Chapter 5

Smith Goes to Washington. A subplot had been added that dealt with campus

insurrections. Chris was starring. She played a psychology teacher who sided

with the rebels. And she hated it. This scene is the pits! she thought. It’s

dumb! Her mind, though untutored, never took slogans for the truth, and like

a curious bluejay she would peck relentlessly through verbiage to find the

glistening, hidden fact. And so the rebel cause didn’t make any sense to her.

But how come? she now wondered. Generation gap? That’s a crock ; I’m

thirty-two. It’s just stupid , that’s all , it’s a…!

Cool it. Only one more week.

They’d completed the interiors in Hollywood and all that remained to be

filmed were a few exterior scenes on the campus of Georgetown University,

starting tomorrow.

Heavy lids. She was getting drowsy. She turned to a page that was

curiously ragged. Her British director, Burke Dennings. When especially

tense, he would tear, with quivering, fluttering hands, a narrow strip from the

edge of the handiest page of the script and then slowly chew it, inch by inch,

until it was all in a wet ball in his mouth.

Crazy Burke , Chris thought.

She covered a yawn, then fondly glanced at the side of her script. The

pages looked gnawed. She remembered the rats. The little bastards sure got

rhythm , she thought. She made a mental note to have Karl set traps for them

in the morning.

Fingers relaxing. Script slipping loose. She let it drop. Dumb , she thought.

It’s dumb. A fumbling hand groping out to the light switch. There. She

sighed, and for a time she was motionless, almost asleep; and then she kicked

off her covers with a lazy leg.

Too hot! Too freaking hot! She thought again about the puzzling coldness

of Regan’s room and into her mind flashed a recollection of working in a film

with Edward G. Robinson, the legendary gangster movie star of the 1940s,

and wondering why in every scene they did together she was always close to

shivering from the cold until she realized that the wily old veteran had been

managing to stand in her key light. A faint smile of bemusement now, and as

a mist of dew clung gently to the windowpanes. Chris slept. And dreamed

about death in the staggering particular, death as if death were still never yet

heard of while something was ringing, she gasping, dissolving, slipping off

into void while thinking over and over, I am not going to be, I will die, I won’t be, and forever and ever, oh, Papa, don’t let them, oh, don’t let them do

it, don’t let me be nothing forever and melting, unraveling, ringing, the

ringing—

The phone!

She leaped up with her heart pounding, hand to the phone and no weight

in her stomach; a core with no weight and her telephone ringing.

She answered. The assistant director .

“In makeup at six, honey.”

“Right.”

“How ya feelin’?”

“Like I just went to bed.”

The AD chuckled. “I’ll see you.”

“Yeah, right.”

Chris hung up the phone and for moments sat motionless, thinking of the

dream. A dream? More like thought in the half life of waking: That terrible

clarity. Gleam of the skull. Nonbeing. Irreversible. She could not imagine it.

God , it can’t be!

Dejected, she bowed her head.

But it is.

She padded to the bathroom, put on a robe, then quickly pattered down old

pine steps to the kitchen, down to life in sputtering bacon.

“Ah, good morning, Mrs. MacNeil!”

Gray, drooping Willie, squeezing oranges, blue sacs beneath her eyes. A

trace of accent. Swiss. Like Karl’s. She wiped her hands on a paper towel and

started moving toward the stove.

“I’ll get it, Willie.” Chris, ever sensitive, had seen the housekeeper’s

weary look, and as Willie now grunted and turned back to the sink, the

actress poured coffee, then sat down in the breakfast nook, where, looking

down at her plate, she smiled fondly at a blush-red rose against its whiteness.

Regan. That angel. Many a morning, when Chris was working, Regan would

quietly slip out of bed, come down to the kitchen to place a flower on her

mother’s empty plate and then grope her way crusty-eyed back to her sleep.

On this particular morning, Chris ruefully shook her head as she recalled that

she had contemplated naming her Goneril. Sure. Right on. Get ready for the

worst. Chris faintly smiled at the memory. She sipped at her coffee and as her

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