Belinda Page 36

  I was dying inside. Dying. And yet I was saying these things to her. And she kept staring in the same cloudy way and then she said:

  “You get out of my house, Belinda. You will never ever again live under the same roof with me.”

  “You got it!” I said to her.

  But Uncle Daryl had come past her and he grabbed me by the arm. “Give me your passport, Belinda,” he said. He was pulling me out of the room.

  “The hell I will,” I said to him. He shoved me into the back of the limousine. And I held my purse in both hands. “I mean it, don’t you try to take it,” I said to him. He didn’t answer. But he didn’t let go of my arm.

  I looked back at the house as we were pulling out. I didn’t know whether Mom was watching or not. Then I realized she would tell Marty the things I’d said to her. And Marty would never understand what had happened, that I was trying to fight her and Uncle Daryl and that I’d never hurt anybody like that.

  I was crying again when we reached the airport. Uncle Daryl jerked me out onto the pavement. People were staring. Everything I owned in the world was being taken out of the trunk. I never saw so many suitcases. They must have packed up everything at the house as well as the Chateau.

  “Go inside,” he said to me. And I went with him, but I was still holding my purse tight. He is not going to do this, I was thinking. I am not getting on any plane for London with him. No, sir, as he. always says.

  People were staring at me because I was crying. And my arm where he was holding it had gone numb. The man who had driven the limo was checking my luggage. He said they wanted to see my passport. I looked at Uncle Daryl and I knew it was now or never.

  “Let me go,” I said. He dug his fingers in, and when I felt the pain through the numbness, something snapped in my head. I turned and with my arms tight around my purse I shoved my knee right into his groin with all I had.

  I ran through the airport. I ran like I haven’t run since I was a kid. I ran through one set of doors after another and down escalators, and back up them and finally out onto the pavement and right up to an open cab.

  “Hurry please, mister,” I was screaming, frantic. “I’ve got to get to the Greyhound Station in Los Angeles. My mom’s leaving from there. If I miss her, I’ll never see my mom again.”

  “Go ahead, take her,” said this poor guy who’d been getting into the cab.

  Just before we made the final turn, I saw Uncle Daryl come running out there at the cab stand, but he had not seen me. At the bus station I switched cabs. I did it again at the Union train station, and at the bus station one more time.

  And then I went right back to LAX and took the next plane to New York.

  It had been six years since I had seen New York City, and I arrived there tired, dirty, and very scared. I had on white jeans and a white pullover sweater, which had been OK for California in early November, but it was already freezing in New York.

  I knew Dad’s salon in Paris had been called simply G.G., but it had never been listed in any book. Well, the New York phone directory didn’t have it either. As for going ahead to some big hotel, I didn’t dare.

  I bought some overnight things and a bag at the airport, and went to the Algonquin and checked in with the cash I had on hand so I didn’t have to give them my right name. Then I tried to get some sleep.

  But I kept waking up thinking somebody was breaking into the room. I was terrified that Uncle Daryl had traced me and the police would come. And, of course, I had no intention of ever carrying out my threat to testify against Marty. That had been pure bullshit.

  Which is why I had to be damned careful about G.G. when I found him, too.

  Well, it was five o’clock New York time when I finally gave up on sleep altogether. And I went out to look for Dad.

  Everybody in New York had heard of G.G. naturally, but the doormen and cab drivers I talked to did not know the location of his famous salon. One said he worked strictly free-lance. Others that it was a private house. Finally I took a cab to the Parker Meridien, just to cash some traveler’s checks, went back to the Algonquin, and set out to find Ollie Boon.

  Now Blair Sackwell had said Ollie’s show had just opened, so I asked the hotel concierge what he knew. Yes, Ollie Boon’s new Broadway opera, Dolly Rose, was playing on Forty-seventh Street, just around the corner from the hotel.

  Forty-seventh Street was jammed with limos and taxis when I got there. Lots of people were giving up and going the last two blocks to the theaters on foot. I ran right up to the ticket taker at the door and said I had to see Ollie Boon, I was his niece from Cannes, and it was a pure emergency, they had to get word to him right away. I took one of the giveaway programs, tore a page out of it, and wrote: “It’s Belinda. Top Secret. Have to find G.G. Top Secret. Help.”

  An usher came back almost immediately to take me down through the little theater and out the side door to backstage. Ollie was talking on the phone in a cramped little dressing room right under the stairs. He played some sort of master of ceremonies figure in the musical, so he was already dressed in top hat and tailcoat and completely made up.

  He said: “G.G.’s at home, precious. Here, talk to him on the phone.”

  “Daddy, I have to see you.” I blurted out at once. “It has to be top secret.”

  “I’11 come to get you, Belinda. I’m so excited. Go down to Seventh Avenue in fifteen minutes. Watch for Ollie’s car.”

  The limousine was there when I got there, and in a second I was safe with Daddy and holding on to him in the backseat. It took us fifteen minutes of nosing through New York traffic to get to Ollie’s SoHo loft. And during that time I gave Dad the headlines, more or less, Mom’s threat to ruin him if I came to him, her story that she’d driven him out of Paris and how I’d gotten myself into an awful mess.

  “I’d like to see her do it again,” he said. He was really fuming when we got to the apartment. And to see Dad mad is strange. He is so gentle and so kind, it is almost impossible to realize he is angry. He sounds like a child playing angry in a school play. “She did it in Paris, all right, because she owned the salon. She gave it to me, you know, but she never put it in my name. Well, G.G.’s in New York is my apartment. And my appointment book is the only thing that counts.”

  Then I knew it was true that she’d driven him out of Paris, and my heart sank. But Daddy was so wonderful, so excited to see me. We were hugging and kissing the way we had at Cannes. He looked perfectly wonderful to me, all six foot four of him, and maybe there is that special thing between us, too, because I see in Daddy’s blue eyes and blond hair the genes that are in me.

  But to tell you the honest truth, almost anybody would love G.G. G.G. is so sweet and so kind.

  Ollie’s place was out of a magazine, an old warehouse with a million pipes and ceiling braces all carefully gilded, and miles of hardwood floor as shiny as glass. Rooms were arrangements of antiques on various carpets under spot lights. Bits and pieces of wall existed just to hold paintings or mirrors or both. We sat down on two brocade couches facing each other near the fireplace.

  “Now, tell me what really happened?” Dad said.

  Now, as I mentioned before, I had not confided in anyone all these months. I have by nature never been a conrider. Mom’s drinking, the pill taking, the suicide attempts—these were my life and they were secrets to be kept. But now I started talking and things just poured out.

  And it was agony to tell it, to range back and forth over Cannes and Beverly Hills and try to put it all together, but once I started I could not stop.

  And I began to see things in a different perspective, even with all the halts and backtracking and crying and disclaimers. I mean, a big ugly pattern started to come clear. But I cannot tell you enough how much this hurt me to tell it, how against my nature it was to drag everything out.

  I mean, I was lying to hotel clerks and doctors and reporters before I could remember. And, of course, we had all of us always lied to Mom. “You go in there and tell her
she looks pretty, that she’s just fine”—that’s what Uncle Daryl would say before her press conferences in Dallas, when she was shaking and she looked awful and the makeup could hardly hide the hangover bruises under her eyes. “You tell your morn not to worry, you don’t want to go off to school anymore, you’re going to stay with her on Saint Esprit from now on.”

  “Don’t you talk about the accident, don’t you talk about the drinking, don’t you talk about the reporters, don’t you talk about the movie, everything’s going to be just fine, just fine, just fine, just fine.”

  Lies, that’s all it ever was. And in my head? Fragments, puzzle pieces that were never fitted together. And this telling it even to my darling dad was like the final betrayal, the final break from Mom.

  What I am writing to you now is the second real telling, and it is not any easier as I sit here thousands of miles away from you alone in this empty room.

  Anyway G.G. didn’t ask many questions. He just listened, and when I was finished, he said:

  “I hate this guy, Marty, absolutely hate him.”

  “No, Dad, really you don’t understand,” I told him. And I pleaded with him to believe me when I said that Marty loved me, that Marty had never meant to let things go the way they did.

  “I thought he was an Arab hijacker when I met him,” G.G. said. “That he was going to hijack that yacht at Cannes. I hate him. But OK, you say he loves you. I can believe somebody like him could love you, but not because of him, because of you.”

  “But, Daddy, this is the thing. I can’t do what I threatened. I’d never tell the police things about Marty. And I think Mom knows that. What I have to do is lie low.”

  “Maybe she knows it and maybe she doesn’t. And maybe if she calls your bluff there are other things you can do. You’ve got a hell of a stop here, Belinda. And she knows that. She always knows what’s really going on.”

  I was puzzled by his words, hell of a story. And I was also scared of what Mom could do. Maybe she couldn’t bust Daddy’s business in New York City, but what about the question of custody? I was a minor here as well as in California. Could she charge Daddy with harboring a runaway or something like that?

  Ollie got home at midnight, wearing only a pair of jeans and a pullover sweater, a real after-theater switch. Dad cooked us all some supper and we ate, sitting on cushions at a round table near the fire. And then G.G. insisted we tell Ollie the whole thing.

  “I can’t go through this,” I told him. But he said he’d been with Ollie for five years, he loved Ollie, and Ollie would never tell a living soul.

  Now Ollie is sweet and gentle like my dad. He is a tall wiry man. He used to be a dancer but, now in his seventies, he cannot dance anymore. But he is still graceful and very elegant with bushy gray hair, and he has never had the plastic surgeons work on him, so his face is full of patience and wisdom, too. At least it seemed that way to me. OK. Tell him, I finally said.

  Dad started using some of my same language. Only thing was he started at the beginning, the way I have in this written account. He started with Susan coming to the island and then us going to Cannes.

  “Some story isn’t it?” G.G. said to Ollie. Ollie was sitting there with his glasses pushed up into his hair. He was looking at me really kindly. For a long while he didn’t say anything, then he spoke in this very dramatic and kind of theatrical voice.

  “So they cut your movie,” he said, “and they cut your career and then they cut your love affair.”

  I didn’t answer him. As I’ve already explained, it was so against my grain to talk about Mom that I was raw all over. Ollie’s sympathy was confusing me. I don’t think I will ever be much of a conrider. I don’t have enough faith in talking about things. The tension just builds.

  “And then they wanted to cut you out completely,” he continued. “The Swiss school was the final exit. And you refused to be written out of the script.”

  “Yeah, I guess that is what happened,” I finally said.

  “Sounds like Mother suddenly found out you were competition and Mother could not handle that at all.”

  “You can say that again,” G.G. said. “Mother cannot stand competition.”

  I started arguing: “But it wasn’t planned like that, Mr. Boon, really it wasn’t. She loves Marty and that is all she can understand.”

  Then Ollie made a sort of speech. “You’re being.kind to her, darling,” hc said, “and please call me Ollie. And let me tell you something about your mother, though I’ve never had the pleasure. I know this kind of person. I’ve known them all my life. They get the sympathy of others with what passes for insecurity. But what really motivates them is a vanity so immense most of us can not conceive of it. Insecurity is simply a disguise. I don’t think from what you’ve told me that men mean much to your mother. You, her friends Jill and Trish, a circle of dazzling acquaintances, I suspect this is what your mother always wanted. And she only found it necessary to seduce and marry Mr. Moreschi when she realized he was in love with you.”

  This rang true. Horribly true. Yet my loyalty to Mother made it hurt very deep. But I remembered that time in the limo when Marty had kissed me. I remembered the look on Mom’s face. Had that been the death knell, that little kiss?

  But I argued. I told Ollie that Marty had taken care of Mom the way no other man had ever done. I could still remember Mom’s boyfriends in the early days, demanding supper, asking where their clothes were, wanting money from Mom for booze and cigarettes. Mom would cook for two hours for Leonardo Gallo, and then he’d get up and throw the plate at the wall. Marty was the first man who took care of Mom.

  “Of course,” Ollie said, “and the babying would have been enough for her until you became a threat.”

  I was agreeing, but it was too ugly and too complicated still.

  Then Dad said it really didn’t matter what made Bonnie tick, I was here now, and I could live in New York, near to him and Ollie and that he would handle whatever Bonnie tried to do.

  Ollie didn’t answer, and then he said in a real small voice:

  “That’s all very nice except for one factor, G.G. United Theatricals is my producer. They financed Dolly Rose.”

  I saw the two of them exchange looks.

  Then Ollie made another speech like this:

  “Look, darling. I understand your position. When I was fifteen, I was waiting tables in Greenwich Village and playing bit parts on the stage every time I had the chance. You’re a big girl, and I’m not going to try to sell you any bill of goods about going home and letting yourself be packed off to school. But I won’t lie to you either. United Theatricals is the biggest break I’ve had in the last twenty years of putting it together with Scotch tape on Broadway. Not only have they financed this musical, which doesn’t make them a whole hell of a lot of money by the way, they’re talking about financing the picture. And I would direct that picture, an opportunity I badly want.

  “Of course, they wouldn’t shut down Dolly Rose. They couldn’t, but the picture? And the picture after that? One word from your mother and her studio executive husband and their interest in Ollie Boon would dry up overnight. No cross words, no explanations, just, ‘Thanks for calling, Ollie, we’ll get back to you.’ And I’d never get a direct line to Ash Levine or Sidney Templeton again.”

  And then something came up which seemed very small at that moment, but it was to mean a great deal later on. Ollie went on with his speech. Dolly Rose was a lavish antebellum New Orleans piece, real Broadway opera, but the property he dearly wanted to make into a movie musical was Crimson Mardi Gras, a book written by Cynthia Walker, the southern writer, and guess who owned the rights? United Theatricals, which had made the straight movie in the fifties with Alex Clemcntine, and the miniseries a few years back. Dolly Rose was good Broadway, but it would never travel. The movie was iffy. But Crimson Mardi Gras? It would run forever. And the movie would be a smash.

  OK, I understood Ollie’s position, I said. And I really did.

 
I had grown up on location in Europe. I knew what it meant to lose the backing. I could remember a thousand arguments, phone calls, struggles to get the food trucks and the wardrobe trucks and the cameras just to stay put. I started to get up from the table.

  But Ollie said: “Sit down, darling, I’m not finished. I’ve been frank with you about my position. Now what about yours?”

  “I’m leaving, Ollie, I’m going out on my own. I’ll wait tables in Greenwich Village. I can do that, too, you know. And besides, I’ve got some money of my own.”

  “Do you really want to be running from the police or from your family’s private detectives? Do you want that kind of thing right now?”

  “Of course, she doesn’t, Ollie!” Dad said suddenly, and for the first time I realized how angry he was with Ollie. He was glaring at Ollie.

  But Ollie didn’t seem to take this very seriously. He just took Dad’s hand, like to calm him down. Then he said to me:

  “Then what you’ve got to do, dearest, is bluff these people. Bluff them hard. Tell them you want your freedom here and now and you will use the story and, believe you me, it is a terrific story, and you can use it not only with the authorities but with the press. But you cannot be connected with me when you do it, dearest, because I might very well lose my backers, no matter who wins your little war.”

  This time when I stood up, he didn’t tell me to sit down. And this is what I told him and Dad both:

  “You keep calling it my story. You keep saying what a hell of a story it is. And you tell me to use my story. But it’s not mine, you see, that’s the awful part. It’s Mom’s story and Susan’s story and Marty’s story, and I can’t hurt all those people. I mean, you can be sure that the press would bring Final Score into it, and then this studio, this great big power we’re all cringing in front of, would cut Susan loose as well. I can’t do anything, don’t you see that? Not anything. It’s like I don’t own the rights to my own story! The rights belong to the grownups involved.”