while I cooked, my favorite pastime after writing and messing around in boats, and while Nick chopped garlic – an irritating job, it always sticks to the knife – Marisa perched herself on a stool at the counter and began to tell me from the beginning.
When her mind began to operate again after the initial shock and the anger that went with it, certainty swept over her like a cold Pacific wave, and she was amazed it had taken so long to come rolling in. Of course she wouldn’t be able to rest until she knew who her father was; met him, if he was still alive; rearranged her life along the guidelines which, trustingly, she felt he would show her, perhaps without knowing he was doing so. Only then, only with the peace of mind and the knowledge such a meeting would give, could she turn back to the two people she loved best in the world. It seems to me very wise of her, at seventeen, to realize that this was the way to finding and trusting them again; and she seems to have known it from the beginning: almost from the beginning, certainly from the moment the Drano had been poured into her mind, unblocking it.
As soon as she knew her mother was alone she went and asked her point-blank who her father really was. I can imagine the exact look in Ruth’s gentle greenish eyes, almost a jade green: a cool and considering look; it was turned on me often enough at the time of my divorce. Marisa has inherited her beauty from her mother and her blue eyes from her maternal grandmother, Corinne: also some of her more sassy characteristics. It’s a funny thing – this difference in eye color makes the two of them quite dissimilar; yet when you look carefully you can see Ruth’s bone structure in her daughter; and these fine bones have enabled her to keep her looks past the witching age of forty: good news for Marisa. There are lines of course, but because there’s been no surgical snipping and stretching they’re virtually unnoticeable; and a touch of gray in fair hair is always attractive; some women pay the earth to have it put there.
She said, ‘Marisa, I’m not telling you who he is.’
‘Then he’s alive.’
‘Yes. And he’s a nice person, a good person. I didn’t fall for a ski bum or a beach boy.’
‘Can’t they be nice good people too?’
‘Of course. You know what I mean.’ Was she touched by the glint of social conscience, a glint of rebellion in her child who had never given her any of the fashionable headaches, who thought drugs were strictly for dimwitted dropouts?
‘So you fell for him and you had his baby, where did … where did Jack come in?’
‘I already knew Jack. He … saved me from a very awkward situation, but that’s the kind of person he is. As you know.’
‘Why didn’t the man marry you?’
‘He was already married.’
‘You could have got rid of me.’
When Ruth gives you her straightest look you don’t doubt her word: ‘I never, never for one moment thought of abortion, I promise you that. I wanted a child.’
‘His child.’
‘My child.’
‘Darn lucky you had Dad around.’
Ruth was relieved to hear the ‘Dad’ and ignored the puerile sarcasm. Marisa knew better than to say outright, ‘I want to see him.’ In that respect, only apparent indifference could protect her, but she didn’t find indifference easy to fake. She tried, ‘Haven’t you got a picture of him?’
‘No. How would your father like that?’
‘He isn’t my father; I wish he was. I wish you hadn’t told me.’
Ruth sighed and shook her head. ‘If you knew how we’ve argued. Argued, discussed, agreed, disagreed – around and around, never-ending.’
‘But you’re glad you did it.’
‘It’s a weight off my mind; I can’t pretend it isn’t.’
‘Off your mind and onto mine. You must have thought how it would be for me.’
‘Of course we did. But isn’t the truth always better if … if it can be told?’
‘No, lies are better.’
‘Oh my dear …’ She held out her arms and Marisa let them enfold her. She intended to play this right. At the feel of those arms, which had always been there when she needed them, she felt the press of tears, but she was damned if she was going to cry in front of either of them. Tears were a form of acceptance, and she was accepting nothing.
Jack, home from another preproduction meeting, found her staring blankly out of her bedroom window. He said, ‘It doesn’t matter, my dear, please try to see it that way. We’ve always loved you and we always will. It’s just … we couldn’t bear cheating on you.’
She looked at his handsome square face, tanned and healthy, curly hair graying at forty-seven, and said it again: ‘I’d rather be cheated. Maybe it’s easier for you, it sure as hell isn’t easier for me.’
‘But it was right. In the end you’ll see that, and we’ll all be … We’ll be closer because of it.’
‘I hope so. What do I call you?’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Marisa, don’t overplay it. You call me Dad, Father, just as you always have.’ She accepted the flash of impatient anger – he didn’t suffer fools gladly; she admired that, it kept you on your toes; kept cameramen and actors, and more particularly wayward actresses, on their toes too. She could feel her love for him trapped inside her. OK, how was she going to let it out of the trap?
When he’d gone she raised her eyes and stared at the famous ‘Hollywood’ sign, deep in thought. As usual, a small group of the faithful were toiling up Griffith Park towards it, and as usual a small group of guards had gathered to send them packing – in case any of them had fire, explosives, or even suicide in mind.
Like many other younger movie people touched by success, Jack and Ruth Adams had never even considered living in Beverly Hills, but had taken to the real hills of old Hollywood where so many of the old and great names had once lived. After them came the realtors and ‘Hollywoodland’. How many of the devotees who regularly photographed one another with the sign in the background knew that this modern Mecca had been erected to advertise a housing development? And what did it matter in a town where fairy tales are all and the truth less than nothing? Lop off a last syllable and you have a myth.
So, gazing at ‘Hollywood’, Marisa wondered who would remember her mother’s past, who would know? Well, for a start there was Ruth’s own mother, Corinne. She would certainly know but, as certainly, would refuse to say; and would at once report to her daughter: ‘You’ve told her, haven’t you? Nothing else could make her ask questions like that. What a mistake – why do you never listen to me?’ Or something along those lines. Anyway she no longer lived in Los Angeles but had gone back to New York: ‘I know it may be dangerous but no more dangerous than LA, and at least it’s alive.’ She was a jaunty old girl. When you’re seventeen, sixty-six is a great age. No, Grandmother was out. Who then?
Seventeen years ago, or around then, her mother had been an actress, not, she often said, a very good one. Jack disagreed: she was good all right, but she’d never had the essential overriding ambition, and
