Belinda (43 page)

"I don't want to go to Europe, I said. "And I don't want to go to school."

She nodded and then she said I had to come and get my dress for the wedding and it was best Uncle Daryl didn't know I'd been at the Chateau Marmont.

Well, I got through the wedding and the week before it. I smiled at everybody. I did my part. Uncle Daryl was much too busy to even ask what I'd been doing, and so was everybody else. But when I did find myself talking to people now and then in the living room or at the reception itself, I said I would be going to UCLA soon, that I thought I could pass the examinations and start early. It ought to be fun.

The wedding itself was the big ticket in Beverly Hills. The tabloids offered a flat $30,000 for any picture taken inside the grounds. And the p0lice had a hell of a time keeping people from blocking the streets. Mom was clearly in love with Marty. I had not seen her this way since the days of Leonardo Gallo. She was not just leaning on Marty or clinging to him, she was focused on Marty completely. And they both looked wonderful that afternoon.

But I will tell you something, the wedding itself was a put-up job. The minister was an overgrown flower child from the sixties, you know, one of those long-haired fifty-year-olds who lives in Big Sur or someplace and got his minister credentials in the mail, and the whole ceremony was sort of dingy with shared wine cups and wreaths of flowers on everybody's heads and all that. I mean, in the woods it might have been OK. But with this crowd, whose vocabulary goes like 'We're talking major package' and 'What about the bottom line' roaming around in the smog and the orange trees, it was a scream. And Uncle Daryl took me aside right after and told me not to worry about the money part of it, Marty had signed an airtight premarital agreement, and this thing was, well, strictly for Mother to be happy, it wasn't scarcely legal at all. "She's just lost her head over this New York Italian guy, that's the truth of it," he told me. "But don't you worry. He'll be good to her, I'll see to that."

I was dying. When I went inside to be alone for a little while, I found Trish and Jill in my bedroom, just sort of hiding from everybody, and Trish told me that she and Jill were going back to Dallas at the end of the week.

"She doesn't have any more use for us," Jill told me. "We're tripping on our own feet around here."

"Time we did something on our own, too," Trish said. She went on to explain that Daryl was willing to help them get started with a boutique in Dallas. In fact, he was giving them plenty. And Mom was going to endorse the store, too.

I felt crushed that they were leaving. Saint Esprit had been over for a long time now, but when they left, it would all be really gone.

I remembered what Marty had said about being alone in this house without them. But I wasn't staying here. I couldn't. It was just out of the question. Only I couldn't think about it right now with the music pouring in from the patio and people moving through all the rooms, like zombies, making no sound on the wall-to-wall carpet. I had to get away somehow.

"Belinda, come with us to Dallas," Trish said.

"Bonnie would never let her go," Jill said.

"Oh, yes she would. She's happy with her new husband. Honey, come stay in Dallas awhile with us."

I knew I couldn't do that. What would I do fifteen hundred miles from the Coast? Go to shopping malls and video arcades or take some nice class in English poets at SMU?

The whole afternoon had been a nightmare, and yet the worst was yet to come.

After Trish and Jill went back out into the crowd, I decided to change and get out.

Then Marty came and closed the door. The thing was over, he told me, everybody was leaving. And he just fell into my arms.

"Hold me, Belinda, hold me, honey," he said. And for a moment that was just what I did.

"It's your wedding night, Marty," I said. "I can't stand this, I just can't stand it." But all the time I was feeling his arms around me and his chest against me and I was holding him as tight as he was holding me.

"Honey, please, just give me this moment," he said. And then it started again, him kissing me-and I just left in my long dress and all, and caught a ride with one of the limos going out the gate.

On the way to the Chateau I asked this nice handsome man next to me, one of Marty's staff, to run into a liquor store and get a bottle of Scotch for me. When I got back to the bungalow, I drank the whole thing.

I slept for twelve hours straight and was sick for twenty-four after that. The phone woke me up on Wednesday. It was Trish, saying Uncle Daryl kept asking where I was.

"Just get down here till .he leaves," she told me. "Then you can go back up there on the hill."

I got to the house around four o'clock. And nobody was around. Nobody except M6ther, who was just telling her exercise coach and masseuse that they could go for the rest of the day. She had been swimming and she looked all tan and natural with her hair loose. She had on a simple white dress. Suddenly these people were gone, and we were alone in the room.

It was so strange. I don't think Mom and I had been alone like this in ages and ages. She looked amazingly clear-eyed and rested, and her hair was very pretty because it had not been done.

"Hi, darlin'. Where you been?" she asked. Drugged-out voice, OK, very level, but not slurred.

"I don't know, no place," I said. I shrugged. I think I started to move away when I realized that she was really staring at me. Now for Mom this is not a usual thing. Mom usually has her head down. She is usually looking away when you talk to her. She is not ever very direct. But she was looking right at me, and then she said to me in a very steady voice; "Darlin', he was too old for you."

For a second the words were just there and I didn't know what they meant. Then I really heard them and I realized we were still looking at each other, and then she did something with her eyes that I have seen her do to other people a thousand times. She looked me up and down slowly, and then she said in the same flat drugged voice: "You're a big girl, aren't you? But you're not that big."

I was numb. Something was happening between me and Mom in these few seconds that had never happened before. I went down the hall and into my room. I closed the door and I stood there against it, and my heart was pounding so loud I could hear it in my ears. She knew, she knew all along, I was thinking, she knew.

But what did she really know? Had she thought it was a crush, a little teenage thing, that Marty had never reciprocated? Or did she really understand what had gone down?

I was shaking when I came in for dinner. But she never once looked me in the eye. She was really drugged by that time, murmuring and looking at her plate and saying she was sleepy, and obviously she could not follow the conversation at the table at all.

We all kissed Daryl goodbye and then I told them I was going, too.

I saw the darkest look of bitterness on Marty's face. But he just smiled and he said: "OK, honey, goodbye."

I should have known it was too easy. Two hours later, when I was crying in my room at the Chateau, he arrived. He was crying and I was crying, real Marty-style Italian opera, and we did not even talk about it. We just made love. I felt like something was broken in me by that little encounter with Mom. It killed me. It killed me inside.

That wasn't the woman I had looked at in the Carlton and thought, Ah, well, she doesn't know what she's doing. She doesn't know at all.

Something else had come out and, to tell you the truth, I had seen it come out at other moments, much less important moments over the years.

After a long time I told Marty about it, what she had said, how she had looked.

"No, honey, she doesn't know," he said. "She may think it was kissyface and crushes, but she doesn't know. She wouldn't want you to come back to the house if she did."

"Does she want that, Marty?"

He nodded. He was getting up to get dressed. He had told Mom's nurse that he was going out to an all-night drugstore. It was a cinch Mom would wake up sooner or later and ask for him.

"She keeps asking, 'Where's Belinda?' She just doesn't seem to understand why you're not at her right hand."

I didn't argue with him, but I had a deep dark suspicion that Mom did know, and still she wanted me to come back, because she thought sure she'd taken Marty away from me. I mean, she was Bonnie, wasn't she? And what had she said, "You're a big girl, but you're not that big"? Yeah, she thought she could have both of us, all right; she'd just rearranged things a little, hadn't she? Better to suit herself. Another one of those instances of "Everything's OK now, Belinda, cause I feel fine."

And as of this day I think I read the situation right.

After Marty left, I got really drunk. I'd taken several bottles with me back to the Chateau from the house, and I drank every drop over the next few days, just lying alone in that room, and crying over Marty and wondering how I could make this misery end.

I thought of Susan. I thought of G.G. But then I thought of Marty. And I didn't have the strength to go to G.G. And the thought of telling anyone the whole story, the thought of ever confiding to anyone what had happened was an agony. I didn't want G.G. to ever ask.

I felt terrible and alone and I felt like a fool. I felt like Mom was right, I should never have fallen for Marty, Marty belonged to Mom. But half the time it was the booze thinking and I just drifted in and out of sleep like I'd seen Mom do on Saint Esprit for years and years.

The only thing that broke the nightmare of those few days was a call from Blair Sackwell one afternoon in which he told me furiously how Mom had dumped him and Marty Moreschi had cut him off.

"I was willing to put three inches of white mink stole on every one of those Bonnie dolls! My label! And the son of a bitch told me to back off. They didn't invite me to the wedding, you realize that!"

"Oh, get off my case with it, Blair, goddamn it!" I shouted.

"Oooh, like mother like daughter!" he said.

I hung up. And then I was so sorry. I sat up and started calling around trying to find him. I called the Bev Wilsh and the Beverly Hills. No Blair. And Blair was my friend, my really true friend.

But an hour later I got a delivery, two dozen white roses in a vase with a note saying, "Sorry, darling, please forgive me, love you always, Blair."

When Jill called the next day to say she and Trish were leaving, I had a hell of a time even talking I was so drunk. But I slept it off, got through being sick hung over, and took a cab to the house for the last dinner with them.

Mom was dopey but all right. Our eyes never met. She said how she was going to miss Trish and Jill, but they'd be coming out for visits all the time. Most of the talk was about the Bonnie dolls and the Saint Esprit perfume campaign and the big fight with Blair Sackwell because Marty didn't think she should do anything but "Champagne Flight" products right now.

I tried to put in a word for Blair. I mean, Midnight Mink was Midnight Mink, for God's sakes, and Blair was our old friend.

Marty just dismissed it. Product identification was everything, blab, blah, blah. This boutique of Trish and Jill's was going to be sensational, with a life-size mannequin of Mom in the window. But why not Beverly Hills? he kept asking. The whole world wanted to shop on Rodeo Drive, and he could start them there, didn't they realize? Dallas, who goes to Dallas?

I watched them, the looks on their faces. They couldn't wait to get out. And they had been buddies with Blair, too, after all. No, they wanted to go home all right.

"Look, we're Dallas girls," Trish said. Then she and Jill and Mom looked at each other, and then they all did some school cheer or something, and they laughed, but then Mom looked real sad.

Time for more hugging and kissing, time for all the farewells. And then Mom lost it. She really lost it. She was crying in that terrible way she does before she really tries to hurt herself or something. Awful sound. And Marty had to take her in the bedroom before Trish and Jill left. As soon as I kissed them, I went in there.

"You stay with her, while I take them to the airport, I just can't let them go like this," Marty said.

Mom was sitting on the bed crying. And the nurse was there in a white uniform and she was giving Mom a shot.

Now this thing of the shot scared me. Mom had always taken drugs, all kinds of drugs. But why an injection? I didn't like to see the needle going into Mom's arm.

"What are you doing?" I asked the woman, and she made a little patronizing sign to me like, Don't upset your mother. And Mom said in a real drowsy voice:

"Honey, it's just for the pain. But it's not really pain." She put her hands on her hips. "It's just like a burn there, you know, where they do it."

"Do what?" I asked.

"Doesn't your mom look beautiful?" the nurse asked.

"What did they do, Mom?" I asked her. But then I could see it for myself. Mom's body had been changed. Her hips and thighs were much much thinner. They were taking the fat off her, that's what they were doing. And then she explained to me it was done in the doctor's office and they called it liposuction and it wasn't dangerous at all.

I was horrified. I thought the world thought my mom was beautiful just the way she was! Nobody had to re-sculpt Mom! These people are crazy, Marty is crazy to let this happen. She cannot eat a full meal, she is doped constantly, and now they are draining her body away from her. This is mad.

But the nurse was gone, and here we were alone, me and Mom. I felt this awful terror that something would happen, that she would say something like she did before. I didn't want to be in the room with her. I didn't even want to be near her.

But she was too far gone to say anything. The shot was really taking effect.

She looked sad and terrible suddenly, just sitting there in her nightgown, like she was lost. And I kept looking at her, and the strangest thought came to me. I know every inch of this woman's body. I slept with her a thousand nights when I was a little girl. She'd even leave Leonardo Gallo to sneak into my bed and we would snuggle in the dark. I know what she feels like all over, what it's like to curl up in her arms. I know what her hair is like and what she smells like, and I know where they took the fat off her. I'd know the places blindfolded by just feeling with my hands.