Valerie Martin Read online

  Marlene, lounging on the divan, her arms stretched out over her head, flipped one of her red sandals to the floor. “Big,” she said.

  I turned on her. “That’s what you think, Miss Has-been,” I said.

  She narrowed her eyes at me as if she was looking into my brain. “It’s what I know, Chance darling,” she said.

  That’s it, I thought. It’s all a lie. From start to finish. I’m a complete fraud. I was never on the stage in New York. I never made it out of Florida. I sang in the chorus of the biggest show in New York, I proclaimed to her and to the world. In Oklahoma!, and had pictures in Life in a cowboy outfit, tossin’ a ten-gallon hat in the air! YIPEEEE.

  “That’s more like it,” the director said.

  The rest of the rehearsal went well. I hardly thought about who I was, I just concentrated on being a liar. Everything I said could be proved false; therefore I was always in danger of being unmasked. This gave me an edge I hadn’t been able to find. I appreciated the peril of my situation. At the end of the day the director’s notes were distinctly upbeat. “Ed,” he said, “you’re getting there.” I glanced at Marlene for confirmation, but she was fully concentrated on every word issuing from the lips of our director.

  That night we had a cookout on the plush green lawn behind the boardinghouse. Tubs of ice sprouting beer and wine bottlenecks dotted a multicolored carpet of blankets and towels upon which we actors preened ourselves in mocking rivalry. Near the house a smoldering charcoal grill, lovingly tended by our prop man turned grill master, pumped into the warm night air the tantalizing fragrance of burning flesh. I was poking a wiener mischievously at the appreciative Eve when I spotted Marlene strolling across the lawn. She was relaxed and oblivious to the palpable alteration in the atmosphere occasioned by her presence among us. She’s like the queen stopping in at the local pub, I thought. She will never know what it’s like when she’s not there.

  “It’s Marlene,” Eve sighed beside me. “She’s so fantastic.” I got to my feet and weaved my way among the blankets. Gary Santos was pouring wine into a plastic cup while the prop man pointed out to our unexpected guest the choicest bits sizzling above the coals. I popped into the space beside her. “Princess,” I said. “What are you doing out among the hoi polloi?”

  She was wearing dark sunglasses, her hair was loose, and her smile was at its most enigmatic. “Oh Ed,” she said, dismissing the charade of our characters. “Here you are. Advise me. What is a tofu pup?”

  “It’s a perfectly tasteless wad of soy cheese.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That sounds appetizing. I’ll have one of those.”

  “Are you a vegetarian?”

  “No. I don’t think so. Are you?”

  “No,” I said. “At least put some mustard on it.” I led her away to the condiments table, snatching a beer from a tub as I passed, acutely conscious of all eyes upon us. I had her, I had her, and I didn’t want to share her. I particularly didn’t want to share her with Eve, who looked on with slack-jawed amazement, but no sooner had Marlene buried her pup beneath a blanket of relish and mustard than she looked out over the field of players and said, “Let’s sit with Eve.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Of course.” As we settled on the blanket, Eve gushed like an overflowing bathtub. “Miss Webern,” she said. “I can’t tell you what an honor it is to be on the stage with you. I’ve admired your work for so long. I saw you in Tiny Alice when I was in high school and that’s when I decided I wanted to be an actress.”

  “Was that a long time ago?” Marlene said, fiddling with her tofu pup, which had slipped out of its bun.

  “Well, I was fifteen.”

  “Best not to tell me how old you are now. Ed, darling, how am I to eat this?”

  Eve closed her mouth and sent me a troubled look.

  “It’s a disgusting thing,” I said.

  “No, no,” she laughed, pressing it back into the limp folder of bread with her bloodred fingernail. “I’m sure it’s delicious.” As she lifted one end, mustard and relish poured out the other.

  “Let me have it,” I said, taking the plate from her. “It’s going to squirt all over you.”

  “That would be discouraging,” she said.

  “Hold a napkin under your chin.”

  “I had no idea you would take such command,” she said, unfolding a napkin and cupping it beneath her chin. I grasped the sandwich gingerly and brought it to her lips. “Just bite it,” I said.

  She obeyed, baring her teeth and taking a sharp bite, neatly catching the dripping condiments in her napkin.

  “Ed,” Eve whispered anxiously.

  “Be quiet,” I snapped. “Let this woman eat her pup.”

  Marlene was convulsed with laughter, but she managed to swallow what she’d taken and opened her mouth for another go.

  “It’s awful, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Completely,” she agreed, chewing thoughtfully.

  “Let me throw it away.”

  “Definitely,” she said.

  I got to my feet folding the plate over the soggy mess. “Do you want some corn? Or a burger?” I asked.

  “No, thank you.”

  “More wine?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That would be nice. Tell me, Eve, are you a vegetarian.”

  “No ma’am,” Eve replied as I ambled off to the nearest trash can. I was working out a plan. If Marlene wouldn’t eat what we ate, I might persuade her to go somewhere alone with me. I had very little money; I certainly couldn’t afford any of the chic restaurants in the town center. The only place I’d been inside was the pub and I couldn’t picture Marlene tucked into a leather booth with a plate of fries and a beer in front of her. I filled a plastic cup with wine and turned back to our blanket. Eve was blathering about something while Marlene bent upon her a look of fascinated concentration, such as you might give an overturned beetle struggling to right itself next to your bare foot on the bathroom floor.

  “Yale is an excellent program,” Marlene was saying as I rejoined the conversation.

  “Yes,” Eve said. “I’m so lucky to be there.”

  “I’m sure luck had nothing to do with it.”

  I agreed. I thought Eve had probably gotten into Yale by fucking someone on the admissions committee. Perhaps the whole committee. She was a wretched actress, empty as a kettledrum.

  “Now what will you do?” I said to Marlene. “You’ve had no dinner.”

  “I have plenty of food in my little cottage,” she said. “It’s a lovely evening. I’ll just sit here a bit and then go back and fix myself something. Frankly it will be nice to be on my own.”

  “I can understand that,” I sympathized, my spirits rebuffed. She was slumming, we were a distraction, but what she really wanted to be was alone. After a few more exchanges she got up and wandered over to the grill where she chatted with the prop man and the lighting designer. I looked on woefully, sucking at my beer while Eve told me Marlene had pronounced her horrible fake Southern accent “charming.”

  “You know,” I said, “I think I’ll get a burger while they still have some left.” I got back to my feet and slunk along the edge of the blanket patch until I came up behind Marlene.

  “I’m using a blue filter for that whole scene,” the lighting designer was saying. “It makes the palm trees black, very spooky.” Marlene drained her cup and turned to me as if I’d arrived on cue. “Perfect,” she said. “Here’s my driver. I think I’m ready to leave now. Ed, will you walk with me?”

  “At your service,” I said, spirits surging back up like champagne behind the cork. Her cottage was a good ten-minute walk. How much could be accomplished by a youthful suitor in a ten-minute stroll through a sleepy summer evening? Marlene had a way of opening and closing the distance between herself and an admirer that was something to see, like watching a skilled angler with a bright fish on the line. She always knew exactly where you were because she controlled the line and understood the play of the currents. This analogy
presumes the fish, once hooked, longs to be hauled in, which is the opposite of the truth, but I was eager to leap from the shallows into her lap, and she knew it. I calmed myself as we left the party grounds and set off along the sidewalk. Several conversational openers flitted across my imagination: Say, I love kissing you in that opening scene or You know that photo you have in your wallet, could I see it again or I’m in awe of you, you are my ideal or When we get to the cottage, what say we hit the sack. Playing them out while I waited for her to speak—for I was determined that she must set the tone, even if we had to walk the whole way in silence—entertained me. I allowed expressions of pleasure, wonder, yearning, bold aggression to flit across my features. A block went by and another. The front lawns deepened and the houses accumulated grandeur.

  “Ed,” she said at last. “What are you doing with your face?”

  I laughed. “I’m going over the things I’d like to say to you.”

  “Why not just say them?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  “Do you feel intimidated by me?”

  “No. But I wouldn’t want to bore you.”

  “I’m not easily bored,” she assured me.

  “You weren’t bored by Eve?”

  “Not at all,” she said. “But you are.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of talking about Eve.”

  “No? You’d rather not?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “But you brought her up. You see, I find that interesting.”

  I chuckled. “You’re good,” I said.

  We paused at a corner to allow a Mercedes convertible to roll by; the town was full of them. I watched Marlene watch the Mercedes, or so I thought, because her sunglasses made it impossible to tell what she was doing with her eyes; they could have been closed. She wasn’t old enough to be my mother, but she was older than any woman I’d kissed before, and she had the aura of confidence and ease only actors who work a lot possess that flooded my veins with envy and desire. Her mouth was set in the cheerful lines that seemed to be their natural inclination and it occurred to me that she seldom actually frowned. She had a great line in the play—When monster meets monster, one monster has got to give way and IT WILL NEVER BE ME!—which she delivered with verve and conviction, her eyes flashing at full star power, but there was still this quality of mild self-mocking about the mouth, this detachment behind which, I surmised, the real Marlene, the Marlene who could suffer, resided.

  “It’s getting dark,” I said. “Don’t you think you should take off the shades?”

  As we stepped into the street she whisked off the sunglasses. “Shades?” she said.

  “I want to see your eyes.”

  “You’re a very bossy young man,” she observed.

  “Bossy?” I said.

  She laughed and to my delight took my arm. “We turn here,” she said. We went along another block at the end of which was a wide drive leading to a mansion. “I want to show you my cottage,” she said. “It’s like something from a storybook.” The drive forked and we took the narrow path that curved around the house and through a garden riotous with flowers. An arbor laden with deep purple blossoms framed the doorway of a pink stucco cottage. “These are clematis,” Marlene said as we passed beneath the arbor. “And here it is. Isn’t it charming?”

  It was certainly charming and I was on tenterhooks to know whether “showing” it to me meant I would be invited inside. Marlene released me and opened the door which wasn’t locked, glancing back as she entered. “Come in and have a glass of wine,” she said, “and let’s see if I have something we can eat.”

  I stepped cautiously inside; carefully I closed the door behind me, resting my hand against the panel, advising myself with a maturity beyond my years, This is your chance. Don’t blow it. The furnishings were summery, rattan and floral cushions, lacy curtains at the windows. There was one big room with chairs, couches, a table, a desk, and beyond that a wide arch through which Marlene passed. A painted screen partially obscured another arch which led, I presumed, to the bedroom. I followed Marlene and found her standing before a wooden tray in the gleaming kitchen, twisting a corkscrew into a bottle of white wine. “May I do that for you,” I offered.

  “No, you may not,” she replied. “Look in the fridge and take out some cheese and there’s a bit of a sausage I think.”

  “You’re right,” I said, choosing among the colorful packages of cheese with French names on their wrappers, “this is quite a fine place.”

  “Beats that boardinghouse?” she said. “Put that on the tray.

  “Oh yes. By a lot.”

  “Well, they couldn’t expect me to stay in a boardinghouse.” Expertly she pulled the cork free and poured out two glasses. I spotted a plate for the cheese in the dish rack.

  “No,” I agreed.

  “So you think it’s fair. The whole star-system thing?”

  “No question about it,” I said.

  She slapped a baguette across the tray and held it out to me. “Take this to the table,” she said. I went out, perplexed by her line of inquiry. She was the star, why would she be lodged with the underlings?

  I set the tray on the table and looked about me. There were signs of her, a paisley shawl thrown across the back of a chair, a few magazines on the coffee table, Vogue and Ms., papers, a book, and what looked like an oversize deck of cards on the desk. I leaned over the desk to check out the book title. It was World of Wonders. I’ll say, I thought. I turned up the top card on the deck: a happy baby riding a horse, a smiling sun beaming down upon him. Marlene came in carrying plates, an apple, and the bottle of wine. “Do you read tarot cards?” I asked.

  “I do. Does that surprise you?”

  “Not really,” I said, which was true. Actors are a superstitious tribe, always looking for luck and a glimpse of the future. They read their horoscopes, practice strange ritual behaviors before performances, carry totem objects with them for special occasions. Madeleine had a silver bracelet she’d worn when she won a state competition in high school that she kept in a velvet bag and wore only to auditions. Teddy had a lucky belt.

  “Let’s sit down,” Marlene suggested. “We’ll eat and talk, and then I’ll read your cards.”

  “Great,” I said.

  We talked. What did we talk about? I believe we talked about me. Marlene asked me questions about what I’d read, my training, what plays I’d seen, what I thought of them, what I thought of the actors in them. She made me feel more interesting than I knew I was.

  At one point she asked me what I knew about her. The photo in the wallet sprang into my brain, but even after a few glasses of wine I was cautious with her. “They say you are married and have a son tucked away in California and that you don’t answer personal questions in interviews.”

  “Is that all they say?”

  “And that you are a great actress.”

  “Oh, well, of course,” she said. “They would say that.”

  “I believe it.”

  “You flatter me,” she said, creating the sudden distance that kept me so off balance. “Now bring me my cards and let’s see what they have to say about you.”

  When I stood up I found myself sure on my feet but lightheaded from the wine. Outside it was dark and humid; a sultry breeze lifted the curtains, rustling the papers on the desk. Marlene switched on a lamp. I handed her the cards and took my seat, oddly excited by the prospect of mumbo-jumbo in a summer cottage with Marlene Webern. One could make a play of it, I thought. The ingenue and the actress. “This is fun,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “It’s serious.” She fanned the deck open and extracted a card. “First we choose your signifier,” she said, laying down a picture of a dark youth on a horse. “You’re a blond now, so ordinarily I would choose a cup or wand, but I know your true color is dark. And this boy suits you. He stands for vigilance.”

  “I’m sure you can’t fool the cards with a dye job,” I said.

  “No,” she
said. “You can’t.” She shuffled the cards and laid the pack facedown in front of me. “Now we’re going to get to the bottom of Edward Day.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” I said.

  “Cut to the left three times, three times.”

  “Three times, three times,” I said, breaking the deck into stacks and reassembling them.

  “And ask a question in your mind.”

  “What sort of question?”

  “It should be a general question.”

  So I couldn’t ask if Marlene would go to bed with me, though that was uppermost in my thoughts. I settled on “What will become of me?” One couldn’t get more general than that.

  “I hope I get the baby on the horse,” I said.

  She smiled. “That’s a very good card,” she agreed. She turned the top card up and laid it across my signifier. “Oh dear,” she said.

  It was the horned devil, all goat legs and bat wings perched on a block; at his clawed feet a naked man and woman, sporting horns and flaming tails, were chained by their necks to a ring on the block.

  “That doesn’t look promising,” I observed.

  “It’s not so bad. It covers the general atmosphere of the question. It suggests you’re in bondage to the material world.”

  “Oh, is that all,” I said.

  “Well, it could be something more extreme. It could be black magic.”

  “Heaven forbid,” I said, refilling my wineglass.

  “You’re not interested in spiritual matters then.”

  “No. That’s right. I’m not.”

  “Well, you should be.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “The cards think so.” She turned up the next one and placed it crosswise on the other two. “This crosses you,” she said. It was a man standing before a series of silver chalices from which snakes, castles, laurel wreaths, and precious jewels overflowed. It was a dreamy picture; the cups floated on clouds. “Scattered forces,” Marlene said. “You waste your energy on fantasies.”

  “That can’t be denied,” I said.