Stars (The Butterfly Trilogy) (33 page)

     "Who is it?" she said, annoyed at being disturbed. All of her tenants knew better than to disturb her during "Lucy," even if she
was
just watching reruns.

     The tap-tap-tapping continued until she said, "Oh for goodness sake," and got up and went to see who it was.

     Philippa was standing there, in her nightgown, looking as white as flour. "Mrs. Chadwick," she said in a faint voice, "I don't feel well."

     And then she lifted up a hand and there was blood on it.

     "Oh my God!" the landlady said. She caught Philippa as she was about to slump to the floor and brought her inside. As she helped the girl into the bedroom, she saw the blood on Philippa's nightgown and spotting the floor. "Jesus, child!" she said. "What happened?"

     Philippa started to cry. "He's dead," she said. "He shot himself. If I had gotten there a minute sooner, I could have saved him. It's all my fault."

     Having no idea what she was talking about, Mrs. Chadwick settled her on the bed, then lifted up the nightgown. When she saw the bleeding, she said, "I'm calling a doctor."

     But Philippa, with startling strength, suddenly seized the landlady's wrist and said, "No. Don't do that. Doctors make reports."

     "Honey, you're having a miscarriage!"

     "Please. Don't call a doctor. I don't want a record...of...it."

     Mrs. Chadwick hesitated and then reluctantly admitted that this might be one of those woman moments that forever must remain a secret. So she rolled up her sleeves and got to work. She sat with Philippa all through the night, during the whole painful process that was like a birth, with labor pains, blood, and everything. But she didn't call a doctor. Not yet. She respected Philippa's wish, for now. But if it got out of hand, there was the telephone, just in case.

     But finally the ordeal seemed to run its course and Mrs. Chadwick put all the towels into a large plastic bag and twisted it tightly shut. Then she
cleaned Philippa and put her into one of her own flannel nightgowns and let her sleep. And she thought for a moment about life, how it wasn't like it was on TV, then she went back into her living room and saw that the rising sun was spilling its beams over her furniture. She wondered for the first time in a long time how her marriage with Mr. Chadwick would have ended up if
their
baby had lived.

     The next afternoon Philippa opened her eyes and the first thing she said was, "Was it a boy or a girl?"

     "You couldn't tell, child," Mrs. Chadwick said gently, dipping buttered toast into a soft-boiled egg and offering it to Philippa. "It was just a little bit of a thing. Nowhere near a baby yet."

     "Mrs. Chadwick," Philippa said, lucid for the first time in hours, "I wasn't able to help Rhys. He didn't take me seriously."

     "Don't talk, honey, just eat."

     She pushed Mrs. Chadwick's hand away. "No, I have to tell you. There was a girl at the school where I was, poor Mouse—she tried to change her looks and almost blinded herself. And then there was Frizz, who always hated the way she looked, believed other girls who told her she had ugly hair. Even Amber, who must have hated herself, to be so cruel, to force herself to throw up."

     Mrs. Chadwick nodded, even though she had no idea what Philippa was talking about.

     "And now Rhys," Philippa finally said. "He hated himself, too. I tried to make him see himself differently, to like himself, to accept himself as he was, but all he saw was death. He was doomed. I couldn't reach him."

     "I'm sure you did what you could, honey."

     "Help me up, please," Philippa said.

     She made her way to the window and looked out at the brand-new sunshine washing over the Hollywood Hills. She wondered if she had been born not far from here; her school file had simply said, "Hollywood." Maybe her real mother was still out there somewhere, not far away at this very moment, looking at the same rain-washed sunshine. "Rhys didn't take me seriously, partly because I'm fat," she said. "He called me a plump partridge, a quail, a child with a young soul. No one takes a fat girl seriously."
She turned and looked at Mrs. Chadwick. "But I'm going to change that. I'm going to have to if I want to influence people and help them somehow. The Mouses and the Frizzes and the—" her voice caught "—Rhyses of the world. I'm going to become thin, someone people will listen to. Someone important. And I'll never be fat again."

I
'M TELLING YOU
, S
YLVIE, IT WAS THE BEST SEX
I'
VE EVER HAD
." Frieda Goldman's eyes snapped open. She was in one of the massage rooms of the Starlite salon at Star's health club, stretched out on a towel, trying to relax as Marcel, a real Frenchman, worked the essential oils of carnation, jasmine, lavender, and basil into her tense flesh. Marcel was a licensed
arôme-thérapiste
in France, where they took seriously the practice of treating stress and minor physical ailments with fragrances. Frieda had decided to avail herself of the service before her dinner appointment with Bunny; she was so excited that she hadn't slept well the night before, and although she had spent the morning on the phone busy with other deals and making contacts, work had not had its usual therapeutic effect on her.

     Syd Stern had called. "Did you get her to sign?" he had said abruptly. "Tonight for sure," Frieda had promised, her mouth filled with the chalky residue of Mylanta tablets.

     Since Frieda rarely drank before sundown and she had given up smoking long ago, she had decided to come to the health club to try to relax
her fifty-three-year-old bones. As Marcel worked wonders with his miracle fingers—carnation oil into her neck, to ease those muscles, and lavender into her temples, for the headache—Frieda's peace was disturbed when two women walked by in the corridor beyond, talking about sex as they came to a halt outside her cubicle.

     There was the sound of someone stepping up onto scales and moving weights along a balance beam. And then: "I'm serious, Sylvie. The
best
sex I've ever had."

     Frieda tried to tune them out. She needed to think; her nerves had gotten to the point where she felt as if she were a gun about to go off.

     "But how can you have sex with a perfect stranger?" Sylvie asked.

     "It's a lousy job, Sylvie," the other woman said, "but someone's gotta do it." And they both laughed.

     "But seriously, how is it handled? I mean, did you pay him or what?"

     Again, someone stepped up on the scales, the weights were moved, the balance beam went
thunk
, and someone muttered, "Oy."

     "Oh no, nothing so tacky as that. It's all done very discreetly. You just kind of let it be known to the management that you're here all alone and that you'd like some company for the evening. Next thing you know, they're calling you and telling you that you've got a dinner escort. So I go to the dining room and there's this gorgeous male, late twenties, waiting for me. And I mean gorgeous—black hair, shoulders out to here, and he treats me like I'm the Queen of Sheba. We have a pleasant dinner, a few drinks, some small talk, and then I ask him if he'd like to come to my room for a nightcap."

     "And? And?" Sylvie said.

     "And, so you can imagine the rest."

     "But how do you
pay
for it?"

     "It shows up on your bill when you check out. Under room service."

     "Do you know how much it's going to be?"

     "I have no idea. And I tell you what, Sylvie. I don't care. For sex like that—I mean
all night long
, my dear—I'd pay anything."

     A few seconds of astonished silence. "But doesn't it make you feel guilty? I mean, what about Gary?"

     "What about him? All he knows is that every time I come home from a week at Star's I'm cheerful and easy to get along with. There's nothing better to pump life into an old relationship!"

     They laughed again and moved on, while Frieda lay beneath Marcel's massaging fingers, thinking about the young man in the tuxedo who had given her the eye the night before when she had arrived, and whom she had run into again that morning in the lobby at the Castle. Once again, he had given her one of those sexy smiles, and to Frieda's astonishment she had gotten a feeling deep in her pelvis. Had
he
been Sylvie's friend's dinner companion? What
would
it be like to have sex with him? And all night long...she couldn't even imagine it.

     Sex! Frieda thought, nearly laughing out loud. So when was the last time
she
had had sex?

     They came back, Sylvie and her friend, from whatever they had done down the hall. Now Frieda heard the water fountain run as the two women continued to talk. "By the way, did you know that Larry Wolfe is here, the screenwriter? That man's a real hunk. I swear he belongs in
front
of the camera, not behind it."

     "I heard he was here to write a screenplay of Marion Star's story. Mind you, I'm too young to remember, but her lover was murdered here, in the famous bathroom. Have you seen that room yet?
Very
naughty."

     Frieda tried again to tune them out. Larry Wolfe's latest project didn't interest her—the Marion Star role wasn't something Bunny could play.

     "Hey, you know who I ran into this morning? Jay Stonehocker—you know, that schlock director who makes millions churning out those awful karate action films? Anyway, we got to talking, and he told me that Syd Stern—you know him, sort of Spielberg-ish—is developing a new project, a series of adventure films starring one woman, a female Indiana Jones. He's looking for someone to play the part."

     Frieda was suddenly alert.

     "You know who would be good for it?" Sylvie said. "My niece. She's studying to be an actress. And my husband and Syd Stern are like
that;
they golf together, you know. He'll take a look at her if I ask him. In fact, I'm going to give him a call."

     Frieda was up and out of there before Marcel could begin to rub the basil behind her knees.

     "You're fine, Bunny," Judith Isaacs said as she closed her medical bag. "You're ready to face the world again."

     "Thank goodness," Bunny said. "My agent is here, she called a few minutes ago, just before you arrived. She's frantic to see me. We were supposed to have dinner tonight, but she insists on coming over right away."

     "Yes. I spoke with Mrs. Goldman this morning. She's very concerned about you, but I assured her that you're all right and that there was no reason you couldn't see her."

     "I wonder why she's here," Bunny said as she tied the sash of her bath-robe and picked up her orange juice. "Frieda says she has something important to discuss with me. She normally isn't so secretive, so I'm guessing it's a movie deal—I'm
praying
it's a movie deal."

     As she reached for the bottle of vitamins beside her bed, Bunny glanced at the photograph that stood among a clutter of Kleenex, cough syrups, throat lozenges, and sleeping pills. It was a picture of Bunny with her father, the wealthy industrialist who was paying for her extended stay at Star's. The photo had been taken four years ago when Mr. Kowalski had taken his daughter on a cruise around the world for her twenty-first birthday. They were standing on the deck of a cruise ship, smiling self-consciously at the camera, trying to look like a close and loving father and daughter. Bunny had been relatively thin then, because she had just come out of a three-month stint at an expensive fat farm, only one of many where she had spent her adolescence. But she had gained the weight all back, and then some, on the cruise.

     And her father had been far from happy about that.

     In fact, for as long as she could remember, Bunny's father had been displeased with her for one reason or another. Bernie Kowalski, the man she could never please, no matter what she did. Sometimes he would look at her with something in his face that said, How could someone like me, rich, sophisticated, powerful, produce such a nebbish? Her part in
Children Again
, though praised by critics and well received by the public, had embarrassed him. When Bunny hadn't received the award for Best Supporting actress,
he had said it was a good thing, because now maybe she would come to her senses and give up this insane Hollywood dream.

     Even when she was younger, she could never please him. He would look at her as if she had somehow let him down. But Bunny couldn't help how God had put her together. She had been called Gidget all through school, even though she wasn't really small; it was because her "lush" figure made her look shorter than she really was. She was the girl in the fifth grade class who had breasts before anyone else. But it was her Kewpie-doll look that had made her such a hit in that last movie, everyone said, and probably why she had earned an Oscar nomination. "Fine," her father had said when she had shown him the reviews. "So now you're going to make a career out of being chubby and awkward? And how many parts like that do you think come down the pike? No daughter of mine is going to degrade herself taking the freak roles that decent actresses turn their noses up at."