Cheating at Solitaire (3 page)

Everybody was watching her. They really were. Everybody was always watching her. They would always watch her. This was what life was like and it would never end. Never never never.

Somewhere at the back of her mind, though, there was
that ocean of water she was walking on, and the thought that it was ending for Arrow. It was ending right now.

Stewart Gordon was holding her up with one hand. She was standing up. She had no idea how she had got that way. She gripped the bar with both hands and wrenched herself away from him. Kendra got paid to go to parties. That was not fair. Arrow was starting to look like a fat slob. That was not fair either. Nothing was fair, and she deserved better than this, although she was not sure for what. The most unfair thing was Stewart Gordon, who was like the voice of doom, or something, all the time. Somebody ought to do something about Stewart Gordon. Somebody ought to put a stop to him.

Even so, when she finally decided to throw up, Marcey was careful to do it directly onto the bartender's pink-and geen, tiny-fishhook-patterned bow tie, and not on Stewart Gordon's chambray shirt.

3

Once, when he was younger, Carl Frank had liked to tell people that he didn't believe in God but did believe in the devil. He didn't tell people that anymore, because somewhere along the way it had become true. God was, as he understood it, a benevolent being, a cosmic Superperson whose first and most important characteristic was to wish his people well. Carl had been around for a long time, and he didn't see any sign of anybody wishing anybody well. Even on a purely mundane level, the here and now, the day to day, all that was in evidence was bad luck and bad faith. Even the good luck was bad, more often than not. When he thought about the people he worked for, and the people they had him looking after, he sometimes wondered if there wasn't a malevolent Superperson out there somewhere, making sure that everything turned out as badly as possible.

About the devil, though, Carl had no need to get metaphorical. The devil was a person just like you and me, except not, and she lived in a cloud of celebrity she had done nothing to earn. In fact, she had never earned anything in her life, unless you counted the money people paid her to go
to their parties, which was considerable. It made Carl stop and wonder every time he thought of it. A million dollars just to show up at a party, when you didn't sing or dance or act or even sling hash in a cafeteria? A million dollars just to sit there and be. That was not luck, it was sorcery, and the devil's name was Kendra Rhode.

The pain-in-the-ass's name was Michael Bardman, and he was getting hard to hear on this cell phone. Cells never worked all that well on Margaret's Harbor, but in weather like this they were about as reliable as a schizophrenic on LSD. Of course, it was impossible to explain that to Michael Bardman, because he had never been on Margaret's Harbor in the winter, and wouldn't come. Michael liked L.A. Michael liked New York. Michael liked some place in the Greek islands where he could spend all day on his boat making phone calls to people he could have been screaming at in person if he weren't so intent on taking a vacation. Carl wondered what it would be like if somebody decided to give Michael Bardman a taste of reality, and then he didn't. The Michael Bardmans of this world, like the Kendra Rhodes, lived in an alternative universe.

The snow looked like a solid sheet of white outside the big front windows of the Oscartown Inn. Carl took a long sucking pull at his Scotch and water and waited for the tirade to be over. It was the same tirade he had heard yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, and the only reason he wasn't scared to death that he was about to lose his job was that he knew that Michael Bardman knew that there was nobody out there who could do it any better.

“Let me try to explain this to you again,” he said, when Michael's screeching had subsided momentarily. Michael Bardman had made something of a career of screeching. It was what he did instead of actually producing movies.

“You keep explaining things to me,” he said, “and I keep telling you I don't want your explanations.”

“You also don't want me to walk out of here in the middle of everything, so you're going to have to listen to them. We're in the middle of some kind of huge snowstorm. They call it a nor'easter—”
“I don't understand why everything has to stop because of a little snow.”

“It's not a little snow, it's a lot of snow. Half the island has already lost electricity and the rest will probably go before morning. We can't film at all, outside or in. And it's not your problem anyway. We're not a month and a half late because of a snowstorm.”

“It's costing a fortune. And on a movie that isn't going to make all that much. I mean, it will do all right, but—”

“But it's not going to be
Lord of the Rings
. Yes, I know, Michael, I know. But nothing is going to get any better, or any cheaper, as long as that woman is here screwing things up. And she's not just screwing things up, Michael, she's doing it deliberately.”

“I don't see why my actors have to drink like fish just because Kendra Rhode drinks like a fish. If Kendra Rhode jumped off a cliff, would they all just jump in after her?”

Carl looked down into his Scotch. His glass was half empty. He would never have been so fatuous as to describe it as half full. He couldn't believe he had just heard what he had heard. He was having a very hard time not bursting out laughing.

“Listen,” he said. “Kendra Rhode does not drink like a fish. She gets other people to drink like fishes. She's never late to appointments. She gets other people to be late to appointments. And, like I said, she does it deliberately. She likes to see people crack up.”

“Don't be ridiculous. You make her sound like, I don't know—”

“It doesn't matter what I make her sound like, Michael. It's true. And as long as she's here, Marcey and Arrow are going to be shit out of control more days than not. And the longer that goes on, the more money you're going to lose. You ought to be grateful as hell that Stewart Gordon is a thorough professional, because if he'd been less of one he'd have walked off this picture weeks ago.”

“He can't walk off the picture. He's not important enough.”

“He's something better than important,” Carl said, think-trying
that it was completely useless trying to explain to Michael that some people did not judge the success of their lives by how well they were doing in the movies. “He's independent, Michael. He's stashed most of the money he's ever made—”

“It can't amount to much.”

“It's more than he needs to live on,” Carl said, “which means he doesn't have to work if he doesn't want to. And the pair of them are driving him nuts. And I don't blame him. You've got to do something to get those two away from Ken-dra Rhode, at least for the next few months, or you're not going to have a picture at all. And that's assuming that Arrow doesn't run away and get married to the latest toy boy.”

“Oh, God,” Michael said. “I thought we got rid of the toy boy.”

“We got rid of the first one, more or less. The divorce is in the works, at any rate. But there's a new one, one of the camera people, not a serious one—one of the grips, I think—”

“Can we just fire him and get him off the island?”

“I'm already on it. But I stopped in at that little pub place on my way here this afternoon, and Marcey was all by herself at a table drinking champagne cocktails and letting her dress fall off her, and Arrow was missing in action completely. So I don't think the news is good. You've got to let me do something about Kendra Rhode.”

There was a very long silence on the other end of the line. Carl wished he could be surer of the cell phone reception in the inn. He needed to get himself a refill. Michael Bard-man's voice came back on the line.

“You can't do something about Kendra Rhode,” he said. “She's a Rhode. They're, what, like the third-richest family in America?”

“Hardly. It's a whole new world these days. Old money barely makes the cut. I'm not talking about having her whacked, Michael. I'm talking about hiring her.”

“Hiring her for what?”

“For a picture. You've got to have a picture somewhere that she could be some use in. Or at least, seem to be some use in.”

“I can't hire her for a picture. And besides, even if I tried, what makes you thing she'd say yes?”

“Make it a big picture. Brad Pitt. Sean Connery. Make it a picture she can't refuse.”

“You must be out of your mind. whatever in God's name makes you think that somebody like Brad Pitt would agree to work with her?”

“You don't actually have to hire her, Michael. You just have to pretend to hire her. Ask her out to the coast for exploratory conversations. That kind of thing.”

“Sometimes I think you're seriously in need of medication. The woman can't act. She can barely speak, from what I can see. And that family has lawyers. You can't just go jerking her around and then thumb your nose at her. She'd sue.”

“By which time you'd have your picture in the can and it wouldn't have cost more than a single arm and leg. A few more weeks of what's been going on out here and your totals are going to look like the Social Security budget. You won't even need to inflate the expenses to make it look like it's been losing money, because it will be losing money.”

“I don't see what Social Security has to do with it,” Michael said. “It's a young picture, except for Stewart Gordon. Young actors. Appeal to the high school set. Rated R so that they'll all feel good about themselves for sneaking in under the rating.”

The Oscartown Inn looked out onto a picturesque village square, picturesque because it had been calculated to look that way, square because it had been hacked out of a tangle of existing streets when the Powers That Be decided that they wanted the town to look like the “real” New England. That would have been in the 1930s, when people like ken-dra Rhode tried as hard as they could to stay out of the public's sight, and places like Margaret's Harbor were important because they were places where rich people could go to live richly and not be observed by anyone doing it.

“It didn't matter in Hollywood anyway,” Carl said. “Even then.”

“What?” Michael said.

“I was thinking about the Great Depression,” Carl said. “People were scared to death that there was going to be a violent revolution. Rich people were. So they hired public relations experts to keep their names out of the newspapers. But it wasn't like that in Hollywood even then. Stars ran around looking rich in public. They always do.”

“Social Security. The Great Depression. I think you're cracking up.”

“I'm going to crack up if you don't do what I tell you. Find some way to get Kendra Rhode out of here before she pushes those two right off the edge of the world and brings down your movie with them. She does it deliberately, Michael. I'm not making this up. She likes to see people crash and burn. I think it's the only thing on earth that doesn't bore her.”

“Shit—” Michael said.

And that was all he said, because the service had cut out. Carl folded up his phone and put it in his pocket. He liked the Oscartown Inn. Marcey and Arrow complained about how stodgy it was, and Carl was sure the inn's management complained about them, but he just found the place comfortable, and that was all he needed to be satisfied. It did occur to him that there had been a time, not all that long ago, when he had needed a lot more to be satisfied, but it was like the man said. You can't always get what you want.

He took his empty drink glass across the lobby and through the tinted-glass, mahogany-lined doors of the inn's bar. He went up to the bar itself and sat down on a stool. The bar had the television on, which was a miracle. The cable company up here had to be the best on the planet. The set was turned to a news channel. A woman reporter was standing in the snow in a pastel green parka with fake fur around the hood, talking into a microphone and shivering.

“You want another one of those, Mr. Frank?” the bartender said.

The bar was dark, the way so many bars were. It was as if most people couldn't really drink in the full light of day. The people around him, sitting at the little tables, all looked like the kind who nursed a single drink for an hour and then
went home. Some of the women had tote bags next to their chairs with books peeping out of them. Over on the far wall there was a huge fireplace that went through to the common room on the other side, the fire in it fully stoked and blazing. Carl had seen Stewart Gordon down here some nights, all by himself with a book of his own. There had to be something better he could be doing with his life than what he was actually doing with it. The problem was, he couldn't think of what.

He made a gesture at his glass and said, “Give me a double this time. I think I'm in for the night.”

4

There were people on Margaret's Harbor who said that Linda Beecham was a living history of the island. If you needed to know who fell down sloppy drunk on Main Street on Christmas Eve in 1924, or who was and wasn't at the Montgomery's Gold and Silver Ball in 1933, all you had to do was to ask Linda. She wouldn't even have to look it up. She sat there on the second floor of the Harbor Home News Building, looking out her big plate glass window at the people of Oscartown, and it was as if the island had its own fairy godmother, the Spirit of Christmas Past in chinos and fisherman's sweaters and big clanky suede snow boots that she'd certainly never bought in any place you could get to without driving over water.

The thing was, though, that any picture of Linda Bee-cham as the Spirit of Christmas anything had to come from people who knew her very little, and then mostly as a decoration. It was true enough that she knew everything there was to know about the island. She had been born and raised there, which was incredibly rare, at least until recently. For most of the world, Margaret's Harbor was a place to take a vacation or to own a second house. People came up from Boston and New York in the summer and sat in the hole-in-the-wall coffee places with copies of
Forbes
and the
New York Review of Books
, and even their waiters were from off-island. There were times when it was possible to think that
there was no such thing as a native of Margaret's Harbor. The whole place was just a repository for old New England money, new New York money, and the families of presidents too famous for their own good.