The Bette Davis Club (5 page)

With Charlotte waving me on, I make my way to the car, open the passenger door, and get in. I have the distinct impression this is what it’s like to suffer a near-death experience.

Tully Benedict gets in as well, on the driver’s side. There’s a hint of beard stubble on his face, which doesn’t surprise me even though it’s his wedding day. Already I can tell he’s the sort of person who has to put up Post-it Notes to remind himself to shave.

Now that I see him up close, I note that Tully has a kind, interesting face. The sort of face that, ordinarily, I would find intriguing. But at the moment, his expression is extremely . . . tense. Well, I expect he’s upset. The poor man has just been jilted. He doesn’t introduce himself or in any way acknowledge my presence, except to ask where the seat belts are.

“There aren’t any,” I say.

He frowns.

“This is a classic MG
TF,” I say, trying to be helpful. “Manufactured in 1955 and kept in its original condition.”

The frown deepens.

Meanwhile, Juven has appeared and is strapping our luggage to the shiny metal rack suspended over the spare tire mount. He might as well be strapping Tully and me into twin electric chairs.

Juven finishes with the bags. Tully leans forward to turn the key in the ignition. I reach out to stop him.

“These old MGs are temperamental,” I say, remembering every word my father ever said to me concerning his car. “Don’t worry about the choke because Juven probably warmed up the engine. But you have to use the starter switch.” I point to a small octagonal-shaped knob on the control panel. “This thingy here, with the
S
on it.”

Tully stares at me like I’m raving mad. I blunder on. “First, you turn the ignition key. Clockwise, if I remember. Then pull out the starter switch. The instant the engine turns over, release the starter. And you have to do all those things quite smoothly, I’m afraid, or you’ll kill the engine.”

Tully looks a bit like he wants to kill
me
. Nevertheless, somehow, he gets the car running. The sound of the engine idling causes people to turn their heads. A crush of wedding guests gathers round us, gawking. There’s something aggressive in the way they surround the car, like wolves or killer bees. I’d be happy if we could get going now.

Tully releases the hand brake and slips the transmission into first gear. We lurch forward.

As we pull away, still in first gear, the crowd surges toward us. God knows who these people are. I’ve never met any of them. They’re all fashionably dressed and brilliantly bejeweled, yet they’re following us with outstretched arms, like characters from
Night of the Living Dead
.

They draw closer, waving at us, snapping photos, and touching the car as if we were movie stars at a premiere. They blow kisses and shower us with rice. “Good-bye!” they cheer. “Good luck!”

A wild-eyed young man steps forward. I recognize him as the star of one of those TV forensics shows. He’s very handsome—in a plastic surgery–enhanced, Aryan kind of way—and very drunk. When he spies the vinyl cling on my side of the car, he jumps onto the running board next to me and pounds on the hood, shouting, “Love Machine, baby! LOVE MA-SHEEN!”

I push him off.

The TV actor isn’t the only one who’s inebriated. They all are. The entire bunch is under the influence. Simply for this—that these people have access to alcohol and, at the moment, I don’t—I envy every one of them.

As we proceed slowly through the crowd and round the circular drive, I glance up at the top of the house. The sun is in my eyes, but if I squint, I can just make out a tall man standing at one of the balconies. He’s smoking a cigar and looking down at the crush of people. Malcolm Belvedere?

Yes, I think so. He’s watching us.

Well, what of it? No time to dream about oysters on the half shell and romantic beach cottages in the Hamptons. No time to reflect on the disappointment I felt when Charlotte told me Malcolm was married.

So Tully and I drive off in the Love Machine—I in the strapless Donna Karan, he in the Armani tux—looking for all the world like the honeymoon couple. Only we are hopelessly mismatched, and any fool can see the honeymoon is over.

CHAPTER THREE

TERRA INCOGNITA

W
e pull away from the house and head down the long private lane. At the bottom of the drive, Tully pushes in the clutch, checks the traffic, and then—gears grinding a tad loudly—merges onto the Pacific Coast Highway. We travel south along the narrow, twisty road, the ocean to one side of us, rolling hills on the other. It’s early spring. There’s not a cloud in the sky, and you can smell the sea. It’s a perfect day for riding in a convertible. That is, it
would
be perfect. I mean, you know, under other circumstances.

At one point, when I look over the side of the car, I get a jolt. The edge of a cliff is only a few feet away, and the ocean—white waves breaking against jagged rocks—is far below us. When you’re riding like we are, in a low-slung English sports car, the cliff seems even closer.

If I had a seat belt, I would tighten it. Instead, I hunker down and grip the chrome passenger bar in front of me.

To pass the time, I begin making a mental list of all the people I’m annoyed with. Angry at myself, first of all, for getting caught up in this scheme of Charlotte’s, even if I do stand to make a large sum of money. Annoyed with Charlotte, just because I usually am. Cheesed off with young Georgia for running away. Irritated with Malcolm Belvedere for . . . for what? Flirting so attractively, I suppose, when it turns out he’s a married man.

The only person I’m not cross with is Tully Benedict. I feel sorry for him. Despite his full head of hair and college-boy manner, he must be twenty years older than Georgia. Old enough to know better, though evidently not old enough to
do
better.

Tully holds tight to the steering wheel. I glance at some brown dots on the back of his right hand. Are those freckles . . . or age spots? Perhaps twenty-five years older than Georgia is more like it.

What kind of person is Tully Benedict? He has just been jilted. His bride-to-be has fled. She might as well have put up a billboard on Sunset Boulevard declaring, “Tully has cooties!”

Yet here he is, chasing after her. So am I, come to think of it, but at least I’m getting paid. Poor Tully. What does he imagine he’ll do when he finds Georgia? Go down on one knee and beg her to come back? How sad.

Of course it’s true, as Charlotte said, that I ran away on my own wedding day. I jilted my fiancé, Finn Coyle. But that was over thirty years ago, and the situation could not have been more different. Still, if Finn had come after me, even in a pretty little sports car, I would not have gone back to him, I would not have married him. Never. No matter how much I adored him.

We follow the highway south to Santa Monica, where I expect Tully to get on the Santa Monica Freeway. He doesn’t. He avoids the freeway entirely. He goes east on Santa Monica Boulevard, ultimately steering us through the mansion-lined streets of Beverly Hills and over to West Hollywood.

I can only assume that Tully is uncomfortable at the thought of taking a very old, very small car—with which he is unfamiliar and which has no seat belts—onto a superhighway. The MG could easily do sixty miles an hour or more, but plunging this roller skate, this 1950s relic, into the modern world of tractor-trailers and sport-utility vehicles does seem . . . chancy. Perhaps, along with the credit cards and cell phone, I should have asked Charlotte for the loan of a crash helmet.

When Charlotte said she had our father’s car, I thought,
It’s as if she’s telling me she has a time machine
. And that wasn’t so far off. Because it looks like Tully intends on driving the slower-paced back roads that existed long before there ever were freeways, all the way from Los Angeles to Palm Springs.

Fine. We are in an old car, we will follow the old roads. Although the other side of the coin is that Palm Springs is roughly one hundred miles east of Los Angeles. Taking the back roads will make our journey that much longer.

After a while, we leave Los Angeles behind completely. We’re heading away from the coast now, inland toward the desert. A brown-and-cream-colored sign announces we’re on Historic Route 66. More time travel? Yes. Because despite the modern mania for freeways, parts of the legendary two-lane blacktop known as Route 66 still exist. The most famous road in America has not disappeared. Not all of it, anyway.

That old song “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” comes into my head. “It winds from Chicago to L.A.”
Although Tully and I are going east, not west. We’re traveling in the opposite direction from what’s described in the song. And thank goodness we’re not going all the way to Chicago; thank goodness we’re headed only to Palm Springs.

We cruise through one town after another. Once, these were nothing more than villages surrounded by orange groves. Now they’re more grown-up. All the same, gliding down Route 66 you get glimpses of what life was like fifty or sixty years ago in Southern California. White stucco motor courts bake in the sun. Mom-and-pop grocery stores hawk cigarettes and cold beer. A fruit stand in the shape of a giant orange peddles fresh-squeezed juice.

I can’t get that song out of my mind. “Get your kicks, on Route 66.” Oh yes, I think, shifting in my seat to get comfortable, I’m really getting my kicks now.

The hardest thing is that I’m nearly sober. The glow I felt from the alcohol I knocked back earlier in the day is gone. I sneak a look at Tully whom, I realize, I don’t know at all. That unruly hair, that distant gaze. Serious suitor—or serial killer? Oh, what have I gotten myself into?

An hour after leaving Malibu, Tully and I haven’t spoken a word. It’s the shock, I suppose. Neither one of us feels chatty. But what do people think when they see us speed past them in the MG? Tully in his tux, me in Charlotte’s Donna Karan, the words “Just Married!” and “Love Machine!” emblazoned on our car.

Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Every motorist, every truck driver, every hog farmer we pass assumes we’re newlyweds. Cars traveling in the opposite direction honk when they go by, their occupants smiling at us and waving enthusiastically. You can’t really blame them, what with the decorations and the balloons tied to the spare tire. The balloons! I forgot about the balloons. I turn round and see them bouncing along behind us in the breeze. Why don’t they burst? They must be made of some miracle new-millennium material. In the event we’re rear-ended, I hope they’ll function as miniature air bags.

Balloons or no balloons, a 1955 MG TF will always command attention. I remember my father telling me that the first TF was made in England in 1953. The car was in production only until 1955, and many people think it’s the prettiest vehicle MG ever built. I could share this trivia with Tully, but somehow I don’t think he’s in the mood to hear anything about British motorcars or my family.

Route 66 does not go all the way to Palm Springs (it veers north), so we eventually cut over to a two-lane state road. We drive on, deeper into the desert. I’m dying for a drink: gin, brandy, eau de cologne, anything. But we left Malibu so fast, I didn’t have time to pack even a thimbleful of spirits.

Finally, from out of nowhere, Tully speaks. “You know about this blue light?”

I jump at the sound of his voice. “Sorry?”

“This light.” He taps at a tiny blue glow on the instrument panel. “It came on. Do you know what it means?”

How should I know what the light means? I’ve been lost in my own thoughts and now Tully’s asking about a blue light. I haven’t a clue what the blue light indicates. I don’t—oh, wait. Oh! OH! The blue light!

“It means we’re low on gasoline,” I tell him. “It means we’d better get fuel as soon as we can.” I scan the horizon for a station.

“I wondered about that,” Tully says. “I noticed there wasn’t a gas gauge. This is some buggy.”

Several anxious minutes go by during which we pass little except sand and sagebrush. Then Tully cranes his neck and declares, “Here we go.” He nods at a ramshackle service station up ahead that looks like it probably hasn’t changed in half a century. When we reach the station, Tully turns in and eases the car up to an aged pump. He shuts down the engine and everything becomes very quiet.

The station is small and dusty, with a little house set at the back. Off to one side are a sun-bleached picnic table and a rusty swing set, both presumably put there long ago for hungry travelers and their fidgety children. The elderly station owner shuffles out and asks Tully if we want gas.

While Tully and the owner are talking, I step from the car and go to the luggage rack at the rear of the car. The sun is bright, and there’s a scent of sage in the air. Battling aside the balloons, I yank one of my cases off the rack. I’m carrying my case to the ladies’ room when I nearly collide with a tiny old woman coming round the corner of the station, toting a basket of laundry. The owner’s wife, I imagine. She smiles up at me.

“Honeymooners?” she asks, a bit out of breath.

“Pardon?” I say.

She puts down the basket, wipes her brow, and inclines her head toward the MG. “Off on your honeymoon?”

I take in the car—the shaving cream, the “Love Machine” and “Just Married!” clings, the bouquet of wedding balloons—and realize what she’s getting at.

“No, no,” I say. “It’s a mistake.”

“Can’t say that, hon. Too soon to tell.”