Fault Lines

She used her old toddler’s nickname for me; she had not been able, at first, to manage Merritt.

“I didn’t run away, as you well know. Where’s Glynn? Is she okay?”

“Oh, yeah, she’s fine. Aghast at what she’s done and scared shitless that you’re going to snatch her home to Daddy and he’s going to kill her, but basically she’s fine. We thought it would be better if I came by myself, to sort of see how the ground lay. Neither of us wanted her to get spanked in the middle of LAX.”

“Nobody has ever spanked Glynn in her entire life,” I said. “Did she say we had?”

“No. Lighten up. She just acts like you do. Come on, I’m parked at the curb and they’re going to tow me for sure. You have luggage?”

“Just this,” I hefted my carry-on.

“Not planning to linger, are you?”

“No. This is not a social call. You know I just came to take her home. We’re not going to argue about that, Laura.”

She held up a propitiating hand, and walked ahead of me down the concourse toward the baggage claim. I followed her, the duffle slapping against my leg. Fatigue and strangeness hovered around me like a miasma. I felt as though I was walking and walking, and not getting anywhere. But presently we were through the thonged claim area and out into the strange bronze sunlight of early afternoon. We did not speak until then.

A red Mustang convertible, top down, was pulled up to the curb in the no parking zone, and an airport cop was just walking around behind it to get the tag number. It was an old model, but it gleamed as if it had just come, newly molten, from the factory.

“Oh, Lord,” Laura said huskily. The southern accent she had lost in high school drama class crept back. “I guess that’s nonnegotiable, huh?”

“Afraid so,” the cop said, staring at her. Even in the Los Angeles airport, where half the women who walked through were blond and wore the jeans-T-shirt uniform and were probably Somebody, Laura stood out. The indefinable, old electric charge smote the air around her. I saw the cop register the fact that here indeed was Somebody and hesitate very slightly. I knew then he was lost. Laura did, too.

“You see, officer, my big sister has come all the way from Atlanta to see me for the first time ever, and my radiator started acting funny in the desert, and I just got the car and I don’t know anything about it yet, and I wanted to surprise her, and I was running so late…” Laura let her voice trail off and crinkled her nose. She grinned, managing somehow to make the grin both repentant and imploring. He grinned, too, slightly.

“Well, seeing as how it’s your big sister—”

“That’s very decent of you,” Laura said, and made that sound as if it were an invitation into her bed.

I tossed my bag into the backseat and Laura climbed into the driver’s. As she started the ignition the cop appeared at her side.

“I wondered if you’d mind,” he said, handing her in a blank ticket pad. “I’ve got this kid—”

“Of course.”

Laura took the ticket pad and scribbled on it with his proffered ballpoint and handed it back with a flourish. He examined it, and broke into a broad grin.

“This’ll kill him,” he said. “Batman was his all-time favorite. Seen it four times.”

“Hope he likes it,” Laura said, and gunned the car, and we were out of the shade of the overhang, into the strange pewter air.

“You didn’t,” I said, laughing helplessly.

“Why not? He saved me a fine,” she said. “Some people do think we look alike.”

Not anymore, I thought, and felt a rush of sadness for her, and the old, fierce, protective love.

“You’ve got her beat a country mile,” I said, and she smiled, and it was the old, sweet, enchanting Laura smile, without salt or shadows in it.

“I’m glad you’re here, for whatever reason,” she said. “I was afraid you were going to be furious with me.”

“I should be, I guess. At you and Glynn. But right now I’m madder at Pom and maddest at Mommee, and neither one of them can help it, really.”

“He can’t help screaming at Glynn and grounding her for the rest of her life? And yelling at you? The old lady can’t help setting Glynn’s clothes on fire and then squalling for her sonnyboy?”

“She has Alzheimer’s, Laura. She doesn’t know what she’s doing most of the time. And he…well, command is sort of what he does. It’s what a doctor is all about; it’s got to be that way or he can’t function. Pom runs a charity clinic down in the projects. Can you imagine what that would be like if he couldn’t control it? Sometimes he forgets where he is; it’s hard to turn a lifetime of habit on and off. And he’s crazy about his mother, and this illness just devastates him. I think it frightens him, too. To get outside help, or put her in a home…that means that he can’t take care of her, that it can’t be fixed. He just can’t handle that yet.”

“Poor baby,” Laura said. I was too tired to keep the discussion going, and did not answer. She was silent for a while, too.

She wove the car in and out of the heavy traffic on what the signs said was the San Diego Freeway. It could have been any large artery in any commercial-industrial area of any large city in the world. The air was noxious, foul and tasting of metal and sulfur and asphalt and gasoline. It stung my nose and eyes and throat. I felt tears start, and a scum of stinging stickiness film my face and arms. The heat was monstrous. Every few minutes we would come to a halt in a frozen river of traffic and the air would eddy and sway, cobralike, above the glacier of cars, and horns would begin to shriek. Before we had gone five miles I surrendered.

“Could we put the top up?” I said. “Maybe you’re used to breathing this stuff, but it’s stripping my throat out.”

“Yeah, Atlanta has such pure air,” she grinned, and I smiled reluctantly, because Atlanta’s air is frequently just as awful a stew of assorted fumes and stinks, only with the addition of killer humidity.

She pressed a button and the top rose and glided silently into its groove. She raised the windows and turned on the air conditioner and the immediacy of the devouring air shrank back, leaving us sealed in a capsule of quiet and stale cool, rushing air. The Mustang’s windows were tinted gray-green and gave the landscape outside the sinister air of a futuristic movie set on some alien, metallic planet where a thin no-color ether took the place of air. The strangeness I had brought with me bloomed into fullness, and I gave myself up to it.

“Nothing feels real,” I said, lying my head back against the headrest.

“Nothing is,” she said. “That’s our secret. You’re going to do just fine out here.”

She pushed a tape into the deck and the pure, somehow lonely voices of the Fifth Dimension spun out into the car: “When the moon is in the seventh house/And Jupiter aligns with Mars/Then peace will guide the planets/and love will steer the stars./This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius…”

She turned her head to me and smiled.

“This was one of the first albums you ever bought me, remember? When you were in college and I was feeling kind of down? It’s always seemed the most comforting song to me; it promises so much…”

I remembered. She had played the record over and over, shut away in her room, until it had become inoperable, and I had had to buy her another.

“Do you need comforting, Pie?” I said, like her reverting to an old nickname.

“Who doesn’t? But no, not really. I just like the song, that’s all.”

Her tone said the discussion was over, and we fell silent once more. She turned onto the Santa Monica Freeway, and I watched as names I had heard all my life sailed by on off-ramp signs: Century City, Twentieth Century Fox Studios, La Brea, Venice. I acknowledged them in my mind, but felt no curiosity about them as I usually did such signs in other new places. Here in this hurtling gray-greenness, everything was strange and consequently nothing was.

She made another turn and said, “I think we’ll try the San Bernardino Freeway. It’s a little longer, but you’ll have a better shot at the mountains this way. Sometimes this stuff lifts outside L.A. proper.”

“What mountains? Will we pass the Hollywood sign?”

“No, that’s back there behind us, in the Hollywood Hills. I’ve seen it about twice. We’ll see the San Gabriels and later the San Bernardinos. I hope. Right near Palm Springs the mountains come right down to the road; they’re really something. It’s beautiful country. I hate it when I have to leave.”

I put my head back and closed my eyes. Pom’s face swam into the space behind them, furious and anguished. I felt a stab of pity and love, and then, once more, the cold, constricting anger that had set me on this journey. Only this morning, it was. It felt like days, weeks. Pom’s face faded. I must have slept.

When I opened my eyes again the seemingly endless string of flat, sun-blasted little towns and strip shopping centers had given way to long stretches of pastel desert broken by strange, spiny, sentinel cacti and scrubby copses of small, silvery gray, wind-ruffled trees. The metallic sky had turned deep blue, and to our left a tidal wave of sharp, deep-shadowed mountains rose. They were so clearly defined that I could see small folds and crevices, carved cliffs and rock faces, the lighter scars of tracks and roads. They were stained the colors of earth and air: rose, brick, taupe, dust-gray, slate, deepwater blue. Beautiful; they were as alien and beautiful to me as the face of the moon.

“Are those the San Gabriels?” I said. “Where are we?”

“No. The San Bernardinos. We’re just past Ontario, coming up on Redlands. Home before long,” said Laura. She stretched both arms straight out and rotated her head on her neck.

“I’ll bet you could use a drink and something to eat,” she said. “I left Glynn making miso soup. She only said yuck six times.”

“How can she be making miso soup? I don’t even know what it is, much less Glynn. You may be sorry.”

“Nah. It’ll be good for you and her, too. Full of vitamins,” Laura said. “Listen, Met, it may be none of my business, but she worries me. She’s a neat kid…Lord, what a beauty; I had no idea…but she’s not really a kid. She doesn’t giggle, she doesn’t squeal, she doesn’t preen and look at herself in mirrors, she doesn’t even have any hot rollers or makeup with her. What’s going on with her? What’s wrong at your house?”

“There’s nothing going on with her,” I said stiffly. “She’s never giggled and squealed and all that silly teenage stuff; I think we’re going to be spared that. She is a good kid; the best. She writes and paints, and she’s good at music and great at science, and her grades are tops, and she’s a terrific swimmer; she wins meets…and there’s nothing wrong at our house. Thank you for asking, though.”

“Don’t mention it,” she said dryly. “Nothing the matter, huh? That’s why she runs away from home and you come tearing out here right behind her? There damned well is something wrong, and if you don’t know it, she’s in even worse trouble than I think she is.”

“Look, it’s just this stuff with Mommee,” I snapped. “That’s going to be settled when we get home, believe me. It’s not easy to be sixteen in a house with an addled old lady—”

“It’s more than that,” Laura said. “No, I will not shut up, so spare me that familiar scowl. She may be your daughter, but she’s my niece, and she came to me for help. Have you looked at her lately, really? God, Met, she’s so serious, and pale, and so damned thin! And she seems apprehensive, even scared, all the time; she whispers like she’s listening for something. What does she do for fun, clean out her closets? Or no, I remember, there’s nothing now to clean out, is there? She told me about her new clothes. Christ. Why do you put up with that old harpy? No wonder Glynn ran away. I bet Pom’s sainted boys split long ago, didn’t they?”

“The boys are twenty-two and twenty-five,” I said. Anger thickened my voice. She had always known just which buttons to push. “Chip is working in New York for a brokerage house, and Jeff is in med school at Hopkins. They’re gone because it was time for them to go out into the world; nothing drove them away. Mommee wasn’t even with us when they left. She was with Pom’s brother and his wife then.”

“What did they do, leave her on a hospital doorstep and skip the country? So now you have her. And I mean you, because I bet Pom doesn’t spend more than five minutes a day with her. Brings old Mommee home and leaves you with the whole thing, you and Glynn.”

“It was my choice, Laura,” I said evenly, determined not to fall back into the old pattern of attack and defend, thrust and parry. I could not stop myself from adding, “Everybody can’t run away.”

My voice sounded smug even to me. But she only shrugged.

“Why not? Where is it written? So you’re going to cart my niece home tomorrow, huh?”

“That’s right.”

She gave me a long, oblique look from the sherry eyes.

“Let her stay,” she said. “Let me show her some of my world. I know a zillion people in the industry; we could see studios, and screenings, and go to lunch at famous places, and I could introduce her to some really famous people. It’s fantasy land, maybe, but it’s mine, and what kid wouldn’t love it? She might even turn into a real kid.”

“Even if I wanted to, Laura, I can’t,” I said. “Pom is really angry at both of us. He’ll get over it, but if I push him much right now he’s going to ground her for the rest of her life. I don’t want him to really punish her.”

“Bullshit,” Laura said. “It’s you he’ll punish. Listen, has she ever had a boyfriend? Has she gotten her period yet?”

“She’s a late bloomer. I was. Lots of her friends are.”

She was silent for a long while, and then she said, “Anorexia can kill you, Met.”

“Do you really think we haven’t been treating her…eating disorder?” I cried. “She’s been to doctors and in therapy since she was fourteen. It’s much better.”

“Couldn’t be much worse,” Laura said. “Why not try something different? Aunt Laura’s Sure Cure. I advise a long motor trip in sunny California, with the top down and good food and new clothes and exotic locations and glamorous people—”

“I can’t let her run all over California by herself, Laura. Be reasonable.” My heart was thumping with annoyance and something else I did not want to examine.

She was silent again, and then she said, “She’d be with me. What you mean is, you can’t let her run all over California with a crackhead actress. I haven’t done a line or had a drink in years, if you’re keeping score. Besides, you could come, too. See my world. I’d love that, Met. I’d love to show you what draws me, what makes me real. I’ve always wanted to; I’ve always thought that if you could just see it, you’d understand…you might see who your daughter is, too, or who she could be. You might even see what you are. You might like what you see.”

“Oh, Laura! I have family—”

“I thought we were family,” she said softly. She kept her eyes on the road and the mountains. They were darkening, casting long blue shadow fingers over the earth. Reaching for us in the red car.

She looked over at me then.

“Aren’t we three here just as much family as your four back there?” she said.

“Pie, please understand—”

“Oh, I do,” she said. She did not speak again.

I was silent, too.

We swept over a rise and down into the vast, mountain-ringed bowl of a valley. Its flat bottom was steeped in shadow like tea, but light still limned the peaks of the mountains, and the sky over them was going silvery. On our left and right stretched huge fields of what looked at first to be strange, stylized, prehistoric birds, all in frenetic motion. They ran in orderly rows that reached to the base of the mountains. I drew in my breath, and then saw that they were propellerlike wind-mills, all running in place before an unseen wind.

I exhaled in pure delight. Laura looked over at me and smiled.

“I know,” she said. “They never fail to knock me out, no matter how many times I pass them. They’re driven by convection, the hot air rising from the bottom of this valley where the mountains hold it in. It’s like someone has literally planted the wind.”

I smiled at the lovely little turn of phrase, forgetting completely that I was angry with her.

“What are they for? What do they do?”

“Power. They can light this desert up for a hundred miles. Back when the big quake up at Big Bear Lake took out all the power these guys went right on working.”

“Quake…Lord, that’s right,” I said, remembering the strange weather and the talk of storms and sinister atmospheric phenomena and the renegade climatologist on TV. “Y’all are supposed to have the big one any minute now. No way am I going to let Glynn stay out here with that hanging over you—”

“Jesus, Met, we have them all the time, little ones, and none of them ever turn into the really big one. Northridge was the Big One; everybody says so. We barely felt Big Bear, and it wasn’t far. If you’re thinking about that wacko scientist, you might remember how the New Madrid business turned out. You’re just reaching, now.”

And I took another deep breath and let it out, and was quiet, because that’s just what I was doing.

You can see Palm Springs a long way away. It is a great swathe of green, a dense emerald prayer rug, flung down in all the tawny, wild-animal colors of the desert. I found it hard, when it came into view, to look away. Palms, jacarandas, hibiscus, lantana, and a great many other exotic flora for which I had no name yet, formed bowers and islands in the almost continuous velvet carpet that, Laura said, was a network of golf courses without parallel in the United States. These were spotted with flashes of silver and blue: ponds, water holes, lakes, and the swimming pools of hundreds of hotels and villas, all catching the last of the sun. In the shadow of the mountains, and up in their steep foothills, lights were beginning to bloom. It looked like a Fabergé village or a particularly glittering Disney theme park.

“Where are the people?” I said. There seemed to be no cars moving on the arrow-straight toy roads that bisected the green.

“At cocktails. Or getting ready for cocktails. Or in some cases getting over the ones they had at lunch,” Laura said. “This is the hour of the dressing drink.”

“What do you do if you don’t drink?”

“Oh…eat. Make love. Garden, if you are so undistinguished as not to have a gardener. Bicycle or run; it’s too hot to do it any other time, except early morning. Ride the tram.”

She gestured ahead, and following her hand I made out a miniature railway snaking up a mountainside, with a tiny tram toiling slowly up it, toward the pink-gold light just receding from the peaks. I thought that what you saw from the top at this hour must be incredible.

“That looks like fun,” I said. “Have you ever been up to it?”

“Believe it or not, I haven’t. It’s sort of like New Yorkers and the Staten Island Ferry. But we could go tomorrow. Glynn wants to.”

“The plane I want leaves at noon,” I said. “I don’t think we could make it if we did the tram.”

“There’s another one at six.”

I did not answer her. The teasing, singsong note I remembered from her childhood was back in her voice. It made me want to shake her and hug her close at the same time. I did not need for Laura to revert to childhood; I had enough on my hands with one agitated child.

Laura swung off the freeway and onto a narrower road. It ran for a time through low, sculptured buildings where fairy lights bloomed on outdoor patios and cobbled streets twisted off into the blue shadows of other buildings. There were people here; strolling in and out of shops, sitting on terraces sipping drinks, jostling and crowding in the canyonlike streets. The buildings were adobe, I supposed, and bleached by the fading light; they reminded me more of Casablanca or Tangier than the American West. Then we were through the cluster and Laura nosed the car up an even narrower road that seemed to climb straight into the roots of the mountains.

Buildings here were low and many-leveled, climbing with the earth. Lights starred some of them. At the end of the road, where the mountains jutted straight up into a rock cliff, lay the carved white cluster of Merlin’s caves that I remembered from her photographs. They were beautiful, but seemed somehow inimical to life. Where would you put your garbage cans in this place? Where would you hang your wet bathing suits, air your rugs? Where would you park your car? When we swung around behind, I saw where: a long, low, white, stable-like building with twisted log supports housed a scattering of Mercedeses and Jaguars and BMWs. There were one or two more Mustang convertibles like Laura’s, gleaming in the dusk. Some of the spaces were empty, but Laura stopped and stared at one that was not. The dusty back end of what appeared to be a late seventies Pontiac protruded from it.

“Shit. Somebody’s company has got my space,” she said. “Everybody knows not to do that; now I’m going to have to call around and catch whoever it is, and they’re going to give me all that crap about not knowing their guests were parked there and…oh, it’s Stu! Oh, good! Or at least I hope it’s good. Damn him, he knows I’m going to have to park in the driveway now. It embarrasses him for people to see that wreck he drives—”

“Who is Stu? I’m surprised Glynn let him in. She knows better,” I said uneasily, thinking that I was not exactly thrilled to have Glynn left alone with one of Laura’s men friends. My mind swiftly built Stu from the air: lithe as a panther, snakehipped, ponytailed and earringed, teeth bleached the white of bones and flashing in a tanned face, jeans riding low, and shirt unbuttoned to show the gold chain nestled in the thatch of chest hair. The gold chain holding the key to Laura’s condo.

She caught my tone and laughed.

“Stu is my agent. Stuart Feinstein. He has a key. No, he’s not going to ravish Glynn. He’s far more likely to be feeding her something healthy and horrible and regaling her with lifestyles of the rich and famous. He’s a darling, an angel, my best friend; he’s never given up on me. And he’s HIV positive and I think he’s got active AIDS, though he won’t say so, and that’s breaking my heart. He seems awfully frail lately. I think I’m the only client he still does much for. He truly believes I’m an extraordinary actress, and that’s more than I can say for most people around here these days, including, sometimes, me.”

“AIDS—”

“She’s not going to catch it from him, Met. Not unless she’s sleeping with him, and I doubt that. He’s gay as a goose. You’re not going to catch it, either. Doesn’t Pom see HIV at that famous clinic?”

“Of course he does, all the time,” I snapped. I was not accustomed to having my sister treat me like a child.

“And I do, too. I volunteer at Jerusalem House back home; it’s this wonderful place where people with active AIDS go and live out whatever time they have left. Their families won’t have them. The volunteers are incredible; they do literally everything that needs doing. The residents are pretty great too, come to that.”

“Terrific,” she said, climbing out of the car and stretching. “What do you do there?”

“Well, I help out with public relations. In fact, I’m going to take that over full-time when we’ve got Mommee settled, I think. I’d love to put what I know to work for them.”

“PR. Whoopdedoo,” Laura said, and went into the gated back entrance of her condo without looking back. Picking up my tote I followed her. I felt like a Junior Leaguer discussing her provisional work. In fact, I had not wanted to join the League, and was pleased that Glynn did not, either. But still, that’s how Laura made me feel. I tried to run lightly and authoritatively up the little curved staircase, needing to regain my big-sisterhood again. Out here in this vast, glittering desert, without my familiar context, I had the uneasy feeling that I was not at all the woman who had boarded the Delta jet in Atlanta that afternoon. But if not her, then who?

She opened the door and vanished into it, and I stood for a moment simply breathing in the alien sounds and smells, and thinking what I would say to my daughter. Somehow, in all the long afternoon and evening, I had never sensed what would be right. I could not feel my way into the meeting ahead. But then, I had never had a daughter who had run two thousand miles away from home, either. I had no precedent for this.

“…and so I said, well, darling, somebody’s got to tell you, and I might as well be the one, because I really don’t give a happy rat’s ass, see, and the plain truth is, you look like a bratwurst in that dress.”

The voice was a tiny, breathy, beelike drone, and might have come from a petulant child, except that there was a sort of corrupted warmth in it that no child could possess. Over it I heard my daughter’s laugh. It was what I thought of as her real laugh, the one she used when she was flat-out tickled and delighted: a belly laugh, a charming, froggy croak.

The other voice laughed, too, and said, “Yes, well there are distinct advantages to dying. You don’t care what you say to who. I’ll bet nobody ever said anything even remotely like that to her in her life. And you know what? She went back and changed the dress.”

“Really? Was it better?” Glynn said.

“Oh, tons. This time she only looked like a meatloaf.”

I stood still, feeling as if I were eavesdropping on children at play.

“Are you really dying?” Glynn said.

“I really am. Not for a while yet, I don’t think, but yep, I’m definitely buying the farm,” the bee voice said.

“Is it awful?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s pretty awful indeed. And then sometimes it’s almost hypnotic, a nice, dreamy, underwater feeling. I kind of like those times.”

“Which do you feel most of the time?”

“You know, most of the time I really don’t think much about it,” he said. “HIV people learn to live right square in the moment. Like babies.”

He must have seen Laura then, because he cried, “Hello, dollbaby! Look what I found messing about in your miso. Can I keep her? She’s quite the prettiest thing I’ve seen until you walked in.”

“Stuart, you faithless hound,” Laura said, and there was the sound of her air kiss and an answering smack of lips on flesh. “This is my niece, Glynn. She’s running away from home.”

“Well, I know that,” he said. “In fact, I know just about everything there is to know about this dollbaby, including the fact that her mama is coming to get her and is in fact here, if that long, tall shadow I see on the floor there is to be believed.”

I felt myself flushing and walked into the kitchen.

A tiny man looked at me. He was damply pale and bald as an egg and looked very old. Then I saw that he was not old, but very ill. Illness seeped out of his pores and dragged at the flesh below his eyes so that the whites showed; illness had eaten away at the meat of him until only his bones were left, fragile and somehow very formal and lovely under the translucent, greenish skin. He had deep-shadowed dark eyes and the remnants of a dark beard, spotty and dry now. His smile was one of singular sweetness and mischief. I felt myself smiling back.

“The shadow says hello,” I said. I looked past him. Glynn, still flushed with laughter, stood stiffly against the refrigerator, backed up against it. Her eyes were wide and her silky hair, fresh-washed, hung in them. She wore her Guess jeans and one of her voluminous, knee-length sweatshirts and her Doc Martens. She should have looked ridiculous, but instead she looked beautiful, and so frightened and vulnerable that I felt tears well into my eyes. I loved her and was glad to see her and was even gladder that it had turned out to be as simple as that.

“Hi, baby,” I said, and she began to cry and ran across the floor and buried her head in my neck. The sweet-smelling top of it came up past my ears now. We had known early on that she would be tall.

Laura drew the little man out of the kitchen and I rocked Glynn gently while I held her, and then said, “Such a lot of tears for such a skinny kid. Don’t waste ’em on your ma; save them for when you need them. I’m not going to holler at you. Didn’t you know I wasn’t?”

“Is Daddy terribly mad at me?” she said, her voice muffled with tears and the cloth of my blazer.

“Terribly. But I imagine he’ll be over it by the time we get home. In fact, I’m sure of it. He’s even madder at me, if that’s any comfort. But what he really is, baby, is scared. He’s scared because his mother is sick and crazy and he can’t help her, and he’s scared because he yelled at his only daughter, whom he loves more than anything in the world, and she was so hurt she ran all the way across the country by herself, and he thinks maybe he can’t get her back, and he’s scared because I took off right behind her. Think about that: the three main women in his world and one is crazy and the other two are on the lam. How would you feel?”

I felt her laugh a little and thought that the tears were over. She raised her stained face to me.

“I feel like such a dork,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to hurt him or scare him, or you either. I just…it just seemed like after what he said nothing would ever be the same, and I didn’t think I could stand that. And it wasn’t fair, Mama, it wasn’t fair—”

“Oh, Glynnie,” I said, sighing at how far she had to go, and how little my words could help her. “Almost nothing is, really. There’s what people feel about each other and what they do to each other, but hardly any of it is a matter of fair. I want you to grow up expecting all sorts of wonderful things, but I mustn’t let you grow up expecting fair.”

“You think he’ll forgive me, then?”

“He already has. He got up this morning and went downstairs to make pancakes especially for you. He was taking them in to you when he found your note.”

“Oh, poor Daddy—” her eyes welled up again.

“Let’s not go too far with this,” I said. “Daddy acted like an ass and he knows he did. He needs you to forgive him as much as you need him to forgive you. He may not have gotten around to realizing it yet, but he will before you see him again. And I promise you, the Mommee stuff is going to stop.”

She sighed deeply. “Will you forgive me?”

She brushed the drifting, wheat-colored hair out of her mouth. Her blue eyes were still shuttered with the thick, gold-tipped lashes that were Laura’s lashes, too. She was not yet ready to look me full in the face.

“For what?” I said, brushing the hair back and looping it behind her ear.

“I must have scared you to death. You never would have taken off out here otherwise.”

“You did. You did indeed scare me to death, and I do indeed forgive you. Now wash your face and come on in the living room. I want to meet this strange man who had you yodeling like Mammy Yokum.”

“Mammy who?”

“Go on and wash. Scram,” I said. “We’ll talk some more about this after I’ve called Daddy and told him when our plane gets in.”

She hesitated for a moment.

“Mom…”

I knew she was truly over the spell of tears and nerves. “Mom” was back. “Mama” was for the bad times.

“Hmmmm?”

“Oh…nothing.”

She vanished into a door that I presumed led to a bathroom and I went into the living room to meet Stuart Feinstein.

He and Laura sat close together on a large, white sofa before a fireplace. A small fire of some strange, sweet-smelling wood snickered behind a beautiful, old, wrought-iron screen, and a bottle of white wine and four glasses stood on a coffee table of weathered gray wood. Besides a tall white lamp, large pillows, and a pair of black canvas butterfly chairs, the room was empty of furniture. Bookcases lined three walls but were bare, and whiter spaces on rough adobe walls spoke of paintings that had once hung there. One wall was uncurtained glass, and the view out over the night-blue bowl that held Palm Springs was breath-stopping. I could see why Laura had fought so hard to keep the condominium. It would be like living in the sky, like a god.

“Join us. We’re celebrating,” Laura said, and Stuart Feinstein waved his glass. It was nearly empty. Laura did not appear to be drinking.

“Celebrating what? Surely not a runaway teenager and a grim old bat of a mother in hot pursuit.”

“Well, of course, that. But there’s something else. I’ve just finished a movie—I promised Glynn not to tell you until we got here—and this angel of a man has gotten me an interview with the Hollywood Weekly. That may not mean anything to you, but it means shit-all in the industry. It might even mean I can kiss that goddamn concho jewelry good-bye.”

She reached over and hugged Stuart Feinstein hard and gave him a smack on the mouth, like a child. He hugged her back with one arm, the other hand balancing the sloshing wineglass.

“How about it, huh? Can the old man still deliver or what? Huh?” he crowed. Also like a child. In the light of the big, white lamp I could see that he was not only ill, but, as I had first thought, rather old, or at least far from young. They looked poignantly like two children, I thought suddenly, huddled together on the big, white sofa as if for comfort against the limitless night outside. The image brushed at my mind like a black bird.

“A movie! Oh, Pie, that’s really wonderful! Tell!”

I poured myself a glass of wine and sank cross-legged to the floor in front of the fire. A small sheepskin rug cushioned my bony buttocks against the quarry tile floor. A picture flashed through my mind that I had not seen there in many years: a dorm room at college, before I moved back home, crowded with Noxema-dotted girls in nightshirts, sitting on the floor and the beds, laughing and talking, talking, talking. Some of that same laughter bubbled somewhere in my chest. I felt, for just a wing-flutter of a moment, very young again.

“Well, it’s not the lead, but it’s a career maker,” Laura said. Her voice sang. “The movie is about this guy, he’s a real sonofabitch, coming up in the industry, from a gofer to a studio head, and about the people he does in on the way. Kind of like The Player, only darker, denser. It’s a real character piece; not so much action, but these intense, devouring relationships. Caleb Pringle did it. You know, Bad Blues and Burn? The character stuff is his signature…”

She stopped and looked at me, waiting for me to recognize Caleb Pringle and register my delight and wonderment. I did not have the foggiest notion who he was. I had never heard of Bad Blues and Burn.

“I’m sorry, Pie, I haven’t seen a movie since Mommee came. I’m hopelessly behind. Tell me about this Caleb Pringle. He sounds like he ought to be manufacturing cashmere sweaters in New Hampshire, or something. After you tell me about your part.”

“I play one of the women he seduces and leaves behind in the gutter, as it were. An older woman, an actress hoping to make a comeback, still very beautiful, but lost, fragile, doomed. He’s just starting out when he meets her, and she still has terrific connections, so he uses her for that and then dumps her. Remind you a little of Sunset Boulevard? Believe me, it’s better. I commit suicide, or my character does. Liquor and pills on the deck of his empty, locked beach house, only ambient sound and this strange, white sunlight. There’s this seagull who sits on the railing and stares at me while I’m dying—it sounds dumb, but it’s very powerful. Pring says it’s best-supporting stuff. He says nobody but I could have done it. This interview—God, Met, it’s going to help so much! The guy who’s doing it is a shit, but everybody reads him first, and I can handle him.”

“He’s latent,” Stuart said. “Makes him mean.”

“Oh, you’re telling! You said you’d wait,” wailed Glynn, coming into the room. She had brushed her hair back and tied it high, so that the bare symmetry of her facial bones showed, and her skin was flushed with scrubbing and excitement. We all smiled at her. It was impossible not to. Where did I get this lovely being? I thought. I thought I would kill the first thing that hurt her.

“You can tell her who plays the jerk,” Laura said.

Glynn turned to me, her face suffused with rapture.

“Rocky MacPherson,” she breathed, as if she were saying “‘Ave Maria.’”

“Rocky MacPherson? Isn’t he that kid who keeps busting up thousand-dollar hotel rooms? See, I do keep up.”

“He’s an incredible actor,” Glynn cried. “He’s all…all spirit; he just burns on film. Caleb Pringle uses him in almost all his movies.”

“He’s also about fourteen, isn’t he? It’s a real stretch from busting up the Biedermeyer to studio head. He must be good.”

“He is, as a matter of fact,” Laura said lazily. “Very focused and very sensuous. He’s almost stopped with the hotels. Pring has brought him a long way. And as for studio heads, I don’t know many over thirty anymore. I found our love scenes very…believable.”

“Oh, God!” Glynn cried, her eyes closed in ecstasy.

“Like to meet him?” Laura said casually.

“Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Don’t tease about something like that…” my rapt daughter whispered, and I looked at her in faint alarm. Was this the child who had said only last week that she planned to have her children by sperm bank because she couldn’t stand the thought of any of the stupid boys she knew touching her?

“I’m not teasing,” Laura said. “Stu says they’re screening The Right Time sometime this week. Rocky’s sure to be there. I can easily make a call or two and find out where and when. Pring was supposed to let me know, but Stu says he’s out of town courting some money guys for a new movie. The production office will still be open. They’ll give us some passes. That is, they would if your mother would let you stay for a few days.”

She dropped her eyes and fiddled with the silver bracelet that circled her thin wrist. I wanted, as I had wanted so many times in the past, to shake her until her perfect white teeth rattled.

“Mother…Mom…”

I took a deep breath. I was certainly not going to allow Pom to punish her for this flight. On the other hand, I could not let her be rewarded for it, either. Glynn was a responsible child, but I had a horror of her coming to think that running away was an answer. There had been too many flights, literal or figurative, in my life to allow her that notion. I knew the prices paid all around for them. But my heart hurt me, just the same. Damn Laura. Damn Pom. Damn Mommee.

“Not this time, Glynn,” I said firmly. “This isn’t a pleasure trip, remember? We’ve got to go home tomorrow. Your father is already fit to be tied, and there’s nobody with Mommee. Show him you can be grown up about things this time and I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t let you come back and visit Aunt Laura before school starts.”

“But Rocky MacPherson—”

“Rocky MacPherson is the very last reason on the face of this earth I would let you stay in California, Glynn. I don’t want to hear any more about him, or this. Aunt Laura spoke before she thought.”

I gave Laura a long, level stare and she gave me her three-cornered kitten’s smile in return. Stuart Feinstein studied the contents of his glass with interest.

“I think I’ll go to bed. I’m very tired. Excuse me, please,” Glynn said, her voice shaking, and walked with absurd and touching dignity out of the room. I heard her steps climbing stairs somewhere off to the right. All of a sudden I felt old, as old as Mommee, as old as the world. Old and dull and inflexible and…all right, mean. And tired within an inch of death.

“Good work, Laura,” I said.

“I didn’t mean any harm,” my sister said. “You ought to lighten up on her, Met. You could lose her if you keep treating her like a prisoner.”

“Do tell me where you acquired your child-rearing expertise,” I said, suddenly furious with her.

“Not, apparently, the same place you acquired yours.”

The old sullen petulance was in her voice.

“I managed to keep you fed and clothed and out of jail for a lot of years,” I said.

We stared at each other.

“It’s late. I’ve got to be getting back,” Stuart Feinstein said, rising painfully. He seemed for a moment to totter. Laura broke the stare and turned to him, putting her arms around him.

“No way am I letting you drive all the way back tonight,” she said. “Met and I will save our fight for tomorrow; it’s nothing new. It’s been going on for thirty-odd years now. We know the rules. You can have the couch. I’ll even give you the mink throw. I’ll make you cinnamon toast for breakfast and you can go back after that. Please, old Pooper. I just can’t worry about you passing out on the road tonight.”

“I’ll take you up on it, if you dollbabies will stop fighting,” he said, giving us the sweet smile. “You’re too precious and pretty to fight. Merritt, did anyone ever tell you you looked like Kay Kendall? She was an English actress, very classy. Used to be married to Rex Harrison. An offbeat beauty with such a nose, and a smile that could melt your fillings. You’ve got both of them. You’re far too pretty a dollbaby to fight with this bad child.”

“I’ll stop if she will,” I said, managing to smile at him. Even ravaged with illness, his charm was enormous. “I need to sleep more than I need to fight. Where am I sleeping, Laura? Not, I hope, in the room with Camille up there.”

“No. I’ll sleep on the other bed in her room. You take mine. It’s the first door at the top of the stairs. I need to get up early, anyway, and you need to sleep a little. If you’re set on the noon plane you can zonk in till about eight.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I guess I’d better call Pom and get it over with. I’m surprised he hasn’t called four hundred times by now. Is there a phone upstairs?”

“There is, but why don’t you wait until morning? It’s one A.M. in Atlanta now. And he may have called; I turned off the answering machine and the phone bell. Glynn was spooked bad enough as it was.”

“Oh, shit, Laura,” I said. “Now he’s going to think that we’ve all three run away or been ax murdered or something. But you’re right. I forgot the time difference. He’s got early pediatric clinic in the morning. He’ll be asleep by now. Wake me when you get up. I need to get that over with.”

“I will,” she said. “You go on up. I want to talk to Stu a little while longer.”

The last thing I heard as I climbed her deep-carpeted stairs into darkness was my sister’s melted-butter voice saying, “Now, tell me everything you know about Pring. Don’t leave anything out.”

I didn’t call Pom the next morning for the simple reason that Amy Crittenden called me first. Laura came and shook me awake at six A.M.

“Grendel’s Mother is on the telephone for you,” she said.

“Who?”

“The snottiest woman I ever heard in my life. She says she’s Pom’s secretary, but I doubt it. He’d have fired her years ago.”

“Oh, God. Amy,” I sighed, and reached for the phone on Laura’s bedside table.

“Hello, Amy,” I said as cheerfully as I could. “I’m sorry you had to call. I was going to call in a little while.”

“Well, I wish you had thought to do it last night, Merritt,” she said in her long-suffering tone. I wondered if Pom really heard her anymore. Laura was right; he’d have had to fire her.

“Sorry. It was so late there when we got in that I thought I’d let Pom sleep,” I said. “What’s up?”

“You could have called any time. Doctor hasn’t slept in twenty-four hours. Neither one of us has. His mother was terribly agitated, and your housekeeper declined to come in on her day off. Doctor was so distraught that he called me. I was glad to come, of course. He absolutely must have his sleep; we have pediatrics this morning, I expect you know. He asked me to call you and find out if everything is all right. You simply cannot imagine how worried he has been, what with his daughter running off like that, and then you, and his poor mother—”

“Yes, I’ll bet he was,” I said, idiot laughter tugging suddenly at my mouth.

“Well, Doctor has some messages for you,” she went on briskly, after waiting a space for the apology that did not come.

“I’ll bet he does. Shoot, Amy,” I said, gulping back the laughter.

“The first is that he has you and Glynn booked on Delta’s noon flight out of Los Angeles today. The tickets are waiting for you at the counter. The second is that you’re to come straight to the clinic on your way from the airport. We had to bring his mother with us this morning; he simply could not spare me another day, and of course it was out of the question that he stay home with her. She has been terribly disruptive; we have had to lock her in the children’s playroom, I’m afraid. Two of the nurses are with her, but she is upsetting the children no end, and of course we cannot spare the nurses indefinitely.”

“Where on earth is Ina?” I said, the picture of Mommee commandeering rocking horses and dolls from tearful toddlers threatening to undo me completely.

“I think Doctor had some words with her when she refused to come in,” Amy said repressively. “I believe he discharged her.”

“Shit! He can’t do that!” I shouted. “Sorry, Amy. It’s not your fault. But Ina is my right hand; I can’t manage that old…Mrs. Fowler without her. You tell Pom—”

“He is going to be tied up most of the day,” Amy said. I could have sworn there was satisfaction in her voice. “He is most adamant about your coming to pick Mrs. Fowler up, though. Oh, and one more thing—”

I drew a long breath.

“And that is?”

“He has made Glynn an appointment with a new therapist tomorrow at two P.M. Dr. Ferguson; we think very highly of him. He specializes in families. He will want to see you, too.”

I did not speak. A red mist of rage seemed to start on the horizon and roll toward me. I watched it with fascination.

“Are you still there, Merritt?” Amy said. “We must insist that you pick up Mrs. Fowler as soon as it is possible. She is utterly out of control. Yesterday she got away from me and got into the swimming pool and I had to go in after her clothed. My foundation garment was ruined.”

A great yelp of laughter escaped me. I simply could not help it. The red mist dissipated.

“You give Doctor a message for me, Amy,” I said, choking on laughter. “You tell Doctor that Mrs. Doctor and Daughter Doctor are not coming home on the noon plane today. It will be two or three days, at least. I will let him know when we decide. And we will not be here after an hour or so.”

“Where may I tell him you are going?” Amy said. She sounded as if she were trying to speak with her jaws wired shut.

“You may tell him,” I said, “that we are going to the movies.”

5

In the middle of my first night in California I woke feeling that I was on a boat and lay awake trying to think why that might be. After a moment of profound disorientation, in which the light of a whiter moon than any I knew at home flooded a room I could not put a name to, I remembered where I was and why, and sat up. The green glow from Laura’s digital bedside clock said four ten a.m. I sat listening, holding my breath, but heard no sound that would account for the boat notion. The house was silent and still, and presently I got up and pulled on my robe and went into the adjacent bathroom. The top floor of the condominium was chilly, and the air that poured in through the window I had opened was dry and sharp and smelled of the desert. I thought of my child sleeping in a narrow twin bed across the hall from me, in Laura’s guest room, and wondered if her sleep was troubled, and if she, too, dreamed of boats. I had a sudden, nearly irresistible urge to tiptoe across and open the door and look at her, but hesitated to wake her. She needed respite from the tension of the night before, and so did I. Tomorrow, I thought. We can sort it all out tomorrow. Or rather, later today.

I had turned on the cold water tap and was bending to splash my face when the cold tile floor beneath my bare feet rolled greasily, as if it were the deck of a boat. It rolled again, more strongly. I clutched the sides of the washbasin, thinking that I had not, after all, dreamed the motion. But what could it be? The floor seemed to undulate, and I felt queasy and queer. Was I going to faint, had an illness of some sort overtaken me? It was not until I noticed that the glass accessories on the countertop were tinkling and the towels were swaying on their bars that I thought: earthquake. By the time the terror hit, the motion had stopped.

I cannot remember a simpler and deeper fear. It had never occurred to me that the real terror of an earthquake is not, in its first instant, the threat of injury or death, but the simple betrayal of one’s primal covenant with the earth. With that connection gone, anything at all is possible; no horror imaginable is beyond possibility. It is the old, cold, howling terror of the abyss, that black and limitless space that underlies all the armaments and rituals of the human condition. We all sense it is there, in the deepest and most unexamined core of us, but there are few things that call it out past the careful layers of civilization. The convulsing of the earth is one.

I froze to the washbasin, holding my breath, and then turned and fled from the bathroom straight downstairs, where a light burned. I would remember that flight with shame for the rest of my life. When the earth began to retch, I ran, not to my child, but to the light. The fact that there was no light and no stirring in Laura and Glynn’s bedroom assuaged the guilt only slightly. I like to think that if I had heard evidence of alarm from my daughter I would have gone there instantly, but now I will never know for sure. It was the first chink in the surface of my selfhood, the first of my intimations that Merritt Fowler might not be Merritt at all, but someone unknown to me.

Downstairs a single lamp burned, and Stuart Feinstein sat on the sofa wrapped in a beautiful, dark fur throw, sipping from a glass of amber liquid. His face was so gray and ravaged that at first I thought the same fear that had frozen me had gripped him, but then he saw me and gave me the sweet child’s smile, and the grayness receded somewhat. It was not fear, I saw, but illness and despair.

“Did our little twitch wake you, dollbaby?” he said.

“Twitch! My God! It felt like…I thought for a minute I was on a boat! The floor rolled—”

“About a three point eight or a four,” he said. “A mere shiver. We get one like that about twice a week, maybe more this summer. We have ever since I came out here. I don’t even get out of bed anymore unless I hear wood splintering. I used to lie there and listen to the Waterford crashing, until I got smart and packed it all up. This was nothing, I promise. Come here and have a snort with me.”

I went over and sat on the opposite end of the sofa. He tossed the end of the throw over me and passed me his glass, and I drank. It was scotch, very good scotch. Even I could tell that. My usual drink is vodka in whatever is tart or sweet, and then not often.

“Thanks,” I said, passing the glass back to him. “I needed that, as they say.”

“Thank you,” he said, and when I looked at him inquiringly, he said, “For not being afraid to drink after me. Or for not showing it if you were. Is this your first earthquake?”

“I work with AIDS patients at home,” I said. “I’m not afraid. And yes, it is my first earthquake. Now that I am afraid of.”

“Don’t be. Like I said, we get them all the time. We’re close to the San Andreas here, and it grumbles constantly. But it’s already had its big one; we’re not scheduled for another thirty years. San Francisco, now, that’s another story. The Hayward is ripe.”

“How do you know? How can you be sure of all that?”

“I can’t, of course,” he said, running his hand over the rich, shining folds of the mink. “But the odds are good. That’s about all anybody can hope for, isn’t it?”

I could see blue veins through the dry, crepey skin of his hands, and fancied that I could see the bird’s bones themselves. Stuart Feinstein was a man who would know about odds. Somehow the thought, or perhaps the whiskey, made me relax.

“I’ll go back to bed and let you get some sleep in a minute,” I said. “But first, tell me about this movie Laura is in. Tell me about this Caleb Pringle. There’s something there, isn’t there? They’re something to each other, or were…?”

He took a deep swallow and made a face and put the glass down on the coffee table.

“The movie’s good. Her part is good, and she’s very good in it. She’s a real actress, you know; this part could be the one that gets these schmucks out here to see that in her, and not just her tits and ass. There’s a lot riding on it. She’s almost past the age where she can play babes; she’ll have to do it on the acting from here on out. Pringle sees that in her, and he can get it out. I’ll give him that. Yeah, there’s something between them; I think that’s why he put himself on the line with the studio over this part of hers. He almost doubled her pages. From what I hear, it paid off. I don’t hear much anymore. I’m a has-been. I was that before the disease was obvious. I was never all that much of an agent; she was the best thing I ever had or ever will, now, and I called in an awful lot of chips to get Pringle to let her test for this one. Once he did, she did the rest. The chemistry was there between them from the first. You could see the lightning hit. They were together all through the filming, hot and heavy. I was welcome on the set because of that, and that only. No, don’t protest, dollbaby, I know I’m done in the industry. I don’t care, really, except for her. I’m sick of it; it eats you alive. Makes you little. I’d have pulled out of it long ago except for her. The last thing I could do for her was to get her this interview with Billy Poythress. It was the last chip I had. The production office wouldn’t even tell me when the screening is, but she can find out when she’s up there. Poythress will know. After today there’s nothing much I can do for her except hold her hand and pray.”

“Does this Pringle care for her? Is he good to her?”

He made an impatient gesture.

“He was while they were shooting last winter. He couldn’t do enough for her. Everybody knew about them. The media was all over it. As for now, I don’t know. He hasn’t been around. He’s off chasing down money for a new film. I heard he was in Europe for a while; he may still be there. If he is, he hasn’t let her know. I don’t think she’s heard from him in a month or so, but she wouldn’t tell me that. Tells me what she has from the beginning: It’s the real thing for her, the rest of her life, and so forth, and so forth. Says he feels the same. But I’ve got a bad feeling about it. She doesn’t look good to me. She’s thin, she acts like she’s somewhere else most of the time. Sleeps too much. Sometimes her eyes are red like she’s been crying. Like I said, she’s not going to tell me. Doesn’t want to worry a sick man. Like she could help it.”

“So what kind of person is he? Would he dump her; does he do that?”

“He’s an asshole jerk, is what I think. He’s a phony. Wears tennis sweaters and a baseball cap, drives an old woody, got freckles and a gap in his teeth and a big, crooked grin. His name isn’t Caleb Pringle; it’s Sherman Goetz, but I don’t care about that. Nobody out here uses their real name. Yeah, he’d dump her. He sure does do that. He does it after every film. It’s his schtick, ditching his last film’s squeeze when shooting’s over, just like copping ideas is his schtick. He calls it derivative filmmaking, says it’s an art unto itself, to take a film that’s already been done and do it better. Some other folks call it stealing. But he’s good at it. He has the touch. He makes big bucks. I just want to make sure that he does right by her in this movie, no matter what he does to her personally. After it comes out she’s not going to need him.”

“I don’t like the sound of this stuff.”

“Neither do I, dollbaby. That’s why this interview is so important. It’s her ticket to ride. You make her promise to dress up pretty and be polite to Poythress. You look after your little sister for me.”

“You’re not going with her?”

“No. I think I’ll stay here and kick back a little. Lie in the sun by her pool, sleep in, have some friends over. We worked it out last night. She’s going to stay at my place above Sunset. You really ought to go. It’s a great location. Right near all the things she’ll want to show Glynn. The Sunset Marquis, where the interview will be, is right down below. And you’d have a terrific view. All of Hollywood at your feet, as it were. And I wouldn’t exactly be an asset to her at this stage.”

“Stuart, I just have to get Glynn home. But I really wish we could stay, just to get to know you better,” I said. “I wish there was some way I could thank you for being so good to my sister.”

“You can go up there with her. You can give her moral support and have a good time yourself, is what you can do, dollbaby. She says you haven’t had much of one lately. You or that pretty child of yours, either. Go. Enjoy. Giggle. Drink things with flowers in them. Eat only things that will make you fat. Ask for autographs. Drive that little red car too fast. Wear things that let your pretty tchotchkes hang out. That’s what you can do. What’s two more days out of your young life?”

“They are long days, believe me. But I think you’re the best thing that’s happened to Laura since she came out here,” I said, getting up and kissing him on the cheek. “I wish you’d stick around to take care of her.”

Then I winced, remembering why he could not. He smiled.

“I wish I could,” he said. “Somebody is always going to have to do it. But now there’s you. God looks after fools and actresses.”

“But I can’t do it indefinitely,” I said.

“Why not?” he said. “Haven’t you almost always, one way or another?”

“Oh, Mom, look! Oh, it’s just so cool!”

Glynn stood on Stuart Feinstein’s tiny balcony, staring out at the valley that cradled Los Angeles. I went out and stood beside her. The valley looked to me like two dirty cupped hands holding a city captive; the gray-yellow smog that lay thickly over it seemed the foul breath of the captor. It was not cool to me or beautiful; the sense of alienation I had felt at the airport the day before was back full force. But she was right in a way. It was a stunning vista. It had the impact of a slap.

We had left Palm Springs at seven, and Laura had kept the car at a steady eighty miles per hour through the desert, until the clutter of small towns and shopping centers began. We had gotten into L.A. well before ten, and wound our way through the stalled traffic on back streets, up into the hills to Sunset and across it. Stuart Feinstein’s building rode the crest of one of the canyon ridges directly above Sunset, and we pulled into his parking lot just at ten. After Amy’s call at six, there did not seem to be any point in going back to bed, so I woke Laura and Glynn. Over bagels and coffee I told them we were going to Los Angeles after all. They were both jubilant; last night’s conflict melted with the cold desert dew. The careening drive was brushed with a magical giddiness.

We were flushed from wind and sun—Laura had kept the top down all the way this time—and from laughter. The minute she had pulled out of her own driveway a great gust of liberation and silliness had swept us all, and we had laughed and shouted and sung songs out of our respective girlhoods all the way to the L.A. suburbs. I had not felt anything like it since college. Once or twice then my sorority sisters and I had driven in someone’s convertible over to the Gulf Coast for spring break, crowded and sunburned and giddy and drunk on wind and speed and possibility, singing endlessly, laughing, laughing. This trip felt like that. In the hurtling Mustang, my blowing hair stinging my face and desert grit peppering my bare arms, I was someone else entirely than the angry, worried woman who had driven this road not twenty-four hours before. I had no sense, for that space of time, that Glynn and Laura were daughter and sister to me. We were, for those few hours, all young and all free and all waiting to see who we would be when the car finally stopped. I don’t think I will ever forget that windborne flight through the California desert.

Back inside, Glynn and I prowled the small apartment while Laura closeted herself in the bathroom with Stuart’s cellular phone. She had turned back into Laura when we opened the door to the apartment, kicking off her shoes and padding restlessly about, humming, picking up bric-a-brac and putting them down, straightening pillows, riffling through the opened mail in a shallow copper bowl on the coffee table. Finally she said she needed to make a call or two and then we’d change clothes and go prowl around Sunset a little.

“I don’t have much to change into,” Glynn said hesitantly.

“I don’t have anything, to speak of,” I said. “Do you have to dress for Sunset Boulevard?”

“Not the way you mean,” Laura said, looking me over lazily. I was wearing the knit pantsuit I had worn yesterday, the one I usually travel in. “But not the way you are, either. Glynn’s fine in her jeans and tee, but you are definitely from Away. Waiters will snub you. Street people will howl with laughter. Let me see what Stuart’s got. He’s about your size now, with all the weight he’s lost. You can bet he’ll have the right stuff.”

“I can’t wear Stuart’s clothes, Laura,” I said. “That’s a terrible presumption. I’ll see if I can find something on Sunset, maybe. You can bear the shame of being seen with me that long.”

“Nonsense,” she said, and went into the bedroom and began pulling open drawers and tossing clothes onto the huge, canopied bed. It was ornate and theatrical, by far the most imposing piece in the apartment. Somehow it made me want to avert my eyes. I hoped Glynn and I would not have to sleep in it, but I saw no other bed.

“Anything on Sunset will cost you an arm and a leg,” Laura went on. “I wear his clothes all the time. He probably wears mine, too, when he’s at my place. He’ll be flattered.”

She brought me out a couple of pairs of blue jeans, faded almost to white and beautifully pressed, and an armful of T-shirts, and went to make her phone calls. Glynn and I explored, the clothes slung over my arm. The apartment was small and low-ceilinged, and almost bare of furniture. Indentations on the thick, gray carpet spoke of furniture recently removed, and lighter places on the walls of vanished paintings, as they had in Laura’s place. This place was much less opulent, much more utilitarian, than her condo, but it had the same air of transience, of waiting. The air was stale and close, and the few pieces of furniture left were lightly skinned with dust. Plants and a large ficus in a corner drooped, and in the tiny kitchen dishes sat in a rubber drainer on the counter, washed but not put away. They were yellow melamine, patterned with ivy. I could not imagine a Hollywood agent eating off them. I could not imagine a Hollywood agent living so meanly as this, especially in an aerie above Xanadu. Automatically I picked up the dishes and put them away in the cupboard over the sink, and filled a plastic pitcher with water for the plants.

“You’re at it again,” Glynn said, grinning at me from the doorway.

“At what?”

“Taking care of people. Of things.”

“Well, the plants are in dire straits, and Stuart was dear to let us stay here. I thought I might as well—”

“It’s a nice thing to do. You’re a nice lady. I wasn’t criticizing you.”

Laura came into the kitchen, a tiny white frown furrowing her forehead.

“Nobody in this asshole place answers their phone anymore,” she said. “Billy Poythress’s oh-so-excruciatingly British secretary said he was tied up with the East Coast but would see me this afternoon at two at the Sunset Marquis for lunch as planned, unless, of course, his plans changed, and then she’d let me know. That is, if I could be reached at this numbah. I said I would be out all morning and would just have to take a chance. She said she quite understood. Bitch. I’d say he was screwing her, but I don’t think he does women. Maybe she gives good—”

“Laura.”

“Sorry. Go on and get dressed. I could use a cup of coffee and all Stu has got is instant.”

“Did you get the production office?” Glynn said as I went into the bedroom. Something in her voice told me she enjoyed saying the words.

“Nobody’s answering there, either,” Laura said. “Which doesn’t surprise me. If the receptionist isn’t around, and she almost never is, nobody else will answer. Too demeaning for filmmakers.”

In Stuart Feinstein’s bedroom, cell-like except for the towering Egyptian barge of a bed, I took off my pantsuit and panty hose and pulled on a pair of the blue jeans. They were so tight that I could scarcely zip them, but the other pair was tighter still, so I put them back on and riffled through the T-shirts. They, too, fit so snugly that I could see every rib on my torso. I chose the largest, a white one that had faded Day-Glo fried eggs and bacon strips on it and said “Eat your breakfast.” I looked at myself in the large mirror on the bathroom door and laughed. I looked like a punk adolescent boy in the alien clothes, angular and slouching and high-rumped. It was not, somehow, a bad look. I would never have worn the clothes in Atlanta, but seeing that I had no other choice, I was not going to worry about it here. Nobody knew me. Impulsively I took off the barrette that held my hair back and shook it out, bending at the waist. When I straightened up it flew about my head in a mass of tangles and ringlets and snarls that looked, in this place, not so wrong either. I went out and stood still for inspection by Laura and Glynn.

“Jesus, that’s perfect, except for the shoes,” Laura said, and Glynn said in surprise, “You don’t look in the least like you. Not in the least. It’s terrific. I think. You sure don’t look like anybody’s mom. Dad would die.”

Then she dropped her eyes. I knew how she felt. I had forgotten Pom for the moment, too. I felt the familiar flush of guilt start, and pushed it back. I would call home that evening, I thought. No matter how angry I was at him, he could not be having an easy time.

Laura went back into the bedroom and returned with a pair of beautiful boots, pointed of toe and with a slight, undercut heel. They were worn but carefully tended, and looked expensive.

“Put them on,” she said. “They may be a little big but you can stuff the toes. You can’t go out in those Hush Puppies.”

“They’re not Hush Puppies, they’re Ferragamos,” I said indignantly, but I took them off and put on the boots. They were only a little loose. I went to the mirror and looked. Laura was right. The boots were perfect. I could not help swaggering just a little when we left the apartment. It was a feeling that seemed to start in my hip joints.

“These boots were made for walkin’,” Glynn sang, and I hugged her and we all laughed and went down into the fever dream that is Sunset Boulevard.

An hour later we were sitting at an outdoor cafe, drinking iced lattes against the sultry heat and watching the passing parade. Sunset Boulevard never fails you. Anywhere else it might seem freakish, almost grotesque, a Fellini street, but here the streams of strolling denizens looked charming, stylish, festive, funny, each in his own costume like people in a Mardi Gras parade. Everyone seemed either very old or young; I saw no one who appeared to be my age, and certainly no one who appeared to be my age as I was at home in Atlanta. Women were thin and striking and either wore chic black or chic jeans or so little of anything that they should have been on beaches. Men wore virtually the same thing, except the ones in outright costumes. There was enough spiky hair and pierced body parts and leather to break the monotony, and a careful scattering of Gap Prep, as Laura called it, but these last were, she said, almost surely visitors from the Valley. The rest belonged. We sat with our jeaned legs stretched out, sipping the lattes and watching, eyes shielded by sunglasses. I stared through mine at my daughter and watched heads turn as people passed her. She eclipsed all the passing young women, with a beauty built of chiseled bones and taut, polished bare skin and the wheat sheaf of hair. Why did she look so different than she did at home? I wondered. She wore almost exactly what she would wear there on any given day. But a flame, a new kind of blood, seemed to shimmer under her skin. Here, in this thick, metallic sunlight, Glynn shone like a tall candle.

A skeletal man on Rollerblades wearing a house dress and ankle socks and carrying a Vuitton tote whirred by and gave us a smile and a nod.

“Pretty ladies,” he singsonged.

“Thanks,” we all yelled after him, and laughed again.

“Don’t mention it,” floated back on the little hot wind he left in his wake. In a moment he was lost in the slowly roiling crowd.

“I love this place,” Glynn said dreamily. “Everybody is so happy.”

“Everybody is stoned on something,” Laura said, smiling at her, “but I know what you mean. Sunset always makes me feel like something funny and fine is about to happen.”

For no reason at all I thought of Stuart Feinstein, back in Palm Springs, huddled like an old, ossified baby in his nest of dark mink. Some of the silly shine went off the morning. I doubted whether, despite his proximity to Sunset Boulevard, anything funny and fine was left for him.

“I wish we could do something especially nice for Stuart,” I said. “I can’t get him out of my mind. He seems so vulnerable. Is there anything that you know of that he needs, Laura?”

“Oh, Met,” she said, and smiled an exasperated smile. “Don’t start trying to fix things up for Stuart, for God’s sake. He doesn’t need anything you could give him. You happen to have a cure for AIDS on you?”

“I just thought…his apartment is so bare. There’s almost nothing in it. I thought maybe we could find some pretty pottery dishes, or a print or something—”

“He doesn’t buy things that will last anymore,” she said. “It depresses him to shop for things that will outlast him. He had some really nice things, or at least Bobby did, his lover who died a few months ago. They lived very well indeed. But Bobby’s family from Iowa or some awful place came and took all his things away while Stuart was out of town, even the paintings and china and silver and crystal. There was some gorgeous Waterford. The only thing they left was the bed. Left it sitting there like a slap in Stuart’s face when he got back. He hasn’t seemed to want to make much of an effort about anything since then.”

“Does he have, you know, enough money? He said he didn’t handle clients anymore, except you. Does he have enough for food and medicine and all?”

“He has enough. I give him some every month. I know he’s okay that way.”

I looked at her. In the brassy sunlight she looked bleached and a little shrunken, even though she was still so beautiful that it was hard to look away from her. My careening, wind-scattered little sister caring for someone else?

“He doesn’t seem the type to take it, somehow,” I said.

“He doesn’t know it comes from me. I deposit it to his account every month on the condition that it stays anonymous. He thinks Bobby did it just before he died. It gives him a lot of comfort to think that, that Bobby died thinking about his welfare. If the truth be known, Bobby was a little shit who never once thought about any welfare but his own. His only gift to Stu was HIV.”

“It’s a wonderful thing to do, Pie,” I said, meaning it.

“It was part of the settlement with old No-Nose,” she said, stretching lazily. “He thinks the extra was for massages for me. Fought it tooth and nail. But we got it. He’d shit sunflowers if he knew it went to Stu. He always hated him. Listen, gang, we’ve got time to do some serious shopping. Y’all game? I want something drop-dead-fuck-you to wear to this interview. This guy’s got prettier clothes than I do.”

The Sunset Marquis Hotel lay halfway down North Alta Loma, on a hill so steep that you practically had to cling to walls to walk down it. I thought that climbing it to Sunset must be sheer torture for leg muscles. Stuart Feinstein’s cowboy boots were wobbling on my feet after two hours of shopping, and Glynn tottered in new high wedgies. Laura, in stiletto-heeled sandals and a new black mini so tight that she had to take tiny, Chinese-empress steps, could navigate scarcely any better than we two. The three of us clung together, arm in arm, wavering and laughing and looking, I imagined, like those old cartoon posters with the characters leaning far back, front foot far forward, that read, “Keep on Truckin’.” We were out of breath and dripping sweat when we reached the little hotel.

Inside it was cool and shadowy, with a tiny lounge on the left, full of people looking as if they were closing enormous deals, and a little restaurant on the right full of very young men and women who all looked like Glynn. Rock stars, I thought; Laura had said this place was a hangout for traveling rock bands. Glynn gave them all long, devouring looks. They all looked back at her. One half-raised a hand as if to greet her, then dropped it. He leaned over and said something to the others at his table, and they all turned and studied Glynn. Even in the artificial dusk, I saw her neck and cheeks redden, and she turned away. We went into the chic little ladies’ lounge and combed our hair and washed our hands and put on fresh lipstick, and then headed for the dazzle of light at the back, where the hotel opened into a tree-and-flower shaded patio around a brilliant blue pool. Laura stopped beside the maître d’s desk, and I took a deep breath, and heard Glynn take a similar one. Then we were following a young waiter in white shorts and shirt around the pool to a round table in a corner, shaded with wisteria and some other red-flowered vine I could not identify. Every other table was crowded with people, most of them men in jackets and no ties, and there was a constant low chiming of telephones. Almost every table seemed to harbor someone talking on a phone. The drink of choice, I noticed, was mineral water with lime. So much for the legends of Babylonian excess I had cherished since girlhood.

“Mr. Poythress is running a little late, and says please order drinks or anything else you want and he’ll be right along,” the young waiter said.

“What a pity,” Laura drawled, giving him a slantwise smile from under the brim of a huge, new, black straw hat. In it she looked enchanting, mysterious, completely feminine, something out of the forties, out of the time of Gene Tierney and Veronica Lake. The young man smiled back, dazzled. He looked over at Glynn and smiled even wider. She, too, had a hat, a slouchy canvas affair with a flower the blue of her eyes tucked under its brim. With the sunglasses and the tight blue jeans and wedgies she looked somehow androgynous, like a pretty medieval boy. I felt rather than saw eyes all over the patio swing toward our table and stop. Glynn and Laura made a riveting pair. I settled my sunglasses more firmly over my eyes, hoping I did not look too much like their duenna.

“Enjoy,” said the waiter, and hustled off to get our Calistoga water.

“You might know the bastard would be late,” Laura said. “He’s probably watching from the men’s room window, going to let us sit here just long enough to be insulted but not long enough to be righteously indignant about it.”

From another table a voice called, “Laura!” and we turned. A thin, brown young man in the inevitable sunglasses and baseball cap got up from a table full of similarly dressed young men and women and came toward us, smiling and holding out his arms. He bent over Laura and kissed the air on either side of her face, and then stepped back and studied her, head to one side. He seemed not much older than Glynn.

“You look absolutely fabulous, lovey,” he said. “Are you in town for the screening? I heard you were in Palm—”

“Corky, love,” Laura said. “How good to see you. No, I’m really just up for an interview. I’m meeting Billy Poythress, if he ever gets here. Corky, this is my big sister, Merritt Fowler, and my niece, Glynn. This, you two, is Corky Tucker, who wrote The Right Time and is going to make us all rich and famous.”

“From your lips to God’s ear,” he said. “It’s nice to meet you both. I can see now where Laura gets it.”

His smile slid with equal approval over Glynn and me, and I smiled back. “Hello,” I said. Glynn said nothing, but smiled, a small, three-cornered smile with her mouth closed. I had never seen that smile before. Mona Lisa now…

“Will you sit for a minute?” Laura said. “Catch me up on the buzz about the film. I’ve been out of town, and I’m dying to hear—”

“Just for a second,” he said, slipping into the fourth chair. “Billy Poythress scares the shit out of me. I doubt that I know anything you don’t, though. Tomorrow night’s going to be a complete surprise to all of us. Caleb isn’t talking about it, but I hear some big changes have been made. Margolies insisted after he saw the rough cut. Nobody knows what they are. I wouldn’t even speculate, knowing Margolies. A chorus line and a collie dog, probably. Maybe a black tap dancer. But you know all that, of course. Caleb’s undoubtedly told you. You’re the one who should be spilling the buzz—”

“Pring is back then,” Laura said carelessly. “No, I’ve not seen him yet. I’ve been at home, back in Atlanta, just got in this morning. I brought Merritt and Glynn back with me for the screening, but I haven’t had time to call Pring. Is he at home, do you know?”

I stared at her. Atlanta? She did not look at me.

“I hear he’s holed up out at Margolies’s place in Malibu, pitching the new film. It’s about Joan of Arc, or some saint. God knows. Margolies probably remembers Ingrid Bergman in the original. The skinny is that he’ll let go the money only if he likes this version of Right Time and if Caleb can find the right saint for the new one. He’s talking about a nationwide talent search, the old GWTW business—”

“My God, Joan of Arc,” Laura said, and laughed indulgently. “Maybe they can get the collie to play Joan. Burn a saintly dog. That ought to part Margolies with some dough. What does he think of Right Time, have you heard?”

“I don’t think he’s seen it since he asked for the changes,” Corky Tucker said. “Tomorrow night’s the night for all of us. I heard that somebody from the production met him at a party in Malibu and he smiled, though.”

I laughed, thinking he was making a joke, but Laura looked over at me and said, “Whole films, whole careers, have risen and fallen on Margolies’s smile,” she said. “Listen, Corks, do you think you could get three tickets for tomorrow night for me? I’m not going to be any place Pring can call me, and I really do want these two to see the film. I think they think I do porno flicks, or something.”

“Sure, I’ll have three left at the box office for you. It’s at the metroplex in Century City, you know, where we screened Burn. I hear Margolies will be there with most of the Vega brass. Probably won’t be able to hear for all the folding money rustling. Maybe he’ll put all the Fowler-Mason women in the Joan thing. You three are turning heads all over this patio, you know that?”

“Go on with you, you big old tease,” Laura said in a mock belle’s drawl. “You’re just trying to turn our poor heads. Thanks for the tickets, Corky. We’ll see you tomorrow night.”

“Six o’clock. Everybody’s going on to Spago after. Say hi to Caleb for me if you see him before then.”

“I will,” Laura said, and he went back to his table. Everybody at it waved at Laura. Laura waved back, smiling widely. She still did not look at me. I felt the strangeness and unease rise like mercury in a hot thermometer.

“What’s this business about being in Atlanta?” I said.

“I’ll tell you later,” Laura said. “Here comes Poythress.”

Over the years since I left the agency I have formed the habit of talking silently to Crisscross. I tell her things that I somehow never tell other people; when something particularly absurd or embarrassing or appalling occurs I tell her. When I am happiest or saddest or silliest I sometimes tell her, too. I tell her these things in person, of course, when we do meet, but I talk with Crisscross far more often than I see her. When I saw Billy Poythress approaching us around the pool I tuned her in.

“Lord, CC, he looks just like Porky Pig,” I radioed across the miles home. “His cheeks hang down and jiggle and he has a round little butt and little plump bow legs, and that snouty nose. He should have an apple in his mouth. And you should see what he’s got on!”

Billy Poythress did indeed look like Porky Pig, but a corrupted, faintly malevolent Porky. There was something dried-out and unhealthy about him, even though he literally shone. His cheeks and forehead glistened with sweat or lotion, his little eyes glittered in folds of flesh, and he wore a lilac and purple satin baseball jacket and cap that gave back light like sunlit lava. Clay-red hair curled from under the cap. His teeth flashed white in a wide smile, and rings on the hands he held out to us as he trotted across the pool apron glittered, too. Heads at every table swiveled to follow him. Hands lifted in salute. Voices called after him. He acknowledged them all with little nods, but he kept his eyes on us. The eyes on the patio found us and lingered, to see who was, this day, Billy Poythress’s anointed.

He stopped and looked at us, hands clasped under his chin.

“I couldn’t even guess,” he said in a lilting falsetto. “You three have utterly confounded me!”

“I’m Laura Mason,” Laura said, uncoiling herself from her chair and extending her hand to him. He mopped his brow in mock relief, even though he was, I was sure, well aware which of us was Laura.

“As good a guess as any,” he said, and I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. It was a purely visceral reaction. Nothing good was going to come to Laura from this posturing little man.

She introduced us and he kissed us on our cheeks and patted our hands and said that he should be doing an interview with all three Fowler-Mason girls, and then he settled himself into his seat and looked around the patio. At a slight lift of his plump hand the waiter scurried over, nearly tripping in his haste.

“You’re not Clint; where is Clint?” Billy Poythress said. There was a slight petulance in his voice. Sulky Porky.

“Clint tore his rotator cuff playing volleyball yesterday and had to have surgery,” the young waiter said. “My name is Charles. The maître d’ asked me to take special care of you.”

“Oh, screw his rotator cuff,” Billy said. “What a bother. He knows exactly what I want when. I hate having to go over it all again.”

“I’ll get it right, I promise,” said the waiter, smiling winningly. I felt a curl of anger at Billy Poythress. What a spoiled brat.

“Well, then, I’ll have a split of chilled D’Iberville water, no ice, one wedge of lemon, not lime. You have it; Clint keeps it on ice for me. And then I’ll have a wedge of papaya with the tuna carpaccio and the gazpacho verde with plain croutons, not the garlic, and a plate of polenta with parmesan. You don’t have to shake your head at me; I know it’s not on the menu. Clint always tells the kitchen when I first come in. Make sure the parmesan is Reggiano. And I’ll finish with the lemon crème brûlée and decaf espresso. Lime there, not lemon. Oh, dear. How rude. I’ve gone bumbling ahead of you ladies. Please…”

And he gestured for us to order. The young waiter, scribbling furiously, cast us a wild look.

“Caesar salad and iced decaf,” I said, picking the simplest thing I could find on the menu.

“That sounds good,” Laura said, and smiled at the waiter.

“Same for me,” Glynn said. He smiled so broadly that I thought his peach-fuzz cheeks were going to split. He dashed away.

He was back in an instant.

“No papaya today, but there’s some pretty passion fruit,” he said anxiously. “And the polenta’s gone, but the cook has some nice potato and rosemary risotto, a fresh batch. And just between you and me the crème brûlée has seen better days.…”

His voice trailed off and I looked at Billy Poythress. His face had swelled and gone deep red, and his eyes were lost in slitted folds of flesh, but his smile remained fixed.

“Get Tony for me,” he said, gesturing at the maître d’.

“Sir, I can—”

“Get Tony!”

The boy turned and fled. Billy Poythress turned to us, face still vermilion with temper, smile still fixed, and said, “This is insupportable. I eat lunch or dinner here two and three times a week. I always mention this place in my columns. I absolutely rave about the food, even though there’s better at half a dozen places on Sunset alone. I put this place on the map with anybody who counts the day it opened; half the people come here because I do. I will not put up with this sort of treatment.”

The maître d’ arrived, lean and saturnine in a dark suit, bending slightly and correctly from the waist over Billy Poythress.

“There is some dissatisfaction?” he said in a flat, precise voice. It occurred to me that this was far from the first time he had stood here like this.

“I ordered papaya and polenta, and that’s what I want,” Billy said tightly. “You’ve never run out before. This waiter, this Charles person, is totally incompetent, and I want him fired. On top of everything else he was extremely rude to me. Extremely rude.”

His voice had risen to a treble shout, and I felt rather than saw heads turn all over the patio. I looked down into my Calistoga water. I felt my face begin to burn. Across the table from me I felt Glynn flinch. Laura sat very still.

“No, he wasn’t,” she said then, sweetly, and smiled up at the maître d’. “I thought he was perfectly polite and charming, and most attentive. It’s scarcely his fault if the kitchen is out of something. I’m afraid Mr. Poythress is upset at me, and spoke before he thought. I apologize to both of you.”

And she smiled her enchanting triangular smile, the one that mesmerized cops and directors and older sisters alike, and sat silently, looking obliquely up at Billy Poythress under the brim of the hat.

He flushed an even deeper magenta, but dropped his eyes.

“My apologies, too, Tony,” he muttered. “The young lady has better manners than I do. I will expect some adjustment on the bill, however.”

“The house will be happy to have all of you as its guests,” the maître d’ said stiffly, and turned and walked away. We four sat in silence, and then Billy Poythress said, “You are an example to us all, Laura Mason. At least I saved you a hefty check; I make it a policy never to pick up a tab. Now. Let’s finish our drinks and then we’ll have our little interview. Let me tell you about this place; did you know that Van Heflin drowned in the pool here?”

I glanced involuntarily at the azure pool and turned away. So did Glynn. I knew that whenever after we thought of the Sunset Marquis, we would both see the body bobbing in the bright water, facedown, like a dark, drowned bird. What a terrible man this Hollywood columnist was. I thought that Laura would pay dearly for her courage.

Our food came and we picked at it in silence, listening as Billy Poythress, good temper restored, regaled us with industry gossip, most of it scurrilous and some of it, I thought, actionable. Then he told us about his boyhood in St. Louis and how he had come West to be a journalist, but found that he was “too sensitive, too vulnerable,” for that hard-edged profession, and so had drifted into what he called the people game.

“Everyone wants to know everything about everybody with any celebrity, and I have contacts that no one else has,” he said. “I give enjoyment to a great many people every week. It makes them happy and it makes me happy. It’s an ideal way to make a nice little living.”

Better than nice, I thought. I would wager that Billy Poythress had not paid for a meal in twenty years.

We finished our coffee and he pushed away his cup and took out a little leather notebook. I saw the tiny Hermès logo stamped inconspicuously on it.

“Now,” he said. “I’m going to do something a little different with you, Laura Mason. From what I hear—and I hear everything—this role of yours in Caleb’s new movie is soon going to be the talk of the industry, so I thought we’d talk today about you and Caleb instead. Simply everybody will be wild to know about that. He hasn’t had anybody on the side since way before Jazz; there was some buzz that he was leaning toward little boys. But you’ve put an end to that. So do tell me all, my dear. I promise to give you as many inches as you give me dish.”

We were all silent. I did not dare look at Laura. Every instinct told me to simply grab her and hustle her out of there, but this was, after all, her territory and her career, and I had to trust that she knew best how to navigate in it. But the sense of danger was almost palpable.

“Stuart told me this would be about my part in Right Time,” she said finally. Her voice was low and level and pleasant.

“Well, we all know that Stuart isn’t exactly at his best these days, don’t we?” Billy said, smiling. Smiling. “I really don’t think you’re very well served there, dear, but you know best about that. No, I told him quite plainly that I wanted to know about your little affaire d’amour. He said he didn’t think you would have any problem with that. After all, it’s been getting beaucoup ink ever since filming started.”

“I don’t know if I can do that,” Laura said presently, and looked over at me. Her face was strained and set. I knew what this interview meant to her. Nevertheless, “Don’t,” I said back to her with my eyes. “Don’t.”

“Well, it’s your call,” Billy Poythress said, putting his notebook back in the pocket of the bizarre jacket and lifting his hand for the waiter.

“Wait,” Laura said. “Let’s talk some more about this.”

“Good,” he said, settling back.

“You’ll want to be private for this, so Glynn and I will walk around on Sunset for a while,” I said. “Why don’t you meet us at that bookstore you like when you’re done?”

She nodded, not looking at me. I stood, and Glynn did, too.

“It was nice meeting you, Mr. Poythress,” I said tightly. Glynn mumbled something I did not catch.

“You too, pretty ones,” he said, beaming. “Enjoy your day.”

When we finally reached the crest of Sunset, breathing hard, Glynn said, her voice subdued, “He’s awful, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” I said, but said nothing more about Billy Poythress. What, after all, was there to say? What he was burned in the air like the afterimage of a great blast.

We had a pleasant stroll in the cooling afternoon, and bought a couple more odds and ends to flesh out Glynn’s Hollywood wardrobe. I had thought to find something I could wear tomorrow night to the screening and Spago, but did not, after all, have the heart to look. I did not think I wanted to go. I would let Laura take Glynn. Billy Poythress had been all I wanted to know about Hollywood.

We did not speak of him again until Laura joined us at the bookstore, and then only briefly.

“Did it go okay?” I said. She was distracted and pale.

“I don’t know,” she said. “God, what an asshole. It may have been all right. There’s no way to tell until I can talk to Pring. I’m going to go back to the apartment and try to call him. Then we’ll go get some early supper. We’ve had a long day.”

“Good idea,” I said. “We’ll get a Coke or something and walk on up, give you a little time.”

“Thanks,” she said briefly, and walked out of the store. Her head and shoulders were erect, but there was no lithe spring in her step, none of the old Laura prowl. My heart hurt for that.

When we finally got back to the apartment the shadows were long across Sunset below us, and the hills behind us were blue. A few lights had come on far across the valley and twinkled like fallen stars. In the spreading stain of twilight the view really was beautiful, soft and somehow tender. Nighttime must be the real time, here.

Laura was not about, but I heard the shower running. Presently she came out, wrapped in a white terry robe that must have been the departed Bobby’s, her face scrubbed shiny, blond hair dark and wet down her back. Her eyes were very red. I knew that she had been crying.

“Any luck?” I said casually, avoiding looking into her face.

“No. I can’t reach him. He’s probably still out at Margolies’s and that number wouldn’t be listed. He’s probably called here, but I forgot to turn on the answering machine. Stu doesn’t use it anymore. Let me get dressed and we’ll go get something to eat. I think I’ll take you to Orso’s. Best pasta in the world.”

And it was good. We sat at a candlelit corner table in a little walled patio, under the branches of a huge, low-spreading tree, and ate sublime pasta and drank red wine and looked as Laura pointed out this industry notable and that one, and laughed when she told stories about them only slightly less scurrilous than Billy Poythress’s had been. We did not mention him, and she did not mention Caleb Pringle again, but both men were as surely present at the table as if they sat across from us. We finished early and left, and it was scarcely ten when we went to bed.

Glynn fell asleep almost instantly, but I lay awake for a long time in the outrageous bed of Stuart Feinstein’s, which turned out to be a waterbed and sloshed disconcertingly whenever one of us moved. There would be no question of feeling an earthquake in this bed, I thought, but tonight, unlike the last one, the idea brought me no alarm. The damage tonight was inside Laura and not the earth.

Sometime deep in the night I thought I heard her crying softly on the living-room couch, but when I slid out of bed to go to her the sound stopped, and I stood for a while at the closed door and then got back into the waterbed beside Glynn. The last thing I remembered as I slid into thin, restless sleep was that I had not, after all, called Pom.

6

I called him first thing the next morning, though. Somehow his weight and presence were palpable to me even all these miles away. I had what felt uncomfortably like a child’s simple need to check in with him, to see if I was doing okay far away from home all by myself. I disliked the feeling so much that I almost did not call, but then I thought, it’s not that I’m asking permission to be here. I already know he doesn’t want me to be here. It’s that I’m telling him where we are and when we’ll be home. Anyone has a right to know where his child is, even if he’s angry at the one who took her there. An adult would make this call.

So I did. I called the clinic. A voice I did not know said that Dr. Fowler was in a meeting across town and not expected back until late afternoon. No, he hadn’t said where. No, Miss Crittenden would not be in, either; she was taking a few days of her vacation time.

“I’m a temp,” she said cheerfully. “They called me in on short notice. I don’t know where Miss Crittenden went. Maybe one of the nurses knows; shall I ask?”

“No, if you’d just take a message for Dr. Fowler,” I said. “Tell him his wife called from Los Angeles and said that she and his daughter plan to come home tomorrow on the midday Delta flight. Please ask him to call me at this number around eight your time. We’ll be away after that.”

I gave her Stuart Feinstein’s number.

“Oh, yes, Mrs. Fowler,” burbled the temp. “I saw both your pictures on the doctor’s desk just a few minutes ago. So pretty, both of you. I’ll be sure to give him your message.”

“You don’t happen to know if Dr. Fowler’s mother is in the office, do you?” I said.

“His mother? No, I don’t believe so. I can find out for you, though—”

“Never mind,” I said. “You’d know if she was.”

After I hung up I dialed the house. Could it be possible that poor Amy Crittenden was baby-sitting Mommee for Pom? But no one answered, and presently I heard my own voice, the one Pom calls my playing-grownup voice, say, “You’ve reached the Fowler residence. We can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave a message we’ll return your call as soon as possible. If you’re trying to reach Dr. Fowler, call the clinic at 555-3004, or his answering service at 555-0006. Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it,” I muttered, faintly troubled. Could something really have happened to Mommee, some accident or illness? Guilt poked its head into my mind, and I booted it out. Pom was a doctor, after all. What better hands for her to be in if calamity had struck? I would only have called him anyway.

But the guilt skulked behind me as I went out into the living room, where laughter and the smell of coffee beckoned me. Glynn and Laura must have woken early, I thought, but looking at my watch I saw that instead I had slept late. It was nearly ten.

They were out on the balcony. Below them Sunset swam in a white-bronze haze, and the tall buildings of downtown were barely visible. The mountains behind us were totally invisible. You could feel the heat’s promise and taste the air already. It was dry, but as enervating to me as Atlanta’s thick summer humidity. I thought of clean, sharp sea air, of pines and Canadian cold fronts. Pom and Glynn and I had planned to take an August vacation at a cottage we sometimes rented on Penobscot Bay. I felt a sudden shiver of fierce longing for it.

Laura looked up when she heard me. If she had been crying the night before there was no evidence of it now. Her face was loose and lazy, softly beautiful as it had been when she was very young, all the hard dry lines gone, and her eyes seemed brimful of liquid light. She was licking jam off her fingers, her legs propped up on the iron railing. A grease-spotted white paper bag lay on the little wrought iron table beside her, and the buttery remains of croissants were scattered about. A carafe of coffee sat beside it, and pots of jams and jellies. A half-smoked cigarette lay in an ashtray on the arm of her chair. Across from her Glynn sat cross-legged on a rickety aluminum chaise, wolfing the last of a croissant. Both of them grinned up at me.

“Morning, Glory,” Laura said in a lazy, sated voice. “Hi, Mom,” Glynn said. There was a sort of stifled hilarity in her voice, as if I had caught them doing something forbidden. Then it spilled over into a giggle.

I smiled.

“You two look like the cats just finishing up the canary,” I said, and poked at the paper sack. “Are there any of those left? Don’t tell me you’ve scarfed them all up.”

“All gone,” Laura hummed, giggling, too. “Vanished down the gullets of three voracious Mason women. Or do I mean rapacious? I know I mean Mason-Fowler women…”

I looked more closely at her. She sounded almost like she had when she had come in tipsy, when she was at Georgia State. But I smelled nothing, and besides, I knew that if she had resumed drinking it would not be in the morning, and not around Glynn.

It dawned on me then, and I looked more closely at the cigarette. It was clumsy and homemade, not a commercial brand.

“You’re smoking pot,” I said in disbelief. “And Glynn, you are, too. Laura, what in the name of God has gotten into you? You know Glynn doesn’t smoke that stuff—”

“Neither do I, normally, but it’s the drug of choice for nausea, and boy was I nauseated this morning,” Laura said, stretching mightily.

“You should have heard her hurling,” Glynn said. “It was gross. I’m surprised it didn’t wake you. It did me.”

I gave her a later-for-you-young-lady look and said, “Why were you sick? Surely there’s something else that works as well as this. If you really are sick, you shouldn’t be smoking this stuff.”

“I get sick before I see myself on film,” she said. “I always have. It’s some kind of stage fright, I guess. And there’s nothing better than pot. Nothing has ever stopped the heaving but that. I’ve tried everything. I can’t barf in the middle of the screening tonight, obviously. Lighten up, Met. I don’t do it except then.”

“Well, Glynn doesn’t do it, period,” I said, furious at her. Things were going along so well among the three of us and now this. It was as if she simply could not go for long without provoking me back into the authoritarian role. She had always done it.

“I just had a couple of puffs, Mom,” Glynn said. “Just to see what it was like. It didn’t do anything for me except make me hungry. I ate three croissants and nearly a whole pot of jam.”

“Yeah, she really did,” Laura said. “You know, pot could be just the ticket for what ails her. You can bet it would fatten her up better than all those shrinks you’ve been carting her to. Cost a lot less, too.”

“Let’s get one thing straight, Laura,” I said tightly. “You will not give Glynn pot. You will not give her crack, or whatever it is that you all stick up your noses out here. You will not give her liquor. You will not do anything that will put her at risk in any way. I want her to get to know her aunt, and I want her to have a good time while we’re here, but I will not tolerate this kind of crap. Your lifestyle is your business only until you let it spill over onto her. Then it’s mine. I’ve got a good mind to take her home this afternoon. We can still get the four o’clock flight.”

“Mommm,” Glynn wailed. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t think. I didn’t even like it—”

“It’s a shame you have to punish her because you’re pissed at me,” Laura said, looking off into the smog. Then she ground out the cigarette. “But you’re ever the vigilant mother lioness, aren’t you, Met? I almost forgot you were for a while.”

I knew what she was trying to do, but it angered me anyway.

“I don’t have to be,” I said. “How I am out here is entirely up to you. It seems to me you’re the one who called the lioness out.”

She smiled. It was her old, sweet, open smile.

“You’re right. I did. And I’m sorry. I could have gone in the john and smoked this. It was inappropriate and I won’t do it again, I promise. I’m really uptight about this screening tonight, it means so damned much, but that’s no excuse. If you’ll stay, I’ll be so exemplary you won’t know me.”

“If you take me home for smoking pot Dad will never trust me again,” Glynn whispered, and I knew that she was right. Everything he thought about Laura, and about my hasty flight West and our staying over, would be vindicated. It never occurred to me not to tell him, and I knew that it would never occur to Glynn, either.

“I know I sound stuffy and old-fashioned, harping at you about pot,” I said, knowing that I did. “I hate always being the heavy. But you both know I can’t condone that.”

“We both do,” Laura said. “It won’t come up again.”

“Then let’s put it behind us,” I said. “What’s on for today?”

Glynn jumped up and hugged me, and said, “I’m going down to the strip and look for some tights and shoes to go with my silk tunic. Laura said they could be an early birthday present from her. I can’t go to a Hollywood screening in Doc Martens. You don’t have to worry, Mom; you can sit right here and see me the whole time. It’s just to those boutiques down there.”

I sighed and let her go. I was not going to be the crow in this flock of songbirds anymore.

“What about you? You want to shop, or prowl, or anything?” Laura said. She did not move from her chair. I did not think she wanted to go out, but I did not know what she did want.

“I think I’d just like a lazy morning,” she said. “Keep me company. I’ll make a fresh pot of coffee and some toast for you. At least there’s bread and jam left. We haven’t really talked since you got here.”

We drank the coffee and sat for a while in companionable silence. The slight, constant pain of missing Laura was stilled, and the solace of seeing my daughter behaving like an ordinary teenager, flitting off after clothes and bubbling with the excitement of a real Hollywood screening, was soporific. The pot incident shrank into the category of adolescent hijinks. On this sunny balcony not yet baking in the heat, the air of festivity and holiday was very strong, and the sense of sheer youngness, of the head-spinning innocence and camaraderie of college, was even stronger. How long since I had spent even a few days in the sole company of women with whom I shared deep bonds? Not, surely, since school and the days just after, when Crisscross and I spent long weekend days together, laughing, talking, being. Except for the scratchy prickle of Pom and the faraway, half-forgotten furor of home, lodged far back in my mind like a faint tickle in the throat, I was nearly perfectly steeped in well being.

“Tell me about this Caleb Pringle,” I dared say into the suspended sunny morning. I could not have said it before.

There was a silence, and then Laura sighed. It was a long sigh.

“He’s the director of The Right Time. He’s probably the hottest director in the industry right now. Everything he touches turns to money, which is all the studios understand, and most of it turns to awards. He’s really good, really creative in a strange, dark, almost delicate kind of way. There’s always a touch of decadence in his films, what he calls a sweet corruption, but there’s this surprising innocence to them, too, even the most violent. And some of them, like Burn, were really violent. He has a mind like I’ve never seen and a vision like I’ve never encountered and—”

“And you’re in love with him,” I said. I would have known from her tone even if Stuart Feinstein had not told me. I did not mean infatuation, either. I had seen Laura through several of those. This was different.

“Yes.” She swung her eyes from the undulating skyline and fixed them on me. Tears shimmered in them, but there was a strange, sweet smile on her face, one I did not associate with Laura. It was tender and it was somehow humble. For some reason that frightened me rather badly. I remembered Stuart’s words.

“So are congratulations in order?” I asked, trying to keep my tone warm yet casual.

“I…don’t know. Yes. I think so. Oh, Met, I do think so; we’ve been just so close, just so…awfully close.…We were together constantly during the shooting of Right Time, and just after, when we came back and he started editing. We laughed all the time, at everything. I know the sort of reputation he has, but he said things—we did things—you can’t do and say things like that unless you’re really in love with someone. You just can’t. I know. I’ve said and done practically everything there is to say and do to a man, and had them said and done to me, and this wasn’t like that. There was nothing on earth held back between us. I can tell when I’m being fed a line. This wasn’t that. He was always talking about next year, or years from now, and he’d said he wanted me to come up to his place in the mountains. He doesn’t take anybody there; everybody knows that. Everybody knows about that place, and the way he goes off up there by himself. But he said he wanted me to see it—”

“Where in the mountains?” I asked. I did not care, but I wanted the happiness to stay in her voice and on her face for a little longer.

“Up in the Santa Cruz mountains below San Francisco. It was just the wreck of a big old hunting lodge when he bought it; but he’s completely done it over. It’s all national park land now, but you can have a place on it if it was there before the park was, and this was. Some very rich San Francisco guy built it in the early twenties. It’s really isolated, I hear, and very beautiful; that’s redwood country up there, and the land is so wild and rough that you can hardly walk it, much less get roads through it. There’s a little private road into his property, but except for that and an old fire tower where his hermit caretaker lives, there’s nothing else. He used to tell me about it, about how much he loved it, and how important it was to him, and what he did up there, and what we’d do.…I might almost have thought this was just, you know, a fling or something, until he asked me up there. But then I knew it was what I thought it was—”

“Why are you talking about it in the past tense, then?” I said gently.

“I wasn’t, really,” she said, and smiled again. This time it was a strained smile that did not reach her eyes, and I damned myself for speaking. But I wanted to know more about this man, about his capacity to hurt Laura. What I already knew did not endear him to me.

“You were. Look, Pie, if he really loves you and means all this, nobody in the world is going to be happier for you than me. But if there’s even the remotest chance that he could hurt you—”

“Pring would not hurt me,” she said. But she did not look at me.

“Then why hasn’t he called you? Why didn’t he let you know about the screening?”

“Oh, Met, he just gets so totally involved when he’s got a new movie in this stage, with everything up in the air and all the ends flying loose—it’s like he’s all swallowed up, hypnotized, or something. Stu said he was in the middle of courting this Margolies for money; you know, you heard what Corky said. Or he could be up at the mountain place. There’s not a phone up there except in the caretaker’s place.”

“A hermit with a phone?” I smiled, hoping to divert her. The anxiety in her voice was too painful to hear. I was very sorry I had brought up Caleb Pringle.

“Well, he’s not really a hermit. He’s a writer and I think he does something about earthquakes, too; he’s got all this equipment and stuff up there, Pring says. It’s just that he almost never goes down into any of the towns. But Pring has to have some way to tell him when he’s coming up and what he wants done, and all that. I don’t think he’d go up there and use the phone in the tower. He doesn’t much like this guy, or rather, he thinks he’s nuts, or something. Obsessed, he says. But he keeps him on because he does a pretty good job and he doesn’t pay him anything. Pring lets him live in the tower in exchange for keeping the place up. The guy has some money, I think.”

“Terrific. A rich hermit with a phone. Just who you want peeping in the windows in the middle of a mountain idyll.”

“He doesn’t come around the place. Pring says it’s like being alone in the middle of a primeval wilderness up there. Oh, Met, nothing ever sounded so wonderful to me as that—”

“Well, I hope you spend years and years up there, baby,” I said, reaching over and kissing the top of her head. The strange platinum hair, flying free today, felt like the pelt of an animal, glossy and strong and a little rough. She smelled, as she always did, of her signature Opium.

“You’ll love him when you meet him,” Laura said into my shoulder. “He should be at the screening. He always is. I’m so glad you and Glynn are coming.”

“Moral support?”

“No. More like prizes to show off. Let him see what an impeccable gene pool I come out of.”

“I’d rather think he was going to carry you off to the mountains than count your teeth and breed you,” I said, laughing.

She stiffened, then relaxed.

“Well, come to that, we would have absolutely gorgeous children, Met. Someday, I mean. Although I have to say my clock is definitely ticking.”

I pulled back and looked into her face.

“You’re not serious.”

“No. It was just a thought. He’s crazy about kids, though. And he’s wonderful with them. There’s this little kid in Right Time; you’ll see tonight. When we started shooting nobody would have given you any odds at all on getting a decent performance out of the little cretin. But after Pring got ahold of him he changed completely. It’s a remarkable performance. In front of Pring’s camera he’s just magic.”

“Well, I look forward to the little cretin and everything else,” I said. “Now. What shall I wear that won’t embarrass you out of your wits? Not, I suspect, the faithful pantsuit and the Hush Puppies?”

She rolled her eyes at me and got up, stretching.

“God forbid. Follow me. I know just the thing.”

Just before we left for the screening I called Pom again. I got answering machines both at home and the clinic. The morning’s worry crept back, stronger this time.

“For God’s sake, don’t spoil this night stewing about Pom and that old woman,” Laura said. “If there’d been anything wrong he’d have called you here. You gave him the number, didn’t you?”

I nodded. The phone had not rung all afternoon. I was particularly aware of that because every now and then Laura would look at it as if willing it to speak. Damn Caleb Pringle, I had thought. If he had any feeling for her at all he’d call her. Nowhere is that far away from a telephone.

“Pom’s punishing you, is what it is,” Laura said, tilting her head at the bedroom mirror. We were all three in Stuart’s bedroom, finishing dressing. Once again I thought of college: date nights, proms, fraternity parties. The strident, embattled seventies seemed to have skimmed LSU without leaving any stigmata at all.

“Pom doesn’t punish people,” I said. “He wouldn’t even think to do it.”

“How do you know? Have you ever run away from home before?”

There was a combative note in her voice, and I did not answer her. I knew that she was nervous about the evening; more than nervous. The shimmer that always hung about her when she was keyed up was nearly visible, and she had been pacing and smoking all afternoon. Not, I was grateful to see, the homemade marijuana cigarettes, but far too many unfiltered, stubby ones. They smelled powerfully, and when I asked her what they were she said, “Players. I know. They’re awful for you. Pring got me started on them. I really don’t smoke much, but I’m giving myself permission today.”

I studied her in the mirror, smiling a little because she simply looked so wonderful. She had brushed the platinum hair straight back and plaited it so that a fat, glossy braid hung down her brown back, and she wore the short black minidress she had worn the day before. It bared her arms and back and much of her breasts, and the only other adornment besides her golden skin was the very high-heeled black sandals. She wore no stockings and, I could see through the fabric of the dress, no bra. She wore no lipstick, either, but had made her tawny eyes up heavily. A faint scattering of the family freckles showed on her scrubbed cheekbones. She looked so much like the young Brigitte Bardot, all sensuality and insouciant innocence, that I could not help staring. I never tired of looking at her, this beautiful chameleon who was my sister. She could be, literally, whoever she chose at any given moment. I wondered if very beautiful people ever simply got tired of the beauty, ever found it a barrier between them and life. I had heard actresses and models bemoan their beauty as burdensome on assorted talk shows, but I had always put that down to cloyingly false modesty. You had to wonder, though. When you looked like Laura, did people expect far more of you or far less? I thought it was a question I might ask her soon.

“Well,” she said, turning to inspect Glynn and me. “The Mason women can hold their heads high tonight. Lord, but we’re something, aren’t we?”

Abruptly, my introspection fled before a gust of the giddy laughter that had bubbled in my chest for the two days I had been in California. She was right. We really were something. I had sleeked my hair back and gelled it the way I had done the night of Pom’s party, and she had found a huge, tawny artificial tiger lily in a drawer, and stuck that over one of my ears.

“Don’t even ask where he got it,” she said.

She had done my makeup: bronze cheek blusher, matte gold eyeshadow, thick strokes of inky liquid eyeliner and mascara, some sort of pink-gold powder on my cheekbones, only a hint of coppery gloss on my mouth. The effect was startling, bold and rakish. Only my own freckles, unmasked by foundation, softened the theatricality. I never would have allowed it to be done to me at home, but I was far from home in more than miles this night. I wore the faded jeans, the boots, and the jacket to a tuxedo she found in the back of Stuart’s closet.

“What under it?” I said, when she hauled it out.

“Nothing,” she said matter-of-factly, and in the end that was what I wore. The jacket was a single button shawl collar, and fit tightly enough so that it did not gap open. But you could see my freckled chest all the way down to my diaphragm.

“I can’t wear it like this,” I gasped, looking into Stuart’s mirror. “I’m all knobs and bones and freckles. What boobs I have have vanished like the morning dew.”

“If you had any you couldn’t wear it, but it looks wonderful, very chic and go-to-hell. Come on, Met. I dare you. What do you care? You don’t know anybody who’ll be there tonight.”

“I know my daughter, who in one moment is going to groan, ‘Motherrrrr,’” I said, looking at Glynn. She was grinning in pure delight.

“No, I’m not,” she said. “You look great. Totally cool.”

“Oh, well, then of course I’ll wear it,” I said. “That’s the ultimate accolade. Not at all what somebody’s middle-aged wife and mother has come to expect.”

I spoke lightly, but I was absurdly pleased.

“You can be those and other things too,” Laura said. “Out here, you’re the other things. It’s about time.”

Flying on the crest of the laughter, I did not stop to examine that. I looked at Glynn and said, “Speaking of other things, who is this waif? Kate Moss?”

“Better than that,” Laura said, studying Glynn fondly. “Way, way better than that.”

Glynn wore the silky tunic that had escaped the fire simply because she had been wearing it. She wore it over tight leggings the color of burlap, and on her narrow feet were soft suede ankle boots in a slightly darker shade. She had folded the tops over to make a wide cuff, and Laura had brought out a wide, aged brown leather belt from Stuart’s closet and looped it loosely around her waist, so that it just rode the top of her hipbones, and bloused the tunic over it. Glynn’s hair fell straight to her shoulders from a central part, like a pour of molten vermeil, and she wore no makeup at all except a faint stroke of the coppery blush, to further hollow her cheekbones. She looked younger by far than her sixteen years, and more than ever, to me, like a creature of centuries-old alabaster and dim golden light from high, arched stone windows. It was such an otherworldly effect that for a heartbeat it gave me a small, terrifying frisson, as if I had looked upon my daughter in her coffin. But at the same time she seemed literally to burn with life. I shook my head and the image faded.

“I feel like I’m Cinderella, going to the ball with two total strangers that I’m supposed to know,” I said. “Come on and let’s get out in the air and light, otherwise we’re all three just going to vanish into thin air.”

“Beam us up, Scotty,” Glynn laughed, and we went out into the twilight that was spilling down the canyons onto Sunset Boulevard.

We were late to the screening, because the traffic on Santa Monica and La Cienega was at a virtual standstill.

“It doesn’t matter; nobody gets to these things on time,” Laura said. For the moment, it was pleasant simply to sit in the stopped Mustang, the top down, the late sun gleaming off the red lacquer, and see, from behind our dark glasses, eyes in all the other cars turn to us. Again I felt the simple urge to preen and flirt and toss my hair that I had felt in those long-ago college convertibles, streaking toward the sea. I knew I would not feel this way again; it would not be possible back in Atlanta, no matter what open-top car I sat in. Atlanta knew me for what I really was. This feeling was born of strangeness, mine and my context, or lack of it. I did not care. This moment was sweet.

By the time we had parked the car in a labyrinthine underground parking lot and made our way up in an elevator to a middle floor in a white building identical to the ones in the cluster around it, it was nearing six-thirty.

“It’s all offices,” Glynn had said in disappointment. “It looks just like downtown Atlanta. I can’t imagine Rocky MacPherson in a place like this. Do you suppose we passed his car?”

“No, I imagine Rocky came in a limo if he came at all,” Laura said. “He alternates between those and his Harley. If he’s to be believed, the last time he rode in a car he was coming home from his christening. They look like offices because they are; the money stuff gets done here. The glamour stuff is done either on location or at a studio. This is a movie theater owned by a chain that does sound mixing; production companies rent it or one like it when they need to screen something. There’ll be music and dialogue, but it’ll still be considered a rough cut. Never mind, everybody who is anybody connected with this movie will be here. This is the first time anybody’s seen this version but Pring.”

We got off the elevator and were in a vast, low-lit lobby furnished in large steel and tweed pieces, with a few towering plants and a terrazo floor and a wall of windows curtained now against the fierce glare from the west. The lobby was empty except for a catering crew setting up a bar against one wall. A ticket booth held a young woman reading a magazine. From behind double swinging doors came a blat of sound that became music.

“Shit, we’re late,” Laura said, taking our tickets from the bored young woman, she took a deep, shuddering breath and we went inside, and stood for a moment, blinking in the darkness. The movie had not started, but there was sound coming from speakers on the walls, a hard-driving, atonal rock beat, and blank white film flashed by. There seemed to be no seats at all left.

“I see two down front,” Laura whispered. “You and Glynn go on down and take them. There’s a row here in back empty. I’ll meet you in the lobby when it’s over.”

“No, you sit with Glynn and tell her what’s what,” I said. “I won’t know anything about anything. I’ll see you after.”

They went down the aisle. Heads turned to follow them. I saw Laura nod and smile at people she knew, and watched my daughter glide behind her with the airborne gait she used when she was acutely self-conscious and trying to hide it. Pride rose in my throat, bringing with it a slight prickle of tears. My daughter and my sister. My beautiful girls. They were the focus of every eye in the theater. I heard a slight buzz of conversation follow them, saw them slip into two seats down front, and found my way to a back row where no one else sat. Sliding into the low, cushioned seat I let my breath out gratefully, and realized how nervous I had been about seeing my sister’s performance in her presence. This was much better. In this anonymous darkness I could suspend my knowing of her, give myself totally to the movie and the woman she would become.

Looking back, I can remember scarcely any of The Right Time. It was as Laura had said, dark both in content and technique. While I was watching it I was mesmerized; I could tell that the acting was excellent, and the cinematography and lighting and sets were arresting. The sly aura of corruption was overpowering, yet affecting. I had the odd sense that it was every contemporary film I had seen, and yet was none of them; Stuart Feinstein had said Caleb Pringle’s trademark was the derivative made new by art, and I recognized both the derivativeness and the art. I knew from the outset that it would win awards, and there was certainly enough sex and violence, both beautiful, to assure its box office appeal, but later I could not have described it to anyone. Partly, I suppose, it was because I was so focused on waiting for Laura to appear that I missed much of the film’s context. Partly, but not all. Somehow The Right Time did not speak to me.

About fifteen minutes into the film a small group of men slipped into the seats next to mine. I nodded and they did, too, and we all fastened our attention on the screen. I did not notice them particularly, except to note almost subliminally that the man next to me wore a dark suit and a tie and had tiny, pointed highly polished shoes on small feet that almost dangled above the floor and that he smelled powerfully of something I could have sworn was Old Spice. Every boy in my high school class had worn it for dates and proms. But that could hardly be true out here, in this time, and so I tuned out the scent and lost myself in the images on the screen. Surely, any moment now, Laura would appear.…

Twenty minutes into the film I saw Laura walk up the aisle past me and out the doors. Light from the lobby flared and then faded. I turned around and looked after her; was she ill again? Had the morning’s nausea overtaken her? She had not looked ill; had seemed, in my brief glimpse of her, simply Laura, in her black and her expanse of bare tanned skin, vivid and arresting. She did not look at me or anyone else. I did not want to get up and rush after her and saw that Glynn still sat in her down-front seat, eyes glued to the screen. If anything had been wrong, surely Glynn would have known. There was a slight murmuring, like a wind in trees, in the theater, but it did not seem to have anything to do with Laura’s leaving. No heads turned when she passed. I settled down again to watch.

The man on the end of the row made a short, low sound when Laura passed us, and in a few moments he too got up and went out. I sat for a few minutes more, increasingly restless, and then the little man beside me left too. He did not speak to the two other men who had come in with him, only nodded, unsmiling, to me and went up the aisle in the spraddling waddle of a penguin. The two remaining men looked at each other, but said nothing.

It was only then that it occurred to me that Laura was not in this movie.

Shock and a swift, punishing grief kept me in my seat for a moment, motionless, and then anger jerked me out of it. This was why Caleb Pringle had not called her, then. He knew her part had been cut, of course he did; he would have to have known. It was he who directed the new version. He knew, and he did not tell her. Instead he let her see for herself, in a theater surrounded by everyone who had worked on the film, who knew what her part had been and what she and Caleb Pringle had been to each other. He knew and let her talk about both the part and the relationship to that poisonous little slug, Billy Poythress. Or, if he had not known precisely that, he should have anticipated such interviews. It was, after all, Caleb Pringle who had told her that her part was, to quote Laura, “best-supporting” stuff. I was so angry that I shook all over, so angry that my knees trembled on my way up the theater aisle.

I looked around for her, blinking against the pitiless fluorescence, but the lobby was empty except for a white-coated waiter leaning against the wall behind the buffet table, smoking a cigarette. Even the young woman in the ticket booth was gone. When I approached the waiter he stubbed out his cigarette and stood at attention.

“I’m afraid the bar isn’t open yet,” he said, showing his perfect white teeth in an opossumlike smile. Everybody in Los Angeles, I thought irrationally, had perfect white teeth. Maybe the Chamber of Commerce passed bleaching kits out to newcomers, or the Welcome Wagon.

“I don’t want a drink,” I said. “I’m looking for a young woman in a black dress, with blond hair in a braid. She came out a few minutes ago.”

“Yeah,” he said, rolling his eyes in appreciation. “She sure did. Went into the ladies’ room so fast I thought she was sick or something. Then some guy went in there, right after her. Some real squealing been going on ever since. Nothing to me; I don’t care. You see everything out here. But if that’s where you’re headed you might want to knock first.”

I glared at him and went swiftly toward the room marked “Ladies,” but paused at the door. I could hear the sounds of sobbing clearly, Laura’s sobbing, and a man’s voice speaking lowly, urgently, as if soothing her. It must have been the man in the seat down the row from me; obviously a friend from the production then, someone who would know what the amputation of her part would mean to her. I went back into the lobby and sank down on a steel and chrome bench. Her friend was probably in better position than I to comfort her, but I could not make myself go back into the theater. I had never heard Laura cry that I had not moved to comfort her. To sit still and know that this time I could not was agony.

I was still sitting there, wondering what on earth I could say to her, what she would do now, when Glynn came into the lobby, like me, blinking in the light.

“Where’s Aunt Laura?” she said. “She left and didn’t come back; did you see her go by? Mom, I don’t think she’s in the movie. I think something happened to her part—”

“I think so, too,” I said. “It’s awful. It’s monstrous. Somebody should have told her. She’s in the rest room now, crying her eyes out, but there’s a man in there with her, comforting her. He was sitting in my row, so he’s got to be a friend. I think he’s the best one to be with her right now. We’ll stick around till she comes out and then we’ll take her home. She’s not going to want to go on to any cast party.”

I thought then of Glynn’s whole-souled anticipation of this evening, of going to a famous restaurant with movie stars, of meeting this Rocky MacPherson who loomed so large in her small pantheon of heroes.

“I’m so sorry, Tink,” I said. “I know how you were looking forward to tonight. But you can see that something like Spago would just kill her—”

“I know,” Glynn said. “No sweat. I heard somebody say Rocky’s not here, anyway. Poor Aunt’ Aura. This is not a good place, is it? Hollywood?”

“No,” I said, getting up and giving her shoulders a hug. Their sharpness, beneath the silky flow of her tunic, jolted me anew. I had almost forgotten the anorexia.

“Thanks for understanding,” I said. “You’re a neat kid. As if I didn’t know that.”

We went back to the bench and she sat for a moment, worrying her fingernail with her teeth. Then she said, “He should have told her. How can she be in love with somebody who could let this happen to her? If she was that close to him, why couldn’t she see what a jerk he is?”

“The old saw about love being blind is true, I guess,” I said. “Most people will bend over backward not to see the bad in somebody they love.”

“Then how on earth do they keep from being hurt all the time,” she said, pain sharp in her voice.

“They don’t. People do get hurt, most by the people they love. Otherwise they wouldn’t care. It’s a price you pay for the love. Most of us think it’s worth it. Most of us don’t get hurt this bad either; people who really love you just don’t sell you out.”

“But you can’t really know—”

“No. You can’t really know.”

“So. Love means hurting. Or it could. Wow. What a wonderful thing love must be,” Glynn said, anger and misery in her scornful voice. I did not answer her. How could you explain it to someone who had not yet known it? But Glynn loved; she loved me; I knew that she did. She loved Pom.

And she had felt the pain of that love. I knew that she had not yet drawn the parallel, perhaps would not. You start young to bury that knowledge deep. The hurt in my heart for my sister spread out to encompass my daughter. Damn you, too, Pom, I thought. She’s too young to equate love with rejection and punishment. You should not have yelled at her; you should not have punished her. Not when none of it was her fault. You truly should not have done that. You’re going to have to make that up to her. I can’t let that go.

The young man behind the bar came over to us carrying glasses.

“The bar just opened,” he said. “You two look like you could use a little something. It’s just white wine,” he added, taking in Glynn’s youth. “Or I could bring some Perrier or something.”

“No, wine’s fine,” I said. “Thank you. This is nice of you.”

“My pleasure,” he said, smiling at Glynn. She kept her head down and did not smile, but she sipped at her wine.

“Thank you,” she mumbled. My good girl.

We had almost finished our drinks, sitting in silence, when the door to the ladies’ room opened and Laura came out. I leaped up and ran forward. A tall man in blue jeans and a tweed sports coat over a T-shirt walked beside her, arm around her. His head was bent to hers. His hair was dark and curled over his ears, and his face was snub-nosed and freckled and attractive in a boyish, unfinished sort of way. He seemed very young. He looked up at me and I saw that he had hazel eyes with laugh lines fanning out from them, and a network of tiny, dry creases about his mouth and on his forehead. Not so young, then, just seeming that way…

I knew instantly that this was Caleb Pringle. I could feel my teeth clench. My eyes moved, almost reluctantly, to Laura’s face, and I realized that I had been avoiding looking at her. Her face was red and swollen, and still damp from tears and undoubtedly a scrubbing with paper towels, but she was smiling, a misty, full smile. Her head nestled into the hollow where his neck met his shoulder.

“Oh, poor Met,” she said tremulously. “Waiting to pick up the pieces. Oh, I’m so sorry you had to be here for this. It’s all right, Met, I promise it is. I understand now. It was Margolies who made Pring cut the part; he cut two others, too. He wanted the emphasis to be all on Lorna’s part. She’s his new patootie. I should have known that. Pring couldn’t argue with him on the cuts, not and save the picture. Not and get Margolies’s backing for the new one. Margolies made it clear that if he didn’t like Right Time he wasn’t going to put any money into Arc, and oh, Met, Pring’s got to make Arc. It’s going to be by far the best thing he’s done, and there’s already a script, and several parts cast, and Pring will lose the actors if he has to go back to the drawing board on money, and there’s this absolutely wonderful part in it for me, better than Right Time, better than anything I’ve ever done, the lead, really…”

She stopped for lack of breath, and laughed. It was a carol, a lark’s song. I smiled, in spite of myself.

“This is Caleb Pringle,” she said. “I forgot you didn’t know him.”

Caleb Pringle smiled. The pleasant, ordinary face bloomed into something extraordinary.

“This is my big sister, Merritt Fowler, Pring,” Laura said. “Of whom you’ve heard more than you probably ever wanted to know. To whom I owe everything. Be nice to her. I think she’s probably mad at you.”

“As well she should be,” Caleb Pringle said. His voice was wonderful, deep and smooth as dark honey. “I could kick myself for not making sure she got my message about the part. I called from Margolies’s place several times but by that time he was so paranoid about the way Right Time was going that I think he was bugging my phone calls. I couldn’t get Laura, so I called Stuart and told him to tell her, but apparently he forgot. I should have made sure—I know HIV gets to the brain eventually—but I didn’t. And believe me, I am terribly sorry, both for Laura and this big sister I have, indeed, heard so much about. I apologize to you both. I feel like a worm about Right Time, but it’s over and I can’t do anything about it, and Arc is going to be a very important picture for a lot of us. I hope…I think…it’s going to mean a lot more to Laura than Right Time ever could have.”

He stopped and looked at me, still smiling. I did not know how to respond. I was not ready to let go of my anger over Laura’s humiliation tonight; I did not want it tossed aside lightly. But I wanted to be happy for her if indeed this new opportunity meant so much more, and I realized that I knew less than nothing about her world and Caleb Pringle’s. It felt important to me to be fair. If he really had tried to get a message to her.

I saw Stuart Feinstein’s wrecked face and heard his voice: “I called in a lot of chips for her on this one.” And “There’s nothing more I can do for her but hold her hand and pray.”

Not the words of a man who would forget a phone message of such import. Not a man to let a cherished friend be ambushed by pain.

But I knew that HIV did indeed, in many cases, affect memory and reasoning. I did not know what to say. And then I looked at Laura’s radiant, ravaged face, and did know.

“As long as you take care of my little sister you don’t owe me any apologies at all,” I said.

“I’m certainly going to try,” Caleb Pringle said. He leaned over and kissed Laura on the top of her head.

“Laura told me everything about you except what a stunning woman you are,” Caleb said. “If there are any more of you at home I could cast a whole movie around the Mason women.”

I smiled politely, not wanting to be complimented just now. It would be very easy for my tremulous liking for this man to slump back into anger.

“There are, and here she comes,” Laura said, just as Glynn got up from the bench and walked toward us.

“This is my niece, Glynn Fowler,” Laura said. “Isn’t she something? Look at that face; wouldn’t a camera love those bones, though?”

Caleb Pringle didn’t speak, only looked at Glynn. He stood very still, and his face did not change expression. He did not move. He did not speak. Then he said, “I imagine it would, yes. Hello, Glynn. I’m Caleb Pringle, the director of this debacle, and I want to assure you, as I have your mother, that I meant no harm to your Aunt Laura, and that I have found a way, I think, to make it up to her. I hope that you will forgive me. I’d like very much to be in your good graces.”

Glynn did not blush or drop her eyes or stammer. She looked at Caleb Pringle for a long moment, an adult’s whole, measuring look, and then said, “I love Aunt Laura very much. I hope you will be good to her.”

She said it in a soft, grave little voice, a near whisper, and he smiled. It was a smile of quick, pure delight. It had been an extraordinary thing for a very young girl to say, and I was flooded with pride in her.

“I’ll try not to disappoint you,” he said. “And for a start, will you three be my guests at dinner tonight? It’s at Spago, and the food is really very good. I expect you’ve heard of it. I want Laura to show the flag, and I’d love to show you two off. Most leading ladies’ relatives are fat and wear aqua polyester pantsuits.”

Glynn giggled, a soft little snort.

“Mom has one of those,” she said, grinning. “She almost wore it tonight.”

“I do not, and I did not,” I said.

“Well, she would have lifted the taboo on aqua polyester pantsuits forever, but I like her just like she is,” Caleb said. “You, too. You look just like a new young star on her way to Spago. The paparazzi will fall all over you. Will you come?”

Glynn looked at me, her face luminous with hope, and I looked at Laura.

Okay? I asked with my eyes.

Oh, yes, hers said.

“We accept with pleasure,” I said, and he nodded and said, “I’ll have my car brought around. We can pick up yours later. I’ll tell you a little about the movie on the way over. Oh, by the way, weren’t you sitting down the row from us, Merritt? Next to Margolies?”

“That was Margolies?”

“Aka the penguin. They tried to get him for Batman. How did he seem to be liking the movie?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He left before I did, just after you.”

He was silent a long moment. Then he said, casually, “Was he smiling, do you know?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t believe he was.”

“Shit,” Caleb Pringle said softly, almost savagely. And then, “Well, he will. Come along. Your carriage awaits without.”

The carriage was a stretch limo of such length and dazzling, sepulchral whiteness that I was embarrassed to get into it. Laura, however, slipped in without even looking at it, and I heard Glynn give a little gasp of joy. This would be incendiary stuff with her small crowd at home. The driver, a diminutive Hispanic in correct livery, nodded and bowed and smiled us into the car.

“Lord, but this is chopping tall cotton,” I said, looking around me at the limo’s interior. It had a bar and more electronic gadgetry, including a tiny television set, than I had ever seen, and there were fresh flowers in a bud vase. Peruvian lilies, I thought. Telephones sprouted all over.

Caleb Pringle laughed.

“The studio hired it,” he said, and pressed a button. The privacy shield rose noiselessly. “I’d much rather drive my old Woody, but Margolies is in love with these things. They must cost Vega as much as Ishtar did. I’ve always thought these things were like riding in a coffin on wheels. Jesus here, however, is a jewel. He thinks I’m working for Ryan O’Neill, who seems to be his idol. I think it’s because I once told him I was working for Orion, because now every time he drops me off he says, ‘Tell Orion O’Neill Jesus say ’allo.’ Oh, well. The first time I shot in Mexico, my Spanish was so bad I told everyone I was making a gorilla. I was a sensation there for a while.”

We burst into laughter and Caleb Pringle popped open a bottle of champagne that rested in a silver bucket and poured it, and passed it around. We all took a glass.

“To Arc,” he said. “Because this is where it starts.”

He raised his glass and looked at Laura, and she smiled dazzlingly and raised hers.

“To Arc,” she said. “And everything else.”

We drank. “Mmmm,” Glynn said, her nose buried in foam. “It’s like drinking perfume.”

“The old monk who invented it said it was like drinking stars,” Caleb said, smiling at her, and she said, “Oh, it is! That’s much better!”

He told us a little about Arc as we ghosted through the spangled night toward the restaurant. The people and cars on the street looked as unreal, as phantasmagorical, as images in a fever dream. The limo’s glass was tinted, but I thought that they would have seemed ephemeral, anyway. I had the notion that legions of Los Angeles’s homeless were watching our rococo progression and felt myself redden in the sheltering dimness, even as I knew it was an absurd thought. There were no homeless in Beverly Hills. At least, I did not think so.

Arc, Caleb said, would be a story about power and passion and innocence and the loss of it, and would proceed on the thesis that Saint Joan had not, after all, been burned at the stake in 1431, but had recanted and lived, and had a passionate affair with the French monarch who was supposed to have abandoned her to her fate, and had, as he said, “changed history another way entirely. I’m not going to tell you just how, because that’s the kernel of the movie and Laura will tell you that I never talk about that, but it’s delicious just the same, and powerful. I want that delicate and battering sense of passion corrupted, of innocence transmuted into power of another sort, of obsession, of purity given over to the service of…the world, I guess you could say. Can’t you just imagine all that religious frenzy, that virginal rapture, put to the use of the body? It could blow a world apart. It will, in Arc. The focus will be on the mature Joan, the lover of the monarch; the young Joan will be only a prelude, for contrast. Joan the woman will carry the load. And what a woman: tormented, passionate, guilty, hungry, sated, rapturous, humble, exalted—it will be an unforgettable role.”

“Who will play the Dauphin?” I said. The concept made me recoil, but it undeniably had power as well as perversity. I could see why Laura was so enraptured by the prospect of playing the adult Joan. It would have everything for an actress.

“I don’t know. I haven’t cast that yet, either,” Caleb Pringle said. “And it won’t be the Dauphin. It’ll be the Dauphine.”

“Oh, my God,” breathed Laura into the silence. “Of course. How perfect. Saint Joan would never have been seduced by a man, but a woman? A woman with sleekness and subtlety and a great worldliness—”

“A woman like that would be a monster if she did that to a young saint,” I said.

“Ah, but Joan was not a saint,” Caleb Pringle said. “Not until after her death was she canonized, and of course in Arc she will not die, but you’re right. The Dauphine will be a monster. The exact opposite of what the French call a monstre sacre, a sacred monster. My Dauphine will be a profane monster. A profane, monstrous, enchanting ghoul, stronger than Medea or Lilith. All evil. Totally depraved. An eater of flesh. Irresistible. It will play wonderfully off all that vast, untouchable innocence.”

“It will be a masterpiece,” Laura said. Her voice was hushed.

“It sounds like the worst of Roman Polanski,” I said sourly. The whole Arc thing made me unreasonably angry and disgusted. Just like, I told myself, somebody’s relative in an aqua polyester pantsuit.

“Well, I’ve heard that before,” he said mildly. “Glynn? What do you think?”

“I think,” Glynn said, “that I see what you mean. All that…untouchedness…spoiled with hands. Like snow when feet have trampled it. It’s still snow, only is it, really?”

He clapped his hands lightly.

“Exactly. Exactly. Innocence corrupted is still innocence, only soiled. Or is it? The conundrum at the heart of the matter. Are you sure you don’t write screenplays on the side?”

She laughed, embarrassed, and dropped her eyes. I stared from one of them to the other. Where had she gotten that? What could there possibly have been in her short experience to enable her to grasp it?

Then she said, “Will Rocky, you know, MacPherson? Will he be at the restaurant, do you know?” and she sounded so much like the teenager I knew that I smiled in the dark in sheer relief.

“I believe Rocky is in the slammer in Carmel as we speak,” Caleb said. “He seems to have taken a dislike to his room at the Pebble Beach Lodge and trashed it. This time I’m not going to bail him. Let him sit there and miss the screening and all the petting and the ink. I’ll send somebody down there to get him out tomorrow. Maybe. Or maybe I won’t. He’s been told what would happen if he did it again.”

“Oh, nuts,” Glynn said, and then buried her face in her hands.

“Don’t be upset,” Caleb said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll get him out in the morning if it will please you.”

“I’m not upset,” she said from between her fingers. “I’m embarrassed. Nobody says nuts, absolutely nobody.”

He laughed for a long time, a young, free sound, and she laughed too, behind her long fingers; her old, froggy belly laugh. Then we had some more champagne, and Laura fixed her makeup, and Caleb thumbed the dial and soft rock poured into the car, and we were there.

At first glance Spago looks like a diner made of double-wide trailers set side by side. At second glance it doesn’t matter what it looks like. One glance at the army of shoving, shouting, sweating photographers mobbing the entrance and you know you are in one of those rare places on the earth where powerful forces converge.

“Who are they waiting for?” Glynn whispered in awe.

“Anybody famous who happens to come in,” Caleb said. “And anyone who looks like they ought to be famous. You. Your mother. Your Aunt Laura.”

“Yeah, right,” Glynn said, but when Jesus helped us from the car the paparazzi did indeed rush at us, frantically, shooting rapidly into our faces, mine and Glynn’s as well as Laura’s and Caleb’s. The little Hispanic darted at them making fierce shooing sounds, and they parted just enough for us to run into the restaurant.

“Wow,” Glynn said, lifting a luminous face to mine. “Did you see that, Mom? Did you?”

“I did,” I said. “Ridiculous. Don’t let it go to your head. You’re flown enough with yourself tonight.”

“No! I want to be more flown! I want to be flown all the way to the moon!” she caroled, and did a little pirouette in the restaurant’s foyer. Her hair fanned out in a surge of silk, and her eyes closed in rapture. Caleb stood and watched her, unsmiling once more.

“Glynn,” I said warningly. Enough was enough.

Caleb Pringle scanned the crowd inside. I looked, too. It seemed to me that every beautiful woman in Los Angeles was in Spago tonight, and every older man, and all of them were rich. Everyone could have been Someone, but I could not tell who all those someones were.

“Are all these women in movies?” I whispered to Laura. “If so, who are they? I never saw so many beautiful women and so many gorgeous clothes, but I don’t know who anybody is. Am I supposed to?”

Caleb overheard me and laughed.

“No, you’re not, mostly. Who they are is women who go to Spago.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, that’s what they do. They get invited to Spago and then they spend the rest of the week, day and night, getting ready to go. And after they’ve gone they kick back and wait until they’re invited again, and the whole thing starts over.”

I looked at him in disbelief.

“You’re kidding.”

“Only a little. Look, there’s somebody I want you to meet. Let’s go over, and then we’ll find the rest of the gang. I think they put us in a private room.”

We followed him through the thronged room, and again, as I had in the movie theater, I felt rather than saw eyes follow us, heard a small, windlike sigh ruffle the surface of the room. Ahead of me Laura pulled her shoulders back and tucked her buttocks in and fell into her prowl. My own shoulders went back and my spine straightened automatically. Next to Laura, Glynn was floating again.

Laura stopped suddenly. She looked up at Caleb.

“That’s Margolies over there,” she said, and her voice was low and angry. “That’s who you want us to meet, isn’t it? No way, Pring, absolutely no way in hell am I going to go over there and make nice on the bastard who cut me out of that movie. No way. Nada. What are you trying to do to me?”

“I’m trying to save you a little face, my beautiful ass. That’s what I’m trying to do,” Caleb Pringle said lazily, but there was something urgent in his voice. “Listen, Margolies doesn’t have any idea who you are; the cut wasn’t personal. It was for his Jacuzzi-brained honey, I told you that. He wouldn’t recognize your face if it got up off the cutting room floor and bit him. As far as he knows, you’re somebody he’s meeting for the first time, somebody he knows I want for Arc. He’ll be charming and polite and think you’re entirely as fetching as you are, and how smart I am to put you in the picture, and that’ll be that. And nobody else in here knows you’ve been cut from Margolies’s new picture, because nobody at all does, but they soon will. And what will they remember? They’ll remember that you sat at Margolies’s table the night of the screening and he slobbered over you and everybody smiled and giggled and yukked, and you were with me, and I’m doing another hot picture with Margolies, and they’ll go around telling the whole industry that they were here the night he hired you for Arc. The fact that you weren’t in Right Time after all will be forgotten because Arc is going to be newer and ten times hotter than that. Capice?”

“I do. Yes,” Laura said. “Thank you, Pring. I shouldn’t have doubted you.”

“No, you shouldn’t,” he said, and tugged her braid, and we moved toward the corner booth where the little man who had sat beside me at the screening shoveled in pasta, head down over his plate. He was, oddly, alone. I would have thought studio heads traveled with retinues.

He looked up when we stopped beside him and smiled. It reminded me of the smile on the face of Bruce, the mechanical shark they used in Jaws. The eyes above the smile were chips of basalt, old and cold and long dead. I thought that I had far rather meet Bruce in the water than this man.

“Caleb,” he said, and his voice was smooth and thick, a flowery oil. “Dear boy. We meet again. Yes. Sit down and introduce me to these pretty things with you. Yes.”

Caleb handed us into the empty seats in the booth, putting Laura across from Margolies so, I thought, he could better look at her. He motioned me in beside her. He put Glynn next to the little man, and nodded to a waiter, who produced a chair as swiftly as if he had woven it out of air and set it at the end of the booth. Caleb Pringle draped his long frame over it.

“Leonard, this is Laura Mason, about whom I have told you an enormous amount,” he said. “I want her very badly for Arc, and I know that after you have looked at her for a few minutes you are going to let me have her with abiding joy. And this is her beautiful big sister, Merritt Fowler, from Atlanta, and the stunning child beside you is her daughter and Laura’s niece, Glynn Fowler. Maybe we should put them all in Arc. What do you think?”

Leonard Margolies nodded sleepily at us, and the shark’s smile widened. “Yes. Lovely, both of them. Yes, we should probably do that, my boy. If indeed there is going, as you seem to think, to be an Arc. Yes.”

I wondered if the repeated “Yes” meant anything, or was just a habit peculiar to Leonard Margolies. It was disconcerting, like hearing a toad hiss. Or a penguin. Or, of course, a shark.

“Oh, there must be an Arc, Leonard. It will be the jewel in your crown, as it were,” said Caleb evenly. “Especially with Laura here on board. I take it from your comment, or lack of same, that you think Right Time might use a little touching up.”

“Well, my boy, yes. A tad of cosmetic dentistry, shall we say. Yes. We will, of course, discuss that in the morning. I’m staying in town just to talk to you about it. See what I do for you? Come to my office about seven. We’ll order in.”

Caleb laughed. I did not think there was much humor in it.

“It will be,” he said, grinning around the table at us all, “in the nature of the condemned man’s last meal. Never mind. Let’s order something wonderful to eat and drink, and be very merry, for tomorrow, et cetera.”

Leonard Margolies raised a limp white hand and two waiters collided with each other trying to reach him first.

“Bring us something bubbly and so expensive for these pretties here,” he said. “Yes. Lots of it. We’ll order for them after we’ve toasted them; I want to think about what they should eat. Yes. I assume,” he said, looking at Laura and me and then at Glynn, “that you belles drink something besides bourbon and branch water.”

We smiled and nodded and he said, “Good. Good,” and looked at Glynn again.

In the low light of the restaurant she had the afternoon’s unearthly shine back, the shine that made me think of alabaster and medieval effigies. Excitement flamed along her cheekbones, but shyness paled the rest of her face to pearl-white. Her eyelashes lay along her cheeks, and I knew that she was struggling with shyness, struggling not to seem what she was: a sixteen-year-old sitting beside one of the world’s legendary restaurants. My heart squeezed in empathy. If I was tongue-tied here, how much worse for her. Too much; we had heaped too much on her tonight.

Abruptly Margolies leaned over and whispered into her ear, and she started and turned to look at him, the satiny hair swinging out, and then she began to laugh. It was the belly laugh. Margolies smiled conspiratorially at her, his eyes alive now, and heads turned toward us, and faces smiled. I had seen the effect of Glynn’s infectious croak before.

“What on earth did you say to her, Leonard?” Caleb grinned.

“That will be our secret, won’t it…is it Glynn? Yes. Glynn. We shall never tell, shall we?”

“Never,” Glynn said. The shyness was gone. She looked at him as one might a favored uncle. Forever after, she never told me what he said.

Margolies studied her openly, turning his head this way and that, smiling a faint smile. It was a gentler smile, but I thought the shark ghosted just below the surface. I was suddenly glad we would be going home the next day.

“Tell me, Glynn, do you want to be an actress like your pretty aunt?” Margolies said. It was more than a casual question; he sounded genuinely interested. I thought that this sudden, real charm was not the least of his power.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think so. I don’t think I have, you know, the looks and everything for it. I think I might like to write or paint, though. Or maybe do something with music.”

“Ah, then, the creative urge is there,” he said.

“As well as a rather startling perception,” Caleb Pringle said. “She caught the absolute essence of Arc before I’d even worked it out for myself.”

Margolies looked at her some more.

“You like Arc, my little Glynn? Yes?”

“I don’t think anyone is going to like Arc, exactly,” she said shyly. “But I think everybody is going to be, you know, different after they see it.”

He did not reply, but nodded several times.

We sat quietly for a bit, a silence that puzzled me but did not seem strained. Into it, Caleb Pringle said presently, “Well, if she doesn’t want to be in the movies like her aunt she could always save France.”

Leonard Margolies looked at him and then at Glynn again. The smile deepened.

“She could indeed,” he said. “Yes. She could indeed do that.”

Glynn looked puzzled and started to say something, but Laura made a small motion toward her and smiled, and she fell silent. There was a kind of suppressed glee in Laura’s face that I could not read, and a sleepy sort of triumph in Caleb Pringle’s. But no one said anything else.

The champagne came and was uncorked, and Leonard Margolies tasted it and said, “Yes,” and the waiter poured it all around. Margolies lifted his glass.

“To Miss Laura Mason and her pretty sister and niece. To a wonderful visit with us. May the magic of Hollywood never fade.”

We drank.

“Now. What can I do to make your trip memorable?” Leonard Margolies said, putting his glass down. “What have you seen? What would you like to see? Have you seen a real studio, had a Hollywood tour? I like to think Vega is one of the great ones. I would be most happy to show you around it. Yes.”

“I can’t think of anything any more special, than to see Vega in the presence of the man who built it,” Laura said. Her cheeks were flaming, and her eyes glittered. She had drunk her champagne rather faster than I liked to see. Laura never could hold her liquor.

“Oh,” Glynn cried in delight. “Could we? Mom? Could we do that? Oh, Jess and Marcia would just die!”

“Glynn, you know we’re going home at noon tomorrow—”

“But if we went early? Maybe we could do it real early?” her voice broke in something near despair.

“Mr. Margolies has an early breakfast meeting. You heard him. No, darling, he’s been kind enough to us as it is.”

“Wouldn’t it be fun if we gave her a test?” Caleb said, as if I had not spoken. “It only takes a few minutes. Glynn, would you like to have a real screen test? We could send you home with a tape of it, so you could make sure Marcia and Jess die. Leonard, we could do that, couldn’t we? We can meet afterward—”

“We could do that, yes. The meeting can wait,” Leonard Margolies said. He sat back, hands together like a Buddha, smiling. Shark, penguin, and toad had fled, leaving an indulgent uncle.

“Mom—”

“Why not, Merritt?” Caleb said. “We could have you on the plane in plenty of time. I’ll send Jesus with the car for you and he can wait, and take you to the airport afterward. Send you both off like royalty. It would be something to tell the gang, wouldn’t it?”

He was looking at Glynn.

“Oh, really, Caleb, I don’t think—” I began.

“It would give me great pleasure,” Leonard Margolies said. “Yes.”

“Oh, come on, Met. There’s no earthly reason not to do it,” Laura said. “How many young girls in the world will ever be able to say that Leonard Margolies personally gave them a screen test? Let her have something wonderful of her very own.”

And of course, there was no reason not to do it. It seemed to disaccommodate no one, and we would make our plane home with time to spare. And Laura was right; after that, there was not apt to be anything special for Glynn for a long time. Why not let her have this luminous moment without spoiling it? I did not know where my reluctance was coming from.

“Well…all right. It sounds like fun and we both appreciate it very much,” I said. “I can’t imagine why you’re being so nice to a couple of visiting Georgia relatives, but we accept with great pleasure.”

Glynn’s face abruptly went stark white and she closed her eyes.

“Thank you, Mom,” she said, in such a breathless small voice that we all looked at her. She looked as if she was about to faint.

I had seen the look before; it meant Glynn was stressed to the very limits of her being, every circuit overloaded. This was simply one liter too much joy in her cup. The next step would be nausea and vomiting, perhaps unstoppable tears. The embarrassment that followed these scenes was killing for her. She had not had one in a very long time; her world until this trip had been orderly in the extreme. I knew that she could not eat her dinner now, not in this place, not with these people. I put my hand on hers and said, “I think Glynn and I will skip dinner, after all, and go back to the apartment. We’ve both had too long a day, and she has an early morning call tomorrow—isn’t that how you say it? I’ll just ask the waiter to call us a cab; you all go on with your dinner, please.”

Glynn did not protest. She looked at me gratefully. No one else protested, either; her white face was eloquent.

“You do that, my nice, pretty girl,” Margolies said as fondly as if to a favorite niece. “Get your beauty sleep and be fresh for your big scene. Caleb, the car, I think.”

“Of course. I’ll send you both home in the limo and it can come back for Laura and me,” he said. “I’ll drop her at her car when we’ve finished dinner. I should have paced this better. Of course she’s worn out.”

When we got up to leave, Leonard Margolies kissed both our hands. Holding Glynn’s, he said, “You mustn’t take all this frou frou too seriously, my dear. It’s very good make-believe, but that’s just what it is. Make-believe.”

Thank you for that, I said silently.

“I won’t,” Glynn said. “Thank you, Mr. Margolies. I’m looking forward to tomorrow.”

He smiled.

“No more than I,” he said. “Yes.”

Caleb waited with us in the foyer until Jesus arrived with the limo, and then hurried us down the steps, his long body blocking Glynn from the milling paparazzi and the exploding flashbulbs. He handed us into the car and said, “Until tomorrow, then. You made a big hit with a very tough customer tonight, both of you. Rest on your laurels. Jesus will pick you up at six, if that’s okay, and we’ll shoot at eight. Jesus, take care of these ladies. They’re very good friends of Orion O’Neill.”

We rode home in the tomblike quiet of the ridiculous limo in silence, simply too full of the last seventy-two hours to speak. When we reached Stuart Feinstein’s aerie above Sunset Boulevard, Jesus handed us as tenderly out of the limo as if we had been Fabergé eggs.

He started to drive away, and then put his head out the window and chirped, “You tell Orion O’Neill Jesus say’allo!”

7

The production studio where the test would be done was in Culver City, just off the San Diego Freeway South, near the airport. The limo picked us up at six. Our driver this morning was not Jesus, but a dark, impassive man who might have been a Pakistani, or from another Middle Eastern nation. He did not speak except to confirm our destination, and we did not, either. Much of the shine was gone from the limo when Jesus was not at the wheel.

Despite the lateness of the hour when we went to bed, neither Glynn nor I slept well. Overexcitement did that to her, I knew, and her restless tossing set the waterbed to rolling like a frail craft in a nasty sea. I clung to my side of the mattress and tried for oblivion; I knew that the next day would be hard for us. The excitement of the test and the proximity to the world of casual glamour and unreality that Caleb Pringle commanded, the rush to make the noon plane, and the meeting, at last, with Pom all lay ahead, stuffed into this one day like sausage into a casing. Add to all that the shuffling specter of Mommee and jet lag, and the mere thought of the next twenty-four hours stunned me with fatigue and a lassitude that seemed to settle in my very bones like some Victorian malaise. There was no way to know what it did to Glynn. Like a young bride on the eve of her wedding, she could not see past the altar of the screen test.

We were up before five, padding blindly around the kitchen for juice and toast and coffee, bumping into each other in Stuart’s tiny coral and aqua bathroom. I pulled on the much-derided blue pantsuit and hastily packed my few things, tossing the jeans and T-shirt I had worn into Stuart’s washing machine and hanging up his tux jacket. Laura had said she would come back to the apartment and wash and dry the things we had borrowed, and his linens. Glynn had been living out of her duffel, so she had little to pack. She would be made up at the studio, Caleb had said, so she needed no makeup, and I, weary of the last two day’s ersatz Merritt, wore none, either. By the time the heat-grayed morning came sliding in from the east we were sitting on the little balcony, watching Sunset Boulevard come wearily alive and sipping coffee. Humidity was thick in the air and the heat was already shimmering off the hazy towers of Century City and downtown. It was going to be a smoggy, broiling day. I thought of Atlanta, and the heat and thickness we had left behind us, and sighed. The vision of the Penobscot Boy cottage superimposed itself over the scene below. Cool, sharp, resinous, clean, clear—that was what I needed. Clarity. I was starved for starkness and clarity.

“Do you think they made it up last night?” Glynn said in the rusty voice of early morning.

“Who?”

“Oh, Mom. Aunt Laura and Caleb. You know she didn’t come in. The sofa bed wasn’t out. She had to have spent the night with him.”

“I thought they already had pretty much made it up,” I said. I did not trouble to pretend that I thought Laura had spent the night anywhere but with Caleb Pringle. Of course she had. I had seen her face last night at Spago when she looked at him. Laura was in love with him. Spending the night was what she did when she was in love, or thought herself to be.

I thought that it was not much of an example to set for an unworldly sixteen-year-old niece, but Glynn had seemed, on this trip, far older than sixteen much of the time. There was a perceptiveness, an adult insight and tolerance in her that we did not see in Atlanta. But then we did not see much of anything about Glynn there except her carefully guarded, post-Mommee demeanor. How much richness were we missing in our daughter, I wondered wearily. Well, that would stop, too. Mommee would be gone, and Glynn would have room and air to become whoever she might. In the sun of her father’s undivided attention, we just might see the last of the starving child who haunted the house by the river. Already, out here, she was eating far more. I hated the thought of the looming confrontation, but resolved that it would come soon. I did not want to lose this budding wholeness of Glynn’s.

“What do you think of him?” Glynn said.

“Caleb? Well, he’s certainly attractive, and he’s being lovely to us. And he seems to be very fond of your Aunt Laura. I don’t really know what I think yet. I don’t know any other film directors to compare him to. What do you think?”

“I think he’s wonderful. He’s funny and not at all stuck-up, and he doesn’t make me feel like a silly kid. He treats me like someone he enjoys listening to and being around. I hope Aunt Laura marries him. I’d love to have him for an uncle,” Glynn said.

I could not see Caleb Pringle as anyone’s uncle, not, come to that, anyone’s husband, though I knew he had been married twice before. I did not think he was or ever could be a creature of the thousand lilliputian tendrils with which marriage and children bound you. But then, neither could I see Laura trussed with them. We were, Glynn and I, far away from home and out of our milieu altogether. Without my context, I found it hard to catch the sense of the people I met. I had never stopped to think how much I depended on simple familiarity.

“I wouldn’t count on that,” I said. “I think they’d have an alternative relationship at best.”

“You mean like just a long affair or living together all their lives but never marrying?”

“Something like that,” I said. “This place just doesn’t seem set up for plain old garden-variety marriages.”

“Well, that would be okay, too,” my child said placidly. “As long as I got to see him every now and then.”

“Don’t you go getting a crush on Caleb Pringle,” I said. “The percentage in that is less than zero.”

“I don’t get crushes anymore,” she said loftily. The limo came then, saving me from wondering when she ever had. I had seen little evidence of them, except the occasional almost obligatory infatuation with untouchable celebrities like this troublesome Rocky MacPherson about whom I had heard so much. Pom had said once, almost wistfully, that it looked as though he was never going to have to run off some obnoxious, lovesick little punk.

We got to the studio about six-thirty. It was a large, sprawling, one-story brick and aluminum building that looked vaguely like a warehouse, sitting in the middle of an asphalt parking lot that, I thought, would be worse than Death Valley at midday. There was a high wire fence around the whole complex, topped with barbed wire, and a heavy steel gate with a guardhouse. It manages to be both forbidding and banal, far removed from the fabled Hollywood studios that had lived always in my mind.

There were few cars in the lot. The limo’s driver lowered the silky, whispering window and said a few words to the guard, who consulted a clipboard and nodded. The driver followed his pointing finger around to the back of the building, which was even barer and less attractive than the front, and pulled up to a plain steel door next to a loading ramp. Glynn looked up at me and rolled her eyes.

“So much for A Star Is Born,” I said, ruffling her silky hair. She had washed it and blown it dry, and it seemed to drift around her face, never quite settling. She wore the same tunic she had worn last night, and the leggings and boots. Caleb Pringle had asked specifically for them.

“I wasn’t expecting all that old silent-movie stuff,” she said. “I know they don’t do that anymore. It would have been fun, though, wouldn’t it?”

The driver opened the door and we went inside. A young woman who seemed hardly older than Glynn was waiting for us. She wore blue jeans and a sweatshirt and enormous, clunking Birkenstock sandals over thick ragg socks, and had a head of glorious, improbable, Dolly Parton hair. Over her tiny mouse’s face it looked so incongruous that Glynn and I both grinned.

“It’s one of the wigs Laura wore in Right Time,” she grinned back. “I’ve always wanted to try it on. I don’t think the effect is quite the same. I’m Molly Shumaker, Caleb’s gofer. He and Laura are waiting for you on the set.”

On the set. Waiting for you on the set. The words ran down my spine like little spiders, and I felt Glynn, beside me, shiver. I could just begin, dimly, to understand the magic in those words, feel the glue that held my sister out here, when the Eastern stage was so much more obviously her metier.

“After you, Miss Fowler,” I said, and Glynn gave me her I’m-having-second-thoughts-about-this smile.

“I’m not sure this was such a hot idea,” she said in a tiny voice.

“Well, it’s too late to back out now,” I said. “Besides, you’d lose your home-court advantage over Marcie and Jess.”

“Right. Let’s do it, then,” she said, and squared her thin shoulders, and marched ahead of me behind Molly Shumaker.

We followed her through a labyrinth of dark halls with closed doors on either side, past a dimly lit canteen, through an empty, cavernous sound stage where cameras stood like sleeping dinosaurs and cables snaked across the floor, and into a second huge room. It was brightly lit from banks of ceiling lights and standing floor lamps, and in front of a large white screen at the far end a group of people fiddled with equipment and drank coffee. Among them were Laura and Caleb Pringle. They were obviously talking and laughing with the crew, but the room was so large that we could not hear them. We went toward them, and I realized that both Glynn and I were walking on tiptoe. Leonard Margolies was nowhere to be seen.

Laura turned and saw us, and came running over and gave us twin hugs. She smelled of soap and lotion and wore a gray leotard and tights with red running shorts over them, and running shoes. They were obviously her own, and I thought that she must have left some of her clothes at Caleb Pringle’s house. He was in running clothes, too, sweatpants and a T-shirt that said The Right Time. The baseball cap on his still-damp dark hair said the same thing. He smiled, and stood waiting for us.

“Isn’t this exciting?” squealed Laura. “Isn’t it a beautiful day? Did you sleep at all? I wish you weren’t going home today; there’s so much else I want you to see…”

She sounded so much like she had when she was a teenager and things were, for a moment, right in her world that I smiled. I had not seen her this exuberant in a long time, not since before she left for Hollywood. The tautness was completely gone from her face; the thin angles were smoothed, and her skin shone with soap and health and something else entirely, which I knew was sheer happiness. I had seen that before, too, if only rarely.

“Yes to all the above except going home. No more discussion about that,” I said. “I don’t have to ask if you slept well. No, don’t answer that.”

She hugged herself with glee and did a little dance step.

“Can’t you see the answer?” she sang. “Oh, Met, he’s back one hundred and ten percent; last night was just—incredible! How could I ever have doubted him? Oh, it’s going to work out, it is…”

I shivered. “Listen, Pie, don’t rush it too much,” I said. “Please. Hold just a little back till you’re sure…”

Beside me Glynn said nothing, only studied her aunt gravely.

“I am sure,” Laura laughed. “You’re just being a big sister. Be my friend for a change! Be happy with me!”

“I am,” I said, smiling. But I wasn’t; not really. There was something about her that reminded me of an out-of-control toddler rushing toward a cliff. Laura, being Laura once again.

Caleb came over.

“Listen, you guys, let’s get this show on the road so there’ll be time to make a tape for the purpose of gloating,” he said. “This is what we’re going to do. John Metter there behind the camera will shoot it; he’s the best I know, and shot Burn and Right Time for me. We’re editing the final cut of Right Time so he was here anyway. You’ll have the crème de la crème, Glynn; he wins big-time awards, Oscars. We’re going to do a very short scene from Arc—one where the young Joan sees for the first time the shape of things to come, you might say. It’s just a few lines, and you’ll just read them off the TelePromp Ter—very simply. Don’t try to act. Just think about the words and say them. We’ll do it in front of this backdrop, because I want the focus to be on you. John will come in close at the end; don’t mind him. Just think about the words. It’ll be just you, but I need another female voice to read a few lines off-camera, and a woman’s arm and hand. I’ve asked Laura to do the honors there. Let her get a head start on feeling her way into Joan. I’ll be in back of the camera with John and I’ll give you a few simple instructions, nothing you’ll mind. Don’t be nervous. It’ll be fun. You look perfect, by the way; I don’t think we’re going to do much to you, but our makeup person is waiting to fluff you up a little. Molly will take you back there. Any questions?”

“I…no. I guess not,” Glynn mumbled through dry lips, and I thought with dread that she was going to freeze, and then she would castigate herself mercilessly for months. This had not been a good idea after all; my instinct had been right about that. She didn’t need anymore self-doubt.

“I don’t know about this, Caleb,” I began, but he held up a finger and smiled at me and said, “Trust me. I won’t scare her. It’s really simple. Piece of cake. That little bit of shyness and tentativeness is just what I want.”

I fell silent. Caleb nodded at Molly, and she touched Glynn’s arm and the two girls went out of the room. I looked from Laura to Glynn.

“I’m really worried about it,” I said. “She’s been having a go-round with an eating disorder and her sense of self-worth is in the basement right now, and then there’s been a difficult time with her father and grandmother…if this doesn’t turn out, she’s going to be more than embarrassed.”

“Laura told me a little about things at home,” Caleb Pringle said. “Don’t worry about her, Merritt. Even if she’s awful—and I don’t think for a minute she will be—we can make her look fabulous. This guy is a wizard. And she’s a very beautiful girl. I have an idea that the camera is going to love her. That’s everything.”

“I told you how good he was with kids,” Laura said, putting her arm around me. “He wouldn’t do anything to hurt her. I wouldn’t let him. I’ll take care of her. It won’t take long. You’ll be glad you let her do it; the tape is going to be a treasure.”

I raised my hands and then dropped them. I was trying hard not to hover over Glynn; the therapist had been adamant about that.

“Good,” Caleb said. “Laura and I thought it would be easier for Glynn if you waited in the canteen while we’re shooting. I’ve always found that parents on the set spook young actors. You can stay if you like, of course, but it’ll be more effective if you see the finished product on the monitor.”

“Whatever’s best for her,” I said helplessly.

“This is, I think,” he said. “By the way, Leonard sends his regrets; he had an unexpected morning meeting with somebody from back East. He’d like to give you the full studio tour and dinner if you could possibly stay over, or if not, maybe you’ll come back soon. He’s really taken with both of you. Laura too. Leonard doesn’t get taken too often.”

“Thank him for us,” I said. “Maybe we can come back sometime.”

Molly came back with Glynn. I stared at my daughter. Nothing seemed to have changed about her, and yet everything had; I could not tell what the makeup artist had done, beyond hang a heavy, rough-cast metal cross on a primitive chain about her neck, but her face had been altered. Her eyes seemed larger, her cheekbones even more prominent, and there were tender shadows in places I had never seen shadows before. Her skin literally shone; it seemed as translucent as alabaster over the bones of her face, although there did not seem to be any makeup or powder on it. Someone had drawn her hair back so that from the front it looked cropped at the nape, and the hair at her hairline had been feathered into silky bangs that brushed her eyebrows. She looked young and frightened and somehow stricken and almost completely medieval in the tunic and tights and the big cross. I could see now why Caleb Pringle had wanted her to wear them. Her wrists looked impossibly thin, and there were red marks around them that manacles might have left. My heart lurched with pity and fear for her; I had never seen anyone look so vulnerable.

She grinned at me then, and crossed her eyes, and the tortured child fled and she was Glynn again, and it was all right.

“Don’t you know enough to genuflect in the presence of a saint?” she said.

“If you’re going to develop temperament before they even shoot this thing, I’m snatching you out of here,” I said, laughing.

She made a pantomime of gagging, putting her forefinger into her open mouth, and Caleb Pringle laughed, too.

“The whole course of history might have changed if little Joan had had the wit to do that to the Dauphin,” he said. “You ready? Molly, Mrs. Fowler is going to wait and see the final on the monitor. Take her and give her some coffee and a sweet roll, will you? I’ll send for you when we’re done.”

The last thing I saw before the door closed behind me and Molly Shumaker was Caleb Pringle bending intently over my daughter, who sat with her face raised to him and her eyes closed. In the white light flooding down on her she looked again unearthly and ephemeral, doomed. But he said something to her and she smiled. I let the door swing shut.

“I don’t know why I’m so nervous,” I said to Molly.

“You’re great,” she said over her shoulder. “You ought to see some of the mothers we get. The poor kid who was in Right Time; God! We got to the point where we were seriously thinking about drugging his mother’s coffee. She was a terror.”

The time seemed to drag torturously, though in actuality it was only a little over an hour when Laura came for us.

“How did it go?” I said, following her back through the maze of corridors.

She gave me her three-cornered kitten’s smile over her shoulder, the one she had always worn when she knew a secret or had been into something forbidden.

“You’ll see,” she said.

They were waiting for us in a tiny studio with padded swivel seats and a large, incomprehensible control board and banks of television monitors mounted overhead. There was a large central screen, and Caleb Pringle was sliding a tape into a slot on the board below it. He turned and gave me an enigmatic nod. Glynn sat in the back row of seats, hunched over, her fists knotted, one atop the other. She had been crying, and would not look at me.

“What is it, sweetie pie?” I said, sinking into the seat beside her and glaring up at Laura. Laura—why did I listen to her? I always ended up coming to some sort of grief when I let her persuade me to do something my instincts cried out against. Why had I thought that would change?

Glynn did not reply. She shook her head. She still would not look at me.

“It was pretty intense,” Laura said. “I had no idea she could tap into that so soon. It took me months to learn to do it. These are just release tears, aren’t they, Punkin?”

She ruffled the bangs on Glynn’s forehead. From the machine, Caleb Pringle said, “This is quite…extraordinary. See it before you decide to report us to the child abuse squad.”

I sank back against my cushion, squeezing Glynn’s cold hand, and waited. I had every intention of giving my sister and her lover as fierce a tongue-lashing as I could muster. But I would, in fairness, wait until I had seen the test.

The screen flickered with light and numbers rolled past and a voice I did not know said, “Test for Glynn Fowler, Arc, June 1995. Take three.” There was a bit more flickering, and then there was Glynn, sitting on a wooden stool against a stark, shadowy backdrop. She sat with her knees together and her hands loosely clasped on her lap, and her head dropped onto her chest. Light fell on her from above, as from an opening in a ceiling; otherwise the set was very dark. The camera came in on her, very slowly, until I could see only her head and shoulders and the great cross lying against her tunic. The angle of her head was heartbreaking. She did not move.

From off camera a woman’s voice whispered, “Joan. Little Joan,” and Glynn raised her head slowly and looked in the direction of the voice. I drew in my breath. It was not Glynn who sat there, but someone who had taken her over, moved into her body. The feeling it gave me was terrible, near nausea but not quite that. This was what possession must look like.

The voice spoke again, louder, and I recognized it as Laura’s, but her voice as I had never heard it: low, caressing, sly, somehow as evil as the hiss of a snake.

“What do your voices say now?” Laura’s corrupted voice said.

Glynn dropped her eyes back to her hands. Slowly they picked up the great cross and caressed it, a soft, unconscious, washing motion. The camera moved in further, as slowly and softly as fog.

“Nothing. They say nothing,” she whispered.

I had never heard such sorrow in my daughter’s voice, never such bewilderment. Never such despair, but despair as quiet as a sigh, or a little wind.

She lifted her face again, and the light caught it, and the camera came on. Her face filled the screen now. Her eyes looked out as if at empty space, and they were blind. Her face was awful, beautiful, lost. I held my breath.

“They say nothing,” she said again. I felt tears spring into my eyes. Glynn’s hand tightened in mine, but I could not look at her.

“There is another way,” Laura’s low, dreadful voice said. “There is another voice that will speak, if only you will listen, and your heart will sing with it, and your body burn.”

Without moving her eyes, Glynn said, “All my life it has been my passion to serve France and my Lord. Only these. But now my voices tell me nothing and my Lord is silent and my passion is cold in this cold place. If there is another voice to make my heart sing, for sweet Jesus’ sake, Lady, tell me it.”

Two great tears gathered in her eyes, and her lips trembled suddenly, and she looked down. The tears slid from beneath her lashes and tracked down her face. She sat silent. Laura’s voice was silent, too.

Very slowly Laura’s white hand came into the frame and reached over. Her finger caught a tear that trembled on Glynn’s chin, and so slowly that it seemed to take whole minutes, her finger traced the tear over to Glynn’s lips, and brushed the wetness across them. Glynn’s lashes dropped still; they shuttered her eyes, but the slow crystal tears continued, one by one.

“You hear it now,” Laura said.

The camera froze on the closeup of Glynn’s face with Laura’s finger on her lips, and then the screen went blank.

For a long moment no one spoke. I could not find the breath to breathe, much less to speak. The little moment was heartbreaking, terrible, and so pregnant with both innocence and evil that it did not seem to me there could be words for it. I hated it. I felt horror and terror and furious rage; how dare he make this of my daughter? How dare Laura? But even as I sat paralyzed, trying to find breath and words, I knew that the test was, as Caleb Pringle had said, extraordinary.

The lights came up and Caleb said, matter-of-factly, “I’ve never seen a first test like it. She is incredible. You do see that, don’t you?”

“I see it. I also see that it is depraved, and evil, and if I had known it would be like this I would never on earth have—”

“But that is just how it should be,” he said softly and patiently, as if he were talking to a child. “She has caught completely that awful innocence at the moment of corruption; seen the snake as it enters Eden. If she were not your daughter you would see.”

I knew he was right. If I had seen this moment in a theater and not known Glynn, I would have been struck silent with its sheer power, instead of with horror and rage.

I took a deep breath and looked at Glynn. She was looking back at me with a simple, whole-souled desire to please; it was a look I saw practically every day at home.

“Well, I do see. And I’m totally impressed,” I said as lightly as I could, and smiled at her. “It was a beautiful job, Tink. How on earth did you do that? Seem so frightened? Cry like that? I didn’t know you’d ever felt like acting might be something you’d like to try—”

“I wasn’t acting,” she said earnestly. “I don’t know what happened, quite. I was sitting there, scared out of my skull and sure I was going to throw up, or stammer, or something, and then I heard Aunt Laura’s voice and it was so…I don’t know how to say it, but it made me feel so…bad. It was like something exploded behind my eyes. I started to cry, and I couldn’t stop, and I was scared of her; I forgot completely it was only Aunt Laura—”

“That is acting,” Caleb Pringle said, smiling at her. “That’s just what acting is. On your part and your Aunt Laura’s. She called it out, maybe, but you’re the one who let it go. I don’t know what else you’d call it if it wasn’t acting. Too bad you can’t stay and be our Joan.”