Starstruck - Love Me Part 16

"All right, all right," a familiar voice called. "I'm coming, I'm coming."

"Emmeline," Margo whispered, holding her arms out tentatively, half to protect herself, half longing for an embrace.

"Miss Margaret." The housekeeper had turned white as a sheet. "What on earth are you doing here?"

"I wanted to see you." Margo gulped, blinking back tears. The mere fact of Emmeline's presence, the sight of the broad face, the strong hands that she had watched so many times iron dresses and pull cakes from the oven and wipe away tears, was almost too much for her to bear. "And I need to talk to my parents."

"I'm afraid they're out tonight, Miss Margaret. At Mr. and Mrs. McKendricks' house-Miss Gamble, what was. They're having some supper party, on account of their housewarming."

"Oh. I see."

A gust of wind blew through the yard. Margo, who had left the Polo Lounge in too much of a hurry to claim her coat, s.h.i.+vered.

"It's freezing," Emmeline said. "Hurry, hurry. You'd best come in before you catch your death of cold."

The kitchen was the same as ever-same black and white linoleum tiles forming a checkerboard pattern on the floor; same collection of heavy copper-bottomed pots hanging above the oven, as though waiting for a single blow to send them clanging-yet Margo found that her eye was drawn to the tiny things that had changed since the last time she'd seen it: Geraniums sticking out of the blue willow pitcher instead of hydrangeas. The yellow dish towels swapped out for white. The remains of a chicken on a serving tray instead of the bones from a roast. She blinked several times, as though her eyes were the lens of a camera, capturing a memory.

"You want a gla.s.s of milk?" Emmeline asked, wiping her hands on her ap.r.o.n.

"No, thank you. But I'd take a cup of coffee if you have some on."

"When do I not?"

Emmeline had bustled over to the stove, flicking switches, fetching cups, filling jugs with milk and sugar with impossible speed. In less than a minute she managed to get the whole mess, along with a plate of freshly baked shortbread rounds, onto a wooden tray. Margo watched her with the same fascination she held for unusually adept dancers who could learn a whole routine after watching it once. It was wonderful to watch someone at the top of their game, and Emmeline was no less a master of her domain than they were. How did I never notice it before? Why did I always take her for granted?

"Thank you." Margo picked up the warm cup.

"Can I get you anything else? I've got one of my special lemon meringue pies in the icebox."

Emmeline's lemon meringue pie. It had been one of Margaret Frobisher's favorite things in the world, the surefire remedy for any hurt. It was under a plated slice of lemon meringue pie that Emmeline had secreted Larry Julius's salvaged business card, after Mrs. Frobisher had ripped it to pieces in a rage. The business card that changed my life, Margo thought. All this is because of Emmeline.

"I'd better not," she whispered, her voice choked with the threat of tears.

"Just as well," Emmeline said. A sharp note had crept into her already anxious voice. "I'm afraid you can't stay long, anyway. They could be back any minute."

Margo barked a short laugh. "Oh, please. Mother's finally invited to one of Evelyn Gamble's parties and she comes home early? I don't think so."

Emmeline shook her head, pus.h.i.+ng a gray curl back over her forehead with a roughened hand. "With the way your father has been lately, who knows?"

The coffee cup seemed to jump in Margo's hand. "He's not been ill, has he?"

"Just some stomach misery when he eats rich food and drinks too much. It's nothing serious, Miss Margaret," Emmeline said in a voice that was thoroughly unconvincing. "Nothing to worry yourself about."

They're not getting any younger, Margo thought. They aren't going to be around forever. This knowledge, which at various points in her life might have seemed like a kind of relief, hardened her resolve about what she'd come to do. "Emmeline," she began, setting down her coffee cup firmly, "I have something to tell you."

"That you're getting married?" Emmeline was suddenly very busy pouring coffee into her own cup and stirring with a small tin spoon.

"You knew?"

"She won't allow picture magazines and the like in the house, but I look at them sometimes while I'm waiting on line at the drugstore. So I've seen a headline here and there. I've got to keep an eye on my Margaret, you see." She glanced up from her coffee, looking almost shy. "I guess that's the ring."

"Yes." Margo held out her left hand for the housekeeper to see.

"Well," Emmeline said, giving the glittering diamond a little tap with her callused thumb. "Isn't that something. May it bring you real happiness, baby."

"Thank you." Margo was feeling bolder now. "They were supposed to send an invitation here."

"Oh?" Emmeline was busy with her coffee again.

"Yes," Margo said firmly. "I gave them the address myself. We haven't heard anything back."

"I can't speak to that. Your mother handles her own correspondence."

"Emmeline, please." Margo grabbed the housekeeper's hand and squeezed it roughly. The cold, heavy band of her engagement ring dug painfully into her finger. "Did it arrive? Did she see it?"

Emmeline sighed, pulling her hand away. "I put it on the tray with all the other mail, just like I always do, and brought it to her in the morning room. When I came to take the tray away again, it was still there."

"It was."

"Yes, miss. All the other post was gone except that one envelope. She just left it sitting there, all alone."

"She didn't even open it?"

Emmeline busily began to tidy up the coffee things, her answer implied by her silence.

"She didn't," Margo said dumbly, shaking her head. "She didn't open the invitation to my wedding." She didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

"Now, Miss Margaret." Emmeline turned back to her with a look of concern. "You've got to understand. Maybe it's no comfort to you, and Lord knows, I'm not saying it's right, but your mother has her own reasons for feeling the way she does."

"What?" The word came out in a wounded howl, startling even Margo with the force of its anger. "What possible reasons could she have?"

"That's not my place to say," Emmeline said, her voice wobbling but holding. "That's for her to tell you, whenever she feels the time is right."

Margo wanted to scream. When? What the h.e.l.l has she been waiting for all these years? Instead, she took a deep breath. "Emmeline, if I left a letter for her, could you figure out some way to make sure she reads it?"

"And let them know you were here? That I let you in? I'll lose my job."

"Then give her a message for me. Tell her I called. Tell her I called and called and wouldn't stop calling until you agreed to tell her what I had to say. Tell her my wedding is next week and I need to see her. She doesn't have to tell Father. She doesn't have to tell anyone. But I've simply got to talk to her. I can't get married unless my parents are there. It just wouldn't feel right. It would be all wrong." As Margo said these words, she was shocked at the intensity with which she felt them. "Please, Emmeline. Say you'll tell her."

Emmeline was still for a long moment. Finally, she sighed. "Is there someplace you want to meet her? She'll want it to be somewhere she won't see anyone she knows."

Margo thought fast. "Schwab's Drug Store." That's where all the trouble between us started, she thought, and that's where it should all be laid to rest. "In Hollywood. Tell her I'll be there every day this week at five o'clock. I'll stay there as long as I can. She can come and meet me and still be home in time for dinner, with no one the wiser."

"All right." Emmeline set her mouth in a grave line. "All right, I'll tell her."

"Promise me."

"I promise. Now you've got to go. It's getting late. They'll be home any minute, whether the master's feeling poorly or not." Emmeline bit her lip. "But let me ask you something, Miss Margaret."

"Anything."

"Why does it matter so much to you? After everything that's happened between you, why do you still care?"

That's a good question, Margo thought. I should ask myself that. "I don't know," she said simply. "I guess, no matter what, she's still my mother."

Emmeline stood very still, looking off into the distance with an expression Margo couldn't define and didn't care to. Finally, Emmeline gave a brisk nod. "I'm going to pack some things for you," she barked. "I don't like the idea of you on the long drive back with nothing to eat."

It's not that far, Margo wanted to say, but she knew better than anyone that while physical distances may be short, psychic ones can seem insurmountable. She watched, in awe once more, as Emmeline moved swiftly around the kitchen, fixing sandwiches, wrapping up pie, pouring the rest of the coffee into a metal thermos and packing it all, along with a couple of oranges, into one of the white string bags Margo remembered her using a lifetime ago to deliver lunch to the gardeners working outside.

"Thank you," Margo said, accepting it at the door. It seemed like a woefully inadequate phrase for everything Emmeline had given her, but she could think of nothing else to say.

"You're welcome, Miss Margaret," the housekeeper said formally.

She opened her mouth as though she was about to say something else; then, suddenly, she threw her arms around Margo in a rib-cracking embrace. "I'll be at that wedding, honey child," Emmeline whispered fiercely in her ear. "Let the devil himself try and stop me."

EIGHTEEN.

Sucking in her stomach as far as it could go, Gabby tugged at the zipper of the dress, wincing a little as the sharp metal dug into her fingers. She let out a little gasp of triumph as she felt it close. Finally!

She took an experimental breath or two and smoothed the material over her hips before she took a step away from her bedroom mirror, frowning at her reflection. It zips, but does it work? On Amanda, the satin-faced black crepe with the low sweetheart neckline looked dramatic and impossibly chic, offsetting her creamy skin and copper hair to perfection.

Gabby, on the other hand, looked like she was going to a funeral.

She sighed with disappointment. It just wasn't fair. After all that dieting, all those pills, she finally had a waistline tiny enough to fit into the corseted Mainbocher Amanda had seemed to slip into so effortlessly. And still, Gabby thought glumly, still I look like the world's best-dressed Sicilian widow.

s.n.a.t.c.hing up the short length of drinking straw she'd taken from the Olympus malt shop and trimmed with a pair of nail scissors, Gabby leaned over one of the neat lines of greenish powder she'd laid out carefully on the polished surface of her dressing table. A single sharp inhale and the powder disappeared up her nose. She'd been crus.h.i.+ng up her pills and snorting them since she noticed some musician friends of Eddie taking cocaine that way in the dressing room at the Club Alabam a couple of weeks ago. It took a little time to crush the powder fine enough not to burn, but it made them work so much faster. Already her heart was racing as she leaned over to snort the second line.

Gabby wiped her nose and looked back at her reflection. I just need a little more color, that's all. Swiftly, she snapped up the little pot of blush from its place on her dressing table and brushed the bright pink powder over the apples of her cheeks and into her hairline, like Viola had taught her to do years ago to keep herself from being washed out by the footlights.

Lipstick was next, a rich scarlet carefully applied to accentuate the deep cupid's bow of her upper lip. Her big expressive eyes were her best feature-even the Olympus makeup artists, who were not exactly shy about expressing their distaste for her various other perceived facial deficiencies, regularly marveled at how they hardly had to do anything to make them pop-but Gabby spat on a cake of mascara anyway and rubbed it onto her lashes with a little brush. It can't hurt, she thought, diligently working the dark powder all around her lash line. Every little bit helps.

Leaning back from the mirror, Gabby inspected her handiwork. Not bad. Her bright cheeks and spidery lashes looked painted, true, but vivid, a little like a china doll. Her eyes dropped to the neckline of her dress-or more accurately, to the two empty pouches just beneath it. It's not that they aren't there. They just aren't quite in the right place.

She opened her top dresser drawer and took out a pair of thick woolen socks. Carefully, she folded each sock into a kind of pad and stuffed them into the cups of her bra. Much better, she thought, admiring the way her new cleavage strained against the fabric. But what if tonight was the night? What if Eddie Sharp finally reached in there and came up with two handfuls of slightly sweaty wool?

"I'd die," Gabby said aloud to her reflection. "I'd die of embarra.s.sment."

She glanced at her watch. Six-fifteen. As was their custom, Jimmy Molloy was supposed to pick her up at seven and take her back to his bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, where Eddie would be waiting to take her out again. It was the ruse they'd been playing for weeks, and it worked like a dream. Jimmy and Gabby always made sure to have their picture taken in the bar before Eddie showed up, and she and Eddie never went anywhere they were likely to be photographed. But it required coordination. Even if she could have convinced Viola to drive her down to Wils.h.i.+re for an emergency shopping trip, there was no time now. Besides, she'd want to know why Gabby needed a new dress just to go to the movies with Jimmy, and that would give the whole game away.

Reluctantly, Gabby removed the wadded-up socks and tossed them into a corner. It was no use. Until she could convince the studio-and Viola-just how urgently she needed a whole new grown-up wardrobe, Eddie was just going to have to see her in something she'd worn before.

Sighing, she flung open the door of her closet, flicking dispiritedly through the tired, mostly pink dresses that hung there. The deep pink she'd worn to the Governor's Ball was way too fancy, her blue cotton check not fancy enough. She brushed past plaid skirts and white blouses, a polka-dotted two-piece with a bow at the neck, the burgundy crepe with the white collar she'd worn the first time he took her to the Dunbar, still draped in the sachets of lavender and cedar she'd hung all over it trying to get the smell of reefer out of the fabric before Viola caught on. When she came to a yellow silk print, she paused. It was a little ... sunny for evening, but she could wear the black evening hat and black gloves Amanda had left her. Like Margo had worn with her yellow outfit at the bridal shop. It just might work.

Plus, to be perfectly honest, Gabby thought, gasping a little against the bodice of the black Mainbocher, I can actually take a breath in it. Should the opportunity present itself, she could get out of Amanda's dress-she just wasn't sure she could get back into it. She slipped the yellow dress off the hanger and tossed it onto the bed, then turned back to the dressing table, picking up the heavy lead crystal perfume atomizer to crush another pill.

"Gabrielle."

"G.o.d!" Gabby nearly jumped out of her skin at the sight of her mother in the doorway. "Don't you ever knock?"

"Why should I knock?" Viola raised an eyebrow. "What are you doing in here that you don't want me to see?"

"I don't know. Nothing," Gabby said quickly, putting down the atomizer and sweeping the loose pill and bits of leftover powder onto the floor with what she hoped was a surrept.i.tious gesture. It wasn't that she was taking anything she wasn't supposed to be, she told herself defensively, just that she didn't feel like explaining to Viola the logic-or the inspiration-behind this particular delivery system. "But, you know, I could have been dressing. I could have been undressed."

"Oh, please. I used to change your diaper," Viola said, casting a critical eye over Amanda's black dress. "It's nothing I haven't seen before. Although obviously, I hope I can't say the same about your visitor."

"My visitor?" Reflexively, Gabby crossed her arms over her deflated, sockless decolletage. "What are you talking about?"

"That bandleader," Viola hissed. "He's here. Says he wants to see you."

Oh G.o.d. Eddie Sharp. In her house. Probably sitting in one of those horrible brocade armchairs that somehow always smelled of face powder and old soup, staring at Viola's humiliating collection of frolicking porcelain kittens and that photograph Gabby was always begging her to get rid of, the one of a chubby baby Gabby cheerfully lifting her sailor dress over her head to display a cloth diaper that Viola, for all her bravado, appeared not to have changed quite fast enough. Gabby had never had a boy show up at her house before, except for Jimmy Molloy, and even he had never been farther than the vestibule. What should she do? What would Amanda do in a situation like this? Or better yet-since Gabby had begun to wonder if maybe Amanda wasn't quite the expert in the field of male-female relations.h.i.+ps that Gabby had a.s.sumed her to be-what would Margo Sterling do?

Margo would play it cool, Gabby decided. She'd act like it didn't mean anything at all, like this was just the kind of thing that happened to her all the time.

"Well, show him into the parlor, Viola," she said, in her best approximation of Margo's crisp, finis.h.i.+ng-school diction. "Give him a drink if he wants one, and tell him I'll be with him momentarily."

"Show him into the parlor?" Viola said, goggling in disbelief. "What am I, your maid?"

No, Gabby thought meanly, but somebody should be. Viola was always going on about how expensive a maid was, and how she wasn't going to pay some stranger her hard-earned money-her hard-earned money, that was a laugh!-to hang around all day snooping, eating their food, doing things Viola could just as easily do for herself, but honestly, it was positively humiliating for someone in Gabby's position not to have any household help. Jimmy Molloy lived in a hotel half the time and still had a butler and a chef; Dane Forrest had a valet; h.e.l.l, she'd even heard Amanda muse about hiring a lady's maid to help her with her hair and clothes.

"Just do it," Gabby said fiercely. "I'll be there in a second."

"Oh, yessum! I's go tell the young gentleman at once," Viola said, backing out the door in an obsequious imitation of an antebellum house slave. "And by the way, Miss Scarlett, you have lipstick on your teeth."

I bet Margo Sterling's mother never answered her own door, Gabby thought furiously as she turned back to the mirror to rub the scarlet stain off her incisor. Margo Sterling probably had a uniformed butler who said things like "she'll meet you in the library" and offered people brandy while they waited.

I need to make more money, Gabby thought as she slipped quickly into the yellow dress. No more Viola negotiating everything, being so pathetically grateful for any little crumb the studio deigned to toss their way. No. As soon as her contract was up for discussion, she was going to call Myron Selznick herself and tell him it was a thousand dollars a week or nothing, with script approval on a guaranteed three-picture-a-year deal. She'd get a big house in Beverly Hills with a big green lawn, a car of her own, a real housekeeper, and a secretary to answer her fan mail and read her scripts out loud to her to memorize. If Olympus wouldn't give her that, well, she could just go elsewhere.

And if Viola doesn't like it, she can go elsewhere too.

Eddie was in the living room, sitting in exactly the chair she was afraid he'd be in, the one with the dark spot that had been the preferred toilet facility of Piggy, Frankie's late cat, during the long years of his incontinent decline. "There she is!" he called, jumping to his feet as she entered the room. "There's my best girl!"

"Hi, Eddie." It appeared that Viola, Gabby noted with some displeasure, had not offered him a drink. Maybe it was just as well. If she was going to have any chance of being alone with him tonight, the safest thing was to get out of the house as quickly as possible, before Viola could put her foot down and/or invite herself along. Besides, Gabby thought as he leaned over to kiss her proffered cheek, he smells like he's had a few already. "You're early."

"Early?" Viola's ears p.r.i.c.ked up. "What do you mean? I thought you were going out with Jimmy tonight."

"And Eddie," Gabby said quickly. "We were all going to see some music, isn't that right?" She shot him a meaningful look, praying he wasn't too tanked to play along.

"Uh, sure," Eddie said. "That sounds right."

"And Jimmy was supposed to pick me up," Gabby continued, "but obviously there's been a change of plan. Anyway, we have to go."

"Now?" Viola looked pointedly at the clock over the mantel. "It's not even six-thirty. I thought you weren't going out until seven."