Authors: Susan Elizabeth Phillips
you know that?"
Some of her fear began to slip away, and she gazed at him with wonder. "I'm really scaring you, aren't I?"
He scoffed at her. "I'm not scared. Hell, no. It's just hard to believe how stupid you are."
She pushed some more. "I can't do anything about the way you grew up. Those welfare people shifted you from one family to another, not me."
"That doesn't have anything to do with it."
"I'm not going to disappear on you like those families did. You can love me as much as you want, and nothing bad's going to happen. I'm your wife for the rest of your life, and no matter how hard you try, there isn't anything you can do to drive me away."
She could see him trying to find a way out. He even opened his mouth to retort, but then a great stillness came over him. Reaching out, she closed her hand over his.
The cactus creaked in the night wind. He spoke softly, still not looking at her.
"You really mean it, don't you?"
"I really mean it."
He gazed at her, and even though he cleared his throat, his voice was husky with emotion. "You're the damnedest, most aggravating female I've ever met."
At first she thought it was a trick of the firelight, but then she knew it was no trick at all. Dash Coogan had tears in his eves.
The
Drop
1989-1990
19
"Do you still feel bitter toward Dash and Honey?"
The
Beau Monde
reporter crossed her legs as she asked the question and regarded Eric through the red metal frames of her glasses. Laurel Kreuger reminded him of a Gap ad. She had a New York intellectual look—slim and attractive with short no-fuss hair and minimal makeup. Her clothes were casual and oversized: turtleneck, baggy khaki trousers, boots, a Soviet army watch.
A
Beau Monde
cover story was worth some inconvenience, but she had been interviewing Eric on and
off for several days; it was Sunday, his only day off, and he was getting tired of it. Trying to channel his restlessness, he rose from one of the hotel penthouse's two facing couches and wandered over to the window, where he lit a cigarette and gazed down at Central Park. The trees were still bare of leaves, and their branches whipped in the March wind. He felt a momentary nostalgia for California, even though he'd only been away for a month.
He finally replied to her question. "Dash and Honey got married at the end of eighty-three, more than
five years ago. I've been too busy since then to give it much thought. Besides, I was basically already off the show when it happened."
As he exhaled, the smoke spread skeletal fingers against the glass, blurring but not quite obscuring his reflection. His face seemed both sparer and harder than it had been during his years on the Coogan show, although it had lost none of its male beauty. If anything, the sullen, brooding quality he had exhibited in his twenties had, in his thirties, matured into a dark sexuality that made the alienated anti-heroes he frequently played on-screen so dangerously compelling.
The Manhattan Sunday traffic crept by far below as the reporter continued her probing. "Regardless of the fact that you were no longer a regular on the Coogan show, you were certainly outspoken at the time."
He drifted back over to the couch where he had been sitting facing her. "A lot of us were. If you'll remember, we had four seasons of that show in the can, and the producers were just getting ready to put it up for syndication. We were all expecting to make a lot of money on that deal. When news of Dash and Honey's marriage broke, it went right down the toilet. Ross Bachardy had to give the show away."
"That sounds bitter to me."
"Money's money." He sank back onto the striped cushions. "If I'd known what was going to happen with my career, I wouldn't have worried."
"Apparently being nominated for this year's Best Actor Oscar changes one's perspective."
"Not to mention one's bank account."
"So you decided to forgive the lovebirds their transgressions?"
"Something like that."
"Do you still talk to either one of them?"
"I was never close to either Dash or Honey. I speak to Liz Castleberry every few months."
"Coogan still shows up once in a while in commercials and doing guest shots, but Honey's pretty much
a mystery lady," Laurel said. "Occasionally somebody will spot her on the Pepperdine campus taking a class, but other than that, she doesn't seem to leave their ranch very much."
"A major waste of talent. She never had any idea how good she was. Still, I'm not surprised she's made herself scarce. The press beat up on her pretty badly."
"She lied about her age for so long that no one believed her when she finally told the truth. The fact that people thought she was seventeen instead of twenty when she and Coogan ran off made it even worse."
He stabbed his cigarette into the ashtray next to him.
"Ross Bachardy was the one who concealed her age, not Honey."
"You sound like you're defending her."
"In some ways, she got a bum rap. In other ways, she and Dash screwed over a lot of people's futures."
"But not yours."
"Not mine."
She glanced at the notebook in her lap. "You've been getting some heady press lately. Gene Siskel said
he expects you to be the premier actor of the nineties."
"I appreciate the vote of confidence, but predictions like that are a bit premature."
"You're only thirty-one years old. You've got a lot of time to prove the critics right."
"Or wrong."
"You don't believe that, do you?"
"No, I don't believe that."
"You certainly are self-confident. Is that why you decided to come to New York to do Macbeth?" She glanced down at her tape recorder to make certain the cassette wasn't running out.
He put his finger to his lips. "The Scottish play."
She regarded him quizzically.
"Actors consider it bad luck to refer to this play by its title. It's an old theatrical superstition."
Her mouth gave a wry twist. "Somehow I don't think you're the superstitious type."
"We have another two weeks before we finish our run, and I'm not taking any unnecessary chances, especially in a production this risky."
"I'll say it's risky. Casting you and Nadia Evans, two of the screen's reigning sex symbols, as Lord and Lady Macbeth was hardly conventional. The critics walked into the theater with their fangs bared. Both of you could have fallen on your faces."
"But we didn't."
"It's the sexiest production of Mac—er the Scottish play I've ever seen."
"Sexy's easy. It's all that blood and guts stuff that's hard."
She laughed, and a current of sexual chemistry sparked between them. It wasn't the first time it had happened, but once again he dismissed the idea of taking her to bed. It was more than the AIDS crisis
that had made him selective about his bed partners. His first year with Lilly, when he had tried so hard
to establish real sexual intimacy with her, had stripped him of his ability to enjoy sex for its own sake. He no longer went to bed with women he didn't like, and he definitely didn't go to bed with members of the press.
"You don't give a lot away, do you, Eric?"
He reached for his cigarettes, stalling for time. "What do you mean?"
"I've been interviewing you for several days, and I still don't have the foggiest notion what makes you tick. You're probably the most closed person I've ever met. And I don't just mean the way you dodge personal questions about your divorce or your past. You don't ever let anything slip, do you?"
"If I could be any tree in the world, I'd be an oak."
She laughed. "I must admit you've surprised me. Tell me why—"
But before she could begin another line of questioning, the door of the penthouse burst open and Rachel Dillon charged in. Her dark, tangled hair flew back from a small, delicate face whose soft features were marred only by a smear of chocolate near her mouth and a round Band-Aid plunked at the center of her forehead. Along with purple jeans and pink high-top sneakers, she wore a Roger Rabbit sweatshirt accessorized with a cast-off rhinestone necklace that had belonged to her mother. She was six weeks shy of her fifth birthday.
"Daddy!" She squealed with delight as if she hadn't seen him in weeks when, in fact, they had only been separated for a few hours. Throwing out her arms and nearly sending a vase of silk flowers toppling in
the process, she raced toward him.
"Daddy, guess what we saw?"
She didn't notice the copy of the
Sunday Times
that lay on the floor directly in her path. Rachel never noticed any obstacles between herself and what she wanted.
"What did you see?" With a well-practiced motion, he swept her up just as she slid on the papers, catching her before she could bang her head on the nearby coffee table. She threw her arms around his neck, not out of gratitude for being rescued from potential disaster but because she always gave him crushing bear hugs after even the shortest separations.
"You guess, Daddy."
He drew her wiggling, energy-charged form into his lap and breathed in her particular strawberry scent
of little-girl's hair faintly overlaid with sweat, since Rachel never walked when she could run. A panda-shaped barrette dangled from the very end of a dark brown lock. While he gave her question serious consideration, he slipped it off and set it on the end table. Rachel's barrettes were everywhere. He'd even pulled one out of his pocket in the middle of a press conference thinking it was his cigarette lighter.
"You saw a giraffe or Madonna."
She giggled. "No, silly. Daddy, we saw a man do peepee on the sidewalk."
"And that's what we love about the Big Apple," he replied dryly.
Rachel nodded her head vigorously. "Daddy, he did. Right on the sidewalk."
"Your lucky day." He gently touched the Band-Aid on her forehead. "How's your owie?"
But Rachel refused to be distracted. "Daddy, even Becca the goody-goody looked."
"Did she now." Eric's eyes grew soft, and he gazed across the room toward Rachel's twin sister Rebecca, who had just come through the door and was holding hands with Carmen, the girls' nanny. She gave him her sweet smile. He winked at her over the top of her sister's head in the secret signal they had developed.
Rachel got here first as usual, but she'll soon be bored, and then
you and I can settle in for a nice long cuddle.
"Daddy, did Mommy call on the telephone?" Rachel bumped his chin with the top of her head as she spun around. "Daddy, she said she'd call me today."
"Tonight, honey. You know she always calls at bedtime on Fridays."
Growing bored right on schedule, Rachel bounced off his lap and raced over to her nanny to grab her hand away from Becca. "Come on, Carmen. You said we could do finger paints." Before she left for the bedroom, she turned back to her sister. "Becca, don't be mushing with Daddy all day, you pokey. After me and Carmen finish, I'm gonna show you how to tie your shoe." Her face grew stern.
"And this time you better do it right."
Eric resisted the urge to leap in and protect his fragile, damaged daughter from her domineering sister. Rachel was impatient with Becca's slowness, but she was also big-hearted and fiercely protective of her. Although he had discussed her sister's Down syndrome with her as soon as she was old enough to understand, she refused to accept Becca's slowness and was merciless in her insistence that she keep up. Maybe in part because of her unrelenting demands, Becca was progressing more rapidly than the doctors had expected.
Eric knew that, despite public perception, children born with Down syndrome were not all the same. They ranged from being mildly to moderately retarded, with a wide variation in mental and physical abilities. The extra forty-seventh chromosome that caused Rebecca's Down syndrome had left her mildly retarded, but there was no reason to believe she couldn't live a full and useful life.
As Rachel disappeared, Becca came toward him, her thumb in her mouth. The girls were fraternal twins instead of identical ones, but despite Becca's slightly slanted eyelids and the gently depressed bridge of her nose, they still bore a strong resemblance to each other and to him. Smoothly extracting her thumb, he gathered her into his arms and kissed her forehead. "Hi, sweetheart. How's Daddy's girl?"
"Becca is boo-tee-f."
He smiled and hugged her. "You certainly are."
"Daddy boo-tee-f, too." Becca's speech was slower than Rachel's, full of word omissions and sound substitutions. Although it was difficult for strangers to understand her, Eric had no trouble.
"Thanks, champ."
As she settled back against his chest, a deep sensation of peace came over him, just as it always did when he held her. Although he could never have explained it to anyone, he felt as if Becca were the universe's special gift to him, the only absolutely perfect thing in his life. He had always feared himself around the defenseless, but protecting this fragile child had begun to remove that haunting burden. In a way that he didn't entirely understand, the gift of Rebecca had let him atone for what he had done to Jason.
He had gotten so wrapped up in his daughters that he had nearly forgotten Laurel Kreuger, who was avidly taking in this scene of domesticity. Although he had never made any attempt to hide Becca's condition, he hated exposing his children to the press, and he absolutely forbade having them photographed.
Even though it wasn't Laurel's fault the children had come back early from their outing,
he resented this intrusion into his privacy.
"That's it for today, Laurel," he said abruptly. "I have some business to attend to this afternoon."
"We were scheduled for another half hour," Laurel protested.
"I didn't know that the girls would be back so soon."
"Do you always drop everything for them?" Her question held the faintly judgmental undertone of someone who has never been a parent.