Starstruck - Love Me Part 20

"About your little problem." Gabby shrugged. "I mean, if nothing else she must know the way to keep Dane Forrest happy between the sheets. Plus, you'd be marking your turf. And maybe making an ally at the same time."

Talk about Dane that way with Diana. It was too, too terrible to think about. Margo suppressed a gag. She was desperate to change the subject. "Why do you care so much anyway?" she asked.

"Well, you know me, I love gossip," Gabby said. "And this is pretty d.a.m.n good. Plus, we're friends, aren't we, and friends worry about each other."

"Even in Hollywood?"

"Who knows, maybe I'm getting soft in my old age." Gabby grinned. "But you know, I feel like I just want you to have what Eddie and I have. To be so in love with someone and be able to express it to each other like that, it's just ..." Her eyes went dreamy. "All the pills, all the dope, that's nothing compared to this. I don't need any of it anymore if I've got Eddie. As long as I have him, I'll be all right. It's just the best feeling in the world."

Thankfully for Margo, Miss Perkins clattered back into the room before Gabby could go off on another unnervingly poetic reverie about the joys of lovemaking in the backseat of a Lincoln.

"A million apologies," the realtor said breathlessly, looking as though she were about to scatter the sheaf of paper affixed to her clipboard all over the floor. "I'm sorry to keep you waiting for so long. Unfortunately, the key to the dressing suite is nowhere to be found, and I haven't been able to reach the owner anywhere. I've already called the locksmith, though, and he should be here in a jiffy." She smoothed her hands over her smart green tweed suit. "While we wait, may I suggest another tour around the gardens? I'd love for you to take another look at the koi pond. And there is some statuary in the formal gardens that personally I'd have moved poolside, for a look of cla.s.sical Roman decadence. ..."

The realtor droned on, chattering about hydrangea bushes and artificial waterfalls, but Margo had stopped listening. She was filled with a sudden urge to do something, to act. Everyone's done everything for me, she thought. Just like Dane said, it's like I'm a child. They tell me what to wear, where to live, whom to marry, what to say. Walking out of her parents' house that night with Larry Julius was the last autonomous decision she had made.

Maybe that's what's been holding me back with Dane, Margo thought, looking around the gorgeous room at the oyster bed, the canopy of pearls. It's not that there's anything wrong with me. It's that I can't be a woman until they stop treating me like a little girl.

"... and of course"-Miss Perkins was still talking-"the fact that the house is west facing means that you'll have a gorgeous view of the sunset during evening entertainment-"

Margo cut her off unceremoniously. "It doesn't matter. Call the locksmith and tell him he doesn't need to come."

"But the dressing suite-"

"Never mind about the dressing suite. I'm sure it's fine. I'll take the house."

Miss Perkins let out an audible gasp. "You ... you will? But don't you ... I mean, perhaps you'd better speak with Mr. Forrest. ..."

"Mr. Forrest has perfect faith in me," Margo said smartly, thinking of the no-nonsense tone that had crept into her formidable mother's voice when she felt some tradesman or mechanic was trying to take advantage of her. "Besides, I'm buying this house myself. You can put all the paperwork in my name and send it to my bungalow in the morning. I'll be waiting."

She accepted the realtor's effusive thanks and excitement with gratification. It was time, Margo thought. Time to get out from under the thumb of the studio and have a house of her own, the way a woman, the way a movie star, should. Somebody had to make the decisions, and from now on it was going to be her. She'd make the house over in her image. Rip out that atrocious ballroom. Build a waterfall into the pool. Plant a privet hedge and flowering bushes all around until she felt as if she were living in a secret garden, like the book she'd loved as a child. She was going to have a home, and a life, of her own. She glanced back at the oyster bed.

And Dane is just going to have to learn to love it.

"Margie!" Gabby squealed as they made their way back outside. "This is so exciting! What a gorgeous house! We have to celebrate."

"Later." Margo glanced at her delicate diamond watch. It was almost five o'clock. "Right now, I've got to be at Schwab's."

"Oh, Margie, again?"

"Again," Margo said. "Every day until she comes."

"Who? Not Diana?"

"No." Margo felt filled with a new strength. No more lies, she thought. From now on, I tell the truth to everyone about everything. "My mother."

Helen Frobisher was an orderly woman.

Upon rising each morning, she washed her hands, then her face, in the blue willow pitcher-and-washbasin set that had stood on her dresser since her marriage, and on her mother's dresser before that. She combed and pinned her fading blond hair into a smooth and unvarying chignon with a marcasite comb as its only adornment, put on one of the fastidiously correct silk crepe dresses hanging in her wardrobe, daubed her wrists and temples with the lavender-scented eau de toilette the doctor had suggested could help alleviate her headaches, and put the stoppered bottle back in exactly the same position on her silver vanity tray.

In her drawing room, to which she retired at exactly nine-fifteen a.m., after supervising Emmeline's clearing of the breakfast things and seeing her husband out the door to his club or his mistress's house or wherever it was he went when he pretended he was going to the office, she sorted through the household doc.u.ments at a secretary with a neatly labeled row of cubbyholes: one for bills, one for invitations, one for personal letters. Everything had its place, from the comb in her hair to the feelings bundled neatly in her heart.

But the message Emmeline had relayed last week, along with her mistress's breakfast tray and a nervous curtsey, as though the old fool thought she was about to be fired on the spot-well, Helen Frobisher wasn't sure where she was supposed to put that.

She'd written it down. Written it down and then crumpled the piece of paper into a ball and stuffed it in the corner of the bottom drawer of the secretary. She retrieved it now and smoothed it out on the leather blotter, squinting at the spots where the decidedly unorderly creases had faded the pencil scratching.

Margaret. 5:00. Schwab's Sunset Boulevard. Please come.

All those years, all that sacrifice, and that was all the girl had left her. Taken everything Helen and Lowell Frobisher had offered her and thrown it back in their faces.

And now she's going to be a bride. Margaret was getting married. To some picture fellow. Some nameless slickster with no roots, no family, no ident.i.ty apart from what the movie magazines made up for him. G.o.d knew where he came from, or who, or what. He'd have sh.e.l.lacked hair, a gleaming toothpaste smile, a light step on the dance floor-and absolutely no idea how to hold his knife or address a lady or what to properly call the lavatory. An upstart piece of trash, called a gentleman only by people fooled by the cut of his too-flashy suit.

Like mother, like daughter.

Maybe it was time to tell her the truth. If Margaret was really going to marry this fellow, if she was really going to fall forever out of the grasp of Pasadena and the Frobishers, she at least ought to know who she really was and where she really came from. Why their relations.h.i.+p had never been easy. Why Helen had been able to wave her out the door without the guilt or recrimination a normal mother would feel. A natural mother.

A real mother.

She ought to be told, Helen thought with a sigh. And I guess I've got to tell her. Schwab's was as good a place as any. It couldn't be tonight, obviously. The Frobishers had dinner with the Winthrops tonight. And dinner tomorrow with the Gambles and the McKendricks, senior and junior. Nothing was worth giving up a social occasion like that.

But the night after that. Or maybe the one after that. After all, Margaret had said she'd be there every night. There was plenty of time to tell her. So she'd know who she was and whom to trust and where she belonged.

So she wouldn't make the same mistakes the Moore sisters had.

TWENTY-ONE.

"New York City!" The redcap's clear baritone rang through the car, loud enough to rouse any napping traveler. "All out for New York City, Grand Central! Welcome to the Big Apple, ladies and gents!"

New York City. At last.

Amanda gave her hat a final adjustment in the small round mirror affixed to the wall of the tiny sleeping compartment that had been her home for the past sixteen hours, since the Twentieth Century Limited had pulled away from LaSalle Street Station in Chicago. Three days on trains, watching more country than she'd ever seen in her life go past through the window, and finally, here she was.

She studied her exhausted-looking reflection, poking at her pallid cheeks, wondering if she could powder away the lilac shadows beneath her eyes. The city that never sleeps, she thought with a rueful grin. Meanwhile, I look like I need to sleep for about five years.

"Grand Central, miss." The redcap rattled the door with a knock that was polite but insistent. "Last stop."

Giving her hair a final pat, Amanda scooped up her leather traveling case and made for the exit. She stepped out onto the plush red carpet that ran the length of the sleek blue-gray train and onto the dim, smoke-filled platform. The sharp scent of diesel filled her nose as she pushed through the throngs of people waiting to embark for destinations north, skirting the uniformed porters struggling with piles of luggage, the little vignettes of joyous reunions and tearful farewells playing simultaneously all around her. Like everyone is in their own little movie.

When she emerged at last into Grand Central Terminal, Amanda gasped.

It looks like heaven. Like the beautiful watercolor of the gates of heaven in the big ill.u.s.trated Bible her Sunday-school cla.s.s back in Oklahoma had been allowed to take turns looking at as a reward for being quiet (and appropriately fearful) during the reverend's weekly sermon about fire and brimstone: the same radiant streams of golden light bouncing off arches of pale, pearly stone; the carved friezes of smiling cherubs and trumpeting angels; the celestial blue ceiling upon which heavenly bodies seemed to float.

The only thing different was the people. Streaming across the marble floor, never glancing left or right, purposeful as any crew she'd ever seen on a movie set. She stared at them in awe, eager to soak up every detail, like an anthropologist recording the rituals of an undiscovered tribe. The women's hair was sleeker, she noticed. Their coats were cut slimmer-the wasp waist was definitely back. The men all carried newspapers and wore snap-brim hats tilted low over their faces, as though to protect them from some imaginary torrent of rain. Did everyone in New York walk so fast? And how did they not b.u.mp into each other? It was like a dance, a vast number ch.o.r.eographed by some unseen, unknowable director. Like G.o.d.

Amanda giggled. Funny how I'm getting religion all of a sudden.

"Hey, watch it, will ya, toots?" The voice blared like the horn of car. Amanda scurried out of the way just in time to avoid being trampled by a mustachioed man with a bowler hat and a briefcase. Before she could apologize, he was already gone.

Wherever New Yorkers are going, Amanda thought, watching his figure recede among the teeming, speeding throng, they all act like they're about an hour late.

She finally made her way through the doors and out into the thrum of Forty-Second Street. In Hollywood, you always heard the East Coasters talk about how much they missed the Manhattan skyline, but from the sidewalk all Amanda could see was doors and windows and concrete and hardly a hint of sky.

And people. So many people, in every size and shape and color of the rainbow, united only by a mutual relentless hurry that seemed to preclude any eye contact or attempt at conversational engagement.

And yet, to her surprise, Amanda found she didn't mind. She didn't resent these swift-moving, smartly dressed people quite literally too busy to give her the time of day. Not at all. She wanted to be one of them.

She wandered over to a quieter block and stood on the corner, watching two or three people hail a taxicab before she mustered the confidence to flag one down and asked the driver if he might take her to a good hotel. He looked her up and down, sticking his head out the window like an eel peering out of its hole to check for predators, and suggested she turn around. Amanda did, and realized she had been standing all this time directly under the gilded marquee of the Waldorf Astoria.

A hotel. No wonder there are so many taxicabs.

Sheepishly, she turned to thank the driver, but he had already pulled away from the curb. She thought of a line from the script from the picture they were making at Metro, the one they'd sent to Gabby to read for before they gave it to Judy Garland, as everyone but Gabby had known they would.

"People come and go so quickly here," she said aloud.

Everything in the hushed lobby of the Waldorf Astoria, from the crystal chandeliers to the giant potted ferns to the exquisitely arranged groupings of antique gilt furniture, screamed money.

Or rather, it didn't scream; it whispered. This was not the flashy glamour of Hollywood, with its kidney-shaped swimming pools and plaster Corinthian columns as gaudy and hastily a.s.sembled as a set on a soundstage. This was old money, or at least as old as money got in the New World. The kind that was not earned but inherited, that by its very solidity had been burnished, not diminished, by the devastation of the Depression, that telegraphed a kind of aristocratic insouciance, a sort of "oh well, whatever happens, we'll never be poor." Must be nice.

Amanda approached the front desk, feeling shyer and less sure of herself than she had in years. Like Norma Mae Gustafson, an Oklahoma rube in a tacky Woolworth's dress. "h.e.l.lo?"

The clerk, unexpectedly soigne in his dark green uniform, turned to examine her. "May I help you?"

"Yes. I'd like a room, please."

"Do you have a reservation?"

"No, I'm afraid not."

The clerk shook his head slightly, as though he couldn't believe anyone could be so colossally careless as to not keep a standing reservation at the Waldorf simply as a matter of course. "I'll have to see what we have available. Do you have a preference as to the kind of accommodation?"

The cheapest kind, thought Amanda, visualizing the rapidly thinning wad of bills tucked inside the lining of her black grosgrain handbag. She was trying to figure out the most discreet way of saying exactly that when she heard a voice call out to her.

"Red! Hey, Red, is that you?"

She was so surprised to see the boy bounding toward her, his porkpie hat pushed far back on his dark hair, his s.h.i.+rt open at the throat, that she didn't recognize him at first. Only when she noticed the battered trumpet case in his hand did she put two and two together.

"Eddie," she said, blinking stupidly. "It's Eddie Sharp, isn't it?"

"Sure is. And I know you too, Amanda Farraday. It's funny, huh? We've never been properly introduced-because believe me, sister, I'd remember-and we know each other anyway. Ain't it the darndest thing."

"That's show business I guess." Amanda fiddled nervously with the clasp of her handbag.

"s...o...b..z, yeah." Eddie looked at her appraisingly. "Now. Tell me the truth." He leaned in closer, as though he didn't want the desk clerk to hear. "What's a cla.s.sy dame like you doing in a flophouse like this?"

Amanda laughed. "Fallen on hard times, I guess."

"Ain't it the truth. You oughta see my usual digs when I come here. They'd put, whaddya call it, Buckingham Palace to shame. But this joint?" Eddie cast a theatrically disgusted glare around the splendor that surrounded them. "Next stop, skid row."

"I guess your star must be falling."

"I guess so." Eddie lifted his cigarette to his lips-which, Amanda thought, were almost indecently full. A slow grin spread across his face as he exhaled. "So tell me seriously, what brings you to this neck of the woods. Business or pleasure?"

"Um ..." To be honest, I don't quite know myself. "A little bit of both, I suppose."

"Good answer. I'm doing a little bit of both myself. My band and I are opening at the Palace in two weeks. But until then"-he smiled again-"it's all about pleasure. So let me know if I can give you a hand with that half of the equation."

I bet Gabby would love that. "I don't think so, Mr. Sharp."

Eddie whistled in dismay, although by his expression he seemed in no way deterred. "Wowee zowie, it just got cold in here. Look, sweetheart, I wasn't suggesting anything untoward. Just that this city can get real lonely real fast if you've got no one to see it with."

"Who says I don't?"

"Not me." Eddie held up one hand in a sort of truce. "I bet you've got truckloads of offers. But if you find yourself craving one of those fancy salads they got here and want someone to eat it with, you know where to find me. In the meantime"-he turned to the clerk-"you take good care of this young lady. Nothing but the best for her, and don't let her tell you different. This lady is a major Hollywood star."

Shamelessly flirty, Amanda thought as she watched him head to the door, but I think he means well. At least the hotel clerk was friendlier, now that Amanda had the official imprimatur of someone he recognized, although when the bellboy opened the door of the suite he insisted was the "only possible option" for a "special friend of Mr. Sharp," her heart sank. With its Aubusson carpets, gorgeous swag draperies, and magnificent green marble tub that was so deep you had to climb down three steps to get to the bottom, she didn't even want to think about what it must cost.

"Is everything all right?" the bellboy asked anxiously, mistaking Amanda's reticence for displeasure.

"Yes," Amanda muttered, struggling to keep down the remains of breakfast suddenly churning at the base of her throat. Don't be sick, she told herself sternly. Not in front of him.

"Good." The clerk gave a little sigh of relief. "And will your maid be arriving with your luggage?"

"No. No maid."

"I see." The clerk thought a moment. "If I may, we have an excellent personal maid service here at the Waldorf, with several ladies' maids trained in all the best houses of Europe. Might I take the liberty of selecting one of our more capable girls to attend you for the duration of our stay? It's a small additional daily charge, of course-"

"No," Amanda said too quickly. "No, that won't be necessary."

"Very well." Clearly, he was miffed. "I'll leave you, then. Please alert us if there's anything else you require."

Maybe it won't matter, Amanda thought as she grudgingly peeled off a few dollar bills for his tip. She'd find Harry soon, and when she told him, he'd take care of the bill anyway. Or maybe I'll just have them charge everything to Eddie Sharp. She giggled inwardly at the thought. After all, he's the one who got me into this Popsicle stand in the first place.

Left alone, Amanda stepped out of her dress, slip, and underwear and stood naked in front of the full-length mirror.

Thoughtfully, she peered at her reflection, running her hands over her pale body, trying to gauge its size. Can you tell? Do I show? Was her waist thicker? Had her hips spread? Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s seemed fuller, she noted with approval, feeling the unaccustomed weight of them against her palms. Harry will like that.

Smiling, Amanda cradled her still-satisfactorily flat stomach in her arms. "h.e.l.lo in there," she cooed. "h.e.l.lo. You can't hear me, but I know you're in there. And I'm out here, waiting for you."

Then she laughed at the ridiculousness of it all. Look at me. Naked and talking to my stomach. Hastily, she pulled her slip back over her head and went into the bedroom to unpack.

She'd found out for sure the first morning on the train. She'd slept in and gone to a late breakfast in the dining car, when she suddenly took a turn and collapsed into the aisle, upsetting a waiter with a huge serving platter of orange juice and scrambled eggs. "Fainted dead away," said the kindly porter who carried her off and summoned the train's doctor, an elderly gentleman with a faint Southern accent and a white handlebar mustache, who was sitting beside her when she came to fifteen minutes later, sticky with orange juice and studded with sc.r.a.ps of egg, on the cot of an unoccupied sleeping compartment.

His diagnosis hadn't come as a total surprise. After all, I'm not an idiot. She knew the signs. But she'd pushed it all to the back of her mind. Somehow, none of it seemed real until the nice country doctor took her hand in his and said, "Mrs. Gustafson"-she'd given him her real name, since they were traveling through Oklahoma at the time; the "Mrs.," bless his heart, he'd inferred all on his own-"Mrs. Gustafson, congratulations. You're going to have a baby."