Lace II (3 page)

From the other side of the boat, Lili watched her mother’s short blond hair ruffle in the breeze. Lili had always expected her unknown, mysterious mother to be a quiet, kindly madonna, an apron-covered, ample figure, always stirring something delicious on an old-fashioned kitchen range. But when, almost a year ago, Lili had finally tracked down her mother, she had found this glamorous, lonely public figure instead of the comforting creature of her daydreams.

Both Lili and Judy were alone in life and they both longed not to be; so they tried to behave as they imagined a mother and her daughter should behave. They made odd little stabs at what they thought was the appropriate way to act. But, although she had made such a great effort to discover her real mother, Lili was suspicious of her own feelings. Lili was an instinctive actress; her fame was the result of having the raw talent, then slowly acquiring the craft, then polishing the talent. She had always had to play her life by ear, so her impulses were important, but she was suspicious of her facility to take on a mood when she wanted to act it. Lili did not want to act love. She wanted the real thing. She wanted what she had always felt she had been deprived of—mother love. Lili knew she was not getting the real thing, she felt it deep in her heart and her bones and her being, but she did not want to face it; so she continued hopefully to grope for it.

Lili also feared that something else might sabotage the relationship with her mother that she was trying so hard to
establish. Lili knew from her acting work, and from watching other people’s stage work, that when a coach or a director asks an actor to play affection, what sometimes unconsciously comes up is bitter rage, always followed by sudden tears and breakdown. This was another reason why Lili feared that she might unconsciously be acting the love for her mother that she so longed to establish with Judy. Lili did not want suddenly to cause an unforgivable showdown with Judy because of Lili’s forgivable but unforgettable resentment of her mother’s abandonment.

The pink fringe of the canopy swayed in the breeze as their little launch darted over the gray-green water. Lili leaned over to Judy. “After the photo session, can I go shopping? I want to buy a carpet in the Grand Bazaar.”

“I’ll come with you, it’s better to bargain with two people, you’ll get a lower price if I stand behind you looking grim. Offer one third of what they ask and settle for half.”

“That’s not really the way I hoped to do it. I want to buy you a present, Judy. I want to buy you the most beautiful carpet in the Bazaar.”

“That’s sweet of you, Lili, but you know it’s not necessary.”

Without realizing it, Lili had expected her real mother to be a duplicate of her beloved Swiss-peasant foster mother, Angelina, and Lili had expected her mother to be poor, like Angelina. Lili had expected to be able to show her love by helping her mother financially. She had had a little fantasy of taking her mother to the best store in town and buying her mother her first fur coat. But then her mother had turned out to be a millionaire. So Lili kept trying to buy Judy expensive presents, which embarrassed Judy. Any show of affection embarrassed Judy, especially touch. Her strict, Southern Baptist parents had never touched each other; they had not kissed or cuddled their children or each other and, consequently, there was a distance in all Judy’s relationships, because, to her, touch was related to sex, not affection.

Lili sensed the loneliness that Judy would have fiercely denied. Judy had achieved everything that spells success—she was a Liz Smith regular, a Page Six standby, she had expensive designer clothes, maids, secretaries, an East Side apartment, a place on Long Island, plenty of men friends and
three very special women friends. But nobody … close. Perhaps that stemmed from her feelings of guilt.

Judy had spent many years feeling guilty about abandoning her child, feeling responsible for her child’s death, feeling guilty that her life hadn’t turned out as planned, and all because she hadn’t been an instant success in The Big Apple.

However much she justified her actions, however tenderly her friends reassured her, there was no getting away from the fact that she had—as Lili felt it—abandoned her own daughter when she was three months old. There had been plenty of justification. Judy had been a sixteen-year-old waitress, working her way through The Language Laboratory in Gstaad, Switzerland, when she had been raped. Judy’s three rich girlfriends at the nearby finishing school had all helped to pay for Lili’s birth and then for her keep. But no matter how hard Judy had tried, business success always, at first, seemed just beyond her reach, and whatever way Judy turned, she came up against an impersonal blank wall at the end of a cul-de-sac. And all the time she knew that she had to succeed as fast as possible, because—her own ambition apart—she couldn’t support her baby daughter until she was successful and made money. Judy’s lack of early success had made her feel helpless and unloved, as well as a failure.

With the cheery arrogance of youth, Judy had expected quick success to be the result of brains and hard work. She didn’t realize that you can put all your heart and energy into your work but the opportunities you deserve just aren’t offered to people who are only moderately attractive; it can make you bitter when the other, less gifted people get the opportunities that should be yours.

Sure, Lili had suffered, but nevertheless Lili had all the things that Judy had never had at her age: beauty, sexuality; money, and time. Time to play, time to go out in the evening without feeling exhausted, time for men. Judy remembered once wondering whether she would be successful while she was still attractive or whether she would ever be able to afford to wear a wonderful dress, to go to a wonderful place and perhaps meet a wonderful man there?

Perhaps it would all have been much easier if only she had been a little bit more beautiful. Judy was ashamed of the fact that she was jealous of Lili’s beauty.

On the opposite side of the water, in the Asian part of the city, the man with binoculars still slung around his neck pushed his way through the boys selling chewing gum and evil-eye beads until he reached the Galata ferry. A few minutes later, the wide wake of the flat-bottomed ferry crossed the wash of the pretty little launch that carried the three famous women, as they sped toward the shore, where richly decorated palaces and mosques crowded together at the water’s edge; the entire view rippled in the heat, so the buildings seemed to be part of the water itself.

*   *   *

“Problems, Judy, problems,” warned the photographer at Topkapi Palace. “They say we can’t shoot in the Harem. It’s impossible.”

People with longer experience of Judy Jordan never used the word “impossible.” If you told Judy that something was impossible, she merely lifted her little nose an inch or so and said, “Only impossible people use the word ‘impossible,’ ” or simply, “It
must
be done.” Now Judy said, “We
must
shoot in the Harem; the copy has already been written, all the headlines are set and your film is going straight back to New York tonight to be developed and printed in time for Friday’s deadline.” She turned to the guide from the Turkish Tourist Board, “What’s the problem?”

“The Harem Quarters are enormous, Mrs. Jordan…”

“Can’t we use part of it for us to get a few shots? Everything was cleared with your office.”

“There must have been a misunderstanding. Photography is forbidden because of the restorations.”

“But isn’t there even one room…”

“Please understand, Madame. The Topkapi Palace is a magnificent national treasure and the Government would be most unhappy if it were not seen at its best. All the most beautiful rooms are in the part of the Palace which is open to tourists. Let me show these to you.”

“OK, do that,” agreed Judy. She looked at her watch and thought, an hour to set up, another hour to get the shots. Yes, there would be time for a quick tour.

“Do you suppose they’ll let us come back and have a proper look?” Sandy asked Lili as they hurried through a
library lined with carved wooden bookshelves, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and tortoise-shell.

“No.” Lili was listening to the guide’s heavily accented voice, as he told a story about some favorite concubine.

“Is it always like this? Being on tour?” asked Sandy, still reluctant to learn that the glamorous life looked better than it lived.

“Yes,” said Lili. “You never have enough time, except in airports; it doesn’t matter where you are, all you really see is the inside of dressing rooms and studios; you can’t go to the discotheques because you’ll have bags under your eyes tomorrow; you can’t sunbathe because you’ll look browner in some pictures than others; you can’t eat most of the food so you won’t either get fat or sick; and everyone is always late and frantic. Isn’t success wonderful?”

“Time to get ready, girls,” said Judy. “We’re going to shoot in the Sultan’s dining room.” She led them to a tiny chamber with walls and ceilings covered in gold-embellished paintings of lilies and roses, pomegranates and peaches. The photographer looked doubtfully at his light meter. “All this interflora stuff might look like psychedelic oatmeal by the time the pictures are printed.”

“Then let’s do a few more shots outside, by the Harem gate, where you’ll get better light,” Judy suggested.

After the photo session was finished and the film had been dispatched to the airport, Sandy and the photographer stayed behind for a more leisurely look at the Palace. “After all, honey,” said Sandy, as they headed for the treasure chamber, “how often does a girl get a look at rubies the size of pigeon’s eggs?”

*   *   *

Judy and Lili climbed into their limousine, kicked off their shoes and asked the driver to take them to the Grand Bazaar.

As she got out of the car, Lili’s tiny snakeskin bag slipped off her shoulder and fell onto the cobbles, spilling coins, lip-gloss and letters. Quickly, Lili snatched them up, but Judy had spotted the airmail letter.

“Not fast enough, Lili.” Judy couldn’t stop herself saying it. “He’s still writing to you, isn’t he?”

Lili opened her mouth and then shut it again; after all, whatever she said would be wrong.

Still, Judy couldn’t stop herself. “Do you think I don’t know my lover’s handwriting after all these months?”

“Judy,
I
can’t stop Mark writing to me.
I
don’t want anything to do with him, I never did.…”

“But he wants
you
, Lili, doesn’t he? And he certainly doesn’t want me anymore.” Judy knew she was being destructive and knew that she should stop, but now that she had begun she could not stop; she had been suppressing this for weeks. “Lili, don’t tell me you didn’t know that Mark was falling in love with you in New York, right under my nose. You can’t pretend that you don’t know what effect you have on men—Lili, the world’s most famous sex symbol.” Judy knew Lili’s most sensitive point.

“You’re not being fair, Judy. What kind of a woman do you think I am?”

Suddenly, Judy’s self-control snapped as jealousy, unhappiness and fear controlled her. “The kind of woman who might seduce her mother’s lover. The kind of woman who could ruin her mother’s business—that’s the kind of woman you are!”

Lili burst into tears of rage. “You’re impossible! I wish I’d never found you. I wish I’d never met you. I never want to see you again.” Impulsively, she turned, plunged into the jostling crowd, and vanished. Grimly, Judy watched her go. Their raised voices, the faces twisted with anger and misery, had gone unremarked in the noisy crowd. But both women knew that their play-acting was over. Within two minutes, the fragile relationship, that both had tried so hard to establish, had been wrecked.

The man with the binoculars watched them argue, then saw Lili burst into tears and disappear under the great stone gateway of the Bazaar. Quickly he followed her, elbowing his way through the heaving mass of people, determined to keep Lili in sight.

*   *   *

“Where the hell can Lili be? She should never have gone off alone like that.”

“Going off alone is her idea of luxury,” Sandy reminded
Judy as she tipped back her chair, crossed her feet on the balcony rail and watched heavy black clouds gather behind the minarets. “You know that Lili doesn’t like the usual star entourage. The rest of them may not move an inch without PR people, bodyguards, a couple of studio executives, two gofers and a hairdresser, but that’s exactly the part that Lili hates. Nobody can make an entrance better than Lili but, although she’s not exactly Garbo, Lili doesn’t care for all the fuss and glitter that I long for.”

“But she knows we’re supposed to meet the agency people in ten minutes.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to meet the agency people. Why don’t we just go ahead and eat?” Sandy stood up and pulled down the zipper of her gold lamé jumpsuit. “Lili can follow us when she turns up.”

But when Judy tried to leave a message for Lili, the clerk pointed out that Lili’s key was still in its pigeonhole. “Miss Lili went out many hours ago. No, not alone. With a man.”

“What sort of man?”

“Not a guest. Maybe Turkish. I don’t remember his clothes. A dark suit, maybe.” In luxury hotels in Turkey, the clerks speak impeccable English.

“That’s odd; we don’t know anyone Turkish, except the agency people,” Sandy said as they turned toward the dining room. Judy said nothing.

As the agency people made over-polite conversation, Judy picked her way through a series of dishes with suggestive names: Holy Man Fainted (stuffed eggplant with tomatoes, onions and garlic), Sultan’s Delight (sautéed lamb with onions and tomatoes), Ladies’ Navels (fried pastries with pistachio nuts and whipped cream). Then the lights dimmed and six plump girls in neon-pink gauze undulated across the dance floor. After the belly dancers came the fire-eaters, then the snake charmer. Not until two o’clock in the morning, when the last cobra had been re-coiled in its basket, could Judy stand up and leave.

Back at the hotel reception desk, her anxiety increased as she stared at Lili’s key, still in its pigeonhole. “This is not the kind of town for a girl to be out with a strange man,” Judy said to Sandy. “However angry Lili was, she would have sent
us a message. After all, she wouldn’t want the police looking for her, if she was just romancing.”