Judith Krantz (15 page)

The very texture of her attitudes, her foreign upbringing, her foreign standards, her enchanting gravity, were so different from that of other, young Hollywood stars that the press treated everything she said with serious respect. She conquered journalists without making the slightest attempt to do so. She spoke English slightly too well, in a slight Scandinavian accent that gave her words a weight of charm and meaningfulness that no other accent in spoken English can produce.

Sylvie Norberg was not a flaxen Swedish blond. She had soft dark blond hair with a slight natural wave, cut simply just below her chin. A light as changeable and mysterious as a combination of moonstones and moonbeams poured from her clear gray eyes, a light that could be kindled by a word, extinguished by a word, a mesmerizing light that made everyone who saw her wonder what she was thinking. Except for her supremely interesting regard, Sylvie’s beauty was untheatrical, touchingly simple and uncomplicated, the look of a woodland dryad, with a freshness that was exactly right for the dawn of the 1960s. She looked like a sensitive tomboy with a mind of her own, a quality that was the essence of the way women wanted to look in a reaction against the sophisticated, mature stars of the past.

Indifferent to public opinion and free of any sense of the limitations that life imposed on ordinary people, Sylvie’s personal motto was simple. What she wanted, she would have.

Throughout her youth she had a history of taking the right turnings on the paths of life. But Sweden, she knew, was not as complicated as Hollywood. In the film industry she would have to stand up for herself or come to belong to a system whose ideals didn’t match hers.

After her second film was completed, the summer of 1959, Sylvie Norberg took a holiday at exactly the
moment when an ambitious American actress would have thrown herself into her career without a thought for anything else. But Sylvie had just completed two major pictures, back to back, with all the obligations of interviews and photo sessions attendant on the emergence of a new star, and she decided that she wanted time off to absorb her new experiences.

It wasn’t possible to spend the summer in Sweden because she had a movie commitment for September which would require several costume and wig fittings in Hollywood during the months of July and August. Still she was conscious of a deep need to hear Swedish again, to speak Swedish again. She missed the cadence of her native tongue far more than she had expected she would. Sylvie accepted a standing invitation to stay with a cousin of her father’s, Sven Hansen, who ran a small Swedish coffeehouse in San Juan Capistrano.

In San Juan she would be near enough to Los Angeles to take the train up for the day, but the tiny old town, built around the ruins of its great Mission, was so quaint, so old-fashioned and so far off the beaten track, that summer there would be as refreshing as a trip to a foreign country. Her first picture hadn’t reached the one movie house in San Juan yet, Sven assured her, and her second wouldn’t be released until the fall. “Some folk may recognize you, particularly after that
Life
magazine cover,” Sven said, “but they won’t bother you if you don’t want them to. And you can count on me not to boast about my famous cousin.”

In the spring of 1959, Mike and Liddy Kilkullen finally admitted to each other that they had reached the end of their marriage. The upbringing of their daughters had provided the thin glue that had kept them together for so long. They had never been able to paper over the fact that they had each, quite simply, married the wrong person.

Her thirtieth birthday had galvanized Liddy, forcing
her to focus on her discontent, and had made her decide to get out while she still could. Valerie was eleven and Fernanda was eight, and she nourished flint-hard, lofty ambitions for them. She intended them to have all the things she had given up, things they would never have if they continued to grow up on the ranch. She had endured its isolation from a major city for ten endless years, but if she didn’t take them East now and put them into good schools, they would never have the polish necessary to take their proper places in the world.

Liddy gathered up her daughters and returned to her parents’ house in Chestnut Hill, near Philadelphia, to spend the summer before filing for divorce. She wanted to consult her family’s lawyers before she took the final step.

Mike Kilkullen did not try to stop her. It was far too late for that, he thought with a mixture of acquiescence and a deep sense of failure. If it were not for the children, he and Liddy would have been nothing more than memories to each other for the last decade. They would work out an arrangement so that the girls would spend as much time with him as possible, but he had long known that she would one day go back to a life she should never have left.

It had been more than two years since she had let him touch her. He didn’t blame Liddy any more than he blamed himself for not agreeing to her repeated suggestions that he sell the ranch and try to make a life for them in Philadelphia. Even the fact that she could come up with such an insane notion showed how pitifully mistaken they had been to get married in the first place.

The weather that spring had been as good as his inner climate had been dismal. After heavy winter rains, the mesas of the ranch had turned as green as Ireland, the cattle had eaten their fill, and after the roundup in March, the crop of healthy, well-grown young calves had fetched record prices. Mike Kilkullen bought two prize bulls at the auction in the Cow Palace in San Francisco and put the rest of his profits
for the year in the San Clemente Bank, where he did all his banking.

You couldn’t get rich as a cattleman, Mike reflected, not in California, but if you didn’t live too high, if you took care of your land and your stock and you kept enough flat crop land rented to provide you with an annual income that you could count on—well, you’d never starve, that was for damn sure.

In Texas the sixty-four-thousand-acre ranch would be considered a small spread, yet at thirty-four Mike Kilkullen found himself one of the major landowners in all of Southern California. The ranch covered almost one-sixth of Orange County, and even though he voted Democratic, he was considered an outstanding citizen—if you forgot the fact that his personal life was as dry as a sinkhole and as bleak as the land above the treeline on Old Saddleback.

Self-pity makes me want to puke, Mike said to himself, and drove into San Juan to see if Sven Hansen’s coffeehouse was still open. He could use a piece of cake and a cup of coffee. He wasn’t in the mood to mingle with the merry, thoroughly sloshed crowd that hung out at the Swallows bar tonight, but the hacienda was so empty after dinner, without his children, that he had to get out or risk feeling sorry for himself. The trouble with cattle, he thought, was that the critters were inclined to sleep at night. If they didn’t, he’d never have to stop working and start thinking.

The coffeehouse was empty when Mike looked in, but behind the counter he saw a girl in a summer dress washing a cup and saucer. Sven must have hired a waitress, he thought, and went in and sat down.

“Miss? Is it too late to order?”

“What is your pleasure, sir?” Sylvie asked. She’d come down from her room for a cup of coffee and was about to close for the night, since Sven was out. But she’d played a waitress once, and suddenly it amused her to play one tonight. The thought filled her eyes with a wanton light.

“Coffee, please, and some of Sven’s seedcake if you have any left.”

Holy Mary, Mother of God, what was his pleasure? Show him another waitress in all the world who looked at him with such delicate mockery, who asked that question in that wonderful accent, using those insanely inflammatory words, and he’d show her what his pleasure was. His pleasure was to kiss her until she was dizzy, to start with …

“May I offer you cream, or do you prefer it as it comes?” Sylvie asked.

“Black’s fine. Have you worked here long?”

“Only a week. Sven is my father’s cousin.”

“Are you here for long?”

“I am visiting for the summer only,” Sylvie said regretfully.

“Do you have a name?” asked Mike Kilkullen.

“Sylvie …”

He was splendid, Sylvie thought. After six busy but lonely months in Hollywood she had begun to wonder where she would find the only kind of man who attracted her, the fully adult yet uncomplicated, utterly masculine men she’d found in Sweden. She had no time for the actors or the producers, directors and writers of Hollywood. They all were too fragmented, too artificial, too preoccupied with the silly, necessary business of movies.

This stranger reminded her of the giants of mythology that she had studied at school, so tall, so broad, so commanding. He looked like a leader of men, he looked like a lover of women, he looked like a man who never put a foot inside a house if he could help it. She studied his strongly hewn features in his square face, his ferociously blue eyes, his fine, aquiline, aristocratic nose and thatch of thick red hair, wondering what background had created this man. She would have him, she decided. She wanted him. Now.

“I’m Mike Kilkullen,” he said, getting up and shaking hands. “Would you care to sit down and have a cup of coffee?”

“Is it permitted for a waitress to join a customer?”

“In San Juan Capistrano, everything is permitted,” Mike said, with his slow smile. “Welcome to Liberty Hall.”

“Do you live in this neighborhood, Mike Kilkullen?” she asked gravely, sitting down. Of course he had to be Irish. Why had she not known at once? A creature of the north, like herself. A man with hot blood and no doubt a bad temper, given to deep loyalties, intense stubbornness, sometimes abandoned to melancholy, living always with a touch of madness.

“I own a ranch about five miles south of town.”

“What do you grow?”

“Grow? I’m a cattleman,” he said with a surge of pride in being able to so present himself to this lovely woman, for she was too composed, too sure of herself, to be considered a girl. “Would you like to visit my ranch? Someday soon? I can arrange it with Sven. Do you ride?”

He was as anxious as a boy asking a girl to the senior prom. Did this woman have any idea how beautiful she was? It puzzled him enormously to find her working in such a simple place, at such an unexpected job, but he thought it would be rude to ask her personal questions.

“I love to ride. Can you provide me with a mount?”

“No problem.”

“Tomorrow is my day off,” Sylvie said.

“But that’s Saturday. Won’t Sven need you?”

“Perhaps he will, but I won’t be here. I will be riding with you, won’t I? In Liberty Hall?” When Sylvie smiled, the little pockets of flesh under her eyes, those expressive puffs of amusement, suddenly changed the quality of her gravity to sheer joy.

“You’ve picked up the customs of the country already.”

“I’ve been told I’m a quick study.”

“I’ll come by for you whenever you say. I can pack a lunch and we can ride out to the ocean and have a picnic by the bluffs.”

“Oh yes! That is exactly what I want to do tomorrow—and I always do what I want.”

“My father used to come down here, wade in and practically scoop the lobsters up in his bare hands,” Mike told Sylvie as they galloped up to a cove set into yellow bluffs down which tumbled a blaze of magenta and purple bougainvillea. They dismounted and Mike threw a blanket, a package of sandwiches, and a thermos down in front of a pile of driftwood where they could eat sheltered from the breeze that blew steadily along the shore.

To their left the Pacific broke in a never-ending chevron of foaming waves and high-tossed white spray against the boulders of Valencia Point.

Between the cove and the water lay a wide, firm beach on which the darkish sand, at low tide, was webbed with a network of seaweed and fringes of foam, bubbly threads of kelp, and the furze of tide plants. Above them floated an endless sunny tent of sky agleam with the particular gauzy, intoxicating lightness that only forms where sky and ocean meet.

Mike unsaddled the horses so that they could wander at will. Sylvie ran out onto the beach, where drops of water sparkled on the sea’s leavings, and stood just clear of the low-tide mark, shading her eyes with her hands as she slowly turned in a full circle. The ocean, the beach, the miles and miles of green hills, the tip of the mountain that was visible in the far distance above the edge of the low bluffs—she spun around and around and looked far out to the horizon and opened her arms in delight at the limitless freedom of this place that stretched from sea to mountaintop.

“It’s heaven!” she cried, and began to run wildly up the empty beach toward no particular destination, a reaction common to many humans when they find themselves standing on the edge of a continent. Mike Kilkullen laughed at the sight of the two horses, who broke into a gallop as she ran, all three creatures at one with the sea, the sun, the air and the eternal
rhythm of the breakers. He ran out to join Sylvie, and the two of them raced up and down the beach, changing directions unexpectedly, swerving and skidding and bumping into each other as senselessly as unleashed puppies, until they had to stop because they were breathless and gasping.

They fell onto the sand, immediately discovered that it was soaking wet, helped each other up, laughing helplessly, and tottered up the slope to the cove, where they collapsed on the blanket, still laughing.

“Don’t you want to kiss me?” Sylvie asked when she could talk.

“That’s the dumbest question I ever heard,” Mike answered, and pinioned her in his arms. She was finely made and slender, he was big and solid, but they were both strong and equally given over to a madness that had possessed them both since they had laid eyes on each other the night before, a need that had kept them both up all night, filled with feverish imaginings.

Impetuous, clumsy, awkward in their frantic eagerness, they kissed and embraced with a hastiness that bruised their lips and made them bump their noses and chins together until they found the right way to fit their faces together.

Sylvie started to unbutton Mike’s shirt while he was kissing her. She had to see the whiteness of his skin where the line of tan stopped below his open shirt, she had to put her hands flat on the muscles of his great chest and feel their strength, she had to rub the texture of the hair on his chest against her open palms. She had taken lovers since she was just sixteen, but not one of them had ever made her feel so ravenously, mindlessly urgent, as if this act had to take place before the rest of her life could begin.