond hair cut short like Steve McQueen’s.

Jimmy laughed. There were a few wrinkles around the corners of his eyes, which made Laura want to put her sunglasses back on. If Jimmy had wrinkles, Laura shuddered to think of what her own face must look like. “His favorite movie star.”

Laura shook her head, pursing her lips. It felt almost like teasing. Her Academy Award now felt like teasing too. Laura kept it in her office at home, a room she avoided for weeks on end. Every now and then she happened on it by chance, catching Oscar’s golden eye, and would then have to retire to her bed. If the statue was real, it meant that her marriage had been real, and not just a fever dream she’d concocted and sold to the children. More than anything, Laura wanted to be given lines, to be given the outline of another human being to pour herself into. She felt almost ashamed of how badly she wanted to be back on a soundstage, the lights warm on her bare shoulders, a crew of hundreds waiting for her to speak. Sometimes, when she was sitting by the pool at the hotel, she pretended that it was a scene in a movie, with the director hiding in the palm leaves, capturing her smallest movements. She wouldn’t dare say it out loud, not even to Jimmy.

A loud knock on the open door startled them both. A stocky man with white hair and heavy, black-rimmed glasses poked his head in. “Mr. Peterson?” he said in a deep, lightly accented voice.

Jimmy stood and hurried to the door, hand outstretched. What he lacked in business acumen he made up for in earnest friendliness, a quality seldom seen in Los Angeles. “Mr. Contogenis. So glad to meet you. Please come in.”

Laura stood and waited to be introduced. She held her hands loosely in front of her body, with her fingers touching. Jimmy shook Mr. Contogenis’s hand vigorously and then turned back to face Laura and the otherwise nearly empty room. Laura wished she’d thought to have the meeting in the bungalow, where the lights were dimmer and she might look more comfortable. She was wearing an outfit that Florence had picked out, a swingy tunic with pants to match. Her first impulse had been to wear a dress, but Florence had insisted. Now she just felt awkward, like someone’s grandmother (which she was, whether she liked it or not) trying to look young and with-it. Laura felt her cheeks flush.

“Mr. Contogenis, allow me to introduce Ms. Laura Lamont,” Jimmy said, shifting his body out of the way.

“Christos,” he said, and reached for Laura’s hand, bringing it to his lips.

“Well,” Laura said, taken aback. “Hello.” No one had kissed her with anything but maternal affection in ten years. In ten years, women went from ingenues to wives, from wives to matrons, from matrons to hags. The skin on her knuckles began to tingle and sing. The idea of a love affair was better than the thing itself, and Laura let her mind careen forward: her skin, his skin, her mouth, his mouth, his glasses on the floor, everything else forgotten for as long as it took. It was as clear as the morning she’d sat with Gordon at her parents’ picnic table: Laura would follow this man when he left the room, no matter what Jimmy arranged. She recognized a spark when she saw it, and wanted to hold it tight against her chest, a blinking signal shouting in all directions.

C
hristos had booked a table for lunch, and they rode together to the restaurant in the back of his limo. They held hands in the car and he whispered into her ear. He wanted to make her a star again, because he’d always loved her the most. Did he mention that he loved her? He did, over and over again, until Laura’s head was spinning with hope and the champagne that Christos kept pouring into her glass. The clouds outside the limousine’s sunroof were compliments, the salty peanuts were kisses on her earlobe, the bottle of chilled champagne pulled from a concealed compartment was a promise of more to come.

The dining room was in a small but beautifully appointed hotel on the beach in Santa Monica, and overlooked the ocean. The room was blue and white, and felt to Laura like the inside of a giant boat. Susie and Johnny had made a movie on a ship once,
Anchors Up!
They played young lovers whose parents were trying to keep them apart. They danced up and down glowing staircases, with life preservers swinging around their waists like hula hoops. Laura hadn’t spoken to either of them since she left Gardner Brothers, but she’d heard the rumors. No one could stay young and cute forever. The word was that Susie shook like a leaf without a fifth of vodka in her belly, that she’d had her face pulled taut too many times, that she was leaving all her money to her Pomeranian. The news on Johnny was even worse: pornography, young men, a club in the basement of a hotel where you could pay for anything. Laura didn’t want to know more.

A waiter pulled out her chair, and Laura slid in, tucking her legs under the table. It was the best seat in the house: She stared out the glass wall at the waves of the Pacific. Laura had a sudden panic—why hadn’t she raised her kids on the beach? Clara could have bopped around in her bikini, and Florence could have studied the shells and
rocks, and she and Junior could have hidden themselves under an umbrella with a couple of books. This was why people moved to California. Without the ocean, they were just choosing to live like coyotes, in the underbrush. The next time someone handed her a big check, Laura thought, she would buy a house on the beach.

Christos set his napkin on his lap, and then stuck a finger in the air, which prompted more champagne.

“I can’t drink this much,” Laura said. “Well, maybe just one more glass.” She was laughing at nothing, at the idea that she was finally back on track, after all this time. He wanted to put her in a movie. The financing was in place! Laura knew that was the trickiest part nowadays, with everyone so plumb sure that they could do everything themselves, without the studio’s pocketbook and expertise. She was glad she’d left when she did, when quality was high and movies were still pieces of art, every inch designed and thoughtful. Christos wanted to go back to that, to make a real picture.

“You don’t think I’m too old? For people to want to see me be romantic?”

Christos looked at her with a lascivious gaze, the only appropriate answer. “I think you’re perfect,” he said. “Even when you were playing a nun, I wanted to get you in bed.”

“Oh,” Laura said. “Thank you.”

Christos motioned for the waiter to come back, and ordered for both of them—hanger steak and Caesar salads. When the waiter was gone, Christos scooted his chair closer to Laura’s and put his hand on her knee under the tablecloth.

“So when do you think we’ll start filming? Is there a good script?” Laura crossed her legs, knocking Christos’s hand away. She liked feeling admired, but this was business. Business came first.

He seemed not to notice. “What’s that?”

“The movie,” Laura said. “When do you think we’ll start?” She
looked down at herself. The outfit Florence had picked out wasn’t so bad, even though it could have been ironed. “I should probably go on a bit of a diet, don’t you think? Maybe I should skip the steak.”

“Oh, we’ll see,” Christos said. He leaned back in his chair and ran his hands up and down over his large belly like a pregnant woman.

“What do you mean, ‘we’ll see’?” Laura tilted her head to the side, checking to see whether a different angle might change the answer. “Who do you have on board?”

“On board?”

“ADs, hair, makeup. I’d love to hire Edna, if we could. I miss those dresses. Edna is at Gardner Brothers, and she is really the best in the business.” Laura paused, already so many steps ahead. “Do you mean I’m the first person you approached?”

Christos leaned forward with a groan. His nose was lumpy, with pores the size of potholes. “I’ll get to it,” he said. “We’re not in a rush, are we?” Laura thought he might reach over and touch her arm, just to let her know that he was going to do whatever needed to be done, but instead, he reached for his glass of champagne. “Next year,” he said. “Let’s talk about it next year.”

“Next year?” Laura said, realizing that the project was as likely as an iceberg in the Gulf of Mexico. “Enjoy your steak,” she said, and pushed her chair back from the table before the waiters had a chance to help.

J
unior was waiting in the bungalow when Laura got home. It was only just the afternoon, but all the shades were down and all the lights off, which made the living room feel like midnight.

“We were supposed to have lunch,” he said from the middle of the darkness, his voice thick with repulsion. “After your meeting. I called
Jimmy to see why you were taking so long and he said you went on a
date
.”

Laura flipped on the overhead light, which made Junior scream, and so she turned it off again and felt her way over to the sofa.

“Not really,” she said, already wanting to pretend it had never happened, that she’d never entertained the idea. “It was a misunderstanding. I thought he was going to give me a job.” Laura found Junior’s knee with her left hand and squeezed it. The truth was so simple when she said it out loud, that what she’d really hungered for was the work and not the love, at least since Irving.

“But you would do that?”

The bungalow was silent, without even the gentle humming of a lamp. Cars drove by, and there were faraway splashes in the hotel pool, but the air inside the room itself was perfectly still.

“I’m sorry, love,” Laura said. “I had to try.”

“You didn’t even think about me, did you?” She could feel his body stiffen.

“Of course I did.”

Junior shook Laura off and got up, his thin legs making creaking noises, as if he hadn’t moved in hours.

“How long have you been sitting here?” Laura asked, but Junior didn’t answer. Instead, he walked in the dark into his bedroom. Laura stayed on the sofa for a few minutes, unsure of what she could say. She and Irving had rarely fought, and had never come to blows, never done any of the things that were bad news for children to witness. If anything, they had been too absorbed with each other to pay proper attention to all three children on a daily basis. Laura had a quick flash of all the times they’d locked a whimpering child out of their bedroom to keep that space for themselves. It was hard to think of Clara as a mother the same way that Laura herself was a mother, hard to
imagine that the two experiences were at all the same. Laura certainly felt no such common ground with her own mother, who had hardly shown her any affection even before Hildy’s death, and certainly not after. She was thinking of her sister so often lately, at the oddest moments. Pouring a cup of coffee in the morning, clicking off the hotel lamp at night. Hildy was there all day long, just waiting in the shadows.

“Junior?” Laura said into the empty room.

The door to his bedroom was slightly ajar, letting Laura slip in without knocking. Laura heard the toilet flush, and then the shower turn on—Junior was in the bathroom. She pressed her face gently to the door and spoke into the wood.

“Sweetie, can you hear me?”

On the other side of the door, Junior made a grunting noise.

“Is that a yes?”

There was the unmistakable sound of breaking glass—the mirror. Laura’s hand moved to the doorknob, which she couldn’t turn. She knocked on the door again, hard. “Junior, please open the door. What are you doing in there? Please open the door.”