Long Shot (3 page)

She was all alone in her mother's house—a limestone cottage with a white slate roof, of an indeterminate age and breeding. The land it stood on, some four hundred acres along the neck between the sound and Castle Harbor, had been in the family since New Year's Day in 1615. Deeded by Governor Moore to the mate of the feisty ship that brought the Bermuda settlers here from the damps of England. Before he ran off to sea, this mate had done a season acting at the Globe. The letters he wrote to his cronies still on the boards in London, letters drunk on paradise, had made him the model for Prospero, or so the story went. Even as a schoolgirl, Vivien Willis understood that the island estate on her mother's side was classier in the way of pedigree than that which attached to her father's ancient lands—those flat square miles of desert scrub that grew to be Orange County, going up a hundredfold in value just in twenty years.

Vivien's mother had kept the Bermuda house as a refuge from her husband, Jacob Willis. There was no paved road or a telephone. The water was out of a pump. As she pointed out to Vivien every spring, the only guidebook a body needed to roam these woods and raw pink beaches was a copy of
The Tempest
. And though the warring parties of her parents' marriage were now long dead and done with, Vivien saw no reason to improve the old stone house. Not that she needed a place to hide from Jasper Cokes, the husband of her dreams. They were far too busy, she and Jasper, to bother each other with marital ties, skirmishes or otherwise. She came here once a year in April to flee the larger matter of herself.

But she couldn't always shake it. It was just after midnight on Monday the third when she gave up and got out of bed. She left the lights all off and took no robe. She made her way out of the house, down the overgrown path to the water. From the close and crooked bushes, she came to a ledge. The nearest lights were far away along the sound, the water as black as the moonless sky. She could have dived in without a light, since she knew the depth at every point for a quarter mile on either side. But she knew she'd never sleep at all if her hair got wet, and she didn't dare risk losing the thin gold chain at her neck, pendant from which was the Willis diamond.

A thing she only wore when she left L.A., in case she was caught in a world depression and needed cash in a hurry.

She knelt into a tangle of ice plant that cascaded along the ledge. She gripped a rusted iron ring that had been in the stone, for all she knew, these past three hundred years. Then she put a foot over the edge, felt for the first step carved in the face of the rock, and made her way down. She reached the water line between the sixth and seventh steps. The water lilted and lapped against her as she went in. Irresistible as ever, warm as the air and supple as silk. When she was in hip deep, she let go the ladder cut in the stone and lay back limply and floated out, like somebody sinking to sleep.

She started to drift, the diamond still as an anchor on her throat. Jasper wasn't the type, she thought, to swim on a sleepless night. If he had no boyfriend current, he still had Artie and Carl, his bodyguard and manager, right at the flick of an intercom. He buzzed them up on a moment's notice whenever he couldn't sleep, and they took up where they had left off in a running game of Chinese checkers. Jasper knew not to dial his wife's room after hours. It was one of the countless rules that allowed them to survive. What was strange just now was thinking about him at all, since she hadn't been home in over two months. Stranger still, she missed him.

They'd talked at ten o'clock, when she called him from a phone booth at the Mid-Ocean Club to let him know she'd detoured here. He'd finished shooting on the new film only a couple of hours before. Already he was beside himself with boredom. She told him to get coked up and go to the Oscars, but that was the one thing he wouldn't do without her. Besides, if you weren't awfully sure you were going to win, it was too much trouble just to get out of the parking garage at the end. Jasper was always the first to admit: He was a moneymaker, not a performer. He only got nominated now and again to put a pretty face in the lineup.

“So,” he said, through the crackle of static, “you getting laid?”

“Not really. And you?”

“Me? I haven't got the strength.”

“Not even to fuck?”

“It's not that,” he said, and he seemed to grope for a reason that would travel all that way. For a moment she thought they'd lost the connection. Then: “It's the small talk, mostly.”

Vivien fell into a lazy backstroke, covering thirty or forty yards from shore before she stopped to look around. In Harrington Sound, she was wholly without the fear of drowning. Not like the ocean she grew up on—the brute Pacific, chill as ice and churning riptide. In some unaccountable way, she felt safer here than anywhere, as if a place survived where she might recover the stillness she lived in as a child—where nothing seemed to happen unless she wanted, and never till she was ready. She paddled about in total darkness, under a sky that ached with stars, and puzzled out the paradox of being Jasper's wife. She didn't know she had it in her to think of the two of them tenderly. Reading the gossip day after day, forever avoiding questions, she thought she'd surrendered
her
opinion long ago.

Jasper and I
, she thought drowsily, turning wide and heading back to land.
Jasper and I are only
—

Only what? Friends? Perhaps it was best to call them partners. Colleagues in a single profession, successful all on their own, who decided to get together to make a deal. A deal too big for one to carry off. How else was one to explain the clash of cultures? That he, the highest-paid actor in Hollywood, should end up hitched to the zillionaire heiress whose every change of clothes was news. Between them, they had the cover of every magazine in the free world sewn up—and this before they even met. When they met, it was more of a merger than a meeting.

Now, for the first time in over two months, she missed him and wished she was back in L.A., so they could be at loose ends together. They had these occasional days when they stuck together like a comedy team. It was them against everyone else, and they loved it. And when it worked, they could always count on being good for about five days—generous, giddy, and tuned to somebody else besides the face in the mirror. It didn't matter what they did. They'd deck themselves in doubleknits and shades and order a platter of ribs at Bob's Big Boy. They'd browse around in dirty bookstores, or stand around on corners and watch the hookers traffic. Anything not to be stars.

The fucking was the least of it, right from the start.

She was just twenty-four when her father, Jacob Willis, missed the hairpin turn at a hundred and five on a road he'd graded himself, between his ranch house and his landing strip. Vivien, in fact, was the one who was landing that day—as it turned out, into the arms of weeping ranch hands. Always after that, she had a certain horror of getting off planes. It was cars she should have been wary of, since her mother got picked off too, just eight months farther down the road, by a taxi in the Place Vendôme. The last thing she ever said to her only child was, like the lady herself, entirely sugarless: “Whatever else is out to break you, baby, don't forget: You don't have to marry money.”

Three weeks later, the orphan Vivien, last of the Willis line, fell heir to about a third of Newport Beach.

It was past time, meanwhile, for Jasper Cokes to take a wife. At twenty-eight, he ought to have had a first marriage over and done with. Not that the public suspected any irregularities. The public believed what it wanted to—that a man with everything ate up life like candy, girls included. Concern over Jasper's waking hours in bed came down direct from the executive suite, where the Gelusil accountants toted up the grosses. Given that Jasper Cokes was altogether too pretty for their taste anyway—the Apollo physique toughed up with a day-old beard, the jeans and moccasins tattered—they wanted the satyr's lust he gave off channeled into a proper deathless passion for a lady. They had no evidence whatever of the men in his life. But they spied an edge of danger in his eyes and, for the sake of their investment, saw they had no choice but to fence it in.

When Jasper and Vivien caught up with each other, in the commissary at Universal, they both couldn't move a muscle if they tried. Each was stuck in the middle of a green banquette, pinned in by prattling fools on either side. Though she looked terrific in gray and dark green, the kinks of her chestnut hair stiff as a broad-brimmed hat, she was fading fast in the midst of preening moguls. She picked over a salad as dead as the days gone by. At the facing table, Jasper sat in a space suit minus the helmet, waiting out the shouting match between the publicist on his left and the producer on his right. He looked up at the selfsame moment Vivien did.

And there they were in person, the rich girl and the movie star. As they stared for a moment eye to eye, they passed the first level of liaison, moving all the way up to invasion of privacy. Seeming to understand on the instant that they, at least, didn't have to go to bed.

“I'll trade you,” she said straight at him, “this whole shrimp salad for an onion ring.”

Only Jasper heard her. It was the curve of the green banquettes, perhaps, that let their voices leap across the aisle—the way it is said to happen under a dome. They were suddenly all alone.

“It's a deal,” he answered with a grin. “But you have to promise to come for a ride.”

“Where to? Are you from Mars?”

“Not anymore,” he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the Mylar sleeve of his space suit. “Now I live on the moon. It's less of a commute. You'll come?”

“Does it have enough closets? They say I have the most clothes of anyone on earth.”

“You won't need them. On the moon, we go around naked.”

“Well, then,” she said, “I can't come with you, Captain. But let's have a drink when you're back in town. You can teach me to tell the stars apart.”

She pulled the spotted carnation out of the bud vase next to the sugar bowl, snapped it off at the stem, and pitched it across. He dropped his fork with a clatter to catch it. The publicist and the producer, roused from their dogfight, looked at Jasper furiously, while Vivien's moguls gathered her up and bore her away to sign her proxies. As she passed in front of Jasper's table, he whispered: “Before I'm through, we'll find you a planet nobody's put a flag on yet. You can have it all to yourself.”

“As long as it has a Bonwit's,” Vivien said.

And that was that.

She sidestroked through the quiet cove to the ladder in the rock. She reached an arm up to pull herself out of the water, then climbed and swung from the second step, her legs still dangling in the sound below. She hung by her hands for a long moment—the breeze on her naked back, the coral rough of the rock against her palms—trying to think of something else but Jasper. She swayed like a pendulum, back and forth. At the end of the arc she bumped against something hollow, knocking it off the wall. It landed below her with a splash. An instant later, one hand let go of the ladder. She held on like somebody on a trapeze and reached around in the dark water. Whatever it was, it must have sunk.

Then her knuckles scraped against metal, and the sudden touch brought back a wave of memory. She dropped to the water and landed close. It was just a bucket—a brittle raw aluminum, with a rim of cork at the bottom to float it. It had hung on an iron hook in the rock for as long as she'd been coming here. She got her hands on it bobbing about and felt it all over. Her mother had used it to gather clams from the sandy floor under the cliff. Yet the overwhelming recollection here was not in the mother-and-daughter direction. The dead were as dead as ever. What seized her instead was a ravenous hunger for Harrington clams.

She put a hand to her throat and gripped the yellow diamond, then flipped and did a deep dive, forgetting her hair. It was only five feet of water, six at most, but she had to squish the sand between her fingers several times before she got one. Bolting up, she dropped the clam in the bucket as she gulped a draught of air. Then down again. In a while, she had half a dozen, enough for a midnight snack, when she stroked back over to the ladder to put the diamond out of danger. She had to shed it to free both hands. Treading water, she unclasped the chain from around her neck. Then climbed up level with the iron hook. As she hung it there, clicking the clasp together again, it seemed to wink dully in the darkness once, like a fallen star. For the moment she wasn't a Willis at all.

She made for the bottom again and again. She didn't really need a dozen, since they didn't taste half so good the next day, and besides, she wasn't hungry. But it wasn't logic that got her into all of this, and she paid no mind to reasons. By now, she was too out of breath to stay down more than a couple of seconds at a time. A band of white was pulsing in her head. She nearly tipped the bucket once—the next time cracked her head on it coming up. Half drowned, but she got all twelve. And twelve was what they always used to have when they sat at the cedar table having a feast of clams.

She gripped the rim of the bucket, her chin propped up on the cork. She wondered idly if the clam knives had survived. If they weren't in the white tin cabinet by the stove, she couldn't think how she'd eat her catch. The sea birds dropped their clams and smashed them on the rocks. She could always resort to a hammer, of course, but the thrill of it was eating them alive. Razored open with the proper tool, they split to reveal the muscle whole—peach-colored, quivering, scalloped—and they fought back when they were chewed, in a final undersea reflex all their own. She hadn't thought of the eating part in years. It was as if the memory only occurred in stages, step by step as she followed along. Just now, it seemed that nothing else she'd ever eaten since had tasted quite so new.