All That Glitters (44 page)

She recalls with some accuracy how she’d come into Feldy’s studio that rainy night when Bud was sitting on the corner of the makeshift stage he’d built at the workshop, how he’d taken her coat and made coffee and the way they’d talked. He’d made her feel at home right away.

“He was so good-looking, wasn’t he?” April said. “What a guy. A girl’d be lucky to get a fella like that, I thought. I wondered what he’d be like, making love with him.” I marvel at her words. Candid confessions such as this are not often to be heard from her lips. I wish I was a doctor so I could interpret them, but I’m not, so I bumble along as best I can.

“What
was
he like?” I ask boldly.

“Oh…” She’s a bit taken aback, shy even; but that’s to be expected: my dumb question. “He was giving. Very giving. He always wanted it to be good for me. But I don’t know, maybe I’m not any judge of that.”

“Why not?” She doesn’t answer. “Why not, Anna?” I persist.

She looks up quickly. “What?”

“Anna? Isn’t that your name—Anna?”

She laughs out loud, splaying her fingers at her chest. “Oh. Yes, I suppose it is, isn’t it? I’ve got so used to ‘April,’ though, these past years.” She thinks, presses fingers to her lips, glances sidewise at me. “Pretty name, April.”

“I think so. How’d you get it?”

She comes right out with it. “Frank gave it to me.”

“When?”

“Oh gosh—back there somewhere.”

“April? What year are we in?”

“What
year
?”

“Yes, what year is it?”

“Why, it’s… nineteen… nineteen… hm. Oh gosh—fifty-something?”

“Fifty what?”

“Oh darn, I just don’t know, Charlie, I’m sorry….” She drawls the words in mock despair. Then her face shows impatience and frustration. “Let me think a sec,” she mutters, making fists on her knees. She thinks hard, muttering and pushing at the tips of her fingers as though ticking off the years. “I was born in nineteen thirty-nine.”

“That’s right, you were,” I encourage. This is really good, I’m feeling excited, it’s creeping up my back. “Nineteen thirty-nine. So what year is this, then?”

She gazes at me with a pleading expression, as if to say “Please, Charlie, make it be nineteen sixty again.” I quickly consider. If I tell the truth, she may be so shocked she’ll vanish again and I won’t be able to reach her. Her being this way is so good, so wonderful—reaching her again, seeing April, not the dead doughfaced Anna. I want to hold on, clutch her, keep her here. It’s as if she’d lived for a long time in a dark cave and suddenly she appears at the cave opening, standing out in the light again, blonde and beautiful. April in tennis shorts and sunstreaked hair.

“Look,” I say, “I want to see you get well, we all do. The doctors and nurses, Mrs. Kraft, everyone wants to see you get well. Try, April,
try,
won’t you, for Frank’s sake? Think, honey, if Frank was around he wouldn’t want to see you in here, in this place.”

“I know. Don’t you think I know that? But where would I go, anyway? If I
were
well again, where would I
go
? Who would help me then?”

God, help me, I pray, please help me to say the right things. Don’t let me botch it up, don’t let me send her back into the cave. Suddenly I, too, am swept up by the release of emotion; I want so desperately to keep that glimmering light from going out again and leaving her in the dark.

I talk encouragingly—about the beach, since I know how much she loves it. “I’ve got a place out at Venice now, you’d like it. You could come there and stay.”

“Oh, I love Venice,” she says. “I was only there once. For a weekend, actually.” I realize she means the other Venice, in Italy, not the beach, but anything’s better than her silence. Keep her talking about Venice, about Capri. She remembers all right—about the
paparazzi
, the baying hounds—but she’s not fearful. She handles the memory. Bud—Frank—Frank—Bud…

“The only two men I ever made love with, you know,” she says.

No, I didn’t know, but I’m not surprised. It’s the kind of girl she was. She never slept around, everyone knew that.

“You loved them both.”

“Yes. I did. No, I didn’t, either. Frank, I loved Frank, that’s all. I married Kit but it wasn’t the same. You can understand, can’t you?
Can’t
you, Chazz?” She grips my hand so hard it hurts. I wince but hang on.

“Yes, sure I understand. I think I do. Only, April—why not—why don’t you try to explain it to me so I’m sure I have it all right? I know you and Frank couldn’t get together while he was still married to Frances, but—well, Frances died, didn’t she? And Frank was free to marry again. Everyone thought you would.”

“I guess everyone did.”

“Why didn’t you marry him, then?”

“Too late. It was too late then.”

“Why?
Why
too late?”

I was having trouble getting through to her; at every word I was afraid she’d slip away and get lost again.

“Why?” she wondered along with me. “I was afraid. By then they’d just about hammered me flat. The publicity, the notoriety, being chased after all the time, all those reporters, cameras… I didn’t want to be a part of it anymore. Always hiding, ducking in and out of places, wearing dark glasses, as if dark glasses could protect you. Like Jackie Onassis—anything to shut them out. But all dark glasses do is keep the sun out; they don’t keep out the world.
Nothing
keeps out the world. And, Charlie—people are so cruel, you know? Maybe not cruel exactly, but they want what they want when they want it. They don’t like being told no or ‘get away.’”

“They want their pound of flesh.”

“Yes, that’s it, flesh, they want the flesh. ‘In Person.’ ‘For One Week Only.’ But not just that. They want your mind, too. They want—inside. They really want to get inside your head.”

I see her watching me, earnestly, anxiously, with such appeal in her eyes. What she has paid, I think; the awful price. And for what? A stardom she never wanted, bestowed by Frank, who thought he saw a good bet and bet heavily—and lost.

I find myself thinking of that tootsie Peg Entwhistle and her leap off the Hollywood sign—smack into the cactus patch. April’s had been a far more spectacular leap; she was a regular Flying Wallenda, and without the net. She’ll stand as a prime example of what can happen to one more pretty girl who gets stung by the cinema asp, who lets herself be persuaded along the paths of filmdom.

Your name in lights is a pretty rare sight, all those light bulbs flashing on and off, blink—April—blink—Rains—blink blink blink, they lay down a red carpet from the curb to the lobby, people scream and claw and shove autograph books in your face or even matchbooks, napkins, you proffer your signature—one more among thousands—the newsreel and TV cameras whirr, “Look this way, April,” “Hey April, how’s your sex life?,” and the studio bosses give you the fisheye, wondering exactly how much you’re worth on the hoof, the movie hoof, the butchers weighing out their pounds of flesh, checking to see how long before the tits and ass fall, checking your grosses. It’s all built on grosses, of course, grosses are the bottom line. “We love ya, April,” but there’s that taint, like fish gone bad. It doesn’t take so long to do a nosedive; no matter how far or long the fall, the end’s the same: splat. Some people would be better off with a frontal lobotomy than a movie contract.

“Frankie—?” she says.

“
Charlie
, honey, I’m Charlie, remember?”

“Oh.” She makes a charming grimace. More and more I see the April of old, the sweet April I used to know. But there was something I wanted to get back to. “April, honey, when you married Bud—”

“Yes? What? That’s all right, go on, ask it.” Bravely. She isn’t afraid to face things. All the shock treatments in the world couldn’t bring this moment about.

“You turned Frank down and married Bud instead. But you say you didn’t love him—Bud, I mean. I’m having trouble with that.”

“Oh, Bud was sweet, he really was. But I couldn’t love him. I loved Frank, you see. Only Bud—he was—determined. You know? You might not realize, I don’t think many people did, but when Bud really set his mind to something, a Sherman tank couldn’t stop him—he just couldn’t be deflected. And… well… he decided he wanted me and he made up his mind he was going to get me. He just kept on and on, it’s all he ever talked about. ‘Marry me marry me marry me.’ And of course I wasn’t the kind of girl who—who’d live with him, without the ring and license, I mean. And there was the baby, too. Frank’s baby—poor thing—God, I loved that baby so, that dear little thing, eleven days it lived. Frank Junior. I just—oh, I don’t know!”

She was growing highly emotional; the tears welled, she choked up, and her hands started to tremble. That baby was almost twenty years ago, and it was painful to see how much it still meant to her, how deep the cut went. Indeed, time does not heal all wounds. I gripped her hands between mine and squeezed hard; after a while she became calm again and went on.

“Well, I guess that’s what motherhood’s all about, huh? I wanted another one, I wanted lots and lots of them, but… And Bud would have been such a good father, what a shame. I paid for it. I got paid back in spades. Whatever that means—getting paid in spades.”

And Bud, I ventured, how did he feel?

“Oh, Bud.” She made a vague gesture. “Bud thought it was all just great. Really grand. Every day was the Fourth of July. By saying yes I’d made him the happiest guy in the world. Funny, how that kind of thing can make you so happy. Must be love. There was a time if I ever could have married Frank,
I’d
have been happy just that way. You go ga-ga over somebody and you can’t get it out of your head. Love’s a beautiful thing, I guess—when it works. Never worked for me, though.”

She paused, as though searching for something, then shrugged and went on.

“It worked for Bud okay, though. He was on Cloud Nine the minute I said yes. Winchell said we were getting spliced. Spliced—I thought that was funny. Well, we tried, we both really tried,” she said, “but it just wasn’t any good. I never ought to have married him in the first place, not when I felt the way I did about Frank. But I really liked him, and so I made up my mind we’d make a go of it, that maybe one day I’d really come to feel about him the way I felt about Frank. Only it never happened.

“Then he had the accident and he was crippled, in that damnable chair, and somehow I thought it was all my fault. If I hadn’t been off my horse, sitting on that damn stump. But I made up my mind I’d be the best wife for him; I tried, I really did. But I couldn’t fool him, you see. He was so smart, Bud, in his big dumb way, he understood me, and he knew what was going on. He knew I didn’t want to make love with him, and that whatever I’d tried to do for him, I still wanted to be with Frank.”

“Did you ever tell him that?”

“Good Lord, no, I tried as hard as I could never to let on. But I could have saved myself the trouble. He knew all right. And I saw that no matter what I did or tried to do, it would never be enough for Bud, he’d always want more. After a while he became bitterly disappointed because we couldn’t have children. In the end I think that was what he wanted most. I said, Let’s adopt, but he had this notion that an adopted child wouldn’t really be his. His father had been adopted, there were problems there, he was a drunk and once tried to kill Bud’s mother, so in Bud’s head all adopted children were like his father.

“Oh, what’s the use? We’d talked about it so often I didn’t want to hear any more. The night before the—the accident, we went outside. I said he should divorce me. He’d been drinking some, he got mad, said I was just looking for an out so I could marry Frank. That wasn’t true, I know it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have done that to Bud. I truly wanted him to be happy, just the way I wanted Frank to be happy—but it just wasn’t possible. Next day, on the skeet range—that’s why—”

She stopped abruptly, looked at me steadily for a moment, then dropped her eyes.

“That’s why what?” I asked. “What is it?”

“That’s why what happened happened. The shooting. It wasn’t an accident, you know. Bud was too good with a gun—he’d never have been careless like that.”

I was grappling with it. “Do you really mean it wasn’t an accident?”

“Certainly not. They bought my story, that’s all.”

“What story?”

“The one I told them. That when he was cleaning his gun, the butt got caught on the chair arm and when he jerked it free it went off—accidentally. But he did it on purpose. He did. It was suicide. He even left a note, but I tore it up.”

I digested this in shocked silence. “Do you know why?” I asked after a moment.

“Can’t you guess? It doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure it out. A child could.”

I listened hard, not wanting to miss a word. “What did the note say?” I asked.

She gave me a twisted smile. “It said, ‘This is the only way I can fix things. At least one of us should be happy. I love you.’” Her eyes grew wet and she began to weep quietly.

I waited and when she was calmer I said, “And now you feel guilty. About Bud, I mean. Have you talked about this with the doctors?”

“Sure, what else? Only there isn’t any answer in talking about it. It’s still there.”

“If you talk about your guilt, it’ll go away.”

She shook her head doggedly. “Wrong, Chazz. Not this time, this isn’t ever going to go away. I don’t mean I hang on to it deliberately—it’s not that. I’d gladly let it go if I could. I just can’t, that’s all. Because I’m not me anymore. Well, only a little bit, sometimes. Like now. I guess this is me, the real me—isn’t it? Isn’t this really me?” Her voice cracked.

I said yes, this was the real her. My heart was breaking for her, the whole thing was so pathetic; she really was split straight down the middle. “Yes, April, this is you. This is really you.” I began talking hard and fast before she wasn’t “you” anymore, before she became the other one, trying to make her believe that if she’d try a little harder she could merge the two into the one, into April Rains again.

“The worst thing,” she went on, “was the realization that I only pitied Bud. I felt so sorry for him and I had this mixed-up idea I could help him by being his wife. He just—
wanted
it so.” She drew a breath and expelled it, her face wreathed in misery. “It was all my fault. I take the blame for everything. It couldn’t ever have worked.”