Dreams Are Not Enough (25 page)

“Bethie, she’s younger than us. To cash in the chips at her age…”

The next afternoon PD finished his last phone call forty-five minutes before he was due at Scandia to buy dinner for a casting director, so he decided to drop in at the hospital.

It was toward the end of visiting hours. Hurrying down the corN

rid or he was surprised to see Hap emerge from room 1001. If he were in there again, PD decided, it must mean she was up to company.

“So she’s feeling better?” he asked.

Hap shook his head. His gray eyes were bloodshot with weariness, and thick, fair stubble showed on his jaw.

“Jesus, PD, she’s burning up.

They’ve got restrainers on her because of the IVs, but she’s too weak to move. “

“What about the leg?”

“She made such a fuss that I convinced them to hold off on the amputation. What if it’s the wrong decision?” Hap slumped in the chrome and tweed chair kept by the door. His usual calm had deserted him and he was struggling for composure.

“How could I have let her keep on working?”

Sitting next to his cousin, PD said, “Stop blaming yourself. She gave you the go-ahead. Any director would’ve done the same.”

Hap said nothing.

PD changed the subject.

“Hap, what gives? You and Maxim put up your own money and work your butts off. And now, at the most crucial time for any movie, Maxim’s away incommunicado and you hand over the final cut to another editor.”

“George is a good editor.”

“George isn’t good, George is dynamite. But ever since you and Maxim began the project you’ve been saying that this is a new kind of film for Hollywood, and only you guys know how to make it.”

“The studio wants a rush job. Right now I can’t put in the time.” Hap gnawed on his thumb knuckle.

PD’s mouth folded shrewdly, and his active brain made a connection that he would have reached far, far earlier had it not been for those sly sexual confessions of Maxim’s in Mendocino. It’s not Alyssia and Maxim, it’s Alyssia and Hap.

After a few seconds PD said, “Hap, this is in the nature of a warning.

I ran into Barry and Uncle Desmond in the lobby. I think Uncle Desmond was telling Barry he ought to be here more. So I imagine he’ll come up to tell you to be here less. “

“Screw him,” Hap said savagely.

“Only trying to help,” PD said.

“This is Dad’s first visit. Barry was here exactly two minutes yesterday. Uncle Tim and Aunt Clara haven’t even phoned for information.”

“I lit candles for her.”

“Jesus, I didn’t mean you. If you hadn’t brought her in” -The private nurse, one PD hadn’t seen before, looked out with a pinched, plaintive expression.

“Where’s Miss del Mar’s husband?”

Hap had jumped to his feet so abruptly that his chair fell.

“Is she awake?”

“For the moment.”

“I’m the one she wants to see,” Hap said, barging by the nurse.

With a questioning look, she closed the door behind them.

PD walked amid other departing visitors. At the long windows, he paused to gaze broodingly at the night, his absent gaze fixed on lights glinting on the Hollywood Hills. Hap and Alyssia, he thought, and tried to figure how this new configuration affected him. He could no more control his dexterously agile mind than his heart rate. You prick, he told himself, and moved briskly toward the bank of elevators.

As he waited, one of the doors slid open and his uncle and cousin emerged.

From Barry’s hunched shoulders and his nervous little smirk it was obvious that Uncle Desmond had been lambasting him.

PD greeted them and, since it seemed top priority business wise to be in on what transpired, he gave himself permission to be tardy for his appointment. He hurried back down the corridor, keeping pace with his uncle.

Reaching room 1001, Desmond Cordiner fixed his glittery, dark eyes on

PD.

“I thought Hap was here.”

“He went inside.”

Desmond Cordiner gave Barry a sharp nod and Barry scuttled into the darkened hospital room.

After a full minute Hap emerged alone.

“Hello, Dad,” he said calmly.

“How is she?”

“Sleeping.”

“Then she doesn’t need company, does she?”

Hap stared levelly at his father.

“Dad, just butt out.”

“It’s Barry’s place to be in there.”

“Dad, no more fucking us up,” Hap said in a low, rumbling voice.

“So she told you.”

“She should’ve in the first place. And I’m repeating—just butt out.”

PD feared his uncle would explode. But instead, Desmond Cordiner removed his glasses, rubbing the bridge of his narrow, impressive nose.

“If that’s the way you feel, Hap, fine. But remember, from now on in unless we handle it right, the press’ll be shredding both you and her.”

Hap’s stubborn, weary eyes remained on his father for a second more, then he turned and went back into the room.

“Uncle Desmond,” PD said.

“Not to worry about a scandal. This isn’t the forties.”

“Stop conciliating, you little agent shit,” Desmond Cordiner snapped.

“I know the goddamn decade, and I know what they’re like in Podunk.”

Then he stared at Alyssia’s door, frowning thoughtfully.

The following afternoon at visiting hours the family began showing up at the hospital. Barry was accompanied by both parents. Lily Zaffarano arrived with her elder daughter, who was married. Rosalynd Cordiner brought a huge gilt box of Godiva chocolates. Desmond Cordiner and Frank Zaffarano came in the evening after work. Beth dropped by. Other family members showed up. It seemed immaterial to these visitors that they couldn’t get in the sickroom. They chatted with one another in the hall, repairing in twos and threes to the ground floor coffee shop.

The Magnum publicity department, though a skeleton of what it had been in earlier decades, generated enormous coverage for the illness.

Hollywood correspondents and television crews crowded the hallways, conferring with any available family member, nurse, doctor or hospital employee. A woman from UPI put on a green uniform and wheeled a bucket into room 1001. When she removed a small Nikon from amid her cleaning equipment, the private nurse on that shift, a two-hundred-pound black woman, shoved the news hen bodily out the door. After that one of Magnum’s security force sat stationed outside.

It was variously reported that Alyssia del Mar, the American who had made it big in France by baring her bosom, was dying, was recovering, that her leg had been amputated, that her leg was fine, that she was in a coma, that she was already reading scripts for a new film. The telegram sent by President and Mrs. Johnson, the air-delivered orchids from Saint-Simon’s Paris greenhouse, the more conventionally delivered flowers from the Burtons, who did not know the invalid, and Ingrid Bergman, who had met her once, were reported on in detail. Only Joyce Haber mentioned that Harvard Cordiner, director of the patient’s latest film, had access to her room, and that item was in conjunction with a story lauding Alyssia’s pluck at continuing to film Wandering On despite a critical injury.

For a week the world kept up with Alyssia del Mar. On the seventh day, a press conference was called at Mount Sinai, and Alyssia’s team of doctors announced that she was off the critical list, calling her condition guardedly grave. But whatever happened, she would keep the leg.

“Good morning,” Alyssia said when Hap arrived at seven—he had wangled dispensation from the floor nurse to sneak up whenever.

“You’re looking”

“Almost human,” Alyssia supplied. Her weak voice held a hint of humor.

“No, great,” he said, glancing at the large, kindly, black nurse.

Nodding sagely, the nurse said, “If it’s okay with you, Miss del Mar, I’ll get me my wake-up coffee.”

When they were alone in the flower-filled room, Hap buried his face in the pillow next to Alyssia’s black hair, which was stringy. The clear liquid continued dripping into her veins, the monitors behind the bed moved in their customary computerized jogs and Hap Cordiner wept with relief.

As the ambulance drove up to the house, neighbors and a half dozen journalists waited on the sidewalk. Barry, currently domiciled in the Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow maintained by the Whitney Charles Bank, emerged from the doorway—Desmond Cordiner had ordered him to be on hand to greet his wife. He trailed the gantry from the ambulance to the front door, a progress recorded by Nikons and shoulder-held television cameras.

The drab living room was exuberant with roses: miniature pink Cecil Brunners in water glasses, crimson American Beauties regal on their three-foot stems, big fragrant yellow roses in baskets, buds of white roses in ceramic holders. Although Alyssia no longer had on the cast and could walk a few steps, the attendants carefully transferred her to the couch. Juanita covered her with a pink cashmere afghan-having lost twelve pounds, Alyssia was perpetually cold. Barry wrote a check for the ambulance charges. After the attendants left, Juanita returned to the kitchen and Hap emerged, kissing Alyssia’s forehead and sitting on the couch next to her.

The threesome waited in awkward silence while the immediate neighbors were being interviewed outside. The press cars drove off and onlookers straggled back to their houses.

“I’m on my way,” Barry said.

“Farewell.”

“There’s the door,” Hap said.

“What kind of tone is that?” Barry retorted.

“I’m not entangled with your wife.”

“Just get the hell out,” Hap said, rising to his feet.

Barry stalked out of the house.

Alyssia asked, “Aren’t we going to be civilized?”

“Exceedingly civilized,” Hap told her.

“If he makes any more trouble, I’ll strangle him in the most civilized way.”

“More trouble? What trouble has he made?”

“It’s quite a list. The booze. Relying on you to support him.

Humiliating you with Whitney in Mendocino. Leaving you alone here when you were practically dead. Avoiding the hospital until Dad laid into him. “

“He does the best he can,” she said, annoyed at her defensive anger on Barry’s behalf—and almost as irritated at Hap for rousing the hackles of her wifely loyalty.

“It’s not like you to bad-mouth anybody, Hap.

And you know Barry—he means well, but he’s just sort of weak.

Things’ll be better for him when he marries Whitney. “

“Marry Whitney? I got the impression she avoided that kind of thing.”

A whisper of her old jealousy—Whitney and Hap disappearing nightly into their cottage at the Three Rock Inn—brushed Alyssia.

“He says she’s taking him East to meet her parents.”

Hap’s jaw tightened. His anger, Alyssia was discovering, generally arose from a conviction that some injustice had been perpetrated.

She changed the subject.

“The flowers are gorgeous.” She touched a pink petal.

“Who sent these?”

“PD,”

Hap said.

PD had ordered a stream of cologne and flower arrangements from the Helping Hand Gift Shop on the hospital’s ground floor.

“He’s been terrific,” Alyssia said.

“And the rest?”

“Me and Juanita.”

At that moment Juanita came in with a bowl of fruit.

“Mostly Hap,” she said.

During their hospital vigil, Hap had formed a friendship with the reluctant Juanita. She had succumbed to his warmth when he pointed out that there was no point calling him Mr. Cordiner. / know you’re Alyssia’s sister.

“Thank you, both of you,” Alyssia murmured.

After supper Hap carried Alyssia to the bedroom.

“Put me down, Hap.

I’m supposed to walk. “

“This is a special occasion,” he said, depositing her on the double bed.

“Special? Mmm?”

He reddened.

“Your first night home.”

She smiled, still looking up at him.

“Juanita’s making up the couch for me,” he said.

He was of course running true to form. As a gentleman, he was leaving it up to her to indicate a readiness for sex. Longing to feel his comforting strength and warmth all night, yearning to wake up next to him, she was on the verge of saying: We could sleep together, just sleep. But then she decided that cuddling, though Barry’s game, would be cruel and inhuman punishment for Hap. And sex was indeed contraindicated, not only because of her general weakness, but also because of the leg, which still ached deep in the marrow.

Alyssia recuperated with astonishing swiftness. After a week she was walking slow laps with Hap around the backyard. (When she ventured into the nearby streets, gaping children trailed after her and adults peered through windows. ) Every day Hap managed to come up with a small gift to make her laugh—a windup plush bird that played “La Paloma,” a tee shirt with a huge red heart over the left breast, a Peter Max poster. She regained her appetite with a vengeance: Hap brought home Uno bars and Snickers, chili dogs, donuts and Twinkies—all the denied luxuries of her childhood. By the end of September she had regained five pounds, and her health.

Those hot fall nights there was a tension between them, a near awkwardness. It was caused by the currents of sexual electricity in the air.

Alyssia’s entire body ached for Hap. All she had to do, she knew, was stroke his hand or look at him in a meaningful way, and he would be in her double bed. She was totally unable to act out the gesture. By the bright daylight, her reticence seemed idiotic—wasn’t Hap proving by word and deed how crazy he was about her? But darkness inevitably reminded her that he was the studio chieftain’s son, and that she worked in the fields.

Riding on the coattails of Alyssia’s cliffhanger recovery, Magnum’s publicity department racked up a miraculous campaign for Wandering On.

CBS Evening News bumped a story on Fellini for an interview with the Cordiner brothers, while the New York Times invited Whitney Charles, Hollywood newcomer, to model styles that went with the Wandering On hippie mood. Newsweek devoted a double-page spread to the making of the film. Alyssia wasn’t well enough to beat the drums, but a soapy article detailing her brush with death appeared in TV Guide.