Stages (44 page)

“Some dope,” he muttered.

“Mm,” Lauren said. She was almost ready to forget that ten minutes ago she’d been out of her mind in love with him. A lot of times it took a certain amount of forgetfulness, or a Valium, before Lauren could drop off. Tonight the problem was a little worse than usual, because she was still high, still horny—and the Tony Awards were only a week away.

Lauren lay there considering that last and sharpest thorn.

She, little Lauren, was actually up for a Tony. Just because she’d gotten behind a long-shot show, made some calls, gone to a few rehearsals, fed a few people cocktails. Now she was considered a producer. What twists and turns life could take, that she should suddenly be on a first-name basis with all these famous people, be mentioned on page six of the
Post,
and eat at places like 21 and Lutece. She was getting used to it all, but there were still times when Lauren thought she might be dreaming, when she asked herself,
Is this actually happening, to me?

Then she would remind herself , that her mother and father must have had such flashes of disbelief in their lives too—her father trying to grease the slushy underside of a car, his fingers stiff from the cold on a January morning; her mother finding a dime tip beneath a plate. Surely they too must have thought,
Is this what
I
was meant to do, is this what
I
am?

I’m lucky, Lauren thought. I just come from a background where luck seems supernatural. Yet that wasn’t explanation enough for the way she felt. Beyond their everyday lives, her mother had had the church, her father had had the track. She, Lauren, had had the theater. But her mother had never seen Christ in church, and her father had never held the harness of a horse in the winner’s circle.

What am I going to do at the Tony Awards,
Lauren thought,
if I have to go on stage, to accept?
Perhaps she shouldn’t even be thinking about it, perhaps what she would do and say would come to her naturally, would just
feel
right, like the sex she’d just had with her husband, so much better because it had not been rehearsed.

The inexpressible can be expressed sometimes,
she thought.
I can say,
“
I’ve always loved the theater,
”
she told herself,
and that will be true.
She looked at her husband, an indistinct bulk wrapped in a sheet that glowed faintly in the dark.
I’ve often loved you,
she thought. And it occurred to her that the way she felt about the theater, and the way she felt about her husband, showed that she had been married twice—and but once with all her heart. In her fashion, she had been cheating too.

*

“I still think it was beginner’s luck,” Jason said to Lauren as they sat in their limousine, as it sat, in the sea of limousines around the Shubert Theater.

“If we’d only gotten a couple of nominations, you might say that,” Lauren replied, “but not with five.”

“Well, anyway, don’t be counting your chickens,” Jason said.

Lauren wasn’t. But she was thinking about what she would say if she won. She couldn’t help it. One would have to be inhuman or an accountant not to be thinking about it. First, she thought, she’d have to thank everyone who’d been really indispensable. That would mean rattling off about a dozen names. Which would be no big deal for someone who had done Gilbert and Sullivan in high school. Then she’d have to thank Jason for being so supportive and encouraging. And she’d have to mention her father and mother who’d always pushed her to get into show business. Would this be enough? Lauren was wondering. Would she be saying what she truly felt?

Their limousine at last pulled up to the marquee, and Lauren and Jason stepped out of it into the brilliance, the lights, the TV cameras, the cordoned-off faces trying to spot stars.

Lauren hunched her shoulders a little out of guilt. She felt like saying to the crowd, “It’s only me, I’m not anybody, really.” Yet she stood straighter as she walked on Jason’s arm down the aisle of the theater. Here they all were—a lot of them smiling and nodding to her. How could you be nobody and be acknowledged by Lauren Bacall? And Carol Channing and Neil Simon and Bernie Jacobs and Judd Hirsch and George Rose? A voice inside Lauren kept repeating,
“
You’re ordinary, regular people, like your father used to say.
”

“
But there’s Meryl Streep,
the reality of the situation declared,
and she was talking to you, only this morning, at Leslie Blanchard’s.
”

It took Lauren a moment to catch her breath after they’d found their seats.

“Should I wave to Nat when the camera’s on us?” Jason asked.

“I told him we’d tug our ears like Carol Burnett used to do,” Lauren replied.

“I wonder if any of this means anything,” Jason said, “to people in Nebraska or Montana or the Hebrides.” Six male dancers were swirling around Sandy Duncan as he spoke.

“The wives look at the dresses,” Lauren said, “and they’re always interested in what Liz Taylor weighs. Try to look involved. This is my big night.”

“I paid the bills,” Jason said. “When you’re the guy in the restaurant who picks up the tab for ten or twenty people, you’ve got a right to sit back and be detached.”

“Concentrate on timing your ear, then,” Lauren hissed. She was feverish with nerves.

As the evening inched forward, she kept turning over in her mind the speech she would make if she won. When her show,
Vaudeville Revival,
got Best Choreography, her heart leaped up, thumping. But her gracious smile at being mentioned revealed nothing of what was going on inside her.

Then
Vaudeville Revival
got Best Supporting Actor. And after that, Best Book. The other awards were scattered. Best Director would probably be the bellwether.

Vaudeville Revival
got it.

“Oh, my God,” Lauren said. She touched the base of her throat with her hand. She felt weak.

“Relax,” Jason said.

With the sense of inevitability, a strange sort of calm was coming over Lauren. She did relax, and her thoughts began to flow. She knew what she was going to say, just as she had known back at Blake, when she was ready to go onstage, her lines all set in her head. She would say:

“I accept this award not just for everyone who worked on
Vaudeville Revival,
but also for myself—and the people I feel I’m privileged to represent: all those people who sit out there in the audience being made to laugh and to cry, all those people who have ever wanted to reach out to the stage and the actors on it, and give back something in return that isn’t just applause. For me this has been the greatest experience of my life, because it has allowed me to feel that I don’t just go to theater, I’m part of it. I wish everyone in the audience could be as fortunate….
”

Then she would hold the Tony aloft and say, “So this is for everyone who buys a ticket and
believes.
”

Lauren held Jason’s hand while they were opening the envelope.

Mary Martin smiled, as if she were looking at a sweet greeting card from an old friend.

“City Streets!”
she said.

The music from that show blared, and several men in black tie scrambled out of their seats.

Lauren smiled and applauded enthusiastically.

“Sorry, kid,” Jason said under his breath.

Later, after the party, when they had settled into the car for the ride home, he said, “I hope you’re not going to let this bother you.”

“Of course I’m not,” Lauren replied. “I’ve already thought about it, and I know why we didn’t win.”

“Why?”

“The show just wasn’t good enough, that’s why.”

“Oh,” said Jason. He reached for one of the crystal decanters in the burled walnut cabinet that also housed the Sony TV.

“The next show I get involved in
will
be,” Lauren said.

It might take two years,
she was thinking,
it might take three.
However long it took, her speech would be ready.

74

Saturday morning Kathy was going to show three houses to a Venezuelan family. Two of the houses were in Beverly Hills and one was in Bel Air. The one in Bel Air belonged to David—or it had belonged to David. Now it was the bank’s. After declaring bankruptcy, David had left L.A. as quickly as he could and had gone to work for his father in New York. Kathy had been repaid eleven percent of her secret investment; she hadn’t minded taking the loss, though. It was a tax write-off if it was nothing else, but of course it
was
something else. It was a source of satisfaction to Kathy. She had proved to herself that she had so completely mastered the system she’d once rejected that she could truly work wonders. And it was a wonder indeed if you could manipulate things to the point where you could say yes, there was still some justice in life. The only disappointment for Kathy in all of this had been seeing David give up. But he’d been on coke, that little tramp had had him wrapped around her finger—and when it all came apart, no doubt he’d thought that his life was over.

That, Kathy well knew, was one of life’s surprises: it’s never over that easily. Too bad for men that they always had to take so long to grow up, but at least David had learned that he had a heart in the process of having it broken. Let him go back to New York and be a baby again for a while. He was an adult now, and he’d soon grow restless in the confines of home.

Meanwhile Kathy had to find a home for the Santos family. The parents were very nice. Their three sons were nice too, although Kathy found the fourteen-year-old in the polo shirt and the riding boots a bit cocky. He was going to Valley Forge, a military school, and made Kathy think of
Evita.
But of course South American aristocrats had never changed that much. Kathy had learned to deal with them, though—not without a little lingering suspicion, however.

Her personal reservations notwithstanding, Kathy gamely headed for the hills with the Santos family piled into her Mercedes. In her rearview mirror she could see the oldest boy smiling through his braces
— Silly of me to let him make me feel so defensive,
she thought,
why, he didn’t even bring along a riding crop.
And Alison would probably like his younger brother, the ten-year-old with the jet-black hair combed straight back, wet.

The first home on today’s list was a ranch house that made Kathy think of the Ponderosa from “Bonanza” redone in marble and velvet. Unfortunately the owners of the house were in residence. The wife was an heiress who, for a hobby, ensnared helpless plants in cruel macramé traps. The husband was a sort of wet electric blanket (he’d once designed appliances and now only walked the dog).

“Not again,” said the husband as he opened the front door.

“This is Mr. and Mrs. Santos and their sons Miguel, Carlos, and José,” Kathy began, ignoring the rudeness.

“There’s been too many goddamn tire kickers coming around here,” the husband muttered as he unwillingly stood aside. When Kathy and the Santoses were all in the foyer, he called out to his wife, “Simone, here’s another bunch.” Then he whistled for his dog, which appeared, whipping everyone about the legs with its tail. Sourpuss pushed the dog outside and followed it, taking along a knobby walking stick that Kathy assumed he was going to use to whack at the rosebushes.

Showing the house was not made any easier for Kathy by the marginally gracious Simone, who followed the Santoses from room to room, picking up vases and lamps ahead of the boys. It seemed to Kathy that from every window Sourpuss could be seen trudging along in his bitter solitude.
Heaven help David,
Kathy thought,
if he ever winds up like that.
A defeated man, giving up on everything but his hostility.

The Santoses’ youngest son had a sudden attack of diarrhea in the master bedroom, and when he emerged from the
his
bathroom it smelled like a chile refinery. As they were leaving, Sourpuss walked back in saying, “It’s about time, I’ve been waiting a half hour to take my shower,” and Kathy watched fascinated as he stalked down the hall to be gassed. More and more it seemed to her that there was an odd rightness about the way things worked out.

Feeling refreshed, Kathy took the Santoses on to the second house, and then to David’s place, which had been stripped of furniture for almost six months. The grass was brown from lack of watering, half the bushes were as dead as cornstalks in the fall, and the pool was still three quarters full. Walking through David’s hollow house, Kathy felt somewhat uncomfortable, but glad that she had not seen what this place had seen. Besides, nothing in L.A. was haunted but the house that had belonged to George Reeves, who played Superman on television and then either committed suicide or was murdered—only his ghost knew for sure. Only David knew for certain what had happened here, and, like Reeves’s ghost, he wasn’t talking.

Kathy was showing the Santoses the closets in the master bedroom when Miguel with the slick hair pointed and said, “What’s that?” Kathy looked up. She saw something gleaming on the top shelf. She reached up and slid it forward with her fingertips. Getting a grip on it, she pulled it down.