My Deja Vu Lover (14 page)

  
“Why?” I whispered, afraid of crying.

  
“My wife is an alcoholic. She’s very sick. She’s been in and out of treatment. Always starts again. Her doctors tell me she’s killing herself. I suppose she is. I can’t abandon her, can I?”

  
“I thought, oh. I’m sorry,” I mumbled, confused, because he’d told me about the ski instructor and other infidelities, not that she was ill or addicted. If that was true, that was different and explained their estrangement.

  
“I’m sorry, too, but I’ve learned to live with it,” he said.

  
“But she’s always going on trips.”

  
“She goes off, yes. She always comes back. Somebody always gets her back here. And so far, I’ve always been here when she needs me. I have to be. She doesn’t have anyone else.”

  
In one way, I was relieved. Sure, there was a shadow of doubt, which is why I didn’t tell Cyd. I knew she would blast right through his story. I wanted to believe him. I wanted him to be that kind of person, a man who wouldn’t desert a sick wife. It gave him qualities of loyalty and compassion.

  
In another way, I hated it that he had such a good reason to keep him bound to her, to be part of her life. It meant he was not wholly my possession. The nightmares reached out from the past toward the present.

CHAPTER 13
  

  
The next episode hit a couple of days later, when I was home alone. Maybe the alone thing caused it, I thought, like depression. The answer was to get out and go someplace. And then I remembered almost passing out on the corner of Pine and Westlake. So location maybe didn’t matter.

  
When Silver wanted to break through, I didn’t know how to stop her. I became her.

  
The girl next to me at the dressing table, Esther, leaned toward the mirror and painted a cupid’s bow on her upper lip. Turning, she smiled so that only the edges of her upper teeth showed. “There, what do you think, Silver?
 
Do I look like Billie Burke?”
  
“I guess so. She has such round eyes.”

  
“I know,” Esther said with a sigh. “Not much I can do about that. If I put any more color on my eyelashes, they’re going to stick together. Hey, did you see the painting Rosco did of her on that magazine cover?”

  
“What magazine?”

  
“Theatre Magazine, I think that’s the name. It’s really expensive, thirty-five cents. I looked at a copy but who can afford that? Oh well, they review a few photoplays but mostly it’s about Broadway gossip, you know, New York City. ”

  
“Stage acting is really different, I mean, you’ve got to have a really big voice.” My voice didn’t carry well at all.

  
We were in the makeup corner, hunched on stools in front of badly lit mirrors, trying to brush up a bit.

  
“You’ve got lipstick on your teeth, Silver,” she said. “Jeepers, this lipstick is awful, isn’t it, smears like anything. I used to think it was only back in New York that people handed out stuff at parties, but I guess there’s a lot of that around here, too.”

  
“What stuff?”

  
“They hand it out at the swish parties. A person would be a fool to try it. Look at his wife.”

  
I could feel perspiration across my forehead. The lights always made my forehead perspire under the makeup and made the color run. Not that perspiration showed on the screen, but if my mascara ran, it would ruin a take and I wouldn’t get another chance from this director.

  
“Whose wife?” I rubbed at my front teeth with the edge of my finger.

  
“That Laurence. Handsome, isn’t he, but poison.”

  
I didn’t know Esther very well.
 
This was the first time we were working in the same picture. She rented a room down the hall from mine at the boarding house and I’d seen her lots, running up and down the stairs to use the telephone in the front hall. Always on the telephone or going out with some man, she’d been too busy to talk to me until today.

  
“Are you a friend of Laurence’s wife?” I asked.

  
“Me? Lord, no. Have you ever seen her sober? She mixes that stuff with alcohol, wait and see, it’ll kill her. That or that man.”

  
That man. She didn’t know I knew him. And I was afraid to ask her anything more. What if she got wise? He’d dump me so fast.

  
“If she drops dead, you wait and see, he’ll get all the sympathy talk, they always do, the men, and the big coverup in the magazines. They’ll make out like she died of some tragic illness, you know? Be good publicity for him, I guess. I hear he supplies her.”

  
I held my powder box up and hid behind the puff so she wouldn’t see my face because, honestly, looking in the mirror, I could see my reaction to his name as plain as day. I couldn’t keep it off. If I was a good actress, it wouldn’t show all over me. My friend Ruth said my ears practically wiggled when anyone mentioned him.

  
“He walks in the room and you light up like a candle,” she once told me.

  
What was Esther saying, that Laurence intentionally gave his wife drugs? Hollywood was wall-to-wall rumors, all those gossip columns, all those lies. It made me so mad, I wished I could tell her the truth about him, how sweet and gentle and considerate he was.

  
Esther said, “Your nails are a mess, kid. You need to quit chewing on them.”

***

  
The scene faded into shadows and the smell of carpet.

  
I woke in a curled lump in the bay window, my face pressed into the carpet, my sinuses blocked and aching, one knee twisted under me where it felt paralyzed. I thought about stretching it out, flexing a bit, and then I remembered what had just happened. I lay still, trying to remember Esther’s exact words.

  
And who was Esther? And did it matter?
 
Someone on the set, another wannabe, another silly girl who ran away from the midwest, heading out to California, sure that she, too, could become a famous face on the cover of a magazine, a bright portrait tacked up outside a theater, a name on a marquee.

  
Laurence’s face, the odd look in his eyes, halfway between wanting me and laughing at me, my mind filled with the memory of a man I didn’t know and wanted to forget. Sometimes, when I wasn’t with Graham, I remembered words he said, but I never heard his voice in my mind.

  
With Laurence, I could hear his voice, low and sexy like a caress, a brush of lips against my throat, definitely his voice saying, ‘Treat me nice. Don’t be a tease. Be wonderful.’

  
From the doorway Macbeth say, “What are you doing on the floor? Are you okay?” And then, naturally, he flipped on the light and I closed my eyes against the glare.

  
“Come on, babe,” His hands slid under my arms as he pulled me to my feet. “When you start falling asleep on the carpet, oh hell, look at you.”

  
“What?”

  
“Your nose is running. You’ve got dust all over you.”

  
I gave a moment’s thought to rubbing my nose dry on the front of his disgustingly clean shirt, thought better of it and headed into the bathroom. By the time I came out, washed and combed, he had the coffee brewing.

  
“You forgot to turn the heaters up,” he fussed. “What’s with sleeping on the floor?”

  
“Didn’t mean to,” I admitted, then added the lie, “I sat down in the window to watch for Tom and I guess I fell asleep.”

  
This was scary, this whole thing, because I had no memory at all of what had happened, or where I had been earlier in the day, or why I had returned home. The scene with Esther was so clear, so real, I should have been waking up in that dressing room, talking to Esther.

  
The kitchen, with the bright lights and Macbeth fussing, that was the dream, the unreal. I tried to focus on holding the coffee mug, sitting down at the table, not asking Mac the time or the day because then he’d go ballistic.
  

  
‘I can’t make it different but you’ll be okay. You’re terrific, Millie Pedersen. You’ll be a star. You don’t need me,’ Laurence’s low voice said in my mind.

  
And then I got it and I said, ‘Are you dumping me?’

  
The mug crashed to the floor, coffee flew, Macbeth swore, and his hands caught me, held me. Somebody was sobbing, I felt Macbeth’s arms around me, then heard Tom’s voice asking, “What happened?” and Macbeth saying, “I don’t know, come on, get her in here,” and then somebody picked me up and put me down into softness, pillows. Someone wrapped a blanket around me.
   

  
Against my closed eyelids I saw Laurence. He was furious but hiding it, saying, ‘No, of course not,’ his beautiful face tight, frowning, trying to hide the truth. No, that couldn’t be the truth, he loved me, he’d said so, hadn’t he? Leaving me, he was leaving me. Why?

  
The tears turned cold on my burning skin.

  
“Hey, lovey,” Tom said. “Bad day, huh?”

  
“Don’t think she has a fever,” Macbeth said.

  
“Probably skipped lunch again,” Cyd said.

  
“Go on, I’ll stay.” Tom’s voice.

   
No point opening my eyes. If I looked at them, they would ask for explanations and there was nothing to tell them. I had no idea what was happening. Scenes slid in and out like half-dreams just before waking, except that nothing
 
impossible happened, the way it does in dreams. Elevators didn’t turn into windows, Cyd didn’t become a crowd, people didn’t turn into frogs, none of that usual dream morphing stuff. I heard Laurence and Esther and Ruth, who was Ruth? I saw Graham, felt his touch, and in between I heard my friends talking softly.

  
After a while I heard Mac and Cyd arguing about whether or not they should go out to wherever they’d planned to go, and Tom telling them to go ahead, he would stay with me, and then the hall door closed behind them.

  
I ran my fingers along rough fabric and knew for sure I was on the couch in the apartment I shared with Cyd. I heard Tom breathing and knew we were alone. I opened my eyes. Tom breathing, that close to me, was kind of soothing and was I equating him to a pet or a ticking clock?

  
“Sorry, Tommy.”
  

  
“How long have you been awake?”

  
“A while. I didn’t want to talk to Macbeth.”

  
I rolled on my side and found him sitting on the floor by the couch, his eyes inches from mine, dark under thick lashes, beautiful in his otherwise thin plain face. A mop of dark curls fell forward over his forehead. I stroked them back. His hair wouldn’t stay in place, but I liked to push it back, anyway. The curls were loose and silky, more like waves, not tight and frizzy like my mop.

  
“Okay,” he said. “You don’t have to talk.”

  
“I want to talk to you. You won’t get upset.”

  
“I’m upset, sure I’m upset. Is Cyd right? Have you been skipping meals?”

  
“Can’t remember. Anyway, that’s not what’s wrong.”