Star Time (8 page)

"Don't tar me, of all people, with that feminist brush that we're all male chauvinists at heart. I fought hard for you. Maybe what's at the bottom of all this is disappointment that you aren’t able to use me to get
ahead.
Maybe I'm just a stepladder to you. When I don't deliver, you blow up."

Chris stormed away, but halted at the front door, her hand on the knob.

At that moment the realization struck Greg that during all the time he and Chris had been together, he had never once been lonely, that he had truly been happy. When they were apart, the knowledge that she would soon be with him was a source of anticipated pleasure, like a birthday gift he knew had been hidden away in his mother’s closet.

"Don't go," he said.

That night they made love eagerly, contritely, desperate to erase the ugliness of what had just passed between them. As always, their sensuality was an ever-achievable, ever-surprising miracle. But neither had yielded, and both subconsciously understood that the differences caused by their single-minded, conflicting drives might be irreconcilable.

Although their infatuation remained as compelling as before, they grew touchier after that, less willing at times to paper over those differences. At work Chris fumed about the barriers placed across her career. While comprehending that the true cause was Stew
Graushner
and
Ev
Carver, she often focused her anger on Greg because he was closest and the messenger and a man. Some of that outrage sometimes came home with her at night, subtly contaminating her behavior toward him. He occasionally wondered if she truly loved him for himself or for what he could do for her career.

Secrecy and isolation, which had originally spiced their ardor, served at times to increase the friction. Both were working long, pressure-filled days that summer and needed recreation, but they could not engage in much of it together. On the weekends Chris often went alone on long horseback rides in the hills to restore her serenity. Greg was not a rider. He missed the social activity he had delighted in upon coming to L.A. and had relinquished for her sake. He resumed playing tennis and sailing. Sometimes, he would dine or go to a party with spirited, achieving, humorous friends he had made before meeting her and invariably felt guilty she was not with him.

Chris had met a few of them in the course of her work and declared them “boring and shallow."

"You're taking yourself too seriously. I have fun with them—no
significance,
just laughs and talk. And they could be valuable contacts; they know a lot of people in this business."

"You and
I
have fun together," she pointed out somewhat defensively. She ignored his last remark. She disliked that sort of thinking, believing that one's work spoke for itself. "And we make each other laugh. Isn't it enough that we have each other's company?"

Actually, she would have liked to join him in public and at social gatherings. But in a city that floated on a layer of gossip, an attractive TV correspondent's clandestine love affair would quickly have been ferreted out and become common knowledge.

The secrecy was also bothering Chris in a different way. "I know it's foolish," she confessed after a long day alone with her thoughts, "but this skulking around makes what we feel toward each other seem squalid somehow. I can’t help it; I feel a little dirty."

When Chris was sixteen, a girlfriend had told her own mother she was sleeping over at Chris's house although she was really with her boyfriend. She asked Chris to cover for her. Having been brought up to take responsibility for the consequences of her actions and to despise hypocrisy, Chris was bewildered by the other girl's predicament. If spending the night with a boy was acceptable, then you did it and felt no reluctance to tell your parents, regardless of their own views. If it was unacceptable, you did not do it. She herself did not do it only because she had not yet met the right boy.

She finally met him in
Poli
Sci
during her first year at college and found sex an exhilarating delight. Her swift liberation unnerved and intimidated him. She discarded him after ascertaining that their mounting bickering was not due, as he claimed, to her aggressiveness in and out of bed, but to his inability to cope with it.

Because she was so honest about her emotions and had only Greg for company, on whom her career depended as well, Chris tended to become more anxious when she thought things were not going well between them. As time passed, she confided a good deal about her early years and often read him her parents' letters or related bits of her phone conversations with them. She knew little about Greg, though. Recognizing that he was not the sort who spoke easily about himself, she accepted the vagueness with which he had sketched the past as a kind of affirmation that the major epoch in each of their histories had begun the day they met. But mystery offended the curiosity in Chris that made her a zealous reporter; like a tiny pebble in her shoe, the vagueness bothered her when she thought about it.

One night, when Greg had to leave her alone in the apartment for a short time, his telephone rang. His recorded voice on his answering machine asked the caller to leave a message. Chris heard a middle-aged woman's voice.

"Greg?" The voice was hesitant, anxious. "This . . . this is your mother."

A long pause ensued while the woman evidently hoped Greg would lift the receiver. Then, resigned, she finally spoke again, this time to record a message.

"You asked about the cemetery." She gave the name and address of a cemetery and then halted again. Even more hesitant now, she stated her phone number. "I hope you'll call me. Please."

When Greg returned home, Chris angrily confronted him. "You said your mother was dead."

"She is."

Chris snapped on the answering machine to play back the message. Greg's face was grim as he listened to it.

She pressed him again after the message ran its course.
"You still
say your mother is dead?"

"She might as well be."

"I'm no psychic. But that's a very healthy woman's voice saying she's your mother. I think I deserve a straight answer."

Greg bit his lower lip. Anguish replaced his customary self-possession.

"Tomorrow," he finally managed to say, "
tomorrow
. . . will be fifteen years since my sister died."

Then, for the first time, Greg told Chris—told anybody, for that matter—about his past.

Greg's mother was born Esther
Kaplowitz
, in a small Pennsylvania city near Pittsburgh, the only child of a Jewish haberdashery salesman and an impoverished rabbi's younger daughter. When her parents balked at the expense of sending her to college, Essie impulsively and perversely chose a mate sure to distress them, but on whom she thought she could depend. Within nine months she had given birth to a boy and a year later, to a girl.

Her husband, Matthew
Lyall
, was an undemonstrative Protestant of Scotch extraction ten years older than she with no family left. Essie had mistaken his straightforward stolidity for strength. That the two were mismatched soon became evident, but both were determined to make the marriage succeed, she because of her children and her reluctance to admit defeat, he because he adored her.

Out of loyalty to her husband and perhaps as a final rebuke to her own parents, Essie gave her children the upstanding Anglo-Saxon names
of Gregory and Margaret and saw to it that they celebrated Christian as well as Jewish holidays. Each year their small Christmas tree was topped by a Hanukkah menorah. She wanted them to feel comfortably Christian with outsiders, Jewish in private. She yearned for her children to be accepted into and get ahead in a world that had stymied her. That was why she had insisted on buying a tiny house in the best school district and why she scraped together the money each week for their music and tennis lessons. She drummed into them until it was a compulsion the need to excel in school and later on, in life. Riches and security and the freedom to do whatever they wished could be theirs if only they wanted it enough, worked hard enough. No sacrifice was too great. Success and family were the only things that mattered. Although she stopped speaking to her parents after her marriage, Essie insisted the children visit them most Sundays, if they could.

Essie was a magnet of joy in the house. Sometimes her humor would start everyone in the family laughing during dinner, even phlegmatic Matt, and keep them nearly helpless with laughter through the hurried cleanup afterward and as they watched TV. If a game show was on, she led them in their own game of aching for the luxury goods, as alluring as crown jewels, that were dispensed as prizes and exalted in commercials: for the Paris trips and the no-frost refrigerator-freezers and the futuristic automobiles to replace their shamefully battered Plymouth.

"Someday we'll have that," she would often remark if an item was particularly needed in their household.

Greg had inherited his mother’s dark eyes and hair, her lively, gregarious nature, and her eagerness to learn. Those eyes were deeply set and sometimes disconcerting when they stared fixedly at other
people's
without blinking or appeared more reflective than a boy's his age should. His father had passed on to him lean height and athletic grace.

His sister,
Meggy
, younger than he, had lighter hair and large, somber eyes at the center of delicately boned features, which belied her tomboy nature and athleticism similar to his own. The siblings were inseparable. She was
Meggy
and he
Greggy
, the closest of friends and playmates. The bond between them was sealed, though, in 1963, when Greg was ten years old, during the long strike at the plant where their father worked.

Essie brooded as the family's debts piled up. One night, finally, she confronted Matt after the children were in bed. She wanted him to find another job or try to start a little business that might give them the hope of a better future. Even if this strike ended, someday there would be another and eventually another and never would they be free of care.

Matt remained stubbornly silent.

"Don't you want to make something more of yourself?" she exclaimed with a sudden, incredulous awareness that guessed the fatal answer before the slow shake of her husband's head verified it.

"I'm a steelworker, Essie. That's what I do. That's what my father did. That's what I am."

Essie's voice chopped like a cleaver. "I can't rely on you, Matt.
Ever.
I can't let you drag me and my babies under."

Listening to the arguments and reproaches through the thin wall between their bedroom and the living room, Greg reached across the space separating his bed from
Meggy's
and gripped her hand. Like an incantation invoked to fend off evil, he swore they would never be parted from each other.

After that night Essie's dissatisfaction with her husband and his lack of ambition, with the bleak certainty that her life would never ease, became unbearable to her. She took a job during the day as a waitress in a luncheonette, widening the breach between them. Matt claimed she had done it to humiliate him. Greg noticed that from then on a lot less laughter filled the house.

Early the next year, his mother took Greg into the dining room, shutting the doors at either end. The dining room was her favorite room in the house, the proof that they were a genteel family, she had often stated. Now, she said, she wanted to talk to him like a grown-up, she said.

Greg waited for her to speak, but instead she gazed for a long while at the gleam dancing on the table and then, one by one, at each carved-back wooden chair she had purchased over time. Greg suddenly understood that she was saying good-bye to objects she loved. He began to shake and staring at his knees, prayed that he was wrong.

"I'm leaving your father," she finally said, and then waited for Greg's head to lift and his eyes to meet hers. "I can't pretend any longer that things will ever be better between us. I've decided to go to California. I've been told there are better-paying jobs for women out there, and people like me looking for a new start."

Greg could no longer keep his eyes on hers and shut them. But he could not shut out what she was saying.

"For the time being I can afford to take only one child with me . . . and even that will be hard. I love the two of you just the same, but a daughter needs a mother more than a boy, and so, I'm taking
Meggy
. When I'm settled and have some money saved up, I'll send for you." She leaned over and kissed the top of his head. "I love you, Greg."

"Then take me, too," he pleaded.

"I wish I could. But nothing here will really change for you," she promised. "You'll live with your father and go to school like you always have. You know how carefully we picked it for you."

"Don't separate me and
Meggy
." Having
Meggy
taken from him was even worse than his parents' separating, than his mother leaving him behind, even than not being the child she chose to take with her.