Die A Little Part 4

Struggling to sleep in the guest bedroom after helping clean up the damage from a late party, I can hear Bill and Alice talking on the back porch, talking soft and close.

"How is it that Lora hasn't been s.n.a.t.c.hed up, anyhow?"

"What?"

"You know. I'm just surprised she isn't married. I mean, you could say the same about me, until I met you. It's just that she seems the type to be married."

"She is the type to be married. She'll get married."

"I'm sure. I just wondered why she hasn't yet, darling. Just curious. She's so sweet and such a warm girl, and-"

"She was almost married once. About three years ago." I am listening as if it isn't me somehow they are speaking about, as if it were someone else entirely. I hold my breath and pretend to sink into the very walls.

"Oh? Did you scare him off, big brother?"

"It wasn't like that. He was a good friend of mine. A guy who used to be on the force when I first started."

"Did you play matchmaker?"

'Sort of. It just kind of happened naturally. We'd all spend time together, go to movies. He was a good guy, and it made sense." His tone is s.h.i.+fting, from cautious to grave, and she begins to respond accordingly.

"So what happened?"

"They began getting serious just as he had to leave the force. TB. It was rough, but she stood by him. You know, that's how she is."

"Oh, dear. Did he-"

"No, no. He eventually had to go to a sanatorium, way up by Sacramento or something. He didn't want her to wait for him. He was a sh.e.l.l of the guy he'd once been. Down to a hundred and twenty pounds. He couldn't bring himself to continue with her. He did the right thing. He said, 'Bill, I can't let her tie herself to me like a sash weight,' he said. So he broke it off."

"He isn't still up there-"

"No. They wrote to each other for a while, but it wasn't the same. Last I heard, he married one of the nurses there and they settled. He works for an insurance company or something."

It really wasn't like this, was it? Was that how simple it was, so explicable in a few sentences, a few turns of phrase? Wasn't it months of high drama, so wrenching, so unbearably romantic that I'd conveniently forgotten that I never really cared that deeply for the amiable, square-jawed Hugh Fowler to begin with?

It had absorbed all the emotional energies of Bill and myself for a fall and winter and an early spring, and then, suddenly, it was as though he'd never been a part of our lives at all. His second month at River Run Rest Lodge and we couldn't remember when we'd next be able to make the long drive up the coast.

And then other things emerged, other things that left no room, no time, no s.p.a.ce for that sweet-faced young man who, so ill, would shudder against me despite his height, his gun holster, his still-broad (but not for long) shoulders. Was that it?

"How very tragic," says Alice. "Like out of a movie. It could be a movie. Poor Lora."

"She'll find someone and it'll be right," Bill says firmly.

I feel my eye twitch against the pillow. I press my hand to it, hard.

"Well, I'm going to help."

"Oh, Alice, I wouldn't-"

"I know lots of wonderful men. Men from the studios."

"I don't think Lora would want to date anyone in the movie business. That's not Lora."

"Oh, brothers don't know," Alice says. "And I can't bear to see her with these sad sacks from school. These men with the saggy collars and shoes like potatoes. I'm going to get her with a real sharpshooter. If you had your way ..."

"Alice, you don't know Lora. She won't-"

"Just watch me."

I can hear her smile even if I don't see it. It doesn't seem real, that this is me they are talking about. I look out the window, at the heavy jacaranda branches trembling gently against the pane. I think, for a moment, about the men Alice seems to know and it's hard to believe they really exist. That they could enter my life, my small world. What would it mean if they came cras.h.i.+ng in the same way Alice has?

As my cheek leans against the gla.s.s, I realize suddenly how hot my face is. I press my hand to it, surprised.

It is a long time before I fall asleep.

With this forewarning, I am prepared when, after one of what Alice refers to as my "sad sack" dates, she phones me and announces she is ready to play matchmaker.

"His name is Mike Standish. Can you believe it? I call him Stand Mannish."

"What does he do? He's not an actor."

"No, no, of course not. He's with the publicity department. He's delicious, Lora. He's a huge, strapping man. He's like a tree, a redwood. He's a lumberjack."

I am always surprised by what Alice thinks might make a man sound attractive to me.

"I don't know."

"Lora, he's very smart and accomplished. For G.o.d's sake, he went to Col-um-bia University."

"He doesn't want to date a schoolteacher in Pasadena."

"He wants to date you. I set it all up. He's taking you to Perino's and then to the Cocoanut Grove. The only question is what you should wear."

"When is all this supposed to happen?"

Why not, for G.o.d's sake. Why not.

"One thing, Lora, one thing," she says, and it's almost a whisper, a voice burrowing straight into my head. "This is what he does: first thing, he warns you that he's going to charm you, and that warning becomes part of his charm."

"Hey, Shanghai Lil, come over here," my brother says, waving his arm toward Alice.

"I think that you no love me still." She pouts, imitation geisha, as she pads over in her brand-new Anna May Wong-style silk pajamas.

"See how nice it can be staying home on a Sat.u.r.day night." He smiles peacefully, tucking her into his arms.

"Until you get the call." She sighs.

"Not tonight. Promise."

"Your sister will have fun enough for us all." She turns from inside the serge curl of my brother's arm and looks to me.

"Oh? Where are you going?" He straightens up suddenly and peeks out over Alice's blue silk to see me.

I pause.

"Just to dinner, I think. And then dancing maybe." I stare at my lipstick, then dab a bit more on for good measure.

"Mike Standish shows a lady a good time." Alice slides out from Bill's arms and slinks over to me.

"We can go out, too, Alice. I just thought-"

"That's not what I meant," Alice says, curling up in front of me as I sit in the wing chair.

"Maybe we can join them. I-"

"No, no, no, darling." She reaches out for my lipstick to add still more. Her face looms over me, and her eyes hang big as saucers. "Besides, they don't want old marrieds along, believe me."

"I'm sure we'd be glad for the company," I say, blotting with the handkerchief she holds out to me. "The more the merrier."

"I'd like to meet this Standish guy," my brother says suddenly. "Have him in for a drink."

Alice shakes her head and slides back into his lap. "Easy, Judge Hardy. You're not her father, after all. You'll meet him soon enough. Besides, doesn't Lora want some privacy? Some life separate from family."

She looks at me as she says it, and there is a wistfulness there, a kind wistfulness that, despite everything, I find myself warming to, and secretly thanking her for.

Two hours later, this: "I could tell you stories, honey." Mike Standish smiles. "Stories to make Fatty Arbuckle blush. The four-o'clock-in-the-morning calls I've gotten, the places I've had to peel them off of the floor, the circus freaks I've had to pay off to keep these little discretions, these quaint peccadilloes out of the papers."

"You sound proud of yourself."

"As they say, life is too short to bother with Puritan hypocrisies. Besides, it's not me racking up time in the booth with Father McConnell. I just clean up," he says, still smiling, rubbing his hands together as if to wash them.

"My grandmother would have called those devil's dues," I say noncommittally, removing the maraschino from the bottom of my drink.

"Your grandmother didn't know what she was missing." He winks, cuff links flas.h.i.+ng in the soft light, summoning the waiter over for another round.

A few days later, as I arrive to help Alice make cookies for the senior banquet, I see that Lois Slattery is back again. I take a chair as Alice fusses over the moon and star shapes. The cookie cutter, in her frustration, keeps slipping from her hand.

"Lois, if you get one cigarette ash near these cookies, I'm going to tear your hair out."

"Better men than you have tried," Lois slurs, unaccountably nodding to me before leaning back in her chair.

"I just don't have the patience today." Alice sighs, wiping her face with the back of her hand.

"Can't the blue bird scouts or whoever manage with store-bought?"

"No, no." Alice's crimson-tipped fingers steady themselves and she manages to get the first perfectly cut star safely onto the sheet.

Lois turns and looks at me. "She gave up Tinseltown for this."

"What a sacrifice," Alice says with a faint smile. "I saw enough of the business from my mother to know where it gets you. I didn't even want to end up working for the studios, but who would turn down union wages?"

I nod, as she seems to want affirmation.

"Still," she adds, "it was a rotten job, running measuring tape over starlets all day."

"That was how we met," Lois says, eyeing me.

Alice, intently at work, raises her hand to Lois to ensure silence as she lifts a pair of moonbeam cookies onto the sheet.

Lois bends forward again with a deep red smile. "You know what that looks like?"

Alice looks at Lois expressionlessly but with a firm lock of the eyes. Lois breaks the gaze and turns to me. "Do you recognize it, Loreli?"

"I guess that'd be a moonbeam, no?"

"Does it remind you of anything?"

"No," I say, feeling like the girl at school who was never let in on the game.

"Relating to a certain brother darling?" Lois waves her cigarette over the cookie and then toward the kitchen door. Alice stares motionless.

"Pardon?"

"You know. I can't say I've seen it myself, but... the scar, doll."

"Oh, the scar from his accident," I say, trying not to picture the horrible night of the a.s.sault. The scar came from the sharp edge of the radiator when he fell after the baseball bat blows from the young suspect. It is right above his hip.

"I haven't seen it since the hospital," I add. "I suppose I've never seen it as a scar. Only as a wound." I feel my throat go a little dry. It seems strange to have us all sitting here, dwelling on this.

"Lois," Alice says with an edge, hands still, hovering over the cookies. Lois returns the tough gaze, bites her lip a bit, shrugs with effort, and looks down at her pointy, scuffed shoes.

Later that night, at the fabulous Alice-inspired c.o.c.ktail party at the Beauvais house, Alice and I drink gimlets together, and the heat wilting us, the crowd pounding in, we draw closer and I've forgotten everything but how much, everything else aside, she only wants it all to be good, to be good and fine.

"Lois, I told Lora to-I mean"-Alice giggles, correcting herself tipsily-"Lora, I told Lois to stop coming by."

"Oh," I say, helping her steady her tilting drink.

"Bill doesn't really like her around. He thinks she's bad news. Which, of course, she is."

"She is?"

"Nothing serious, of course," Alice a.s.sures. "I'm just trying to wean her off me, but it's hard because we've known each other so long."

Then Alice tugs me closer to her, nearly pressing her mouth to my ear as we nestle on the Beauvaises' sofa. It is then that she tells me how they met, years before, at the studio.