Your dearest friend,
Olivia
Mary Lisa had a sheen of tears in her eyes as she folded the letter into the envelope and handed it back to Jack.
“Shall I tell her you read it?” he asked her.
“No, Jack, let it be up to my mother. Olivia’s letter has already made a difference, at least to one of us. Who knows what else it will accomplish?”
And this time, he said it aloud, “You are the woman of my heart, Mary Lisa Beverly.”
FIFTY-EIGHT
There are approximately fifty hours of soap operas each week on the three major networks.
BORN TO BE WILD
Sunday Cavendish is staring out the window of her office, her arms crossed over her chest. She’s wearing a black suit with a white silk blouse beneath, and three-inch black heels. Her red hair is piled atop her head, tendrils lazily curling down in front of her ears. She’s thinking about the scene with her mother at her club when she’d bared her soul.
They roll the club dining room footage, gauzy and vague as Sunday’s memory, then clear. She sees her mother’s pain, the sheen of tears in her eyes-it left her with no doubt that her mother loved her father dearly, and perhaps she still does. Sunday knows it wasn’t an act, but real as it gets. And now he is back.
She shakes herself, pours a glass of water from the crystal carafe, sips slowly. She thinks about her father the last time she saw him, three days before.
They roll the footage of father and daughter in her living room, fading it in again as her remembered thoughts strengthen. Looking somehow diffident, his voice soft, nearly pleading, he told her how much he’s missed her, the awful hollowing pain he’s felt all these years without her. Her uncertainty, her desire to believe him, the tug she’s feeling toward him, are all clear on her face.
She says aloud, barely above a whisper, “Who are you? Who are you both?”
There’s a knock on her office door, pulling her back to the present.
“Enter.”
Her father walks in. “Sunday,” he says, then crosses the distance between them and bends to clasp her hands and kiss them. He straightens and she pulls her hands away. “I wanted to see you. I couldn’t wait. Your secretary said you don’t have an appointment for ten more minutes.”
“I thought you were taping a sermon this morning.”
“It’s done. I came directly here.”
She lightly touches her fingers to his cheek. “Don’t you wear makeup? Or did you wash it off?”
He shakes his head. “The TV people are talking about it, but I’m hanging tough. I’ve always thought it ridiculous for a grown man to have his face powdered up.”
She grins back at him, and nods.
He looks at her intently. “I know you, Sunday. What’s wrong? Something’s bothering you.”
“You’ve known me for two weeks, Father,” says Sunday, her voice light, dismissive. “You can’t begin to tell if there’s anything wrong with me.”
He pauses a moment. “I’ll admit I had some help.”
An eyebrow goes up.
“I saw your mother last night.”
She looks astonished, holds it, holds it-
“Clear! Mary Lisa, you need to have your nose powdered, it’s shining like a beacon under the lights. You too Norman.”
Mary Lisa grinned at Norman. “The TV people are talking about makeup again.”
Norman got his own nose powdered while Lou Lou dusted away the shine on Mary Lisa’s nose. A couple of minutes later, they picked up the scene again.
Sunday looks astonished. “You saw Mom? Goodness, that must have been an adventure. I don’t see any wounds. Was there lots of blood?”
He laughs. “Not really. It seems to me that your mother has mellowed a bit over the years.”
“Surely you jest. It proves you don’t know any of us. It’s been too long, far too long.”
He says slowly, thoughtfully, “Is she really the monster you’ve painted, Sunday?”
She looks at him. “I’m still wondering if you’re the monster she’s painted. The monster my grandfather painted as well.”
“Does the old fraud still have his brain?”
“Oh yes. He can still shoot down anything that walks on two legs.”
“I want to see you this evening, Sunday. Perhaps we can meet for dinner. You can select the restaurant.”
She stares at him a moment, studies his face, then slowly nods. “All right,” she says. “Dino’s, at seven o’clock.”
MARY Lisa was glad to see the end of an incredibly difficult day on the set, ruled by Murphy’s Law. The dialogue of a scene between her half sister, Susan, and Susan’s husband, Damian, had misfired so badly the actors were making gagging noises, and then to make matters worse, Betsy Monroe, her TV mom, had her hair dyed and it turned a virulent Halloween orange. Out of sheer frustration, Mary Lisa had eaten a bacon cheeseburger for lunch with Lou Lou staring at her, disbelieving, while Jack, grinning, offered her catsup. She felt the curse of guilt until she promised herself she’d drink a diet soda for dinner, nothing else, or she’d roast in hell.
But Jack seemed to have enjoyed the day. He was treated royally on the set of Born to Be Wild, since he was guarding the Golden Goose and the studio didn’t have to pay for it. He rarely left her side, eyes always on alert, watching her and those around her hour after hour, absorbing the bustling activity, the turnarounds sometimes frenetic enough to stress out a doped-up elephant. He thought the acting was decent, and sometimes very good, and he especially enjoyed watching Mary Lisa, particularly when Sunday Cavendish put her outstanding cleavage on display.
Mary Lisa was happy as a clam when she was finally able to put her Mustang in park, turn off the ignition, and forget all about it. They were home, tucked away in the Colony, together and alone. What she had in mind at that moment was to haul Jack into her house, lock the door, take him down to the floor, and kiss every gorgeous inch of him. And so she said, “Listen up, Chief. You’re mine as soon as I can get your splendid self on the other side of that door.”
He immediately launched himself out of the Mustang and stood against her front door, his arms crossed over his chest, his foot tapping, those aviator glasses of his hiding his eyes, his windblown dark hair falling over his forehead, the whole package making him look like a Top Gun.
Mary Lisa, eyes on him, lust heating up her innards, managed to get out of the car, but that was as far as she got. Six-year-old Alice Neuerberg, with her beautiful board-straight dark hair that had never been cut, was on her, dancing and prancing all around her, showing off her new black patent leather shoes.
Murphy’s Law had followed her home.
Alice’s shoes were for her grandmother’s wedding, she told Mary Lisa, and her mom had paid sixty-nine dollars for them and told her she needed to stop growing. She never once stopped talking, showed her shoes to Mary Lisa from every angle, until she saw another neighbor two doors down drive into her driveway, and skipped off to nab a new audience.
Jack was sitting on her front porch by this time, his long legs stretched out, ankles crossed, grinning toward her. He’d taken off his sunglasses. He looked tired, she thought, maybe a hint of strain around his beautiful eyes from worry, but mostly, he looked happy to be right where he was. Well, she felt all of those things too.
“Great shoes,” he said, waving toward Alice.
“Oh yeah. Everyone who’s home in the Colony is in for a treat. Her mom will hunt her down in about a half hour.”
“Her grandmother’s wedding?”
“Yeah, Millicent’s an actress, popular everywhere she goes, and the guy she’s marrying is an accountant for one of the studios, real sharp, just graduated from Harvard. Come on in and I’ll get us something to drink.”
“Sounds nice.” He followed her into her house, habitually checking for anything out of place, listening for any noise that shouldn’t be there. “I talked to Danny during that last scene,” he said, catching a can of Diet Dr Pepper Mary Lisa tossed to him from the fridge. “He doesn’t know where to go from here.”