Private Screening (2 page)

“Yes. Has he brought on the usual death threats?”

“No—not that.”

“What is it?”

He heard her exhale. “Stacy Tarrant left her number with the service.”

Lord looked out the window. Finally, he answered, “It's a joke, Cass.”

“I called information. She's not listed, naturally, but it's a Malibu exchange. That's where she's been holed up since you and Harry drove her into exile, as
People
magazine would have it.”

Lord was silent.

“Tony? Let me give you the number, just in case.”

Lord wrote it down. “Anything else?”

“Only one.” Her tone was flat. “Larry Parris called from Hollywood. He says you'd better sell film rights to the Carson case before ‘Phoenix' makes him passé. He's quite concerned that what with your divorce, Harry's been ‘bad luck' for you, moneywise.”

“Tell him luck is a talent.”

“He also thinks he can get Jaclyn Smith as Stacy Tarrant.”

Lord now remembered Stacy as he had asked his final question at the trial. “She doesn't look like Tarrant.”

“Nobody looks like Tarrant.”

“Then maybe he should try Jodie Foster.”

She spoke more gently. “Feeling lousy, aren't you?”

Lord could hear her concern. “You're a nice person, Cassie. I love you, in my funny way.”

“Ah, honey, if only you weren't a boy.…” She waited a moment. “I can't help feeling sorry for her, now.”

Through the window, dusk fell like pink powder on a gray-blue bay. Closer, in the attic of a brown Victorian, Lord saw the sudden glow of someone switching on a television; he imagined this repeating in homes across the country. Finally, he said, “And I can't sell those film rights.”

“I know.”

Cass rang off.

Disconnecting the telephone, Lord walked to the living room and turned on SNI.

They were running the other film of Stacy, as he had known they would.

Preparing for the trial, Lord had studied it perhaps twenty times. But cross-examination, when he had forced her to watch with him, was the last time he had seen it. Kilcannon lay wounded on the stage; as the lens closed in, Stacy bent her face to his. Her lips moved, and then Kilcannon's. She looked up, beseeching help, into the eye of the camera.

With Carson's life at stake, Lord had asked her if his act seemed rational. But neither of them, he understood now, had truly known the answer.

Once more, SNI began to run the kidnapping.

Lord returned to the kitchen. The terrorist's words pursued him like the voice of a fun-house monster: “I am Phoenix.…”

It troubled Lord that he was already used to the name.

“John Damone will die unless Stacy Tarrant can persuade you to pledge five million dollars, through a unique and public act of selflessness which I will disclose on my first live broadcast, tomorrow night.…”

At that moment, Lord was certain that the hostages would not be rescued.

Reconnecting the phone, he dialed the number Cass had given him.

“Hello.” A woman, answering on the second ring.

“Stacy?”

“Yes?”

“This is Tony Lord.”

Silence. “I wasn't sure you'd call.”

Lord recognized the voice now, smoky and a little low. It was so bizarre that, in his discomfort, he almost laughed. “It really
is
you.”

“It's really me.”

Her tone was cool. “About Damone,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

“I suppose you are.” That was meaningless, and meant to be. “I want to see you.”

Lord paused. “Are you sure it's really me you want?”

She ignored that. “He's televising tomorrow night. Can you come?”

The tape of Phoenix echoed from Lord's living room: “And on the final day you will witness her release or execution—live.…”

“I'll come,” Lord answered. “You knew that.”

Part 1

STACY TARRANT

THE CONCERT

June 2, The Previous Year

1

L
YING
in bed, Stacy Tarrant felt a stranger in her own city.

Jamie dressed in silent concentration. With the drapes closed, their suite was a collage of all her other mornings on the road. Running for president had begun to seem so much like rock 'n' roll that she was living in a time warp; in fifteen hours, for the first time in a year, she would face twenty thousand people she already feared.

“Fuck this,” she announced, put on her glasses, stalked naked to the window, and jerked open the drapes.

It was 6:00
A.M.

A dawn-lit haze made the tangled freeways look like the map of a mirage. Turning from the mirror, Jamie bantered, “It's Los Angeles, all right. But what does it mean?”

Stacy smiled. “I'm more curious about where we're going.”

Behind her, she felt him summoning Senator James Kilcannon, slim and tailored and quick. “On a magical mystery tour of Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Sacramento, and San Francisco again, for Alexis Parnell's cocktail party and the rock 'n' roll spectacular which will finance next Tuesday's triumph. I hope.” The last words, closer and softer, were followed by a kiss on her neck. “As if my boyish charm weren't sufficient, you're about to make me the Democratic nominee for president.”

He sounded rueful, Stacy thought. Half-teasing, she answered, “Isn't that what you expected when we met?”

“You told me you wouldn't sing then,” he parried gently. “And the circumstances were distracting.”

Turning, she touched his face. “Why the Mona Lisa smile?” he asked.

She hesitated. “I guess I was thinking that people like us get the lives we ask for.”

His eyes were bright with irony and understanding. “But then nothing's perfect,” he said lightly. “Nothing, and no one.” Kissing her, he went to meet the aides already waiting in the next room, to plan his day.

Suspended between present and past, Stacy stared out at Los Angeles.

She had loved it since she had driven there with John Damone—a kid singer, her first single just released, who had never heard of James Kilcannon. “The freeway is forever,” a disc jockey had proclaimed as her beat-up Volvo joined a river of people on the move. She had begun tailgating and braking, shifting and accelerating, and as she'd hit Beverly Hills still high on the challenge, rows of palm trees seemed to float and vanish in the shimmering subtropic light. The image of a mirage had come to her then, and over time she had seen Los Angeles as a deceptive Oriental city and its absence of center as a metaphor: you could drive the maze for years, searching for the place where you could make things happen, but it kept moving behind some palm tree in a canyon you couldn't find. Yet, that first day, she had felt that
they
would find it, she and Damone—passing a convertible at the West Hollywood line, her voice had come from someone else's radio.

It had been the first time. Stacy had pulled over to the side, and realized she was close to crying.

She had been twenty-five then, and had written the song when she was seventeen, a thousand crummy clubs ago. “We've worked so hard,” she'd murmured.

And one year later, when she had come back from her first exhausting concert tour to realize that she was making more money than God, she'd found a Spanishy-looking house in the West Hollywood hills so outrageous in its campiness that she'd grinned just walking through it: a bar modeled as an English pub with slot machines; a sunken bathtub with a bidet next to the sauna; Greek columns surrounding the pool. By the time she and Damone had found the black bedroom with mirrors she had been laughing out loud. “Looks like a wet dream from Walt Disney,” he'd remarked, and Stacy had decided to buy it on the spot. She'd moved her piano and all her sound equipment into the mirrored bedroom and stuck two palm trees by the pool so she could write songs under them. And now her face was as famous as her voice, and the city of mirages was her home. It disoriented her to stare at it from Jamie's suite.

She had met him four years later, with her third album number one, and her time so consumed by writing and touring that Stacy had wondered if she'd killed the rest of her. And then Damone had called to announce with exaggerated reverence, “Senator James Kilcannon wants to meet you.”

That strangers called because they both were famous had no longer startled or impressed her. “He wants money, right?”

“He wants you to sing—the way the law works
you
can only give a thousand bucks, but by packing an arena you can raise four hundred thousand more.”

“But why would I
want
to?”

“Shall I tell him that?”

She thought a moment. “I will.”

But James Kilcannon had surprised her.

Stacy had been used to meeting politicians so determined to project warmth that it felt like she'd been mugged. But an air of amusement about Kilcannon suggested that he held part of himself back; this hint of complexity had appealed to her. His hazel eyes had an iris so much wider than the normal that they seemed to absorb everything around him, yet his fine sculpted face made him look impossibly young to be president. “You're wondering what I want from you,” he'd said. “Besides thirty seconds as a gossip item.”

They were having lunch at Harry's Bar. Like other things in Los Angeles, its original was elsewhere; one difference from Hemingway's Florence haunt was the faces turned to watch them. Smiling, Stacy answered, “I'm just curious how you'll rationalize it.”

“Simply. I want to be president and I think I need you to do that.”

“I don't believe that. And I don't believe you do.”

“I'm afraid I do, though. Six months ago, I came to see you in Washington. People who waited for hours to hear you sing wouldn't cross the street to vote for me or anyone.”

“It's because they can feel things without being used.”

“Stacy, it's because there are two Americas now, and the one you reach doesn't respond to words or ideas, but to sound and pictures—film, TV, video games, music. I don't like this, but I'm not responsible for them—you are.” His face was keen with challenge. “I wonder if it's enough to let them make you famous because you're a beautiful woman who can sing.”

She tilted her head. “If you're trying to make me feel guilty, skip it. I've worked too hard.”

“Then you've achieved something,” he answered crisply, “for yourself. But if people like you don't ask their fans to commit to the world they live in, we'll end up with a generation so passive and easily manipulated that the next Hitler could stage the Holocaust as a miniseries.”

She gave him a comic look of skepticism. “You're running to keep Hitler off of MTV?”

“I'm running for things
you've
said you care about—like women's rights, for openers.” Shrugging, he finished in a throwaway tone. “And because I can't imagine being dead unless I'm president first.”

Suddenly, she wanted to communicate with him, not just fence. “Does needing it that much ever scare you?”

For an instant he looked so vulnerable that Stacy knew she'd caught him by surprise. “Does it you?” he asked.

“It sets you apart,” she answered softly, “to try and do what other people can't. It doesn't help that you never quite know why they want to be with you.”

As Kilcannon glanced down, she noticed his lashes were unusually long. “Stacy, I'm not asking you to sing, all right?”

“Then what do you want?”

“Something more, I think.” Looking up again, he asked quietly, “Are you free?”

There was no missing it. After a time, she said, “I can be.”

As they left, Stacy realized they made a striking couple.

Later, as he held her in the dark, she wondered why it had happened. “Stacy?” he murmured.

“Yes?”

“I really
did
like your concert.”

Stacy laughed aloud. “So you
are
going to ask me to sing.”

“Not after this.” His voice softened. “What I want now, is to see you.”

For two years he had done that, in fragments stolen from his race for president or jammed between her tours. For weeks he'd be a face on her television; then they would be lovers on the Baja. They'd rented a house there. Mornings they would swim, or run the beach. In the afternoon, hiding from the savage brightness, they would make love. He read poetry to her, Yeats and Dylan Thomas. Sometimes Stacy sang new songs she'd written as he listened, thoughtful. Her reasons for performing seemed to fascinate him—as if, perhaps, he saw himself reflected. Besides Damone, he was the man with whom she talked most easily.

“How is it for you?” Jamie asked her. “Onstage.”

They were sitting at a white wooden table overlooking the ocean; their bottle of Chardonnay was half empty.

“It's getting harder,” she said finally. “They expect so much now.”

“You never use drugs?”

“It's safer to depend on myself.” Stacy shrugged. “Sometimes, before a show, I don't feel too great.”

Jamie gazed out at the ocean. “Do you know why you keep doing it?”

Stacy wondered how to explain this. “When I write a song,” she said, “it's still not finished. It's only when I can take something that doesn't exist outside me, and put myself out there to give it to other people, that I feel complete. There's nothing I've ever felt as strong as that.” Speaking this, she realized how much it scared her. “Sometime, I won't have that anymore. Maybe they'll stop coming. Maybe, some night, I won't step through the curtain.”

“And if you can't, then who will you be?”

She turned to him. “I've never really known.”

Jamie reached out, brushing the hair back from her face.