Hollywood Husbands (33 page)

She was caught off guard. This was the last thing she’d expected. Wes was furious, like a big caged animal. And he looked so funny as he marched up and down her kitchen with his highly impressive credentials swaying in the breeze.

Marriage. Hmmm…
Each time she did it, it was a terrible mistake.

Marriage. Hmmm
… It might be kind of fun. And front page news, of course.

Wes grabbed another can of beer from the fridge, and pressed it open so violently that a fine spray flew all over the floor.

‘I don’t know a thing about you,’ she pointed out reasonably.

‘I’ll tell you whatever y’need to know.’

‘How
kind
of you.’

He ignored her sarcasm. ‘I’m free, white, and over twenty-one. I’m also broke, and in a spot of trouble with some characters who think I owe them money – only I don’t. There are no strings attached to me. I’ve got no social diseases. I won’t be your go-fer, but I’ll look after you and watch out for your interests. I’m no fuckin’ genius, but I’m street smart and sharp – y’can learn a lot from me.’

She went on to say something. He held up his hand and stopped her. ‘I don’t want anything you’ve got. Not your house, your cars, your money. I’ll sign any goddamn paper your lawyer puts in front of me.’

‘If you’re broke, perhaps you can give me some kind of indication about what you intend to live on?’ she asked acidly.

He swigged from the can of beer. ‘I don’t mind you payin’ the bills. I got no macho problem about
that
.’

She began to laugh. ‘What a relief!’

Walking over to her, he grabbed her around the waist, and pulled her towards him: ‘I think we’d be a pretty steamy combination, don’t you?’

‘I’ve got everything to lose and nothing to gain,’ she protested feebly.

He rubbed the scar above his left eyebrow with one hand, and cupped her tight ass with the other. ‘Yes you have. You got me. And y’know somethin’, rich lady?’

It was ridiculous, but she felt the heat of desire creeping up on her again. Her voice was husky. ‘What?’

‘I’ll make you the happiest broad in Hollywood.’

Somewhere in the Midwest…

Sometime in the seventies…

The girl grieved for her father and his lady friend in a proper manner. She was taken in by a neighbouring farmer’s family, while the entire community speculated on who could have committed such a hideous crime – setting a man’s house on fire and incinerating everyone and everything in it.

‘They said he was crisp as a burnt chicken,’ the girl heard the woman of the house confide to a friend.
Good
, she thought.
I hope he suffered. I hope he died a thousand deaths
.

Nobody suspected her of the crime. In fact, for the first time in her life she received love and sympathy from most of the people around her.

The farmer and his wife had four children of their own, and it was understood right from the start that her stay with them was only temporary. She shared a room with the two daughters and kept to herself. The sisters – one seventeen and one almost eighteen – regarded her as an unwelcome intruder. Although she was younger than them and in a lower grade at school, they knew her reputation as a loner, and thought she was odd. Their names were Jessica-May and Sally, and they thought and talked about nothing but boys.

‘I think Jimmy Steuban’s cute,’ Jessica-May would say.

‘
I
like Gorman,’ Sally would join in. And then they would discuss the pros and cons of both boys for hours at a time.

Occasionally they would both stare at the girl and demand belligerently, ‘Who do
you
like?’ When she didn’t answer they would dissolve into fits of giggles and whisper among themselves.

The farmer’s wife was a kind woman. Her husband was a brusque man with bright red hair and matching beard. Their two sons, ten and twelve, were little rascals, up to tricks day and night. The girl settled into family life, and waited for the sheriff to find one of her brothers or sisters to take her in. She had no regrets about what she had done. Her father and his painted whore deserved it.

Money in the farmer’s household was short, and it wasn’t long before the girl was asked to contribute to the family income by getting a job. She worked weekends as a box girl in the town’s only supermarket. Her sixteenth birthday came and went. She didn’t tell anyone. There was nobody who really cared.

At night, in the room she shared with the two sisters, she would lie in bed and gaze at the ceiling for hours on end wondering what was to become of her. She had no intention of staying in the town, and secretly she started saving the tips she got at work. With her sixteenth birthday behind her, her body began to fill out at last. Her breasts grew, and her waist narrowed. Suddenly she looked like a woman, and the boys at school took a lot more notice of her than they ever had before. One boy in particular, Jimmy Steuban, started to follow her everywhere. He was seventeen, with black hair and an athletic build. The girl tried to ignore him, because she knew Jessica-May liked him. But he was very persistent – always asking her for a date, and hanging around outside her place of work.

One night she let him walk her home. He grabbed her in the bushes near the farmhouse and tried to kiss her. She screamed so hard he ran like a frightened moose.

But he didn’t give up, and against her better instincts she started to like him back, and before long they were girlfriend and boyfriend. Jessica-May was furious. Every day she pleaded with her mother to get rid of the unwanted boarder.

‘She has nowhere to go,’ the kindly woman pointed out. ‘No kin that anyone can find. We’re God-fearing people. We must keep her till she’s at least seventeen.’

Jessica-May got angrier, and did everything she could to make life difficult for the girl. She put dead mice and cockroaches in her bed, messed up her school books, cut the buttons off her clothes, and generally bad-mouthed her. She elicited the help of her sister, Sally, who joined in gladly. Both of them wanted to see the back of her.

Jimmy Steuban was her only solace. He treated her nicely. Took her to the movies and on picnics, and talked to her as though she was a decent human being. When he finally tried to make love to her, she found that she couldn’t say no. So she allowed him, one cold night in the back of his father’s rusty old Ford, to remove her blouse – and then her flimsy bra. He touched her breasts reverently, and spoke of how much he loved her. Then he lifted her skirt, pulled down her panties, and thrust his manhood into her.

She was rigid with fear and anxiety, expecting it to be like it was with her father. Only somehow, with Jimmy, it was different, and she found herself relaxing and responding with more feeling than she’d ever had in her life.

‘You’re terrific!’ he gasped. ‘I really love you!’

She really loved him too. And over the next few months they made love and plans on a regular basis. ‘What if I get pregnant?’ she asked him nervously one night, although deep down she was sure that she couldn’t, after what had happened.

‘I’ll marry you,’ he said gallantly. ‘We’ll live in a castle, and I’ll be your prince!’

Six weeks later she discovered she was pregnant. She told Jimmy, who told his father. Two days after that Jimmy was sent out of town, and she never heard from him again.

Jessica-May and Sally crowed the news from the rooftops. Shortly after, she was sent to a home for unwed mothers fifty miles away. The home was run by nuns – strict, unsmiling women, who demanded respect and obedience at all times. The sixty pregnant girls had to rise at five a.m., do two hours of penance on their knees in a freezing cold chapel with a concrete floor, and then housework until noon, when they were given a plate of soup, a piece of stale bread, and a cup of milk. The afternoon was study time, because most of the girls were under eighteen. Bed was seven p.m., and once every two weeks a florid-faced, bull-necked doctor arrived to examine them. The doctor had his own examining room in the house. Some of the inmates christened it the torture chamber.

The girl dreaded his visits. She never slept the night before his always punctual arrival. He drove a dusty sedan, and was usually accompanied by a sour-faced nurse, who preferred to spend her time drinking cups of herb tea with the nuns. The doctor didn’t seem to mind. As girl after girl presented herself to him he always said the same thing. ‘Clothes off. On the table. Legs in the stirrups.’

He never looked at their faces, or knew their names. He called them by numbers, and when one of them was carted off to the hospital and gave birth, he crossed her off his list, and added a different name in front of the number.

The girl drew number seven. It wasn’t her lucky number. She had never been to a gynaecologist, nor even heard of them – but a fat redhead confided that this was not the way it was supposed to be.

First the doctor drew thin, rubber gloves onto his bony hands. Then he dipped his index finger into a jar of Vaseline, and plunged straight into whoever was on his table. He stayed inside a good five minutes, sometimes ten, probing, pushing, hurting – for he was never careful. Sometimes he bent his head down, grabbed a torch, and peered inside for a very long time. Once he arrived with a hat that looked like a miner’s, a flashlight perched on the top. This contraption enabled him to look and feel at the same time. Occasionally he forgot to put on his gloves. The worst times were when he inserted a wooden speculum and forced the labia wide. The girl had to stop herself from screaming because it hurt so much, and when she mentioned it he’d said, ‘Don’t be such a stupid child. You let your boyfriend get inside and have a good time. If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t be in this mess today.’

The breast exam came next. A long session of fondling, pinching and squeezing.

Businesslike, when he was finished, he would say, ‘Off the table, let me look at you.’ And whoever was in the room would have to endure a lecherous once-over from the rheumy-eyed doctor. Once a month he took a Polaroid picture. ‘For my files,’ he always said.

‘Dirty old man, he should be struck off or whatever they do to filthy old perverts,’ said one eighteen-year-old. But everyone found out that complaining got them nowhere. The nuns thought the good doctor was a saint, and would hear no ill of him.

The girl endured her pregnancy as she had endured the rest of her life. She kept to herself and remained silent.

‘Fuckin’ stuck-up bitch!’ said a skinny brunette. ‘Think you’re too bloody good fer us, doncha?’

She didn’t think. She knew. One day she was going to leave her humble beginnings far behind and make something of herself.

When her baby was born, shortly after her seventeenth birthday, it was put up for immediate adoption. She suckled the infant for a mere six days, and then it was taken from her.

‘Sign this,’ said a big nurse with pop-eyes and a hairy chin.

‘I don’t th—’

‘You have no choice.’

She signed, and was sent from the hospital to a foster home. While there, she learned that Jimmy Steuban had gotten Jessica-May pregnant and that they were to be married immediately. No exile for Jessica-May – far from it. The wedding was a lively affair, with four bridesmaids and a two-tier cake. The girl read a report in the local paper. And there was a picture of the happy couple. Jessica-May wore a white dress her mother had sewed for her. And Jimmy Steuban looked fine – if slightly uncomfortable – in a rented tuxedo.

The girl waited until she was eighteen before doing anything about it. She waited quietly and patiently. Then one night, when the moon was full and shining like a beacon, she borrowed her foster brother’s bicycle, stole a can of gasoline from the local gas station, and rode seven miles to the tiny house where Jessica-May and Jimmy Steuban lived with their new baby.

Quietly, methodically, she shook the gasoline around the house.

Lighting the first match was easy…

BOOK THREE

Hollywood, California

August 1985

Chapter Forty-Nine

Poppy Soloman had changed her outfit five times. She was in a panic and simply could not make up her mind. Should she wear the Valentino? The Chanel? The Saint Laurent?

She stamped her foot and let out a blood-curdling yell of frustration.

Howard came running into her dressing room from his bathroom. He wore boxer shorts, his usual manic expression, no toupee, and a dribble of white powder between his nose and his upper lip. ‘What the fuck happened?’ he shouted excitedly.

Poppy, clad in nothing more than sheer beige panty-hose and a magnificent diamond necklace, her long blonde hair swept up in an elaborate style, pouted. ‘Baby can’t decide what to wear!’ she wailed.

‘Jesus
Christ
!’ he roared. ‘I thought you were being murdered!’ He waved lethal-looking scissors in the air. ‘I nearly cut my friggin’ balls off!’

‘What were you doing with scissors near your balls?’ she asked curiously.

‘Trimmin’ the grass,’ he replied sarcastically. ‘What do you
think
I was doing?’

Poppy sighed. She was in no mood for one of Howard’s silly outbursts. ‘You’ve got to help me, sweet-buns.’ She picked up a deep pink Bill Blass creation from the floor. ‘Tell me
truthfully
which dress you like best.’

‘Pick the most expensive,’ he said sourly.

‘I don’t keep the receipts in my head,’ she replied tartly. ‘Now, please be sensible and cooperate. Otherwise we’ll be late.’

‘You can’t be late for your own dinner party,’ he pointed out.