Dreams Are Not Enough (2 page)

“She comes out, she says nothing, she leaves. What the hell is that all about? Barry-boy, you and the lady shared many years of matrimonial bliss. Let’s hear your theory on why she’s called this chummy powwow.”

Barry walked to the pool, frowning reflectively at a dead eucalyptus leaf afloat in the chlorinated water. Why are we here? He couldn’t pursue the thought. His reasoning power had fled. Coming face to face with his ex-wife, disturbing enough after so many years, had fluttered the pages of his authorized history of their disastrous marriage, the version that laid blame for all their woes at her slender feet. Now, after being in her presence less than two minutes, it didn’t seem so obvious, did it, that she had eternally done him the dirty?

On October 8, 1959—a blazing hot Saturday—three weeks into his senior year of pre-law at UCLA, Barry Cordiner took by far the most daring act of his twenty years. He eloped to Las Vegas with a girl called Alicia Lopez whom he had met exactly seventeen days earlier.

Barry couldn’t remember his mother ever actually informing him in her rather nasal voice that, not being rich like his cousins, he had to earn top grades, be prompt and avoid the troublemakers at school.

Neither could Beth. The twins therefore agreed that their obligations must have been genetically programmed: the ultimate requirements were that Beth graduate from college, then marry a Jewish professional man who had either already made it or would soon make it, while Barry must propel himself into a lucrative law practice before picking an equally suitable mate. Neither of them rebelled. How could they? Clara Cordiner bought her own clothes on sale at cheap stores like the Broadway while taking her children into Beverly Hills to outfit them at Saks or Magnin’s; she prepared them nutritiously balanced meals.

She taught them manners, for she had been gently reared.

Clara Friedman Cordiner’s father had owned a large shoe store, and she, an only child, was cosseted. Right before her twenty-second birthday, she had been window-shopping along Hollywood Boulevard when Tim Cordiner, hurrying along, possibly a bit loaded on bathtub gin, bumped into her, knocking her down. He apologized by taking her for tea on the veranda of the nearby Hollywood Hotel. He was very tall, and his laughter rang loud and hearty. Being in the movie business, he knew Gloria Swanson, Tom Mix, Irving Thalberg, Louis B. Mayer, Art Garrison, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Clara had never met such a dashing man. Of course her orthodox parents would never let her date a goy, so she invented excuses to get out. Less than a week later she lost her virginity on Tim’s Murphy bed. The following month, she missed her period. Tim, who was equally nuts about her, said, “We’ll go tell your folks about us.” In her large, immaculate home, Clara wept and vowed to rear her future offspring as good Jews, with Tim concurring—his virulently antisemitic Hungarian peasant forebears must have been twisting in their graves. After disowning their daughter forever, the Friedmans also wept, then sat shiva, the traditional seven days of mourning, counting her among the dead. Clara’s missed period turned out to be a false alarm, and she took eleven years to conceive the twins. Early in her marriage she discovered that her husband, a studio grip, spent his days shifting heavy props: his knowledge of the Hollywood famous was garnered from his older brother, Desmond Cordiner, a bigshot at Magnum. Tim drank; he cheated on her. Yet when the chips were down—and in the Tim Cordiner household they often were—the couple clung together.

Barry understood that it was his obligation, as the only son, to make it up to his mother for his father’s shortcomings.

During the long, hot drive through the Mojave Desert to Las Vegas he had been unable to entirely block the vision of his frail mother’s impending horror; yet, standing at the gaudily painted altar with Alicia at his side, seeing the tears on her luminous, flushed cheeks, his heart seemed to swell, and he accepted there had been no stepping back from the madness that had overtaken him the first time he’d seen her sipping a Coke at Ship’s Coffee Shop in Westwood.

Love at first sight had been accompanied by the classic symptoms:

sleeplessness, loss of appetite, inability to think of anything but Alicia, a constant semi-erection. They had made out vigorously in his 1950 De Soto coupe, but hadn’t gone all the way. Barry held Alicia in reverence, and also feared failure—his one experience with an aging pro on Main Street had been an unhappy one.

Barry was exceptionally thin: standing at the altar in his rumpled gray suit, he gave the impression of a malnourished adolescent who had grown too quickly. As he shifted on his storklike legs, he could feel the sweat running down from his armpits despite the extra-strength Mitchum’s he had applied the previous night before setting out for his date with Alicia—it wasn’t until they were embracing that he had seriously entertained the idea of elopement. The hairs on his neck prickled with awareness that his cousins and sister were staring at them, and he had a momentary surge of regret that he’d invited them.

Alicia brought out a hitherto dormant protectiveness in him. During the six broiling hours in his un-airconditioned car, she had worried about looking a mess at her wedding—and from the guests’ vantage point, she did. The rear of her scarlet crepe dress was puckered into ugly creases, causing its miniskirt to ride yet higher in back of her slim, shapely thighs.

Glancing sideways at his bride, Barry found himself unable to look away. He considered Alicia gorgeous, but he wasn’t positive whether others did. From the heads swiveling in her wake he knew that most people found her riveting. True, her skirts were unfortunately short and her tops a shade tight so that the buttons pulled between her full, peach-shaped breasts, but this didn’t fully account for the zephyrs of attention that trailed her: women turned as often as men.

Ignoring the justice of the peace, who was rumbling on about the duties of matrimony, Barry gazed at Alicia’s profile, attempting to convince himself that he wasn’t moonstruck, that she was indeed gorgeous. As usual, he was incapable of analyzing her face. Her skin assuredly was unique. Other women possessed faultless complexions, but he’d seen no other skin with this velvety incandescence. Light was not an external quality for Alicia, but appeared to emanate from within, as if an electric current flowed with the blood that now was pulsing rapidly in the subtly blue vein at her throat.

He realized she was clutching the wilted bridal bouquet (he had just purchased it in the wedding chapel’s tiny vestibule) so tightly that the baby’s breath trembled. Edging closer, he let his arm rest in moist reassurance against hers.

At noon, the temperature in Las Vegas was well above a hundred, and the chapel lacked air conditioning. The justice of the peace’s bulging, magenta cheeks appeared to be melting into the creases of his double chin.

Hap, Maxim, Beth and PD were equally miserable.

The cousins had all been born in 1938 or 1939, the socalled Golden Age of Hollywood. Hap and Maxim were sons of Desmond Cordiner, the family emperor. Long before their births Desmond had been a major wheel in the Industry, second in command to Art Garrison, founder of Magnum Pictures, and after Garrison’s death he had taken over as head of the studio. PD’s father was Frank Zaffarano, the director whose sentimental, flag-waving films had made a bundle for Magnum. Barry and Beth’s father, Tim Cordiner, never rose higher than a grip. The cousins, therefore, belonged to the top, upper middle and bottom of an industry with a well-defined hierarchy. This had not prevented the friendship forged between them in early childhood from binding them yet closer during adolescence and adulthood.

PD’s button-down shirt collar had wilted into shapelessness and ^“gG globules of sweat showed on his face. The fresh handkerchief he took out to mop his classically handsome features was impeccably ironed:

his mother, Lily Zaffarano, nee Lily Cordiner, had a live-in maid and cook as well as a laundress who came in on Tuesdays to iron the voluminously skirted little dresses and petticoats other daughters, Annette and Deirdre, but she personally attended to her husband and son’s linens. Frank Zaffarano, who had left the hilltop town of Enna in Sicily at sixteen, kept the old Italian belief that a woman’s purpose in life is to serve the men of the household.

Hap and Maxim appeared less uncomfortable, though the blue of Hap’s sport shirt had a growing splotch between his broad shoulders.

The brothers were both six foot three, but here the similarities ended.

Hap, the older by thirteen months, was large-boned. He had thoughtful gray eyes, a wide forehead and a nose that once had been broken during football practice, leaving him with a rugged look.

Maxim spotted a sheet of old newspaper on the floor and he retrieved it. As he fanned himself, his narrow, well-shaped lips curled down in an acid smile. He had inherited a smaller, handsome version of his father’s thin scimitar of a nose; his attenuated height was elegant.

Women fell all over him—among the Cordiners, he had the reputation of being a cocks man

Beth alone seemed cool, until you noticed the moistness where her silky brown page boy curled toward her throat. Her delicate, unflushed face was lightly tanned as were the round arms bared by the sleeveless, powder-blue chemise that she wore with a strand of small cultured pearls. With her slightly too-thick legs tucked under the pew, she was the ultimate California coed.

She showed none of the inner anguish that she felt as her twin was severed from her and joined in wedlock to this cheap-looking girl, a girl whom Beth had not known existed until five thirty this morning when Barry had tapped on her window, whispering that she should dress and come to Las Vegas for his wedding.

“Beth, no noise,” he had warned through the window screen.

“I don’t want Mom and Dad in on this.”

Beth had a far more deeply ingrained sense of responsibility than her twin. As she sat on the hard wooden bench she was thinking up ways to ease the blow for their mother, who suffered from a coronary condition.

The justice of the peace was inquiring in an orotund tone, “Do you, Barry, take Alee-sha to be your lawfully wedded wife to cherish and protect?”

“I d-do,” Barry stammered.

“And do you, Alee-sha, take Barry here to be your lawfully married husband and promise to honor and obey him?”

Alicia murmured assent.

The justice said that by the power vested in him by the state of Nevada they were man and wife.

Alicia turned. Her lashes fluttered as Barry bent for the traditional kiss.

The justice of the peace clomped over to lean on the front pew, assailing PD, who was closest to the aisle, with odors of rancid sweat and raw onion.

“Can I bother you and the little lady here to be witnesses for the happy couple?”

“Come on, Bethie,” PD said.

Now a faint flush did show on Beth’s smooth throat. Nobody, not even Barry, who was closest to her in this world, was aware that she was mad for PD. Her greatest childhood treat had been to stay overnight at Aunt Lily and Uncle Frank’s house, occupying the small room adjacent to PD’s. Her adoration had turned distinctly physical during her eleventh year, when she had simultaneously attained her menarche and learned about the Italian renaissance. In her secret thoughts she called PD by his baptismal name, Paolo Dominick, visualizing him as a Medici duke clad in velvet and satin. Beth knew her love was hopeless—she was irrevocably Jewish, PD a devout Catholic, and besides they were blood relations, first cousins. Being sensible as well as pretty, she dated many boys, thus becoming the most popular senior in USC’s Alpha Epsilon Phi house.

She and PD waited while the justice of the peace with painful slowness readied the license for them to sign. Afterward PD linked his moist-jacketed arm companionably in hers and they went outside.

The others were waiting in a clump to take advantage of the sliver of noontime shade cast by the parody of a church steeple that topped the wedding chapel.

“Where’ll we go for the wedding breakfast?” Hap asked. He was Our Own Gang’s unofficial leader, originally because he was the largest, later because they respected his unerring instinct for fairness.

“This is a no-frills elopement,” Barry replied stiffly.

“My treat,” Hap said.

“Ours,” Maxim added.

Hap and Maxim took it as a given that, as the ones with trust-fund incomes, they would foot the bill for group extravagances. PD was able to accept the largesse because his father was well known as a director, Beth because as a female she was accustomed to checks being picked up. Only Barry felt a poor relation with his manhood threatened each time he was treated.

“Not that I don’t appreciate it” -he started.

“Come on, Barry,” Hap said.

“Alicia deserves some little celebration.”

“It’s not necessary,” Barry said awkwardly.

“We’ll” — “Jesus Christ, will you guys quit arguing in this oven?” PD interrupted, “I’ll sign Dad’s name at the Fabulador. He has privileges there.”

The Fabulador, with its top-rank entertainers, opulently appointed rooms and five gourmet restaurants, was considered the best hotel on the strip. Dapper Uncle Frank must have dropped considerably more in the Fabulador’s colossal casino than the family suspected. PD led the way to the Champs-Elysees, the most expensive of the eateries, and when he explained whose son he was, the beaming captain escorted them to a large booth. Flipping open stiff white napkins for Alicia and Beth, he suggested that they start with the blue points.

While the others tipped on horseradish, tabasco, red sauce, Alicia gripped the damask of her napkin. Noticing, Hap picked up the tiny pitchfork to pry the fleshy mollusk free, eating it without any doctoring. She watched, and followed suit. Swallowing the first oyster with a gulp, she hastily covered her mouth with her napkin. She played with the rest, twisting her fork.

At first the cousins were a little stiff, as if Barry’s marriage had somehow elevated them all to another generation and they weren’t yet certain of the ground rules. Even Maxim’s sarcastic humor was blunted.