Melanie rose from where she’d been sitting under the window and watched as the little red sports car backed out of the Blankenship driveway. Max Somebody—lucky Max—was heading back to the real world. She then sauntered into the kitchen and reached for a glass out of the dish drainer.
She put her hand on the cold tap to get a drink but the next thing she knew, a shriek had torn its way out of her mouth and the glass lay in brilliant shards on the other side of the room. The hurled cup had responded as glass does when connecting with a solid surface at high velocity. Broken bits now glittered like diamonds on the floor.
Melanie inhaled a quick breath.
She’d just flung one of Mrs. Gilbert’s pretty glasses across Mrs. Gilbert’s sunny kitchen and it had burst into smithereens like confetti onto Mrs. Gilbert’s imported Argentine tiles.
Carson had told her that the Gilberts had been advised she’d be an excellent renter. Quiet, tidy, and careful.
Quiet? Oh, yes, most of the time she was mind-numbingly quiet. Tidy? Not really, but she had Eva. Careful? What did that even mean?
A humorless laugh launched its way out of her. She was absolutely not careful, was she? She’d aligned herself with a communist.
A communist, Melanie!
And now, because she’d been careless instead of careful, she was sweeping up a glass that wasn’t hers, hiding out like a fugitive in a house full of someone else’s things.
She tossed the bits into the trash and imagined storming through the Gilberts’ house, grabbing every breakable thing, and chucking each one as hard as she could against a wall.
It was deliciously satisfying to picture it, but only for a moment.
When the moment passed, Melanie felt only fresh defeat and hopelessness. She wasn’t that person.
And this house and the things inside it meant something to someone. It felt like a prison after five months but it hadn’t always felt that way. In the beginning, Melanie had been glad to have a place to hunker down in. She was embarrassed, angry, and heartbroken. Irving started bringing her cheap paperback romances to read every week, and her parents—after they’d recovered from the shock—sent her, through Irving, their already-read issues ofNational GeographicandBetter Homes and Gardens, magazines that she would never have read before but devoured from first page to last. The packages from her parents always included her mother’s award-winning butterscotch cookies and the offer of a one-way train ticket back home to Omaha.
She’d made it a point to exercise in the mornings to keep her figure—which she still did—and spent many afternoons after Eva left reading aloud the lines for every character in old scripts. Irving provided those, too—to keep her elocution and characterizations at peak level.
Melanie had been hopeful the first two months at the Malibu house, lunging for the phone when it rang, thinking Walt was calling to tell her the studios had realized her name didn’t belong on that list and had taken it off. When Irving brought her mail she grabbed it greedily looking for any official-looking envelope that held within it news of her exoneration. But when fall arrived and Carson left for New York, the monotony of her purposeless days began to wear on her. She felt as though the voice of doom was whispering to her that this was her life now: hiding out in a house that wasn’t hers and waiting for vindication that might never come. It took a concerted effort to not listen to that voice.
She had also begun to feel restless with the oh-so-subtle changing of the seasons. Malibu was a sleepy enclave on a twenty-mile stretch of coastline with seemingly nothing but glittering sea and sand on one side and hillsides and canyons of toast-colored chaparral on the other. In between land and ocean and canyons of wilderness were cozy sea-view houses of all shapes and sizes and not much else. A few inns and restaurants, beaches for walking, wave sets for surfing. And always the relentless pull and push of the tides, the rising and setting of the sun, and the call of seabirds. It was a place where you could forget—if you wanted to—that there were hours in a day and chores that needed doing and problems that needed solving.
Melanie had decided one afternoon in mid-October, when she could stand the boredom no longer, to disguise herself and walk the winding half mile down to the beach. It was an easy walk getting down there; the hard part, she knew, was going to be walking back home. Yet Eva walked that route every day from the bus stop on the coastal highway and never complained. She decided not to think about the uphill return trip as she set out, nor that she was having to sneak around with a truly ugly scarf tied around herhead—one she’d found snooping in some of the boxes in the master bedroom closet that the Gilberts had left behind—and wearing too-large sunglasses.
When that first little jaunt had proved uneventful, she decided to try a few more.
Sometimes she called for a taxi if she didn’t want to walk, and she would ask to be let out on the stretch of peaceful coast six miles away where a hundred or so Hollywood stars had their beach houses. Carson had told her that set designers had been loaned out to build the initial houses in what everyone called the Malibu Movie Colony. At the beginning—more than thirty years earlier—the Colony had attracted such stars as Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Clara Bow, first as leaseholders and then outright owners of the now famous beach property when its original owner landed in financial trouble and sold the lots.
Barbara Stanwyck had a home there now, Carson had said. And Bing Crosby, Gary Cooper, and Merle Oberon.
On another outing to the edges of the Colony, Melanie dared to go inside the Malibu Beach Café for a cup of coffee, just to see which inhabitant of the movie world she’d been ousted from might wander in. She hoped no headlining name would recognize her under the scarf and glasses. She thought she saw Paul Newman in a booth at the back that day. It was hard to be sure and she didn’t want to stare or walk back there to confirm it. Melanie lingered before leaving, gazing at all the framed autographed photos on the walls of movie stars who’d eaten there. It had been a depressing evening for her when she returned home.
The day after that she phoned for a taxi again, this time to take her fifteen miles down the coast to the pier at Santa Monica. She didn’t even get out of the car to get an ice-cream cone or a hot dog,though she wanted both. It was enough, at least on that occasion, to see joy on the faces of those enjoying the sun-kissed afternoon.
It was risky being out like that, though. Especially now. The man from Washington who had questioned her had advised her she might be subpoenaed. But she also knew that a subpoena had to be hand delivered. She felt safe at home in that. She couldn’t be served at the house because she never answered the door. Ever. That was Eva’s job. Not that the doorbell rang that often. And if it did ring after Eva left, Melanie sat in the kitchen, where she couldn’t be seen, and waited for the person to leave. The few times this had happened, it was only a delivery of something she’d asked Carson to get for her.
She wasn’t even sure those who had the ability to summon her even knew where she was living.
But getting served could happen easily if she was out and was identified.
All a subpoena server had to do was pose as a sympathetic fan, gushingly ask her if she was Melanie Cole, and when she said yes hand her the summons. At least this was what Carson had told her. It could happen that fast. Walt agreed it was probably best to stay out of sight.
Irving, who wanted her working again, was on the fence on this topic. Yes, he wanted her safe from prying eyes and tabloid journalists and heartless shutterbugs wanting to make a quick buck. But a summons to testify could clear her name. Get her off the blacklist. It had cleared the names of others.
After they’d coughed up names, though.
Did he want her to be hated like Lee J. Cobb, and that director Elia Kazan, and the screenwriter she’d never even met who namedher and Carson and half a dozen others? Did Irving really want her to join the despised ranks of other Hollywood types like these three men who’d given up, given in, and given names?
When she’d said as much to Irving, he’d told her he didn’t think she’d end up being hated. Not after a while, anyway.
