Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (34 page)

"We've gotten to wondering," he said, "if Bix and Alicia didn't start caring for each other a little more than they should have."

Ward whistled. "I hope you aren't planning on spreading that up and down the Valley. It would kill Charles."

"We know that," Doug said instantly.

Jill did not know that at all. Charles might well be the most rugged man in the Valley; he was certainly the most adept at getting what he wanted.

"What put this notion in your heads?" Ward asked.

"We've seen a couple of their letters. They seemed so compatible. The tone was so frank and honest. They seemed to have a lot in common."

"What do you think?" Jill asked Ward. "Are we crazy?"

Ward shrugged. "I'm the worst one to ask. I idolized them both. Of course, it never occurred to me that Bix might be falling in love with her, since I was so similarly occupied."

"But she met Bix first," Jill pointed out. "Why didn't she fall in love with him then? Why care for Charles first?"

"That I can explain," Ward answered. "Remember the time. It was during the war, and she'd just lost her parents before it started. If you felt like the world was turning upside-down, I don't know as how Bix would be the man you'd want at a time like that. He was the sort to turn everything sideways, whereas Charles was always so upright, so magisterial. He was the oldest brother... and that meant something then, even though there wasn't any great property to go with it. There was a certainty about Charles that must have been enormously comforting. Bix could see everything twenty-six ways from Sunday, and during the war Charles's simple 'this is how it is' must have been appealing. He must have seemed so safe to her, such a rock."

"That's not how he comes across now," Jill said honestly and waited for the standard Ringling line about Charles's Terrible Loss.

"You've got to remember something about Charles," Ward said. "He turned his back on the one thing he had a talent for. That doesn't do a body any good. I remind myself of that every time someone tries to move me up off the sales floor."

Jill's glance drifted toward Doug, now fitting the cardboard back into the frame. Here was another Ringling turning his back on the one thing he was good at.

Doug stood up to restore the doodle to the wall. Jill asked Ward one more thing. "You're sure that this doodle was done in April, not August?"

"I'm positive. Bix was a terrific brother. I don't know that he paid more attention to me than Charles did, but he was more fun. With Charles I never forgot how much younger I was. I did with Bix. When he was missing during the war, Mom and Dad tried to act hopeful around me, but I knew they were figuring he was dead. So when he came back... and then died again, I spent a lot of time remembering him and—" Ward broke off. He had to clear his throat before he began. "This happened in April. Trust me. Now, come back to the house and let's see what's for lunch."

Jill and Doug followed Ward back outside, but on the front walk, Jill touched Doug's arm, slowing him down. "You realize what this means, don't you? Bix didn't help my father just during June and July; he was planning the revisions while they were still in production the first time. They still had almost two more weeks of filming back in Hollywood, and he already knew they were going to need major revisions."

"I know." Doug had come to the same conclusion. "But I don't get it. Could the studio executives have nixed stuff before they were even done filming?"

"If they had had those kinds of reservations, they would have shut down production. Two weeks of filming costs a lot. They probably didn't know. But Steve Lex, the first editor, was already assembling footage; maybe he was passing along his own doubts."

"We don't know." Doug started back down the walk.

Jill didn't move. "Well, there's one thing we do know," she said flatly. "It was Bix who figured out how to save the movie, not my father."

But Cass had gotten credit. He had been listed as co-screenwriter. If the big ideas had been Bix's, then Cass wasn't entitled to that. So why did he get it?

There was an easy answer—because Bix was dead. Alicia was dead, the important members of the crew were dead, Charles was paralyzed by grief. Who was around to speak up for Bix? To defend his achievement?

No, that wasn't possible. This was where Jill was going to draw the line. Her father honored the dead. He, alone of all his circle of Hollywood friends, faithfully went to funerals. He would send a car to the gates of Jill's school, and Alice would help her change out of her uniform into a dark dress. They would meet Cass at the church or synagogue. At the gravesite afterward, Cass would put his hand on Jill's young shoulder, and she would smell the scent of tobacco that clung even to his overcoat.

Cass's favorite poem, Yeats's "Easter, 1916," was a commemoration of the dead. This reverence was, he had always said, part of being a Virginian. He would never steal credit for the work of a dead man.

But stolen or not, he had gotten that credit. It didn't make sense. It was so unlike anything she could ever imagine him doing. Was it possible that she didn't know him? That the image he had presented to her was false? If so, it was time to revise her image of him. But what was she going to replace it with?

Ward was already across the street. Jill and Doug caught up with him, following him inside the house. Grace was in the kitchen, fixing lunch.

"Did your dress fit?" Ward put his arm around her waist.

Jill couldn't remember her father ever putting his arm around her mother's waist.

Grace Ringling fixed her husband with a stare. "You'd better believe it."

"Why didn't you leave it on?" Doug asked. "I would have loved to see you in it."

"Because I tried it on for myself. If the rest of you get your jollies out of seeing a sixty-year-old woman in a dress made for an eighteen-year-old, then you'll have to go elsewhere."

CHAPTER 14

On the way home from Winchester, Jill remembered that it was Monday. "I'm not going to be around tomorrow," she told Doug.

"Fine. What are you up to?"

"I need to go back to L.A."

"Back to L.A.?" His eyes shot to hers, his brows lifting in surprise. Then the surprise drained away to be replaced by a dark, shuttered look—Phillip Wayland standing in the hall outside his sister-in-law's bedroom. "I'm sorry to see you go," he said formally.

He was assuming the worst. She slapped his arm with the back of her hand. "Don't be a goat. I'm not leaving. I'll be back first thing Wednesday morning. I'm just going for the day. I'm in a psychotherapy group and it meets on Tuesday. I went last week. It's no big deal."

"You went all the way out to California for a meeting? An hour meeting?"

"Actually, it's ninety minutes." As if that made a difference.

"Isn't that— No, no." He stopped himself. "You don't have to explain yourself."

"I don't mind. One of the rules of group is that you go, and I always try to play by the rules."

"So you plan on going every week?"

"Absolutely."

Doug drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. "Then I have a question... although I don't suppose I could answer the equivalent question if you asked me, and even to ask it implies—"

Jill interrupted. "What's on your mind?"

He made a face at her. "You scoff, but this may be a tricky question."

"I can handle it."

"All right... when you say every week, what are we talking about? How long do you plan on being here?"

Yes, that was a tricky question. "What do you think the answer is?"

"I don't know. I mean, my instinct is to say that everything is okay, that we're all on target here. But I worry that we're from such different backgrounds, with such different rules, that I, even in all my wisdom, could be completely off base."

"Our backgrounds aren't that different," she argued. "Yes, I had money, but my father never lost his basic middle-class way of looking at things. I'm not a careless jet-setter. The money doesn't have to be an issue between us, Doug. Not unless you need it to be."

"You didn't answer my question."

"Yes, I did. You know I did. I'm going to stay here until we both want me to go."

Doug's eyes flicked across the car again. Then, tactile man that he was, he touched her arm. He needed a physical confirmation of her sincerity.

Reassured, he settled back in his seat, driving with one hand on the wheel, the other elbow bent out the window. "You'd better not count on me
ever
wanting you to go."

That night Doug worked out a great plan for Jill's traveling to and from California. She would buy one one-way ticket and then a series of SuperSavers, whose low fares required staying over Saturday night.

"Here's how it would work," he told her. "This week you'd fly out on ticket number one and then come home on the one-way ticket. Next week you go out on ticket number two and come home on number one so it looks like you've been there over a Saturday. The week after, you go out on ticket three and come home on two, and so on through the summer."

It was a grand scheme, but she looked at him blankly. "Why would I want to do that?"

"Because you'd save so much—" He stopped, remembering whom he was talking to. "Because it would be such a good exercise in keeping track of airline tickets, because it would remind you what a beetlebrain you're sleeping with... I don't know." They were in the kitchen. He leaned his chair back on two legs until it hit the wall with a satisfying little crash, followed by the noise of his head connecting with the plaster. "I hate to think what this is costing you."

"Have you ever talked to anyone about this head-banging problem of yours?" she inquired politely.

"I didn't even know I had a head-banging problem," he groaned. The phone started to ring. "You get that. I can't. I have to stay here and bang my head."

She got up, ramming her hip against his arm. She meant to do it lightly, but as he was, at the moment, trying to bang his head against the wall in new, unusual, and painless ways, she knocked him off-balance. The chair crashed to the floor, leaving the chair sideways and him sprawled on his back.

"I'm sorry," she mouthed as she picked up the phone.

He lay on Aunt Carrie's green-flecked linoleum, watching Jill pick up the phone. Still on his back, he squirmed over so he could look up her skirt.

A slender, dusty foot came down over his eyes. "Hello," he heard her say.

He thought about doing something weird and sexual with her foot, but she had been walking around the kitchen barefoot and he and Randy weren't exactly wizards in the Mop 'n Glow department.

"It's for you." The foot lifted and light flooded back into his eyes. Jill had her hand over the receiver. "Are you too stupid to stand?"

"Unquestionably."

She dropped the receiver to his chest. Still supine, he picked it up. "Hello, this is Douglas W. Ringling." One of the dogs padded over and started to sniff his ear. Doug pushed her away.

"Hey, Ringo."

It was the Lynx's soft, thick voice. Doug cheered into the phone. Of all the men he liked, this one, his college roommate, was the one he liked the most.

"It sounds like you've got sisters in the house," the Lynx said. He knew Doug's family.

"Actually not."

"Oh, my man... do tell."

Jill had sat back down at the kitchen table. From his spot on the floor Doug could see only the long line of her fabulous legs. "I can't. She's right here."

"That bad, huh?"

"No, that good."

Jill leaned over and looked at him under the tabletop.

"Do you want me to leave?"

"No, stay here."

Even if she were out of the room, Doug didn't know what he would say about her. Her "trophy" qualities embarrassed him. He was crazy about the way she looked—although in bed, he supposed that her degree of fitness was as important as her looks—and he was fascinated by her money. He didn't covet it; he wasn't wallowing in gold-digger fantasies. He was just curious what it was like to have so much. God knew that the Lynx had plenty, but even he wasn't in Jill's league. Moreover, the Lynx's money was that "quick" money that she had been talking about the other day. Every morning, Doug knew, the Lynx woke up expecting it to be gone. Jill was calm about her money. She had always had it. She always would.

But to tell another man, even one he knew as well as this one, that she was rich and lovely put the wrong spin on things. This wasn't about her being rich and lovely; it was about her being her.

"Do your folks like her?" the Lynx asked.

"Are you kidding? My dad wants to marry her."

"She should snap him up. He's a lot better bet than you are." The Lynx had met Doug's parents on the first day of their freshman year at Duke. Raised in the woman-dominated culture of the inner city, the eighteen-year-old Lynx had been mesmerized by Ward Ringling, unable to believe that guys actually had fathers like this. Within twenty minutes Ward was calling him "son," an appellation he had before used only for Doug.

"He just wants her for her car," Doug said. "She drives a '57 Bel Air with no miles."

"A '57 Bel Air? Is that for real? Ask her if she wants to trade."

Doug reached his leg under the table and poked Jill on the ankle. She leaned back down, her hair falling almost to the floor.

"That Lynx wants to trade cars with you."

"What does he drive?"

"A green Jag."

"I don't like green cars," she said and disappeared back above the tabletop.

"She doesn't like green cars," he told the Lynx. "And anyway, why do you want it? It's a real white man's car."

The Lynx chuckled. "So perhaps I can offer her what no white man can."

"Good point. I'll ask." Doug kicked Jill again and when she appeared, he relayed the offer. "The Lynx says he'll fulfill your every sexual need for a week if you give him your car."

"A week?" She shook her upside-down head. "No, it would have to be a month, minimum."

"Oh, pity. He doesn't have that kind of stamina."

A sharp oath burst from the phone, followed by a steady gush of profanity. Doug took the receiver away from his ear and let the Lynx curse into mid-air. Jill, whose face was turning pink from hanging upside down, listened appreciatively for a moment, then disappeared back up the rabbit hole. Doug kicked his shoe off and ran his foot up her ankle. She reached down and pulled his toe... hard.