Alexandra Waring (38 page)

“You’re kidding,” Jessica said.

Alexandra smiled, reaching to pick a piece of lint off of Jessica’s shoulder. “No, I’m not.”

“Did you ever
…
?”

Alexandra glanced at her and then walked over to the door, shaking her head. “No, thank God,” she said, taking hold of the doorknob and turning around, “because I never would have gotten here if I had.” She smiled. “It’s not in my nature to do anything in moderation, I’m afraid.”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” Jessica said, looking at herself in the mirror one last time. “Okay, Alexandra Eyes,” she said a second later, walking to the door, “I’m ready.” Alexandra opened the door and held it for her. Jessica took a step and then stopped. She looked at Alexandra. “Thanks for telling me that,” she said.

“Thanks for being someone I can talk to,” Alexandra said.

Jessica smiled.

Alexandra smiled.

And then they walked down the hall to the studio.

27
The Unveiling
Part III: Gordon

“Damn it, I don’t believe this,” Gordon said, hitting the steering wheel. “And I can’t get over to the parkway for another five miles. And why the hell is everybody on the road? This is Memorial Day—why aren’t they on the beach?”

“Don’t look at me,” Betty, his assistant, said, turning on the radio. “But if you want to
ask
me,” she added, tuning in a station, “I say let’s put the top down.”

They were in Alexandra’s car, a 1972 navy-blue MG, sitting there, stuck, in the center lane of the Long Island Expressway. His flight had been delayed getting in Friday night, so Gordon had stayed over with Alexandra and then early the next morning, at her request, had taken her car to Amagansett to give it a sorely needed open-highway run. While the drive out had been a breeze, Gordon doubted that this “drive” (sitting at a dead stop in three lanes of traffic) was doing very much toward cleaning out the fuel line.

Betty was in a group house this summer in Quogue, and while Gordon had known that she would be out for her first weekend, he had hardly expected to see her walk into Vanessa Winslow’s house this morning for brunch. “Not everybody thinks of me as the hired help,” she had whispered to him, just as Vanessa came sweeping out of the kitchen, trailing yards of silk from the outreached arms of her robe or whatever the heck it was, saying, “My dear friend, I’m so glad to see you!”

(The endless delays in Vanessa Winslow’s contract payments from DBS had started this unlikely friendship between Betty and one of America’s biggest—and most insecure-television stars. While Vanessa’s agent and lawyers had-quite rightly—forbidden Gordon to talk to her until the monies involved were received from DBS, Betty had started calling her up to tell her how much Gordon and
everybody
at DBS revered her, and how crazy it was making all of them that their accounting department, was so slow. After a while Vanessa had started calling Betty to find out what was going on, to gossip, and to hear more nice things about the work she had done in the past, all of which Betty had evidently seen. When the money had finally been paid three weeks ago [at which time Gordon had given Betty a seventy-five-hundred-dollar bonus], Gordon had been allowed to talk to Vanessa again, and while he had expected Betty to remain friendly with Vanessa, he had not expected to see her as a guest this morning.)

At brunch Betty had asked him if she could hitch a ride back to the city and, rather than dissuade her, Gordon’s explanation that he wanted to stop off in Locust Valley to see his parents had only made her insist. “Oh,
please
, “ she begged him, pulling on his arm. “All my life I’ve wanted to play Locust Valley Lockjaw. Come on, Gordon, I swear I’ll clench my teeth the whole time. I will!” And so Betty had come with him to Locust Valley Lockjaw Land and now they were sitting, stuck in traffic.

But Betty was right—they should at least put the top down and enjoy the late afternoon sun. He reached behind their seats to unzip the back window, undid the two hooks in the front, looked around to make sure that everybody was still in this unbelievable dead stop, slipped off his shoulder harness, opened the door and climbed out to bring the top down.

For a car that was almost three hundred thousand miles old, the MG was still a beauty. This was its third black convertible top. (The first had been ruined in 1980, while Alexandra was conducting an interview at a medical research center in Portola Valley. A monkey from the lab had somehow clawed and torn it, so that when Alexandra came back outside it appeared as though the little monkey was eating her car. The second top had been lost in ‘87, at the hands of a politically inspired vandal in Washington, who had slashed I R A through it while Gordon and Alexandra were eating in a restaurant.) The engine had been rebuilt about a hundred thousand miles ago; the outside of the car had been meticulously color-matched, repainted and resealed twice; the underside had been recoated several times; and the black leather interior had been so well cared for in the sixteen years of its life that it seemed only to look better and smell more wonderful each year.

Alexandra swore she would never part with this car and Gordon didn’t blame her. Besides, he was the only other person she had ever trusted to drive it all these years.

“There,” Gordon announced, plunking back down in his seat and closing the door.

“Nice,” Betty said, holding her hair back with one hand and angling her face toward the sun.

Gordon watched Betty a moment (she had closed her eyes) and thought of Alexandra at twenty-one, sitting in almost the exact same pose. He remembered it very well, her sitting like that, because they had been sitting in the MG for two hours on Route 1 that day in 1979, waiting for bulldozers to carve a new lane out of the hillside because the southbound one had slipped into the ocean. (“Even if a house does fall out of the sky every once in a while,” Alexandra had sighed, “at least in Kansas the roads stay pretty much where we put them.”) The wait had been worth it, though. He remembered their weekend at Big Sur, what they had done there, still.

Gordon blinked a couple of times, refocusing on the license plate on the car in front of them, thinking how strange it was to be in this car with anyone but Alexandra.

“What exactly is it that your mother has?” Betty suddenly asked him, shielding her eyes from the sun with her free hand.

He sighed, gave a little shrug and looked over across the divider at the cars passing the other way. “The vapors, I think.”

“The what?”

“I was kidding,” he said, looking straight ahead. The car ahead of them was moving. He pushed in the clutch, revved the engine a little, shifted into first, let out the emergency brake and let up on the clutch.

ZOOM.

Errrt.

Into neutral.

Wow. Twenty whole feet.

He yanked up the emergency brake.
Thump, thump
; his feet came down off the pedals to the floor.

“If I’m being nosy, just tell me,” Betty said.

“No, it’s okay,” he said. He propped his elbow on the steering wheel, gently gnawing on the back of his knuckles. “She’s, um,” he said, dropping his hand into his lap, “reclusive at times. I don’t know why, exactly, or if there’s a name for it or anything—she’s always been that way. As long as I can remember, anyway.”

“So it wasn’t that she didn’t like me,” Betty said.

When they arrived, Gordon’s father had been out playing golf, and his mother kissed him hello, shook Betty’s hand and promptly fled upstairs with the excuse that she wasn’t feeling well. (God only knows what she would have done had Gordon introduced Betty as more than simply “Betty.” How could he ever explain Betty having his mother’s maiden name?)

“Oh, she liked you fine,” Gordon said, feeling embarrassed, as he had always felt embarrassed about his mother’s behavior all of his life. “She’s just not very good with strangers.”
Or anyone
, he thought.

“How is she with Alexandra?”

Gordon looked at her.

“You’re going to marry her, aren’t you?” Betty asked him.

The cars ahead were starting to move; he released the brake and put the car into gear to follow. “Yeah,” he finally said. “I am. But that’s not for public consumption yet.”

“Okay,” Betty said.

They passed an accident in the left lane and, immediately after, the traffic began to clear. Gordon reached over to open the glove compartment, groped around, found a pair of sunglasses, shook them open and put them on. Then he closed the compartment, shifted gears and shot ahead into the left lane.

“I do like her, you know,” Betty said over the wind a few minutes later, holding her hair back, looking at him. There was a roaring sound and Betty looked over at the pickup truck that had drawn up beside them in the middle lane. Then she looked up and gave the young man—who was leering down at her from the cab—a little wave. “How ya doing?” she called up to him.

“All
rrrriiight,
” the guy declared, grinning and hitting his horn twice in approval.

Gordon looked up at the guy in the pickup, saluted and stepped on it, pulling ahead.

“Hey,” Betty protested, hitting him on the arm, “that could have been my future husband.”

“Oh, come on,” Gordon said, “you can do better than that.”

“Better than what? If he isn’t on drugs, likes women, doesn’t have a sexually transmitted disease and speaks English, he’s the best bet I’ve had in years.”

Gordon laughed.

“Yeah, you laugh. All you guys do. A hundred pretty women for every single, straight guy in this town—I guess I’d laugh too if I were you,” she said. Betty leaned closer. “If I want to get married I
have
to be rich and famous or I’ll never find anyone. And you wait and see, Mr. Tee-Hee-Ha-Ha, when I’m rich and famous,
believe
me, I
will
meet a guy like you and he
will
want to marry me.”

He laughed again.

“It’s not funny,” she said, trying not to laugh herself. “I mean, what am I supposed to do? Marry the homeless?”

They could hear the truck honking hopefully behind them.

Betty looked around at the truck and then sat back in her seat again. She turned to him. “So how
is
a girl supposed to meet a guy like you if she isn’t famous?”

“Alexandra wasn’t famous when I met her,” Gordon said, glancing over. “She was nine. I met her in Kansas, over the holidays. Her brother was my roommate at school.”

“But her father was really rich, right?” she said. “Didn’t you meet her because they were rich—and famous? Her father was a senator or something, right?”

“A congressman. And no, he wasn’t rich. Her mother’s family had money though—but most of that went into the farm.”

“So she really is from a farm,” Betty said.

Gordon smiled. “She really is from a farm—can bale hay, drive a tractor, ride a horse and everything.” He changed lanes before continuing. “But she hasn’t had it quite as easy as you think, you know.”

“That’s what they all say,” Betty said. “Okay. So let me guess. Her father married her mother for her money.”

Huh. He had never thought of that. “No, no,” he said, feeling he should give his prospective father-in-law the benefit of the doubt. He glanced over at her. “Now this is between you and me, right?”

“Sure,” she said.

“Well,” he said, eyes back on the road, “Lexy’s grandfather, Granddad, had a drinking problem, and he sort of let the whole farm go to hell and then, when Lexy’s father married Mrs. Waring, she rebuilt the place and got it running again. She still runs it.”

“So what happened to the grandfather?”

“Oh, he stayed around. He was a great guy, don’t get me wrong. And he didn’t drink all the time. And he loved the farm, he had grown up on it—he just couldn’t run it. And he was absolutely crazy about Lexy—and she was about him, particularly since she was so much younger than the rest of the kids and didn’t really have anyone to play with there. And so, since the Warings lived in Washington most of the time, Granddad was more of a father to her in ways than her own was. At least, he was the one who spent the most time with her.”

“Her parents left her with an alcoholic?” Betty said, incredulous.

“Well,” Gordon said, “he wasn’t an alcoholic exactly. He just sort of —you know, at night sometimes, or maybe he might go on a quiet bender for a day or two. Maybe on holidays too. Nothing spectacular.”

“I repeat,” Betty said, “her parents left her with an alcoholic?”

“Oh, no, Mrs. Waring was there—Mrs. Waring, senior—Gran. And Granddad didn’t even live in the house anyway, so it wasn’t as if he sat there drinking in front of Alexandra.”

“What do you mean he didn’t live in the house?”

“He lived in a nice little cabin by the barn. Near the house.”

“What?” Betty cried.

Gordon laughed. “I guess it does sound a little strange. It didn’t at the time, though. Granddad and his wife loved each other—they just couldn’t live together. Gran was very much the God-fearing disciplinarian type, so they were always arguing with each other, and she was always sniping at him about something. But in their own way they were inseparable, you know what I mean?”

Betty shook her head. “No,” she said, “I don’t. I’m afraid my grandparents not only lived in the same house together but slept together in the tiniest bed you ever saw. My parents are the same way.”

“Well, whatever,” Gordon said, pausing to wonder why he was trying to explain all this to Betty, why it bothered him that she had never seemed very high on Alexandra. “Anyway, Alexandra loved them very, very much. So when they died she had a very hard time getting over it.”

“They died?” Betty said. She frowned, leaning closer. “What happened?”

Gordon sighed, lofting one eyebrow. “Gran was driving—not him—and some drunk kid hit them. Can you believe it?” He sighed. “He shot right across the highway and hit them head on.”

“Oh, no,” Betty said.

“Yeah,” Gordon said, nodding.

Betty thought about this for a second and then said, “How old was she?”

“Alexandra?” Gordon said, glancing over.