Reign (34 page)

Sid sat for a minute, staring at Evan. Finally he shook his head. "That's bullshit. Believe me, I know. I was there, pal. Right after they were married, Dennis didn't want to let your mom out of his sight. And when he did, I was right there. If anything funny had gone on, I'd have known about it."

"You're right. You're probably right. But he just seemed so crazy . . . I don't know, maybe I should just get the hell away from here."

"Maybe you should stay. You might be able to help him."

"Help him? How?"

"He needs stability right now. Maybe he's looking back at the days when he was the Emperor, thinking that things were better then, simpler. Play the role and that's it. He needs to have people around him who care, Evan. Robin's death's has left a helluva gap. We've all got to try and help to fill it."

Evan walked to the window and looked down at the tree-lined street. "Why, Sid? Why do we have to?"

"Because he's a good man. A generous man. And because we love him.”

“You really think that's true? You think he's good?"

"Yeah, I do. He works his heart out when the telethon comes along each year. And in the past twenty years he's given away millions. Literally millions.”

“I never knew that."

"Nobody does except us and the IRS. He doesn't want it publicized. But there's another thing — if this musical theatre project works out it's going to mean work for hundreds of show people. It's a damn good cause." Evan didn't speak. "Hang around, kid. He needs you, really."

"All right. For a while. I don't know what I can do, though."

"Just don't piss him off again. Let him go, even if you think he's wrong. He's got to work some things out on his own. But be there when he needs you.”

“All right, Sid. Thanks for listening."

"Hey, anytime." He gave the boy a hug.

"Curt's gonna wonder where the hell I am," Evan said, and went to the door. "So long, Sid."

"See you, kid."

~ * ~

Kid
, he thought as he watched the boy leave.
Yeah. My kid?

Sid felt his gut cramp and wondered if he had been able to keep the look of shock off his face when Evan had dropped the bombshell. If Evan's reaction was honest, he had. That's what came of once having been an actor.

One hot afternoon and one drink too many, and he had lived with the guilt all his life. Dennis had been in New York meeting with John Steinberg, and Sid was left alone with Natalie Pierce, Dennis's wife of three months. She was a few years older than Sid, but ravishingly good looking, and when she asked him to sit with her at poolside and talk, he had done so willingly, and had made them both several drinks.

One thing had led to another, and before he was even aware of it, they were screwing in the cabana, without benefit of condom. Nine months later Evan had been born.

Sid had never been sure if he or Dennis had been the father. As the omniscient majordomo of the Hamilton household, he knew that they were the only two possibilities, and prayed to God that it was Dennis and not himself. Natalie Pierce had never requested a repeat performance, much to his relief. She was, he grew to realize, a games player, and had fucked him just to have fucked her husband's friend. With that mindset, it was surprising that she had never mentioned their indiscretion to Dennis, but such, Sid had figured, must have been the case, for Dennis's attitude toward Sid had not changed a jot. In another year, Dennis and Natalie were divorced. The year after that, she was dead, her games ended forever.

But the guilt had remained with Sid. Several times he had been on the verge of quitting over some outrageous words or actions on Dennis's part, but always he stayed, feeling himself condemned to penance because of his previous disloyalty with his employer and friend's wife. A greater penance, however, was the presence of Evan when he came to live with Dennis after Natalie's suicide.

It was Sid who became the surrogate father when Dennis was on location shooting a film, or working fifteen hours a day on his short-lived TV series. Later, with the success of the
Private Empire
revival, he saw Evan less and less, but the bond that had been forged in Evan's young childhood was still strong.

And apparently the bond that was forged, ever so briefly, between Sid and Natalie Pierce Hamilton was still strong too, in Dennis's mind at least. Sid had no idea that Dennis had ever suspected. How could he have? There had been no insinuations about Sid in Natalie's biography that had appeared in 1977, which presented a roster of her sexual partners, for one of Natalie's weaknesses was a loose tongue. Perhaps she hadn't considered Sid worth mentioning to her cronies.

Then why had Dennis told Evan that he was a bastard? Merely out of spite, in order to hurt him with his mother's adulteries? It didn't seem like Dennis. He could be hard, but not petty.

Of course, Dennis had not seemed like himself for months. Still, Sid had noticed no change in the way he was treated. Hadn't Dennis come to see him the night before to talk about that hallucination he had had? Surely there was evidence that he considered Sid a confidant, and bore him no ill will for a twenty-year-old indiscretion, even if he did suspect. He had even hugged him.

But dear God, Sid thought, forgetting for a moment the surprising revelation Evan had mentioned, what was happening to Dennis? Coming on to Donna a few months ago, the hallucination of seeing the Emperor as a separate entity several weeks before, and then today, with Evan, claiming to be the Emperor. . .

The grief and loss must have been great, but he had been acting strangely even before Robin's death. What was going on in Dennis's head? What in God's name was he thinking?

"Let's not go to the Kirkland Inn tonight," Ann said, as she and Dennis walked from her front door to his car, a white Porsche that sat in her driveway like a glowing, friendly beast.

"All right. Any special reason?" he asked, opening the door for her.

"I'm too susceptible to old emotions at that place," she answered smiling, not telling him the real reason.

Terri had been quick to tell her that she was going out to dinner with Evan Hamilton that evening, and Ann strongly suspected that it was not because she was attracted to the boy, but because she thought it some kind of revenge for her mother seeing Dennis. It was stupid of Terri, but then Terri could be awfully stupid at times. If she had been clever, Ann thought, she would not have said a word, and when Dennis and Ann walked into the Kirkland Inn, as they would have if Ann had not had the advance warning, Terri could have been sitting there with Evan, waving pleasantly, even asking them to join her, making it a most uncomfortable and humiliating evening.

But instead she had tipped her hand and given the game away. Ann knew that Terri would talk Evan into going to the Kirkland Inn, so Ann would make sure that she and Dennis went elsewhere.

They ended up at a steak house two miles east of Kirkland. Although the restaurant was crowded, Ann saw Terri's smooth, short cap of red hair nowhere among the heads that bobbed over the plates. She breathed a sigh of relief and turned her attention where she had wanted it to be all along, to Dennis.

Though the ambience was more bustling than she would have preferred, the dinner was excellent, the steaks cooked precisely the way they had ordered them, the salads crisp and fresh, the dressing delicate, and the selection of wine was remarkably varied. Between bites, they spoke of inconsequential things, not mentioning the tragedies that had occurred in the theatre. By the time they ate dessert, a piece of blueberry pie for Dennis, a cup of custard for Ann, she was feeling relaxed, partly as a result of the wine, partly from the ease of being in Dennis's company again, and from knowing that there was no longer a wife offstage.

It was absurd, she thought, that she should be feeling guilty over not having to feel guilty. If she could have wished Robin alive again, she would have. But wishing would change nothing, and, circumstances being what they were, she thought she would have been a fool not to be glad to be there with Dennis, to have him across the table from her, their eyes meeting constantly, and her reading in his eyes things unspoken, things she longed to hear.

The meal finished, Dennis paid the bill, and they walked outside. The winter air was brisk, and their breath puffed out like amber clouds in the gleam of the lamps that lit the parking lot. She slipped her arm though his as they moved toward the car, and, after he unlocked her door, he turned to her, put his arms around her, and kissed her, a light and gentle kiss, made with no demands. They stood there for a long time, until she shivered from the cold in spite of her warm coat, in spite of Dennis's embrace. Finally he spoke.

"This feels so right. All those years ago, and it seems like only yesterday since I held you." He sighed, and she felt his warm breath against her hair. "I wish that time never would have passed. I wish we would be back there, that we had done things differently."

"I do too," she whispered. "It was a mistake. It didn't take me long to find that out."

"Mistakes," he said, "can be corrected."

They kissed again, and he opened the car door for her. When they were both inside, he started the engine, and heat rushed at them from the vents. "I don't want to take you home," he said.

"Whose home?"

She could see his smile in the semi-darkness. "Come to the theatre with me.”

“What show will we see?"

"A love story." There was only the trace of a smile now.

"Do you know how it will end?" she asked him.

"Happily. I pray to God, happily." Then he added, "
This
time."

She made a little gesture toward the night, the cold darkness. "Let's go," she said.

~ * ~

The other love story, the one that had taken place twenty-five years before, had not had a happy ending. That ending had come on a July night at a table at the Kirkland Inn, with a young man and a young woman seated across from each other in candlelight. They held hands, but as the words passed between them, the grips loosened, and soon there were two hands in the center of the table, barely touching. She withdrew hers first, into her lap, blinking away the tears in her eyes so that he wouldn't see. But he did, through the teary haze that warmed his own eyes. She loved him, yes, she admitted that, but it would not work. Her parents were against it, and she had never gone against them, simply could not. They wanted her to finish college, and she wanted to also.

Couldn't they write to each other, he asked, write and maybe he could come up to see her at her college on Mondays, when the theatres were dark, and the show wouldn't run forever, after all, it might even be a flop, so did it make sense to call an end to everything now?

She had to, she told him. She could not imagine being away from him, but it was her parents, and she could not disobey them.

Then you don't love me
, he said.

But I do
, she answered.

They were still young, barely past adolescence. They were in love with each other, but with their own lives as well, he with the theatre, she with her school, her friends there, and bound by her ties to her mother and father. They were confused, they were angry, they were hopeless and doomed to estrangement. After that night, they did not see each other again for twenty-five years.

And twenty-five years later, their children sat facing each other across that same table in that same inn. An onlooker who knew both their parents would have noted the resemblance. The boy's features were strong and clear, his red hair the shade of his father's before gray had touched it. Though her hair was cut short, and was similar in color to the boy's hair rather than her mother's, the girl bore Ann
Deems's
delicacy of features, the small mouth, the pert nose, the small but intense green eyes under gracefully arching brows. The hands of the two did not touch, though. Not yet.

"You expecting somebody?" Evan asked. "You keep looking around."

Terri smiled as though it hurt her. "No, not really."

They had finished their entr
é
e, and were waiting for dessert. Up to that point, the conversation had been neither sparkling nor provocative, so Evan was surprised when Terri asked him if he was a virgin.

He gave a little laugh. "Why?"

"Curious."

"The same reason you keep looking around?" She didn't answer. "No, I'm not. Is it your business?"

"It might be. A person can't be too careful these days."

"About what?"

"About their sexual partners."

He looked at her for a long time before he spoke. "What?" He knew it was a dumb thing to say even as he said it. He had heard her clearly, and realized the implication, but he was too distrustful of fate to think that it should drop something this desirable in his lap.

"Look," she said, and now her smile was not as pinched as before. "I know you find me attractive, and I think you're kind of a hunk in a strange way.”

“Thanks. I guess."

"And we're both unattached, so why shouldn't we?" She cocked her head at him. "Unless I've been reading you wrong."