Everything and More (46 page)

With Gerry she strolled around the Place du Tertre, where a few of his buddies, in order to pay for their serious work, set up easels to paint Utrillo-style street scenes for the occasional tourist.

Together she and Gerry shopped on the Rue des Abbesses and the Rue le Pic for the meals that she fixed in the bathroom-kitchen. They played a silly, happy game, dividing their purchases by gender. There were boy-Gerry-foods, the meats in Au Couchon Rose, the oysters in Lepic sur Mer. The girl-Roy-foods were selected in Patisserie Babette and Crémerie des Abbesses. They made love in the afternoon with dusty shadows of pigeons coming through the attic skylight.

Considering she was crazy in love with Gerry Horak, she knew amazingly little about him.

When she inquired about his life in America, he put her off truculently. “I’m not much at shooting the bull.” The meanings behind his vivid, huge abstracts eluded her, and she would have thought him a failure at his profession had she not discovered a slickly handsome four-color brochure put out by his New York gallery: the first page listed the museums where he’d been exhibited, an impressive number of first-rankers that included the Tate and the Museum of Modern Art. From Roxanne de Liso she learned that he had spent a year in the psychiatric ward at the Birmingham military hospital in the San Fernando Valley. “I don’t mean to be a gossip,” said Roxanne, “but I knew him back at poor Henry Lissauer’s, and well, you seem to have fallen under the Horak spell. So you ought to know he does have a spotty history. Personally I’ve never seen a sign of mental instability, but he
was
in psychiatric confinement.”

Though Gerry never discussed his family, he definitely was not what her mother would call a gentleman-though-poor. His manners left something to be desired. He could be truculent. He invariably cut off her attempts to share her past with him. But so what difference did any of this make? At her advanced age, when every single girl in her KayZee pledge group was married and had a minimum of two babies, she had finally found love.

Two days before she was to return home on the twenty-four-hour polar flight, she accepted that the most important part of her would die—literally cease to exist—if she were torn from Gerry Horak.

“Gerry,” she asked, her face burning, “what about coming back to California?”

“California,” he said with a brooding look. “Why?”

“You’ve been talking about trying seascapes in all different lights. I seem to recall that Los Angeles lies on the coast—I forget the name of the ocean.” She reached for his broad hand. “Gerry, I have a good job, we could share expenses.”

“Look, babe, we get along just swell in the hay, and you’re great to be with, too. And I’d probably join up with you if I hadn’t been badly stung once. But now I stay clear of entanglements.”

“One rotten apple,” she said. “All women aren’t bitches.”

“It soured me. Eventually you’d be getting a raw deal, holding the bag.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

They were resting on a sunlit bench in the slanting, cobbled little park near the Rue Ravignon. Shading his eyes, he squinted at her with a funny, wistful expression she had never seen on him.

“I’m self-centered about my work,” he said. “I can be a mean bastard when I’m disturbed.”

“You need somebody to do everything for you so you
can
paint.”

“And it’s not in my books to get married.”

“I respect that.”

“Later on you won’t.”

“Hey, you’re talking to a career gal.”

“That’s what you say now.”

“Marriage isn’t on my agenda either,” she lied. Once they were together, Gerry would see the manifold advantages of marriage to a woman with a full and loving heart.

Gerry continued to squint at her with that peculiar pensiveness.

She held her breath, waiting, waiting. A woman lugged two string bags into a house with fringed lace curtains.

“What the hell,” he said finally. “I’ve been gone damn near four years, that’s plenty.”

Returning to Beverly Hills, Roy did the unthinkable. She moved out of her mother’s house to set up housekeeping with a man.

NolaBee poured out a stream of Southern-accented, smoke-punctuated pleadings, warnings, reproaches. Waces, Roys, and Fairburns, she implied, were turning in their Greenward graves. When Roy carried out her cartons, NolaBee hurled her final invective: “I reckon you’re making your own bed, Roy, and my feelings just don’t enter into it.” Roy invited her mother for dinner, to Sunday brunch; NolaBee refused, and with each refusal Roy felt that ancient, futile jealousy: her mother had forgiven Marylin
her
trespasses.

It wasn’t that Roy wanted to alienate her mother or horrify her KayZee alumnae group. She couldn’t help herself. Gerry Horak was in her blood. It was as if in surrendering her body to him, she had also committed her soul. He owned her. Yet, paradoxically, for the first time in her life she felt absolutely in the center of herself. Adoring, loving, sexy. (She was uncertain whether or not she had reached the ultimate peak, but she found physical joy and a ravishing satisfaction in giving her guy what he needed.) I’m a real woman, she would think. Gerry’s woman.

He never mentioned marriage.

Roy thought about it all the time. Panic, sweaty panic, overcame her when she thought they might not eventually be married.

She stopped to market, then drove up Beverly Glen. Here, in this steep canyon wilderness where mule deer mated and opossums went their solitary way, artists, musicians, writers, and other oddballs avoided the bourgeois straights of the Eisenhower era.

She parked in a stone-paved notch, lugging her heavy grocery bag up the fifty-three steps that led through a sylvan grove of spicy-scented eucalyptus.

Moisture curled the tendrils of her short poodle cut and she was panting by the time she reached the narrow grassy ledge fronting the redwood cottage. In the ruddy late-afternoon sunlight, Gerry—naked except for his faded cut-off jeans—stood slashing paint onto a huge canvas stretched against the wood shingle wall.

Totally absorbed, he did not notice her arrival, so she watched him a few moments. Sweat sparkled on the golden pink on his broad shoulders where the tan had peeled. Virile brown hairs sprang from his strongly muscled thighs and calves. Biceps swelling massive as a peasant’s, he thwacked on a gob of paint.

The work itself, she ignored. All greens and browns, its meaning was inexplicable to her.

He could get pretty brutal when she watched him, so she proceeded into the inconvenient old kitchen. Before she put away the
groceries, she took off her flower appliquéd yellow Adele Simpson—if she wore anything good around the kitchen, she invariably spattered herself. Barefoot, wearing old black toreador pants and a halter, she started the coals in the round portable barbecue outside the kitchen door, then peeled the potatoes, slicing them thinly to fry in butter.

She was washing the salad when she heard the shower.

These hot nights, they ate outside. She lit the hurricane lamps.

“Pretty swank,” Gerry said. The first words he had spoken to her in the hour and a half since she had arrived home.

Roy’s freckled face crinkled eagerly. “I aim to please,” she said. “Have a good day?”

“Worked,” he said tersely. “What about you?”

If she nattered when he was preoccupied, he would blow up, but once he had directed a question at her, she knew it was all right to talk. Between mouthfuls of rare porterhouse, crisp potatoes, and salad, she told him about a good customer who had returned a Galanos original with makeup stains around the collar, about the well-corseted young Brazilian matron who—hallelujah!—had bought fifteen pairs of shoes with matching purses, a shipment of fall sweaters arriving in the wrong colors. Beyond the glass-enclosed candle flames, Gerry nodded. He was sympathetic to her, though not to Patricia’s. He scorned the idle females who made a cult object of their aging flesh. Roy was baffled by the impressive resentment that he nursed against these rich women whose elegant
modus vivendi
she admired without envy.

While she did the dishes, Gerry sat at the living-room table frowning over some sketches he had done last Sunday on the beach at Santa Monica.

The night air had cooled off the small cottage, and she sank onto the bulbous couch with its cretonne slipcovers, listening to the owl that lived in the live oak, to the crickets, the faraway cars. The haysweet scent of the grass that she had just watered drifted through the open windows to mingle with the smell of Jergen’s lotion on her hands. For a few minutes she floated in the rustic pleasures.

She reached for
Time.

Marylin’s new movie,
Providence Valley,
was panned with bitchery and insufferable wit. A final ameliorative paragraph read: “Rain Fairburn gives a luminous performance which so captures the innocence of first love that it is impossible to believe this lovely creature has two children. The crumbling studio system should recognize her qualities and not cast her in wells of mediocrity like
Providence Valley.”

If they’d had a telephone she would have called Marylin to congratulate
her on the paragraph. Resting the magazine on her halter, Roy considered the paradox of Marylin, who was universally viewed by the press as having the best of all possible worlds, a tip-top career as well as a long-lasting marriage, a child brought back from the dead to perfect normalcy. (Marylin’s travail over Billy’s hospital bed, gushily rehashed by the avid-eyed day nurse, had taken up nearly an entire issue of
Ladies’ Home Journal.
) But the outside world was not privy to Marylin’s heartrending stillness and pallor during Billy’s slow recovery. Marylin once again had been suffering the unassuageable pain that follows amputation of love. Neither Marylin nor Joshua ever spoke of Linc, but BJ corresponded with her brother. He had moved to Rome. Marylin had patched her life together as best she could, tied to an aging, domineering husband and a career that she had not sought, solaced by two adorable children. (Roy’s fey little niece, Sari, had been born nearly a year to the day after Billy’s accident.)

Gerry put down his sketchbook.

“There’s a review of
Providence Valley
in here.” She held up the magazine. “Hated the film, loved Marylin.”

“She was damn good,” Gerry said. With Roy he had attended the sneak at the Bruin. They occasionally went to the Fernaulds’ Sunday barbecues, and as far as Roy could tell, he and Joshua hit it off at these hectic and lavish affairs—he certainly warmed to Marylin, but what mortal man wouldn’t react favorably to that exquisite, luminous glow? NolaBee’s continued failure to show up when they were at the Fernaulds’ made it obvious that she was avoiding them. Gerry had laughed about it. But when Roy had wept, he comforted her.

Stretching vigorously, he came over, grasping her hand, pulling her to her feet. As they hugged, a delicate flush covered her freckled face. She could feel his rising erection.

“Love you so, Gerry,” she murmured.

She went into the bathroom to insert her diaphragm. No matter how hot and heavy they got, she always took it from its round blue metal box. Marylin’s long-ago contretemps had indelibly marked her. Often, though, as Roy squatted with the rubber circle, a thought would come to her: Maybe being preg will do the trick. Yet she always pressed home the jelly-slathered disk. Bad enough that she was concealing from Gerry her unquenchable need for matrimony. She rebelled with all her warm and open mind at further subterfuge or devious trickery. In bed, she kissed down his scarred chest to his hard penis: he expected intimacies of her that once had shocked her to the core but that she now accepted as part of being his woman. He himself spent ages on what marriage manuals called foreplay. She was wet everywhere before he threw off the sheet to kneel behind her
crouching body. This was the position he preferred, so she accepted it, though she longed to be face to face so they could kiss. (In those bleakest moments of pain when she wondered if he would ever marry her, she had decided that he preferred the anonymity of an abstract vessel.) His sweating body rushed swiftly over her, and then he collapsed gasping.

Had
it
happened to her? In all the heavy breathing, his and her own, she never could be positive.

  
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