Stages (32 page)

“It would be nice if she could know that without having to learn it for herself,” Melanie said. “I had to discover on my own that there was more to me than I thought. Brett was my whole world, you know?”

“I know,” Kathy said. She squeezed Melanie’s hand.

“It wasn’t a long time that we had together,” Melanie went on. “And it ended so abruptly. Sometimes it all seems like a dream. The memories have faded a little now—although sometimes one of them comes back to you, clear as a bell, and you feel the old aching for a while. But then it goes away, and you go back to doing whatever it was you were doing, to being who you are
now.
”

“The memories you have, Mel,” Kathy said. “At least they’re not bitter ones. I’m afraid of bitterness. I can’t
be
hateful. I don’t want revenge. I just want to forget the past and take my first few steps into the future, on my own.”

“Where are you going to live?” Melanie asked. “Are you going to stay in Scarsdale?”

The waiter came over to ask if everything was all right, and if he could get them anything else.

“Do you want a glass of white wine?” Melanie said. “Or Perrier?”

“I don’t think so,” said Kathy. “I’ve still got half this bloody mary left.”

“Could we have a couple of glasses of generic water, maybe?” Melanie asked the waiter.

“Sure,” he said. “Right away.”

“He’s a little
too
cute to get into a soap,” Melanie said as the waiter went to the bar. “They like them to look like truck drivers who’ve had their hair styled against their will. So are you staying in Scarsdale or what?”

“No, I’m thinking of moving,” Kathy replied. “I want to make a clean break. Like Aaron has. You know the ultimate irony in all of this?”

“What’s that?” Melanie asked.

“Aaron and I met in Washington, during one of the big antiwar demonstrations.”

“I remember,” Melanie said.

“We were both so committed,” Kathy said. “And now he’s living with a woman—
get this—
whose father is a big executive with
Dow Chemical.
”

“Times change,” said Melanie. “Along with people.”

“I’ve been changing too,” Kathy said. “For a long time. And I hardly knew it. Mel, I have a confession to make.”

“What’s that?”

“I read
Architectural Digest
.”

“What?”

“I said I read
Architectural Digest.
I’ve had a subscription to it for three years now. I have all the copies I’ve ever gotten stacked on a shelf in my closet. I can’t throw any of them out. I look through them all the time. I
like
looking at those houses, the ten-room apartments on Fifth Avenue and the beach houses in Malibu. They’re…
glorious.
That’s the way I feel looking at those pictures, I can’t help it.”

“Well, this is certainly a side of you that I’ve never seen,” Melanie said.

“It just happened one day,” Kathy tried to explain. “In the supermarket. I picked it up in the magazine rack and started looking through it, and I was hooked. Just like that. I respond to
properties,
in some basic way, like Lucy in
Peanuts
when they ask her what she wants for her birthday and she says, ‘Real estate.’ I know it goes counter to everything I ever thought I believed in. But I believed in Aaron too.”

“Kathy Lowenthal, hooked on the shelter magazines. Whoever would have thought it.”

“You don’t even know what I’m thinking of doing.”

“So, fill me in.”

“I think I want to move to L.A. Mel, in the last issue of
Architectural Digest,
there was this house that was mostly glass cantilevered into a hillside above Los Angeles, it looked like it was floating in the sky. Seeing it just thrilled me. And Los Angeles is full of properties like that, wonderful, dramatic houses—and the
prices
they’re starting to get for some of them! I think it’s the place to be for anyone who wants to get into real estate.”

“You want to be out there with Paula/Veronica, huh? And David?”

“I’m just drawn to the place,” Kathy said. “And not because of them, because of the houses. That’s where the glamour is, for me. Isn’t that something, coming from the mouth of someone who once thought private property was an evil?”

“I don’t know if it’s necessarily a contradiction,” Melanie replied. “I think what it all boils down to is that we were all so furious at our parents, with their middle-class complacency, that if we couldn’t get away from them we just wanted to lock ourselves in our rooms, with our Jimi Hendrix posters. We grew up behind barricades, remember. Maybe we’ll always live that way, locked in our rooms—but we’ll keep
adding
rooms. Until we’re back in the suburbs where it all started in the first place.”

“Maybe it doesn’t pay to think too much about where it’s all going to lead,” Kathy said. “There are these necessities in life that you have to deal with. I have to work, I have to have a job. And that being the case, I might as well be doing what I enjoy. Working at something you don’t really like doing—I think that must be about as bad as a bad marriage.”

“Think of the number of people who live with both of those things,” Melanie said. “Why do you think they still sell so many cigarettes?”

“Well, I’m not going to be one of them. You know, Mel, I’m almost ashamed to admit this, but I think I’m going to go the whole route. I’m going to dye my hair, and I may even change my name—in honor of L.A.”

“Not in homage to Veronica Simmons, I hope.”

“No, this is mostly for me, and my career. Would you buy a million-dollar beach shack in Malibu from Kathy Lowenthal-Goodman? Uh-uh, no way. She’s one of those people you see in a Volvo station wagon with a NO NUKES sticker on the back of it. But Susannah Eastlake, now there’s a horse of a different color. “

“How’d you ever come up with that?”

“You remember…at my
wedding
”
—Kathy’s eyes swept the ceiling—“when you asked Paula how she’d decided on her stage name, and she said she’d made it up out of a couple of associations that were significant for her personally?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“Do you also remember Susannah Spencer, who was my roommate for a year, and she’d transferred up from Sweetbriar, and she had this really sweet personality, all floral and southern?”

“Sure, I remember her.”

“Well, that’s where I got the name
Susannah.
And
Eastlake
is the style of the chairs in my grandmother’s living room. It’s a Victorian style, with a lot of curlicues, that makes you think of those Victorian houses in San Francisco that they paint all colors of the rainbow. It’s waspy, but it’s not illiberal.”

“Susannah Eastlake.” Melanie considered the name. “It does have a nice ring to it.”

“You don’t think I’m crazy, thinking about doing stuff like this?”

“I think you should go for it, Kath,” Melanie said.

“Go for it,” Kathy said. “Why the hell shouldn’t I? I wonder if I’ll run into Paula out there. Or David.”

“Did I ever tell you the story about Howard Johnson and Lee Remick?” Melanie said.

54

As they sat watching the rushes from the week’s shooting, the director said to the studio executive, “You see what I mean, the camera loves her.”

“Mm,” the executive replied. “It’s remarkable, isn’t it? Any actor would look like shit in person if they could look like that on the screen. Who’d you say is your editor?”

“Tompkins.”

“I’d tell Tompkins to leave the rest of them on the cutting-room floor. Dump the bodies in New Jersey somewheres. Just get in as much of
her
as possible.”

“He’ll do the best he can. Funny, isn’t it? The ones the camera hasn’t blessed like this, they want it on them all the time, like Streisand. But this one, she’s always getting out of the way of everyone else—I tell you, she’d defer to the fucking credits. And she sits there, while that
asshole
Petersen flubs his way through a scene, when we’ve already done ten takes of it, not saying a word, and
she
was
perfect
the
first time.
”

“Well, Petersen is box office.”

“I wouldn’t bother pushing him for an Oscar on this one.”

“We’re not stupid. Obviously we’re going to be campaigning for Simmons. I think she’s ready for it.”

“
They
may not think so, though. Remember, this is only her third movie.”

The studio executive lit a cigarette and rested his head on the back of his plush chair. “Remember we only need a percentage of what
they
think,” he told the director, “and we account for a lot of jobs, so a lot of people are going to vote the way we want them to, because they want us to stay healthy so they can keep those jobs. The best performance you see from any actor is him paying his bills.”

“She should be on Carson,” the director said. “And Merv Griffin.”

“We’re trying to get her into
People,
”
said the executive. “She’s not all that easy to promote, though. It’d help if she was fucking somebody.”

“Well, she’s been
linked romantically
with Beatty, and Rod Stew—”

“I’m not talking about PR bullshit, I mean
really
fucking somebody.”

“To tell you the truth, Stu, I don’t know what she does. There have been days when she shows up on the set looking a little tired—but I don’t know from what. She lives in a little apartment on Wilshire. Sometimes she makes dinners for people: makeup people, the sound crew. I’ve been to her place. She’ll make a buffet, and put the food on an ironing board with a tablecloth over it. She’s
a fantastic
cook.”

“She must have recipes. I’ll tell publicity to contact the women’s magazines.”

“That’s an idea—look, would you believe that’s a twenty-eight-year-old
actress
?”

Stu turned his attention to the screen again. Veronica, round-shouldered and gray, was reaching with effort to hang a coat on a peg.

“She’s supposed to be—what? Eighty at this point?”

“Yeah, we had two days of exactly the same weather, and I wanted these shots of her against the setting sun—one when she was twenty and the other when she was eighty, so the second day she spent the morning in makeup, and I got exactly what I was after.”

“What’s the accent she’s using? It sounds sort of hillbilly.”

“The Shakers did talk like hillbillies. None of us knew that until Veronica came across it in a book. She’s probably read a dozen books on the Shakers since we began this project.”

“Petersen sounds like Fess Parker playing Davy Crockett. That’s the trouble with a performance that’s so fucking
authentic,
it makes the bread-and-butter slobs you have to have along for the ride look like the no-talent fucks they are.”

“She’s good with him, though. Works with him the way I used to see my mother giving my baby brother Gerber’s strained peaches out of a jar. His performance is a hell of a lot better than it would have been without her.”

“I’ll tell you something, Martin. When I saw
Islands in Winter,
I cried.
Me.
She got to me, she really had me going. And you know why? Because she made me remember that I
love
movies, she made me feel this rush of joy…joy in, I don’t know, life, I guess,
art.
There’s too few like her. The ones who give us back…our dignity.”

“Maybe she will get an Oscar this time out. The Academy isn’t
always
ungrateful.”

Stu shook his head, marveling at what he was seeing on the screen. “She really isn’t seeing anybody, huh?” he said.

“Nobody I know of,” Martin replied. He scratched his salt-and-pepper beard absently, concentrating on the film he had just shot.

“Christ, I should call her up myself.”

“You’d get her answering machine,” said Martin.

“I had lunch with David Whitman a couple of weeks ago,” Stu said. “He told me that he fucked her back when they were in college.”

“Nobody’s perfect,” Martin said.

Later that evening Stu tried calling Veronica. He got her answering machine.

It was in a closet of her bedroom, where she couldn’t hear it.

Veronica was in her living room, which she had virtually emptied of furniture, save for a simple, rush-seated, ladder-back Shaker chair.

Veronica was moving back and forth across her bare floor, dancing and clapping her hands, and singing a Shaker hymn.

She had been doing this for hours, just as the Shakers themselves had done once upon a time, and she would keep doing it for hours more.

55