Four Wives (27 page)

L
OVE SAT OUTSIDE THE
Beverly Hills Hotel in her rental car and let the memories flood in. It was a landmark now, but in the days when Alexander Rice would come their way, it was an overpriced and notorious home for the rich and famous. The Pink Palace had been a perfect fit for a man who needed to feed his ego.

That was what Yvonne used to say when he came to town. That was the explanation she would give Love when he came and didn’t call.
It’s a full-time job, keeping his ego satisfied.
In reality, his trips to the West Coast were infrequent. L.A. was a town of uneducated, flighty celebrities. Not much for him to do if he wasn’t cutting a deal with one of them.

Now he was back again, brokering another deal for himself. How ironic that he’d lived so close for most of her adult life, and yet they were meeting here’at the scene of her many crimes. She closed her eyes hard, but the feeling remained, encasing her in humiliation both old and new. Old, for the mistakes of her adolescence. And new, for accepting her father’s pity, which was all this could possibly be. She was convinced of this now. Pity. Duty. Or perhaps raw curiosity sparked by the deep reflection of his life’ a reflection that had written her out completely.

With Yvonne looking over her shoulder, she had read the book cover to cover on the plane, her heart racing at every juncture where her name might have been. Where her name
should
have been. He wrote of his marriage, his children by that marriage’the legitimate children. He wrote of his childhood, his early misadventures and the fascinating people he’d met along the way. It was an interesting read, and Love might have been relieved that she was spared from its pages had it not rendered her so completely insignificant. It had not seemed possible, but she felt more humiliated by her exclusion than if he had revealed to the world her sordid tale from start to finish.

Still, there was no turning back now. Turning back would only ignite the suspicion that she was somehow unable to face him.

She pulled up to the valet, got out, and handed him the keys. From the corner of her eye, she saw her father sitting on a stone bench, looking out for her at the entrance. She took her time as the valet handed her a ticket, then she placed it in her purse. Her mind was working hard to process the image of the man she had just captured. His hair had gone mostly white, and she had to remind herself that he was in his mid-seventies now, that she was close to forty. He was dressed in a loose-fitting, white button-down shirt, faded blue jeans, and sandals that befitted his pretentious, bohemian image.

She looked down as the car was driven away.
You can do this,
she told herself. It was a few moments. Anyone could get through a few moments. But when she looked up, her heart nearly stopped.

“Love?” He was at her side, reaching out to embrace her. She felt his arms pull tight around her back, but she could not return the gesture. Everything in that moment’from the mere sight of him to the smell of his cologne’was overwhelming. She hadn’t seen her father in twenty-two years, but those years might as well have never happened.

When he let go and stepped back, his cheeks were flushed. He cupped her face in his hands the way he used to do years ago, and took in the sight of his daughter.

“Let me look at you!”

Love smiled at him, then looked away. But he held on until her eyes met his again, and he could reassure her. “You look wonderful,” he said, and Love could see that he wanted her to believe in his sincerity. “Come on inside.”

They walked through the front door, talking of small things. The plane ride, the weather on the other side of the country. And as they walked, Love tried to settle her nerves as the memories rushed in. He was playing inside her like an old song, the kind that provokes images of the past so vivid they cannot be suppressed’emotional images that demand to be relived as long as the song is playing, and for some time after. It was upon her now in her father’s presence’the unhindered ambition, the invincibility of her youth. The time when she was the golden girl.

“Let’s go out by the pool,” he said.

They walked through the lobby to the terrace where he ordered her a lemonade.

“Ahh… good memory,” she said. It had been her favorite, and she found it both endearing and presumptuous that he had chosen it for her now. The waiter seemed to know what he was having.

“It’s been a long time,” he said, hanging his head in a somewhat regretful fashion. “I’m sorry for that.”

Love smiled and looked away. His guilt was awkward, her shame unbearable. They had a history that should never have been scripted for a father and daughter.

“It was a lifetime ago,” she answered, shifting in her chair, determined not to show her pain.

The waiter returned with a lemonade and a glass of scotch. They were silent as he placed the drinks before them, and Love allowed her eyes to study her father’s face as he swirled the ice in his drink. It was then that she saw it’the childhood memories bending through the prism of her adult life, exposing the source of emptiness she’d felt as a child. She knew now what a parent’s love should be. Fierce and unconditional. Selfless. Sitting with her father again after all these years, she could see that Alexander Rice had never felt that kind of love for her’even before she’d given him reason.

“You seem happy. Motherhood suits you,” Rice said, breaking the silence.

Love forced a smile. “Thank you.” That was all she was going to say about her life. “I got ahold of the book. I read it on the plane.”

Rice took a long sip of his scotch, then gently placed the glass back into the water rings that had formed on the table. His initial surprise quickly turned to resignation. “So … I guess you know why I wanted to see you.”

Love shrugged and held her palms to the sky. “I don’t, actually.”

He smiled then, seemingly pleased that his daughter was being strategic.

“There are a lot of reasons I didn’t go into your life.”

“You mean reasons why you left me out completely. And Yvonne as well.”

Rice nodded. “Yes. I left both of you out entirely.”

“Let me guess. Your editor made you do it? “

“No’no. Not at all. Nothing like that.”

“Then what?”

Rice sighed and looked at his folded hands resting on the table. “I didn’t want everything to be rehashed.” Then his face grew concerned. “The drugs, the … the other things. Right up to the incident in the hospital. What I’m saying is that there might have been a renewed curiosity in those years of your life’renewed interest in a young person who had everything and then just …”

“Just threw it away.” Love finished his thought, nodding with the acknowledgment of what was in his head’what was in the head of every person who knew her, or knew of her, so many years ago. Nothing was as it seemed, and no one had ever attempted to find the truth. It had been so easy to believe in the deviant character of Love Welsh.

The anger was beginning to choke her.
“Nothingjust
happens. People
don’t just
fall apart without reason.”

Now he was on the defensive. “Of course not, Love. There was a lot of pressure on you’and I was the worst offender. You were a child. I’m not judging you.”

“Everyone judged me. Everyone assumed that I just fell in with the wrong crowd, got too full of myself, lacked discipline.”

“I only knew what I heard. I pleaded with your mother to get you some help when she moved you here. Maybe I could have done more, but I didn’t know what to do. I was three thousand miles away. Part of me thought you would grow out of it.” His eyes were concerned now, but she could not let herself believe in his self-deprecation. It was just not in the man. Still, watching his face, the pieces of her past came before her. One by one she could see them, and for the first time since those dark years, she spoke of that night.

“Didn’t you notice that it happened in an instant? And even more to the point’that it happened after
a particular
night?”

Rice nodded, then hung his head as though this were the last place he wanted to go with her. Still, he followed. “The night of my fiftieth birthday.”

“Yes. The party at your club. Do you remember what happened? “

“Yes. Love, please …”

“And that was?”

Rice paused for a moment as though he were incapable of speaking the words. Still, he managed to give her an answer. “That you slept with Pierre Versande. Your teacher. My friend.”

“The thirty-five-year-old professor. I was thirteen.”

Again, Rice paused. “Yes.”

“And you thought what, exactly, about that?” Love’s tone was angry now, and with every word she knew that any chance for a warm reconciliation was being cast aside for a confrontation that was long overdue.

“That you went a little crazy. Drank too much. You were old beyond your years, Love, growing up the way you did, and I accept full responsibility for that. I never spoke to Versande again after that night. It was reprehensible. But I never thought that was the reason for everything that followed.”

Love nodded as she took it in, relieved that someone had finally spoken of that night to her face. Now her own perceptions could be confirmed. No one had understood that night, or the reasons she went on to degrade herself so badly. Why she devoted so many years to her own destruction, just to quiet the shame’shame that she herself had brought to bear. Her father had made it perfectly clear that no one knew the truth. And how could she blame them? It was only now, immersed in her past, that she was able to see it. Now, without the protection of substances and well-rehearsed denial, she was exposed, naked before the truth.

When the words came, they were soft but clear.

“It was not consensual.” The sentence was formal, lacking even a trace of melodrama. Still, they cut deeply.

“What are you saying, Love? That Pierre Versande raped you that night?”

She was distant as she spoke, trapped behind some invisible shield that kept the truth from sneaking back inside her. “He gave me a glass of champagne. I had a few sips, maybe half of the glass because he was sitting next to me and I wanted to be grown up. I started to feel sick. Dizzy. Pierre said he would take me to lie down.”

His voice was still in her head. The room, with its art-deco furnishings and modern paintings was now before her. Then the walk to the back room, the eyes that were upon them, people drinking, smoking pot, snorting coke. There was so much laughter, the music was loud. He closed the door behind them, dimmed the light. She crawled onto a leather couch, relieved to lie down, thinking she would sleep off the champagne and never drink again. Her body was so tired, listless. Her mouth unable to form the words, to tell him to stop when his hands fell upon her.

Her father reached across the table, touching her arm as it rested on the table. “That’s enough. I understand,” he said. Then, after catching her eye, “I am filled with regret. I should have known. I should have known you enough to realize it was all wrong.”

Love searched his face for shock, anguish, rage. Anything that would be appropriate under the circumstances. But instead he held only a distant sympathy.

“Everything is so clear to me now. You were a different person after that night.”

She thought back to the morning after, going for her lessons at his house. Versande was conspicuously absent, but the house was filled with her father’s colleagues and staff. And from them she’d felt the invisible brand upon her. Within days her few friends stopped calling, their mothers forbidding it. Her reputation had been forged at warp speed and it was self-fulfilling. Within a year she was into everything’alcohol, coke, the pill of the day’until she finally jumped off the cliff with her mother’s Valium. And for the first time since those years, she could draw a line to the trigger. She was not the wayward girl who was seduced by an older man. She was at her father’s club where she should have been safe. And there’d been more than champagne in that glass.

After a moment, when the air cleared, Love got up from the table. “I should go.”

“No, I … ,” Rice started to say, rising from his chair.

“I want to go.”

Her father gave her a sad smile, his face replete with understanding. This was too much for her.

“OK,” he said.

She started to walk away, but his words stopped her.

“It all turned out in the end. That’s what matters.”

But that was a lie. The great Alexander Rice didn’t believe in the mundane. She could have been one of the great ones’as great as he, perhaps greater. Still, the weight of his disappointment had somehow been lifted. She had failed at many things, destroyed her own potential. But he was a man who didn’t know how to love, and that, to her mind, rendered him incapable of passing judgment on anyone.

She turned to face him again, this time unleashing the anger upon words that soared from her heart.

“You have written your books. You have been admired by many. And I know you have been loved.”

The strength of her voice rendered him still as she reached into her purse, grabbing a handful of papers that she tossed on the table between them.

“And you have loved no one but yourself.”

The tears came then, flooding her face. Her father had no breath as he looked at the papers. They were photos of her children’his grandchildren. His legacy.

When his eyes returned to his daughter, she was drying her face. She gathered the pictures and carefully slid them back in her purse. She looked at her father one last time, but for the first time as a grown woman. A woman with conviction.

“You tell me who’s had the extraordinary life.”