Beauty and the Brain (43 page)

Brenda and Colin laughed along with the
nurse as George dove with relish into his roast beef. Brenda
blessed Nurse Cleary for providing relief to her dour mood, if only
momentarily.

The distraction didn’t last, of course.
After George ate, the nurse shooed them out of his room, and she
and Colin were left with each other, the memory of a magical
afternoon, and a future she couldn’t even guess at. Pragmatic as
ever, she decided to get as much from Colin as she could as long as
they remained at the Cedar Crest Lodge.

Feeling shy but determined, she asked,
“Would you like to come up to my room for a while, Colin?”

He gaped at her as if he couldn’t imagine
such a thing. Brenda experienced a sharp stab of irritation. “Don’t
worry,” she said dryly, “I won’t ask you to do anything you don’t
want to do.”

“What?” He gulped. “I mean— No. I mean, yes,
I’d love to go to your room. And—and—well, you don’t have to do
anything you don’t want to do, either.”

Swell. Just what she wanted to hear. She
felt glum when she and Colin entered her room a few minutes later.
He taught her another lesson in lovemaking that night, though, so
Brenda decided she ought to count her blessings and not long for
things that couldn’t be.

“Cut! And . . . It’s a wrap!” Martin cried
through his megaphone, joy ringing in the words. “Great job,
everybody. This picture is going to be a winner.”

Dismay flooded Colin so suddenly that he
winced, although he immediately chided himself for being foolish.
He’d known there were only a few more days of filming left to be
done after George’s accident. He slanted a glance at his brother,
who was out of bed and sitting on a stump, looking bruised but
unbowed, his arm in a sling. George looked happy, too.

Might as well be, Colin thought bitterly.
George would undoubtedly work with Brenda countless more times as
he built a career in the pictures. This was it for Colin, and his
heart hurt at the thought.

He sought out Brenda among the crowd of
Peerless employees who swarmed onto the set as soon as Martin’s
announcement hit the air. The cameras stopped churning, sprockets
stopped clunking out onto the ground, the cameramen grinned and
shook out their arms, which were tired from cranking, and a general
cheer went up.

Brenda appeared to be happy, too. How
depressing.

Nevertheless, Colin knew better than to make
a spectacle of himself by sulking in a corner. Gathering his
courage in both hands and shoving his misery aside, he joined the
throng, trying with all his might to look as if he was happy,
too.

So what if his pose was a lie? So what if
the picture was a ridiculous piece of fantastic fluff? So what if
it reinforced white America’s misunderstandings about Indians? So
what if the story couldn’t have happened the way it was depicted in
Indian Love Song
in a million years?

So what if he never saw Brenda again.

Colin’s heart gave a sudden, sharp spasm. He
told himself to stop brooding. If he never saw her again, the world
would continue its orbit around the sun, the moon would continue
its orbit around the earth, the sun would continue to shine, people
would continue to misinterpret history, not to mention science, and
nothing would change. Except him. He’d never be the same again.

“Colin!”

Brenda’s voice cut through his gloom, and he
looked up. She was smiling at him. It fascinated Colin that every
time she did that, his insides lit up as if a lamp had been lighted
in his soul. He didn’t understand it. Such a phenomenon didn’t fit
into any scientific dogma he’d ever read.

To hell with science, he thought savagely,
and then he couldn’t believe he’d done such a heretical thing.
Whatever would his parents think? Or his professors? Those
dried-out, dried-up, gray-haired sacks of trivia and nonsense.

Good Lord, he was failing fast.

His mind went blank when Brenda rushed up
and threw her arms around him.

“Oh, Colin! We made it! In spite of George’s
accident and the wrong Indians and flowers on the tipis and
everything else, we made it! We can all go home again!”

His arms had wrapped around her naturally,
as they’d become accustomed to doing in the past several days,
since she and he had first made love.

The notion of never making love to her again
almost forced a cry of anguish out of him He suppressed it with an
effort. He didn’t let her go, but he did whisper, “Will that make
you happy?”

“Oh, yes. I miss my family so much.”

“Ah.”

She seemed to sense something of a
troublesome nature in his attitude, because she drew slightly
back—without releasing him, thank God—and peered up into, his eyes.
Her own glorious blue eyes, even set as they were this moment
against a background of dead white makeup, were large and luminous
and remained the most beautiful eyes Colin had ever seen.

What a marvelous specimen of the female
human being Brenda was. She was, without a doubt, the most perfect
example of the species ever to have graced the earth.

When her hand touched his cheek, he pressed
into it, aching for closeness. “You don’t sound very happy about
it, Colin.” Her voice feathered across his senses as soft as a
dandelion puff

He took a big breath and decided he didn’t
care if he made a total fool of himself. What was pride in the face
of so great a loss as this? “I’m going to miss you, Brenda.”

“You will?”

Colin didn’t understand why she sounded
surprised. It must be obvious to her by this time that he worshiped
the very ground she trod upon, not to mention every other thing
about her. “Yes. Very much. Terribly.” He almost said he feared
their parting would kill him, but such a dramatic utterance went so
exactly against everything of truth and science he’d learned to
value in life that he couldn’t do it.

She didn’t speak immediately. When she did,
Colin’s heart lurched again. “I’m going to miss you, too.”

“You will?” He didn’t believe her.

Again she waited for several seconds before
she spoke. Her words were very soft, and they sounded tentative, as
if she doubted he’d be happy to hear them. “Oh, yes. I . . . I love
you, Colin.”

He blinked at her, sure he’d misunderstood.
For a second, his mind raced like a guinea pig on a wheel,
spinning, spinning, spinning, trying to decipher what she’d said,
sure she couldn’t have said what he thought he’d heard. At last he
said, “I, uh, beg your pardon?”

She made a
tsk
sound, as if she
didn’t want to have to repeat herself. She did it anyway. “I said,
I love you.”

Evidently he still looked doubtful—or
perhaps dumbfounded—because she hurried on, “You don’t have to love
me back. I’m not trying to put any pressure on you. I’m not that
type of person, no matter what you think. But I do want you to know
that I love you. Very much.”

He realized that tears had pooled in her
eyes, and the understanding of what it had cost her to admit her
love smote him. Hard. He still couldn’t comprehend the magnitude of
her confession; it sounded impossible to him. “You love me? Me?” if
he’d had a hand free, he’d have pointed at his chest, but his hands
were occupied in holding on to Brenda.

The faintest hint of exasperation visited
her face. “Yes, darn it. You don’t have to look and sound so
incredulous. I know you don’t want to hear me say it, but it’s the
truth, and that’s that.”

“No;” he said. “I mean no, I don’t not want
to hear you say it.” Dash it, he’d never been so ungrammatical in
his life. He tried again. “I mean, you can’t possibly love me.”

The hint grew into a certainty. She snapped,
“Why not? Is there some sort of scientific principle that says an
actress can’t love a professor?”

“What?” He didn’t understand her question.
“No. I mean, yes. I mean, what does science have to do with
anything?”

She rolled her eyes. “Nothing. But why can’t
I love you? Is such a thing so impossible?”

“Yes.” Colin started feeling a wee bit more
cheerful. “I mean, no. It’s not—well, it
seems
impossible,
but I don’t suppose there’s any hard-and-fast biological or
physiological canon against such a thing occurring. Stranger
behaviors have been manifested in animal life before this, I’m
sure. Like, say, cats nursing rabbit babies and so forth.”

“Good God.” She leaned back and stared at
him as if he were a rare and peculiar subspecies of the genus
Homo sapiens
.
Homo idioticus
, perhaps.

“But—but—but—” Colin stopped stammering,
drew in a breath, swallowed, and fumbled forward. “I mean, you
can’t love me. I’m just a stupid scholar.”

She tilted her head to, one side and studied
his face, clearly puzzled.

“What I mean to say,” he slogged on, “is
that I can’t believe that you, of all people, could possibly love
me, of all people!’

“Why not?”

Why not? Why
not
? Good question.
“But—but—I’m so—so—stuffy.”

She nodded. Not encouraging, that.

“And I treated you so badly.”

Another nod.

“And—and—” Suddenly, the dam holding back
his emotions burst, and he cried out, “And I love you more than
life itself!” He didn’t even qualify his sensational statement with
scientific theories about how such a state of being was impossible
to achieve.

“You do?”

“God, yes. And I knew you’d never marry me,
so I didn’t even think to ask you.”

“Really? How odd.”

“But—but— Dash it, Brenda, if you love me,
and I love you, why can’t we get married?”

“I can’t think of a single reason.”

“You can’t?” Colin stared at her,
bewildered.

She shook her head.

He swallowed. “Would you mind living in Los
Angeles? That’s where my job is.”

“Not at all. I’ve been wanting to retire for
a long time now.”

“And you won’t mind being married to a
professor?”

“Gosh, no. As long as you promise to
practice your lectures on me.”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly. And you won’t mind if I buy a big
house for us with a huge library and a billion books?”

“Heavens, no. I’m not one of those men who
resent the success of women.”

“Glad to hear it.” There was a distinct
twinkle in her eyes now.

Colin, still scarcely able to believe this
was happening, swallowed once more, cleared his throat, and took
one last chance. “So—so, will you marry me?”

“You bet I will.”

Colin barely heard the whoops and cheers
that went up from the Peerless folks when he and Brenda kissed each
other.

George acted as his brother’s best man at
the wedding. Martin presented the happy couple with a complete set
of Shakespeare as a wedding gift.

Brenda and Colin, who moved Brenda’s mother
to Los Angeles, built a fabulous estate on Sunset Boulevard. Colin
was soon one of the most popular professors on the new university
campus. Brenda was as happy as a cat in a cream pot with her big
library and her books.

They were both delighted that their three
sons and two daughters possessed both beauty and brains.