Degree of Guilt (22 page)

Why was it, Terri wondered, that so often with Richie she did not know how she felt. She might be angry, somewhere, but all she felt was numb. ‘It’s not my mother, Richie. It’s me.’

Richie gave a knowing laugh. ‘Okay,
you
. Then ask yourself whether a few hundred bucks is worth all this time on the phone. You’re eating into our profits, Ter.’

It was dark, Terri suddenly realized; she had not seen night fall. ‘I’ll think about it,’ she finally said. ‘Okay?’

‘Great.’ Richie was upbeat again. ‘We can talk about it as soon as you get back.’

Terri paused. ‘Listen, if for any reason I’m home late tomorrow night, please keep Elena home, all right?’

‘Sure. I’ll take her out for dinner at some place she really likes, then maybe for an ice cream float.’ He paused, as if struck by a new thought. ‘Listen, why don’t the three of us go to Tilden Park this weekend – take a picnic, ride the train. Great family day.’

Something in his energy, Terri thought, made her wearier yet. Then she remembered how much Elena liked the train. ‘That sounds fine,’ she told him, and said goodbye.

For a while, she simply sat in the darkness. Terri thought about room service, wondered about Lindsay Caldwell, about Richie and herself; did nothing. She felt unreal – adrift in a tropic night, away from her daughter, waiting for a call from someone she had seen only at a distance or on film.

The telephone rang, snapping Terri to alertness.

‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Hello. Is this Teresa Peralta?’

The voice was clear, unadorned; Terri had always thought of it as stylish midwestern. ‘Yes,’ Terri answered. ‘Thank you for calling.’

‘You’re welcome,’ Lindsay Caldwell said. ‘But then you knew I would, didn’t you?’

‘Is this about Mark Ransom,’ Lindsay Caldwell asked Terri, ‘or Laura Chase?’

They sat on the deck of Caldwell’s glass-and-redwood beach house at Malibu Colony, watching the morning sun dance on the ocean. Wearing blue jeans and a white sweater, Lindsay Caldwell seemed smaller than the woman Terri remembered seeing; with her tawny hair, clear blue eyes, and look of watchful intelligence, she appeared less like a film star than like a casually affluent suburban mother who did graduate work on the side. The sole difference was the businesslike authority, neither flaunted nor concealed, of a woman who produced her own films and thought her own thoughts; at whatever cost, Lindsay Caldwell had found out who she was.

‘I’m not sure,’ Terri answered. ‘On the telephone, you said that I must know that you would see me. I don’t even know why Mark Ransom wanted to see
you
.’

Caldwell’s expression mixed appraisal and surprise. ‘You don’t,’ she said flatly.

Terri shook her head. ‘What I thought,’ she ventured, ‘is that you might have been a patient of Dr Steinhardt’s.’

‘It’s a decent guess.’ Pausing, Caldwell turned toward the water. ‘There was a time when I ran through therapists like some women run through lovers, although what
I
was shopping for was a father. But no, I never tried that particular Freudian.’ Caldwell’s tone became quiet, reflective. ‘Although I’ve told myself often enough that no one could have saved her, or helped Laura save herself.’

The last caught Terri by surprise. ‘You
knew
her?’ she asked.

This time, Terri thought, Caldwell’s look had a certain furtive quality, as if her answers were themselves a form of probe. Slowly, she nodded. ‘I was quite young then. Nineteen, in fact.’

Terri paused a moment. It was difficult to accept that Lindsay Caldwell would give her time, harder still to ask her about a legendary actress without knowing what the point was or why Caldwell would care to answer. Terri felt less lawyer than star-struck voyeur.

‘Was that what Mark Ransom wanted to see you about?’ she asked.

Caldwell raised an eyebrow. ‘“That” being . . . ?’

‘Laura Chase?’

Caldwell nodded. ‘Yes. That was why Mark wanted to see me.’

Caldwell’s tone was neither helpful nor hostile; Terri had felt more warmth from the woman who had spoken on the Berkeley campus than from the one sitting next to her. She decided to pursue a different tack.

‘I heard you speak at Berkeley once,’ she said. ‘What was so effective was that you used what had happened to you, like sexual harassment or trying to get artistic control, to bring you closer to things that bothered me and all the other women I knew. But it’s hard for me to relate to Laura Chase at all.’

Caldwell’s look became interested, more personal. ‘It’s because you don’t
want
to – none of us does. Laura was an exaggeration of everything women most fear in ourselves: a needy victim, full of short-sighted guile, who played into male fantasies and traded a sense of herself for any form of “love” that would keep her from feeling alone.’ Caldwell paused. ‘If you’ve never, ever, had those thoughts about yourself, then you’re either delusional or have such remarkable strength of character that you need to tell me how you’ve done it.’

There was no edge in Caldwell’s words, simply an unsparing self-knowledge that embraced them both. ‘I’m more delusional,’ Terri said simply. ‘Some days it works better than others.’

For the first time, Caldwell smiled. ‘It’s like trying to be feminist – some days it works better than others. But, at least in my experience, it beats the known alternative.’

Terri nodded. ‘Unless you’re Mark Ransom.’

‘Iron Mark.’ Caldwell’s tone was flat. ‘A man truly in touch with his primal self.’

Terri hesitated. ‘Did you know him – I mean, before he called?’

‘Oh, yes. We met at a symposium at Yale on “Women in Film.” Someone thought it would be entertaining to invite him.’ Turning, Caldwell gazed out at the water. ‘We had a disagreement, it’s fair to say, regarding Laura’s place in the pantheon of role models. It was hard to gauge Mark’s strongest emotion – his passion for Laura Chase or his instinctive dislike for me. I was less confused: I remember calling him “the poet laureate of the centerfold.”’ Caldwell frowned, shaking her head. ‘What a complete waste of time. It’s so much more effective to speak for your own beliefs than to ridicule someone else’s.’

The breeze picked up, rippling Caldwell’s hair. She looked clear-eyed, a little younger than she was, yet etched with the self-knowledge that time brings. Terri felt momentarily at peace; she watched the ocean, the line of white where waves struck the sand and, farther out, long strands of kelp undulating with the ebb and flow. A lone runner grew small in the distance, vanished. The air was heavy and smelled of salt.

Finally, Terri asked, ‘Why did you decide to see him?’

Caldwell kept watching the water, as if she found it soothing. ‘He discovered I’d known Laura.’

‘What did he say?’

‘That he wanted to talk to me about it. Personally.’

Caldwell’s answers were becoming terse again, a little distant. Perhaps, Terri thought, another direction would help things flow.

‘Laura Chase was much older,’ she ventured, ‘and even then, you couldn’t have been much alike.’

Caldwell shook her head. ‘More alike than you think. I’d been locked up in boarding schools for years, rebelling against my father through the usual well-considered means – drinking and boys.’ Caldwell paused. ‘There got to be a lot of boys. The angrier my father was, the less it mattered who I did it with, even boys I hated. Back then, they called it promiscuity. I forget what Radcliffe called it when they threw me out.’

Terri had not known this. But Caldwell spoke the words with a tired familiarity, as if she had traveled this road many times before, in search of understanding.

‘How did you meet Laura Chase?’ Terri asked.

‘That part was easy. As you may or may not know, my father ran Paramount then, so they stuck me in the family business.’ Caldwell’s voice became dry. ‘Eventually, I developed a perverse desire to be more important than he was. But my first job was a minor role as Laura Chase’s kid sister, for which my major qualification was to be more or less flat-chested.’

‘I’ve never seen that one, I guess.’

‘It never got made.’ Caldwell’s voice grew softer. ‘Laura killed herself just before our biggest scene.’

For a moment, Terri was silent. Then she asked, ‘What was she like?’

Caldwell’s eyes narrowed. ‘In retrospect, I suppose the most obvious thing about her was a kind of ruined sensitivity – she wanted to love and be loved but was far too needy to find that in any way that wasn’t self-destructive. One day, she would sleep with an extra for the most fleeting sense of security. The next day, she’d stay in her trailer until the director begged her to work. But she could never find enough within herself to figure out how to get things right.’ Caldwell’s tone turned rueful. ‘What she did have was an uncanny sense of what was wounded in other people. Especially when the wounds were like her own.’

It was best, Terri decided, to see where this might go. ‘It’s funny – I’ve read a lot about your parents or your politics or how you got to make your own films. But I don’t remember you saying anything about Laura Chase.’

‘I’ve never talked about her.’ Caldwell gazed toward the water. ‘Not in public, at least.’

Terri paused. ‘Why was it,’ she asked, ‘that you were willing to talk with Mark Ransom?’

‘He said that he had tapes. Of Laura, talking to her psychiatrist.’ Caldwell paused. ‘It came as a surprise to me.’

‘Is that how he became aware that you knew Laura Chase – something on the tapes?’

Caldwell turned to her. ‘Can I ask why you care?’

The question was edgy, guarded. ‘Ransom had a tape,’ Terri answered, ‘from a few days before she died. It’s about a weekend in Palm Springs – Laura Chase meeting James Colt and two of his friends. What happened to her was bad enough that it may explain her suicide.’

‘And she mentions me?’

Terri was startled. ‘Were you there?’

‘In Palm Springs?’ Caldwell turned away. ‘God, no.’

Her voice held a hint of pain. ‘As far as I know,’ Terri answered, ‘Laura didn’t talk about you on that tape. Ransom must have had another one.’

Caldwell looked at her again. ‘He told me he had all of them.’

Terri nodded. ‘What he tried to do with Mary Carelli was trade the tape for sex.’ She paused, and then added, ‘That particular tape seemed to excite him.’

Caldwell stood and walked to the railing of the deck. She leaned there, palms flat on the top rail, staring out at the ocean. ‘What you’re trying to establish,’ she finally said, ‘is that when Mark met Mary Carelli, he had some sort of premeditated sexual agenda and that the tapes were a part of it.’

‘Yes.’

Caldwell shook her head. From the back, the gesture suggested not denial but weariness. When she turned, she seemed a different woman, vulnerable and self-doubting. ‘You simply don’t know what you’re asking. But then Mark Ransom did know. And if I understand what I saw on
60 Minutes
, Mary Carelli could use a friend.’ She hesitated, looking intently at Terri. ‘If I tell you what happened, I decide whether and how it gets used.’

It was a statement, not a question. Terri nodded. ‘All right.’

Caldwell searched her face. Finally, she asked, ‘What is it that you want to know?’

Terri reflected. ‘Maybe where to start is what Ransom said was on the tape.’

Caldwell looked at her for another moment. ‘Just enough to convince me to see a man I loathed.’

‘What were you afraid of?’

‘Several things.’ Caldwell’s voice and gaze were steady now. ‘Beginning with the week I spent in Laura’s guesthouse.’

Terri said nothing. She was learning to know when words were needed and when silence was better than speech. Lindsay Caldwell seemed in control of herself; if she had decided to talk, it was for her own reasons, and all that Terri needed to do was listen.

‘I was a mess,’ Caldwell began. ‘Drinking every day, screwing more or less at random. Some days I’d wake up pretty close to a blackout drunk, uncertain whether the fragments of memory were real or some twisted dream. A couple of times men called me and I couldn’t remember who they were or what I’d done with them.’ Caldwell paused. ‘Even when they told me.

‘That was how I was when I met Laura – drunken, careless, and lost. Like Laura herself.’

The words came easily, as if Caldwell had said them to herself a thousand times. But speaking them aloud produced a rough edge in her voice Terri had not heard before, onscreen or in person. ‘Laura knew that,’ Caldwell continued. ‘She had radar for the wounded. Before the first scene we did together, she seemed remote and hardly real, as if she were another species of woman. But she was the one who realized that my hands weren’t shaking out of fear but because of what I’d done the night before.

‘It was an adaptation of a William Inge play – she was a glamorous woman from Chicago, returning to her tiny hometown, and I was the bookish sister, too scared to leave. The first scene was supposed to be in my bedroom, both of us putting on makeup for a dance while we talked about her life.’ Caldwell shook her head. ‘I knew my lines well enough, but eyeliner was beyond me. My hand shook too much.

‘So Laura improvised. She took the eyeliner from my hand, said, “Here, let me show you,” and applied my makeup while we finished the scene. It was instinctively perfect, just right for the relationship between the two sisters, and the lines flowed from there. The director loved it.

‘Afterwards, I thanked her. She gave me that funny smile she had – like she knew your worst secrets and didn’t care – and said, “If you’re going to drink like that, wait until they need you enough to clean up after you.” And then she went off to her dressing room.

‘That night, when I was walking to the parking lot, I felt a hand on my arm. It was Laura. “Are you at least taking the night off?” she asked. I wasn’t, of course – I’d been semi fixed up with a bit actor who I knew in my heart wanted to tell his friends he’d fucked Leon Caldwell’s daughter. Which was exactly why I was going to let him do it.’ Caldwell shook her head. ‘I don’t know why, but I couldn’t tell Laura that – it was like she knew me too well. After a moment, she said, “You’d better come home with me.”