Stages (33 page)

They found his wheelchair in the water, but they never found Jack Case’s body. Listening to the minister at the memorial service that was held for him, Lauren thought yes, he
had
slipped the bonds of earth, truly. He had been bound by his own body, and now he was free of it, and the world too.

The rest of them had to deal with what he’d left behind. Andrea shrank from her son, avoiding his eyes. Jason said nothing to her about what had happened, limiting his conversations with her to matters pertaining to the business or the settlement of Jack’s estate.

One night Lauren said to Jason, “I’m not trying to defend what she did or anything, but I think you should remember that your mother is only human.”

“Some people are more human than others” was Jason’s reply.

A year after her husband’s death Andrea had bought a house in Palm Beach. She offered the house on the Sound to her son.

“Do you want it?” Jason asked Lauren.

“I don’t know,” Lauren replied. “It almost seems too much. And what about your sister?”

“My sister knows that mother is basically going to be in Palm Beach from now on, where she can play tennis year round. My sister wants to live in California, she told me, in Marin. That’ll be three thousand miles away from our mother, maybe a little further, if you measure diagonally.”

“Does Maria really hate your mother that much?”

“No, it’s just that the greater the distance between them is, the more comfortable she feels with her.”

Lauren sighed.

“I guess we’ll be moving then,” she said. “It’s a great house, there’s no denying that. And no matter how big it is, it’s still just a house. A
house
can’t be
blamed
for anything.”

“It can have negative associations,” Jason replied.

“That’s because there are haunted people,” Lauren said. “But I don’t believe in haunted houses.”

They moved to the Sound a month later.

Lauren’s first pregnancy had ended with a miscarriage. Shortly after she and Jason moved, Lauren became pregnant again. She was delighted at the prospect of a new, fresh happiness entering their lives, and she tried to involve Jason as much as she could in what was happening to her. Since his father’s death he had become increasingly absorbed in the family business, to the point that he was treating everything outside it as trivial. Lauren sensed that her husband had taken refuge in the world of men and men’s affairs, because of what had happened with his mother. Where was that going to leave her? she wondered. Was she to be put in the category of
women
—among the other things men got around to when they had the chance?

To avoid such an outcome Lauren had been trying to get Jason to do things with her. They went to see
The Hotel Baltimore,
which Lauren loved. Then, when Lauren saw that her old friend from college Paula was creating a sensation in an Off-Broadway show, she rushed Jason in to see it, telling him that they would definitely have to go backstage afterward. That prospect actually got a little rise out of him, and when the curtain went up, Lauren was delighted to see her husband watching attentively.

Something happened during the performance, though.

Paula was better than Lauren even in her wildest imagination ever dreamed she could be. Lauren couldn’t take her eyes off her. She felt that she was watching something almost miraculous, and a kind of reverence came over her. Veronica Simmons made Lauren Case feel inadequate, made her feel as if she had sold out without even knowing it, betraying something higher, nobler, more important—something that Paula Rubin had, overnight, become.

If she hadn’t been three months pregnant, Lauren would have felt as though she didn’t exist at all.

Swept up with the rest of the audience, Lauren applauded at the end until her hands hurt, stopping twice to wipe the tears from her eyes.

“I
won’t
mind meeting her,” Jason said as he helped Lauren with her coat afterward.

“Jason, I don’t think we should,” Lauren said.

“Why not? She’s somebody you went to school with, isn’t she?”

“They don’t like to be bothered with people. I’m sure she’s tired out after a long performance like that.”

“Huh? Wasn’t it you who told me that actors always have the time to hear someone tell them how good they are?”

“I just don’t want to do it tonight, Jason. I’m tired myself. The baby.”

“All right, all right.”

Enormously relieved, Lauren walked with her hand on her husband’s arm out to their waiting limousine. She would not have to face Paula, not now or ever. She would never do what Paula had done. She would never do what Andrea had done, either. The way she had lived her life, Lauren felt that she at least deserved this much: not to be judged. Once she got into the stretch Cadillac, she did not look back at the theater’s marquee.

This time Lauren’s pregnancy went well, with herself and with her husband. Jason came with her to classes, and he wanted to be in the delivery room with her when the moment arrived.

He was, in his sterile mask and cap, looking down on her as she struggled, encouraging her with his eyes.

It was worse than Lauren had thought it would be.

The pain was nearly overwhelming, and there were moments when she was hanging on only by their words to her.

Push.
Push.

Lauren concentrated on her husband’s face, telling him with her look that this was all for him, that this new life was her gift to him of everything she had to give.

At the outer edge of her pain was a faint little awareness that she was making this good for Jason: that she was acting.

56

It was midmorning when Rebecca climbed into the restored, pink 1957 Thunderbird that David had given her. She had risen at ten, and made herself a cup of coffee, which she drank out by the pool. Everything was sunlit and still on the terrace. The only sounds were those of a woodpecker
pok-pok-poking
against an oak tree and a neighbor’s sprinkler swishing.

Yet amid the sunlight and the calm Rebecca was somewhat agitated. For today was the day she had chosen to do something she had been planning to do for a long time.

David was on a roll, there was no doubt about that. Everything was going his way, and the few obstacles he encountered he was able to turn to his advantage too. When the studios wouldn’t go for Forrest Reston’s latest vehicle, David had put together his own package and sold it to CBS as a miniseries. The production had garnered enormous ratings—and David had been nominated for an Emmy, as producer. He was talking about forming his own production company now.

David and Rebecca had started using coke the year before, usually before they went to bed. Then David had started bringing it to parties, where he’d snort it in the bathroom. Lately he’d been bringing it to the office as well. Rebecca wasn’t sure how much of David’s recent success had been fueled by the stuff. She did know that as he’d been using more she’d been using less, and he hadn’t even noticed.

So in more ways than one, the time was ripe.

Rebecca had really dressed for this occasion. She’d put on a Gucci dress made of tissue-thin gray suede leather and ostrich hide shoes of the same color. The shoes had little markings that made her think of teeny tiny nipples.

Popping on her oversize sunglasses and sweeping back her hair, Rebecca backed the pink Thunderbird into the street. Coasting, with her foot constantly tapping the brake, she descended the hill. The houses, with their protective walls overflowing with lush bougainvillea and hibiscus, grew larger and larger as she approached Sunset Boulevard. At the small blue neon sign that spelled BEL AIR in script, Rebecca turned right.

Rebecca had told David that she was going to Santa Monica today, to see an old friend who was just back from Honolulu. She did get onto the Santa Monica freeway, but instead of heading for the beach, she drove into downtown Los Angeles. She got off the freeway at one of the numbered streets that open like the ribs of a tattered fan from the shiny high-rise office buildings that comprise the business district that came to L.A. as an afterthought. Rebecca drove past anonymous warehouses and hulking three-story houses with Spanish music wafting from their open windows.

The shiny pink Thunderbird was conspicuous on these streets, on which were parked old Cadillacs and Ford station wagons, and vans with painted-over signs on their sides.

Rebecca parked by two wood-frame houses that were joined at the alley between them by an iron gate. On the empty porch of one of the houses was a makeshift mail chute that extended from the railing to the center of a boarded-up window. She walked up to the iron gate and pressed a buzzer. There was no answer for more than a minute. Then a voice issuing from a small overhead speaker said, “Yeah?”

“It’s Becky,” Rebecca said. “I called yesterday.”

“Who?”

“Becky.” Asshole,
she muttered under her breath.

The speaker crackled.

“Look,” Rebecca shouted at it. “Just go and tell Johnny that Becky’s here.”

After a couple of minutes, Rebecca was buzzed in. She walked quickly along the alley, past a small fenced yard, past a staircase leading to the roof of one of the houses, and into a large courtyard with a pool in the middle of it.

Three women were standing by the pool. One was in a bikini and the other two were wearing sleeveless tops and shorts that exposed crescents of their buttocks. “Anybody who’ll keep me off Sunset and out of the tank for two nights in a row, they’d be my main man too,” one said as Rebecca walked by. None of the three paid the slightest attention to the visitor, and the one in the bathing suit began to study herself in a compact mirror. Though she was not more than twenty, her skin showed the wear and tear of acne, and her cheeks were caked with makeup.

The pool was surrounded by a high concrete wall where it was not enclosed by the two houses and a third structure that was like a small, windowless barn. Rebecca went directly to an ell of the larger house, where there was an office of sorts. By the office’s open door was a woman of around forty who was sitting on a folding chair reading a comic book with deliberation. She was wearing a dress covered with brown and gold flowers that looked like the upholstery of a kitchen chair. The dress was unbuttoned in the front, revealing the woman’s exhausted breasts.

Rebecca brushed by the woman and stepped into the dark of the office, where a black man with oily hair was laboring over a small film-editing machine. He was sitting at a desk that was piled high with photographs and opened manila envelopes and order forms.

“Roger,” Rebecca said.

The black man looked at her.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said. Surprise seemed to be something that had forsaken him years ago.

“Where is he?” Rebecca asked.

“I think he’s takin’ a nap.”

“Is he shooting today?”

“I don’t know.”

“Forget it. I’ll find out fast enough.”

Her heels clicked on the concrete around the pool. Whisking herself up to the heavy sliding door of the building that could have been a barn, Rebecca put her shoulder to it, and it rolled ajar. Inside was a big open room filled with props and lights and cables.

“Hey, close that,” someone said. “We’re working in here.” Rebecca pushed the door shut behind her. The man who had spoken to her was fat and bald with a beard and a leather vest and black high-top sneakers. Rebecca figured he was a new photographer. Here the photographer was also the director, and sometimes his instructions to the actors could be heard faintly on the movie’s sound track, along with automobile horns and jets passing overhead.

Evidently the set for whatever was being filmed now was just the desk on which all the lights were focused. It looked like a grammar school teacher’s desk. At either side of the bulky desk were two nuns in full habits. Each of them had a cat-o’-nine-tails in her hand. About to bend over the desk were two other, younger nuns whose habits were pulled up to expose their bare legs and buttocks. The hit man had the camera trained on a hand-lettered credit panel that began with the title
Mother Superior and the Naughty Novices.

“I’m looking for Johnny,” Rebecca said to him.

“He’s sleeping.”

“Thanks,” said Rebecca.

“He doesn’t like being disturbed,” the fat man said.

“I don’t think he’ll mind this time,” Rebecca replied.

She went back outside and climbed a flight of stairs. She banged on the door at the top of the stairs and, hearing mumbling from within, opened it. She walked into a studio apartment that was dominated by a king-size bed. The bed had a headboard of red crushed velvet, and the walls on either side of it were paneled with gold veined mirrors. Sprawled on the bed was a man of about thirty. He covered his eyes with the back of his hand and said, “Shut the fucking door, you’re blinding me.”

Closing the door behind her, Rebecca said, “Johnny, it’s me.

The man on the bed narrowed his heavy-lidded eyes. “Hey-y-y, look who’s here,” he said.

“Surprise,” said Rebecca. She smiled hesitantly. But she couldn’t hold back her eyes; her eyes were all over him, taking him in hungrily. His droopy cowboy’s mustache, his smooth brown skin, his bikini briefs, the same milky blue as the water in the pool below. Nothing had changed. Just the sight of him drained her of everything but her desire for him, left her with no will of her own but her will to be his.