Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“It doesn’t have anything to do with you. It keeps their minds off the fact that they have to die and all their money is worthless on the other side of the grave. They can buy anything they want except a free pass from the Grim Reaper. It makes them madder than hell.”

Norma turned and looked at the side of Fincher’s face as though she didn’t know him.

LINDA GAIL’S COSTAR had contracted dysentery in Mexico and had sidelined production back in the United States for almost two weeks. In Santa Monica, she stared out her picture-glass window at the bronze-skinned young men lifting weights on Muscle Beach. Many of them had peroxide hair and wore bathing trunks hardly more than G-strings. She wondered how many of them were as unfaithful as she. Jerry Fallon sipped from a vodka Collins at her wet bar. Down below, against the brick wall that surrounded her tiny garden and patch of lawn, the bougainvillea bloomed as brightly as drops of blood in the cool sunlit air. “You’re going back to Houston?” Jerry said.

“Does that bother you?” she replied.

He pulled a cherry out of the ice in his glass and bit it off the stem. His mouth made a sucking sound when he swallowed it. “Yes, it does, love.”

“You think I’m escaping the menagerie?” she said, turning around.

“As talented as you are, you share many commonalities with the girls we dig out of these small-town anthills you Americans are so fond of. You do grand for a while, then you start to grow a conscience. You look upon your former life as one of naïveté and goodness. The rest of the world thinks of these places as the cultural equivalent of Buchenwald. That’s why all of you left. You might remind yourself of that.”

“You know how offensive that is, Jerry?”

“You had a fling and your hubby found out about it. What did he think happens out here? This is Babylon-by-the-Sea. On a spring night you can hear the hymens snapping like crickets. Are you going to dump your career and go back home and serve your redneck friends beer while they tell nigger jokes?”

“That word was never used in our home.”

“I’m afraid you’re about to leave us in the lurch, love. It’s in your eyes. You want it both ways.”

Why did Jerry always make her feel like a child? “I don’t know what you’re saying,” she lied.

“Your lover is a handsome war hero and millionaire movie producer. Except you can’t have him and still be the virginal lass from Hushpuppyville.”

She sat down next to him. He started to drink from his glass, but she took it from his hand and replaced it on the bar. “You drink too much,” she said.

“I hope you don’t divorce. Because if you do, I’ll probably marry you, and you’ll make my life a bloody hell.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. What you told me on the set in Mexico? That was true?”

“About your ability? There’s no question about it. Everybody knows it. That is, everybody except you. I’m going to speak a bit coarsely here. Every man in this town wants to go to bed with you because you’re beautiful. But that’s just part of it. They want your talent. That also goes for the ladies who are AC/DC. They’re like candle moths swimming around the light in the bottle.”

“Where does that put you?”

“I’ll probably be an asterisk by your name. You’re a temptation, though. I’d love to have a run at you.”

“Why didn’t you ever try?”

He stood up from the bar and put his arm around her shoulders. “Come over here,” he said.

“What for?”

He walked with her to the picture-glass window. “See all those guys lifting weights down there? They want power and success that will never be theirs. They’ll sleep with men or women to get it. Or maybe to have the crumbs from under the table. By the time they catch on that they’ve been had, it’s usually too late. When you get fucked out here, it’s for keeps. And when it’s over, you hate yourself for ever thinking you were the one in charge.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, her cheeks already burning.

“You never fucked somebody cross-eyed, all the time telling yourself you were in control? You never told yourself you had sexual power over others that they couldn’t resist? Because the day you did is the day you not only got fucked in spades but helped the other person do it.”

She went into the bathroom and locked the door and sat on the side of the tub, her sobs muffled behind her hand, unsure for whom she was crying.

ON THE NIGHT flight to Houston, the plane hit a violent electrical storm, one as intense and terrifying as the storm Linda Gail had witnessed off Santa Monica Beach. The windows of the plane were streaked with rain, the clouds erupting with great yellow pools of lightning, the thunder crashing so loudly that drink glasses were shattering in the stewardess’s compartment. The plane was dropping with such rapidity through the air pockets that she couldn’t hear the engines. But she kept writing on top of a book balanced on her knee, the beam of a small nightlight aimed at her sheet of stationery.

Once again she was putting down on paper the words she needed to say to Hershel. This time she was determined to hold nothing back and accept the consequences of her behavior, whatever they were, and to let Hershel decide whether he wanted her. She didn’t mention Roy’s name. She simply stated that she had been unfaithful and the fault was hers alone. If there was any lie in her words, it lay in her statement that she loved Hershel (though she did, it was not in the way a wife or lover would).

As the plane slammed against the updrafts, spilling luggage and hatboxes into the aisle, she wondered if she had underestimated the storm’s potential. The plane’s wing lights were blinking, the clouds streaming through the propellers like black smoke, making her wonder if her eyes were playing tricks on her or indeed the engines had caught fire. When a stewardess was knocked to her knees, none of the passengers was willing to unhook a seat belt in order to help her up. The door to the pilot’s cabin was swinging wildly on the hinges, but there seemed to be no one available to secure it. She pulled the curtain on the window and kept writing and tried to suppress the fear that caused her hand to tremble each time she reached the edge of the page.

The great challenge was not in admitting wrongdoing; it was incurring the possible loss of her career. What if her betrayal caused Hershel to ask her to quit Warner Bros. or to leave Hollywood? As soon as she posed the question in those terms, her ego immediately flared to life, burning like an indignant white flame in her chest. You earned your career, a voice said. Why should you have to give it away? Was she supposed to be a penitent the rest of her life?