Destiny (93 page)

Christian had, then, just emerged from one of his brief, turbulent love affairs. Edouard, who knew this, was patient, and stayed silent.

HELENE AND LEWIS

LOS ANGELES, 1964

ff A

^ ^ /m nd so, he made me lie down. Right there. It was fihhy. There /-* were cockroaches all over, and dirty dishes—no one ever JL A-washed the dishes. He made me lie down, and then he put his hand over my mouth so I couldn't scream. And then he did it to me. My own stepfather. My mother was right there, in the next room, but she was probably out cold from the drinking. I don't know. I never asked her—if she heard. I was frightened to. I never told her one thing. I was only twelve years old."

Stephani Sandrelli drew in a deep breath; she fixed Helene with her eyes. She smoothed down her skirt, and rested her hands on her knees, folded neatly, like a well-behaved child.

"I ran away from Chicago not long after that. I'd had enough. I couldn't stand it."

Helene frowned. She said gently, "I thought you said it was Detroit you hved in, Stephani?"

"It was Detroit first. Then Chicago. We moved. We were always moving." She stood up. "Should I go and see if they're ready for you yet? They can't be much longer. Your stand-in's been out there for hours. ..."

"Stephani—it's all right. When they're ready, they'll—"

"It's okay. I don't mind. It's no trouble. ..."

Stephani was outside before she could stop her, and Helene sighed. As she opened and closed the door, a blast of hot dry air came in. Tucson, Arizona. Outside, it was ninety-five degrees, and getting hotter by the day. Inside, the air-conditioning whispered. Another state, another movie, another trailer, another character. Change of location, change of part. In the past year alone, she had filmed in Los Angeles, New York, Massachusetts, and the Dakotas. And now the Arizona desert, for another four weeks.

Today she was waiting to die, in a hail of bullets, next to the wreck of a car, at the hands of her lover. It was three in the afternoon, they'd had technical problems, and she'd been waiting to die since she came in for

572 • SALLY BEAUMAN

makeup at six o'clock this morning. The Runaways, directed by Gregory Gertz, whom people were calling the next Thad Angelini, with a script originally written by a friend of Lewis's, since reworked five times by five different writers. A good script though, and a good part, but in one respect Greg Gertz did not resemble Thad; they were behind, two days at least; she thought they might go a whole week over.

On the dressing table in front of her there was a photograph of Cat, which Madeleine had sent her, taken in honor of Cat's fourth birthday. Cat was in the garden of the Los Angeles house, seated proudly on the brand-new bicycle Helene had arranged to have sent to her. She was smiling. Helene looked at the photograph, and felt as if she might cry. Cat looked so proud, and so pleased . . . and she herself hadn't been there. She had to fight to get time at home, and whenever she lost the fight, as she often did, in the maze of shooting schedules, script conferences, and publicity campaigns, she felt guilty, just as she did now. The bicycle was fine; but Helene had not been there to give it to her.

Another blast of hot air; the door had opened again, and Stephani San-drelli's face appeared around it.

"Fifteen minutes," she said, "Jack thinks fifteen minutes at most. I've asked catering to send you over some tea. I have to go now. They need me for a fitting. ..."

"Stephani—I don't want any tea, I—"

The door had already closed again. Helene gave a sigh of exasperation. She leaned across to the trailer windows, and watched Stephani teeter her way past the other trailers, past the generators, picking her way over equipment and cables. A group of male extras lounging outside one of the farther trailers turned to watch her as she passed; one of them pursed his lips in a whistle. Stephani's hips swung in her tight skirt; her breasts bounced up and down; and she herself seemed quite unaware of the effect this produced. When it was made evident to her, as it was now, it did not seem to please her. She glanced over her shoulder at the men, and increased her pace—as if she were running away from them. The dazzle of platinum hair disappeared from sight. Chicago, Helene thought, or Detroit —was any of it true?

Stephani had a bit part in this movie, four lines, no more than that, but a number of crowd appearances. She had attached herself to Helene from the first, and Helene, irritated by her, then amused, and finally intrigued, now hadn't the heart to get rid of her. When they had been filming in the studio, Stephani had hung around the commissary, waiting for Helene to come in. She began by running little errands, for Helene's dresser, for wigs, for makeup. She would fetch and carry, take messages, relay phone calls: It's no trouble, was her constant refrain; I don't mind. It's a pleasure. . . .

DESTINY • 573

When her services were not being utilized in this way, she would station herself somewhere from which she could watch Helene, and would simply stare at her, wide-eyed, missing nothing, like a child on its first visit to the circus. The crew, and some of the other actors, laughed at her. Stephani was the butt of all their jokes: she was so luscious, so wilhng, so star-struck —and so dumb. Helene felt sorry for her— that was how they first came to talk, and then, when she listened to Stephani, she became fascinated. The stammering confidences, the breathy childlike voice, so at odds with the curvaceous body. The way of talking she had, with her head drooping, shyly, looking up every so often, and fixing Helene with that wide, startled, blue-eyed gaze. She intrigued Helene, and Helene watched her, wondering if she could catch that way of speaking, those characteristic gestures, wondering if she could act her.

Then, when she first arrived for the location work, Helene began to miss things. Tiny things, unimportant things: once, a bar of soap she used; another time, a handkerchief; a day later, one of the hairbands with which she tied back her hair when she took off her makeup; the day after that, a lipstick. She thought nothing of it at first, did not even associate the missing items with Stephani's constant presence, until one day Stephani came in, and instead of the normal pale pink lipstick she wore, she had painted her lips a quite different color. Helene recognized it; she said, "Oh, Stephani, my lipstick," before she could stop herself, and Stephani stood there, with a funny proud look on her face.

"It's true," she said. "I took them. All those things. I couldn't help it. I didn't mean any harm. I just wanted to be you."

Helene stared at her in consternation. Then, after a httle pause, she said gently, "Stephani—I don't mind, it doesn't matter. But that's silly, you know. Why should you want to be me? Why can't you be yourself?"

"Be me? Who would want to be me? I'm a nobody. I'm a joke. You're Helene Harte. . . ."

And that was how it began, really. The conversations, in the trailer, day after hot day, the endless boredom of waiting. The tedium of filming, the endless inevitable waiting around: Stephani passed the time with her stories, and Helene listened. The stepfather; the mother; the boyfriend; the photographer who first spotted Stephani's potential. The nude pinup that Stephani was now ashamed of The decision to go to Hollywood. The fateful meeting, one night at a party, with the elderly agent.

"He took me to Cannes once. For the film festival. It was the year you won the prize. I've never forgotten it. It was the best year of my life, that year. He's dead now."

Helene listened to all this with fascination. At first, she thought it was the absolute predictability of Stephani's story that absorbed her: the way in

574 • SALLY BEAUMAN

which, undeviatingly, it followed the course of all the other similiar stories she had read in a million magazines and press handouts. It was, give or take a few elements, the story of Marilyn Monroe, she supposed, on whom Stephani had clearly modeled herself, and for whom she cared, passionately.

"I saw all her movies, every one of them. And when she died, I cried. I cried every day for a week."

Helene contrasted this with Thad's reaction to the actress's death. When he heard the news he said, "She would have died anyway. This will be good for you. This is where you stop being a star and start becoming a legend." He giggled. "You know—they're insatiable. They'll need a replacement."

But Stephani's grief seemed genuine. It was only gradually that Helene began to notice things wrong with her stories, small discrepancies, like the one today. And this disturbed her greatly. Stephani, she began to suspect, had made herself up. Perhaps some of this lurid past was true, but other parts of it, Helene became more and more sure, were invented. She never pointed this out too directly to Stephani, for she knew that it would hurt her. Stephani clearly believed her own tales, and it was when Helene realized this that she knew what it was that had drawn her to the girl—she understood her own sympathy.

Had she herself not done a very similar thing? Helene Harte, with her shadowy and vaguely glamorous European past—this Helene Harte was every bit as much of an invention as Stephani Sandrelli.

When this first occurred to her, it made Helene impatient, and she dismissed the thought; after all, whatever stories were spun in the newspapers by journalists desperate for copy, she did not believe them. She knew who she was. . . . And then she began to wonder: was that the case? Was she herself entirely sure, always, where truth shaded into fabrication?

Sometimes she felt very sure that she did. When she was at home in Los Angeles, with Cassie, who had been with her now three years, she felt sure of her own identity. Her first action, when she had been paid in full for her first film, had been to repay Cassie the money she owed her; they remained in touch after that, and when Cassie wrote and said that the beauty parlor was getting too much for her, and she was thinking of selling it, Helene at once asked her to come to work for her in Los Angeles. It was a decision she had never regretted, and her reliance on Cassie had grown. Perhaps, to some extent, Cassie had taken the place of her mother: certainly, she felt free with Cassie in a way she felt with no one else. With Cassie she could talk about the past; Cassie would read out loud to her the letters she received from friends in Orangeburg, and Helene's sense of who she was

DESTINY • 575

would grow strong. The South, the trailer, her mother, the feel of being poor, it all came back to her so sharply, and so vividly.

But at other times, her childhood seemed very distant, a country of the mind.

Lewis did not know the details of her previous connection with Cassie; Cassie did not know the truth of her relationship with Lewis; and there were still parts of her past that Helene spoke of to no one.

So the truth was not a simple thing; it was layer upon layer of truths, so mixed in with lies that sometimes Helene felt afraid, and she could not quite remember, any more than Stephani could, which truth she had told to which person, or which lie.

Sometimes, when she was with Cassie, she would think, / am still Helene Craig, and she would be able to see the long chain of connections between the girl she had been and the woman she had become. But at other times, those connections were severed; she would lose all sense of who she had been, could not relate that person to the person she was now. For now, she had a public identity: she was Helene Harte, and Helene Harte, she felt, was a barrier between herself and other people. They did not look at her now and see Helene Craig, who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. They saw a famous and successful woman, apparently assured, apparently independent, bom to a life not dissimilar to the one she led now. She had become famous, not just for her performances, but for other, trivial things as well. For her taste; for the clothes she wore; for a certain restraint in her manner which was interpreted as coldness; even for the fact that, unusually in Hollywood, she was never seen with a man other than her husband, and even the most energetic gossips could not drum up a breath of convincing scandal.

It was now impossible for her to enter a room without everyone in it being aware of who she was: people felt that they knew her before they met her; their opinions of her, for or against, were formed already, on the basis of films seen, or stories read. There was her reputation—a wall between her and the rest of the world—and there was Helene, the woman she felt herself truly to be, imprisoned on the other side of it.

Thad said, when she tried to explain this to him once: "So what? You're famous. What did you think would happen?"

Not this, Helene had wanted to reply. But she was ashamed to confess that she had been so naive; it had never occurred to her that once she was famous, she would cease to feel free.

There was a knock on the trailer door. The location manager—they were ready for her scene now. Helene turned to the mirror and stared at her own face. Who was she?

Well, today she was Maria, a small-town girl, a rebel, on the run with

576 • SALLY BEAUMAN

her teenage lover, caught up in a romantic elopement that went hideously wrong. Maria was about to die, just when she was about to grow up, and die suddenly, and pointlessly, as a result of a silly argument, a lovers' quarrel that went murderously off the rails.

She knew Maria; she recognized her, Helene thought. She knew exactly how Maria moved and thought and hoped. She could hear Maria's voice, and she could speak with her accent. She knew everything, from the way Maria dressed and did her hair, to the little characteristic gestures she had, one of which she would use now, for the sentences Maria spoke before she died. Oh, yes, she recognized Maria, and understood her, even if she did not always understand or recognize herself.

That thought calmed her, as it always did. She felt it again, that quietness and sureness that she had first discovered in Rome, working on Night Game. She stood up, opened the door, and walked down the trailer steps. Stephani was back at her usual post, on the fringes, watching. As Helene passed her, she smiled, and held up two fingers, crossed.